Anti-Trans Academia (w/ The Needle)
We spoke with The Needle about their investigation into how a hate group funded and influenced anti-trans research at McMaster University.
Footnotes:
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] So, SAGM, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, is a group that masquerades as a medical funding group, but which is in reality, very much a pseudoscientific group. Their work is not taken seriously by the medical researchers or even the establishment at large. They're essentially a fringe group which seeks to promote anti-trans studies. SGM effectively has a veto on all research funded through this cooperation. And I want to drill down on what Jane just said. It's it is very common for research to be funded through university foundations and such, but they didn't even have that level of abstraction here. It wasn't, oh, SCGM, send us a check to our university foundation and we'll research this, you know, in broad terms.
[00:48] It was send a check to our department and we'll research under these contractual terms. And that's a very different arrangement. I'm Russell here with my colleague Nishay today and we're joined by some special guests. Returning from The Needle is Jane Migliera Bighgam, the managing editor at The Needle, as well as Artemis T. Douglas, the editor-inchief at The Needle. Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, our pleasure. You released some interesting reporting recently on a group called the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine or SEGM. I wanted to get our audience familiarized with this group because they're funding research that is going into anti-trans legislation and policy recommendations as you report in some of your recent reporting.
[01:45] And this is kind of a topic that we're interested in at Psymposia as well on the psychedelic side. Sort of like the ideologies of the funders that are kind of pushing research into the space and lobbying and policy recommendations and things like that. I think it's really important. So I wanted to talk to you all about SEGM itself just in general kind of to start with. Can you give us a little background on the group like when did they start? what's kind of the ideological aims of their project and what have they been involved in prior to your most recent research? All right, so SAGM, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, is a group that masquerades as a medical funding group, but which is in reality very much a pseudoscientific group.
[02:33] Their work is not taken seriously by the medical researchers or even the establishment at large. They're essentially a fringe group which seeks to promote anti-trans studies and virtually their entire public record goes towards that particular goal. This is what they are interested in. This is what they are funding and this is what they used their extensive war chest on. Most recently, they have become known for how they were funding McMaster University, a Canadian research institution into promoting a number of anti-trans studies and this had been the subject of controversy for several years. The cooperation had been cancelled by some of the researchers involved due to heat brought on.
[03:19] However, the terms of the agreement had never been made public, nor had the amount and there's also some ambiguity as to how much money had changed hands as a result of this. Because of our reporting, this information has been made to has been made publicly available as we have been attempting to get gain access to these records since last December and we've only now been able to release this. In addition, SCGM is I just want to dial in on their name. They say they're evidence-based gender medicine, but that that that title evidence-based is a misnomer. Everything about them is a misnomer. But if you look and in that article you popped up, if you want to pop it back up, we talk about this.
[04:09] But basically the recommendations the system to grade evidence for medicine if you look at other routine medicine and you look at transition medicine a lot of various types of medicine are actually considered very low quality but groups like SCGM take that from a professional term of art used among medical practitioners properly situated in the context and try to and in some cases successfully do weaponize that and saying, "Oh, it's low quality in a way that people misunderstand to mean, oh, there's no evidence of this." And we see that with the SEGM partnership with McMaster University.
[04:56] One such example is with their study into myctomy, which we can go into a little bit more, but I want to drill in on this. The researchers said that they had low quality evidence that mistctomies led to necrosis and death. When you read the actual details of the study, what it meant was there was no evidence that mistctomies led to more necrosis or death, but they were able to frame it as like, oh, this lack of evidence is now evidence towards something that isn't happening. And so I think that that reveals the whole purpose of SCGM is to take the existing consensus and warp it towards really away from defending trans people in transition medicine.
[05:43] It's actually worse than Artemis is letting on there. It's not they had they said that they had a high level it was a high level of evidence regarding the claims that masectomies led to necrosis and death. However, if you dig down into the actual article in which they do this, which is one of the other articles we have, in reality, they are saying that they have proven to a high standard of evidence that there is no link between masectomies and necrosis. They just declined to mention this in their abstract, which is the point in which most people will read it. And again, this is a very dense medical study. This is not something most people are going to read into unless they're a subject expert. So for the casual observer coming into this, they're going to think, "Oh, mysties lead to necrosis and death."
