#135 — Navigating Sex and Gender
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Summary
The Catholic Church is a machine designed to ensure that children get raped, and that the world doesn t find out about it. And it s a machine that spends millions of dollars to protect individual priests who have raped for decades, from one parish to the next. This sort of thing is underreported, as we all know, and also sedulously covered up by the Church, in fact, it s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church are a machine, one of whose primary function has been to ensure that children get raped and that the world does not find out about it This really is not an exaggeration. Here, in this ghoulish machinery, set whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord. And every detail matters, like, like hell and sin, like the belief in hell and the shame of out-of-wedlock birth. Of course, there are other religious communities that have raped their kids, and conceal their crimes from the public. But no one has perfected this horror like the Catholic church. except perhaps the Orthodox Jews in recent years. And they can pay the price for their crimes when it comes to covering up the crimes they commit against their own kids when it s time for them to come forward with their own crimes. This is not to bring embarrassment to the church, but to bring shame and shame to the Church so as not to the world and to the public by not to be embarrassed by the crimes done to them by the church but by the shame and hypocrisy of the church . to be a in order to avoid embarrassment or to avoid shame and guilt . to not be embarrassed as , not to be shame and the that matters a . . . to be on the public . . and not to have shame and sin And to ? to the shame that matters? it s for what matters ? What does the Church do with its own children? What are they really doing with their children ? What is the Church s role in the rape of them? what does it do with them how does it really do with their is it
Transcript
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There was the Pennsylvania clergy sex abuse bomb that went off this week.
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There's a grand jury report detailing the abuse of more than a thousand children by more than
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300 priests over the years, and there are probably vastly more.
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This sort of thing is underreported, as we all know, and also sedulously covered up by the
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In fact, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church is a machine,
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one of whose primary functions has been to ensure that children get raped and that the
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That reminded me of an article I wrote about 10 years ago when a similar scandal happened
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I wrote an article titled, Bringing the Vatican to Justice.
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Actually, I may have read this on a much earlier podcast, but I'll just read the first two paragraphs
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here because it's really all I have to say in the present case, and it makes a point that
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I've paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
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Frankly, it has always felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so
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tiny a barrel, and there seemed to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self-abased.
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Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one's eyes.
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Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand
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Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats
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Then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time, and to children
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The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced and so fully betrayed is simply too depressing
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But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention.
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Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible.
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The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched
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by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behavior
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Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring instead that
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the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives.
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As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations
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of decent people to shame and hypocrisy, or to neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by
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Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution, one
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of the wealthiest on earth, that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual
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sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access
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Finally consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed
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mothers vilified, wherever church teaching holds sway, leading boys and girls by the thousands
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to be abandoned to church-run orphanages, only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy.
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Here, in this ghoulish machinery set whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame
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and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.
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But let's be clear about what's happening here.
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This isn't just the law of large numbers, where you sample hundreds of thousands or millions
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of people, and you find some thousands of them abusing children.
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There's something special about the Catholic Church.
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Okay, there's a specific machinery here, based on dogmatism and faith and ridiculous ideas.
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And every detail matters, like the belief in hell and sin and celibacy and the shame of out-of-wedlock
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Of course, there are other religious communities that have abused their kids and conceal the
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crime so as not to bring embarrassment to the institutions.
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There have been scandals among the Orthodox Jews in New York in recent years.
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But no one has perfected this horror show like the Catholic Church.
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This is an institution that routinely spends millions of dollars to protect individual
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priests who they know have raped children for decades, moving them from one parish to
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the next, where they can rape again, paying hush money to victims, and when these cases wind
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up in court doing everything they can to shame and discredit the children or the adults who
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were once those children. This is pure evil. And the details are insane. I'm just going to read
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you a snippet from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. Okay, this is a quote.
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Despite a priest's admission to assaulting at least a dozen young boys, the bishop wrote to thank
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him for, quote, all the good you have done for God's people. The Lord who sees in private will reward,
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end quote. Another priest confessed to anal and oral rape of at least 15 boys, as young as seven.
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The bishop later met with the abuser to commend him as a, quote, person of candor and sincerity,
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and to compliment him for, quote, the progress he has made in controlling his, quote, addiction.
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When the abuser was finally removed from the priesthood years later, the bishop ordered the
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parish not to say why. Quote, nothing else need be noted, end quote. This is further down here in the
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report. We came across a file in which the diocese candidly conceded that this, quote, is one of our
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worst cases, end quote, but of course told no one about him. Actually, we came across the statement
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in the files of several other priests. Then there was the file with a simple celebratory notation,
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quote, bad abuse case. Victim sued us. We won. There was the priest, for example, who raped a seven-year-old
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girl after she'd had her tonsils out. This is me now. This girl was raped in her hospital room.
