TRIGGERnometry - ＂Sex is NOT a Spectrum＂ - Colin Wright

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson.

00:00:09.520 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:15.700 Our brilliant guest today is a former evolutionary biologist who is now the managing editor at

00:00:20.860 Quillette and we'll get to talking about why he's the former evolutionary biologist.

00:00:24.900 Colin Wright, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:26.960 Hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

00:00:28.640 Yeah, it's great to have you on, man. Listen, I obviously put a little bit of a teaser in there in the introduction about why you're no longer an evolutionary biologist. So why don't you just give everybody a little overview of your whole sort of life? How are you, where you are? What has been your journey through life to the point where you sit here talking to these two very problematic people?

00:00:48.320 my whole life so it's a lot um let's see i guess a good place to start would be just like immediately

00:00:55.360 after high school and how i started going down the evolutionary biology route

00:00:58.800 uh so i didn't i was a pretty terrible student in high school uh barely graduated and then i

00:01:05.260 went to community college as a business major where i started basically getting f's in all

00:01:10.880 my classes and failed and i flunked out of community college got put on academic probation

00:01:14.980 and they, uh, they booted me from the college. Um, so I worked in like record stores and

00:01:19.720 restaurants for a while and then I became a real estate agent for, uh, well, I just started to be

00:01:25.920 a real estate agent in 2008 and that's when the market crashed. And so being a real estate agent

00:01:32.120 wasn't a really great time, especially someone, I think I was 21 or 22 at the time. Um, so luckily

00:01:38.940 at the time I had also been sort of involved in this whole, the whole like new atheist movement

00:01:44.260 that was in the late 2000s, early 2010s, and I was really involved in sort of arguing against

00:01:52.700 God and stuff like that. And a lot of the arguments kind of would go back to

00:01:55.620 evolution versus creationism. And so I found myself just sort of going to these evolutionary

00:02:01.080 biology textbooks all the time, web resources to read about why these arguments, the creationists

00:02:08.500 and intelligent design proponents weren't very, very scientifically based. And that sort of got

00:02:14.580 me hooked on the whole evolutionary biology thing. And since I was unemployed, I decided I needed to

00:02:19.940 pick something. And so I decided to go back to college to pursue a career as an evolutionary

00:02:25.000 biologist. So I begged them to let me back in the community college, and they did. And then I did

00:02:32.640 well there. I transferred to UC Davis. I graduated there with my bachelor's in evolutionary biology

00:02:37.900 in 2012. Then I went to graduate school for my PhD in evolution, and I graduated from UC Santa

00:02:45.140 Barbara in 2018. Then following there, I went to Penn State to start a two-year postdoc.

00:02:52.980 And it was sort of during that time, and also during my time in graduate school,

00:02:57.000 where I had realized that there's sort of these things you can't really say on the left as well.

00:03:02.600 So when I was arguing against creationism, intelligent design,

00:03:07.900 There was never this pressure on me from my colleagues to sort of not argue as extremely

00:03:15.700 as I was, or, you know, I had all these open blogs and I was very open about my arguments.

00:03:21.040 And when I criticized these people, it was always, you know, they would tell me I'm wrong,

00:03:25.240 but they wouldn't say I was a bad person until I started seeing sort of these pseudoscientific

00:03:30.820 ideas sort of on the left among my colleagues, which I guess I would call like blank slate

00:03:36.580 ism which is this denial that there's any differences between males and females personality

00:03:42.760 wise everything is just socialization and when I started pushing back against those ideas I

00:03:48.400 started getting a lot of a lot of pushback from my colleagues and they were calling me you know

00:03:52.660 they would say I'm sexist if I think that there's any sort of innate differences and so I just kind

00:03:56.680 of shut my mouth for a while that carried on when I went to my did my postdoc at Penn State

00:04:03.300 But then they sort of upped their ante on the insane things they were saying.

00:04:07.000 So whereas before they would say that, you know, personality differences between the

00:04:09.960 sexes aren't real. 1.00

00:04:11.360 I now had some friends who were, you know, PhD scientists during grad school, biologists,

00:04:16.740 and they were saying that biology, that biological sex wasn't real as well, or they would say

00:04:22.460 that it's a spectrum, or they would say that there's five sexes or 10 sexes.

00:04:27.120 And these are just insane claims.

00:04:29.120 and I sort of had a history of engaging with bad ideas wherever I see them so it drove me nuts

00:04:34.580 so I basically just had all this pent up frustration with these pseudoscientific ideas

00:04:42.980 and I ended up writing an article called The New Evolution Deniers that I published in Quillette

00:04:47.380 that sort of went really viral then I followed that up with an article in the Wall Street Journal

00:04:53.060 called The Dangerous Denial of Sex that sort of blew up and then I had basically students at Penn

00:04:58.740 States saying that they felt unsafe with me being on campus because I was challenging some ideas

00:05:03.240 that they had about biological sex and ideas of gender identity and things like that. So I then

00:05:09.680 ended up leaving academia on my own because I had a lot of colleagues that were basically trying to

00:05:15.460 cancel me. There was a whole internet mob attacking me and my tweets. And so I just didn't feel like

00:05:22.580 I was really in charge of my future and success in academia. I don't think I'd get hired as a

00:05:27.520 tenure track with professor or get or get tenure even if i managed to get a job so uh luckily

00:05:32.880 quillette picked me up and that's what i'm doing right now i'm the managing editor over there

00:05:36.360 and uh yeah i can actually start thinking more freely now so you had to leave because there was

00:05:43.180 a dispute about the number of sexes and you say some of these people were saying there's five

00:05:47.400 there's ten obviously they're all biggest because we know there's 65 um 67 67 yeah sorry i'm

00:05:53.320 canceled now as well don't forget smoke gender smoke gender very important but we're actually 1.00

00:05:57.640 we're already starting to confuse sex and gender which is something we need to talk about let's

