Based Camp - June 06, 2024


Why Do We Treat Sexual Identity Differently from Flavor Preferences？


Episode Stats

Length

27 minutes

Words per Minute

189.93442

Word Count

5,203

Sentence Count

329

Misogynist Sentences

10

Hate Speech Sentences

19


Summary

In this episode, we talk about the cultural solution to same-sex attraction and why it s a problem, and why we shouldn t shame people who are born with it. We also talk about why we should not shame people for being gay or lesbian.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I don't know where you're going to go. So let's dive right in.
00:00:02.560 It's something I've been thinking about recently.
00:00:05.240 There are many things that humans have predilections for,
00:00:08.460 whether those predilections are genetic or due to our environment growing up.
00:00:12.660 Two broad categories where I think humans have a varying predilections that are
00:00:17.500 both genetic and environmental are the things that arouse them and the flavors
00:00:22.880 that they enjoy.
00:00:24.220 That's true. Yeah. Okay. Huh.
00:00:26.500 So the question then becomes, why is it that I cannot impugn someone?
00:00:35.320 I'm like, I don't like this particular food. I don't think that cake is healthy.
00:00:38.380 I don't think you should eat cake every day.
00:00:39.900 I can understand that my kids might even like the taste of cake. Okay.
00:00:44.900 But I am going to shame them for eating cake.
00:00:47.620 I am going to withhold cake from them.
00:00:50.500 Yeah. Or soda or alcohol. People are very passionate about these things.
00:00:54.400 Why is it that as a society, that's a totally normal thing to say.
00:01:00.920 But if I come from a cultural group that has similar beliefs around something like
00:01:05.960 gender transition, same sex attraction, that scene is homophobic.
00:01:12.360 Would you like to know more?
00:01:13.700 Our family doesn't particularly like Italian food.
00:01:17.480 Like I find it to be carvy and honestly a little bland for my taste.
00:01:20.760 We don't serve it a lot to our kids. Okay.
00:01:22.440 Now, a family that likes Italian food, that like receives pleasure when they eat Italian food
00:01:29.400 and really enjoys that, I understand that there's other families like that.
00:01:32.780 I just don't want that for my family. Right?
00:01:35.620 Now, this is a totally normal and inoffensive thing to state.
00:01:39.460 No one is going to say I'm apostophobe when I state something like this.
00:01:44.280 Yeah. That's just not for you.
00:01:45.300 What is really fascinating is when I correlate this with something like sexuality, you would get an extremely negative response.
00:01:56.980 Because a lot of people, they will attack our position on gayness, which is to say that I as a family,
00:02:02.700 like if my kids were born same-sex attracted or due to environmental conditions become same-sex attractive,
00:02:07.740 I'm not going to shame them because I think that we have other solutions to have families right now.
00:02:12.820 And I think that the costs of shaming them are less than the benefits from a cultural perspective.
00:02:17.740 But I hold nothing against the cultures that do.
00:02:21.780 And I can understand why from a historic context, especially if they have other cultural solutions for same-sex attraction.
00:02:27.440 And a lot of people are like, all conservatives have the same solution to same-sex attraction.
00:02:31.480 This is just objectively not true.
00:02:33.380 So if I'm just contrasting three groups here, traditional Catholics, traditional Muslims, and traditional Protestants,
00:02:38.800 traditional Catholics who are born same-sex attracted, if you look at the Catholic priesthood,
00:02:41.980 some studies show that over 50% of the priesthood is same-sex attracted.
00:02:45.020 It is, they get a position of status, but they just have to maintain celibacy.
00:02:49.560 That's actually a pretty good trade-off and not particularly inhumane.
00:02:52.740 It's like ethically sourced eunuchs.
00:02:54.120 You go to, obviously it has led to some negative externalities for altar boys.
00:02:58.860 Yeah, I was going to say, not always eunuchs.
00:03:01.760 But if you look at rates within the Catholic Church versus other professions where people interact with kids a lot,
