Sept. 15, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:11
1748 Delusions of Gender - Dr. Cordelia Fine, The Freedomain Radio Interview
Cordelia Fine studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, followed by an M.Phil in Criminology at Cambridge University. She was awarded a Ph.D in Psychology from University College London. From 2002 to 2007 she was a Research Associate at Monash University, and then at the Australian National University. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Macquarie University, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
This is an interview with Dr.
Cordelia Fine, an eminent academic researcher and writer.
The book is entitled Delusions of Gender, the Real Science Behind Sex Differences.
This is the description of the book.
I hope that you will read it. I found it incredibly powerful and illuminating.
Delusions of Gender is a vehement attack on the latest pseudoscientific claims about the differences between the sexes.
Sex discrimination is supposedly a distant memory, yet popular books, magazines, and even scientific articles increasingly defend inequalities by citing immutable biological differences between the male and female brain.
That's the reason we're told why there are so few women in science and engineering and so few men in the laundry room.
Different brains are just better suited to different things.
Drawing on the latest research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and social psychology, Delusions of Gender powerfully rebuts these claims, showing how old myths dressed up in new scientific finery are helping to perpetuate the sexist status quo.
It reveals the mind's remarkable plasticity, shows how profoundly culture influences the way we think about ourselves, and ultimately exposes just how much we consider hardwired is actually malleable.
This startling original and witty book shows the surprising extent to which boys and girls, men and women, are made and not born, empowering us to break free of the supposed predestination of our sex chromosomes.
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I have on the line the Inestable Dr.
Cordelia Fine, who is the author of a book that has just been released called Delusions of Gender, The Real Science Between Sex Differences, and she's also the author of A Mind of Its Own, highly recommended as well.
Thank you so much, Dr.
Fine, for taking the time to have a chat.
It's my pleasure. So, when you talk about the real science between sex differences, I'm surprised you seem sort of very generous as to how your book dives into the analysis of that science, which seems to be the really bad science between sex differences, and it really is quite chilling to see or to read about the amount of bad science that is going on in the supposed biological basis for gender differences.
Was that a surprise for you as you began to explore the topic, or did you know that going in?
No, no, it was a very great surprise to me.
I mean, what initially motivated me to write the book was an experience I had as a parent rather than a researcher, which is that I tend to read a lot of parenting books.
I'm a voracious reader of them.
And one of the books that I read as a parent claimed that hardwired sex differences mean that boys and girls should be parented and taught differently.
And I thought that was fascinating. That was really interesting.
But then when I looked up the actual neuroscientific study on which that claim was based, I realised there was this extraordinary gap between what the study showed and what was being claimed from it.
And when I started to look at other popular books about gender, I saw that neuroscientific data were being misused in very similar kinds of ways.
So really my initial motivation was just to alert people to the fact that these old-fashioned gender stereotypes were being dressed up in Neuroscientific finery and just to remind people not to be so enthralled with brain imaging that they forgot about the importance of social factors.
But then when I started to look more closely at the scientific literature, I took it for granted that there were data out there that showed that there were differences between the brains that had importance and prenatal hormonal influences and so on and so forth.
And as I started to look at this literature, it appeared very solid from a distance, but when you started to look at it more closely, you sort of realise all these sort of gaps and flaws and inconsistencies and so on.
And I found myself very surprised by just how little really concrete evidence there was for the idea that there is such a thing as a male brain hardwired to be good at understanding the world and a female brain hardwired to understand people.
And so, you know, really the book did shift at that point.
Of course, I was still interested and I still think it's incredibly important how this work gets popularized and, you know, it's completely overblown and exaggerated to the point that it just becomes, you know, basically fiction.
But then my aim for the book really became to explain this much more complex and actually much more interesting picture of the state of the science In a way that will be accessible to everyone.
But yes, I did come in.
I was surprised. I don't come from a background in critical studies or feminist studies or women's studies.
And I came to realize during the course of the writing of the book that this has been going on for centuries.
There's nothing new about neuroscientific information being used.
Premature conclusions being drawn from it or biases being built into the research and so on and so forth.
