Madeleine Kearns of National Review joins Emily Jashinsky to discuss the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe v. Wade. They also discuss President Biden’s proposed revisions to Title IX policy and Emily’s recent reporting trip to northern Mexico.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Emily Jashinsky:
Welcome to High Noon, the podcast where we have smart conversations with interesting people or interesting conversations with smart people. I don’t know which is the proper tagline. I’m Emily Jashinsky, obviously, filling in for the one and only the great Inez Stepman, who is cavorting about Europe this week. As we record this podcast, it is my pleasure and my honor truly to be here filling in for Inez on High Noon. I am joined today by someone I think of as equally brilliant as Inez. That would be Maddy Kearns from National Review. Maddy, thank you so much for joining us on this edition of High Noon.
Madeleine Kearns:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Emily Jashinsky:
Now, Maddy, congratulations are in order. It is now, I believe it’s public that you are engaged. You were betrothed, what, was it in the last two days, three days?
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. I was in New York with my boyfriend, now fiance, and he popped the question at our favorite church in Manhattan. Inez was making fun of me that this is the most Catholic proposal she’s ever heard. It was after mass, went over to little shrine of St. Joseph, and he asked me there. So it was really nice, really sweet.
Emily Jashinsky:
What a beautiful story. I love that. And a beautiful weekend, I’m sure, June in New York City.
Madeleine Kearns:
Oh yes. Very hot, sunny, wonderful weekend.
Emily Jashinsky:
Just before the city starts to smell of garbage.
Madeleine Kearns:
No, it smelled of garbage.
Emily Jashinsky:
It did. Oh, okay. Good. I feel like it’s usually July, August.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah.
Emily Jashinsky:
But maybe it just gets worse in July and August.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yes, definitely. Yeah.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, this is not a podcast about garbage smells or personal news.
Madeleine Kearns:
No, but it could be.
Emily Jashinsky:
As much as we could keep going, Maddy. Right. That would be fun actually, but we do have big news to talk about. In fact, even bigger news than your engagement, Maddy, which is, on Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Mississippi ruling that the justices handed down. Nobody knew. The entire city here in Washington, D.C. was tense for weeks. Reporters getting to the Supreme Court early, protestors getting to the Supreme Court early always, ready to be prepared to demonstrate and to capture those demonstrations whenever.
The judgment was rendered and we now have it. The leak as anticipated or the leak, I should say, had us all in anticipation that Roe would be overturned. It seemed that would be the case and indeed it was. The final ruling doesn’t seem to be all that different from the leaked ruling that was written by Justice Alito and IWF where Maddy and I are both fellows.
So this is a truly an IWF production in every way. The great IWF does not take a position on abortion. What we’re going to do, I think, is get into some of the interesting details about how this will unfold politically and practically over, I’m going to say, the next decade, because the next days, the next week, I mean, this had an immediate impact on the country, on the laws in the country. There were trigger laws already on the books in some states and in both directions laws that codified Roe and laws that basically banned abortion in most cases immediately.
So the country has already changed dramatically and did the moment that judgment came out, basically, and that’s not going to stop this debate, Maddy. So I have a lot of thoughts about where I think this debate is going to go in the coming days, weeks, months, years, and decades. But I want to start by asking you: what is on the proverbial political table in these, let’s say, state legislatures in Congress, where Democrats are surely going to try to codify Roe with some piece of legislation? What do you see at least in terms of policy? Where do you see this debate heading right now?
Madeleine Kearns:
So I think right now, it’s going to be the Democrats making the most of this for the midterms. They want to get away from inflation. They want to get away from rising gasoline prices. I mean, this is what Biden made clear in his address. He was saying, “This is going to be on the ballot come November.” They want it on the ballot because it’s a distraction. And the way it’s been framed, obviously, is that this is Republicans taking away a constitutional right in an unprecedented way. This is what Biden said.
So I think they’re really going to hammer that home and they’re certainly going to get amplification of that in the liberal media. Most of our institutions, that’s actually the remarkable thing about the overturning of Roe; is most cultural institutions in America are very much on this. The pro-choice side have been since Roe was passed in the first place and so it’s kind of this incredible revolution really to have this.
And there’s lots of reasons why it happened and, certainly, Trumpism is one expression of it. It was interesting to see. I thought Biden credited Trump for the overturning of Roe. And Trump, in a really rare moment of I don’t know what, he credited God. So I don’t know what’s going on here. Something just insane in our politics that these are the characters that have brought around this thing that a significant portion of Americans have been fighting for, for a long time. But in terms of this, so I basically see it as the midterms. It’s going to be the Democrats scrambling to really just use this to their advantage. And I think they will find that to be effective in some ways. I think that people do care about this issue.
I’ll caveat that with, it doesn’t seem that people care about it as much as they make out that they care about it. It might have been in the USA Today poll showed that this isn’t the most important issue certainly by a long shot. This is not something that people would necessarily consider a voting priority one way or another. I think a good test of that as well was Glenn Youngkin’s victory, where you saw like, in Democrat places, you’re going to find that they’re already going to have abortion. They’re going to have legal abortion. It’s going to be protected. So it’s not really this pressing issue for them. Whereas, in the way it’s presented in the coastal elites, it’s much more this is something that’s got this question of urgency.
So that’s the Democrats. They will try and use it. We’ll see how that goes. More interesting question, I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this; is what do Republicans do now? Because, obviously, we’re going to see a bit of sorting of the sheep from the wolves here in terms of who has really been convinced pro-lifer and who has been saying what needs to be said to get the pro-life contender to vote for them as a Republican. That’s going to be very interesting and I think it’s going to be very interesting to see the parochialism in America, how it’s going to play out differently. Some states are going to go more incremental. I mean, it’s interesting that the Mississippi law that [inaudible 00:07:52] is 15 weeks. That’s not a heartbeat bill. That’s in line with most of Europe. I don’t know; what do you think about that?
