Welcome to empower you. I'm Amy Stevens. You may have heard Pastor Steve's podcast where we had a conversation about public policy engagement or civic engagement.
You know, COVID changed a lot of things in our community, and this is where the road really exploded in membership and where people began to get engaged.
And so Pastor Steve came to me and said, Hey, would you consider volunteering to help lead this effort?
We have all kinds of views in our church, diverse views. And really, how do we make sense of that? How do we move forward?
People are exhausted. A lot of people angry. Some just trying to raise their kids.
How do we stay engaged? And I'm convinced it's through big, important little things, things that you and I can do every day.
And that's what you're going to hear on these podcasts. You're going to hear from people in the community, school board members.
You're going to hear from people that work in the life pro-life space.
You're going to hear from legislators, people that are going to talk to us about what their lives are really like, what their jobs are really like, and actually how we can make a difference and or support them.
And so that is the hope for Pastor Steve. That's the hope that I have. And we look forward to engaging with you.
Today, I have a very special guest. All my guests are special, but I've known you quite a while and I'm so happy to have you here.
I want to tell you a little bit about Eli Bremer. Eli's an Olympian. He's a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
He's a lifelong Coloradan and you were former chairman.
We can talk about that later of the El Paso County Republican Party.
And you ran for U.S. Senate. And in 2022, you were endorsed by a majority of the county commissioners statewide.
But as an athlete, you represented the U.S. in pentathlon, which I don't even think people mostly know.
So you're going to have to inform all of us on that. But you did for over a decade and you qualified for an unprecedented 12 World Cup championships.
You were ranked number two in the world. You represented the U.S. in the 08 Beijing Olympics, which I was looking at.
And you've also served as a TV broadcaster for four Olympic Games. But your family also has a lineage of service.
I know your dad. He was our county commissioner for a number of years.
Duncan, your uncle, Paul Bremer, was appointed by former President Bush as presidential envoy to Iran.
So we've got a lineage of engagement, policy, everything here.
But since 2016, and I think that's an interesting caveat you're here, you've been a driving force for reform of the Olympics.
I know particularly around women's gymnastics, calling on the Olympics.
And that is a very interesting story there.
But you were also the first Republican to predict that Leah Thomas would win the NCAA championships and that the protection of women's sports would become a national issue, which is what we're discussing today.
So welcome.
Well, thanks, Amy.
Yeah, so happy you're here.
I got to say one more on the family side. You forgot my wife.
That's right. Cammy, who we're going to have to have on here, too.
Cammy is our county commissioner in District 5, which you can explain.
Center part of Colorado Springs.
And she's on her second term.
Yep, she's the chairman of the board right now.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, you got to remember that.
We got to remember this.
And then your son, the story about your son, if you're pro-life, and the story about Struthers' birth.
And what did he weigh, one pound?
One and a half pounds.
Oh, my gosh.
27 weeks and 105 days in the hospital.
Yeah, it's just an amazing perseverance, this guy, perseverance.
And he is just grown right now.
So how old is he now?
He's eight years old.
And you'd never know that there were issues if you didn't know his backstory.
So he's swimming, he's playing tennis, he's playing golf, he's speaking Chinese.
He's in a Chinese subversion program.
I love it.
From the lowest, most susceptible human being to a very boisterous normal eight-year-old.
You know what?
We have another future diplomat on our hands in our future.
Thank God.
I'm so happy for that.
I want to talk about, you know, you and I caught up recently, and I wanted to talk about the Title IX women's sports issue.
Because we're seeing it not just from the standpoint of college, NCAA.
Now we're seeing it in high school, and I suspect even further in sports.
And we have a lot of families, daughters in sports, and they're worried about this.
They're worried about the locker room situation.
They're worried about bathroom situation.
They're worried about their protection.
They should be.
And they should be.
They should be.
And they should be.
And so I want to talk about how you got involved.
involved in this your prediction on the leah thomas situation that now
is known worldwide
don't back was just a little bit title nine's been around for fifty years now
and
uh... it used to be controversial i guess it's becoming controversial again
uh... it's it's weird to see the
the political sand shift because the democrats would have been the original
you know suppose a proponents of it and now republicans are the party that's
saying hey we need to defend us so
it is the federal law that protects uh... women's uh... options in
uh... sports and in educational programs
so that's the jurisdiction of that law and we're seeing major issues there
which i think we're gonna talk about today we're also seeing seen this play
out outside a federal jurisdiction
it's happening at the state level it's happening at the local level it's
happening at the uh...
