Trans Rights vs. Women's Rights with Kathleen Stock

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman. So continuing my UK theme, today's guest is Kathleen Stock. Kathleen's a philosopher and a writer, and she was a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex for many years until she was stampeded out of her job by a mob of angry students. As you'll hear in this episode, Kathleen's main offense was her views on trans issues, which are broadly aligned with people like JK Rowling and Helen Joyce. And for these critiques of trans activist ideology, she was more or less run out of her university.

Now, Kathleen's story didn't make as many headlines in America as it should have, but it's really one of the most egregious examples of cancel culture since Brett Weinstein's debacle at Evergreen. And though Kathleen and I don't agree on everything, as you'll see, I think the treatment she's received has been shameful. In any event, we discuss all of that here. We talk about the conceptual distinction between sex and gender, and we talk about whether you should respect people's preferred pronouns. And I think there's some distance between Kathleen and me on those two topics. But we also talk about the conflict between trans rights and female rights. We talk about what to do with female-only spaces, such as locker rooms, bathrooms, women's sports, and prisons. We talk about what to do with children who self-identify as trans. We talk about puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical transitions. And we discuss the phenomenon of social contagion, detransitioners, and dissisters. So without further ado, Kathleen Stock.

[Music]

Okay, Kathleen, thank you so much for coming on my show.

Well, thanks very much for having me. It's great to be here.

Yes, so we, uh, one thing we share in common is, is a love for philosophy. I was a philosophy major at Columbia, and you were a philosophy professor for a long time. And I want to start there. What was your initial area of focus in philosophy, and what were the ideas that really motivated you?

Um, so my PhD thesis was on imagination, and in particular, relation to fiction, film. And that's pretty early on. What I was drawn to, partly, I think, because I was already a voracious reader of fiction, and I wanted to do something philosophically in an area I was already enthusiastic about. So I was really enthusiastic about fiction, and I wanted to understand how it worked philosophically, and also what the imagination was, because it's quite a strange faculty, if you want to call it a faculty. Somewhere between belief and desire. It's a bit like belief, but obviously you don't believe what you imagine most of the time. Well, I would say none of the time. Oh, sorry, all the time. But it's also a bit like desire in the sense in the role it plays in fantasy. So there were loads of interesting questions around that that I could ask. And actually, at the time, it was coming up as it were, like there was more and more funding going into philosophy of imagination. Thought experiments were hot. Simulation theory in the philosophy of mind was hot. So it was quite a good time for imagination.

Yeah, it still is.

Sure.

Well, that's interesting. And you, you also had, you had some writing about music as well, in the very beginning as well, you?

So because of my interest in fiction, that kind of tended to put me in contact with people interested in philosophy of art more generally. And I somehow managed to organize a conference on music, philosophy and music with someone else in Manchester. And then a book came out of that, which I edited. It's called Philosophers of Music, and it had some quite, you know, big names in it. Roger Scruton was in it. Yeah. Paul Boghossian from NYU, like philosophers that, well, Scruton always talked about music. But there were other philosophers in there from other areas that were quite well known, but had this side interest in philosophical questions about music. And I got a few of those. So it was a cool thing to do.

So I was originally a professional musician before I pivoted to philosophy. And people always ask me if I am ever tempted to combine the two, to write about music from a philosophical lens. And I have to admit, I've never been tempted to. Even though I'm still a pro musician, I've never, I've always found that, I think at bottom, I am a subjectivist when it comes to what music is good at some level. So I find it hard to, whereas I'm very much an objectivist when it comes to moral truths, factual truth, scientific truths. So I find it more interesting to try to intervene on conversations and debates in those realms where I believe there are objective truths, then, then I find it to intervene in, you know, your music or cuisine preferences. Because, yeah.

Yeah, but I kind of agree with you about that, actually. Yeah. I wouldn't put music and cuisine quite on the same level, but they're not far apart. But fiction, on the other hand. So the kind of questions I was interested in about fiction were not about whether it's good or not. It was more like, what it is, and also its relation to epistemology. Like, because you, there's some people that think fiction is just all invented, all fun, all intent, entertainment, all the time, and has no role to play in, um, education or moral education, even. Whereas I think it's obviously true that you can read a fiction and learn something about the world. So, but how, given that it's all made up, is the question, right?

So were you ever tempted to major in literature or or go in that direction or write yourself?

My first degree, um, was in French and philosophy. So, and that was basically reading nothing but French literature. And I enjoyed it a lot. And I think I could have gone into that. So, yeah, I suppose at some point I was tempted.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, so let's get into the stuff that you've been more known for recently, which is, you know, I, I actually, from my perception, is that the controversy surrounding you're leaving the University of Sussex over, uh, your, your opinions about gender and trans and all the rest. You know, we have our versions of those controversies going on in America, but, you know, as large a story as that was here, I think it, it actually didn't cross the Atlantic quite as much as I would have expected. Um, you know, given that we, I mean, from my point of view, America is, I don't know, a few months or a few years behind the UK on, and Western Europe in general, on the trans issues in terms of where the conversation is at. Um, but we do, you know, pay attention. You know, JK Rowling is a huge flashpoint in America as well. So, um, I'm, I'm sure many of my podcast listeners are aware of, of your situation, but I, I also think that many aren't, but would be keenly interested in it. So I guess let's just start there. When did you start running into difficulties or problems at, uh, with your position as a professor at the University of Sussex?

2018. Um, but that's exactly when I started to be more open about my views. Um, although not fully open, actually, because I knew there would be controversy, and I was sort of easing into it, trying to be very sensitive. So one of the relevant background things is that I was at the university, a university in Britain that's based in Brighton. And Brighton is the LGBTQ capital of Britain. Okay. I didn't know that. Like, uh, I think they just, someone was telling me the other day that in a particular part of Brighton, 15% of people are LGBTQ. So the San Francisco of, yeah. Yeah. 100%. So, um, so, and a lot of students come to this university because of that. And, and I'm a lesbian, so that was all working fine. But I, um, had some severe concerns about the direction that trans activism in this country was taking. It was a very radical position that your identity, your claims about your own identity, as in, I am a woman, makes you a woman. And not only makes you a woman in some kind of benign sense, but then gives you access legally to women's changing rooms, sports teams, uh, prisons, if you're convicted of a crime. Um, and if you're a child or a minor, puts you on a track to irrevocable changes before you've had a chance to think about it. So all of that, I was worried about. And, um, I also had concerns about this idea for lesbians in particular, and and gay men as well, but particularly lesbians, because not only was womanhood been presented as an identity that you could just opt into, but also lesbianism was, in the sense that if you're a man, a male who says he's a woman and is attracted to women, then you can say you're a lesbian, and you'll be counted by major LGBTQ organizations as a lesbian, which is incredibly strange to me, that males could be lesbians. So all of that. And then there were philosophical issues around that, because philosophy was being used, bad philosophy was being used, in my view, to prop up these ideas. You know, kind of deconstructionist, postmodern turn kind of philosophy, where language constructs everything. So, um, I started to speak up a bit about that, and immediately, um, as I knew, I kind of kind of knew I would, ran into big problems in my university, also in the discipline of philosophy, and to some extent with the general public. Um, yeah, so it wasn't, it wasn't a popular thing to do. Yeah.

And then when did you end up leaving Sussex and what were the circumstances around?

