You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 158. Kristopher Kaliebe.mp3
Kristopher Kaliebe:
No longer are those journals actually reputable on this subject because they know they have to serve their larger organization. They're just a piece of this big organization. And so why in the medical journals are you not seeing any disagreement or anything? It's institutional policy to support this. You can go outside to other journals and there's an incredibly rich dialogue going on. I'm just painting the picture of what has gone on so people understand how manipulated this all has become and that you no longer can really trust these organizations. They put advocacy before science. And now they can't roll it back because, look, they've really embarrassed themselves. I mean, it's just human nature. Once you come out and already back something, it's very hard to back off no matter how silly or crazy your ideas have been. We're in the middle of a situation where these organizations have really screwed up pretty seriously. They're not yet ready to admit it. You must be some kind of therapist.

Stephanie Winn: My guest today is Dr. Christopher Kalibi. He is a child, adult and forensic psychiatrist, clinician and medical educator with 20 years of experience, known for his stance openly opposing the fraudulent practices known as gender affirming care. Dr. Kalibi, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Thank you for having me, Stephanie.

Stephanie Winn: So I let you know before we start recording, I'm just gonna let my guests know right now. I am a little sick today, so I have a throat thing. We're gonna try to edit out my clearing my throat and all of that, but if I sound a little funny, that's what's going on. Anyway, Dr. Kalebi, it's great to be here with you. For those who aren't familiar, or maybe for those who are, I mean, heck, I don't even know the answer to this question. How did you end up getting called into battle in the gender wars?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, I first and foremost see patients and I teach. And I have residents and medical students that I'm responsible for teaching them. And I see kids myself. So I need to provide high quality care to people that come in front of me. And it is obvious to me that the whole idea of gender-affirming care with everything that goes along with it, the medicalization, without even knowing the facts I was suspicious of it, so I was like, this seems really weird, not normally what we would do, and the whole idea of affirming, I've done a lot of work, I believe I have pretty good therapy skills, I take therapy very seriously, the whole idea that you would go along with a narrative of a child or an adolescent is contrary to how therapy is done. I mean, we don't argue against people's narratives, but we want to explore them and understand what's going on, but to automatically and immediately affirm seemed, you know, crazy to me seemed seemed very contrary to how I was trained and what appropriate care would be. So I had already started to have some suspicions about this. The other thing that was really interesting and really is not spoken about enough is I started medical school in actually actually 95. So you know what, when we say 20 years practicing, I finished my last fellowship in 2005. But I I have 10 more years, and those are pretty busy years when you're in medical school and did my general psychiatry residency, my child psychiatry fellowship, and my forensics fellowship. That's 10 years. I saw zero trans-identified patients during that time. In my first 10 years of practice, I saw zero trans-identified patients. So all of a sudden, we have this new group of patients that we've never had before. It seemed incredible. Plus, since I knew a little bit about the statistics, I was like, well, these kids are most likely, if it was an early onset gender dysphoria, girlish boy, boyish girl, they grow out of it. And mostly are ended up being same sex attracted adults. There's no reason to treat this. And it's also inappropriate to call them a label as if we know that there's gonna be a long-term trans identification as an adult, which is contrary to what the statistics are. So even not knowing much about the subject, I was right away like this is not I'm not going to practice like this. I'm not going to teach my residents like this. And I'm going to stand up and ask questions. And so that has brought me down the road that I went down.

Stephanie Winn: So it seems like the first thing you did where you publicly put your name behind this as a professional saying this is wrong was this report that you wrote for a Florida case. Can you tell us about the case and the report?

Kristopher Kaliebe: I went ahead and just thought about what are all the issues at stake? What do I think needs to do? What does the court need to hear from a non-advocate? Because if you look at who writes the reports on the other side, these are individuals who are all professionally aligned with gender affirming care. They both make their money off of it and they've staked their professional reputations off of it. So it's really, to me, interesting how much… they have been able to stake claims about how psychiatry is done when they only do one little teeny bit of psychiatry. This is a very narrow field and doing things that are completely opposite. So I just was asked to write a report I laid out on every single level that I could think about the ethics, the problems with medicalization, how this is contrary to therapy, how we're pulling in a lot of our most vulnerable kids and particularly causing harm to those who we really should be protecting. So, you know, I put it all in the report.

Stephanie Winn: And what was the context of that report or how was it used?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Florida had passed a law restricting, the Florida Board of Medicine had voted to restrict these practices and Florida had passed some laws restricting. And so anyone who's sort of following this realizes that the ACLU and other activist groups challenge all these laws and bring their experts and these all end up in court. And obviously the Supreme Court right now is handling one of these cases. So we don't have every single state keeping going through this, which is what has been happening is every state that passes the laws and gets challenged and it goes to court. So it was part of that same process.

Stephanie Winn: So you had said earlier that in some ways you've never seen anything like this before. And that's the main issue I hear from a lot of professional whistleblowers is, hey, this is a real deviation from best practices, from everything we know about non-maleficence and everything we know about developmental psychology, preventing iatrogenic harm and so on. At the same time, you have also been critical of over-diagnosis and over-prescription, and I'd imagine that's a pretty hot-button issue as a psychiatrist who treats children and adolescents because you have to make some really difficult decisions about when and if it's appropriate to put young people on psychiatric medications. So I'm wondering, you know, definitely about the places where you see this as a deviation from how we typically approach care, but also where you see this maybe bleeding into other topics with regard to how we treat diagnosis and treatment.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, well, I will say that the whole issue of what we're now calling gender dysphoria, or was previously called gender identity disorder, is a prime example of how the diagnostic and statistical manual that we use in medicine, and particularly, obviously, that's a psychiatric manual, is a very imperfect document. It can cause problems. And if they don't properly vet, and if they're not cautious and thoughtful about how they do these disorders, then they end up causing harm. And this is not the only place where the psychiatric establishment has Led us down a road towards over treatment and over diagnosis It's just one of the latest and most egregious ones probably is the most egregious one. But if you look at how psychiatric medications and the whole idea of diagnosis has become the dominant paradigm through which people see themselves and see mental illness and you will you'll see how distorted it is when I think a quality psychiatrist is going to talk about getting a biopsychosocial formulation and understanding all the layers of developmentally where a child is at, what kind of what did they bring into the table physically, sometimes in extremes, let's say like a level three autism, you're going to be like, okay, that's a very biological disorder. that fits the medical model a little bit better. But most of the stuff that we're treating in psychiatry, like behavior and learning problems, the kids like emotional up and down, like trauma related issues, like families that are struggling. The stuff that we're treating doesn't fit that great into the medical model. Alan Francis says that we should write our diagnoses in pencil, you know, not then. But of course, now it's a computer and stuck forever and people just collect diagnoses. So I've been advocating for well-rounded, holistic approaches my whole career. I very much emphasize exercise, mindfulness, eating right. We have a track for our psychiatry residency for the Andy Weil Center for Integrated Medicine, so I'm one of the faculty on that, where I'm You know helping teach the residents that there's a whole bunch of options out there that are not just the pharmacy I mean, I think I I don't want to be anti medicines I think people medicines can be beneficial but we should be very careful much more careful than we're usually being these days and So yes, this to me is just the most egregious and worst example of how the reductionism that we need in order to label things can then lead to bad outcomes. And this level of reductionism of the gender dysphoria diagnosis has led to a overemphasis on this one little thing and us forgetting about everything else we knew and that if we just treated these kids with the regular treatments that we'd normally have, that we would be doing a lot better job.

