The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 379. Sex Matters

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.220 Today, I'm speaking once again, despite the best efforts of YouTube censors, to author, journalist, and biological women's rights advocate Helen Joyce.

00:01:24.220 We discuss the much-delayed censorship of our last interview on this channel, our joint efforts at resisting the ideology that motivates such silencing,

00:01:35.740 the genuine UK tradition of natural rights, and the harsh reality of what women and men both stand to lose on the tyranny and falsehood front today.

00:01:48.100 And we do more than touch on the great adventure of the truth.

00:01:52.220 Well, it's good to see you again, and it's interesting that we get to talk here once again for whatever the hell good that's going to do,

00:02:00.720 just after YouTube polled our last discussion, which was actually quite shocking to me, eh?

00:02:08.500 Because YouTube has left me alone until now, but they've taken down three of my podcasts in the last month.

00:02:15.320 Matt Walsh on the trans front, because I talked to him about what is a woman, Robert F. Kennedy, which actually shocked the hell out of me,

00:02:23.940 because he's running an active presidential campaign, and the fact that a bunch of backroom, half-wit, trans-radical activists,

00:02:31.880 or their equivalent, would dare to interfere with an ongoing presidential campaign,

00:02:36.120 especially given that he's a lead Democrat contender, just beggars my imagination.

00:02:42.700 I can't believe we're in that situation.

00:02:44.880 And then they took down my conversation with you.

00:02:47.540 And, you know, you're completely reprehensible.

00:02:49.900 You know, you were just an economist journalist for years, and there's hardly anything respectable about that.

00:02:55.280 And so, if this is the situation we're in, it's a pretty bloody, sorry state of affairs, that's for sure.

00:03:03.140 And YouTube is a particularly terrifying entity in some ways,

00:03:09.360 because it is the world's number one broadcast network, and it's transnational.

00:03:14.060 And so, it's beholden to no master, except whatever idiot ideology happens to grip the imagination

00:03:20.420 of the half-wit censors operating behind the scenes.

00:03:23.720 So, anyways, what do you think about the YouTube cancellation?

00:03:26.660 It was like a year after we had our conversation, two or more.

00:03:30.520 Exactly.

00:03:31.120 I mean, people had listened to it already, many, many of them.

00:03:33.620 I wonder why the complaints had suddenly appeared at that point.

00:03:36.260 And I understand they didn't say exactly what we had said was hateful,

00:03:40.320 but I'm guessing that it was to do with referring to Ellen slash Elliot Page as a woman and she, her.

00:03:46.020 And so, I think that shows how the creeping idea of hate speech and hate as a freestanding,

00:03:55.200 floating signifier, as opposed to being an aggravator to something that is already a crime,

00:04:00.360 is colliding with the idea that referring to people's sex is a hateful thing to do if they

00:04:04.700 don't want you to.

00:04:05.820 And suddenly, we're in a situation where making totally straightforward factual statements

00:04:09.720 is something that can get you censored and possibly even convicted for a crime.

00:04:16.300 Yeah, well, let's walk down that delightful route.

00:04:21.200 So, I've been watching, to the degree that it's possible, the events unfolding in Ireland.

00:04:27.980 I mean, this is wonderful to see this happening in the UK.

00:04:31.300 That's really something to be terrified of.

00:04:36.120 And so, back in 2016, I burst onto the political scene, so to speak,

00:04:43.720 as a consequence of objecting to this Bill C-16 in Canada,

00:04:47.780 which was the first bill that I could see in an English common law-derived society

00:04:54.940 that mandated the content of private speech, right?

00:04:59.680 You could do that to some degree on the commercial front.

00:05:02.640 And this was despite the fact that the American Supreme Court in 1942, I think it was 42,

00:05:08.180 made it unconstitutional to do so in the US.

00:05:12.440 I thought, well, there's no way I'm letting, especially the Trudeau liberals,

00:05:17.560 have control over my tongue.

00:05:19.060 And I don't give a bloody goddamn what the reason is,

00:05:21.740 because it's always some faux-compassionate,

00:05:24.380 we're caring for the oppressed lie to accrue power to the tyrants.

00:05:28.600 And the legal experts I debated at that point said,

00:05:31.780 oh, well, you know, it'll never come to jail or prison,

00:05:34.320 and this won't go any farther, and you're just being impolite,

00:05:37.920 and all that complete nonsense.

00:05:39.280 And here we are.

00:05:41.400 So what's happening in Ireland?

00:05:43.700 We're trying to pass a law that creates a standalone offence of hate.

00:05:49.200 Hate is undefined in it.

00:05:51.460 It is anything that is regarded as offensive,

00:05:54.440 I mean, as far as we can tell,

00:05:55.620 offensive by people who have certain protected characteristics,

00:05:58.500 and it's added gender identity to the list of protected characteristics,

00:06:03.280 which it defines circularly.

00:06:05.520 Your gender identity is your gender identity, padded out a bit.

00:06:09.060 And then it does a bunch of other really terrifying things,

00:06:12.540 like you have to just possess the material.

00:06:15.540 If you possess the material, the assumption is that you want to spread it.

00:06:19.060 And it's up to you to show that you don't intend to spread it.

00:06:22.220 Right, so it's an assumption of guilt.

00:06:25.260 Yeah, yeah, so it's up to you to say.

00:06:27.360 But, I mean, if you're writing a book,

00:06:28.520 obviously the intention is to spread it.

00:06:30.240 And there's a carve-out for works of, I forget the exact wording,

00:06:33.640 but it's basically legitimate artistic or scientific merit.

00:06:37.440 Oh, yeah, and who's going to decide that?

00:06:39.180 Exactly, exactly.

00:06:40.320 I mean, the same people who don't want me saying that Ellen Page is a woman

00:06:43.260 are the same people who say that saying that is Nazism.

00:06:46.400 So they're hardly going to say that it's legitimate scientific or artistic merit to say that.

00:06:51.840 And then there's a bunch of other mad things about it,

00:06:54.280 like it specifically says that having it on servers could be caught.

00:06:57.940 And Ireland is this major offshore sort of centre

00:07:00.560 for a bunch of the world's social media companies.

00:07:03.860 I mean, lots of places are headquartered there

00:07:06.200 or keep their servers there for tax reasons.

00:07:09.860 And then when you say something like,

00:07:12.900 well, what about just misgendering?

00:07:15.120 Could that be hateful?

00:07:16.180 They'll say, oh, no, no, don't be silly.

00:07:17.560 You know, that won't be.

00:07:18.340 But I mean, it is, on the face of it, something that people could complain about.

00:07:22.240 And I mean, we both know that-

00:07:23.200 No, no, we'll complain about, absolutely 100%.

00:07:25.060 Absolutely we will.

00:07:26.280 The activist types know perfectly well how to weaponise investigative boards.

00:07:31.660 I mean, the Canadian College or Ontario College of Psychologists

00:07:34.800 has gone after me in Ontario trying to strip me of my licence

00:07:37.880 because half-wit activist, narcissist types all around the world

00:07:42.600 have used their email or their online system

00:07:45.080 to complain about me doing such things as poking fun in a relatively,

00:07:50.940 you know, what would you say, aggressive manner at Trudeau

00:07:55.680 and his former chief of staff and an Ontario city councillor.

00:07:59.300 And in terms of specifying exactly what the nature of the offence is,

00:08:04.220 you mentioned that on YouTube.

00:08:05.480 No one does that.

00:08:06.880 One of the bloody complainants submitted the entire transcript

00:08:09.940 of my three-hour discussion with Joe Rogan as evidence for my-

00:08:13.800 I think on that particular, I was complaining about these idiot climate models

00:08:19.000 that equally idiot economists then build shaky forecasts on top of.

00:08:23.500 And I was pointing out the absolute bloody genocidal stupidity of that.

00:08:28.000 And apparently that's also, you know, a crime against my profession,

00:08:31.680 which I am apparently bringing into disgrace.

00:08:34.380 So that's all unfolding in Canada at the moment.

00:08:36.920 So they don't seem to understand anything about the chilling effect.

00:08:40.800 Like, so they're like, don't worry, that won't be covered.

00:08:43.360 But how can you not worry?

00:08:45.080 You know, OK, I'm now all in.

00:08:46.980 I've decided that this is what I talk and write about.

00:08:49.420 And that's a decision I made.

00:08:50.540 But most people are not in that situation.

00:08:52.320 Most people are getting on with a different job.

00:08:54.060 They're teachers or they're nurses or, you know,

00:08:56.400 they go into an office every day.

00:08:57.680 And they can't afford to take the risk of saying something

00:09:01.140 that just might be reported.

00:09:02.100 Yeah, well, that's the whole point.

00:09:03.800 Yeah, and then get investigated.

00:09:05.020 They don't understand, they don't, it isn't that they don't understand the chilling effect.

00:09:09.140 It's bloody well 100% that the chilling effect is the point.

00:09:13.520 Exactly.

00:09:14.180 Look, there is a burgeoning literature.

00:09:16.560 There's 10 studies now, 10 studies on the structure of left-wing authoritarianism.

00:09:22.580 Yeah, psychological studies.

00:09:23.860 So the first finding, which is a finding my lab generated in 2016,

00:09:28.460 was that there was a coherent set of beliefs that look progressive on the political front,

00:09:33.580 but that are allied with the willingness to use fear, compulsion, and force to impose them.

00:09:39.060 And that's left-wing authoritarianism, as opposed to just your standard left-wing political belief.

00:09:44.620 And then we looked at what predicted that from a psychological perspective.

00:09:49.060 Okay, so the biggest predictor was low verbal intelligence.

00:09:52.280 And it was a walloping correlate, right?

00:09:54.460 So when you say, well, how can people be foolish enough to stupid enough, let's say, to buy these ideas?

00:09:59.740 The answer is, well, you know, if you're not that bright and someone hands you a one-size-fits-all

00:10:05.320 and explains-everything explanation, it's all power.

00:10:08.840 Well, then, first of all, that's very attractive because it's simple,

00:10:11.880 but also you don't have the critical faculties to think it through.

00:10:15.020 The next best predictor was being female.

00:10:17.260 The next best predictor was having a female temperament, over and above being female.

00:10:23.220 And since then, there's been accruing studies,

00:10:26.420 and the most terrifying of which was published in the last year,

00:10:30.700 showing that you can predict left-wing authoritarian beliefs using dark tetrad personality traits.

00:10:39.100 Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism,

00:10:43.460 and they had to add sadism to it because the first three weren't enough.

00:10:47.660 And the correlation between those traits and that left-wing authoritarianism is so high

00:10:52.380 that they're almost indistinguishable on the measurement front.

00:10:55.920 So this isn't a political issue.

00:10:57.780 This is an attempt by narcissistic psychopaths to use compassion to mask their all-out grip on power.

00:11:06.500 It's really what it is.

00:11:07.860 And they're enabled by social media.

00:11:10.920 It's really not good.

00:11:12.320 Yeah. So when I went to Ireland a couple of weeks ago,

00:11:15.520 and I addressed a meeting called the Shannath, the Senate, the Upper House,

00:11:19.140 and about four or five senators came and various journalists and so on.

00:11:22.420 And one of the senators who came, a woman called Eileen Flynn,

00:11:25.280 she had to leave halfway through, but she was there afterwards.

00:11:27.580 And she talked to me and she said,

00:11:29.140 I haven't read your book, but I've heard that, you know, it's well-written and I must have a look at it.

00:11:33.220 And then she went into the session of the Shannath that evening

00:11:36.880 and said that she'd had to walk out

00:11:39.060 because so much hate was being spewed in this meeting.

00:11:42.440 It was me and a barrister, an Irish barrister and an Irish woman who is doing a lot of campaigning,

00:11:47.960 John Nesbitt and Lorcan Price.

00:11:49.620 And so I don't know which bit she thought was so hateful,

00:11:52.100 but I did take the opportunity to say,

00:11:54.740 I'm going to say some things that I think are now going to be criminalised.

00:11:58.100 For example, that there are only two sexes and that you can't change sex.

00:12:01.600 So I thought it was extraordinary that somebody would then straight away afterwards

00:12:05.560 in a meeting that was dominated by the justice minister, Helen McEntee,

00:12:09.400 saying, we are not going to criminalise saying these things.

00:12:13.400 That this woman then stood up and said,

00:12:14.900 I was at a meeting where somebody said these things

00:12:16.740 and I felt I had to leave because there was so much hate.

00:12:19.620 Like it kind of gives it away, doesn't it?

00:12:22.480 And then, you know, there's been remarkably little commentary,

00:12:25.520 remarkably little commentary in Ireland.

00:12:27.160 The Irish Times, they've only done an op-ed on it.

00:12:29.420 And this op-ed was great law.

00:12:32.140 You could just add a definition of hate and that would make it perfect.

00:12:36.040 It's like, what are these people on?

00:12:37.980 Why would journalists stand up for free speech?

00:12:40.580 I mean, that used to be the sine qua non of the profession.

00:12:46.560 It really used to be like, but this was actually written by an academic, this op-ed,

00:12:49.900 but it was pathetic.

00:12:50.720 It was absolutely pathetic.

00:12:52.100 And he came to this meeting and, you know, just sat there and listened to me saying,

00:12:57.200 look, these are the things that I will be reported for.

00:12:59.860 And by the way, this is unconstitutional.

00:13:01.980 Why shouldn't a viewer of this program,

00:13:05.760 I mean, we know I'm already beyond redemption,

00:13:08.480 so there's no sense focusing on me.