[06:33] When even their own study refuted that claim. Yep. And a little bit more background on SCGM. They started in 2021. Well, they started as a nonprofit in 2021. They have a couple million dollars in their war chest right now according to our best guess based on their 990 filings and they have been branded as a quote unquote hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So hopefully that sets the stage. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And do they kind of front themselves as protrans or how do they like present themselves? That's a great question. If you look at their mission statement, they don't front as necessarily protrans, but pro-evidence, but they do it in a way that can confuse people.
[07:26] If you look at their 990s, and I'll let I'm going to pull that up, and I'm going to let Jane answer, too. But if you look at their actual mission statement from their 990s, it's it'll kind of reveal that. But yeah, go ahead, Jane. Sorry. Essentially they are trying to present themselves as a normal medical group with normal medical that's funding normal medical studies. However, however, they really don't have that reputation among the actual medical researchers. They are essentially just known as the anti-trans medical group by these groups. And this is a reputation they've had for effectively as long as they've existed. And are there when you're looking at their 990s, is there any hints as to who is funneling money into this group or where their kind of war chest is coming from?
[08:13] I wish it's not disclosed. They don't disclose their financials or their donor list. I mean, they do to the IRS, sure, but it's not publicly filed. So, we don't actually know, okay, how and who is funding this group. We just know that they have a relative amount of funding that's kind of insane. So if you look at the summary and anyone can fact check this if you go to the 990 either through the IRS or through you know ProPublica's nonprofit explorer that that archives most 990s the and I'm quoting from their 990 here. SEGM's aim is to promote safe, compassionate, ethical, and evidence-informed health care for children, adolescents, and young adults with gender dysphoria.
[09:07] And that is the boiler plate that they put on all their 990s. You have to remember that evidenceinformed me and honestly I think and it's my opinion that their definition of safe, compassionate and ethical are all going to be slanted towards cis people's experiences. And so what I mean by that is they're going to look at cis comfort and cis experiences as the default. And so anything that deviates from that is not safe in their view or at least that's how they act. And they conduct just based on some of the reporting that I've read from you all these kind of like systemic reviews that often will purport low evidence or something.
[09:56] Isn't that kind of an issue in the trans healthcare space in general is that there hasn't been a lot of like legitimate or largecale research done and so all they can do is like summarize these things up as low evidence and then push that out or something like does that play into how they report information? Yes, a lot of the studies in partic I in particular a lot of the studies regarding the use of estrogen and progesterone are highly outdated at this point. For example, many much of the database on the use of estrogen prior to a couple years ago was essentially a batch of studies done in the 90s, a drug which called Promearin, which is a very different compound to the drugs given to trans women today. So yes, we don't have a lot of these big studies analyzing the effects of estrogen on trans women.
[10:45] This isn't because there's like no this isn't because like nobody's particularly interested in this. Quite the opposite. In fact, the fact is the matter is there have not been these largecale research efforts to document the effects of these drugs leads to a lot of misinformation around them. For example, a lot of the trans women I know have a mountain of anecdotal evidence showing that the drug progesterone when given in conjunction with estrogen promotes breast growth. there. This is a claim that is generally disregarded by doctors. Not because there are studies to the contrary, but because nobody has really bothered to test this until very very recently. I believe there was a study earlier this year or last year that coming out which covered this topic.
[11:30] However, this is not a level of evidence that most doctors actually look at and as a result, most doctors are unwilling to prescribe progesterone for the topic of breast growth because they h they just don't know. And so this lack of evidence on the protrans side and lack of documentation in a medical context leads to a lot of error leads to a lot of errors on the fact of doctors and eventually leads to trans people themselves having to take up the mantle of figuring this out all on their own very often with zero budget. Yeah. And before we kind of jump into the specifics of the reporting on SEGM and McMaster, I just wanted to turn it over to Nishay in case they had any questions or anything about SEGM here at the beginning.