Stephanie Winn: You mentioned the DSM and currently on DSM-5, and you mentioned current diagnosis, gender dysphoria, and the DSM-4 is gender identity disorder. And I actually encourage people to read the DSM-5 section on gender dysphoria, because it's very revealing. I mean, my section is all highlighted and marked up. And sure, if you're new to this topic and you're not in our field, it might all look like gobbledygook, but if you have any experience or interest in this field, I think it's so interesting to look through that section because you'll notice a lot of inconsistencies. You'll notice the diagnostic criteria are based on stereotypes. You'll notice that the prevalence rates written in this book that was published in 2013 look nothing like the prevalence rates today. You'll notice that although it says some things about how some people with this may choose to medicalize, it says nothing about the responsibility of the diagnosing professional who's reading that DSM and using it. in determining whether or not it's appropriate for those people to go on to medicalize, right? It's like leaves that part out. So I think that's super interesting. I've actually advised some of the people who come to me to just look at it themselves. Um, but unless there's anything you want to say about that, I have a comment on this over diagnosis and the shift that you've seen, because you said you've been in the field since 95.

Kristopher Kaliebe: That's when I started medical school. Yes.

Stephanie Winn: So I mean, when it comes to children, adolescents and young adults and their desire for a diagnosis, their desire for medication, I'm curious what shifts you've seen because the culture has changed so much since then. the stigma or lack thereof or whatever the opposite of stigma is, maybe we could call that secondary gain, you know, as well as factors like malingering, cluster B traits and things like this, you know, what, even if potentially you could even set aside the question of gender dysphoria if you wanted to in answering that question or not, but how has that changed in the last 30 years?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, those trends have all moved in one direction, which is away from the word we use, stigma. And I think people have been using a very oversimplified concept of what stigma is and what are the implications of stigma. So you were saying what's on the other side of stigma? Is this a thing to balance? And the other side is what what they what I call illness identity. So illness identity is the opposite of stigma. And when you are saying, hey, you know, every all this is normal, everything is normal. Be however you want to be. It's not a problem. OK, I get it. We don't want to give people who have true mental illness a hard time. We're not trying to make their lives tougher. We need to be compassionate. We want to help people that have mental illness. There's no doubt about that. And there's no doubt that people do get a hard time, especially when they have severe persistent mental illness. That's a very tough thing to to to navigate life with. That being said, when you want to go the opposite and you're, and the people who are making the DSM want to make the criteria looser and looser and looser, so everything can get labeled. Once these labels get released into society, the DSM no longer controls what people do with them. And if you look at the, you know, Edward Shorter book or the, I'm trying to remember the other, the transient mental illnesses. But you have a whole history of a disorder comes, there's a ecological niche for it, they're sort of supported in this, and then it fades away as society changes. And so we've had different names for, you know, we don't know, no longer diagnosing, you know, like psychogenic paralysis or these other, you know, these things that used to happen and used to be, you know, sort of more major labels are now are now gone or we rarely see them. And yeah, it seems like we've we have a bunch of especially young people that are willing to define themselves through if you're suffering, if you're not having your needs met, if your things are not going well for you, you're naturally going to wonder, hey, what is it? Well, you know, what is going on with me? What is that? And when you're given a label then you're turning away from, we just all suffer as human beings. I just need to make my way in the world. Maybe when I grow up, there will be an assigned label, but for right now I'm a kid developing and it becomes part of their identity. It's a way that they say that they're suffering. But to take all that stuff so seriously and medicalize a label that people are giving themselves, that's when psychiatry goes off the rails. And so I think this is part of the challenge is, we have to understand the implications of what we write in our books and that there's negatives about loosening these criteria and it can lead to over diagnosis and over treatment. And especially when you're talking about group identities, not being aware that there was some possibility that you were going to unleash an identity that lots of people would gravitate to and in the end it would cause harm is an absolute failure of people who write the book.

Stephanie Winn: That's such a good phrase, illness identity. It really succinctly summarizes something that we're putting our finger on. I might use that in the title of this episode, come to think of it. I hear you describing how the symptom pool has changed over time and how as people identify into that symptom pool, their development can be arrested, which leads into the criticism of social transition, something I appreciate that you've had a stance on, because I think out of all of those of us professionals who are concerned about medicalization, there are those who are more cautious about social transition. I'm definitely on that end of things. And then there are those I frequently hear, not directly from them, but indirectly, about those who seem to minimize the harms of social transition, as if you can separate the two, right? So it seems like if what we're looking at is secondary gain and illness identity, and there being some sort of social reward that creates more of a permanence around one's identification with their struggles, how does that affect the issue of social transition, which is sometimes framed, let's be honest, as experimentation in adolescence?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, I think experimentation to me would be, hey, what clothes are you going to wear? Or are you going to wear makeup? Changing your name is not experimentation, right? Saying that you're a different sex than what you are is not experimentation. I'm not sure how we got to this place where people have sort of snuck in this idea that the kind thing to do, that the nice thing to do is to go along with a child's self-identification. I don't think that that's, I think at its face value, people realize that that's silly. We don't, you know, as As one of the experts in the field was asked or said, if your five-year-old comes to you and says they're a dog, do you go buy him dog food? I mean, no, you don't. I mean, there's biological realities that the adults in the room need to keep in mind. And there's real serious implications when we start pretending that that's not a reality. And so yeah, I'm very troubled that so many people are so willing to endorse what I see as a really harmful practice, even if it didn't lead to medicalization. And then we then we know it does lead to medicalization. So once you have someone going down that road, It makes it very hard when in theory, as an adolescent, you'd be like trying on one thing and then you try on another and then you try on another and you're trying to find your way in the world and be able to play different roles and see where your skills are. This is this is not that. I mean, this is a full changing of your name. It's a especially today where people are online and they've staked out a claim and they're every it's very hard for kids to get out of these things. And it's also a non-reality based change. So it makes it very hard for people to then, you know, change back from it. So I think for any number of reasons, it seems like a terrible practice. I'm not the, I don't rule the universe. People could do what they want to do. Parents can make choices as they want to do. I'm just telling you my professional opinion. And when someone asked me, is that it seems to be a terrible idea. If someone is a trans identified adult with a long standing transit, that's a whole different question than a child. It's still a complex question, but it's a whole different question than a child. And so to me, it's not even a difficult choice, we should not be fully socially transitioning kids. It doesn't seem to make any sense to me. And I wouldn't recommend it. That's not saying I'm trying to people do what they want to do. But if you want to my opinion, that's my opinion.