But I was quite naive going in, so it was a shock.
And one of the things I thought was very interesting that you, I think, elucidated very well in the book was how difficult it is To do any kind of meaningful tests on babies, in other words, the amount of biases that need to be scrubbed out of the process, this seems like there's such an enormous challenge, and so many of the studies that you cited completely bypass these.
So, for instance, I think you mentioned that one of the studies that is cited quite regularly, the children were not put forward in gender-neutral clothing, which could have some effect on how the researchers are treating them, that there was a lot of things that I think you say is fairly standard practice when trying to do these kinds of tests on babies that simply weren't there, which have a huge impact on the outcomes.
Well, yeah, I think, I mean, as I came to realize, this methods are absolutely critical in this area of research.
And I think the newborn study is a good example.
And I would acknowledge that this kind of work is incredibly hard to do.
I mean, when you compare the newborn study to sort of To a study of newborns that did go to all the efforts to eliminate as much as they possibly could the potential biases from people responding to the baby unconsciously in a way that was influenced by the knowledge of what sex they were.
I mean, it's an incredibly hard task and I do acknowledge just how difficult and time-consuming and effortful this research is.
But I think that it is Really very important that when there are these methodological limitations in these studies, that they are explicitly acknowledged.
And it's very worrisome to me that a result from that kind of study that does have a number of methodological flaws can then just be spread throughout the popular literature and presented in such a way that it looks as if science has shown that You know, boy babies are hardwired to be interested in things, and girl babies are hardwired to be interested in people.
Right, and I mean, one of the reasons I appreciated having a chance to read this book was I sort of vowed to myself not to, or to try as hard as possible, given all the limitations that we have from our own histories, to not impose gender on my daughter.
And I've been waiting for 20 months for gender to show up, because I think, like most people, you don't have the capacity to Drive into the literature in the way that you did.
So I accept that the world is round, though I haven't seen it from space.
I accept that the Sun and the Moon are different sizes, though I haven't done the maths.
I just assume some things based on the experts around me.
But I was somewhat skeptical, though not entirely skeptical.
So I was sort of a wait-and-see approach.
Like, okay, so I'm not going to impose gender stuff, even though everyone has said to me and the literature seems to say that it's built in.
I'm just going to wait for it to see.
How it shows up or when it shows up.
And so far, it's in my daughter's 20 months, as I said, it hasn't shown up at all in any particular way that I can find.
But you do see it all over the place when you're parenting.
I don't know if you had this experience as well, but people impose these kinds of things all the time in their parenting.
And since reading your book, I've been trying to talk to other parents when I see this coming up.
This assumption that, you know, girls when they're younger are just smarter and boys are kind of dumb and that, you know, girls are more cuddly and boys, all they want to do is throw dinosaurs at each other and, you know, put their heads through walls and stuff like that.
So, it really has been incredibly illuminating and this is one of the reasons I was...
I actually contacted you about another book, but when you sent this one to me, I dove in with great ferocity because it's such a powerful and important topic.
Because in reading your book, I sort of looked at myself and my history and said, well, if I pull gender out of my identity, what's left?
It seems like a little bit of a house of cards, and I think that's probably quite challenging for people.
Well, that's right, and I think what's interesting is that that's especially...
I mean, I'm sure that's not true in your case, but I think it is actually true with children.
So, you know, they have one social identity, which is that they're children as opposed to adults, and then they have...
The most prominent social identity, which is that they're a girl or a boy, and they don't have many other social identities to draw on as a whole.
I think probably people very much underestimate what kind of impact this might have, because babies are born into this world in which sex is the most important social division.
It's the most obvious social division.
It's continually emphasised, particularly in children's world, which are very much dichotomised in a pink-blue way.
It's a world which is absolutely saturated with information about what goes with being female and what goes with being male.
Of course, all of us parents, whether we like it or not, we do have a head full of assumptions and expectations about gender, regardless of whether we do endorse them, and I actually think most people do.
And I think we haven't really taken seriously enough how this contributes to what are the really very subtle sex differences that are evident in infancy.