00:03:06.580 like public school system, the rates of, well, you guys know what I'm talking about,
00:03:11.880 are higher in the public school system, even on a per-teacher basis.
00:03:15.180 A lot of people don't know this, and this was a report done by the Clinton administration, so get off me on this.
00:03:19.800 Protestants, it is, you just suppress it.
00:03:21.600 But isn't that what I tell people with cake?
00:03:23.700 Isn't that what I tell, just suppress what many cultures say with something like alcohol or cake,
00:03:28.740 or some foods that we might think are culturally distasteful.
00:03:33.020 Some cultural groups like Jews, for example, or Muslims, for example, don't eat pig, right?
00:03:38.840 It's not for any specific health reason, it's just don't eat pig.
00:03:42.760 This is a control, and you're like, pig is good.
00:03:45.380 I like eating pig.
00:03:46.420 But that doesn't mean I have anything against Muslims.
00:03:48.660 So I'm starting by just laying out the problem, right?
00:03:51.020 That's interesting, yeah.
00:03:52.240 So the question is, why is this the case?
00:03:56.840 And people are like, people are really forced to live, oh, and I forgot the Muslim solution.
00:04:00.260 The extremist Muslim solution is gender transition, which is actually really funny to me, the gender transition.
00:04:06.880 Progressives are like accidentally discovering conservative Islam, which is you have a gender-confused young person with same-sex attractive,
00:04:13.600 and it's just transition, done, fixed it, no more gay.
00:04:16.820 It's an interesting cultural solution, and we can get into briefly as to why I think you see this within Islamic populations and not in other populations,
00:04:23.320 is it solves the sex ratio problem you have within Islamic populations, because you have religion within Muslim populations.
00:04:30.520 Because some people have multiple female partners.
00:04:32.500 Yeah, you have more unattached males in this culture, so there are more males who will just never get a partner, so it does make sense to transition.
00:04:37.860 It's a greater societal stability, yeah, people get married.
00:04:40.840 Yeah, because also one of the big things I would say is if you decide that you live in a society that is anti-carb, and you freaking love carbs, like, all right, that's tough.
00:04:49.280 You'll adjust, but when you live in a society that doesn't let you choose the life partner that you'd be sexually compatible with,
00:04:57.880 and for some people that's a really important part of their relationship.
00:05:00.700 But why is that an important part of their relationship?
00:05:02.940 Like, it's an interesting thing to note, right?
00:05:04.740 Like, historically this was not an important part of relationship.
00:05:07.840 Sexual compatibility.
00:05:08.540 Yeah, that is an interesting thing.
00:05:09.880 That's its own, like, huge Pandora's box, right, is why do we care so much about sexual compatibility?
00:05:16.340 There's an evolutionary argument to be made that, at least when it comes to male-female pairings, which are reproductive in nature,
00:05:23.920 it could matter because studies have shown that people, when they just smell sweaty shirts or something,
00:05:30.160 are more likely to be attracted to people with whom they would be genetically more compatible for whatever reason, right?
00:05:36.960 You do see these levels of compatibility, but I'm talking historically, throughout most of history.
00:05:41.840 People are, yeah, typically around people with whom they're fairly well genetically matched.
00:05:45.080 Marrying people who you've never had sex with, who you've likely never even kissed, who you've never held hands with,
00:05:50.780 this is historically the norm.
00:05:53.480 Even if you're talking about many indigenous cultures, which, I'm sorry, these are progressive left to elevate indigenous cultures.
00:05:59.420 So I'm just saying that even among the cultures that they elevate, while you can find some that are outside of this,
00:06:05.080 actually historically, no, you were not having sex outside of marriage to that frequently,
00:06:08.740 except in rare anthropological cases.
00:06:10.620 And this is especially true of the successful cultures, the cultures that ended up conquering their neighbors and forming long-lived empires.
