Biden’s trans policies are ‘doing nobody any favors,’ says Scott Newgent.
Biden’s trans policies are ‘doing nobody any favors,’ says Scott Newgent.
Scott Newgent is a 47-year-old transgender man and parent living in Texas. Newgent is the founder of TReVoices, a group of trans campaigners who oppose radical gender activism and seek to educate politicians and families about the reality of gender dysphoria. Here, he talks to Madeleine Kearns about the Biden administration’s transgender policies.
Madeleine Kearns: Hey, Scott. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. We’ve been in touch for quite a while, but it seems that I’m not the only writer interested in your perspective and efforts to educate the public about the dangers of transgender extremism. J. K. Rowling described you as a “hero.” The comedy writer Graeme Linehan said he recognized in you “a similar soul.” And I believe you may even have appeared in an excellent new book that lots of us worried about transgender ideology have been reading.
For those who don’t know who you are, I’ll just explain how you got involved in the transgender debate. You were born female and had a medical and surgical “sex-change” intervention six years ago at the age of 41. In the interest of time, I’ll just list some of the consequences of the transition (as it’s called), as you yourself have described them (and have kindly provided evidence of in the form of medical records, pictures, and other documentation):
- Seven surgeries
- A pulmonary embolism
- An induced stress heart attack
- Sepsis
- A 17-month recurring infection
- 16 rounds of antibiotics
- Three weeks of daily IV antibiotics
- Complete hair loss
- Loss of arm function
- Arm reconstructive surgery
- Permanent lung and heart damage
- Bladder damage
- Insomnia
- Hallucinations
- Hair growth on the inside of your urethra
- PTSD
- $1 million in medical expenses
- Lost home, car, job, career
- Marriage break-down
- Temporarily unable to look after your children
- So far, unable to sue the surgeon responsible in part because there is no baseline for care for transgender patients
Does that about sum it up?
Scott Newgent: Yeah. And passing out multiple times from pain.
MK: I think that one of the first questions at the forefront of our readers’ minds on being confronted with that list is: Why did you do it? What were you hoping to get out of transition? Did you understand the risks of these complications before you started the process?
SN: Barbara Kay, a writer in Canada who has become a friend of mine, asked me that question recently. She was like, “Have you ever thought of why you did this?” And I wrote it down as a draft chapter of a memoir and sent it to her, to which she said, “There’s gotta be more reason than that.” And then I started to write it again and as I started to write it again, I just started to break down and just bawl my eyes out. I realized that there are so many more reasons why I did this.
The family that I come from is a very male-dominated family that has produced a lot of male athletes. And I saw at a very young age how that male dominant personality caused problems in my childhood everywhere. Like “Kellie, you need to do this, this way. Kellie, you need to do it this way.” And I started to think, after talking with Barbara, how much easier it would have been for me to be born male. I started to look at the structures of my life and the struggles of my life and realize that if I had swapped chromosomes in my mother’s stomach, I would have been the quintessential male.
I would have been a professional athlete, a college star. I would have been everything. I knew that, and because I wasn’t, I struggled with it. When I was seven years old, I said to my uncle that I wanted to be a boy for Christmas. And he was like, “Well, you can’t be that. Do you want me to get you a guitar?” All the women in my family dressed really feminine and I learned to carry myself as a woman. Later, when I came out as lesbian, I was never a butch lesbian.
Then my wife, who I got divorced from, was a devout Catholic. I mean, almost over the top to the point where I thought it was a kind of mental illness. And she couldn’t handle the idea that she was a lesbian. She would say that I seemed more like a male. And I’d come to a place in my life where I was tired of being a lesbian. I reflected on all my childhood stuff and started to think that maybe she’s right. I started to see some of the whole transgender craze. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was born in the wrong body.
MK: So, let me ask this as a follow-up. When you were getting these surgeries and medically transitioning, were you under the impression that you were going to literally change your sex?
SN: Yeah. They actually tell you that.
MK: Right. Let’s move from the personal to the political. President Biden has promised to pass the Equality Act which would redefine sex to include gender identity in federal anti-discrimination law. Obviously, you’ve been through transition. Are sex and “gender identity” the same thing in the way the —
SN: Maddy, you know I don’t even know what people really consider sex or consider gender. I can give you my own ideas on it. I don’t get caught up in all that crap. I don’t know what all that is. Can you just ask me something in English?
MK: The reason I’m asking this is that the effort on the political level is to redefine sex in the way that it was presented to you by your surgeons — as “gender identity” — as this thing that is going to cure all your problems. It is this same kind of thinking is being enshrined into law. Do you think that is going to help people?
SN: No, it’s not going to help. Here’s the thing. You can’t transition genders. You are who you are biologically. If I die and you bury me in the dirt and dig up my bones a hundred years later, they are going to say, “That was a female.” That doesn’t change. But what you can do is make a person look different. I call it like a hybrid, which is that you can take females and remove estrogen and pour on testosterone and it creates a totally different effect. The way I think is different, the way I look is different, but it’s also different than being a male. I’ve created something unique. And what I don’t understand in the trans community is why that reality is not accepted.
