Ep 868 ｜ A Biologist Explains Sex ｜ Guest： Dr. Colin Wright (Part One)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
170.32614
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Colin Wright, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an atheist, joins Allie to talk about the science behind biological sex and whether or not there are two sexes. Dr. Wright talks about his background in evolutionary biology and how he became an atheist.
Transcript
00:00:01.000
What is sex? Is it chromosomes? Gametes? What does this mean? Is it different than gender?
00:00:09.300
Why does any of this even matter? We've got an evolutionary biologist here today with us,
00:00:15.360
Dr. Colin Wright, who is going to explain all of this science to us like we are five. This is
00:00:21.860
part one of a two-part conversation that I will be having with Dr. Wright. He's also an atheist.
00:00:27.600
So in the second part of our conversation, we are going to talk a little bit about
00:00:31.580
atheism versus Christianity, where morality comes from, why the conversation about fairness and
00:00:37.240
privacy and safety for women and sports really matters morally from our differing perspectives.
00:00:44.100
And so I think you're going to love these two conversations. This episode is brought to you
00:00:47.560
by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's
00:00:57.600
Dr. Wright, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Before we get started on this
00:01:08.500
conversation, if you could just tell those who may not know who you are and what you do.
00:01:14.160
Yeah. So thanks for having me on. So my name is Colin Wright. I'm an evolutionary biologist.
00:01:20.100
I'm also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I write and speak mainly on issues of biological sex,
00:01:27.280
which might sound weird until you realize that there's a large swath of society that's currently
00:01:32.840
denying the reality of there being two sexes. They think sex is a social construct. Maybe it's
00:01:38.920
a spectrum. Maybe there's more than two sexes. And this has a lot of implications in society. And so
00:01:44.640
I'm sort of just trying to bring more sanity to this debate, trying to just explain the basic biology
00:01:52.020
technology out there to make sure that if we're going to be making rules and laws and policy based
00:01:58.860
on biology, that it will at least get the biology right. So that's sort of what I'm doing. I used to
00:02:03.800
be an academic evolutionary biologist and actually sort of got run out of the academy for making these
00:02:09.900
basic claims like there's only two sexes and it's immutable. And so now I've sort of dedicated my
00:02:15.940
time now to, I guess, pushing back against this large social societal delusion, I would say about
00:02:24.340
biology. Yeah. So you graduated, you received your PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in
00:02:30.740
2018. Now in 2018, I know that definitely a lot of this madness was out there, although I don't think
00:02:37.180
it was quite as prevalent and prominent as it is today. So when you were in school for evolutionary
00:02:43.580
biology, were y'all already talking about and debating this issue of, well, is what is sex?
00:02:49.560
What is gender? Is sex a spectrum? Or was this kind of new to you over the past few years?
00:02:56.040
It was fairly new, like in my direct field, because I studied sort of evolutionary behavioral
00:03:01.860
ecology. So animal behavior, I studied social insects. And a lot of these, you know, the sex
00:03:07.900
differences, it's just taken as a granted because some of the biggest sex differences you see in nature
00:03:11.740
are those that are related to biological sex. So my field, or at least my close colleagues,
00:03:16.960
we were just so far past this debate of whether sex was real, we were just already, you know,
00:03:21.720
that's a given, we're doing other stuff at the frontier of science. Assuming all that is true
00:03:26.960
and robust, which it is, it was maybe in around 2015, 16, when I first started seeing some of these
00:03:33.140
narratives about sex being a social construct, maybe there's five sexes. And so I kind of just tracked
00:03:39.800
it and noticed it was there, but I treated it kind of like I treated young earth, or sorry,
00:03:44.600
like, like, like flat earthism or something like that, where it's just like, that's crazy. That has
00:03:49.080
no chance of taking over society, because I just, I can't imagine it becoming, you know, this,
00:03:55.920
this viral belief, because it's so departed from reality. And then it wasn't until nature published
00:04:02.840
an article in, I think 2015, that was called the sex spectrum, which said that scientists think that
00:04:07.580
sex is more complicated than two sexes. And then it was really the hoax studies that James Lindsay,
00:04:12.520
Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian did, where they called out a lot of this stuff and really
00:04:16.300
just sort of exposed some of these fields that are promoting these ideas for the frauds that they are.
00:04:21.860
So I just started speaking up about that. And in 2018, is when I first first started speaking up
00:04:26.300
about it and publicly. Yeah. And I wonder why you did because there were obviously a lot of people
00:04:33.000
receiving their PhD in evolutionary biology at the same time as you, a lot of your professors who
00:04:39.020
knew the same things that you knew, right? It's not like you had any kind of special knowledge about
00:04:44.120
sex that those around you didn't have. But I'm sure you saw a lot of people didn't say anything,
00:04:49.320
or maybe they even pretended to entertain this idea that sex is a spectrum. What kind of motivated
00:04:54.240
you to say, nope, I can't just sit back and be silent about this?
00:05:01.260
That's a good question. And I think a lot of it has to do with the reason I got into science in
00:05:05.540
the first place. You know, I wanted to be an evolutionary biologist because I thought it is
00:05:10.280
sort of this rigorous way to address a lot of questions about who we are as a species. You know,
00:05:14.940
it's sort of a philosophically robust field where you can get real answers about, you know, where we
00:05:20.100
came from, where we're potentially going, what is the basis for the behaviors that we see in people,
00:05:25.860
what explains this diversity, what explains our tribalism. You know, all this stuff can be looked
00:05:30.060
through in an evolutionary framework. And I initially got into this field because I thought
00:05:36.640
that being an academic biologist was the place that we could have these robust, lively conversations
00:05:42.600
about truth. And if I were to say something that was incorrect, you know, the response is going to be,
00:05:50.100
another counter argument based on reason and evidence. But when I started talking about this
00:05:55.560
issue, that was definitely not the case. It wasn't, you're wrong. And here's reason X, Y,
00:05:59.860
and Z was you're wrong. And you're a bigot, you're a transphobia, all of this stuff.
