Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / The Gays Who Reject "LGBTQ+"

Transcript

The Gays Who Reject "LGBTQ+" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:02
  G'day humans!
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  And what exactly does it mean to be queer?
• 0:09
  What does it mean to be a member of the LGBTQIA plus community in 2026?
• 0:16
  Today's guest was raised in a Christian cult, essentially,
• 0:20
  an extremely conservative evangelical Christian community called the Lamb of God.
• 0:27
  and he was gay.
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  And when he finally found himself
• 0:30
  and connected with his gayness
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  and thought that everything was going to be peachy
• 0:35
  when he went to Columbia University
• 0:36
  as a mature age student
• 0:38
  after living a troubled life
• 0:40
  of coming to terms with his own sexuality,
• 0:42
  of descending into the pit of depression and despair
• 0:45
  caused by an addiction to heroin,
• 0:48
  he thought that he was entering out of groupthink,
• 0:51
  entering out of a homophobic echo chamber,
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  but he found himself troubled.
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  by the way that gayness and queerness and transness was being articulated on campus
• 1:01
  and then propagated through the wider culture.
• 1:04
  He's written a book about that.
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  It's called Cis White Gay, The Makings of a Gender Heretic.
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  And it has a lot of people talking about whether or not gay rights are best served
• 1:14
  by an LGBTQIA plus coalition that is now as obsessed with anti-colonialism,
• 1:20
  anti-Western ideas, anti-Zionism, Gaza, and a whole other grab bag of ideas
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  as it is with the rights of gay people themselves.
• 1:28
  Ben can be read frequently in The Atlantic,
• 1:30
  The Wall Street Journal, Quillette and The Free Press.
• 1:33
  I hope you enjoy, as much as I did,
• 1:34
  the one, the only Ben Appel.
• 1:44
  Ben, I saw that you wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal
• 1:48
  about how you don't want to sort of be pigeonholed into being queer,
• 1:52
  that you're just a gay man, you're not queer.
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  And then The Advocate, a storied gay newspaper magazine, like lifestyle kind of institution, published an op-ed criticizing you and saying that you're trying to exclude queer people from the conversation and reinstate a power dynamic that has marginalized non-conforming queer people.
• 2:23
  and I left a little bit befuddled about what we're talking about when we're talking about
• 2:29
  queer and gay.
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  What was the point of your piece?
• 2:33
  Yeah.
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  I mean, the point of my piece was I never
• 2:35
  really had that, an issue with the word queer, describing myself as queer, if it was just a
• 2:42
  synonym for gay.
• 2:44
  Um, you know, but over the years, what I've come to understand is that it
• 2:50
  represents a politics.
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  It's a political stance.
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  And there's a lot bound up with that label.
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  So
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  there might be some people that use queer as a synonym for gay, and they might be fine with that.
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  But coming from the academic world, Columbia and so on, learning more about how queer theory itself
• 3:16
  is kind of infused into all this and the dynamics there.
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  And then kind of suddenly seeing that there were a lot of otherwise straight individuals
• 3:25
  identifying as queer, it felt really kind of weird.
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  And I just didn't want to be a part of it anymore because I didn't find myself perfectly
• 3:38
  politically aligned with all of these individuals.
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  It was very, it put us into a box and I felt like it was regressive and made things a lot smaller for me, not bigger.
• 3:51
  I hear people talk about how there are like straight people identifying as queer.
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  I don't know any.
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  I don't think I've met any.
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  Who are these people who supposedly like what are they?
• 4:00
  Are these university students with blue hair who feel like they're a slightly kind of gender queer?
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  And so they call themselves queer because they want to embody both genders and show solidarity for trans people.
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  And is that what we're talking about?
• 4:12
  Yeah, essentially.
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  I mean, it's a stereotype.
• 4:15
  It might sound cliche now, but that is really what it's like.
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  I mean, when I was an intern at GLAAD in my first summer at Columbia, and I was an intern.
• 4:27
  GLAAD is the Gay and Lesbian something or other?
• 4:31
  the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation that's what was that was what it stood for now
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  it's just known by the acronym glad it is no longer the gay and lesbian alliance against
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  defamation because so as not to exclude queer people transgender people etc so like many of
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  these many of these non-profits that started out as gay and lesbian organizations stonewall in the
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  uk i think it's acorn in australia uh they've now become essentially um let's just say rainbow
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  affiliated uh mega instant you know non-profits that try to uh push for whatever the sort of most
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  expansionist view of deconstructing gender and sexuality is rather than fighting strictly for
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  the rights of gays and lesbians precisely and that is exactly what i was reacting to because
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  it didn't jive with my identity and how I understood myself as a gay person.
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  Also, I don't
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  have any desire, I don't see it as fruitful to deconstruct the sex binary to pretend like
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  the sex binary isn't real or that sex differences aren't real and very consequential.
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  That, yes, there are absolutely edge cases, you know, where people have disorders of sexual
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  development, DSDs, you know, used to be known as intersex.
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  That is a very real thing.
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  But it's
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  about, you know, 0.02% of the human population.
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  So, you know, that does not undermine the reality
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  that sex is binary.
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  So I don't have any need or desire to pretend like the so-called reality that
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  we've constructed based on, you know, scientific evidence and what we've gathered from observation
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  and years and years and years of learning and understanding ourselves.
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  I don't have any desire to, I don't think that that's oppressive.
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  And I don't think that the solution to, you know, creating more equality,
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  either between the sexes or races or whatever,
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  I don't think that that needs to be part of the equation.
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  So, yeah.
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  So, I mean, there's this sort of hysterical, you know,
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  I guess 2020 version of like the trans movement which was like maximally obsessed with denying
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  that there's any biological difference between males and females and you know sex as well as
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  gender is a spectrum and you know a lot of that has now been instantiated into law which we're
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  sort of still living with the ramifications of many jurisdictions like the state that I live in
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  basically give you sex-based preferences depending on how you assert your own
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  gender to be.
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  So they've kind of bought into the muddling of sex and gender such that if I
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  can find one person who's known me for more than 12 months to assert that I am a female and I say
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  that I'm a female, then under the law of the state where I live, I should be able to avail myself of
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  all the privileges of being a female.
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  That obviously is a bit batty, but what do you make
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  of when you say you don't want to sort of deconstruct biology what are you and you carved
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  out intersex people you didn't carve out transsexual people what do you make of the
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  i suppose the stronger claim of the trans movement which would be okay okay there are males and
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  females in the biological kingdom and we all know that a male dog and a female dog are different and
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  like a male you know plant and a female plant are different but there is this minority of people who
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  have been born who persistently insist that they're in the wrong body and the only way that
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  they seem to be able to live fulfilling lives is to uh transition so doesn't that deconstruct the
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  sort of rigidity of the biology that you were just talking about no no it doesn't because you know
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  taking synthetic hormones if you are let's say if you're a male and you believe that you are
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  born in the wrong body which is a belief system and and it is based on a belief it's it's not a
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  scientific reality or a proven scientific reality no one is born in the wrong body we are our bodies
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  um but that's more of like i guess a philosophical debate i'm not sure but anyway you know i mean
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  isn't it though a psychological debate like there's all kinds of psychological conditions like
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  um yeah i don't know you know clinical depression yeah no i don't you're setting the bar for what
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  is scientifically valid too high if you want like them to physiologically show up with a vagina in
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  order to be a a woman like there's obviously something going on in the brains of a certain
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  minority of people that makes it impossible for them to live happy fulfilling lives no i don't
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  deny that reality at all but what i also don't deny is material reality you said you just said
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  showing up as someone with a vagina, or you're talking about the physical parts that makes
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  one a male or a female, that is required.
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  And so I don't deny the reality of people experiencing
• 9:39
  that distress or that dysphoria at all.
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  But I do not think that that trumps reality.
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  If I
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  believe that I am something, it does not have any effect on what the reality of the situation
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  is materially.
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  And again, I support trans people.
• 10:02
  I've worked in trans rights.
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  I certainly
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  want to create greater space for gender nonconformity.
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  That was the primary motivator
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  of why I got involved in, if you want to call it LGBT activism, but activism from the beginning,
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  I was a profoundly girly kid, very, very girly.
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  And I was confused, are you a boy or a girl?
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  I was,
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  you know, called slurs.
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  I grew up in Christian fundamentalism.
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  I had a really difficult time
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  with that.
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  My, because I was, you know, this was before, you know, young people were identifying
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  as trans and, or gender, you know, so-called gender affirming care was really a solid option,
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  And especially in the United States, this was in the 90s, in the early 90s, mid 90s,
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  my coping mechanism was to totally masculinize, to defeminize.
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  I was constantly self-scanning for signs of femininity.
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  And I became kind of a shell of a human because in a lot of respects, I lost so much of my
• 11:06
  vitality, because I was so constantly distracted by, oh my God, don't look too swishy, don't say
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  these words, don't use words with S's in them.
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  I had to cut my hair, walk differently.
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  Everything
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  had to change.
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  So as I got older and I came out and I understood how much of my gender,
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  if you want to call it that, performance was something that was, yes, absolutely the result
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  of masculinizing through sexual maturity and testosterone, but it was also something that was
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  in me specifically socially conditioned because I was reacting to my surroundings.
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  I was like,
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  I want to create a space where, or create a world where, or help create a world where young people
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  grow up who these inherently gender non-conforming individuals who are going to be a minority
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  of them.
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  There's always going to be a minority of gender non-conforming boys and girls.
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  The majority will behave typically, typically like the typical male and the typical female, but there's always going to be a minority of males and females that behave more like the opposite sex.
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  So what can we do about that?
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  How can we create more space so that they're not growing up in these conditions where it's like they're being told that they're bad or they're being told that they have to change everything about themselves to fit in?
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  I really am all for gender nonconformity.
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  And if you want to call it that queerness, if we're talking about gender nonconformity and queerness, I'm all for that.
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  And I really appreciate that and value that.
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  I do not think that everybody needs to act like me or act like a typical male or a typical female.
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  It is actually the exact opposite.
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  And what I became, what really activated me when I was working at GLAAD and then, you know, and in 2017, 2018, 2019, when I was at Columbia and I started understanding and learning about the medicalization of young people where they were arresting their sexual development and feeding them opposite sex hormones to kind of disguise them as the opposite sex.
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  It was all about adult trans people are unhappy because they don't pass, especially trans
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  women, you know, males that they don't pass.
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  So, hey, if we stop them from sexually maturing and we arrest their puberty, then they're
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  never going to masculinize to begin with.
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  So then if we just feed them estrogen, continue to deny them testosterone, then they'll have
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  a better likelihood of passing as women and then they'll be happy.