Emily Jashinsky:
I think that’s really the key question and not just for Republicans, but in general, how this conversation is had in public. If you believe that life begins at conception, your legislative priorities are going to be very different than whether you believe viability is the standard or whether you believe in exceptions for rape and incest. I think the pro-life movement has talked about the issue of abortion in a way that was very much tailored to the Roe norm. And now that there’s an opportunity for the pro-life movement, the conservative movement, the Republican party to do policies that aren’t just working around Roe, but are working in a post-Roe world, I think the conversation is going to push a lot of Republicans into an uncomfortable space that they don’t want to be in.
I know the last thing that establishment Republicans want is armchair quarterbacks in conservative media, giving them unsolicited advice, but what I would tell them to do is to be honest about what they think and to be honest about if they believe life begins at conception, your policies should be honest reflections of that and your rhetoric should be an honest reflection of that because I don’t think people are inclined to believe you actually think life begins at conception if you do not act as though you think that abortions after conception are taking life. That is just absolutely critical, I think, going forward.
One thing I think Inez would appreciate or one maybe broader piece of context, I think, Inez would appreciate us framing this discussion in is the sexual revolution discussion. I wrote a piece about this right away on Friday and how Gen Z right now is currently rethinking the sexual revolution. Even BuzzFeed wrote a long story about how “sex positivity” has fallen out of favor with Gen Z, with maybe younger millennials, who have really been hurt by hookup culture in so many ways that these norms that were set by elder millennials, by Xers and by boomers have turned out to be an experiment that was harmful to a lot of women.
I don’t think you can talk about the sexual revolution and I think feminists would agree without also talking about abortion. And whatever you think of abortion, this is an industry of, what’s the right way, sort of technologically advanced abortion, where it went from the dangerous treacherous back alleys into medical facilities. Now, there are pills. It’s been very technologically advanced and sanitized and industrialized. That is very new to civilization. Even some contraception methods are very new to civilization. In vitro fertilization is new to civilization. And that’s not to say all technologies that we just talked about are bad. That’s not to say all technology in general is bad. It’s just to say that this is very, very different and the world changed very quickly in about 50 years.
So I’m curious, Maddy, what you think about, as the sort of consequences of the sexual revolution are becoming more and more manifest in younger people who aren’t quite reactionary, but are definitely sort of fumbling around in the dark, looking for the answer to problems caused by the sexual revolution, how do you think this conversation then will unfold in that broader context?
Madeleine Kearns:
Initially, before we get to the abortion part of this, I found the #MeToo Movement, especially in the last five to 10 years, really, really fascinating because I saw in it women beginning to understand that this whole, you can have sex like men, the whole sex and steady lane, wasn’t really working out that well for them. They would engage in these hookups, they would behave as disinhibited men, they have contraception, they don’t have to worry about pregnancy, that’s the area, and yet they would feel kind of degraded, they’d feel hurt. There was a lot going on there.
Some of that was, as has been talked about many times by other people, this sort of retrospective withdrawal of consent. So you consent at the time, but then you think better about it later and then you think, “Actually, did I consent at the time? Because if I consented at the time, why do I feel so miserable?” There was this huge focus on consent and the whole thing was obviously bankrupt by partisan mechanisms because, I mean, it was just people were using it for cynical reasons, like transparently cynical reasons. So it got less interesting, it got boring. But that in itself, that initial dissatisfaction, I think, was that story in the New Yorker, Kate Pierson-
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh yes.
Madeleine Kearns:
… showing really sorted, a fair young girl goes to college, has a sexual relationship basically because she thinks it would be impolite to refuse him. So she’s not really attracted to him, she doesn’t really see a future with him, but he expects sex and she just thinks like it’d be like ordering… I think the line is like, it’d be like ordering something from the menu and then when it arrives, it’s like saying, “Actually I don’t want this, turn it back.” So she goes through with this and she feels degraded and awful.
And I think, rather than this focus on consent, the question of abortion and the question of pregnancy, as opposed to just the sexual act, introduces this question of, this other C word, commitment. And we had this huge emphasis on not slut-shaming. That was like, “Let’s not slut-shame.” I remember actually it was Norm Macdonald and his Postmus thing has this really funny joke, where he’s like, “I was way ahead of the curve and this guy’s like, ‘Right back in high school, I was saying like, ‘No, don’t shame the sluts. If you shame the sluts, they’ll stop having sex with us.””
Emily Jashinsky:
Why do we want to shame the sluts?
Madeleine Kearns:
Right. Exactly. But it’s perceptive because it’s no saying that, yes, of course, stigmatizing people and making people feel awful because of decisions is just not a very kind way to be and we shouldn’t do that. But, at the same time, there’s something valuable in shame in that it teaches you to protect yourself the same way you put your hand on a hot stove and it hurts, you withdraw your hand. There’s something about shame that is like, “This isn’t good for me.” Slut’s not a very nice word, it’s not very nice to make all about the women here, but we did have an equivalent. And the equivalent for men was, I’m thinking of a very 1950s term right here, but it’s the cad, right?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. Right.
Madeleine Kearns:
The lout, the womanizer, just basically a really despicable person who uses women. And that’s what we would see as, we’d see somebody who uses women. Yes, we’ve always had people who, in acts of desperation, have sought out abortions, but for the vast majority of women up until really post sexual revolution, ’70s, it was unthinkable. For you to get pregnant, your options were, you have the baby, you give the baby up for adoption. Or before you’re pregnant, you abstain or take the risk with the contraception. But I actually think that what that dynamic was a woman realized that she had the burden here. That the idea that she could behave like a man was just completely foreign concept. So she had the burden.
So if she was going to engage in sex with a guy, the bare minimum, she could reasonably expect and society would support her and reasonably expecting that would be, should they get pregnant, he commits; shotgun wedding. She could reasonably expect that. And if he failed, he would be stigmatized. Now, what we did with contraception and abortion is we shifted that. I was watching Friends recently and there’s just-
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, good.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. I love Friends. I think it’s interesting, especially, because we’ve moved so far since the ’90s, but when Rachel gets pregnant and she has this conversation with Ross and she’s like, “No, I just want you to know I don’t expect anything from you.” And I’m thinking like, “Why would she let him off the hook like that? Maybe they don’t want to get married but, at bare minimum, he should be paying child support. He should be showing up. He should be looking after this kid and taking an interest.” But she doesn’t expect that, society wouldn’t have expected that, and the reason for that is because it’s an affirmative choice that she’s made to continue the pregnancy. This is very long rambling.
