Why is trans identification declining? (10-15-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. How does one go about breaking somebody out of a delusion? How do you do that? I would submit? Now, I'm not a delusion breaking expert. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I didn't even stay overnight at a specific hotel. I'm just saying that it seems to me that the way you help break somebody's delusion is by telling them the truth. And we actually have historical examples of delusions being broken in exactly this way. I will get to that, but in a completely possibly related story, there is a piece by Eric Kaufman at unheard dot com. That documents some new polling data. And analyzes it and finds that since twenty twenty three, there has been a sharp decline among gen Z's Generation Z, there has been a sharp decline in people identifying as transgender and as non binary, which I've never actually understood what that is and why it's included in the rainbow of colors. Because the non binary, like just the name of it, gives away the game that there are only two genders. I mean, like, wouldn't you be called like. Non omninary or something, or you would have to have a different name, because non binary means that there is binary and you are not binary, which, of course then self defeats the entire name. It's just like all kinds of relativism, right, the. Moral relativism, for example, that there's no universal truth, no absolute truth, except the very animating statement that defines what relativism is is in fact an absolute right. If your philosophy is that there is no absolute truth, that is an absolute statement, and it is then self defeating. Your entire philosophy goes out the window, because you're defining it by the thing that you say doesn't exist anyway. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression FIRE, or as I call it FIRE, conducted a large annual survey of US undergraduates pulled over sixty thousand students in twenty twenty five, and according to Kaufman's analysis of the raw data, it shows that in that year just three point six percent of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female three point six percent, okay. By comparison, that figure was five point two percent in twenty twenty four. Okay, So it went from five point two down to three point six in just one year. And if you go back to the two years prior, if you're looking at twenty twenty three and then twenty twenty two, the number of people that are identifying, or the percentage that are identifying as a gender other than male or female, it was up almost at seven percent. Okay, So it goes from six point eight percent to five point two, then to three point six. Why is this declining? What could be the cause? The share of trans identified students has effectively been cut in half in just two years, and the trend is especially pronounced at quote unquote elite institutions. What's going on? Interestingly, when the trans and queer trends were at their peak, freshmen were more likely to be non conforming in their gender and sexuality than seniors were. Again, these are college students, right, so at the peak seems like it was being driven by the incoming freshmen. Now that BTQ, which is bisexual, trans, queer or questioning, so I would think that would be BTQQ or BTQQ squared BTQ squared anyway, now that this identification is in decline, they're seeing the reverse is true. Younger students are less BTQ than the older students in their colleges, which makes sense if you think about it, right, when you've got freshmen coming in and they are more likely to be identifying in these quote non conforming ways, and then as they proceed through their college career over the last four years, you see now the seniors are over non conforming, right, They've got higher rates of non conforming behavior and identification. And so those are the freshmen they've just moved through the system. But what you would expect to see, if it was dare I say something real, you would have seen these numbers continuing to go up or at least to plateau. You would expect it to at some point level out right, But it's not. It went back down. And so now you have incoming freshmen that are not identifying in nearly the numbers as their senior cohorts. So why Kaufman says that it's tempting to speculate about the reasons behind the rise and fall of trans and queer identities mental illness. People may point to mental illness, right, Okay, well he takes a look at that. But that has fallen among teens since twenty twenty one twenty twenty two, which makes sense. That's probably pandemic related, right, you had higher rates of mental illness and such in this cohort that was coming up during the lockdowns and the masking and the paranoid hysteria. But also, this doesn't really make sense either, he says, because the drop in mental health issues encompassed every social group, including trans and queer youth. Right, so all populations are seeing a decline in the mental illness categories mental health issues category, So that doesn't really explain it. What about online behavior? Okay, apparently no change though in the online behavior of young Americans, So this does not seem to be what's driving the retreat from alternative gender and sexual identity either. Okay, what about a shift towards more of an anti woke posture, right, or a vibe shift as the kids would say, Well, Fire and other data show little change in students' political ideology or party identification over the past five years. Woke attitudes such as support for shouting down speakers, punishing those perceived as hostile to transgenderism or Black Lives Matter that has not receded much since twenty twenty either. Okay, so that doesn't really explain it. Okay, Oh, how about this religion? Right religion now? Despite hints of a youth religious revival, the fire survey data shows no major drop in the share of non religious students, who still make up nearly half of the sample in recent years. Woke progressives and secular students are much more likely to identify as trans, bisexual, or queer than conservative or religious people. So that doesn't really explain the decline. What is going on here? You know? Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service. Converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit Creative video dot Com got a message on Twitter from Russ who says, regarding the stupid non binary thing, he says, my college son says, it's largely two things. This is this is the explanation from a certified college kid, one of two things. One an easy way to be special in the current environment without having to really do anything. You just claim to be non binary, and people are. Like, oh my gosh, that's I really, you know, it's funny. I had a similar kind of experience when I was in college and I was exploring faith and religions and that sort of thing philosophy, and for a while there I would identify myself as a dist because I wasn't sure, you know, and uh, I remember it like people. Are like, oh hmm, yes, They're like, oh, that's so enlightened and such. You know, that was the reaction I would generally get. And then after the exploration led me to back to Christianity, people were amazed how stupid I became all of a sudden. It was pretty instructive, you know, Uh, Deist, Wow, you're smart. Christian Wow, you got stupid all of a sudden. Yeah, just kind of probably along the same lines as this. But no, you also, I mean, you get you get points, you get credibility, you get cachet among the among your peer group when you identify as this special thing as non binary. So that tracks. That makes sense. The other explanation he says is some people have been raised with extreme caricatures of male and female roles. So if you're not on either extreme, like an alpha male or a demure female, well then you must be non binary. Yeah, like this is part of the problem. We've we've taken essentially personality, right, people's personality. People like maybe you're not this, you know, alpha dominant dude, you know, and so therefore, well I must be non binary because I'm not that. No, that you just have a different personality and that's fine. It's like being a tomboy as a girl. That doesn't make you a boy. It's your personality and it's fine anyway. That's that seems pretty reasonable. So going back to this Eric Kaufman piece at unheard dot com, he's analyzing the polling data from uh FIRE, which is the Foundation for Individual Rights and express And they've been doing these surveys on college CAMPI for years and the latest study they did had sixty thousand students, and they have been tracking a decline in self identification as trans and non binary non conforming BTQ, so bisexual, transgender, and queer slash questioning or whatever. And so why have these numbers now started dropping for like the last three years. Why are they on the decline? And he runs through some of these potential explanations, but none of them really explain. You can't really it because they don't track together. He says, trans and queer identification have declined among young Americans, even as levels of wokeness and irreligion have not. For young people, gender and sexual identity are now independent fashions that rise and fall separately from other cultural and political currents. Yes, it's a discreete characteristic. Whether trands and queer identities will drop to the levels we saw back in twenty ten, that's still an open question, right, we shall see. But the fact that both have declined sharply in just two years is a startling and unanticipated post progressive development that the education and media establishments will be reluctant to acknowledge. All Right, So I'm just going to throw this out there. I'm just spitballing here, but I would submit that what explains the drop is actually what I have been saying, that this is a social contagion, and what we are seeing now is an indication that the fever is breaking. I think that explained, and it just so happens to perfectly align with what I was saying for the last you know, five years, So it makes me seem like I know what I was talking about. So it does fit quite nicely in my resume. So I recognize that bias that I have, But when I read that, and he doesn't say social contagion. He does not take up that as a potential explanation. But to me, that is the explanation. It makes perfect sense. At some point the fever would break, and it has. That's what it seems like. The fever has broken. And why has it broken? I would submit it is due to the backlash. It is due to parents, professionals, more and more people saying, you know what, No, this isn't true. It's just man or woman, And more and more people are now are speaking this truth and it is breaking the delusion. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. 