Culture Friday: Pushback

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 15th of March, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is author and speaker Katie McCoy. It's always great to see you, Katie. Good morning.

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning. Great to see you both as well.

EICHER: I want to start with the Tik Tok vote in Congress, Katie. Because as you’ll notice in our questions today, it’s about cultural pushback, and this is certainly one of them.

What I notice is there’s nothing like social media and its impact on young people that will unite our divided country. This bill requiring the platform to disconnect from the Chinese Communist Party or risk being banned passed with Republicans and Democrats and I might add a two-thirds margin required for a rushed piece of legislation. Now, it may well die in the Senate, but the same sentiment that drove the House may well show up in the upper chamber. But I wonder about this: How do you read this culturally? Why do we distrust the CCP but have a corresponding trust in American-owned big tech? What’s your read on that?

MCCOY: Well, for one thing, we have very different laws than the CCP does. There's a famous description of what a true free society is that you can go into the middle of the center of your government and criticize it openly, with no fear of retribution. We have that in America. If you're a citizen of China, you do not have that. Now, there's some valid debate about the degree to which the government should be making policy that affects access to social media, avenues of free speech, and then also business. But if you're just a casual observer of the news, you know that this is not just an ordinary business, because this is not just a typical foreign relations dilemma. The Chinese Communist Party, lest we forget the big balloon that happened not too long ago, flying over most of our country. And so I think, on the one hand, this shows that Americans are waking up to a very real and present danger that we have in terms of our national security. So I am personally glad to see this now. One of the craziest things that came out in this debate about whether or not to mandate that TikTok divest from China was you had teenagers contacting their congressional representatives threatening suicide if you took TikTok away, and I think that might be the greater reflection of where we are as a society. And it's like this 0 to 10. People use this almost as this threat or weapon in order to shape policy, how they want it to go. I think that might be one of the most alarming reflections of our society in this whole TikTok debate.

BROWN: Katie, I want to go back almost one year ago. It was very early in the presidential campaign season, candidates were throwing their hats into the ring. Right here on Culture Friday, I asked you about the kind of questions you thought the listener should be asking the candidates regarding sexuality and gender.

How you answered was short of prophetic. Let's listen.

MCCOY: If parents wanted to turn the tide of all of this in one election cycle, they would ask every candidate to make a statement on where they fall on WPATH standards of care.

Well, that was in June of 2023. Then last week leaked documents surfaced revealing what you and doctors have been saying all along about so-called gender affirming medicine for kids: the science is far from settled and families have been lied to.

This could be a time to say, I told you so, but it isn't, is it?

MCCOY: Oh no, this is a time to celebrate the fact that information is finding its way out. Thank God for whistleblowers who are working in these organizations in these clinics, who are shedding light on what we all knew, but may not have been able to prove. Now WPATH, which again stands for a World Professional Association for Transgender Health, is considered this standard of care for transgender medical treatments. And they are in many ways setting the conversation for public policy. You will find no few representatives of our current presidential administration endorsing and supporting what is in WPATH and WPATH's "research," and I say that with air quotes, "research" is dubious at best and predatory at worst. And one of the things that we're seeing with this elite document is just how activistic this organization is. This isn't about data and health. If it was about data and health, we will be following many European countries in reversing course. This is about ideology. This is about the belief that we have the ability to determine for ourselves the limits of our lives, the boundaries of our existence, with or without nature, and certainly without God.

BROWN: Katie, let me follow up quickly. While we're talking about transgender services, you know, it's striking in the UK, the National Health Service this week banned puberty blockers at gender identity clinics. Pretty significant development.

MCCOY: Yeah, this is huge. The United Kingdom has been slowly reversing course for a number of years. We saw it begin to chip away after Keira Bell first won her lawsuit against her doctors, and then the Tavistock clinic shut down. And now as more and more data comes in, countries in Europe are halting so many of these treatments that they had rushed children into doing. And the reason they did in the United Kingdom was, they said the data does not support that this is helping. But then you have to ask helping what? Helping these teen mental health crises? And that is because overwhelmingly, when a child, a teenager begins to talk about gender dysphoria is more often than not a symptom of something else that is going on. And that can simply be you have a vulnerable teen that is highly suggestible and going on social media, and hearing things like if you don't enjoy puberty, you must be born in the wrong body. Who enjoyed puberty? No one. And so these stories are reinforcing, again. Common sense, what we have known for so long, that what these children need is psychological care, emotional care, spiritual care, but we don't need to alter how God designed our bodies to be. And by the way, puberty blockers have been billed as safe, effective, fully reversible, and they are anything but. They are having devastating long term effects that we still don't even fully know. I think 20 years from now, we will look back and rightly call it medical experimentation on children.

EICHER: I’d like to stay in the UK for this pushback question: In Ireland, voters rejected an invitation to redefine the family, saying no to a referendum on a constitutional change of language centering marriage and the status of women within families. One target was a provision referring to the primacy of the family as the “fundamental unit” of society that possesses “inalienable” rights that are prior to the laws written by political bodies. And the second referred to the woman as an essential contributor to the common good through her role as a caregiver.

So this seemed ripe for change, given less than 10 years ago Ireland legalized same-sex marriage and about six years ago liberalized abortion laws. But the change failed, and I wonder what you read into that, not as an Irish political scientist but as a reader of cultural trends? Do we have another instance of pushback here?

MCCOY: I think now average everyday citizens are wising up to the effects of ideas that have been introduced to society for about 20 to 30 years. The pushback in Ireland, it reminds me of the full effects of a manifesto that was written back in the 1990s. And it was a group of activists who talked about how we have, human beings have the right to total self-determination, to sexual definition, and gender identity, and family equality. That phrase family equality is very important. And we see it even in places like California law and family law in some of these more liberal societies. Another thing, I wonder if I were citizens had seen is this correlation between parental rights and the definition of a family. We're seeing that here in our country as well. If you decouple biological sex from family terms or family ties, like mother or father, then you can define a family however you want to. And if the state can then determine what the definition of a family is, the state can also determine whether one is a fit parent or not, not based on anything to do with one's biological tie to one's children, but simply which birthing person you came from. Which individual sired you. And Stella Morabito is a brilliant thinker. She's been talking about this for over 10 years, and she really was prophetic talking about the connection between the desexing of society and removing these biological terms from family relationships and the effects that it can have. So this is very interesting to see that Ireland really is reversing course, on some pretty progressive ideas.

EICHER: All right. Katie McCoy is an author and speaker. Her most recent book is titled, To be a woman, the confusion over female identity and how Christians can respond. Katie, it's always great to talk and we will catch you next time.

MCCOY: Sounds great.

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