Head Inside Mental Health
Todd Weatherly, Therapeutic Consultant and behavioral health expert hosts #Head-Inside Mental Health featuring conversations about mental health and substance use treatment with experts from across the country sharing their thoughts and insights on the world of behavioral health care.
Head Inside Mental Health
The Neuroscience of Sex and Gender with Dr. Michael Gurian
Dr. Michael Gurian, New York Times bestselling author of 32 books, takes us deep into the crisis facing boys today with his latest book "Boys: A Rescue Plan" where he offers a roadmap for raising healthy and fulfilled men. This conversation reveals what Dr. Gurian calls "a mismatch of the male brain with our systems." Drawing from neurobiological research, he demonstrates how male brains develop and function differently from female brains—not better or worse, just different. Yet our educational, counseling, and family systems often fail to accommodate these differences, leaving boys struggling and vulnerable.
Dr. Gurian challenges the big three; academic, political and media influences and extremes in the gender debate, offering a science-based perspective. He introduces the concept of "bridge brains"—individuals whose brain patterns fall between typical male and female—and makes crucial distinctions between biological sex and social gender constructs. His definition of healthy manhood as "a loving, wise, and successful male adult" provides a positive framework for male development beyond toxic stereotypes.
Join us to hear Dr. Gurian's guidance for parents and professionals working with gender-questioning youth. By distinguishing between "gender dysphoria" and "brain sex dysphoria," he advocates for supportive approaches that acknowledge biological realities while respecting individual experiences. This conversation offers practical wisdom for anyone concerned about the well-being of boys and young men in today's complex world.
Hello folks, thanks for joining us on Head Inside Mental Health, featuring conversations about mental health and substance use treatment, with experts from across the country sharing their thoughts and insights on the world of behavioral health care. Broadcasting on WPBM 1037, the voice of Asheville independent commercial free radio, I'm Todd Weatherly, your host, therapeutic consultant and behavioral health expert. With me today I have an honor and distinguished guest who I got to meet in person at one of his trainings is Dr Michael Gurian. Dr Gurian is a New York Times bestselling author of 32 books what do you like? Do you have any free time? Published in 23 languages.
Speaker 1:As a marriage and family counselor and social philosopher, he has pioneered efforts to bring neurobiology and brain research into homes, schools, corporations and public policy. Dr Gurian is co-founder of the Gurian Institute, which conducts research internationally, speaker, trainer and consultant to help professionals, schools, agencies and organizations better understand and assess the needs of both sexes and all genders and most effectively intervene and work with children and adults from birth through childhood. Michael has spoken for the United Nations on violence against women, provided information on boys and girls' educational needs to the White House and briefed members of the 114th Congress on the Boy Crisis in America. A number of Michael's books have sparked national debate, including the Wonder of Boys, the Wonder of Girls Boys and Girls Learn Differently in Leadership and the Sexes Co-host of the Wonder of Parenting podcast as well. But today I'm pleased to have him joining us to talk about his latest book, boys a Rescue Plant Moving Beyond the Politics of Masculinity to Healthy Male Development. Dr Gurian, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I'm going to do a little promo. I got the book. It was not signed. I'll just have to get that later, you know.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:But you know, I've gotten to be in a presentation and experience some of your work firsthand, which, as a facilitator and a presenter myself, I give you the compliment of really enjoying the entire day and not being bored for one moment.
Speaker 1:So very engaging and wonderful presentation.
Speaker 1:But it's also full of uh, full of a lot of information, uh, and one of the one of the pieces to me was a lot of these statistics about, about boys specifically.
Speaker 1:We'll focus on boys for this one right, um, but you know the amount of violence they encounter, the, the, the amount of poor educational performance that they suffer from and endure, how many more of them are in jail, how many more of them will suffer from suicide and violent suicide and be successful at it, and there's just this wide number of statistics that are out there about how boys and men experience these things at much greater levels than women do, than girls and women.
Speaker 1:So it's a little startling because I think that it points at something that you talk about in this book and have talked about at other times, which is the vulnerability of boys and men and how is really difficult for a lot of our society kind of play with like being a man and being vulnerable. That's not okay. Right, tell me a little. Just give us the. Give us a little bit of the sample of of how this found its way into your work and how it became a focus of of working with schools and educators and governments and everything else and and you know, feel free to talk about the big three government, education or academics and media. How did that find its way into your work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know it's. It's a good question. I, I, um, I started out years ago, so we're talking about late eighties, years ago, so we're talking about late 80s, and I was already doing research on. I was very fascinated with what would the genetics be for male, female, because I had lived overseas as a kid via my parents who worked overseas and and wherever I would go, even if we didn't have the language, us little boys were playing with other little boys and you didn't really need the language you know, and girls were playing with girls and and I just intuited right that there was something going on. And I'm, I'm 66. I'm born in 1958. So I came up in the era where it's all socialization, you know sex, gender, it's all socialization. And we've seen a resurgence of that kind of kind of academic programming thing socialization and we've seen a resurgence of that kind of kind of academic programming thing, um, the last five, ten years and um, but I knew that couldn't be right. I mean, it couldn't be that I could go to india and we get to india and suddenly I'm playing with boys with no language, but but it's very clear that something's going on.
