Guestsplaining: Mary Margaret Olohan on Documenting De-Transitioners | Fr. Patrick & Fr. Gregory
September 16, 2024
Fr. Gregory: And this is Father Gregory Pine.
Fr. Patrick: Welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all who support us. If you enjoyed the show, please consider making a monthly donation to us on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. Father Gregory, I am happy to be here with you today, a worthy companion. And happier still to welcome to this episode of Guestsplaining, Mary Margaret Olahan, the author of new book, “De-Trans,” which tells the true stories of those who have escaped the gender ideology cult, Mary Margaret, we’re so happy to have you with us. Welcome to the show.
Mary Margaret: I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Fr. Patrick: This book is so important. I’ve said it elsewhere and I’ll say it here again. I really think that the transgender ideology question is the most pressing moral issue of our time. It’s an extremely important issue for the personal good of those involved in it, for the Catholic Church, which has an opportunity here to offer moral clarity and for our culture, because obviously this is gonna have so many downstream effects. But you’re one of the few people who’s writing about this and really working hard on this issue. So what inspired you to write De-Trans? How did you become aware of the stories that you’re telling in the book?
Mary Margeret: Well, I first started diving into the topic a couple years ago when I was already reporting on gender ideology as kind of a culture wars reporter and I got into that beat because I grew up in a very big, serious Catholic family. We were homeschooled and we spent a lot of time talking about why we were homeschooled, for example, you know, a lot of the indoctrination going on in public schools, whether it was gender ideology or sex education or just political ideological content in schools. We were very aware that we wanted to be raised at home in accord with our Catholic Faith and we were really grateful to our parents for doing that. And so when it came time for me to pick a beat as we call it in journalism, I was really excited to do the culture wars beat because I felt like most of those issues were ones that I had already kind of had a sense of why they were so important and they intersected with our Faith so much you know when it comes to protecting the innocence of children or the lives of the unborn or gender and marriage, family all of these things are so important and so I was reporting on so-called gender affirming care in in around 2020, 2021 and I remember writing a story about gender affirming care and how media outlets were using that phrase. And my editor and I at the time were like, we think this is referring to surgeries, even for kids, but we’re not totally sure. So I did a deep dive in this story. And I was just so profoundly disturbed to find out that gender affirming care at the time, we thought with kind of just social transitioning, we thought it would just kind of meant that at schools, teachers were calling kids by their preferred pronouns. That’s what we kind of thought that gender-affirming care was. But it turns out we now know it means transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even if we’re talking about children. And it’s a euphemistic phrase that was being pushed by all these outlets and activists at the time to try and mask the grizzly realities of what was going on. And so after I wrote that story and did a little bit of a deep dive into gender-firming care and the group pushing it and what it actually meant. I was very on the alert for more stories like this and I was looking for people who had tried to go down this transition route and wanted to talk about it. And once I started looking, I couldn’t believe how there have been this kind of resurgence and people online talking about trying to undergo gender transitions. Or I like to say attempted gender transitions because we know you can’t actually transition. It’s not possible. And there was one night I was making dinner for myself and I noticed online that there was this Twitter spaces event. And it’s just kind of like a big group where people can raise their hand and talk online. And I joined it. It was specifically for people who had tried to transition, specifically using hormones. So it testosterone for the women and estrogen for the men. So I tuned in as I was making dinner and I just could not believe what I was hearing. These people were describing how mentally and physically they had suffered from the hormones they were taking and what changes they had experienced and all these different complicating factors that I had never heard of it sounded kind of dystopian and kind of sci-fi like in the way that they were describing how their lives had been changed and also also disturbing was one person would speak and sound like a man and then reveal that she was actually a woman and her voice had been permanently altered by the testosterone. And a man would speak and describe how estrogen had affected him and changed his voice and changed his body. They were describing loss of fertility, loss of sexual function. All of these things that you would never hear about from what I call establishment media. And so I listened in on these conversations and at the time I didn’t really know how to report on them because all of these people were, they were using anonymous names online and they were, you know, I couldn’t necessarily prove that they existed and that they were who they said they were. And at the time, I was a little bit of a newer reporter, so it was more daunting to me. But I thought, I’m going to put a pin in this. I want to come back to it. This is