it's happening virtually everywhere and so i've never seen
i've never seen a political issue
that is so pervasive and touching so many levels of government as what we're
seeing right now yes go into that a bit for me
so i think you know the federal level you you have the right for women to have
equality
of opportunity with men and and again this is the controversial
uh... because you had the the male programs were predominantly driving the
revenues at the college level and this is largely been views a college right
uh... college program
uh... and so for a long time there was an argument that uh... that the men's
programs were making the money the women's programs were
in fact you know taking the money out of the the men's programs it was a
perversion of the private marketplace right
and i'm a borderline libertarian economics person uh... you know it was my
undergraduate degree at the air force academy was economics so i'm an econ
junkie
and the more i started learning about this the more i realized that actually
wasn't the right way to view it because college sports
are are effectively a monopoly they're a government granted and protected
monopoly
monopolies don't answer to normal market forces
and so uh...
because they've been granted the special governmental status and sort of allowed
to exist in a non-free market way i think it's perfectly appropriate to say
that they must also serve a societal good we require this this is normal
monopolistic governance uh...
and so i think it's been good that women's sports have had been required to
receive
equal funding
as you and i were talking about in our you know not not on air here but before
this is actually benefited male sports which a lot of people didn't understand
uh... fifty years ago when title nine started
girls didn't participate in sports at the same level as boys
so if i'm running a marketplace
it's actually good for me to have more customers and we we doubled the number
of people available to be customers of youth sports because title nine
women's sports scholarships right and so now you've got millions and tens of
millions of girls participating in youth sports right that wouldn't have but for
title nine or would not have gone to college by the way exactly i mean i remember
thinking
wait you could get a scholarship for tennis and like and actually go maybe to
a great school wow well and and that has
external benefits as well Ernst and Young a couple years ago did a study
and they found out that ninety four percent of female executives played
organized sports growing up
fifty percent played in college
so when when people talk about equality of women's pay yeah in you know in in
women's ability to uh... break through glass ceilings in the workforce
the fastest way to do that is through girls sports participation
so girls are are learning in sports the soft skills of goal-making perseverance
things like that that make for great executives my wife who is now the
uh... you know effectively the executive of uh... you know
twenty five hundred employees you know
uh... hundreds of millions of dollar budget
she swam growing up she swam at college and
you know being able to draw on the soft skills that she learned as an athlete
has been very good for her as an executive yes yes we'll have to say she
was a georgia bulldog that's right georgia bulldog all things georgia
yeah and if you're in the south
I just tell people when I'm in georgia and I say my wife's a dog they say good for you
and if I say that in colorado they're like you're a jerk
d-e-w-g d-e-w-g
I love it well anyway I
you and I also were saying that
uh... this this thing about
uh... back in uh... the olympics where gymnastics was coming
about and the nasser situation how did you get involved in that
so that was a that was a really interesting part of my life and by
interesting I mean
very very ugly in many ways
uh... as I sort of was winding down my own athletic career
I had spent ten years at the olympic training center
right I knew you know all the great athletes I was in michael phelps first
commercial I knew apollo ono's before anybody knew who apollo was
he didn't have two nickels to rub together and you know we we'd all just
sit around at the training center in the dining hall,
and there are great friendships formed
that I still keep to this day.
And so I'd spent a decade networking
with the top athletes in the country,
and I started hearing commonalities
of complaints they had.
And maybe to a fault, my brain just wouldn't turn off.
And I started thinking about what
I knew from my academic studies, what
I knew from my professional life,
and I started piecing together that there were governance
problems in the Olympic movement,
again, predominantly around the fact
that they were a monopoly.
And so being maybe a little bit naive,
I gave a speech to the Olympic Athlete Council,
and I said, we're going to have a massive problem because
of our governance.
And the senior leadership of the Olympic Committee
actually already knew that we had massive sexual assaults
in the Olympics, and they were covering them up.
Nassar was probably not known by this time,
but they knew enough.
They knew that the systems were in place
to allow for a major cover up, and that I
had correctly identified that.
So the senior leadership, the CEO of the Olympic Committee,
and others started really gunning for me
and went after my reputation, went after my businesses.
And then this was several years before Nassar,
and it became a protracted battle.
In 2016, as monopolies will do.
As monopolies will always do.
So anyway, so as we round the corner into 2016,
it had started ratcheting up.
It felt like a powder keg in the Olympics.
I flew out to DC, met with Will Hobson, who's a Pulitzer Prize
winning journalist, and he had just won a Pulitzer Prize
on exposing corruption in the NCAA.
And I said, what we have going on in the Olympics
is going to make the NCAA blush.
So starting in the spring of 2016,
he started writing front page articles of the Washington
Post about the issues in the Olympics.
And then Nassar hit, and it went completely crazy.
I got a call from Nancy Hogshead-Makar,
who I didn't know at the time.