And then once children know what side of this very important gender divide they fall on, I mean all bets are off really.
You can't rear children in this kind of strongly gendered environment and not expect it to influence them and motivate them quite powerfully once they know what side of the gender divide they belong.
And I really did have similar experiences to you.
And it's interesting that you mention my first book, A Mind of Its Own, which I talk about how our social perception is shaped to some extent by the social stereotypes that we hold.
And despite having written that book, I was amazed as a parent to see the sort of contortions that people would sometimes go through to see their children as children.
Their behaviour is being consistent with gender stereotypes, which of course sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't.
One example that always comes to mind is when we were interviewing a babysitter and she was with us for about half an hour and for the first 29 minutes that she was with us, I think one of my children was just sitting very quietly by the fire colouring in.
I have two sons, I should say, so one son was very quietly Colouring in by the fire and the other son was just lolling against his dad, just not doing anything.
And then minute 30, the one who was lolling against my dad sort of climbed up onto the arm of the sofa and leapt off it.
And the baby said, oh boy, they're just like space explosive rockets or something like that.
Because that's 3% of her experience.
So that's what you've got to generalize, right?
Right. So, you know, the 29 minutes of counter-stereotypic information was just ignored.
And then the sort of one moment of Consistent with stereotype was sort of filed away.
But, you know, I think part of it is that these gender stereotypes, you know, they're part of our cultural law and so there's an immediate understanding between people when you sort of trade in stereotypes, which I think, to some extent, contributes to it.
I mean, that's why advertisers, of course, like to use gender stereotyping because, you know, there's this huge store of mutual understanding to the I think that's probably the case in general conversations as well.
It's not as if parents are just so blind that they don't understand the nuances and subtleties.
Nobody thinks that their child is just a pure child.
It's a stereotype, but I think that it's easier to communicate about them in those ways, I think.
Right, and I think it's something you talk about a little later in the book, which I think is very chilling and true, is the degree to which peer socialization reinforces these.
So even if you're a parent who doesn't want to socialize or, I guess, gender imprint your child, there is that challenge.
I was reminded this last summer, I was talking at a conference, and there was a A little boy there whose hair was, you know, down to his sort of mid-back.
And his mom said, well, that's the way he likes it.
And watching this little boy run around, I mean, part of me was full of admiration for this mother allowing her child to express himself in this way.
And part of me was thinking, How high is he going to be hoisted by his own underwear in the schoolyard, you know, when he goes back to school with his hair this long?
Because there is that feeling like you want your children to be individuals, but they do have to kind of fit into society, and society as a whole has this gender approach that really is the last great bastion of prejudice and stereotypes.
As you point out, we wouldn't allow this in any other sphere.
We wouldn't be allowed to say, well, blacks are like this and Chinese people are like that without people's jaws dropping in any civilized discourse.
But it is so common to have this imprinting and stereotyping.
So if you don't do it, there is that fear, I guess, that people have that if you allow your son to play with dolls, just to take a stereotypical example, that he's going to be set upon by the wild boys of the clan in this Lord of the Flies sort of situation when he gets into a social situation.
Yeah, I think to some extent those fears are I mean, psychologists talk about jeer pressure.
You know, jeered at, particularly for boys to cross down, so to speak, it's easier for girls to cross up because, you know, what's associated with males is sort of higher status and what's associated with females, which I think is, you know, another quite sad indictment of our 21st century that that's still the case.
And yes, it is, as a parent, it is It's very difficult because you don't want to endorse gender stereotypes but you also want your children to fit into the world and to be happy.
I described the efforts made by Sandra and Daryl Bem who really went to the extraordinary lengths to try and avoid their two children Acquiring the cultural correlates, as she called it, of gender and I think it's probably an effort that's never been matched before or since the lengths that they went to and there was an acknowledgement that it was difficult for her children to find their way in the world without using gender as part of their identity.
As you said before, it is such a huge component of who we are that if you eliminate it as a legitimate Part of your identity, then that makes things very difficult.
And I think we need to perhaps acknowledge a bit more the pressures that children are under.