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  Everything will be great and they'll just seamlessly blend into society.
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  And I was like medically engineering young gender nonconforming people to be, you know, simulator of the, of the opposite sex.
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  That does not seem to me like expanding what's possible for gender nonconforming people by any stretch of the imagination.
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  Not just because it was like, but it's denying them sexual maturity.
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  It's denying them a normal, it's, it's denying them the ability to be able to grow up and just make it to adulthood with their bodies intact, with their, with healthy endocrine systems.
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  it was it was regressive and to me it was very regressive i do not deny the reality that gender
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  non-conformity is real the gender dysphoria distress is real but i'm talking about the
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  solutions and what is actually in my opinion i guess progressive or more more of an opportunity
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  rather than something that's sending us back to decades ago and just to tease out that that
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  progressiveness that progressive strain in case people are kind of missing it what i'm hearing
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  you say is that coming out of a very conservative christian household where you had to conform to a
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  particular uh explicit presentation of what masculinity was yeah you expected that the
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  quote-unquote queer spaces that you were going into like the gay and lesbian alliance and
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  Columbia University would be pro-weirdness and pro-camp and pro-playing-around-with-gender
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  norms, but you actually found that the context in the 2010s in which camp masculinity was framed
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  was invariably a trans one, and that it was actually a way of implying that boys and men
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  who are not conventionally masculine might be, in fact, trans women rather than just
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  part of the rainbow of diversity of all the shapes that gay masculinity comes in?
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  Precisely.
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  Yes.
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  I mean, and just to back up for just one second, it wasn't actually,
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  and I mean, absolutely within that conservative Christian environment growing up, it was
• 15:51
  fundamentalist Christianity.
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  It was called a Christian covenant community called the Lamb
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  of God is what I grew up in.
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  You know, the women were handmaids and males were the leaders,
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  It was like that.
• 16:00
  But oddly, and I write about this in my book, that I didn't really become so aware of how different I was in terms of being as effeminate as I was until we left that community when I was about 12 and we were ripped out of it and then I was put in public school.
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  and that was where all these kids made me very aware when we were in that community it was such
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  a tiny tight-knit community there were four kids in my grade including me the only thing that was
• 16:29
  important was that like we were on fire for jesus and we evangelized and we prayed and worshiped
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  and prayed over each other and spoke in tongues and all these things like that was that was the
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  the priority it did nobody was there weren't really it wasn't really an in crowd it really
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  wasn't made known to me how different I was.
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  Now, were individuals, were adults aware of my
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  difference and what it foretold most likely about my future in terms of, oh, he's going to grow up
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  to be a homosexual, which is essentially the worst thing that you can be in the eyes of God?
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  And did
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  they instill in me these ideas about when that happens?
• 17:07
  Not saying you're going to be gay, but
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  But really making sure I understood how evil homosexuality was so that when the time came that if I was confronted with this, I would know what to do about it or what not to do or whatever.
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  That was that's the difference with with my with my story there.
• 17:25
  But, you know, yeah, that's it.
• 17:27
  That's interesting in itself, isn't it?
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  It's almost like if homosexuality is just not an option, then you feel less pressure not to be a homosexual because the cult has ruled it out.
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  So it's almost like even not on the table.
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  So you don't feel that you're bad.
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  But then when you actually come into a context in which homosexuality is possible, then you're subjected to homophobia because there's like it's like there's no homophobia in Iran, supposedly, according to the Iranians.
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  You know, it's like because there are no gay people.
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  And if you're really queer, then you just get a government funded sex change operation.
• 18:04
  Right, which is, in a way, kind of similar to the dynamic that what I'm describing here.
• 18:09
  So yes, like you said, like where I expected people to be campy and playing with gender,
• 18:13
  and that absolutely goes on.
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  People who would argue with me would be like, what are you talking
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  about?
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  That's everywhere.
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  And I'm like, well, yeah, in a way, first of all, a lot of it's
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  really performative.
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  But secondly, yeah, it is.
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  But again, like you just said, going back to
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  identifying these things as somehow evidence that one is trans, one is not the sex that they are,
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  one is born in the wrong body, one must medicalize, you know, chemically castrate themselves,
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  deprive their body, males must deprive their body of testosterone, which keeps us healthy and
• 18:48
  functioning well, you know, must destroy our endocrine, must castrate us, like these kind of
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  things all of this saying that you know this somehow makes you something that you are not
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  that to me is regressive and again where was this idea been that males must do this if they can
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  like i don't you know a lot of people who are normies here will say well the vast majority of
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  people who get you know who have toyed around with transgenderism or with gender queerness or
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  whatever, because they were, you know, they're playfully trying to problematize their own
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  masculinity by wearing a dress while they've got a beard or, and going by they, them.
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  We're not
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  medicalized.
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  We're not forced into medicalization.
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  It was, it became more of an option than it had
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  previously been.
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  But the vast majority of people who identify as queer or trans are using,
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  just using language.
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  And it may be unseemly for them to require the rest of us to put our
• 19:42
  pronouns in our email signatures if we work for some woke multinational.
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  But at the end of the
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  day you know we'll move on from that and everyone will get on with their lives what's what's the
• 19:50
  problem no and and that and that's a good point i think that having having been immersed in this
• 19:57
  world and seeing people who have and absolutely not been forced although you can argue that you
• 20:04
  know a young kid doesn't have the agency to advocate for themselves if if they are you know
• 20:12
  put in these situations and reality is framed this way, like you have always felt this way
• 20:18
  because your body is wrong or something is wrong with you or you were born in the wrong body and
• 20:23
  kind of that framing.
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  I'm more of an encouraging of parents keeping kids grounded and rooted in
• 20:32
  reality.
• 20:32
  But anyway, I am in this world and I know many people who, again, were not forced or told to
• 20:39
  but were guided towards medicalization and have had really deleterious effects from it, have really suffered and realized not even in every instance that they were just gay people.
• 20:53
  These were individuals that found this route through different avenues, whether it was like they went to college and they got really immersed in the kind of radical queer movement there.
• 21:03
  And that was part of that rebellion against nor Western norms and institutions was to embody a radical like it's almost like embodying radicalism by, you know, by changing different aspects of your body, whether it's getting mastectomies and so on.
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  but also a lot of gay people that suffered because of this who were affirmed when they were young
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  and who attempted or tried to live as the opposite sex for a long time,
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  who did go on to undergo bottom surgery, who perhaps maybe didn't go undergo bottom surgery.
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  Some of them haven't.
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  But then coming out of the other side and getting really sick and also dealing with very profound health consequences still.
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  You know, bottom surgeries, while not the majority of, let's say, trans identifying males or trans women do not get bottom surgery.
• 21:58
  Bottom surgeries are kind of notoriously.
• 22:02
  There's not really high success rates like in just in terms of oftentimes, I think it's probably in somewhere in the 40 percent range, 44 percent.
• 22:12
  Anyway, whatever it is, they require multiple second hospitalizations for really serious health issues.
• 22:19
  People have fistulas, which is they have holes in between their anal cavity and their and different organs, which creates infection after infection after infection.
• 22:29
  They ultimately, gay men who ended up taking this route can't have either neovaginal sex or anal sex because of the infection and because of the pain and the difficulty of the experience or they might not be able to orgasm and have that possibility anymore.
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  And it profoundly affects their lives.
• 22:47
  And so understanding this and knowing people that were like this, I understand that there are different routes and that some people have successful experiences with this.
• 22:56
  you know we could talk about that but yeah it's not about a must it's more about the entire
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  framing of it and really teaching young our younger generations the next generations of children
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  because this is heavily encouraged in school curricula which is undermining I mean in law
• 23:19
  like you just said I mean if kids are growing up in a world where it's like if I say that I'm a
• 23:23
  woman than I am a woman.
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  Our job as adults is to help young people understand reality as it is,
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  because we can tell kids anything, and that's how they'll grow up believing that the way that the
• 23:39
  world is.
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  So we're doing a huge disservice to young people by pretending that things aren't
• 23:48
  as they actually are.
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  And I think that it's very, very harmful.
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  And so constructing that reality of,
• 23:57
  yes, not everyone's necessarily medicalizing, but if you have people saying that this makes
• 24:02
  one a boy or this makes one a girl, or your peers here, they're all identifying not as female
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  because A, B, C, D. They like short hair and play football, and they just don't feel that way.
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  kids feel all kinds of things so they feel discomfort puberty is very you know an uncomfortable
• 24:23
  distressing period if you're framing it as this could be a sign or is a sign of some kind of
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  gender dysphoria and you're and and the and you are it's it's hugely it's it's really problematic
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  and a lot of people get hurt and you're actually you're making me think of the analogy to to gayness
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  here to the sexuality spectrum when you talk about the gender spectrum because you know so
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  puberty is very confusing lots of young people going through puberty do all kinds of things and
• 24:56
  feel all kinds of things that will not stick for the rest of their lives you only have to look at
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  the amount of same-sex meddling amongst 13 to 15 year old boys who do not turn out to be gay
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  to realize that they're trying to contextualize the surge of hormones and the curiosity and their
• 25:16
  self-understanding and you know get their rocks off in whatever ways that they might uh you know
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  the english private school system or anything i see you know see any any environment in which uh
• 25:26
  young males are given free reign uh and you'll see just how messy the boundaries of straightness
• 25:31
  and gayness are at that age in particular and if every single um urge that a 13 year old
• 25:39
  had to like look at another boy's willy was interpreted as being through the prism of that
• 25:45
  means that you're gay then we would live in a very different world we sort of do live in that
• 25:50
  world with regard to gender in the sense that every child who expresses a desire to put on a dress or
• 25:57
  you know to to exhibit behaviors that are not conventionally masculine for the past five or
• 26:03
  ten years has all of a sudden been sort of contextualized into this through this scene
• 26:08
  through this prism of, oh, well, we should be certain to emphasize the fact that sex is a
• 26:15
  spectrum, gender is a spectrum, you can be both, you could be either, you can change it.
• 26:21
  And yeah, I think that does, certainly in terms of the implications that it has for healthcare
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  and for the law.