In fact, after the first phone call I had with her,
my wife said, who are you on the phone with?
I said, she's a swimmer from the 80s, Nancy Hogshead.
And my wife's jaw drops, and she says
she's got three Olympic gold medals.
And I had her poster on my wall growing up.
And Nancy had heard about me and called me up and said, Eli,
we're dealing with systemic sexual assaults
in the Olympics.
You seem to have a grasp of what brought this about.
So I started working with her and discovered
that it really was systemic.
And then that put me at the forefront
of the Olympic reforms.
Congress asked me to basically explain to them
and demystify the Olympic system.
And I realized that these governance systems actually
can cause really nasty trauma to athletes if they're not
addressed.
So again, walking forward, I wound up
as the lead-off expert in the Child USA
report on Larry Nassar.
And as that report was coming to a close,
it was a four-year process, this issue
of males competing in female sports cropped up.
And I started talking to some of the women's rights people
that I worked with.
And I said, guys, this is the next major thing that's coming.
And same issues, and if we don't deal with this,
we're going to have something much bigger than what
happened with Nassar.
Yes, and we do, don't we?
Oh, yeah.
And we do.
Yeah, what happened with Nassar was,
I don't want to say isolated, because it was broad.
But it was limited to a single sport.
It was limited to a single set of sports administrators.
And it was well-defined.
What we're seeing now is going on everywhere.
And this is the number one threat,
I believe, to girls and women in America
today in terms of their ability to participate
not just in sports, but eventually
in commerce, in business, in politics.
Yes, yeah, because remember, in the last Olympics,
we saw how this kind of sexual trauma
affected our athletes, right?
Simone Biles, we've seen others saying, yeah, I participated.
But don't think for a second I wasn't traumatized
through the whole thing.
And now I can't really seem to move forward,
or I sunk into massive depression.
And that goes with you.
It does.
That goes with you.
And again, systemically, though, like monopolies
are wont to do, the feminists who are around,
they're silenced.
Independent women's voices, silenced.
Some of them are, and some of them are not.
It's crazy.
When I was campaigning for the Senate,
I started realizing that Leah Thomas was
going to become the flashpoint.
It had all the signs as we headed into the fall of 2021.
As we rounded the corner after Christmas,
Nancy Hogshead, this gold medalist
who I'd worked with on the Olympic reforms,
she reached out to me and said, hey, we're hosting a Zoom call.
And we'd like you to come on the Zoom call.
I've got a bunch of my feminist activists
that want to know what the heck's going on.
And so, I tried to log on to the Zoom call that night
and realized that she didn't have enough licenses.
So I called her up and I said, Nancy,
I'm in the waiting room.
She said, Eli, I've got 100 licenses
and I've got 150 people in the waiting room.
Oh my gosh.
And I don't know what to do.
And I said, well, my Senate campaign has 500 licenses
on our Zoom account.
Do you wanna just send that out?
Right.
Just put a disclaimer, it's not a campaign event.
So five minutes later, I've got 250 liberal women's activists
on my Republican US Senate campaign Zoom call.
And I'm like, well, this is interesting.
And we spent the next hour talking about
how to lobby Congress to protect women's sports.
So there are women's sports, women's activists
who have come out and spoken on this.
But, and I think they're growing.
I think that number is growing too.
By the way, how do you get involved in that?
Because I can tell you, I think we have a lot
of women athletes living here in Colorado Springs
and engaged in various sports.
It just come in subtle here.
We have a lot of Air Force, as you know, retired.
When we're done with this, I'll need a link or something
because I think, again,
parents here are now looking at their daughters,
their own engagement in sports and going,
oh my gosh, what do I do?
What do I do if this happens at Pine Creek over here
or at Academy or what do I do?
We had an incident up at one of the high schools
on the north side of town.
Parents called me up and said that their daughter
had been acting unusual and they finally got her
to tell them that there was a boy
that decided to start identifying as a girl
that showed up in the locker room after PE
and expected the girls to change in front of him.
And the parents were traumatized.
The girl did not want this made public
because the fear of cancellation.
So, and this is very real, but also Amy,
I think it's important to remind people,
this is not a fight just for girls.
I don't, I'm the father of a boy,
but I don't want my son to grow up in a culture
that believes that boys should subordinate girls,
that men should subordinate women.
I want him to learn that women are equal but not identical
and that you treat women with respect.
And ironically, that has sort of gone by the wayside.
So I think this is a battle that men need to engage in,
that boys need to engage in,
whether you've got daughters or sons,
it doesn't make any difference.
This is a, in the same way that when we had people
who were not allowed to drink at certain drinking fountains
because of their skin color, you know,
everybody in society needs to stand up and say,
that's wrong.
