Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Can We Have Sex Back?" with Alice Dreger

Transcript

"Can We Have Sex Back?" with Alice Dreger · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to the show that goes where others don't.
• 0:05
  The show that rejects partisan squabbling and tribal groupthink.
• 0:10
  I'm Josh Zips. I'm your humble warrior princess,
• 0:14
  hunting down the world's most fascinating minds to wrestle with one provocative question each week.
• 0:21
  Much of modern culture and politics and media is tailor-made, especially social media.
• 0:27
  Taylor made to pander to what we already believe and distort what we don't,
• 0:33
  to reinforce our biases and exaggerate our differences.
• 0:37
  But change doesn't happen in an echo chamber.
• 0:41
  It's time to leave the mental comfort zone to flex our minds and step on some landmines.
• 0:48
  It's time to have uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to 2022.
• 1:03
  I hope you've had a lovely Christmas and New Year.
• 1:07
  I'm currently in Fiji on my way back from the States where I've had an amazing month wandering around
• 1:14
  having a white Christmas with my in-laws ski-dattling from country to country
• 1:20
  throughout Europe visiting family and friends I haven't seen since the beginning of the pandemic.
• 1:25
  And most recently going on Joe Rogan's podcast which is always a blast.
• 1:30
  I love Joe even when he and I disagree about a lot of things.
• 1:34
  He is such a curious puppy dog.
• 1:37
  It's sort of like a homecoming to wander into that studio again after not having been there in a few years.
• 1:43
  Having done the show six times when I lived in New York when he was based in LA, he's in Austin now.
• 1:49
  If you're discovering this show because you heard me on Joe, welcome, great to have you.
• 1:54
  A lot of what I talked about on Joe's show actually in the more kind of esoteric and woo-woo aspects of like the 800-page book of human history
• 2:04
  and how weird it is to think about how recent some of the most incredible advancements in civilization have been
• 2:11
  and extraterrestrial intelligence and where the aliens are, why they're not obvious to us in neighboring galaxies
• 2:19
  and so on. All that woo-woo actually comes from an episode of this show which if you like that you will love.
• 2:24
  It's with Tim Urban who I name checked on Joe's show.
• 2:28
  So go back and absolutely do listen to my episode with Tim Urban. It might even be my favorite.
• 2:34
  Some other highlights to get yourself acclimatized to this show would be a replay of my nor McDonald conversation,
• 2:41
  the late great comic nor McDonald which is taken from when I was on a half post live.
• 2:47
  Sam Harris is always a great chat.
• 2:50
  Actually the first episode of Uncomfortable Conversations with Stan Grant who is probably Australia's most important and influential indigenous Australian about race relations
• 2:59
  and the race wars and Black Lives Matter and everything is a great place to start as well.
• 3:05
  Oliver Berkman has been on the show twice and his first chat is incredible.
• 3:11
  He was also a terrific guest about how the whole woke industry encourages us to think about ourselves as victims
• 3:23
  and to blame ourselves and create guilt complexes that are somewhat reminiscent of what her research has revealed about the way
• 3:31
  that perpetrators of domestic violence force their victims to feel like they're actually the ones who are doing the wrong thing instead of the victims in the relationship.
• 3:39
  So Deena is an interesting listen. She was also part of the collaboration that this episode is part of which is a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney.
• 3:48
  I'm a professional fellow there and this is part of a series called Permission to Think.
• 3:53
  And today's episode is an absolute doozy. I love it. I recorded it before I traveled and it's with one of my favorite intellectuals, Alistrader,
• 4:04
  who's a writer, a historian, now something of a journalist I suppose and a bioethicist,
• 4:11
  a former professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics.
• 4:15
  And she's one of the world's leading experts into intersex people and she does a lot of academic work and activism in support of individuals who are born with atypical sex characteristics.
• 4:27
  That might sound a little bit sort of, I don't know, abstract and academic.
• 4:32
  But in reality it gives her incredible insights into the whole shifting sands of the gender wars and transgenderism and what it means to be gay and straight
• 4:42
  and what it means to be male and female and JK Rowling and transgender bathrooms and all that sort of stuff.
• 4:47
  Alice's best known book is Galileo's Middle Finger, which sort of shines a light on how activist groups have tried to suppress scientific research over the years.
• 4:58
  You can jack out her TEDx talk, it's called Is Anatomy Destiny.
• 5:02
  And yeah, I think you'll get everything you need out of this particular conversation.
• 5:06
  She has a recent essay in Quillette called Can We Have Sex Back, which I think is a perfect title.
• 5:16
  If you want to follow me on Twitter, do so.
• 5:19
  I'm a little bit more lackluster on Instagram, but you can find me anywhere.
• 5:22
  Be sure to subscribe to this show, do all the usual ratings and so on.
• 5:26
  And in the meantime, welcome to show, welcome to 2022.
• 5:29
  May it be a year of great pleasure and plenty in contrast to the past two.
• 5:33
  Enjoy this uncomfortable conversation with the one and only Alice Prager.
• 5:47
  What's interesting about sex?
• 5:51
  What's not interesting about sex?
• 5:57
  If sex are not interesting, we could tell our children the truth about it.
• 6:01
  What's interesting about sex today is that we have so many disagreements going on.
• 6:06
  I think about what it is, which makes us a sort of unique moment in some ways in the history of civilization.
• 6:13
  I think people argue a lot right now about how many sexes there are.
• 6:17
  I find that argument tiresome because I'm a historian and the answer to that question is it depends on what moment in time you are sampling.
• 6:24
  The way humans will answer that question.
• 6:26
  Nature has no answer to that question. Humans decide the answer to that question.
• 6:30
  And I think people like to think that nature tells us the answers to things.
• 6:35
  But nature often provides us a range of things from which we can choose an answer.
• 6:40
  And sex is one of those cases in terms of how many of them there are.
• 6:44
  It's funny that when I was asking the question, I was intentionally ambiguous.
• 6:48
  You could either mean sex to mean procreation and having a good time in the bedroom or you could mean something akin to gender and biology.
• 6:56
  You took the latter, so let's go there.
• 6:59
  Why is it uncertain? Why is it not just there's XX and there's XY?
• 7:03
  And then of course there's a whole conversation about gender performativity and transgenderism and how we might want to express the characteristics of sex, but that there's fundamentally two different biological sexes.
• 7:14
  What's wrong with that view?
• 7:16
  Well, for one thing, not everybody has XX or XY.
• 7:20
  So some people have XXY and some people have XXXY and some people have XY and some of their cells and XX in others of their cells.
• 7:28
  And some people have combinations of four or five different types of cells.
