--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Georgia Howe: A young woman in Texas is suing her doctors and insurance providers for performing irreversible transgender procedures when she was a teen. What happened to me was preventable. I want to hold my providers accountable to what they did.
--:-- John Bickley: What is she accusing her doctors of and what is the goal of her lawsuit?
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's July 29th, and this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire. It's curtains closed for many small theater companies across the country. It is still a challenging time to produce theater. There is a cost of living crisis. Ticket prices are expensive for a lot of people. Like I said, for families, this represents a huge investment. Why, in many cases, won't the show go on?
--:-- John Bickley: And new survey data shows a growing number of adults are saying, "I don't," to tying the knot. What do experts say is behind the growing retreat from marriage?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: A 21-year-old Texas woman who no longer identifies as transgender is suing her doctors in excess of $1 million over trans medical interventions she received as a teenager. Here to discuss the lawsuit is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: So, Sorin Aldaco filed this lawsuit late last week with the Tarrant County District Court of Texas. What do we know about the lawsuit?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Hey, Amanda. Sorin is suing five of the individual medical professionals and the three healthcare groups that facilitated her transgender-related treatments and surgeries.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: The complaint says these medical providers, in their pursuit of experimental gender-affirming medical therapies, administered a series of ruinous procedures and treatments to Soren, who at the time was a vulnerable teenager struggling with a slew of mental health issues.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The suit says Soren's experiences with these providers shock the conscience, and they've led to Soren's permanent disfigurement and profound psychological scarring.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Soren was put on a large dose of cross-sex hormones as part of her treatment, and she underwent a double mastectomy to remove her healthy breasts at age 19 and went on to suffer severe complications. Two weeks post-op, she required the emergency removal of blood clots, and doctors had to insert temporary drains.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Soren told me about that experience. I went to the ER, and I was there for eight hours by myself. I had only local anesthesia while they were actually performing the operation to reopen my incisions. No pain meds, just a scaffold and some Q-tips to help clean out the blood clots.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: It's probably one of the most traumatic medical procedures I've had because I was awake for the whole thing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Sorin's lawyer, Ron Miller, told me Sorin was prescribed testosterone by one named defendant within a matter of minutes of knowing Sorin and without any psychological assessment. Miller also said that another medical provider authored a falsified letter in support of Sorin's double mastectomy.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: The letter was supposed to come from a practitioner who had been providing Soren therapy on gender dysphoria for over a year. And while Soren was meeting with a practitioner, the therapy was not in relation to her gender.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The facts of the case are just almost unbelievable. The level of disregard and kind of reckless indifference that these medical professionals had for Soren's health safety or well-being, both physically and psychologically, it just grotesque.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Now, this petition says Soren is seeking in excess of $1 million in damages. Do we know exactly how much she's seeking?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, Miller told me they're seeking far more than that $1 million, but that number can't be disclosed per Texas procedure.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Miller also added that it's not so much about getting a payout, so much as sending a message to insurers. For none of us is it really about the damages other than how much of a message can those damages send.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's what we want the damages for, for the most part. It's catching the attention of insurance companies. They might want to stop insuring this kind of practice. And if they stop insuring this kind of practice, practitioners tend to not like to take that risk on themselves so they stop doing it.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Now, what's the legal precedent for this? Have any young people wanted a case like this in the U.S.?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Not yet, but there are a growing number of cases like this working their way through the courts.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: A young female detransitioner named Prisha Mosley filed a suit against her doctors just last week, which was the first of its kind in North Carolina. Mosley says she was just 16 years old when she was put on a path to medically transition and claims healthcare professionals lied to her, both by telling her that she could become a boy and grow a penis, and by withholding critical information about permanent loss of function from such treatments.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Another young woman who has since detransitioned, Chloe Cole, is suing the Kaiser Permanente healthcare system for her transgender treatment, which included puberty blockers and a double mastectomy. On Thursday, Cole testified before Congress about her experience.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Doctors are human too, and sometimes they are wrong. My childhood was ruined along with thousands of detransitioners that I know through our networks. This needs to stop. You alone can stop it. Enough children have already been victimized by this barbaric pseudoscience. Please let me be your final warning.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's a pretty powerful statement. Certainly an issue that's not going away anytime soon. Amanda, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Yeah, anytime.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: Across the country, some of the nation's most prestigious theater companies are going dark this year, leading to concerns about the future of the industry. According to the New York Times, some of the biggest names in live production are closing up shop, hoping to rebound next season with more successful offerings. Here to discuss the dearth of theater shows is Daily Wire contributor David Marcus.
--:-- David Marcus: Hey, Dave. So what is happening here and what happened to the old saw that the show must go on?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Good morning. Yeah, the shows are not going on. According to reporting this week in the New York Times, we see some of the most important theater companies in the country scaling back productions or going dark altogether.
--:-- David Marcus: Cal Shakes, a major outfit in California, has no shows for the rest of this year. Neither does Looking Glass Theater in Chicago. And the Williamstown Theater Festival, which historically has attracted some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, is also doing zero full stage productions.
--:-- Georgia Howe: This news all comes just a few weeks after it was announced at the Public Theater in New York, arguably the nation's most prominent, where musicals like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Hamilton were developed, is cutting one-fifth of its staff.
--:-- David Marcus: It's entirely obvious that this part of the industry is being devastated and it frankly might be on life support.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Yeah, sounds like it. Now, is this still rooted in the losses suffered during the pandemic lockdowns when obviously no theater productions were being staged?