Sure. So in, I left last year, in October of last year. And between 2018 and 2021, there'd just been wave after wave of hostility, public open letters from academics, endless, uh, articles about my trans, my alleged to transphobia. The colleagues in my university going onto social media all the time and saying I was a danger to trans students. Meanwhile, I was teaching trans students happily, as far as I was concerned. Um, you know, so I was quite, uh, used to intense hostility. It felt very intense. But in 2021, it kind of ratcheted up because a group of students, nobody knows who they were, actually, um, decided to orchestrate a campaign to get me out of my job. So then they, um, basically started a campaign physically on my campus, where they would put posters up with my name on all over the place, saying I had to be fired or quit. Stickers in the bathrooms that I used. I had a manifesto that was full of, um, kind of wild, absurd claims about what I thought, which is upstanding. Like, there's just so much ridiculous, uh, misinformation about what it is I actually think out there. So they were saying I was, I can't even remember now, but, you know, sort of thing goes, I, I'm a right-wing, and I'm not, you know, how do you identify? But I don't identify. Well, I'm, I've always voted left, and I continue. I don't think I could vote for the conservatives in this country. So let's just assume, you know, that there is someone out there listening to this podcast that is actually quite open to your arguments, but nevertheless has imbibed some misinformation. And just get this out right at the front. Sure. What is it that you, uh, believe about rights for trans people?

Well, obviously, as a philosopher, you straightforwardly ask, what is a right and so on. And rights claims are not rights. But I believe trans people, as every other person, should have all full human rights in terms of protection from violence, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, property, all the standard ones. I would, uh, absolutely defend. And in this country, um, we have two laws that protect trans people, and I've never, I've got no objection to either of them. So, uh, we have the Gender Recognition Act, which is, um, offers the possibility to legally change your sex under certain conditions. And we have the Equality Act, which names gender reassignment as a protected characteristic alongside sex, biological sex, pregnancy, um, age, and various other ones, race. So that's all fine. And my objections are not to any of those things. My objections were in the context of this new, it for you, the UK, this relatively radical demand that those laws be changed. Actually, the demand was those laws be changed so that identity, inner feelings of identity, would be the protected characteristic rather than a process, um, like a surgical process, or even a kind of behavioral process. It would be just simply saying, I am a woman, makes you a woman. You could get, then the idea is you're supposed to be able to get a legal sex change just simply by declaring that you're a woman. And actually, even without legal sex change, according to the new, um, orthodoxy on the left, so that's what I was objecting to. The, the sort of incursions into what I think of as women's and children's rights by this new radical position, which is different to what we had before. Right.

So this, this episode won't come out probably for a few weeks. So I don't want to dwell too much on news that may change. But we are speaking, I think, maybe 24 within 24 hours of, uh, of a new story in the UK where you'll be able to summarize it more accurately, but Scotland has tried to change a policy in the direction of what trans activists or the the most radical trans activists want, making it easier to live as a woman in all facets of society with fewer requirements. Yeah. And that has been blocked by the UK. So can you talk a little bit about that?

I mean, so I can try and help people through this, although it's a bit complicated because of the system, the Scottish position in the UK set up, which is devolved government. So they have some law-making powers. Scotland, I'm actually from Scotland originally. Um, so Scotland has is governed by the Scottish National Party, and they have, for some unknown reason, taken an extremely radical stance. They had basically been spoon-fed by trans activist organizations to go for what's called self-ID. And self-ID is not just happening, it's not being pushed just here, it's, it's everywhere. You know, it's internationally, it's on the agenda in Germany and Spain and, um, it's already in Canada. So, for instance. So, um, Scotland have announced, are basically tried to implement or are trying to implement a new law which says will make it much easier for people to legally change their sex. The UK situation as it stands is that you have to, um, have first of all, have medical sign-off, some kind of medical sign-off, some kind of assessment of your motives and like why you might want to transition. You also have to show some commitment to living as the opposite sex, like wearing clothes or, you know, although no one's very clear what that actually means, but there is some commitment built into the law that you have to kind of live as a woman, as in, look like you mean it. The government, Scottish government, wants to get rid of those criteria, basically make a much shorter period, I think it's three months between declaring and getting your certificate. They also want to lower the age, um, at which you can do this, I think to 16. Um, now, in England, that's not going to be the case at the moment under this government. So that was a sort of a two-tier system. And the, the problem, as presented by the UK government, and I think this is true, is that it's very unclear how this affects women's rights in particular, because we also have biological sex as a protected characteristic. But, um, a large number of people now can, will be able to change their sex through simply, pretty much through self-declaration. And then it's really unclear whether they get counted as having changed their sex and therefore protected under sex and gender reassignment or not. And this puts women's rights and, um, trans women's rights, as it were, if you want to call it rights, right up against each other.

What's an example of how this might manifest in the, in the real world?

Um, so, well, one of the ways in which it, um, is, I mean, it's all very unclear, and there's lots of argument legally about what it'll mean. But for instance, comparators. So if you're trying to establish a discrimination claim, uh, for a woman, you would, one of the things you would do is look for a male in the same situation and say, well, would this have happened if a male had been involved rather than a female? Should trans women, who's the comparator now? For trans women, is it a male or a female? For instance, is the question. So I would say, um, or at least, if a trans woman and a woman have a competing claim, should we treat the trans woman as, as the same sex as the woman, or as, because you're gonna treat them like a woman, then you use them, you'd use a male comparison. Yeah. And you wouldn't necessarily, you wouldn't, certain aspects of the situation would then be obscured. And that's the general complaint about treating trans women as women for all circumstances is that, you know, this is the more heretical part of my view, but I'm, I'm sorry to say, I don't think they are women. And therefore, I mean, literally, they're not women. They're men who have changed, have gone through a legal process to, um, change their status. And it's kind of fiction, but they haven't actually changed sex, because human beings can't change sex. So there are situation features of their situation that might be relevant to discrimination cases, for instance, that will be obscured if we say, oh, but it's a woman. Yeah.

And so I want to revisit what you just said there. Sure. So, uh, there's this basic distinction going back a long time now between sex and gender. Um, and some people observe this distinction, some people, there's, there's debate about this. But the way it is taught often is that sex has to do with your chromosomes. So I'm biologically male, and you're biologically female. And those are the words that pick out sex. And then there's this other thing called gender identity. And then people debate whether gender is a straightforward function of sex, or whether gender identity is an internal psychological thing. And, you know, a male can identify as a woman, and a female can identify as a man. And, and there's no contradiction there. So I, I wanna, I guess I want to ask, you know, and I'm provoked to ask this by you're saying that trans women aren't women. So like, from my perspective, I would have no problem saying a trans woman is not a female. I would have no problem with saying that, because that's just a straight-up scientific fact. Well, trans activists would say you're being transphobic. Many people say that's transphobic. But I actually, I say that with no hatred or bigotry in my heart. I just cannot, I mean, you know, like, so you're asking me to deny that there is a phenomenon to be talked about, right? If I'm going to say a trans woman is female, well, then there's nothing to talk about, right? We're just trans women are just females. And it almost, you wouldn't even understand why there's controversy surrounding trans. Yeah. Yeah. So, but if I observe this gender-sex distinction, I should be able to say, oh, trans women are biologically male, but, you know, live as women in society as women, is not the same as all women. Right. Okay. So, so talk about what is your viewpoint on the gender-sex distinction? Do you accept that?

