Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Trans Rights, Women's Rights, Gay Rights, Oh My!” with Professor Robert Wintemute

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"Trans Rights, Women's Rights, Gay Rights, Oh My!” with Professor Robert Wintemute · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
• 0:07
  It's been one of the most dangerous, thorniest, most hazardous subjects to broach for the
• 0:12
  past five years, really.
• 0:14
  The question of whether we can have conversations about women's only spaces, women's only
• 0:18
  prisons, women's only rape crisis centers, women's only athletics carnivals, without raising
• 0:24
  the question of what exactly is a woman in many political campaigns.
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  It's even been a gotcha question that some journalists have posed to unwitting politicians.
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  Can you define a woman, a question that would have seemed banal 10 years ago, has been
• 0:39
  up and down and out and so topsy-turvy it leaves your head spinning.
• 0:43
  Where are we on these wars between transgender activists, women's rights activists frequently
• 0:50
  known as transgender exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs?
• 0:55
  And the gay rights movement, Robert Wintermute is a world expert in this field.
• 1:01
  He's a gay gentleman himself, who started out as a human rights campaigner on behalf
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  of transgender people and was fundamental in one of the founding documents about transgender
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  rights around the world and has since modified his thinking somewhat, earning him the
• 1:16
  eyeer of some trans activists.
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  And this year, a few months ago, New South Wales, the state where I live, the most populous
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  state in Australia, enacted a law, the Equality Legislation Amendment, LGBTIQA+, Act
• 1:32
  2024, although it came to effect in 2025, which now allows people in my state and Sydney
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  to change their registered sex without undergoing any surgery, introduces non-binary as a recognized
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  descriptor, and basically is just a self-reporting.
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  A woman in New South Wales is somebody who fills out a form saying that they are a woman
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  and nothing more.
• 1:56
  So if you thought that the transphobic extremes of Trump and Elon had set back the trans-right
• 2:02
  movement, it's worth noting that legislatures and courts take a long time to catch up and
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  many of the most extreme trans ideas from 2020 and 2021 are only now being enacted as
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  the law of the land across many jurisdictions in the West.
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  Robert Wintermute today's guest has written a new book about this.
• 2:22
  Its entitled Transgender Rights versus Women's Rights from Conflict to Coexistence.
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  He is a professor of human rights law at King's College London, has been for more than 30
• 2:32
  years.
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  He got his doctorate of philosophy from Oxford in 1993, and I started by asking Robert
• 2:38
  why culture has created so many areas in which we need to define ourselves as men and
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  women on this narrow binary in the first place.
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  I hope you enjoy it.
• 2:48
  As much as I did, the one and only Robert Wintermute.
• 2:56
  What has changed over time is the significance of being a woman.
• 3:01
  I mean, for centuries it affected your legal rights.
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  There was a time when women couldn't vote, when women were excluded from certain professions.
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  So those distinctions were never justifiable and have disappeared, but we still have
• 3:20
  women's and men's toilets and changing rooms and prisons.
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  And that's when your sex matters.
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  Right, and in some cases we have quotas for women to try to ensure that they're properly
• 3:32
  represented on corporate boards or in parliament, so whatever it might be.
• 3:36
  Yes, yes, and that was an issue in the UK Supreme Court case.
• 3:41
  In fact, when I was watching the video of the hearing, I noticed one of the women judges
• 3:48
  on the court asked, so a man can transition from male to female at the age of 50 and claim
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  to represent women, having had a life experience mainly as a man.
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  So that was clearly one of their considerations.
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  And what do you say to the reposter to that, which is that that person isn't a man.
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  They may be biologically male, but they've always been a woman who was born into the wrong
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  body.
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  Well, I don't, so many people say no one is born in the wrong body, only every person
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  gets one body, no one chooses their sex.
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  And some people have strong feelings, beliefs, thoughts that they're a person of the opposite
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  sex, but that has no effect on their biological reality.
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  So I mean, someone may identify as a woman, believe their woman, but they're not a woman.
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  Changing your clothes does not make you a woman.
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  Changing your birth certificate does not, and taking home female hormones or having surgery
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  does not.
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  But that obviously sounds, I guess, I suppose that lands for many people as if it's on
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  the wrong side of history, given the attempts that have been made to accommodate the minority
• 5:11
  of people.
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  We're talking here about what would traditionally be called transexuals, not people who,
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  I don't know, have some social contagion whereby they decide to start being playful
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  with their gender later in life, but we're talking about that minority of people who from
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  a very, very early age persistently insist that they are in the wrong body, and it seems
• 5:32
  that the only way they can lead flourishing lives is to facilitate that.
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  It lands as being regressive for them to articulate biology that way.
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  Not deterministically.
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  Well I explained this all in my book, Transgender Rights vs Women's Rights.
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  So I went back to square one and asked, why did any country ever allow change of legal
• 6:00
  sex?
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  Sweden appears to have been the first country in Europe in 1972.
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  And I concluded that they took the wrong fork in the road.
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  So they were dealing with a male to female transgender person who had had full surgery,
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  who went to them and said, here I've done the best I can to resemble a woman.
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  I have difficulty in life because people see my, my documents say, I'm male.
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  Please change my documents to female to make my life easier.
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  And that was the sympathetic response, of course, will help you.
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  And then later they said, okay, now I want documents changed with no medical treatment.
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  So you, Josh, under the law of the UK and New South Wales and many states in the US, can
• 6:57
  be legally female with a beard and male genitals.
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  And in the UK that was introduced to some safeguards you had to have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria,
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  and then the demand became self identification.
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  You just fill out a form and now you're a woman.
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  Okay, so if this Swedish parliament had known that this was where this would lead, I don't
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  think they would have changed the law back then.
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  What was the other fork in the road?
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  Protection for transgender people against all forms of violence, harassment and discrimination
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  triggered because their appearance does not match what people expect for a person of
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  their birth sex.
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  And I think that is the best approach.
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  So we have nearly 60% of countries in the world do not allow change of legal sex around
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  17 states in the US do not allow it.
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  Right, but those 60 countries and those 17 states are probably not places where progressively
• 7:58
  minded small little liberal people want to live, they're probably fairly regressive.
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  Like the case of the pro-trans person is a case that says we are bigger than the petty
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  deterministic mandates of our birth and we can treat each other in a more compassionate
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  way by sort of honoring the internal preferences of each person regardless of whether they
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  align with a strict interpretation of biology.
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  I'm sorry, but honoring internal preferences has created a mess and I have to be honest
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  with it.
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  I'm just country blank that's just been sitting on the sidelines.
