In this episode, Simone and Malcolm discuss the rise of white pride in the LGBTQ+ community, and why it might be a symptom of a larger cultural problem: White Pride. They discuss what it means to be a white person in a culture that values and celebrates diversity, and what it might mean for the future of the gay+ community.
00:00:28.060If in the end, maybe someone being gay or trans or any other thing could be a product of their hormones,
00:00:34.440which could even be influenced by things that their mothers did or did not do, did or did not consume or were not exposed to.
00:00:41.740So I feel like there's this really interesting gradation.
00:00:43.920At any rate, maybe why some people are really drawn to try to loop themselves in to things like Pride Month when they are, for example, just asexual or poly.
00:00:54.020Maybe that's into that to say, like, I want to be proud about something about myself culturally, something about my people and my tribe.
00:01:00.040And I also think that, like, I don't know, of the people I know who are asexual, who are poly, they are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly on the wealthier and more educated end of the spectrum.
00:01:10.000I do think it's telling that of all the places where I've been in the world, that where we see Pride most, I guess, openly and enthusiastically celebrated is also where white culture is also super not cool to celebrate.
00:01:27.840Like, I was just thinking about, like, where's the only other place where I've seen, like, enthusiastic celebration of LGBT?
00:01:39.000Yeah, they do have bigger Pride events in other places.
00:01:42.120Yeah, Pride in coastal cities is the strongest.
00:01:44.260Because when I think about, like, the best, like, gay Pride parades I've been to or drag shows or, like, events in general, San Francisco, obviously, D.C., Cape Cod, like, just the best.
00:01:54.980Oh, yeah, those are definitely locations where you would have the highest amount of cultural shame.
00:01:59.460With this new model of LGBT as laundered white pride, do you view it any differently?
00:02:05.440Like, I don't know what to make of it yet in my head.
00:02:09.060It's not great to grow up feeling like your ethnic group is wretched and deplorable and, like, intrinsically, genetically, or culturally worse than all other groups.
00:02:23.500And not everybody raises their kids believing this, but there definitely is a portion of the population that raises their kids believing this.
00:02:28.820And I think that portion of the population's kids is the portion that is most likely to end up identifying it's LGBT.
00:02:35.260I don't see it as a bad thing, really, because it's better than these kids having nothing they can have pride in.
00:02:43.520Especially if you buy this meme that there's just something intrinsically immoral about white people or whiteness, which exists within certain cultural groups, especially in the San Francisco, New York area.
00:02:56.500People started basing their identities off of the state of the sexual identity research 20 years ago.
00:03:03.440And now, if you update the research, like if the research finds new things, well, then you've undermined someone's identity, right?
00:03:13.180It's now whatever the state of the field was 20 years ago, that's canon.
00:03:18.040Even if it doesn't align with the actual data, which is one of the things that we point out in our book is the concept of even gay and straight is probably not a really effective way of talking about sexual identity.
00:03:49.360So one thing that we were talking about was this concept that, you know, generally, when you're looking at falling fertility rates, one of the things that's really associated with cultural groups that have been able to maintain their fertility rate is pride in that cultural group.
00:04:04.620Like a belief that we are a good thing in the world and more of this thing should exist.
00:04:09.420And we argue this is one of the reasons why Jewish populations have been so resistant to fertility collapse because a lot of the times we talk to a Jewish person and they're like, I want more Jewish people to exist in the future.
00:04:18.820And okay, so that makes a lot of sense.
00:04:20.780But when you're talking about white people more broadly, like Caucasians generally, I think that there's this belief that if they have any pride in an aspect of who they are or their culture, that is white pride and it is evil.
00:04:36.000The interesting thing is there has been a group that has come with a message that says, oh, actually, if you join our cultural group, now you can be white and have pride in the cultural group you've joined.
00:04:54.320And this is the LGBTQ plus population.
00:04:57.000Just for some statistics here, gay married couples have a higher medium household income than opposite sex married couples, but their poverty rates are about equal.
00:05:09.040And if you look across the U.S. population, you actually see higher rates of black and Hispanic LGBT identification currently, but this disappears and becomes the opposite when you correct for age.