[12:16] Yeah. It was making me think of like organizations like Autism Speaks where it's like the framing is technically like we're trying to help autistic people, but in all of their perspective and everything they're putting out, at least historically, I haven't kept up with that organization, but historically, it's all been coming from a neurotypical vantage point as like the normative perspective and trying to like fix people who are deviating from that norm. So there's a long history of I think this kind of you know on a surface read the rhetoric is looking like it's helping but when you dig deeper into the actual you know where they're directing their energies it's from this very kind of like hostile perspective.
[13:03] So I just I was thinking about just connections to other historical examples. I know that they are generally regarded as a hate group by many autistic advocates. I don't know enough to comment on the analogy between them and SGM. And I can say that your read is is somewhat correct. To be honest, I haven't kept up with watching Autism Speaks either. So, I don't know how much that they're actively funding studies either now or historically that support their goals, whereas SEGM's entire existence has been that. And so I think that there there is a salient comparison to be made there, but it is the mechanisms by which the two groups have acted might be a little bit different.
[13:48] Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I think part of the reason I was just interested in raising the connection is it points to the real importance of developing literacy around, you know, reading beyond the surface level representations of what organizations say they're doing because I think it can be very easy to slip into kind of thinking that this is a good thing if you're not kind of alert to that possibility. And in kind of getting into the specifics here and jumping into like your most recent reporting on McMaster and CGM, can you talk about some of the kind of topline takeaways from this reporting and like what you found around the funding for McMaster University, what was being funded there, and how kind of how much control SEGM was given over these research projects.
[14:37] All right, I'm going to go into that. There's really two different major findings that we found in this. The majority of the documents themselves are actually fairly uninteresting. They do a lot of contract negotiations like figuring out, hey, how much am I getting paid? There's a bit of negotiation back and forth. That's actually the majority of this. However, we highlighted two really important things that we think that the general audience needs to take away from this. Firstly, how in November of 2021, SEGM was saying that their priorities had shifted and that they're now going for to be funding studies not just on things related to adults, but actually I'm going Yeah, good. Good on you. You highlighted our priorities are shifting and we m may want to move on straight to systematic reviews of key interventions of social transition, puberty blockers, cross- sex hormones, non-genital surgeries, gen and genital surgeries for those under 26.
[15:33] Now, I want to point out that this was in November 21. This was a fringe talking point even at the time that this happened and even among anti-trans proponents. Again, the at this time the most common argument around trans healthcare was do whatever you want with your body but keep my kids out of it. That was a very common line even among Republican politicians. So the fact that a major medical group is willing to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at studies that go that explicitly target for example surgeries which are go for those under 26 aka adults is a notable shift and it shows that this it shows that there's some amount of fore planning on of this by these anti-trans groups in that the policies that are going to be advocated for a couple of years down the line were being plotted out as far back as 2021.
[16:33] And if you scroll back to the bottom of the very bottom of the article right now, we can see that I believe as of June, a ban on health many basically all forms of trans healthcare for youth under 26 is now recorded in the platform of the Texas Republican Party. Seeing as the Texas Republican party has a massive amount of power on the state, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a formal ban on trans healthcare for those under 26 in the next electoral cycle, that being the 2027 to 2028 legislative session. Yeah. In all likelihood, Texas is going to ban healthcare for many forms of adults. and this was already being played out in 2021.
[17:20] It showed a level of planning which has generally not been ascribed to these groups. I'm going to go on to the second finding from this. If you go up to where they start discussing the actual terms of the agreement, if you go back a little down in appendix A of their contract, McMaster hands over editorial control to SEGM. Quote, "The research team will conduct systematic reviews of the literature and the other evidence synthesis agreed between the groups using the highest possible methodological standards in full consideration of the needs in SGM and the nature of the evidence available in these contexts of interest. The re research team will update SGM about their progress on a bi-weekly or monthly schedule as needed. Wherever the team research team needs to use innovative methodological approaches to conduct any stage the evidence synthesis they will obtain approval from SCGM before proceeding.
