Chris Williamson Reflects On His Time On Love Island

I was looking at a bunch of headlines that had come out recently to do with reality TV dating shows. Yeah. What do you think are the lessons that young people are taking about love given how many reality TV shows are to do with coupling up and breaking up and making up? It's about winning. Yeah, it's all about competition. Essentially, what we've done is taking love and turned it into a game show. Now, there's no way that won't have a trickle-down effect on society. What we're learning is to cheat on them before they can cheat on you. Get to Casa Amor and couple up before they can do it themselves. So, essentially, we're going into relationships retreating our partners as opponents. And who can win? And the prize of this kind of competition is who can be the loneliest fastest. Who can create the loneliest a lonely relationship faster? Who can get single faster? So, if I cheat on you first or if I don't text back first or if I don't I win. But, what are you winning? What's the trophy of these games? The trophy is a lifetime of loneliness. So, essentially, we've made the prize depress depression is the prize of depriving yourself of love, unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, you've got experience in it. Did you find that it became a competition while you were in there? So, I was pretty bored for most of my all of my experience on Love Island. I was also going through an existential crisis because I was faced with a bunch of people that I thought I was. Right? I was adamant that I was this big name on campus party boy, and then I go on Love Island and I'm faced with people who are the role that I was pretending to be. Yeah. And I just read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist as well. It was like the first book I'd read in probably a decade. Um so, I was kind of in this weird out I had this weird out-of-body experience for a good chunk of that time where all of these things were going on and there were storylines or whatever and and all I was thinking about was this guy If anyone's not read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, there's this young shepherd boy going on a journey of self-discovery trying to find out who he is and that really really spoke to me at the time and I was in the South Coast of Mallorca which is Spain and it was in the middle of summer and I was I read this book during the media lockdown week and then went in in this total fever dream. Yeah. Um so my experience of Love Island I don't think it's perfectly representative. Yeah. Some of the things that I did realize were that it teaches young people that love is a game to be played. Yeah. That loyalty is both super important and also unbelievably disposable at the same time. Like think about when Love Island comes on TV in the UK. I'm team such and such. Right? Like Kadia or whatever like like Chris. Like you know like whatever way did they Yeah, they they try and do that thing. I'm team this and then as soon as one person decides they're going to move on typically if it's a guy he's being totally unfair. If it's a girl maybe that dude was a bummer if he was cute or like sweet then that was her fault and she shouldn't have done it. It's so it it it encourages people to make very quick decisions to fall very hard very fast to have loyalty but only kind of have loyalty to someone who's likeable. Yeah. Like a lot of people are like unlikeable people deserve relationships too. You know what I mean? Like it's everybody needs somebody. Um yeah it's it really does It's like a popularity contest even in there? Absolutely. Yeah, of course of course because you know the status Do you get real emotions like real jealousy and real anger or I didn't have a single romantic emotion during Love Island but I had a lot of bromance no romance but a lot of bromance right while I was in there. I cried when I left because I was missing my boys. Like I didn't want to leave my boys behind and I had this really intense emotional experience. I'd you know spent a lot of time I'd really connected with guys while I was there, but I I The girls were perfectly pleasant, but I wasn't bothered about leaving them behind. your self-esteem in any way that it wasn't connecting with the girls, or not really? Did you just find validation I just wasn't I really wasn't attracted to any of them. Okay, so then it doesn't bother you. We kept on saying When the girls were coming in, everybody had a type, right? And I I I don't think that they'd read necessarily all of the guys' sheets, and you can see that in the fact that there isn't a single relationship from that season. Wow, not one. Not one. No. Even the winners? Even the winners. No. When the winners lasted like less time than anybody else. Okay. Um so Mhm. Married at First Sight. Have you seen this story? I I I I am I'm familiar with it. Okay, so for the people that don't know the transgender bride set to take Married at First Sight UK by storm transitioned age 21 at an NHS hospital before spending 50,000 pounds on cosmetic surgery to be taken seriously as a woman, Mail Online can reveal today. Channel 4 viewers will see Ella Morgan, 29, who was born Evan Morgan, wed a male contestant amid a row over whether the groom was told first or not. Ms. Morgan is shown in the trailer for Married at First Sight telling her new husband her big secret after they married, having admitted her transition has made her fear rejection after being treated as a dirty secret in the past. However, Channel 4 has now revealed that they did tell the man in advance he'd be marrying a trans woman. It is understood that the man is furious with how the broadcaster treated him during the show and after but the beauty and fashion consultant from Bristol says she is determined to be the star of the show to shed light on the struggles and realities of being trans adding, "We're not freaks or mentally ill. I'm still just like any other girl." Okay. Going to be difficult for you to comment on this one, Sadia. going to be difficult. I'm trying to see how I can behave and not offend, but here here's a reality of it. If I was even if I was born a woman or whatever, and I had millions of cosmetic procedures, and I have a higher risk of uh depression because of the you know, the lifestyle I've chosen. A man has every right to know that. And has every right to say it's not for me. It's not for me. I wouldn't be with a somebody who was born a woman because it's just not for me. I'm a heterosexual woman. And I'm entitled to identify as that. Now, what I find the thing is if it's really painful to be transgender and it's a lot of suffering, I don't think it's good for TV to kind of capitalize on that for views. And then use that as somebody suffering as a form of views. But I also say that it does it does