00:05:25.960This is more because there are more younger black and Hispanic people in the general population.
00:05:31.020And I think the real smoking gun that this is what's happening, that it is allowing predominantly white, middle and upper class individuals who otherwise are told by society they can't have pride in anything, well, now you're allowed to have pride, is that it is now becoming kind of offensive to discuss that being gay is something you're born as, or being trans is something you're born as.
00:05:55.540And if you think this is an offensive thing to discuss, and if you think this is an offensive thing to discuss, and you're like, no, nobody thinks that's offensive to discuss, well, okay, so there's a recent study.
00:06:02.980Simone, why don't you talk about this study?
00:06:05.100Right. Yeah, because I was the one to first get really freaked out about it.
00:06:08.460One group of researchers looking at the presence of endocrine disruptors in first trimester mothers found that mothers with elevated levels of endocrine disruptors also saw higher rates of boys born essentially with like less transition to full maleness.
00:06:25.940So, for example, the distance between the anus and the penis was shorter, sort of like that developmental stage happened less completely, less successfully.
00:06:34.340And then around age eight, boys who in utero in first trimester had mothers with higher concentrations of endocrine disruptors in their bloodstreams also showed less, we'll say dimorphically male play.
00:06:48.840So they played more like girls essentially, which indicates that there are exogenous factors that could affect the extent to which someone shows certain dimorphic gendered behavior, as well as physiological traits.
00:07:03.080So I was bringing up this study with an African friend of mine, like from Africa, it's a slightly different cultural background, they're not as up to date with like modern American progressive culture.
00:07:13.240And I was like, well, and of course, I don't really talk about this study publicly much because it'd be seen as wildly offensive to trans people.
00:07:19.200And they were like, wait, why would that be if it wouldn't that like be an argument that would show that the explosion in the trans population could be a biological change and that these people aren't imagining it and that there really is like a lower gender differentiation or many more people being born actually the opposite gender.
00:07:40.920And I was like, why is this such an offensive concept to these communities when it seemingly the way that when I grew up in a gay community, you were born gay, you were born trans, and that was the defense for that community.
00:07:55.880And what I realized is now it's considered offensive to either say that you were born gay or to say that you're definitively not born gay and it's a choice.
00:08:06.080It's the same with the trans community, right?
00:08:07.760It's like they want to keep this in a box.
00:08:09.820They don't want anybody asking these questions or saying that it could be something that you were born as.
00:08:14.780And so the question is, why would you want to keep that in a box?
00:08:17.220Well, the reason you would want to keep it in a box, because so long as people aren't born gay or born trans, if anyone can become gay or trans, like the old political lesbians, these were a group of feminists who believed that it was immoral to be heterosexual because you are like benefiting men.
00:08:36.240But if you say that anyone can join the LGBTQ plus community, well, then you have fully opened it to the entire like white upper class community to join because this pride offering is more valuable to them.
00:08:53.500But I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Simone.
00:08:58.200I think what really did resonate with me was this backdoor to pride, even if you are white.
00:09:03.860And I wonder if that's why there's creep into the pride community.
00:09:07.820I was just listening to commentary today on the addition of, for example, poly people, maybe to LGBTQA plus pride and also asexual people.
00:09:19.240Like many people complain like, well, asexuality is more like a hormone imbalance than it is a sexuality.
00:09:25.380But then like, where do you draw the line?
00:09:27.380If in the end, maybe someone being gay or trans or any other thing could be sort of a product of their hormones, which could even be influenced by things that their mothers did or did not do, did or did not consume or were not exposed to.
00:09:41.000So I feel like there's this really interesting gradation at any rate, maybe why some people are really drawn to try to loop themselves in to things like pride month when they are, for example, just asexual, which really hasn't subjected people to that much discrimination throughout history.
00:09:57.640Aside from maybe them being obligated to have sex in some relationships and they're not that into it, which I don't know, I'm not too worried about.
00:10:04.820Or poly, maybe that's just trying to get into that, to say, like, I want to be proud about something about myself culturally, something about my people and my tribe.
00:10:13.460And I also think that, like, I don't know, of the people I know who are asexual, who are poly, they are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly on the wealthier and more educated end of the spectrum.
