Dr. Jay Wesley Richards on What Every Parent Should Know About Gender Ideology and Gender-Affirming Care
In a previous episode of Humanize, Wesley interviewed Jennifer Lahl, director of The Detransition Diaries, which documents the stories of three young women who received what is called “gender-affirming care”—including a mastectomy in one case—and later realized that they were indeed the female sex they were born.
That discussion focused mostly on the radical body-altering interventions that children who question their sex too often receive. In this follow-up interview, we take a broader look at “Gender ideology” generally, and how the West got caught up in a moral panic that has seen an explosion of both adult and child cases of gender dysphoria. The discussion ranges from describing the supposed “Seven Sexes” that gender ideologues argue exist, to the role of social media in this social contagion, to how the ideology represents the hegemony of feelings over facts, and the reasons children are the prime targets of gender warriors. It is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
Jay Wesley Richards, Ph.D., is an analytic philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family and the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Religious Liberty and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. He is also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and Executive Editor of The Stream.
Jay is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); The Human Advantage; Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt; and Eat, Fast, Feast.
He is also creator and executive producer of several documentaries, including three that have appeared widely on PBS.
Jay’s articles and essays have been published in The Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Washington Post, The New York Post, Newsweek, Forbes, Fox News, National Review Online, The Hill, Investor’s Business Daily, Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Huffington Post, The Federalist, The Daily Caller, and many other publications.
Jay has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs, including CBS Evening News, MSNBC, Fox and Friends, PBS, CBN, TBN, and is a regular guest onEWTN.
An experienced public speaker, he has spoken at academic conferences; college and university campuses in the United States, Europe, and Asia; many think tanks in the U.S. and Europe; public policy meetings; and on several occasions to members of the U.S. Congress and U.S. congressional staff.