incredibly important. And over the next couple of years, I would try and report on stories of detransitioners. As I saw them coming up, so Helena Kirchner, for example, is one girl who is in the book. She’s kind of a philosopher. Her sub-stack is so interesting and I would encourage everyone to read it if they want to understand this issue better. One of the things that she really gets into is pornography and its effect on her and her understanding of womanhood and femininity and how that impacted her decision to try and transition. But Helena and I, we worked together a little bit on a couple of stories. And when I finally got the opportunity to write a book and I was asked, what would you wanna write it on? I immediately knew that I would wanna share the stories of detransitioners. And I’m not gonna lie, I thought it was gonna be easier than it was. I thought that I could kind of just knock out a bunch of stories of detransitioners and share them the way I normally do in stories, in news stories. But this was a project that took me about six months to write and then even six months more to edit and to really solidify. And it was a very emotional experience too, to speak to these people who had undergone such invasive and traumatic events and to hear about their mental and physical suffering and that of their families. And I also spoke with Abby Martinez, who’s the mother of a girl who ultimately committed suicide. That was a very emotionally charged conversation where we both became very tearful as we talked about her story. So it’s an emotional book for me. It’s very sad, but I think that their stories are the best way to combat gender ideology because it’s their lived experiences. They went through this themselves and the radical activists on the left like to really weaponize personal stories. Well, these are personal stories and they shouldn’t be ignored because these detransitioners have really been through hell and now they’ve lived to tell the tale and that’s part of what I’m trying to do here is to help them do that.
Fr. Gregory: I think that we’ll probably afford a good amount of time to hear some of those stories or to hear, kind of vignettes from some of those stories. But I think too of, you know, kind of like the average listener, folks who tune into Godsplaining and might bob in or out of an issue. And I think that you made reference to the fact that the beat that you kind of took on whatever it was, you know, four, five, six, seven years ago, it’s kind of like a typical culture warrior’s beat. And I think like, yeah, I think a lot of people have grown weary, dismayed, discouraged by the culture war or their role as culture warriors. I think often of this line from George Orwell, where he says, “To be a good writer, you have to wake up angry every morning.” As Christians, I don’t think that it’s our responsibility to wake up angry every morning, but I think that we need to wake up like attentive, like caring, concerned, somehow involved, sufficiently so as to actually like, lay claim to our responsibility and exercise our agency and be involved. So I think that like when it comes to this issue, my suspicion is that a lot of folks listening are perhaps ever so slightly exhausted by it, maybe embarrassed that they are exhausted by it and somewhat bewildered as to how to proceed. And it can be difficult to like kind of conjure up sympathy when a lot of the punditry is just like, “I’m angry about this and I’m angry about that.” And you know, like many people just want to distance themselves from what seems like an overcharged exchange of anger. So like kind of in working with these people who tell their stories, how has that been for you in occasion of a kind of greater sympathy or a greater entry into the story as it is so as Father Patrick described it at the outset, important for the present time and something in which we all need invest to some degree or extent.
Mary Margaret: Well I certainly become weary of some of these culture war events as well. You know, as someone that’s been reporting on them very closely for a number of years now, it is exhausting. But something that I like to sort of take refuge in is that the facts are so pertinent and the facts are something that you can always cling to. No one can hold the facts against you necessarily. The truth will set you free, right? So when I report on these stories about the detransitioners, for example, that gives me a lot of comfort because I know these are their stories. These actually happened. These events are not just speculative. We’re not waxing eloquent on our annoyances about them. It’s just, if this is what happened. And so I think that for myself, I really, I find a lot of solace in telling stories that people can rely on versus just, you know, kind of commentating and getting angry. And I think a lot of people are weary of that commentation and that the kind of raging against the evil that we see in the world today. But if they’re equipped with the facts, then they can talk about it calmly and briefly, which I think is underrated. If we can just simply say, no, I don’t support putting a child through a gender transition. There’s many young kids that regret that. Here’s the statistics on that. And here’s why they regretted it. That’s a lot more persuasive, I think, than a rant or a hurraying about why you think these things are so wrong. So that’s at least my take on it and I think that I found personally on social media and when I share my stories, typically I’ll just say what happened and I have been surprised by how far they will go and how many people will see them or interact with them, just because they prefer to interact with the factual facts of the matter versus somebody’s very aggressive take on it.
