Aug. 16, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| This is a really fast, quickly growing movement. | ||
| Among millennials, something like 10% identify as a third gender. | ||
| So that's a lot of people. | ||
| And I would be totally on board with people identifying however they want if it didn't also include things like medical interventions, like double mastectomies, taking testosterone. | ||
| Testosterone in a lot of cases. | ||
| And in a lot of cases, I think these are just young gay people who are struggling with that. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, guys, make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel and have clicked that pesky notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is a neuroscientist who specializes in gender, sex, and sexual orientation, as well as the author of the new book, The End of Gender, debunking the myths about sex and identity in our society. | ||
| Dr. Debra So, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
| Thank you for having me again. | ||
| So I was checking right before I sat down to see when I had you on last. | ||
| And it's almost two years to the day. | ||
| It's two years to the week. | ||
| And we were talking about much of the stuff that you wrote about in this book, | ||
| gender and the whole LGBT letter conglomeration and identity and all of these things. | ||
| And I remember when we sat down for the first time that a lot of people said, "Oh no, this trans stuff, | ||
| this isn't real. | ||
| Nobody really cares about this stuff. | ||
| All these things, these are just made up things that only academics and you YouTubers care about." | ||
| Flash forward two years to where we're at right now with your book coming out this week. | ||
| And it's like, this is one of the biggest issues around. | ||
| So, I guess my first question is, it must feel pretty good to not be crazy, huh? | ||
| I guess so, but I'm just so horrified by how everything has turned out. | ||
| I mean, I was really hoping, when I saw you two years ago, I remember things were just starting to pick up in the mainstream, and I was still hoping there's still a chance maybe this is going to get caught, people are going to figure things out, we're going to be able to cut this off before it gets too crazy, but it really has just gotten worse. | ||
| And with The End of Gender, I wrote that book really with the hope of trying to, again, bring more attention to these issues, So that people might take them seriously and realize that, you know, we're not just a bunch of fringe, crazy people complaining about things. | ||
| These have real implications for people's lives, especially for young people. | ||
| And it's going to be really, really unfortunate and ugly in a few years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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All right. | |
| So the book is really spectacular and you dive into what are considered some of the most controversial topics of the day. | ||
| So we're obviously going to get to all of that. | ||
| But for for anyone watching this that didn't see our first interview, can you just do like a quick two minute sort of recap of your bio of how of your training that led you to write this book? | ||
| Right, so I, when I was in my PhD, so I have a PhD in sexual neuroscience research. | ||
| I now work as a journalist. | ||
| I write predominantly about the science of sex and gender, also about politics and how politicization of scientific research is really doing society a disservice. | ||
| And I also write a lot about academic freedom because that's becoming another problem that we're seeing. | ||
| And so for myself, in the last few years of my PhD, I had noticed that the political climate of academia was shifting, and it was becoming very clear that there are certain topics that you are not allowed to research, that you're not allowed to talk about or discuss, even if you are a scientific expert in the field. | ||
| And one topic in particular that I had been following was the issue of gender transition in children. | ||
| And so at that time, every single mainstream news piece, pretty much, I could count on maybe one or two fingers the number of pieces that had come out criticizing this at that time, said that the best way forward for children who are gender dysphoric, so they feel they're more like the opposite sex than the sex that they were born as, The best way forward for them was to socially transition at a young age. | ||
| Younger being better, and that once they did transition, they flourished. | ||
| You know, parents would say that they're doing so much better. | ||
| But from a scientific perspective, all of the research literature suggests that it's actually better for these children to wait until they reach puberty. | ||
| There's a very, very high chance that they're going to outgrow the way they feel. | ||
| They're more likely to grow up to be gay in adulthood. | ||
| And so I wrote an op-ed about this and I waited about six months because I didn't know if I really wanted to publish it because I knew it was going to be, there's going to be huge backlash. | ||
| And I asked a number of my mentors and colleagues what I should do. | ||
| And I remember one of my mentors said to me, I asked him, should I wait until I have tenure? | ||
| Because at the time I had planned to stay in academia and I had a whole plan in terms of what I was going to do in terms of my research. | ||
| And he said that tenure would not protect me in this climate. | ||
| So I decided to publish that piece and It was a difficult time. | ||
| I'm really glad I did it. | ||
| And I write in the book about, you know, what that process was like for me and what it was like being mobbed really badly for the first time. | ||
| But once you get through your first mobbing, you're fine. | ||
| And you know, they can't stop me now. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because you know I've been through my own version of the mob thing and I feel the same way. | ||
| Once you get through it, you will survive. | ||
| It's gonna hurt, it's gonna suck, all of that stuff, but once you get through it and survive, you will be stronger on the other side. | ||
| Could you just talk a little bit though about The reaction from your colleagues because I'm still I think a lot of people can't accept somehow that academia could be this corrupt that when you write a paper using scientific evidence saying that you know when you transition this young it doesn't necessarily lead to a happier life and you use data and evidence to support that | ||
| That you still get hit from the other academics. | ||
| Like, I think people can't really, the average person who's not in academia can't really understand how that happened to academia. | ||
| Well, I would say within sex research, which was my discipline, it really has been like a canary in the coal mine, because we saw these issues, especially left-leaning science denial. | ||
| This has been an issue for decades in sexology, which is the scientific study of sex and gender. | ||
| So most of us in sexology are liberals. | ||
| I consider myself still to be a liberal. | ||
| And I think my colleagues are just focused on doing good work, as they should be. | ||
| So I wouldn't say, not that you were saying this, but I wouldn't say sex research necessarily themselves are corrupt in why they stay silent. | ||
| It's more that they know they already have a target on their back. | ||