Speaker 2:So, late 80s, starting to try to study what you could know of genetics and then and brain research. So I was trying to get a little brain scans to try to study what you could know of genetics and brain research. So I was trying to get a little brain scans to try to see what are the differences between male and female brain. And if they existed, then they're going to come in on the genetics because we see them worldwide, so they're everywhere, right? So there's got to be something with the XX and the XY. So luckily there were other people earlier in the eighties who were looking at this in adults. So what I ended up doing is I ended up studying it, discovering it, finding it out, you know, thanks to them. And then I did it for child development.
Speaker 2:So the wonder of boys is my was my fifth book, and that was in mid nineties, so 30 years ago, and in that book then I started asserting the brain research and saying, ok, look, we got to look at the fact that this is robust, worldwide. Race doesn't matter for this, culture doesn't matter for this. There are male patterns and female patterns. When was that? In the schools we were losing our boys. The girls are doing much better than the boys in school. And here are the reasons in terms of male brain, the mismatch of the male brain with the school system. Now, in that era, mid 90s, that was the era of girls are in trouble, girls are falling behind, boys have everything. Boys are doing great, right.
Speaker 2:So I was sort of counterculture, saying this was in the wonder of boys saying, yeah, that's, I have two daughters. Obviously I support girls and women. Of course we do. I'm a good feminist. But we're missing something here. Um, the boys are actually the ones who are struggling much more. They get 70% of the D's and F's and what's happening now was true 30 years ago, you know.
Speaker 2:Um it that has not changed. In some areas it's gotten worse. The male test scores are not as good as female. The male discipline referrals to principal, vice principal, head of school, assistant, head of school, those are, you know, off the charts compared to girls. The amount of violence that boys are experiencing, you know, and you listed it suicide.
Speaker 2:And then I started talking about male type depression, that that's different than female type depression. So what I, what I've been trying to do, is, because of this initial kind of intuition, based on my childhood, that something must be going on. That's, that's transcultural, that's, you know, genetic, that's brain-based in terms of male, female and the application of it to child development that we could develop assets to help boys and girls. So right around then we did a two-year pilot at the Korean Institute was formed and we did a two-year pilot out of University of Missouri, kansas City, six school districts there, and kind of proved the thesis that, okay, if we train teachers, therapists, counselors, everybody in the big three which I call academics, government, media, if we could get them trained in this male-female brain difference and how robust and powerful this is, then the systems could shift and we could get systems to pay attention to this and therefore then the systems could serve the kids better.
Speaker 2:And so primary systems I've done corporate and so on but primary systems you know where I'm known for would be in school systems, counseling. You know anything having to do with where we as adults meet boys and girls. You know women and men and of course and of course. So, starting all the way back with Wonder of Boys, I was I already was arguing, as we know, that there's a spectrum for male and female. So you have and those are folks who would now show up as gender fluid, trans, intersex, that there's a spectrum, but at the same time male and female brain scan so differently that even you know we can even look at trans scans and we can see everything. So it started with an intuition, and then it led to research overseas, and then it led to and then went to brain scans.
Speaker 1:brain scans, yeah, I definitely.
Speaker 2:I want everything to be scan based, like I want all of my work to be science based.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you know to a certain extent, not gender is important. The differences between genders are important. But if you take a brain scan, what you're looking at, you know I might not. You might see it, I might not see it. A lay person is definitely not going to see it, teachers probably won't see it. But I'm looking at a brain scan. I don't know whether that's male or female, but what I can tell you about this brain scan is this person is going to respond to this kind of educational environment versus this one better.