I took my son to school one day and he often likes to read on the way to school.
He's a bit of a bookworm. And he was reading a book called Jennifer's Diary.
So it was about a girl and it had a pink cover and a picture of the girl in the front.
There was a lot about the book that said, this book is for girls.
And as we approached the school gates, he put the book down and he looked at the cover and he said to me, Mum, do you think people at school might think this is a book for girls?
And I looked at it and I said, well, look, I think they might.
They probably will, but it's a book that was written for boys and girls and it would be a shame for boys to miss out on reading it just because of what colour the cover was and so on and so forth.
I said, if you want me to take it back home with me, then I will.
He was very brave and he just popped it into his bag and ran off.
I was very proud of him.
He was aware that there was an element of danger to being seen reading that book.
I think we probably need to be a bit more aware of the gender The gender borders that are in place and how difficult they can be for children to cross.
I think you just need to make sure that you keep your GI Joe covers handy in your purse so that you can just flip them on the book.
When he gets close, it looks very much like...
I was actually quite sad to read.
It's something I've thought of, and I've talked about it with my wife, but I didn't really get it, I think, to the degree that you talk about it in this book, the degree to which, I'm trying to remember how you phrased it, and correct me if I've gone astray, it's something like, men are people, but women are women.
And that showed up when there was gender-neutral animals or characters in stories that they were generally interpreted to be Male.
And so, unless a character was explicitly identified as a female, the default position was male.
And you mentioned earlier, just as we were talking, the degree to which the woman's side of things is considered lesser or inferior.
And I think one example of that that you cite in the book is that there is a word for a tomboy, but there's no sort of counterword for a boy who has, quote, feminine qualities or aspects.
Well, there is a word, but it's a sort of...
The sissy or whatever, right?
The sissy. Right, whereas tomboy quite often has sort of positive...
I mean, I'm thinking of Scout and To Kill a Mockingbird or other sorts of characters which have sort of tomboy qualities.
And of course, thinking about this in terms of my daughter, that's very sad that she may be entering into a world where the female perspective or the female approach is considered to be lesser or inferior.
So it's not even gender differences.
It really is a gender inequality, I think, that you're talking about.
No, that's absolutely right.
And like you, I did find that one of the more depressing aspects of the book.
In a sense, I think it's almost self-perpetuating.
I mean, if you see, you know, for example, we think about the under-representation of female characters in movies for children, for example.
I mean, I think a lot of this, and also, you know, characters in books, is a lot of this is probably driven by this perception, which is to some extent incorrect, that You know, girls will feel free to show an interest in male characters, but boys won't reciprocate, so they won't want to watch a film that has a female as a main character.
And in a sense, it's almost self-perpetuating because then you sort of have males appearing more often and then they, you know, increases their visibility and their importance and so on.
And so it goes on to the sort of self-perpetuating aspect to it.
And then, of course, once you reach adulthood, it continues in the sense that Profession that are dominated by women and that involve greater amounts of more traditionally feminine qualities tend to be lower status and lower paid.
And just in general, as women tend to move into greater numbers in professions, the salaries do tend to go down.
So it's just sort of a very pervasive effect that can have quite substantial economic implications apart from Apart from anything else.
So, yes, it is sad that we think of ourselves as being a very egalitarian society now, but even from the earliest ages, there is still this ambivalence in parents.
You see parents, as you mentioned, limiting boys' access in particular to More feminine toys and so on.
And it just continues throughout life.
There's two examples that popped into my mind.
One was when you talked about the language that was used to describe the male characters versus the female characters in children's books.
The male characters were strong and ferocious and courageous and all of these bulked up words.
And then the female characters were nice and gentle and frightened and dependent and so on.
It seems to have this...
This language around gender seems to be...
Oh, the other one was the birth notices.
There seemed to be a lot more pride and positivity and so on for boys as opposed to girls being born.
It's almost like masculinity is something that strengthens you and femininity is something that weakens you.
That just strikes me as so...
I mean, it's not even 19th century.
It seems like even further back then.
I think we have to go to the stone age to find that.