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  For example, a psychiatrist who has a young person come to them with
• 26:35
  you know suspected gender dysphoria and has to evaluate whether or not this 15 year old girl say
• 26:41
  is actually a transgender man or whether or not she's going through a phase that might be partly
• 26:48
  social contagion partly some other psychological issue that's going on perhaps you know she's got
• 26:54
  anxiety perhaps she's got depression perhaps she's on the autism spectrum we don't know
• 26:58
  those kinds of questions have been framed of late as uh what do they call it conversion therapy
• 27:05
  essentially like they've been poo-pooed by the uh the sort of uh lgbtqia plus lobby as being a way
• 27:12
  for psychiatrists to try to impose cisgenderness and anti-trans uh behaviors onto young trans
• 27:20
  people and i mean i've interviewed psychiatrists including the head of the australian psychiatric
• 27:26
  association i think that's the name of the outfit who in 2022 came on my radio show and said like
• 27:34
  Thank you for even talking to us, because I feel like the girl at prom who's standing on the sidelines and never getting invited to dance by anyone in the media, because nobody wants to actually talk about the fact that there is a real, genuine, vibrant, but somewhat secret debate amongst psychiatrists about what to do about young people who are presenting with what the LGBTQIA plus lobby wants us to regard as being a slam dunk case of gender dysphoria.
• 27:59
  But what we would want to probe a little bit more before recommending that the best solution for this is to inhabit the opposite sexes, you know, gender identity.
• 28:11
  So that's just what comes to mind.
• 28:14
  Yeah.
• 28:14
  And I mean, I think that it's just really important for people to understand the history of where this all comes from.
• 28:20
  I mean, you might be familiar with this, but this medicalizing, identifying young children as transgender or born in the wrong body and then this idea of freezing their, you know, preventing their natural puberty and then giving them opposite sex hormones to live and pass as the opposite sex.
• 28:42
  That began in the 80s and the 90s in Amsterdam.
• 28:45
  Dutch clinicians saw that, again, adult trans women weren't necessarily faring so well.
• 28:53
  They weren't really able to have quality relationships.
• 28:57
  They were just not functioning as well as they could in society.
• 29:01
  And they attributed that, again, to a large part of it was their inability to pass as real females.
• 29:11
  So after masculinity—
• 29:12
  Pass is kind of just for people who aren't up with the lingo, meaning that a person would not suspect that you're not a biological female when you walk down the street.
• 29:20
  Right.
• 29:20
  And so, you know, so they said, well, you know, once a male goes through puberty, you know, their shoulders will broaden, you know, they have different bone structure, hair, all of these things.
• 29:32
  And certain things that you can correct with, you know, whether it's electrolysis or with surgery, not correct, but change with electrolysis or surgeries, different things like that.
• 29:40
  But then certain things, you know, there's not a lot you can do about broad shoulders or height or different things like that.
• 29:47
  The Adam's apple, the giveaway.
• 29:49
  The Adam's apple.
• 29:49
  Yeah.
• 29:50
  So, well, you can shave that down, but you know, so that, that actually there are things that you can do there, but you know, there's just a lot that, that, that masculinizing, it's just, these things don't reverse.
• 30:00
  So they said it was entirely based on this idea.
• 30:04
  It was all based on this idea that these kids will be happier if they can pass as the opposite sex.
• 30:14
  Well, the problem with that is that how do we identify who these kids are going to be when they when when you have this girly little boy or this really butch little young girl?
• 30:24
  And of course, they are experiencing maybe some kind of the very least social dysphoria or alienation because they're very different from they perhaps are bullied.
• 30:35
  their parents might reject, all of these different things, then of course they're going to be like,
• 30:39
  there's something wrong with me.
• 30:40
  I'm so different.
• 30:42
  And so, you know, if, if how, how do you determine
• 30:46
  which kid is going to, to grow up just to be gay or to not even be gay, but just to be whatever.
• 30:54
  And a kid that is going to continue to want to live or attempt to live and pass is the opposite
• 31:01
  sex.
• 31:03
  So they were convinced we have it down.
• 31:06
  We can determine it because we see that it's
• 31:09
  persistent.
• 31:10
  It starts from a young age.
• 31:11
  These young boys are like, I'm really a girl.
• 31:13
  I'm
• 31:13
  really a girl.
• 31:14
  I want to wear dresses.
• 31:15
  I want to do this.
• 31:16
  I want to do that.
• 31:16
  And they're just
• 31:17
  really insistent on this for a long period of time.
• 31:20
  And their depression and their anxiety
• 31:22
  gets even worse when puberty begins.
• 31:25
  And as puberty continues, it gets worse and worse and
• 31:28
  worse.
• 31:29
  Ah, those are the trans people.
• 31:31
  Like those are the people that, that we know are going to be
• 31:34
  this way.
• 31:35
  So they start just experimenting and they say, let's start giving these because
• 31:41
  puberty blockers had been around for precocious puberty and also for, you know, sexually
• 31:45
  castrating adult sex offenders, male sex offenders, and then also for treating cancer.
• 31:52
  So they said,
• 31:53
  we'll just give these kids, they started with like, you know, one or two, and then they had,
• 31:59
  they started studying them, and they had this cohort of young people that they began with.
• 32:04
  And it was about 70 kids.
• 32:07
  And, you know, some of them were lost to follow up.
• 32:10
  It wasn't a very good
• 32:13
  way of going about this.
• 32:15
  But what's important for people to know is that 60, what is it, 61, 62
• 32:21
  of the 70 were homosexual.
• 32:25
  They identified as being attracted to the same sex.
• 32:29
  One was
• 32:30
  heterosexual.
• 32:31
  The rest were bisexual.
• 32:32
  One of them didn't know.
• 32:33
  And one identified as heterosexual
• 32:35
  out of the 70 kids.
• 32:36
  So when someone like me is talking about like, hey, how many of these kids
• 32:42
  just left alone, they might come to, who knows, maybe be able to become comfortable with living
• 32:50
  in their bodies as they are.
• 32:52
  And maybe we can just create more space for these gender non-conforming
• 32:56
  individuals in society rather than requiring them to change everything about themselves so that
• 33:01
  to our eyes, they pass as something that's more acceptable in this framework of this very rigid
• 33:09
  sex binary, just in terms of how it's expressed via gender and how we see and interpret it in
• 33:16
  the world in society.
• 33:17
  So, you know, that is what really distressed me when I started learning about
• 33:23
  all of these things was, oh, I'm not crazy that these kids were likely just like me or a variation
• 33:31
  of me.
• 33:31
  But at the very least, they were they were same sex attracted people who were were denied the
• 33:38
  opportunity just to grow up, you know, healthy and normally one of them, a male died.
• 33:44
  His his
• 33:45
  puberty was interrupted.
• 33:48
  And the natural Dutch protocol that they developed from the beginning
• 33:51
  was they get puberty blockers, like around the age of 12, they start cross-sex hormones age 14,
• 33:58
  16, 16 years old.
• 34:00
  And then when they reach 18, they get bottom surgery.
• 34:03
  Because if they remove
• 34:04
  the testes, if they do all that, then they don't have to worry about blocking puberty anymore.
• 34:08
  and they can just continue to give them estrogen and try to simulate a female and a male body.
• 34:17
  And what a consequence of blocking puberty, and you can hear surgeons, queer surgeons,
• 34:24
  you know, queer identifying surgeons, individuals that work in these worlds saying how this is
• 34:28
  a major problem with having successful bottom surgeries is that when you puberty block a boy,
• 34:36
  their testicles, their scrotum, their genitals stop growing.
• 34:42
  It doesn't grow naturally.
• 34:43
  Well, what do they use for vaginoplasties for these adults?
• 34:46
  They use scrotal tissue and penile tissue to construct these canals.
• 34:53
  So when these boys reach 18, 19 or adulthood and it's time to give them these vaginoplasties,
• 35:01
  they don't have enough tissue.
• 35:02
  So what they do is they extract pieces from their colon.
• 35:06
  And they think, okay, this will work.
• 35:07
  We can just line it with that.
• 35:09
  Well, this boy in the original cohort got an infection.
• 35:14
  It became infection and he died.
• 35:16
  He died in the hospital because of this specific infection.
• 35:20
  Infections are, this is still a process that goes on with taking sections of the colon
• 35:27
  to construct vaginal canals when there's not enough scrotal tissue to be able to construct
• 35:33
  these canals.
• 35:34
  So this is a very like real problem and an issue.
• 35:39
  So when you have members of the earliest cohort actually dying, others are lost to follow up.
• 35:46
  This is not like, hey, this hang on.
• 35:49
  I'm sure the like in the early days of any procedure, it's always like experimental and sounds somewhat barbaric.
• 35:56
  the the number of people who are getting like i i think there's a risk of conflating a few things
• 36:02
  here right there's the there's the cultural uh sort of emphasis on the truly humanitarian thing
• 36:10
  to do to be contextualizing gender difference through a prism of trans nurse right then there's
• 36:18
  like um puberty blockers which are not uncommon uh but still not you know the majority of the way
• 36:26
  that we treat gender non-conforming adolescents.
• 36:29
  And then there's what you're talking about,
• 36:31
  which it strikes me is really an issue
• 36:34
  for the medical profession.
• 36:36
  I mean, the question of whether or not
• 36:38
  there's an infection because a very rare operation
• 36:42
  that is only undertaken in the most extreme cases
• 36:44
  to avoid probably suicide.
• 36:45
  What do you mean rare and extreme cases?
• 36:48
  What do you mean?
• 36:48
  I mean, the proportion of people who are ticking a box
• 36:51
  that says that they're genderqueer or trans
• 36:55
  who go on to get their get bottom surgery is vanishingly small
• 37:05
  okay i mean we're you know there is not a there is not a logical pipeline from the camp eight-year-old
• 37:12
  boy in the primary school who likes you know wearing a dress to that person becoming an 18
• 37:18
  year old who is choosing to get bottom surgery and then getting an infection and dying because
• 37:23
  a piece of their colon was used to construct an artificial like that well no it just in terms of
• 37:29
  of of young people dying no but what i'm saying is is that and and yeah you you are right about
• 37:36
  that absolutely what i'm saying is that people not understand i just was saying people need to
• 37:43
  understand the history of this because the way that it the narrative has developed over the
• 37:49
  years is that this is just old hat.
• 37:51
  We've been just doing this for like kids have trans kids
• 37:54
  have been around forever and we've just been, you know, and everybody's just scared of it because
• 38:00
  suddenly Donald Trump says, Oh, like it's, this is not an established protocol.
• 38:07
  This was like,
• 38:08
  huh, actually they're not really, this isn't really working out so well.
• 38:15
  And, but it just
• 38:18
  exploded.
• 38:19
  It became, in the European countries where this protocol continued, where they
• 38:24
  continued to try to perfect it and develop a better strategy for treating young people
• 38:31
  under the guise of, yes, puberty blockers are the route to take.
• 38:35
  And yes, you know,
• 38:36
  cross-sex homeowner at 16 are the route to take.
• 38:38
  And yes, likely some kind of surgery
• 38:42
  when they get of age, that will perhaps be the route to take.
• 38:46
  They were exercising a lot more
• 38:48
  caution.
• 38:49
  When this came to the United States, when people started these practices in 2007
• 38:55
  at Boston Children's, at first it was operating in the same way, like caution, caution, caution.
