Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at quillette.com and click the

subscribe button. And this week on the Quillette podcast, I'll be talking about the ongoing

gender war, which was the subject of a recent conference I attended

in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That conference was hosted by Genspect, an international organization

that advocates for a psychotherapeutic, non-medicalized response to gender distress.

GenSpect also raises awareness about the serious risks associated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations as a means to, quote, affirm the declared trans identity of gender-distressed individuals.

Genspect was founded by Irish psychotherapist Della O'Malley, who gave an opening address

in New Mexico.

In that address, she opined that we are now entering what she called trans-glast-glast

which is to say a period during which people can speak more candidly about the real reasons

for the alarming spike in transgender self-identification among depressed and alienated youth,

especially girls.

Just a few years ago, that kind of discussion was often stigmatized as transphobic, but times

have changed, as many European countries have severely restricted policies that once provided youth with virtually no questions-ask

gender transition. Leading the charge here has been the UK, where the authoritative Cass review

of the medical literature in the field has demonstrated that there is actually very little evidence

that gender transition provides any kind of mental or emotional

benefits, despite exposing recipients to abundant medical risks in the process.

Many U.S. states and even a large province in ultra-liberal Canada have also rolled back the

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