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  I don't know if they're regressive, progressive, whatever.
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  I would say to them, don't start down this road.
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  Do not change legal sex and protect transgender people.
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  And I think that is really what every country should be doing.
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  And if in the cases where you need a gender recognition certificate, how do you get a
• 9:02
  gender recognition certificate?
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  In the UK.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah, you have to apply for it.
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  You need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
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  And you need to show that you have lived in what they call the acquired gender for two
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  years.
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  Now, that is not defined in the act.
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  I don't know if a person born male who maintains a beard would be seen as living as a woman.
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  But there are no formal requirements.
• 9:32
  Whether you need to change your name or your clothing, hairstyle, etc.
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  And sorry, after the Supreme Court decision, does such a person qualify as the opposite
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  sex as their new sex or no?
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  Not under the Equality Act 2010.
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  And this applies to sports, single sex spaces, etc.
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  Quotas was the specific issue in the For Women Scotland case.
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  One issue that came up was associations of lesbian women.
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  So lesbian women might like to have a lesbian speed dating event.
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  But a person comes along who is legally female but has male genitals.
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  It was unclear before the decision whether that person could be excluded.
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  Now it is clear that they can be excluded even if they have a gender recognition certificate.
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  So this is, this is again why I get to this question, why change legal sex at all?
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  When sex doesn't, whether your birth sex, your biological sex, it doesn't matter.
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  It makes no difference.
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  When your birth sex does matter, it makes no difference.
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  As a professor of human rights law, has your view changed on this?
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  Most definitely.
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  I've been working in this area for 40 years.
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  In 1985, I was the first openly gay lawyer at the Millbank Law firm in New York having
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  studied law in Canada.
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  And so I moved to the UK, did a PhD at the University of Oxford.
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  And in the late 90s, I witnessed the formation of the LGBT political coalition.
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  And I would say at the time, I didn't really see what the two groups had in common.
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  But the coalition formed and I just went along with it for many years.
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  And I think there's a tendency to defer to what transgender people say.
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  We, a non-transgender person doesn't really understand what it's like to be transgender.
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  The challenges of this person might face.
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  And so if they say, we need something, you tend to say, okay, and you don't really question
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  it, especially if you're a man.
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  And so I just went along with this for many, many years.
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  Until in 2018, I had what I call my light bulb moment.
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  I was teaching in a summer school and I was asked about an exception in UK law, which
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  still exists.
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  So originally you couldn't change your legal sex at all.
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  Then you could change your legal sex, but not if you were married.
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  If you were married, you had to get a divorce first because otherwise your marriage would
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  become a same sex marriage.
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  Then in 2013, the law was changed for England and Wales, so you could have a same sex marriage.
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  So then you could change your legal sex if you were married, but only with the consent
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  of your spouse.
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  And in the transgender rights movement, they call this the spouse of veto.
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  And they consider it a terrible injustice.
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  So I was asked about this in the summer school and I just tried to explain it.
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  In human rights law, we have a concept known as the rights of others, which appears in
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  the European Convention on Human Rights.
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  Sometimes your right to do something can justifiably be limited because it affects the rights of
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  other people.
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  So in this case, generally you'd have a person born male wanting to change their legal
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  sex to female and the wife has a strong objection.
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  The wife says, well, actually I entered into an opposite sex marriage and you are unilaterally
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  trying to convert it into a same sex marriage.
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  The person might have a strong, the wife might have a strong religious objection.
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  So I said, well, that's why the law has this exception.
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  So either you get your wife to agree or you have to get a divorce first and then you
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  change your legal sex.
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  So there was a transgender student in the classroom who strongly objected to this.
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  How could I compare the fundamental right of the transgender person to change their legal
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  sex with a contract?
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  So the marriage was dismissed as irrelevant.
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  I explained the concept of the rights of others.
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  What I didn't say at the time that I could have is that your right to marry is actually
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  a fundamental right, except if you're already married to someone else.
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  You have to get a divorce to tidy up your affairs before you can exercise your fundamental
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  right to marry.
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  So it's the same situation, but the transgender student was not having it and at one point
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  I was feeling frustrated and I said, trans rights don't trump everything else and the student
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  became angry and got up and left the classroom.
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  And this light bulb moment was that this transgender student did not seem to understand that
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  women have human rights too and that sometimes they're in conflict with transgender rights
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  and a balance needs to be struck.
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  And so after that I started speaking to women about their concerns in 2020.
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  I read the Georgia Carter Principles, Principle 31 saying that every country in the world
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  must take sex off birth certificates and I thought that was outrageous.
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  What was that?
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  What was the Yogyakata set of principles?
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  It's what you might call a civil society document.
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  Some organizations got human rights organizations got together in 2006 in the city of Georgia
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  Carter and Java and Indonesia and published an interpretation of what human rights law
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  requires for LGBT people, international human rights law.
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  And the first version was published in 2007.
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  They did a second version in 2017 which was more radical and that included this principle
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  31, take sex off birth certificates.
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  So that we actually shocked me and I was interviewed about the Georgia Carter Principles.
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  I'm considered a kind of founding father because I was one of the experts that attended
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  the first meeting.
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  Were you there in Indonesia?
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  Indonesia, yeah.
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  And so people kept asking me, so were these conflicts between transgender rights and women's
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  rights discussed in Yogyakata and I had to say no, they never came up.
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  And as I said before, was that Robert because of cowardice or oversight?
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  I would say oversight, there were two transgender experts in the room.
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  They said what they needed and no one objected.
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  I didn't object, as I said before, I deferred to transgender people and none of the women
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  in the room raised any objections.
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  So I mean, it didn't have a serious effect on the first diversion.
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  It just said, it took the UK law, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and said, this is the
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  minimum standard for the entire world.
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  So you cannot require any form of medical treatment.
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  But it did not say what you cannot require a person to undertake medical treatment in order
• 17:44
  to affirm themselves as being a change for the effects.
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  So no, no hormones or surgery.
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  But what it didn't say was what you could require.
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  So the UK's diagnosis of gender disorder was not mentioned.
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  And then when they did the second version in 2017, I did not participate in that version.
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  They introduced this principle 31, which says every country in the world must remove
• 18:16
  as a requirement of international human rights law, sex from birth certificates.
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  And until that is done, change of legal sex must be allowed with no psychological diagnosis.
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  So it says the UK law is not permitted anymore.
• 18:36
  Yeah.
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  I mean, it strikes me that we're getting hung up not in this conversation, but in culture
• 18:43
  and society about whether or not sex, it's really that we can save a lot of time and
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  hassle by just reducing the focus on sex in the first place.