Well, the first thing to say is that the gender-sex distinction is, the word gender is multiply ambiguous. And and part of the problem in this toxic debate, as it is such as it is, is that people are using the word gender in different ways. So I, I recognize the sense in which you're using it, but I don't actually think that's the sense in which it gets used consistently. Um, and so that's the first difference. So if I just disambiguate a few senses of gender, um, sometimes it's used as a polite synonym for sex. As in, you don't want to say the word sex, because actually, unfortunately, the word biological sex is the same, it's the same word as having sex. And people feel a bit squeamish about that, particularly if you're English. So, um, they say gender. And if your passport asks for your gender, it means female, male, or male, you know, it's just. So there's that. Then there's a sense you've just mentioned, which came about, you know, largely through this work of feminists in the 70s, who would say, well, no, gender is nothing to, in a sense, not nothing directly to do with sex. It's to do with presentation, it's to do with, um, behavioral roles, it's to do with stereotypes and norms about how men, how males and females, human males and females, should behave as males and females. So that's masculinity and femininity, girls liking pink, boys liking blue. But that can differ from culture to culture. And that's what gender means. Now, there's a third sense, which actually I think is closer to the way you're using it, and and I don't personally think makes any sense, which is that womanhood and manhood, genders, but they don't reduce to ma to maleness or femaleness. Um, somehow being a woman is a matter of presenting as a, in a feminine way, and being a man is a matter of presenting in a masculine way. You know, actually, I think that's profoundly sexist. You know, why should we reduce womanhood to lipstick and pink, and manhood to being macho? So I would say there's a straight away, you've got a reason to say, no, no, manhood and womanhood are not masculinity and femininity. We want to say women and men can be as masculine or feminine as they want. Like, I'm quite a masculine woman in many ways, and that's okay. So actually, it's freeing to say that rather, and I find it quite constricting that the idea that you're a wimp, you know, that what makes them a male, a woman is that they like girly things. Right. No.

So this is, this is a point that I've made in the past as well, which is when I was growing up, the idea that I got from the authorities in my life was that a boy can be any kind of way. Sure. Right? And, and no doubt there were pressures from all kinds of domains for boys to be a certain way and girls to be a certain way. But there was also an understanding that the, the real enlightened attitude was to say, you can be any kind of boy. You can be a boy and wear pink. You can be a boy and play with the girls, and you're still, you can, you're still perfectly valid boy. You can be a girl that likes to roughhouse with the boys. And when I was growing up, you would call that a tomboy. And that was not an offensive trait. It was like a perfectionist. It's fine. A neutral term. And, and there's a marked difference between that and the attitude that actually, if you have, you know, girl-typical likes as a boy, well, then maybe you are a girl. Right? And that is a much, that that's an attitude that's more come, come about in the past 10 years. Sure. And it's very dangerous for our children, particularly our children that would otherwise turn out to be gay or gender non-conforming. I mean, so that's, but that is the logical consequence of saying that what makes a, a male who wears lipstick and dresses a woman is that is their gender identity, understood as their attraction to those things and their identification with those things psychologically. So the, and just to follow up, what the sort of second part of my answer to your question, the other problem I see with saying that trans women are women or trans men are men is the word woman is not synonymous with female. The word woman functions in our language, and in every language, actually. There's always a word for woman because it's one of the most fundamental distinctions between humans, males and females, and men and women. It functions to, to denote human females past the age of sexual maturity, because we have girls, we have women, we have boys, we have men. We need those words because girls and women are not the same, boys and men are not the same. So we need a concept that picks out the adult human females. And that's not males, you know. And, and that concept works in millions of important ways in our language all the time, because socially there are important differences between girls and women, boys and men that we have to be continued to mark. So the idea we can just give away the word woman, but keep the word female, is is not workable, I'm afraid. And also, you know, females, obviously, there are females that aren't human. Even female and male is a distinction across the natural world. So we need more fine-grained concepts, and we have them, and they've worked fine for thousands of years to pick out the adult human females and the adult human males and the children.

So one thing, I mean, one thing here is, before the current era of gender ideology and this new, um, this new idea that, you know, a girl that likes boyish things may in fact be a boy, should be educated that way. Before that came on the scene in a widespread way, you still had a very small percentage of people that was growing up, as long as they could remember, just felt that they were the other gender. And in that case, you can dissect out the component of social fad or anything like that, because it just was very taboo. You know, everywhere in the world until recently. Um, what is the, what is the best way to approach such a person socially? Right? So like, when I, I struggle with this because I'm, you know, I'm perfectly happy to offend the trans radical activist community and just insist on certain facts that I'm never going to lie about, no matter who I get aided by, because, you know, you have to be dealing with reality. But I also want to talk about the subset of people that are trans with as much respect that is due to them. And, and, and part, you know, I struggle with this one because if calling somebody a woman who is, who is a natal male, is going to be the litmus test of respecting that person as an individual, uh, it's something I feel I'm okay doing. Even even as I may disagree with the ideology that you ought to be treated legally like a woman in all cases. Right? Well, so I struggle with that too, or have done. I mean, I've, so, um, in my, I've written a book about this, and I've tried to bring in actually some of my expertise from the philosophy of fiction into this area. And it seems to me, because it seems to me that the best way to understand claims like trans women are women, my pronouns are she and her, or whatever, is their fictions. The best way to understand the possibility of legally changing your sex is it's a legal fiction. And legal, the concept of legal fiction, it doesn't just occur there, it occurs in other contexts too. Like, sometimes corporations are treated as people for the purposes of particular laws, or, you know, so there's, it used to be that as soon as a woman got married, she was treated fictionally as a kind of property of her husband. But, you know, so there's, there's a precedent for legal fictions. Um, and, oh, those are all kind of unpopular. Well, they weren't popular ones. Yeah. Well, this one isn't that popular anymore. But that's partly because of the demands of the radicals. You know, up until 20 years ago, I think people were very happy to just kind of muddle through this, because there wasn't this huge, hey, there wasn't a boom socially in transitions, and B, there wasn't this demand, this sort of uncompromising, [ __ ] you kind of demand, um, for accommodation. But, um, in my personal, the way I deal with it is, I think, well, okay, it's a fiction. And I'm happy to go along with fictions much of the time. I, fiction plays a really rich part in my life, and I think you can get a lot out of interpersonal fictions. And it's not just in this realm, you know, there's, there's role play, there's, um, kind of just getting immersed in a great book, you know, so there's plenty of precedent in our lives for immersing ourselves in fiction. And I'm happy to immerse myself in a fiction that this person has, um, is a, is a man or a woman. I don't think they are, but I can, you know, entertain that thought relatively unproblematically. However, what I absolutely object to, and what is happening in this country and elsewhere, is that we are becoming mandated to accept that fiction. I will not, for instance, I will not extend the courtesy of that fiction to a male rapist in a women's prison. You know, I will not. And I won't really do it with children, right? Because I think it's, they haven't quite got the difference between fiction and reality yet, they're still learning. So it would be very harmful to, uh, go along with the, um, presumably probably temporary identifications of children who are playing and trying new things out, and always were like, as you said, like in our generation, there was lots of kids who played around with that stuff. So, so it depends on the context. Now, there are much more hard-line people than me, they think you should never entertain the fiction, but I'm not, I'm not there.

Yeah, I mean, I think I think we may draw that line in in pretty similar places. So for me, when I hear people on the right, such as Ben Shapiro or others, who will say something like, well, I'm, I'm just never going to call anyone by pronouns that contradict their natal sex, because by doing so, I am conceding the belief that biological sex is a social construct. I am, it's tantamount to saying I agree with the whole ideology. And it's also tantamount to, he might say, you know, validating somebody's mental illness. Right? Whereas I have no problem calling pretty much calling anyone what they want to be called, provided that it's like a real English word, like he, he, and she. I will call anyone the opposite if they want to, if it's a good faith ask, and they, I will try my best, although I will mess up a lot, and I will ask for forgiveness, but, you know, I will expect some lenience given how hard that is. But I won't go for Z or any of these other things, most likely. So there is, there are people who draw the line there. I mean, but to me, that seems like a matter of again, I, I guess you could call it immersing yourself in a fiction, although I'm sure that will fall on some people's ears as, um, disrespectful. Yeah, because everything, everything I say falls on some ears as disrespectful. Yes, it can be helped in this conversation. But, um, yeah, I would definitely draw the line right where you drew it, not only with prison and children, but also with sports. Oh, yeah. With many sports. But I don't mind saying she can't get on this team, right? Because she's no woman. Right. Right. Me too. Yeah. So, so yeah, so I mean, let's, let's just talk about those cases, I guess. The most, let's just talk about the most, I think probably the most important case, which is children. There's this, there's this problem where, you know, as I said, if you ask happy trans adults, you just, you know, ask them to tell their life story, many, not all, but many will tell a story where as soon as they were conscious of themselves in the world, they just knew in a way that is irreducible, inexplicable, not analyzable, just a primitive brute feeling that they were the other sex. And it was a stable feeling throughout puberty. And, you know, as soon as they were legally able, they switched and so forth. Now, that is the truth, it seems to me, which is not taboo to recognize currently, right? If you say that, that is celebrated, and it is true. The problem is that there are all these other people who, who you don't hear from as often in the media, who had gender dysphoria just as strong as as children or as teens, and then it, it just gradually went away, and they, you know, developed an understanding of themselves that was compatible with the bodies they were given by nature, and they live as their birth sex. Yeah. And then there are other people that do transition medically because they have strong gender dysphoria, and then end up regretting it and detransitioning, and having usually lifelong medical, serious, really, really unpleasant side effects as a result of the utter chaos of introducing hormone therapy and surgeries and reverse surgeries that are sometimes, um, you know, that are almost in their infancy as as medical procedures, that are not, uh, well understood, even sometimes by the surgeons performing them. Um, and so, so how do you, you know, what do you make of the current conversation about gender dysphoria and trans identity in children, and how would you want to intervene on that conversation?