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Also, the new administration is not fawning all over them and given them special privileges, and in fact are saying you get nothing. If you are a male dressed as a female, you still compete against males. The other interesting thing that shows it more of a environmental and not biological is Hollywood having a trans kid. It's like the latest accessory. They all need to have one. What are the odds that less than one percent of the public is transsexual, yet probably thirty percent of the Hollywood actors have a trans kid. Megan Fox has three, and she's at one hundred percent, well above the natural average. Yeah, who is it, Cynthia and Nixon? You know who that is? Of course you don't. She was one of the actors in uh Sex and the City, the orange haired one, the ginga and she at one point she was like making some kind of half hearted run or maybe it was just a threat to run for mayor of New York City. And I remember like she was talking at some rally or something, well maybe like screaming more than talking, but she was saying, how you know, like one of her kids's trans, her kid's best friend is trans. Some other friends they have is trands. Like all these people that are around her that are trands. And it's like just the the statistical probability that you would have that many people like Megan Fox has three trans kids like that, that is, that's statistically impossible. That's why I say this is a social contagion. There's also a little bit of the Munchhausens by proxy thing going on here with parents transing kids and such. In fact, here, let me play this clip. This is Helen Joyce. I actually played this clip several years ago. She made these comments on a podcast hosted by Peter Bogosian. Peter Bogosian is academic guy and one of the three co authors of the Grievance Studies, along with Helen Pluckrose and James lindsay, they submitted a bunch of fake woke papers studies quote unquote to these various journals that are supposed to be you know, like the expert class that peer reviews stuff, and like highly credentialed journals in the fields of whatever, I mean, these soft sciences and such. And they wrote these fake papers and submitted them and got like almost half of the dozen that they submitted actually published. And they did it to prove that there is no actual scientific rigor at the publications or that's propping up these theories. As long as you say the right things, you get published, and then once you're published, then other people cite your work as scaffolding to support your quote research. At one point, I want to say, they had translated mind komf Hitler's autobiography. They translated that and they swapped out word they swapped out like Jews for various other people, and they submitted it for publication like that's what they were doing. They talked about like dogs in a dog park being racist against black dogs because they wouldn't hump the black dogs or something like that. I mean, just they made up just absurd studies and got them published. So Peter Bagosian one of those academics, and he's interviewing Helen Joyce. She is a writer and author and became this women's rights activist or advocate in the UK. She's Irish and she said for this interview with him, And again this was several years ago, and so this clip is now making the rounds and it is especially relevant now. There's a lot of people who can't move on on this, and because that's the people who transition their own children. So those people are going to be like, you know, the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn't know the war was over, They've got to fight forever. That This is why there's another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we'll ever have experienced. A lot of people have done the worst thing that you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably. Because of it, those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity and for their own self respect. So they'll still be fighting. And each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups. And now you can't talk truth in front of that party, and you know you can't, because what you're saying is you, as a parent, have done a truly human rights abuse of awful thing to your child that cannot be fixed. There are specific individuals who are really actively against women's rights here, and it's not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels, so that it's because they've trans their child. And so those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me, because people like me are a standing reproach to them. I don't want to be I'm not talking directly to them. I don't spend my time bitching about them. But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natal males and women's spaces. Well, it's their son that we're talking about, and they've told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don't, there's no way back for them and their child. They've sold their child a bill of goods that they can't deliver on. And I'm the one who has to be bullied to try to force me to deliberalness. So those people are going to meet the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I'm sorry to say, because they've everything to lose. Yeah, she was right back then, She is right right now. The survey data shows that this social contagion appears to be breaking, and there are going to be a lot of people that are not going to be able to admit what they have participated in. Remember when we had Bill O'Reilly on the program a couple of months ago, maybe a year ago, talking about the Salem witch trials. I think the book was called Killing the Witches or something, and same thing. It was the same thing. You had this reward system inside of that society for these young, predominantly young girls, you know, preteens, teenagers that would get all sorts of attention, and then their peer group would all act out together that they were being possessed, they were being taken hold of by some witch. They would make these accusations, and then people were put to death, put to death, and then it finally broke, that contagion finally broke. In fact, history is replete with examples of this. Have you ever heard of the glass delusion? Happened about four hundred years ago. The glass delusion people thought they were made of glass. In the Middle Ages, people thought that they were made of glass, which was a pretty new technology at the time, and it particularly afflicted the nobles, the elites. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years This cause means a lot to me. I participate in the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year and it's called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth, that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash Walk and then you can search for my team name Pete's Pack. There's also a link at thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make a team and join that one too, or make a donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slaw lash Walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. This is from the Hellion who says social contagion with suicidal empathy is an awful combination. Yeah, people just they. Just supported, they just affirmed right, and what people needed to hear was truth. John from New Jersey says, fads come and go. This fad is passing that and eventually logic sets in and then a random seven oh four number says it can be explained easy it was. It is a fad, right, well, that I mean, a social contagion. You can call it a fad if you want, but like it means, you know, it means a certain thing. It's like an irrational I mean, because a fad can be something that has a rational basis why people start doing something. An irrational fad, I guess, is more social contagion, right, It's an irrational belief in something. In this case, it is delusion, the belief in a thing that is not true. And in that regard, it's very similar to the glass delusion, which was a disorder that popped up in the fifteenth century or no, yeah, well six no, seventeenth century, late sixteenth early century, seventeenth century in the Middle Ages in Europe. In fact, Princess Alexandra Amili and King Charles the sixth both had it, and it's in popular plays from the time, it's in literature over the centuries. What exactly was the cause of this peculiar manifestation of mental illness. This is at history dot Com at the time attributed it to the now discredited diagnosis of melancholy, a kind of noble depression, not like noble as in rich people right. Aristocracy is often linked to the powerful, the wealthy, the geniuses. In the case of the royals, contemporary psychologists speculate that believing one was glass could have been a way of expressing how vulnerable and fragile and exposed they felt in their public positions. It was a way of expressing humanity, sensitivity, and perhaps a desire to be left alone. So this was one of the things people who thought they were glass they would not allow you to come near them for fear that you would literally break them. At the time, glass, particularly clear glass, was a precious new commodity. It was mostly found in royal palaces, churches, and government buildings. According to Professor Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, fixations with innovative materials have been reported throughout history. Before the glass delusion, there were people who believed that their bodies were composed of earthenware, and during the nineteenth century people started to believe that they were made of the dominant construction material of that day, concrete. Later on industrial Revolution, I would point out there were people that thought they were machines, that they were these big industrial machines, that they had been constructed somehow. Our modern day delusions tend to involve technology. Sufferers may believe the government has planted a microchip in their brain, or that a computer is constantly monitoring. Well, that actually is true, there is, yeah, So how do you break the delusion? You break it with truth. There was one report at the time, again four hundred years ago, that a doctor beat one of his patients, just started wailing on him because the guy thought that he was made of glass. And to prove to the guy that he was not made of glass, the doctor just beat him. See, you're not broken. You would have been broken if you were glass. And it seems to have solved the problem. All right. Let me go over and talk with John. Hello, John, welcome to the show. Yes, sir, test your geniosity here do you remember, mid to late eighties. I just moved here and there was the daycare accusations against a particular owner of all the just wild, crazy abuses of the kids, and it hit several daycares here and it was all over. That was all over. There were a lot of them down in Florida. That was a Yeah, that was the That was a panic. It was tied into the Satanic panic as well of the time, where every people thought there were Satanists, you know, holding secret Satan rituals and such, you know, after hours and all these businesses. Sure, how many innocents daycare owners went to prison? Yeah, no, there were, there were a few. There's I've seen a couple of documentaries over the years about that panic as well. Yeah, I mean it is a invasion. I guess. So, yeah, I mean they call it a panic, so yeah, I mean it could be. I mean, I think there's probably an element of the panic because people weren't saying, like, I'm a Satanist. You know, they're not saying I'm a daycare abuser, right, they were accusing everybody else of being that thing. They weren't. They didn't actually believe that they were the thing. So I guess maybe that's a minor difference in the in the application of the label, but yeah, I mean it's it's of a similar kind. He's proven your geniosity. Well, thank you sir, Thank you. John. No, it's a good example, same sort of dynamic. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.