But is that an accurate way of looking at what you're putting forward?
It struck me that masculinity just seems to be something which empowers and femininity seems to be something that you have to kind of have in your life that you have to limit your exposure to because it's going to, I don't know, enervate you or something.
Does that make any sense?
Well, look, I think it's just a general thing that what is feminine is somehow lower status.
And I'm fully behind these sort of pushes to place more value on traditionally feminine values and occupations and so on and so forth.
But I do feel that until we get over this idea that Well, those are literally feminine things or until we have complete gender equality, it's never going to be quite successful because it's going to be detrimental to people to display those kinds of qualities because they're associated with lower status.
And the problem for women is that when they do display these, the kinds of masculine traits that they need to display in order to express their high status and their power, there's actually a backlash So it's not just, these gender stereotypes aren't just descriptive, not saying, well, this is what women are like, but they're actually, in some regards, prescriptive.
So women should be nice.
They shouldn't be assertive and ambitious and overconfident.
And you see that again and again in controlled laboratory studies, women being penalised for showing these male traits.
So I think there's a real issue. One is There's an obstacle to women showing the traits that sometimes are necessary in certain kinds of professions and leadership roles.
But also I think it's an obstacle to perhaps making these places very powerful roles a bit more feminine in a way that they probably could benefit from being because the feminine is seen as being lower status.
One of the things that also changed throughout the process of writing the book was I thought, oh, you know, I'll have a chapter at the end saying, well, here's what we should do about all these things, you know?
And, you know, by the time I reached the end of my book, I was like, oh, something blue.
It was just all things too intractable for you.
The idea that, you know, there might be people come up with a five-point bullet plan for eradicating gender inequality and stereotyping from the world just was quite comical in a tragic kind of way.
So, yeah, I don't know what the answers are, but, yeah, it is dispiriting.
I wanted to ask you what Well, it's two questions.
The first is that it seems counterintuitive, to say the least.
And I've really noticed this as a stay-at-home dad, right?
So, of course, I'm taking my daughter everywhere.
And it's hard to not notice the fact that I'm very often the only guy in the room or at the library or at the mall or at the Play Central, whatever.
So, it's strange and seems counterintuitive that the gender...
That raises the children, for want of a better word, and I know that's not a universal statement, but that's certainly what I've experienced, that the gender that raises the children is the gender that ends up as a sort of lower caste, so to speak.
Because, I mean, you'd think that the first thing they would do is say, well, this is really important, and men and women are equal, or maybe even women are superior or something, because That would seem to me to be more intuitive.
How do you think it works out that with such a strong representation of women raising children that there's still this negative or, I guess, lesser view of women's capacities and value?
Well, that's an interesting question.
I suppose you're asking, you know, given that the child is having so much contact generally with women that women would be betraying a much more Sorry, let me answer that a different way.
I think probably what seems to happen is that there is a positive representation of women and that women are seen as being nicer than men.
It was interesting, one of the studies I talk about in the book points out that even in the first few months of life, I think about three or four months of age, Babies who are reared by mothers are already showing a preference for female faces, whereas this small group of babies that they managed to find who were being raised primarily by their fathers actually showed a preference for male faces.
And I think this idea that women are nicer is quite well instilled from an early age and continues.
Women are nice but weak, whereas men are bad but bold.
But I think in terms of why You still have this difference in status.
I think probably if you just look around, you have to take it from the wider society as a whole.
So children will look, well, perhaps even look within the family to see who seems to have the decision-making power in their family.
For example, in the families of the world around them, who is predominantly in positions of power in society at large, whose faces it tends to be On the newspaper and on the news and who is most often represented in books and films and so on and so forth.
So I think perhaps that provides some kind of answer to your question.
There was this very interesting study by developmental psychologist Rebecca Bigler who was interested in how children perceived the value and importance of what women do and what men do and she noticed that even by the age of about 11 or 12 when she She gave sort of very unfamiliar jobs, showed men and women doing these very unfamiliar jobs like higgling, things that children would never have heard of and she sort of randomly assigned them to being performed by males and females.