00:06:17.060 So the question here becomes, this is weird, right?
00:06:21.440 And I think that you came up with one of the answers.
00:06:23.840 The elevation of sexual identity to something that was critical that a person lived out
00:06:29.460 came downstream of sexuality becoming key to a healthy relationship,
00:06:34.900 and sexual compatibility becoming key to a healthy relationship.
00:06:37.440 Because in a historic context, it wasn't.
00:06:39.460 And I actually think relationships are worse off for it being elevated.
00:06:44.500 Yeah.
00:06:44.760 And when you look at subreddits, for example, like dead bedrooms, it's...
00:06:48.460 Yeah, when you make a relationship about sex, and then the sex almost inevitably changes over time
00:06:56.460 as people have kids and hormones change and things get mismatched,
00:07:00.220 yeah, like you're setting yourself up for failure.
00:07:04.160 Yeah, I'm with my wife because I respect her as a human being.
00:07:07.340 That was what I was looking for.
00:07:08.800 Somebody...
00:07:09.240 Well, screw it.
00:07:09.560 I'm with you because you're friggin' hot.
00:07:11.240 But whatever.
00:07:11.660 But, like, I...
00:07:12.920 Eve, your effect on my arousal patterns is, like, the last thing that I'm thinking about
00:07:19.120 in terms of what recommends you as a wife.
00:07:21.380 100%, yeah.
00:07:22.100 If we got divorced, it would never be over sex.
00:07:24.720 It would never be over sex.
00:07:27.300 And it's the same with our kids.
00:07:28.600 When I'm elevating, when I'm telling my kids the type of person they should be looking for
00:07:31.100 in a spouse, I would not elevate that.
00:07:32.580 So I think this is one thing, is the perverse elevation of sexual compatibility was in relationships.
00:07:38.140 Yeah, that's interesting.
00:07:38.940 And just, honestly, sex within relationships.
00:07:41.660 It's people approached diet from only the perception of dopamine spikes.
00:07:47.080 It's like, no, you should probably approach diet from the perspective of, are you surviving?
00:07:51.000 Are you healthy and functional?
00:07:53.300 Yeah, but the other thing that led to the elevation of this as an identity, so we're
00:07:56.900 going to talk about this, is the elevation of casual sex.
00:08:00.120 There was no real reason for gay men, outside of, like, married gay men going to gay bathhouses
00:08:05.660 occasionally, which historically was very normal, to, when I say married, heterosexually married
00:08:10.000 gay men just going to get relief occasionally outside of their marriage, that as soon as
00:08:15.500 you had casual dating was in these communities, and it was expected that everyone in high school
00:08:20.480 was sleeping around to some extent, and everyone in college was sleeping around to some extent.
00:08:23.780 Which is a very new thing.
00:08:25.740 Which is very new.
00:08:26.700 Then, yes, for these people to indulge in what was giving them arousal, they needed to go out and engage in a way that was public.
00:08:37.440 And people could say, admittedly, right away, but, like, how dare you compare this to stuffed cake and stuff like that?
00:08:44.540 Being gay has no negative health consequences.
00:08:47.760 And here I'd be like, REEE, record scratch?
00:08:51.480 Excuse me.
00:08:52.940 Record scratch, that sounds more like an autistic REE right there.
00:08:56.740 REEE, record scratch.
00:08:58.100 Are you, do you not remember the AIDS epidemic?
00:09:01.200 It nearly genocided the entire gay community.
00:09:06.000 Because intrinsically, you are going to get more STDs passed by anal sex than you are through other forms of sexual contact,
00:09:15.980 because it leaves more blood-to-blood contact.
00:09:19.020 Duh.
00:09:19.660 There is a reason why cultural groups culturally evolved.
00:09:23.960 The iterations that shunned this behavior had more surviving offsprings,
00:09:27.240 and why you see a level of homophobia in almost every long-lived widespread culture in the world today.
00:09:33.300 Okay?
00:09:34.040 Now, we have scientifically gotten to a point where we can get over that.
00:09:37.720 But if you're talking about, like, when the gay movement was first blossoming,
00:09:40.880 no, we had not yet gotten to a point where we could get around that.