• 39:02
  Very few people were doing this, but then it exploded in the United States because it became
• 39:08
  gender affirming care.
• 39:10
  The protocol in European countries was not to affirm, affirm, affirm,
• 39:14
  affirm, affirm.
• 39:15
  Like you're doing a, you're violating a kid's human rights if you don't
• 39:19
  immediately say, oh, you're a girl.
• 39:20
  Okay.
• 39:20
  Yes, you're a girl.
• 39:21
  What's your new name?
• 39:22
  There was so much more exploring and trying long periods of, of, of psychological evaluation.
• 39:30
  Again, to me, in my opinion, I think that the entire construct is batshit crazy.
• 39:35
  I knew from
• 39:36
  the first time I heard that they were puberty blocking gender non-conforming, I thought that
• 39:39
  was the most insane fucking thing I've ever heard in my life.
• 39:42
  And I know I'm not alone in that.
• 39:44
  However, with that being said, I don't automatically think that these people were
• 39:48
  all nefarious or they were, they were trying to help individuals, but they were just operating
• 39:53
  from a place that I just don't fundamentally agree with ideologically in any way, shape or form.
• 39:59
  So,
• 40:00
  So, but when it came to the state, it became really, there were so many things.
• 40:06
  There was a confluence of variables.
• 40:08
  It wasn't just like, oh, money, it's a moneymaker, although that was part of it.
• 40:12
  Or it wasn't just, it just became something where kids were affirmed.
• 40:16
  And so the individuals who brought these protocols to the United States were and are
• 40:23
  still very distressed by the path that these protocols have taken.
• 40:28
  If you talk to people like Dr. Laura Edwards-Lieper, who was the head psychologist at Boston Children's, the first gender clinic in the U.S., who brought the Dutch protocol to the U.S., who helped establish it here because she worked with the Dutch clinicians under them and in Amsterdam.
• 40:44
  She is hugely distressed by the path that this has taken because she knows that there are so many different factors, that kids could just be gay, that there are many different pathways to identifying as trans as the opposite sex, especially now.
• 41:01
  There's social influence.
• 41:03
  There's different sexual proclivities, whether we talk about men being aroused by the thought of themselves as women and wanting to identify as women for that reason.
• 41:14
  Anyway, with that being said, you know, I'm not just it's it's just exploded and it's gone down.
• 41:24
  It's not what it initially intended to be, which I don't agree with anybody, but it's not even what it initially was supposed to be.
• 41:31
  Now all these European nations are reversing course and the systematic evidence reviews which are coming out where people are trying to replicate these studies, they're consistently showing that no, kids are not faring better.
• 41:45
  The depression and their anxiety is not in fact decreasing and it's not in fact saving lives.
• 41:51
  The suicide where kids are just going to kill themselves if they don't have that, that is not a reality by any stretch of the imagination.
• 41:58
  There was always this claim that, what was the slogan?
• 42:01
  It's better to have a live daughter than a dead son, to the parents who would bring a gender non-conforming son to a gender clinic, which is so kind of insidious because it's such an emotionally manipulative way of framing a complicated issue in the most simplistic possible terms.
• 42:21
  A hundred percent.
• 42:22
  Yeah, go ahead.
• 42:24
  Well, I was just going to say on the politics of it, I mean, look, America is always a bit extra, like the rest of the world is fully aware of this.
• 42:30
  You know, America takes, you know, one little insight, you know, America goes, oh, you know, people of color are not adequately represented yet in, you know, in the power structures of the United States.
• 42:41
  And then, bam, you've got wokeness and the 1619 project and everything's overboard.
• 42:45
  Oh, you know, we've got breakthroughs in longevity.
• 42:47
  Bam, you've got Silicon Valley, like ice baths and like, you know, optimization and everything.
• 42:52
  And part of that dynamic, that kind of to and fro of like Americans doing things, you know, 100% more in either extreme than the rest of the rich democracies seem to, at least since the war, is that now you've got, you mentioned Trump, this backlash.
• 43:09
  And so you've got the phenomenon of, I mean, I'm sort of, I suppose, presupposing or begging the question by calling it a backlash because LGBTQIA plus activists would say that what's happened to trans rights in the past few years is just a natural extension of deep-seated American bigotry towards gender non-conforming people.
• 43:30
  I know you would argue that it doesn't come from nowhere and that there's a dynamic of kind of pushing the right into this overreaction.
• 43:40
  How do you see that kind of playing out and how do you feel about what trans people are going through right now?
• 43:47
  Well, I do see that as I do see it as a backlash, but I see it as, you know, Newton's third law, you know, for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
• 43:57
  I do think that it's really physics can really explain what's going on politically.
• 44:03
  And it's kind of always been that way.
• 44:05
  But especially now, because of how everything's so hyper, you know, supercharged with social media and with our attention economy, but the left is going to react to the right, the right's going to react to the left.
• 44:17
  going to react to the left.
• 44:18
  I mean, when Trump came along and started running in 2015 and people
• 44:24
  were really up in arms because he's this, you know, bombastic, everything, you were there,
• 44:30
  we were all there.
• 44:31
  You know, these special interest groups reacted.
• 44:35
  They, first of all,
• 44:37
  raised loads of money, millions and millions of dollars, positioning themselves as like,
• 44:43
  we're going to be the resistance against this individual that's coming into power and coming
• 44:49
  into office.
• 44:50
  And it really worked out fairly well for them in a lot of ways, because a lot of these
• 44:55
  more radical people who were kind of back at the helm or had always been at the helm of these
• 45:00
  organizations, but were especially back at the helm after, you know, all of us, you know, normal
• 45:06
  gays, assimilationist gays got out of the way.
• 45:09
  We got our, you know, we can serve in the military
• 45:11
  and we can get married.
• 45:12
  Now, let's get back to what we were doing,
• 45:14
  you know, back 60s, 70s, 80s,
• 45:16
  where, you know, we're trying to overturn the table
• 45:19
  and create a socialist YouTube, whatever it is.
• 45:23
  You know, let's radicalize, let's radicalize.
• 45:25
  It was the perfect opportunity for them to be like,
• 45:30
  everything that comes from that side
• 45:34
  is framed as further and further far right
• 45:37
  and of Trump, Trump light or Trump,
• 45:41
  itself, MAGA, MAGA light, MAGA, everything was coded that way.
• 45:45
  And it's like, okay, so
• 45:46
  what we're proposing seems as crazy as it could be, seems normal and, or seems the right,
• 45:58
  empathic, compassionate, you know, social justice minded way.
• 46:04
  And people will,
• 46:07
  a lot of people don't have the bandwidth to really go into a lot of these issues so they're like okay
• 46:11
  this this organization or these people whom i trusted for so long and i know are the good guys
• 46:18
  they're telling me that this is this is the next frontier in whether it's gay rights or trans or
• 46:24
  lgbt sure like i'm absolutely gonna go are you saying kids are killing themselves oh my god
• 46:31
  absolutely they need you're saying the republicans are trying to deny them the medicine that's going
• 46:36
  to save their life.
• 46:37
  It just goes on from there.
• 46:39
  So it really is a reaction.
• 46:42
  And so you see
• 46:46
  so much of it.
• 46:46
  Everything's just so reactionary.
• 46:48
  The more that the right comes forward or MAGA or
• 46:53
  Trump has come forward with some kind of proposals, the left is going to come back just as
• 46:58
  hard.
• 46:59
  And the rest of us, the majority of us are really going to be bopping around in the middle
• 47:04
  and kind of finding ourselves living in the world of these radical extremes that are,
• 47:08
  we're just, we're just caught up in their, in their fight or crossfire.
• 47:12
  And so I think that
• 47:13
  that's a huge explainer for it.
• 47:15
  I really, really do.
• 47:17
  Trans identity, this is not across the board.
• 47:19
  This is not everyone.
• 47:20
  There are trans individuals who are just like, I was gendered as fuck.
• 47:23
  I want
• 47:23
  to live my life as the da da da da.
• 47:24
  But trans identity is so infused or has become so infused
• 47:29
  with a kind of a leftist positionality like a leftist this it is bound up in this idea that
• 47:41
  you know of intersectionality you know this kind of like I will I will be marginalized I will
• 47:47
  marginalize myself where I am marginalized I will identify this way and it is I am now embodying the
• 47:53
  politics of of of the necessity to rid the world of of capitalism and to rid the world of of you
• 48:04
  know it's all in the same bucket you know cis supremacy white supremacy capitalism colonialism
• 48:09
  it's like these things are all of that same problem and so i am i am now embodying this
• 48:16
  politics of deconstructing or hoping to deconstruct the reality that all these nefarious
• 48:26
  actors, these cis white straight men have built that just works for them and people like them,
• 48:32
  those at the top.
• 48:33
  What we're living in, this society, the world that we've constructed,
• 48:37
  it only works for them.
• 48:38
  It doesn't work for any of us.
• 48:40
  And so we need to really tear this down
• 48:43
  and kind of start over from scratch or get to get somewhere different.
• 48:47
  And it's all part and parcel
• 48:48
  of the same thing.
• 48:49
  Again, that's not for everyone, but for younger generations and for the way that
• 48:53
  it is framed within these worlds, whether it's special interest groups and so on, that is behind
• 49:01
  the framing of it.
• 49:03
  So I guess the argument against your opposition to that kind of, you know,
• 49:11
  conception of queerness as this holistic worldview that incorporates a whole bunch of different
• 49:17
  components of resistance rather than just, you know, gay rights, would be to say, you're the
• 49:22
  beneficiary of a revolutionary movement that was undertaken in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
• 49:30
  We both are.
• 49:31
  And the people who were prosecuting that movement seemed just as destabilizing and revolutionary to
• 49:38
  the powers that be at the time as the new queer rainbow liberation, Palestine, Gaza,
• 49:46
  anti-capitalist Mamdani front do today.
• 49:50
  And so it's a bit rich to enjoy the privileges of all
• 49:54
  the gay rights that were won by dissenters and ne'er-do-wells and troublemakers in the past,
• 50:01
  and then pull up the drawbridge and say, okay, now that we've got our rights where we don't want
• 50:06
  people to conceive of themselves in an equally extreme revolutionary way right now.
• 50:13
  I don't see it that way.
• 50:14
  I don't see the ne'er-do-wells.
• 50:16
  I mean, sure, Frank Kameny,
• 50:18
  who was fired from the federal government, wanted to argue for not being fired because he was gay.
• 50:24
  I mean, these individuals, yes, they were radical.
