Her new book sounds the alarm.

Abigail is an independent journalist and author. Her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was a bestseller, and her new book is a bestseller even the NYT has had to recognize eventually. It’s called Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She also has a substack, The Truth Fairy. Check it out.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the news of UK restricting puberty blockers, and the harm that therapy can do to normal kids — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: the brittle bones and teeth-splitting that result from puberty blockers; their effect on IQ; when blockers are necessary; the suicide canard with trans kids; the radio silence around Bostock; how 40 percent of kids are in some form of therapy — “awash in psychopathology”; kids publicizing their mental health on social media; How to Talk So Kids Will Listen; the work of Haim Ginott; “neurotic hovering parents” who rarely correct bad behavior; parents giving up authority; dysregulated kids; Abigail’s upbringing; my tumultuous childhood; Gabor Maté; drug addiction and childhood trauma; iatrogenesis; smartphones; Covid; social emotional learning; why breathwork and mindfulness doesn’t work for kids; how SSRIs can kill adolescent sex drive as it’s developing; Richard Bing’s study on convicts and PTSD; the benefits of therapy for adults; psychotherapy as a literary practice; how therapy has filled the void of religion; kids rushing to become “LGBTQ” because it’s valorized; gay kids today are more accepted but more miserable; the parents who use their trans kids as props; the benefits of same-sex schools; the spike in days off for mental health; and the current cover-story by Andrea Long Chu.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Richard Dawkins on religion, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and George Will on Trump and conservatism. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to [email protected].

One listener was “blown away” by last week’s episode with Christian Wiman on suffering and God:

I recommended the episode to about 10 of my friends. I also memorized Larkin’s “they fuck you up” poem, along with “At Thirty-One” (my kids painted both opening lines on our attic wall). I will get Wiman’s book today, right away.

I was so charmed and awed by your discussion, and I loved the ending concept of human embeddedness — that people simply cannot exist alone as individuals, that our life depends upon other lives. I gave a sermon at my church about the concept of entangledness.

In reference to your discussion of Mary vs Martha, there is some very new, fascinating research that Martha may have been made up — inserted in the story as a narrative foil for Mary. A young researcher at Duke has studied the oldest original written version of the story and found evidence of tampering by later scribes to manufacture another sister. This research is referenced in a terrific sermon that also finds historic maligning of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute being apologized for by Pope Francis — who now recognizes her as a 13th apostle.

Interesting. Another listener who appreciates Wiman:

You’re right; that was one of your best episodes! I listened to it after listening to Rob Henderson, and the two together are profoundly moving.

I liked Wiman’s take on Nietzsche and Cioran, both of whom I enjoy reading. Cioran is actually rather funny (yes, the bit about vomiting up man is a riot). Nietzsche poses questions that people, if they’re going to be serious, need to deal with. However, I have no use either for eternal recurrence — which I think is a kind of Hell — or the Übermensch.

I put the Kamienska poem up on Facebook after hearing it. And I really enjoyed your discussion of Larkin and kept thinking of the ending to “High Windows”:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

I was thinking of that when you were talking about Larkin and light. These words come to my mind when I watch the Canada geese in flight, which I do often.

From yet another listener who was “touched by your conversation with Christian Wiman”:

However, I want to put in a good word for the silence and bleakness of West Texas, which you drew attention to a couple of times. I think you were laying the foundation to discuss the theme of silence in Wiman’s poetry, but as a native West Texan I bristled a bit, since that region is much maligned in the rest of the country. I grew up in a town just like Wiman’s (our high school played Snyder), but I had a happy childhood because my parents were loving and well-adjusted. That determines everything — including my appreciation for the landscape, which most people find distressingly empty. I see it as hauntingly beautiful.

Admittedly, I now live in the hilly, wooded Northeast, but I always look forward to returning home. It’s as soul-stirring as Cape Cod, but without the traffic, crowds, and craziness.

One more on the Wiman pod:

After I listened to your conversation, I thought of this music video (which was filmed in Kyiv at the end of 2021 — prophetic):

Great conversation, thank you. Those of us who struggle with faith are still grateful for moments of love and awe.

A note on the theme of religion in general:

I’ve been a fan of your podcast for a while, and I just joined as a paid subscriber. I want to tell you how deeply grateful I am to the Dish — a nourishing morsel of faith in my otherwise faithless media diet. Your clarity and curiosity about God and Christianity and how they work in your life, and your sturdy but free-thinking stance in the face of overwhelming cultural momentum against anything Christian — these have given me courage.

I live in South Berkshire County, Massachusetts, which is surely one of the most aggressively secular corners of the country. Though raised in, and possibly soon returning to, Catholicism, I’ve belonged to a small United Church of Christ congregation for the past two decades. To live here with the least friction possible, I learned to keep my church-going hush-hush. But you contributed to my recent decision to “come out” as a Christian.

That gives me great joy. Another listener remarks on the episode with Rob Henderson:

I’m happy to see that his book is shining some light on the foster care system. Each state is different in how the foster care/adoption process works (I’m a lawyer, so I am interested in the actual statutory framework). My wife and I became foster parents after having two “bio kids,” since we had the space and the gear. Our small city was in the midst of the opioid epidemic and the social-services safety net was overwhelmed with kids needing care. It was a tumultuous couple of years, but we did end up being able to adopt our youngest son.

One thing that I rarely see reported is the number of kids who age out of the foster care system and become homeless. Anecdotally, I heard that nearly half of our city’s homeless population are kids who turned 18 and had nowhere to live. So, fixing foster care could be a way to help address the homelessness situation as well. (Plus, you know, the moral imperative to properly care for innocent children who by no fault of their own are born to dysfunctional parents and then become wards of the state.)