00:09:44.100 And the families of these people who told them it was better to live a closeted lifestyle than die of AIDS,
00:09:52.580 which was the alternative for many of these people, were probably right.
00:09:56.140 That's a horrible fucking thing to say.
00:09:58.300 But it's also objectively true if you're talking about the early gay movement and what happened to many of these people.
00:10:04.660 Yeah.
00:10:05.360 It's really sad.
00:10:06.320 And I appreciate what they went through to normalize their community.
00:10:10.800 But then you have the other thing, which is to say, whenever you take a community and you say,
00:10:16.500 you can't do this and we will shame you for doing this,
00:10:19.640 and the desire is strong enough to do that, that a portion of people are still going to indulge in that,
00:10:23.840 then you will get a subculture that forms around that.
00:10:26.800 So why isn't there a subculture for people who cheat on their partners?
00:10:29.180 Because that is, like, historically, men wouldn't have same-sex liaisons.
00:10:33.500 Women would, to a lesser extent.
00:10:35.060 And also men wouldn't...
00:10:35.800 There are subculture around cheating on your partner, but we'll get on that in a second.
00:10:38.000 Okay.
00:10:38.660 I actually think that portions of the modern poly movement evolved out of this subculture.
00:10:43.620 Oh, interesting.
00:10:44.520 I like that take.
00:10:45.360 That's fun.
00:10:45.760 But we can get on this in a second.
00:10:47.660 So we need to go back to, if you had something like spicy food,
00:10:52.520 everyone in society who eats spicy food is going to be punished.
00:10:56.160 Okay?
00:10:56.520 You would get a subculture of people who like spicy food, and they'd hang out in places.
00:11:01.620 And then they begin to use words like, oh, that's spicy to mean that's cool and stuff like that.
00:11:06.440 Because their hierarchy within their culture begins to become determined by how much they are willing to other themselves in mainstream society
00:11:14.760 to fit in with that culture in the same way that, like, if two goths meet each other and they've never met each other before,
00:11:18.820 their relative hierarchy is normally determined by the number of, like, body modifications or outfits or knowledge they have of obscure bands
00:11:24.920 that would other them in mainstream society or tattoos or whatever, right?
00:11:27.180 So you begin to get, like, tattoos of chili peppers and, like, certain jewelry configurations.
00:11:32.020 Like, when you meet someone, oh, you know this is another, Spicer.
00:11:34.800 Spicer.
00:11:35.420 I like that.
00:11:36.160 Fine.
00:11:36.560 They begin to talk among themselves, and they begin to develop alternate ways of speech and stuff like that.
00:11:42.620 Because they're talking within their own communities, and they need to signal to other members of their community.
00:11:46.940 And then, oh, wouldn't you know it, there's this much rarer group of people, but they're really eating salt.
00:11:53.460 And they're also shunned by mainstream society for their salty tastes.
00:11:57.400 Now, this community is also an underground community, and they just learned it's more convenient because both groups are hated by society
00:12:03.800 for things that they do as food to meet in the same locations and everything like that.
00:12:09.040 This is largely what happened with the gay and trans movement.
00:12:12.560 These movements have no real reason to be connected.
00:12:16.020 But from sort of the economies of scale and resources perspective, it just made more sense to share some spaces.
00:12:22.140 Yeah, in the early days.
00:12:23.180 But they are, as biological phenomenons, I think almost completely unrelated.
00:12:28.460 One's an arousal system thing, one's a gender system thing.
00:12:31.880 Even if it is an arousal system thing, it's a much more specific arousal system thing.
00:12:35.860 It's not the same kind of a thing.
00:12:38.220 But they judged themselves by the people who hated them because people always do that.
00:12:44.360 When you are othered by society, you go where the critical mass of cultural inertia is, and that's where you begin to identify.
00:12:52.380 And that's how these various movements that really didn't have any reason to conglomerate began to conglomerate amongst each other into what is now LGBTQ+.