Emily Jashinsky:
No, this is actually perfect.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. But to your point about how is this going to change the dynamic, I don’t see this changing overnight. I mean, our generation women younger than us, women older than us have lived their entire lives with an expectation of accessible abortion as a backstop to a contraceptive lifestyle. So it’s not going to change overnight, but, ideally, what you would see is people joining the dots between we’re really not happy with the prevailing social ethic right now hence this confusion around consent and dissatisfaction with hookup culture. Maybe we just expect more from men. Maybe this whole bro choice thing of guys, like David Portnoy, who want to have their lifestyle and then they are outraged that abortion isn’t available and it’s like, these things are connected. Maybe that starts to become socially unacceptable. Again, I would welcome that. I would very much welcome, if we don’t go the slut shaming route, that’s fine, but let’s at least bring back some shaming of guys who don’t step up.
Emily Jashinsky:
A lot of people would say that shame never existed, which is incorrect as you point out. The feminist would argue men never face the stigma for abandoning women in those situations, but this is actually really excellent.
Before we do segue, I have some thoughts on everything you just said, but the next item on the docket, as Inez likes to say, is actually going to be Title IX. There’s so much talk about when it comes to Title IX and our sexual ethics in this country and in the 21st Century. And to that point, Maddy, everything you said, it was so interesting because you’re right that the expectation, the norm, for people like us, the downfall of Roe, and you’ve heard this from a lot of people in the pro-life movement in the last couple of days, was unthinkable.
It was a conservative fantasy, basically, that Roe would ever go anywhere whatsoever. And here we are June of 2022 and Roe’s gone. So for both the left and the right, something happened really quickly that suddenly abortion was this norm, this standard, this expectation that felt like it was etched in stone, almost into the constitution itself, because Roe was always considered settled law and untouchable. And as we know, that didn’t turn out to be the case, but it does change the way in the same way that contraception technologies like IUD technology, the pill itself, all of these things really changed the way that human beings had sex in the west and the last half century.
So that’s a really important part of this conversation because abortion started to be legalized in the years leading up to Roe itself. It was even Janet Yellen coauthored a paper with her husband in the late ’90s for the Brookings Institute that found abortion actually increased single motherhood because people were having more premarital sex because you just psychologically, and I’m putting my own read on the paper although that’s what Yellen concluded that this had to do with the change in abortion law, but you could see, psychologically, women just had a different idea about what options were available to them.
That’s why I think it’s so important to have this conversation in the context of all of the changes that have happened. Technologically, just over the last half century, this is a really big deal. We think of these things as normal and we think of these things as right, but the point you just made about how women have… It is another important thing to remember. The choice isn’t about whether to continue with a pregnancy, the choice in a consensual situation, so majority of abortions, if it was consensual, the choice is to have sex outside of a relationship with somebody where you want to get pregnant. This is the outcome of sex. We know it’s function, it’s biological function.
And so I think women believe and have been conditioned to believe that they’re entitled to have sex exactly as men do, which is with no physical consequence. That you have a right not to have that physical consequence of your own decision. And we’ve just sort of shifted the burden that way; sex is something you do for pleasure and that’s purely it. It’s, I think, become really dangerous and that’s actually a good segue into the Title IX docket item, which is, we’re going from Roe to Title IX and then taking a hard pivot on Item 3 in the docket to the Southern border.
But while we’re on this topic of sexual ethics, Maddy, the Biden administration finally released its plan to revise the Title IX Guidelines back to the Obama-Era Title IX Guidelines away from the improvements that Betsy DeVos had made to them, which had been lauded by even her most bitter enemies, including the Washington Post Editorial Board, including writers for the Atlantic. This was broadly considered by pretty much everybody who followed the issue closely that didn’t happen to be a partisan arm of the Democratic party or the fringe activist Democratic party. This was considered an improvement in the Obama-Era Guidelines that we’ll be returned to after the comment period, because that’s how our administrative state works. They give you this fig leaf of input into the process by having a notice in comment period.
So the Obama-Era Guidelines were a disaster; everybody knew that anyway. They were considered kangaroo courts. Major law groups spoke out against them. I would say there were three major problems with them. And Inez, as a lawyer, she has a much more granular understanding. Well, she’s been working on this issue for years and years and years, but that’s not to call her old, although she is. She loves when I do that. I think you can sort of categorize the problems with the Obama-Era rules in three particular ways.
One, they used an overly broad definition of sexual assault and sexual harassment to the point where it was almost meaningless, defining just about every unpleasant interaction that a woman can have with a man, as potentially if she wanted it to be as sexual harassment. It was just such a broad definition.
The second area of this would be that they did it via Dear Colleague letter. So there were three Title IX Dear Colleague letters. One was about transgender sports issues and the other two were about Title IX as it pertains to adjudicating sexual assault and harassment. Those were the first two. And Dear Colleague letters are anti-democratic. As all of the people outside the Supreme court right now are claiming is the case with the returning of Roe, they basically completely subvert the process of Republican government that we have in this country and they give legislative power; a power that clearly belongs to the legislature, to unelected bureaucrats who can govern by Fiat because they tether public funding to these Dear colleague letters. And if you do not follow them, then you have that problem and it created a nightmare.
The third issue, I would say, in addition to all of those problems, is they created kangaroo courts beyond just the problem of the definition. They created kangaroo courts by basically eliminating due process. You could empower the single investigator model, which is what Biden wants to go back with. One bureaucrat is involved in adjudicating this. In many cases, it changed the standard of evidence from preponderance to clear and convincing, which might not sound like a big deal, but, in practice, is an absolutely huge deal. They took out cross examinations under this idea. What’s the best way to describe it? It was the Greg Lukianoff book in a very sort of like fragility-
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Yeah.
