Today’s children face many new adversities that past generations could never have imagined. Filmmaker, Don Johnson sits down to discuss his new film Dysconnected, and the truth behind this radical movement thats being pushed on our children.
Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion
Cy Kellett :
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Ct Kellett, your host, and very happy to welcome my friend Don Johnson this time to talk about a new film that Don has. This is actually a very busy time for Don. He’s got a brand new book out for Catholic Answers Press called Twisted Unto Destruction, and he’s got a brand new movie out called Dysconnected, which we are here to discuss. Don, welcome.
Don Johnson:
Hey, Cy.
Cy Kellett :
Congratulations on all the things-
Don Johnson:
Thanks.
Cy Kellett :
-that you got.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, didn’t exactly plan for them all to be released within 10 days of each other.
Cy Kellett :
But sometimes that’s how it goes.
Don Johnson:
-sometimes that’s how it goes.
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. Do your children remember what you look like? Or are they-
Don Johnson:
It’s getting a little hazy for them, but I pop in once in a while.
Cy Kellett :
I watched your movie, Dysconnected, and I actually am still not sure what my emotional response to it is. It churned me up. And it’s a movie about people involved in the transgender movement, people who have transitioned, one of whom in the movie … maybe more than one I, but certainly one that de-transitioned, I guess is the way you say it. And what a mix of emotions from the joy of seeing …
Each person is a lovely instance of God’s creation. And it’s beautiful that you as a filmmaker are able to show that. There’s no sense of this is the enemy over here. But also, a sense of horrible loss and tragedy, fear for what is happening and will continue to happen, especially to young women and girls. And also, these stories come full circle in some cases and have beautiful redemptive endings. So I’m just starting there. I don’t know how to respond to your movie emotionally.
Don Johnson:
Well, as a filmmaker I’ll take that.
Cy Kellett :
Okay.
Don Johnson:
Honestly, I mean, movie making is … They’re emotion machines supposedly. That’s what they’re supposed to be. Right?
Cy Kellett :
Okay.
Don Johnson:
That’s what they are. And so as a filmmaker, you’re trying to get people to feel something, the visual medium. So the worst thing you can hear is, “It made me think.” I mean, yes, we want people to think, but if you’re thinking too much, you’re probably bored by it and you didn’t get to the end of the movie. So I’m glad, because you’re one of the few that have seen it so far. So I appreciate that. It’s not even out to the general public yet. But it is an emotional issue that has many layers to it. There’s a lot of pain and suffering, which of course, as a dad, that’s why I’m making the movie. I’ve got four kids, they range throughout those teenage years and, what a horrible time to be a teenager.
So trying to address that issue. But I also know that as a parent, a lot of us parents are just feeling overwhelmed. I call it a tsunami in the notes for the movie. This thing seems to be overtaking all of our institutions. It’s affecting all of our families. I suspect everyone listening, unless you’re in a cave somewhere, that you know people who, “Oh, her daughter just changed her pronouns,” or whatever.
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. It’s everywhere.
Don Johnson:
It’s everywhere.
Cy Kellett :
And certainly in many of our own homes and somewhat horrifying to parents, and we’ll get to the part about it being an issue that is separating parents and children and the mechanism of that. But first of all, the first insight in the movie that you share that I found quite striking is that if you attend to the cover of Vanity Fair Magazine or the mass medium anyways, you’ll have a sense that the transgender movement is about middle-aged men who want to present as women. But that is demographically a complete deception. That is not what this movement is about.
Don Johnson:
That’s right. That’s a very small percentage of people. Yes, they make a good magazine cover. Yes, we see them in the high reaches of government. And yes, they are having an effect on the culture, but that effect is being felt primarily among young girls, some boys, but primarily among young girls. And it’s just getting younger and younger.
What these men have is usually some sort of autogynephilia, where it’s a sexual dysfunction, where they get aroused by dressing in women’s clothes. That is not gender dysphoria that we have typically assigned to young kids. With the young kids, it’s actually mostly been very young boys. About 0.02% of young boys would’ve had a question, “I don’t feel quite comfortable in my body.” And they all grow out of it. 99% grow out of it by the time they get out of puberty. This is historically what has happened. But starting in 2015 with Bruce Jenner switching over to Caitlin and a huge movement online. So Discord and all of the social media were just full of pro-trans movement propaganda towards young girls. Starting then, it has overtaken. It’s this huge fad that has overtaken the teenage girls, and they’re the ones that are just being decimated by this.
Cy Kellett :
Okay. Well, what about the person who says, “No, Don, that is not correct for you to use the word “fad” because what’s really going on is society is becoming more tolerant, and people who were hidden before can now come out of the shadows.”?
Don Johnson:
Yeah. So the argument is that this is actually a biological condition, that certain people are just born this way, and that historically they would’ve had to keep that under wraps. Now that society is accepting it, now they can all come out. And of course, you look at that, and you say, “Okay, if it is a biological condition, first of all, let’s examine how we’re treating that.” Secondly, if it is a biological condition, you’d see a wide spectrum of society across all ages that-
Cy Kellett :
Why aren’t 40-year-old women coming out? Yeah.