Everybody now needs to stand up and say,
we need to protect the women's sports category
because this is a basically human rights level fight now.
No, it is.
I remember my son as an athlete went to Air Academy High.
You and I talked about this.
He was in college at Lehigh.
And this is when Obama had kind of really across the board
said, all male athletes are rapists, right?
And he stood up at Lehigh along with other athletes
and said, this couldn't be further from the truth.
We resent this kind of just labeling.
And you know, it takes a lot.
I mean, to stand, which we're gonna talk about later,
but to stand and to stand artfully
and actually intelligently
and to be able to identify this stuff.
When I was in DC, I remember,
I don't think people really get that Obama changed at HHS,
the Title IX rules and regs to include transgender
way before Trump ever got in.
And then when Trump got in,
HHS through Roger Severino said, oh, we're reversing that.
We're gonna move all that.
So that language was changed.
And then boom, bada bing, we're back with Biden.
And that language rechanges again.
I mean, it's insane.
It was day one.
I remember Nancy Hogshead, who again,
she's a dear friend of mine.
We couldn't be farther apart politically.
I'm a strong Republican.
She's a strong Democrat.
But this is an issue we completely agree on.
She called me up after Biden was sworn in
and she was furious.
She said, did you know that President Biden
just signed an executive order
giving men access to women's sports?
I said, well, yeah, that's what he does.
This is, I mean, how did you not see this coming?
Right.
Well, that was a payback on day one.
Yeah, it was.
And that was, in President Biden's view,
one of the most important things to happen
was to allow men to take women's scholarships from them,
which I think is bizarre when you think about that.
Right, right.
But tell me about the national outcry on this.
I mean, what kind of headway are we making then?
I mean, it feels like losing the battle everywhere.
It's actually the opposite.
Every poll, the longer this is going on,
the more people are saying, this is ridiculous.
It is, right.
The polling is continuing to trend farther and farther.
toward common sense on this issue.
The most polling indicates that today,
seven in 10 Americans would agree with us on this issue.
What's really interesting is if you dissect that out
by political groups, virtually every Republican does,
which is what we would expect.
Unaffiliateds are gonna break nearly universally
on this issue, and roughly half of Democrats also support it.
So from a polling point of view and where society is,
society thinks this is stupid.
Society gets it.
What's very interesting is that around the country,
if I were to look at it, I can find zero congressmen
or women on the Democratic side who will come out and say,
gee, we support women's sports as a category.
I can't find a governor who will do it.
There was one state representative in Kansas
who bucked his party and came out
and supported overriding Laura Kelly's veto.
Laura Kelly twice vetoed
Protecting Women's Sports Act in Kansas.
I helped a very large ad campaign work against her
on this issue, and she came out and said,
no, I'll protect the women's sports category,
and only women should be in it,
but she believes that you can have an XY chromosomes
and male genitalia and be a woman,
and then you have a right to compete in women's sports,
which is ridiculous.
But anyway, so there was one Democrat there.
I truly believe that if I went to Congress,
okay, and again, Congress just voted on this
a few weeks ago, and it was 100% party line.
All Republicans voted to protect women's sports.
Every Democrat voted against it.
I believe that if you made that a secret ballot,
every Republican would still vote for it,
and I'll bet you 80% of the Democrats in Congress
would vote for it.
So it's one of these things where I think
in the privacy of their own homes,
they're like, yeah, this is crazy,
but they're being dragged in by this very vocal minority,
by the woke and canceled culture
that we're seeing out of corporations.
But I do believe that this is backlashing,
and part of this, Amy, is I think we're talking about it
the right way.
If you talk about it as being anti-trans,
then it's a losing issue.
But if you say, well, we want,
under the First Amendment, if you're a man
and you wanna wear a pink tutu and run around
and say, I'm a girl, I'm a girl,
I'll defend your right to do that.
That's a freedom of speech, freedom of expression.
But you can't go do that in the women's locker room.
And we have federal laws that have given women
the opportunity to be equal to men in sports,
and we need to fight to defend that.
So when we talk about protecting women's rights,
this is a winning issue, and it's a growing issue
that, again, more and more people in society
are coming on board with.
Are you hearing from parents locally at all
about things going on?
And the reason I ask you that is,
I remember when I first joined the legislature,
and I would, it was 2007, and we were dealing,
I don't even know what we were dealing,
but Rob Witwer and I put an amendment in
that bathrooms couldn't be used, you know.
You were probably denounced as crazy, no, whatever.
Oh, you know, actually, Rob had worked it
where the both of us said, you know,
for churches, for other areas,
bathrooms are not gonna be touched.
I think that might have been struck down by now.
But at the time, I remember people were like,
why did you put that amendment in?