Stephanie Winn: seems like more than ever there's a blurring of the boundaries between our understanding of temporary states versus permanent traits. And I'm thinking about like how in Spanish there are two different forms of the word to be. So anyone who's familiar with like Spanish 101, right, there's ser versus estar. Like one is like I am as in I am a woman. And then another is like I am as in I am hungry or cold, which In Spanish, you wouldn't even say I am, you would say I have hunger or I have coldness. But there's a distinction in these choices that we make with language between my understanding of that which does not change and my understanding of that which does change. And that's something I find so alarming when I… Yeah.

Kristopher Kaliebe: And can I mention this other thing that I think is really surprising to me? I find it strange that we're not saying, how come, let's say with a boyish girl or a girlish boy, how come we're not saying, well, let's make more space for kids to act in ways that don't fit sex stereotypes? Isn't that a better solution than to change the name and to pretend like the person's the other sex? I mean, that seems crazy. So I think and when you know early onset is more likely to be grow up to be a same sex attracted adult. So I find it to be very homophobic and hostile to the same sex attracted people that this is now what we're the professionals are telling them to socially transition their kids. And who are they going to injure most? These kids that it were you know for the for the guys It's really strongly associated and it's still associated for the for the girlish boys or boys girls So either way, I think it's hostile the same sex attractive people to do this too. So this is a whole nother sidebar because everyone wants to moralize this subject and say I'm the one with the you know that that has the the moral opinion and you guys are the bad evil people trying to stop these kids from Transitioning then let me also say This has gone on through all of human history that we've grouped kids into, into boys and girls. It, it is, it is not a problem to do so. It has existed and it's, it's fine. So it's like, what we're doing now is the opposite of what we, what was done all through human history. And there's, there's really this whole like, Oh my God, I can't believe you do that. It was like, well, that's what everyone has been doing always forever. It was just yesterday that some people changed this. It just happened.

Stephanie Winn: It seems to me like if we look at the trajectory over the last 10 or 20 years of this exponential rise and the number of young people identifying as trans or claiming the label of gender dysphoria, or some alternate so-called gender identity, there's like 212 of them last time I counted, I don't know. If we look at that growth curve, It seems to me like maybe 10, 15 years ago, there was much more of, excuse me, how do I put this? A higher percentage of the youth claiming those labels were indeed gender atypical in their behavior and likely to grow up to be same-sex attracted. I think I'm seeing that less and less, especially as we're looking at it swallowing a larger and larger percentage of the population. Like there's only so many people that can be gay just in terms of population averages, right? So it seems to me like, I mean, I get parents coming to me from both sides. I have, you know, parents of rough and tumble tomboyish girls claiming to be boys and they seem like lesbians, but I also have parents of girly girls for whom This is all an act. I mean, it seems really incongruent with who they were before, with what's in their nature. And if we look at actual sort of sex traits and behaviors, not with any value judgment, not saying it's better or worse to be one way or the other, just looking at what traits tend to match with what sexes. We're looking at kids who are more gender typical, that are falling prey to the social contagion as well. And again, I have to look at that secondary gain, that illness identity, as you put it, as an explanation for what those kids are getting out of gravitating towards these labels.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, and I think that we also have to be honest with people and the whole idea of gender identity as currently formulated is a non-coherent idea. So we also have a lot of stuff built upon a non-coherent idea that ends up being able to support this because the original idea of gender identity was your sense of whether you're female or male. which that was what it was, right? Just you do sense that you're female or do you sense you're male. So, well, you may have a cross sex. Feeling okay that there are people that that have that this whole idea that you know now It's whatever you think you are you can just make up something and the whole world is gonna go along with these 70 labels I mean Why should we why am I gonna go along with some crazy label? I mean fine you call yourself whatever you want and but why would the world encourage that or wanna go along with that? It seems once again, when you build things on incoherent basis and then release it into society, a lot of kids that are confused and troubled and not doing well for whatever reason may grab onto it and then it leads to problems.

Stephanie Winn: I don't quite understand that distinction you just made when you described what gender identity means.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, so gender identity now is male, female, anything in between or anything you want it to be. There was originally this idea of gender identity that was sort of your sense of being either a man or a woman. That was the original sense. with no in-betweens and no other kind of things, right? And there were some people who were like, well, I'm biologically male, I'm a man, but I feel like more like a woman. Okay. But not with all these in-betweens and these other things. So you've now created this amorphous concept. And when people say like, oh, people have been using this term gender identity for so long. It's like, well, they used to use the other term that just meant a man or a woman that made sense when they were doing that. Now that you've turned it into anything you want it to be, it is no longer a coherent concept. It doesn't fit. And you can't claim that researchers and experts and all this have been using this term for 50 years. They were using it with a different meaning for the first 35 years of it.

Stephanie Winn: When it comes to that different meaning, so now is when we're getting into the nuances of slightly different viewpoints within the gender critical counseling and psychiatry fields. I guess I'm trying to understand. So when you describe this more classic definition and a man saying he feels like a woman, what does that mean to you? Because I have a hard time just taking that at face value.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, well, I'm open to criticisms about even that concept, but the original concept was the sense of mostly of men that they're men and women that they're women. And so that's what gender identity was in the beginning. and that's not what it is now and so I your Um, you know, it's fine. Kids want to label themselves. I don't really doesn't fine, but it's, it's also like, don't expect me to take it seriously.

Stephanie Winn: I mean, Well, let's explore that, that concept, if you don't mind, because I think this is something that people get hung up on. They get confused by parents, get kind of stumped, right? And I'll have to ask our listeners to bear with me as I have a cough drop in my mouth because I think ultimately having a cough drop is probably better than how I would sound if I didn't have one, but you can kind of see it in my face if you're watching on video and it might sound a little different. But I mean, so if I hear I don't feel like a man. I feel like a woman." Or, I don't feel like a girl. I feel like a boy. When I hear that, I think there's so many different meanings that those sort of statements can have. And one place that I would start to make distinctions, I think it was my former guest, Jaco Fonsell. Do you know him? Oh, yeah.