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Just picture the life of this person, okay, in the context of a faith so captivating that
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there was no recourse here. Picture the family around this girl. You get indoctrinated from birth
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into a cult, and this is a cult staffed with an inordinate number of pedophiles who gain access
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to your kids. Back to the report. Or the priest who made a nine-year-old give him oral sex and
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then rinsed out the boy's mouth with holy water to purify him. Or the boy who drank some juice at
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his priest's house and woke up the next morning bleeding from his rectum, unable to remember
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anything about the night before. Okay, so that's as much as I'll give you. Sorry to ambush you with
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that, but it's hard even for me to pay attention to this stuff and remember how horrible these details are.
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None of this should be surprising. This is in the DNA of this organization. If you had to sign a user
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agreement for the Catholic Church, this should be part of it. Somewhere in the fine print, it should
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say, the ideology of our organization acts as a filter attracting sexually confused and conflicted
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and conscienceless men. And we employ these people and hide their crimes. And we've done this for over
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1,000 years. Now give us your kids. Hearing that the Catholic Church is raping children should be as
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surprising as hearing that Google and Facebook are selling your data to third parties. Anyway, it's
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intense to read about all this. You're getting me just after I did that. Hence the topspin. Imagine if
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there were a Fortune 500 company that was raping and abusing children for its entire existence and
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systematically concealing it. What would we have done to that company? And now consider what hasn't
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happened to the Catholic Church. Okay, there have been many other things in the news. I can't bear to
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comment on Trump at the moment. But it's good to see people in the military coming out publicly
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in criticism of him after McRaven wrote his letter. And it was the Sarah Jong hiring at the New York
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Times. I think I'll talk about that with Jonathan Haidt, who's coming up this week. And then Jaron Lanier
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is finally coming up. That had to get rescheduled. So got some good podcasts on the horizon.
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I'm going to break now for my discussion of funding the podcast. As always, if you've heard it,
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It's exactly six minutes and 45 seconds long, so you can just scroll ahead and enjoy today's
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I just want to decide once, and then know that I'm supporting this work at a level that I'm
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I want to encourage you to support the show at a level you're comfortable with.
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For everyone else, please know that the small percentage of you who have begun funding the
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Okay, well, today's guest is Marty Hazleton. Marty is the world's leading researcher on how
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ovulatory cycles influence women's sexuality. She's a professor of psychology at UCLA and at the
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Institute for Society and Genetics. She's a former editor of the leading journal in the field,
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Evolution and Human Behavior, and she now directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at UCLA.
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Anyway, I had a great time talking to Marty. We talk about sex and gender and the role of
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hormones in human psychology, something she calls Darwinian feminism. We focus on the unique
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hormonal experience of women. But up front, we talk about things like transgenderism and the Google
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memo and other controversial topics. This stuff is increasingly important, not only ethically,
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but politically. Cuts across many of the free speech concerns we've been airing on this show.
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So without further delay, I bring you Marty Hazleton.
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I am here with Marty Hazleton. Marty, thanks for coming on the podcast.
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So describe what you do. I should say at the top here, we'll be discussing your book,
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Hormonal, The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones. But how is it that you have come to write about
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hormones and what is your particular academic perch?
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So I would call myself an interdisciplinary evolutionary scientist, by which I mean,
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you know, and some people would probably look at my work and say, oh, that's evolutionary psychology.
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I know what that is. But I think of myself as being a little bit broader than what is typically
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assigned to evolutionary psychology, if that makes sense. So, you know, I certainly have looked at
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phenomena that are well-worn territory in evolutionary psychology, like mating relationships and so
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forth. But I've really also been interested in connecting the dots between using the evolutionary
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or adaptive logic to understand why humans do the things that they do and perhaps to get new insights
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into those things and test new hypotheses and actually look then at behavior and see, you know,
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what people are doing and describe that sometimes in some detail. But I'm also interested in the
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mechanisms in between, both the psychological mechanisms, which I think people who are interested
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in evolutionary psychology would recognize as straight up evolutionary psychology. But I've also do
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this work looking at hormonal moderators or hormonal mediators of the kinds of phenomena that we're
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interested in. And maybe this is too nitty gritty for your audience. I don't know. Please just tell
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me if you want me to back off a little bit in terms of the technical detail. But I think it sort of,
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you know, puts me in, you know, this field of biological endocrinology or social endocrinology,
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but also behavioral ecologists, I, you know, reference their work. I look at, I do a lot of
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comparative work in setting up my studies. So I look at the literature on non-human primates and on
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female animals who experience estrus all the way across the spectrum. So some of our insights actually
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come from looking at rodents, you know, humans clearly aren't rodents.
