Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Kara Dansky, author of the book The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls, to the newsmaker line to discuss the transgender movement, who is behind it, and why it is dangerous.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now is Kara Dansky, author of The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls. Good morning, Kara.
Dansky: Hi. Good morning.
Leahy: Kara, how on earth did you go to Johns Hopkins and then graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and then kind of write a book like this? All of your law school classmates must be going, oh, she’s left the orthodoxy of the world, and can we even continue to talk to her?
Dansky: It’s really interesting because I am a lifelong leftist and a feminist, and there are lots of us out here who are very upset about what our party, the Democratic Party, is doing on the topic of gender identity, and specifically now with Title IX.
Leahy: So you’ve written this book that was published by Bombardier, an imprint of Post Hill Press, which is based right here in Brentwood. I’m guessing you worked with my good friend Adam Bellow.
Dansky: Yes, I do. Yeah.
Leahy: Adam was my editor on a book that I wrote 10 years ago when he was at Harper Collins, a great guy. And he probably helped a lot in framing the book, is my guess.
Dansky: Yes, absolutely. He reached out to me and he wanted me to write the book to really communicate with American sort-of-traditional liberals who are very confused about what is going on and why on earth the current administration and the Obama administration were, and are, actively involved in obliterating the material reality of biological sex.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael has a question for you, Kara.
Carmichael: Kara, yes; I’ve not read your book, but I have heard you interviewed before. Can you lay out for our audience exactly what you are saying the Left is doing that you are so against?
Dansky: Sure. So there are so many Americans across the political spectrum who are very upset about how the current administration is redefining the word sex to include the phrase “gender identity”, which doesn’t have any real meaning in any real-life sense.
We have all been taught that the word “transgender” has some sort of meaning, but it actually doesn’t. It was just made up. Every single person on the planet, all eight billion of us, are either female or male. It’s not complicated.
There’s no subcategory of people who are “transgender” for whom sex is irrelevant. It just doesn’t exist. And yet the current administration is doing its best to persuade all of us that it does have some sort of meaning, but it’s all a lie.
Leahy: Why are they doing that, Kara?
Dansky: There’s a massive industry that’s behind all of this. Everyone wants us to think that this is a civil rights movement to protect a marginalized group of people, but that’s not true. What’s really going on is there is a massive industry.
It’s being fueled by pharma and by medical supply companies to abolish the material reality of sex. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar industry. It’s funded by a few individuals, such as a man named Jon Stryker, and a man named Tim Gill.
There are a couple of other individuals who are multi-billionaires who are doing this in order to persuade us all that transgender is a coherent category of people. And it’s not. And I really want all Americans to understand this. We can stop using the language.
We can stop saying transgender if we mean men and boys. We can just say, men and boys. So, for example, probably a lot of your listeners have heard of a man called Lia Thomas who competed on the University of Pennsylvania swimming team in the women’s category. And the media, for the most part, will refer to Lia Thomas as a “transgender swimmer.” Lia Thomas is a man. It’s just fine to say that.
Leahy: How does somebody with your clear logic receive a response from your former allies on the Left?
Dansky: So none of my former colleagues at the ACLU will talk to me at all. I’ve lost friends. It’s very difficult to be on the political left and to speak out against this or to speak about this. But there are a lot of us out there.
Leahy: You are a speaker of the truth.
Dansky: Well, sure, why not? None of us really has anything to lose by speaking the truth. And in fact, this assault on material reality is so vicious and so problematic, that it has consequences for women and girls, and it has consequences for all of us. And we all need to be speaking the truth.
Carmichael: Are you surprised by your former friends shunning you in such a way over your position on a subject that, as far as I’m concerned – I can think of a lot of Left climate-change and tax rates and all these other things are ideas that separate the Left and the Right significantly.
But in this particular area, I would think that the percentage of people who think that, for example, if you were to poll – in fact, you may have the answer to this. If you were to poll the public, what percentage of people think that a 10-year-old should be able to have a sex change operation?
Dansky: Right. The polling has been done, not in the last couple of years, but a couple of years ago. The vast majority of Americans do not think that men should be able to compete in women’s sports, do not think that a 10-year-old ought to be able to have surgery or a hormonal administration that forever will mutilate the child’s body.
No one is in favor of this. It is being driven by a small minority of very wealthy people, and you will not hear that in most mainstream media outlets. You will not hear voices like mine. So thank you for having me on the show to talk about this. But I’m not surprised.
Carmichael: If you had political power, what would you do? What would you do to support biological women and girls and boys and men?
Dansky: I would definitely get rid of every single law across the United States at the local, state, and federal level that redefines the word “sex” to include the phrase “gender identity.” It’s really important. You asked me if I’m surprised by the backlash about this, and I’m not.
And I will just say this is the most contentious issue that I have confronted in my lifetime. I am staunchly pro-abortion rights, and I have friends who are staunchly against abortion. We can have rational conversations about that.
I was very against the previous president. I know people who voted for him. We can have rational conversations about that. This issue brings up so much tension and irrationality that it is very, very hard to even have rational conversations about it. And that should tell us all something, that there’s something going on here.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