[18:10] I'm not going over all the quotes just because there's a lot of them but in it in total it means that SEGM can veto the changes which McMasters researchers are using to create these studies. In effect, this means SEGM has total editorial control over the research created by McMaster University regarding these subjects. And for those who aren't familiar, a study, an academic study like this is comprised largely, if not entirely, depending on who you talk to, of its research questions and its methods. And if you look at the disclosure of the mystctomy study we previously covered, the McMaster researchers very clearly stated that they collaborated with SEGM on their research questions.
[19:01] So that was already known. this document that we got as part of our Freedom of Information request over in Canada and what Jane just underlined, the fact that the methods were subject to a essentially a veto by SCGM means that there was no aspect of this study under in its composition, its execution that would be meaningful in terms of determining its direction. that SEGM didn't have direct control over. And I really want to underscore the line in full consideration of the needs of SEGM. That is a very strong line to be putting in contractual language and yet it is there.
[19:47] And have you looked into whether is it the McMaster IRB that's overseeing the trials or who are the IRBs involved in these studies that are getting funded? Do you know? That's a good question. You know, I haven't looked at that. It might be worth just looking into. The reason I ask is because some of the really sketchy psychedelic research that has happened was not accepted by university IRBs and then they went to for-profit IRBs that are kind of a bit more paytoplay than some university IRBs. So, that was why it was on my mind. So from kind of like an explain it like five perspective just for people who aren't like immersed in academic research or anything like that how abnormal is this to seed this kind of control over to the funding organization?
[20:37] Very a lot of these organizations for example the universities it's not unheard of that universities will take funding in order to cover a specific subject that happens all the time. However, universities normally have much poor editorial control over the final products which their researchers are putting their names on. And yet in reality, this didn't happen with SGM. SGM effectively has a veto on all research funded through this cooperation. So this is not the norm. This is a very large exception and it would explain why they were why McMaster University and SCGM were so reluctant to release this information to us. It's why it took what eight months from us requesting these documents actively receiving them.
[21:27] And I want to say that it wasn't just Mc like the process of getting the documents wasn't just McMaster. McMaster flat out denied the records, all of them. We had to go through the Ontario Privacy Commission and basically do an appeal and our case worker there was wonderful and essentially, you know, needled them into giving us the documents over this process, but it took her that long to convince them to reverse their decision basically. And so it's one of those things where yeah, the documents don't look great for McMaster because it's not a standard process. And I want to drill down on what Jane just said. It's it is very common for research to be funded through university foundations and such, but they didn't even have that level of abstraction here.
[22:21] It wasn't, oh, SCGM, send us a check to our university foundation. We'll research this, you know, in broad terms. It was send a check to our department and we'll research under these contractual terms. And that's a very different arrangement where the money for the research and the control over its methods and its research question were all SCGM. And I think another thing that's important to stress is that SEGM is and has been for years has been branded as a hate group. So, it's one of those things where it would be possible to do your due diligence on the group that's funding you to do very specific research.
[23:06] And I can't speak to whether or not those researchers did their due diligence and we're okay with the trade-off or not. I wasn't there. What I can speak to is that as someone who has performed academic studies who have that have been IRB approved myself, I've done three. I'm working on a fourth right now. If a nonprofit were to say, "Hey, can you help us with this research?" I would have very clear firewalls. If I said yes, it would be like, "Okay, yes, I can help with this research, but here's the line." And I would have, if possible, someone in addition to my IRB, someone at a different university review my protocol to make sure that I'm not overly biasing my own study from the get- go. And I think that that level of care is is maybe abnormal as well, but it is it's very important to be very careful when you're taking these industry sponsored studies that you're not biasing your own science from the get-go.