Another looks ahead to next week:

Excited that Richard Dawkins is coming on the Dishcast. Though it’s a bit late in the game, he had an amazing, perhaps heroic tweet recently where he defiantly declared there were two sexes and mocked Scientific American for suggesting otherwise (I hope this topic comes up!):

This ridiculous article (shame on the once-great Scientific American) ignorantly misunderstands the nature of the sex binary: “Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary.” Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by “assignment at birth,” but by gamete size. It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish. But it is universally DEFINED by the binary distinction between sperms and eggs. You may argue about “gender” if you wish (biologists have better things to do) but sex is a true binary, one of rather few in biology.

I’ve heard Dawkins in recent interviews and he is very civil, so I think it’ll be a great conversation!

I sure hope so. I’m looking forward as well. Next week!

A future guest rec:

You mentioned in your colloquy with listeners last week that a number of woke intellectuals have rejected your invitations to appear on the Dishcast. Is Michelle Goldberg one of them? If not, perhaps you’d consider inviting her?

I took a dim view of Goldberg until recently, seeing her as someone who put only the tiniest bit of distance (at most) between herself and the hard left. But her last two op-eds on the Israel-Hamas war have really impressed me, both in terms of their thoughtfulness and in terms of her willingness to court disapproval from the hard left. I’m not yet ready to categorize her with Jill Filipovic, another person well to the left of me who nevertheless is very sharp and clearly thinks for herself in a way that many that far to the left of me don’t. But Goldberg is definitely moving in that direction for me.

I agree with your listener that it would be nice to hear you in conversation with people who can make an intelligent and thoughtful case for woke-adjacent ideas.  It helps me to develop my own thinking on these subjects.

Agreed on Goldberg. Another rec:

I was re-listening to your wonderful interview with Christopher Caldwell on the “unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Movement,” after having read the latest maddening NYT article by Nikole Hannah-Jones today. Towards the end of your discussion, you and Caldwell discuss the future of post-Trump conservatism, and land on people from the American Compass, such as Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley and a couple others. American Compass is actually exciting to me: not Trumpian, and not stuck in the Reagan era. Dare I call it sort of Burkean, in that it wants to conserve the common good?

Please consider having on Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass and author of The Once and Future Worker. He’d be great to listen to.

Oren Cass is doing very interesting work. On the topic of transing kids we covered last week, a reader sends a “follow-up note on ‘phallus-preserving vaginoplasty’ (and ‘vagina-preserving phalloplasty,’ and ‘nullification’):

Via Leor Sapir, I just saw that Align Surgical (San Fran, LA) has scrubbed those procedures from its website. So, does this mean it no longer provides these services, or that they just don’t advertise them? Between the WPATH leak and the various European countries studies, I think the gender industry is going to try to go underground with many of its procedures and recommendations.

Another reader on “trans care” for minors:

You only briefly touched on the underlying issue about medical practices on supposed trans kids: money. You used the word “lucrative,” and that’s the matter that seems to me not being fully explored. Who pays for these medical expenses? Who benefits from putting children in puberty blockers and the surgical procedures? There appears to be an eagerness to go the medical route with all the associated costs involved passed onto the patient.

The thing about child sex reassignment, if it includes hormones or surgery, is that it requires life-long medical attention. That’s the kind of “illness” unscrupulous doctors cherish: an indefinite money-stream.

Another reader:

I just want to mention that most doctors refuse to sterilize women in their 20s or 30s who don’t want children. Still. To this day.

So there’s that.

One more on the subject:

Just a note to thank you for writing about the horrors of the treatment of gender dysphoria in children. I’ve written to you before about my personal experience — my niece who transitioned. The lack of any guidelines for assessing a teenager’s overall mental health and treating mental illness before going straight for the testosterone at a fucking teenager’s insistence is shocking and had tragic results in my case (he killed himself a few years after transitioning). Just thank you for getting the word out. Maybe, maybe health professionals will wake up one day.

On the SOTU, a reader writes:

I wish Biden hadn’t backpedaled on his use of the word “illegal” in his State of the Union address! Laken Riley’s killer was in this country illegally. “Undocumented”? It wasn’t as if he’d merely neglected to produce some paperwork!

After delivering a strong speech, this was a reminder of how readily Biden lets himself be pushed around by the wokesters. This could have (and should have) been his Sister Souljah moment!

Some lighter fare from this reader:

In light of your analogy of Joe Biden to Abe Simpson, you might enjoy this brief clip from Monty Burns’ run for governor (watch to the last second!):

On the continued thread on rescue pups:

We are also British expats who recently got US citizenship — moved here in 2011, and currently live in Rye, NY. Glad to hear you’ve found another four-legged companion. Here are our two rescue dogs — one is a lab mix (half lab, 1/4 Harrier, 1/8 American foxhound) adopted as a puppy, and his mum was a feral rescue. And the other a shih-tzu terrier mix adopted at about two years old.

Very much enjoying the Dish. Keep up the good fight!

Another:

Your introduction to Truman made me think of our dog Wally. He is also a stray mutt who was found wondering in the woods in West Virginia without a collar. The running joke in our family is that Wally was out there just long enough to be traumatized, but not long enough to experience any personal growth or develop any coping mechanisms. And separation anxiety is entirely understandable on their part. By definition, the last owner left and didn’t come back. So that makes our quick grocery runs a lot more dramatic for them.

Hopefully Truman doesn’t destroy as many things as Wally did when we first got him. One of his days of destruction:

Oh, Truman is destroying a lot. Abigail Shrier’s new book, for example:

Delicious.

Thanks as always for the emails and pup pics. You can send yours to [email protected].

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