Don Johnson:
You wouldn’t see, which is what we are seeing, you wouldn’t see a group of 12 girls who in sixth grade all decided that they were gay. And then that same 12 girls the next year all decided that, “No, we’re actually trans fluid or gender fluid or something.” And you wouldn’t see then 15 of them go down to Planned Parenthood en masse and get their testosterone from them. If you look at how the movement works-
Cy Kellett :
But we are seeing things like that in many places.
Don Johnson:
We’re absolutely seeing it.
Cy Kellett :
Clusters of girls-
Don Johnson:
Huge clusters of girls will literally show up at Planned Parenthood, the whole friend group. In fact, one of the young girls, we hid her identity in the film just because she’s so young, and we don’t need the harassment. But she’s 15. She got into it when she was 12, 13 in the GSA club in school, which is the Gay Straight Alliance, which oftentimes is essentially now a recruitment tool for the trans movement. And she’s like, “Yeah, our whole friend group, we just kept moving through this.” And actually, the way she got out of it is she started thinking about, “This doesn’t seem like it’s biological.”
She literally started thinking along those lines and started asking questions and then was basically shut down. Well, we can’t ask questions about this. So it’s absolutely not biological. It is a social movement now. And again, I don’t want to be too quick with the fad. I should qualify when I say fad.
Cy Kellett :
Okay.
Don Johnson:
Because you think fad, you think when we … Well no, you and I are both even too old for goth, but I’m thinking in the nineties, the goth movement in the eighties. Yeah. There’s fads that people-
Cy Kellett :
I want to go back to the hula hoop. Sorry.
Don Johnson:
You’re really-
Cy Kellett :
You’re really old.
Don Johnson:
But these kind of trends like a social trend where you want to be cool. There is some of that, right? You can be an outcast in society, feel very unpopular, especially in today’s social media age. But you’ve got an Instagram account and you flip your pronouns on your Instagram account, suddenly I’ve got 50,000 followers. I’m a superstar. So there is some of that. But I also try to take a fairly good section of the film to look at some of the other emotional, psychological issues that are at play here. And there are a lot of them.
So it’s not a biological issue, but it certainly is an issue that we traditionally would have tried to address with therapy. So things like autism, upwards of 30%, at minimum 30% of these kids are on the autism spectrum. It’s probably more like 50 or higher. There’s that aspect. A lot of them have been abused. So the sexual abuse factor plays a major role. Many of them come from broken homes and their identity is crushed that way. Pornography is a huge player in this where you have young girls that are just sick and tired of being objectified, being-
Cy Kellett :
They’re probably afraid of being objectified.
Don Johnson:
Absolutely, absolutely afraid of… And you think about, the porn that was available when we were kids, you’d have to sneak around and find a magazine somewhere and then you’d find a picture of a naked lady. It was bad enough. I mean it wasn’t good. But today, it’s violent rape and degradation on your phone to everyone.
Cy Kellett :
With full sound and color, it’s action. It’s a totally different animal. And also you don’t have to… your friend’s brother got the dad’s magazine and now we can all thumb through it. This is children at 8, 9, 10 years old, seeing sex for the first time as a profoundly violent and violating act.
Don Johnson:
And then they are being asked, sometimes they feel forced almost. The social pressure is so strong to be a part of that. And they’re like, Well, I don’t want to be the girl in this situation, maybe I will be the boy. I will pull myself out of that. So there’s all of these different factors at play pushing that population towards grabbing a transgender identity.
Unfortunately, it’s not going goth where you’re like, Okay, I can look at those pictures and laugh now. Or my pictures from the eighties with my mullets and the crazy clothes. You think, Okay, that was silly. Now I move on. This is permanent damage we are doing to these kids. Because it’s not, If you go take a trans identity now, there’s a very clear vortex that you’re going to get sucked into some steps that you’re going to follow. And there’s no way out of those really, once you’re in, you’re on this path. And it starts with social transition where you were going to change your names, maybe behind your parents back if you’re at school. We’re going to change your pronoun. We’re going to change your name. We’re going to have different clothes for you at school to wear when you get here so that you can dress like your new gender.
So we’ll, social transition and then at the earliest convenience, if you are pre-pubescent, we will put you on puberty blockers, which stop puberty. And by the way, stop a lot of other things with your body. It’s a horrendous, horrendous thing to do to your body. After you’ve been on puberty blockers for a while, inevitably high nineties in the percentage, you then go on cross-sex hormones. So if you’re a girl we’ll start to feed you testosterone, weekly shots, monthly shots every two weeks., After testosterone for as little as a few months to a year, we will schedule you for surgery starting with what’s euphemistically called top surgery, double mastectomy, removing your breasts.
Cy Kellett :
And these are minors or near minors having their breasts removed.
Don Johnson:
Minors, and this is a very important point because this is disputed among the culture. No, we wouldn’t do this to anybody below 18. No, we’re absolutely doing this. And in fact, just in the week that we’re talking, several hospitals around the country have pulled down their entire websites because it has been alerted that, oh, here’s the videos we are showing you about how in fact we are doing these surgeries on 15 year olds, on 13 year olds. The organization that provides the quote guidance to doctors wpath, they recommend as young as 13. 13 years old for a double mastectomy.