• 18:55
  In other words, a lot of trans people who I know say, yeah, I don't need to go to the
• 19:02
  prison of the, I'm hoping not to go to prison, but if I have to go to prison, I don't need
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  to go to prison for the sex that I identify as I don't need to play in sports.
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  I don't need to go to a women's shelter if I was born a biological male, but I do resent
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  moving through the world with people constantly raising their eyebrows about who I am and
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  about my right to identify as the way that I want to every time I have to cross a border
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  and hand a passport to a customs agent who asks me in intrusive and invasive questions
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  about why I don't quite pass as a woman because there's an F on my passport.
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  And if there was just no F on my passport, then the vast majority of occasions that make
• 19:39
  us feel discriminated against would evaporate.
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  Like, well, what do you make of that?
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  In some part of me thinks that it's just more parsimonious to meet them halfway and turn
• 19:50
  the volume down on sex altogether.
• 19:53
  Well, first of all, I would say that not many people in the transgender rights movement
• 19:59
  make the distinction that you've just mentioned.
• 20:03
  The transition to rights movement, though, is probably different from transgender people,
• 20:06
  right? Like all activists, like all activist groups are more extreme than their, the people
• 20:11
  like claim to represent that is that is probably true.
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  But the people talking to the governments and the legislatures are the activists.
• 20:22
  And they don't make that distinction at all that all I need is a passport.
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  I don't need anything else.
• 20:28
  Their position is generally trans women or women in all circumstances.
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  So in California, a person who identifies as person born male with male genitals who
• 20:40
  identifies as female has a right to go to a prison for women.
• 20:47
  And, and you have the ongoing disputes about sports competitions, et cetera, et cetera.
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  So on the, in most people, I would say in the transgender rights movement,
• 21:00
  do not accept any exceptions.
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  So a trans woman is a woman for all purposes.
• 21:05
  Now going back to the past sport,
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  the solution I would propose is to train people inspecting these documents just to look at the photograph.
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  So does the person in front of you match the photograph?
• 21:25
  If that's, if they do, no problem.
• 21:29
  So society has to get used to different appearances and not expect that because it says,
• 21:36
  M that, that the person should look like you, Josh, the person could be a combination.
• 21:45
  They could have some stubble, some lipstick, earring, shoulder length, hair, address.
• 21:52
  And it says M and that's okay.
• 21:55
  And actually I've been advocating for the clear right of everyone to dress how they want since 1997.
• 22:05
  And an article I published then was cited by the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal in 2020.
• 22:12
  They had a case of a man going into prison, a man with shoulder length hair.
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  He was told you have to have it cut short.
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  And a woman going into prison with shoulder length hair could keep it as it was.
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  And the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal agreed this yes, this is sex discrimination.
• 22:32
  That's the way it should be all over the world, really.
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  So just if the photograph matches, that's enough.
• 22:38
  Right.
• 22:39
  And you mentioned that you heard from women during the period of your change of heart.
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  How in your estimation has the feminist movement been split on this?
• 22:50
  Because my last job was at the public broadcaster in Australia.
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  Most of my colleagues were very talented female producers.
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  And occasionally this would come up.
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  There was a snafu of a whether or not a trans woman could use a women's only bathing space at one of the beach pools that we have in Sydney.
• 23:07
  And my female producers were of the opinion, you know, just live and let live.
• 23:12
  Stop, you know, just don't focus on it too much.
• 23:15
  Like it doesn't bother us.
• 23:16
  It's, you know, if there's leery behavior, if there's, you know, offensive or intrusive or invasive behavior, then address that behavior.
• 23:24
  But, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to go to the mat on the question of whether or not, you know, exactly what junk someone has in their underwear.
• 23:33
  If they want to use the women's pool, like the gist of it being a woman's pool is sufficient for us.
• 23:37
  The environment, the general generalized environment of feeling that you're surrounded almost exclusively by biological women.
• 23:44
  And certainly exclusively by people who carry a feminist flag is enough.
• 23:49
  That's clearly not the perspective of people like Jermaine Greer or, you know, we know the people who copped a huge Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling, the people who took a lot of fire over the past 10 years for standing up and being accused of being trans exclusionary radical feminists.
• 24:07
  But how did you notice that cleavage?
• 24:10
  It tends to be generational. You tend to find younger women wanting to be progressive.
• 24:19
  I can give you a good example of a discussion with a very liberal younger woman, probably under 40 at the time in London.
• 24:29
  We were talking about the scenario that I would put to your former female colleagues at the public broadcaster.
• 24:38
  I'll just pause here for a second.
• 24:41
  As I said before, the issue is asymmetrical. It doesn't affect men at all.
• 24:46
  So if a person born female, identifying as male wants to go into men only spaces, men don't really care.
• 24:54
  Well, can I just pause on that? I mean, if there was a men's support group, right? If there was a men, what we would call an Australian men's shed where guys come together to talk about bloke stuff and air their issues and there was a trans man, I could imagine that coming up.
• 25:08
  It might, it might and there are some situations where someone might reject, but I'm just saying on the whole.
• 25:17
  There's certainly no fear of being much less fear of being physically overpowered.
• 25:22
  Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in that sense, it's asymmetrical.
• 25:26
  But even on the women's side, it's mostly a hypothetical question.
• 25:32
  And I'd say, so most women will never go to prison. Most women do not compete in competitive sports.
• 25:41
  And most women have never seen male genitals in a changing room.
• 25:47
  But so you that's the that's the scenario you have to imagine.
• 25:51
  So I'm going back to my liberal female friend in London. That's the the scenario we were discussing.
• 25:57
  Okay, you're in a communal women's shower room. And there's a person with male genitals standing there.
• 26:05
  So my liberal friend was bending over backwards to be progressive and said, well, isn't this just like race?
• 26:14
  Isn't this like a white woman saying she doesn't want a black woman in in the shower room?
• 26:22
  And I had to say no, sex is not like race.
• 26:27
  We don't have fortunately no longer any different changing rooms and toilets for people of different races.
• 26:35
  We do have them for people of different sexes for good reasons.
• 26:40
  So in again, in London, I know a lesbian woman, a member of what was originally founded as a lesbian and gay swim club,
• 26:52
  was in the women's changing room and before one of the sessions of the club.
• 26:58
  And saw standing next to her a person with male genitals and objected to this.
• 27:04
  She was told that she was transphobic. She cited the equality act 2010 exceptions on single sex spaces and services.
• 27:14
  And she was told by the club that the law was transphobic. She was sent to mediation and eventually she left the club.