• 50:28
  When Andrew Sullivan was proposing
• 50:30
  you know marriage equality in the 80s and then i mean but andrew solve is because this was a
• 50:35
  concert he he argued for it from a i i guess from a conservative standpoint but also a standpoint
• 50:43
  that that reaffirmed western institutions that said like this isn't going to change anything
• 50:49
  this is actually going to open the the possibility and the opportunity for gay people to be fully
• 50:55
  functioning, healthy, happy, really contributing members of society, like this will be good for
• 51:03
  all of us.
• 51:04
  And so it was reaffirming these institutions.
• 51:07
  And so, yes, these folks were
• 51:09
  seen as radicals, as as complete inconveniences, as like, oh, we must, you know, absolutely.
• 51:16
  But and I'm all for that.
• 51:18
  But there were, meanwhile, a lot of people who were more radical
• 51:24
  that hated the idea of becoming,
• 51:28
  you know, of reaffirming these institutions.
• 51:31
  And we're arguing with the Andrew Sullivans of the world
• 51:34
  and saying like, what are you, you know,
• 51:37
  don't ask, don't tell,
• 51:38
  like we need to abolish the military.
• 51:40
  Like, what are you talking about?
• 51:42
  Like they weren't about reform,
• 51:44
  they were about revolution.
• 51:45
  And so again, this more pragmatic approach,
• 51:49
  if you want to call it the Andrew Sullivan approach
• 51:51
  or folks that understood that bipartisanship is essential to affecting change, that there has to
• 52:00
  be compromise, that we live in a pluralist society, that we're going to work within this framework
• 52:04
  that we've created, which is pretty much the best humans have been able to come up with since, you
• 52:08
  know, this liberal society that we built, you know, that, you know, this is it, you know, this is what,
• 52:14
  it's not perfect, but this is pretty darn good and people are doing a lot better.
• 52:18
  So we'll work
• 52:18
  within this framework, very similar to the kind of maybe politics of respectability approach that
• 52:24
  black individuals took during the civil rights movement.
• 52:26
  Like they understood that peaceful
• 52:30
  protesting and that, you know, staging sip-ins and so on, like this was going to be the way to
• 52:34
  change people's minds.
• 52:36
  And they're ultimately going to flourish within working within this
• 52:40
  world.
• 52:40
  Yes, there's a lot of variables here, but like, let us be part of this nation.
• 52:46
  Let us be
• 52:47
  contributing members of society.
• 52:48
  Let us have the same opportunities as everyone else.
• 52:52
  And we're
• 52:52
  not going to come back and say, now we're ruling and we're going to just tear everything down.
• 52:57
  It's more like, yeah, we're all going to be living together in the society that we've built
• 53:01
  and helped build together.
• 53:03
  And so there were all these radicals that, again, once this progression
• 53:07
  of, you know, really took off of a bipartisan effort to get marriage equality, you know,
• 53:16
  enshrined into law.
• 53:17
  You know, this was a hugely centrist undertaking.
• 53:21
  It was very pragmatic and it involved a lot of people on both the left and the right.
• 53:27
  The radicals, in my view, the more radical factions were like, OK, in a lot of ways,
• 53:34
  now you've got what you want.
• 53:36
  Get out of the way.
• 53:38
  Let us get back to this project that we were, we had never stopped feeling passionate about.
• 53:45
  And again, with Trump coming in after Obama, it was like, it was really kind of the perfect
• 53:52
  landscape.
• 53:53
  It was like, oh my God, we have something to react to.
• 53:56
  We have something, this force to fight again.
• 54:00
  Imagine if it was like a kind of milquetoast.
• 54:02
  Imagine if Hillary got, I mean, there wouldn't be, if Hillary had won the 2016 election,
• 54:06
  there wouldn't be this huge, you know, apparatus to react against and to resist and to fight against.
• 54:16
  We might have continued along a similar, more reasonable path for trans individuals and for,
• 54:23
  it wouldn't have been framed and kind of overtaken by the more radical factions of this.
• 54:30
  It is hugely radical to say that to enshrine into law that gender identity trumps sex or is at the very least equal to sex.
• 54:43
  It completely nullifies sex in policy, in medicine.
• 54:49
  That is a hugely radical and completely made up and bogus notion that has had huge sprawling consequences.
• 54:59
  Okay.
• 55:00
  That is not, it makes no sense.
• 55:04
  It's completely incoherent.
• 55:08
  We cannot underestimate the, the, the, the impact of things like that.
• 55:13
  It's not just like, well,
• 55:14
  you know, so many, not so many people are doing this or, or, oh, well, kids said it all.
• 55:19
  I,
• 55:20
  I don't understand really the numbers game when people frame it that way.
• 55:23
  Like women are being
• 55:25
  raped in prisons.
• 55:28
  And this isn't just reported by, you know, right wing state, you know,
• 55:31
  Daily Wire or whatever.
• 55:32
  I mean, this is an NBC news outlets where women on Rikers Island are
• 55:37
  coming out and saying, I've been raped by a male individual who identified as a trans woman that
• 55:40
  came in.
• 55:40
  They're being locked up with under male individuals who are sex offenders and murderers.
• 55:46
  And they are being, these are working class women, you know, very people that come from
• 55:50
  really empowered.
• 55:51
  I mean, who do you find?
• 55:52
  What kind of people do you often find in prisons?
• 55:54
  These are very underprivileged individuals who are completely being ignored.
• 56:00
  And if you say this,
• 56:02
  well, how many, I mean, how many women do need to be raped for us to realize that perhaps this
• 56:07
  self-ID or gender identity policy isn't necessarily working?
• 56:10
  Do I think that all
• 56:11
  these individuals should just be sent right back?
• 56:14
  Can we be concerned about, you know, perhaps
• 56:17
  trans identifying males or transsexual women being subject to violence in male prisons?
• 56:24
  Yes, but women should absolutely not have to take the brunt of that.
• 56:29
  Everyone should be protected.
• 56:31
  So what can we do?
• 56:33
  Is there a possibility for third spaces?
• 56:35
  Do we need third restrooms,
• 56:36
  gender neutral restrooms as well as male?
• 56:39
  What can we do?
• 56:40
  There's a pragmatic way of going about
• 56:42
  this.
• 56:42
  We live in a pure realistic society.
• 56:45
  It doesn't have to be this entirely extreme thing.
• 56:49
  The ideas that I have and I put forth are profoundly reasonable.
• 56:54
  I love the idea of
• 56:58
  injecting reason into these conversations and not having it be suicide or fascism or whatever.
• 57:07
  You know, burn or bust or burn it all down or whatever, return to Jim Crow.
• 57:15
  It doesn't have to be like that.
• 57:17
  I mean, the burn it all down also has a different, you know, you mentioned the civil rights movement.
• 57:23
  It is, it's like there was a, there's an assumption that underlies successful civil rights movements, the black civil rights movement, the gay civil rights movement, indeed, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the decolonization of the Indian subcontinent, that all feature a kind of underlying assumption that the people doing the agitating are just asking for
• 57:47
  to be treated the same way that everybody else gets treated.
• 57:51
  It's like a fundamentally egalitarian
• 57:53
  request, which I think is successful because it lands as commonsensical to people who were
• 57:58
  raised in a Western liberal tradition.
• 58:00
  It's like, you get to get married, you get to rent an
• 58:03
  apartment without having your partner, your sexual partner scrutinized, you get to open a bank
• 58:08
  account with your spouse, you get to be at your spouse's deathbed when they're dying.
• 58:12
  We don't
• 58:12
  get those things.
• 58:13
  We just want the same things that you have.
• 58:15
  We're not trying to take anything
• 58:15
  else away from you.
• 58:16
  We're not trying to change anything else.
• 58:18
  And that was the message of Andrew
• 58:19
  Sullivan.
• 58:20
  It was the message of Martin Luther King.
• 58:21
  It was the message of Mandela, you know.
• 58:24
  And I think you're right that now we live in a world where that's not the request that seems to
• 58:29
  be being made by the LGBTQIA plus community.
• 58:33
  It's not just we want to be left alone and treated with
• 58:36
  respect like everybody else.
• 58:38
  It's we want an end to colonialism, occupation.
• 58:43
  We want you to
• 58:45
  demonstrate sufficient fealty towards first nations individuals to recognize that you're
• 58:50
  standing on stolen land to celebrate the diversity of uh sexual difference and biological difference
• 58:57
  to pledge fealty to the idea that gender and sex are the same thing and that they're both a spectrum
• 59:03
  to and it's like hang on a second what where did we how did we get from let's treat everybody the
• 59:09
  same to we all have to count out a set of demands that are being imposed on us by a small clique
• 59:18
  otherwise we're on the wrong side of history how did that happen well that's the and that's the
• 59:23
  problem with framing it as oh now you just want to pull up the ladder behind you and prevent other
• 59:30
  people that's that's the wrong that's why that framing is so wrong i am actually it's a difference
• 59:36
  in kind.
• 59:36
  It's not merely a difference in extent.
• 59:40
  Right.
• 59:42
  Yeah.
• 59:42
  The last election in the United
• 59:44
  States was very traumatizing for a lot of trans people in the sense that the most popular ads and
• 59:50
  the most funded ads in some of the swing states by the Trump campaign were, you know, Kamala is
• 59:56
  for they, them, Trump is for you.
• 59:58
  It was all about trans people and trans bathrooms and kind of a
• 1:00:02
  panic about that.
• 1:00:03
  Do you see how do you see that?
• 1:00:05
  Because that invariably raises the hackles of
• 1:00:09
  people who feel like they're being besieged by a far right takeover and makes them less likely to
• 1:00:15
  be willing to compromise.
• 1:00:16
  But what's the correct response?
• 1:00:19
  Well, that's a good question.
• 1:00:20
  What is the correct response?
• 1:00:21
  I mean, I and I do I write about this.
• 1:00:23
  I write about this in my book.
• 1:00:24
  It's like, you know, have has has the Trump administration 2.0,
• 1:00:30
  have they been like reasonable or, or thoughtful about their approaches to, to correcting some of
• 1:00:36
  the, the, of course not, you know, like, of course not.
• 1:00:41
  Who would expect that?
• 1:00:42
  You know?
• 1:00:43
  I mean,
• 1:00:43
  when they're just like, Hey, trans people out of the military, no matter how much, I mean, one,
• 1:00:48
  it's like, no matter how many years you've put into serving our country, but two also trans
• 1:00:53
  individuals in the military have made the argument, like, uh, you've invested millions of dollars of
• 1:00:58
  your tax dollars into my career, building my career as an individual in the military,
• 1:01:03
  this is a huge loss for you, you know?
• 1:01:06
  So yeah, there are arguments to be made for like, how can
• 1:01:10
  this, you know, what can, what's the right way to go about this?
