Original subtitles

This autumn, I will be on a tour of North America and parts of Western Europe,

talking about my latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, A Darwinian Reverie.

I will be joined on stage by a range of friends and foes.

The book is aimed at the same audience as the

Selfish Gene, but the content is quite different.

Beginning on September the 4th, I will be visiting Dallas, Austin,

Newark, Washington, Boston, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, probably San Diego and Los

Angeles, then San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver.

Then returning across the Atlantic in October, I have events in Oxford,

Coventry, London, Cambridge, Glasgow, Salford, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Dublin,

and Belfast.

The events will include a Q&A and a limited meet and greet.

You can get your tickets at RichardDawkinsTour.com If you are watching

this on YouTube, you might have noticed that this episode is a week delayed.

But if you want to get early access to our

episodes, consider becoming a paying member.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share it with your friends.

Thank you for all your support.

The savage missiles hurled at Kathleen Stock in the Stocks of Sussex University

gives the lie to the pretense that her tormentors should be pitied as an

oppressed minority who just want to peacefully get on with their life.

I've long admired her gentle courage in the face of vicious bullying.

When we finally met at the Dissident Dialogues Conference in New York this May,

I felt an instant affinity.

It was a pleasure to conduct the following interview.

Kathleen, it's a great pleasure.

I long wanted to meet you, read about all your

exploits and we have corresponded a little bit.

What was it that led to this terrible time you had at Sussex?

Was it because of material goals or was it other things?

I started writing and talking in public about what I thought were the problems

with the rampant trans-activism in institutions in 2018 and my book came out in 2021.

So I'd already gone through protests at my talks, open letters against me,

people writing to my bosses saying I shouldn't be employed for about three years.

So no, the book probably didn't help.

But at the same time, I really don't think that any of the people that ended up

coming to my campus to try and get me out had read my book.

They just don't engage with your ideas.

That doesn't surprise me because having read

the book, it is an academic work of philosophy.

It does what philosophers are supposed to do, clarify issues, define terms,

sort out confusion, that kind of thing.

It's very hard to see how anybody could object in this kind of way that they did.

Did you get any backing from the university itself at that time?

Well, eventually, by the time Marx's men were coming to the campus with posters of

my name on it saying via Kathleen Stock, she's a

transphobe, they felt they had to say something, yes.

But I mean, it had been on a lower level, on

a smaller scale, but still quite significant.

There had been harassment going on for years, including from Sussex faculty who

would be regularly tweeting about me saying I was a danger to students and that

I shouldn't be teaching and really trying to work against me.

And they didn't do anything to that period.

It is an extraordinary development because a university is a place where you're

supposed to be exposed to ideas and, well,

hypothetical thought experiments and unfamiliar ideas.

And for fellow members of the faculty to say you shouldn't

be teaching because it is actually quite shocking.

I have a colleague, a philosophical colleague in Oxford who says that he can

divide students up into those who are prepared to take on

board, to take on a hypothetical which they don't like.

I mean, suppose it were true that so-and-so... Say marriage was wrong.

Yes.

And about half the students can do it.

And the other half simply can't.

And I suppose a philosopher meets that more often than some other subjects.

I mean, philosophy students traditionally have never had any problem that way.

And I think that the ones, the half that can't these days, it's not that they're

naturally unable to, it's that, you know, constitutionally unable to,

it's that they've ingested a faulty theory of moral guilt where even if you sort of

entertain a counterfactual that includes contemplating some awful state of affairs

and what might follow or believing in some morally corrupt principle and what might

follow, you are somehow morally compromised.

And so they just don't want to do it.

They don't want to think of a world in which

it might be true that gay marriage was immoral.

And I remember talking to philosophers a few years ago, like five years ago,

and they were saying that they had taught,

for instance, the views of, is it John Finnis?

Anyway, some Oxford philosopher who had strong views about the immorality of

homosexuality and they had taught those views as part of a wider discussion for

years, but only recently you were finding

students saying well, I can't read that, you know.

And it's really, it's kind of a, they feel literally

that they'll be contaminated in some way by contact.

And I think that's what happens with my book and my thought and also being on the

same platform as me even so people won't even go anywhere near me.

They won't be on the platform with me to argue against me.

They say things like it would only kind of validate her views as worthy of rational

scrutiny if I were to disagree with her in public.

You know, so there's really kind of deep, deeply incoherent, but kind of deep

subconscious metaphors of contamination and purity going on here.

It's very weird.

The book, your book is, it's a gentle book.

Yes, it's very gentle.

It's not an aggressive book.

I keep saying to transactivists, if they would

listen, I'm as moderate as you're going to get.

There are some people out there who are much more kind of polarised than I am.