• 27:23
  And since the UK Supreme Court judgment in April, she suggested to me that maybe the club owes her an apology because she was right all along.
• 27:34
  So yeah, so that's if you're really going to take this extreme position, you have to apply it to communal shower rooms, to prison cells and to sports.
• 27:47
  Can I just push on this analogy about race and the claim that that then non analogous like to be as generous as possible to the kind of alien argument of the young woman you were speaking to.
• 27:58
  There have been times and places when there was a very justifiable fear, probably of white people being victim of, I don't know, violence from black people.
• 28:09
  I mean, if you were in a partite South Africa, it was probably very likely that an average black person was a poorer and maybe had a higher rates of incarceration and criminality.
• 28:23
  Then the white elite. So it's conceivable that at the time it would have seemed sensible to isolate communities.
• 28:31
  Is there not an analogy there that the trans community is a historically disadvantaged community and is being excluded from that scenario in the changing room and that there could be a future in 50 years or 100 years time.
• 28:43
  When we regard that as being equally retrograde, not that there's no difference. There is a difference between a person with male genitals and a person with female genitals, but there's also a difference between a black person and a white person.
• 28:55
  We might just in the future say those are sort of trivial differences in comparison to the way that we want to express ourselves and express our gender identity.
• 29:03
  Well, this argument has been made. I can refer you to a book published by a transgender person, Martin Rothblatt, the apartheid of sex, published in 1995.
• 29:17
  I read it in 1996. I liked the part about same sex marriage. I thought, oh great, this is good stuff. And kind of skimmed over the rest. I didn't really process it.
• 29:30
  In 2023, I went back and reread the book and was absolutely shocked. It said, yes, sex should be taken off birth certificates. It should be treated like race. And there should be no single sex basis.
• 29:44
  One set of prisons for all with mandatory contraceptive injections to prevent pregnancies, one set of sports categories, et cetera.
• 29:59
  So I think for most women, a nightmare scenario. Yeah, so that's, and I just historically, if you go back to 1954, US Supreme Court decision brown versus Board of Education, which was the, well, it was specifically about racial segregation in public schools.
• 30:22
  But it was applied across the board to public toilets, drinking fountains, et cetera. And at no point did anyone say, well, we should apply this to male and female spaces as well.
• 30:36
  Not in 1954 and not today. They are most definitely different.
• 30:42
  Are there as many trade-offs between women's rights and transgender rights as we are told from both sides, from either the extreme transgender activists or from the conservatives who, who would previously have been called turfs like it.
• 30:57
  What is the, what is the most harmonious way of resolving whatever conflicts there are and are any of the conflicts phony?
• 31:04
  Well, there are fewer conflicts and you think, for example, violence. Nobody is proposing that transgender people should be sitting in the subjective violence or not protected against violence.
• 31:17
  Now, this came up at McGill University, Montreal, January 23, 2023, when I gave a talk.
• 31:26
  There was an open letter to McGill University calling for the cancellation of my talk because it would promote the genocide of transgender people around the world.
• 31:37
  Okay. Just saying the things I've been saying to you would cause genocide. Okay. So that is just absurd.
• 31:46
  Employment discrimination. Nobody calls for employment discrimination against transgender people in the vast majority of situations where your births six is not relevant.
• 31:58
  So employment discrimination against transgender people has been illegal in the European Union since 1996 and under US federal law since a US Supreme Court decision in 2020.
• 32:10
  And no one is debating that. So in this, in this chapter common ground, I just go through it quite a wide array of rights that are not contested.
• 32:21
  So what is contested, first of all, changing your legal sex and how easy it should be.
• 32:27
  Second, the exceptions that are necessary if you have changed your legal sex.
• 32:34
  And third, the issue we haven't discussed so far, medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria. Those are the biggest issues.
• 32:43
  Yeah, we'll get there in a second. I just will also before we leave adults want to get a clarify what the status quo of the law is in places like the state where I live in Australia because we so we just passed this law that said what exactly?
• 33:01
  In what company does it put us in terms of other jurisdictions?
• 33:06
  It's you it's pretty much the self identification model has been adopted in New South Wales. New South Wales has gone from a law requiring surgery to one requiring a statement of support from someone who's known you for 12 months that you're acting in good faith.
• 33:29
  And that is all does that person have to be a justice of the piece or something or they just have to be somebody someone who's known you for 12 months.
• 33:37
  So one person in the world. Yeah, yeah, and most people could come up with that person. So I'm sure anyone could come up with one human being in the world who would vouch for them.
• 33:48
  Yeah, so you could call that a safe guard. It doesn't exist in Ireland, for example, or Argentina, but not much of one.
• 33:57
  So I just like to comment on this bill because I read it. I read the first version of the bill, which said that the individual applying to change their legal sex could nominate a sex descriptor any sex descriptor of their choice if it was not a prohibited one, which included offensive or obscene words.
• 34:21
  Okay, so when I read this, what's the sex descriptor? What does that mean? Well, male female or something else. So for the something else, then the first version of bill, you could put whatever you wanted.
• 34:34
  So the question I asked, I was going to put this in my book, but eventually I didn't. So could you put kangaroo or koala?
• 34:42
  Right. Right. Yeah. And in the first version of the bill, I couldn't see anything to prevent that. So I just discovered on well, really, the over the weekend that the bill has become law and has come into force on the first of July.
• 35:00
  But it was watered down somewhat in negotiations between the member of the legislative assembly and the labor government in the South Wales.
• 35:11
  So now it says you can change your sex on your birth certificate. And the choices are male female non binary, non specified or something else provided by regulations.
• 35:28
  So far, I can't find any regulations to give you other options. So now it's for, but there was, I saw a discussion on Australian television about the fact that the new law says you can change your sex.
• 35:40
  As many times as you want in the UK, it's once when a condition of changing illegal sex is that you're going to live with this new legal sex for the rest of your life in Australia, no limits.
• 35:53
  So presumably in the winter, you could be male spring female summer non binary, autumn, non specified and then continue the cycle.
• 36:05
  And this would literally open you up to all of the benefits of the opposite sex. If there are any under the law, like this isn't just a game that people can play, but like I would literally be able to change my sex and then be able to fulfill a quota in a political party that might have them, for example.
• 36:24
  Is there any other safeguard? Is there any common sense safeguard where the rubber actually meets the road to, I don't know, soften the impact.
• 36:34
  Very good question. So this morning, I checked the law. It says so person who has changed their legal sex is for the purposes of any law in New South Wales, a person of the sex stated in the certificate.
• 36:51
  But this is subject to any other act. So other acts can override this. I checked there's an exception for transgender participation in sports and the new act that has come into force in 1st of July.