[24:02] And I just want to underline that. And just to the specifics of that funding, you all reported that they were the McMaster researchers for these research studies were paid over $300,000 Canadian, which is over $215,000 US to conduct some of this research. Can you give me some specifics on what research they actually conducted and how it has been used since it was published? Artemis, do you want to focus on the masectomy study considering we did a deep dive into that one study? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good call. So the mistctomy study itself is kind of a it's kind of the best case that we can point to but it's also a worst case scenario and what I mean by that is it has been cited by both the federal government and in private medical associations and through that sighting by private medical associations has been indirectly cited on the state level here in the United States.
[25:03] And so the HHS report cites it, the federal government cites it, and in the passage of Oklahoma, I believe it was HB3586, the bill I colloqually call the right to abuse a trans kid. They call it the right to raise act. Basically, it removes consideration of a child's being trans and being abused around that that being trans, being forced to be sis, as something that case workers can step in. And so now that now unsupported parents of trans kids in the state of Oklahoma have full reign to do whatever they want, even if it's abuse, to try and make their kids stay sis because of this bill on the debate floor.
[25:49] And I watched this live on the debate floor for this bill right before it passed. The Oklahoma legislature, one of their legislators cited the ASPS position statement, which in turn cites this SEGM's mistctomy study. Yeah. And so it's one of those things where the exact impacts of these studies is hard to trace because they just snowball so quickly. And we know this much about this one study, but we also know that Miss SEGM has been funding more than just this one study. We just know about the McMaster partnership thanks to grassroots activism that got it cancelled and made it enter the news cycle in a way that was easy for us and others to kind of watch, right?
[26:43] And so that's the big thing is like we don't actually it's not in the public record how much more they've done other than what they put in their 990s which is anyone can check those. I mean they funded multiple systematic reviews and it the language implies that they had more than just the McMaster partnership but we don't know that either way and they've funded multiple open access publications as well that they didn't necessarily fund the creation of. So, but yeah, dialing it back to the mistctomy study, this anti-trans science or really pseudocience sits alongside that relative der of accurate transition medicine science like Jane was mentioning earlier to create something that snowballs into lots of negative effects really fast.
[27:33] It reminds me as well of there's one of the leading purveyors of psychedelic pseudocience, the multi-disiplinary association for psychedelic studies or maps. They or the founder of that Rick Dolin has said very openly that you know that they don't do science, they do political science with a goal of changing the culture and that's kind of like their orientation. So it sounds like that's kind of similar here. Like there's a preconceived outcome in mind and there's reverse engineering to how can we create the trappings of legitimate science in order to manufacture that outcome. They aren't as open about it as that other group you just mentioned, but the end result is the same. Yep. And I want to underline that they to kind of give an idea of how they're able to mechanisms by which they do that.
[28:26] Since their founding they have been run by academic named Robert D'Angelo he is psychoanalyst and I'm and in his own publications as an academic there's one that he puts very front of center on his own CV kind of here's my academic bio website that most academics have some version of called and I kid you not it's called quote trans is not the new gay end quote and I read that article and in that article he basically excoriates his own industry, his own field of academic study, psychoanalysis for its historical abuses and conversion therapy against gay people and then uses that critique to say that supporting trans people is the same thing. that somehow supporting that trans people exist and you know not just
[29:27] Affirming us but helping us get to where we want to be and all of that is somehow the same thing as conversion quote unquote therapy violence and I think that that particular article is very revealing of the moves that groups like SCGM regardless of like you know Robert D'Angelo could quit tomorrow and he could no longer be the president of SCGM that mechanism I think is still there of misdirecting actual critique and actual histories of harm to justify further harm if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so you all are kind of heavily on the beat of SEGM. Is that something that you will continue to follow into the future and are there things currently in motion that you are looking at for the future of SEGM and what they're working on right now?