Um, well, the first thing I'd say is that, um, and this may sound harsh, but hey, I'm always skeptical about retrospective narratives. I mean, if you're interested in literature, you should definitely be aware of the underlying narrator, and that includes all of us. Like, I'm not saying it's a special reason to be, um, suspicious, but I just think that this whole idea of like, since I could breathe, I realized that I was in the wrong body. Of course, if you are fully transitioned and happy, you might look back and think that. But, you know, I don't know. I think that's a neat explanation. Um, but leaving that disagreement aside, um, the problem is, as you've just identified, is that there is absolutely no way of telling, none, which of those scenarios is going to be the outcome for a child right now. And, um, we also know that there are all these other surrounding factors that make it more likely that transition. I mean, the, the complicate, the, so the story of what's happening now, so for instance, the most blinding the obvious one is that it's now a massive internet trend. So you can't really say that had they not been exposed to their friends or their internet buddies or these chat rooms or these organizations that are now telling them that they might be trans, you know, if they had them exposed to all of that, that they would have interpreted their own experience in that way. I think what people need to realize is that there's a real temptation to revert for some reason to a kind of religious, quasi-religious idea in all of this, that there's a soul, like a gendered soul, deep in you that is emerging. And then the child says, I'm trans, or I'm a boy, when you thought they were a girl. That that's just their sort of their true nature emerging. And we, for some reason, as a culture, and particularly in the US, I have to say, there's massive credulity around that. The idea that this child would know who they are that early on, and that somehow we must capitulate and defer and immediately arrange for all sorts of medical procedures. That's crazy. Because we also know that, um, if there's a high, relatively high proportion of autistic children in this population, we also know that if you've got a history of trauma, you're more likely to have gender dysphoria. We also know that there's a, his children who have a history of being in care or looked after are more susceptible to transition or to thinking that they want to transition than others. Those are big red flags. They should be all telling us there's something, uh, really not simple, straightforward about this. And we're a hundred miles away from the idea that your, their little soul is just popping out, and that now we need to like dress them differently and call them different pronouns and start giving them puberty blockers, which, as you've just said, we know practically nothing about. And what we do know is terribly alarming in terms of like things like bone density, kidney function, height, um, all sorts of things. And then, of course, once you're on puberty blockers, you're almost guaranteed to go on cross-sex hormones. Like there's a huge, like 89, 90 or something like that. So you're on a pathway. You start age 10. There's really, it's very likely you will end up, um, changing your body irrevocably before you even know what.

That explains that high rate, because that's actually surprising to me that so few stop. So few, you know, stop after puberty blockers.

Well, partly, I mean, evidence in this area, at all, the evidence that is presented is often very ideological and very bad. And I think it's an interesting development, a good development recently, that people are proper people with understanding of stats and understanding the difference between a controlled experiment as opposed to a kind of anecdotal sample, you know, um, are starting to look at the evidence. But, um, in my understanding, partly is because the myth that puberty blockers just kind of paused things and give you a chance to reflect, that's that's just not true, actually. Um, it retards your development quite obviously. It stops you from, um, quite literally stops your body from developing. It also arguably stops your brain from developing, because puberty is a really important process in human development. All sorts of things happen. So you'll be, um, you'll be different to your friends immediately. You will be bodily different. And by now, you're special. You've got this medical process in your life. Your parents are referring to you as trans. Your parents may be quite proud of the fact you're trans, because it makes you a bit different. You know, you become this kind of, it's psychologically influences you down a certain direction. Um, I think it's, although it's not true that every child that's been on puberty blockers will will carry on, it's, it's best by the time they get a chance to start taking cross-sex hormones, they're still very young. Their prefrontal cortex hasn't even properly developed. And they are now different to their friends who have sexually matured. So that makes them, it seems to me, more vulnerable to narratives. Yeah. You know, to continuing the path they've already started.

It's worth considering, um, other examples of people being influenced by suggestion. Because, you know, this idea that some number of trans-identifying kids, and especially girls, are natal females, are under the sway of a powerful social contagion, fad effect. This can seem either totally ridiculous to people, or totally, um, or or very offensive, because of it's, it's politicized. But I think if you just forget the issue of gender identity for a moment, and just look at all of the other examples of social contagion and suggestion that happened, that happened all the time. Like, one is the placebo effect, obviously. It's like this, this powerful feeling that when you take a sugar pill, your pain actually goes away. Right? And it's such a big problem that we have to organize all of our medical research around correcting for it. Right? So this is just one example. There's another, another, there's an Atlantic article about a year ago about, um, a slew of young girls on TikTok. Oh, this is Tourette's. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, actually feeling and manifesting symptoms of Tourette's from looking at TikTok influencers that have Tourette's. Like, there's these charismatic people that let you in on their Tourette's, and you learn their ticks, and it's actually, I've seen that, you know, there's, it's fascinating to watch. But they're out, they also get very famous. And then, you know, if you know, you have 14-year-old girls basically mimicking, not even quite consciously, the ticks of their favorite influencers. And you see this sudden spike in, um, Tourette's. And doctors are wondering, what is this coming from? Something in the water supply? And they end up tracing it to that, each of their new Tourette's cases is on TikTok, following these influencers, and often using the same ticks as them. Yeah. So when it's happening to you, it feels real, because it actually is real. Right? Like the placebo effect is real, your pain really did go away. But it's also the product of, yes, social influences. And it may not be as stable once you are say, removed from your peer group. You might, those feelings may go away. Yes. And I don't think we should expect children to understand this. I mean, as you say, how could that seem very real at the time? And we all can remember what it was like to be in a peer group and to be pressured into thinking or feeling certain ways. You'll look back and think, that wasn't really me, but I was caught up in something. 100%. That's just normal. What's bizarre is that the adult, you know, laughed when you said, um, that the adults might think this is really ridiculous. I mean, really, are there adults out there that don't realize how, um, susceptible humans are to social contagion? As we all stare at our phones on the tube, you know, all in the same posture, all look, you know, we are constantly in the group of trends. Um, and you can be swept up in political movements or religious movements. And history is absolutely littered with, um, examples. And there's something strange and arrogant about our time that we, we think that we're not susceptible to this sort of thing. If we do, I mean, I, I'm fully aware of it. The clothes we wear, everything about us is influenced, pretty much, unless you're a massive eccentric and have no social awareness whatsoever. It's influenced by our social environment. Um, but as you say, for children, this is terrible, because they are playing, exploring, finding out about the world. And, um, the evidence does seem to suggest, as far as it's pretty limited, but, you know, that many would desist, many would desist if they were just left alone. And also, the other bit of evidence that's interesting is that social transition makes it less likely that you'll desist. So merely social transition, merely calling a child by her preferred pronouns or, um, changing the name at school, makes it less likely that they'll desist. So we're kind of validating what could have been a temporary thing and making it permanent by our acquiescence.