• 7:32
  And then the other issue is that your sex chromosomes don't actually tell you how your body develops.
• 7:38
  They can tell us part of what's going to happen in terms of your biological development.
• 7:42
  But there are other genes that come into play that are not on the X or Y chromosomes.
• 7:47
  And then there are also things that happen during prenatal development that can change how your sex develops.
• 7:53
  So if your mother is exposed to particular kinds of hormones, for example, that can change your sex development.
• 7:58
  So the truth is XX and XY tell us a little bit about how you developed, but they don't tell us the answer to how your whole body developed.
• 8:05
  So there are people who are born as girls.
• 8:08
  You would have no question looking at them in the birthing room that that's a girl, but they have XY chromosomes, which is normally male.
• 8:15
  And then there are people born who absolutely clearly are a boy when they're born, but it turns out they have XX chromosomes.
• 8:21
  So nature is far more complicated than our politics would sometimes like.
• 8:26
  And these people might have internal sex organs or something.
• 8:30
  They might be XY, but they might have what tiny testicles inside that they haven't noticed or something as they were growing up as a girl.
• 8:38
  Or if they were XX, then they might have what ovaries that aren't being noticed. Is that the point?
• 8:46
  Yeah, so there's lots of different types of conditions. If we count up all the different kinds of sex differences that you can have besides the normal, what we think of as the standard male or the standard female, there are at least 30 some different types.
• 8:59
  But just as a couple of examples, you can have somebody born with a condition called complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.
• 9:05
  And when she's born, she'll look absolutely like a girl inside. She's got XY chromosome. She has testes, but her body doesn't respond to testosterone and other masculinism hormones.
• 9:16
  So when her body develops, except for having testes inside, she's developing externally in terms of a genitalia as a female.
• 9:22
  Her brain is subject to the more female typical brain development.
• 9:27
  And very often in these cases, you don't know anything's up until she hits puberty and she starts to grow and develops breasts and rounded hips because her body is making hormones that lead to estrogen, so she'll feminize according to the usual feminine puberty, but she won't menstruate because she doesn't have ovaries inside and she doesn't have uterus.
• 9:45
  Then an example will be done and the discovery will be made, but she is a woman. I mean, this is a person who in terms of her development, in terms of her upbringing, in terms of her self concept has been a woman from the start and makes no sense to call somebody like that male.
• 9:59
  She has some male characteristics, but she's a woman.
• 10:02
  And then you can have a condition, for example, called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which in a very extreme version of it can lead to a child whose XX being born to appear to be male.
• 10:15
  So in that circumstance, the child has XX chromosomes and ovaries, but some other glands that can be involved in sex development, the adrenal glands are in high gear, they're making lots of antigens, which can masculinize development.
• 10:28
  So when the child's born, the child's born with male genitalia, the brain has been subject to the more male typical pathway.
• 10:34
  Kid appears to be male. If it's a very severe form, the child can have serious medical problems, but I actually a few years ago met by telephone a young man who was 19 years old and we'd been having some medical problems.
• 10:46
  He was a straight young man, 19, played sports, you know, sort of typical guy and had just found out that he had that condition and he had ovaries in the uterus inside of him.
• 10:56
  And the reason he was having medical problems was he was menstruating internally.
• 10:59
  I mean, you could call that person female, but it would make no sense to me. He'd been born appearing to be male, raised as a boy, had the brain development more typical to males, you know, it makes no sense.
• 11:10
  In fact, part of the reason he was calling me is doctor wanted him to talk with me about whether or not he should get a sex change, which I found a little odd because I'm a historian, but okay, I'm happy to talk to people.
• 11:20
  And I said to him, do you want to be a woman? You sound like a guy to me and he said, no, and I said, well, then why would you have a sex change?
• 11:27
  And he said, well, because my doctor keeps telling me, well, I've got ovaries inside. And I said, listen, I don't let my ovaries tell me what to do.
• 11:33
  I don't think you should let your ovaries tell you what to do. Have a mount, you know, if you don't want them there, have a mount, have your uterus out and go on with your life.
• 11:41
  I recognize he's going to be infertile, and that can be a rough thing to grieve over, but, you know, he wasn't planning to be a mother.
• 11:47
  He was planning to be a father, so his life had changed radically, but there was no reason for him to change his whole identity based on what he found out was inside.
• 11:55
  So in the current cultural moment, it sounds like what you're saying that there are a multiplicity of different sexes, and it's not just a binary, could fit into one of two sort of dominant camps at the moment.
• 12:07
  You know, the conservative or what might be regarded as the anti-transgender sort of traditionalist side might say, okay, so there are these exceptions.
• 12:14
  There are these sort of fringe cases, of course, and they should be treated, you know, as with respect and dignity on their own right, but that's a medical condition for the vast majority of people, we're still working with a biological binary.
• 12:27
  And then, alternatively, you could have a sort of pro-trans attitude, which is see, there are so many different ways of being male and female that the whole thing means absolutely nothing, and there is no correlation between biology and gender, so just do whatever floats you boat.
• 12:42
  Are those the only two options?
• 12:45
  No, and I don't think you actually need to believe that sex has a multifaceted existence in order to believe that transgender makes sense.
• 12:56
  So transgender is about how you feel, it's about how your brain works, how your identity works, how your life works.
• 13:03
  We don't need nature to tell us there are lots of different variations within sex to allow for transgender people.
• 13:10
  Even if there were only two sex types in the world, in terms of the biology of gamy production, in terms of the biology of chromosomes, I would still want to respect a transgender person who felt that the sex assignment given to them does not work in terms of their gender identity, and I would absolutely recognize them for the gender they self express as, because that only makes sense to me in terms of a human rights perspective.
• 13:33
  It's basic human dignity as far as I'm concerned.
• 13:36
  Some people say, okay, so there's really only two types because it's gamy production, and they say for the intersex types they really fit into the two categories or not at all because they don't have gamy production.
• 13:47
  This is if you make eggs or you make sperm, I find that argument really kind of silly because children don't make gametes.
• 13:54
  So females are born with eggs, but males don't start making sperm for a while. I'm postmenopausal, I'm not popping eggs anymore, does that mean I'm not female anymore?
• 14:03
  Does a guy who has his testicles out because he has testicular cancers, he no longer male, that kind of attitude strikes me as sort of naive.
• 14:11
  We decide to make that decision and say, oh, it's gamy production, oh, it's chromosome, oh, it's genitalia, oh, it's nipples, you know, whatever you want to choose, I can tell you historically somebody's chosen something for one of these every single time, somewhere in history.