--:-- David Marcus: Yes and no. Obviously the lockdowns hurt the industry but not equally at all levels. So for example Broadway had its third highest grossing season on record last year even with attendance slightly down.
--:-- Georgia Howe: But there's a big distinction here. Broadway refers only to 17 theaters in New York that house commercial for-profit productions. The companies struggling, who we just talked about, are non-profits.
--:-- David Marcus: And they were already having big difficulties before the lockdowns, leading some critics to suggest that the non-profit model itself was broken and failing to create shows that generated much interest from audiences.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Why would a for-profit versus a non-profit model impact the type of shows and the success of those shows that get produced? Isn't a play or musical just a play or musical?
--:-- David Marcus: The incentive structure is entirely different. The only question a Broadway producer asks is, can I get butts in the seats? Nonprofits tend to get most of their operating budgets not from ticket sales, but from donations or grants from wealthy individuals or institutions.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The logic here was that this model frees them to produce riskier, more challenging work. The flip side of that is that all too often, this is work that few people want to see.
--:-- David Marcus: These companies also have missions beyond entertainment, often with political or social overtones such as gay rights or anti-racism. This helps them to attract donors. But it's not clear that these politically charged themes are what audiences want when they choose to spend an evening at the theater.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Could we see some of these institutions, many of which have been around for decades, simply cease to exist as we've known them?
--:-- David Marcus: It's certainly possible. All of these companies that are taking production breaks will be looking to come back strong next year. But the question is, what will they do that's different? If they look to safer, popular shows, they could get more audience, but they risk losing donors who want to fund quote unquote high art.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What we could also see as these legacy companies fail is newer models of live theater. Shows done environmentally in bars or cafes, for example, shows that create interactivity with audiences through technology.
--:-- David Marcus: This is potentially an enormous moment of creative destruction where the very infrastructure and production models used for half a century are going to be questioned.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Could this be something akin to the end of American theater? Is the threat that severe?
--:-- David Marcus: No. Look, theater has existed since the first cavemen pantomimed how they took down a woolly mammoth that afternoon. There will always be some form of live storytelling, but it could look very different, and that's not entirely new.
--:-- Georgia Howe: A hundred years ago, for example, four or five hour long plays were common. Now they're rare because people don't really want that.
--:-- David Marcus: So the form's going to have to adapt, as it has for thousands of years. Well, I guess it's adapt or die, another old song.
--:-- Georgia Howe: David, thanks for joining us.
--:-- David Marcus: Thanks for having me.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: New survey data shows that a record number of Americans over 40 have never been married. Sociologists say this is bad news for a number of reasons. Daily Wire reporter Moreta Lordi is here now to tell us more about this new data.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: So, to start out with the obvious, how low is the lowest on record when it comes to marriage rates?
--:-- Georgia Howe: I think you have to say shockingly low. One in four Americans, 25%, are now hitting the 40-year mark without having ever tied the knot.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: So to set that in some context, the number in 2010 was 20. In 1980, it was 6. So basically, for the last 40 years, we've seen an unrelenting drop that sociologists are describing as a retreat from marriage.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Extrapolating from that, some project that more than a third of today's adults in their 20s will never marry.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, offered a fairly dire warning when we asked him about these new Pew numbers.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What worries me about this trend we're seeing documented by Pew, there's basically a whole large group of young adults who are not benefiting from marriage and probably will never benefit from this fundamental institution.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: Okay, but I think the response you might hear to that, especially from younger people, is, so what? Why does it matter if Americans today are doing things differently than their parents?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, parents is an operative word there because for one thing, less marriage is leading to lower birth rates. And that comes with a host of negative societal impacts.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: It leads to slow economic growth, less wealth production. Aging populations mean a smaller tax base and more strain on resources, more dependence on government.
--:-- Georgia Howe: But marriage's value doesn't just come from its relationship to procreation. The personal benefits of marriage are really indisputable.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: People who get and stay married are more likely to flourish by just about every measure of well-being. This was what Wilcox had to say about that.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We know that Americans who get married and stay married are much more likely to be prospering financially. They have about eight times the assets as they head into retirement in their 50s compared to their peers who are single or divorced.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: They're also much more likely to be happy with their lives, about twice as likely to be happy with their lives compared to their peers who are not married.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So there are just tons of ways in which marriage provides financial, social, and emotional benefits to Americans today.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: He went on to point to the stark increase in deaths of despair that we've seen, that is those related to suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Those have been overwhelmingly concentrated among working-class men who are not married.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And something important to note out of this research is that the decline is not hitting all groups equally. The black population is marrying less than Hispanics, whites, and Asians.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: Those with less education are less likely to get married than those with college degrees. So when we have these discussions about wealth disparity, for instance, that plays into these findings. If one ethnic group is marrying less, that will have a reverberating impact for their income and net worth.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Do we have any sense of why Americans are marrying less? That's complicated, but it doesn't appear to be because attitudes about marriage have changed much.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: People still generally view the institution positively. 95% of teens still say they plan to get married one day. But as women have started out achieving men, that has led to disparities that has disrupted the marriage market as women generally prefer a partner with equal or higher professional prospects than themselves.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Wilcox also points to how technology has changed the way we live and that we are increasingly secular. Religious devotion corresponds to higher marriage rates.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: So as he told us, it's a perfect storm of multiple factors.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Definitely a lot to untangle on a very important topic. Thanks, Marit.
--:-- Moreta Lordi: Thanks, John.
--:-- [Music transitions to the end of the show]
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend.
--:-- John Bickley: That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with an extra edition of Morning Wire.