| Usually sexologists are dealing from science now, coming from the right, because usually Not everyone on the right has an issue with sex researchers, but historically it's been more on the right. | ||
| Now that it's coming from the left, it's like sex researchers don't know how to deal with it, because in a lot of cases it's people on the same side as you, and you feel as though, well, is this really as important as calling out when the right comes after us? | ||
| So I think that's one layer of it. | ||
| You know, it's very competitive in academia and to get a tenure position is almost unheard of nowadays. | ||
| So you're very busy. | ||
| It's stressful. | ||
| And then you have these other academics and other disciplines who are not scientific. | ||
| Not to say that they all have bad intentions, but they're starting to take over. | ||
| They're the most vocal and they're getting a lot of support also, I would say, by mainstream news outlets. | ||
| So as time goes on, it feels, I think, more and more like you have more to lose than to gain by speaking out. | ||
| So why start speaking out now? | ||
| And that's how we got to where we are. | ||
| So one of the things that I'm really amazed by, and I've brought this up with a couple guests when I've talked about the trans issue, I've talked about this with Douglas Murray and with Rob Smith and a couple other people, is that in many ways the trans movement now seems almost perversely anti-gay, meaning that if you're an effeminate young boy, they would rather see you transition to be female rather than accept that you actually are just a gay male. | ||
| So I also think, just for me personally, it's particularly weird because I played with G.I. | ||
| Joes and Transformers, so no one thought I was gay per se, right? | ||
| But I have friends that were boys that played with Barbies, and people thought they were gay when they were five. | ||
| And that if they now, even though they're maybe in their 40s now, if they were growing up now and they were four years old, five years old doing that, they would have been put through transition. | ||
| And that seems sort of anti-gay, doesn't it? | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| And myself, as we talked last time I was with you, I grew up in the gay community. | ||
| I find this very upsetting. | ||
| I have countless friends who have reached out to me over the years saying, you know, Debra, if I were growing up now, I probably would have transitioned because this is such a common thing when you are a young child who is likely going to grow up to be gay. | ||
| You tend to be gender atypical and have interests that are gender atypical and friends of the opposite sex. | ||
| So that's been a huge concern of mine, especially we talked also about how transitioning now, I consider, and I think many in the field would agree, that it is like the new conversion therapy where if you have a healthy gay child who, say you have a little boy who's very feminine, I think some parents have a sense there's a chance he's going to grow up to be gay. | ||
| So if he's attracted to men when he's older, if he transitions to female as a child when he grows up, he's going to appear to be a straight woman. | ||
| So that, I mean, and I think homophobia does play a role in terms of the parents who, not for all of them, but for some of them who are so on board with this and who are championing this movement. | ||
| And then there's another layer, I think, of anti-gay sentiments in that you have some individuals, some trans women, not all, who are saying, you know, if I'm a woman and I still have body parts that would be considered male, if you are attracted to women, you should be wanting to have sex with me. | ||
| And I don't think that's okay either. | ||
| I think it's totally fine if people I think trans people do deserve love and respect, but I also don't think it's right to impose on people. | ||
| Just like, you know, some people might not be into Asians with blonde hair, and that's perfectly their right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think it's starting, the sort of hysterical nature of this, of what you just described, like, you have to be attracted to me if this and all of those things, do you think it's starting to backfire on them? | ||
| Because I think most people, even conservatives, that sort of, as you alluded to earlier, they don't sort of love talking about these topics. | ||
| I don't know a lot of conservatives that don't want trans people I don't know any conservatives, actually, that don't want trans people to be treated equally under the law or something like that. | ||
| But I do sense that there is a real backlash now, where the movement has gone so far that people are just like, you know what, forget this whole thing. | ||
| The whole thing is evil. | ||
| And that's what I'm worried about, because when we group these letters together, I can sort of understand the people that are frustrated like that. | ||
| I could see that. | ||
| What really concerns me is where we are going to be going, what the next step is going to be in terms of what the outcome is going to be. | ||
| And so we're seeing also this growing trend of non-binary people identifying as non-binary. | ||
| And again, that can be for some people a way of coping with the fact that they are gay or lesbian and they are not yet able to accept that about themselves or because it is easier to not identify as gay in society because there is still homophobia. | ||
| Can you just explain what non-binary is, just for someone that might not know? | ||
| Yes, so it's people who identify as a third gender, so they may say they're both genders or neither. | ||
| So non-binary, gender fluid, gender neutral, gender queer, even though queer is considered by some people to be a slur against gay people. | ||
| I don't tend to like to use the word queer. | ||
| So yeah, so this is a really fast, quickly growing movement. | ||
| Among millennials, something like 10% identify as a third gender. | ||
| So that's a lot of people. | ||
| And I would be totally on board with people identifying however they want if it didn't also include things like medical interventions, like double mastectomies, taking testosterone, testosterone in a lot of cases. | ||
| And in a lot of cases, I think these are just young gay people who are struggling with that. | ||
| And we should offer them support, instead of having them undergo these interventions. | ||
| Right, so that's what I think is so interesting about this, because I think the average person wants most people to live and let live, and however you identify, that's fine, as long as you're not, you know, forcing someone to do something. | ||
| I think what happens then is this next version, where it's like, you can say you're non-binary, and if you feel that way, then so be it, but what happens is then they won't let you accept biology. So now it seems like this is now in direct | ||
| conflict with biology. And I think a lot of people are sort of, they're like, no, that's the | ||
| last line here that we're just not going to give on. Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Right. And again, like you, I have no issue with people, how they want to identify. Just | ||
| don't tell me that that's what the scientific research shows. | ||
| Because when you start denying science, that doesn't help anyone. | ||
| And the truth is eventually going to come out. | ||
| So with regards to gender, gender is binary, because for 99% of us, our gender is our biological sex. | ||