00:06:03.240
And then coupled with that, this, I was being increasingly required to, you know, I was applying
00:06:08.280
to jobs at this time, tenure track positions, and I was being increasingly required to fill out these
00:06:12.580
DEI statements. So not only was I being forced to sort of say certain things that I didn't agree
00:06:19.780
with, but I was also being forced to not say things that I knew were true. And this was just
00:06:25.580
the opposite of why I got into science in the first place. And to be a science, I want to say
00:06:29.580
true things about biology. That's what it means to be a biologist. And so academia just didn't seem
00:06:35.060
like it was no, it was no longer the right fit for me. If I can't speak freely about biology as a
00:06:40.440
biologist, then what's the point in being a biologist in the academy anymore?
00:06:44.620
And had you considered yourself politically active at all? I'm sure at this point,
00:06:49.840
you didn't really consider it even like a political issue. But were you ever involved
00:06:54.000
in politics or the so-called culture wars up to this point?
00:06:59.580
I wasn't throughout all of grad school. You know, when I went to grad school, I used to have
00:07:03.840
a blog beforehand where I kind of talked about the creationism, evolution, intelligent design
00:07:08.860
debates. But to me, that wasn't really political. I mean, there were some political implications,
00:07:13.040
but it was always an empirical issue for me. And it wasn't like a main reason I voted one way or
00:07:19.620
the other. When I went to grad school, I was mainly just putting my head down trying to get my PhD at
00:07:25.580
the time when focused on my academic work and writing technical papers. So I largely stopped
00:07:30.480
even talking about sort of these, I guess what you could maybe call it a cultural type of debate
00:07:35.740
and just focused on my research. And it wasn't until I realized that, you know, why am I studying
00:07:42.500
these really esoteric topics about the social behavior, personality of wasps and spiders and ants
00:07:48.000
when half the kids in my class that I'm teaching don't even know what a male and a female is.
00:07:53.760
And so I just sort of felt like I needed to look back and repair, you know, the bridge behind me
00:07:59.180
that so many scientists before me had constructed because it was just crumbling. And so it was hard
00:08:05.360
to focus on sort of this, the frontier minutiae when so many big aspects, foundational principles
00:08:12.800
So obviously I'm a Christian and you're an atheist. And so we disagree about how we all came about,
00:08:32.080
but can, is it even possible to teach evolutionary biology without the reality of XX and XY?
00:08:42.800
So, no, I mean, I think it's, you need, if you're going to teach about biology, if you're
00:08:51.360
going to teach about the biology of sex, what makes people males and females, especially if you're
00:08:55.360
talking about mammals, you'd absolutely need to talk about chromosomes because they are what
00:09:01.180
determines an individual's sex. Now, an important distinction here is there's a difference between
00:09:06.860
what determines the sex of an organism versus what defines the sex of an organism. So in
00:09:12.620
developmental biology, when we talk about sex determination and that humans and mammals
00:09:17.140
have chromosomal sex determination, this just means that genes on certain chromosomes are what
00:09:24.340
trigger us to develop into males and females in utero while we're developing. But some other
00:09:29.760
species do this differently, like alligators and a lot of other reptiles, they use temperature
00:09:33.960
at which they're incubated that determines what sort of pathway they develop down and become a male
00:09:40.260
or female. So while we might say that chromosomes in humans determine our sex, you know, the sex of
00:09:47.140
any organism across the entire animal kingdom and plant kingdoms, regardless of how their sex is
00:09:53.780
determined, it's always going to be defined based on the sort of the type of gamete, either sperm or
00:09:59.720
ova, that their reproductive anatomy has been sort of organized around to produce. So that might be a lot to
00:10:07.520
chew on. Yeah. But that's why I asked you to come on. Now, I'm hoping that you can kind of break it all
00:10:14.660
down for us like we're five, in the words of Michael Scott, because I'm not a scientist. Most people,
00:10:21.680
I'm guessing, who are listening to this, watching this, are not scientists. But we understand that this
00:10:27.420
is a biological argument that must be made. It's important to be made, whether you are an atheist or
00:10:34.100
a Christian. Obviously, Christians, we have a high view of the body. We have a high view of sex. We have a high
00:10:39.660
view of biology. And so I really do think that everyone should understand this from a biological
00:10:45.440
perspective. You wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, an opinion piece. A biologist explains why
00:10:53.120
sex is binary. Everyone remembers when the Supreme Court justice nominee at that point, Ketanji Brown
00:10:58.900
Jackson, she was asked, can you say what a woman is? And she said, well, I'm not a biologist. Okay,
00:11:07.080
so Dr. Wright, you are a biologist. I know you kind of just did this, but break it down for us as if we
00:11:12.920
are like, okay, so you're teaching a bunch of elementary schoolers about what sex is. Start us
00:11:19.480
there. What is it? So sex, sort of taking a step back, is a form of reproduction, where two individuals
00:11:31.020
combine their genetic material in order to produce a new individual that is sort of genetically unique.
00:11:36.840
It's a genetic mixture of both the parents. Now, some organisms do this by connecting what they're
00:11:45.940
called gametes. So we have the two different types of reproductive sex cell that an individual can
00:11:53.940
create. In humans, we have sperm and ova. These are defined by the size of the gamete. So by definition,
00:12:01.400
the larger sex cell is defined as the ovum, or the egg, and the smaller sex cell is defined as the
00:12:08.560
sperm. Some species don't have different sized gametes. They're called isogamous. Okay, that
00:12:15.640
means they're just, there's no such thing as male or female in those species, because there's no such
00:12:20.700
thing as sperm or egg. They're just same sized gametes fused to create an offspring. Humans, mammals,
00:12:27.400
many other plants, we're what are called anisogamous. Okay, and the term isn't that important. All it really
00:12:34.280
means is, we reproduce by fusing two different sized gametes together, sperm and ova. Whether an organism
00:12:43.140
produces sperm or ova, that is what defines what sex they are. Okay, so males, by definition, produce sperm.