00:13:10.340 But why should someone who's watching or listening to this video not assume that you are precisely the sort of hateful,

00:13:17.540 you know, bigot that these well-meaning people in Ireland are only trying to protect the oppressed from?

00:13:24.600 You know, like, and I might as well push you because we might as well establish this.

00:13:29.300 It's like, what makes your position on this credible?

00:13:32.780 And, like, why aren't you the sort of person who could be criticized by the leftists in the following manner?

00:13:40.060 It's like, well, you're white.

00:13:41.400 You're privileged.

00:13:43.160 You've got a posh accent, although I wouldn't know that because every accent, British accent, sounds posh to, like, what would you call it?

00:13:50.740 To Irish people, I sound really posh.

00:13:53.340 Yes, exactly, exactly.

00:13:55.220 Because I've picked up a lot of English.

00:13:58.100 You're using your freedom of speech, which really doesn't exist,

00:14:01.500 just to buttress your position in the power hierarchy,

00:14:03.780 and you don't mind tromping around oppressing people,

00:14:06.020 especially those who are truly on the margin,

00:14:08.680 like those confused about their sexual identity or, even worse, trapped in the wrong body.

00:14:13.900 And so why aren't you exactly the sort of hateful bigot whose views should be suppressed,

00:14:19.800 given your penchant for what the UN now calls symbolic violence?

00:14:26.720 I mean, it's a great question because that's, I mean, you've perfectly laid out their argument for doing it,

00:14:33.020 that there are people who are oppressed or who are minoritized in the jargon,

00:14:39.180 and that if we allow people to say what they like about those people, then those people will be harmed.

00:14:44.500 So, I mean, basically, I'm never interviewed in Ireland and mentioned, I mean, I am Irish.

00:14:48.600 I'm from Dublin, although I know I sound quite English.

00:14:50.580 I've lived in England for a long time.

00:14:52.700 And normally, Irish girl goes abroad, writes book that does well, gets on, you know, Sunday Times bestseller list.

00:14:58.420 They interview you, like in Ireland, like you're a big cheese then.

00:15:01.440 So it's really strange that I haven't been on the national broadcast or in the Irish Times.

00:15:05.280 Anyway, I got invited on a community radio station last week,

00:15:08.580 and the interviewer said to me, you know, we've got a lot of immigration now.

00:15:12.480 We've really large amounts of numbers of people coming from Ukraine, you know, from the Middle East.

00:15:18.860 You know, Ireland is still open to immigration from all over the EU, and there's a lot of tensions.

00:15:23.240 So isn't it really important that we stop people from being insulting about these people?

00:15:30.060 And, you know, I've just lived through Brexit, and I've seen what happens when you stop people from saying what they think about political developments for a significant amount of time.

00:15:38.160 And it isn't that they come around to being right thinkers, according to the people who are stopping them.

00:15:43.200 It's that it builds up and then it breaks out.

00:15:45.940 So I actually think it's even more important that Irish people are allowed to say what they think about large amounts of immigration.

00:15:51.920 I mean, it's a blimmin' democracy for a start, but also you need to be able to say what you think in order that the country can stay together,

00:15:58.820 rather than have people feeling resentful and silenced and then taking it out by voting for people who I genuinely would think are extreme.

00:16:06.840 So that's one argument.

00:16:08.400 Well, you also need to let people say what they—first of all, you need to let people say what they think so they can think,

00:16:18.460 because most people think by talking, and all of us think by listening,

00:16:24.160 because then we get exposed to what other people think and have more than one brain to rely on.

00:16:29.380 And so it isn't that free speech is just another hedonic right.

00:16:33.240 It's actually the process by which we transform our adaptation and renew the state.

00:16:39.020 And so it's actually the linchpin of any healthy psyche and polity.

00:16:42.640 So it's not merely a matter of, you know, people having, well, what would you say,

00:16:48.220 the right to go to hell in whatever handbasket they choose and to mouth off.

00:16:51.840 But it's also the case, you know, that you want everyone to be allowed to speak freely

00:16:57.520 so you can see what the hell they're up to.

00:16:59.740 Because if you drive, let's say, people whose views are somewhat warped underground,

00:17:05.120 all that happens is that those views fester and spread and deteriorate into a bitter kind of resentment

00:17:11.620 and then explode into violence, which is what the bloody leftist radicals want anyways,

00:17:16.620 because they thrive in that environment.

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00:18:54.580 Yeah, and you also, it shows a profound lack of confidence in your own ability to state your case.

00:19:04.500 You know, if the Irish government is so sure that the levels of immigration are right, and listen, I'm not taking a position on that.

00:19:10.360 I don't tend to comment on things that are outside my area of expertise.

00:19:14.020 I really don't know whether what they're doing is the right policy.

00:19:17.660 But they should be able to defend it.

00:19:19.220 They should be able to tell voters, this is why we're doing it.

00:19:21.440 This is why we think it's good.

00:19:22.840 These are the things we weighed up against each other.

00:19:24.760 These are the downsides.

00:19:25.780 These are why we think the upsides are more important.

00:19:27.880 If they can't do that, it shouldn't be their policy.

00:19:31.080 And so, yeah, the thinking aloud thing is very important.

00:19:33.260 Like when you think aloud, like when thinking is aloud, you have to think aloud.

00:19:37.080 Like I can't just do it by writing.

00:19:39.580 I have to have discussions with people.

00:19:41.420 And then what I said when I talked to the senators was that there's a bunch of things that I very urgently need to say, especially in Ireland, where gender self-ID has been the law since 2015, and where we're seeing extraordinary capture of education.

00:19:57.520 So the children are really going from having been brought up in quite a small C conservative system where, you know, change was slow.

00:20:03.520 Like when I was smaller, we looked at England and saw, oh, they're bringing in, you know, radical changes to the way they teach.

00:20:08.540 And we didn't do that in Ireland.

00:20:09.500 We just went slower and we were very much better for it.

00:20:12.220 But now in Ireland, they're teaching children like the most radical version of gender ideology.

00:20:17.480 You know, real full-blown sexist spectrum.

00:20:20.440 You know, it's bigotry to say there are boys and girls type stuff.

00:20:23.400 And they're thinking of making that much more the case.

00:20:26.600 And that's what we know causes gender dysphoria.

00:20:29.220 We know it makes children distressed.

00:20:31.240 We know that it leads them to transition.

00:20:32.780 And we know that if they medically transition young, they will be medicalised for life.

00:20:37.960 They will be sterile.

00:20:39.800 You know, they will have their sexuality destroyed and orgasmic.

00:20:44.520 You know, these are incredibly important things to say because actually we're looking at an unfolding medical scandal.

00:20:49.640 So I say these things not to be hurtful.

00:20:52.580 You know, enforced sterilisation, by the way, is a crime against humanity by the definition.

00:20:58.460 Right.

00:20:58.760 And that's where I think we're at, you know.

00:21:00.680 And I wrote a Telegraph article about this about eight months ago, something like that, calling for the imprisonment of the butchers who are performing this surgery.

00:21:09.680 But I fail to see altogether how this doesn't qualify as a crime against humanity.

00:21:14.160 Because if it's minors who are being subjected to this, I cannot in the least see how it is that that isn't being enforced.

00:21:22.740 Because if you're a minor, you are under the dominion of your idiot lying therapists, all of whom who, if qualified, know that every single bit of the gender-affirming nonsense is not only a lie, but a truly unethical lie.

00:21:37.240 You know, as a psychologist, you are duty-bound by the ethical codes of your profession not to rely on simple self-report as a diagnostic marker.

00:21:48.400 You are bound to use multiple measures to specify diagnosis.

00:21:52.780 And you can be called for professional misconduct if you don't do so.

00:21:56.140 And the American Psychological Association has not rescinded those guidelines and simultaneously now insists that you have to abide by self-description.

00:22:04.860 Now, obviously, you can't do that because an anorexic is going to describe herself as too thin.

00:22:10.500 And how the hell you're supposed to make the distinction between an invalid claim of self-identity and a valid claim of self-identity?

00:22:18.160 Well, the answer to that from the radicals is see you in court, buddy, and make sure you don't fall prey of our idiot regulations.

00:22:25.860 Idiot, internally inconsistent, reprehensible, and self-aggrandizing regulations.

00:22:31.560 Yeah, to call it sickening is barely to enter the fray.

00:22:36.320 And it's also linguistic.

00:22:38.260 I think, you know, it's not by coincidence that the sane people want to push self-ID and want to police people's speech.

00:22:46.180 Because when you look at what it means to identify as something, it is a linguistic thing.

00:22:51.040 Like, they've stripped out even the things that the old-style transsexuals would have done, which involved surgery or, you know, dress clothing when we had more rules about how people dressed.

00:23:01.900 There's nothing left now except the simple statement that you are a member of the opposite sex.

00:23:06.600 And it's regarded as gender policing if you say it should be anything more than that.

00:23:09.780 So, if a person is able to say, I am a man, I am non-binary, and that brings that state into being, you know, just by the linguistic utterance, it's essential to shut up everybody else.

00:23:20.860 Because when they speak, they create a reality.

00:23:24.040 Like, if you're in this place where words create reality.

00:23:27.140 And it's like a parasite that's come in and taken over an older idea of what human rights are about, which is more about coexistence and rights can collide.

00:23:39.400 And sometimes, you know, one person's right to privacy impacts on another person's right to speech.

00:23:44.220 And we have to think about it and weigh them up and everybody try and work out what the best way forward is.

00:23:49.400 But this has snuck in because there is no way of comparing, you know, my right to say, I am immortal, I am an animal, you know, I am a man, with somebody else's right to say, well, that's not what I see.

00:24:03.360 And that's not the sort of species that humans are.

00:24:05.800 And those claims are not the sort of claims that have any evidence behind them.

00:24:09.020 You know, the things are incommensurate.

00:24:10.740 And one side just has to shut the other up.

00:24:12.860 Carl Jung, back in just after the Second World War, I think, said that the logical conclusion of the Protestant Revolution would be that everyone was their own church.

00:24:25.860 And we see this abetted by the humanists, I would say, particularly on the psychological side, that the self, the self-determining self now is the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent onlooker.

00:24:38.440 And the trans activist types, the ones who proclaim self-identity, say exactly the same thing to everyone that God said to Moses, which is, I am that I am, right?

00:24:49.620 I'm the thing that defines itself.

00:24:51.600 And so we're seeing a quasi, we're seeing a religious transformation with the elevation of the self to the highest position.

00:24:59.220 And then this accompanying insistence that you pointed out that no one is allowed to challenge that because, of course, that's a challenge to this central spirit of predominance.

00:25:13.320 That's exactly what it is.

00:25:14.440 You know, and what's appalling about this from a psychological perspective, and this is also why I'm appalled at the infinite legions of cowardly therapists, especially psychologists who are betting this,

00:25:25.980 is that every bloody psychologist worth his salt knows that at the transition from the age of two to the age of three,

00:25:34.940 you move from subjective self-identification, which is like the rampaging two-year-old's proclamation that what he or she wants right now is what's going to happen or else,

00:25:46.040 to this state of negotiated identity, which is the state of play, where if you want to make a friend, you have to decide to meet in the reciprocal middle.

00:25:57.980 And children who are incapable of that become alienated and miserable for the rest of their life and tend to drift off into antisocial behavior and its accompanying tantrums.

00:26:07.420 And all the lying psychologists who are abetting this self-identification frenzy are foregoing their elementary knowledge of developmental psychology

00:26:17.600 and insisting that subjective self-identification is actually what an appropriate social tactic and as well as an unerring diagnostic marker.

00:26:30.620 I'm so embarrassed for my profession.

00:26:32.760 The only thing that could possibly be worse for me as far as I'm concerned in terms of shame is being a former faculty member or potentially a member of the surgical college.

00:26:42.800 Because, you know, the therapists are lying, but the sadistic surgeons are butchering and, you know, that's actually even worse.

00:26:50.040 And by the way, among surgeons, psychopaths and sadists are overrepresented.

00:26:56.740 That's a nice little fact just to throw into the fray.

00:26:59.660 And, you know, it doesn't take a genius to figure that out because if you tend to be particularly empathetic, let's say,

00:27:05.640 you're going to end up as a family doctor or a psychiatrist, not as someone who, you know, is willing to draw blood.

00:27:14.320 And I'm certainly not saying that every surgeon falls into that category, but I'm saying that if you do fall into that category,

00:27:20.540 surgery beckons just the same way being a Boy Scout leader beckons to the pedophiles.

00:27:26.280 Yes, yes.

00:27:27.200 And the other thing that happens in the medical front is that there's like a distributed chain of responsibility.

00:27:33.420 And when everybody's responsible, nobody's responsible.

00:27:36.420 Like, you know, in comes a kid who's unhappy and the gender, the GP, the family doctor, that person doesn't sterilize this kid.

00:27:44.040 They just refer.

00:27:45.160 And the gender clinic looks and they diagnose gender dysphoria, but they don't sterilize.

00:27:49.220 They refer to an endocrinologist.

00:27:50.960 Well, the endocrinologist doesn't create the definition of gender dysphoria.

00:27:54.680 You know, the endocrinologist just checks that, you know, you haven't got diabetes and your weight is at a normal level or whatever.

00:28:00.060 And they prescribe you maybe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

00:28:03.660 But, you know, they didn't diagnose you.

00:28:05.080 They were told that you were the right person for this.

00:28:07.280 And then they refer to a surgeon.

00:28:09.120 And the surgeon is at the end of that chain.

00:28:11.140 And, you know, I agree with you.