Kristopher Kaliebe: I do know.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, Jaco, he's lovely. And when I interviewed him, it was on this paper he had released, and he used the term symbolic equivalence. And so an example here, I'll use that pencil that's sitting on my table right here. So I'm going to pretend this pencil is a pen, and this is Jaco's example, right? That if my father gave me this pen, and I hate my father, symbolic equivalence might be, I hate this pen. And I really genuinely perceive that the pen itself is worthy of hate rather than being able to distinguish, wow, I have some negative emotions when I pick up this pen because it reminds me of my father who I have issues with. So it has to do with sort of one's psychological maturity if they can distinguish that or if they're just kind of equivocating between the thing and what that thing symbolizes in their inner world. So I kind of want to start off with that concept of symbolic equivalence, so that when a person uses a statement like I feel like this or I feel like that, you know, is that a literal thing for them? Are they able to explore it symbolically to recognize that there's something they mean when they say that? And I guess a few different categories that I see people might mean when they say something like that For male, we know autogynophilia is a part of it. So some of it's sexual in nature. Some of it, I also think of autogynophilia and heterosexual trans-identified males as the safety blanket. So for some, I think of it as the female identity that they've created in their minds. and that they might be sort of synthetically ingesting through these chemicals that they put into their bodies and this sort of alter ego that they've constructed for themselves. That female identity is like, I call it the safety blanket or the comfort blanket in my course ROGD Repair, because it seems like a self-soothing mechanism. They don't know how to deal with anxiety. They've maybe never had a successful relationship with a woman. They don't know how to harness their anxiety as a man to go out there and pursue goals, including pursuing being successful with women. So they kind of jump to the conclusion that they want, which is the comfort and love of a woman. In this case, it's an imaginary woman or synthetic cross-sex hormones. So I think of that being kind of one direction that I would look for what a man means when he says, I feel like a woman. And then similarly, a girl not feeling like a girl or a woman or feeling like a boy, I hear opting out of the difficulties and embarrassment and scrutiny and self-consciousness that can come with being a girl, the vulnerability and pain and ickiness of her period and of being ogled and all of those kind of things. I also often, when I listen to what these girls say, I hear being a boy not as a thing that they proactively want to be, like conquering masculinity, but more like boy as not girl, boy as neutral, boy as I don't have to pay attention to my appearance, my mannerisms, how I come across to other people. I don't have to worry about all these things. I can just kind of hide behind this amorphous blob of a gender identity. And then the world won't judge me, and they'll just leave me alone. Or I can be crass and obnoxious. Like, those are all just a few of the things that I kind of read into those statements that make me go, Wait a minute. I don't take that at face value. What do you mean when you say that?

Kristopher Kaliebe: and that's exactly why as conversion therapy now, right? When it's actually the best treatment, the most appropriate treatment, is the treatment that's being pathologized and stigmatized. And the affirming and the medicalization are both inappropriate treatments, and they are being lionized. So yeah, it's a crazy world we're living in. And I agree with all your symbolic equivalence, you know, insights or they're like, that's, that is how, you know, this is how therapists help people make sense of these outward, you know, manifestations of what's bubbling up underneath, especially in adolescence. Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Well, on that note, here comes the Trevor Project banner on my YouTube video. Anytime we talk about the subject, it pops up. People always feel the need to let me know in the comments section. Yes, I know, people, this has been happening since episode 11 of my podcast. I'm very familiar with it. There's nothing I can do about it. But keep leaving those comments because they do help with the YouTube algorithm. Thank you very much.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Is that something I said?

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, you said conversion therapy. No, it's fine. I mean, you said conversion therapy, so the Trevor Project banner is going to pop up and we can all make fun of the Trevor Project in the comments. Thank you. But on that note, you've been quite involved in your professional organizations. So I know you don't want to necessarily throw any of your colleagues under the bus, but what can you tell us about the state of professional organizations today?