• 14:24
  Major doesn't care, I don't know why we should be so obsessed with it, it doesn't make sense to me to be super obsessed with it.
• 14:30
  For me, the question is, how should we think about respect for each other? And the answer to that is not let me do a chromosomal assay on you, or let me do a blood test on you, or let me check out your genitals, the way we respect each other is just to deal with each other's human beings face to face.
• 14:45
  So that sounds like a very tolerant and accepting and progressive point of view, yet if one Googles you and transgender, then about a dozen years ago, you got yourself into hot water and suddenly you were the target of a hate campaign as being an anti-transgender academic, how did that come about?
• 15:06
  Well, as a misinformation campaign, like we're very familiar with nowadays in terms of many different news issues where you can get misinformation campaigns.
• 15:15
  At the time that that all bloomed up, I was doing a history of a book controversy over a book by a man named Michael Bailey, who's actually having lunch with me tomorrow, because we're friends nowadays, but I can't help it.
• 15:26
  You are a relentless transgender. He's not either, by the way. Many people have been accused of that actually actively agitate from transgender rights and medicine and the world.
• 15:42
  But what happened was he did a book about what he called feminine males. So he was interested in gay men who start off as being kind of feminine in terms of interests and hobbies, what happens with regard to men who ultimately transition to become women, males who transition to become women.
• 15:59
  And he talked about a particular theory by a researcher named Ray Blanchard from Canada who talked about the idea that the motivation for transition among trans women actually is not just about gender, it's about sexual orientation.
• 16:14
  And it's about multiple different types of sexual orientation. Blanchard identified two. One is very, very, very feminine, what he called androphilic males, which are males attracted to other males whose lives make more sense as females. So they transition.
• 16:29
  And the other category was the controversial one. That's a category called autogynophilia, which Blanchard identified as natal males. So people born male who feel sexually excited at the idea of being or becoming a woman.
• 16:42
  And it took me while to wrap my head around what that kind of orientation looks like. But to be honest, the more I studied human sexual orientation, the more I thought they're all weird.
• 16:51
  Everything, including heterosexuality, which we think of as plain vanilla, is strange if you think about it. And so Bailey came under attack because a group of transgender women didn't like him talking about this particular approach because they thought that it would make them look like they were mere fetishists.
• 17:08
  And I don't think that's what autogynophilia is about. I think autogynophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation. And if it turns out a person's life will be better for transitioning, then my feeling is always, I don't really care what the cause of the need to transition is.
• 17:21
  My feeling is, if transition is going to make your life better, then we should help you transition. For me, it's outcome-based question. But Bailey as a scientist was interested in the question of etiology, where does it come from? And that's what made it really, really controversial.
• 17:36
  That said, nowadays, thanks to the internet, there are a lot of people who are out about being autogynophilic trans women, and they are quite out about it. And so, you know, I talk with a lot of men.
• 17:47
  As it turns out, some friends of mine who are trans women also identify as this, but did so years before I knew them. I just was not familiar with this theory because people, a lot of people who are interested in transgender rights think it's dangerous to talk about sexuality, and they want to talk only about gender.
• 18:03
  My own personal opinion is that for many of us, our genders and our sexualities are intertwined. They come together in a way, and I don't mean that as a sexual joke, but it is kind of what happens.
• 18:15
  They're linked to each other, so for all of us, gender identity and sexuality, or many of us, gender identity and sexuality are interlinked.
• 18:22
  I can understand the reticence there. I can understand that it's a harder sell in maybe a center-right country like America to convince...
• 18:31
  If you come with a bit of puritanical baggage and you're a little bit sort of a sex-phobic or maybe anti-kink, then it's a harder sell to say, I want to present as a different gender than the one that I was assigned at birth because I get my rocks off doing that.
• 18:48
  Then to say, this is an intrinsic part of the hot water in my brain.
• 18:53
  But I think the thing you have to understand is that for most of us, when we're performing our genders, that is to say deciding what to wear, deciding how to present ourselves, we're also getting our rocks off in the sense that we are presenting our genders as part of our sexual orientation.
• 19:09
  And we are going out into the world expecting people to treat us in a particular way that will engage both our gender and our sexual orientations.
• 19:17
  The truth is, you know, straight women don't just simply go through the world and put on whatever happens to be at the top of the closet that day.
• 19:26
  They're thinking also about who are they going to encounter that day? If they're going on a date and they want to get laid, they're going to be thinking about what they're wearing.
• 19:33
  The truth is, we all do that kind of thing and I don't think it's worth thinking about it as a fetishistic thing.
• 19:38
  To me, it's just something that comes along with sexual orientation.
• 19:41
  Now, I know some people object to, for example, trans women being in women's bathrooms because they say, you know, that they'll treat women in a sexual way.
• 19:49
  My own feeling is we're all out in the world that Freud was not wrong. We're out in the world as sexual beings.
• 19:55
  And the thing to do is to think about how to manage our behavior so that we're respectful towards others.
• 20:00
  And my experience of trans women is that they are respectful as NATO women are except, you know, a few people in all these categories sometimes are not respectful and we should judge people on the basis of their behavior.
• 20:12
  You know, Martin Luther King, the great American civil rights leader said in his, I have a dream speech that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
• 20:21
  And what I tell people is we should judge people by the content of their character, by their acts and not by the color of their skin, the shape of their skin, the history of their skin.
• 20:31
  As far as I'm concerned, that stuff doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is, are we treating each other well?
• 20:37
  Won't the advocate on behalf of the traditionally oppressed minority respond to that saying, well, that's all very well coming from a place of white privilege, white supremacy, white power, middle class comfort.
• 20:47
  But the reality is that the world does judge us on the basis of our sexual presentation. It does discriminate against transgender people who suffer from astronomically higher rates of violence and suicide.
• 20:59
  It does judge us on the basis of whether or not we're an African American in America or an indigenous Australian in Australia.
• 21:06
  And therefore it's naive to have that kind of rose colored attitude towards the world.
• 21:11
  Well, the only way to change it is to believe that it needs to be fixed.
• 21:15
  So we can absolutely acknowledge the terrible history and the terrible reality of today without saying that that's the way it has to be.
• 21:23
  And that was the point of having a dream was to work towards something better.
• 21:29
  That's true. He didn't say I have a dream. He didn't say I recognize reality.
• 21:35
  Exactly. And I have to say I do not understand why people need to spend so much energy policing sex and gender.
• 21:43
  I don't think it's necessary and it harms a lot of people. So this kind of constant angry policing around sex and gender.
• 21:50
  I find exhausting and hurtful and hateful and it does not have to be necessary.