But I think we saw in the discussion
where this was going.
Well, and what's interesting is people have asked me,
is there a common ground on this?
Can you find a common ground?
And in most cases.
Oh, common ground, now that's a, that's.
In most cases.
That's a compromising word.
Yeah, I know, isn't that crazy?
But in most cases, I can find common ground with people.
So I'm very pro-life.
But, you know, I could probably find common ground
with someone who's pro-abortion in the area of,
let's say, foster to adopt policy.
And saying, would you agree that if we have kids
in foster care, we should help them find a loving home?
Okay, so I believe in the ability to find
some middle ground on most issues.
This is an issue where I just don't see that.
Because what you actually have are men, okay?
These are actual men.
And I'd like to also point out,
we see this as, this is entirely one way.
You don't see women clamoring into men's sports
because they're gonna get clobbered, okay?
You don't see women running into men's locker rooms
and trying to change.
That's not, you don't see women being declared
Man of the Year or entering men's bodybuilding contests.
So we're seeing men entering women's beauty pageants,
men going into their locker rooms,
men going into the women's sports category.
This is a one-way men imposing themselves on women.
Now, you said something interesting the other day to me.
And I, we talked about deviancy, right?
Versus dysphoria, okay?
So let's tell me about that.
Let's pause on that for a second.
So gender dysphoria is a medical condition
where your brain thinks that you have a different sex.
you actually have.
OK, and that's been known for years.
I think the woke left is trying to muddy the waters on that.
But that's a legitimate medical condition,
in the same way that there are people who
have a belief that they don't have an arm or a leg
or something like that.
And historically, the way you treat
that is to bring the brain into compliance
with the reality of the body.
So if a patient walks in and says,
I don't believe I should have an arm,
the surgeon doesn't cut the arm off and say,
there, now you don't have an arm.
We've solved the problem.
They send you over to psychology and psychiatry
to deal with the mental issue.
What we're seeing, though, is this
has risen simply too fast to be a growth of gender dysphoria.
And so there's a growing theory among those
involved in the experts that what we're truly seeing,
and this is based on looking at social media
feeds of some of the high-profile men
who have attempted to hijack women's sports,
that there is a, that this is about
sexual gratification of the man.
So, and we'll look at a few of the cases.
Leah Thomas is a biological male with male anatomy.
Okay, when he competed.
Now they say he's taking hormones?
Yes, no?
Hormone blockers, I believe.
So he's subdued his testosterone.
But I just, I know we have a sensitive audience,
so I'm gonna be very careful about how I describe this.
But he has every anatomical part of a male.
Yes.
Okay, and his romantic interests
have historically been in women.
Okay.
Okay, and in talking to women
who were at the NCAA championships,
he stripped down and was walking around naked
in the women's bathroom.
The women were counseled by the NCAA
that they could receive counseling
if their transphobia caused sensitivities
around seeing a naked male in their locker room.
But prior to this, Leah Thomas had put out
on social media comments about his enjoyment
of having a sexual fetish around pretending to be a woman.
And we're seeing this more and more.
There's more indication that this may be
one of the bigger things that's coming into play.
Right.
Is that what we're not seeing play out
is a massive growth of a psychological condition
of gender dysphoria.
What we're seeing is an exploitation of a system
by males who have a sexual fetish
around dressing up as women,
around being naked and imposing themselves on women.
Like we're hearing from prisons.
Correct.
And this is happening in prisons.
It's happening in a lot of places.
So that's, in my opinion, the essence of this issue.
And to give everybody real clarity on this
is what's really happening is you have men,
many of whom it appears are really sexual deviants,
are trying to sexually and physically impose themselves
on women at the expense of women.
And so when you ask the question, is there middle ground?
I would sort of ask the question,
okay, how many women should be required
to undress in front of a man against their will?
To me, the number is zero.
I think that should be a zero.
I don't think it's like 5%, 10%.
I don't think there is an appropriate number other than zero.
How many women should lose their sports careers
over to a man who wants to gratify himself
sexually or otherwise at the expense of women?
My number is zero.
Or who speaks out.
Now that leads me to Riley Gaines
because you've been working with her.
And I mean, just the treatment of her,
the woman who has trained her whole life,
disciplined her life around this,
speaks out that this isn't right.
And she's the one.
She's the one made to pay.
Now we're seeing this all over society, but.
And she definitely over the last year
has become the lightning rod around it.
But we're seeing this, we're seeing it more and more.
There's more women now that are speaking out
and they're speaking out correctly and telling,
I don't like the word their truth
because truth is objective and it's not internal to someone.
It is truth.
The truth is, this is men imposing themselves on women.
And I'd like to back up, let's say six years ago
to the hashtag Me Too movement.