• 1:01:14
  Of course, it's not going to be
• 1:01:16
  that way.
• 1:01:17
  But neither was anything that occurred under the Biden administration in terms of the
• 1:01:24
  the route that he took towards, you know, gender affirming care, puberty blockers, you know, this,
• 1:01:30
  you know, kind of listening to the special interest groups that they're essentially in the pockets of
• 1:01:36
  the Democratic Party.
• 1:01:37
  And not to say that the right isn't in the pocket of other special interest
• 1:01:40
  groups on the right.
• 1:01:41
  But, you know, it's like, that's just that's the way that it's going to go
• 1:01:46
  when you have this polarized when our political parties are so polarized, and and they're
• 1:01:52
  reflecting what's going on in the country, at least among the most vocal individuals in our
• 1:02:01
  society.
• 1:02:01
  There's a lot of us that are less vocal that are more like, this is crazy.
• 1:02:05
  I don't want
• 1:02:06
  any part of it, but I guess I'll just vote for the lesser of two evils.
• 1:02:10
  I mean, I opted out of
• 1:02:12
  the 2024 election.
• 1:02:14
  I could not bring myself to vote for Trump by any, but I also, there was just
• 1:02:19
  no way in hell after being immersed in and understanding the so deeply what was going on
• 1:02:27
  in the democratic party and how they were continuing to ignore the problem and and all
• 1:02:35
  of these things that they were contributing to directly and not listening to any reason and and
• 1:02:40
  they were framing anyone who erred from their narrative as right-wing or bigoted or racist or
• 1:02:48
  transphobic or white supremacist, it was just completely inexcusable to me.
• 1:02:51
  And it was just
• 1:02:52
  a mirror image of what was going on with MAGA.
• 1:02:54
  And it's still in a lot of ways is.
• 1:02:56
  So I just find
• 1:02:57
  that there was just no way that I could bring myself.
• 1:03:01
  That was the first time I've never,
• 1:03:02
  I never thought I would be, you know, do that.
• 1:03:05
  But I live in New York, I live in New York City.
• 1:03:06
  So
• 1:03:06
  it really makes no difference.
• 1:03:08
  Yeah.
• 1:03:09
  So what the, how did you get the courage to start talking
• 1:03:12
  about this?
• 1:03:12
  And when was that?
• 1:03:13
  Because in the late 2010s, when you were at Columbia, and you
• 1:03:16
  were noticing that there was this movement to essentially erase everything that was interesting
• 1:03:22
  about you as a younger, more flamboyant male.
• 1:03:25
  By the way, I always get confused about one of the
• 1:03:29
  weird tricks in this debate that normies can find head spinning is that both sides
• 1:03:34
  claim to be the ones who are most in favor of the rainbow diversity of human experience,
• 1:03:41
  Like the conventional LGBTQIA plus activist groups will claim that you're trying to force everyone into a very narrow white cis male stereotype and that you're trying to be dismissive of nonconforming individuals.
• 1:04:02
  And you will respond by saying that in trying to contextualize all camp masculinity and butch femininity as versions of transgenderness, it's the LGBTQIA plus activists who are trying to force people to conform into their very narrow universe of this is the correct politics and this is the correct approach towards capitalism and oppression and colonialism and whatever.
• 1:04:29
  and that you're arguing for us to have a greater appreciation for the different diverse ways that you could be gay,
• 1:04:36
  you could be a right-wing gay person, you could be a conforming gay person, and that that is getting excluded.
• 1:04:41
  So it's hard for the average sort of center-left person who just wants to be on the right side of history
• 1:04:47
  and who wants to back the most humane side of this to know where to turn.
• 1:04:53
  Do you just want to opine on that before we go back to Colombia again?
• 1:04:57
  Yeah.
• 1:04:59
  So you're saying to know where to turn.
• 1:05:01
  Yeah.
• 1:05:01
  Like what is what is your argument for why your position is the more inclusive one when the normal person in the street sees the rainbow flag with the indigenous arrow and the, you know, kind of liberationist language of the activists who you oppose as being the more inclusive group?
• 1:05:23
  group it's such a this is such a frustrating it's a frustrating question to answer because
• 1:05:31
  it makes me sound like answering it i'm aware of how it makes me sound like a chris ruffo or like a
• 1:05:38
  a kind of like you know just an anti-woke uh um oh god we're this we're in this existential crisis
• 1:05:45
  where the West is being da-da-da.
• 1:05:47
  But, like, I just...
• 1:05:52
  People do need to understand, like, the ideology...
• 1:05:55
  The differences in the ideologies behind
• 1:06:00
  what the movement has become.
• 1:06:02
  Like, do you think that there's, like,
• 1:06:08
  capitalists and Zionists and, you know,
• 1:06:13
  So folks in these organizations that are like working towards, you know, preserving Western institutions or or.
• 1:06:24
  I do not.
• 1:06:26
  I think that they have been largely pushed out.
• 1:06:28
  Now, if you might say like, well, what's the big deal about that?
• 1:06:33
  Well, it's a very big deal because.
• 1:06:36
  we live in a capitalist society.
• 1:06:38
  Like we live in a, in a liberal, a free market society.
• 1:06:42
  Like that is what our entire economy is built upon.
• 1:06:45
  That's what our wellbeing is built upon.
• 1:06:47
  That is what has lifted out millions or billions of people from poverty.
• 1:06:52
  It's not perfect.
• 1:06:53
  Again, none of this is perfect.
• 1:06:55
  People are still unequal, like there, but there are just ways to go about this that
• 1:06:59
  are.
• 1:07:00
  So there's just a fundamental difference between people like me who are, I, I am still,
• 1:07:10
  you know, on the left, I still, or at least of the left, maybe I'm more centrist.
• 1:07:15
  I don't really
• 1:07:15
  know, but I, I don't think that we need to kind of replace capitalism with socialism.
• 1:07:23
  I don't
• 1:07:24
  think that socialism works.
• 1:07:26
  I don't see Israel as an apartheid state.
• 1:07:30
  And I do not.
• 1:07:31
  Now, are there
• 1:07:32
  nuances to these discussions?
• 1:07:34
  A hundred million percent.
• 1:07:36
  But, you know, that automatically
• 1:07:41
  excludes me from being a part of that.
• 1:07:44
  It has come to be that that excludes me from being a part of
• 1:07:46
  that world.
• 1:07:47
  And whether people realize it or not, they are excluded from that community and from
• 1:07:52
  that world if they agree with me on those things that they they are not represented by these
• 1:07:57
  organizations that and these people that they continue to vote for and to give their dollars to
• 1:08:02
  and to give their donations to they are not representing their their interests by any stretch
• 1:08:09
  of the imagination so so i feel like there's we just really need to understand like what the
• 1:08:15
  reality is on the ground before talking about like, I think it just really all does build out
• 1:08:22
  from there that there are people that are, it's not just about like an old school kind of right
• 1:08:27
  versus left.
• 1:08:28
  I'm a little more fiscally conservative and you're more socially liberal.
• 1:08:32
  We're in a different paradigm.
• 1:08:34
  It's like a different time.
• 1:08:35
  It's a different framing.
• 1:08:37
  And people, yes, are still living in that old paradigm, but it's becoming more and more obsolete
• 1:08:43
  because of the influence that more radical individuals on the left and on the right have
• 1:08:50
  in positions, whether it's special interest groups, whether it's working in tech, whether
• 1:08:53
  it's working for social media, whatever it is, working in education, working in politics.
• 1:08:59
  I mean,
• 1:09:00
  it really is cultural, hugely, hugely cultural and tied in with culture.
• 1:09:06
  And we're just not
• 1:09:07
  operating in the same way that we were even like 25, 20 years ago.
• 1:09:10
  So it's funny that you mentioned
• 1:09:13
  Zionism, Ben, because there's another analogy that occurs to me as I hear you talk, which is not
• 1:09:18
  the analogy that you're making, I know, but I'll make it anyway.
• 1:09:21
  We live at a time when a lot of
• 1:09:23
  organizations and groups that are agitating for things that we don't agree with will manipulate
• 1:09:30
  our well-being towards something that we do agree with, that they also agree with, in order to
• 1:09:35
  enlist our support or our funding or to gain credibility for themselves by essentially using
• 1:09:42
  us as pawns in their bigger argument.
• 1:09:44
  So this is something that the LGBTQIA plus movement does.
• 1:09:49
  It
• 1:09:49
  sort of, it piggybacks on the general sense of goodwill towards gay people, uh, and then tries
• 1:09:56
  to smuggle in a whole bunch of stuff using us gay people as pawns in order to do so.
• 1:10:00
  Um, similarly
• 1:10:02
  as a Jewish Australian, I feel the same about the Netanyahu government, which will, you know,
• 1:10:07
  smuggle in, which will sort of use my Jewishness and my grandmother's, you know, abysmal treatment
• 1:10:12
  during the Holocaust as a way to justify whatever it wants to do.
• 1:10:16
  And similarly, on the other side,
• 1:10:18
  the pro-Palestinian movement will elicit funds that end up going to essentially jihadist groups
• 1:10:26
  by preying upon people's well-meaning sympathy for Gazans being bombed.
• 1:10:32
  And it's like, there's just,
• 1:10:34
  it's very very difficult to maintain an even keel in which you are not being manipulated or used as
• 1:10:42
  a pawn in somebody else's grand uh game that you want no part of i feel like i'm constantly like
• 1:10:48
  my identities such as they are are constantly being used and abused by other actors more than
• 1:10:54
  they even are by me i just want to live a life and like have pay my mortgage and you know play
• 1:11:00
  with my kids a million percent i couldn't agree with you more that's very well said you know i
• 1:11:05
  mean but but it's but that's also that was a hard thing for me to kind of reckon with as a gay
• 1:11:11
  individual who like was so firmly believed in like these institutions that i long to be a part of
• 1:11:17
  like the glads and the hrs the human rights campaign and all of these people that came before
• 1:11:21
  me and and kind of this whole apparatus that i had complete and utter faith in was understanding like
• 1:11:27
  oh, that there is so much of this that is built upon a house of cards and that it really has been about sloganeering and ignoring the inconvenient truths or realities or things that complicate matters.
• 1:11:39
  the nuance of specific situations to really, to get the end goal and to make it into the end zone
• 1:11:45
  with whatever, you know, thing we're fighting for.
• 1:11:49
  So much of it, again, has been like a reaction
• 1:11:52
  to like, you know, when I think it was the Hawaiian Supreme Court that kind of ruled that,
• 1:11:58
  you know, gays could get married.
• 1:11:59
  I think that was like one of the first instances in the U.S.
• 1:12:02
  It was like, what did the right do?