00:28:12.820 Anyone who cuts off a child's genitals or cuts off the genitals of somebody who was gender distressed, you know, during their childhood and has now arrived at adulthood,

00:28:20.820 that person is doing a really, truly terrible thing.

00:28:23.380 The only thing that I can see that there's any mitigation is they didn't make that decision.

00:28:28.580 There were at least three or four other people before them who are meant to have said that this is the right child.

00:28:33.280 So nobody sterilized the child, but now the child is sterile.

00:28:36.620 You've put your finger on the underground rationale for the collectivization of responsibility.

00:28:42.420 Because if you distribute it, and this is a well-known social psychological phenomena,

00:28:46.780 if you distribute responsibility in that fashion, everybody steps away from the plate.

00:28:51.040 And so if you're particularly manipulative, you figure that out and you can use it to further your own dark agenda.

00:28:57.100 Now, you did a pretty good job of defending free speech, I would say, when I pushed you on the question.

00:29:01.760 But I don't think you did a very good job of defending yourself as a credible, say, commentator.

00:29:08.960 So why don't you just walk people through a little bit about your history and why it is that you shouldn't be regarded as,

00:29:16.440 what would we say, a right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-oppressed person bigot?

00:29:22.240 I mean, I'd take two parts to that.

00:29:24.200 And one is that I think that we jump too easily to saying this person's speech is suspect because they're right-wing or they're religious.

00:29:32.380 Now, obviously, there's far-right and there's crank-religious, but loads of people are right-wing and loads of people are religious,

00:29:40.040 and they've every bit as much right to say what they think as other people do.

00:29:44.020 So I'm not willing to just answer as saying that, as it happens, I'm not right-wing.

00:29:47.900 I'm not.

00:29:48.360 I'm pretty centrist.

00:29:49.420 I'm also not religious.

00:29:50.760 Those things are true.

00:29:52.640 But I don't think that somebody who's sitting here in front of you is saying, you know,

00:29:55.740 I'm right-wing and I'm evangelical and this is what I think.

00:29:58.240 They've got every bit as much right as I do to speak.

00:30:00.440 So that's the first thing.

00:30:01.380 But the second thing is, I'm just a very establishment person who's saying a very ordinary thing.

00:30:07.760 You know, I'm saying what most parents would say, which is that children don't know their own minds

00:30:13.220 and need to be protected by the people who know and love them until they're adults.

00:30:16.900 And sometimes that will involve saying to the child, no, I don't agree with you.

00:30:20.720 I think you've got to wait.

00:30:21.840 I think you've got the wrong end of the stick.

00:30:23.560 I think that you're being over-influenced by your friends.

00:30:26.280 I mean, my mother would have said, if everyone else is going to run off the cliff, are you going to run off the cliff?

00:30:30.300 Like, no, no, no, no.

00:30:31.760 You protect your children.

00:30:33.180 You wait.

00:30:33.960 Most people feel like that.

00:30:35.180 And then also the things that I'm saying, like, God, I could have so much more out there opinions than that there are two sexes and that you can't change sex.

00:30:44.560 And that in some circumstances you have to pay attention to what sex people are when you make decisions about your own life.

00:30:51.220 Like when I go into a space that's meant to be female only and there's a male person in there, this impacts on me.

00:30:56.400 It doesn't just impact on him.

00:30:57.740 It impacts on me, too.

00:30:58.380 And what is the impact exactly?

00:31:00.520 I mean, this is a relatively difficult thing for men to understand, obviously.

00:31:04.400 I mean, if I went into a change room and there was a woman there, you know, I'd wonder what the hell she was doing there.

00:31:10.620 And there'd be a certain degree of perplexity.

00:31:15.140 I'd probably ask her what the hell she was doing there.

00:31:17.600 That'd be my guess.

00:31:18.680 But I wouldn't care, you know.

00:31:20.560 But you might be embarrassed.

00:31:22.400 You might be embarrassed.

00:31:23.300 Well, I wouldn't be because look at me, after all.

00:31:25.980 Yeah, but suppose, like one of the things that women don't remember about these sorts of situations is lots of men are genuinely worried about being put in a situation where there might be false allegations made against them, in fact.

00:31:37.960 Oh, yes.

00:31:38.500 Well, that's definitely.

00:31:39.860 Well, look, on that front, you know, before I left the University of Toronto, my colleagues were advising me that if I ever had an undergraduate female in my office, or a female of any sort, for that matter, that I was to keep my door open.

00:31:52.160 That that was the best thing to protect me.

00:31:54.620 Yeah, well, I think that's a very reasonable thing to do.

00:31:57.360 Well, I mean, that might be just a reasonable thing to do.

00:31:59.720 No, but in the situation, in the situation where we are, you know.

00:32:02.640 But the same girl, if she says she's a boy and she comes into the changing room with the men and she strips off because she's a boy, because there are people that deluded.

00:32:11.460 Like, everybody else is in an impossible position.

00:32:13.980 Like, either you're meant to pretend that this girl is a boy, or you're being put in the position of being a voyeur.

00:32:19.140 Like, it's just bizarre.

00:32:20.960 So, I mean, funnily enough, and I want to reclaim this word, which is intersectional.

00:32:25.840 Like, obviously, intersectional is one of those words that's like a big klaxon alert idiotic thing is about to be said.

00:32:31.380 But the idea of saying intersectional in the first place was that you would try to think about lots of different sorts of people.

00:32:37.540 So now think about an Orthodox Jewish person, an observant Muslim person, a woman who's a survivor of rape or child abuse, a very shy person, somebody who's had the experience of having unjust allegations made against them.

00:32:53.080 Like, there's just a lot of different sorts of people who have, also have rights, also have interests, and on occasion will want to be in a single-sex space when they're vulnerable, when they're sleeping, when they're undressed, when they want to talk about experiences that are specific to one sex or the other.

00:33:09.020 You know, if you've got a group in a rape crisis center where people are talking about their experiences of childhood abuse, those experiences are very different for boys and girls.

00:33:18.280 You will probably want to have single-sex groups.

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00:34:26.680 So under what circumstances do you think that same-sex gatherings, let's say, should be permitted or required?

00:34:41.640 Because this is actually a very tricky issue, right?

00:34:43.840 Because my wife and I have talked about this a lot, and she's actually a little harsher on this front than me,

00:34:48.820 and she thinks that women invaded men's spaces so badly that this is part of the backlash.

00:34:54.640 But underneath that, there's a real complexity, right?

00:34:58.300 Because I might say, well, is it okay for rich men in London to have a men's-only private club?

00:35:06.000 Because that's a good question, right?

00:35:08.020 That's a border issue here.

00:35:09.980 And it begs a more sophisticated question, bearing on what you described, which is, all right,

00:35:17.440 when is it necessary for the sexes to have their own spaces?

00:35:21.620 And what are your thoughts about that?

00:35:23.240 Like, where should we draw the line?

00:35:25.720 Because part of this argument, culture war, is about where we draw the eternal line.

00:35:30.780 Bathrooms seem, at least until recently, as an unquestionable bastion of same-sex privacy.

00:35:39.740 But we've obviously blown way past that and made it almost mandatory for that to disappear.

00:35:45.840 Change rooms as well.

00:35:46.900 You know, Riley Gaines, the swimmer, was thrown with all of her compatriots into a change room,

00:35:52.600 which the bloody NCAA deemed unisex moments before the swim meet in question.

00:36:00.380 They were thrown in there with this six-foot-two narcissist who claims to be a woman,

00:36:05.000 and then were pilloried by the officials and then the university that they came from for being

00:36:12.200 prejudiced against poor William.

00:36:14.900 And it's William, by the way, not Leah, because I'm done with that nonsense.

00:36:19.420 So where do we draw the line as far as you're concerned?

00:36:22.680 I mean, when should the sexes have their own space?

00:36:26.200 So freedom of association is an important right.

00:36:29.000 And if people want single-sex spaces, like if somebody wants to set up a man-only book group

00:36:33.040 or a woman-only book group, I don't think they should have to explain themselves.

00:36:37.480 I can see the issue with, you know, dining clubs and so on, where a lot of politics happens

00:36:42.340 and where a lot of power play happens and so on.

00:36:44.500 If you keep women out of those spaces or you were to keep black people out of those spaces,

00:36:48.020 you would be hoarding power.

00:36:49.440 And I genuinely think that's a difficult question in law, because it's hard to say of one space,

00:36:55.340 you know, that's where the backroom brokering happens.

00:36:57.400 And of another space, well, you know, that's harmless.

00:36:59.480 That's just people who have interests in common.

00:37:02.440 And then when it comes to spaces like toilets, I mean, it's amazing how fast people forget things.

00:37:09.200 But when women started to do factory work during the Industrial Revolution, there were no single-sex

00:37:13.660 toilets.

00:37:14.440 So women had to use the same facilities that men did, which were not exactly sanitary or nice or private.

00:37:18.760 And those became spaces where women experienced a lot of violence, a lot of sexual violence.

00:37:23.720 So women, factory girls, would go to the toilet in groups and protect each other and watch each

00:37:28.180 other, or indeed go out on the street and just rely on the fact that they had big skirts.

00:37:31.480 So that's why women go to the toilet in groups.

00:37:34.100 Of course, that's why.

00:37:35.340 Because, sure, that's why.

00:37:36.620 Because it's a protective strategy.

00:37:37.040 In decent ones.

00:37:38.500 But in decent separate toilets, no, you just go to gossip.

00:37:41.900 But yeah, women would not drink water during the day, so they didn't have to go to the toilet.

00:37:45.140 So there was actually a decades-long fight to get women's toilets and women's facilities.

00:37:51.100 And in most countries, labour laws will still say that you must have women's toilets in workplaces

00:37:56.880 where there are women.

00:37:58.580 And then in sport, it's obvious why you separate the sexes.

00:38:01.580 But actually, you can separate the sexes a little bit differently in sport.

00:38:04.420 You can do it as female-only and open.

00:38:07.340 Because if a woman is, you know, unusually large or strong or something, and she can

00:38:12.480 compete maybe at the lower ranks of the men's divisions, why shouldn't she?

00:38:16.640 It's not a problem for anyone.

00:38:18.100 So you just, you close, you protect one category.

00:38:20.520 It's the same as, you know, a 17-year-old.

00:38:23.000 It's a problem for men.

00:38:24.420 I remember when I was a kid, so there was this girl who fell into the category that you

00:38:30.700 just described, you know, she was a pretty husky, tough farm girl.

00:38:37.320 And she was genuinely tough.

00:38:38.840 Like, there were definitely boys that were afraid of her.

00:38:42.060 And I would say that was all boys.

00:38:43.800 And there was a reason for that.

00:38:45.080 The first was, well, she was actually pretty tough.

00:38:48.000 And so if you were playing shinny hockey on the street and she gave you a check, you pretty

00:38:51.920 much noticed.

00:38:52.600 But there was an additional complication, which was, if she took you out, well, then you

00:38:59.140 were pretty damn pathetic because you'd been flattened by a girl.

00:39:02.320 But if you fought back, you were even more pathetic because then you fought back with

00:39:07.020 a girl.

00:39:07.500 And so, you know, you might promote the open category, but that puts men in a terrible conundrum

00:39:12.680 because there's a real rule for good men.

00:39:16.280 There's a real rule.

00:39:17.560 And the real rule is do not pick on women.

00:39:20.920 Like, that's number one rule of good men, right?

00:39:23.900 And under any circumstances whatsoever, at the cost of your reputation.

00:39:29.500 And so in anything that's got physical violence involved in it of any sort, that would include

00:39:35.280 rugby, say, or American football and that, you can't have the sexist compete because

00:39:38.760 it's not just about strength.

00:39:40.280 It's about things like the way the neck is made, the thickness of the skull.

00:39:44.980 You know, women are really not evolved to protect themselves against punches the same

00:39:49.140 way that men are.

00:39:50.300 But in sport more generally, so I actually come from a very sporty family.

00:39:53.920 I have a bunch of very good cricketers as brothers and sisters.

00:39:56.940 And my sisters would play on the boys' team when they were little because there weren't

00:40:01.200 girls' teams.

00:40:02.280 So the girls had to jump from 11 to 15 and there was no under-13s.

00:40:07.300 And I mean, when they were 11, they were teeny tiny.

00:40:09.120 They couldn't be playing with the 15-year-olds.

00:40:10.660 So they went on to the boys' under-13s.

00:40:12.680 And the thing is, the boys then did complain.

00:40:15.140 This is a good long time ago.

00:40:16.220 They complained because my sisters were so good.

00:40:18.940 And indeed, the girls were taken off.

00:40:20.800 But I mean, this is cricket.

00:40:21.680 There's no genuine complaint there.

00:40:23.560 It's just not wanting to lose.

00:40:25.560 So I think, you know, you can conceptualize it in like 90-something percent of the cases

00:40:29.820 that the female category is like the under-18 category.

00:40:33.400 A 17-year-old is allowed to compete as an adult.

00:40:36.040 A 19-year-old is not allowed to compete as an under-18.

00:40:38.320 Right, yeah.

00:40:38.940 Well, it seems like a tentative solution, at least.

00:40:41.660 On the freedom of association front, so what if I said something, you know, rather radical

00:40:46.280 like, well, let the bigoted halfwits hang out with whoever the hell they want.

00:40:50.160 And so if people want to set up a man's-only corporation, for example, well, have at her.

00:40:54.920 I mean, you've just cut yourself off from 50% of the talent pool, which probably isn't

00:41:00.400 the wisest move in the world.

00:41:01.660 And maybe even if you want to do that with prejudice in mind on the racial front, you should

00:41:07.720 be allowed to do that too, in the hopes that such behavior would be immediately revealed

00:41:12.000 as self-defeating and eradicate itself from the public commons.