Kristopher Kaliebe: It's not great. It's not great. It's a long path that has gotten us where we're at. And I think that most of the membership of these organizations have really been treated very badly by the leadership. So if you are a child psychiatrist and you're reading the Child Psychiatry Journal, you're getting 100% affirmative articles. That's all you're getting. They're not publishing letters to the editor. They're not publishing it, you know, and we're busy people. Most people are not, you know, now I think because it has become such a hot button issue and as time goes on, more psychiatrists are seeing, you know, trans identified kids. So, We're trying to catch up, but sadly, these organizations run around their committees, right? So normally you'd have a committee. and it would be counterweighted by another committee. Like you've got the psychopharm committee, and yeah, they're a little bit overexcited about psychopharmacology, but you also have the psychotherapy committee, who's a little bit overexcited about psychotherapy, and you have at least some counterbalance, so none of them are running how the organization, and each committee, by the bylaws, by the way that they're set up, is the content expert. for that group. So sadly, all you got to do basically is take over a committee at one of these organizations. And now those are the content experts on the subject. And this is so new that the only people doing it are people that work in gender committees and are advocates who are gonna be on these committees. And they sold it to the administration, who I think was willing to buy it because they have big hearts, but don't read a lot, and accepted at face value that this is lifesaving, yada, yada, yada, you know, both evidence-based and the moral thing to do. And so it was kind of an easy sell because psychiatrists are, um, I'd say a little bit gullible and have very big hearts and they really want to do the right thing. And especially when it comes to gender nonconforming people and the bad history psychiatry has with them. They, I think we're, we're going to bend over backwards to not appear that they're, you know, unsupportive to gender nonconforming people. And I think that those, those issues get very confused. This is not about. same-sex attracted people this is not about bisexual this is a whole different thing and the goodwill that psychiatrists have towards same-sex distracted people is part of what got manipulated by the advocacy groups and the advocates in this and no one wants to stand up at these meetings and go like this is just seems crazy because the you know you you do have a Heavily left-leaning organization too. So this is also part of you have to realize that even though psychiatrists tend to be left-leaning and child psychiatrists maybe a little bit more, but you the leadership are people from universities. They're people from big cities. They're people who are very so the leadership is even more left-leaning than the people who are in the who are the Practitioners, I'd say probably you got to the standard psychiatrist. They're probably really not that political and most of us don't want to get in the middle. I didn't want to get in the middle of this. No one wants to get up as a psychiatrist and take a stand on a divisive issue. because you know you're going to have patients on both sides of it. It's going to mess up your ability to connect with people. Whichever side you choose, it's going to mess it up for people on the other side. So psychiatrists don't want to say anything about these kinds of things. But the narrow group of people who leverage this got the institutions, all of the major medical societies, got them to make official proclamations from the organization, right? Which was a brilliant move. I mean, they took over the bureaucracy of the organizations and made them play this card. Part of it was based on that word that the Trevor Project, which I won't say so that people don't have to see banners, and part of it was other fake selling of this as evidence-based and all this. And so they used those claims to get the, you can go down the list, Endocrine Society, American Psychiatric Association, ACAP, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics. They used this moralized kind of claim to push the organization to get behind it and allowed some activist people to write some stuff. And they gave it the stamp of approval. And it's fascinating that once they did, they boxed themselves into such a corner, because in 2018 is when ACAP, the Child Psychiatrists, came out with a statement on, I'll say the word, conversion disorder, where they throw in the gender identity thing. It was sort of like based about the homosexuality, but they threw in or gender identity. This is what they do. And then the same year in 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with their, you know, crazy statement about how they're supporting gender affirming care filled with errors, filled with exaggerations, filled with misinformation. But they are now standing behind it. And so endocrine society 2017. So the professional organizations have have officially come down on the side of this issue, without really any science to stand on, but pushed by advocates. And this is a really incredibly unusual situation. Because if you think about it, who runs the major psychiatric journals? who runs the major endocrine journals, who runs JAMA, the Journal of the American of Medicine, is run by the AMA. So these organizations have already come out saying that they support something organizationally. And now the editors of their journal are not gonna stand up to the organization. Of course, they're just gonna print the stuff that they're told to print. So when you look at, I mean, no longer are those journals actually reputable on this subject because they know they have to serve their larger organization. They're just a piece of this big organization and the journals are controlled by them. And so why in the medical journals are you not seeing any disagreement or anything? It's institutional policy to support this. So of course, us psychiatrists who are doing submissions for meetings and we're not getting accepted, our letters to editors are not accepted. No, that has all been suppressed in squelch. You can go outside to other journals and there's an incredibly rich dialogue going on at lots of other journals not associated with the medical associations. So I'm just painting the picture of what has gone on so people understand how manipulated this all has become and that you no longer can really trust these organizations. They've become advocate, they put advocacy before science and now they can't roll it back because look, they've really embarrassed themselves. So they almost have to, I mean, they're already going to get, you know, the APA or AAP is already part of a lawsuit. And I mean, it's just human nature. Once you come out and already back something, it's very hard to back off no matter how silly or crazy your ideas have been. All of us have that, you know, sunk cost fallacy is the Cognitive kind of bias that captures that the best but we're in the middle of that we're in the middle of a situation where these Organizations have really screwed up pretty seriously, but I don't read they're not yet ready to admit it But those are that's sort of a layout of the manipulations And so I've been trying to help them to change but when I try to help them to change They don't take it very well. They get upset with me. I

Stephanie Winn: It sounds so diabolical, and it makes me think of the idea of the mind virus. And I think about how viruses actually work, which is they, you know, they're not living in and of themselves. They what, just have, they have RNA, but not DNA, I think it is.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, it depends, but yeah, DNA mostly, yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Oh, they have DNA, okay.

Kristopher Kaliebe: There are viruses, it depends which kind of virus, right?

Stephanie Winn: Sorry, what do I know? But I think this part is accurate. I mean, you can correct me, you're a doctor. But I mean, if I understand correctly, viruses are not in themselves living, but they insert themselves into living cells like bacteria. And as you know, we all have lots of healthy bacteria helping run the show in our bodies. And they inject themselves into those bacteria, and hijack the bacteria away from their original purpose towards the purpose of replicating more copies of themselves, the viruses, right? Did I have that mostly right?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, of course, they use the mechanism of the cell, they insert their DNA, and then they crank out more virus.

Stephanie Winn: So I mean, thinking about that as a metaphor, it feels really apt for what you described with the institutional takeover, right? These people with this agenda, go into these institutions and they take advantage of the resources and infrastructure and the way things are done within that system. They make it look like we're doing things the way that things are done. It all sounds very official, but it's hijacking these existing systems to replicate more copies of the mind virus, so to speak.

Kristopher Kaliebe: I think it's a 100% apt analogy because they did take, they snuck in, because there was never a back and forth in the journals like, oh, this would be the points of going to gender affirming care, this is against gender affirming care, this is how we do it. That never existed. They shoved it down people's throats, basically. But they also control because they all have their own little email thing that they send out. So if you're a member of these organizations, you get a news blast from them. Well, guess what news they sent? They only send one side of the news. They're not going to send the other side of the news. They have their own throwaway journals that has the right. They have the journals they control when you go to the conference, who gets to present at the conference, when they have facts for families or other kind of things, who writes those. Right. So they came into all of these parts of the bureaucracy and controlled them and shamed anyone who would stand up to them, because obviously in these organizations, no one stood up to them. And they have now used the whole bureaucracy to where, especially like the young trainees, they've never seen anything else. All they've seen is this, and they're like, oh my god, this must be right, because it's all I've been overheard, and it's all I've been taught, and I don't know anything different. So in some ways, we have the sad situation where we have to feel a little bit sorry for some of the, especially young trainees, that they actually were taught this. They didn't, they've never been taught anything different. And you assume there's this thing called the chain of trust in medicine, where you assume that the person who's teaching you is an expert and really knows what they're talking about. And it's all been vetted. And so the chain of trust in youth gender medicine is completely destroyed because it got co-opted by people who didn't really care about the truth. They wanted just to be advocates and to shove this stuff down people's throats. And they successfully did it. But now you have a generation of trainees who have never even heard the other side because they don't read the other journals and they don't look at what's going on internationally and they haven't read them for it themselves. Most people, I mean, doctors are busy people. Trainees are busy people. They don't read stuff skeptically most of the time. It's more like a guild. You're learning here to do your craft. Come in here. We're going to tell you what you need to do. And you know, there's free thinkers among them. But many of them are OK. Well, I'm just going to put my head down and do what I need to do. And I don't want to ask questions because it's a social there's a social harm with asking questions in. The bad type of environments there shouldn't be. We should encourage people to ask questions. I tell my residents I don't want them to have my opinion. I want them to think I want them to understand these issues. I'm not trying to indoctrinate someone into something. I want us to have a good, rigorous constructive high level, I mean, we're, we're psychiatrists, for God's sakes, we're the highest paid professionals, and the people with the most training, we should be able to have high level discussions on this stuff. And if a psychiatrist can't talk about sex, and can't talk about difficult issues of bias, or of, you know, the anything that's like sensitive, then you're going to be a terrible psychiatrist, like we have to talk about this stuff in our training. But unfortunately, the way we're getting trained now is that there's one opinion, here's the opinion, we've handed it to you, go operationalize this opinion.