So six years ago, we had this rash of women saying,
we have these powerful men in the entertainment industry
and the finance industry that are imposing themselves
on women, okay?
And I'm like, what's happening today?
So, you know.
How many women are at the very top of the NCAA?
Yeah, I mean, I think I'd argue
that we again have powerful men imposing themselves
on women, you know, on women.
And the sports administrators who have tolerated this are,
by the way, rich white men.
So it's really kind of interesting.
And what's encouraging to me is to see.
women, historically liberal women, who are activated around the abortion issue, who are
coming around and saying this is a different issue.
And if I might digress into that for a minute, because people say, well, how can you, you
know, you're a pro-life, how can you say you support women's rights?
Well, first of all, I don't think those are in Least Pit Exclusive.
I think that that's different.
But as we look at why is this becoming a lightning rod issue, why are some of these women who
were lifelong Democrats would never consider voting for a Republican, why are they changing?
I think it's because, you know, we had Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court
and nothing happened.
Okay.
In Colorado, nothing happened.
Our laws didn't change.
Nothing happened.
Okay.
The vast majority of women in America don't deal head on with abortion.
Okay.
It's not a, it's not a personal deal to most women.
You wouldn't know that at the Capitol.
But there's, there's women who are past childbearing age, there's women who are trying to get pregnant
and can't.
So it's, it's an issue that is more esoteric to, to a lot of the women's activists.
Okay.
But this one is, you know, my mom is in her seventies and she swims every day or three
times a week.
And let's say that a man decided to identify as a woman, he walks into the locker room
there.
She's impacted by that.
So women of every age are at this point being impacted by men encroaching on women's spaces.
And so I think this is why this issue is, is by far transcending now abortion as, as
the women's rights issue, because there's literally not a woman out there who I know
of that doesn't eventually use a public restroom or who doesn't have a daughter in sports or
who doesn't want her son to marry a tremendous woman who has great opportunities in life
because she got to participate in sports.
So this issue touches so many more women than the abortion issue does, which is why I think
it is, it is, it is now the preeminent issue on women's rights.
And I think it's, it's going to surpass everything else in the category.
I'd argue we haven't done a good enough job actually looking at pro-life into women's
rights.
Okay.
I don't think we've done a good enough job because I had a podcast where we talked about
what took place in the Capitol this past year and transgender, feminist, Planned Parenthood,
all as one speaking as one, right.
And that we're all going to pay for it.
I like, I had a girl who sat next to me.
I don't, I don't know who she was, but she said, well, I didn't see anybody there for
me when I had my kid.
Like I didn't get the tummy tuck.
I didn't get any gender affirming care.
I got to birth a bowling ball and gender affirming care is boys who want to pretend to be girls.
That's what it generally is.
But I looked, I, I, it was so funny cause she was dying.
I kind of looked, you know, and kind of was like, well, I mean, you know, when we're talking
about all this and where it's going, you know, I think, and I, I do, I will tell you, take
the Riley Gaines issue, a woman that speaks out about it or says, Hey, is there something
inherently wrong, right.
In, in, in some of this is the one punished, right.
So yeah.
Yes.
No, no is yes.
Right.
Is wrong.
Wrong.
You look at these, uh, these girls in California who were beaten by boys and lost their, their
place at the state meet, uh, they were told that if they spoke out, they'd be punished
and suspended from school under the anti-bullying rules at the school.
So, um, you know, we're, we're dealing now with an issue that, uh, that tomorrow, 22nd
of June, uh, there will be a world team trial starting in Knoxville, Tennessee, and there's
a biological male who's expected to win the cycling world team trials for the women.
And I happen to know that the, the women who've been involved have been told explicitly they're
not allowed to speak out that if, that if they lose their spot to a male, they need
to take their lumps because there's corporations who will pull their sponsorships back.
Right.
And so it's, and so going back to, again, the kind of women that are coming on board
with this, I'll, I'll use Inga Thomas as a, as an example, uh, Inga Thompson, rather.
She's a three-time Olympic cycler who has spent her entire life.
She's probably in her mid to late fifties now as a, as a Democrat voting party line
Democrat.
I was talking to her a few days ago and she said she has unregistered as a Democrat and
is not going to vote Democrat anymore until they figure out what a woman is.
And I've seen this again and again.
Um, my, uh, my deputy campaign manager, uh, Riley Scott, uh, she was a four-time all American
swimmer out of USC.
Her mom, uh, Terry Scott was, was one of the original title nine recipients and it was
a volleyball scholar at Berkeley and she wore a Birkenstocks and she's liberal.
And she, uh, she testified.