00:41:15.840 Because the alternative, that's the freedom of association argument in some sense, right?

00:41:20.820 You get to hang around with whoever you want.

00:41:22.900 And the ultimate expression of that, by the way, is sexual congress, right?

00:41:26.520 Because the most discriminating form of behavior that any of us ever indulge in is on the sexual

00:41:33.380 front, where we discriminate madly on every grounds you can possibly imagine, constantly

00:41:39.260 and in principle to our own advantage, with no care whatsoever for the disadvantaged and

00:41:44.860 oppressed, right?

00:41:45.780 And we regard that as a cardinal right.

00:41:48.500 I don't have to sleep with anyone I don't want to or don't want to.

00:41:52.420 It isn't even need.

00:41:53.700 You know, in Huxley's Brave New World, that went by the wayside.

00:41:56.800 And it was a sign of immorality to say no to anyone who offered a sexual invitation.

00:42:04.140 Oh, well, we're heading that direction.

00:42:05.440 I mean, there's even a book called The Right to Sex.

00:42:07.400 I mean, there are arguments now about how, say, an ugly or a fat or a disabled or an elderly

00:42:12.860 or a poor man, you know, he's not going to get anyone to sleep with without paying.

00:42:16.900 So we have to have prostitutes for those men.

00:42:19.220 And well, what if he's poor?

00:42:20.500 Well, then the state has to pay for them.

00:42:21.760 I mean, these arguments are seriously being made in some corners of academia.

00:42:24.680 And it's easy to brush them off because it's corners of academia.

00:42:27.960 But we have seen what happens when you take casually absolutely crazy ideas.

00:42:33.460 Women should just be required to make themselves available at a moment's notice to everyone who,

00:42:38.420 you know, this is the least bit of interest.

00:42:42.040 Yeah, it's the end.

00:42:42.980 I think a partial answer to what you're asking might be to think along the lines of Adam Smith,

00:42:48.040 who saw two different spheres.

00:42:50.960 And in The Wealth of Nations, he talked about the invisible hand, which governs the market.

00:42:57.060 But then he also talked about theory of moral sentiments, which was the realms where the

00:43:01.480 market didn't go.

00:43:02.700 And at the time, that was larger than now, because it included the formation of families.

00:43:07.800 And now with dating apps, you can apply economic arguments to how people make decisions on dating

00:43:13.200 apps.

00:43:13.460 Like, it's a lot more marketized than it was.

00:43:15.560 But there is a realm where the market does not go.

00:43:19.980 And traditionally, we have thought that everything that happens behind your front door is that.

00:43:24.820 Right, right, right.

00:43:25.420 You know, you don't do care.

00:43:27.440 Yeah, but also with care.

00:43:29.120 Like, the reason that a child cares for their aging parents isn't because the parents cared

00:43:33.420 for them when they were small.

00:43:34.480 It's not a market exchange.

00:43:35.460 But of course, the market is coming in there.

00:43:38.480 It's coming into child care.

00:43:39.640 It's coming into elderly care.

00:43:41.880 And as soon as you do that, the government has opinions about how it's done.

00:43:46.140 Like, if the government is providing any of the care, well, the taxpayer has opinions

00:43:49.560 on whether you're a good enough carer or not.

00:43:51.700 So I think we're in a state of flux where we're marketizing a bunch of things that used

00:43:56.060 to live in the theory of moral sentiments realm.

00:43:59.240 And that is part of what we are seeing happening.

00:44:02.080 And I think it's part of the answer to your question.

00:44:04.080 You know, if something is freedom of association, it's in the non-marketized part.

00:44:08.360 But if what you're talking about is, say, how an entirely government-funded operation

00:44:14.320 like the BBC hires, I think that's in the public domain.

00:44:18.320 And that might be somewhere that you would have rules that say, this isn't about freedom

00:44:21.320 of association.

00:44:22.200 This is about transparency, that you are, you know, doing things in a fair and open way.

00:44:26.280 You're advertising all your jobs, you know, that sort of thing.

00:44:28.940 But inside your house and certainly inside the bedroom and when it comes to care, those aren't

00:44:33.480 the rules that we play.

00:44:34.160 Yeah, well, the market exchange, the direct market exchange argument's an interesting

00:44:39.900 one.

00:44:40.260 So if there's direct exchange of money for service, let's say, or goods, then the standard

00:44:48.120 non-prejudicial rules should apply.

00:44:50.880 And otherwise, it's in the private domain and you can go to hell in a handbasket in whatever

00:44:54.400 manner you choose.

00:44:55.940 But the example that you give of, you know, rich men, you know, having a club that's only

00:45:00.100 for rich men, when we all know that is where the next candidates are going to be chosen

00:45:03.680 for election and it is where, you know, quiet words will be had about who's to be the next

00:45:07.800 governor general of the BBC or whatever.

00:45:09.900 Like, that's the genuinely difficult, the edge case.

00:45:12.200 Is that theory of moral sentiments or is that wealth of nations?

00:45:15.840 And I don't have a strong, I don't have a guiding principle to say where exactly that

00:45:20.760 border lies, just to say that those are difficult questions.

00:45:23.120 But the question of whether you want to undress in front of somebody is not difficult in the

00:45:28.980 same way.

00:45:29.880 Like, women do not have single-sex changing rooms in order that we stitch up the world

00:45:33.860 inside that changing room behind that closed door.

00:45:36.500 That is not why we have it.

00:45:37.760 We have it because nearly all-

00:45:39.180 I know you're conspiring away behind those doors.

00:45:42.320 They talk about it as privilege.

00:45:44.140 Like, I've seen white women described as the equivalent of the white women who would have

00:45:48.220 kept black women out when these white women are saying, I'm just keeping men out.

00:45:53.120 Like, that's what America, that's the standard argument in America, that women arguing for

00:45:56.760 single-sex toilets and changing rooms are like the bigoted women during Jim Crow who

00:46:02.160 would have kept black women out.

00:46:03.980 Whereas, you know, I don't think women's desire to keep men out of private spaces has

00:46:08.220 anything in common with white people's desire under Jim Crow to keep black people out.

00:46:12.640 It's safety, it's privacy, it's dignity.

00:46:15.760 But, I mean, they will make these arguments explicitly.

00:46:18.140 They will literally compare you to racists.

00:46:20.120 So, I think, I mean, the obvious ones for women are privacy, safety, dignity, consent.

00:46:28.260 Like, we used to think that consent was a thing.

00:46:30.600 I thought we thought that until about a half a second ago.

00:46:32.900 And a woman who says, you know, I only consent to having, say, a hysteroscopy,

00:46:37.580 which is an operation that does require you to undress from the waist down and does require,

00:46:41.860 you know, more than one person sticking things up you.

00:46:44.000 And it's, you know, pretty undignified and painful.

00:46:45.920 A woman who says, I will only undergo this with other women is making a statement about

00:46:50.760 her bodily autonomy and integrity.

00:46:52.840 And a man who says, well, I'm a woman and therefore I'm entitled to do this is a man

00:46:57.480 who's overstepping consent in an incredibly rapey way.

00:47:00.860 So, it's amazing to me that that man is something that's going to be...

00:47:02.760 Oh, that'll definitely get us kicked off YouTube's now you've gone and done it.

00:47:06.660 Yeah, well, I think you're just going to have to put your videos up somewhere else now,

00:47:10.000 aren't you?

00:47:10.280 Yeah, well, luckily, that is a possibility with Twitter and with Spotify.

00:47:15.760 And so, so far, you know, there are, although YouTube, the problem with YouTube is it's

00:47:19.880 the market monster.

00:47:21.080 And if it kills us, they're really trying to kill me.

00:47:23.760 I think they're probably the plan of the radicals who are pushing this is probably to see if

00:47:28.140 they can take me out.

00:47:29.400 And they're definitely doing that with everybody who's involved on the Daily Wire front.

00:47:33.380 I mean, it's to make you an object lesson.

00:47:35.800 It's so that other people just don't even go there.

00:47:37.780 It's the same with J.K. Rowling.

00:47:38.880 Like, you know, she's big enough to defend herself, and she has done brilliantly.

00:47:43.520 Yeah, so far.

00:47:44.720 Yeah.

00:47:45.100 So, no, I think she will really be able to do it because she has, she's like the Beatles

00:47:48.980 equivalent of bigger than God, you know?

00:47:51.520 Like, she is the author.

00:47:53.620 Yeah, well, there are ways of taking people out that aren't verbal, you know, that are

00:47:58.620 pretty damn final.

00:48:00.080 Yes.

00:48:00.340 Yeah, well.

00:48:00.940 But even if we just look at the verbal thing, what they're doing is they're making it so

00:48:04.560 incredibly painful and difficult for her and taking up all her time.

00:48:08.880 That anybody who is not at the J.K. Rowling level thinks, I can't do this.

00:48:12.820 Which is everyone, which is everyone else in the world.

00:48:15.180 Exactly.

00:48:15.580 Including even, even the Queen of England, let's say.

00:48:18.020 Exactly.

00:48:18.400 I know it's a king now.

00:48:19.760 Yeah, so it's to, it's to make everybody else think this, you know, just don't go there.

00:48:24.780 Like, I said, I'm always here.

00:48:25.720 I always hear people saying, like, you're very brave to do what you do.

00:48:28.280 I couldn't do it.

00:48:30.080 And, well, I can see why.

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00:49:49.640 Yeah, well, okay, but let's tell they're doing the same thing to me in the Canadian front,

00:49:57.420 by the way, with regards to the College of Psychologists, because the College of Physicians

00:50:01.400 weighed in on the side of the College of Psychologists this week, trying to insist that they had the

00:50:06.460 same ability to regulate their physicians, all of whom are terrified to open their mouth

00:50:10.640 about anything contentious now, by the way, because I've talked to dozens of them, hoping

00:50:14.820 they can make of me an object lesson, which luckily isn't going to be as easy as they

00:50:19.100 first hoped it would be.

00:50:20.720 They've been threatening to take me in front of a disciplinary board for months, and according

00:50:24.160 to their own idiot regulations, we're supposed to do that in 150 days.

00:50:28.180 And so far, they've shied away from that opportunity, because they actually make those public.

00:50:32.640 And I'll put that on my damn YouTube channel in a second, and we'll see what happens at a

00:50:37.300 face-to-face disciplinary board, where they're arguing that these bloody butchers should have

00:50:42.620 free access to children. So especially now that, what, it's seven European countries have

00:50:47.480 backtracked on that front with a fair degree of amazing rapidity, including the Netherlands,

00:50:52.900 which is where all this idiocy started to begin with. So we can see who's on the wrong side,

00:50:58.120 the Joseph Mengele side of history, let's say. You'd think the bloody Democrats in the U.S.

00:51:03.940 would wake up to that, but they're not known for their consciousness. So we'll see how that

00:51:09.080 plays out. Yeah. So, hey, so what's it like being Helen Joyce at the moment?

00:51:14.140 It's fine.

00:51:15.500 Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, you know, you said you understand why people

00:51:19.480 remain silent, but you don't. So, like, you know, I'm getting increasingly tired of being

00:51:27.660 sympathetic to people who remain silent when they have something to say. Like, I do understand it.

00:51:32.420 I've met 200 people who've had their lives flipped upside down by being cancelled. It's not pleasant.

00:51:39.700 But inviting the woke mob to dominate the world, that's not all that pleasant either. So it looks

00:51:44.500 like a choice between various forms of hell. Now, you wrote this book. So tell me what's,

00:51:51.680 we haven't talked for like a year and a half, something like that. What's it been like for you

00:51:56.220 to have published that book? And what's life like for you in the practical sense at the moment?

00:52:01.480 So, I mean, I'm having a ball. I think that the big difference, the big question on this,

00:52:08.960 whether people are living a nightmare or actually enjoying themselves, it's not so much about

00:52:14.280 whether they've been cancelled, because you will be, you will be. Like, it's just going to be,

00:52:19.200 you know, they go after you. It's whether it's inside your house or not. So there are quite a lot

00:52:25.340 of women who, and also men, by the way, who talk to me who are living absolute nightmares because of

00:52:31.300 things that are happening to their children in particular, or women whose husbands have

00:52:35.220 transitioned and who have, you know, spent all the family money and gone through these weird

00:52:40.100 surgeries and now say their wives are lesbians. And if the wife doesn't think of herself as a

00:52:44.360 lesbian, you know, she's a bigot. And so people go through these horrific, horrific nightmares.

00:52:48.680 And those people typically can't speak because there's typically people whose privacy they must

00:52:53.100 protect their own children. And I'm never more sorry for anyone than when I meet one of these

00:52:58.460 people. I meet them all the time or I get them on my inbox. And they're living a nightmare, not just

00:53:03.620 because of what's happening inside their house, but because the whole of society is gaslighting

00:53:07.040 them. So the child's school will be saying, congratulations, you've now got a daughter, you

00:53:12.360 know, this sort of thing. They'll get told they get referred to social services. If they go to their

00:53:16.700 family doctor, that person doesn't help. Their own friends say they're bigots if they don't go

00:53:21.880 along with something they can see is really harmful for their child. And then there are some of us who

00:53:26.000 have come into it in other ways. For example, we were just trying to do decent journalism.