• 37:06
  As a note, it says, nothing in this part changes access to toilets, change rooms, sport or allocation in correctional facilities, women's refuges or any other place. So, yeah.
• 37:21
  So if there was a rule that tried to encourage greater female participation in the arts and there was a funding body or something that would provide $10,000 in startup cash to get women into unscripted television production or something like that, I could change my sex tomorrow and get that grant.
• 37:42
  Possibly, it depends whether they thought about this scenario and wrote in an exception. Often they nobody thinks about it. So there's no exception there.
• 37:54
  They couldn't do it at hawk because then they'd be in breach of anti discrimination law because they'd be discriminating against me as a trans person presumably quite possibly. So that's why you need to anticipate and write in an exception.
• 38:07
  But I can cite two examples. So I grew up in the province of Alberta in Canada, which is known as the country's most conservative province. So I was very surprised when I learned that Alberta has self identification and had it before New South Wales.
• 38:27
  And a man, it's reported you can find this in various websites, BBC, etc. A man changed his legal sex to female to get cheaper car insurance.
• 38:38
  Oh, yeah. Right.
• 38:40
  Yeah. So that's a good reason.
• 38:42
  We have to pay more for car insurance because we're going to drive this.
• 38:45
  Yeah. Now that is sex discrimination because every individual should be judged on their own driving record. If you're a safe male driver age 20, you shouldn't be charged more.
• 38:59
  And that is the law in the European Union. There was an exception for insurance premiums and it was struck down by the Court of Justice of the EU in 2011.
• 39:09
  That's the solution, not changing your legal sex. There was another case in Switzerland actually Switzerland adopted self identification in December 2020 on the same day of same same sex marriage.
• 39:24
  So this is a characteristic of these political changes. They're done under the cover of same sex marriage. The public is distracted or there is just no time for public debate or discussion.
• 39:37
  So the New South Wales law, most of the stages in the parliament took place in less than 48 hours in October 2024.
• 39:46
  So in Switzerland, which has self identification, a man changed his legal sex to female to avoid compulsory military service.
• 39:57
  And presumably there was no exception for this.
• 40:00
  I mean, another way you mentioned that they often come through with the same sex marriage. It's not just that there's a technocratic or logistical connection between these laws and same sex rights laws, but also I think culturally they've done a good job.
• 40:16
  They've done a lot of trans activists of piggybacking on the rhetoric and intuitions of gay rights equality.
• 40:24
  Here there was a long conversation in New South Wales about conversion therapy. In the case of gay kids, they would try to have the gay beaten out of them or discouraged out of them usually by religious bigots.
• 40:40
  And that does a long and terrible history of that. And then that analogy gets used in the case of the transgender issue to demonize psychiatrists who are trying to investigate what else is going on with a child who is presenting with gender dysphoria.
• 40:55
  Because if to ask questions about their overall mental health or possible depression or anxiety or autism or whatever it might be is a form of conversion therapy because you're refusing to a priori honor their gender identity and ostensibly trying to discourage them out of it or something.
• 41:13
  I think there's a big cultural way in which a lot of this probably wouldn't have happened had it not been for the credibility that the success of the gay rights movement has been able to lend it.
• 41:25
  Well, that's definitely true. And a real watershed was June 2015 when the US Supreme Court decided that there was a right of Saintess couples to marry in all 50 states.
• 41:41
  So by 2015 you had Saintess marriage across the UK in most across the US in most of the UK in Canada in New Zealand and on going debate in Australia.
• 41:59
  So you had LGBT rights organizations panicking most of their work was done. So how are they going to raise money? How are they going to justify funding? And so they took up transgender issues in a big way.
• 42:17
  And so yeah, they well in my in my book, I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I call it the hijacking of LGBT organizations by the transgender rights movement.
• 42:31
  And what this is meant is that no dissent is permitted. So I mentioned the interview, I started to be interviewed about the Georgia Carter principles as one of a person who was there at the start.
• 42:46
  And so journalists contacted me. I said what I thought this was published in the online magazine, the critic on the first of April 2021.
• 42:58
  The next day I got an email from the executive director of Ilga Europe, the International S.V. N.G. Association European region based in Brussels saying that this had serious implications.
• 43:12
  So I had done free legal work. This is pro bono work doing what are called in the US Amicus Curie, I friend of the court, breeze in Europe third party interventions for Ilga Europe for over 20 years.
• 43:30
  And only on lesbian and gay cases, I did not work on transgender cases. I said to them, let's agree to disagree. I don't work on transgender issues for you. I will happy to continue working on the lesbian and gay cases.
• 43:46
  And two weeks later I was told that it was now impossible to work with me. So the relationship of over 20 years was terminated because no dissent is permitted.
• 44:00
  And if a lesbian woman in one of these organizations says, well, actually, I don't think that a person born male, retaining male genitals is a woman, then they would be silenced as well.
• 44:14
  So that's the situation. Why do you think that strategy emerged, Robert? I mean, the cynical explanation is that they want funding in these groups, but there's something broader going on culturally from people who don't have such a crude vested interest.
• 44:28
  You mentioned the genocide accusation that you got at McGill. I've had similar experiences where I've pitched a panel conversation about this issue. And I'm told that well, we don't count on us having conversations that call into question. People's right to exist.
• 44:47
  For example, you know, well, I'm not calling it a question. People's right to exist. I'm calling it a question. I'm calling for a conversation about a particular approach towards identity and towards the trade-offs of human rights.
• 44:59
  But it's like this is a very different strategy in a very different fever pitch than other civil rights movements. It doesn't smell of Gandhi. It doesn't smell of Martin Luther King. It doesn't smell of Nelson Mandela. It smells of something much more sensorious. Do you have an explanation for why?
• 45:16
  Yes. In fact, I can refer you to an excellent explanation, which appeared on the 26th of June this year in the New York Times. It was the 10th anniversary of same sex marriage across the US. Andrew Sullivan, the commentator, wrote a guest essay about the radicalization of the LGBT rights movement.
• 45:45
  And he contrasts the patient persuasion that required in his case, you could say 26 years. So he wrote an essay calling for same sex marriage in 1989. And success was achieved in 2015. And he went across the country, doing debates with people, trying to address their concerns, etc.
• 46:13
  Person by person persuasion was the tactic or the method of the LGBT rights movement. The transgender rights movement is an element of what you could call the woke social justice movement, which doesn't believe in persuasion.
• 46:34
  By the way, the transgender member of the House of Representatives in the US, Sarah McBride has commented on this recently, the failure to try to persuade.