| Of course, there are intersex people and there are trans people for whom this doesn't necessarily apply. | ||
| But that's not to say that gender is a spectrum or that it's however you Wanted you don't you don't choose your gender, you know, this is what they're teaching in education now that that people Choose their gender and I think it's really harmful to put all this misinformation out there Especially in the case of someone who is identifying this way for reasons that may come from you know their own internal struggles maybe they have other mental health issues and | ||
| And we're not being able to talk about that. | ||
| I think if we could have the conversation and someone could say, yes, I've considered all these things, but I still feel I would like to have a double mastectomy and that would be better for me, even though a lot of these individuals are really young when they're doing this, then I wouldn't have so much of a problem. | ||
| But we can't even have the conversation. | ||
| If you even try to bring it up, it's considered hateful. | ||
| Even to say that there are two genders is considered transphobic now. | ||
| Right, so some people watching this are going to clip it and say that you're transphobic and I'm a self-hating gay and all the usual stuff. | ||
| So to counter that, and you write about this in the book, can you just sort of give me the road map? | ||
| If there was a young person Six years old that really felt that, you know, they were physically a boy, but they identified as a girl. | ||
| What do you think a healthy roadmap would be as opposed to the unhealthy roadmap that you're talking about that's just transitioning them at such a younger age? | ||
| I would say to the parents especially, just to love your child unconditionally. | ||
| It doesn't matter what toys they want to play with, how they want to dress, who their friends are, anything like that. | ||
| If this little boy wants to wear makeup and dresses and play with his girlfriends, then that should be totally fine. | ||
| And conversely, if you have a little boy who is male typical, I think that's also fine. | ||
| I think among especially woke parents, they don't want their children to be gender typical nowadays, which is just so bizarre. | ||
| So it's like the inverse of what it used to be, that parents didn't want their kids playing with gender-atypical toys because they're afraid their kids are going to grow up to be gay, and now it's that they don't want them playing with gender-typical toys because they think that's going to limit their growth as an adult. | ||
| So yeah, just leave him alone, and if he says he wants to be the opposite sex, see how he feels at puberty. | ||
| Right, so then what does that look like? | ||
| So now, okay, so the child, they love them, they let them play with whatever they want, be friends with whoever they want, who wear whatever they want, et cetera. | ||
| Now puberty comes along. | ||
| Then where are you at? | ||
| Well, what would normally happen, say, in what's been documented in the research literature, is children who are gender dysphoric, once they start having crushes on their peers, once they start, you know, growing into their bodies, a lot of them realize, oh, this is actually pretty great, I like my body, and I'm happy. | ||
| The ones who remain dysphoric and persist, I would recommend seeing a mental health professional, or even prior to that point, if the child's gender dysphoria is quite severe and debilitating. | ||
| The issue, though, is that nowadays, The vast vast majority of mental health professionals who work with gender dysphoric children and even gender dysphoric adults are I don't want to say that they're compromised but definitely ideology is playing a huge role in terms of how they practice because they cannot by law | ||
| Say anything other than, yes, if you want to transition, I'll help you. | ||
| I'll help to facilitate this. | ||
| Because they're going to be accused then of practicing conversion therapy, even though conversion therapy for gender identity does not exist. | ||
| There's a difference between conversion therapy for sexual orientation, which as we talked about last time, is not effective. | ||
| It should not be done. | ||
| There's no such thing as conversion therapy for gender identity, because young children who identify as the opposite sex, again, their gender I don't use the word fluid, but it's more flexible because they haven't fully developed yet. | ||
| So with development, they're more likely to feel differently. | ||
| Right, all right, so wait, just to completely clear that up, and we did go into the first part, or the second part, last time, so gender, or conversion therapy for gay people, meaning to take a young gay boy and to do whatever version of conversion therapy there is, there's just no evidence that that actually works. | ||
| What you're saying here is, if a therapist was dealing with a young person who identified as the other gender, That in essence, they sort of have to go with it because, what is it? | ||
| That they would lose their license or is there, because it's not conversion at that point at some level, right? | ||
| Or you think it's just the pressure of being a therapist that they'll be ostracized. | ||
| It's the climate. | ||
| It's that other professionals will ostracize them. | ||
| It's because they do run the risk of them losing their license because organizations will come after them and say, you are not practicing according to what the standards are supposed to be. | ||
| They'll also have activists coming after them, trying to ruin their reputation and their livelihood. | ||
| And so what has happened is I know colleagues who have told me that anyone who does not feel right about this, they are leaving the field. | ||
| They will not see patients with gender dysphoria, period, because they just, they don't feel right and they can't do their job properly. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So I know you're a neuroscientist first, and you talk a lot about the brain science behind some of this stuff. | ||
| Can we do like a sort of simple version of what, you know, studying the brain would show you about, say, what a cisgendered heterosexual brain might look like versus, you know, the brain of a gay person versus a trans person? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there is a very strong research literature documenting differences in the brain associated with sexual orientation. | ||
| So the gay people and straight people, when they're viewing pornography of their choice, that they prefer. | ||
| So if you have a straight man, he'd be looking at women. | ||
| If you have a gay man, he's looking at men. | ||
| The same network of brain regions activate in the brain. | ||
| So it has to do with emotion, has to do with the visual system, has to do with regulating sexual drive. | ||
| And so, people often ask me about the neuroimaging research as it pertains to the transgender population in terms of, is this something biological? | ||
| Is this something that we can see in the brain? | ||
| Because I think, regardless of what your political affiliation is, people are curious to know, is this something that is hardwired? | ||
| It can be changed? | ||
| Most people on the left, I would say, argue in favor of biological or brain-based explanations for gender dysphoria because In their minds that justifies transitioning and I have to be clear I do think that adults should be supported in transitioning. | ||
| I have no issue with that and research does show that for adults transitioning can be beneficial for them. | ||