• 1:12:03
  Like rights were like, oh, we need to pass laws in these
• 1:12:07
  state legislatures to ban gay marriage.
• 1:12:09
  So it was almost like marriage became this huge cause
• 1:12:14
  because holy crap, like all these right-wingers are going to be banning it everywhere.
• 1:12:18
  Well,
• 1:12:18
  if we want to do anything about it before that happens, we need to make this part of our,
• 1:12:22
  it's just this confluence of events.
• 1:12:23
  And then suddenly it's like, love is love.
• 1:12:25
  And it's like,
• 1:12:26
  yes, you know, sure.
• 1:12:28
  Love is love.
• 1:12:29
  Absolutely.
• 1:12:29
  But so is sex is sex.
• 1:12:32
  Like marriage between two
• 1:12:34
  males is going to be fundamentally different than a marriage between a man and a woman because it
• 1:12:38
  involves two males like a gay marriage involves two females there's going to be variations in this
• 1:12:45
  and we're not all going to you know fit into the same you know marriage as an institution is is
• 1:12:52
  this universal thing and it doesn't change but we're not all you know interchangeable in terms
• 1:12:56
  of the people that that are that enter into these institutions so anyway you know there's just a lot
• 1:13:03
  of realizing how much within even the gay movement itself or like, you know, within that preceded,
• 1:13:11
  you know, me and us and this now LGBTQ, LGBTQIA that operated in a similar way.
• 1:13:19
  And that,
• 1:13:19
  you know, for a lot of people too, were super, super, they were not, their hands were absolutely
• 1:13:25
  not clean when it came to, you know, attempting to censor or silence people that were disagreeing
• 1:13:31
  with their views or framing individuals that had any kind of objection as horrible bigots and so
• 1:13:38
  on and so forth.
• 1:13:39
  I mean, it was unforgiving, but I don't know.
• 1:13:43
  In a lot of ways, activism,
• 1:13:45
  that's how that operates, especially in the States, like you were talking about earlier.
• 1:13:50
  It's like everybody is trying to recapture that romantic late 60s radical view, the old
• 1:13:59
  you know, things they would see depicted in like the wonder years and the black and white
• 1:14:03
  documentaries, like, you know, we've got to have something to fight for, man.
• 1:14:06
  You got to have some
• 1:14:07
  of that.
• 1:14:07
  And so it's like super like, oh, I'm going to be on the front lines of that.
• 1:14:10
  And,
• 1:14:11
  and then the cause ends up, you know, and the, and the, the excitement of the cause
• 1:14:16
  completely replaces like what the actual cause is about.
• 1:14:19
  And soon you're like,
• 1:14:23
  non-binary kids need mastectomies.
• 1:14:26
  You know what I mean?
• 1:14:26
  And it's like, wait, what?
• 1:14:28
  You know,
• 1:14:30
  I mean, so where did you get, when you were at Columbia and there was a very intense time in the 2010s, you know, in terms of what is now called cancel culture or wokeness or however you want to characterize it, there was enormous social penalties and, you know, people can dismiss it and say, well, just don't read the comments on Twitter.
• 1:14:48
  You couldn't not read the comments on Twitter in 2017.
• 1:14:51
  That was the currency of the world.
• 1:14:53
  Between 2012 and 2020, essentially, there were enormous ramifications.
• 1:15:00
  And it wasn't just people saying mean things about you on social media.
• 1:15:03
  That would then redound to mainstream employers.
• 1:15:07
  It would, you know, have people kind of hounded and doxed and often fired and, you know, relationships severed because they were disputing what seemed at the time to be a new set of norms that were being imposed in a very censorious and rigid way and had enormous penalties for people who dissented.
• 1:15:25
  um so as you started to feel like hang on this movement that i'm part of is not actually
• 1:15:30
  representing the kind of playful you know weird way that i that my gayness was expressing itself
• 1:15:37
  and is trying to give me a a narrative about my own i guess flamboyance that doesn't feel real to
• 1:15:46
  me where did you begin to broach the uh the heresy in public yeah and and you know yes you're right
• 1:15:55
  Like it was, I mean, essentially 2018, the 2018 Columbia campus was essentially a Twitter feed.
• 1:16:02
  Like, how would you describe it?
• 1:16:03
  Like, imagine the 2018 Twitter, Twitter.
• 1:16:07
  That's what it was.
• 1:16:09
  Now it's like, imagine like the, the far reaches of blue sky, like, or, you know, or whatever, like that's what it is now.
• 1:16:17
  Having proudly never been on blue sky.
• 1:16:19
  I don't know what that is, but I, I can imagine.
• 1:16:22
  Yeah.
• 1:16:22
  Oh, or actually threads.
• 1:16:24
  I'm telling you threads.
• 1:16:25
  Like if I put out that wall street journal piece that I put out about queerness, I mean, they lost their minds on that platform anyway.
• 1:16:33
  Oh yeah.
• 1:16:34
  Like we will destroy him.
• 1:16:36
  Um, uh, uh, but, um, yeah, it was a hugely charged time.
• 1:16:43
  And again, I entered into it in 27, January, 2017.
• 1:16:48
  My first week at the school began.
• 1:16:49
  It was Trump was inaugurated during my first week at Columbia.
• 1:16:53
  Okay.
• 1:16:55
  And mind you, this is really important for people to understand.
• 1:16:57
  I am a non-traditional student.
• 1:16:59
  I had been a hairstylist for a long time.
• 1:17:01
  Like I said, I went back to school to finish my undergraduate degree.
• 1:17:03
  So I'm 33 years old and married to a man.
• 1:17:06
  I had moved to New York from Maryland.
• 1:17:08
  So I'm living in New York.
• 1:17:09
  I'm a full-time student.
• 1:17:10
  And I'm 33 years old when I'm entering into Columbia as an undergraduate student where I'm matriculated in with because the way that they have it is that nontraditional students are, you know, with everybody else in these classrooms.
• 1:17:21
  So you can have classes that are, you know, traditional 19, 20, 21 year olds.
• 1:17:25
  And then there can be like a 30 year old and then even a 50 year old.
• 1:17:27
  And then, you know, it's just we're not the majority, but we are a big part of the campus culture, you know, student population there.
• 1:17:38
  and so I'm 33 hugely depressed I mean I was like this is the end of the world when Trump got
• 1:17:43
  elected and I was just like I'm going to go to school like I had already had this plan but I was
• 1:17:50
  like I'm going to become the most educated activist like resistor I'm going to just completely
• 1:17:59
  buckle down and I'm not going to just post angry diatribes on Facebook and Twitter I'm going to get
• 1:18:05
  into this and I'm going to be as effective as I possibly can.
• 1:18:09
  Like, watch out.
• 1:18:10
  Like you think like I will be a like social justice warrior.
• 1:18:14
  Like I will be a fucking warrior, you know?
• 1:18:17
  And that was what, that was the fire that was really lit within me.
• 1:18:20
  I mean, I was like, from the very beginning, I was like protesting with the Muslims on
• 1:18:23
  campus and like participating in the afternoon prayer with them and then being like, wait,
• 1:18:27
  what am I doing?
• 1:18:28
  Why am I doing it?
• 1:18:28
  But anyway, like, you know, I was like, you know, I, I'll, I got, which way is Mecca
• 1:18:32
  again?
• 1:18:32
  I kind of, where are we?
• 1:18:34
  Yeah.
• 1:18:34
  Yeah.
• 1:18:35
  literally.
• 1:18:36
  And so, you know, I am just like, sign me up.
• 1:18:40
  Like, what's the what?
• 1:18:42
  Oh, that's what I'm
• 1:18:43
  I'm supposed to are meant to believe like that.
• 1:18:45
  But but very quickly in my tenure there, like I
• 1:18:49
  have these because I am an adult, I've lived in the world.
• 1:18:53
  You know, I come from this background
• 1:18:54
  where it's not just fundamentalism, you know, this where I a world of like purity policing and
• 1:18:59
  social group think and really understanding those dynamics.
• 1:19:03
  I also had gone to psych wards and I
• 1:19:06
  shot heroin.
• 1:19:07
  I was a huge drug user and I had gotten sober in my early twenties.
• 1:19:10
  So I had been
• 1:19:10
  sober for over a decade, maybe 15 years by that, or no, about 12 years by that time.
• 1:19:16
  So I had been
• 1:19:18
  through some hard knocks too.
• 1:19:19
  I mean, I had had breakdown, you know, like I had been through some
• 1:19:22
  things and I, I didn't really come from this affluential or wealthy or privileged, you know,
• 1:19:27
  so you know i'm i'm there and i have this you know ability to kind of think critically about
• 1:19:36
  some of these ideas or what i'm being told to believe is like the good or the right way to
• 1:19:40
  look at things and it's seeming a lot of it was seeming backwards to me especially the way that
• 1:19:45
  they were asking me to look at or think about race think about my black classmates think about
• 1:19:52
  it was just very much like this
• 1:19:55
  this very much
• 1:19:56
  disagrees with what
• 1:19:58
  I've kind of always understood
• 1:20:01
  and it's worked
• 1:20:02
  like I grew up with
• 1:20:05
  you know
• 1:20:06
  in my neighborhood it was mostly black kids
• 1:20:08
  that we would play out with in the neighborhood like I
• 1:20:10
  grew up with like I understood
• 1:20:12
  I do really kind of
• 1:20:14
  judge people by the content of their character
• 1:20:16
  and not by the color of their skin like those
• 1:20:18
  lessons that worked
• 1:20:20
  and that was what
• 1:20:22
  really influenced the way I like saw the world around me.
• 1:20:25
  And so when I was kind of understanding
• 1:20:27
  and learning these different principles that were really contradicting that and disagreeing with
• 1:20:31
  that things, it was like, I couldn't really ignore it.
• 1:20:34
  But what did I do?
• 1:20:35
  Like I completely stuffed
• 1:20:36
  it down and became like a basket case.
• 1:20:38
  I mean, one, I'm really there to succeed because I'm like,
• 1:20:41
  I'm spending a million dollars to be here.
