Alasdair Gunn – Interview and Transcript
ALASDAIR GUNN – 17 AUGUST 2023 -THE EPOCH TIMES
[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “By the time this hits the parents, there’s … almost a religious fervor that they’re up against.”
Alasdair Gunn, also known by his pen name Angus Fox, is a vice-director at Genspect, an organization seeking to broaden the treatment options available for people questioning their gender—beyond “gender-affirming care.”
Mr. Gunn helped inspire parents to share their stories in the new book, “Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids.”
The gender industry has “parasitized people’s emotions,” Mr. Gunn argues. “And it’s managed to remain as though it’s some very respectable normal field of medicine, as though it’s knee replacement or orthodontics or something, and it’s not.”
FULL TRANSCRIPTJan Jekielek: Alasdair Gunn, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Alasdair Gunn: Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m delighted.
Mr. Jekielek: Or should I say Angus Fox?
Mr. Gunn: You can say either. My Twitter handle is a portmanteau of the two that got mashed together as well, so there’s three options for you.
Mr. Jekielek: I should mention that because you have written in Quillette and in other places under the pseudonym Angus Fox in the past. I’ll give people a bit of a preview here. I read the bulk of your book, Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans, 75 anonymous essays by parents who are in the midst of this issue. You’ve been nominated to speak about this whole thing, but you’re not a parent yourself. How did you get into this and get the trust of all these parents that are in a precarious situation?
Mr. Gunn: Have you ever slipped and fallen and thought, “Oh, here I go and I’m going down.” That happened to me this morning by chance. Honestly, I fell into this in a backwards sort of way. I didn’t expect any of this to happen. I came across an anonymous video, an asymmetrical interview where the interview was seen and she was not seen.
It was a mother who was simply describing what had happened to her daughter who had decided to start identifying as male. It was extraordinary, and I had no idea. I‘d never even heard of a woman having a sex change. I thought that wasn’t a thing, much less with a teenager. My first reaction was I felt terribly sorry for her because she was obviously a very normal, decent person who’d been hit by something.
My second reaction was, and I happen to be gay, was that we’re going to be blamed for this because LGBT is everywhere. There’s very much this sense of including transsexual and trans people, which honestly I’d never really thought in any depth about. I reached out to a group of similar parents. I joined a message board, which had parents who were similarly experiencing this very strange new phenomenon of an adolescent child developing a transgender identity seemingly overnight.
They were quite skeptical because at the time this was a community very much under attack. It still is, but it has changed. They wish to protect their identities mainly because they wish to protect their children. They think their kids are going to grow out of this and they don’t want this to follow them for the rest of their lives.
They want them to be able to leave this behind. If it weren’t for that, most of them would be public. They’ve been attacked by activists who decry them as transphobic, and so it took a long time for them to trust me. But they did in the end and they let me into a meeting. I heard their stories and I decided to write them up.
We started something together. It was a very strange moment, but it helped because these parents feel very helpless. They feel ostracized, they feel attacked by society, and they need to do something to give themselves a belief that they can resolve their situation for the better.
Mr. Jekielek: We’ve learned over the last few years that the fear of ostracism can really affect human behavior. I read over 60 of these essays and one of the themes that comes out is that there is a standard playbook these kids get pulled into where they already know what to say.
Then in some cases it’s the therapists or guidance counselors that respond in a particular way. It’s like this extensive coaching exercise to the point where the parents realize that the kids are all saying the exact same thing. How did this happen?
Mr. Gunn: Yes, we call that the script. From a parent’s point of view, the script is written on Reddit, Tumblr, and Discord, those three platforms, but on other platforms as well. These are just platforms. It could be WhatsApp, and it could just be your mobile phone, but this is how these kids are communicating. It’s a generational challenge because my generation wouldn’t necessarily use Discord, for example. We are in very different spaces.
They receive this script from their friends. The best way to think about this script is like if your child found a poem that resonated with them. The feeling is probably real, but the information in it is not real. When they say, “I’m at risk of suicide,” this is something they’ve learned from their friends.
We actually have no evidence of that risk. It’s a very complicated and thorny issue, but there is no evidence of suicide risk. They tell this to one another and then they believe it—that they’re at great risk of suicide if they don’t transition. I could introduce you to detransitioners who would tell you, “I really believed that about myself. I believed if I didn’t transition, I would be at risk of suicide.”
Mr. Jekielek: The complicating element is that if you believe it, it makes it more true.
Mr. Gunn: It may make certain types of behavior more true, and then those certain types of behavior could in theory put you at risk. It’s true to say that there is some elevated suicidality among young people who question their gender. According to one study, it’s also true to say that there’s an even higher degree of suicidality among bisexuals. Now, we don’t take all bisexuals and say, “We must rush you to a doctor.”
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be discussion of these things, but it’s not necessarily a medical issue, and it’s certainly not evidence of a physiological problem. These young people read this script, and then they present with this script, and in a sense it’s kind of outlining the way that they feel. They could feel that way for many reasons, but the information is very often false and it’s taken from elsewhere.
