Abigail Shrier is an author, journalist, and writer for the Wall Street Journal. Her new book is "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters." At the outset, Shrier makes it clear that she has no issue with adults making decisions to transgender. Despite a higher level of suicide by transgendered adults (compared to the population at large), many transgendered adults are in a better place after transgendering. This is a very different situation from teenaged girls, where the decision to transgender is often driven unwittingly by intense social pressures by friends (groups of teenage girls often transgender together), loneliness and a misreading of the causes of one's anxiety or teenage unhappiness.

In the discussion with Joe Rogan, Shrier is concerned that most transgendering decisions of teenaged girls is a mistake with horrific consequences. The problem is that most of these teenaged girls are not mis-gendered. They are often confusing other issues, such as generalized anxiety (exacerbated by social media) and high-functioning autism, for misgendering. All the while, they (most of them come from left leaning households) receive high praise and attention from their peers and families, who are viewing these decisions, even by young girls, as a "civil rights" issue. To make things worse, testosterone is being handed out like candy (including by Planned Parenthood) based often upon self-diagnoses. Some surgeons will readily perform transgender surgery on girls without even requiring a psychological consult.

What are the numbers?

Shrier:

Gender dysphoria used to afflict 0.01 percent of the population, so one in ten thousand people so probably no one you went to high school with, but today we already know that two percent of high school students are identifying as transgender and two percent of high school students, you're talking about 1.1 million teenage high school kids in America.

Joe: Two percent? . . . Most of them are girls

Joe: Most of them are girls.

Shrier: We can just look at the number of gender surgeries and we see that in 2060 between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for biological females quadrupled, so we know they are the biggest and fastest growing population

Joe: Wow - that's a stunning number, two percent.

Shrier: You go from 0.1% of the whole population to two percent of high schoolers and the vast majority of them are teenage girls. I can give you a bunch of other statistics. One of the reasons it's hard to know exactly how many, aside from the fact that we don't have a centralized control of this, is because you don't need an actual diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get testosterone, so you just go in and get it you don't need the diagnosis. In England, where you have a centralized medical care, and there you do need a diagnosis, they know that the numbers for adolescent girls are up over 4,000 percent.

Joe: Holy shit. So you knew all this stuff before you wrote the book?

Shrier: No, it came out in the course of writing it.

Joe: So that had to kind of affirm your idea that this was a real problem.