• 21:55
  You know, as somebody who's now 55 years old for the people in my life who are using the they them pronoun, especially if they're using it newly and they used to use he or she, I struggle.
• 22:07
  And so people have said to me how dare these people make us do this.
• 22:10
  And my attitude is what is the big deal of me having to check myself and remind myself they're preferred pronoun?
• 22:16
  Is it really that hard?
• 22:18
  Now does it in fact cause me to hesitate sometimes and define myself thinking how do I think about gender?
• 22:24
  And so it puts me in a position of having to do some thinking?
• 22:27
  Yes. And I don't think that's a bad thing. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't have to respect what the other person is asking of me in terms of the gender.
• 22:35
  You know, I had somebody say to me to conference once, you know, this will never change because we're never going to get used to using a plural pronoun for a singular person, right?
• 22:44
  How can we use they then for a singular person? And I said to this is exactly what I was told in the 1980s when we were trying to shift the language from using he as the supposedly gender neutral pronoun.
• 22:55
  So when you were talking about a person without a specific identity, we would use the word he and we shifted over to he, she.
• 23:02
  And I was told that people will never do this because we're so used to using he, we could not possibly use he slash she.
• 23:08
  Well, now we use he slash she, we put she in, we're moving towards just using they as a gender neutral pronoun. This can be done.
• 23:15
  It's not that hard. We don't have to go to war over pronouns.
• 23:18
  Also, we already use they then as an ambiguous gender pronoun anyway, you know, when the when the bus driver tells you get off the bus, you listen to them, I might say to my kids.
• 23:28
  You listen to them because I don't know whether the bus driver is a man or woman.
• 23:31
  You said you don't want this sort of policing of sex and gender. What do you mean by that? What is the policing then? If you're cool with that then, what's the policing?
• 23:39
  Well, I mean bathroom policing in the United States is very, very intense. So the idea that we can't have people come into bathrooms if their biological gender history is different or their biological sex history is different than what their gender identity is.
• 23:54
  I think that's frankly just kind of silly. I don't know what the big deal is about bathrooms in America.
• 24:01
  You know, I'm somebody who likes to be very efficient. So I sometimes go into men's bathrooms because at concerts and things often is the case, the women's line is really, really long.
• 24:11
  And long before this started, I just started going into men's bathrooms because I find men much quicker. I don't know what women are doing.
• 24:17
  I'm not doing it. No, don't get it. Nobody gave me the manual to tell me why I'm supposed to be taking longer in the bathroom.
• 24:26
  I am washing my hands because I do history of medicine. So I do wash my hands, but I don't have to take a long time in the stall. So I don't know what that's all about.
• 24:34
  I can't believe you just confess that you use the wrong bathroom. I mean, don't go to Virginia. You can get hanged in Virginia for that.
• 24:41
  Well, not being a woman, usually going into a men's room, weirdly enough. So I was at a sex research conference a few years ago.
• 24:48
  This was about 10 or 12 years ago, so long time ago. And it was a sex research conference where we were all together in the same room.
• 24:56
  And that meant that every time there was a break between sessions, we all went to the bathroom.
• 25:00
  So it was difficult to get everybody in and out of the bathroom before the next session was starting.
• 25:06
  So we had just been in a session where we were watching pornography because there was a study of a particular question about pornography.
• 25:13
  So we're all sitting there very politely. Yeah, I'm sure that was the reason. I'm sure there was a great academic reason for you to watch porn.
• 25:19
  Yeah, there is. So we're all watching this together. And then there's a break at the end of the session. And everybody goes to the bathroom and the Louisins line is really long.
• 25:27
  So I'm like, well, screw that. I'm going into the men's room. So I go into the men's room. And the women are like, you can't do that.
• 25:32
  I said, we were all just watching pornography together. I can't go into the men's room. I'm pretty sure we all know what a penis looks like.
• 25:38
  So I went into the men's room. The guys were like, hey, Alice. And I just used the stall. And I was polite and respectful and didn't stare at their penises.
• 25:46
  And took myself out of there. I don't know why we have to be quite so intense about bathrooms.
• 25:51
  But sports is another area where people are very heavily into policing. And this is an area I've written about.
• 25:58
  And also advised the International Olympic Committee. My own feeling is, okay, I'm not somebody who plays a lot of sports.
• 26:03
  So I don't have that particular competitive attitude. But my own feeling is it is not worth burning down houses and destroying people's lives to insist that everybody be divided into a simple two sex category, which is hormonally based.
• 26:18
  Which is how the International Olympic Committee historically has managed sex and gender. And that's been really problematic.
• 26:24
  So my own feeling is that we should let people play in the gender in which they identify that it makes sense. And does that mean that sometimes people will have a male biological history that gives them an advantage in women's sports? Yes.
• 26:35
  And I'm willing to live with that to say we can move on to a better world.
• 26:39
  What do you say to the outstanding female weightlifter who is constantly trounced by the other woman who went through puberty as a male who now has stronger bone density and stronger musculature because of it?
• 26:54
  That if we want to call it a woman sport, then we're calling it a gender category. And the gender category encompasses people who may have some biological male history.
• 27:05
  If we want to change the categorizations and say we're going to have hormonally historically based categories.
• 27:12
  So you're going to be in category A, if you grew up with this hormonal profile, and you're going to be in category B, if you grew up with this hormonal profile, fine.
• 27:20
  But let's be honest and call them hormonal classes, not gender groups because they're not gender groups, they're hormonal classes.
• 27:26
  So we can do that. It would be weird, but we could do that. And then honestly we'd start to realize well some people have certain biological advantages even within those categories.
• 27:36
  So for example, there are some men who naturally make a lot more testosterone than other men. Does that mean we shouldn't allow them in that category?
• 27:44
  Once you start breaking it down and recognizing that there are not two simplistic categories that people come different from each other, not just in terms of sex, but in terms of so many other things.
• 27:57
  Sports and the concept of a level playing field, you start to realize now there's a lot of stuff we're creating all the time in terms of artificial categorization.
• 28:05
  But when you do start breaking it down, don't you risk the whole edifice falling apart? I mean I think they're concerned.
• 28:12
  You may be cool with that, but the female footballers and female weightlifters may not be in the sense that maybe the first step is that no woman, no cisgender woman, can realistically compete at an international level in weightlifting anymore because trans women are going to routinely outcompete them.
• 28:31
  But then maybe the solution to that is, well, why are we dividing sexes by sex and gender at all? So everyone should just compete against each other.
• 28:38
  And then there'll be no female tennis stars because everyone will be competing against male tennis players.
• 28:44
  Well, or you could create categories that are honest, which are categories that are not gender categories. They're categories that are about the history of sex development.