I'm in the middle.

I'm trying to like say how can we all get along

and what are the compromises that we could make?

But the thing is we're just never going to be able to make the compromises that the

transactivists demand because they started out on such a sort of extreme position

that even to say no to them they consider to be radical.

Well, another thing I've noticed about you is that you're very clear.

And as indeed you should be.

And I've got a quote here which I'm going to

read to you but not from you, from somebody else.

So just find your...

I think there's a tendency for obscurantism in certain academic fields to

be valued for its own sake as though it's somehow impressive.

I'm going to read this quote.

This form of theoretical extractivism had to be countered by uncovering specific

histories and archives, more accountable narratives and ways of knowing produced by

those who had for too long constituted the phantasmatic objects of fear, the zones of

experiments, the fetishised example that demonstrated

the validity of Western epistemologies as one sentence.

The fact that it included the word phantasmatic gives

me a clue as to the author potentially, but who is it?

Well, I think about you, Judith Butler.

Spot on.

She's very fond of phantasmatic stuff.

That seemed to me to be making no effort whatsoever to convey anything at all.

It seemed to me to be saying, listen to me, this must be

profound because you don't understand the word I'm saying.

I mean, that's one of her clearer sentences.

If you read enough of her, you realise she's got a certain kind of rhetorical,

recurring rhetorical tropes that go through her writing.

Like she often asks a question, a very, very long question with lots of clauses.

So it's a rhetorical question.

But instead of spelling out the claim and why the claim might be true, she says,

would it not be...

Well, that's OK.

I mean, a rhetorical question is OK.

But the language is...

I mean, I actually always used to say to my students,

don't ask a rhetorical question, say what you mean.

Because we want to know what you... It's all a bit too vague.

But is it...

I mean, do you find in this whole field, is there a tendency towards obscurantism?

In the academic version, yes.

I mean, there's sort of...

Transactivism is a sort of multi-headed hydra, but there is an academic wing who

are there to basically produce the arguments or the simulacra of arguments

that will validate the transactivist conclusions, whatever they are.

And in that field, yeah, because you're going to

be obscurantist, because that's all you've got.

You've got to employ the tools at your disposal, because there's nothing that is

going to make it true that sex is a spectrum or that...

that what happens to intersex people, so-called intersex people has got anything

to do with chromosomally typical trans people.

You're going to have to do a lot of fancy footwork and kind of obscuring the...

muddying the water to get from here to here, so that's all they've got.

Well, I like your discussion of the... of sex before we get onto gender and the...

the gamete distinction and the chromosome

distinction and what we call the cluster distinction.

Would you like to tell our listeners a bit about that?

Well, so... what is sex is a philosophical question.

Like, what is biological sex, although everyone knows the answer in practice I've

maintained, and pretty much everyone knows how to differentiate between the two.

So...

the most simple and I think probably the best account of the division between the

sexes is to say that, you know, that the female sex is...

is any biological entity in a sexually dimorphic species that's on the way to

producing... it's on a developmental pathway towards the production of large gametes.

And the male is on a pathway towards the production of small, more mobile gametes.

Now, of course, to be on a developmental pathway going towards does not mean that

something might not interfere with that developmental pathway.

You think it's going to go wrong genetically or...

from the environment.

Put that little caveat in.

Yeah, because otherwise you find these really stupid arguments saying,

well, you know, I haven't got ovaries, so...

I mean, actually, as it happens, I had one of my ovaries removed in my twenties.

Because, you know, I'm not half a woman.

Mostly on a developmental pathway and then an ovarian cyst.

Or worker bees who are sterile females.

Exactly.

Or you find people saying to me, it drives me crazy, you know, there are

people who think that once women go through menopause, they're not women anymore.

So that's the simplest one.

And that's got nothing to do with chromosomes.

It indeed hasn't.

I have to register that it's something very surreal explaining this to you,

because I literally understand practically

nothing about biology, but I do understand this.

You know, there are males and females across the

animal kingdom and their chromosomes are different.

But all of them are on the way, a developmental

pathway towards the production of some kind of gamete.

Then if you wanted to just go to zoom in a bit, you might say, well, really what the

question means is what's human biological sex.

And you could then talk about chromosomes and really it would be the presence of the

Y chromosome or the absence, which is compatible with a range of so-called

intersex conditions like XX, multiple Xs and

a Y is still the Y that makes the difference.

It's the Y.

Now the third one, so what I did in the book was say,

look, here's three potential accounts of biological sex.

We don't have to choose between them because any one of them will withstand all

the standard objections to from the trans activist side.

The third one's sort of hardest, I think, to defend because

it adds a kind of element of human interpretation in.