00:10:23.380So I do see that because I don't think also, especially white, wealthy and educated people are allowed that much to even have pride in, for example, like being graduates of the school they graduated from, which in the past used to be huge, right?
00:10:38.880Yeah, because that's a sign of status.
00:10:40.360So it would, of course, be seen as a negative thing to show pride in because it would be like class status.
00:10:46.880If you have victimhood status, then it's fine.
00:10:48.880You know, you have to be the adventurous, enlightened, educated victim or the outgoing victim, something like that.
00:10:58.740Well, the victim tag is necessary if you want to be, I guess, palatable from a public relations standpoint, which is why that was such a good South Park joke.
00:11:07.240Well, and I think that this is something that you point out where when we talk about this as a cultural group that's really selling us pride, we mean this quite literally to the extent, and I think we mentioned this in other podcasts, that we would count by their community's rules as LGBT, both of us, because we would both at least be agender, which is a form of genderqueer, which is a form of trans.
00:11:30.540And I was talking to some progressive friends, and they go, agender isn't a form of genderqueer, and it's like, yes, it is.
00:11:36.640It's defined that way by most of the major LGBT organizations.
00:11:40.260If you don't believe me, just go Google definitions of genderqueer that are found on these organizations' websites, and agender will clearly be under the definition.
00:11:51.600And when I say agender, it doesn't really matter to me that I'm a guy.
00:11:54.780Like, if I woke up tomorrow and I was a woman, I'd be like, fine, I'll find a way to make this work.
00:11:59.800I'm gay, but I'd find a way to make it work.
00:16:09.640And so I feel like that's more culturally celebrated.
00:16:12.280Pride in coastal cities, in liberal areas is the strongest.
00:16:15.720But I would also say that white Pride is strongest in the South.
00:16:19.260In the South, like, you see, I mean, like, people are still flying, like, Confederate flags and whatnot.
00:16:23.680There is actual more white Pride, and there's more resistance to not having white Pride.
00:16:29.080And that, therefore, there's less, per our theory or model here, of a drive or demand to have alternate channels for Pride as a white person, if that makes sense.
00:16:42.340Because when I think about, like, the best, like, gay Pride parades I've been to or drag shows or, like, events in general, San Francisco, obviously, D.C., Cape Cod, like, just the best.
00:16:58.700Whereas, like, in the South, I don't think there's much reason.
00:17:01.440Also, because I think there's a lot more, even if we're, like, you know, independent of Confederate stuff, like, there's still just a lot more.
00:17:15.400There's more, like, proud to be a Baptist or whatever, whereas you don't get that in coastal cities.
00:17:19.240So, like, because there are more outlets for a white middle to upper class or even, like, lower, like, impoverished even, like, there are lots of channels there.
00:17:29.280And yet, yeah, in coastal cities and North, you really don't see that.
00:17:33.640Hence, maybe more LGBT, et cetera, Pride.
00:17:37.440I think there may be a tendency to dismiss this as being a sign of just how liberal an area is.
00:17:45.420However, if you look at places like Cuba, you do not see large pride events.
00:17:53.400In fact, gay marriage wasn't even legalized until 2022.
00:17:57.800Well, I think that this is really interesting, that it is sort of white pride laundering.
00:18:04.620In the same way, we're going to launder our white pride and have these big parades about it, but we're going to pretend it's not a white pride parade.
00:18:17.380And after I had this realization, I'm never going to be able to see gay pride parades of anything else, just giant white pride parades of people who say that, oh, I'm not a white, I'm not, you know, pro.
00:18:29.580Which is interesting because this isn't what the gay community used to be.
00:18:33.400And I think that this is important to note, is that the gay community used to be people who were born gay and had to live their entire lives, like, really discriminated for this.
00:19:03.140But I think that historically, if you were in the 80s and you went up and you said, I'm LGBT, right?
00:19:09.480And yet, your form of sexuality or gender identity did not lead to you being significantly discriminated against, the community would have been like, that's a little offensive for you to say that.
00:19:23.720If you were, like, agender or something like that.
00:19:27.280Or you were something that, like, didn't mean that you had to live a lifestyle that caused you to constantly be attacked in the way that they were constantly attacked and victimized.