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, Mary Margaret, I agree with that and I would like to add to that, that that’s how I like my homilies, clear and brief. (laughing) I don’t think I’m the only one out there that has that preference. I can imagine if it hasn’t come already that there’s going to be a wave of reaction to the book. I suspect that those who are promoting gender ideology, promoting gender transitioning, so called, are going to be very interested in undermining the accounts that you’ve offered in the book. So what would you say to critics who would attack the book by saying, for example, that you’ve chosen to tell the stories of a few people that are representative of a minority experience. How do you address some of those concerns that you might perceive coming or that have already come towards the book?
Mary Margaret: Yeah, I would tell them I’m telling these stories because no one else will. And so if they would prefer to tell the stories of other people, they can do that. But these are people who have been underrepresented in establishment media for a very specific ideological reason that organizations like the ACLU and the HRC and GLAD, all these very pro-trans, pro-LGBTQ groups don’t want detransitioners to be heard. And I’m not just saying that, that’s something that they themselves talk about. They’ll say, “Transition regret is very rare. You shouldn’t be promoting these stories. It harms transgender people, etc., etc. And so that’s kind of part of the job I’ve perceived for myself in conservative media for a long time now is conservative media exists to fill the void that other outlets and media leave. There are many stories that aren’t being told nowadays that wouldn’t be told at all if conservative media wasn’t telling them. One good example is the Loudoun County rape scandal where a poor girl in Loudoun County, Virginia, was assaulted in her bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. And we all know the fallout from that. And many people believe that that was in large part what caused Glen Youngkin to become governor of Virginia was parents being absolutely outraged by this story and the way the school district reacted to it and the way Democratic lawmakers and media reacted to it. And it kind of caused Virginia to turn red in that aspect and to elect a Republican governor. But those are stories that, story itself wouldn’t have really surfaced if major conservative news outlets like the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, and Fox News hadn’t really put a lot of emphasis behind it to get it out to the American people. And we saw that during COVID as well in the pandemic, there were a lot of stories that just weren’t being told, you know, factually on coronavirus statistics or on governors and lawmakers who said one thing and then did another. And you know, you could be on either side of this political spectrum, but I think you still should be able to acknowledge that there are certain stories that are unacceptable for establishment media to tell, at least in their eyes. And so when it comes to detransitioners, you can just look at how they’ve covered it. Establishment media really didn’t cover these stories until conservative media had put enough emphasis behind it that the New York Times and the Washington Post felt compelled to do some profiles. And so then they did do one big piece per outlet on the transitioners. And of course, they noted them that detransition regret is very rare. This is abnormal and they implied that people like Chloe Cole, one of the detransitioners in my book, is profiting off of her transition and her transition regret and there’s a lot of rude implications. So anyways, the short of that ramble is these are stories that haven’t been told and they haven’t been told thoroughly and that’s why I’m telling them. And I want people to be able to understand the manipulation that went on here, or the lies that parents and young people are being sold, and the realities of what an attempted transition does to our youth. And I tried to do that in a really intimate and vulnerable way. Some of it’s a little bit TMI, and that’s a fair warning. We get very nitty-gritty here, but I also think that’s important. I think that given all the euphemisms that establishment media uses to talk about these issues, I think it’s really good to be blunt and plain and to be really factual when we’re talking about all of this. So, you know, when I’m talking about some of these very invasive genital procedures, I will talk about them, but I’ll quote from John Hopkins Medical Organization, for example, to give you a good idea that this isn’t just me speculating or me trying to describe something that I don’t really understand. Here’s John Hopkins Medical Organization, the definition of what a phalloplasty is and things like that. So it’s very raw, but I think that that’s a huge part of helping people understand what’s going on.
Fr. Gregory: Perhaps then kind of in respect for or steam of the project itself, maybe you could just tell us a story or recount one of the stories of the persons whom you interviewed or the family members of which persons you interviewed. Maybe just give us an insight into, I know that there’s no real typical arc, but an arc which communicates a depth of sorrow, of pain, of suffering, that folks just typically aren’t exposed to.