Emily Jashinsky:
Right. “The Coddling of the American Mind” with Jonathan Haidt, but it’s very much the fragility ethics for millennials, that a cross-examination re-traumatizes victims and is therefore unfair, even though it is a necessary element of due process. Now, those are the three buckets just as we’re dealing with adjudicating sexual assault and harassment. The fourth thing is that there was another Dear Colleague letter in 2016. I think it was May of 2016 from John King, at the end of the Obama administration, that read gender identity on the basis of sex, the famous phrase in Title IX.
Biden’s administration is doing a couple different things with that. He is first already in the proposed guidelines, included gender identity. He says gender identity needs to be included when we think of sex, but he’s also said we’re going to put out different guidelines as it pertains to trans-sports. Maddy, so much to deal with there.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yes.
Emily Jashinsky:
It was a huge announcement. There’s so much to talk about because the media is ignoring it or taking the Biden administration’s talking points directly and inserting them into their headlines when they say Biden’s new Title IX Guidelines would protect trans-athletes, or trans-students is what I saw a lot of in the headlines. But let me throw it to you with this and you can take it wherever you want. You can go back to Roe, you can go back to the sexual revolution, you can tie it all together, have fun with it, but I’m going to throw it to you with this. It is deeply inconsistent for the Biden administration to say we need separate guidelines for athletics. And I mean that phrase literally, if gender identity is in fact equal to sex, then you should have no reason to issue separate guidelines for sports because it is plainly sex. If, on the other hand, it is not the same as sex, equal to sex as they claim, then it has no place being read into Title IX, which is specific to sex for a reason. So with that, I’ll say, take it away.
Madeleine Kearns:
Well, I’m going to start where you left off with this: why did they treat sports differently? I think it’s because they have realized that is a losing issue.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Madeleine Kearns:
I think we have seen this in the international context. We’ve seen the world’s swimming organization come out and basically say, “Unless you transitioned before puberty, this isn’t fair. This isn’t fair for women, so we’re going to exclude you.” The International Cycling Association, that’s not its name, it’s French name, but they did a similar thing. It was less robust than that. It was something to do hormones, but it was certainly leaning towards exclusion of male athletes. It’s just, think of how much controversy the Lia Thomas thing got in the U.S. And that’s, that’s without mainstream media being honest about it. Alternative media had a huge breakthrough, I think.
I think that’s something they’re out of step with even liberals and even Democrats. And so I actually found that sort of gratifying. It was a nod to, “Okay. We realized we’re going to have to at least be diplomatic on this one. We’re going to have to figure out.” You’re right. Of course, it’s massively inconsistent, but when has inconsistency ever bothered them? Whole thing’s pretty inconsistent.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
But the due process thing is interesting to me because when I first found out about these sort of category courts, so I moved over to the U.S. in 2016 and was aware of what was going on under Obama-Era Guidance regulations. My first question, sort of naively, to my NYU classmates, we were discussing this. I think we were reading Laura Ketmas’s book and I said-
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, boy.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. And I said-
Emily Jashinsky:
No, NYU was not home to “Mattress Girl”. That was Columbia. So never mind.
Madeleine Kearns:
Oh, it’s Columbia. Yes, it was Columbia.
Emily Jashinsky:
Emma Sulkowicz, yes.
Madeleine Kearns:
So my first question was: where I come from, these offenses are crimes.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
If somebody sexually assaults you, if somebody sexually harasses you, if you are raped, you don’t go to some administrator, you call the police and then you go through the legal system. Why is this? Let’s just say, even if it wasn’t atrocious in terms of due process, even if it was these kangaroo courts, they weren’t kangaroo courts. They were sort of pseudo-judicial setups where there was ostensibly fair. Why are you doing this? Why is this your role? I don’t understand. So I just object to it on that, but it totally relates to what we’re talking about before with the sexual revolution and this beginning to understand that something isn’t working.
Instead of working through that and taking some responsibility for maybe choices that you’re making or lifestyle decisions you’re making that aren’t making you happy, it becomes just resentment. I find myself sort of defending the process rights of people who I think behave like pigs.
Now a pig, isn’t a rapist. They’re different things. A pig isn’t the same as a predator necessarily. You could be a frat boy who totally objectifies women and just hooks up in a completely irresponsible way, gets really drunk, whatever, treats women with no respect. I think the proper way of approaching that is treating it as a moral issue and having, again, like I would like to see a resurgence of shame and, yes, a little bit of stigma. Maybe not going too far, but, yes, I think somebody who behaves like that should be ashamed. But I don’t think we should start accusing them of criminal behavior.
The problem is that we have this culture, this prevailing ethic, where everything is absolutely fine, morally fine, it’s all like everything goes. You could be a cocktail party and you could say you’re into the weirdest stuff. You could say you’re into, I don’t know, tying people up by ear like, I think we know what weird stuff is Maddy. You want to defecate on people, I don’t know, whatever it is. And people would go, “Oh good for you. That’s so interesting. You’re so worldly.” But the moment somebody touches your leg and you didn’t give them a green light, do you know what that usually means? It means somebody you’re not attracted to hanging on you.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
That’s what it normally means.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well.
Madeleine Kearns:
No, seriously, because think about it. No, think about it, right? People reading each other’s body language and I refuse to believe anybody actually has sex in the way of may I now do this, may I now do that, may I now do this, may I now do that? It’d be just like be told to turn off anyway. I don’t understand [inaudible 00:34:46]. So what happens is the unattractive make advances and rather than just being rejected and humiliated, and they would learn from that; that is also a valuable life experience to be rejected and humiliated, it’s like, “I was harassed. I was whatever.” So I just think that we need to bring back the separation of being able to say that is not good behavior, that’s bad behavior, and I disapprove of that behavior. I don’t want to behave in a way that encourages that behavior. But that is not the same thing as that person has committed a crime.