00:19:38.200But the community has sort of been taken over to an extent by this cultural virus, which is expansive.
00:20:03.760Well, and I guess also it's very easy to find one of these groups that you can identify with.
00:20:10.980For example, in our sexuality research, we found that women aren't really that attracted, like, primarily to primary or secondary sex characteristics.
00:20:19.560Like, not sexual body parts, but rather dominance and submission.
00:20:23.640So that means that, like, you could argue, and this has shown up in other research, too, that the majority of women are sort of, by default, bisexual.
00:20:32.740So instantly, like, you can opt into that.
00:20:34.920I think the majority of women don't choose to identify as bisexual.
00:20:39.900But, like, if you need that outlet, you can find it.
00:20:41.920I think that's the most important part of this is that maybe...
00:20:45.640And we now have a better understanding of how malleable our sexuality is because so many people are taking gender hormones.
00:20:53.100And we now know that when you're on gender hormones, you have a 25% chance of changing the primary gender you're attracted to.
00:21:00.300And people describing once they go on testosterone or once they go on estrogen, just the extent to which they feel super different is meaningful.
00:21:07.280Even me, I have hypothalamic amenorrhea.
00:21:10.680I don't have periods on my own, meaning that I have to take, like, tons of estrogen to sort of, like, function normally as a female.
00:21:27.120You're going to have to start that over.
00:21:28.780If you could start after just, like, right when you interrupted me, that would be good because that's where you broke up.
00:21:33.280Uh, and you've talked with me about this as well, where you would say that normally you're pretty asexual or at least responsive sexual, where you can get turned on, but only if somebody is engaging you already.
00:21:47.160But your sexuality becomes proactive when you're on all these hormones.
00:21:51.420And you begin to feel active attraction, like, like, you want to jump me right then, which is something that you almost never experience when you're not on these hormones.
00:22:00.300Which is why I think the critique that asexuals just have a hormone imbalance is not off, really.
00:22:06.700But all of this stuff is so interesting that we have entered a society today where you can't say it's not a choice.
00:22:20.640Well, and think about how offensive it is to say, like, if I were to walk up to an asexual and be like, oh, don't worry, you could just, like, medicate yourself out of this.
00:22:26.940How offensive would that be, especially when you start to identify your sexual orientation with your personal identity?
00:22:37.020And one of the first things that you indicate in The Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, our book on human sexuality, is that your sexual orientation does not mean that you condone something morally or that you support something morally.
00:22:50.060Like, if something turns you on, that doesn't mean you're okay with it or that it's part of your identity.
00:22:54.480It's just something that turns you on.
00:22:56.200And I think, furthermore, we need to recognize that the things that turn you on may change depending on either endogenous or exogenous hormones, meaning, like, hormones that are just happening either because of puberty or just general life or your gender, whatever, or hormones that you're taking or hormones that you're exposed to by the environment outside of your control, but, like, not intentional.
00:23:20.060And I guess it's dangerous, let's say, if indeed our theory is correct, if indeed LGBT, et cetera, pride is one form of white pride laundering.
00:23:31.780And then people choose to identify as one of these categories because they want something to identify with it that they can be proud of.
00:23:39.320They want to have a culture they can be proud of.
00:23:41.200And they start to strongly identify with a sexual orientation that may ultimately shift over time because of their hormonal changes or, like, maybe doesn't really represent them or whatever.
00:23:49.940I don't know. I think it's kind of dangerous. It would be much better for someone to build cultural pride around a culture or religion that they very logically and intentionally chose and didn't just fall into because of a hormonal balance or imbalance or, I don't know, approximate social group.
00:24:08.640It's just it's a little frustrating, but it's very interesting nonetheless.
00:24:11.580Yeah, well, and I think the one thing that's really disgusting, we talk about this laundering, is the recent change of the gay pride flag.
00:24:18.460Like, if it turns out that this is actually psychologically what's going on, to include these stripes for, like, what is it?
00:24:33.840So, with the flag now having the brown and black colors in it for BIPOC individuals, not even gender or sexuality, they're literally, like, wearing blackface to hide this white pride outlet.
00:24:48.480Well, but wouldn't you say that's almost like a correction?