00:12:51.220
Females, by definition, are the individuals that produce ova. Because there is no intermediate
00:12:58.100
gamete between sperm and ova in any species, there are only two sexes that an individual can be.
00:13:05.460
Okay, unless we find this intermediate or third type of gamete that completely, you know, that people
00:13:10.980
can have the reproductive systems organized around to produce. Until then, there's only two sexes.
00:13:18.520
This is a stable reproductive strategy in the animal and plant kingdoms. It's evolved independently
00:13:25.600
many, many different times. And most importantly, humans, we're mammals. We have our sexes that are
00:13:35.840
split into two different organisms. Some organisms, like your common garden snail, for instance, can be
00:13:41.960
both male and female at the same time. They're what we call hermaphrodites. Humans are not like snails.
00:13:48.020
We have bodies that are either male or female. And this is something that is just genetically set
00:13:55.360
when you're, you know, developing in your embryo. And it's not something that you can change later
00:14:00.420
in life through just changing your secondary sex characteristics, like your breasts or your facial
00:14:05.580
hair, or deepening and making your voice higher. That's really it in a nutshell. That's why there's
00:14:13.220
only two sexes. And when, when someone like me says that sex is binary, what we're saying is that
00:14:18.040
there's only two sexes. Now people will bring up intersex conditions. Yeah. And while I think we need
00:14:24.640
to sort of leave the door open where some people could have conditions that are very complex, that are
00:14:30.900
a mixture, they have, you know, maybe some testicular tissue with some ovarian tissue, they have very
00:14:36.620
ambiguous genitalia, their cells, they could be mosaics to some degree of XX and XY. It may be the
00:14:44.320
fact that some individuals are sort of ambiguous in relation to sex. This doesn't mean they're a third
00:14:51.280
sex, because there is no third type of gamete that exists that they can read that they can be producing.
00:14:56.280
Um, but it's, but they're definitely not a third sex. So, uh, sex ambiguity is not a third sex.
00:15:03.400
So even with the existence of intersex conditions, this doesn't undermine the fact that sex itself is
00:15:10.260
binary. There's only two. Right. It is some kind of genetic anomaly, which really has nothing to do
00:15:16.540
with transgenderism. I've always thought that it was very unfair that these people who were born with
00:15:21.840
some kind of anomaly are included in LGBTQ, because it's not an identity that you're taking on. It's not
00:15:30.460
some kind of so-called orientation. And as you said, it doesn't prove that sex is not a binary. And you can
00:15:37.900
tell me if you think that this is a good metaphor. I've said just because there are some people born with
00:15:43.000
one leg doesn't mean that human beings aren't bipeds. It doesn't mean that we're not supposed to have
00:15:47.920
two legs. It doesn't mean that that's not the rule. Um, it just means that some people are born
00:15:53.100
with, if you want to call them imperfections or anomalies, whatever they are, it doesn't negate
00:15:58.180
the rule of binary sex. Yeah, I think that conveys an important point. Although I think, you know,
00:16:06.120
in terms of, if we're talking about legs, you know, someone can actually be three-legged,
00:16:10.700
whereas someone can't actually have a, be a third sex. Yeah. Um, an analogy I tend to use
00:16:16.500
is sort of, uh, that of a coin flip where we have, you know, the two faces of a coin heads
00:16:22.120
or tails, you know, those don't come in degrees. If you flip a coin, it's not, you can't say
00:16:26.720
that. Oh, it was 25% heads on that single flip. Um, so heads and tails don't come in
00:16:32.040
degrees, but there've been people who've done these types of studies. I think with a nickel,
00:16:36.180
one out of 6,000 flips could potentially land on its edge and the edge it's neither heads
00:16:42.800
nor tails. It's just sort of like this, oh, we need to reflip the coin. It's, it's this
00:16:46.980
undefined thing. It's, it's, it's neither, but neither heads nor tails isn't like another
00:16:53.020
face of the coin. Uh, if, if that makes sense, I think that's maybe a little more accurate
00:16:58.020
analogy, but, uh, um, it conveys the point I'm trying to make. And you make a really good point
00:17:15.280
in your wall street journal article. You say we're not seeing a surge of people born intersex. We are
00:17:21.060
seeing a surge of people identifying as the opposite sex, even though they're not intersex,
00:17:27.240
they don't actually have any confusing characteristics at all. That is the surge that
00:17:31.500
we're seeing. We're not seeing some growing trend of intersex people, but gender ideology,
00:17:37.940
you say seeks to portray sex is so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional
00:17:44.560
practice of classifying people as simply male or females, grossly outdated and should be abandoned
00:17:49.720
for a revolutionary concept of gender identity are really abandoned for a revolutionary concept
00:17:55.440
of like sex fluidity. Because like, this is the argument that's made. I see you refuting this
00:18:00.120
all the time on Twitter. People will say, look at this species. See, they're more than male and
00:18:04.740
female or this mammal. They're really more than male and female. And they'll try to finagle it in some way
00:18:09.120
that is not actually scientifically accurate. Or they'll go back in history and say,
00:18:13.740
see, there was some kind of acknowledgement that there is a spectrum between male and female that just
00:18:18.760
can't be reduced to XX or XY. I saw George DeKai say that the other day, that science actually
00:18:24.860
proves that transgenderism, not the other day, I think it was like two years ago, but actually proves
00:18:30.640
that sex is some kind of spectrum. And yeah, you're right. They're just trying to make it more
00:18:36.600
complicated than it really is to basically, it's like a form of Gnosticism. It's like, we can't fully
00:18:42.180
know this like special knowledge that's out there. We need these transgender people to tell us what the
00:18:46.460
truth is. Yeah, it's, it's a really important point of their reliance on intersex conditions.