| So the issue I have is when people start taking again the research and trying to bend it to fit their political narrative. | ||
| And so we had one study that came out, I think it was a year ago, that was in children with gender dysphoria. | ||
| So the research literature to date has been looking at gender dysphoria in the brain has been in adults. | ||
| And so what it has shown is that adults with gender dysphoria, their brains are shifted in the direction of the sex they identify as, as opposed to their sex at birth. | ||
| So if you have a trans woman, so she was born male, identifies as female, her brain is shifted in the direction of females. | ||
| But the thing is all these studies is that they are conflated with sexual orientation. | ||
| So again, everyone in the study, so if you have a trans woman, she was born male, identifies as female, she's also attracted to men. | ||
| So in all of these studies of trans people, they're attracted to people who share their birth sex. | ||
| So from a sexological perspective, because it can get a little bit confusing, Sexology, we consider sexual orientation for someone who's trans is based on their birth sex, as opposed to how they would be post-transition. | ||
| So, all this to say is, with the kids, this study got so much media attention, people saying that gender dysphoria, see, it's in the brain, because they similarly showed that their brains were shifted in the direction of the sex they identify as, and this was taken to be support for early transitioning. | ||
| But again, we don't know, sexual orientation was not reported, so we don't know Maybe these children, when they hit puberty and get older, are going to be gay. | ||
| And again, they don't need to transition. | ||
| The sad thing is that researchers just don't want to touch this now. | ||
| So what you will find is all of the research coming out is compromised. | ||
| Because the only people that are doing these studies are scientists who are totally on board with gender ideology. | ||
| And they know that they're not going to have any issue when the studies come out. | ||
| Any studies that come out criticizing gender ideology or criticizing trans activism are either going to get put under review for a second time, which is completely ridiculous and unnecessary, or they're going to be retracted, or the scientist is going to be called names and smeared. | ||
| So a lot of people just say, I'm going to pick something else. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's why I find what you do so fascinating, because it's like, sex is always controversial, period. | ||
| In eternity, in human history, everything about sex is controversial. | ||
| And then when you couple it with this new woke ideology, it's like, I could see why someone like you would be worried, you know, years ago about putting that paper out, or why the average researcher now is just like, I don't need the headache, and I'm not gonna do it. | ||
| You mentioned before that there is evidence that when adults transition that they are happier on the other side. | ||
| Is that overwhelming or is it 50-50? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| There was a meta-analysis that showed that it can be beneficial, but I think what's important is that it's taken on a case-by-case basis and that each individual is able to get the support they need and to go through a proper assessment with a mental health professional to determine, is their gender dysphoria really about gender and is this something that can be solved? | ||
| Through transitioning. | ||
| Because in a lot of cases, there are other issues going on. | ||
| There was one study that showed for people who present with gender dysphoria, as many as 60% have another psychiatric mental condition. | ||
| And so, that's something that needs to be taken into consideration. | ||
| But the thing is now, people don't even want to say that gender dysphoria has anything to do with the mind or mental illness, because mental illness is stigmatized. | ||
| And I don't think mental illness or gender dysphoria Or transitioning should be stigmatized, but there's no way we're going to remove the stigma if we are not able to talk about it openly. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I don't remember if this happened to me before we last spoke on the show, but I was at an event at University of New Hampshire and I was talking about this topic and there was a woman who said she was trans and she was yelling that I'm a Nazi and I'm a racist and all the usual stuff. | ||
| And I kept saying, listen, I want you to be treated equally under the law. | ||
| I hope you have someone that loves you. | ||
| I want you to be able to be employed and happy and have all the benefits of everybody else. | ||
| And she just kept saying, you know, I'm awful and all these things. | ||
| You're not going to believe this, or maybe you will. | ||
| It turns out that she was a gender studies professor at the university. | ||
| I assume that's pretty consistent with what you're hearing at the university level too, right? | ||
| Not just the research level, but just even at just the university, the teaching level. | ||
| I find it's usually the people who are always advocating for love and tolerance and acceptance who are the most aggressive and nasty when they disagree with you. | ||
| And so that's not to say that all gender scholars are like that, definitely, but I do find I'm always amazed because the whole purpose of being in academia is about debating ideas. | ||
| I would think that's the reason you choose to be a professor is you want to Share ideas, debate with your colleagues. | ||
| It's about vigorously disagreeing, and that's how you get at the truth, and that's completely taken off the table nowadays. | ||
| Now it's about very much, there's only one way to think about an issue, and if you think outside of that issue, yes, you're going to be called a Nazi, you're going to be deplatformed, you're going to be smeared publicly, and they're going to try and get you fired. | ||
| So it's really absurd, but I think it's not just in academia anymore, as we see everybody getting cancelled now. | ||
| This has spread to the mainstream. | ||
| Yeah, is it weird for you to be sort of in a political fight? | ||
| Because that's not, you know, sex is political now, but like, it's not really what your passion is, but you know, just from following you on Twitter, like, you're in the political fight as much as I am at this point. | ||
| I didn't ever think this is what I'd be doing. | ||
| I really thought I would be a scientist. | ||
| I've always loved to write, so I was hoping to maybe write one day, do a book one day. | ||
| And the fact that I've gotten the chance to do one now has just been such a blessing and I feel so grateful. | ||
| But for sure, I feel it's something I feel very strongly and I've always felt very strongly about speaking my mind. | ||
| And so I think it does make sense in a way that this is the direction I ended up going in because I feel in this climate, you don't really have a choice. | ||
| Either you're going to put your head down and stay quiet and just You know, it's not worth it, or you're gonna go through the multiple mobbings and say, okay, keep it coming then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You obviously talk in the book and you've sort of mentioned it here about just the denial of what is actually presented in the research. | ||