00:24:50.400Could it almost be this subtle recognition that LGBT pride stuff was kind of white pride masquerading as other sexual identities?
00:25:00.560And therefore, we have to throw in, hey, remember, white people can't have pride about anything.
00:25:06.640Remember, don't be too right. That could be it. That's a charitable interpretation of what's going on there, and that could be it.
00:25:10.680I don't know. That doesn't sound very charitable to me, unless you just want to accept the premise that white people are super evil no matter what.
00:25:18.840Well, and this comes to another thing. You were talking about people identifying with their sexuality, first and foremost.
00:25:24.940This is why one of the... We've had such an easy time doing research in the sexuality space and, like, uncovering tons of new stuff in the practice.
00:25:32.660Well, it's shooting fish in a barrel because no real research has been done in the space in, like, 20 years.
00:25:36.300And the reason is because people started basing their identities off of the state of the research 20 years ago.
00:25:42.280And now, if you update the research, like, if the research finds new things, well, then you've undermined someone's identity, right?
00:25:50.160So you can't update. It's now canon. It's now whatever the state of the field was 20 years ago, that's canon.
00:25:56.700And even if it doesn't align with the actual data, which is one of the things that we point out in our book, is the concept of even gay and straight is probably not a really effective way of talking about sexual identity.
00:26:10.320So by that, what we mean is it appears that even if you're just talking about, like, male or female, what do you prefer?
00:26:18.080Well, it turns out that's not really the way those are grouped in the brain or in populations.
00:26:22.220So it's pretty common to have a guy who is, I think it's about a third of guys or a quarter of guys in our studies, who finds the female, like, silhouette, like, general body image attractive, but it gets discussed or at least no attraction from a vagina.
00:26:40.120And that is fascinating to me that it appears that there's sort of three categories here.
00:26:46.840One is general body shape, which can go on a spectrum of male and female, and then with males and females attraction to disgust, not male to female, right?
00:26:57.580Because you can be all the way attracted to both male and female body shapes or all the way disgusted by both male and female body shapes.
00:27:02.400But then you have these separate metrics of one is secondary sex characteristics, and the other is primary sex characteristics.
00:27:09.280And it's actually, while it does often happen that these things align, it doesn't happen enough that it makes sense that the predominant way we categorize sexuality is male to female attraction.
00:27:22.180It's probably better to say arousal to disgust along, like, these 10 different metrics.
00:27:27.560But, of course, that doesn't align with the state of the research when everybody started basing their identities off of their arousal patterns and gender proclivities.
00:27:36.940It would be cool if we switched to that, though.
00:27:39.440Like, if you could have sort of your, like, docket of, like, here are all the turn-ons, here are all the turn-offs for me.
00:27:45.200I feel like people would find compatibility a lot easier to work out, but whatever.
00:27:49.520That's a totally different can of worms.
00:27:51.540Basically, the kid's scale is nonsense.
00:28:05.480It's not great to grow up feeling like your ethnic group is wretched and deplorable and, like, intrinsically, genetically, or culturally worse than all other groups.
00:28:19.400And not everybody raises their kids believing this, but, you know, there definitely is a portion of the population that raises their kids believing this.
00:28:25.800And I think that portion of the population's kids is the portion that is most likely to end up identifying as LGBT because there is nothing.
00:28:33.000It's not a—I guess I don't see it as a bad thing, really, because it's better than these kids having nothing they can have pride in.
00:28:40.380Especially if you buy this meme that there's just something intrinsically immoral about white people or whiteness, which exists within certain cultural groups, especially in the San Francisco, New York area.
00:29:15.840No, it's funny because the moment I said it to you, I go, is LGBT white pride?
00:29:21.000And you thought for a second, you go, oh, my God.
00:29:24.120Well, no, I more, like, loudly said that in the middle of the dairy aisle.
00:29:27.660But hopefully no one there knows us too well.
00:29:31.140No, this is actually, when we talk about sexuality, one of those things where, like, we'll be talking to a trans friend about this.
00:29:36.040We go, yeah, we do, we talk a lot of deviant stuff about sexuality on our show and on our, and they're like, oh, yeah, I'm part of the kink community too.