Zack Ford On Louder With Crowder 6–2–15

Last week I agreed to go on Steven Crowder’s radio show. He invited me after we had sparred a bit on Twitter over some LGBT issues — he’s pretty conservative on these topics, to say the least. Here’s the interview:

And here are a few thoughts:

First, thanks to Steven for spelling my name correctly and emphasizing that it’s with a K, not an H.

Also, just for the record, I pre-taped this interview on Wednesday afternoon. Steven seemed to suggest to his viewers that it was live on the show Thursday night, but that wasn’t the case. Sorry, the cat’s out of the bag!

Steven gave me ZERO context for what he wanted to discuss. I obviously had some ideas, but there wasn’t a lot I could do to prepare. He, on the other hand, had very specific ideas he wanted to hammer home with citations at the ready.

If you look at 1:14:28 in the video, you can see that Steven’s attempt to downplay expectations after the fact falls flat. He had a citation ready to put up on the screen, and his entire argument depended upon it. He introduced it without even telling me what the study was. He was ready to insist that the study he’d found proved either that transgender brains are not different before hormone therapy and/or that hormone therapy has harmful effects.

He posted the study after the interview, and as Julie Rei Goldstein helped clarify, the study supports neither of those points. Indeed, the section he read on air about brain size didn’t even refer to the differences in brain structure that have been observed in the other studies, like what Julie linked to.

What I noticed, more importantly, is that Steven’s study didn’t conclude there was any reason for trans people not to do hormone therapy. It was purely observational about the effect on the brain.

The findings imply plasticity of adult human brain structure towards the opposite sex under the influence of cross-sex hormones.

Big whoop.

Steven wanted to insist that doctors could cherry-pick from results to justify denying trans people treatment — it was concern trolling at its best. He relied on one study that didn’t even support that conclusion, then attacked me for relying on the overwhelming consensus of medical professionals. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For the record, as the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found, some trans people were denied all health care, not just trans-related treatment. Either way, it’s placing a discriminatory burden on them.

There was also a study that Julie pointed out in the Twitter discussion afterward that I was not familiar with that found that surgery did help lower transgender people’s suicide rates. Thanks Julie!

I think the conversation about HIV criminalization speaks for itself. I didn’t have CDC numbers at the ready, but oh well. I found Steven’s arguments oddly hypocritical. He really wants to toss people in jail for not disclosing their HIV status, but he doesn’t think HIV is a big enough of a problem for gay men (let alone women of color) to even call it an “epidemic.” The only consistency between these two positions is stigmatizing people with HIV.

Because I was going to be traveling home to Pennsylvania for my grandmother’s funeral Thursday evening, I knew I wouldn’t be around Twitter as the interview was airing. Below is the series of tweets I scheduled for that time with citations supporting the points I made on the show.

And here are a few other thoughts I put out as people started to respond both to my tweets and the interview, including sincere answers to some questions I received:

I told Steven I’d happily return to his show, and I stand by that. I also stand by the points I made and the citations that support them. Maybe next time I’ll know in advance which of his talking points he wants to drive home and which citations he wants to use to support them.

UPDATE: Steven is now arguing that my claim to have not known the topic is “dishonest.”

Here was my entire conversation about the topic for the conversation with his producer Jared:

I guess letting conversations “develop organically” means having very specific topics in mind and citations ready to load on the screen to respond to them.