00:06:02.240 and it's always a frustration of ours that whenever we talk to somebody like you we've had

00:06:06.540 diana fleishman jeffrey miller brett weinstein all of these people invariably we have to go back to

00:06:12.040 very basic things but we're gonna have to do that because it's been so muddled and so muddied so

00:06:18.400 how many sexes are there so far we've only counted two in the animal kingdom some species are asexual

00:06:27.360 so they only have you know one they're just just females but um if there's more than one there's 1.00

00:06:32.980 only two there's never been found three uh or you know so no more than two basically is the short

00:06:39.260 answer so where does the confusion come from then the confusion comes from well there's a big

00:06:47.080 conflation between gender and sex for one. Um, and there's all different types of gender or the

00:06:52.880 all different types of definitions of gender, but a big part of the confusion comes from people

00:06:57.720 confusing these secondary sex characteristics with primary, uh, sexual anatomy. So I'll give

00:07:06.240 you an idea of the difference. So the primary, uh, sexual anatomy comes down to your gonads. 0.98

00:07:13.700 What type of genitals do you have? 1.00

00:07:16.120 Like, what is your biology organized around for the production of either sperm or ova, basically? 0.97

00:07:22.720 So that's what defines an individual's sex, you know, flesh and blood individual.

00:07:27.780 But then individuals also go through puberty.

00:07:31.120 So when puberty comes along, we develop what are called secondary sex characteristics.

00:07:34.840 If you're female, you'll grow larger breasts. 1.00

00:07:38.660 You'll become sort of more curvy the way your fat's deposited over your body.

00:07:42.760 Males will get, you know, facial hair, they kind of get more square jaw, more upper body strength, kind of more square bodies. 0.97

00:07:49.820 These are differences not of sex itself, but of sort of sex-related characteristics.

00:07:55.980 They're highly influenced by sex and testosterone.

00:07:58.940 And so people see that there's sort of a variation of bodies, and they confuse that with being a variation of biological sex itself.

00:08:06.160 Whereas you can have a bunch of variation in the way bodies look.

00:08:09.520 but you still have two sexes that are sort of underlying all that variation.

00:08:17.020 And Colin, you know, there's frequently people who say that there's more than one sex and they

00:08:22.100 would use the example of intersex people. Could you give a brief explanation as to what an

00:08:28.580 intersex person is and why that is not a third sex? Yeah. So an intersex person is someone where

00:08:39.140 there's some ambiguity of their genitalia or their gonads, or there's like a mismatch

00:08:45.220 between their outward appearance of their sexual phenotype and their internal reproductive

00:08:51.820 anatomy.

00:08:52.740 This only occurs in about less than 0.02% of the population.

00:08:57.320 So almost every single individual is, you know, over 99.98% of everyone is clearly male

00:09:04.720 or female, and they don't differ to each other in degree. 0.88

00:09:09.140 I like to use an example of sort of flipping a coin, for instance.

00:09:13.700 So if you were to flip a nickel, one out of every 6,000 flips will land on its edge.

00:09:19.500 A nickel has a, you know, heads and tails.

00:09:23.200 Heads and tails don't come in degrees.

00:09:25.260 You know, you're not, when you get a heads, it's not like 30% heads or 60% heads.

00:09:30.400 It's either all heads or all tails.

00:09:32.900 But you will get that one out of 6,000 where you'll land on sort of the edge of the coin.

00:09:37.280 And that's a real outcome. But just because there is sort of this intermediate outcome doesn't negate the existence of the categorical male or female or heads or tails that we have on a coin.

00:09:49.380 So that's kind of the way to think about biological sex and intersex individuals.

00:09:54.800 It's not a perfect analogy, but I think it goes sort of a long way to show how you can have intermediates and still not have sort of a spectrum of sex.

00:10:04.600 You know, we're all not just varying degrees of maleness and females.

00:10:08.620 We're almost all mostly either all male or are female.

00:10:12.160 And maybe there's some in the middle that are sort of sort of ambiguous.

00:10:16.580 And I mean, I don't want to sound judgmental because I definitely don't mean it in that way.

00:10:21.540 But is it accurate biologically to say that people who are intersex, that is an abnormality in their development?

00:10:30.580 It's not like a third like normal option.

00:10:34.200 And it's just something that happens in the same way that people can be born, you know, with one leg or one hand or whatever.

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00:11:07.380 theater get tickets at mirvish.com yeah i mean it comes down to some developmental

00:11:14.620 uh error if you will or there's a condition that they have that makes it so

00:11:19.860 their genitals don't develop you know fully um yeah and that's basically what it boils down to 0.83

00:11:28.500 We have these two different types of reproductive anatomies.

00:11:31.280 They serve a function, but creating any sort of a bit of anatomy, whether it's a hand or

00:11:36.440 an eyeball or, you know, gonads or something, these are complex developmental processes

00:11:41.100 that if you have just one little, you know, genetic defect or a mutation that's sort of

00:11:48.860 neutral in some sense, it can throw a wrench in the developmental process and you're going

00:11:53.920 to get maybe a non-functional outcome or maybe an ambiguous outcome.

00:11:56.920 Now, there's an issue people have is you'll say, you know, and I hear people say it a lot, I'll say that there was, you know, an error during sex development. And then they'll immediately say if, you know, they're arguing from an intersex position, they'll say, oh, you're calling me an error. Or if you say that it's a, like this, you know, they'll basically just confuse you talking about their condition as being sort of a developmental error with them being an error like as a person.

00:12:23.720 And that's just – those need to be divided and separated completely because even though someone might not be 100% male or female, they might kind of be somewhere in the middle, they're still 100% human and that's sort of how we need to see these individuals and treat them with the dignity and respect that we'd give anybody.

00:12:41.480 Well, that was my point when I said I wasn't being judgmental.

00:12:44.640 No one's denying these people's humanity or anything like that.

