Dr. Deborah Soh is a sexual neuroscience researcher, columnist for The Globe and Mail and Playboy, and author of Why Transgender Kids Should Wait to Transition. In this episode, Dr. Soh talks about why she left the academic world, why she decided to leave academia, and why she felt she had no choice but to leave.
00:00:19.000Okay, perfect. Do you get people that don't want to tell you that they've read your work?
00:00:22.000Not so much. I find more so people, they read it and they say, oh wow, you know, I didn't know.
00:00:26.000But Playboy's had a long history of having amazing journalism.
00:00:29.000You've done a lot of tremendous work at really shattering this idea that biology is this malleable concept that is so fluid and I'm glad you've done it.
00:00:43.000And I was actually quite disheartened to hear from you how much resistance even within academia you were finding when you decided to leave the academic space.
00:00:51.000And I was hoping you could explain a little bit about that and what really got you to depart working within the sciences full time.
00:00:57.000Yeah, so I finished my PhD last year. I loved being a researcher. I will always love research but I found that the climate has definitely changed to the point now where you really can't pursue any sort of meaningful research.
00:01:07.000You have to worry more about how the public is going to respond to what you find and so most researchers will stay far, far away from anything that could be potentially construed as controversial.
00:01:17.000So for myself, my decision to leave academia was very much because at that time no one was talking about this idea that the majority of gender dysphoric children outgrow their feelings of dysphoria.
00:01:27.000They don't go on to be transgender in adulthood. They're more likely to be gay adults.
00:01:31.000And this was completely unacceptable. And if you looked at mainstream media at that time, any coverage on this issue was talking about how social transitioning was the best way forward for these kids.
00:01:40.000And if you didn't support that, that you were a bigoted person.
00:01:43.000So I decided to write an op-ed called Why Transgender Kids Should Wait to Transition.
00:01:48.000And from that point on, I decided there was no turning back.
00:01:51.000And that piece, and I remember reading it and being very impressed with it, and also that it was fairly well received in mainstream circles, I found as well.
00:01:59.000I mean, we're told that you're not allowed to address this, but you wrote this, and I saw that there was a lot of backlash, but there was also a lot of support for it, which was encouraging.
00:02:07.000Were you seeing that as well in the midst of it, or am I getting a little bit more of a glossed-over image as an outsider than you did as the writer of that?
00:02:15.000It was definitely mixed. I would say there was quite a bit of pushback, but I was prepared because I knew within sexology there's a very long history of trans activists coming after researchers who produce work or who say things that are considered, you know, not in line with the trans narrative.
00:02:29.000So I knew it was coming, but I felt strongly enough about it that I had to say something.
00:02:34.000But I think, I mean, looking back, I have no regrets.
00:02:37.000It does make such a huge difference when people do reach out and say to you, thank you for saying that.
00:02:41.000People have a sense of relief because they think, you know, I've been thinking these things or I thought that was the case.
00:02:45.000I mean, something like biological sex and how there are differences between men and women.
00:02:49.000I can't imagine going through life and being told these things and feeling that there are no differences, but knowing that's not quite right and not having anyone to talk to about that.
00:02:59.000So, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's one of those issues that I find particularly odd because I don't have the PhD in sexual neuroscience.
00:03:07.000And I could tell you that there are differences between men and women.
00:03:10.000And that doesn't, to me, strike me at all as a radical concept.
00:03:13.000And I think when the James Damore Google controversy happened, there was a lot of discussion around that.
00:03:22.000And I'm a fairly cynical person in some issues, but I was baffled that there was so much resistance to what isn't even a judgment call to say that men and women are different.
00:03:29.000It's not about saying one's lesser or more.
00:03:31.000It's just saying that they're different in the same way that a dog is different than a cat.
00:03:34.000I mean, that isn't to say that one's better than the other.
00:03:37.000Is that pushback coming from within the science community or is it coming from people looking into the science community?
00:03:43.000It's from both. I never thought I would see, say, neuroscientific research being published showing that there are no differences in the brain between men and women.
00:03:52.000I mean, within the field, everybody knows that's not true.
00:03:54.000But there was one study that came out a couple of years ago showing that that is what I would say that did a lot of damage in terms of people's understanding about sex differences.
00:04:02.000Because everyone, that study got so much media coverage and everyone that believes there are no differences between men and women or who say that there are no differences or that gender is a social construct,
00:04:11.000they point to that study and say, well, there's the proof.
00:04:14.000But my colleagues, a group of them, reanalyzed the exact same brain data from that study and found that you could, in fact, tell the difference between male and female brains.
00:04:22.000So it's unfortunate because the media didn't cover that second study.
00:04:29.000And another group of researchers took another collection of brain data that was actually higher resolution, so it's higher quality.
00:04:35.000And they found that you could tell, on average, about 90% of the time whether a brain was male or female.
00:04:39.000So it's not accurate to say there are no differences.
00:04:41.000But that first study that came out that suggested that these brains exist along a mosaic and there are no differences,
00:04:47.000because it's politically correct and because it sounds nice, that's why people like to promote it and to talk about it.
00:04:53.000I know there's always been a lot of concern that, you know, in areas like the arts and humanities and sociology and gender studies are all mired in this political ideology.
00:05:05.000I think there were a lot of people that really wanted to believe that the stems, that science, technology, engineering, mathematics were that last bastion of black and white.
00:05:14.000That isn't the case at all you're describing.
00:05:16.000And is there a point at which things went wrong or has this been a really gradual shift?
00:05:21.000It's been gradual, but I've definitely been seeing it more in the last five years.
00:05:25.000I think part of the problem is that academics who know better will keep their head down because they don't want to rock the boat.
00:05:30.000And understandably so. I mean, it's not fun to be mobbed.