Speaker 1:And you know, I came out of the master's in education but an experiential ed, and we always try to address these differences through. You know Colb's learning styles. You know there's you've got all these different kinds of learners in a classroom. Let's try and figure out a way to address, to engage in a process that engages all learners. I think you've gotten a little further to the base where it's. You know you've got you've got genders in a classroom and they operate differently, they socialize differently, they learn differently. You know just simple things like boys are easier to learn to write if they get to draw first and just little pieces like that. I mean we always ran into the barrier that teachers were worried they're going to have to implement this whole new curriculum design there in their classroom and like, eh, we can't do that, but if they just have this basic information, it's like, look, just walk to your learner and know that there's some differences. You've got a few tricks here that can help you make that person a better educated individual and be more successful in their academic. You know and we could go even further you know, a young, a young boy, who becomes successful in academics versus failing in academics becomes someone who's probably better socialized, more well-liked, has better self-esteem. Like they end up being more successful adult, largely because they don't suffer from these often traumatic events that are involved in failing in academics early on.
Speaker 1:So the piece that I really wanted to do and I really enjoyed reading the book, but the quote that I pulled out of here and I think it speaks to not only what is it that happens to men or to boys in the classroom, right, but to men in general and you talk about the ideology, the fragility of males is right in front of us. We're missing it but we neglect and avoid it. The dominant themes of toxic masculinity and masculine privilege have a bit of worth, but they don't solve the social problems because they dismiss the fragile male, the boy who's suffering and the man who is adrift. And I pull that quote out because toxic masculinity is such, it's this big terminology that we've got going on. I always tell people and something I appreciate about the work that's here is that, you know, let's move towards something, not away from something. You know we can talk about what we don't want to be, but what do we want to be?
Speaker 1:Basic masculinity, male, the uber male, this alpha overdone kind of version that you know a male's not supposed to become, or if they. Well, depending on the circle, you sit in right and then there's the fragile male that we dismiss and everything else. Who's the male that exists in your mind in between these two kinds of poles, where they're healthy and they're adapted and they feel like they belong in the world? What does that look like to you? What's this? What's a version of healthy male? What would you say about that?
Speaker 2:Well, I so. Whenever I'm asked you know what is a man?
Speaker 1:I always say.
Speaker 2:I always say a man is, and it will answer the question A man is a loving, wise and successful male adult. Loving, wise and successful male adult. So every one of us who are X, y, who have a Y, we're going to grow up, go through puberty. We're going to become male adults because our bodies will and our brains will change, but will we be loving, wise and successful? So that's the man part. A man is a loving, wise and successful male adult. And the approach you have much to do with what's going on with our boys and it's a social frame and it, you know, it's a sociological frame basically, and it goes along with started in feminist sociology about 50 some years ago, and we've all put it to good use. There's good use to it, um, but it doesn't really get at, um, what boys are experiencing and um, and just saying, well, either the reason boys do bad things is because of too much masculinity or the reason they don't grow up is because of too little masculinity.
Speaker 2:Really, either way is very soft yeah, so poor way to address it either way, right, what boys are trying to do, right is they're trying to become good men. So they're trying to become loving, wise and successful. Good, you know, men. And for them to do that, right, we have to raise them. So the whole system has to raise them well. Uh, the family system has to raise them well. And you know from, know from the book, and you know all the way back in Wonder of Boys I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:We want to be these good men. We got to raise them in a three family system. We got to have a nuclear family, an extended family and a tribal family, and they got to have male influence in all three of those families, especially once they hit puberty and adolescence. Here's the science of why. There's a lot of really good science around that brain science. And so they got to have that. Then the educational system has to see them as males and has to raise them or educate them, mentor them as males so that they also become loving, wise and successful male adults.
Speaker 2:And then counseling systems, right, right, have to we we, as you know, I come from the psych field and the education field right, we in the psych field have to counsel them, um, as you know to become loving, wise and successful male adults, and maybe five percent of what we will do will be talking to them about masculinity. 95 of it is we got to work with them as males. So so we have to like change our counseling systems. You know we can't be having them sit for 50 minutes Ain't going to work, they're going to leave counseling. It's not a fit for their brain, it's a mismatch of their brains with our system. And the school is the same sit listen. Uh, not not a good match for male brain.
Speaker 2:And so the educational system also has to help them become loving, wise and successful, and, uh, so that means changing classrooms. What you know what I call systemic change, which is that they, they don't need a new curriculum. You, you're, you're very right, you know. They don't need a two million dollar curriculum to do math in such and such a way. Um, what they need is and it costs very, very little is they just need systemic change.
Speaker 2:They need to see the brain scans, get the training stuff that they should have had if we didn't have all of this kind of sociological argument in college. They would have seen the brain scans when they went to college and grad school, and you and I would have seen them at grad school and college, and then we would be able to set up our systems to do better for both girls and boys, women and men. So it's a mismatch of the male brain with our systems, the systems that are generated through the big three. That's the mismatch. It's not really you know, it's not really much about masculinity, even though we love to talk about it Right?