The parents who are writing and talking about their experiences in PITT [Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans] and who’ve joined Genspect, very often by the time their child actually presents to them, they’ve already been identifying as a member of the opposite sex online for six months or more. They’ve been sharing information with people who’ve been encouraging them to see themselves as transgender, and who’ve been telling them that anyone who doubts that is transphobic.
They are very often told the only people who would doubt they are trans are trans people. When you think about it, that is a cognitive sinkhole. Because as soon as you question if you are trans, it’s like the ground is gone from beneath you, and you’re trans.
In fact, there’s a website called, “Am I Trans?” If you go there, you just get the word yes. They’re existing in this kind of community which is quite different from what their parents expect. By the time this hits the parents, there’s almost a religious fervor that they’re up against. They don’t realize how far this has gone in the child’s life already, and a lot of that is from the internet.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a whole series of essays in the book about something that I was aware of. I’ve been looking at this issue for the last two years. I wasn’t aware of how deep this could go. There’s a connection to specific types of pornography, and there’s a connection to sexual predators that are participating in this. The kids get pulled into the dark web in some cases. I don’t know how prevalent this is, but clearly this has happened to numerous parents.
Mr. Gunn: The dark web is a technical thing, and one of the stories in this book is about a young woman who was actually pulled into the dark web. The dark web is a particular interface using the internet, which is really very sinister. There isn’t a way of keeping young people out of these communities. The screen literally just says, “Confirm that you’re over 18,” and then you click yes. This is a problem that has been going on since I was a teenager.
I’m no longer a teenager, and I haven’t heard a single politician come up with a serious answer on how to stop this, and I’m afraid I don’t have one either. There’s a much broader problem of the sexualization of children. But with this gender identity, it’s very clear that it’s something which has allowed predatory men to be a lot bolder and exploit children. They say, “The adults around you don’t understand your gender identity. They don’t understand that you’re trans. I do.”
It’s an unrolling and unfolding disaster for these young people of both sexes because there are no guardrails. There is no way to keep predatory men out. One of the stories I wrote about two years ago in Quillette was a horrible story, and I won’t give the details. But it was very clearly an older man by 14 years interfering with a younger man who was a post- pubescent 15-years-old.
There’s something that has afflicted our culture where people can say certain words like, “Maybe this is a trans woman who’s advising or helping or understanding.” For some reason we then reroute the normal part of our brain, which would normally say, “Why is a stranger talking to a child about sex?” That’s normal thinking.
I’m particularly angry about it because there are a lot of people who will attack that normal question, and they don’t realize we’ll get the blame for it. Gay people will get the blame for it. There’s a lot of normalization of this that’s going on under the banner of LGBTQ, and that makes me extremely angry, because there’s nothing about being gay that makes me want to talk to your child or anyone else’s child about sex. Yet clearly, our culture is giving a very different signal.
Mr. Jekielek: Another theme that I noticed is that the GSA [Gender and Sexuality Alliance] organizations within schools are somehow often involved. Is that accurate?
Mr. Gunn: Yes. For a start, GSA did a nice little bait and switch. It used to be Gay-Straight Alliance, and now it’s the Gender and Sexuality Alliance. Notice the pivot from talking about sexuality to talking about gender and sexuality, which is nicely, smoothly done without anyone having to reprint their stationary. Particularly, young women are going into these GSAs and they are being bombarded with ideas that they simply don’t need to have. They simply don’t need to have them. It’s not making them happier and it’s not making them safer.
There is a very brave young woman I know called Helena Kushner who’s a detransitionist. She appeared on Fox News and she’s spoken about this. If you turn up and you are what in their dialect they would describe as cis, which means you’re not trans, you’re not identifying yourself as non-binary, and you don’t have anything snazzy going on in the gender department, they will really be pretty awful to these young people, particularly to the girls it seems.
If you go to one of these GSA clubs, they’re just going to push you, at the very least, to have the courtesy to be non-binary, pansexual, or to be trans. It really is a very strange ideological environment. I was very resistant when people said, “Oh, it’s like a cult,” because I thought, “I’ve never been in a cult, and I don’t know about them.” But there is something quite cultish about this mentality. It is a one-way street.
There’s another detransitionist that some of your viewers may be aware of, another very brave young woman called Chloe Cole who’s speaking out about this. She was told on Twitter the other day, “You’re a traitor.” Now, this is Jonestown stuff. If you believe yourself to be the victim of medical malpractice, that’s not treason. You’re not betraying a country, and there’s nothing you’re betraying.
This mindset is being indoctrinated through schools and through the internet in particular. In the book there’s a title which says, “The internet and school indoctrinated my child.” In a way they go together. There are parents who have noticed very negative behavior on their children’s devices and have done the right thing, which is to take away the device.
Not only will they take the device, but they will ensure that other devices can’t come in. In other words, they are doing good old-fashioned parenting and confiscating them. Thanks very much. But I’ve heard of schools replacing them, and if the school doesn’t replace them, a friend will replace them….