Hi.
Good morning.
How are you doing?
You look just like you do on your emails.
you please give us a little background on your professional training and your
position in the American College of Pediatricians?
Yes, certainly. I received my medical degree from the University of Connecticut and completed
my internship and residency in pediatrics at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center and
did some additional training in adolescence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,
Virginia. And
had the privilege to practice general pediatrics for 15 years before going on full-time with the American College of
Pediatricians in advocacy for children.
I am entering my second term as president with that organization.
You've stated that the transgender ideology is responsible for large-scale child abuse.
Could you please explain why you call it child abuse?
Essentially, transgender ideology holds that people can be born into the wrong body.
it's simply not true. We can demonstrate this by looking at twin studies. No one is born in the
wrong body. So to take that lie and essentially indoctrinate all of our children from preschool
forward with that lie, we are destroying their ability for reality testing. Okay, so this is
cognitive and psychological abuse.
I want to say just a little more about that, and the reason it destroys the reality testing
is because although children age three, preschool age, most can correctly identify as I am a
boy or I am a girl.
Most children will not understand that a boy grows into a man and stays a man or that a
girl grows into a woman and stays a woman.
If they see a man get into a dress and put on makeup, many 7-year-olds may believe he
just became a woman.
And the other side is not being honest, they're not acknowledging that.
And this happened most recently in Rockland, California.
It was the end of the kindergarten school year,
and the kindergarten teacher called the whole class together.
This was at the behest of the...
boys, parents, and had the whole class sit down and she read them two gender, I will
call them gender bending stories. One was the red crayon in which you have a crayon
that's actually blue wrapped in red paper. So that primes the kids to think, oh,
What's on the outside doesn't have to match the inside.
The next story the teacher read was I Am Jazz, which is about a boy whose parents helped
him impersonate a girl from the age of three.
He now has his own television program, he's 17, but looks like a girl from the waist up.
I'll call him Joey, left the classroom, presumably to use the bathroom, and then came back into
the classroom in a dress.
And the teacher said, boys and girls, Joey is actually a girl just like Jazz.
From now on, we need to call her Josephine.
Again, I'm making the names up.
But this was very confusing to the other children in kindergarten,
and it terrified one girl in particular.
She was home with her mother, had just bathed, got out of the tub,
mom wraps her up, little girl goes by the mirror, her hair was slicked back.
She burst into tears.
Mommy, am I turning into a boy?
I don't want to turn into a boy.
Joey turned into a girl.
Am I going to turn into a boy?
Now I know this because the mother called me, again, as the president of the College
of Pediatricians.
I've been outspoken, so parents reach out to me.
And this mother is being told that she is the one.
Who's crazy her daughter is the one who is having a problematic reaction. This is insane. Okay, so
Transgender ideology. Yes, it's child abuse because we are gaslighting our children number one and that's all children
And in gaslighting these children many of them
Now that they're thoroughly confused will
Think that they really are the opposite sex and they will be sent down a medical pathway
They will be as they approach puberty. They'll be put on puberty blockers
And then from puberty blockers, they will be put on cross sex hormones that combination
will permanently sterilize
most if not all of those children and
Also puts them at risk for heart disease diabetes various cancers
Girls now if they have been on testosterone
Which is their sex change hormone if they've been on testosterone for a full year by age
16 they can get a double mastectomy
So, yes, gaslighting, and surgical mutilation, that's child abuse.
It's institutionalized child abuse.
To make matters worse, you must realize that prior to transgender ideology, these children
were treated either with watchful waiting,
because for many kids, it may be a passing phase.
For many children, the girls may just be tomboys.
So either watchful waiting,
or family and individual therapy.
With those approaches, up to the vast majority,
75% to 95% of kids would accept their biological sex
by young adulthood, late adolescence.
So yes, this is child abuse if the parents
find a child that their child is questioning their sex. If things on
your own at home are not going well, I encourage all parents to seek out
local therapists who will work with them to find underlying either family
dynamics or conflicts.
If the only therapists you find locally say, oh, you must accept them as transgender,
they can reach out to us at bestforchildren.org.
That's our website, bestforchildren.org.
And we can recommend some therapists who will work with families
if they're not in the local area, even by Skype.
college students are pressured more and more to let go of reality and accept the transgender
narrative and they're even pressured to use transgender pronouns.
If you were in medical school today, how would you respond to that pressure?
That's a good question. I would hope that I would cling to reality and sound reason.
Words matter. Biology is reality, not bigotry.
We're at a point now in which we know, we have documented at least 6,500 genetic differences
between men and women.
Men and women cannot be treated the same in medicine.
Because of these genetic differences, women are more prone to autoimmune diseases, for
example, than men are.
We must approach our patients.
in accordance with their biology, not in accordance with their perceptions, which are delusional.
So I would hope I'd be able to respond.
in that fashion but it would be very difficult because just as we are seeing
this tyrannical
on our college campuses, it is that way within the highest levels of medicine.
