Hello everybody, I'm here talking today with Sarah Stockton. Sarah is a therapist and she was interviewed for Matt Walsh's documentary What is a Woman.

She's been involved in those sorts of issues for quite a long time. I watched the documentary and was struck by her testimony.

She also reached out to me, wrote me a letter about how things had unfolded for her in her therapeutic practice over the last five, ten years.

We've decided jointly that a further conversation might be useful publicly and also useful to people who are family members of adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, but also useful for therapists who are torn ethically about how to proceed properly in this fraught gender affirming.

Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. I'm sure that your decision to make your concerns public has been very hard on you.

I have some real sympathy for that. Why don't you start by telling everybody how it is that you came to be involved in this entire quagmire but also why you decided to participate in the Matt Walsh documentary, which I'm also sure took a fair bit of soul searching.

What do you lay out of the story?

Yes, and I think we'll talk a little bit more about my experience, but I started in 2008 working in a special transgender team, and that's where I started my expertise and specialty in that.

I had participated and co-authored the transgender assessment that mental health professionals used to assess transgender youth readiness to begin hormone treatment or medical treatment.

I had published that and I had worked a great deal of my first part of my career, traveling, teaching doctors, teaching schools how to change their practice for to be more gender affirming care.

I had a terminology that is more recent, that was not what I was using back then. Then I sort of came across in my practice a lot of concerns around this being 15 years in and treating a lot of sexual issues.

I had some concerns with how it was developmentally being presented to our children.

I kind of just stopped doing that specialty and I went on to just doing sex.

As life would have it, I have children who are in grade school and coming across these issues and children coming into my practice with questions that I can only understand that they would have because of this presentation being even allowed to be taught to them at such a young age.

So what actually happened was a client sent me a clip of Matt Walsh on Dr. Phil. I had never heard of Matt Walsh prior to that.

I just happened to message Matt Walsh and told him, hey, I was a part of writing the assessment and I had some concerns and he contacted me right away and I had flown out within a week and did the documentary and spoke with him.

Right, so we'll talk about a little bit about how that's impacted your life. Let's go back. What's your educational background? Like, how did you train as a therapist?

Yes, so I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and then I went to circus university where I received my master's degree in marriage and family therapy.

Okay, and then how did you get involved? This was back in 2008. You published a paper that was devoted towards assessment. Was it specifically assessment of gender dysphoria? What exactly was the paper and how did you get involved in that particular issue? Why did that attract your attention?

Okay, it's very good question. So in my school where we were going, we were the top place for actually developing the hormone assessment to start adults on hormone replacement therapy.

So the professors there were very much in charge of being the first ones to ever be giving these letters, making these letters. So we were introduced to what you had an opportunity to get on.

They would call a transgender team and you would have to interview to be on this team and I will be honest with you. I'm a young 22 year old and my interest is insects and that was obviously introduction into a complex thing that people were dealing with.

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