• 46:47
  So it's basically I would call it a quasi religious approach, which is here is that we're going to tell you the truth. And if you don't accept it, your evil and should be silenced. So trans women are women.
• 47:03
  The Stonewall group or organization in the UK in 2018, they printed t-shirts, trans women or women get over it. And when I was at McGill, there was a chance the students were trying to drown me out from outside before they invaded the seminar room and stopped it.
• 47:23
  They were chanting, fuck your system, fuck your hate. Trans rights aren't up for debate. And so that that has been the approach, no debate, no discussion. And that is, I could say a recipe for political backlash.
• 47:42
  If you don't allow people to express their concerns. And that's why the transgender rights movement is now losing in court. They've lost in the UK Supreme Court in April and in the US Supreme Court in June in the case about medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria.
• 48:04
  And at some point I'd like to link that to the conversion therapy.
• 48:08
  I will, I promise. I just want to touch on that and sort of say that not only are trans rights losing in court, but they're also dragging down public support for gay marriage at the same time, which just read in the economist is at lows that we haven't seen in decades in the United States, particularly among Republicans.
• 48:26
  And one of the possible explanations is that, you know, small sea conservative middle Americans or middle brits or middle Australians, as you might call them, are a bit fed up and put off by the whole this whole thing and find it all a bit extreme.
• 48:40
  And one of those casualties is support for same sex marriage.
• 48:45
  Let's talk about the allegation of conversion therapy and let's talk about pediatrics because this is probably the most contested and where the passions run the hottest. Where are we?
• 48:57
  Well, I was asked to write a chapter for a book that's going to be published in France about conversion therapy and I had to sit down and think about it for the first time.
• 49:11
  And the first question I asked myself is how is this different from religion?
• 49:17
  So particularly with regard to adults. So in the European Court of Human Rights protects the right to proselytize, to tell people that their religion is wrong or their absence of religion is wrong and that your religion is the right one and they should change the minds.
• 49:40
  And that was my starting point and so I was asking myself, so why is your sexual orientation so sacred that no one can tell you you're making a mistake?
• 49:51
  So then I looked at the laws in the US and there's a very interesting pattern.
• 49:57
  So the political polarization in the US means that you have blue states and red states.
• 50:04
  Blue states are good and do everything right. Red states are evil and all of their ideas are bad.
• 50:13
  So in the blue states, medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria is permitted.
• 50:20
  So this will mean puberty blockers, obstetics, hormones and surgery. You get cases of girls who are 15, even 13, having their breasts removed.
• 50:32
  Is that legal? I thought that the protocol was puberty blockers at those ages and then surgery after the age of whatever adulthood.
• 50:41
  Well, it depends on the country. In the UK, the National Health Service does not offer any surgery for gender dysphoria until the person is 18, but those limits don't exist in many US states.
• 50:56
  So the blue state position is medical treatment is permitted at any age and bot conversion therapy is prohibited.
• 51:09
  Having concluded, I couldn't see why you needed protection against conversion therapy for lesbian and gay adults at least if you don't want it, just say no.
• 51:23
  And if it's because you're in a religious community and you're being pressured to change, it's really difficult for the law to intervene because how do you protect people from their own religious beliefs.
• 51:37
  Now, we had a big debate in the UK about satomasochism in the 1990s and the conclusion of a law commission was that you should be able to consent to it as an adult.
• 51:48
  But you have the same people who campaigned for the right to consent to satomasochism now saying no, you cannot consent to conversion therapy.
• 51:59
  If someone puts you in a chair and says, I think you're living your life the wrong way, no, that is abusive and something you shouldn't be able to consent to and that just doesn't make sense to me.
• 52:10
  But are we normally talking about minus in the case of conversion therapy and we normally talking about 13 year old boys who were being sent off to be yelled at by or manipulated by religious brethren.
• 52:25
  It depends on the country. So in Germany, it's only under 18s, the US states that prohibited, it's only under 18s, but Canada, it's any age, France, it's any age, some states in Australia, so it depends.
• 52:43
  But I would say the main incentive for a conversion therapy law is to prevent psychotherapy as an alternative to puberty blockers, opposites and hormones, especially in the case of a minor with gender dysphoria.
• 53:05
  So that is the main object of it. And so what has happened in the US, the question of laws prohibiting medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria went to the US Supreme Court on the 18th of June.
• 53:22
  The majority by voted six to three rules that these laws are permitted, they have a rational basis, you have 24 states that prohibit all treatment of this kind.
• 53:33
  It's possible in future that more states will adopt these laws to protect young people because they are essentially too young to make these choices.
• 53:43
  In England, a person under 18 cannot buy cigarettes or alcohol, cannot have a tattoo and cannot have a Botox injection, but until recently they could have puberty blockers, which might result in permanent changes to their body.
• 54:01
  So that is the concern, so the evil people of the red states, in fact, maybe they're onto something that children need protection.
• 54:12
  And if you look at, so this red state blue state debate in the US, if you go to the UK, we had a conservative government that banned, first the National Health Service stopped prescribing puberty blockers, and then the conservative government banned private prescriptions.
• 54:29
  When the labor government won the election, they extended that ban and made it permanent.
• 54:35
  So we have a political consensus in the UK, it is not good blue state versus evil red state.
• 54:41
  So that's the issue of laws banning medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria that's been settled in the US, it's up to each state to decide.
• 54:52
  But with conversion therapy, that issue is now before the US Supreme Court.
• 54:57
  So in a case from Colorado, a therapist who wants to offer a psychotherapy to a person minor with gender dysphoria is confronted with Colorado's law against conversion therapy.
• 55:11
  And the therapist is arguing that this is a violation of the right to freedom of expression.
• 55:17
  And so that probably by June next year, there'll be a judgment on that issue.
• 55:23
  Can we not make a distinction between conversion therapy on the issue of sexuality and conversion therapy on the issue of gender identity?
• 55:31
  I can imagine a case being made that sexuality is quite well understood.
• 55:36
  It has a very long history of understanding what treatment does to people.
• 55:42
  It doesn't seem hugely open to social contagion, kids gay, even if they grow up in environments where it's terrible to be gay.
• 55:51
  There's obviously some kind of genetic or epigenetic, you know, source of sexuality and therefore it's unusually cruel to try to cajole someone to be had to have a different sexuality than they believe that they do.
• 56:08
  But that the same kind of rigidity does not necessarily apply to gender identity, especially in cases where there might be a social contagion effect of a bunch of girls who are kind of gender queer and, you know, on the autism spectrum or something all coming out and maybe you want to interrogate that as a psychiatrist or a psychologist more intently than would be appropriate to interrogate their sexuality.