00:18:54.520
So there's this historian of science named Alice Drager, and she wrote in her book,
00:18:58.460
it was called hermaphrodites, the medical invention of sex. She, you know, it's, it's a well,
00:19:03.980
it's a well-written book, but she had a passage that says something like, you know, the, the existence
00:19:08.420
of the hermaphrodite, this is what she refers to as intersex people, not only calls into question the
00:19:13.700
sex of that individual hermaphrodite, but calls into question the stability of, of whether or not
00:19:20.120
everyone is male or female. And it, you know, it makes us all sort of unclassifiable to some degree.
00:19:26.720
Now that is just a complete fallacy. The suggestion that just because some individuals
00:19:31.020
have conditions that make them sort of ambiguous with respect to sex, therefore we're all to some
00:19:36.820
degree ambiguous with respect to sex. That is just a complete non sequitur. That is not true at all.
00:19:42.180
You can't extend the blur of a very small percentage of the population. We're talking one out of every
00:19:48.760
6,000, 5,000 people to, to the entire tapestry, the entire canvas and say that, oh, we're all just so
00:19:56.940
ambiguous or at least ambiguous enough where we need to just rely on people's self-report, you know,
00:20:01.420
we can't rely on doctors to, to get it right, you know, when an individual is born.
00:20:06.680
Um, and as I said in the piece, you know, we're not seeing a surge of people with intersex conditions.
00:20:11.940
We're seeing a surge of people who are unambiguously one sex identifying as the opposite sex.
00:20:17.880
So if we could go back to the coin flip analogy, this would be like, this isn't something that landed
00:20:21.500
on the edge. This is a heads identifying as tails, tails identifying as heads, clear cases that are not
00:20:28.700
ambiguous. So I refer to this as the intersex trap. Whenever you're talking, having a debate, let's say about
00:20:34.660
males and female sports, uh, you want to maybe talk about Leah Thomas, because this is a perfect
00:20:40.760
example of a person who's unambiguously male playing against people who are unambiguously female,
00:20:46.540
but the activists will bring up someone like Castor Semenya, who's an intersex athlete. Um,
00:20:53.060
because they want you to, cause it's a little more difficult with Castor Semenya. And then they'll
00:20:56.700
say, well, what about this intersex condition? What about this one? And they want you to just sort of
00:21:00.700
be on your heels, trying to decide, you know, making calls on these really difficult intersex
00:21:05.480
conditions to distract you from making the easy calls on people like Leah Thomas, who is,
00:21:10.580
who's not intersex, who's just the heads identifying as tails. Um, so we just, we need to reject that
00:21:16.540
right in the beginning that transgenderism and being intersex are just, they couldn't be conceptually
00:21:22.940
more different. And we need to treat them as a different concepts. They are because activists gain a lot of,
00:21:28.340
uh, you know, it's the wedge when they keep them fused together, they pretend they're the one in the
00:21:32.520
same, or at least they're intrinsically tied together in some way that they're not.
00:21:36.540
Yeah. It's really, it kind of reminds me of when you see those, like I saw the, when Target had their
00:21:43.140
like pride display and they had a shirt that was supposed to be LGBTQ and one of the people that I
00:21:49.360
guess is a part of this community was a person in a wheelchair. I'm like, when did we start lumping in
00:21:54.940
people who can't walk with LGBTQ? And I mean, even including like the brown and blacks and how skin
00:22:01.400
color is a part of this. And I, I think that you're right. I think it's like collapsing all of the, um,
00:22:07.700
supposed victim categories, the ones that are actually like the identities that are actually innate, like your
00:22:14.060
skin color or your disability and ones like gender identity, which are actually chosen to just say, you know,
00:22:22.880
these are all people who are just being themselves and are different and we have to accept and celebrate
00:22:27.900
them. Um, I got in a debate the other day. It's very, very interesting person. And I, he kind of
00:22:35.400
conservative, a Christian. So, and he was, you know, he was from Texas and he was telling me about how his
00:22:42.260
parents like support Ted Cruz. So I'm just assuming that he is also kind of conservative too. But then he
00:22:47.620
said, you know, I'm politically independent. I've never voted Republican before, but I do, I'm pro-life.
00:22:54.220
And so I was like, this is, you know, this is really interesting. So I asked him, I said, what
00:22:57.200
issue do you think Democrats get more right than Republicans or conservatives do? And he said,
00:23:04.180
gender. And I was like, what? And he said, yes, I think that Democrats have it right when it comes to
00:23:12.200
the fluidity of gender. We talked about Leah Thomas and he brought up the examples that you're
00:23:17.060
talking about. Cause I said, okay, like you think a man should be able to compete against women. That's
00:23:20.580
not fair at all. We went into this whole debate and he lost, but he, he brought up, he said, well,
00:23:27.160
what do you do with someone who just happens to be a really good athlete who like say a man who's
00:23:33.760
competing against other men, but he's way taller, way bigger than them, has more testosterone.
00:23:39.440
Maybe he, maybe he has a greater anaerobic anaerobic capacity. He has greater lung capacity,
00:23:44.620
greater muscle mass, all of these things that we use to say, well, this is why men shouldn't be
00:23:48.860
able to compete against women. Sometimes those distinctions are also true within the sexes.