Speaker 1:Well, it's, you know you're saying it, of course it's. It's recognize and acknowledge that there are differences, like we were even struggling with that piece to a certain extent. And in our systems today there's this recognition and acknowledgement that there's this difference and that difference can be. You know, if you're a teacher or if you're a parent, that you can be effective in acknowledging that there's a difference here. And there's a way I might treat my son versus my daughter, this boy in a classroom versus a girl in the classroom. And you know, now we trip into the hot and delicate territory of gender fluidity, right, hot and delicate territory of gender fluidity, right? Um, and I, I want to, I want to bring to bear kind of comparative ideologies here and get your response to it, because, in truth, you've already responded to this. I love it and I've got a quote in the book that I'm that I like to bring out.
Speaker 1:But, um, you know, trying, I won't give him too much credit, but you know, you've got Jordan Peterson out there and he is, I think he doubles down on a lot of the masculinity stuff. He makes some points that are not necessarily in error and one of them that he talks about, he does it at length in a variety of ways. But you've got a gender fluidity and you've got members of the LGBTQ community that are identifying this individual maybe a boy or a girl. They're a boy and they feel like they're a girl, and that individual is trapped in a body from birth. They're just trying to emerge. There's an idea about that as gender identity. Then there's sex. What is your gender? What biological organs do you have? What does your brain scan look like? And they tend to get mashed together. Jordan will go in and he'll say you know, one is a social construct gender fluidity and gender is a social construct, whereas sex is not. Sex is a biological. You know is something that you have biologically and that exists with you.
Speaker 1:But then, all of a sudden, the argument starts to get hyperbolic, it starts to take sides and everything else, and this is where I would probably pull out your quote, which I really like, having a personal experience with transgender children myself as a child advocate and this was something you did in response to somebody who was arguing with you. As a child advocate, I'm an advocate for all children, including trans, gay, intersex and gender nonconforming. But human sex exists in 2024, and now 2025, just as much as it did in the past and as much as it will in the future. It is an immutable biological reality that predates our present experiments with gender.
Speaker 1:The term cisgender is not accurate to that reality because of the assumption that sex as a culture is a. Sex is a culture construct. Gender is a culture construct, but sex is not, and I think you see a lot of people having strong reactions to that, and I really love the way that you talk about it in this book. How is it that you bring this to government and education and everything else? How do you soften the blow, so to speak, and give it to them in a way that feels approachable but also doesn't disregard this fluidity piece that we know exists in our community?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So. What I advocate, as you know, in this book, more than in any other previously, is that we stop using as much as possible in the big three so academics, government, media which means spreading through the whole society. We stop hitting sex and gender against each other and we use the term sex gender. So, instead of, you know, saying gender, which is what the term that's used for everything, now, right, we say sex gender because sex does come first, it always will, right, it has for a million years, it will for another million years. So sex comes first, it's wired in, and gender is a social construct, as you've noted, and the social construct comes second. So 30 years ago, just like now, we knew all about the spectrum. Right posited then was that we should use the term bridge brain for what now we call gender fluidity, and that that will really, really help kids. At the same time, trans is a different category because we can scan trans brains and you know, boys at Rescue Plan has all of this research in there, so people are going to look at it. We can scan trans brains and we can see that up to 30 brain centers in a trans brain are operating like the other sex right. So they may have a male body and genitalia, but their brain is operating more like, much more like a female brain. So that's an extreme bridge brain.
Speaker 2:So a gender fluid person is a bridge brain. They're not trans, they're a bridge brain. They're somewhere in between, in their own minds they're. They're kind of in between. They're still female, they're somewhere in between in their own minds they're kind of in between. They're still female, they're still male. But there's a wide spectrum of what is female. Forty four billion people are female, right. So wide spectrum of female brain and we can scan it and see it. And then wide spectrum of male brain. We can scan it and see it. And gender fluid is kind of in the middle, not trans, but kind of in the middle. So bridge brain, and I actually it's. I think it's much healthier to help a gender fluid person and say, oh, you're, you know, let's look okay you're not trans you're saying you're trans but actually you're not.
Speaker 2:We can see that you're not trans. This is a confusion of language. Um, you're a bridge brain and um, just know that and we accept you as that. So you don't have to assert. You don't have to assert gender and take it over to trans when you're not trans, which can lead if you're trans, that leads to a whole other medical situation. Let's look at you as gender fluid. Let's look at the social construct that you like, the gender roles you like. We'll look at that with you, trans will be here, and intersex, intersex also. You know there's we've got around, we don't know two, three million Americans who are intersex. That's specific. You have both sets of genitalia, potentially, or your XXYXYY, so that affects your brain. So your intersex. So these are actually different categories, but sex always comes first. So the movement to make everything gender is where we get in trouble and where we do things medically that we shouldn't be doing. You know, on children, shouldn't be doing those things on children, they're children.