• 28:53
  And you say that the people who have this history of sex development play together and the people of this history of sex development play together and be honest about what that is, but don't call that gender because that's not what that is.
• 29:03
  And that would be based on the sex that they were when they went through puberty or the sex that they were assigned at birth.
• 29:08
  Well, that's the issue, right? You'd have to go through everybody's medical history and try to figure out what everybody had in terms of their advantages.
• 29:16
  And we don't bother to do this with other issues in sports. We don't, for example, say that at the elite level, we're going to divide people into height classes, and then we're going to have a short basketball group and a tall basketball group, right?
• 29:29
  We don't say that we're going to divide what we do actually divide people in wrestling in terms of weight classes. That is somewhere where that is done.
• 29:38
  But I mean, just another example in some places in the world when kids play sports and they're pre puberty, they do not bother to divide them into gender because sometimes the girls can equally compete with the boys, for example, in soccer or what the rest of the world would call football.
• 29:55
  And so you can have categories that are age categories, but once they hit puberty, you're going to have a differentiation in terms of the natural body type differentiation.
• 30:05
  So I think it is possible to create these categories, but what we have to recognize is that we know a lot more than we used to know about these categories.
• 30:15
  And it's not really possible to pretend anymore that gender is a simple thing or that sex is a simple thing.
• 30:21
  Those days are over.
• 30:22
  So let's inject the fun definition of sex back into this conversation, not just the biological one.
• 30:27
  What's the relationship between sex, sex, attraction, sex, procreation, sex, fun sex, and sexuality, and gender, and biological sex?
• 30:39
  I mean, I'm thinking about what you were saying a little earlier about males who perform with characteristics that are traditionally associated with females, a feminine sort of men.
• 30:50
  Now, some of those will be gay, some of those will be biased, some of those will be straight, it doesn't map on perfectly, but it certainly seems like more gay guys seem to have more feminine characteristics.
• 31:01
  And a friend of mine the other day was talking up how wonderful Iran is because Iran is so nice towards transgender people because they give the government provides you with free sex change operations or sex affirmation surgery as we call it now, if you're transgender.
• 31:15
  And I was like, what that means is that as someone who's married to a man, I would in Iran be required to either have my dick chopped off or marry a woman.
• 31:26
  I'm not sure that that is that great, but I suppose for some people who are genuinely transgender and also gay, that might suit. Can you help me through this thicket?
• 31:37
  Yes, if you have a few weeks. So you're right. The idea that somehow Iran is a blissful place is really not the case because you're right.
• 31:48
  And they're taking people who in this culture would be gay men and insisting that if they want to survive, literally survive, that the way they will survive is to become straight women through sex change operations.
• 32:00
  And that is not something you want the state imposing upon you, but it is the case that it makes some sense to decouple sexual orientation from gender identity.
• 32:13
  You were saying you were referring earlier to gay men. What we mean by gay men in this culture is men who are attracted to other men.
• 32:22
  But that is something that sexologists refer to instead as a male who is androphilic. So a male who is attracted to other males.
• 32:33
  And the reason they make that distinction is because people may in fact change their gender, but rarely do they change the way they're oriented in terms of what turns them on.
• 32:43
  It's useful to decouple the gender from the orientation. And then what we know is that there are many places around the world where it's well documented that there are some children who are born who, let's take the male sex, who are biological males, but they're kind of feminine as children.
• 33:01
  They may be interested in the more traditional girls interests in that culture. They're more interested in attending to their mothers, more interested in hanging out with other little girls.
• 33:10
  And in many cultures in the world, a third gender category has been created in order to normalize those kids. And it creates a third gender category where those kids basically grow up as women.
• 33:21
  So just to give you one example, in Samoa, the research of Paul Vasey has documented what happens with the fafafine.
• 33:27
  And these are biological males who are identified early on as being more female typical. And so they're categorized into this third category called fafafine, which means in the manner of a woman, living in the manner of a woman.
• 33:40
  And they will grow up and they will be what we think of as like gay men, except that they're living as women.
• 33:46
  And so our categories don't necessarily map on to other people's categories, but what's interesting is the patterns do map on around the world.
• 33:54
  And that gives us reason to believe that for some men homosexuality is probably inborn and comes along with a complex that influences gender identity and gender orientation to some degree in addition to sexual orientation.
• 34:08
  And we see the same thing with some biological females and there are categories around the world in some places that have categories for normalizing butch girls basically and making them into grow up as boys who will then marry women.
• 34:21
  In this culture, they might be butch fam lesbians who marry other women. In other cultures, they may be identified as males with or without a sex change.
• 34:29
  They may be identified as males and allowed to marry women and women will marry them. So there are different kinds of categories and different traditional cultures and the one we have here is similar in some ways and different in other ways.
• 34:42
  So when sex researchers talk about orientation, rather than talking about homosexuality and heterosexuality, when they're talking about individuals, they prefer to talk about things like androphilic,
• 34:52
  kind of feel like meaning attracted to females or bisexual attracted to both sex types. Does that help?
• 34:59
  Just an interesting aside on Samoa when I was in my teens, I did an exchange program to Tonga and lived in a little Tonga village for a month.
• 35:10
  I was interested to learn that most of them are not sleeping with each other. Most of them are sleeping with straight men.
• 35:27
  And they'll buy a case of beer so that a straight man will allow them to go down on them or something without getting too explicit.
• 35:35
  Like that's their sexual life and that's totally acceptable and there's nothing presumed to be non-masculine nor non-heterosexual about the straight guys engaging one of these female presenting males for a sexual favor in exchange for something.
• 35:51
  We would totally blow the minds of people in the West, I think, who are much more, I suppose, dogmatic about the boundaries.
• 35:58
  Although that may also be changing. Is there a risk of confusion or contagion among gender identity as a result of people's confusion about their sexuality?
• 36:10
  What I mean is I have a number of gay friends who feel like they were very girly boys. They were putting on lipstick and dressing up in girls clothes and they didn't like sport when they were kids who tell me that now, if they were growing up, they probably would be trans.
• 36:26
  They probably would think that they were transgender. There certainly seems to be some concern particularly in the United Kingdom about there being a contagion effect among adolescent girls who all seem to be trans boys at higher rates, certainly within certain peer groups.
• 36:42
  It seems to be disproportionately among people who are on the autism spectrum. Like what do you make of that whole grouha hara about like our queer kids being misled into transgender identity?
• 36:55
  Well, I don't like the use of the term contagion right because it makes it sound like being transgender as a disease. So I don't think that's a useful way to think about it.
• 37:02
  But is there a cultural influence in terms of how you end up seeing your gender identity? Absolutely. So at all points in history, people have understood their own identities within the context of what their culture has allowed.