Interesting. Yeah. So that, I mean, that's an argument for the Ben Shapiro position of not, the children of just like, you know, putting, putting ten toes on the ground and calling someone a he when they're asking. I think it should be. Right. I absolutely think so. I think it would help if it was, if Ben Shapiro, not that I know the guy, obviously, but I'm assuming he's not going to be perhaps unfair, but, you know, I would like it if we could also say, wear what you want. You know, have your hair anyway. Um, be, if you're same-sex attracted, that's not a problem. You know, I mean, um, I would like it if we're going to insist on reality, then we should also make sure that our version of reality isn't ideological in the other direction and doesn't actually covertly slip in quite rigid views about what boys and girls should be. Right.

So the argument that would come at this point from not just trans activists, but well, I guess mainly from trans activists, but is compelling to a wider group of people too, I gather, is that trans people, and and trans teens in general, are very susceptible to depression and suicide, and all of that is made worse when they can't socially and medically transition. There's absolutely no evidence for that. So, so try to, if I were a person that believed that strongly, yeah, I would be hearing our entire conversation through that lens. That's intentional. What do you say? How do you convince a right person who believes that? What would you say?

Um, I would say first of all, you know, you have been, it's not a surprise if you're one of the wider people have been convinced by this argument. That's not a surprise, because this is used like a hammer to push through almost everything in the trans activist movement. Suicide, the S.C.A., the specter of suicide is terrorizing parents and terrorizing children. Uh, sorry, well, maybe children too, but teachers, you know, into just going along with this. And it's, you know, you need to unpick this. Well, first of all, the stats that are quoted are wildly off. You know, sometimes it's like, I've seen 50% of, uh, trans teens contemplate suicide. You know, where did they get their evidence from? Was it a self-selecting sample? And what are the questions like? And there's a difference between thinking occasionally, you know, a thought crossing your mind, and actually, you're crazy. It's crossed my mind. So I'm not negating since the problem of

Suicidal ideation. I'm just saying we need to make lots of distinctions. And there's a difference between ideation and attempts. And there's a difference between attempts and success. And we need to like have stats on all of that for starters.

Um, if you take, for instance, the, um, the waiting list, I think it's the waiting list. But anyway, if you look at, um, and a colleague of mine has done this, looked at, uh, actual suicides on a given cohort of people under the care of the gender identity clinic in the UK called the Tavistock. That was the one for children. He concluded that based on that sample, um, being trans did increase your risk of suicide attempts by a factor of five. Okay? Now, the next thing you need to do is say, okay, but what are the other comorbidities in this cohort? So, for instance, autism increases your risk of suicide. Um, depression and anxiety increase your risk of suicide, quite obviously. Anorexia increases your risk of suicide attempts. And there are clusters of, uh, health problems, mental health problems in this population, very often, right? So that's the next step to go, okay, but we need to, we can't just take out this particular stat and not look at the context. Having a smartphone and being a teenage girl increases your risk, you know? And there's actually, if you look at the, um, the rates of suicide in teenage girls, not trans-identified teenage girls, just teenage girls, they've since smartphones arrived, they have gone up quite radically, okay? So all of that is to suggest there's a mental health crisis in children generally.

The next and final, or I don't know, final, but the third and most obvious piece of the puzzle is to say, okay, so we've got, we totally agree trans-identified teens, and I would always say trans-identified, I would not say trans teens as if that's like a, you know, a permanent fact about them because we don't know. [Music] There's a mental health crisis in trans-identified teens, as there is in the wider group. Where's the evidence that social transition is going to help them? You know, how, why is the causality that way around? Or sometimes we hear, oh, it's because of transphobia. You know, we've got no idea why these kids are troubled. But we have some idea that they are also, many of them autistics, many of them are same-sex attracted, many of them have wider emotional problems. We need to do proper exploration of their situations. But there's just no straightforward move from, oh, socially transition them and their problems will be fixed. Just none. So it's a bizarrely oversimplified, propagandistic cudgel that is being used to terrorize people into acquiescence for a severely ideological program.

So, I mean, I, I'm not a parent, but I often think, what would I do faced with this as a parent? Faced with a kid that adamantly feels that they are the other gender and wants to be called as such, treated as such, and in the limit, put on puberty blockers, hormone therapy, etcetera. This is a position that a lot of parents are in. They don't know what to do. Um, and, uh, I mean, it's to me, the balance that's being struck right now is at schools, which, uh, in, in America certainly, and I believe the UK, are overwhelmingly populated by teachers and administrators from one side of the political spectrum rather than balanced. Many kids are getting the very simple message, well, not just from school, also from social media, from YouTube influencers, from TikTok. And I've seen videos of people who, you know, who say this basically, the answer is as simple as transitioning, right? Like, if you transition, you, you know, the door to happiness will just spring wide open and you will, all of your problems will be solved. Um, and, you know, that is an extremely attractive message to an angsty teenager that has probably worse mental health issues than the average teenager, um, who doesn't like their body, who, you know, like, this, um, selling that dream to a teenager is enormously attractive. So I have no idea what I would do as a parent, is my, my point. But what I would really want to convey is, I would want to say, okay, those YouTubers and TikTokers you're watching that are giving, you know, leading these impossibly perfect lives where they're happy all the time, I just want you to balance that with narratives of people who have de-transitioned, you know, wrecked their bodies, become infertile because, and we're equally convinced as those other people that this was the right thing for them. And if you can look both of those narratives in the face and make the decision you want to make at 18, then perhaps there's nothing more I can do as a parent because everyone is their own person, they're going to make their own decisions above a certain age. But I feel the media currently, the mainstream media, if unless you're outside of Fox News and explicitly right-wing media, you know, social media, you're getting one narrative. And, um, the other, the other uglier parts of that reality are kind of down-regulated for teenagers.

Oh, yeah, definitely. Um, I mean, I feel awful for parents in this position. And I don't, you know, it's only by the grace of God that I'm not in the position too. I have children. Um, I have teenage children, so. But I know their friends and some of their friends are in this position. So it's awful because 30 years ago, um, you could have been, for instance, a lesbian, a young lesbian who thought she was a boy. And actually, a lot of my lesbian friends did go through a phase of insisting they were called by boys' names and trying to pee standing up and play with the boys, you know? And, and their parents just said, okay, they were kind of liberal parents. They were like, fine, we'll call you George or whatever. And then they grew out of it. Um, but now parents can't really just do that casually anymore. Um, they, it's all been subsumed into this massive firestorm, uh, culturally, where if you go along with it, then your facility, I think you are facilitating something that's probably potentially harmful. And if you stand up against it, you're, you know, you can be banished from your friends group, you can be prosecuted in some places. It's insane. So, um, I know a lot of parents, either because I just know them by accident or because they seek me out, who are in agony, like agony, because they're not particularly right-wing, they're not particularly, um, socially conservative, but they just don't want, having sort of looked after their children, tried to give them the right food, protect them from kind of all sorts of harms, have the best chance, they just don't want their children to like cut their breasts off or, um, take drugs that will give them facial hair for the rest of their lives, when they're convinced that these kids do not yet know what this really means. And they don't know what to do. And they also often, they cannot speak about it because they protect their children's privacy. You know, they still care enough about their children's privacy not to go on the record about it. So they're trapped in a system where no one's speaking for them, very few people speaking for them. Or the people that are speaking for them are like Ben Shapiro or whoever, and they don't necessarily even relate to that worldview otherwise. It's terrible. So, um, it's hard to find people speaking for them with empathy. And, yeah, yeah. And that's why you actually seek it out, right? Like, unless I had, just because I'm the type of person that goes into rabbit holes like this, unless I have spent, had spent an hour on D-trans Reddit, just reading people's stories, right? I would have probably very little picture, yeah, of what, you know, what many of these stories are like, right? And you get just all these stories of people saying, I was, I was exactly as convinced as all of the most vocal TR, I was, I was as convinced as your best friend who's trans that I was trans when I was 16, right? Yeah. Um, and, you know, it occurs to me, I think this is, I've noticed this, I, that often, um, it is lesbians that are most outspoken about this issue because you maybe you know so many people that you know turned out to be lesbian but would today be categorized as trans. So you are more alive to the phenomenon, perhaps. It's definitely part of it. The other part of it is that, um, there's a trend for social transitioning within the lesbian world. And, um, especially for butch lesbians. So, and, you know, you can say, well, they're adults, that's fine. But I find, and it's fine for any individual, I'm not gonna try and argue them out of it. But I feel like we're losing pride and self-acceptance as lesbians. Like, it's okay to just be a same-sex attracted woman who presents as a woman. And I'm actually really happy with this myself. Um, I don't see many role models around me. Um, and I think younger lesbians don't see them. And also the word lesbian is now fallen out of favor. You've got to call yourself, even as I say it, it feels slightly antiquated. Yeah, of course it does. Because it's this, because of the, I think because of the cultural affect tends to that is there, you know, there is a kind of distaste for gay people and lesbians. It attaches to the words eventually. So people try to get rid of the words. So now lesbians hope that they will be cooler if they're subsumed into the queer umbrella with, you know, or their non-binary. They're not really women. So, you know, how can they be, how can that cultural affect attach to them? But that, I'd rather just say, look, who are same-sex attracted women? It's okay. You know, and actually, it's fun.