[30:16] Yes. Yes, we are still have we still have a number of open questions about how yes, we know that they're funding a ton of studies and we know they have a ton of funding, but the details of this are still quite obscure. We believe that McMasters University, McMaster University's cooperation with them is simply the tip of the iceberg and there's and that there is more out there to be found. We are still looking for this and we are still accepting any tips regarding this connection. A lot of some studies that were made public through them have this acknowledged in their documents. Others don't. We also don't know where their money is coming from because they it's millions of dollars over the last half decade that is essentially unaccounted for in its funding.
[31:01] We don't know where that's coming from. And finding that out is going to be a major part of identifying where the funding for these anti-trans studies is coming from. this information is not public but we are actively looking for it that we are. Yeah, that's really interesting and that I would love to see that come to fruition because we in the sort of psychedelic reporting space are lucky enough that weirdly the funders are loud and proud of what kind of money they are putting behind the kind of ideological research that they're doing. So we have had kind of the opportunity to track a lot of these funders and their ideologies directly. But that's really interesting that it's very much behind that sort of opaque wall in the space that you all are covering. Yeah, for sure. I do think it's interesting that whoever is funding SCGM and SEGM themselves have put up this wall because a lot of times anti-trans groups are a little bit maybe not loud and proud, but as you've said, but they're a little bit more like yeah,
[32:03] Of course we're funding this. like they're a little bit more obvious about what they're doing. And I think that the reason for the wall is likely because it does allow SCGM a certain level of ability to attempt at being like that that that appearance. I'm not saying they're succeeding, but you know, not having their funders be obviously anti-trans actors does let them, you know, pretend that they're, you know, a neutral scientific advisory board and they're really not. And I think that could be why the wall is there. But yes, we'll keep investigating and kind of see what we can come up with. Yeah, seems like there's a clear strategic play there for why they would I do want to I do want to emphasize the strategy of that wall. a lot.
[32:53] It used to be that being anti-trans was just a strictly right to farright position. This is again, this might be shocking to people who don't remember what the attitude was around being trans a decade ago, but the widespread anti-trans hysteria is a shockingly new phenomenon, especially as it spread beyond the rightwing. For example, a lot of the anti-trans bias in the New York Times, for example, is is again a fairly recent phenomenon. It used to be much more tolerant in this regard and the work of New York Times a organization which presents itself as neutral has been a major player in spreading the anti-trans hysteria beyond the right wing and towards more centrist and even some and even increasingly some left-wing figures.
[33:39] So having some groups that that have the kind of neutral pres presence helps to spread the panic and I believe that SEGM is using similar tactics. I also agree with that assessment because using the New York Times example, a lot of their journalism or whatever you want to call it has been cited in things like Supreme Court cases that have and other court cases that have undermined our rights and our civil liberties. And so if you look at that and you say, okay, I think that's a mechanism that SEGM is trying for by pretending to be this neutral entity. They don't only launder into a kind of a discourse, you know, across ideologies, but they also launder into the world of evidence, which is their whole game.
[34:27] Strategically, it's why the ASPS was, you know, it's maybe not why, but a success of that strategy that the ASPs, the A, American Society of Plastic Surgeons, was willing to site the McMaster mastctomy study funded by SCGM. And so yeah, I that is very much that play acting at neutrality lets them do more than if they didn't have it. Yeah. Oh, that really, you know, aligns with our experience, you know, in the New York Times as a group that has been targeted in the New York Times with a bunch of lies. And just seeing the way that that article I mean the journalist of that article Rachel Newer, one of the two writers was has been open about the fact that she was shopping for people who would have a specific perspective against us and you know only looking for that predetermined perspective and but like because this is the New York Times and it's seen as the paper of record it's not just in Supreme Court you know
[35:29] Context it also ends up in places like Wikipedia. So these lies about our organization and us as individuals are then laundered into the you know status quo objective perspective on things. And this is just ultimately a consequence of the state of profound inequality that exists in the society today because billionaires have the levers to pull to decide to steer society in a specific direction and they can manufacture performances laundering, you know, consensus perspective when it's actually just some people at the top really want things to be steered in a certain way. Exactly.
