Yes, Youth Gender Surgery Is Really Happening: Colin Wright Lays Out The Details

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's another episode about . . . gender! Specifically what's really happening when it comes to medical protocols for young people seeking gender reassignment surgery or medicalized transition. Last month, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, convened for its annual meeting and announced new guidelines for treating gender dysphoric kids, including guidelines about surgery for minors under eighteen. Though the conventional wisdom has long been that actual surgery performed on minors was rare (admittedly, Meghan parroted this line) it's looking increasingly like such surgery is a lot more common than previously thought. In this conversation, Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who's been writing about the complexities of the new gender wars since 2018, talks with Meghan about the chain of misinformation that results when pediatricians and other clinicians rely on advice from professional medical organizations that have been captured by ideology. He explains what we know about the numbers of kids being medically treated for gender dysphoria and how much data even exists about longterm outcomes. Colin describes—sometimes in graphic detail—what goes into surgeries such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties and why their high rate of complication seems to be ignored by the medical establishment and the media. He also explains what "intersex" actually means (spoiler: there are not as many intersex people as there are natural redheads) and how the entire concept has been distorted and misused when talking about sex and gender identity.

Guest bio:

Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and Founding Editor of Reality's Last Stand a publication and newsletter exploring the biology and sex and gender ideology. He is a contributing editor for Quillette and an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM).

He received his PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Colin has published articles in major news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Quillette, ad The Times, and has been a guest on many popular podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dowm. This is another episode about
0:10.7	gender, specifically what's happening in the realm of medical protocols for young people seeking
0:17.7	gender reassignment surgery or medicalized transition. And there are a lot of those
0:22.9	young people now. If you know this podcast, you know that I cover the subject a lot. You also probably
0:30.1	know that I'm very careful about how I cover it. It's an incredibly complex topic and there's a lot of
0:36.9	noise at the extremes.
0:38.6	The people I've had on the podcast to talk about it are, in my opinion, some of the best
0:43.1	thinkers and researchers on the topic.
0:45.7	And that's included clinicians, journalists, researchers, and other interested parties,
0:51.2	some of whom are themselves transgender.
0:53.7	I'm returning to the subject this week,
0:55.9	because we are fresh off the annual meeting of the World Professional Association for Transgender
1:01.4	Health, or W-Path, and that is the group that decides, among other things, at what age a child
1:08.7	or adolescent can begin to take hormones or even have surgery to affirm an
1:14.0	opposite sex identity. My guest, Colin Wright, is an evolutionary biologist who has been writing
1:21.2	about the complexities of the new gender wars since 2018. Now, Colin could have come on the podcast at any given time over the last few years
1:30.5	to talk about any number of things, but I wanted to talk to him now specifically about the
1:36.1	implications of the new W-Path guidelines and what they mean for kids who are being seen at
1:41.9	gender clinics all over the country.
1:50.2	I also wanted to get at a question that I probably hear more than any other from people who follow this issue closely.
1:52.4	And that is this.
1:53.8	Given the pervasive messaging that suggests that anyone who asks any questions about gender
	...

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