Stephanie Winn: This way of doing things, it feels like it also hijacks our limbic systems because there's an emotional quality to how that information gets communicated. And the most recent example I can think of is that John Oliver rant about men and women's sports. Did you see it?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, no, I didn't, but I have heard plenty about it.

Stephanie Winn: Well, and you know his characteristic way of speaking. So we watched it with our 10-year-old, actually, because he has been interested in politics lately. And he sees through the gender nonsense, but he also wanted a different perspective. So we said, OK, well. He happened to be asking for a different perspective right when everyone was talking about this John Oliver segment. So it's like, OK, let's watch this together and see if you can spot the errors. And watching it with a 10-year-old is really interesting because there's just so much that he doesn't have the knowledge base for. But at 10, you do have emotional instincts. You can read body language and tone of voice and things like that. And so watching it together, you know, we're able to kind of talk about summarizing, like, what is the meta level of communication that is being transmitted here? And it sounds something like this. If you translate what John Oliver is signaling, it's, of course, I have the right answer on this subject, and so should you. And if you don't have the answer that I determine is right, it's because you're an idiot and you're morally corrupt. That's the message, right? It's guilt tripping. It triggers our shame and embarrassment. I don't want to be wrong. I don't want to be stupid. I don't want to be morally corrupt. I better do what John Oliver tells me to do, right? That's what's being transmitted. And while he's just one example of that, I feel like that's the whole kind of tenor of the discussion. And it just hijacks our instincts to belong.

Kristopher Kaliebe: A hundred percent. So this is part of why I support the movement, which there's a number of pieces of it within academia, but I would say it's best represented by Heterodox Academy by John Haidt and others that started in where it's, we're going to try to reshape back to what I would just call classical liberalism of the way school used to be, where everything is okay, we can talk about ideas, constructive disagreement is important, that we want to have constructive disagreement, we have to have it, because I won't know where I'm wrong or where I in error unless someone tells me, but I have to be in a conversation with them in order for that to happen. So yeah, I have some hope because the pendulum swung so crazy that now new organizations are cropping up and people are changing things. The Open Therapy Institute is another great organization. So I think we're finally growing new organizations that are gonna help turn things around, but it's gonna take a while.

Stephanie Winn: Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit ROGDRepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's ROGDRepair.com. So I have to ask you out of duty to my listeners and especially to the people who are in my course, ROGD Repair, where they get early access to these episodes. I mean, I get asked for psychiatrist referrals and I have no idea where to send people. I do have my private therapist referral network. It's not perfect, but I at least have a list of people I've exchanged emails with, and I have some websites I can refer to people to. But when it comes to finding a trustworthy psychiatrist, I never know what to tell people. What do you tell people? How can concerned, let's say, parents of trans-identified youth, sort of one of the main populations that listens to the show, how can they find a trustworthy psychiatrist?

Kristopher Kaliebe: That's a great question, and I wish I had an easy answer for you. There really is a silent majority, I think. Most psychiatrists that I meet are skeptical of this whole movement and most of them I think would be able to properly handle stuff, but most of them don't want to say anything. So how would you find someone who's not going to say anything? It's difficult. One thing you could do is if they're part of a university or if they're on LinkedIn, you could go to their profile and you can kind of look at what their Areas of interest are and how they presented themselves and what type of presentations they've done And so I think if they're affiliated with the university and have a CV out there you could pull it down and look at it Those are probably the best ways to do it and that probably won't get you great information for some of them many of them have a Their practice will have a website associated with it So you can look on there, you know, look on that too. And it probably will give you a tell. I mean, if it has pronouns, then it has pronouns. If it doesn't, you know what I mean? Frankly, you know, so you, there's things you can look for and decide based on, on what, how they're presenting themselves. I wish it was easier because a lot of the better psychiatrists are trying to remain quiet about this because they don't want to be in the middle of a war and they are hesitant to take a public stand on something because of like I said before that and that's that's my answer

Stephanie Winn: It's good to hear that you think it's a silent majority. My advice ends up sounding so paranoid on the subject and maybe a little crazy until you've seen what I've seen and you understand why. You've probably seen what I've seen. But my general stance that I recommend to parents who have kids who are in the, as I believe it's a cult, is that therapists and psychiatrists and pediatricians are basically guilty until proven innocent. And again, sounds like a really paranoid stance. But when you've seen what I've seen, what I remind people is once you're in, once your kid is seeing this professional, if you've made a mistake and the person you've chosen, good luck getting out of it. Because if your kid likes this provider, and depending on their rights to consent to their own treatment at a certain age in your state, their legal entitlement to see the provider they want, you're out of luck and you might have just drove the triangulation wedge deeper. So I do advise people to look for those little tells. I mean, typically people with more conservative values will signal that they, you know, they treat first responders or something like that. But then you'll also see those are the people who are religious, which may not be a fit for everyone or especially not everyone's Kids, I wonder if there are like screening questions. I mean, I'm also cautious to advise people about asking questions because another part of my approach is like, be careful about which of your cards you put on the table for whom, because once your cards are on the table, you can't take them back. And that's where my stance really differs. From people like miriam grossman for example with whom i respectfully disagree on a lot of issues like her stance is very aggressive it's put all your cards on the table tell people you know put them on the defensive. And my stances and tell you know who you're dealing with and what your rights are and what leverage you have and don't have. Be a little bit more cautious because the last thing you want to do is put yourself in a position where your kid's doctor, therapist, school administrator, social worker, whoever is in the picture is looking at you like, oh, it's one of those bigoted parents of a poor trans kid. We better rush in to help that kid. Well, now you've got the whole system working against you.