00:12:47.800 But I guess what I'm saying is if we know that some people are born with six fingers,

00:12:52.620 we don't then say the number of fingers on a human hand is a spectrum.

00:12:56.980 We just go that some people are born that way.

00:12:59.720 It's not the normal way of developing.

00:13:02.580 It doesn't reduce the value of that person or the value of their hand.

00:13:06.340 Francis is looking incredibly tense at this point.

00:13:08.800 Am I?

00:13:09.240 Yes.

00:13:09.940 That's my concentration face.

00:13:11.900 What are you concentrating on, mate?

00:13:14.220 Mate, actually, I was thinking Anne Boleyn, she was born with six fingers.

00:13:17.040 That's why they called her a witch and they burnt her. 1.00

00:13:18.900 Oh, no, they didn't burn her. 0.96

00:13:19.720 They decapitated her. 0.88

00:13:21.620 Good old days. 0.99

00:13:22.520 Anyway, so, yes, Colin, so we've talked about sex.

00:13:28.060 Now, the bit where it gets much more complicated, I think, is gender, right?

00:13:34.080 So how many genders are there? 0.99

00:13:36.500 you know it all it all really goes back to what you define gender as so as a biologist i i tend

00:13:45.560 not to say what gender is just because there's so many different definitions so you'll have sort of

00:13:51.700 this radical feminist point of view where they look at gender as sort of the societal norms and 1.00

00:13:56.840 expectations that society puts on individuals based on their perceived sex that sort of uh

00:14:03.260 whips them into these these sexual roles basically like you have a submissive you know in the kitchen 0.98

00:14:09.620 taking care of kids woman role and then a more dominant head of the household you know male role 1.00

00:14:14.500 those are those are how some individuals conceive of what gender is uh some people talk about gender

00:14:19.560 as just innate differences in personality and preferences between males and females

00:14:26.140 some people in the trans community see gender uh as sort of this internal identity and feeling of

00:14:33.240 masculinity and femininity and how well you you identify with these sort of stereotypical

00:14:38.400 gender roles or sometimes even just reduced to a feeling of you know I just feel like a man or

00:14:44.060 woman on the inside and they're not really defined in any any big way so I tend not to say like what

00:14:49.540 gender is I usually ask people what do you mean when you talk about gender so I can then know if

00:14:55.300 they're confusing gender and sex or something because people can do the gender thing if they 0.89

00:14:59.880 want to i only really have an issue when it like oversteps into my field which is biology and they're

00:15:07.380 they're confusing some certain terms and you know a lot of times you'll hear people say that male and

00:15:12.000 female are gender identities now and that's just where i kind of draw lines like no male and female

00:15:17.020 these are scientific terms actually mean something very very specific uh and i refuse to relinquish

00:15:23.340 the language in some of those realms because it just creates mass confusion which is evident if

00:15:28.740 you go on twitter for any amount of time and colin we often hear this sentence being used

00:15:36.240 or this phrase you know where gender isn't a social construct gender is a social construct

00:15:41.320 can you just break it down and please in layman's language what that actually means and whether you

00:15:46.720 agree with it or not yes if we're so if we're talking about gender um some people will say

00:15:53.580 It's a social construct, meaning that as a society, we sort of enforce certain norms and expectations according to somebody's biological sex.

00:16:01.520 And I kind of mentioned before, like masculine and feminine sort of gender roles.

00:16:06.480 That's sort of what people mean sometimes when they talk about gender being a social construct.

00:16:11.760 There are people who talk about sex being a social construct as well.

00:16:15.600 And when they talk about that...

00:16:16.780 It is the way I do it, Mike.

00:16:18.800 Yeah.

00:16:20.620 I love the way you just looked at your mind.

00:16:22.660 yeah that's never happened to him good carry on colin sorry i apologize for that oh no worries

00:16:27.980 um then there's people who will move away from gender or they'll conflate gender and sex and

00:16:33.600 sometimes they'll even outright say that both gender and sex are social constructs um and they

00:16:40.000 sort of make this error as i mentioned before of confusing these secondary sexual characteristics

00:16:44.440 that are sort of on a on a spectrum to some degree you know if we're talking about secondary

00:16:49.680 characteristics like body shapes as opposed to your actual sexual reproduction reproductive

00:16:55.320 anatomy and they'll make this point they'll try to say you know because intersex individuals exist

00:17:01.900 and they're sort of ambiguous and we have some individuals that are you know have very feminine

00:17:07.200 looking bodies who are actually males and you have more butch looking you know masculine females and 1.00

00:17:13.560 they're actually females this means that sex itself is sort of also a social construct because

00:17:18.440 If you can't draw the line anywhere along these different body forms, then, you know, it's any place you decide to draw a line is arbitrary, is their argument.

00:17:29.420 But as I mentioned, just because we might have some ambiguous cases like the edge of a coin doesn't mean heads and tails doesn't exist.

00:17:36.360 We still know that, you know, we might not know in some intersex individuals where that line might be for an individual.

00:17:42.980 but there's still no question for you know over 99.98% of individuals that they're clearly either

00:17:49.980 100% male or female. Have you ever been abroad and fell out of place because you didn't speak

00:17:58.000 the language? No because I voted Brexit mate. Brexit means Brexit. I know that when you go

00:18:03.680 on holiday sometimes you don't speak the language it can feel really awkward a little bit like

00:18:07.900 Francis talking to a woman. Do you want to learn another language? Now I don't for obvious reasons 0.96

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00:19:01.760 dot co dot uk forward slash play and use the code trigger and we're not going to explain how to spell

00:19:08.760 the word trigger because that would be patronizing and colin we seem to have reached this point well

00:19:17.520 not seem to we have reached this point where we're talking about different sexes different genders 0.56

00:19:23.900 now when i went to school which wasn't that long ago despite despite my appearance it was

00:19:31.100 It was a very hard school.