Colorado had the Saving Women Sports Act here and she said I'm a single-issue
voter I will no longer vote for anyone or any party that doesn't recognize the
fundamental biological nature of what a woman is and and I think that's again as
people think about how do we talk about this issue you know this is a defining
a defining point is we view womanhood as being a biological state and the woke
agenda says it's a psychological state. Or as Douglas Murray would say we have
hardware and then software was where everybody just went nuts yeah and and I
think he's and and this by the way is a gay man writing a book on the madness of
crowds and it is I think a form of madness the thing that I get concerned
though is what does that do that kind of suppression do to women take your
cyclists who are told oh it's it's devastating right and you know mentally
physically emotionally because these are women we want in the boardrooms and
as executives right? And the ripple effect of this just inside that that
microcosm there I was talking to a coach who's got I believe a 16 and a 17 year
old girl who's on girls who are on the National Circuit racing with this male
and she was telling me that one of the issues they're they're running into is
that when they're on these long road races you know the three four five hours
long periodically you're consuming a lot of liquids and liquids have to go
somewhere and so they have a call of nature call and the leaders of the
Peloton will say hey we're we're doing this and they pull off on the side of
the road in the middle of nowhere and it's not up until this point what
happens next isn't an issue because they're all women right so now there's a
man in that group who is expecting you know a 16 and 17 year old girl I talked
to these girls coaches and she said you know these girls do not want to undress
in front of a man or display you know their private parts in front of a man
right and so you know they're they're scratching their heads and saying how do
we even participate in the sport yes with this man imposing himself on our
bodies Wow Wow I it just goes so many different ways right and but Amy
eventually you have to come back to saying there men are men and women are
women there is a biological difference and men and women are different but not
unequal and you can say that without being called a transphobe well it's just
recognizing a biological reality right okay call me crazy but no man will ever
give birth to a child every human being on the planet owes their life to a woman
we we need each other right and we were built to complement each other you know
we're different physically men don't live as long you know their bodies are
built stronger they burn out faster women you know have have the ability to
bear children they tend to be much more intuitive you know that they do they do
great jobs that men can't do and so you know they're equal but not identical and
I think the average human being actually knows this whether you're looking at
yourself in the mirror your spouse or your child you know that there's a
difference between men and women and boys and girls that's why this is coming
to a head now and most people the vast majority of Americans are saying this is
stupid right it's really dumb it's quite insane yeah but the psychological I
think the byproduct psychologically to me when you have spent your life with
with other women working out I mean I played on tennis team right I mean you
there's a camaraderie there is you know you spend all your time doing this and
then to be told if you object right you're gonna get canceled yes you'll be
canceled so Leah Thomas's teammates were told if they objected so they were
expected to share a locker room with him and undress in front of him and again
this is a man who is sexually attracted to women and active sexually with women
okay must be a crowd for the closed-off bathroom oh yeah it was it was terrible
and then they were told if they quit the swim team they'd basically be
blacklisted that they couldn't transfer schools that they if they spoke out they
would never get a job they would never go to master's degree right I mean they
were they were blackmail right total emotional blackmail and it's but here's
here's the other set of victims though Amy is that we're breeding this as a
problem it's not good for the person who's pretending to be a gender that
they're not the suicide rates the left always points to the suicide rates and
stuff like that and I say okay okay so if I and there's tons of research people
can go online to read about this right about the about hormonal deficiencies if
I take a male and I reduce his testosterone by 50 60 70 percent and you
just go into a symptom checker they're gonna say it leads to depression
trouble sleeping irritability suicidal tendencies stuff like that okay that
same amount of testosterone if I put that testosterone that leads those
symptoms in a man if I put that in a woman's body it's gonna lead to
irritability
And so, it's really interesting that if I take the word transgender out of the equation
and I look at the medical, they say, well, we don't have medical research about gender
affirming care.
Yes, we do.
It's been going on for years.
It's called hormonal treatments.
And if you said, what's the fastest way to drive a male crazy psychologically, I'd say
take out his testosterone.
The male brain cannot function without enough testosterone.
This is proven medical fact.
And then all of a sudden, we get these sociologists to come in and say, well, maybe he's not a
man.
He's a woman.
I'm like, tell his DNA that.
Well, didn't we just see?
We just looked at a number of European studies coming out of the UK, coming out of Sweden.
And Europe is shutting this down now, which is crazy that we are more ridiculous than
Europe.
I never thought I'd see that day.
But yes, here we are.
I mean, Sweden has just pretty much said, Sweden pretty much said no on COVID.
Here's what we're doing.
And they've said no on this.
Here's what we're doing.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And same with UK.
And these are not just one study.
These are there.
These are meta analysis.
Well, and, and, you know, it's funny, I've been playing around with AI chat bots.