| Have you figured out any tricks beyond going on podcasts and talking about this stuff on YouTube and everything else to convince people that evidence actually matters? | ||
| Because in many ways, I think what the left is throwing at us now is just sort of this anti-intellectual It's just, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Like the more evidence that you show in a certain way, it almost, they use that as proof that they are right | ||
| because you're a part of the patriarchy or, you know, you're part of the machine that they're trying to dismantle. | ||
| Have you figured out any tricks to actually break through in a way? | ||
| I generally don't try to change the minds of people who are on either extreme or who are extremely ideological. | ||
| 'Cause I feel at that point, there are comparisons being made to people | ||
| who are extremely ideological and people who are in a cult. | ||
| And I do feel in some ways, it's really difficult to break through to someone, | ||
| especially on the internet. | ||
| Unless you're sitting down with them face-to-face, maybe that can make a difference. | ||
| But I try to speak to the people who aren't really sure what they think or they want to learn more. | ||
| And I always appreciate when people go to the primary source. | ||
| So, I mean, I'm sure you know how this feels. | ||
| I get accused of quote-unquote saying things all the time when I've never said whatever it is the person is saying that I said. | ||
| This will be reported in newspapers. | ||
| This will be all over social media. | ||
| It's crazy to me. | ||
| I don't know how someone can do that and feel okay about doing that. | ||
| Especially if you know this is something that other people are going to see publicly. | ||
| And I also think if they wanted to actually end issues like discrimination against particular sexual and gender Minority groups that you would actually want to go after people who are saying hateful things if I'm just reporting what the research says and you have a problem with me Then let's talk about the research and what your issues are with that and some people do and I appreciate that and I will engage With someone if it's in good faith | ||
| But if you are making things up and saying that I'm saying things I did not say, how does that actually help your cause? | ||
| And so it makes me feel like a lot of people in this fight don't really care about the issues they say they care about. | ||
| They care about clout. | ||
| So I just generally, and I would say to your audience also, if you are engaging with people and just trying to understand, that's totally great, I think. | ||
| You can only do so much. | ||
| Do you think the liberals have enough juice, have enough energy, have enough of a sort of intellectual undergirding to stand up to this woke thing? | ||
| I think this is sort of the new split that, you know, the sort of 30 or 40 of us, you know, that we're loosely called the intellectual dark web, whatever it is now, You know, we were sort of warning about all of this stuff, and I see a real split occurring at this point, where there's some of us that sort of think that liberalism can somehow fight the woke thing, even though I personally see no evidence of it. | ||
| And then there's the ones that are, I think, more in line with my thinking on this, which is that there's a lot of bridges to be built to the right. | ||
| It doesn't mean that those guys are perfect all the time. | ||
| And as you said, you still identify as a liberal, as I do as well. | ||
| But do you think that liberalism in and of itself can withstand what seems to be happening right now? | ||
| I think so if more people start speaking up. | ||
| And I do see... I'm actually surprised because some of the people who said to me even two years ago, I'm not going to get involved in this. | ||
| This is not going to benefit me. | ||
| I don't have a dog in this fight. | ||
| So, you know, let's just hope it goes away on its own. | ||
| They are now saying, this is really bad. | ||
| I didn't think it was going to get this bad. | ||
| And I need to start speaking up about this. | ||
| How can I speak up about this? | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| So I do think the tide is going to turn. | ||
| I just think it's going to get much worse before we get there. | ||
| And my concern is also with all of the science denial and all the denial of information. | ||
| How is that going to affect our society and our knowledge and our growth? | ||
| You know, because nothing good can come from denying reality. | ||
| Yeah, well, we're in a constant denial of reality at this point. | ||
| You're in Toronto right now. | ||
| Is there any difference the way this is discussed, maybe from a Canadian perspective than it is from an American perspective? | ||
| Or has the internet just sort of leveled the playing field on that? | ||
| I think the biggest thing, like what I tell people I know is just to try to stay off social media as much as you can, because that really exacerbates everything. | ||
| It doesn't matter where in the world you are, I think social media is really polarizing us. | ||
| In terms of differences between Canadians and Americans, I think we're just as bad, or we're getting there, so don't worry. | ||
| You're not alone. | ||
| Yeah, we export everything. | ||
| So the title, The End of Gender, Yeah, I thought it was kind of interesting because it's like you're dealing with and unpacking all of these seriously complex issues related to identity and gender and everything else, but you're calling it the end of gender. | ||
| Do you think that what we're left with at the end of this conversation, if we can truly have it honestly, is that gender won't matter, won't exist? | ||
| What do you mean by the end? | ||
| Yeah, let me clarify because when I announced this, when I announced the book on social media, people got upset at me because they thought I was saying that this is like the very super woke far-left end of gender and that gender doesn't exist anymore or that gender is completely what you want it to be and it's based in self-identification and there's no tethering to biology or objectivity and that's not at all what I'm saying and I really want to emphasize. | ||
| That's why I'm asking you! | ||
| That's why I'm asking you! | ||
| Opposite of that, I'm saying gender is very much biologically based and it is the misinformation and denial of science and denial of biology and denial of evolutionary psychology that is leading us to not have a proper understanding of gender and that's why I see its demise. | ||
| Yeah, so paint the picture that turns some of this around besides just some people getting braver, like the political part of this even. | ||
| I mean, when you see at this point, all of these, you know, the LGBT organizations that at this point I think are just basically using gay people to now push the gender stuff. | ||
| I mean, what has to happen to them? | ||
| Are there nonprofits that are fighting this from a, Correct scientific perspective like what has to happen now really? | ||
| What I see happening and I actually have a line in the book where I say I'm appalled and I love I love the gay community and I have many gay men who've reached out to me over the years complete strangers who say to me Thank you for saying what you did Because I was one of these children. | ||