Yeah, I mean, so the word queer, as I knew it between the ages of roughly 18 and 24, you know, when I was in college, it was a bizarre word because it actually did not denote any particular sexual orientation or gender orientation or like all the other words, gay, lesbian, trans, non-binary, they all had, I could give you their meanings. If, even if in the case of non-binary, I may not fully understand the meaning, I could give you a sentence on what all of these things mean. Queer seemed to just be a kind of vague, a bit like emo, right? Like queer, actually, you didn't have to, you could be a heterosexual cisgender queer person. And what that meant essentially was that you like have like a kind of like a cool, funky sense of like how you dress and like you use words like folks and do you have like very left, very annoying. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, but in, you know, many, many girls like I knew went through a queer phase or like they, that is like kind of the personality that they settled on, like you would with emo or like a jock or any of these kind of archetypes, right? So it became an archetype. And yet it's a part of an acronym that includes legitimate sexual orientation identities and, uh, and trans identity. Yeah, it's a terrible state of affairs. I mean, yeah, I mean, how strange would it be to have it be like LGBT Emo or LGBT? You're getting there. I wouldn't be surprised. We've now got asexuals, um, in the umbrella, uh, which is defined as just people, you know, you don't even have to be completely disinterested in sex, you can also just be interested in sex sometimes and other times not, which is pretty much everybody. So, all right, you know, the whole thing is, uh, industry. My favorite is the word for a person that's only, uh, sexually attracted once they feel an emotional connection. Okay, what's that again? I call it a human female. But there is actually a word for it. Yeah. Everything's an identity, including, as I adverted to earlier, the original sexual orientations of gay man and lesbian. And no identities, you know, trans men can go into gay clubs and get annoyed that they're not being treated as gay men, even the fact they haven't got, uh, the, the full equipment, as it were. Um, and, you know, males are dressing up in preposterous outfits and going onto the internet and saying they're lesbians because they are attracted to women. I would say that's a heterosexual male, you know, they're opposite sex attracted, literally. But the fiction is that they're lesbians. And what's of course, you can just dismiss this as all absolutely crazy internet ephemera. But the depressing thing is that our institutions, the ones that have, were supposed to stand up for lesbians and gay rights, for instance, have capitulated completely. So if you go on to, um, GLAAD website or Stonewall in the UK website and look at the definition of lesbian, it can include males, pretty much. They have, they have, in other words, they are treating sexual orientations as inner identities as well. So it's all become an identity soup. So why not add, um, people that wear interesting clothes and have blue hair, right? You know, why not? It's just another identity. It's all personalities now, in aesthetics. It's, it's not about actually politics anymore.

So I have an acquaintance who, um, who I think, in her telling, became a TERF. Um, I should say trans exclusionary radical feminist, which is, you know, often used as a term of abuse for for someone like yourself or Helen Jordan, even a radical feminist. So, or JK Rowling. But, and she, she is a lesbian. And she experienced during college that there was, you know, a bile, a natal male who, uh, was trans. Um, so, you know, you would call a woman and was basically guilting her into feeling that she should be willing to have sex with her, right? I would say him, right? Just to be clear. Yeah. Well, she, she, you know, this person with a penis wanted a woman to have sex with them, whatever you want to call him. And was using just the total tactic of guilt and manipulate, the age-old male tactic of, however I can get you into bed. But, you know, in this version, it was inflected with a, you're a bigot if you don't have sex with me. Yeah. And this experience was, she felt that she could not even complain about this because the, you know, the culture at Columbia and Barnard was such that to complain about this openly would be to social risk. Yeah, to to risk cancellation and to risk just being branded that way. Why heterosexuals? No doubt. That's the thing that really sticks. Well, there's many things that stick in my craw, but one of them is that to be lectured by heterosexual women about, you know, your sexual orientation as a lesbian. And it's usually women, you know, telling you that you should be tugging the line. Um, yeah. So that's the other reason why lesbians tend to be at the forefront discussing this, because as I said, there are now, um, trans women, not who only, not they say they're lesbians, but they also say that you're a lesbian, I'm a lesbian, why don't you, why aren't you interested in me? Are you transphobic? And just so everyone understands this, you know, you need to think about it. We're lesbians in the original sense, a sexual orientation excludes males. And there's a male telling us that they're a lesbian too. And therefore, and that the only reason, of course, they'll say things like, well, you've got a choice, you know, of course, you've got a personal choice. But if your reason is that I'm, uh, a male, then you're transphobic. Um, now, that's not going to have any effect on me except extreme irritation. But it might have a big effect on a 17-year-old girl who's just discovered, was just finding out about her sexuality. And it, um, in queer circles, you know, obscures all the social dynamics that can happen there, which are 100% structured around biological sex. And, and all in old ways, like males badgering females for sex, except now that they're women, it's, uh, supposed to be, you know, supposed to be different somehow. It's not different, it's the same. So that's all, you know, it's, well, the other thing to add again is, if this was just going on in kind of youth groups and there's not much we could do about it, it would be bad enough. But our institutions, again, Stonewall in the UK, for instance, the head of Stonewall is on record as saying that if you are a lesbian who, um, excludes trans women from your dating pool because they are trans women, as in because they are male, this is analogous to what she referred to as sexual racism. And that would be the idea that you exclude people of his own ethnicity from your dating pool, and that's racist. So you can ask questions about whether sexual racism is a thing. But assuming that you think sexual racism is bad, the head of the LGBTQ organization in Britain telling lesbians that they're as bad as sexual racists for not wanting to lead with trans women, that's where we are. Yeah, which is insane.

So we've spent a lot of time, I think, and complaining about the beliefs and the extent to which those beliefs have been adopted of the radical trans activists. I'm curious actually, how many trans people feel that they are spoken for by these beliefs? Because, you know, one, one thing I've noticed on the issue of race, which is more my, my typical hobby horse, is that anti-racist activists always claim to be speaking on behalf of black people in general. And then when you look at the polls, you often find that they speak on any particular policy issue for a minority. Right? Like the example I've used a billion times to pour to death my podcast listeners is at the height of 2020, Gallup polled black Americans and just asked a simple question, do you want more police, less police, or the same amount? Only 20% answered less, which was the BLM position. 60% answered the same, and 20% answered more. So fully 80% of black Americans did not share the position of defang and defund and minimize the police. But you would never know that if you were just watching the news, and you would assume that pretty much black people in general just all agree, right? Yeah. And I wonder if there isn't something like that going on here too, like what percentage of just like trans people walking around the street living their lives are party line on all this stuff? Yeah, right.