00:53:30.460 And we've now got quite a lot of support from each other. And I mean, I now work for an organisation

00:53:36.440 called Sex Matters, where there's several of us and we can, you know, we have a great time when we

00:53:41.160 feel we're getting some traction with the UK government. And for us, this is an important

00:53:46.940 civil rights movement, really. Like, I know that our opponents think that we're trying to reverse

00:53:51.680 equality and civil rights. But no, we see ourselves very much as in the grand tradition of the

00:53:56.480 suffragettes and in the grand tradition of the civil rights activists. You know, we're fighting for

00:54:01.160 human rights, in fact. So we're having a great time. But every day I have to remember that there

00:54:07.900 are people who agree with me on everything, are silenced, and are having the absolutely most

00:54:12.140 miserable time because it's inside their house. And that's the distinction I'd make. It's not really

00:54:19.160 about how bad the activists come after you because, you know, I know I didn't go back to

00:54:23.860 The Economist, by the way. The last time we talked, I was on a year's leave of absence and

00:54:27.560 they were very supportive and were very happy to have me back. But actually, I just felt I was

00:54:31.780 doing something more important, really, than editing some pages of the world's best weekly

00:54:36.160 news magazine. But I just had something else to be doing. So I'm having fun and I'm finding it very

00:54:44.440 interesting. Well, okay. Why did I get away with it? Yeah, exactly. Well, this is the critical issue.

00:54:49.840 You're not JK Rowling, right? Yeah. And there are other people who have decided to speak. I talked

00:54:56.080 to Andrew Doyle yesterday and he's a good example of that, right? There are people who've decided to

00:55:01.660 not to remain silent and who aren't, haven't been taken out of the fray entirely on the personal or the

00:55:11.840 social fronts and you're definitely one of them. So what, why are you lucky or what did you do right,

00:55:17.260 do you think? So on the not taken out, it was very much because The Economist didn't fold.

00:55:24.480 Okay, so. Yeah, it's about the employer. So I wasn't facing destitution. You know, what I said,

00:55:32.360 like my friend, Maya Forstatter, who founded Sex Matters, she and I talked about these things

00:55:37.940 around the same time, 2017, 2018, I had started to think about this as something to write about,

00:55:42.860 not just in The Economist and actually in the end, not in The Economist elsewhere.

00:55:46.940 And I met her, she was still working at the Centre for Global Development, which is an American,

00:55:51.040 Washington-based think tank, which has a European arm and that's where she was working.

00:55:54.940 And she wanted to write things like, when you're thinking about global development,

00:55:58.300 it's important to remember that there are two sexes. Because that, and that used to be a truism,

00:56:02.380 like everybody understood that. You had to think about mothers, you had to think about child

00:56:05.420 mortality, you had to think about maternal mortality. It used to be obvious that if you

00:56:10.540 gave money to the mother rather than the father, like it would get spent on the children. You know,

00:56:14.480 there were all these sex-based issues. Violence is very, very sexed as well.

00:56:19.540 And she was just saying these very ordinary things. And she was told by the Washington office to stay

00:56:24.100 quiet. But she and I would talk a bit, like not often, but we met a few times and we were both saying

00:56:29.700 the same things. And when the people in the Washington office complained about her at CGD,

00:56:34.400 she ended up losing her job and had to go to employment tribunal. And it's still four years

00:56:37.880 later, just finishing off that process. Whereas when they came to The Economist, the editor said,

00:56:43.620 we fully stand by Helen Joyce. She's an excellent journalist. And they went away. You do not have to

00:56:49.000 be very strong to stand up to the bullies. No, they can only take you out one at a time.

00:56:53.080 Yes. And they're like sharks. They can smell the blood in the water. So if there's no blood in

00:56:57.580 the water, they just go and find someone else to go after. So it wasn't even as if The Economist had

00:57:02.180 to put much effort into this. It was just the most basic business of saying, no, we're not bound

00:57:07.740 to bullies. And it wasn't even that the editor agreed with me. She didn't. She didn't disagree

00:57:11.580 with me either. She just hadn't got any opinion on it. She just said, I don't like bullies and I do

00:57:16.160 like free speech. And it was that simple. Just saying, I don't like bullies and I do like free speech.

00:57:21.960 So it was really her, because I'm curious about why The Economist did support you. I mean,

00:57:25.440 for a long time, although I think The Economist has become, what would you say,

00:57:32.080 reprehensibly quasi-woke from time to time in recent years. And that's really been a loss as

00:57:38.680 far as I'm concerned, because it was one of the world's great magazines and maybe the world's

00:57:43.220 greatest magazine. I think you could make a case for that in some ways. But despite the fact that

00:57:49.120 they have tilted in the climate hysteria direction, let's say, and so forth, at least

00:57:56.260 on some occasions, they did stand behind you. Now, why was that? What was it about The Economist

00:58:02.860 in particular that made that possible? Because especially at the time when this blew up around

00:58:06.940 you, in some ways it would have been easier for them to hang you out to dry, right? Plus,

00:58:13.460 they could have claimed moral virtue while doing so. And we know how delightful that is,

00:58:16.720 especially when you don't earn it. I mean, really, it is because the editor

00:58:20.520 has a backbone. And, you know, like, it sounds so simple, but, you know, I don't think she agreed

00:58:27.440 with me. I don't think she thought the topic was interesting. She just reflexively wasn't going to

00:58:32.620 let people push her around. And if only there were more people like that. And also The Economist is a

00:58:38.440 place, I mean, I would never speak ill of them anyway, I would, you know, because I wouldn't speak ill

00:58:41.860 of an ex-employer. But actually, I had 17 very happy years working at The Economist.

00:58:46.280 It's a place with a wonderful ethos and a very strong collegiality and somewhere where our

00:58:54.520 editorial meetings, it is not just accepted, it is expected that you put forward unpopular

00:59:00.980 opinions if you have them. And so I have stood up and I have seen other people do that in those

00:59:05.480 editorial meetings and stood up and argued against. So, for example, The Economist really had a strong

00:59:10.740 line in favour of having a second referendum on Brexit. And I really opposed that. I thought it was a

00:59:15.360 terrible, terrible mistake and a terrible judgment. Although I was very anti-Brexit. Like, as far as

00:59:20.900 I was concerned, it was anti-democratic, like once to try to have a second referendum. And I stood up

00:59:27.060 and gave it my best shot over about a three-hour editorial meeting that we really shouldn't go for

00:59:31.800 this. And the editor and the deputy editor came by my office several times over the next two days and

00:59:36.660 said, you know, what about this? What about this? What about this? You know, they really regarded it as a

00:59:40.640 valuable contribution and then wrote the editorial saying the opposite. So, you know, that collegiality

00:59:47.220 and that long history. Thinking and believing in the Socratic method as well, that you're challenging

00:59:52.220 each other. That the person who says the opposite to what everybody else is saying is the person who's

00:59:56.940 helping you most. And not just doing it in a reflexive sort of, you know, knee-jerk, contrarian way.

01:00:03.100 But I mean, I think that, you know, that's a problem in journalism in general is as it's become

01:00:07.920 a graduate profession. And it's not just like, I have a PhD in mathematics, so I'm a rather unusual

01:00:14.080 graduate to have gone into journalism. But it's mostly people who will have studied like, you know,

01:00:18.820 great subjects like English or history or the economists, lots of economists, obviously. But

01:00:23.780 then also sort of the studies type things, like lots of people who have done social studies or media

01:00:28.480 studies or journalism itself. And so they become more homogenous, more distant from what the

01:00:35.920 population is like. Like you used to come into journalism by going into the local press. You

01:00:41.000 probably weren't a graduate. You spent your years doorstepping the families of murder victims,

01:00:47.580 going and reporting on council meetings. You know, you learned through shoe leather. And if you were

01:00:53.320 good, you worked your way up through the ranks. And you might arrive at a very senior position in one of

01:00:57.660 the great newspapers of the world, not having a degree and having an awful lot of common sense

01:01:01.980 and experience. And now that's just not there because local journalism is dead. So people go

01:01:07.480 straight into those institutions. The pay is much worse. From the universities.

01:01:11.140 So it's better off people. Yeah. So it tends to have to be people who have some money behind them

01:01:15.380 because the pay is so bad and you need to live in the capital city. And yeah, you've just got a very

01:01:21.020 homogenous, graduate, like liberal in the American sense, not the 19th century British sense,

01:01:28.380 like hyper-liberal actually. Like you've got papers like the New York Times that say that

01:01:33.660 they actually have to like really try to get anybody who's right wing to work for them. And then when

01:01:39.620 they do that, like they get Barry Weiss or somebody, you know, she ends up having to leave

01:01:43.420 because it's so unbelievably unpleasant as a workplace.

01:01:45.700 Right. Yes. And it's a pretty damn weird world where we think Barry Weiss is right wing.

01:01:50.500 Exactly.

01:01:51.280 I mean, it's just beyond comprehension.

01:01:53.760 Yeah.

01:01:53.980 So, yeah.

01:01:54.860 Yeah.

01:01:55.440 So, okay. So let's delve into this.

01:01:58.180 Let's delve into this a little further. So, you know, we were commiserating with those who

01:02:02.900 wish to remain silent because of the miseries that might be visited upon them. And those are real

01:02:06.980 enough. Jay Bhattacharya, who's a physician at Stanford, you know, he was taken to task by his

01:02:12.780 erstwhile compatriots when he did nothing but stand up bravely and tell the truth. And he lost

01:02:16.880 35 pounds in three months. And I've talked to plenty of other people who were basically hounded

01:02:21.340 into asylums by the woke mob. And those are strong people. And this is not fun. But you did this.

01:02:28.880 Now you even transferred careers. So what the hell are you doing now? Like what are you up to exactly?

01:02:35.020 You're not working for The Economist anymore. And what's your goal? Why do you think it's a valid

01:02:41.000 goal? And then even more, why are you managing not only to make this successful instead of absolute

01:02:48.260 bloody hell, but something that, you know, you seem fully on board with and actually pursuing to,

01:02:53.960 what would you say, to some degree of success? How are you managing all that?

01:02:58.420 Right. So I work part-time for Sex Matters, which is now an organization that has, it's funded almost

01:03:04.960 exclusively by people paying five to ten pound a month to support, to support us in attempting to

01:03:11.020 shore up the existence of sex, binary sex in law and life. Like it's that simple. We're standing up

01:03:17.160 for sex-based rights, right? Human rights that involve recognizing that there are two sexes.

01:03:21.080 That's Sex Matters, right?

01:03:23.040 Yes.

01:03:23.500 And where can people find out more about that?

01:03:25.600 Sex-Matters.org. It's that simple. I mean, we publish an awful lot of material. I would say

01:03:32.820 that it's very focused on law and regulation. And that's part of why it works is because in the UK,

01:03:39.660 the laws and regulations are actually pretty good. Like the practice is appalling, but we still have,

01:03:44.580 we have, you know, we haven't wandered off into Bill C-16 and into American, you know, Title IX covers

01:03:50.080 gender identity instead of sex. We still have pretty decent laws. It's just that practice is

01:03:55.500 wandered away from them. So the idea is to drag practice back to where the law is. You know, if we

01:04:00.400 need to take legal challenges or judicial reviews, we will. But also we can engage politically. We can,

01:04:05.880 you know, do mass actions and so on. So that's part of what I spend my time doing. It's not well

01:04:09.800 paid because this is going to become a charity and charities are not highly paid workplaces.

01:04:14.720 That's fine. And I write a newsletter that's doing okay. So if people want to find me,

01:04:19.840 that's the HelenJoyce.com. And I also do writing tuition, which was something that I used to do

01:04:25.380 anyway. And I make some money from that. So it's not what it used to be money-wise, but it's fine.

01:04:30.620 My children are nearly gone.

01:04:31.420 Okay. My son and I developed this app you might be interested in called Essay. Essay.app. Yeah.

01:04:38.380 And it teaches people how to write while they use it to write. It's a word processor that has

01:04:42.760 production and editing tools built into it. Okay. You're making people like me obsolete then.

01:04:49.640 No, no. No, no. It'd be something that people like you could use to their great advantage because

01:04:54.360 it would take some of the busy work element out of what you're teaching

01:04:58.620 because it runs people through the elements. So for example, it has tools that help people

01:05:04.140 understand that when you write a paragraph, you should think about reorganizing the sentences

01:05:09.320 and that when you write a sentence, you should think about writing variants of the sentence and

01:05:14.060 picking the best sentence. And you should think about reordering your paragraphs and has tools for

01:05:18.600 all of that. So anyways, we have a lot of subscribers. Yeah. Essay.app. It's a very, very good

01:05:25.120 program. And for the typical bad writer, it'll improve the quality of their writing by 50% if

01:05:30.460 they use it once. Right. Just because it helps people understand what editing means. So Essay.app.

01:05:36.340 There's my little ad for today. So, and your book, by the way. So yeah, it's a portfolio career,

01:05:40.560 you know? I mean, that's the answer. Right, right. It's a portfolio career. Oh, I also have a column

01:05:44.320 in the critic. So yeah, it's fine. I'm fine. Right. Okay. Okay. So you're distributed widely

01:05:50.740 enough so that it's not easy to take you out and you're competent enough as an entrepreneur and as

01:05:56.380 a practitioner to make all those things work. And do you have any, well, apparently, do you have

01:06:02.280 any financial security in the fundamental sense? My God, no, I'm not. I'm not privately wealthy,

01:06:08.840 unfortunately. No. I guess, do you know what? I have to be honest and I have to say that

01:06:14.640 and I was already so far in that it was too late to go back before I knew I was taking a big risk.