| I actually had one individual reach out to me Tell me around this around the time my first op-ed came out He said I was thinking of transitioning and I read your op-ed and I decided to wait and I'm so glad I did so There is a line in the book where I say I'm appalled at the number of gay men who are in support of transitioning children because this is leading to the extermination of gay kids. | ||
| And what I really think is going to happen, and this is so unfortunate and makes me so sad, is that these kids are going to be changing their minds in a few years. | ||
| I say five to ten years. | ||
| So, what is this? | ||
| This is going to be August 2020 when this comes out, so give it 5 to 10 years. | ||
| There are going to be so many kids who are saying, why did my parents let me do this? | ||
| Why did medical professionals let me do this? | ||
| They are going to have Issues from being on hormonal treatments, from surgery. | ||
| I'm already seeing all of these young people, these detransitioners, and it really breaks my heart. | ||
| And no one is listening to them, and no one is taking them seriously. | ||
| And there are going to be tons of class action lawsuits. | ||
| And I already see good clinicians in the field who are concerned, because they know it's coming, and they feel at a loss. | ||
| Because we've been trying to raise attention and get people to take us seriously, but they just call us transphobic. | ||
| Right, and by the way, it's not just the personal issues and the medical issues and everything else. | ||
| There's gonna be an insane amount of legal issues that pop up there. | ||
| I think there's gonna be kids, they'll be young adults at the time, that are gonna start suing their parents. | ||
| I think they're gonna start suing the doctors and probably everybody else involved. | ||
| I'm sure there are lawyers looking at that right now. | ||
| There's gotta be, right? | ||
| And I would say to your audience, too, because I'm sure they've been following these issues as well, pay attention to the people who are most loudly and proudly embracing this and saying this is great for the kids, because when this time comes, they're going to turn around and say, we had no idea this was going to happen. | ||
| And they're going to pretend that they had no idea when they are coming after those of us who are speaking out about it. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's a little weird to be ahead of the curve, isn't it? | ||
| Because you kind of feel like you're behind it sometimes as the things start to come true. | ||
| I feel the odd thing and when I was writing this book I felt the whole time it was a very emotional process for me because it felt very much like those of us who see it it's like we're able to see the future and we're just trying to scream as loud as possible to get people to pay attention. | ||
| Don't I know it, I know it. | ||
| You just mentioned the detransitioning part of this. | ||
| Is there a lot of literature or a lot of research on that as far as how many people have done it? | ||
| Are they happier after? | ||
| Are they suicidal after? | ||
| I mean, what do the numbers look like on that? | ||
| There was one study in Sweden that looked at people who had transitioned and then changed the marker on their legal documentation and then changed it back. | ||
| And they found that about 2% of people who had transitioned changed back. | ||
| But the thing is, not everyone who detransitions does it legally. | ||
| And also, the data collected for that study, it finished around 2011, I think it was. | ||
| So that was before this huge influx we see of young people, especially young women, identifying As male, and I've written quite a bit, and in the book I talk about rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which is this phenomenon of young women who are very quickly identifying as male, wanting to transition to male, taking testosterone, again getting double mastectomy. | ||
| When they are very gender typical as children, it's usually very out of the blue. | ||
| Usually they have other mental health issues like autism. | ||
| For a lot of them, they have sexual trauma that's not being talked about. | ||
| And so we don't yet have the data for that. | ||
| We don't know what that's going to look like. | ||
| Although there is one county in the UK where hundreds of detransitioners are coming out and saying, I have autism, I'm lesbian, and why didn't people, why didn't professionals, you know, do what they should have done, which is ask me questions. | ||
| Yeah, I can't imagine discussing anything almost more controversial than that. | ||
| You couple this sort of rapid transition with autism and then you get, you know, people to try to talk about that. | ||
| It's like, no one's gonna, you could see why the average researcher just would just be like, no way, I'm not doing this. | ||
| No, and it's difficult enough to get a study published, you know, to get funding for your... I mean, in the book I talk about a number of situations where researchers have gotten approval and they've gotten money to do their study and still they have to deal with all these extra roadblocks that pop up or people coming after them and threatening them. | ||
| So at the end of the day, you know, the science is taking a very unfortunate turn. | ||
| I think we're going to look back on this period with a lot of horror and disappointment, but I'm hoping that the outcome is not going to be that terrible if we start speaking out about it. | ||
| Yeah, have they done real research on the social pressures related to all of this? | ||
| So like when you mentioned the rapid onset where suddenly a whole bunch of girls that otherwise, like it sort of appears out of nowhere in essence, that could it be from a peer group and then they're really doing these things that are just really just crazily extreme to fit in, in essence? | ||
| Yeah, so the one study that's been done on rapid onset gender dysphoria to date was published in 2018 by Lisa Littman, and the research did suggest that there's a pure contagion aspect to it, in that these girls, so for 40% of the girls in the study who had come out as trans very quickly, they had at least half of their friend group also identify as transgender, which is 70 times the rate of what you would see in the general population in terms of people who identify as transgender. | ||
| So that in itself should raise a red flag in most people's minds. | ||
| But people are saying, oh, this is due to greater social acceptance. | ||
| But if that's the case, why is it you don't see the same thing among boys? | ||
| You don't see the same thing among people of different ages. | ||
| It's very specific to teenage girls and young adults, young women. | ||
|
unidentified
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So what do you make of that? | |
| Because young boys, you know, young boys can be susceptible to peer pressure and all that kind of stuff too. | ||
| So what is that about then? | ||
| I think for these young women in particular from the conversations I've had with them it's very much about feeling discomfort with their body for a lot of them going through puberty and suddenly getting male attention and not really appreciating attention from certain people and also the messages that they're getting from the media is that if you are gender non-conforming at all as a woman then you are probably transgender or you are probably another gender and if you look at celebrities a lot of Celebrities who are born female who are gender atypical identify as a third gender. | ||