Speaker 1:They're 12 years old.
Speaker 2:They may have heard from someone that they're trans now.
Speaker 1:But maybe they lock onto something that somebody said and they want to do that too, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, most of them are not trans. It's social contagion and it's bad terminology. They're not trans. Again, we can scan a trans brain and see trans. They're gender fluid. They would be bridge brains.
Speaker 2:So what I do, as you know, is I take a very moderate approach. I just try to get everyone to look at all the actual categories, like LGB, you know, lesbian, gay, bisexual that's wired in. We knew that all the way back 30 years ago. So that's wired in. That isn't that, you know. That's its own category. And, of course, we're going to give equal rights to people who are LGB. It's wired in. Just the way heterosexuality is wired in. Trans is wired in. Intersex is wired in gender fluidity. That's much more of a bridge brain.
Speaker 2:And so I'm trying to help everyone look at all the categories, because saying just gender, which is what we do for everything, is getting us in all sorts of trouble. So therefore, we are not actually taking care of our boys, we're not taking care of our girls, who are sex right, that's sex. We are not taking care of our men. We are not taking care of our women. That's sex. We got to make sure to remember that sex is the baseline. So if we mismatch our systems to males or females anywhere. We're mismatching to their sex, and then gender social construct comes later. We include that.
Speaker 1:Well, and it, you know, I think here's a good metaphor or a good, you know, comparative. It's like if you've got a, let's say, you've got an individual, an adult, that is transitioned, and they're they were female to male and they, they transit, you know, they were able to get half the surgery, but they haven't gotten all the surgery. If, for some reason, and maybe there was a shortage on testosterone and so on and so forth, and suddenly their menstrual cycle returns, you've got to go to the doctor. Well, you probably want to go to a doctor who knows something about menstrual cycles. If that's where your issue exists, regardless of how you identify, regardless of the thing that you've tried to make changes in and do all those things. We're not arguing any of that with you. But if you're going to go get medical care for this, that organ is a female organ and you need to go to somebody who knows how to work with and treat a female organ, to somebody who knows how to work with and treat a female organ. And you know, I think we bring that, you know, bring this back to the brain, right All of a sudden. It's like if we look at the brain and we stop getting in trouble with this terminology then we can actually address people kind of where they live. And just like we know that brain development that you know, you see, in children there's lots of neurodendritic activity, a lot of it, and as we grow older you lose neurons, pathways start to solidify and you've got this brain development piece. That happens for folks. So even in a brain that is bridge-brained, it might lean in one direction or in another and start to form, if you will, right. And because the brain, you know neuroplasticity, is one of the one of the great discoveries of our century. Ultimately that we, we know that the brain can change and it can do, mark you know, remarkable and wondrous things in both directions.
Speaker 1:The question I have for you is In the world, you know, outside of environments, that we, you know, we hopefully, can control. We don't always do it well and your work is helping people do it well, but you know, a school environment or a classroom environment is a controlled environment. The media environment is not a controlled environment, it's designed for completely alternative purposes. So let's say, for the bridge brain that lives out in the world, that is trying to find we're talking about maybe a young adult, mid to late teens trying to find an identity and we know from attachment theory we're talking about identity at these ages being really, really important and things that can go awry if they're not done well. So we've got an individual. Maybe they're bridge-brained and they're trying to find an identity and they're arguing with this set of people or with a parent about what they're called, what they're called. You know what gender they're being identified for. How are you educating parents on navigating that piece?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I do it the same way I do in my counseling practice. It's a both and of course, I mean you're still your sex and and you're you're probably a bridge brain sex and and you're, you're probably a bridge brain. So, trying to get everyone the language, like with clients, I always I try to figure out, and parents can do this too. That's part of why I write these books, so parents can read them and educators, you know, so that they're you can grab it. And one of the things parents can use is you're okay, you know what. You're probably a bridge brain. You're saying you're trans, son or daughter, you're is. You're okay, you know what. You're probably a bridge brain. You're saying you're trans, son or daughter. You're saying you're trans, likely it is. You're a bridge brain.
Speaker 2:If you, if you're presenting with, you have, if you have, gender dysphoria, okay, that's dysphoria, which is depression. So we can treat that right by looking at who you are and if you get out of all of this language stuff that's confusing, let's just look of all of this language stuff that's confusing, let's just look at your brain. It's your brain that's depressed, right, it's your brain, body that's depressed. Let's go there.