00:13:01.220 Which is interesting, and take that to mean whatever you mean.
00:13:04.560 But what then ended up happening is people begin to define their identity by this subculture.
00:13:12.940 And this always happens with subcultures.
00:13:14.560 I remember how personally hurt I was as a kid when I was dressed as a seamster, basically.
00:13:20.760 Weird, not true seamster, but like my own take on it.
00:13:24.340 And somebody was like, oh, I love that seamster look.
00:13:26.300 I used to be a seamster too.
00:13:27.680 I had a seamster phase a few years ago.
00:13:29.500 But I felt so hurt by that.
00:13:30.760 I was like, this isn't a phase.
00:13:32.980 This is my identity.
00:13:34.120 How dare you?
00:13:35.500 People always think that their community right now is their identity.
00:13:38.820 Right.
00:13:39.100 You see this in the right as well.
00:13:41.280 Individuals who are like in their Andrew Tate phase think that this whole man masculine thing is like their identity.
00:13:47.940 Or this whole MGTOW thing is like the core of who they are.
00:13:51.060 Or this whole red pill thing.
00:13:52.260 And it's like, no, trust me, bro.
00:13:53.180 This is a phase.
00:13:54.260 This is just the community that you are identifying with right now.
00:13:56.880 And you have identified a sense of self around this community.
00:14:00.100 Now, certain communities can exist throughout your entire life if they become stable cultural units.
00:14:05.600 Which is what happened with the LGBT culture.
00:14:08.440 But that doesn't mean that it is intrinsically part of a person's humanity other than any more than like the foods that you like are an intrinsic part of your humanity.
00:14:17.600 I think that's what we're looking at here is we and then people can be like, what is your human identity really?
00:14:24.440 And I can say that of all the things that are not your identity, the things that I am extra sure are not your identity are the things that you didn't choose about yourself.
00:14:34.640 The things that are just biologically coded into you.
00:14:37.840 Like how much of a sweet tooth you have, your sexual orientation, et cetera.
00:14:42.920 Your gender.
00:14:44.500 Your arousal pathways, yeah.
00:14:45.820 Your race.
00:14:47.300 Your, like these things may cause society to treat you differently, but they're all things that you didn't choose about yourself.
00:14:54.800 And therefore, you have less ownership over them than the things that are a result of who you differentially are.
00:15:02.840 Oh, I like that.
00:15:03.660 Yeah.
00:15:03.880 So the point you're trying to make is that what we should use to define ourselves are the things that we are, our prefrontal cortex, cortices essentially would say are ours.
00:15:15.800 That we own them.
00:15:16.680 We didn't inherit them genetically.
00:15:18.660 I mean, determinist, it was inevitable that we were going to hold these stances.
00:15:21.440 But at least there are stances that we intellectually own instead of stances that we just genetically, hormonally inherited, right?
00:15:28.800 Yeah.
00:15:29.640 That's cool.
00:15:30.180 Well, and I also think that you can see that we talk about things like shaming eating calories, right?
00:15:36.900 Somebody's with a sub-community, because we definitely do that, with a sub-community form around that has its own social norms and everything.
00:15:41.760 Yes, that's what the Hays movement is, where they pretend that eating too many calories isn't unhealthy.
00:15:47.080 Well, but then there's also the pro-anna movement, which is all about the complete opposite.
00:15:50.240 Yeah, but with the Hays movement, what's interesting is there are social norms within the Hays movement, where if somebody begins to lose weight, or if somebody begins to suggest that being healthy, that this may be incompatible with being healthy, they get shunned and shamed by the community.
00:16:03.840 Oh, yeah.
00:16:04.760 Which is just what you're going to see within things like the trans movement.
00:16:07.260 And keep in mind, I think trans is a real phenomenon, but I also think that a portion of it has gone off the rails right now.
00:16:12.920 But if you are within the trans movement and you point that out, you will be completely excluded and ostracized from the community, which creates a really toxic environment within the community because people can use that identity to hide negative behavior patterns.