Kristopher Kaliebe: to operationalize their view of what's going on, which is one of the exceptional things about this. Okay, normally in mental health, you have people who, hey, maybe they do CBT, or maybe they're psychodynamic, or maybe they prescribe medications. But they don't call the other ones terrible people and say that, you know, that they are that they're ruining people's lives and that they're they should be damned to hell. But in this business, that seems to be what the groups, you know, especially I mean, I actually think the gender critical people are much more reasonable, obviously. But there is this Fervency among some providers that if you got caught up in it, it could it could be a challenge I'd also say that I may have a biased sample Because of who I am and that I you know, but I can tell you this for sure like our residents I mean, I treat very good residents and they seem open-minded and they seem to I would be confident to send and we're not that beholden to what the national trends are. So I think it's more normal. There's some affirmative people, but it's not like most people are. So I do think maybe I'm overly optimistic or I have a better view because of my selection bias. But I but I don't see like most of people the bus the Chinese we have are very smart I wouldn't feel I wouldn't you know, I'd send people to them I'm not concerned about them immediately affirming or any of that kind of stuff So I think I think the world this is moving in the right direction at least in some places

Stephanie Winn: I mean, you might have a positive bias, but I think I also have a negative one given the nature of the work I do too. So, you know, we're all the blind men and the elephant here. I want to know what that tail feels like to you because I'm over here with this trunk on this side. So where do you feel like Let me put it this way. You brought up the term illness identity earlier, and I loved that term, but we didn't go too much further into that. I mean, but zooming out a little bit from the gender issue, we are looking at this bigger picture of what do we do when the culture is antagonistic towards the habits that support good mental health, right? What do we do when people are getting rewarded for foreclosing on an identity at an early age before they're fully developed? What do we do when it's not cool for young people to be sincere, and, let's say, preppy or well put together or ambitious or motivated to succeed or to have a, quote unquote, normal life. I mean, when the culture is teaching youth that they have to have some kind of victim status or else they'll be labeled an oppressor, for example. Or when the culture is rewarding illness and kids are learning that you get that dopamine rush of attention on social media from presenting yourself in this histrionic manner, and they're not feeling the pain of the long-term consequences of living that way, what can people in a position like yours in psychiatry, for example, do? And how does that affect patient care when it comes to people who, at a young age, want antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, ADHD medications, all these medications?

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, that's a big question. I mean, I feel like that is part of why I got into this is that individually, you can only treat so many people, but there are wider trends in our society, which seem to be very counterproductive. And I will frame it in a manner I think mental health people should talk about more. One is Life is full of suffering, you know, just like the Buddha said. And that's the first noble truth for a reason. Life is hard. And if you don't make life hard, and you don't make it a little rigorous on your own, you're susceptible to be to causing problems for yourself and that we need to make it a little bit hard on our kids in order that they are becoming robust. We want them to be the strongest individuals that they can be, that should be physically, they should be strong and that should be mentally, they should be strong. And so they have to be skinning their knees along the way. They need more. We need to stop over protecting them. We need to get them out into the world. We need to get them off of the devices. We need to help them when they do have problems. Then we come in with enough help to get them through the problem, and then we back off and let them develop again. So, you know, I think we have failed in a lot of ways. We're not meeting the needs of the kids. I think as a society, people on the left and right could agree on a few things, which I think we do need to change. One is, Kids are not, we used to have more music in schools. We used to have more art in schools. We used to have neighborhood sports where people didn't have to go far and they didn't have to pay a bunch of money to put their thousands of dollars to be club this or club that, right? It used to be that we would be in the neighborhoods and people could get their needs met. And so I think we've had a number of trends that have really worked against our kids and I think that's a big part of what's going on right now is that there's a lot of people that are being out in the real world forming relationships trying things on being able to build skills But I came back to it recently because if you think about what Winnicott was saying, he's like, don't perfect your parenting. You don't want to be a try to be, you don't even want to try that, nor could you do it even if you tried, but if you try, you're going to mess up your kid. But you just want to be good enough so that they, you help them when they need it. But then they're growing into a person on their own and becoming independent. You're, you know, you are in this business. I'm in this business. We know there's so many kids now they're college age, but they seem like they're 13. They haven't really been out in the world. They haven't really done anything. They haven't skinned their knees. They haven't tried. And so this is a societal issue that we do need to face that we have to do better for our kids. And I think we've, we've had some very bad policies and that we need space for kids that, you know, are where they can. Develop identities if the only identity is to get their online they're gonna get a bunch of pathological ones if they get an identity through playing music Then they might get a positive one they get an identity through art if they get an identity through drama if they get a Identity through sports. I mean those are the kind of things that people are trying on along the way and as they grow up. And I think that holds much more promise. We're not going to therapize our way out of generational problems with kids. We need to have stuff in their neighborhoods that help them. And the schools have been a huge failure in how the public schools with a lot of their ideological craziness, including on this issue, I think has worked against all the therapism in school. Like they don't need it. They need to be they should be doing their schoolwork in school. They don't all need therapy. That's not what we didn't send to school to get therapy.

Stephanie Winn: You brought up several excellent points. You talked about building identity through expression and creativity. And, you know, I've been doing this long enough now where I'm starting to hear back from parents that saw my coaching, let's say a year ago, and now their kids desisted. And I get to hear that follow up. And we did have a recent, you know, I had a recent catch up with parents where that was exactly it. Their son was building an identity as a musician, but was also experimenting with the trans identity. And so we talked about, like, how to support him leaning into the musician stuff more. and practicing building that identity in a way where there's a connection between confidence and competence. And that's exactly where he is now just really focused on his music. He also talked about overprotection, this overprotection from natural consequences. And I think some parents really get that they understand that it's sort of an uphill battle in this day and age because The culture does not have as many outlets as there were even 10 years ago, pre-pandemic, doesn't have as many sort of things built into the community, plus now it's easier than ever for parents to get into legal trouble for allowing their kids to do things independently at an age that some observer thinks is too young. So there's all of that kind of working against parents, but then there's parents' own inclinations. And I almost wonder if this is because since people are having fewer children than we did in our past, that you're like more invested in each child. I've heard that argument before. And sometimes when I'm coaching parents, we find where this is occurring sort of on the micro day-to-day levels. And it's things like, Your kid is supposed to be doing their own laundry now, but they're not in the habit of doing their own laundry, so they forgot to do their own laundry. Now it's Monday and they don't have any clean underwear to go to school in. Are you going to step in and rush to do their laundry for them? Or are you going to step back and let them feel the pain and embarrassment of their own failure to take care of the thing that is now their own job to take care of? And for many parents, it's like they really have to fight that urge to rescue their child. But what we have to talk about in our coaching is what will happen down the line if you don't fight that urge, right? Which is your kid will never learn in a visceral, embodied way that their brain holds on to that doing my laundry is important and I'm going to make sure every Sunday night that I have clean clothes to wear for the week. you want your kid to internalize that lesson. And at that age, it has to come through tangible experience, through immediate experience. You can't just explain things, right? You can't just say, here's what will happen in the future. No, you have to let them experience it. And if you don't let them experience it in these kind of ways that are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things that are survivable, then the consequences just get bigger and worse down the line. And sometimes when I'm helping parents like clean up messes years down the line, this pattern, we're looking at infantile adults without those independent living skills or, um, yeah, adults who are making huge messes of their lives and potentially incurring some major consequences, but the boundaries and the consequences have just never felt real to them. And now they're in big trouble. And then the gender affirming cares thing steps in, right? And parents are again, trying to explain the consequences of what will happen if you do this to your body. And it's not real to the kid because consequences have never felt real in their lives.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, I mean, this is a dilemma of the modern era, but I would also, I think in some ways like dads being less involved, I think dads are more about consequences. So this is a little bit like extra femininity. And it is a challenge to, Try to honor that most moms do like 80% of the parenting, even when the dads are around, the moms are doing more work than the dads. And you don't want to be critical of moms because they're doing all this heavy lifting of parenting. But by practice, you see it all over and over again. But if anyone is going to love too much, it's usually the mom. And that loving too much ends up harming the kid. And exactly what you're saying, you know, especially when it's like natural consequences, you got to let consequences hit your kid. If they don't feel bad, why would they change? You they have to feel bad. So you have to have consequences that make them feel bad so that they change. So it's so topsy turvy in our world. Oh, we don't want our kid to feel bad. It's like, no, we want them to feel bad. So they decide to change or else they're going to keep doing the same thing. They're not going to grow. And with schools, it's terrible. So many families, but once again, I get more moms than dads on this, they will go to school and criticize the school because something happened with their kid. So they're going to school with this like, hey, I'm gonna show my kid that I really got their back and I'm gonna fight for them in the school. And I'm like, you're undermining the authority of the school when you go complain to the school about your kid. I mean, if it's egregious, you should complain to school. But for most of the time when I see it, it's not egregious. And what I would say to my kids, if they get in trouble at school, I'm like, I don't care what happened. I don't even wanna hear your side of the story. I wanna hear from the school that you're not causing problems. End of story. I'll punish you more. I'm not gonna sympathize with you causing trouble, especially when it's a pattern. And so many times in our practice, we see that these patterns, or if it happened in first grade and second grade and third grade and fourth grade, it's not the fifth grade teacher's problem that caused your kid to have a problem. You can't go trying to fight the school. You need to support the school to help your kid change. Back to the consequences thing. They have to get the consequences. So yeah, those are all challenges I see. And I think that the most competent therapists, you know, see that same thing and try to help parents with this, but we are caught up in some cultural stuff that's, you know, says like warm, fuzzy parenting is always the right thing and it's not.