00:19:32.200 Yeah, it was a hard school.

00:19:33.700 But it was, you know, we were taught there were two sexes. 0.99

00:19:38.080 Sex and gender was the same thing. 0.96

00:19:40.500 And that is a scientific fact.

00:19:44.680 And there is nothing that you can do to dispute that.

00:19:47.220 How have we got to this place now where you go up to the average person on the street

00:19:51.320 and say how many genders are there, and they will have a meltdown and probably run away? 1.00

00:19:56.040 I think you can thank Judith Butler for a lot of that.

00:20:00.260 She had a book called Gender Trouble, where she sort of brought up this gender as being 0.96

00:20:04.560 sort of a performance.

00:20:06.580 And if you look at just where you're coming from politically, conservatives tend to, they

00:20:11.780 don't distinguish between sex and gender.

00:20:13.840 If you look on, if they're filling out a form and it says, you know, what's your gender?

00:20:18.340 Well, they're going to, and the options are usually male or female, that just means biological 0.95

00:20:22.360 sex to them. 0.80

00:20:23.360 If you then talk to people on the political left, you know, they have this much more complex

00:20:27.880 notion of gender that can be either the social construct kind or the identity kind or the

00:20:33.120 behavioral difference kind. And it's just this big mess. And sometimes they'll even conflate it

00:20:38.020 with biological sex. So yeah, it's just a complete mess. And that's why whenever you get into a 1.00

00:20:43.260 conversation about sex or gender, you just need to ask to define the terms. What do you mean when

00:20:48.040 you say gender? What do you mean when you say sex? And then you can have a sort of a yardstick

00:20:52.980 where you can compare, you know, the actual concepts that are being discussed rather than

00:20:57.120 talking past each other using terms in completely different ways.

00:21:02.080 Well, one of the things I'd probably disagree with you on in terms of left and right, I

00:21:06.000 would say the main position is position of people who are not on political Twitter, which 0.95

00:21:11.580 would be a very significant portion of the country who have no fucking idea what we're 0.71

00:21:15.620 talking about, actually, that would be the mainstream opinion on this issue, I would 0.97

00:21:19.920 imagine.

00:21:20.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:21.520 So when I say it's not really a right and left, I mean, I think most people on the left

00:21:26.180 probably use gender to mean sex as well it's just more of a fringe um the identity politic left the

00:21:33.020 critical theory type people uh those are the people who are um you know the social justice

00:21:38.740 activists they're the ones who are making all the confusion around sex and gender right so the the

00:21:44.680 other issue that gets talked about a lot and i do think it's important we've had a number of

00:21:49.020 transgender guests on the show and we've discussed that with them and they're people who are very much

00:21:53.360 uh of the opinion that uh you know gender dysphoria is something that's caused by

00:21:59.120 developmental issues and other people you know that say that there's a male brain and a female

00:22:04.260 brain and and gender dysphoria just for for people watching and correct me if this definition is

00:22:09.660 wrong is the feeling that your body does not match your gender in other words you have a male body

00:22:17.120 but you feel that you're a woman right is that broadly accurate yeah it's not even just a feeling

00:22:22.640 but there's you know it comes with a whole lot of anxiety and anguish too it's sure it's you just

00:22:27.980 feel like you know you can't live your life this way you just it's there's there's a lot of torment

00:22:32.660 that goes hand in hand uh with it that you need to justify the medical intervention type things

00:22:39.480 right so it's incredibly disconcerting certainly no one would seek to deny that now the question

00:22:48.180 that always interests me when i speak to people in your former line of work biologists evolutionary

00:22:53.660 biologists is the main debate seems to be is is is if in order to say that you have the wrong body

00:23:01.000 that presupposes that uh you you can have a sort of male brain and a female brain to some extent 0.57

00:23:07.520 right uh so certainly a lot of people make that claim uh is there such a thing as the male brain

00:23:14.660 and the female brain so it's it's a complex question there's there's not like a single 1.00

00:23:20.760 thing that you can boil down like what a male brain is like you can't look at just a scan of

00:23:28.260 a brain you know and not know who it belongs to and know with absolute certainty like oh it's got

00:23:33.100 you know this one thing it's definitely uh it's definitely a male brain i mean you can talk about

00:23:38.040 chromosomes if you want but you know if we're talking about strictly anatomy and things like

00:23:41.280 that. You're not going to find a single factor. But a lot of people are kind of confused on what

00:23:48.340 it is scientists mean when we'll say, you know, a male brain and a female brain. We don't mean

00:23:53.820 that there are like these categorical things. So their brains between males and females aren't like

00:23:58.680 biological sex itself, where there's, you know, you either have the anatomy or you don't. It's more

00:24:04.180 like um the anatomy of human faces okay so you can look at a human face and you can with a high

00:24:12.300 degree of certainty say that person looks like a male that person looks like a female and they've

00:24:18.040 done studies where you know people are i think in the high 90 range where if they could just look

00:24:22.960 at a face that's you know the hair is kind of back and they can't they all they can see is the face

00:24:27.240 in the features. High 90% accuracy that you can actually correctly assign them to male or female.