MK: One of the things that the Equality Act is going to do, similar to the executive order on “gender identity” that’s just passed, is force women’s only spaces, shelters, sports teams, and all the rest of it to include people who are biologically male. I know that you of all people can truly empathize with people who struggle to accept their biological sex. Given that, do you think that such a policy is helpful or fair?
SN: No, it’s not going to help. And it’s not fair because what we’re essentially doing is we’re allowing males to go into female spaces. There is no baseline for, “Hey, you know what? This person has been on estrogen for 20 years. This person has been on estrogen for ten years. We have this study here that says that this is when the body uses all its strength from a male standpoint.”
What we’re doing in society right now is allowing a thought, a feeling, a delusion to dictate legislation. We are not going back to reality. We’re not doing studies because when we actually do, those very studies go against what all the transgender activists are saying. It’s basically saying, “Hey, you know what, women, you guys should have fought all these years for all these rights and we’re going to give them to men, too.”
It’s absolutely wrong. And it’s creating this thing in society — which I think is hilarious — where people who have never transitioned, never watched anybody transition, want to jump on the LGBTQ rights train and argue with me about what transgenderism is and what it is not. And they seem to believe in this mass hysteria that you can swap genders and that it’s not that big of a deal. Oh, and that if you don’t like it, you can de-trans, which is another fantasy that people are putting out. It is a major, major medical undertaking and it fixes nothing. That’s what I don’t think people understand. It does not fix mental health. It does not fix anxiety. It actually makes it worse.
MK: There is another transgender policy that’s topical right now. The Trump administration said that you can identify as trans in the military, so long as you are willing to bunk with your biological sex, but what you can’t have is continued treatment for gender dysphoria or require “special accommodations.” What do you think of Biden’s recent decision to repeal that?
SN: And have transgender people in the military?
MK: Yes, and people with gender dysphoria.
SN: And gender dysphoria is basically feeling like you were born in the wrong body, that you are the opposite sex?
MK: The American Psychiatric Association would define gender dysphoria as clinically significant feelings of that nature, the sort that requires ongoing treatment.
SN: I know the answer to this, but I’m asking you if gender dysphoria is believing you are the opposite sex and you are not, or believing that you are the opposite sex and you were born in the wrong body? What is gender dysphoria?
MK: Gender dysphoria is defined clinically as a marked feeling of incongruence between your gender identity and your sex — which is rather circular in my view, because the fundamental questions still remains: What is gender identity? I’ve been studying gender identity for years now and the closest I can get to defining it is by its mysterious, unfalsifiable, and potentially determinative association with sex.
SN: Right. So here’s what Trump’s Department of Defense did. They looked at “gender dysphoria.” They looked at the military. They tried to find studies. They tried to figure out where gender dysphoric people should be, where transgender people should be. And they found what everybody else has found, which is nothing but, “I feel, I felt.”
So, what he did was he eliminated people from the military and for good reason. Until society is able to define what transgenderism is and what it is not, we need to be the people that step back and say, “You know, we’re gonna let the studies come out. We’re going to step away from sports. We’re going to step away from the military. We’re going to make everybody else feel comfortable because we are a small portion of society.” Once these studies come out that define what we are, what we are not, how we can transition, then let’s figure out how we work into society.
Biden is simply giving in to all the trans activists who say trans women are women. But no, they’re not. The reality is that trans women are men who take estrogen. That’s functionally different. It’s not bigotry, it’s reality. It’s called protecting women. So, I agree with Trump on it: 100 percent, 150 percent as a trans person.
MK: Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, various Democratic candidates expressed the desire to assist and facilitate child transition. What do you make of that?
SN: This was really hard for me because I’ve done it. I deal with people who have done it. I’ve known a couple of kids who became adults and killed themselves, realizing that only then [after transition] were they in the wrong body. I’ve got three kids who are at the age where it is legal and possible to medically transition in the United States.
If I could get up and shake Biden … I would do it. He is a total idiot to allow kids to do this. An absolute idiot. Transgenderism, medical transitioning, is plastic surgery. It creates an illusion. If you go into it, thinking that it changes anything, you come out at the end with the only long-term study that tells us the highest suicidal ideation is seven to ten years after medical transition. Why do you think that is? Because you have to face reality at some time. So, we’re taking children that suffer from mental illness, that suffer from a dysphoria, that don’t fit in, and we’re clumping them into a group of people that are listed like superheroes right now to medically transition.
And they’re going to grow up and they’re going to hit 25. And they’re going to say, “Hey, mom and dad, I can’t have kids. 90 percent of the population won’t date me. I have early onset osteoporosis. My heart is the size of a twelve-year-old, because you paused my puberty. I have anxiety. I have all these things and you know what? Now I’m in the wrong body. Now I’m going to kill myself.” So, we have a president that is pushing this because he’s too much of an idiot to say, “You know what, maybe we should study this.”