01:06:22.660 I had already written about quite controversial things. So I was a foreign correspondent in

01:06:27.520 Brazil and while I was there, you know, I wrote about political corruption. I, you know, I wrote

01:06:32.880 some quite scary things. And then I also always liked, I always liked controversial topics. So I wrote a

01:06:39.640 piece about, you know, what pedophilia is and how you might treat, you know, how you might deal with

01:06:43.480 pedophiles. I wrote about pornography and the effect on children. I always liked those hot topics

01:06:49.480 and try, you know, I like hot topics that you can try and treat in a cool way. And I don't mean cool

01:06:53.820 trendy. I mean, cool, low temperature. One of the great bits of advice I got from my editor when I was

01:06:59.440 writing my book and then when I was reading the audio book is she said, the hotter the topic,

01:07:03.540 the cooler your tone. Yeah, yeah, that is good. That is good advice. It is good advice. And it was very

01:07:08.480 good advice when reading it. She said, when you get to the bits where you're talking about,

01:07:12.000 you know, this child's life is going to be destroyed. She said, take a deep breath,

01:07:16.200 slow down and just let your voice sink. And so I've always been like that as a writer,

01:07:21.720 you know, I specifically, but I thought, I thought journalists were meant to be like this.

01:07:24.540 I've always liked the bits where you find the most controversy and the most, you know,

01:07:29.900 most heat and least light. That's where you think you can do the most useful journalism, I thought.

01:07:34.180 So I had found this topic. I got interested in it. I wrote about it. I got a level of pushback.

01:07:40.600 I did not at all predict. And by then it's too late. Right. Well, it's by, it's too late. It's

01:07:45.480 very interesting that you describe it that way because, you know, what I saw on the faculty front

01:07:49.500 was, so undergraduates will write what they think their professors want to hear because they're

01:07:55.740 just undergraduates and they have no power. And then graduate students do the same for the journals

01:08:00.320 and the professors that they're working under. And then assistant professors are terrified because

01:08:04.880 they don't have tenure. And then newly tenured professors are terrified because they're not full

01:08:09.760 professors. And so everybody in the whole chain thinks, well, you know, once I get to a position

01:08:15.020 of security, I'll be brave. But after you've sold your soul for 15 years, there's nothing left of you

01:08:21.600 that's brave. And the idea that you become brave because you have security, it indicates nothing

01:08:26.920 but a profound misunderstanding of what constitutes bravery. And, you know, what you tell me indicates to

01:08:32.300 me that you're just doing now what you've always done, essentially, like you're on different

01:08:37.080 fronts. But, you know, you actually wanted to be a journalist and go investigate difficult things

01:08:41.680 and think and dig around in the muck and try to find some light. And you're just continuing to do

01:08:47.020 that. And that is relatively rare. You know, one of the things I've really learned since 2016 is

01:08:53.440 how rare that genuine faith and courage truly is. You know, it's like one person in a hundred possesses it.

01:09:00.920 And I've always wondered, for example, how 30% of Germans, East Germans could end up as government

01:09:07.440 informers. But after watching what happened in the lockdown in Toronto, I realized, you know, very

01:09:12.880 rapidly that we were still exactly like that. And that 30% of people in Canada would wear a mask

01:09:18.360 happily for the rest of their life if they could come to inform on their neighbors as a consequence.

01:09:22.740 You know, and so that cowardly, what would you say, alignment with the powers that be for

01:09:30.600 personally self-aggrandizing purposes, that's the norm. And that courage to dig around and to speak

01:09:35.940 the truth, especially on uncomfortable topics. You know, I was reading the story of Abraham today.

01:09:41.960 You know, there's a real cool passage in that. Abraham goes with two angels to Sodom to sort out the

01:09:50.820 city, which is like a fairly daunting task. And before he does that, he has a little discussion

01:09:57.720 with God. And God has basically said that he's going to destroy the city because of its iniquity.

01:10:03.400 And Abraham says, well, how about if I find 40 people there that are good? And God says, well,

01:10:08.880 if you can find 40, I won't destroy the city. And Abraham bargains back and forth until he gets down to

01:10:14.140 10, which is a very interesting story because it proclaims that you can strike a covenantal contract

01:10:24.860 with reality itself, that you can bargain, which is a very interesting idea. But more importantly,

01:10:29.580 that if even 10 people in a doomed city are still willing to speak, that the entire thing won't come

01:10:37.700 tumbling down. You know, and I do think that's eternally true is that freedom itself, the absence

01:10:44.340 of totalitarian hell depends on the willingness of a very small minority of people to lift their

01:10:49.720 heads above the turrets and to say what they believe to be true. And it's a very tiny percentage

01:10:55.160 of people. It's like the thing that economists say that prices are set at the margins. Like I think

01:11:00.500 this about free speech as well. And it's why, you know, I'm sometimes, you know, some of the women

01:11:05.260 that I talk to a lot who would be, you know, atheist, feminist, I mean, again, I am an atheist.

01:11:10.060 This is not me trying to position myself on a religious spectrum here. They don't like working

01:11:16.900 with religious people on anything, on anything at all, not even on very narrow things like free speech.

01:11:23.500 But the thing is that if you're, if you're not, if you're an atheist, if you're not religious,

01:11:28.240 like you have to be a bit mad to think that it's worth the personal grief in the one life that you get

01:11:34.880 when you're going to be nothing after you die, to stand up against what, you know, on what is

01:11:40.640 obviously a mad issue, but, and nearly everyone agrees with you, but like always somebody else

01:11:43.940 could do it. Like most teachers know very well that you shouldn't be teaching children that

01:11:47.900 sex is a spectrum. Like really most of them know that. So why do most of them not stand up? Well,

01:11:52.900 because there's other people. It's like the bystander effect. Other people could do it. Why should

01:11:56.480 they do it? The only people who are going to stand up on this by and large are the people who

01:12:01.660 think their immortal soul is on the line. And so I think that they are the people who set the

01:12:06.560 boundaries of free speech is people who have what are quite unusual opinions.

01:12:10.900 That puts you in an even more mysterious category then, doesn't it? But, but here's a, here's a

01:12:15.660 little twist on that, you know, that I think is relevant given your, the details of your biography.

01:12:21.380 So here's one thing I've come to realize about truth. So if you enter a conversation, like I could

01:12:29.060 have come onto this conversation and thought, well, you know, what do I want to extract from Helen to

01:12:33.720 make my YouTube channel more popular? And if I had thought that way, I probably wouldn't have talked

01:12:39.240 to you at all because the probability that we're going to be canceled and that that'll be a risk to

01:12:43.040 my YouTube channel is very high. And so I'm not thinking instrumental thoughts when I talk to people,

01:12:49.220 I'm thinking something completely different, which is I'm going to say what comes to mind in the

01:12:54.260 clearest manner I possibly can based on the presupposition, two presuppositions. Number

01:12:59.580 one is that whatever happens, if you tell the truth is the best possible thing that could have

01:13:03.400 happened, even if that isn't obvious to you in the moment. Right. So that's an axiom of faith,

01:13:09.140 right? That the truth is that's face. Yeah. You bet. Truth is truth sets you free and brings the

01:13:15.340 habitable order that is good into being right. Yeah. Despite the evidence. Okay. But there's another

01:13:20.400 thing that's very cool too. And I think this is something that also appeals to JK Rowling,

01:13:25.760 you know, and, and to you, and you tell me what you think about this. So

01:13:29.180 if you just say what you think, you don't know what the hell is going to happen.

01:13:35.480 You have to let go of the outcome, right? Cause there's no instrumental manipulation

01:13:39.320 associated with it. And you might think, well, that's a hell of a risk because maybe the mob will

01:13:43.000 come to you. But, but I can tell you what's very interesting about that, which is that it's a hell of an

01:13:48.120 adventure because you don't know what's going to happen next. Now, you know, you seem quite pleased

01:13:53.860 by the fact that you're able to see what you think and all these weird things are happening around you.

01:13:58.740 And, you know, you're sailing your ship out on the high seas with plenty of storm, but, you know,

01:14:04.640 imagine you would remain silent. You wouldn't be the person that you are and you wouldn't be having

01:14:08.260 the adventures that you're having. So I think that true truth is adventure. That's what the story of

01:14:13.700 Abraham is about, by the way, the notion that truth itself is an adventure. It's an adventure

01:14:18.180 that justifies life.

01:14:19.440 That's really interesting. And I think that the, the, the, the two things that that immediately

01:14:24.620 makes me think are one, you know, and this is just a personal characteristic thing. It's neither

01:14:29.180 good nor bad. I'm a very unanxious person. You know, I'm not someone who feels nervous about

01:14:34.140 things. I'm not someone who finds giving talks scary or anything like that. I don't ruminate.

01:14:39.560 You know, I didn't lose any sleep over the idea that I might lose my job or anything like that.

01:14:44.040 And so I think that's maybe unusual, especially unusual for women. And I don't know why it's the

01:14:49.460 case, but it just is the case. So I, I just never worried. I always had faith that I would be able

01:14:55.140 to find a, you know, something else to do. And also my biography has, I've changed my job a lot

01:15:00.760 of times. Like I trained as a dancer. I went into studied mathematics. I became a journalist and now

01:15:05.040 I'm a campaigner. It always worked out. I was always able to make it work out. So that's one of the

01:15:10.080 two things that I thought listening to what you were saying. And the other thought that immediately

01:15:13.740 came to mind is that, um, I, I really find cognitive dissonance almost unbearable. So the

01:15:21.780 idea of, of having to pay some sort of lip service to a, not just idiotic, but an internally

01:15:29.380 contradictory belief system really bothered me. Like bothered that, that I lost sleep about.

01:15:35.520 Like I would, I would stay up late at night. I would lie in bed thinking like, but how can they think

01:15:39.340 that sex is self-identified? How can they think that it's right to tell children that you aren't

01:15:44.420 just a boy or a girl and don't attach too much meaning to that? It's just a fact. Um, so,

01:15:49.560 so I think that's, that's just saying. Why did that, why did, okay. Well that, okay. So that's very

01:15:53.160 interesting. So let's, let's, let's elaborate on that. So I'll tell you something else I learned

01:15:58.700 well delving into the biblical corpus most recently. So there's a prophet, um, Elijah. And Elijah is a

01:16:06.800 major league prophet. When Christ is transfigured on the top of the mountain, it's Moses and Elijah

01:16:12.280 that appear with him. And it's pretty obvious why it's Moses, but it's not so obvious that it's

01:16:16.180 Elijah, right? Cause he's nowhere near as major a figure as Moses. Um, but I'll tell you what

01:16:22.160 Elijah figured out. This is a revolutionary realization. Um, Elijah set himself up against

01:16:31.760 this God named ball and ball was a nature God. And so you can imagine in the middle East at that

01:16:37.980 time, there was plenty of speculation that the central divine spirit of the cosmos made itself

01:16:45.260 manifest in the storm and in the thunder and in the lightning and, and in the hurricane and in the

01:16:50.220 earthquake, right? These massive natural occurrences that are awe inspiring, right? And what inspires

01:16:58.080 awe is divine? And so nature's divine. Now, Elijah wasn't very fond of that idea. And, uh, he's the

01:17:05.340 person who, to whom the still small voice first came. And he's the person who realized that whatever

01:17:12.020 the God of the old Testament was, the God of Israel was not a nature God per se, but something that made

01:17:18.480 itself manifest inside that was akin to the voice of conscience. So I want to ask you, you know,

01:17:24.680 people abide or they don't by the dictates of their conscience. Now you said you're not a nervous person

01:17:30.820 by, by temperament, but that you were kept awake by, by what? An, a sense of internal incoherence

01:17:39.700 or discontinuity. Like, and is that, is that conscience? And if so, like, what do you make of

01:17:45.060 that exactly? Like what's calling to you to sort things out and separate the wheat from the chaff,

01:17:50.740 so to speak? And why did you decide to abide by that instead of taking the easy route?

01:17:56.700 I mean, for me, it didn't feel like the easy route. It, it, it, to, I, it was that thing of

01:18:02.940 like, I could do no other, you know? And I, I didn't think of it as conscience. I have to think

01:18:06.920 more about that. What I thought about it as the same thing that made me interested in pure mathematics.

01:18:10.600 You know, I like proofs. Well, that's logic, you know. It's, yeah, it's logic, but it's consistency.

01:18:17.520 It's consistency. Right. Well, but that's part of logos, right? That's part of logos. You know what

01:18:22.900 I mean? Technically speaking, it's part of the notion that there's an internal coherency and

01:18:28.700 transparency and comprehensibility to the cosmos itself, right? And that, and that that's something

01:18:33.760 we're called to put ourselves in alignment with. And if you're a mathematician, obviously that calls to

01:18:37.980 you on the aesthetic and intellectual front in a very, very profound way.

01:18:42.200 Yes. So, so, okay. So it's illogic for you and incoherence, but I, but I would like,

01:18:47.680 I understand that aligning that with the voice of conscience is not a self-evident proposition,

01:18:52.480 but, but it's worth contemplating, right? Because there's something about that incoherence that

01:18:57.460 why does it grate on you? Do you think? Why can't you just swallow it?

01:19:03.220 I mean, I've asked myself this many times, like, what are the differences between people who can

01:19:07.340 swallow this and people who can't? And I don't think there's any one rule, but all I can tell

01:19:14.180 you is just having said that I'm not an anxious person, I am feeling my throat close up at the

01:19:20.640 idea of stating something that I know to be a direct falsehood and not just a direct falsehood.