00:16:31.340 Then I think the bigger question or takeaway I have from this is, yeah, okay, so there's no reason why because we feel a certain orientation or attraction to things that we should necessarily indulge in them.
00:16:46.120 But then the question is, what is ideal or justified in terms of denying yourself a craving versus not?
00:16:52.480 Because a lot of these things are cultural.
00:16:54.240 Like you say, a lot of food prohibitions are based on very old religious traditions that originally may have evolved to help with sanitation, food safety, but now don't really have a place in society.
00:17:04.980 How does a person individually, thinking for themselves, decide if they're going to act on certain sexual fetishes or arousal pathways or not?
00:17:15.040 I think that's a great question.
00:17:16.420 And I want to point out here, because one thing that I'm sure I'll get criticized for is people saying that the gay individuals are responsible for the AIDS epidemic that ended up hurting the community.
00:17:24.840 And that's not what I'm saying here.
00:17:26.100 If you look at early things, like early food prohibitions may have been around health reasons, okay?
00:17:32.640 If an individual eats of those foods and gets a health issue because they were eating those foods, I am not here saying it's their fault, like whatever, but it's an objectively true thing that these things are correlated.
00:17:44.020 And so then the first question is, are they still correlated?
00:17:47.560 Are the reasons why we shame things like gayness, right, still correlated in our society?
00:17:54.120 Does it still hurt people in the way it used to hurt people at the same rates?
00:17:58.760 And the answer is no.
00:17:59.980 So within my cultural group, I will not shame my kids for doing it because everything you would potentially shame your kids for is an avenue other cultural groups can use to break your kids out of your cultural group.
00:18:12.520 Yeah, and it's a rebellion trigger.
00:18:15.800 It's a rebellion trigger.
00:18:16.860 So you are creating mechanisms for kids to leave your family with every one of these you stack up.
00:18:23.480 So there is a very strong motivation to remove these stacks because when a kid – and anything around sexuality is an incredibly powerful one to put people to use because the age at which kids most deconvert from their birth culture, i.e. their religion, is between 15 and 21.
00:18:38.400 That's also when they're going through puberty, that's also when they're experimenting with these things for the first time.
00:18:42.520 This is the candy the man in the van can use to take them to the second location if you don't want them to go.
00:18:49.380 So if you can de-stigmatize these within your cultures, you actually get a lot of additional cultural protection.
00:18:55.840 However, transness – now this is a different thing.
00:18:59.880 I actually – when I look at the trans community, when I look at the data around the community, I think that it leads to more mental health problems.
00:19:06.380 Whatever we have in terms of gender transition technology right now – and this may not always be the case – I think it's causing more problems than it's fixing.
00:19:15.640 And I think that there was this great recent study done by a very respectable researcher which really showed this, that a lot of the narratives we've been getting around transition being the solution to gender dysphoria were just not long-term data-based.
00:19:27.380 And this then leads me to say with my kids, would I warn them against that community?
00:19:34.640 Yeah, I would say that it is probably true that some portion of humans do have an incorrect sort of gender modifier in their brain.
00:19:41.700 But they happen to be born with that.
00:19:44.520 I do not think that gender transition is the cultural solution that we would recommend for them.
00:19:51.620 Yeah.
00:19:52.280 Which for some people is sucks, right?
00:19:54.140 I don't know what to say.
00:19:55.120 Like, if somebody has a gambling addiction, it hurts them to say, yeah, you shouldn't be gambling.
00:19:59.900 And they might identify a lot as a gambler.
00:20:02.100 They might really like doing it.
00:20:03.120 They might have a biological compulsion to do it.