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Not all of them, right. Except the rats. But yeah, so, so I mean, the comparative work also figures
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into my approach. So I said, I want to sort of claim a broader base for understanding the particular
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social phenomena that I'm interested in, which mostly had to do with intimate relationships.
00:21:04.820
Well, it is a fascinating and fraught intersection of disciplines, as you know, and I think I'm going
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to lead you onto some of that dangerous territory. There are several taboos here. There's this taboo
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around viewing the human mind in biological terms at all. And there's a related taboo around acknowledging
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sex differences. I mean, it's even taboo in some quarters to acknowledge that biological sex is even
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a thing. And this leads us to what I think you consider to be mistaken notions of feminism. And
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in your book, you write about something called Darwinian feminism. So let's just pick a place
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to start here. Perhaps we should just start with the basic concern around understanding the human mind
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in biological and evolutionary terms. I mean, it's not, I don't think anyone at this point thinks that
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the logic of evolution subsumes every interesting question about what it's like to be us or what it
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is to have a human mind. But how do you view biology and psychology at this point?
00:22:13.820
You know, I think you kind of have to take it on a case-by-case basis. For some things,
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like things that are linked with reproduction, and this perhaps is why this is such well-traversed
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territory in evolutionary approaches, social scientific approaches. You know, so thinking
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about reproduction, so close to the engine of natural selection, and therefore how our minds
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and the minds of our cousins, our non-human cousins, have been shaped, that seems very straightforward.
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Now, that's not going to tell us everything. So we're not going to be able to derive from first
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principles, everything that we want to understand about humans, and there are plenty of surprises.
00:22:55.520
So, and I can give some examples of some of those, but you're asking me a more general question,
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which is the intersection between psychology and biology. I don't think that anybody who is credible
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could say that it's all biology, right? It's turtles all the way down.
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Because humans do things that are very uniquely human. And I think this is interesting, both in
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response to, as a potential response to your question, but also as one of the things that's
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tripped us up in gaining access to information that I think is important. So humans are undeniably
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their own kind of special species, right? We can drive Porsches, we can, you know, make lattes,
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we can, we speak multiple languages, we can read and write in those languages. We have a way of
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preserving cultural knowledge over time that has allowed us to technologically exploit our modern
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environment, or our environment in general, to an extent that you just don't see with other species.
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So I think that seeing, so that's just a really important thing to acknowledge, and any competent
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treatment of evolution and human behavior will include a large component that explores how those
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things happen, how they make humans unique, how they have, have make the animal models or the more
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purely biological models inadequate as the full story.
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You know, of course, the line between biology and culture is difficult to draw, because much of
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culture has to be viewed as a kind of extended phenotype. And, you know, we've evolved for some
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tens of thousands of years in the context of having linguistically based culture.
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Yes. And I think that there are some fascinating evolutionary psychological questions there. So we can
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ask the question, well, what are the kinds of things that humans bring when they are entering their
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social world? What are the kinds of things that they bring with them that help them acquire these
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useful bits of culture? So things like, and this is some work that's been done, has, was done at UCLA
00:25:11.000
and continues to be done all over. It's gotten very popular. It's gotten very influential, I should say.
00:25:17.960
And that is thinking about how we keenly observe different potential behavioral models and which
00:25:26.940
models are, which of those models have behavior that it's most likely to be repeated, because they
00:25:34.060
show some signs of success, right? So I think that there are some really fascinating evolutionary
00:25:38.660
psychological questions about what is the evolved machinery that we bring to this, our social world
00:25:46.640
that allows us to practice, transmit, benefit from technology.
00:25:52.680
Let's focus now on sex and gender, because this is really where you have spent most of your time.
00:26:00.020
First, I think the difference between sex and gender may not even be clear to most people. How do you
00:26:07.500
Yeah, well, I think that there's some disagreement about just exactly how we should define the terms.
00:26:12.200
Um, so I think of gender as being more of the sort of like continuous, um, difference in masculinity and
00:26:21.280
femininity. So you can occupy any number of different levels of relative femininity or relative masculinity,
00:26:29.280
the things that we would recognize. So if we can think about masculine and feminine as, um, what is
00:26:35.720
gender typical, um, there is still a ton of variation between those gender typical, um, central tendencies.