And so I went on to the main one, a few couple weeks ago, and I asked it if gender affirming
care was scientifically proven, and it said yes.
So this is something people need to watch out for, is that as AI comes up, these bots
have been programmed on this.
And then I queried and I said, so it's signed, it has been scientifically valid through the
scientific method, and the chat bot had to back up.
And then I said, well, how many studies have shown this?
And it basically couldn't produce any.
And so I think when people hear this, that gender affirming care has been proven to be
true, is a complete falsehood, right?
It's like Dan Crenshaw yesterday in Congress asking what Yale doctor about this show me
just one study.
So what what's been going on in academia is that is that a progressive will write a paper,
it gets reviewed by other progressives, and then they reach, quote, consensus, right?
Yeah, it's peer reviewed, and they reach consensus.
And I'm like, well, consensus isn't how, in fact, the chatbot I was using said there was
a consensus on this.
I said, does consensus mean scientific truth?
And you know, again, had to back up, it's like, no.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
So you know, I think if people want to do some research on this, yes, go Google hormonal
deficiencies in men, what are the symptoms?
And if I take those away, you realize that, and this is an area, I mean, I'm passionate
for these people that are caught up in this, because I think it's wrecking their lives.
And I look at this and say, a lot of the symptoms that we see that people are saying are probably
caused by hormones, not fixed by them.
And so this is, it's been known that in America, male testosterone has been dropping about
1% per year for over 35 years.
And so I'd like to see, instead of us coming out and saying, let's have men who think they're
women impose their selves on women, no one's yet done a study on their incoming hormonal
levels and saying, is there, you know, what else is going on behind the scenes with this?
And so I think as conservatives, we can show compassion on this issue.
Sure.
And I think that's important.
Sure.
I don't hate anybody.
I support, I support people's right to say or do just about whatever they want, as long
as it doesn't impinge on somebody else.
But we can also then say, we can have compassion and say, I feel bad for people that have a
40% chance of trying to commit suicide.
But exacerbating their problems doesn't help.
Let's get to the bottom of it.
You know, if someone's obese and diabetic, you don't do them any favor by saying, let's
just affirm your disease.
Let's work on fixing this and bringing your body into a reality that's healthy.
Now, you can't talk about this, probably.
I think you told me you were in touch with someone who actually went through some transition,
Chloe.
Oh, I haven't, I haven't directly, but a number of people I work with have been, and this
is becoming a much bigger issue.
These girls who transitioned at age 13, and you're not transitioning, you're mutilating
your body.
Okay.
And it's permanent, it's irreversible.
And, you know, if I, if I went to a coffee shop in downtown Colorado Springs, and I approached
the average, we'll call it 30 year old woman who's there having a cup of coffee.
And I said, there's a country that, that allows their children to be genitally mutilated and
sterilized to conform to societal and cultural norms.
Is that appropriate?
They would say, absolutely not.
And I say, that's America in 2023.
Yes.
So we've got to get some clarity around this.
We need clarity.
We do.
And once again, I think the issue is not only just getting the right help.
I mean, at 13, the brain, right?
Your development, your social, emotional, your all that is so into play, right?
And I think if asked, if at any doctor, I mean, I can even tell you, doctors have said,
this is a phase, this is this, let's just wait a while.
My eight-year-old son thinks he's a Jedi, okay?
He used to think...
So did my son, thought he was too.
Two years ago, he was into Paw Patrol, he thought he was a dog, okay?
But we're not transitioning him and we don't take him to the vet.
Right.
So there's a certain dose of reality that we need.
And it's interesting that we have people say,
well, your brain's not mature enough to own a gun until you're 21, 25 years old.
Right.
But at age 6, 7, 8, you're mature enough to, you know, to say,
oh, I'm actually a girl when I'm a boy.
Well, I want people to understand how they can get a hold of you or, you know,
because this is such important work.
Tell me, how do they get a hold of you?
I'm pretty easy to find.
I'm on all the social media platforms.
That's actually, ironically, that's how most people reach out now.
Yeah.
So I'm working a couple of things behind the scenes that aren't quite ready yet to announce launch on.
But to me, this is a passion.
I think it's something that's important for our society.
Again, I'm a man.
I competed in the Olympics as a man.
I have a son.
Right.
But I look at this, and I say, I don't want to have my son grow up in an America
where the girls that he's in school with are second-rate citizens.
Right.
I don't want him, you know, I want the girl who he eventually meets and marries to have the same opportunities that he did.
So you have the same relationship with a spouse that I have with mine.
Right.
We agree.
Because she had these opportunities growing up.
We agree.
Eli, thank you.
I'm just so grateful to even have the conversation about this.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me on, Amy.
I appreciate it.