00:23:54.180
And so what are we really supposed to be distinguishing people by when really there is a
00:23:59.160
spectrum along both sexes of hormones and capacity and height and weight and all of those things.
00:24:04.760
I'm sure you've heard that. Like, what do you say to those kinds of people?
00:24:09.440
Yeah. So, I mean, sports is meant to be fair within certain classes, but within those classes,
00:24:16.820
you know, we're not saying that everyone who has any sort of advantage needs to be squashed in some
00:24:22.940
way. I mean, LeBron James is six foot eight and 250 pounds, complete athlete, uh, in the extreme,
00:24:30.900
you know, he can just jump over the heads of practically everyone. And that's just like,
00:24:34.740
is it unfair for LeBron James to be allowed to compete with people who aren't as genetically
00:24:39.880
gifted? Well, no, it's not unfair. Sports wants to find these people who are these anomalies who
00:24:46.580
are, who are just these, you know, crazy athletes who are just a cut above the rest. Um, but it's
00:24:51.740
within a certain class of being biologically male that we allow this variation to exist. You know,
00:24:56.920
we have, um, we could have boxing for instance, which we just say, you know, the best fighter
00:25:02.880
wins. Okay. Like it doesn't matter how much you weigh. Um, but then we would only be seeing,
00:25:07.640
you know, people who are 250 pounds and six foot eight boxing each other. And that wouldn't be fun.
00:25:13.020
We want to recognize that there's other aspects to being a fighter and skills and training that we
00:25:18.040
want to see. And so we make these things that are, uh, you know, these weight categories. So we can see,
00:25:23.580
you know, featherweights, uh, bantamweight, heavyweight, super heavyweight, all that stuff.
00:25:28.780
Um, because we, we realized that, you know, we, we don't just want to see one variable overtake
00:25:34.860
every other variable. Uh, and this is the same thing with sex. So sex isn't simply just, you know,
00:25:41.860
one single variable. It affects every variable in your entire body. It affects how tall you are,
00:25:47.200
how strong you are, uh, everything that we, that affects the way you perform. Um,
00:25:53.580
an important aspect of whether something is fair or not has to do with whether you would have that
00:26:01.000
advantage, um, otherwise. So for instance, if I were to start taking steroids and I joined
00:26:10.020
a power lifting competition, you know, next week or next month, I'm not a power lifter. So no matter
00:26:17.340
even if I'm, even if I'm juicing, I'm going to lose. Is the fact that I still, that I lose
00:26:22.940
to mean that it isn't unfair for me to take steroids? Well, no, it's still unfair because
00:26:27.400
no one else is taking steroids and I'm doing better than I would have otherwise. So the
00:26:32.620
same thing goes for sports that are segregated by sex. So Leah Thomas, it's unfair for Leah
00:26:37.880
Thomas to compete with females, uh, because Leah Thomas wouldn't have been as good otherwise
00:26:43.940
had they not gone through male puberty. Okay. So male puberty is really the variable that is
00:26:50.080
creating this unfair disparity that makes it so males shouldn't be allowed to compete in
00:26:54.020
female sports because no other female has access to this certain going through this process that
00:27:00.920
changes your body fundamentally in every way imaginable that makes you a better athlete.
00:27:06.540
Um, so this is why some States for instance, have policies where, you know, they'll actually
00:27:10.440
allow males to compete if they hadn't gone through male puberty, which, you know, is a issue of,
00:27:15.280
you know, are we encouraging puberty blockers, that type of thing. Um, but they're at least
00:27:19.180
getting at what gives them the unfair advantage. Like I could ride an e-bike in the Tour de France
00:27:24.480
and I'm probably still going to lose just because, you know, I, uh, people who are still naturally
00:27:29.060
better at, at me than I would be even on an e-bike, but it still wouldn't be fair for me to compete
00:27:34.180
on an e-bike because nobody else gets that boost and I wouldn't have been as good without the e-bike.
00:27:49.180
You do hear a lot that, okay, it's not unfair for these men to compete in female competitions
00:28:00.300
if they don't win. If they, you know, if they come in third place or they come in a hundredth
00:28:05.480
place, well, then it just proves that men are, you know, they're competitive against women,
00:28:11.360
that there's not really that big disparity there, but that's not true. I mean, they still
00:28:15.320
have the innate advantage of the testosterone that has been pulsing through their veins at
00:28:20.080
much higher levels since they went through puberty. And whether they're in a hundredth
00:28:25.020
place, third place, first place, there is a woman that they, uh, you know, basically
00:28:31.160
metaphorically or, uh, figuratively elbowed out of the way to get to that position. And
00:28:37.080
so some woman was disadvantaged. It might not have been all the women that were moved out
00:28:42.560
of the way, but some women were moved out of the way because this person has a biological
00:28:46.520
advantage. I remember learning a little bit about this, about just like testosterone and
00:28:50.940
how much it changes the body. And obviously there are differing levels of testosterone.
00:28:56.160
I think at birth, the differences in even our brains and how our brains develop in utero
00:29:01.620
is, can be based on our sex. Sex has a large part of how we develop and then testosterone levels.
00:29:07.940
And of course, correct me if I'm wrong in any of this, it kind of even out between boys and
00:29:11.800
girls when you're young. But then when you go through puberty, male testosterone just
00:29:17.280
shoots through the roof. And that is really what makes these huge changes in a male's body
00:29:22.680
that just are insurmountable for the female, right?
00:29:27.700
Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, there are high school boy athletes right now who are 15
00:29:32.840
years old, 16 years old, who can beat the women's world record in sprinting in every single category.
00:29:38.580
I mean, that's just how big the disparity is. This isn't, you know, crapping on women athletes.