00:24:35.160 You can guess their sex. But is there any like one part of a face that is definitional of having a

00:24:43.120 male face or a female face? Well, no. What you have is you have slight differences in a bunch 0.75

00:24:48.240 of different traits. So when testosterone acts on your body, it's going to sort of act on all

00:24:53.860 your traits simultaneously and push them in certain directions. So males have the more square

00:24:57.640 jaw. We have kind of closer set eyes, they're further set back. There's all sort of these

00:25:04.520 little features on a face that sort of our brain does this multivariate analysis when it glances

00:25:09.780 at someone and it says, those are the features that are kind of correlated in this, you know,

00:25:14.320 the syndrome of a male looking face. And then females have sort of a syndrome that looks like,

00:25:19.920 you know, a female face. But there's some individuals, you know, we're not 100% good

00:25:24.500 at guessing someone's sex based on just looking at their face. So there is some sort of middle

00:25:30.860 ground. So same thing with brains. So you can't just look at a brain and say, this is a male

00:25:35.220 brain, this is a female brain. Brains are these complex, you know, they have multi-trait organs. 1.00

00:25:44.180 And so you need to look at all these different traits simultaneously. And when you do that,

00:25:47.980 you can make sort of these predictive models with computers that can accurately assign them

00:25:52.280 to male or female. Uh, so we're talking about just sort of tendencies as opposed to any single

00:25:58.940 defining trait that makes it a male and female face. So, uh, I'm sorry, brain. So that's sort

00:26:04.920 of how to look at them. There's, there's overlap. Um, but it's a strong like bimodal distribution

00:26:10.340 of what makes a male brain and a female brain. Uh, I tend to just talk more about masculine or

00:26:16.080 feminine um traits and you know is your brain more masculized or feminized and that can be 1.00

00:26:21.160 across the many different axes at once but but the reason i ask you the question is a lot of

00:26:26.420 people make the claim that to have gender dysphoria is to have the wrong brain what is your view on

00:26:33.440 that from a scientific point of view um there's just no good scientific evidence and basis for

00:26:40.920 the claim that you can have sort of a brain that's mismatched for your body so our human

00:26:46.960 our brains are made up based in you know they're developed based on your in utero testosterone 0.77

00:26:52.340 also testosterone after during puberty and those are going to affect the way your brain looks but

00:26:58.640 if you're a biological male like you have a male brain even if it's a highly feminized male brain

00:27:04.920 you know it's not like these categorical different these categorical different things

00:27:10.220 that are floating out there and you can find a female brain somehow lands into a male body that's 1.00

00:27:15.780 just sort of this um cartesian dualism that i think science has pretty much done away with at

00:27:23.040 this point so so given that then what is your explanation of the phenomenon of gender dysphoria

00:27:28.440 um you know it could arise just due to having a highly feminized brain that's in the body of a 0.99

00:27:37.000 biological male. I mean, we talked to a lot of homosexuals who in youth, they sort of had these

00:27:44.200 gender non-conforming behaviors, you had tomboys, and they did experience some degree of gender

00:27:48.860 dysphoria because they tended to like the, you know, tomboys like to do the behaviors and

00:27:54.720 activities and have the preferences that boys tend to have. And you have some boys that tend to

00:28:00.120 migrate and feel more comfortable doing the sort of activities that little girls tend to do on 1.00

00:28:04.960 average. And they experienced some degree of gender dysphoria. Now, that's not saying they're

00:28:09.480 trans. I'm saying that's sort of a type of dysphoria. But being trans is a different 0.97

00:28:14.800 psychological condition that goes above and beyond sort of having these gender non-conforming 1.00

00:28:19.940 types of behaviors. It's persistent. It begins very, very early in life, and it just remains

00:28:27.840 through puberty. And it's this severe discomfort they have in their body. So it's a whole different

00:28:33.140 thing um doesn't mean they actually have a male brain and a female body or vice versa but it's a 1.00

00:28:39.300 it's a psychological condition where they really feel like it is and it causes them stress and

00:28:44.100 that's a real thing to to to treat um and people should get help for and we should be sympathetic

00:28:49.840 to those people who are dealing with it and colin i really wanted to talk to you about the science

00:28:54.940 element of all this and again going back to my school days there were two sexes male and female 0.98

00:29:01.740 or the rest of it aren't we in quite a worrying place for science where you have scientists who

00:29:09.580 are reputable saying things there are 62 genders or whatever else isn't that showing that actually

00:29:16.300 the the subject is in crisis i think there's a big problem in academia right now because

00:29:24.120 i mean if you just if you go back to the things that i wrote that got me in in hot water i just

00:29:31.720 said the most boilerplate things I can imagine saying as a biologist there's two sexes and they 0.99

00:29:38.640 matter in some contexts like sports or what prison you go to or something like you know these are

00:29:43.760 these shouldn't be controversial statements there it's more controversial when you go into the

00:29:48.480 gender thing but at base I mean I got people trying to cancel just for saying that sex isn't

00:29:53.840 a spectrum and you know that's if people want to disagree they can but they don't really just

00:30:01.080 disagree. They come through your careers and they want to make sure that you can't get a job

00:30:05.540 anywhere. And I know for a fact that a lot of my colleagues agreed with me. I mean, I didn't

00:30:10.600 just come out and publish my first article for Quillette out of nowhere. I made sure I checked

00:30:15.580 with a lot of my colleagues and my mentors all looked at it and they said, this is absolutely

00:30:20.320 correct, but you probably shouldn't publish it because it could be harmful for your career.

00:30:26.380 And then I just had to reflect on why did I become a scientist in the first place? You know,

00:30:30.460 I did it because I wanted to pursue questions and pursue truth and mentor students.

00:30:36.560 And I thought being a professor would be a good way to be able to sort of have that intellectual life, I guess, of spirited debate.

00:30:46.660 And when I sort of realized that that wasn't the case, it was definitely eye-opening.

00:30:50.940 And it's really concerning about the current state of academia because it's only gotten worse since I've left.