make you different from other women. If you're saying the trans struggle it was really hard for you in your childhood and you found it really depressing, that makes you different to the woman that grew up in the body she identifies with. So to say that you're on par with the typical woman is not true because you've gone through a different type of trauma that we haven't. So essentially you're never going to be like a woman not even just physically but also psychologically you're never going to be like a woman. And it's okay to never be like a woman. It's okay the thing that I find difficult to understand about the whole trans debate is one for many decades we were told gender is a social construct. It's just this imaginary thing that we're telling people we've been told it's a social construct. Everybody saying it's a social construct. The liberals are saying it's a social construct. But then if you say that you identify as the opposite gender they give you biological treatment. Now if it's a social construct essentially you're only identifying as a social construct you don't need to change your biology. It doesn't make any sense. It's like saying that your football team who you support is a social construct. I don't need to change my biology to be a Man United supporter because essentially it's a social construct. So if gender is a social construct, why do we need to transition? I think the the argument on the other side of the fence would be I want my outer appearance to reflect my inner experience. Then why not change your inner experience rather than your outer? Don't know whether they have control of that. That that's no different to a like for example a anorexic will genuinely believe that they are the fattest person on the world. They identify as fat. Now the reality is I'm not going to give them a liposuction so that their brain and their body are aligned. I have to look at the psychological defect that caused them to be aligned and focus on the psychology first and if that doesn't work then we can look at biological procedures. But the reality is that I don't see how when it comes to anorexic I get that is you know self is not healthy or whatever it is. But at the same time we know the suicide rates in transgenders is not healthy either. We're doing them a disservice by simply giving them a shortcut to biological procedures while skipping psychological interventions. Yeah, there's I had a Hannah Barnes on the show she did a big investigation into GIDS the gender identity something service that was at the Tavistock clinic in the UK that's recently been shut down and then kind of restarted again and then the restart kind of I think had some controversy as well. And um there is an unbelievably high percentage of autism and OCD and other sort of co psychopathology type things in the trans community and there is this big question that she asked which was are people mentally disturbed because they're trans or are they trans because they're mentally disturbed? Yeah. And there is a a question to be asked that if untreated autism or OCD or something like that if that ended up getting treated whether the gender dysphoria downstream from that would dissipate. And that's a I think that that would encounter in some of the real like hardline trans communities I think that would encounter some challenges because they would say that almost by getting rid of the autism you're denying the personhood of the trans person because it delegitimizes the gender dysphoria and almost makes it like how the light bulbs in here give off light, but also heat. It's like, "Oh, the gender dysphoria was a side effect of autism." And we don't know. We don't know the direction of of causality here, but it's one of the most heavily contested, highly hot topics. Would you be uh ostracized as a like a a man that chooses not to be with a transgender woman in America? Depends what you're talking about. I mean, this discussion of are you allowed to have your own preferences is fascinating, right? You know, if you prefer blondes, is that somehow prejudiced against brunettes and gingers? Yeah. If you prefer tall girls, is that somehow prejudiced against petite girls? Like the the line between the question of are you are you being either transphobic or homophobic by not dating somebody who is biologically the same sex as you, but has transitioned? It's it seems like a slippery slope from there to just well, why shouldn't you date somebody that self-IDs as that, you know, I don't need to do the external comparison. Do you know Blair White? You familiar with her? Yeah, so Blair's a good friend. I she looks more like a girl than a lot of girls do, right? But I don't know I if she was to get into a relationship with somebody and not open up about She hasn't had bottom surgery, so it's a a surprise that's waiting to visit you at some point. It's a fascinating discussion. I do think that the not dating transitioned people is transphobic argument has kind of been and gone. Anybody that genuinely looks at that and says, "Yeah, you should date how we tell you to date." It's it's again, like does that mean that I have to date everybody? Why do I not have to be attracted to my video guy? Do you know what I mean? Like I'm supposed to have I'm allowed to have preferences. And yeah, it becomes kind of a self-defeating Did you Did you ever hear about the study with Dr. Money and the twins? Um so there was two twins uh that went to hospital to get circumcised, but they accidentally burnt the penis off one. So what the doctors decided to do is raise the child They were both boys, but raise the child that had his penis burnt off as a woman as a girl. So for the first 7 years of life, they just put her in dresses, made her believe that she was a girl, everything was like, "You're just a girl." But as um the girl hit puberty, she felt more and more like a boy and she she remember being suicidal saying, "I want to be a boy. I feel like a boy. I want to play with like the balls and I want to play sports." And so eventually they told him the truth and he went back to being a boy because he just the self-discovery of your hormones, but eventually ended up committing suicide because of the trauma. So the whole idea of playing with people's uh gender, especially when they did pre-puberty because that study showed that as soon as puberty hit in, completely a boy again. So if you try and block uh try like a pubert- like the hormones before puberty, you're blocking them their self-discovery that might occur after hormones. So it's quite a dangerous thing to do. We'll get back to talking to Sadie in 1 minute, but first I need to tell you about Factor. If you are too busy this autumn to cook, but still want to make sure that you're eating well, Factor is the solution. 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