You may not like Trump, but what you can say about him is that he does the tough things. Biden does not. He has a portion of his party that accepts transgenderism, that doesn’t even know what the f*** it is. And it bothers me. The kids thing bothers me.
MK: One of the reasons this debate is obscured over here is a false left/right division that seems to be applied to every issue. In the United Kingdom, Keira Bell, a young woman who began the process of irreversible treatments similar to yours before the age of 16 recently won her case in the U.K. Supreme Court, which ordered that Britain’s National Health Service to stop all these treatments for those under 16. Would you like to see similar laws passed in the United States?
SN: Yes, I’m very familiar with that case. First of all, Keira is so strong, and she saved so many people. I’m so thankful for her. But what happened in the U.K. is something that is not happening in the United States. It’s not happening in Canada. Which is, this: People brought that situation forward as a united front. So, there were women, there were men, there were people from all the different parties, there was a judge.
And the reason why it passed, by the way, is because that judge said, “Hey guys, we’re not going to talk about, ‘I feel, I felt.’ What we are going to talk about are the facts.” So, every time Mermaids [a U.K. charity promoting sex-changes for children] and the transgender activists argued, “But people are going to kill themselves!” The court said, “Where’s the study?” “Well, hormone blockers are safe.” Where’s the study? “Well it helps mental illness. Here’s the study!” You mean the study that was retracted? “How about this study?” No, that one was retracted, too. Do you have a study that wasn’t retracted that says it helped mental health? No? Okay, we’re not going to do that.
So basically, it came down to the fact that we have no firm understanding of what happens to people when they medically transition. What we do have is the documented list of problems, mental illness, this and that, and guess what? It’s not a good idea. And it had nothing to do with a political stance. The thing that bothers me is that right now we have five bills that are trying to halt medical transition here in the United States, and each one of them is run by conservative, evangelical Republicans. All the people supporting them are all Christian.
And I’ve talked to several people about this. What they do is they try to talk about this as a religious issue. Like “I’m representing Christianity, I’m representing evangelicalism,” or whatever. And I’m saying, “Hey, how about bringing this to the forefoot, representing children, to keep children safe?” Here’s a transgender person. Here’s a gay person. Here’s the evangelical person. Here’s the Republican person. Here’s a Democrat. We have everybody covered. Okay. So, you can’t call us a bigot. Cause we got the whole circle around it. We’re all here. Now let’s talk about facts. Like they did in the U.K.
But they’re not doing that. The politicians that are bringing these bills know that they will not pass. They know it. I was actually on a call that I dropped off because the senator, I won’t say his name, laughed when I said, “Are we going to get a hearing?” Laughed.
Why are you doing it then? What is it you’re after? Your name in the paper? Is that why? Because I’ll tell you, I’ve got about 20 kids I’m talking to that that want to shoot their heads off and you want to laugh because you’re not getting a hearing because all you want is for the other evangelists to say, “Good boy! Good Christian!” What about the kids?
MK: Final question. Most people would accept, especially with the list I read out at the beginning, that you’ve had a really hard time. And most people would not want to make your life any harder. The reason I mention this is that while the activist types can’t be reasoned with, there are many people out there who are very well-meaning who just want to help minorities, who are maybe being taken in by some of this. What laws, policies, or social attitudes would help people in similar situations to yours?
SN: Well, I want to say, first of all, gender dysphoria is a mental illness. There’s no way medical transition can help anybody with gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is an inside out problem. You have to fix it on the inside. You don’t fix it on the outside. Now with that said, since the beginning of time, we’ve all changed our looks. Like we’ve been wearing lipstick for how many years? We’ve been wearing mascara for how long? We have all been trying to enhance the way that we look. So, we need to look at trans people, in reality. Trans people are people who are not comfortable with the way that they look, so they take synthetic hormones to create an illusion of the opposite sex. It will never be a biological switch.
It is an illusion. To say so is not hateful; it is reality. I’ve lived it. I’ve talked to several hundred people who’ve lived it. It’s a very small portion of transgender people who are making all the fuss. Unfortunately, people who don’t want to make a fuss, don’t come out. They don’t need to, they don’t want to.
Most women who get breast augmentations are not walking down the street going, “I was born with these bad boys. Can you believe how awesome I am?” No. You had a breast augmentation! They’re not yours! Don’t run down the street drawing attention to them, that’s craziness. If you want to get plastic surgery, do it. If you want to create an illusion of the opposite sex, do it — do it as an adult, get it regulated, have medical guidelines for care. Don’t allow anybody to get into the business. But don’t say, “Hey, you know what? 99.99 percent of society is going to cower to the 0.01 percent that has a mental illness that we are trying to treat the wrong way.” It’s idiotic. It’s politics. Biden is doing nobody any favors.