Again, at our office at the American College of Pediatricians, I receive emails and phone
calls even from physicians and therapists, psychologists on the left who are clearly
against us because we're pro-life and again, they're on the left and they're even LGB
affirming, but they will thank me for speaking out because...
We wish we could, but we can't. We'll lose our jobs. We'll get death threats.
I receive emails from concerned parents throughout the nation asking me to review health curricula,
and it has now become transphobic to teach middle school students that women have ovaries and men have testes.
transphobic. I've not received any death threats. I have been accused of being the
leader of the skinheads of pediatricians and a lot of other things that you know
wouldn't repeat in polite company. Oh, one of my one of my greatest fans
goes by Slowly Boiled Frog, has decided that I'm not even licensed to be a doctor.
He or she writes it in such a way to imply that I'm some sort of charlatan or maybe I did something illegal.
So, for the record, yes, I still am licensed.
I have chosen not to do clinical practice because I believe advocacy requires a full-time
commitment.
The argument...
The, if you can even call it that, I'll call it a claim.
The claim by the activist physicians on the other side is that when a child persistently
and consistently insists
that he, I'll use for ease of example, that he is really a girl, really.
Well then, that's it. That's how you diagnose born transgender.
And that is proof that they have the brain of the opposite sex in their body.
And, you know, we have studies that have found changes, differences between adult transgender
brains and the brains of their biological peers who are not transgender.
Okay.
So, let's...
unpack that. Number one, the definition of a delusion is a fixed false belief. So if
I persistently, consistently insist that I am Margaret Thatcher, or persistently, consistently
insist that I am a cat, or a person, I'm an amputee trapped in
normal body I am delusional and in fact there are people who believe they are
amputees trapped in normal body they are appropriately diagnosed as having body
identity integrity disorder mouthful but you get my drift number two let's talk
about the brain studies there have been several many have found no brain
differences but we don't talk about those
There are a few that have found some differences on what's called functional MRIs and
They prove nothing. The reason they prove nothing is because the brain changes due to behavior.
We have documented in numerous studies that behavior changes the appearance and the physiology and function of the brain.
So, to have a few studies that are very small, have never been replicated, say, hey, there
are brain differences, more than likely, the fact that the person has lived transgender
is what caused those differences, if they're even real.
So, how do we know, Dr. Cortella, that what you said, that no one's ever born this way,
how do we know that?
If a brain were somehow the wrong sex, due to factors before birth, every single identical
twin would have the same gender identity all the time, but they don't.
Why? Identical twins have identical DNA, so if it were in the genes and
solely in the genetic, the DNA, solely there, then 100% of the time they
would both be transgender or both be non-transgender.
twin study we have.
shows that the vast majority do not match. If you have one identical twin
who's transgender, 72% of the time the other twin is normal. That tells us that
it's post-birth effects that primarily impact your identity. Post-birth effects.
So if I told you that my Ford car parked in the driveway was not really a Ford but a Ferrari,
you would question my mental sanity.
So why is it that some medical professionals validate the idea that a man can become a
woman?
ideology. Really, it comes down to ideology and worldview.
And it's been that way from the beginning. Gender as a term, prior to the 1950s, was,
number one, did not refer to people, and number two, was not in the medical literature.
Sexologists were PhDs and MDs in the 50s who were taking the term with
transsexuals at that time. People who believed they were transsexual, mostly
men who wanted to be women, and these sexologists were the ones who basically
invented
so-called sex reassignment surgery.
And amongst themselves in the 50s said,
well, what are we treating?
How are we going to justify this?
Because they knew full well.
Even then, sex is in the DNA.
And...
mutilating the body does not change a person's sex, how are we going to justify this?
And so they basically looked at the word gender, which meant male and female referring to grammar,
and you can go online. I went back to dictionaries in the 1700s and you can actually see the definition
of gender.
all the way up. So in the 1950s, one of the one of the sexologists at the time was John Money,
Dr. John Money, and they said, well, we're going to take gender and say that it means for people,
it means the social expression of an internal sex identity.
That's what we're treating.
They pulled it out of the air to justify lining their pockets to do mutilating surgeries.
And this is the very same underneath everything that the activists today are saying.
It's the same definition that they're using. It has no basis in reality.
So what you're saying is even radical surgery cannot change a man into a woman. Is that correct?
Radical surgery, no, no surgery will change the DNA which is imprinted in every single cell of the body.
Again, it's a combination of reason and science, they meld, they go together.
Human sexuality is binary.
We know this because in nature, reproduction is the rule.
And human beings, we engage in sexual reproduction.
You need a man and a woman to do that.
So chromosomes.
Women are x, x. Those are the sex chromosomes. Women have two x, x's. Men have an x and a y.
Those are genetic markers. They're genetic markers for female and male, respectively. Okay? Binary.
That's the rule and it's self-evident.
Exceptions to the rule, biological exceptions to the rule, do not...
invalidate the rule.