And so, first of all, I think Title IX and the latest regulations are just a complete mess because they conflict those two things and don’t actually address any of the real issues that need to be addressed. But the redefinition of sex to include gender identity is kind of interesting as well, honestly, because if the whole assumption of feminism is that there is gender asymmetry and so there’s gender based violence… Sex based violence. Sorry, I’m doing what they do in confusing those two terms; sex. Well, because gender used to just be polite or more polite way of saying sex, but sex.
There’s these sex differences and women are more vulnerable. But if we redefine women to include men, I’m curious as to what you think. How do these two things work together? How do these two things not contradict each other? If we’re saying we need to hold men who misbehave to higher account and have these kangaroo courts and resuscitate the kangaroo courts, but, at the same time, we’re saying we are actually aren’t sure what a woman is.
Emily Jashinsky:
No-
Madeleine Kearns:
I don’t… Yeah. Don’t realize [inaudible 00:36:47].
Emily Jashinsky:
It’s incompatible. And that’s, you come from the land of the TERFs. That’s where the TERFs come from, right?
Madeleine Kearns:
TERF Island.
Emily Jashinsky:
TERF island, that’s where you get J.K Rowling, that’s where you get Kara Dansky, that’s where you get your Matt Taibbis, where you get people who are from the far left that, via a horseshoe theory, have now come around and are joining arms with people on the far right on this specific question because Title IX in and of it itself is such an interesting microcosm of the problems plaguing the feminist movement. When we talk about Roe, when we talk about all of these other states that had legalized abortion before Roe, the Title IX was signed by Richard Nixon. It was seen as part of the second waves, major legislative accomplishments. And the feminist movement has championed Title IX for years against conservative opposition, basically saying, this is an encroachment of the federal government that creates more problems than it solves. It hurts men’s sports, et cetera.
I actually sympathized with that position, but it’s been interesting to watch. For instance, last week was the 50th anniversary of Title IX and that’s why Biden released these guidelines last week. It was allegedly to celebrate Title IX, We could talk to some of the great female athletes that work with IWF and just talk to them and say they’re all in a position where their peers, people who are following their paths, are women, are going to be hurt by the Biden administration’s pro-woman nonsense because it’s actually pro-man.
Madeleine Kearns:
Right.
Emily Jashinsky:
It says you’re just having more men that are biological men, people who have had privileges in certain spaces, whether it’s just being privileged to have a body that is more equipped to do athletic competitions in many different contexts or not having to menstruate one week of every month or not having to carry the child, which privilege isn’t the right word because that’s a privilege for women, but they’re certainly, if you’re goals are professional, privileges to being a man who doesn’t have to carry the child.
So yes, it is fundamentally incompatible. It makes absolutely no sense. That’s why I think Title IX is so useful as a glimpse into the problems that are plaguing the feminist movement as they’ve really been founded increasingly. So on this bedrock of moral relativism, that’s also allowing this trans-humanist ideology to fester that we can escape the things that make us unhappy. And it’s wrecking a generation of women. It did great damage to the millennial generation. It is doing more damage to Gen Z as it gets worse and worse.
And Maddy, you’ve reported extensively. You had a wonderful cover story for NOR a while back, probably a year or two ago, on trans-issues kind of generally and then specifically in some cases. And since we’re talking about the Biden administrations and we spent a little bit of time just now on Title IX, I’ll preface this by saying one of the “red pill moments” of my life was when I was an intern for the great Christina Hoff Sommers over at the American Enterprise Institute. I was helping with a re-release of her absolutely excellent classic book, “The War Against Boys.”
My job was to go through the old footnotes and the new footnotes, compare them, make sure studies that have been cited were up-to-date, accurate, et cetera. And when I was going through some of the studies that Christina writes about and looking at how they define sexual harassment and sexual assault, when you look at those studies and you see it under their methodology, that this is the definition, this is the question we posed to people on the phone, cat calling in some cases was included in the definition and it was like everything the media tells you is wrong when you just read the studies yourself. That’s sort of how I saw it. It was like a light bulb moment.
It’s the job of journalists to be the intermediary, to be the person that reads the study, because normal people who are happy enough not to go into journalism don’t have to do it. So, Maddy, I imagine you had similar moments of like, whoa, as you were reporting that wonderful cover story out, even though you’d been covering that issue for a while, it was a very in-depth piece of journalism. So I wanted to ask if you could just talk to us about reporting that story out. And when you look back on writing it now in the context of Biden inexplicably swinging from what most people considered an improvement to what most people considered across the political spectrum to be a bad state of affairs.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. So I think the cover story you were referring to was 2019 and I think it was the one about James Younger.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Madeleine Kearns:
This was kind of like the hook, but it was about much more than him. And this was with a little boy is a little boy in Texas and there was a very messy custody dispute between his parents and his mother wanted to raise him as a girl and start him on the whole puberty blocking and so on. His father was completely against this and so they were having this tug of war, essentially, over a child.
It was jumped on by liberal media and they were very much on the trans narrative. What I basically did, I had pretty good sourcing on the story because I was able to get materials from the depositions and in the hearings and see who their expert witnesses were and see what their expert references were seeing, and really shed a light on the whole industry, especially with child’s transition, which is the most disturbing part of the entire transgender phenomenon, is child’s transition because it’s often the most vulnerable children imaginable.
I mean, I had access at one point to a Facebook group with tens of… Well, it was 8,000 parents who were transing their kids. There were people posting pictures of young teenage girls with down syndrome, having had double mastectomies, and just the craziest stuff. And it’s crazy to think that was four years ago-
Emily Jashinsky:
That’s amazing.
Madeleine Kearns:
… coming up for. I just felt that the whole trans thing is so shrouded in euphemism. It’s actually confusing to even know where to begin in debunking the euphemism because what is actually kind of a complicated, awful process that requires a couple of sentences to explain. If I was to try to explain to you, okay, they’re turning children into transsexuals by doing this, this, this, and this and this specific thing, I’m going to spend a paragraph on that, but what they say is gender affirming care. And that sounds really nice. Affirming, that’s nice.