Mary Margaret: Yeah, I think a good story to share is that of Prisha Mosley, partially because she has, I wouldn’t say a happy ending because her life is very much just getting started, but there is a happier conclusion to her story in my book, which is more positive. So Prisha was a young girl in her teens and she was really deeply struggling with anorexia. She had a host of mental health problems. She was feeling isolated at school, not getting along with a lot of people. And she was sexually assaulted as a young teenager. And that sexual assault really weighed heavily on her. It made her want to get out of her female body, it made her want to distance as much as she could from femininity because it made, she felt that, her femininity had betrayed her. Specifically her breasts, she felt like there was something wrong with her that had drawn this person to assault her. And so also as a result of this assault, she became pregnant and So also as a result of this assault, she became pregnant and she was so anorexic that her body could not maintain the pregnancy and she miscarried. And this was really, really hard for Prisha. She obviously did not want to lose that child. And she took it very, very, she felt that extreme guilt that her body had failed the baby in this way. And so she was carrying this around with her as a young teenager. Her parents’ relationship was not great. Her mother was struggling with a whole host of her own problems. And so Prisha was really dealing with her own problems on her own. She described to me in vivid detail seeing a rock on her walk one day and that rock was in the shape of a little baby and it reminded her of the baby that she had miscarried and so she picked up the rock and took it home and kept it in the box with her and and called it what she would have called the baby and she still has that box with her to this day and I think that kind of gives you a good picture of how deeply emotional and traumatized she was by what she had already been through at this point. And now she was spending a lot of time on the internet. She was being exposed to a lot of pro-transgender content online. And something that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that the anorexia community online bleeds into the transgender community online. So for girls who are struggling with anorexia, there was a community called pro-an where someone like Prisha would go on and receive support and accolades from other girls who were also anorexic and were trying to become as small and skinny as possible. And they would post what Prisha called, progress photos, which in effect were news on the internet to try and show each other how they were progressing in their, in their anorexia. And effectively how they were becoming more and more starved. And that’s interesting because mental health professionals and doctors would look at those photos and say, “No, there’s something wrong here. You’re starving yourself to death. You’re in danger. You need medical help.” But when it comes to the transgender issues, that is not the way the medical community views that type of thing. Interestingly enough, Prisha told me that this pro-anorexia community kind of bled into the pro-transgender community in that people in the pro-transgender community are also posting progress photos online in a similar inappropriate fashion where these progress photos are perhaps nude photos of them after getting a double mastectomy or, or changing their body in certain ways to try and look more masculine or more feminine. And so she slowly began to sit into this different community and the people in these online transgender groups would tell her, “Oh, you’re struggling or you don’t like your female body.” It’s because you’re actually a man and slowly but surely she began to believe that all of her problems were stemming from the fact that she was a guy and that was why she had been suffering so much mentally. And so at this point, she went to see a therapist who was a gender-affirming therapist who encouraged her to explore this new identity, told her that yes, she was a boy, affirmed her. And since Prisha was a minor, she couldn’t undergo these gender transition procedures without the permission of her parents. And so her parents had to consent to the whole deal. And this is a part that I think a lot of people don’t fully understand. And I would like to caveat here that there are many parents who are evil and very selfish and narcissistic and push their kids into transition in a desire to promote themselves and to have some kind of status on social media or with their friend group. And that is very wrong and obviously not something that we would condone but it is a different animal than what I think a lot of these other situations have panned out to be which, in Prisha’s case, involved her parents loving her not wanting their daughter to go through an invasive gender transition and going to seek the help of medical professionals who they should be able to trust to tell them what the right thing to do here is. And you know, they’re hearing all the rhetoric of loving and affirming and doing what’s best for their daughter. So in this case, Prisha’s mother talked to her therapist and was very concerned about this route and what the therapist and the doctors told her parents was, “If your daughter isn’t allowed to receive so-called “gender affirming care”, then your daughter may kill herself. This is a line that’s given to many, many parents. This exact line is, “would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” And that’s a threat that’s given to many parents nowadays by medical professionals who took an oath to do no harm and yet they’re telling parents if you don’t follow our ideological convictions here, your kid will probably kill themselves and it’ll be your fault. And these parents who are usually just, you know, average American parents who are not super keyed into politics. They love their kids. They don’t want their kids to suffer. They don’t really want to go out away from the norm, not super looking to push boundaries and so what do they do? They trust the medical professionals and they go along with it and unfortunately for Prisha and for Chloe Cole and a number of other young people They deserve more than that they deserve their parents to research more and to do, to push back against these doctors and to find better health. But not every parent is equipped with the skills and the