Stephanie Winn: I've seen that issue with the moms and dads and I've seen a few manifestations of it, but one that I see in families with gender confused youth is let's say dad is like a manly man He hunts, he fishes, he fixes the car, you know, and watches football. And son is artsy, musical, sensitive, not so manly. Not necessarily gay, just not the toughest guy in the world. Or maybe that's just not cool anymore. And it is his nature, who knows? But one thing that can happen, I'm sure you've seen this, right? Is that though dad's way of disciplining the son kind of alarms mom. Now I'm not talking about corporal punishment or anything abusive. We're not talking about name calling or screaming at the top of his lungs. Of course, there are lines to be drawn. I'm talking about his voice sounding a little harsher than we as women are comfortable hearing in our homes, or being a little bit more direct, or blunt, or, you know, stepping in. Anyway. My point is that sometimes women witness those father-son interactions and that mommy instinct to protect baby boy comes in and then her intervention sends a signal to the son Your father isn't safe. Your father doesn't know what he's doing. You can't trust your father. I will rescue you. When life hands you harsh consequences, I will rescue you. This masculine guidance is not to be trusted. And that's what the son is getting, when what he really needs to be getting is, this man loves you more than anyone else ever will. He is the best intermediary between you and the world, and he is trying to help you succeed. And if he's sending you a message that seems a little harsh, it's because life itself will dole out harsher consequences for the same behavior, and he's trying to protect you from those. So you should probably listen to him because he really has your best interest at heart. And I've seen moms interfere with that process. And then the son identifies as trans. And, you know, we start unpacking. Why does the female role feel safer to him? What is he looking for protection from? And I've seen good results when mom learns to step back.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. So yeah, it's a common, you know, we've, we've had a, um, we're in a new era where we don't send our boys off to war anymore. So we had a very, if you look at Europe in the last, you know, 500 years, uh, they were almost always at war. And, you know, we are a country that mostly came through that Judeo Christian European, uh, heritage and. and I think that's a really good point And we're having trouble stepping away from that. We've had peace for so long. I mean, I pray we will continue to have it. And we've had these minor wars, but we haven't really been at war. But our ancestors really were. And we had shaped up a whole bunch of things about our culture that are sort of militaristic and it had negatives, but it also had positives that guys were expected to be shaped into some form for the society. And they have to realize that they show their worth by showing how little they're worth because they're willing to sacrifice themselves. I mean, that's what you do as a soldier. And so we really don't, we haven't found a way to get into the modern era and get the best out of our boys and make them work hard and be rigorous and become strong and robust. And so I think this is a difficult project for society because we don't have that immediacy and urgency of war that used to provide something that really was bigger than any one person and kind of caused them to have to face some pretty big issues relatively early in life. And yeah, the male nature can be, you know, when it goes well, it's a great thing for society. And when it goes bad, it's terrible for everyone. And I think unfortunately, we have too many of them not going well.

Stephanie Winn: That's an interesting way of zooming out to the big picture sort of, you know, society and like, yeah, what what happens when men's sort of evolutionary drive to challenge themselves and make something of themselves and sacrifice and be prepared for major emergencies when that drive doesn't have an outlet and consequences don't feel real. Well, I think this is a good time to make sure to ask you about what you're doing with Restore Childhood.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Well, yeah, so I think if people want to see some of my writings and to see an organization that I support very much, Restore Childhood, you can go on their sub stack or look on their website. They have a gender toolkit for schools for helping parents to navigate schools is really good. and there's uh they have some new products on there too about um working with the with youth they if you can you can look back through probably about two years of uh stuff that i occasionally have written on sub stack if you want to find out more about me so great organization uh there's many i mean thankfully this is one of the nice things about the new world we're in is that new organizations are growing So I hope that they will continue to grow. And I know you're having Natalia on at some point, so she can tell you a lot more about it.

Stephanie Winn: But yeah, we will have Natalia Murakavar on the show pretty soon to talk about what they're doing with restored childhood. But I'll make sure to include those links in the show notes as well as where people can find you.

Kristopher Kaliebe: and I'm not a public figure Yeah, I'm hiding. But the Restore Childhood is the only place I have stuff that's written online. And I've done a number of podcasts. People can find them. I think they're mostly linked there.

Stephanie Winn: Fair enough. It sounds good. Well, thanks so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure.

Kristopher Kaliebe: Yeah, great chatting with you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.