00:26:45.000
And so I tend, and so I think it is most appropriate to, and it becomes very awkward, um, otherwise it's
00:26:51.800
most appropriate to, to refer to those things as gender. You know, I, I read a paper, it's been a few
00:26:57.260
years now, um, but I believe it was about mate copying, mate choice copying in guppies. And the guppies in the
00:27:03.560
paper were referred to as having gender. And I just thought, hmm, okay, this is definitely
00:27:10.840
not how I'm thinking of the appropriate definition of the word. But I think what it points out,
00:27:17.160
yeah, is that people are reluctant to use the word sex, male, female.
00:27:22.280
Right. That's what I was going to say. There's something awkward, not even socially, but just
00:27:27.360
semantically or grammatically using sex in all of these sentences. And I'm sure that in the past,
00:27:34.000
I have used gender in many of these cases as a synonym for biological sex.
00:27:39.280
Yes. And so I would tend to think of, so biological sex, and I, I talk about, so I teach a class,
00:27:45.520
an entire, um, year long freshman cluster course, the so-called sex cluster. Um, it's all about sex and
00:27:51.440
gender. Um, and, um, in that class, we dig deeply into these issues. But one of the things that we do
00:27:58.800
is we sort of arrive at some common definitions, um, and sex and gender, the difference between sex
00:28:04.660
and gender is one of those. And so the way that we tend to think about sex and the way that I think
00:28:09.520
about it is it's more like understanding what are those central tendencies of masculinity and femininity
00:28:16.680
that we can identify as being sexually dimorphic characteristics of, of human beings. Now, of
00:28:24.140
course, there are going to be exceptions, right? There are, um, there are cases, fascinating cases
00:28:28.200
of intersex. Um, there's the question of sexual orientation, which takes people away from those
00:28:34.420
gender typical, um, categories. And so there's still plenty of, um, variation, but I, but I tend to be
00:28:40.600
comfortable with using the word sex referring to biological sex. So if we're talking about at the
00:28:46.320
chromosomal level, if we're talking about, um, on average differences in hormones, although even
00:28:52.520
there things can get a little squishy, but then, then I find, I think sex is, is really most appropriate
00:28:58.120
and, and even somebody's identity, whether they identify as male or female, I, I would often be
00:29:05.080
comfortable using the word sex there as well. Now that we're fully in the wilderness, let's just define
00:29:10.420
some more of these terms. So, so intersex and transgender and non-binary, give me the lexicon.
00:29:17.420
So intersex people are born, um, with a phenotype that is neither clearly male nor female in some
00:29:24.700
important way. And so the, the classic case, I suppose, would be looking at babies who are born
00:29:31.900
with genitalia that are neither clearly male nor female. So they have an intersex condition.
00:29:37.460
Is there a chromosomal abnormality here? We're just talking about amounts of, of testosterone or
00:29:43.000
not? It has, it has lots of, um, potential triggers. So humans, when we are born, we are
00:29:50.680
sort of what look, you know, those, the, there's sort of a female default to our phenotype. And then
00:29:56.620
with the appropriate gene and hormone actions, you'll see sex differentiation. Um, you'll see sex
00:30:02.860
differences emerge between males and females in utero and, and well beyond, of course. Um, and so
00:30:09.820
there, at any of those levels, something could be different, um, in, during development. So whether it
00:30:16.620
be at the chromosomal, you know, whether you're XX or XY, um, and some XX individuals will appear to be
00:30:27.160
male in their phenotype. And so, so, so, you know, so there are, so there are the genetic predictors,
00:30:32.420
but then there are other things that can happen down the line that involve hormone levels, um,
00:30:37.720
and potentially also some environmental, uh, determinants, environmental trauma. That's the
00:30:42.700
easiest case. Um, somebody who has a botched genital surgery and is that changed from male to female or
00:30:50.180
vice versa, um, would also potentially have an intersex identity fall into that category of intersex.
00:30:56.340
What's really interesting, I think, and I think really pushes the boundaries of political correctness
00:31:02.960
is to ask the question, well, we know what's gender typical. Usually a male is attracted to
00:31:10.380
a female, a female is attracted to a male. What about these very numerous voluminous cases of people who
00:31:18.520
are, um, attracted to members of the same sex or maybe, or have bisexual attraction, or maybe they just
00:31:26.340
Do we think about that as a sort of intersex condition, even though everything else about them
00:31:33.500
Right. So let me just, uh, before I wade into that, so non-binary...