I think that's a really good question. And I think there is diversity of opinion. Um, but I will just, before I say that, I want to point out this analogy with the race case, which is that, first of all, remember that this basically, the trans, um, category as, as popularly defined now, is so broad that all you need to do to get into it is say, I am non-binary, or I am a man, or whatever it is. So you don't need to, there's nothing else except what you say, which means, you know, there's obviously a disinology with race. Yeah, fair. Right. Um, now, there's been a massive influx in the last 10 years into the trans category, as I've just defined it. And it's mostly young people, most of whom, so some of whom will alter their bodies, many of whom will not. Even it's just kind of attitude or, as you say, a haircut or whatever. Um, so they are much more likely, I think, to sing from the same hymn sheet because they kind of got into it partly through because of the alleged politics of it and the kind of liberation and, you know, the system and we're victims as well. That's a big thing, like giving yourself a kind of victimhood, um, that gets you out of all the guilt that you no doubt feel for being white, middle-class, uh, privilege. I used to joke when I went to Columbia that if you, especially Barnard, it was a particularly radical, it was the women's college, um, connected to Columbia, right across the street, that I used to joke that if you were just a straight white girl, you had to find something. Yeah, of course, because or else you were just going to be uncool for four years. And you can't just be uncool for four years, right? So you gotta, you gotta find something. Better be queer, or learn to juggle, or have a talent, or, you know what I'm saying? At some point, that's gonna learn to sing. That cannot persist. Like when the whole class is non-binary, then eventually we'll have to swing back to sure. It's actually because trad or something, right? Right. That may already be close to having to help us. I mean, what we ideally want is that we didn't keep swinging. Yeah, it was extremes where we could kind of just say, you don't have to keep posturing away, right? But anyway, um, the diversity of opinion that does exist, I think, um, although it's very hard to establish definitively, is between what I would call old-school transsexuals. That is, people way before all this radical trans activism, who had operations, took hormones, probably many of whom pass, as it were, and so have been, have been, as they say, using women's bathrooms for years, and changing rooms for, maybe not changing rooms because I think people are often self-conscious about their bodies and like state, but, you know, they've been passing and they've been, and many of their colleagues might not even know that they're trans. And now the ones that I know, um, again, it's not a, it's not like a random sample or anything because they make themselves known to me, but they are furious about what's happening, partly because they think, look, I went through all this pain and suffering and social rejection and all of it. How can you say that you're a woman just because you feel like one is not enough? You've got to do something. They think to earn the status. So that's a divider I see all the time. However, how you would establish that, it's very difficult because a lot of, um, old-school transsexuals don't want to come out. You know, that was the whole point, they wanted to assimilate. That's right. Um, and also there's just not enough for a big, a big survey of population level data. You'd need like lots of data, and I don't know how you'd get it. And again, the bodies that are sort of that the government and political parties kind of, um, devolve responsibility to LGBTQ organizations to tell them what to think, and they're not doing that research. They really aren't. It's not in their interests to do that research because this whole thing's a massive cash cow for them. So they're going to keep, um, pushing the narrative of, um, of victimhood and suicide and you need to capitulate to our demands and you need to radically restructure all your institutions because it keeps them in business.

So let's talk a little bit about the issue of sports. Uh, Leah Thomas has been the recent flash point here, the swimmer from Penn, who was, who's a born male and swam as a male and was certainly talented, but not top tier as a male swimmer, and then transitioned and was recognized as having transitioned by the college swimming association and then competed as a woman and did extremely well, did much, much better, what's a surprise. Um, and, um, obviously this brought out, this was a huge controversy because, you know, you had people arguing on TV that to have been, you can cancel out all the athletic benefits of being a male with say, you know, two years of, um, you know, testosterone suppression and, and so forth. And, you know, you have experts, you know, so-called experts, kind of making these claims that there's no lingering effects of having gone through a male puberty that would give you any benefits in a sport like swimming. Um, but, you know, beyond the more ridiculous and claims that there's just the problem of what to do here. Because I'm a person, you know, I want to create a society where a person can be trans and be an athlete and compete in the sport and do that, right? But I do not want to create a society where every world, every new world record holder in the women's category is a natal male, yeah, which is where we'll go. So how do you, you know, how do you view that issue? And, you know, what's your prescribed policy solution?