And by that, I am referring to intersex conditions.
We live in an imperfect world, we live in a world with disease and disorder.
There are a variety of very rare biological genetic disorders that are called result
in disorders of sex development.
These individuals have a true physiological genetic biological problem.
So it may be appropriate within those cases they may need surgery.
They may need hormones.
but that's a case-by-case basis. And they are the exception, not the rule. Why do we refer to them
colloquially as intersex? Because they are between the norms. And many people with intersex
conditions, they can lead very happy, healthy lives.
but their treatment is very personalized.
Transgender, someone who identifies as transgender,
however, that's not a problem in their body.
Gender identity, all identities, they're in our thoughts. Thoughts and feelings,
those are not hardwired, they develop, and they may be factually wrong or
factually correct. Individuals with disorders of sex development.
are being used as pawns in the fight for basically a civil right to a mental illness.
There's no such thing as a civil right to a mental illness,
but that is in fact what we are dealing with with the transgender rights movement.
Now a lot of liberal professors claim that the male, female, binary is only a social construct
that you grow up learning that men and women are different, but it's really something entirely
fluid.
How would you refute that?
Well, we started to in the, in the, the, um,
Last question. And again, to believe that, you have to be completely ignorant of genetics.
There are 6,500 genetic differences between men and women.
Now, the fact that it's a binary, as I said, comes down to the fact that, okay,
the reality is we have sexual reproduction in the human species, and reproduction is the rule in biology.
Okay, number one. We have a binary.
rationalize outside of that you have to rationalize away really now the entirety
of medicine because as I said earlier with 6500 genetic differences between
the two it impacts
how we treat disease. Women are not small men. That is how women used to be treated. We used to,
science used to do research predominantly on men and then look at women and say,
oh, you're just a smaller body mass. So we're going to treat your heart attack the same way
and your high blood pressure the same way. And now we're realizing
Wow. No wonder we had different results with women. Look at this. Now we can prove and understand why.
And there's a big push in movement to get more women into pharmaceutical studies than ever before.
Because we are different.
The social construct, transgenderism is a social construct.
The fluidity of sexuality, that's a social construct, okay?
They have it exactly backwards.
And the word gender, as I said earlier, is nothing more than an engineering...
a linguistic engineering term and has no place in medicine.
We have biological sex,
we have sex differences that some of which are purely biological,
and others that develop as a result of nature and nurture.
Women have loads more oxytocin and oxytocin receptors than men do.
That contributes, that is the hormone.
that is associated with nurturing.
It is released during labor, breastfeeding,
and is so key and important in the first three years
of the mother and infant bonding.
It's the bonding hormone.
So although men have oxytocin as well,
They have far fewer receptors in their brains.
Every organ of the body is sexed, if you will, just genetically speaking, and it's utterly
ridiculous to make that assertion.
It seems to me that you're saying that at a very deep level, the transgender movement
is attacking the order that exists in human nature.
Would you go that far and say that human nature is under attack?
Oh, certainly.
If my feelings alone determine who I am, then there really is no such thing as a man or
a woman.
We're essentially promoting doping.
You know, men are doping on estrogen to become handicapped men.
Women are doping on testosterone to become handicapped men, in a sense.
I mean, this whole, oh, what are we doing sports?
I mean, really, doping is illegal, period, the end, that's it.
You cannot, giving a woman testosterone does not make her a man, giving a man, estrogen
does not make him a woman.
The estrogen makes the man a handicap man, and the testosterone makes the woman the equivalent
of a handicap, I mean, well, I shouldn't even say handicap man, because you can't change
sex.
And, in fact, you know, in the Olympics and so forth, they used to, if a woman were
Extremely excelling, they would be concerned about doping
and testosterone is one of the things
they would look for in her system, high levels of it.
So this is utterly ludicrous.
In the past, a man puts on a dress, he's wearing drag.
Well, now the drag is no longer made out of cotton and silk.
Now the drag is hormones and surgery.
It's still drag.
It seems to me like it's a refinement of the radical idea of total equality.
The error is to equate equality with sameness.
They don't mean it's same, does not mean equal, right?
Because we're equal in human dignity.
But being male or female, that is the ultimate diversity we should be celebrating.
There is no greater diversity than female and male.
That is our innate identity.
male or female, and it's written in every cell of our body at the level of our DNA.
I would agree.
We're making the mistake of equality meaning sane.
If that's what you believe, then ultimately we're eliminating there's no such thing as
a woman, there's no such thing as a man.
Alright, so finally, could you say something to encourage more Americans to stand up for
the sacred institution of the family?
Absolutely, I would say, you know, the natural family.
meaning a loving marriage between a man and a woman is the most pro-child
institution we have. So if you love children, nurture your marriage, first of
all, it's the greatest gift you can give a child. We must stand up for that
because our children are hurting and decades, decades of social science,
demonstrates that.
This is the most important thing we can do in terms of children's physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
It's the family. It's the family.