• 37:14
  It's very rare that you find somebody that manages historically to come up with a brand new kind of identity that is not already existing within that culture in terms of the cultural evolution.
• 37:26
  So, you know, I totally understand why it concerns people who are gay and lesbian who feel like they're watching youth who ought to be naturally growing into the same categories they grew into as gay and lesbian, but are instead ending up in a category of transgender.
• 37:40
  But my own feeling is, again, the outcomes question, what's the best thing for those kids? And if in their lives they're going to be best off in terms of understanding their own self identity to be transgender, then I don't have a problem with that.
• 37:54
  Might it result in the fact that we have statistically fewer gay men and statistically fewer lesbian women? Yes. And that can be a problem politically.
• 38:03
  But I don't really see that as the reason why we shouldn't sort of understand the question to be, what's the best thing for this child?
• 38:10
  Now, one reasonable critique, I think, is all other than things being equal, it's probably better not to do massive interventions on your body that are hormonal interventions and surgical interventions.
• 38:21
  If you could theoretically avoid those kinds of things and have the same positive outcome without having to do major changes on your body, then all other things being equal, that would be better.
• 38:31
  That's because hormonal interventions and surgical interventions come with non-trivial risks. But my question again would be if it's going to turn out okay, and that's going to be something they identify as, and it's a positive identity for them, what's really our problem?
• 38:46
  I don't think we're allowed to say, no, you got to stay on my team, if it means that their life is better off because of a different kind of identification than somebody might have had 50 years ago.
• 38:56
  What if it means an end to what we traditionally understand to be gay culture or lesbian culture because everyone who is like no more butch dikes because they all became men?
• 39:05
  I don't know, I mean, it would be a strange thing to have happened, but remember butch dikes didn't exist in terms of cultural recognition 200 years ago, right, in the West.
• 39:16
  They existed, but they didn't exist in terms of cultural recognition. They were categorized as troubling women, basically, right, women who in some circumstances were obligated to have their clitoruses cut off to try to stop them from having these urges that were seen as unnatural urges, et cetera, et cetera.
• 39:35
  200 years ago, the culture had a problem with that category and tried to normalize it in a different way.
• 39:43
  I do feel like the moment that we've had where people are allowed to self-identify is a much more positive experience than we would have had 200 years ago.
• 39:52
  But is it possible that we've taken self-identification far enough that people are choosing categories that are unrecognizable to people my age?
• 40:01
  That may happen. And that's part of natural historical evolution of human culture. Is it painful sometimes? Sure.
• 40:10
  The other thing I want to remind people like every generation looks at the younger generation and says kids these days, you know, how dare they do these things, right.
• 40:18
  The generation it was weird colored hair, then it was piercings, then it was tattoos. Now it's various kinds of interventions on one's body to change one's gender presentation.
• 40:28
  My own feeling is like we always sort of criticize what the younger generation is doing. And in fact, I think it's important for them to find their way in the world by sometimes doing things to their body that we may go, oh, I wouldn't do that to myself and my wish the kids didn't do themselves.
• 40:44
  Our respect for them means having respect for allowing them to make decisions and maybe making decisions we wouldn't make and maybe making decisions we think are wrong decisions.
• 40:54
  But if we're going to take seriously the ability to respect each other and to let people at bodily autonomy, sometimes it's going to make us uncomfortable.
• 41:02
  So empowering young people, letting them make their own decisions and making, you know, sort of getting out of the way so that they can express themselves how they will is now also tied up with a kind of orthodoxy around some of these issues at academic institutions, particularly in the United States, where you'll see, you know, universities and colleges sort of putting their finger on the scales and insisting that a certain type of conversation has to take place and other kinds of conversations are either hate speech or welcome on.
• 41:31
  On campus, this is another thing that you are vocal about. What is the state of play there?
• 41:39
  Well, in the United States, it's troubled without a doubt. So there are many people who are being subject to being driven off of campuses, losing their jobs, losing their status as students in some circumstances because they're expressing ideas that are considered so forbidden that there are things we can't even say.
• 41:59
  And it's very troubling to me. So in the United States, recently a transgender woman who was a researcher who looked at issues of pedophilia, so the attraction of typically men, but not always, but older people attracted to children had done research in that area and was basically driven out of her 10 year job because people were so upset that she was taking seriously the question of how to think about pedophilia as a sexual orientation.
• 42:24
  That's very disturbing to me. Disturbing also is just the ways in which I see colleagues all over the country taking things off their syllabus because they're just too afraid to get into conversation points and to be brought up on charges of creating hostile environment simply by asking questions, for example, about sex and gender.
• 42:44
  You know, it's hard to know exactly where to draw lines in terms of certainly we don't want a situation where you have a professor who is openly racist or openly sexist and creating a genuinely hostile environment within a classroom.
• 42:58
  But much of the time you end up with these days to extreme an approach in terms of really policing people's speech, I think it's really important, especially within an academic environment, to have the space to say things that maybe you don't believe, maybe you believe, but are unpopular so that we can explore those ideas together and figure out where we go from there.
• 43:21
  And we don't really have that ability. Right now we're doing this constant conflation of speech with identity. So if somebody says something that tells you who they really are and we really need to decouple those and begin to have spaces in which people really are able to put forth ideas that don't necessarily tell us who they are but are putting forth an idea so that we can debate it.
• 43:41
  You know, the other thing that we need is we need to have an ability for people to explain themselves within reasonable stretches of time and not simply be canceled off the face of the planet very quickly.
• 43:53
  And then we need the ability for people to apologize for things that they've done if in fact they've changed their mind about something.
• 44:00
  It's incredible to me how often people are being sort of hauled up on the cancel altar over something they said 10 or 15 years ago just makes no sense at all.
• 44:09
  When you say that we need a space in which more controversial or unpopular ideas can be aired on campus, how does that mesh with your earlier spirit of generosity towards getting out of the way of the kids these days and letting them express themselves however they want to you say we shouldn't have racist and sexist speech from professors creating a truly hostile environment.
• 44:29
  What if the definition of racism for young people these days is simply to, for example, deny that the United States is an iridimably racist country or that Australia is or that we were founded on racism and that it's in our DNA and that to deny that lands as being a racist claim for the work students.
• 44:50
  Where does the generosity end?
• 44:54
  Well, I think in those cases the students are not actually engaging in the dialogue and so it's not actually a productive conversation which you're having as an attempt to simply shut down all conversation and that's not going to work if what you're trying to do is teaching and learning and research.