Speaker 1:This is a condition. Let's treat the condition.
Speaker 2:Gender dysphoria. It's dysphoria, right, so let's try to help you, and bridge brain is a way to help you. So it seems like you're a bridge brain and here are the qualities of a bridge brain, you know, which are going to be sort of the same qualities of someone who is saying they're gender fluid and um, and then somewhere in there we, we, we as parents, are going to be talking with the caregivers and saying does this child, does my child, have gender dysphoria or brain sex dysphoria? So brain sex dysphoria is another thing that I'm advocating that we take into our DSM doesn't exist now. Everything's gender dysphoria.
Speaker 2:So that's just creates a lot of problems for parents, for therapists, for educators, for everyone. Everything is gender dysphoria. Gender is a social construct. The term is not right for what is actually going on with our kids, but if we want to use it, okay, let's differentiate gender dysphoria from brain sex dysphoria. A trans person has brain sex dysphoria. They are depressed because their brain sex does not match their reproductive biology, and that is a much more significant disorder and much more can lead to suicide, let's say, than gender dysphoria disorder, and much more can lead to suicide, let's say, than gender dysphoria, which is, I'm a bridge brain and I don't fit and I'm not sure which way to lean Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, and the great thing about a bridge brain is you don't have to pick. You know the parents and the teachers and the therapists and the psychiatrists. Everyone is looking and saying, yeah, but you know, you're not trans, you're a bridge brain. So now so part of what has to happen is parents and the psychiatrist. Everyone is looking and saying, yeah, but you're not trans, you're a bridge brain. So part of what has to happen is parents and the whole system. Parents have to help school systems and everyone get re-educated toward what's actually going on. And so, rather than everyone getting educated toward everything's gender dysphoria, and so when you have gender dysphoria, you immediately go into gender affirming care. We have to, we have to look at, educate the systems, and parents can advocate for this educate the system so that they can differentiate.
Speaker 2:And as the parents and the kids differentiate, the systems differentiate.
Speaker 2:So then the systems will understand what care to give what which child and the systems will.
Speaker 2:Then you know, the parents will advocate and say I do think my child has brain sex dysphoria, or I do think my child has gender dysphoria, but not brain sex dysphoria, and then the systems will do brain scans and will look and see, okay, you have, you actually are trans, you have a brain sex dysphoria or and in the again, the majority of cases of kids who present with gender dysphoria, the systems will look at them and say, okay, you have gender dysphoria, not brain sex dysphoria, so gender affirming care, what we call that, which is, we're going to start you on biological interventions actually not a fit for you, right, because you're not trans, so not a fit for you. We're going to do these other things and parents, which is going to be, you know, medication, counseling, you know, and and parents need to be advocating for that and this thing that happened, like in the state of California, where parents are not going to be told, so the school doesn't have to tell the parents if a child comes in and says, well, I have gender dysphoria.
Speaker 2:Right, ok, that is not a good move. I mean, of course there's going to be backlash.
Speaker 1:California's making a lot of mistakes these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know the parents need to be involved, helping their kids, and as the parents get educated, then they won't overreact, they'll understand that this is a both-and you know.
Speaker 1:They might Some do.
Speaker 2:But you know they might some do, but you know, I think, well, you know, we're talking about trying to make societal change is what we're talking about. Right, right, and we got to educate everyone. It's just like with gay, lesbian, LGBT or gay. You know, I mean, 30 years ago, parents were overreacting to that much more than they are now. Yeah, some still do Stages of change. Oh, absolutely, we have been able to educate and say, hey, this is hardwired, here's how it works. You know, please do not be overreacting to this. Please support your child, and most parents are. There are still some who overreact, but most parents are. Well, the same has to happen here with sex gender. We got to get everyone educated in what's actually going on, because there's so much variety in the brain.
Speaker 2:And to your point about neuroplasticity, let me just say this one thing Sex gender is not highly plastic, right? So sex on the brain is not highly plastic. So when we talk about neuroplasticity, right, as you know, we're talking about we can train the brain to do these different things and it'll create bypasses, right, we'll have different. Different synapses will fill into different damage the brain pathways right yeah, especially trauma.
Speaker 2:You know you have neuroplasticity, you can create different pathways, but sex is hardwired on the genes in utero, so we come out with the sex on our brain. Uh, so I don't want listeners to think, okay, well, because I say I'm gender fluid, I am now because I say that I'm rewiring my brain for sex, I'm not.
Speaker 1:A bridge brain person. An individual might decide they want to identify as a certain gender. That doesn't necessarily make their brain different in the way that it was in utero. Is that would that?