resources to do so. And so in Prisha’s case, she was allowed to move forward with her gender transition. And she went on to testosterone. She had many negative side effects from that. And she also ultimately got a double mastectomy, which is irreversible, so removable of both of her breasts. And when she consented to these procedures, she believes that she wasn’t able to actually give informed consent. Since she didn’t know all of the implications of such a surgery, and she didn’t fully understand what she was getting into. Same with the hormones, the testosterone, she had no idea what effect these would have on her body. And frankly, the doctors who gave them to her didn’t either. The testosterone, especially on women, and estrogen on men, those are experimental drugs that we don’t fully know the implications of and we’re finding that out now through the expose of the W Path files, the world professional transgender health association, I think I don’t even know the whole acronym, but it’s this group of very radical doctors who are allowed in our country and in others as medical professional organization that have said that gender-firming care is a good thing and helps young people. But meanwhile, these same radical doctors know that, for example, testosterone is ruining fertility in young girls. It’s causing cancerous tumors in other girls. And they’ve talked privately about how kids can’t consent to these things. They’re mental health issues, prevent them from properly being able to consent to these procedures. And yet none of this is shared publicly and publicly they just condone and embrace these procedures. So unfortunately people like Prisha have fallen victim to this type of lie and have undergone these procedures thinking that they’re condoned by all the top professionals in our medical community. And it took her a bit to understand that none of these procedures that she had done had actually made her happier. She had been promised by the doctors and therapists that this would make her happier, that she, her mental health issues would resolve once she had become, you know, become a boy. And after her double mastectomy and that she slowly was healing her scars were forming and she was on testosterone, she realized that she did not feel better. In fact, she felt worse. And I think that’s a moment for a lot of detransitioners where they realized, wait, this was supposed to make me feel better and I don’t, was all of this a lie. And it causes them to look more closely at what they’ve been through and what they’ve been told. And for many of them, they’re realizing I was manipulated, I was lied to, and now I’m in a situation that I don’t totally know what to do with. And so many of these be transitioners just kind of fade into the background, they don’t want to talk about it, they want to resume their lives or what they can patch up of their lives because they might be missing body parts, they might be severely affected by hormones in certain ways such as bone structure, muscle density, muscle formation, hair growth, hair loss, skin coarseness, just all these different side effects that they weren’t expecting. But for people like Prisha, she was brave enough to share her story online and to say, “I was told all these things and now I clearly know that I was lied to.” And she received support from people online and was able to get her story in front of enough people that reporters like myself saw it and were able to talk to her and to share her story as well. And so that’s how her story got out. And I would just like to add that Prisha, who thought maybe she could have never had children again, is about to give birth to her first baby. Her second baby, but her first baby to be born alive. And that’s a really beautiful gift from God for Prisha that she’s going to be able to be a biological mother to a baby that is her own. And I think that’s really beautiful. And to her so-called gender journey because not every person that goes through this type of transition is able to have children after all. And Prisha is blessed to be able to do so and I’m so happy for her. –
Fr. Patrick: Right, that note is especially hopeful. I mean, Mary Margaret in the time that remains to us, what are the kinds of things that we can be doing to support detransitioners, especially in the Catholic community? How can we help them to know that they are loved, that the Church is a place where they’ll be received, where they can meet the healing graces of Christ, and where their lives can be renewed and restored?
Mary Margaret: I think that the Catholic community is really well equipped to be welcoming detransitioners because something that a lot of the detransitioners really need to hear is that they are loved by God in their unique, their uniqueness as a human being, right? And I think a lot of them have been trying to learn this in a secular fashion on their own where they’re trying to understand I am unique in who I am, I don’t have to fit into certain boxes. I don’t have to pressure myself to be a certain way. I should just try and relax and be the person that I was created to be. And I think Catholicism comes into that picture very well because they’re craving love. They’re craving understanding of who they are. And and it’s, Catholics should be able to offer that to them in a very low stress loving manner. And just in saying, yes, you are loved, you are uniquely created and we want to love and celebrate you just for who you are. And I think that’s something that radical leftists try and say in a different way. They try and say you are, you are perfect no matter who you want to be or what you are. But it’s not, it’s not hinged on the proper understanding of human dignity, right? We can accept and understand who someone is without affirming a fake identity or affirming things that are not true and good. So I think the Catholic Church is in a great place to be welcoming detransitioners and loving them. And I hope that we can do more of that.
Fr. Patrick: That’s another great note of hope. Mary Margaret, thank you so much for joining us for this quick conversation about your book. Again, the book is De-Trans True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. I’m just out from Regnery Press. Thanks again for joining us for sharing Prisha’s story and for talking about your work.
Mary Margaret: Thank you so much for having me. This was so great.
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