I mean, the whole thing is that. So being able to actually just get your hands on the facts: which doctors are doing this? What are they doing? What are they telling patients? What are the results? And the way I chose to write the piece was really just to thoroughly report because, if you just strip it from that euphemistic jargon, the facts just speak for themselves. It’s just shocking. It’s shocking that they would lie to children about something really fundamental and then basically conduct reckless experiments on them because that’s what you’re doing.
There’s no reason to think and there’s no long term studies, and nor should there be, because in order to get long term studies, you need a randomized control group and you need to start experimenting on some of the kids and not on the others and compare the results. The question is, and I think often the same people in this debate end up on the defensive, but it’s like, you want to do this absolutely radical thing, something that would’ve been absolutely unthinkable a few decades ago, turn children into transsexuals before they’ve even reached sexual maturity. You have to make the case for why, okay?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
It’s not on us to explain why you shouldn’t because the first principle in medicine is, first, do no harm. It’s something I think a lot of people don’t seem to realize, and this is a difference between British and American healthcare, but you want to avoid surgery if you possibly can. You want to avoid taking medication if you possibly can because every single thing you introduce into your body has side effects. It has potential risks. It could introduce new problems. And so, if there is a way of avoiding taking those risks, if there is a way of being healthy without it, you take that route.
And the incredible thing is, if you look at the history of how we treated gender confused youth in the past, well, for most of them, they didn’t need serious clinical help anyway. It was just a passing phase, which we’ve now turned into a big complex by pathologizing normal childhood expression. But there was a significant minority of kids who had had deep rooted gender confusion. The clinicians helping them, this is pre-1990s before they started experimenting, realized that the best possible thing would be for them to accept their sex by the end of adolescence. Why? Because it’s easier to change your mind, especially if you’re a child. It’s easier to change your mind than to entirely rewire your sex body and-
Emily Jashinsky:
Was not possible.
Madeleine Kearns:
It was not possible. Yeah. So it’s obviously the ideal outcome. And what’s incredible is that the claim now, and you have serious people claiming this, it’s not just the people that Matt Walsh interviewed in his documentary. You have New York Times columnists claiming this stuff, saying that what I just described, recognizing that as the ideal outcome, is conversion therapy.
Emily Jashinsky:
And hate speech, by the way.
Madeleine Kearns:
Hate speech, I agree.
Emily Jashinsky:
Literally. Yeah. And that’s the problem with these new Title IX regulations, is that they actually are really going… There were speech problems before with the broad definition of sexual harassment, but if you read gender identity into Title IX pronouns, basically become a form of sex-based discrimination. And so if you use the wrong pronoun, you can be facing a Title IX complaint.
Madeleine Kearns:
Right. Yeah. It’s extended to mean sexual harass-
Emily Jashinsky:
What you just said. Literally what you just said.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. What I just said is sexual harassment. I mean, no, I had New York Times columnist retweeted one of my articles a couple weeks ago and said that I was essentially saying that it would be better if trans people didn’t exist. Actually, what I was talking about was what I just articulated to you, which it’s the ideal outcome in these therapeutic context. It would be better for a patient not to have gender dysphoria than to have it, clearly. The reason they’re seeking clinical help is because there’s a problem. You don’t go to a therapist if everything’s fine. You don’t go to a doctor if everything’s fine. Of course, it would be better if they weren’t gender dysphoric. Now, if you want to define transgenderism to mean it as Camille Paglia meant it, fine, I don’t care. That’s fine.
Emily Jashinsky:
Which is not what anybody means when they say that anymore.
Madeleine Kearns:
No. But the thing is you can’t have it both ways. Is it an identity or is it a medical problem?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
Okay? Now, if you’re just talking about identity, I really couldn’t care less. I don’t care if there’s girls, I don’t care if there’s people who are trans. That’s absolutely fine, whatever. If it’s a medical problem and it requires treatment, that treatment should be based in material reality, it should be based in the type of care that has the greatest efficacy and safety, and the least ideological motivation. That is just such a common sense statement that it is truly disturbing that anybody could take objection to.
Emily Jashinsky:
You’d think. And here we are.
Madeleine Kearns:
And we are.
Emily Jashinsky:
I need to cut off this hateful rant before we get into legal trouble. No. Actually, speaking of Camille Paglia, I think this was, gosh, 2017. If I’m thinking of the right thing, I went up to New York at the time to see Camille Paglia talk to Andy Cohen at an event. And she said, I think this was then, that when the Dear Colleague letter came down on Title IX and gender identity from the Obama administration, that’s when she thought Hillary Clinton was going to lose the election and that Democrats are going to lose the election. I think that goes to your point about why they’re now trying to do separate guidelines when it comes specifically to sports, which is, I think an intellectual contradiction. But that’s an important point that they have really started to lose momentum because of Lia Thomas, who you’ve reported on extensively. You went to some swim meets, didn’t you?
Madeleine Kearns:
I did. I went [inaudible 00:51:42]-
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, that sounds boring. No offense.
Madeleine Kearns:
It’s really funny people have asked me that, “You really care about the sport issue, are you an athlete?” I’m like, “No, I’m a woman.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. We shouldn’t let women play sports. I’m kidding. No.
Madeleine Kearns:
But I was there when Lia Thomas was thrashing the girls and dominating them and it was just like really the most incredible thing.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
It was incredible thing.
Emily Jashinsky:
But yeah, this is where the momentum shift has come in.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yes.
Emily Jashinsky:
And speaking of issues that the media misrepresent and that the public generally doesn’t have an idea of what’s really happening, Inez asked me to talk a little bit before we wrap up about my trip to the Southern border and to Northern Mexico this month. It was quite interesting. The Federalist is going to be putting out a documentary. My colleague, John Daniel Davidson, really led the trip. We went with David Agron, who’s a great journalist based in Mexico City. He’s written two dispatches that are worth consuming every word of because they are based really in what we saw in Northern Mexico and that’s a side of the story that the media is completely disinterested in.
We talked to migrants for days and we had very detailed, very tragic conversations with them. Obviously, it’s nearly impossible to verify the details of their stories, but it is very true that each person who tries to cross into the United States is a customer to the cartels and our lax and confusing border policy is a payday for the cartels. It is exploited by them. Our policy benefits them. It has allowed them to industrialize the migrant passages from South and Central America over the Rio Grande River.
