BUCK: We are joined now, as promised, by Abigail Shrier. She’s an award-winning journalist and author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. And her recent piece — the recent thing she wrote about speaking to students at Princeton University — is up on ClayandBuck.com right now. Abigail, thanks for being here with us.

SHRIER: Oh, thanks so much for having me on.

BUCK: So you wrote recently about how when you speak at Princeton, you told students there — obviously, very elite Ivy League institution. You started out by explaining how you are not somebody who has sought the controversy or even the hatred of people who disagree with you. But essentially being willing to stand up for what you think, to be effective and to refuse to bend the knee, is to be attacked mercilessly. Tell us about this.

SHRIER: Well, I do think that’s about all you need today. I mean, you know, it’s a funny thing. I attended, you know, fancy institutions myself and was very much there. I talked to the Princeton kids and said, “Look. I know what it’s like. I know what you’re going through. But today, you don’t actually need to be a provocateur to face, you know, an entire tornado of hate.” But the problem is that we need very badly more than ever people to stand up and speak truth to lies. And we’re just not seeing enough of it. And we’re losing rights in this country right now because people aren’t speaking out.

BUCK: And specifically, this was on the issue of the trans agenda. I mean, Abigail, I’ve been involved publicly in this debate now going back about a decade, and I remember things that we would say years ago about, “What about when men want to compete in women’s athletics?” initially the left and the trans-agenda folks were saying that will never happen.

Now we’re there and we’re being told on pain of social excommunication and professional excommunication you have to say things like, “A man does not have an advantage over women in sports competition,” or else you’re a bad person. This seems like a disorder, a mass delusion.

SHRIER: Yeah. There’s not even any doubt about it. I mean, male puberty confers permanent and massive advantages on the male body. Even if they later reduce the testosterone — the active testosterone, bioactive testosterone rate in the body, levels in the body — they still have, you know, larger lungs, larger hearts, more oxygenated blood, vastly greater muscle mass, bone density, fast-twitch muscle fiber.

So it’s not a fair competition. People know it’s not a fair competition. These girls are watching their records getting destroyed, and all their hard work is coming to nothing, and now is their time to speak up. Because pretty soon girls are gonna very rationally just say, “I’m not gonna bother competing. What’s the point?”

CLAY: Abigail, your piece — this is Clay — was so fantastic. I shared it from my Twitter account. I think I read it late Sunday night as I was getting ready to the new week to start and found myself nodding on so much you said, because we’re around the same age. I think you said you were 43. I’m 42, and I felt like so much of your path was similar to the one that I have followed.

I want to start… I want to build on what Buck said there. We had a couple of stories — I think you saw them — up at OutKick about two Pennsylvania women swimmers who didn’t even feel like they could use their own name to criticize the fact that they now have a biological male teammate who won one race — and for people out there who don’t know swimming, this is virtually unheard of — by 38 seconds and another race by 15 seconds.

It just doesn’t happen, and the identities colliding here — feminists, people who believe in Title IX, the equality of women’s athletics — are terrified to speak out even though what we are seeing is the destruction of women’s athletics because biological men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And even if they decide to identify as women — and even if they potentially take some testosterone blockers, add estrogen, whatever else, as you pointed out — they still have massive physical advantages, which is why men’s and women’s sports have been separated forever because otherwise women wouldn’t be able to compete biologically with men.

SHRIER: That’s right. And, you know, just to give these students their due, they’re terrified of the reprisal of the DEI officers, the diversity officers in their own school. They’re afraid they won’t be able to go to law school or medical school or whatever their next, you know, goal is professionally. But now is their time because they actually have nothing to gain at this point.

Their records are being vandalized. They cannot win. It’s a completely fixed fight, and we’re going to lose all the gains of Title IX if people don’t start speaking up. And, frankly, it’s incumbent on the coaches to stand up for the young women. They need to stand up and the young women themselves, I believe they should.

CLAY: Abigail, I was talking about this earlier in the show, and we talked about it some last week. One of the things… I expected that there would be people who would push back against the articles that we put up at OutKick from the two women speaking out against this transgender teammate. We didn’t actually have anybody push back.

And that, to me, is almost even more chilling because what it reflects is so many people in the sports entry who understand what the value of competition is and that this is the antithesis of that, are not even willing to argue in favor of it. They’re just pretending it doesn’t exist. Is that what you see a lot as you covered issues such as these?

SHRIER: Absolutely.

CLAY: With that chilling impact, you don’t even really get a debate? You just get people pretending that it doesn’t exist at all.

SHRIER: Right. We could make this all go away tomorrow, in other words, because actually what people don’t realize is that most Americans are completely reasonable and they don’t want to destroy women’s sports. We’re actually very proud of our female athletes in this country.

CLAY: That’s right.

SHRIER: And across the board we’re proud of them. So the question is, “Do you let petulant mobs of children scare you out of saying what’s true, or are you willing to stand up to them?” And, you know, we could lose this country over it. You see the silencing, you see how little, you know, free — how diminished our ability to speak the truth is, you know, in public, you know, given that we’ve allowed them to push us around. And now is the time to real estate stand up to them and say “no more.”

