Hello everyone. I needed to write and read a very carefully intro to this podcast episode

as it deals with particularly tricky and contentious matters. So please forgive the deviation

from spontaneity that such writing and reading necessarily requires. The discussion that follows

this intro is as free-flowing as might be hope for if that is some consolation. In 2016, I released

three videos on YouTube, commentaries on law being passed at the federal level in Canada, Bill C-16,

purporting to grant protected status to people with uncertain, so-called gender identities,

but in my opinion, constituting an unwarranted intrusion into the socially necessary and fundamentally

important domain of free speech. Those videos went viral for reasons that are still not exactly clear.

I believed at the time that the introduction of confusion regarding the conceptualization and

terminology of masculine and feminine identity would produce far more trouble than it would cure,

more specifically, that would produce a psychogenic epidemic among vulnerable young women around the

age of puberty, experiencing the onset of increased negative emotion, characteristic of that age

and sex. This is exactly and precisely what has happened and it's not good and it has to stop.

In any case, my objection in these videos in some subsequent interviews, most famously, I suppose,

with Kathy Newman of Channel 4 News, with Joe Rogan multiple times, with Helen Lewis of GQ,

as well as two books I wrote in recent years and a lecture series on Genesis,

brought me to what has been increasingly broad public attention. That has been a great adventure

with the attendant cost of severe and often exceptionally caustic criticism. I have now talked

with at least 100 people who have also been made into public targets. Without exception, it has

struck them to the core, put their careers at risk, alienated them too often from family and

friends and driven not a few into psychiatric care or wards. Everyone mobbed reacts as if they

have contracted a potentially fatal illness and the social media environment we now inhabit

...