That is a problem not only because it enriches cartels, but because it endangers so many desperate people. We would walk into Matamoros, for instance. We went to Matamoros and Reynosa, so on the Eastern side of the border between Texas and Mexico. As soon as we walked into Matamoros, right across from the bridge, right on the street, as you’re walking off the bridge over the river into Mexico, there’s a congregation of Haitian migrants that are basically living on the streets. There have been different encampments that were cleared over time. We started talking to them and asked, “When was the last time you lived in Haiti?”
For all of them, it’s more than a couple of years. They have not been in Haiti in years. But for a lot of them, it’s five years, closer to 10 years, after the earthquake of 2010. They have been living in Chile or Brazil or Argentina or even in Tijuana, and they’re over in Matamoros now or Reynosa or any of these border towns in Tijuana itself now because they want to get into the United States. They specifically want to live in the United States.
In their idea, their perception is that their lives are so miserable. Whether they’re Honduran or Nicaraguan or Salvadorian, their lives are so miserable. They would rather sleep on the streets or in a shelter and take these treacherous journeys, hundreds and hundreds of miles up through Mexico, just for a chance to get into the United States. It’s better for them to sleep on the streets, to live in a shelter that’s crowded, than it is to continue to exist in their countries where they feel like, they’ll tell you over and over again, they have no future.
They endure kidnappings, they endure beatings, they endure all kinds of danger, and they know it. They know it’s going to happen, but it’s all for the chance to get into the United States of America because that’s where they want to be so badly. Almost all of them have family. Pretty much everyone we talked to had family living in the United States. One family that we talked to with a tiny little daughter, so cute, when they were kidnapped within recent days that we’d talked to them, they had to have their family living in the United States get a Western Union to the cartel so that they could be released. So they were held in captivity for a few days until a member of their family could just come up with enough money to send it to the cartel and get them released.
We talked to someone who ran a shelter, who talked about people who had recently crossed the river. You have to pay the cartels to cross the river. When you get into Mexico, they give you a number. You have to pay them to basically chauffeur you through Mexico. You have to pay them to get across the river. Sometimes it’s the same price, but this shelter leader had seen people cross the river. The cartel literally pulled them out of the water, that’s how closely they patrol the border, asked them if they had their number, what their number was. And when they said they didn’t have a number, the cartel pulled them out and brought them back to Mexico, brought them back to the other side of the river, because everybody is a customer.
And so, our policy is so confusing. It’s not clear. I’ll just end by this long detailing of my attempt to condense a few days over in Northern Mexico and in South Texas into a dispatch here is to say, we talked to one leader of a shelter. Actually, he’s a leader of a Bible school. He’s run a Bible school in Matamoros for years and years that he had to transition into a shelter because the situation had got so bad. And as he’s now running this shelter, he told us he has meetings with the U.S. consulate regularly and tells them, “Please put out a statement, in plain English, explaining exactly what the United States border policy is. What you have to do to meet the asylum criteria, what you have to do to qualify to actually cross, put it out there in plain Spanish.”
This is going to help the problem a lot, because there’s so much disinformation that’s fermented by the cartels, that’s promulgated by the cartels, that just comes from people who did cross the border illegally or hired a lawyer and ended up getting in, and it incentivizes people to take these very treacherous journeys.
Well, they never do. I don’t know why, But Maddy, as somebody who comes from a country and a part of the world where, certainly, if you look at London and other areas, there have been issues with migration, with asylum seeking, but this question of a Southern border is very different. You don’t have a failed state right across a river, basically. And the difference between what it looks like just as you’re crossing the bridge on one side or the other is obviously vast, but what do you make of the predicament we find ourselves in as a country from a perspective of somebody who actually does have a different perspective, perhaps outside perspective, for a lot of your life?
Madeleine Kearns:
So I actually really appreciate the writings of Lionel Shriver on the issue of immigration and especially this particular issue of the border. She’s American novelist, but she lives in London, I think.
Emily Jashinsky:
She’s been on Federalist Radio Hour.
Madeleine Kearns:
Oh really?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
I’m a big fan of hers. She always gets invited on places to talk about skill shootings because of her novel, “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” But what she does with this issue, she sort of says, “Look, whenever we’re having these conversations, we need to acknowledge something, which is, there’s just something inherently unfair and seemingly random that some people are born in countries like the United States and other people are born in hellholes.” And I think any sort of humane policy has to start with a sense of gratitude that frankly, that’s not you, that’s not the situation you inherited, and a sense of reasonable, prudent, generosity to people.
Now, of course, our country cannot take everyone. It shouldn’t have to take everyone. It’s got to think of its own interest. That’s just how it works. And one thing I will tell you, I could talk about the similar problems we have in the UK and how we don’t have a land locked situation, but we have people taking this treacherous journeys across the channel. And these are people who have been in other countries before. They’re fleeing France. They may have originally been in-
Emily Jashinsky:
I would. Talk about shadow countries.
Madeleine Kearns:
No, but they’re kind of like constantly chasing Nirvana, the most wonderful. But the thing is I do think that it’s related to the absolute incoherent mess of legal immigration.
Emily Jashinsky:
What would you know about that, Maddy?
Madeleine Kearns:
Seriously, one does not simply walk into Mordor. If you want to come to the United States, I could talk for two hours for this and I’m not trying to-
Emily Jashinsky:
Have you tried swimming?
Madeleine Kearns:
No. Seriously, it is a grinding bureaucracy, it is mindless, it is maddening, it is expensive. And, look, the United States has a for shortage. It has a rich history of immigration. I’m very pro-legal immigration. My philosophy is-
Emily Jashinsky:
I’m sure you are.