| So I think no one is saying to them it's okay if you are a young woman and you are different or you feel like you don't fit in. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| Another thing is a lot of young women are being told if they don't like getting a period that that means that they should be a man and I'm thinking No woman likes getting her period. | ||
| That's just part of being a woman. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| I love being a woman. | ||
| You know, I take a lot of pride in being a woman. | ||
| So I just wish that we could have this conversation or there was more of this happening because they're not they're not receiving this information. | ||
| They're only receiving one message. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm going to sort of give you a theory that I've been trying to put together through some of my own interactions. | ||
| So this is not scientific in any way, but I think there's probably something to it. | ||
| What I find on Twitter is the angriest and most hostile and awful saying the worst things possible to me. | ||
| Whenever that happens from one of these anonymous accounts, I go to the account and almost without exception, | ||
| they have their gender profile, their pronouns in there. | ||
| He, him, she, her, Z, the whole thing. | ||
| And I do think there's a sort of connection between, I wanna be very clean about what I'm saying here, | ||
| that there's sort of a connection between knowing who you are | ||
| and knowing reality as it is, and then being happy or functional or something. | ||
| Can you clean this one up for me? | ||
| Because I haven't fully pieced it together. | ||
| But I do think it's quite bizarre that the people who are constantly preaching about tolerance and diversity and everything else are in many cases the ones that act completely the reverse of that. | ||
| I think part of that could be because gender is so trendy nowadays and people are given attention and praise for identifying in a way that is different from male and female. | ||
| I think for some people, and this is not to say that everyone who identifies as something other than male or female or anyone who doesn't identify as their birth sex has mental psychopathology. | ||
| But I do think for some people who have pre-existing psychopathology, they're latching on to gender and this movement as a way to bring about meaning in their life or as a way of feeling good about themselves. | ||
| And so anyone who questions that, they take that very, very personally and very deeply. | ||
| And I think that's part of why they lash out in such a horrible way. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of the intersectional piece of this whole thing that even related to everything going on right now with the protests and the riots and Black Lives Matter? | ||
| You know, we had your initial Black Lives Matter movement, and then about 10 days in, there was this massive rally, I think it was in Brooklyn, for Black trans lives. | ||
| And I never heard anyone that had a problem with black trans people. | ||
| I mean, these things have all become something that's not quite what they are. | ||
| Can you explain sort of the intersectional piece of this? | ||
| How they all kind of link together? | ||
| I'm not a fan of intersectionality, as you probably know. | ||
| So I just see it as a way for people to further promote their own personal agenda. | ||
| I have nothing against wanting to protest for trans lives or black trans lives. | ||
| or anyone's life or black lives. | ||
| I'm all for it. | ||
| But it's when you start being authoritarian and starting to shut down scientists, right? | ||
| They had a day where they, this was not about black trans lives, but they shut down STEM for a day in the name of fighting racism, which makes absolutely no sense to me. | ||
| So, I think, like identity politics, it's just about creating increasingly smaller factions to further divide us, and for particular people to get their chance at having some power. | ||
| Are you worried that because we're injecting race into every conversation, we're injecting gender | ||
| into every conversation and sexuality and all of these things into everything, | ||
| and now it's in sports and messages are just everywhere, every TV show that you watch, | ||
| that we're gonna sort of raise a generation of bigots, not because they're actually bigoted, | ||
| but they'll just be sick of all of these issues and then they're gonna view the world through that lens | ||
| where everything is about your race and your gender and your sexuality and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, that definitely concerns me because for me, and maybe I have an old school view of things, | ||
| but to me, to assume that the way someone looks or that their race says anything | ||
| about the kind of person they are or the way they think or their capabilities, | ||
| that to me is racist. | ||
| But I find that in woke land, It's racist to assume that someone's race doesn't play in those things. | ||
| And I'll never forget, I remember very early on when I started writing, I went to this event and I spoke with one of the organizers and she said to me, she looked in my eyes and she said, I think it's great that you write. | ||
| We need more women who look like you writing. | ||
| And I thought to me that sounds a bit racist but then I realized after that what she she thought this was a good thing like that she was praising me because she's saying you know I guess there aren't many Asian women who are journalists but I don't want to be Considered a good journalist because I'm Asian or because I'm a woman. | ||
| I want it to be because my work is good. | ||
| And I think that's what it should be about your value as a human being should be about who you are as a person not ticking off certain boxes. | ||
| So it does disturb me quite a bit because I feel especially for white people. | ||
| They feel like they can't speak up about it because they're going to get called racist. | ||
| Yeah, but Debra, you know that Asians are the new white people, right? | ||
| I mean, we now know, I mean, we know this, right? | ||
| Like by the woke ideology, Asian people are now in effect white because Asian people, regardless of the ethnicity or nationality, in most cases have succeeded. | ||
| So now we just gotta throw them in with the white people. | ||
| When I saw that pamphlet that was circulating a couple weeks ago, and it was something like, hard work is whiteness. | ||
| I just thought, okay, I guess we are white then. | ||
| Well, you're right. | ||
| You're talking about the thing that was put out by the, was it at the Black Museum in DC? | ||
| The African American Museum in DC? | ||
|
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I'm not sure. | |
| There's been so much. | ||
| Yeah, there's so many of them. | ||
| But in effect, if you believe in the individual and you believe in hard work and you believe in family, that these are all tools of white supremacy. | ||
| I thought anyone could work hard or care about the nuclear family or anything else. | ||
| What else should we hit on here? | ||
| How about that for an open question? | ||
| What are the other things that you're hitting on in the book that you think the average person needs to know about? | ||
| Well, what I can do is I can maybe just summarize what the different myths are because that will give your audience a sense of what we cover. | ||
| So I took a science-based approach to debunking some of the most prominent myths in our society. | ||
| So there are nine of them. | ||
| So I talk about how biological sex and gender are both not social constructs. | ||