[36:14] Yeah. Well, as we come up kind of on the end of our time here, is there any like major takeaways that you all took away from the reporting that you produced or even like the process of reporting this? I know it was a long time coming. You had a lot of great experience it sounds like with the Canadian kind of freedom of press junk like outlets and things like that with the caseworker and stuff. I'm more familiar with the US side of that, but that's really interesting that Canada kind of has the same thing going. What are your kind of big general takeaways from the reporting that you all were able to just produce? Just how different the process of creating studies that lead to anti-trans conclusions. Just how different those that process is from the process behind the studies that release information that has protrans.
[37:01] The protrans side is much more standard. It's much more regimented in the typical me in the typical manner of the field and it leads to results that lead to say transition is effective for the people who want it. By contrast that all the studies that have anti bias are so obviously rigged from the start that it's very clear that they had to rig it from the start in order to come to the conclusions they did. And once you dig into the process by which these things were made, it becomes obvious that these were not created with the be with the full scientific rigor you would expect of medical studies. Absolutely. And I think really it's important I want to say that the entire anti-trans panic is is largely manufactured and the way that actually you describe Neshi as the it's you know a few billionaires and their pals putting their levers on public
[38:03] Discourse and while we don't know exactly which billionaire or pal or actor is funding SCGM we do know that they have millions of dollars and have had millions of dollars come in most of the years that they have existed and that money doesn't come from nowhere. And so really, not only is anti-trans science obviously, as Jane is putting it, in many cases obviously rigged from the start, it's also motivated from the start. And I think that's a very important thing to walk away with is like, okay, this study says something negative about trans people or about transition medicine, who funded it and why is a really important question that people need to ask and have some media literacy around around these topics.
[38:51] And I would say it also reflects just the classic fascist play of, you know, creating a scapegoat to distract attention from the real sources of the problems in society. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I do that then. Yes, there I want to comment on that. Yes, there's the aspect of the fascist playbook of distracting from issues of society. However, that doesn't mean that the people pushing it don't actively believe it. And I think that's a trap that a lot of people covering this from an outside perspective fall into. They think, oh yeah, they don't believe it, so it's not really like, again, they'll substitute it. But they're going to keep targeting trans people because they believe that trans people deserve to be targeted.
[39:37] It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And yes, that is circular reasoning. I acknowledge that. But they're going to keep doing it because they believe it is just. and whether or not the tactics actually work, they're going to it's going to keep they're going to keep they're going to keep hammering this particular point and people who recover this have to take that into account. Absolutely. I think that just is if you look at not to make it all about one man because it's not I it's not just Robert D'Angelo but if you look back at that trans is not the new gay study in the context of what Jane just said it shows that he's very convinced of what he's doing and that what he's doing is ethical and promoting safety, compassion, and evidence when in fact he's not.
[40:26] He's promoting a normative cisupremacist worldview, but he doesn't I would say just based on that one output, he thinks he's, you know, waging an ethical fight. And I think that people have to, as Jane said, contend with just because it's, you know, motivated by distracting from actual failures in society and promoting fascism doesn't mean that the foot soldiers doing that promoting aren't bought in. Oftent times they are. Right. Right. Yeah. There's all those overlapping interests, whether it's distraction or true belief, they're all sort of using one another to end up in this space where we're at right now. Absolutely. Yes. Well, at the end here, Nishay, anything else that you'd like to ask or say before we kind of wrap up? Well, just say thank you so much for coming on and sharing your amazing research and also for taking all that time to, you know, dig into the trenches to and to report out so that people can be more informed.
[41:24] And I think, you know, the more that the kind of connections across these various fields like trans medicine and psychedelic medicine can be brought into the open, the more that different communities can rally and support one another through this very difficult time that we're in. I want to specifically add on that point because we don't know if this is true regarding SEGM in particular, but a lot of people pushing the anti-trans medicine arguments are a lot of times pushing the kind of pushing the psychedelics are good for like a right-wing perspective arguments and very often these things happen to overlap. For example, Jordan Peterson being a prominent example of this. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I'll just put a brief plug for our psychedelic conversion therapy series that is in the process of coming out over the course of the week that we're recording that that covers a lot of those dynamics in detail.