00:29:44.300
It's just saying that they have very different bodies and they're capable of very different
00:29:47.900
things within their own categories. You know, we wouldn't say that a, you know, bantamweight
00:29:54.100
boxer is any less of a good boxer or something because they're competing in a lesser weight
00:29:58.800
class. It's just, they're just different classes of bodies that we're trying to account for.
00:30:04.020
Um, so I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. And, you know, it's when you're playing,
00:30:09.740
you know, we see children a lot, as you mentioned, sort of play in co-ed leagues and stuff, but it's
00:30:13.860
not until you get to high school really where segregating by sex is really important. And then
00:30:18.920
especially when you get into the elite sports, because even though like some differences might
00:30:25.440
only be like, let's say that there's a 10% average difference in the population between sort of
00:30:30.500
the strength of males and females is greater than that. But even if we're only 10%, you
00:30:34.820
know, while that might not seem a lot when you're talking about just the most people you
00:30:38.500
see every day, when you're like looking at the top 0.1% athletes, uh, in any category,
00:30:45.400
it's going to be all men up in that category. There's going to be no women who are going to
00:30:49.760
be up there competing. So you have a league like the NBA for its existence or any other professional,
00:30:55.120
um, sports organization. Like the NBA, isn't the MNBA. It's not the men's basketball association.
00:31:01.940
There's no rule that's keeping females out of the league. It's just that there's no female who's
00:31:07.060
ever been able to possess the constellation of traits that has made them competitive in the NBA.
00:31:13.720
Um, and so that's just a really important to think about, you know, and if we're doing this at
00:31:17.480
the upper, you know, in the Olympics, yeah, there might not be that many trans women who are competing
00:31:22.180
in female sports. And so they might not always win, but if this trend keeps going along, then for
00:31:27.680
sure, you're going to have males that are going to be beating every single category because these
00:31:31.860
differences matter at the elite level. Yeah. And really, if all you have to do to be a woman is
00:31:37.640
to say you're a woman, then you're not even going to, eventually you're not even going to require
00:31:42.500
these people to take estrogen or make any kind of changes to their body whatsoever. If you're going
00:31:48.320
to be consistent in your ideology, actually that guy that I was arguing with the reason
00:31:52.820
why he lost, because he said something that was so silly. This is an Ivy league educated
00:31:57.120
guy. He said, he, I said, well, don't you think that there is probably a reason why sports have
00:32:02.900
been separated by sex? Like you don't think that's just random. He said, well, actually,
00:32:07.340
no, they haven't always been separated by sex. If you look at ancient Greece and ancient Greece,
00:32:12.300
they weren't separated by sex. Anyone could play. It's just that the women weren't competitive
00:32:17.820
against the men. And I said, yeah, why do you think that is? And of course he got all,
00:32:24.960
you know, befuddled and everything. And, um, but it's funny. I mean, a lot of these people,
00:32:30.780
and this is not a dumb person. A lot of these people who are smart in a lot of ways for ideal,
00:32:35.980
ideological reasons or convenience reasons or whatever, they just don't see the inconsistency
00:32:42.920
in their belief system. It's really wild. Yeah. There's an important, so in what you said there,
00:32:50.260
and it's something I've been trying to call people out on, it's like,
00:32:52.880
you don't need to care about female sports. Like this is a question anyone can have for themselves.
00:32:58.620
Like if your position is that we shouldn't have female sports because if they can't compete,
00:33:04.380
well, then they can't compete. And then, yeah, that's, that's fine. You know, the, to the best,
00:33:07.860
the best player wins. Like that's a position you can argue if you want to. I very much disagree with
00:33:13.600
that. I think we should have sex segregated sports. I think women and girls should have
00:33:17.120
the ability to, to win medals and succeed and have to strive to, to be able to compete and win.
00:33:22.280
Um, but that's, that's just my, my values. That's my opinion. Um, what I take issue with is people who
00:33:29.120
are pretending that not, they're not saying that they don't think women should have the right to
00:33:35.720
compete or that they don't, they don't want women's sports to exist. Instead, what they're saying is
00:33:40.180
they can't even care if they wanted to, because sex is a social construct. And what does it even
00:33:46.500
mean to be a woman anyway? Like that's what they're saying, but I wish they would just be honest and
00:33:55.420
say that they don't think women should have the right to compete rather than pretend that women
00:33:59.080
aren't an actual category that can be protected. So, um, yeah, that's, that's the insidiousness of the
00:34:04.660
ideology. It gives them a shield to, to sort of mask what they're actually believe.
00:34:09.760
And I just want to, we've cited this study before. I just want to reiterate what you're saying,
00:34:14.100
the importance of the differences in sex. Duke University, um, released a report in 2017. I'm
00:34:19.500
sure that you've, I'm sure that you've seen it or sorry, it wasn't 2017. It was a few years ago.
00:34:24.980
And they said this, if you know, sport, you know, there is, you know, this beyond a reasonable doubt,
00:34:29.500
there is an average 10 to 12% performance gap between elite males and elite females. The gap
00:34:35.620
is smaller between elite females and non elite males, but it's still insurmountable. And that's
00:34:41.340
ultimately what matters. They found that in 2017, Tori Bowie, she's an Olympic champion
00:34:47.160
in the a hundred meter dash three time Olympic medalist that her lifetime record in a hundred
00:34:53.160
meter dash was beaten by men and boys over 15,000 times, including high school boys.
00:34:58.900
The same is true for Alison Felix, another Olympic champion. Her 400 meter dash record was beaten
00:35:04.780
over 15,000 times by men and boys in 2017. So that means, you know, uh, even 18 and under the times
00:35:15.580
of the fastest high school boys, according to the study were faster than the times of female Olympic
00:35:21.600
athletes. So the best of the best high school boys, 15, 14, 16 years old are faster than the fastest
00:35:30.960
women, adult Olympic sprinting athletes. Like that is the differentiator and kudos to Duke
00:35:38.280
university for saying, it says it's not because of better resources. It's not because of a different
00:35:43.160
identity. It is because boys have an androgenized body because the girls have ovaries. Men have
00:35:51.100
testes because of the testosterone that is produced by each sex. That is why this gap is totally
00:35:58.480
insurmountable, even between elite females in high school boys. And then you probably remember that
00:36:03.920
story of the U S women's soccer team. They lost to the UC Dallas under 15 boys team. It's wild.