Speaker 2:yeah, they still have a bridge brain is also hardwired in utero. So right, the spectrum is hardwired in utero and it's just that as we grow up, we learn who we are and we see where we fit on the spectrum and you'll have some people who are extreme male on the spectrum. Uh, the great example would be action stars and you know, of course, the individuals are not that.
Speaker 1:But your classic masculine male yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, if you see an Arnold Schwarzenegger, what you're seeing, let's say, is you're seeing someone who we would just use as icon of extreme male brain, even though Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't necessarily but the Terminator or whoever he's playing, I'd say that would be extreme male brain, which and you're going to see this develop that brain is not going to use as many words, it's not going to connect as many words to feelings as even the average male brain is.
Speaker 2:It's going to be more spatial, mechanical, more visual, graphic, more physical, you know, more cerebellum dependent. You know way out on the one end, and then you know, then you move, and you move, and you move and you get closer to the middle and then you have, ok, I'm a bridge brain. Ok, well, how do I know I'm a bridge brain? If I'm male, the way I know I'm a bridge brain is that I can connect more words to feelings more quickly. So my words to feeling ratio not only is more rapid, but it has more depth. So the more that a male brain moves toward bridge brain, the more we measure word to feeling ratios, because that's the best way to know if this is a bridge brain.
Speaker 1:Word to feeling ratio, because you can still have very physical athletic bridge brain males and for females the same.
Speaker 2:very physical athletic bridge brain males and for females, the same.
Speaker 2:You know the extreme female uh brain we know is the, is the brain that uh is, is what we call ultra feminine if we wanted to use those language, but it's that brain that didn't get actually a lot of the testosterone, androgenic chemical, and so that brain is way out on soft color, high word to feeling ratio, not spatial.
Speaker 2:So spatial is objects moving through space, not spatial, way, way out on the extreme. And then the more females get toward the bridge, you know they would have gotten a little more testosterone. And and then there we look at them now and they look at themselves and corporate world loves this stuff because a lot of these the bridge brain females go. Oh yeah, I'm really spatial, I don't use as many words, I'm still female, but I'm more like what I think of as a male brain or what you gurry and just showed me brain scans of as a male brain and she's a bridge brain and she knows it and so, um, that stuff's hardwired in and the soft wiring is how the opportunities we give it and how it works in the world but it's already hardwired, so it's not sex, is not neuroplastic.
Speaker 1:Okay, I mean, that's a good distinction. You know, the funny thing is is that I, I kind of I ran into the brain scans and you use these in your presentation. Of course, I ran into them prior to that because I've got family members who are transgender and the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center, which is, you know, doing a lot of research, but a lot of there's, but a lot of what they're doing when they're advising families who are coming in about, you know, should we? And this is a lot, and this is a topic I'd love to hear your opinion about. But if you've got a child, that's gender dysphoria or sex dysphoric, right, and they do a brain scan and like, yeah, well, your little girl that's, you know, got all the markers of, of having the sex of a female does in fact have what we see in the averages, a male brain, and that's why they feel this way and it's and it's linked to the affirmations and whether or not, you know, drugs should be used before the age of 16 and 17, and all those kinds of things. Their research is asking these questions and applying brain research to it and saying these are the things that should inform any decision, regardless of the age, etc. Which is a pretty sophisticated way to go about it. You ask the average family hey, you need to go get some brain scans when you're facing these issues. It could be an expensive thing to go get. It's a fairly sophisticated thing to kind of engage in until it becomes normalized and everything else.
Speaker 1:What is your thought about? You've got an individual that is gender dysphoric or, excuse me, sex dysphoric. They mourn one sex and feel like the other, born one sex and feel like the other, being under the age of, say, 16, 17, 18 or 19 and engaging in hormones and surgeries and so on and so forth. You know there's a. There's a fairly fairly large population of folks that say, hey, don't touch them until everything sorts itself out. 18 or 19 years of age. Then you've got a. You you've got a smaller population of people that are that are affirming as soon as, as soon as this individual starts saying things like this, you want to start affirming those things. And that even includes et cetera, et cetera. You know surgeries and and, and hormones and et cetera. What are your? What would you say to that? Um, both the parties, you know.
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely. Well, in Boys at Rescue Plan, I mean absolutely. My point of view on it as a medical psychiatric professional is I make it very clear I would fall. I always am a both and person, I'm always kind of in the middle, but I would fall. In terms of child development, I would fall more on the side of the folks who are saying don't you're very careful about what you do for biological interventions until that brain and body has had the chance to go through puberty and get to? You said 16, 17. I mean, yeah, I think probably it's going to fall out at 18, just legally, right, just because the way each state's going to do it. But yeah, yeah, until they need to get through. There are just too many negative side effects.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interrupting a process before it's complete.