[42:17] Yeah. And yeah, it's just it's this thing that we're seeing more and more often right now is the same forces that are rolling back protections on LGBTQ rights and rolling back restrictions on conversion therapy bans are often the same people who are showing up at the White House for executive orders promoting psychedelics. And that's a very concerning mismatch of ideologies there in my opinion that we there was certainly things going on in that regard throughout like history of psychedelic research, but there's like this weird spearhead happening right now of this convergence of like the Christian right with psychedelics. I just saw another book published today about Christianity and psychedelics. Like the this seems like a big publishing thing like that's happening.
[43:02] But yeah, all of these kind of more right leaning forces are very much embracing psychedelics. And if you look back over kind of the history of a lot of our reporting, that's something that we've kind of talked about as a focus in the psychedelic industry over time, a strategic focus in their lobbying efforts and their like funding acceptance efforts was to court the right-wing because they saw that as their potentially biggest adversary. They're like they saw the kind of mainstream society sees us as like leftist hippies. So we need to shift to curing veteran PTSD to accepting money from people like Rebecca Mercer and things like that. So it's been a very conscious effort on the part of the psychedelic industry to court those forces.
[43:49] Yeah. That explains how the public perception of psychedelics shifted so quickly over the course of 2020. Yeah. Well, kind of in the end here, if we want to scale back just a little bit, do you all want to give a plug for The Needle here and kind of tell us what you're all about and what you got coming up in the future? Sure. The Needle is a trans news outlet. We f with a heavy focus on investigative journalism and cultural coverage. We've been pursuing these things since our the very founding of our organization last year, and we are actively looking for more funders to continue funding what we do. things for trans people are actively deteriorating at a rapid pace to the point where many of the most prominent people in trans advocacy are if not leaving the United States actively planning to do so if XYZ red line is crossed.
[44:43] This is a very difficult time to work in this field in large part because everybody's scared. Everybody's kind of hunkering down and a lot of our core audience that being trans people does not have a lot of expendable income which with which they would use to fund it. Our reader base to funer base is a lot smaller than many other outlets with similar reach for this reason. That is why we are calling on anybody who can fund our research, fund our investigation and fund our culture coverage to do so. We need the support of the public. This would help immensely in order to get this information out there. Yeah. And I al I also want to throw out we are specifically looking for an underwriter for an Irish expansion of our coverage. for calling it the Ireland beat because Ireland is in the process of negotiating and drafting a new model of care for transition medicine that will determine what trans people in
[45:45] Ireland have for probably the next decade and very few there's really only one trans really it's an LGBT publication in Ireland and we want to bring our bias fors approach of trans reporting ing buy and from trans voices to back to Ireland. I've done some reporting on Ireland already, but yeah, if anyone is willing to organizationally underwrite an Irish beat to make sure that the fight against transmedicalism in Ireland is covered in trans voices, we're open to talks. As well I do want to add one last point on Ireland in particular because it is a topic of immigration for a lot of trans people from the US who are looking as I said a lot of trans people are leaving the United States in rapid numbers and Ireland is one of the most common destinations there.
[46:43] So having coverage there mean having coverage in Ireland means having coverage of where trans people are going increasingly. So that's going to be a very important beat to cover. And having lived in Ireland for about a year, the Irish trans community that that exists is very vibrant and active and they deserve to have, you know, good journalism as well that is by and for trans people. And so yeah, we're looking for anyone who wants to partner with us on building an Irish beat. you'll do a lot of good impact and yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's great info and I didn't realize that about Ireland that that was such a destination for people leaving the United States. So, that's really important. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your work.
[47:32] I really appreciate all the reporting that you all do and it's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. I would love to have you on in the future. Yeah, same. This was great and I appreciate both of you for bringing us on and talking to us today. Yeah. Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.