00:30:57.980 and so you you came to academia you were a mature student you came relatively recently to it

00:31:05.360 was it very much different when you started off the when you started off your academic career

00:31:11.000 and did you see it suddenly go downhill by increments or was it almost like a sudden change

00:31:17.300 almost out of nowhere it was incrementally so I started to going to school as a biology major in

00:31:25.100 2008. And at that time, you know, this whole, you know, there were people who you consider

00:31:32.140 by today's standards pretty woke, but it wasn't a really big, a big thing. And they hadn't sort of

00:31:37.640 made it totally mainstream in any big way. I still felt like I could speak my mind on certain issues

00:31:45.340 about sex differences. And it wasn't until I got to my undergrad. So at UC Davis in the early 2010s,

00:31:53.280 when I really started to see this behavior, and it has just really ramped up ever since then,

00:31:58.820 and especially in the last, I think, just three years, it's gone incredibly fast. And then post

00:32:05.340 George Floyd, you know, all this other issues have sort of just spiked as well. And they've

00:32:11.900 sort of just blitzed the institutions with this ideology, and no one wants to stand in the way

00:32:17.560 anymore because they'll just get cancelled immediately. And what responsibility do you

00:32:23.080 think universities have for what's happening in wider society, but also issues such as, you know,

00:32:30.560 pre-pubescent children transitioning, etc.? I mean, I think a university just needs to

00:32:38.180 uphold academic freedom, freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity, just not trying to suppress

00:32:46.540 ideas because they might be politically incorrect or something. I mean, we have this, there's this

00:32:53.020 lip service that academics will pay to these ideas. They talk about tenure and how good tenure

00:32:59.680 is because tenure allows you to, you know, speak your mind freely and gives you this academic

00:33:04.840 freedom. So we see these things as values, but that's sort of contradicted to the way that we

00:33:10.500 treat pre-tenure faculty. You know, when you don't have tenure and you're saying controversial things,

00:33:15.600 people just are so quick to want to cancel you and keep you from from getting tenure. So what's

00:33:23.880 the point of having tenure and saying that we value this when you're basically weeding out all

00:33:28.460 the individuals who would need tenure when they get it? Because, you know, if you're making sure

00:33:34.080 that these and the people who need tenure never get it because they're weeded out before they can

00:33:38.000 even get it. So everyone who gets tenure now are just the ones who never were going to say anything

00:33:45.000 controversial in the first place. And to me, that's just a highly contradictory set of values

00:33:50.500 that needs to be addressed. And it's mind boggling that the position you express seems pretty

00:33:56.100 sensible and reasonable to me, and I think to most people. And that is now controversial within

00:34:02.440 a scientific discipline. What does that say about your former colleagues? What percentage of them

00:34:09.160 And do you think, is it a case of there's a few people who believe all this woke stuff about sex and gender, and then a very large cowed majority?

00:34:20.000 Or is it now at a point where actually the people who buy into this stuff are becoming a big chunk of the professoriate?

00:34:31.700 So it's hard for me to know, because I have a limited experience.

00:34:35.240 I started grad school at the University of Pittsburgh, and then I finished in Santa Barbara.

00:34:39.160 And so I have sort of my own experience from being in those institutions, and it seems

00:34:46.700 like there's a pretty big generational gap where you have some of the older professors

00:34:51.220 basically are, they agree with what I would say about biological sex and all this stuff.

00:34:58.460 It's the younger grad students, the postdocs, some of the newer, younger professors that

00:35:04.360 getting jobs there uh that are sort of parroting these these woke ideas of the sex spectrum and

00:35:11.160 um yeah basically and it's it's quite a bit in my experience i mean i i'm not gonna name any names

00:35:19.520 but i've i worked with a lot of scientists when i was in grad school and as a postdoc and almost

00:35:25.060 maybe over 70 percent of everyone i've ever collaborated with um has basically tried to

00:35:31.880 distance themselves from me and my views around biological sex. Some of them have even had to

00:35:36.880 contact me and say, you know, hey, I need to call you out on Twitter just because my colleagues are

00:35:42.960 around me and they've noticed that we've co-authored papers together on spiders and ants,

00:35:48.000 and they're asking questions about our relationship. And so I need to just go out and publicly say that

00:35:55.080 I disagree with you. And so that gives you sort of an idea of this mutual policing that's going

00:36:00.340 on in these departments where they didn't even say anything controversial they were doing the

00:36:04.800 right thing but they're getting pressured and feel the need to denounce me just because they're

00:36:08.920 worried about the splash damage from someone that authored a spider paper with them in 2015

00:36:13.940 like that's that's just shocking to me and every time i hear about what's going on in the

00:36:21.480 universities we've got it uh in the uk as well i always think why are there not

00:36:27.560 bodies at the university the heads of departments so on and so forth who don't stand up to these

00:36:34.160 people that's that's the million dollar question it's just there there's a lot of spinelessness

00:36:41.960 going on and you know they to some degree i understand it because academia is not like some

00:36:47.680 some other jobs i mean it's it's incredibly competitive whenever you are applying to a

00:36:52.320 just a postdoc job or even a faculty job hundreds of applications are going into each one of these

00:36:57.500 things to even be qualified to be a professor you need to go to school for 10 years at a minimum

00:37:05.240 almost more likely 15 or so because you need to get your you know your four years of undergrad

00:37:10.660 your five years in grad school you need to do between two and four years of a postdoc and

00:37:15.260 that's just to get the the interview and maybe get a tenure track position and then you got six more

00:37:20.720 years when you get that job of uh of research before you're going to go up for tenure so some

00:37:25.380 of these people are you know if they're not tenured they have 20 years invested in that

00:37:29.360 it's such a narrow topic like the biology of flower beetles or something and that's

00:37:36.020 they're not gonna get many jobs doing anything else they've dedicated 20 years to this

00:37:41.200 uh and it's just it's easier just to to acquiesce it's easier just to cave into the mob

00:37:47.820 because if you push back they'll they'll try to cancel you and you know you're you slipping up

00:37:53.400 one thing can just nullify 20 years of intense research and competition and

00:37:59.340 publish or perish. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's just a,

00:38:03.560 it's just a field that's ripe to have individuals scared into silence and not

00:38:09.660 say anything because there's just stakes are way too high.

00:38:13.800 And I find this really, really depressing.