Speaker 2:Yeah to overdoing it. Okay Now, and I say in the book, and we want to remember that hormone therapy, hormone replacement, even puberty blockers, those have already been used for decades, like, for instance, for girls who are getting their periods at seven or eight, right, we have a number of our young girls, especially in the Western world, who are going through puberty too early and their brain chemistry is off and we have reasons for that happening. We think it's coming through the chemicals that are coming into their bodies via food and pollutants and so on. So already puberty blockers have been used for that population and they've been used successfully. So it's not as if they're evil or something like that. They're not. And if they are needed to help with a condition that they will help with, then it's okay. But using them at the rates and the levels that are going to stop puberty beyond 10 or 11, where we want it to stop at seven or eight. We want to wait till you're 10 or 11 for a girl to start going through puberty.
Speaker 2:Okay, if we say we're going to use the puberty blockers to stop it completely all the way through, then I would argue, no, that's too severe an intervention. Yeah, it's going to affect. It's going to have too many potential negative effects like sterility and all these things that we shouldn't be doing to children. But that doesn't mean we can't have gender affirming care. If we reorient what gender affirming care is, so if we say to them more, like you described, where we go, either I can get brain scans for you, or if we can't afford them, or they don't exist yet in our community, which they don't in many communities then at least we can be training our professionals to be doing neuropsych batteries that help us to understand is this person trans, is this person gender non-conforming gender, non-binary, or are they trans? We can activate those sorts of neuropsych batteries in our profession and parents can ask for them for their child and we can do them.
Speaker 2:And then we can be affirming the child in saying, okay, you know, you're a bridge brain, here's how we'll work with you. You're trans? Um, we. But at 12, we can't really know yet, right, because the brain really hasn't formed enough for us to absolutely know until you go through puberty. Um, because you can go through puberty and then some different things can happen by 17. Um, like even some trans kids who say I'm absolutely trans by 17, they say, ooh, I was not trans, I'm gay, but I couldn't figure out who.
Speaker 1:I was, I was trans yeah.
Speaker 2:So we have to do a both and um, but I definitely would be against severe biological interventions for these young people. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve it's all still too early for the most significant they weren't already medically indicated, right exactly yeah, they need to be medically indicated for something you know, something else than the child says they're trans.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's just not enough it's a pretty good rule for any kind of intervention medical intervention, you know, or for any kind of intervention of that kind. It's, you know, the is it medically necessary? There's your, there's your marker. That's what you, as a doctor, you're telling you that a procedure is medically necessary because of some condition that might exist, there's your marker. If you're doing it to, you know, experiment with the philosophy this 12 year old has, in their head, hit the brakes. You know what I mean. So I, you know this. Uh, it seems to me and you tell me whether or not you find this statement to be correct that we could make this whole thing a lot simpler, that we could make everything the problems that society is experiencing and all these other pieces we can make it a lot simpler for schools, for parents, for families, for the government and et cetera, if we just kind of shift our ideas about it a little bit. Would you say that that's true, yep?
Speaker 2:Yep, I absolutely would, and I'm noticing the time, so I'm going to have to make this my last answer, just because of the time, because I have to do another podcast right after this. We can educate everybody on I mean, not just on rescuing our boys, but specifically we have, as you know, one part of the book is specifically to help people with sex, gender, so that every system can understand what is going on, and we will make it simpler if every system gets educated in what is sex and what is gender. It sounds complicated. It's like oh, now there are seven categories. I just wanted gender dysphoria. But no, actually, if we look at each category and everyone is trained to understand who fits in each category, then we are going to know what to do for each child.
Speaker 2:Going on right now is way too broad and it's too political, you know, whether on one end or the other, and it's just not giving parents and kids and practitioners what they need. It's a real failure. Fortunately, I think, in the big three academics, government and media where they just decided we're going to go this one direction Either there is gender dysphoria or there's not, and that's going to be it.
Speaker 2:That can't work.
Speaker 1:We can dive into that rabbit hole a little bit the politics and everything else but we'll have to save that for another time. Dr Gurian, I want to thank you so much for joining me today and I hope that everybody will pick up a copy of Boys a Rescue Plan so that they can take a look and be more versed about the world that we live in, how to support our children. Thank you so much for joining the show. This has been Head Inside Mental Health with Todd Weatherly on WPBM 1037, the Voice of Asheville. Take care, dr Gurian, it's good to see you.
Speaker 2:You too, todd, thank you, thanks for all you're doing. Yeah, let's do it again. Outro Music.