01:19:27.240 Like, you know, I mean, if I look over at something in this room and I say that something that I can see

01:19:30.700 is blue and then I say it's actually red, like that's not giving me the sense of anxiety because it

01:19:34.540 doesn't impact on anything else. It's just a meaningless falsehood. But the thing that you

01:19:39.520 say in mathematics is, you know, like what, what does an equals mean? The equal sign is something

01:19:44.760 beautiful and special. And if, if, if two things are equal, then, you know, that's a, that's got a

01:19:49.920 unity and a perfection to it that's unchanging. And then you can do, you can do the same thing on

01:19:55.120 both sides of an equation and it's still a true equation. And true is true is such a beautiful word.

01:19:59.500 So if you've got two things that are equal and you multiply them both by two, or you add 10 onto

01:20:04.260 both of them, you've still got an equation. And then you could say, like, if you didn't know

01:20:08.820 anything about how all mathematics is internally coherent and it's all connected with everything

01:20:13.180 else inside mathematics, you could say, well, take one little tiny equation just over in the corner

01:20:18.100 of your eye, not an important one, like not a, not a theorem that we need for building bridges or,

01:20:22.840 you know, running supercomputers, just some tiny little equation over here. We'll break that

01:20:27.580 equation. Like what's the problem? What would the harm be? The harm is you've broken all of

01:20:32.180 mathematics. It's all connected because if you've got a force equation, you can add that to any other

01:20:38.260 equation and straight away, you've got a falsehood. Anything can be equal to anything. And that's chaos.

01:20:43.000 So now I'm feeling anxious because now you've got like the equal sign, but it's not equal. It's a now.

01:20:50.060 Well, that's extremely interesting. Okay. So the case you made is that first of all,

01:20:54.800 that your mathematical sensibility is aligned in some manner with your reverence for what's true

01:21:01.880 and beautiful, right? Yes.

01:21:03.440 So there's an aesthetic element to it. Completely. And all pure mathematicians,

01:21:07.400 all pure mathematicians will tell you that. Now it's a long time since I've done any pure

01:21:10.460 mathematics, but that people will say, I knew that this was good, this theorem, this proof was going

01:21:16.520 in the right direction when they've proved something because they can feel that it's beautiful.

01:21:19.880 Yeah. And a lot of mathematicians will talk about, you know, that's an ugly proof. Like it's a shame

01:21:24.140 that it's such an ugly proof. Can we find a more beautiful one? And so what's beautiful? It's

01:21:28.240 elegant. It's simple. It's minimal in the machinery that it uses. And once, you know, if you've got all

01:21:36.300 the requisite knowledge and the requisite concepts, once someone shows it to you, it's as if you always

01:21:40.940 knew it. You think like, how did I not see that before? You feel like you just looked around and

01:21:45.340 noticed something that you hadn't noticed before. And now you have that theorem rather than it being

01:21:49.720 90 million lines of code, you know? And I didn't have to work out all the ways that it broke

01:21:54.580 everything, but it actually does break everything. When you introduce a falsehood, it breaks everything.

01:21:59.700 Okay. So there's, here's something interesting about the Abraham story. Again, I hate to return to

01:22:04.900 that, but it's on my mind because I've been writing about it. So when Abraham undergoes a name change

01:22:10.580 from Abraham to Abraham, which is a transformation of identity, right? A profound transformation of

01:22:16.500 identity. And he goes from being the utmost father, which is what Abraham means, to the father of

01:22:22.100 multitudes, which is what Abraham means. So there's a shift in status and it appears to occur because

01:22:27.100 he's been diligently pursuing a moral pathway. And that produces, catalyzes an ethical transformation

01:22:33.040 in him that's so deep that it's as if he becomes another person. It's like a rebirth phenomena.

01:22:38.000 And he does that. That happens to him, according to the text, because he's striving to be perfect.

01:22:47.200 Right? And there's a gospel phrase that Christ refers to much, much later that you should,

01:22:51.660 you should be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. And part of the reason for that is that

01:22:56.180 if you want to enter into the kingdom of paradise, nothing perfect can come with you. Nothing

01:23:01.820 imperfect can come with you. Now you, you trod on that territory in your explanation of your

01:23:07.680 affinity for coherence and beauty, because you said, and this is very interesting, that

01:23:12.080 if you take a system that's coherent logically, and you allow yourself to falsify even one of the

01:23:18.340 minor propositions, even one, that you risk demolishing the whole damn edifice, right? And so,

01:23:25.820 and there is a moral claim that's driving you, I think, that is associated with your fear of doing

01:23:30.320 so, right? That is associated with your interest on the aesthetic front with mathematical perfection.

01:23:35.600 And that's your realization that if you voluntarily falsify anything that you see or communicate,

01:23:42.960 that you risk contaminating the entire enterprise. And then, you know, you might say, and tell me what

01:23:47.940 you think of this, that enterprise has two elements. One would be that you contaminate your own psyche,

01:23:53.440 because now you're, you render yourself unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

01:23:58.140 But that's not as bad as it gets, because, and I've thought about this a lot on the totalitarian

01:24:03.340 front, you know, it's, it's the individual willingness to swallow the lie that enables

01:24:07.440 the totalitarian mob. So if you allow yourself to assent to something, you know, to be false,

01:24:14.280 no matter how small, not only do you put your own soul in a mortal peril, you might say,

01:24:19.120 but you also destabilize the entire polity by doing so. And that's on you. That's the right thing

01:24:25.200 to be afraid of. It's no bloody wonder you feel anxious when, when you're apprehending that,

01:24:29.380 because it means that you can actually see reality for what it is, as far as I can tell.

01:24:34.000 Yeah. And, and, you know, what, what you're talking about when you talk about the coherence

01:24:38.640 of everything and everything being attached to everything else and speaking honestly and rightly,

01:24:43.100 it's the opposite of queer theory, because the point of queer theory is to destabilize categories

01:24:48.240 and to have things interpenetrating to, to, to, to look at something like, you know,

01:24:54.540 what is a child and what is an adult. And okay, there's a blurry categories and we introduce a

01:24:59.780 hard line at 16 for some things, 18 for others. So they're not like zero and one in mathematics,

01:25:04.520 but equally, they're not like nothing. It's not like a two year old can be an adult or a 60 year

01:25:11.300 old can be a child. So just because, but these, these people, they're so obsessed with the fact

01:25:16.040 that some categories are fuzzy or that there might be a different cutoff for different things,

01:25:21.720 or that it might depend on the use case that they're, they, they just, they turn the whole

01:25:26.400 thing upside down and they try and say that, you know, a child can be more knowledgeable about,

01:25:32.540 say their gender identity than an adult can be. Like you hear this all the time from parents who

01:25:36.760 have bought into this stuff. They say, my child leads me. I learn from my child.

01:25:41.320 Oh yeah. Yeah.

01:25:42.220 You know, and that's just one little tiny grain of truth in that. You can learn.

01:25:46.260 Yes. There's always a grain of truth. It's amazing.

01:25:48.280 Yes, of course.

01:25:48.740 Claims that the queer theoretic people make, you find yourself saying yes, but,

01:25:53.220 and by that time you've already lost the moral clarity or the clarity of explanation. Because

01:25:57.780 once you have to say, well, I agree. Okay. Sometimes children are wiser. Yes. Okay.

01:26:01.520 In some ways they know themselves better. You know, you need to get to the point that that's not what

01:26:06.520 they're saying. What they're saying is they want the child to be supreme and the adult to follow.

01:26:11.860 They want the child to teach and the adult to learn. That's the wrong way.

01:26:15.300 No, they want their, they want their use of their child for the purposes of self-aggrandizement to

01:26:21.080 be paramount. Completely.

01:26:22.120 You know, 50%, here's a fun, here's a fun statistic. 50% of mothers who have children with

01:26:30.760 gender dysphoria have borderline personality disorder or it's rough equivalent.

01:26:35.360 Right. Right. Right. Right. 50%. Yeah. That's a lot given that the prevalence of borderline

01:26:42.640 personality disorder in the population is under 1%. Right. And I watch these people sacrificing

01:26:48.640 their children to the public proclamation of their own inclusiveness and tolerance. And I think

01:26:54.220 there's, you'd have to go a long ways into, into the depths of hell to find a deeper abyss than that.

01:27:00.820 Right. When you're willing to sacrifice your own bloody children and your, and the progeny of your

01:27:06.440 children to your own moral claims, you have committed the worst possible sin you can, you can

01:27:13.400 manage as a mother. And if you're the kind of idiot father that's abetting that, you're doing exactly

01:27:18.120 the same thing. And you ask yourself, how could somebody do that? Because I don't think that they

01:27:23.200 are speaking with clarity to themselves in which they say, you know, I am an evil person and I wish to

01:27:28.760 do evil. Like obviously our capacity for self-deception is pretty much limitless, but what

01:27:34.600 is it that they're thinking? And it has to be this reversal. Like a friend of mine, Eliza Mondegreen is

01:27:40.360 her pen name. She's a, she, she's in Canada, actually. She's in Quebec and she's an American

01:27:45.480 graduate student. And she recently said that these, these gender doctors and these parents and so on,

01:27:52.460 they have given their allegiance to what she calls the trans altar. Like it's not the real child

01:27:58.080 that's in front of them. They've given their allegiance to this, this, this self-created

01:28:02.540 being. And the thing is that once that's the person that you're looking at, you can perform

01:28:06.780 any atrocity on the body in order to release that, you know, created or mythical sort of person.

01:28:14.020 You know, you sterilize the child in order to, in order to do, like to bring their body in line.

01:28:19.520 Exactly. Exactly. And so these, once you start this business of calling things by not their right

01:28:26.620 name and by saying that zero equals one or that, you know, any, any sort of break, everything becomes

01:28:32.320 broken. And you find yourself not just doing atrocities, but doing like literally the exact

01:28:37.700 opposite of the thing that you're meant to do. So if you're a child safeguarding organization,

01:28:42.360 you find yourself deliberately and specifically putting children in danger. If you're an organization

01:28:48.040 that's anti-censorship, you find yourself deliberately, specifically, and actively trying

01:28:53.060 to silence people and so on and so forth. You know, women's organizations in America now spend

01:28:58.060 their days arguing for the rights of men to overstep women's boundaries. Like, you know,

01:29:04.000 the sports women in the girls who were having to compete against trans athletes in America,

01:29:08.700 they reached out to all the big women's organizations, including the law ones and, you know,

01:29:12.800 National Organization for Women and all of them saying, you know, we are women who are having men

01:29:17.820 intrude upon our spaces in a way that is destroying our rights. But those organizations are now

01:29:22.280 actively men's rights organizations. So it's this reversal that you see, it's absolutely

01:29:26.680 extraordinary. And that is the consequence of breaking one little bit of an interconnected

01:29:31.540 logical system. But that's what queer theory wants you to do. It wants you to be unable to define

01:29:36.960 everything, anything. In the biblical corpus, that's expressed symbolically as heaven turning

01:29:42.840 to iron. Oh, I don't know. Because heaven is obviously an aerial place, right? And a light

01:29:50.500 and aerial place. And when everything flips upside down, it turns to iron and everything turns upside

01:29:55.660 down, right? That's permanent carnival, by the way. You know, the carnival as a symbolic expression

01:30:01.100 was a time, this happened in medieval times, where for one day all the rules were turned upside

01:30:06.420 down, right? Well, it's the equivalent of the pride month now, except it didn't last.

01:30:10.860 Or drag queen. Like, that's what drag is. You know, drag is, and drag in its own place,

01:30:16.100 I have no problem with it. I'm not interested, but it's not aimed at me. It was gay men in nightclubs.

01:30:20.280 You know, I'm not a gay man and I don't go to nightclubs, so completely fine. It was just meant

01:30:23.760 to be transgressive fun in the evening where people are drunk, you know, whatever. And then it leaks

01:30:30.640 out. And then you're like, why would those be the people that you're trying to get into libraries

01:30:34.840 to read to three-year-olds? Like, specifically that. Like, and that's the one and only thing,

01:30:40.440 the one and only group they're trying to get in. Well, I do think, too, that that has something

01:30:45.660 to do with the elevation of the narrow self to the highest place of worship. And it's not even

01:30:51.380 a selfishness, eh? Because if you're truly selfish in the highest sense, then you serve other people,

01:30:58.780 because there's a lot of other people. And if you serve them well, they will reciprocate. And that's

01:31:03.800 what you do if you're mature and wise. But if you're immature and self-centered in that immature

01:31:09.320 way, then you will want gratification for what you want right at the moment, no matter what.

01:31:15.420 And the insistence that the drag queen types get to read to toddlers, let's say, is what? It's the

01:31:22.280 logical extension of that claim of infinite short-term subjective supremacy. I get to have exactly what

01:31:30.500 I want, right bloody now, and damn the consequences for everyone else, including me tomorrow. And that's

01:31:38.520 such a temper tantrum two-year-old way of looking at the world that it brooks no interference whatsoever

01:31:46.140 and has no limits. You know, and if you watch a two-year-old have a temper tantrum, you know,

01:31:51.540 Oh, the world is exploding. Yeah.

01:31:53.720 It's amazing. I've seen adults do that in my clinical practice. I've seen adults have a temper

01:31:58.960 tantrum. And believe me, man, that is something that will put a chill on your heart. It is something

01:32:04.140 to see that absolute chaotic rage burst forward in an adult. But that is, that temper tantrum of a

01:32:13.340 two-year-old is, that's the central spirit that animates the subjective self-identity of the worst

01:32:20.740 activist types. Nothing gets in the way of that. You know, a two-year-old will hold his breath till

01:32:25.380 he turns blue, which is a hell of an accomplishment on the anger side. You just try that and see how

01:32:30.440 much will it takes. Yeah. And the extraordinary thing is it's so tedious. Like, these people are

01:32:36.260 meant to be doing something that's entertaining. And I can't think of anything more boring.