00:38:19.460 The fact that, you know,

00:38:21.160 that you say a biological and scientific truth which we all know to be accurate and suddenly you

00:38:27.680 get cancelled for it and it comes to a point that do you think the trump needs to step in do you

00:38:35.340 think the government needs to step in to make sure that if the if the university can't police itself

00:38:40.540 then surely the government has to do something that's a big you can tell he's on the left can't

00:38:47.240 you call it yeah i mean we do have get the government in there we do have the academic

00:38:53.780 freedom and so i there i do have a problem with saying like what you can study what you can say

00:38:59.160 like you know people should be able to say that that sex is a spectrum and i want this i just i

00:39:03.960 want the university to be this more liberal open environment to ideas where no ideas are censored

00:39:08.640 we're all just doing science and using evidence and reason to back our claims up uh that's what

00:39:14.800 should be the case now there's a whole other argument for the sort of critical theories type

00:39:19.180 stuff that you have in the humanities and are they actually doing is it real scholarship you know

00:39:24.680 they're just laundering ideas and passing off you know they're just citing crap study to make

00:39:30.100 another study and to have this this uh house of cards basically a publication where you look at

00:39:35.880 this massive amount of literature and it looks impressive but it's just built on on the shakiest

00:39:40.720 foundations where they don't actually think that you can objectively know anything and everything

00:39:45.620 is relative like there can i can see some case for having some you know defunding of these and

00:39:52.320 these these areas but um i don't think we should be telling faculty what they can or can't say

00:39:58.880 specifically but ultimately a bad idea is a bad idea is a bad idea and these bad ideas have

00:40:07.140 consequences i don't want to be operated on by a doctor by a surgeon who believes that gender is

00:40:12.760 a spectrum i'm sorry if that makes me a bigot i just think with subjects like science it's all

00:40:19.240 very well you know english and whatever else and history but with subjects like science where it's

00:40:25.420 an incontrovertible fact isn't it incredibly toxic for someone to be spouting nonsense

00:40:31.160 Yeah. So the thing that we need to get back to is just sort of championing this liberal science, free exchange of ideas, marketplace of ideas. The issue isn't that people are saying totally absurd thing.

00:40:48.680 I mean, people have said absurd things forever, but it's sort of the ideology they have around this where they're in a place of power where they are able to sort of censor other people from dissenting.

00:41:03.300 They don't want this marketplace of ideas.

00:41:05.440 They think they have this truth and they're trying to shut down debate on these issues.

00:41:10.900 And that's the concerning part is the authoritarian dogmatic aspect of their ideas.

00:41:17.140 You know, people can be wrong.

00:41:18.540 Like, I'm sure I'm wrong about things, and I think they're wrong, and it's not so much a bad thing that you're wrong as long as you're willing to, you know, subject your beliefs to scrutiny and have other people feel like they can actually say, actually, I don't think that's entirely true, but right now they won't accept that type of even modest pushback.

00:41:38.960 You know, for example, me saying that sex isn't a spectrum. That's a scientific claim. You know, that's and it's one that I'm willing to support. And with, you know, with a bunch of evidence and multiple species across, you know, plants, reptiles and mammals to make that argument. But they don't engage with the argument. They just try to get me out of academia. So I'm just out of sight, out of mind. That's the problem.

00:42:03.300 them. And do you sense that the pendulum has started to swing back? For example, in the UK,

00:42:10.880 we had a review of the Gender Recognition Act, which is a law to do with how you can claim your

00:42:19.360 transgender, etc. And actually, I think due to a lot of the pushback, the idea that you can self

00:42:25.140 ID, in other words, if you say, I'm a woman, that means you're a woman, irrespective of what you

00:42:31.340 look like what surgery or whatever um that actually got removed so there seemed to be some

00:42:38.420 movement in to a more or more sensible position do you feel that that's likely to happen from here

00:42:45.880 and in or is there some way to go i think people are definitely starting to see with these ideologies

00:42:53.340 and the effects that they're having for a long time they've somehow just been able to fly under

00:42:58.100 the radar and they've just been propping up and people were shocked when they saw them and they

00:43:03.020 thought that they might just be these anomalous things you didn't have to worry about. And

00:43:07.180 because of that, no one paid some serious attention until now it's becoming a really

00:43:12.280 big problem. It's going to depend on the specific issue. I think a lot of the gender 0.99

00:43:17.840 issues with rapid onset, gender dysphoria, puberty blockers, those, you know, should we give 0.78

00:43:22.660 cross-sex hormones or blockers to children? There's all sort of a bunch of questions there.

00:43:27.500 I think that will probably be addressed a little faster just because it's a little more, a little easier to address, especially when there's children involved in this whole thing.

00:43:36.940 The UK is already doing better as the US is lagging behind it.

00:43:40.380 We're just not nearly as organized on that front.

00:43:43.460 I think some racial issues will probably take a lot longer to remedy, just especially in the wake of the whole George Floyd and Black Lives Matter era that we're in right now.

00:43:56.000 But I do think that people are starting to push back against some of these, you know, the postmodern critical theories type thing.

00:44:03.100 And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, but it's going to get worse because we're seeing their reaction to real pushback.

00:44:12.220 At least people are starting to identify the problem we're pushing back and they're sort of throwing an even bigger fit, which is good because at least the discussion is happening.

00:44:20.700 You know, Trump called out critical race theory by name and by no means a Trump supporter, not going to vote for him. But I think that was a really good thing because he put a name on it. He gave us something to talk about. And now you see the critical race people, they're starting to backpedal and talk about it's just, you know, racial sensitivity training and they're already changing their arguments. And that's a good thing.

00:44:41.680 You know, we just need to keep keep the discussion going, because for the longest time, they've just had complete control over the discussion.

00:44:49.260 And I think we're sort of sort of trying to regain something.

00:44:52.880 And I think there is some some back and forth happening that I'm at least excited about and hopeful for.

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00:45:27.980 And Colin, what would your advice be to these academics

00:45:34.640 who find themselves in a similar situation to you?