Well, so it's completely false that two years or no, you know, any number of years of testosterone suppression will cancel out the benefits that a male puberty gives you athletically speaking. It gives you, um, bigger lungs, broader, on average, you know, there are always exceptions, but that's how we establish the rules is by looking at the averages. And it gives you faster twitch muscles, um, denser bones, you know, there's just a range of, uh, sporting advantages that males who've been through a male puberty have over females. And that's why the performance gap between them is so consistent. And it's why, for instance, you know, the fastest woman in the world will be beaten by 700 college males, you know, in certain sports. It's, it's just a, absolutely predictable and consistent because it's based in biological capacities. Um, now, of course, for some sports, you don't even, the governing bodies are not even requiring you to reduce your testosterone. They're just saying that you're, it's like a magical formula. I am a woman gets you into the team. And that's obviously incredibly unfair on women. But it's also dangerous in contact sports like rugby. There's a big push in Britain to get males into rugby teams. It's absolutely bonkers. You get tackled by a massive male as a woman, you will potentially break your neck, yeah. Um, so it's like the sort of, I, you know, I don't know, the kind of, if people go along with this, then they truly are embedded in a cult, as far as I'm concerned, because it is so obviously unfair and crazy. The, at some level, that there has to be some litmus test of common sense, of reality. If you're watching a UFC fight with someone born male, something males, I mean, they're just male, yeah, beating the crap, yeah, out of a woman, yeah, breaking their jaw. It's, it's, I, I almost feel, you get to the point where I, I'm so upset by it, I, I can hardly even argue about it, right? Yeah, at that level, it seems like. And also to imagine being the competitor in that situation and feeling proud of having won that way. I know it's something I struggle with my head around that. I mean, I met, um, the mother of, of one of Leah Thomas's competitors, and I listened to her, um, talk about what happened in that situation and how, you know, because if you come up in the college circuit at that level, which is an elite level, then you know, every, all the names of everybody, yeah. And suddenly there's this new name, Leah Thomas, and they're like, who's this? We've never heard of this person. And they're all sitting in the changing room, and this, I'm sorry, I'm just going to say man walks in. And they have all these complicated swimsuits that involve, you know, like their high-performance swimsuits that involve getting completely naked and then having to pull them on again, and then working out ways to get towels over them so that they can't, um, can't be seen by this man in the changing room. You know, there's a man in the pool, and there's a man in the changing room. And this is a good example where we need to say that because a certain kind of credulous, probably non-sporting person who doesn't give a [ __ ] about how this goes down, is engaged in a fantasy that this is a woman in the pool and a woman in the changing room. And it really isn't. And it matters on a number of levels to say that out loud. Um, I'll go along with the fiction. This is another situation where I would be more comfortable saying a male. Well, it's an adult human male. It's adult. He's not a child. He's not a boy. He's a man, right? You know? And if he was a boy, he wouldn't be beating them. The reason he's beating them is because he's been through puberty and he's a man. And that's why I think it's really important to retain that concept. What we should do about it, you know, I want, I want trans people to be able to participate in sport. But frankly, they already can. This is a fantasy, a victimhood as well. Okay, Leah Thomas performed before against the males, and I believe he wasn't, he was pretty mediocre. Um, he can, he, or she, if you'd rather, come perform again and in the, in the male category. Why? Because that's where he belongs, because that would be fair. Why don't I just have some kind of a third category? Fine. And actually, I've argued in other contexts like for that, I guess, like for instance, um, they should be separate prison wings for trans women. I think because they are, it is difficult to put them in a male prison. But it, you know, there's not quite the same risk. That's the thing. I mean, I do understand in many contexts that there is a real social need for a third option because you can't put a transition to trans woman in a male prison and not, and they are very vulnerable there. Yeah, so we need to think about that at least. But that doesn't apply in sport. You know, there's no danger. It's just there may be your identity is not being respected. And I am old-fashioned enough to not really care about identities being respected in some contexts. The one tweak of that is though, if you are, take, if you are, you know, suppressing testosterone, it's like steroids in reverse. Well, if you are, but if you are, right? Is Leah Thomas suppressing testosterone? I believe so. I, I could be wrong. When they competed, I believed, I believe so. But even so, I mean, genetically, physically, the massive shoulders, oh, sorry, pretty male. No doubt. The lung capacity, the bone structure, just the lingering effects of. I'm totally with you on that. And I've even, you know, this is a, I follow certain, you know, commentators in the sort of bodybuilding community that that actually probably in a way sort of know the most about the effects of testosterone because a lot of them are just taking exogenous testosterone to get huge, you know, like when these guys get, get crazy for these Hollywood roles in two months, right? They're, they're taking, yeah, almost always they're just taking some exogenous testosterone to up their levels and, and so their athleticism. And, and so the effects of, you know, slightly more testosterone and slightly less testosterone are pretty well understood. It makes a huge difference, right? That's why it's, that's why it's against the rules to do it in like every sport except Jiu Jitsu. It's steroids, right? If you take a little bit of extra testosterone, and it's no, it actually, it doesn't matter whether that's exogenous testosterone or the testosterone your body naturally produces, right? So it makes a big difference. But, you know, their, their, if I'm not mistaken, there was a time when, you know, the rule was like, to compete as a trans woman, your T levels had to be like here. Yeah, but they were, that bar was like way higher than it would be in a, in a biological woman, like you were allowed to have T levels that were almost like a low testosterone male, yeah, which are still way higher than most women have. Absolutely. And now, I believe it's hard to keep up. And I've not checked out recently, but I believe that the, the official position now that the governing bodies, the world governing bodies, is that they removed that requirement, but then kind of devolved it down to individual sporting bodies in particular sports to make a decision. In other words, they are fudging it because it's now become incredibly, uh, complicated all of a sudden. I mean, another thing to say that, and why I'm possibly sounding a bit irritated about this issue in particular, is that I just think it shows how little people care about women's sport. I mean, they don't care about, I mean, America, they care about it more than they do here. Um, but, you know, it's not as well-funded. It's, uh, many professional, you know, one of the, one of the, um, women that just won the, the women's football World Cup in England went back to her job in a cafe the next day, you know, is they have, they're traveling, uh, standard class, sometimes paying for their own travel, you know, there's just all this stuff that they have to put up with anyway. And then to have, um, biological males waltz in, sometimes very late in their careers, after having a pretty mediocre career elsewhere, waltz in, start winning awards for being brave, you know, as well, but given by male sporting bodies. Um, and, you know, the, we see the ones that actually end up competing against males, but we don't see the ones that got pushed out and didn't even before qualification as a result. It's just, it's very irritating.

No, it is. I mean, I, if, if I were a woman or a parent of a woman that's been waking up at 5 AM for 20 years training, yeah, I would be livid. And it's being done in the name of justice. Yeah. I, I believe it. And there's so many of them are are afraid to speak out about it like on so many issues because you then, you know, you're just, you're risking your job, you're risking your reputation. You now have to become the person that talks about this in order to salvage your career, right? Like you're gonna have to make it your whole thing. You can't just say, no, this upsets me, right? Because then, well, yes, you'll be discredited on every other issue. But, um, I mean, what I do think is very impressive is that the older generation of women athletes are really coming out to talk about this on behalf of the younger women still caught up in the system who can't afford to lose their sponsorships or their places. Um, I wish that that model was happening in academia or, um, medicine or other areas where there's a lot more cowardice. So, I mean, the one thing you say about women athletes is they're brave and strong, and they are fighting. I think the older women athletes in particular are really inspiring in this area.

So what is your, uh, what's your current status right now? So you're no longer a professor at Sussex. What are you, what are you up to these days? And how have you managed to land on your feet and, and are you, are you doing okay?

I'm doing good. Um, I've got a portfolio career now. I'm not going back to, uh, academia full-time. Yeah, I don't want to. Uh, I, I'm a founding faculty fellow at the UATX, which is this new university venture, um, that Barry Weiss started in Austin. And they're building a university there. So I have taught in a summer school there. I'll be going back, um, this year, and I'm very pleased and proud to be associated with that project. I'm on the left, obviously. There's quite a lot of people on the right involved as well, but that's great. It is really. Barry's a good friend. Yeah. Well, it's a great idea and I'm happy to be involved with that. Um, but I'm also writing. So I really enjoy writing, not for an academic audience anymore, thank God, but a general one. I have a column for a British online publication called Unheard, where I write every week. Um, I do other bits and pieces. I'm also got something exciting in the pipeline I can't quite talk about yet, but I'm gonna do so. Yeah, I've got loads on and I'm happy and a bit liberated, to be honest.

Well, that's good to hear. So before I let you go, um, can you give my audience your Twitter handle and or website and or anywhere else you want to direct them?

Sure. So my Twitter handle is @DocCStockK, so it's got two K's at the end. Um, I write an Unheard every week. You can, if you just go to Unheard, you'll see, um, my columns where I hold forth on a variety of culture war style issues and other things too. And I've got a website called CassidyStock.com, but I don't really do much with that anymore because I just can't keep up with it all. So.

All right, Kathleen, well, it's been a pleasure. And, oh, I've got a book though. Oh, yeah. Yes. Um, so my book's called Material Girls: Where Reality Matters for Feminism. You, unfortunately, such as the, it did very well in the UK. It's sold tens of thousands of copies and it's been translated, but I couldn't get a deal in the States because everybody treated it as transphobic, as far as I can see. So what it is out is available on Kindle and Kobo in the States, or you can order it from the UK if you want, but I would just get it on Kindle. Yeah. And I basically try to go through the philosophical ideas behind these radical claims we've been talking about in a skeptical way that sort of explains them.

Well, I'm of the belief that, uh, you should buy books that get banned, yeah, even if you won't read them, as as a resistance to the. It wasn't banned, it just wasn't, never got started. But, right. It had been published in this day. So no doubt. Well, yeah, I mean, Abigail Shrier's book was, you know, not on Amazon for exactly quite a while. And these are, you know, these are serious books. These are not, I mean, not that it should matter, it shouldn't even matter whether they're serious books, really. But these are not hacks. These are serious, in my view, people making serious arguments about consequential issues that are getting ruled out of bounds because a small, you know, a small number of people are extremely offended by it. And, and this is, I mean, it's ridiculous. This is not how we approach religious offense, at least most of the time. This is not how we approach any other kind of offense, right? If you get 10% of the population that says I hate this, we don't ban it, right? We don't take it off Amazon. No. So I encourage people to support you, if only to to fight that trend. And also because you bring a lot of substance and and seriousness to this issue. Um, thank you. And we, as I often argue, we, we should be kinder and more open to the blasphemers and heretics of our age. So, um, yeah, let's end on that note. Thank you, Kathleen.

Thanks very much. That's it for this episode of Conversations with Coleman, guys. As always, thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast, commenting on social media, or sending me an email. To check out my other social media platforms, click the cards you see on screen. And don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time. [Music] Thank you.