• 1:20:42
  And also like, I'm gonna, you know, get good result,
• 1:20:45
  like summa cum laude, like all this craziness, but I'm also like bananas in my head because I'm like,
• 1:20:50
  don't say it don't even think it you know when i start learning these ideas i'm at glad
• 1:20:55
  and there's a young woman next to me who is you know saying that she's trans and then nine binary
• 1:21:01
  her pronouns are they them she has a boyfriend but then she's on grinder and and you know and
• 1:21:07
  and i'm like and i'm like well i guess this is just the way that we're supposed but even
• 1:21:12
  even then i'm like what why are you pretending like you're a gay man like you this is not this
• 1:21:19
  is not for you like you're a straight girl yeah like you have a short haircut and you don't shave
• 1:21:24
  your legs but you're like obviously a female you know and like a pretty gender conforming one at
• 1:21:30
  that like you're just a basic female you know i've just there are so many layers of different of
• 1:21:35
  identity there that i need to unpack them so it's a biological female student yeah who is claiming
• 1:21:42
  to be a transgender man because she feels male inside well no she's a gay one oh no she would
• 1:21:49
  go back and forth between she wasn't really sure she would like identify as non-binary trans but
• 1:21:54
  her pronouns were they them so she would toggle she was like and she would but when you're saying
• 1:21:59
  that when she was in her when she was inhabiting the masculine side of her identity she would go
• 1:22:05
  on grinder a gay male hookup app to look for other guys who are gay who want to have sex with a
• 1:22:14
  biological woman who is identifying as a male right yes and in other words if you just burst
• 1:22:22
  into the room it would just be a straight couple fucking and you know but but the hookup was on a
• 1:22:26
  gay app yeah yes and it was also like her sitting there on grinder and being like oh cis gays are so
• 1:22:36
  racist like what sick gays are so problematic you know she's a white girl you know so it's just like
• 1:22:40
  going into this space that is not for her and then like kind of policing the propriety of the space
• 1:22:46
  it was very much like i i i could not unsee it or think of it differently as like a white individual
• 1:22:53
  identifying as black and going into a predominantly black space and being like oh you're so you're not
• 1:22:58
  doing this right or you're probably you know it was it was completely it was a it was actually
• 1:23:04
  offensive to me but it was because it just to have someone kind of just kind of co-opting like
• 1:23:09
  who I was and just so naturally as if that was like, you know, completely acceptable.
• 1:23:15
  And then
• 1:23:16
  to also talk down to people like me or about people like me, um, and to frame all of us as
• 1:23:22
  racist or problematic or whatever was, was, what did, did not make me, I did not endear to this
• 1:23:29
  individual anyway.
• 1:23:31
  I mean, imagine if the black civil rights movement had been expanded so much
• 1:23:34
  that it basically was like included black people of color and their allies who were able to identify
• 1:23:40
  as uh people of color if they felt sufficiently sympathetic towards the conditions of of black
• 1:23:48
  people then you know you would just have white people you know talking about how they are actually
• 1:23:55
  kind of uh you know race queer essentially and they they feel themselves embodied in multiple races
• 1:24:01
  right it wouldn't fly well and also there yeah you're right it wouldn't fly but and then also
• 1:24:07
  it's kind of an interesting way to think about like how people perceive gender is that like you
• 1:24:11
  know if we think about like you know shades of of skin color or or race you know if someone's
• 1:24:16
  multiracial or bi like that is how people are configuring or encouraging people to think about
• 1:24:21
  sex like people are various like shades along the sex spectrum you know so it's like oh well his
• 1:24:30
  genitals are completely, you know, inconsequential.
• 1:24:33
  Look at his long hair and his painted fingernails
• 1:24:36
  and he's wearing pants, but he has open toed high heels on.
• 1:24:40
  And also he's been taking a little bit
• 1:24:43
  of estrogen.
• 1:24:44
  So he's got a little bit of a breast forming.
• 1:24:46
  So like, he's not a male, obviously he's
• 1:24:48
  somewhere along that.
• 1:24:49
  I mean, that is kind of like the construct that people are framing that.
• 1:24:55
  I don't know.
• 1:24:55
  Do you think we can rescue gender and sex as being different things?
• 1:24:59
  Because it
• 1:24:59
  It seems so obvious to me that 90% of the confusion about this in the minds of the layperson would just evaporate if we all just reasserted there being two different things.
• 1:25:12
  There's sex, which is a biological thing, and almost every living organism is split into two different biological categories.
• 1:25:20
  you know one of them has small fast sex cells and the other one has large stationary sex cells and
• 1:25:28
  you know that's the way that mammals work and if you went and bought a female puppy and brought it
• 1:25:33
  home and then found out that it was a male you wouldn't shrug and go oh well we all know that
• 1:25:37
  sex is not binary and that it's a fiction so that you know no you would call the dog breeder back
• 1:25:44
  and be like dude you gave me a male um you know so there's that and then that there's all kinds of
• 1:25:49
  culturally contingent ways that we play with gender and that we ascribe characteristics to
• 1:25:55
  sex that are probably not innate.
• 1:25:57
  And, you know, we don't know enough about how sex manifests itself
• 1:26:01
  culturally yet to understand what's what, but, you know, people are free to play around with
• 1:26:06
  their gender however they want to, and that's fine.
• 1:26:08
  It doesn't mean anything about their
• 1:26:10
  underlying sex.
• 1:26:11
  Yeah.
• 1:26:12
  I mean, if I like to consider myself a free speech absolutist,
• 1:26:15
  Like that's how I, that's what I would identify as or call myself, but I would not necessarily
• 1:26:21
  object to abolishing the word gender and just going back to like, just calling sex, what
• 1:26:27
  it is sex.
• 1:26:27
  And if you want to talk about sex roles or sex norms or sex based, whatever, but sex
• 1:26:33
  has become, uh, uh, gender really, really obscures because people use it as a synonym
• 1:26:43
  for sex and then they use it it's kind of like queer they use it as a synonym for for gay but
• 1:26:49
  then they also use it in various other ways it's like with gender they use it as a synonym for sex
• 1:26:54
  but then it also carries so many additional meanings yeah and it's weird that even like i
• 1:27:00
  mean i was in new york last week and went to a broadway show and and saw something that i don't
• 1:27:05
  think I've seen in Australia, which is an old storied institution like a Broadway theater,
• 1:27:12
  which just reeks of the past where the seats are made for people who are four foot 10,
• 1:27:17
  having restrooms that said, you know, we are a gender affirming, you know, establishment,
• 1:27:23
  please feel free to use the restroom that aligns with your gender identity,
• 1:27:30
  which is all very well but there are there are general biological like needs that women have
• 1:27:38
  that men don't have when it comes to doing a wee so it's like why are we talking about gender in
• 1:27:43
  this particular context like there seems to be a this seems to be when you're talking about
• 1:27:47
  flopping your dick out of the urinal versus sitting down it seems to be a pretty clear-cut
• 1:27:51
  case where you're talking about where you're not actually talking about gender you're talking about
• 1:27:54
  sex i mean we could probably go on all day about like the absurdity of it because it is
• 1:27:58
  incoherent like that is is is a feature it's not it's not a bug of this like it is incoherent
• 1:28:06
  and and it doesn't it doesn't work or make sense that it you could just we could go on and on
• 1:28:13
  but you know yeah sorry go ahead well i was gonna say do you think that gay rights should be should
• 1:28:19
  sever themselves from transgender rights or from the lgbtqia plus movement or do you think that
• 1:28:28
  the whole movement is uh is done for or do you think that there are still ways in which trans
• 1:28:33
  people should be agitating for their recognition that do not align with gay rights or has gay
• 1:28:38
  rights won completely like is there no need anymore for gay rights i mean it goes it depends
• 1:28:45
  on who you talk to i mean like i i i'm not like of the mind i don't want to put it kind of
• 1:28:54
  put it out there to kind of make people think that I'm like, you know,
• 1:28:58
  get rid of them, divorce them, this and that, like, you know, but it doesn't really make sense
• 1:29:04
  to have different identity groups that whose identities are, are different and involve
• 1:29:15
  such different but intersecting variables like sex is is hugely consequential to both
• 1:29:23
  a transgender identity and to a homosexual identity but together they don't agree because
• 1:29:29
  if you're saying that uh uh sex is inconsequential in one then if you're applying that same
• 1:29:39
  idea to homosexuality then that essentially kind of erases the existence of the gay individual
• 1:29:43
  Because, you know, then you're telling me that one who identifies as male is male.
• 1:29:50
  So if I do, am not attracted to an individual who is, has a vagina and, but identifies as male, then I'm like bigoted or transphobic or something like that or, or, or whatever.
• 1:30:04
  Like, what's the big problem?
• 1:30:05
  What's the big idea?
• 1:30:06
  There are lesbians who are saying that like some women have penises and if you don't want to, you know, so there's just a lot that disagrees in the very concepts of what is a transgender person and what is a gay person.
• 1:30:23
  So in a lot of ways, it doesn't make sense.
• 1:30:25
  I mean, you know, but then there are a lot of overlaps.
• 1:30:29
  There are a lot of people find or come to identify as transgender or transsexual because they are so profoundly gender nonconforming and same-sex attracted that they find or believe or even perhaps do find a better and more fulfilling or easier or more comfortable way of life if they can pass as the opposite sex.
• 1:30:53
  of blending into society as just a normal run-of-the-mill gender-conforming straight
• 1:30:59
  individual because that is how they society you know what i mean so there's there there are
• 1:31:06
  overlaps so yeah but i i also i'm very i've become very very cynical about activism itself
• 1:31:14
  and about political movements based on identity i don't think that they are a bad thing i don't
• 1:31:19
  think that they haven't worked really, really well.
• 1:31:22
  But it is also part of the reason why we
• 1:31:25
  are in the mess that we're in because of separating people by their individual identity and these
• 1:31:30
  different characteristics rather than it has fractured us.
• 1:31:34
  And there are huge side effects
• 1:31:40
  of that in our society, in a pluralistic society like the society that we're trying to live in and
• 1:31:45
  build if we're fracturing everybody by these different identities and activating them the
• 1:31:52
  same way.
• 1:31:53
  The thing is, is that when it comes to LGBTQ or LGBTQI or LGBTQIA, there are so many
• 1:32:01
  things where it paints us as this monolith, as we all agree and we all want the same things.
• 1:32:08
  We are so many and varied.
• 1:32:10
  It would be like trying to put all left-handed people and activating for
• 1:32:15
  you know left-handed rights and saying if you're a left-handed person then you must believe or
• 1:32:20
  think this way and this is what your goal is it's like no i'm just a there are conservative gays
• 1:32:26
  centrist gays libertarian gays left-wing gays all of these different things there are conservative
• 1:32:32
  transgender people you know like this is a real thing so um it it's limiting and it's dehumanizing
• 1:32:40
  I think it makes our humanity, it diminishes our humanity by expecting us to be part of this same coalition.
• 1:32:51
  So that's a long-winded answer to that question.
• 1:32:54
  It's a good one.
• 1:32:55
  It's also a good place to wrap.
• 1:32:57
  Ben, congratulations on the book.
• 1:32:59
  Thanks so much for speaking to us on Uncensored Conversations.
• 1:33:01
  Thank you for having me, Josh.
• 1:33:03
  I appreciate it.