01:32:40.560 Like, you know, what, what, what, what any normal adult finds interesting or entertaining has some

01:32:48.020 element of difficulty and continuity to it. You know, you become good at something and then that

01:32:52.460 becomes enjoyable. You play an instrument and you don't just bash on the keyboard as you learn to

01:32:56.720 play. And then that becomes more enjoyable as you get better at it. Or you do, you know, you become

01:33:01.340 a footballer, you want to get better at it. Like whatever it is you're doing, it's got some

01:33:04.560 project. Drive to mastery. Drive to mastery.

01:33:07.140 Yes, exactly. Playful drive to mastery.

01:33:10.000 But if what you're doing is just tearing things down, like it's not just that there's no

01:33:14.120 skill to it. It's tedious. I often look at these people who are doing these horrifically boring

01:33:20.860 and stupid PhD theses about, you know, the experience of pregnant men, i.e. women who are taking

01:33:26.880 testosterone or something like that. And I think like, oh my God, you know, we still have malaria.

01:33:32.220 We still have cancer. Or you could just be making-

01:33:35.420 We have child sexual trafficking.

01:33:36.440 Yes. Or you could just be making coffee for people, you know, a bunch of people want some

01:33:39.960 coffee in the morning. You should just be making coffee for people and making the world a better

01:33:42.640 place in your own small way. And instead, you're wasting your one and only life on total boring

01:33:50.360 nonsense. And it's not just that it's nonsense, it's that it's boring.

01:33:53.760 Well, there you go. So, well, then, you know, you've circled back there to that notion of truth

01:33:58.740 as adventure, you know. So, let's say you decide to admit a falsehood into the theater of your

01:34:04.220 consciousness, right? That's like inviting the devil himself to come in and play. Well, your

01:34:08.220 proposition as a mathematician is, well, you risk the integrity of everything by doing that.

01:34:13.320 Okay. And that's utter chaos and terribly anxiety-provoking. And your apprehension of that

01:34:18.200 anxiety is enough to make you anxious and you're not even an anxious person. But then you put your

01:34:23.260 finger on something else too. You let falsehood in to disrupt your proper aim, let's say. And that's what

01:34:30.680 happens. Then you end up pursuing something that's so goddamn meaningless that it just puts you into a

01:34:35.740 pit of despair, especially when trouble comes to visit. You know, like one of the things, I was very

01:34:41.120 ill for about three years. And one of the things that kept me going through that intense period of

01:34:47.720 catastrophe, because my wife was also mortally ill at that time, and my daughter was extremely ill too,

01:34:53.060 was the fact that I had something insanely exciting to do. I was writing a book, which I, and I was trying

01:34:58.160 to make it a truthful book. And I think I did that to the best of my ability. And I could get up and

01:35:03.220 sit at the damn computer and write for a couple of hours, you know, despite being in so much pain

01:35:07.780 that it's almost indescribable. And that was because it was worth doing. And the reason it was

01:35:11.960 worth doing is because it was true, you know. And then you have the bloody adventure of your life

01:35:16.420 instead of descending into the kind of resentful, bitter misery that wants you to take out the whole

01:35:21.260 goddamn world. And solipsism as well. You know, like if you're, suppose you're writing a thesis that's

01:35:26.860 about, you know, the experience of clandmasculine parents, meaning women who are pregnant but call

01:35:32.640 themselves men, right? Like, there's no constraints to what you can write, because it's just nonsense

01:35:37.140 beginning to end. So you just write nonsense. There's no criterion for what would be a good

01:35:43.200 thesis on that field. Like, it's just stupid. So how do you get yourself up in the morning to do it?

01:35:49.240 Like, you know, you've written a book, I've written a book, it's one of the hardest things I've ever

01:35:52.240 done. How are they doing it? When Cain, when Cain extracts revenge on Abel, right, he pulls down his

01:35:58.920 own ideal, right? Because that's what happens. Cain is irritated and bitter because he isn't Abel.

01:36:05.360 That's why, right? So he's insanely jealous. And he shakes his fist at God, and then he kills Abel.

01:36:12.260 And then he tells God, my punishment is more than I can bear. It's a bit of a mysterious phrase,

01:36:16.760 but what it seems to mean is something like this. What's left for you if you destroy your own ideal?

01:36:23.280 How the hell do you get up in the morning? You've torn everything down. You can't put pen to paper

01:36:27.520 because there's no criteria for quality. It doesn't matter whether you write or whether you don't

01:36:31.740 write. And even if you do write, it doesn't matter what you write. So how can you be anything but

01:36:36.160 hopeless in a situation like that? And how can that be anything other than a punishment so great you

01:36:40.820 can't bear it? Isn't it interesting? I mean, it looks easy, but then, I mean, the fascination is with

01:36:45.900 what's difficult, isn't it? So why would you not want to try to do something that was hard and that

01:36:51.880 you mastered it and you achieved? And I mean, I look at these people and they're churning out all

01:36:58.420 this stuff. And then it gets picked up in schools. It gets picked up in laws, unfortunately. And I mean,

01:37:06.360 in laws are one place that you have to have some consistency and some logic and some meaning to

01:37:10.440 them. There was this great thing we found recently at Sex Matters, which was a great English

01:37:15.660 jurist, Edward Cook is his name. It looks like Coke, C-O-K-E, but it's pronounced Cook.

01:37:22.780 And he was the guy who said that Parliament was supreme, that Parliament was where the authority

01:37:27.520 flowed from, as opposed to, say, divine right or from the monarchy. And he was trying to say,

01:37:33.520 where was the limit to what Parliament could do? Because Parliament can't do anything, like laws can't

01:37:38.740 do anything. And the example he chose was it can't make men women. Like, Parliament could say men

01:37:44.100 could be women, but men will still not be women. And it's so funny to see now we're in a place where...

01:37:49.920 I think you could argue, and on psychological grounds, from an evolutionary perspective,

01:37:55.860 and this has to do with this axiomatic certainty that you were describing and the necessity for that.

01:38:01.320 I think that the distinction between male and female is the most fundamental perceptual distinction.

01:38:08.400 And that if it goes, everything goes. I think it's more fundamental than dark and light,

01:38:14.840 because you could survive blind, right? I think it's more fundamental than up and down,

01:38:19.460 because sex evolved really in an environment, in an aquatic environment, where up and down were

01:38:24.300 fundamentally more or less irrelevant. Like, I don't think there is a single equation

01:38:30.140 more fundamental than man does not equal woman. I think you're right. Right? So then if you swallow

01:38:36.720 that, if you can force people to swallow that, they will swallow absolutely everything you try to

01:38:43.860 force feed them. And so then the question is, well, what's the nature of the spirit that is trying to

01:38:49.480 convince us to falsify our perceptions at that level? Because it's a real mystery. Like,

01:38:55.380 what the hell's going on here? You know, you said, well, why drag queens and toddlers?

01:39:00.620 And the answer is something like that. Well, if you won't object to that, there's nothing we can

01:39:07.140 do that you won't object to. And if we want to be able to do absolutely everything we want to you

01:39:13.500 at any given moment, that's a good place to start. Yes. And even if people don't believe you,

01:39:19.380 like one of the things that people say about propaganda is, you know, did people believe the

01:39:24.060 ridiculous claims in Soviet Russia? Like a lot of the time, no, they didn't believe it. But the

01:39:28.040 point is they didn't believe anything. The point wasn't to make them believe the lie. It was to

01:39:32.020 make them believe nothing. And then why do you want people to believe nothing? It's because you want

01:39:35.620 them to do nothing. So that's the chain of it is, you know, force people to at least pay lip service

01:39:41.020 to an obviously absurd proposition that nobody would have paid lip service to even 10 years ago,

01:39:46.680 or else stay silent. And then either you've confused them so much that they do believe something

01:39:51.620 really nonsensical, which means you can, you know, they're so confused, they'll believe anything,

01:39:55.320 or at least they now don't believe anything. Like if we live in a world where formerly respected

01:40:02.680 institutions like the BBC can seriously use phrases like sex assigned at birth, can seriously take it

01:40:09.040 as axiomatic that people are boys or girls depending on what they say and not depending on what they are,

01:40:14.580 then why would I believe anything else they say? And if I don't believe what anything the BBC says,

01:40:18.680 then why would I believe anything? And so now I've got to start constructing my own,

01:40:23.120 you know, my own understanding of who's telling the truth and what is truth and so on from the

01:40:28.500 ground up, which is not somewhere I thought I was. I mean, I'm 54, I'm nearly 55. So at 50,

01:40:34.020 to have suddenly discovered that institutions that were built up over, in some cases, centuries,

01:40:39.780 have been so eaten away by termites that we are in a place where just the most basic,

01:40:46.820 the most axiomatic thing about our species, like, I can only think like other things that

01:40:51.120 are as obvious about our species don't distinguish between us. It's things like,

01:40:54.960 you know, that we breathe air, not water. But we all breathe air, not water. So what's the,

01:40:59.180 what's the thing to break, you know? We can't put us all in under water and have us all die

01:41:04.000 and then claim that we can breathe water. Like this is, this is the only thing that we are split,

01:41:08.760 that we are divided on, that is really fundamental, that we're divided into two sexes.

01:41:12.760 So now you can claim that one sex is the other. There's nothing else you could do that with.

01:41:17.280 You can't say we're immortal because the fact is we actually do die. You know, the body is there,

01:41:22.820 it's gone. The person no longer moves. And we're not there yet on not giving birth

01:41:28.840 or not needing to have both sexes for reproduction. You know, these are the fundamental things about

01:41:34.160 what it is to be a mammal. And here we are. And we're saying that like the most,

01:41:40.060 one of the most fundamental things about what it is to be a mammal, that there are two sexes.

01:41:42.860 Yeah, well, and you know, it's no wonder that, that rates of anxiety and hopelessness are

01:41:48.200 skyrocketing among young people because, and this goes back to your observation about

01:41:52.380 shaking the foundations. You let a profound falsehood in and it takes out everything. And when it takes

01:41:59.760 out everything, there's no direction. And so that's anxiety, virtually by definition,

01:42:04.400 because anxiety emerges in the midst of directionlessness and there's no hope. And so

01:42:10.020 not only do we risk subjecting confused children to medical atrocity and insist that that's the moral

01:42:19.660 thing to do, but we demoralize them with confusion as profoundly as we can possibly manage. You know,

01:42:26.840 and I knew that was going to happen back in 2016, which is why I objected to that goddamn bill to begin

01:42:32.440 with because I thought for every trans kid, you hypothetically save. And I mean, hypothetically,

01:42:39.200 you will confuse a thousand into hell. I knew it. I knew the literature on psychogenic epidemics

01:42:46.440 and that's exactly what's happened. Well, I, we should stop this part of the conversation. I guess I'm

01:42:52.040 going to turn over to the daily wire side of the, of the conversation. Now for those of you who are

01:42:59.120 watching and listening, as we illustrated in this conversation, the daily wire crew, including me

01:43:05.760 are under a certain degree of assault from YouTube at the moment. And that's not a good thing. And God

01:43:10.940 only knows what the consequences of it will be, especially once we post this video, which I don't

01:43:15.340 imagine will make them particularly happy. Um, so if you're inclined to throw some support, the daily

01:43:20.780 wire way, you know, this isn't a bad time to think about doing that. And, uh, um, because

01:43:25.760 my, what would you say, alliance with them has been very productive and seems to be increasingly

01:43:31.660 necessary. So anyways, I'm going to talk to Helen, maybe a little bit more on the optimism side on

01:43:36.720 the daily wire plus channel to see where we think we might head in the future. Um, so you could join

01:43:42.140 us over there. Thanks for your time and attention, everyone. And for the, to the film crew here in

01:43:46.260 Toronto for facilitating this, the daily wire plus for making it possible. And Helen, well, it's always a

01:43:51.840 pleasure talking to you with your mathematical clarity and your love of the true and beautiful

01:43:56.000 and your courage. So like, good on you. Thank God. You're one of those 10 people that's stopping

01:44:00.940 Sodom from being, uh, annihilated by fire and brimstone, let's say, um, so far. And, uh, we'll

01:44:08.060 go over to the daily wire plus side and continue our conversation. Well, thank you very much. And to

01:44:12.640 the film crew here too, by the way. Oh yeah. And your book, just so everyone knows her book,

01:44:17.880 which you shouldn't read unless you want to be reprehensible. Um, and then to have your phone

01:44:22.660 confiscated, let's say by the Irish authorities, if you ever happened to visit that fair green

01:44:27.700 emerald, uh, well, let's see, I may be a test case, Jordan. No kidding. No kidding. Trans when

01:44:33.620 ideology meets reality. And you can tell Helen is a reprehensible type because she actually believes

01:44:40.020 that there's a distinction between ideology and reality is, and is willing to express that

01:44:45.100 sentiment whenever challenged, including in writing. So pick up the book. Trans when ideology

01:44:51.980 meets reality. Yeah. And, and you can, you can also wander over to her website and that's what Helen,

01:44:58.100 you said Helen Joyce dot. The Helen Joyce dot com. There's some poor woman. The Helen Joyce dot com.

01:45:04.060 Right, right, right. Who has got that website first. Yeah, yeah. The Helen Joyce dot com. Right. She's

01:45:09.720 good to follow on Twitter too, which is a place where you can still follow her. Thank you to Elon Musk.

01:45:15.360 Okay, good. Off to the Daily Wire we go. Thanks, Helen. Thank you.

01:45:19.540 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 10, 2023

379. Sex Matters ｜ Helen Joyce

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