00:36:13.060
Yeah, it's, it is insurmountable. And we just seem to be having, or at least some people seem to have
00:36:18.700
this amnesia that testosterone is a performance enhancing drug. And that's why you're not allowed
00:36:23.260
to take exogenous testosterone. When you play sports, it's considered doping. It's illegal to do
00:36:27.260
why? Because it gives you a performance, a major performance advantage. And essentially every male
00:36:33.520
is just carrying around this factory of, of performance enhancing drugs that is not available
00:36:38.840
to every female in the population. So this, this really isn't controversial. We all know this is true.
00:36:44.280
We have, that's why all the PED policies have been set in place, uh, for many, many decades,
00:36:49.640
as far as I can remember. So, um, it's just, we need to get back to common sense on this stuff.
00:36:57.560
All right, guys, like I said, that was part one of a two part conversation. Make sure you tune in to
00:37:14.700
the second part with Dr. Wright, where we get into atheism versus Christianity. Why any of this
00:37:20.960
matters if God and a transcendent morality doesn't exist? How is anything ever really
00:37:27.540
just or fair or right or wrong or true or false outside of a giver and a determiner of all of these
00:37:33.940
things? Dr. Wright is going to give us his perspective. I'll give mine on the next episode
00:37:39.060
together. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll be back soon.
00:37:46.080
Good morning, related gals and related bros. This is Ron Simmons. And as many of you know,
00:37:52.120
I am Allie's dad. Allie is on maternity leave and we have decided that I will periodically bring you
00:38:01.540
some news updates that keeps you current on things that are going on. Of course, Allie's podcast will
00:38:07.860
go on four times a week and she's got some great interviews that she's done. Uh, you're going to
00:38:13.200
really, really enjoy them. And, but I'm going to come on just every so often and kind of bring you a
00:38:18.100
little bit of a news update. Uh, as you know, I've, if you've listened to me with Allie a couple of
00:38:23.440
times, I've got an investment background. So sometimes we'll talk about the economy and what
00:38:27.780
have you, but also served in the Texas legislature, uh, for three terms. And so we, obviously I'm
00:38:34.340
interested in politics and we'll talk about that. And then finally, I'm an author. I released a book
00:38:39.440
a few months ago called life lessons from the little red wagon. And we might touch on a few of those
00:38:45.440
as we go forth. Uh, but today what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about our favorite
00:38:52.240
doctor, Dr. Fauci. Well, if you pay attention to Dr. Fauci, or if you got tired of paying attention
00:39:01.060
to him, like I did, uh, may not have thought about him lately, but if you paid attention to him,
00:39:06.580
Newsweek, the magazine Newsweek just reported the latest squirm by our favorite doctor, the infamous
00:39:13.660
Dr. Anthony Fauci. In an interview with CNN over the weekend, he agreed that mask, wearing a mask
00:39:22.700
has very little effect on the overall spread of COVID, but he claims that they work individually.
00:39:31.040
Now, if they don't help the overall spread, but they work individually, how do those things go
00:39:37.000
together? Seems like an oxymoron to me, but when he's pushed on a study by the University of Oxford
00:39:42.740
Oxford proving that there's no evidence that they work, he squirmed admitting they really don't have
00:39:49.760
an overall effect on the spread of the pandemic. When you're talking about the effect on the epidemic
00:39:56.900
or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong. But when you talk about as an individual
00:40:02.780
basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there's no
00:40:09.560
doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage. When you took at the broad
00:40:14.240
population level, like the Cochran study, the data are less firm with regard to the effect on the overall
00:40:21.460
pandemic. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about an individual's effect on their own
00:40:28.020
safety. That's a bit different than the broad population level.
00:40:31.440
Dr. Fauci, would you please just go into retirement with the what really amounts to be the millions of dollars
00:40:40.700
that we have paid you and will pay you during your retirement? Just please, please go away.
00:40:47.580
Now, on to politics. So here we are the day after Labor Day or the week after Labor Day, and the official
00:40:55.820
political campaign season kicks off for the 2024 presidential election. President Biden, who will
00:41:04.860
be the Democrat nominee unless he decides not to run or can't run, who knows what the answer is to that.
00:41:11.960
He still claims he's going to, so we'll take him at his word on that, which a little bit of a joke in
00:41:17.300
there, but we'll do it. Well, if you ever go to a website that follows politics, 538 is a good one to
00:41:24.940
follow. It's run by a guy named Nate Silver, and they do a pretty good job of being down the middle.
00:41:30.780
They're a little left-leaning, but it's a very interesting website and have a lot of data in
00:41:36.480
there. And there'll be a link on the Alley show page today, which will show that to you. But in
00:41:43.920
looking at that website, after the first hundred days in office, Biden had a 54% approval rating.