BUCK: We’re speaking to Abigail Shrier. She’s award-winning journalist. Her book is Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Get it if for no other reason… It’s excellent, but get it because they don’t want you to have it. The left does not want you to own this book, to buy this book, which is a great enough reason, I think, for all of you out there.

Abigail, to that end, it seems that — and this also comes up when Clay mentions, “Where’s all the pushback to the article on OutKick?” It seems that we’re in a society now where there are machines and institutions — and by machines, I mean, there are, you know, advocacy groups and activists and social media giants who enforce this orthodoxy. But I can’t ever see a person going out there and engaging in debate on this issue.

For example, everyone at CNN or MSNBC — pick a channel that is left-leaning; same thing on, I’m sure, NBC News now — they’ll celebrate the U Penn male swimmer beating all of these women. They won’t ever engage in debate. These DNI people that you talk about and the H.R. offices of major corporations, it feels like no one will take the heat for the unreality we are forced to believe in, but there are institutions that manage to push it so that there’s no accountability for the insanity. Do you see what I mean?

SHRIER: I see exactly what you mean, and you’re right. No one’s willing to debate ’cause they lose on the merits, and every American — every reasonable American — knows they’re out of their minds, right? They don’t want to lose all of women’s rights, which is what we’re looking at right now. We’re seeing men in battered women’s shelters and in women’s prisons.

Talk to women. I’ve talked to women at that time Chowchilla women’s prison in California, and they’re terrified they’ve got men in their cells — men who are capable of getting a full erection — merely because they announce they’re women. And what’s going on in this country right now is insane, we know it’s insane, and all it takes is the will of good people to stand up and say, “This is nuts. No more. Not in my country.”

CLAY: Abigail, J. K. Rowling — who a lot of people out there are going to know as the author of the Harry Potter books — has actually been a pretty good advocate for many of the things that you’re speaking about, and she has gotten absolutely savaged for this. Now, it would be easy for somebody who is basically a billionaire like her to just say, “Hey, I’m not gonna get involved in any of these cases.” Have you had any interaction with her? What do you think of her willingness to actually step forward on an issue such as this and fight battles?

SHRIER: I think she’s wonderful. I think that, you know, sometimes people dismiss her and say, “Oh, she can do it because she’s a billionaire,” to which I say, “Where are the other billionaires?” They’re silent. I think she’s an incredibly admirable and when wonderful person. She has done more to stand up for women’s rights than vast majorities of women. And I tell you, she does it at great expense to herself. She didn’t have to do this. She did it, and I think really she is to be commended for it.

BUCK: I’m just wondering when people that you know or come across in the media, they become familiar with what you say on this — they either hear you on this show, they see you on Tucker’s show on Fox talking about this issue — does pretty much everyone admit to you in private that what you’re saying is true or publicly…? Or do you come across true believers in the media who really think that men can be women and men can get pregnant? And I mean in a private setting, not for the virtual signaling in the broader media.

SHRIER: Right. Almost everyone agrees with me, so much so that I have gotten literally, you know, the top Democratic the aides to the most left-wing Democrats writing to me saying, you know, privately I agree with you. There’s almost no one who supports the views of these young radical extremists. But look, they have a lot of influence in social media. They throw fits. Companies cave to them so they are exercising vastly outsized power. They don’t have the numbers but they’re exercising a lot of power right now.

BUCK: Like the digital Bolsheviks, Clay.

CLAY: It is! How much of this is social media, Abigail, in your experience? Because you’re around my age, and it means that if you’re around my age you may have been working in media in your twenties and thirties and you didn’t have this stultifying, cancel culture raining down upon you. People still had debates. How much of this do you think is directly related to the power of Twitter where, to my point, nobody’s defending the idea of a biological man competing with women, but they’re just trying to pretend it doesn’t exist?

I believe it’s ’cause they’re terrified that they’ll be the target if somebody at ESPN speaking out, if somebody at a prominent sports network speaks out. They think they’ll be attacked for this in a way that I don’t think was present prior to the rise of Twitter?

SHRIER: I think it’s almost entirely because of social media. Parents who speak out about this, parents who tell their daughters about this nonsense are afraid of being outed on social media. Everyone is. We have this now system in this country where we’re constantly being monitored to see if we obey the orthodoxy.

Any anyone can be exposed in front of thousands or even millions depending on what goes viral. And that’s really the problem. Americans remain very reasonable. They’ve always been, and we continue to be. But, unfortunately, they’re able to leverage this monitoring system and exposing each other and effectively a tattletale system, and it’s really keeping people in line who really could push back very effectively if they realized how thin is the agreement the other side.

CLAY: What did you think…? I’m curious if you watched the Dave Chappelle Netflix special —

SHRIER: I did.

CLAY: — and what did you think of the controversy that emerged from that?

SHRIER: He’s terrific. He’s able to… Dave Chappelle is able to do what few other people are willing to do — and look, it came a great cost. He lost a documentary over it. But he speaks the truth, and we all admire him for that. And look. He’s not a transphobe but he lives in the world and is willing to call things as he sees them, and he really is to be admired for that.

BUCK: Abigail Shrier, journalist and author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Abigail, Clay and I really admire your courage on this issue and your clear-sightedness on this. Thank you so much for being with us.

SHRIER: Thank you. Take care.