She found that even by this quite young age, children thought that what men were doing was more important, more skilled and better paid than what women were doing.
So I think from these cues in the world around, children are still very effectively Picking up this message, even though, of course, no one's explicitly saying what men does is more important and more valuable and so on.
And the fact that it's implicit, I think, is even more powerful for children.
I was really struck by the study around, if I remember rightly, it was moms who were interacting with somebody from a different race, and no matter what they said, it was the body language that the children picked up on.
That's one of the great challenges of parenting is Your language skills don't matter, fundamentally.
No matter how expressive and sophisticated we are in our communication skills, the only thing that my daughter cares about is what I actually believe in a sense with my body, like how I act.
It doesn't matter what I say.
You know, I can baffle gab with the best of them adults, but when it comes to kids, you really are kind of stripped down to your raw beliefs.
I think that has a lot to do with it too, how the mom is treated by the dad.
Not what they say, but what actually goes on in the power dynamic is probably translated down because children just seem to learn so much through body language that it really is something to remember, that it's just not as simple as changing your language.
It really is around changing your whole belief system.
That's right, which is easier said than done.
And the last question I'd really like to ask you is, and I'm very interested in economics, so I always think about things in terms of supply and demand in this kind of environment.
So when you look at the Real misuse and misrepresentation of scientific studies that themselves could be accused of a fair amount of misrepresentation.
So the people in the general population who are, you know, economically or scientifically literate to some degree, they get this impression that this is sort of a settled science, you know, that there are these brain differences and it's, you know, hormonal.
I love that example you have of the, I think, a three and a half year old girl who the mom tried to give her trucks and all these sort of male, quote, male toys.
And gave up and said, oh, it's just gender and its hormones when she came on and found her daughter cuddling and putting to bed the truck and tucking it in and so on until somebody asked, well, who is it that puts the girl to bed?
And it was the mom, right? So she was imitating the mom.
But what do you think is driving the demand for this kind of amplified prejudice?
I don't really know a nicer way to put it.
Why do you think people are so hungry for getting the scientific validation of these gender stereotypes?
Well, I think, to some extent, the answer is in the way that you express the question.
It is validating the stereotypes.
What I find interesting is that people who take the kind of sceptical view that I now do...
What I came to realise when I was writing the book was, rather depressingly, that this book has been written many times in the past and it will be written again many times in the future because the science keeps changing.
And then the science goes on the scrap heap and then there's the new, you know, justification and explanation for gender equality and again that will join the scrap heap and so on and so forth.
It just keeps going on. But what I find interesting is that, you know, always the accusation is, well, you know, you just want to believe that, you know, there aren't any hardwired differences that can explain these things.
And I actually find this psychologically a little bit unconvincing because I think it would actually...
Be a lot more comfortable, in a way, to believe that there were hardwired sex differences that did explain why there is still so much gender inequality.
And then we could put our efforts into raising the status of what is traditionally feminine and feminine careers and professions and so on and so forth, which I think is a very worthwhile thing to do, but I actually just don't happen to believe in the supposed scientific explanations.
You know, social psychologists have identified what they call the system justification motive.
So we do have this sort of psychological need to feel that there is some fairness in the world, that the status quo is natural and fair and somehow inevitable.
I think when people were debating about whether women should get the vote, it was probably a lot more comfortable to think that there was something about their, you know, the brain stem that meant that it probably wasn't a terribly good idea for women to be part of a political process rather than just think, well, you know, Sorry, just being grossly unfair and discriminatory here.
And I think in a similar way, when we think about how much gender inequality there still is, even in our Western, you know, relatively egalitarian societies, I think it's very uncomfortable to think there isn't actually any reason for it other than conscious and unconscious sexism and the complex interaction of where these things all work together to maintain the status quo.
So I think part of the appeal of these books that trade in hardwired sex differences is that they let us off the hook.
We don't have to look to ourselves and to our society anymore.
We can just blame the brain.
And I think in the case of perhaps of educational books, perhaps they just offer simple answers to what are actually very complex Why is it that particular groups of boys aren't performing well?