00:41:51.480
Now, since August of 2021, or May of 2021, that has continued to go down. And really, since August
00:42:01.800
of 21 and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, where he left many of our friends there that helped us
00:42:08.120
during that war to go under the Taliban and their very strict and draconian methods, we left them back
00:42:19.060
there. His approval rating has been hovering around 40%, which is very poor. In fact, there's only two
00:42:28.940
other presidents that have been close to that range after this long being in office, after 955 days,
00:42:39.020
for example, it's only Jimmy Carter, who was only at 29% after the same length of time that Biden's been in
00:42:47.260
office. And then President Trump was about similar to where Biden is. So it's very interesting as to how this
00:42:55.740
worked out. In fact, Wall Street Journal has something called, there was an article over the weekend on
00:43:02.880
Bidenomics. And for inflation, which all of us have felt, if just go to the gas pump or look at your
00:43:10.260
grocery prices, that only 39% of the people in America believe that President Biden's done a good
00:43:19.560
job on fighting inflation. 63% have opposed that. And that's not good news. If you're trying to run for
00:43:28.460
reelection, I can tell you that. But even a bigger challenge that he has, and this was done by
00:43:33.740
website Morning Consult, shows that in key, what we would call swing states, like a Wisconsin, a Michigan,
00:43:43.460
Pennsylvania, Nevada, those are states that tend to be 50-50 Republican, Democrat.
00:43:50.920
President Biden is really hurting. In fact, his approval rating, which is what we call the
00:43:57.060
difference between the approval and the disapproval rating, how that's changed over time, is in
00:44:04.140
Wisconsin down 13%, Michigan down 14%, Pennsylvania down 15%, Nevada down 14%. Even in his own home state
00:44:14.960
of Delaware, his approval rating over the last, since he's been in office, is down 3%. So that's
00:44:23.560
really incredible. It's just overall, though, for independence even. Now, this is even more
00:44:32.280
interesting because Democrats, you know, are going to support him. But independence, where you have to
00:44:36.460
have, if you're either, if you're the Republican nominee or the Democrat nominee, you probably control
00:44:41.580
40% or so of the vote that's going to vote that way no matter what. But the 20%, the independence,
00:44:48.480
it's kind of, you don't know where they're going to go. This is the number that most of us focus on.
00:44:54.080
And for example, in states like Colorado, 53% of the independents approved Biden in 2021. Now in 2023,
00:45:04.920
60% disapprove of him. In Arizona, 65% of the independents disapprove of the job he's doing.
00:45:12.880
And in Michigan, 65% of the independents disapprove of the job he's doing. So it doesn't look good for
00:45:21.040
President Biden. But of course, the challenge is, is that former President Trump has challenges
00:45:29.700
as well. When it comes to a general election, he and President Biden run neck and neck. And you can get
00:45:38.580
this information off the 538 website as well. Now let's take a couple more minutes and talk about
00:45:44.260
the Republican primary, which is the one that will be the most contested. As of yesterday, the
00:45:51.720
former President Donald Trump has got 51%. Governor Ron DeSantis is at 15%. And Nikki Haley is at 6%.
00:46:03.500
And I have found a website that I think you'll really like on US Presidential Election News. It's just
00:46:12.400
very good and looks to be mainly information, not opinion. And it's USPresidentialElectionNews.com.
00:46:20.340
And you remember that the presidential election is not a national election. And even the primaries
00:46:31.260
aren't national primaries, they're individual state primaries. So it really matters winning states.
00:46:37.440
And in primaries, both Republican and Democrat, they're delegates. So really, when you're voting,
00:46:43.620
you're voting for the delegates of your state that go to your state's Republican or Democrat convention.
00:46:50.820
And then they cast their vote for whomever it is that the majority has told them to vote for
00:46:58.940
in their particular state. The first primary or caucus, as they call it in Iowa, is January the 15th
00:47:10.120
of 2024. The next one is January 23rd. So it's coming up really right around the corner.
00:47:15.280
And you'll want to be paying attention. South Carolina is February the 24th for Republicans,
00:47:21.380
February the 3rd for Democrats, and Nevada is February the 6th. But the big
00:47:26.360
prize is on Super Tuesday, which is March the 5th. And that will be there's 10 or 15 states that will be
00:47:34.920
going to the primary election polls that day and voting. And that's where it'll mainly be determined.
00:47:44.660
I think unless the race gets a lot tighter, President Trump could wrap it up by that day.
00:47:51.460
But there's a lot that can happen between now and then. So anyway, I'm going to talk to you more
00:47:55.540
about politics as we go on. But I'm going to run out of time here. And before I run out of time,
00:48:02.100
I want to bring up a couple of other things. Every time I go on here, I want to talk a little bit
00:48:06.840
about taking the next uncomfortable step. And the next uncomfortable step is something I talk about
00:48:12.520
in my book, Life Lessons from the Little Red Wagon. And today's next uncomfortable step,
00:48:17.960
and hopefully it's not uncomfortable, but it can be, is make sure to remember to date your spouse.
00:48:25.440
Sometimes when we get married and have kids and get in our careers, we just get so busy and we forget
00:48:32.080
to date our spouse. So think about that and make sure that you're dating your spouse. It doesn't mean
00:48:39.240
you have to take, go out to a big fancy dinner, even have to go anywhere. Just remember to treat your
00:48:45.500
spouse like you treated them when they were your boyfriend or girlfriend. And I think that'll help
00:48:51.860
all of our marriages. And I can be better at that, certainly myself. Last thing I want to say is our
00:48:57.180
good friends that are also Blaze podcast, the Robertsons that have the podcast Unashamed. There's a movie
00:49:04.920
coming out at the end of September called The Blind. And it's the life story of Phil Robertson.
00:49:12.820
And it's going to be out September 29th. But you can go online right now and buy your tickets at
00:49:19.800
theblindmovie.com. It's very important that we all go do that so that we can get more distribution
00:49:26.380
out into the cinemas because it's an independent film. And I know that it's going to be something
00:49:32.080
that you'll enjoy because there'll be lots of humor in there, lots of heartwarming stories,
00:49:37.800
and an incredible story of redemption. Thank you for your time today. Make sure that you continue
00:49:44.740
to listen to Allie's podcast and that you also follow her on all her social media channels.