• 45:09
  So that's certainly problematic. There are some students for whom the academic environment is so fragile and the academic environment is so dangerous to their psyche, at least they tell us this, that I think effectively what they have is a disability.
• 45:29
  We have to ask ourselves the question of whether or not it's possible to do a reasonable accommodation within the institution at that point.
• 45:36
  So if you are so so called triggered by even so much as a discussion, for example, about where transgender comes from or about the history of race in America or something like that.
• 45:47
  That very conversation is likely to cause you a psychic break such that you may feel suicidal or you may be unable to come to class.
• 45:55
  Then you have an impairment and within the context of that classroom you have a disability and I think the right way to deal with that at that point is dealing with it as a disability and referring it to the office of disability for students.
• 46:07
  And dealing with it in a way to ask the question, is it possible to make a reasonable accommodation for this student without completely dismantling the classroom?
• 46:15
  And if it's not, then it's not doable. You know, there are some people for whom they may have a physical disability where it's simply impossible to participate in a class.
• 46:25
  For example, a person who might have certain kinds of sensory disorders where it's just not possible to be in an ordinary classroom.
• 46:31
  We may make special accommodations to make it possible for them to have access to the same type of education but not within the context of that classroom.
• 46:40
  And in some circumstances, I think that's where we have to go. Is the recognition that if some people are really genuinely as incredibly fragile as they claim to be that maybe they can't handle the classroom?
• 46:51
  I mean, you're giving a lot of credit to the student's claim of fragility but as we just discussed in the conversation around the potential contagion, not contagion,
• 47:00
  unless not the use the word contagion of transgenderism among adolescent girls, one builds up one's attitude towards the world and one's attitude of oneself in the basis of the cultural soup that you're swimming in.
• 47:12
  So if there is a narrative that's going on among young people that any conversations about sex being binary or difficult conversations about race or difficult conversations about feminism,
• 47:24
  any of these sort of touchstone hot button issues are a way for the power structures, the white supremacist power structures, the patriarchal power structures to impose their will on you.
• 47:37
  Then isn't that the case that it's not a question of does this person have a disability that makes them incapable of hearing this?
• 47:43
  Does this student in a peer group in which the norm is that they sort of feign fragility because that's what it means to be a good person to not count on such evil ideas?
• 47:57
  I don't know what to do with people who are faking it. That's a whole other question. If people are faking being that fragile, I don't know what to do with that.
• 48:05
  I don't know how you figure out who's faking it and I don't know what to do with that.
• 48:10
  Are we all faking offence to some extent? Allos isn't there, isn't there?
• 48:15
  So sorry, you just froze a little bit, but I was just saying, you know, the extent to which I will express offence against something rude that someone says when I'm around my grandmother is different than the extent to which I will express offence when I'm around my buddies at the bar.
• 48:32
  That doesn't mean I'm lying in either case, but it does mean that I'm moderating my response to things on the basis of my in-group.
• 48:41
  I think sometimes something genuinely is offensive. I've certainly had to be subject to ridiculous claims in my life about women are and are not capable of.
• 48:54
  They certainly conveyed to me a message that sometimes such speech is acting as if that's the reality of the world and sometimes speaking that kind of reality in a weird way creates that kind of world.
• 49:06
  But I don't think we can stop having the conversation just because there are some people who frankly are in some circumstances simply trying to have power and shut down everybody else's ability to have any say.
• 49:21
  It's a difficult question. Historically speaking, we've not had quite so much of a problem with this because historically speaking, people were segregated into class types where they couldn't move up and down those class types very easily.
• 49:33
  So what we're seeing in some ways is the negative aspects of our successes of having created a world where more of us are talking to each other and more people of access to education and to jobs and to all the rest of it.
• 49:45
  I've written about, and I don't know how to deal with this question, that there are some people who are shutting down conversations because they're attention grabbers and because they're narcissists.
• 49:56
  And they simply want to shut down a conversation because they want all attention directed to them and they want to control everybody in the room.
• 50:03
  I don't know what you do with that. I really don't know what you do with that. But there are some people who are doing that and I don't think we can let them be in control.
• 50:11
  Let's pivot from those people and the sort of cancel culture conversation to just how academic work gets done and how universities fund things and how corporations fund things.
• 50:21
  You sort of express concern about the corporatization of education, the branding of universities and things like that.
• 50:30
  And maybe the winnowing of permissible academic pursuits towards things that are very worthy. If you as a sex researcher want to get funded to do a study into something that you just think is fascinating, then you have a certain chance of getting funding.
• 50:45
  But if you say that it's about increasing HIV response or if it's about helping the transgender community combat that's actually transmitted diseases, then it's a lot likely to get funding that if you're just saying, I'm just interested in why people have this kink.
• 51:00
  Yeah, well, that's, I mean, that's not that different than the way things have always been unfortunately in terms of people with grants having to make claims about their research that is not necessarily totally on target with what they're really interested in doing.
• 51:13
  I mean, I think that corporatization of university systems is troubling because in general corporations have a system whereby they're interested in a singular message, a brand is a singular message.
• 51:24
  And when you have a university, you really need to allow people to be off brand in the sense that they don't need to maintain a single message on behalf of the university.
• 51:33
  But the problem is, you know, universities have become very obsessed with their endowments, very obsessed with income. And that's how they tend to measure now, whether or not an academic, for example, should get tenure, is the question how much money they're bringing in, not the question of whether or not they're generating any interesting new knowledge.
• 51:49
  We also have this total wrapping, at least in the United States of sports culture combined with academics, so that in some cases, the football teams are kind of leading the decisions being made by the university.
• 52:01
  I mean, I live in East Lansing, Michigan, and Michigan State University is the school there, and they just entered a contract with the football coach for $95 million.
• 52:11
  Now, that's not all being paid with public money, it's being paid partly by donors, but you have to ask yourself the question, what does it mean when by far the highest paid person in the university system is a football coach?
• 52:23
  I mean, what does that really mean at that point? $95 million for a 10-year contract, so he's making $9 million a year for leading the football team.
• 52:32
  Now, that's where people start joking that it's a football team with a university attached, and I think that's right.
• 52:38
  And when you have that, then you've got these contracts that are really leading sort of, you've got a university mentality that's all about how do we maintain the system where we're popular, where we're partying, where we're connected to money, where donors are giving in this kind of huge amounts of money, and it becomes very problematic.
• 52:57
  Right, so academics feel pressure not to blow that up by being the target of some campaign by some online group or whatever about something that they're studying that that group thinks is unpalatable.
• 53:10
  You're not supposed to cause the administration any trouble, correct?
• 53:15
  Are academics sufficiently courageous at the moment?