I think if you look at it as a whole, it's probably a very complex picture to do with social forces that are going to be very, very difficult to deal with.
But if you can just say, oh, it's to do with boys' brains and girls' brains, you can offer a sort of very simple explanation that seems to offer a Potentially offer some kind of quick fix.
But I think primarily the appeal of these books is, as I say, that in a sense they can let us all relax and go, okay, look, it's not sexism.
It's not prejudice. It's not me.
It's not me. I'm not part of it.
It's fair. It's natural.
It's inevitable. There's nothing we can do about it.
Let's focus our minds on something else.
Yeah, it is a great tragedy of human society that for every moral progress, every moral progression that a society has, people feel, well, we've now reached that shiny city on the hill and there's nothing more to do.
And everybody sort of drops exhausted like they've swum in from four miles out to sea.
And it is, I think, some people feel like, oh, there's more to do.
Oh, that's exhausting. And, you know, that means examining my own beliefs and my own history and changing and There does seem to be a sort of change, exhaustion, or growth anxiety that sets in.
I don't know. I'm just amateur analyzing from a great distance.
But you do sort of see this.
And then a new generation comes along sometimes that says, well, yeah, there's more hills to climb, more places to go in terms of making the world a better place.
So I really just also wanted to just end with a real pitch for the book.
I mean, I read a lot.
I interview a lot. I've talked to some very great psychologists and writers.
This book is fantastic.
I mean, it's one of the few books that has just blown my mind.
I mean, that's just not a very technical way of putting it and not a very highfalutin phrase, but it has caused me to just open up your brain and you look at what makes your identity up.
Obviously, gender is not something I've thought about a huge amount, which may have something to do with my gender.
But certainly, being a father and being a husband, it's becoming more and more important to me.
And it is something that, you know, it's a courageous book in my mind.
I think also it's a delightfully written book and a very, very well-written book.
Your passion really shines through your humor in the face of what is obviously a whole series of somewhat...
Non-elevating information, if I can put it that way.
You're good humor. This is a laugh-out-loud book at times.
I particularly enjoy it.
I actually did startle my daughter.
But when I was reading this, when you were talking about how fathers and mothers, when they were asked, do you want boys or girls in interviews, the fathers were all like, well, I want boys so I can get them to play sports and climb things and run and so on.
And you said, well, space aliens reading this might be led to believe that Baby girls are born without limbs because they just don't think of them actually being able to do these kinds of things.
The content is completely fascinating.
The deconstruction of this shaky pseudoscience and Lord knows science has had a long and sorry history of trying to find personality And identity in biology.
Your deconstruction of the science is fantastic.
The writing style is beautiful.
The humor is, and the good humor to plow through this and to come out with such a positive book.
I know you said at the end, it's like, oh, you know, but I really didn't find that.
I find that for me, you know, when the rubble is blasted away, I get the energy to start sprinting.
To have that rubble of pseudoscience, I think, very powerfully blasted away, to me, gives a very clear avenue for moving forward and frees me up from it, even unconsciously, which is going to inevitably happen based on your beliefs, from unconsciously imposing stuff on my daughter and just allowing her to explore her own identity and to try and catch myself when this stuff comes up and to really see it as I have.
Really, it's like a huge light's been turned on for me reading this book and watching other parents I've had great conversations with my wife about it.
If you're a parent, if you're thinking of becoming a parent, if you have parents, then I really, really strongly recommend that people read this book.
I really can't recommend it highly enough.
And I really, really do appreciate you taking the time.
I know we had a bit of a back.
Two creative people trying to organize something is sometimes akin to watching a barrel of monkeys rolling down a hill.
I really do appreciate you taking the time to write the book.
I found it enormously liberating and encouraging, so I hope that you get more feedback that way, because I just found it a great, great, powerful read.
Oh, thank you so much.
Those are lovely comments.
I appreciate that, and have yourself a great time, and if you get a chance, I'd love to have you back at some point to talk a little bit more about how socializing with your sons has gone.
We can compare notes about how the genderless female of my loins is going into the world.