• 56:35
  Are they not two different things?
• 56:38
  I think there are because there's really no evidence that any amount of psychotherapy will change someone's sexual orientation if they're same sex attracted.
• 56:50
  So it really is pointless, but on the with regard to gender dysphoria, there was a lot of evidence before gender affirming medical treatment was introduced that most young people with gender dysphoria change their minds and decided no, I can accept my body and I don't need any medical treatment.
• 57:18
  I can accept my sex. So that is a major point of contention between many lesbian and gay adults and transgender rights activists.
• 57:31
  I have a chapter in my book with the title why transgender rights are not like LGBT rights and the major point of dispute is that many lesbian and gay adults can remember being feminine boys or masculine girls and being left alone to grow up and become happy lesbian and gay adults.
• 57:57
  And the statistics on children refer to gender clinics show that most of them large majority are same sex attracted.
• 58:07
  And so some people call this this the medical treatment the conversion therapy and in fact what they're doing is conversing converting potential future lesbian and gay adults into future heterosexual adults.
• 58:24
  And sometimes they say that I've heard at least this expression in France about extreme positions sometimes meeting so the ultra progressive position that children require medical treatment meets the position of the government of Iran.
• 58:42
  So in Iran you can't have an open lesbian or gay relationship but if you say your transgender they're quite happy to book you for surgery.
• 58:53
  So if your gay man attracted to men you would be told great you need to change your body as a woman you can have relationships with men.
• 59:01
  So the position of many lesbian and gay adults now is leave the children alone let them grow up offer psychological support and explore other causes of their mental distress.
• 59:17
  Is it autism sexual abuse earlier as a child what what other causes it could be but don't try to change their bodies.
• 59:28
  Isn't the problem with leaving it alone in the case of a transsexual that the that puberty then cements the biology of their natal gender and that there's there you know there's been no way to get out of it.
• 59:43
  But I mean I feel like the cohort of people who we're talking about here is relevant that that we're being sloppy in the broader culture about the difference between this minority of people previously called transsexuals who from the age of two insists that they're in the wrong body and who really do lead largely miserable lives if that's not accommodated versus
• 1:00:09
  you know various concentric rings of populations of people who might have drunk some gender cool aid and find it fulfilling in some way to express whatever other psychological issues they've got going on through identifying as non binary or the opposite gender like are we are we throwing the baby out with the bath water here.
• 1:00:36
  No I wouldn't I wouldn't say that because most of this discussion about medical treatment concerns risks and benefits and is there enough evidence have the treatments being studied et cetera but I think there's a much bigger problem which is how do you know what this child will want when they're 18.
• 1:01:03
  Okay the child says one thing now I'm a boy but actually I'm really a girl will they say the same when they're 18 nobody can know that that is why caution is required now some will say well this is terrible for the truly transgender child who go through puberty will have sex characteristics they don't want but first of all
• 1:01:33
  the past evidence shows that the majority will change their minds we we have to think about those those children but when we say the majority will change their minds aren't we talking about the larger cohort of all of those concentric circles of of people who identify as trans I don't think the majority of the inner cohort of true transsexuals changes their minds today.
• 1:01:53
  Well there can nobody knows who the true transsexuals are and the past studies point but yeah and the past studies show that up to 80% of them change their minds so I can recommend the book by Hannah Barnes time to think about the gender clinic in London the pediatric gender clinic and she just she interviewed various people one of them said that the the people the children who were not truly transgender were treated as
• 1:02:23
  collateral damage so in this zeal to help what was assumed to be the truly transgendered child they were changing the bodies of children who might have changed their minds later if they had been left alone.
• 1:02:39
  So that's just the first the first big problem is you don't know which children are the ones who will want this treatment when they're 18 I compare I compared it in a draft document with cancer so a child has cancer we know that child has cancer we know the situation is urgent we treat them.
• 1:02:59
  Gender dysphoria is it permanent or temporary we don't know so that's why and the medical treatment is not urgent so that's why we we should not intervene now the second reason.
• 1:03:15
  Just to pause there before we get the second reason surely it's possible that we've been unduly sloppy in our zeal to for trans equality and trans rights and that we have there have been these tragic instances of detransitioning and over diagnosis and those instances of collateral damage should never have happened.
• 1:03:37
  And at the same time if we were really diligent about using professional psychiatrists and psychotherapists to ascertain who are the ones who are the true transsexuals almost with whatever biology they have or psychology they have and who are the ones who are victims of contagion or something else going on.
• 1:03:58
  Wouldn't you be able to I mean you sound fatalistic about it like throwing your arms up and saying there's no way that we could possibly tell the difference but surely people who've worked in this field forever would have a pretty good idea about the likelihood of this being a person who is going to live a life of quiet desperation if we don't give them puberty blockers and this is another person who is probably in a category that is somewhat more fungible.
• 1:04:24
  You might think that that possibility exists personally I just think it's not it's fallible and my sympathies are with the missed diagnosed child but it is said and I had this conversation recently in the Netherlands that that's where this treatment was first invented gender affirming treatment and they said yes we had rigorous psychological screening before we offered the treatment.
• 1:04:54
  Well that rigor has been abandoned in most places in the world it's now gender-ferending treatment means a boy says he's a girl and the reaction of the parents the healthcare professionals etc is supposed to be that is an absolute truth you know who you are we must get you medical treatment as soon as possible.
• 1:05:17
  And in the book I mentioned had a bar it's time to think the different defense of puberty blockers is it's merely pausing puberty giving the child time to decide what they want to do that is theoretically possible but what she points out in practice there no thinking takes place.
• 1:05:36
  Because there was no psychological support it was just a medical conveyor belt you're on puberty blockers and you go to office sex hormones and you go to surgery and there was no reconsideration of whether this is the right treatment so that's so it's the uncertainty of which children would benefit from this in the long term which is the reason why I pose all medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria.
• 1:06:05
  But there's a second reason even if you could be absolutely sure that this is a truly transgender child who will want this when they're an adult there are benefits to going through puberty to going through puberty means that you will have fertility and in some cases it's necessary according to a transgender surgeon to have an orgasm.
• 1:06:33
  So this this surgeon Marcy Bowers pointed as she said if you haven't had an orgasm before the medical treatment starts you might never have one.
• 1:06:44
  Okay so there's a quite a trade off there passing better as an adult and this is more an issue in the male to female case so yes you might try to pass better as an adult but you take risks with your fertility with sexual pleasure as an adult and even the surgery is more complicated.