Cy Kellett :
And where does their expertise come from?
Don Johnson:
I would say nowhere. Their ideologues. I mean they’re just, Yeah, no, where’s
Cy Kellett :
Where does that money come from?
Don Johnson:
So the money of course is huge in this. So the money comes from pharmaceutical. So the pharmaceutical companies obviously are making a ton of money in the same way that pharmaceutical companies make any money. If they can sell you drugs, which is what the synthetic hormones are, they’re produced in a lab and then sold to you. And you think about Ct, what a great game that is. In the past, if you are a pharmaceutical company, you’d have to wait for somebody to get sick.
Cy Kellett :
But now-
Don Johnson:
Now everybody’s available. Well, not only are we going to take healthy people and give them drugs, the drugs that we give them actually make them sick. So you go on puberty blockers, you go on cross-ex hormones, you are now a medical patient for life because your body does not produce the proper hormones to keep it alive. You’re just not doing what your body is supposed to do.
Cy Kellett :
So we’ve got you as a customer for life.
Don Johnson:
Customer for life. And then the side effects, then you have to get more drugs than the surgeries, which are horrendous. As emotionally painful as it was to watch parts of the film, the stuff that I kept out of it, just for the sake of keeping it PG 13, you can’t believe what we’re doing to kids’ bodies, horrendous stories you hear. Yeah. It’s a billion dollar in your industry already, the surgeries. And that is a growth industry.
So we are marketing this. And again, if this was biological, there’d be a set number of people that this applies to and we wait for them to come and we give them the drugs. No, we are marketing. In fact, I saw an article just this week about Planned Parenthood’s new finance model, and this is a huge moneymaker for Planned Parenthood. They don’t have to just rely on abortions now. Selling testosterone is a huge moneymaker for them. So you can walk in as a 14 year old and in an hour walk out with testosterone, essentially no questions asked. Now they’re not going to admit that. But anecdotally, that’s what happens. You can walk in as a whole group of junior high girls and all of you walk out with testosterone.
Cy Kellett :
One of the emotions, although I’m still sifting through my emotions, is one of shame at not fighting this. How are we as fathers and mothers as adults not saying, no, not just you can’t touch my children, you can’t do this to children. You are wrong to do this. That a girl who comes to you and says I’m a boy does and has nothing wrong physically with her. You’re not diagnosing she has breast cancer or she has ovarian cancer. She’s presenting with no physical symptoms. And you are medicalizing her, putting her on all kinds of medicines. You’re doing surgeries on her and her personality, her judgment is she can’t vote yet. She can’t even be tried in adult court if she commits a murder because we know that their brains are not formed. Their mind is different. So it’s clearly exploitive child abuse. And I have to say, I feel shame watching it, what else can I do? I have to say no to somebody like it. We have to say no.
Don Johnson:
Yeah. Well, and one of the reasons we made the movie is that people, some people are unaware. Knowledge is growing, but a lot of us say two years ago we didn’t know this stuff was going on. So I mean, fair enough. We’re trying to make people aware. But I agree with you Ct once you’re aware, this is not one of those issues that we can like, Yeah, it’s a cultural issue. And it’s sad. Now this is the medical malpractice scandal possibly in the history of the world, right? It’s that big and that evil, these, well,
Cy Kellett :
You would put it up there with things like the Tuskegee Airmen experiments or the sterilizing of women who had mental health problems.
Don Johnson:
Or lobotomies. Think of the scale.
Cy Kellett :
The scale is enormous.
Don Johnson:
That’s what-
Cy Kellett :
And the damage is permanent. You cannot reverse. You’re not just flipping on a switch and flipping it off like, Oh well we went this way for, We’ll go back the other way. And this is what you see in the movie. The consequences in the body of women.
Don Johnson:
And this is a flat out lie that they’re telling kids by the way, that we need to be aware of as parents, as teachers, as pastors, whatever. The ideologues will tell kids, We’re just putting you on pause when we give you puberty blockers. And then you start up again or you switch for a little while and you switch back. That’s absolutely false it’s absolutely not true. Your body is permanently changed from everything from your voice, which is a major deal. You now as a girl will have a male voice for the rest of your life there’s no going back from that, and this is, it’s devastating to, because the detransitioners, I mean there’s a Reddit group, it’s over 40,000 detransitioners strong right now. The numbers behind this are way bigger than people think they are. Hundreds of thousands of girls get sucked into it.
Cy Kellett :
Well, I think one of the things that we’ll stop at Don is if we just have laws that say if someone’s done this to you, there’s no statute of limitations. You can sue them until you’re a hundred. Then doctors will stop doing it because the risk won’t be on the child. The risk will be on the doctor and then they’ll be a lot more careful.
Don Johnson:
That is the hope, right? That is the hope that we can sue them into submission. No that’s right. That’s where it’s going to. In fact, the plastic surgeon that we interview in the ... Read more on Catholic.com