00:31:41.960
...is a statement about a person's self-perceived gender weighting?
00:31:47.900
Yes. Yes. And so those, those may be people who have an intersex condition, um, or who just
00:31:54.280
want to not be in the gender binary. They, um, are more comfortable being in between, perhaps
00:32:01.680
not having people know anything about the biological foundations of, of their sex at some level.
00:32:08.140
Um, so these are people who will identify openly as queer. Often those people are, um, have same,
00:32:15.300
same-sex attractions. And so part of their queer identity will be breaking out of that binary with
00:32:21.500
respect to, you know, who one is attracted to. Um, there's just, there are lots of flavors in the,
00:32:29.300
uh, in the, um, you know, the sexuality rainbow, so to speak, um, for humans. And we're discovering
00:32:36.220
even more of them, um, as we move along. So that's, so that's, uh, queer or non-binary. Um,
00:32:42.760
but then there are, of course, all of the different boxes that you might be able to check on a
00:32:49.620
Yeah, the boxes are proliferating. Somebody I saw on Twitter a few months back took a picture of the,
00:32:57.040
the beginning of, I think it was like the, the, the LSAT or some other standardized test where they
00:33:02.660
were asked to check their, their gender. And, uh, there was something like, you know, 12 boxes.
00:33:08.680
Right. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And maybe there need to be 12 boxes so that everybody's
00:33:14.920
preference is, um, acknowledged and respected. You know, I know that it's, it's bothersome to people
00:33:21.640
who are, you know, who really prefer binaries and boxes, um, and want to categorize the world in that
00:33:28.720
way. And so we make, make people uncomfortable, I think, when we acknowledge that there are these
00:33:33.060
variations, but I think it's really important to do, um, just, you know, as a scientist who studies
00:33:38.160
these topics that have real human relevance. So these, these students come into my class, um, and
00:33:44.360
maybe, maybe just, uh, questioning their gender identity. They may be asked, have a lot of questions about,
00:33:51.640
you know, how they are different in some way from others that they have noticed. And, uh, you know,
00:33:58.160
one of the things that I, I'm really proud of at my time here at UCLA is exploring those things,
00:34:05.400
talking about them and giving students a language to do both, um, to ask some questions about themselves,
00:34:12.400
but also to, you know, sort of have their consciousness raised about, um, these gendered issues
00:34:19.560
in our everyday society. Well, I wasn't actually planning to start here, but now that we've opened
00:34:24.160
Pandora's box, let's just stay with these more esoteric questions before we get into just basic
00:34:29.400
differences between men and women. So just to pivot back to the, the time bomb, it sounds like you armed
00:34:36.920
for us. Is it a plausible thesis that homosexuality should be thought of in terms of intersex? Is that
00:34:46.080
what you just suggested? Um, well, I think that we're really pushing the boundaries when we ask that
00:34:52.060
question. Um, and no doubt people will get quite irritated with me for having raised it. Um, but I
00:34:58.720
think that if what, if what we mean by sex, um, is gender typicality and gender typicality is not hard
00:35:08.320
for us to quantify. So what are the, on average, what are the differences? What, what are men like
00:35:13.520
on average? What are women like? We respect the fact of course, that, you know, in defining that,
00:35:19.760
that there's a lot of variation. Um, but as soon as we recognize that an individual is not fitting
00:35:27.520
into that binary or not even really getting close to the, on average, um, male or female in their,
00:35:34.540
in certain aspects of their phenotype, then I think we, we ask the question, well, do we want
00:35:39.480
to consider that to be an intersex case? I wouldn't say condition necessarily, um, cause that medicalizes
00:35:45.980
it a little bit too much, but, you know, so as soon as we apply, start being principled in our
00:35:50.860
application of these definitions, then I, then I think it leads us to these questions, which rightly
00:35:56.040
have made people quite uncomfortable. Well, then what would you do with all the other
00:36:00.700
just ambiguities of human sexuality or the, or the, the varieties? So you have things that are,
00:36:06.400
I guess, traditionally classed as paraphilia or, you know, something that's, it's definitely
00:36:11.620
non-standard. If someone, if you have a boot fetish or you have something that's, you know,
00:36:16.820
not especially well subscribed, does that throw a, a wrench into any kind of paradigm where you would
00:36:23.240
want to just think in terms of this single continuum? Well, I think that we might think about
00:36:29.780
those cases as just different. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,
00:36:36.800
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