• 1:07:11
  So if you take puberty blockers you have the penis of a boy which surgeons then have to try and turn into a vagina and it is becomes more complicated so but my basic argument would be that.
• 1:07:26
  Sorry how does the puberty block a change the biology of the penis because it doesn't grow.
• 1:07:31
  So the surgery is normally turning an adult penis into a neo vagina but if you have a boy's penis you have a lot less to work with.
• 1:07:46
  But I say my sorry without getting too graphic I do just want to understand this point you're saying that the size of the penis actually then becomes consequential in terms of the creation of the vagina because the nerves and so on have to be in is that what.
• 1:07:59
  There's less tissue to work with I've read of one case where they had to take part of the intestine to add additional tissue so.
• 1:08:09
  But I would sit my main argument even to the the truly transgender person assuming we could identify that person would be how can you know whether you can accept your post puberty body the only one you'll ever have if you don't go through puberty.
• 1:08:32
  So now there's a when there was a comment in the New York Times about there being a value judgment that it's better not to be transgender and I.
• 1:08:44
  I would limited to taking hormones of the opposite sex for your entire life and risking side effects and having surgery that does not always go well and can have complications.
• 1:09:00
  So accepting the body you have not taking hormones not having surgery is a better outcome than then having that medical treatment is possible so that's why I think children should be protected until they're 18 and then they can make the decision whether they need to make permanent changes to their body.
• 1:09:24
  By the way a topic for another day I would make the same argument about male circumcision.
• 1:09:30
  Interesting yeah I mean also I mean the difference in the case of circumcision would be that the child is still capable of understanding the general contours of what it means presumably I mean we might differ about that but in the case of losing the ability to have an orgasm.
• 1:09:49
  There's no way that a child can even understand what the conversation is like the stakes are impossible to comprehend right because you feel completely different post puberty than you do pre puberty about sex or about sexual attraction or about whatever totally different universe you just have to look at a 15 year old male especially to know how different that creature is from an eight year old.
• 1:10:11
  So how can the eight year old make decisions about what the 15 year old ones.
• 1:10:15
  They can't and the sorry I was gonna say yeah I mean in the past the evidence showed that gender dysphoria often resolved itself after puberty so that's why it's important to go through it and.
• 1:10:36
  I want to let you go Robert and I also want to let myself go because I have to go and feed my kids but the it sounds to me like what you're saying from a from a human rights law and a moral perspective is not just that this is a clash between you know trans rights and all other rights or trans rights and female rights or trans rights and.
• 1:10:56
  Children's rights but that as a gay person you know it was quite chilling to hear you make the point about a feminine boys and.
• 1:11:08
  And tomboy girls now sort of being I mean talk about you know if you wanted to be as hyperbolic as the trans rights activists and talk about genocide you could talk about a genocide of you know a feminine little camp boys and masculine tomboy girls who are now growing up in a context in which.
• 1:11:33
  That could be presumed to be evidence of them being the opposite sex in other words is you know you worried about there being a clash here between actually the LGBT is not just a strange mishmash but a contradictory one and that there's a basic conflict between gay rights and trans rights.
• 1:11:57
  Definitely and that the talk I gave at McGill had the title the sex versus gendered identity debate in the UK and the divorce of LGBT from T.
• 1:12:12
  And what really attracted the almost 200 student protesters what was the red flag for the bulls so to speak was I mentioned that there's a new organization in in the UK called LGBT alliance of which it's a charity of which I'm a trustee and so LGBT alliance generally supports transgender rights.
• 1:12:41
  That has particular disagreements about change of legal sex women only spaces and medical treatment of children and so that's why we take some distance from the transgender rights movement because we need freedom to disagree.
• 1:12:57
  So the change in the UK is no LGBT without the tea or LGBT with the tea my counter chant is LGBT is not like tea sometimes we might disagree.
• 1:13:12
  But but in the LGBT community this is considered high treason.
• 1:13:21
  Okay so the LGBT alliance was attacked from the moment of its birth by transgender or an organization for transgender children and adolescents called mermaids which went to court to try and have our charitable status revoked even though they didn't have any legal standing to do so.
• 1:13:46
  And well well over let's say three or four hundred thousand US dollars was spent on legal fees and they lost their case that's amazing that is that is like frankly disgusting that any you know activist group that claims to be four people's rights would try to revoke the you know try to discredit another group that is fighting for people's rights for another group's rights because it differs in opinion about.
• 1:14:15
  Certain trade offs like it's gross yeah yeah and yeah this is no debate and I just went to a an LGBT law event recently I normally I now I don't go to LGBT spaces I don't feel welcome there.
• 1:14:32
  And I really felt I like I told people like Charles Darwin at a creationist conference so everyone there has these certain beliefs trans women or women medical treatment of minors is a good thing it's just been banned in Argentina Brazil that's terrible rising transphobia and I don't agree with this and and not a single person there mentioned my book and they didn't want to talk about it.
• 1:15:01
  And the weirdest and like most macabre thing about all this is that the greatest victims of this are trans people and they're right to be worried about transphobia because it is on the rise and it's caused by these people who are self appointed activists who've just.
• 1:15:15
  You know asked for so much more than is the average person regards as being reasonable and of course there's going to be a backlash i've been saying for seven or eight years be careful there's going to be a backlash to this you can't just keep in can't keep chanting and chanting and shutting people down and thinking that they're going to cop it indefinitely it was obvious that we're going to get a backlash and the people who pay the price for that just as the people who pay the price for G had us are everyday Muslims are the you know it's like.
• 1:15:45
  The movie play out so many times it's infuriating that it keeps on happening yeah I would just say there the transgender rights movement has made some unreasonable demands that have triggered a political backlash the question is whether they're willing to reassess their demands.
• 1:16:02
  And the problem is once you go out on the trans women are women limb it's hard to go back so i'm hoping that they will and that they will honestly reassess their position it's not a big shit it doesn't have to be a big shift i know it feels big to the people who are all inside baseball but to the rest of us are on the outside.
• 1:16:22
  You know just instead of trans women or women it's trans women are basically kind of women and should be treated as such in almost all circumstances but not every single one.
• 1:16:33
  Well that's not that bad right no no not at all i actually i publish an essay in the quillette online magazine and the final sentence was transgender persons are human beings and that should be enough.
• 1:16:50
  I'll leave it on that Robert thank you for your wisdom thank you for your insights also if people are interested in Andrew Sullivan and the piece that he wrote in the New York Times he was on this show last month and he'll be another guest in a in a few weeks time he's an amazing person and well worth looking into for an early gay activist point of view about what's gone wrong in the trans universe as are you Robert thank you again.
• 1:17:15
  Thank you.