00:45:38.320 Would you advise them to take your route,

00:45:40.220 to stand up, to say what you believe in?

00:45:42.680 There's not that many jobs that quite like, my friend.

00:45:46.780 Or would you say, go down the other route?

00:45:49.960 You know, you've worked 20 years for this.

00:45:51.900 This is your career.

00:45:54.060 Don't risk it.

00:45:54.960 So I think everyone's situation is going to be really different and you need to be able to do what you can in your own capacity. I mean, I'm a single guy, don't have kids. You know, I have a family that could have supported me if I needed to, you know, just be homeless for a while.

00:46:14.360 You know, my my my low point isn't as low as some people's could be for sure.

00:46:20.640 If you're if you have a family to take care of and you need to pay the bills, you know,

00:46:25.220 I can imagine, yeah, you don't want to just go on and start tweeting that sex is a spectrum

00:46:29.020 and, you know, just to lose your job.

00:46:31.260 And, you know, was it really worth it?

00:46:32.880 Probably not.

00:46:34.240 But there are probably some things you can do in your daily life.

00:46:37.220 You know, if you try to get, you know, if you're a professor, try to get on some of

00:46:40.980 these diversity committees, these boards, and just ask a lot of questions and make them really

00:46:45.580 explicitly detail what exactly they're saying, what do they mean, define the terms, be a dissenting

00:46:51.820 vote in some of these, you know, try your best not to be in people's faces. And as much as you

00:46:59.260 can do is all that we ask, because I think we do have a collective action problem where most people

00:47:05.480 are probably in agreement. But if people just keep standing up one by one, then they each get shot

00:47:10.900 and keeps everyone from wanting to stand up themselves.

00:47:14.620 So I think more and more people are finally,

00:47:17.840 seem to be more willing to speak up

00:47:20.320 and hopefully that continues.

00:47:23.180 And Colin, the last question that I'm going to ask is,

00:47:26.980 and it's something that I wanted to ask you before,

00:47:30.700 was would you do it again?

00:47:34.060 If you had the chance again,

00:47:37.160 would you still stand up and speak out?

00:47:39.320 yeah definitely it's just i mean that's why i wanted to be a scientist in the first place

00:47:46.320 that's why i went down this route 12 years ago to be a scientist because i wanted to be able to

00:47:51.680 challenge ideas and debunk things and uh that's that's just sort of in my blood i guess uh and

00:48:00.280 that's what i continue to do and i got luckier than most i was able to get a job at quillette

00:48:05.260 afterwards. You know, the publication that led to my demise in academia is kind of an interesting

00:48:11.680 circle there. But yeah, I would definitely do it again. No question. I think I have more control

00:48:21.100 over my own future success now, whereas before I'd have to just stay completely silent in this

00:48:29.720 competitive job market. And right now academia is not doing too well, even just for the job

00:48:35.180 market wise, but I couldn't have just been happy just studying my wasps and spiders and not speaking

00:48:41.700 up about things I think are important. Well, the last question I'm going to ask is the last

00:48:46.680 question we will ask all our guests, Colin, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about

00:48:52.180 as a society that we really should be? That's a big question. I think

00:48:57.740 it's getting increasingly difficult to sort of voice our support for good ideas or condemn bad

00:49:05.720 ones without encountering people who accuse you of some sort of betrayal to either the political

00:49:11.580 right or left, depending on which side you tend to gravitate towards. But I consider myself sort

00:49:17.200 of more of a moderate and a centrist. And I think this describes probably most people, you know,

00:49:24.300 if we're being honest about it.

00:49:25.880 So I think we need to be talking more about the importance of making strategic alliances.

00:49:30.960 So and how to make progress in political environment, an atmosphere that's so polarized.

00:49:36.660 It's essentially, you know, we have this duopoly going where you give support for one idea on one side and you're that person.

00:49:43.860 Or if you disagree with something on the other side, you know, you're you're a bigot or something like when I voice voice support for critical race theory or sorry,

00:49:51.860 against critical race theory and supporting trump's decision to do that you know that's

00:49:56.400 there's a social cost you pay for agreeing with trump um but if we demand this ideological purity

00:50:01.900 while living in this sort of polarized environment we won't make progress on issues and it's bizarre

00:50:08.140 because i being someone who is really involved in sort of the excuse me the atheist community

00:50:14.280 back in the day the people i argued against were evangelical christians and these are the people 0.79

00:50:21.280 that i find myself more and more on the same side of the debate with right now not on evolution

00:50:26.880 but on you know critical race theory on these gender sex issues and i'm making all these

00:50:32.100 alliances with people that i never thought that i would have you know been on on their side on a

00:50:37.080 certain thing and it's it's having this amazing effect of you know they're becoming more human

00:50:40.980 again we're finding out how many things we actually do have in common uh and it's extremely

00:50:46.160 refreshing um just to sort of make these alliances with people and having certain values on certain

00:50:53.520 issues you can be in conflict with other issues but you know if we want to get things done and

00:50:57.860 have enough people to do it i think we need to talk about strategic alliances you know there's

00:51:02.720 obviously there's there's a limit to that like i wouldn't march with you know the kkk or something

00:51:07.620 just because they're also uh you know for or against you know the sex spectrum or something

00:51:12.420 like that so there's there's some baskets and there are lines that can be crossed so you you

00:51:18.080 need to consider some aspects of somebody but i think we should probably put our uh drop our

00:51:23.740 defenses at least a little bit so we can get some uh some progress that makes sense colin thank you

00:51:30.140 so much for coming on the show uh make sure you head over to at swipe right on twitter and follow

00:51:36.280 colin there and obviously his work at quillette as well and we will see you very very soon with

00:51:41.820 another interview or another brilliant live stream all of them go out 7 p.m uk time

TRIGGERnometry - October 07, 2020

＂Sex is NOT a Spectrum＂ - Colin Wright

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