Madeleine Kearns:
… completely nothing to do with me.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
But I think big walls, big doors. And those two things are related because you need to disincentivize illegal immigration and you need to incentivize legal immigration by making it accessible. People should at least be able to apply. Now, like I said before, a country does not have to take anyone. Nobody’s entitled to enter a country that they weren’t born in. That’s just the way it is, but that’s never going to change because potential immigrants are not voting constituents. They don’t have a vote. So they can’t lobby Congress. They can’t get things changed. They just have to suck it up.
I honestly cannot tell you how many times people have said to me, “You should just get fraudulently married or you should just blah, blah…” Seriously, there’s people who just do this. They do it because it’s easier.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
So if you are that desperate to come to the United States and you’re not a criminal and you’re not a robber, but you really believe in the U.S. and you’re attracted to it and you think you have something to offer, and I’m not one of those people who thinks it should be only highly skilled immigrants, I’m happy to have people coming to the United States to do jobs that Americans don’t want to do.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes. Just like yourself, for instance.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. Taking on transgenderism.
Emily Jashinsky:
Exactly. Yeah.
Madeleine Kearns:
Seriously, like-
Emily Jashinsky:
You don’t have any skills.
Madeleine Kearns:
None whatsoever. Certainly not sports [inaudible 01:04:09]. I think that’s great, but line up, get in line, get your paperwork in order, learn English, and I’d be grateful. There’s just recklessness, obviously, but it’s incentivized. And it’s incentivized by, obviously, Biden and Democrats for purely cynical, insincere, political reasons, talking the talk on immigration and meaning none of it. Of course, that incentivizes people to hurl themselves at the Southern border because they genuinely believe like Mr. Biden, he’s a nice guy, he’ll not send me back, he’ll let me in.
Emily Jashinsky:
Do you know how many clips I have, and this will be in the documentary, of migrants saying exactly that?
Madeleine Kearns:
I believe it.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yes.
Madeleine Kearns:
I believe it.
Emily Jashinsky:
And some of them don’t follow in news very closely, but others just have this general sense that when the administration changed, he would be less harsh than Donald Trump and so it was more worth the risk after he took office.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah. I mean, this is a recent thing though. I feel like it used to be Republicans were the pro-immigration party, but pro-orderly, legal immigration and the Democrats were sort of like, “No, it’s the workers.” I was chatting with my colleague, Jay Nordlinger, about this and he was there for all of this, so he remembers it. He’s like “This is weird. This was our thing and then we switched.”
First things first, we need to stop incentivizing illegal immigration. Basically, Biden should, and never will, say, “Anybody who comes here illegally will be sent back immediately. If you want to come here, you have to play by the rules.” But the rules have to be coherent and make sense. Seriously, there’s so many things where you can accidentally break a rule without even knowing it was a rule and it’s just because there’s layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy. So I don’t have any great ideas about how you fix this.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, yeah, and clarity. No, you’re right. You’re talking about legal immigration and a lot of the immigrants or a lot of the migrants that come to the border want to come legally. They don’t want to break laws. They want to hire a lawyer to see if they can qualify for asylum. And if they don’t, they’ll stay in the U.S. And as long as you can get across the border legally and you’ve already paid cartels up to that point, almost no matter what. But as long as you can get to the border legally, you can work, you can hire a lawyer, you can have your family and friends in the United States work enough to send you money to hire a lawyer, and then you can cross legally.
And a lot of them want to do that. They don’t want to break the law because they want to have a shot at staying in the United States. All of us, so John and David, we talked to this young Cuban boy who had fled after the July 11th protest last year. He wasn’t protesting. He was looking at the protests and says he was persecuted by the government just for looking. Again, hard to verify, but that’s what he’d said to us and he took the journey. He paid a coyote to help him cross the river because he was under the impression that Cubans were exempt from being sent back under Title 42. That had changed the day before and it had not been made public.
He hired a coyote to help him illegally cross the Rio Grande River under the impression that he would qualify for asylum under our laws. Our laws are so unclear. To qualify for asylum is a very difficult and it’s a very narrow category. So yes, the laws themselves need major overhauls and nobody has the political will to do that at all.
Madeleine Kearns:
Because it’s thankless because you’re not going to have Americans lobbying for it. You’re not going to have them putting pressure on it. So why would you bother? [inaudible 01:08:38], but making it easier to get here.
Emily Jashinsky:
The aforementioned pastor who was running the Bible school turned shelter said he thought a lot of it started in 2016 when the Obama administration changed it so that Cubans who touch American soil, that sort of famous conception we all have, who literally touch the soil in Florida are granted asylum. When that happened, Cubans would go down. They realized if they went down through South America, they could come up through Mexico without taking the aquatic route. And that kind of created infrastructure, is basically what he was saying, and it taught and showed others that they could take the same route. And cartels, obviously, figured that out too.
So this does stem from the law. In all of these cases, it comes from the law. There has to be an overhaul, but we all lack the political will to do it. Maddy Kearns, any closing thoughts as we reflect on this winding, sweeping, vast conversation that has taken us through so many twists and turns? Anything that you feel as though you should say as we’re wrapping this up and trying to tie a bow on it?
Madeleine Kearns:
Well, if I was looking for a common thread, I would say that laws and policies and cultural norms should be based on reality.
Emily Jashinsky:
What a beautiful thought?
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah.
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, then the common thread is it should be based on reality, but, increasingly, our institutions are captured by a vocal minority that has destroyed the concept of reality and is more relativistic and nonsense. What a nice thought to end on.
Madeleine Kearns:
Yeah, absolutely.
Emily Jashinsky:
Maddy Kearns of National Review, thank you so much for joining us on High Noon.
Madeleine Kearns:
My pleasure.
Emily Jashinsky:
I’m Emily Jashinsky, filling in for Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum here on this production of High Noon. I’m Emily Jashinsky, of course, Federalist Radio Hour, Rising on Hill TV, The National Journalism Center, and a senior fellow at IWF. Inez likes to make fun of me for all of those things that I have to list in one breath and introductions and conclusions. I always forget how Inez wraps this up. I forget her parting words of wisdom. I think it’s be brave, so I’m just going to go with that. Again, thank you so much for listening to this conversation on High Noon. We’ll be back soon with more, but until then be brave.