| They are not spectrums. | ||
| I talk about how sexual orientation is related to gender identity, even though many activists and many even educational organizations say they're unrelated. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| They are related. | ||
| I talk about gender transitioning in children. | ||
| I talk about the issue of trans women in women's spaces and sports and prisons. | ||
| And then I talk about sex differences. | ||
| Let's stop on that. | ||
| Let's stop on that one for a sec, because I'm amazed by this. | ||
| I mean, this thing where we're watching males transition to female and then play in women's sports And break every record in weightlifting and racing and all of these other things. | ||
| And it's like, man, one day there's gonna be a washed up NBA player who is going to transition to female and be the MVP in the WNBA. | ||
| And then what are the feminists gonna say? | ||
| But I believe that will happen in the next couple of years. | ||
| What will the feminists say at this point? | ||
| I think it depends on what kind of feminist. | ||
| So liberal feminists will say, probably say, What's the problem? | ||
| I don't think most athletes who are identifying as female or coming out as female are necessarily doing it to get an advantage. | ||
| But it's not to say that it's never going to happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But whereas radical feminists who are critical of gender and are critical of this whole thing, they've been the most outspoken about this. | ||
| And I would still, I mean, I identified as a feminist up until a couple of years ago. | ||
| I still want gender equality for men and women. | ||
| I think we do, for the most part, have that. | ||
| But feminism, I've been critical of feminism just because I think it has lost sight of its main goals. | ||
| And so radical feminists, you know, have joined hands with conservatives, which would have been completely unprecedented, to say this is not fair. | ||
| And to consider, again, I think I have no issue referring to a trans woman as she, you know, referring to her using the pronouns she'd like and give her respect and legal protections. | ||
| But in something like sports or say mixed martial arts, which is one of my favorite sports, You cannot pretend that there are no differences at all between trans women, even after transitioning, and women who are born women, because someone can get very badly hurt or even killed in a fight. | ||
| Is the irony then that I guess the radical feminists, would they argue that there should just be no women's sports at that point? | ||
| If gender is just a social construct, I mean, wouldn't they just say, okay, well then there shouldn't be any women's sports, but then unfortunately what they would end up with is that there would be no women in sports or very few women in sports? | ||
| Wouldn't that be the end outcome? | ||
| My sense, again I'm not a radical feminist so I don't want to speak for the community, but my sense would be because they don't deny biological sex being real. | ||
| So they would say women deserve to have equal opportunities and trans women aren't, they don't consider trans women to be women because they were born male and they've been, in their eyes, socialized as men. | ||
| So there's no way that they can understand what it's like to be a woman. | ||
| But from my understanding, radical feminists are in favor of sex segregation in terms of sports because that's the only way that women have a fair Sure chance. | ||
| It's not that women are less capable. | ||
| It's just that's the reality with biology and Reality. | ||
| Yeah, and reality. | ||
| Well, speaking of reality, did you see the video, Joe Biden was at the LGBT Equality Forum, and he said that it's not what prison, it's not what gender your birth certificate says that should decide what prison you go to, it's what gender you identify as. | ||
| Meaning that you could just say, okay, I'm a woman, you could be a male murderer, say I identify as woman, and then they'll put you in a female prison. | ||
| I mean, stuff like that must make your head explode. | ||
| Well, I did see that and I remember thinking, I wish that they had someone who worked with forensic populations to speak to this because that is not, that's definitely not a good idea. | ||
| And I have worked with sex offenders in the past, both in a research and clinical capacity. | ||
| And we used to have a saying, how do you know a sex offender is lying? | ||
| His lips are moving. | ||
| So I think, as with anything in these issues, they have to be on a case-by-case basis. | ||
| But, you know, I detail in the book a little bit more about what I specifically think should be done and how we should approach these issues. | ||
| But it's just, you know, it's really become a question of, are you on the left or right? | ||
| And people basically state what they think their side wants them to say on these issues. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are there any other myths we should hit on? | ||
| Um, in the book, oh, so the last few are sex differences and sex and dating because there's so much misinformation. | ||
| Young people are totally confused and have no idea how to go about dating nowadays, so I offer some advice. | ||
| I talk about gender-neutral parenting and then also social justice and academia. | ||
| And I have to say, so I announced this book, as of today what we're taping, I announced it only a couple days ago. | ||
| One of, one very prominent columnist in Canada, Barbara Kay, she wrote a review about my book. | ||
| and the publication, so she'd been at the National Post for 20 years. | ||
| They refused to run her review because it was a positive review, | ||
| and so she subsequently resigned. | ||
| And this is after a number of, I think this was the straw that broke the camel's back, | ||
| but I'm just amazed at, already, there's a lot of pushback to this book, | ||
| and it's just science. | ||
| Why is that seen as threatening? | ||
| This is something I just cannot grasp. | ||
| I understand why people see it as threatening, but we need to talk about why. | ||
| And at the end of the day, scientists need to be able to do their job. | ||
| Yeah, Barbara Kay, you know, she's one of the, I know you know this, but she's one of the great journalists of Canada. | ||
| I actually saw the tweet about her resignation. | ||
| I had no, I didn't click it. | ||
| You know, I was doing a couple of other things. | ||
| I had no idea it had to do with your book. | ||
| That is unbelievable. | ||
| Absolutely, well, unbelievable. | ||
| Everything's unbelievable now. | ||
| So I guess it's totally believable. | ||
| She did a long Facebook post explaining why she was leaving. | ||
| And then the other half of it was the review of my book. | ||
| And then, so both of those pieces were run by the Postmillennial. | ||
| So if your audience wants to look into that a bit more, they can check that out. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Well, Debra, good luck with the book. | ||
| We're going to put the link to The End Agenda right down below. | ||
| And I hope we can do this in person at some point, or I'll come to Toronto, or you'll come here. | ||
| We'll figure something out. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome to see you, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, it's great to see you too. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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