• 53:20
  You know, in the United States where there's no national health care, it's very difficult to be courageous, because as soon as you take a risk and lose your job, you're losing not just your job, you're losing your ability to survive in the world literally if you have any kind of disease that presents itself.
• 53:34
  So the question of courage is a question of context, right? The person is not going to be courageous if they're surrounded.
• 53:40
  I mean, they're not going to do extraordinary feats if they're surrounded completely by people with machine guns pointed at them.
• 53:46
  And in the current academic system in the United States, it's very difficult to be courageous, because we don't have any national health insurance, because there are so few jobs.
• 53:54
  It's very difficult to move between jobs because we have a social media culture where if people come at you, it's going to be very difficult for you to get another job.
• 54:02
  I mean, the lies that have followed me around continue to follow me around.
• 54:05
  I still run into people who challenge me on the basis of things I absolutely never said, you know, and it's very, very frustrating.
• 54:13
  So the question of whether or not people are courageous, I would say some people are managing to challenge systems, but it's very difficult to survive in a system that is so stocked against you, which it is right now in the United States.
• 54:26
  What would you do about this? I mean, short of introducing Medicare for all in the United States, you know, at a more local or granular level, if you were impressive the world and you could weigh the magic wand and have things change.
• 54:39
  What's the sort of shortest distance between here and there?
• 54:43
  Well, national health insurance is something that I think is critically important, not just for academia, but for things like activism and things like journalism for people to be able to survive in systems that are low money-paying systems and to take risks.
• 54:57
  It requires that you have some safety net and we're lacking that safety net.
• 55:00
  But in addition to that, I would like to see faculty be much more involved in governance of universities.
• 55:06
  And I would like to see more universities adopt what are called the Chicago Principles, which is the idea that university administration should not be the arbiters of what we are and are not allowed to say, who's allowed to be invited to campus, what we teach.
• 55:18
  But rather that should be a project of the faculty and the students to have conversations, especially the faculty about what kinds of things we can manage to tolerate.
• 55:26
  And we should, at that point, the Chicago Principles suggest tolerate a very wide variety of viewpoints because ultimately it's going to be a better environment for all of us.
• 55:36
  When does all this leave feminism, Alice?
• 55:40
  Well, I suppose it depends where you define feminism. I mean, people define feminism differently.
• 55:46
  I like the definition of feminism that says that feminism is the radical idea that women are people.
• 55:52
  I think where at least us is the same old recognition that there are certain gender inequities.
• 56:01
  Women are still paid much less than men, at least in the United States. Women are much more likely to be the victims of sexual assault to not be taken seriously by the criminal justice system when they are victims, to not be elected to representative office, to have to suffer much more inequity when they are parents.
• 56:19
  All of these kinds of things still exist. And I think where it leaves feminism is still working on those inequities that exist in the world because they're really unfair and they don't have to exist.
• 56:31
  Do you see a difference in the way that you think about feminism and the way that you're younger students think about feminism?
• 56:37
  There does seem to be a sort of difference between, you know, a lot of my younger friends and colleagues are coming back to the transgender conversation.
• 56:46
  Very interested in non-binary conceptions of gender, in gender self-expression in various ways.
• 56:52
  They're a bit skeptical of any idea that there's any biological difference between the sexes.
• 56:57
  So they're very interested in us all essentially being the same. And I see that in contrast to the feminism of my mother's generation, of Germain Greer and Camille Paglia, where it was about the idea of growing up as a girl being fundamental to the experience of being a woman, and they're being certain characteristics of womanhood that are worth cherishing and not allowing to be, as they would see it, steamrolled by fads of gender expression.
• 57:23
  You know, the feminism that I grew up with certainly had within it the idea that we should not be limited by being girls by a specific conception of gender.
• 57:33
  And so I think one place feminists of my age struggle is when we hear younger people who are biologically female say, I don't think I'm really female because I enjoy playing rough sports or I am interested in being an engineer or I am attracted to women.
• 57:51
  Our feeling is, well, those are all possible within the category of being female, so why do you need to identify as something else?
• 57:59
  So that's I think we're part of attention rises and rises quite legitimately.
• 58:05
  That said, I mean, if somebody does feel that their identity makes more sense in terms of presenting, for example, as gender non-binary, as feeling that they don't make sense in either traditional category, I get it, right?
• 58:19
  I mean, there have been, I suspect that if I had grown up during the current generation and I was the same person I was then, which was somebody who had strong views of the ways, strong views against the ways in which I was being held back simply by ridiculous ideas of what it means to be a female, I might have identified as gender non-binary within that category.
• 58:36
  And I don't think there would be something wrong with that.
• 58:39
  When my four-year-olds are my age, do you think that they're, do you think of their kids, how do you think their kids are going to think about gender and sex and both meanings of the word sex?
• 58:53
  I hope I'm alive to see because I'm very curious, so I hope I'm alive to see what happens.
• 58:59
  I'm very, very curious to see where it goes from here.
• 59:02
  Gender is a human process, culturally speaking. We keep reinventing it in different ways. Different cultures have understood it to mean different things.
• 59:12
  There are patterns across the world. For example, females are much more likely to be sex-shamed around the world.
• 59:18
  Men are more likely around the world to be praised for having lots of sex partners, women get criticized for it.
• 59:24
  So there are some things that are probably hardwired in our brains in terms of how we see males and females.
• 59:30
  But there are many cultures in the world where what it means to be a man looks very different from our concept and what it means to be a man where you can touch other men without any kind of concept that, you know, oh, you might be gay.
• 59:41
  Not that there's anything wrong with being gay, but straight men in America are very uptight about touching each other, about hugging each other, about crying with each other.
• 59:50
  There are many places in the world where straight men are absolutely allowed to do that with no shame whatsoever.
• 59:55
  So gender is a cultural process and a cultural, a kind of collaborative process that we don't think enough about.
• 1:00:04
  And my own feeling is I'm curious to see where it goes. I'm not scared of people who are transgender and gender non-binary.
• 1:00:12
  I don't feel threatened by them and I don't understand why so many people do feel threatened by them.
• 1:00:17
  I just, I don't get it. I think we can beat people together in the world.
• 1:00:22
  There's so much about myself that I don't really totally understand and I don't feel the need to hyper examine it any more than I do other people that we can just be at peace together.
• 1:00:33
  And that would be my goal. My hope is your children's generation will be at peace more than ours is.
• 1:00:39
  Great. Well, I'll have you back on the show in 40 years and we can compare notes and see how it went.
• 1:00:43
  I was trying to thank you so much for joining us on permission to think and on couple of conversations as well as talk to you.
• 1:00:49
  Thank you.