00:20:05.160 But at the end of the day, it just seems to be correlated with long-term negative outcomes.
00:20:08.800 So I wouldn't recommend that.
00:20:10.480 And that would be the heuristic I'm using, whether it's food or arousal patterns or anything like that.
00:20:15.820 And this is why we are generally very open to things like fetishes and stuff like that on this show, where people can be like, why are you so open to these sexual things?
00:20:24.620 And it's because that provides our kids with a level of protection.
00:20:29.220 Yeah.
00:20:29.660 And generally with rules, what we've seen from the research is it really is best to have almost no rules.
00:20:36.620 And then just the one or two rules that really matter, you hold to them fast and you never make exceptions.
00:20:42.900 But yeah, the more rules.
00:20:44.000 You have a religious community that can back all of your rules.
00:20:46.640 And this is the other thing about predilection, shaming, and stuff like that.
00:20:49.860 I will never impugn another culture for their practices.
00:20:55.800 Okay?
00:20:56.840 I'm not going to say you don't get to practice these practices.
00:21:00.260 Those are not my kids.
00:21:01.420 That is not my culture.
00:21:02.760 And people will say, what if it leads to those kids committing suicide?
00:21:07.040 What if it leads to them being depressed?
00:21:09.020 And I'm like, okay, let's look at the data, people.
00:21:11.680 It turns out that people who grow up outside of hard religious cultures or very religious cultures have much higher rates of depression and suicide than people who grow up in very religious cultures.
00:21:22.200 So does that mean we should get rid of those groups?
00:21:26.120 No, of course not.
00:21:27.420 Like, it's absurd, right?
00:21:29.420 This, oh, what if kids end up committing suicide because of this, actually ends up giving more power to the ultra-religious communities and less power to the secular communities when you look at the data.
00:21:41.080 Like, overall sources of data outside of edge cases like gender transition and stuff like that.
00:21:45.900 But they selectively apply the data only where it allows their community or group to impose their ideology on and their moral framework on other cultural systems, which I see as immoral.
00:21:59.520 Yeah, totally.
00:22:01.380 Any final thoughts?
00:22:04.900 What about you?
00:22:06.200 What about me?
00:22:07.480 Like, where I stand with all this?
00:22:08.680 What do you think on our kids, et cetera?
00:22:11.440 Yeah.
00:22:11.760 In general, with our kids, I just want them to be safe.
00:22:14.700 And I want them to ideally have kids that they give great experiences to.
00:22:19.620 So the way I look at it is if there seems sex attracted, not a problem.
00:22:25.460 Just make sure that you freeze your sperm or eggs early.
00:22:29.040 And when you find the right partner, do IVF, whatever it might be.
00:22:33.220 I think that's all fine and good.
00:22:35.060 And the cool thing about us having a bigger family, too, is let's say that we have a same-sex attracted kid and they want to have kids that are closer to biologically them.
00:22:45.340 Instead of getting a sperm donor or an egg donor, because let's say we have two girls who turn out to be a girl who turns out to be a lesbian, she could just have her brother donate sperm and then have kids that are quite biologically similar.
00:22:58.420 So I don't know.
00:22:59.380 I think that there are fine solutions and we don't actually have a lot of logical reasons to be pretty specific about people's transitions.
00:23:08.140 I mean, I don't think collectively we're even against our kids transitioning, though we would probably say, wait until you're of age, like you're an adult 18 to 21 before you actually do it.
00:23:17.280 We're not going to support that before, ideally fully myelinated, before you actually start transitioning.
00:23:22.380 I know that's tougher hormonally to do that transition later, but still deal with it.
00:23:26.080 And then before you transition, freeze your genetic material, eggs or sperm, ideally as embryos.
00:23:32.160 Yes, but I would add that I do not think that the long-term outcomes for these individuals are very good if you look at the real data rather than the data that they're pushing.