00:05:33.000And nowadays, even if you do have tenure, you risk losing your job if you say things on social media or if you produce research that the public doesn't like.
00:05:40.000So I really think the only way that things are going to change is when academics do start speaking out.
00:05:45.000But I'm not sure at what point that's going to be.
00:05:47.000I don't want to put you into a hole that you clearly didn't want to go into here.
00:05:51.000But do you not think someone like you would really be important to keep in academia?
00:05:57.000I mean, you have to shoulder the burden of this, but but it strikes me as that we need more people like you that aren't turned off by this field.
00:06:08.000How can we foster a climate where that happens?
00:06:10.000Yeah, that's a good question, because I think about it all the time.
00:06:13.000And I think, you know, with every column I put out, I would not be able to say this if I was still in the academy.
00:06:18.000And it's really unfortunate because the things I'm saying are not even that controversial.
00:06:51.000We've seen a lot of studies where you look at them years later, you can't replicate them or you can't reproduce them with the same results.
00:07:22.000I think funding agencies, I would like to believe that they're objective.
00:07:25.000But I think that nowadays it's possible that they prioritize subjects or areas of research that are going to be socially palatable.
00:07:36.000Because otherwise when the public gets upset and says who funded this, it's going to come back to them.
00:07:41.000So that's one problem I would say within the academy as well, in particular institutions.
00:07:45.000I know some institutions, academics aren't allowed to engage with the media without getting permission first.
00:07:50.000So that's another barrier that you would need to go through.
00:07:53.000So I think people just eventually say, well, why am I going to put myself in that situation and create all these problems for myself?
00:07:58.000You asked for permission to sit down with me, right?
00:08:00.000You don't need to ask anyone for permission now. That's great. It's very liberating.
00:08:04.000But the one thing, and you touched on this earlier when you used the word sex a couple of times, is this interchangeability between sex and gender.
00:08:13.000And I hear this a lot from activists where they'll talk about, I want my password to list my gender as whatever.
00:08:19.000And I actually went and looked at my passport. It doesn't say gender anywhere on it. It says sex.
00:08:24.000Driver's license says sex. Health card says sex.
00:08:26.000And why is it that these two words, which are so mired in politics, we still haven't found a way to really break through that semantics there?
00:08:36.000I think it's intentional. Yeah. I think part of it is that people find the word sex uncomfortable to say.
00:08:41.000So that could be part of it. But I think, too, for those who know what they're doing, they intentionally use the word gender in place of sex because sex is based in biology.
00:08:48.000You can't really deny biological fact. I mean, people try to, but it's a little bit more difficult to argue about biological sex than it is gender, even though gender for 99% of us is identical to biological sex.
00:09:00.000So I think that's part of it. If you use the word gender, it's somewhat removed.
00:09:05.000And so then people can argue that this is socially constructed or that you can choose how you feel or who you are.
00:09:12.000And when you talk about the social constructs, the challenge is that we all know there is a subset of the population where their outward gender does not reflect their biological sex.
00:09:24.000Is there any scientific truth to this idea that we hear oftentimes in the more sociocultural space of being pan gender, where your gender changes every day or things like that?
00:09:35.000Or are these are these things that we even have any empirical research on?
00:09:41.000Not on the idea of gender fluidity or something like pansexuality or being pan gender.
00:09:46.000Sorry, pansexuality is something different. It means you're attracted to all genders, which is, you know, essentially male and female and transgender people.
00:09:53.000But in terms of the fluidity aspect, it's not backed by science.
00:09:57.000But what I think people are referring to is this idea that, yes, we all are a combination of male and female traits.
00:10:02.000Nobody is 100% masculine or 100% feminine.
00:10:05.000So I don't think we need to throw out the categories of male and female to account for that.
00:10:09.000I think that's just a natural part of being human.
00:10:12.000When we look at the idea of children and when I was younger, you'd have some girls who were tomboys and boys who I don't know if there was a word for it.
00:10:21.000But Tom girls, I suppose. But you have kids that were a little bit more of the opposite gender in some areas of the way that we conventionally view them.
00:10:30.000And the one thing I found knowing people in that space is that it was not reflective of anything other than a girl with conventionally masculine interests or a boy with conventionally feminine interests.
00:10:40.000You know, the girls that like rough and tumble sports, the boys that like dolls.
00:10:44.000Is there a risk that these things, which used to be just a part of growing up, are now becoming clinicized in a way?
00:10:50.000Where now parents are, well-meaning parents, thinking, oh my gosh, my girl is liking sports and playing in the dirt.
00:10:56.000Maybe she's a boy. Is that a risk or is that an overblown concern?
00:10:59.000Definitely, I think that's a risk. I think the nuance has been lost now.
00:11:03.000And parents are being told that they need to take their child's, what they say, at face value.
00:11:07.000So, I mean, children say all kinds of things.
00:11:09.000And especially young children, they don't have the vocabulary to say, I want to do things that the opposite sex does.
00:11:14.000So what they will often say, if you have, say, a little boy who wants to do things that girls do, he'll say, I am a girl.
00:11:20.000So now parents are being told by medical professionals that if your child says this, you must listen to them, you must affirm them.
00:11:26.000And as I mentioned, you know, the majority of kids who, I mean, they may not even be gender dysphoric if they're gender atypical.
00:11:32.000They might just like to do things that the other sex does.
00:11:34.000But in the event that, say, they do experience a lot of distress about their sex, they're likely going to outgrow that by puberty anyway.
00:11:40.000And that's where we get into where you really started off in many respects, of this idea that children will sometimes go through these steps
00:11:49.000and it's not indicative of anything else that's going to be long-lasting.
00:11:52.000So is the remedy to that to not do anything in the way of hormones, puberty blockers, any irreversible treatment or invasive treatment