00:23:40.720 Yeah, but when you're looking at, and I think it varies, too, you really have to look at the actual community.
00:23:44.740 If we have someone with rapid-onset gender dysphoria, it's a very different story from a kid that we have who, from the very beginning.
00:23:52.960 No, I agree. As parents, I think, it's funny, if you had parents who were actually supportive of this, they could actually tell you, which I've often seen with kids, is they'll go to their parent and they'll say, mom, I've always acted like a girl.
00:24:04.520 And the mom's like, I have raised a girl. You have not always acted like a girl. You have acted very differently from your sisters.
00:24:10.940 You have acted like your brothers your entire life.
00:24:13.120 It's just this community is good at getting people to recontextualize their entire life history through their own lens.
00:24:19.020 And so they knew that they had a family that wasn't going to be reflexively anti-supportive.
00:24:23.200 So I do agree with that, to give them honest information about whether what the community is telling them about their personal autobiographical history is actually accurate.
00:24:31.040 Yeah. I view it, this sounds terrible, but I view transitioning similarly to how I view suicide.
00:24:35.900 If someone for 20 years has wanted to end themselves, you know what, like they've been consistent about that.
00:24:42.720 They've not flinched. They've been committed to it. They've planned around it. They've held their stance.
00:24:46.500 We've checked with them a billion times. Let them go for it. Same with transitioning.
00:24:51.080 These are like, typically, if you're doing it all the way, which you should if you're going to do it, permanent, irreversible changes.
00:24:57.740 So if you're committed and you're ready to go. So I would just say I would take the same approach that we take to food, which is generally we're pretty permissive trying to go against really strong, like need pathways often backfires as you see with diet culture, right?
00:25:12.720 People who go on diets inevitably slingshot back as soon as they lose control or stop being on a Zempic or whatever, right?
00:25:20.440 They run out of their meal packets. And I think the same goes for sexuality.
00:25:24.720 So in general, unless you feel like there's a very severe risk to a particular food or arousal pathway, for example, if someone decided that they were super into eating humans, I'm sorry, we're going to draw a line there.
00:25:38.400 And if someone has specific, very illegal arousal pathways, and I'm not going to mention those words.
00:25:42.920 Nope. Sorry. That's just not going to happen.
00:25:45.160 Speaking of, this is something you get with vegans as well. I don't say vegans are like anti-meat eaters, right?
00:25:49.840 I don't say they hate. And I understand why they might practice that as a family for cultural reasons. And I support that. It's just not my choice.
00:25:57.400 Yeah. Yeah. Even, yeah. As long as it doesn't hurt a baby. I don't know enough about the research around vegan infant formula, for example. I worry a little bit about that, but whatever.
00:26:08.760 I love you too.
00:26:11.040 And if it doesn't work, they'll die out. So whatever.
00:26:12.940 No, nothing that can hurt babies. Never. I will find them and kill them.
00:26:16.920 I'm like that dream I had last night where someone was threatening Indy, who right now is dreaming very vividly in front of me in her crib.
00:26:25.540 And then I just beat this person up ruthlessly, screaming at them while people around me watched.
00:26:31.380 I can't instinctually, I have dreams about hurting people who hurt babies. I cannot let that happen.
00:26:38.420 But anyway, I don't, I'm sure vegan formula is probably fine.
00:26:42.040 I love you, Simone.
00:26:42.820 I love you too, gorgeous.
00:26:58.140 Oops, sorry. Okay, we're recording.
00:27:00.420 So you suggested as a topic, quality and food, which I find so intriguing. All I can think of immediately is this one scene from the Japanese film Tampopo, where there's this one couple that their entire, like all of their romantic liaisons is based on really weird food stuff.
00:27:18.820 This is going to go in a totally different direction than you think then.
00:27:21.360 Yeah, I don't know where you're going to go. So let's dive right in.