And really

so if we go back to the gamete account, it comes up with some, one might wonder

whether it came up with some kind of politically unfortunate conclusions

because of people's developments, sorry, differences of sexual development.

So for instance, someone who has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome,

which means that they have a Y chromosome, but their body cannot register androgens,

so they, at puberty, grow breasts and evolve they have probably have

underscended testicles, but that may not, no one's going to know, you know,

it we think it looks, the world treats this person as a woman, as a girl,

and then a woman, and this person thinks of themselves as a girl and a woman,

and then they don't menstruate, and then they, there's

an investigation and find actually this is a male.

So on the first two accounts, there's a male person here.

Now I know parents of children with CAIS and it's extremely difficult for them to

accept that they have a male child, even though, strictly speaking,

they will recognise that their child has chromosomes, but they say there's a sort

of more social sense in which this is a woman.

And I can't tell my daughter that she's a man, really, and you know, it's very

difficult, so I sort of said, well, that we could have an account which takes

clusters of properties and doesn't necessarily prioritise any particular

element, like chromosomes aren't the most important.

If you've got primary sex characteristics of a female and you've got secondary sex

characteristics of a female after actually this case wouldn't have primary,

but you've got secondary sex characteristics, then we can choose how we weight those.

You know, humans in categorising the world, we tend to categorise it according

to our interests and our needs in conjunction with material reality.

That's why we have more concepts for vertebrates than invertebrates,

because we need vertebrates more than we needed vertebrates.

So I was thinking of trying to sketch out a charitable position which would allow

that in some cases, as long as the phenotype is sort of naturally generated,

as it were, not through like sticking endocrines in your arm or having surgery,

because I think that takes it beyond biology, that there might be an account

which would allow for these difficult edge cases to be

in the right category for the way that we see the world.

Having said all that, you know, honestly, I

don't know that it works, but I did my best.

As a biologist, of course, I knew all about the gametic and the ______,

and I thought that the class 2 one was interesting.

So thank you for that.

By the way, on the gametic thing, you might be interested

that you know it's universal, perfectly universal.

There's an evolutionary account for how it came about, that isogamy, which is a

primitive condition where you have equal gamete size,

where each parent has to contribute 50%, that's unstable.

So if you have a mutant produces a slightly larger than average isogamete,

then, let's say one hit the slightly smaller one, we only get away with that if

they can manage to mate with the larger one.

So it became more stable.

It became unstable.

So that was a kind of runaway evolution towards an isogamy, which is the ______.

Why is that stable?

Why doesn't it just continue?

It does continue, in some cases, in some algae.

But it's interesting that there are conditions in which it is unstable.

There are conditions in which we could have ended

up being equally paired in sporting competitions.

And that's what does happen in some algae.

But the instability was the thing that happened in well, all animals.

So that's interesting.

Okay, what about gender, though?

Well, gender is a word that has become completely ambiguous between different senses.

As you know, traditionally, for a while, it's been

used as a polite synonym for sex, biological sex.

Elizabeth Gaskell talks about gender in ______.

And she doesn't mean ______.

The second-rate feminist meant ______.

She just means ______.

Is it a man or a woman?

So there's that use.

And because people don't want to say the word sex, you know,

repressed Anglo-Saxon people don't want to say the word sex.

And then there's a second-rate feminist use of it,

which is really about masculinity and femininity.

And they would understand those things, or most of them

would understand those things as culturally constructed.

So it's the set of gestures, stereotypes, norms that tend to, in a particular

cultural context, to be associated with the male sex

as opposed to the ones associated with the female sex.

It could be anything from fashion to the way you

walk to the stereotypes applied to you by others.

And feminist thought still do think quite often that, you know, some very bad

stereotypes have been attached to females that we need to get rid of or change.

So that would be gender in that sense.

The social meaning of sex.

And then, and this is where things went wrong.

Within academia, I've got two more to go, but within academia there was a crazy

move, which I've written an article trying to absolutely get rid of forever,

but there's no one who reads it.

A crazy move to make gender stand for womanhood and manhood,

but understanding those in a social, not biological sense.

So no longer just saying yes, some men are, some women are masculine,

some some, sorry, some women are masculine, some men are feminine,

you know, but now saying that masculinity is what determines manhood and femininity

is what determines womanhood, which is very regressive.

And that didn't catch on, but there is, you know, in the wider population people

don't talk like that, but in academia it's very common to understand gender as

standing for social womanhood or something like that.

So it's just moved away from the biological realm.

We're not necessarily talking about adult human males and females anymore,

we're talking about people that have a certain kind of gendered presentation,

and that's what defines them as women or men.

And then, the fourth one, and the most current one, is gender identity.

Your gender identity is now supposed to be something that's a feeling inside you

about whether you really are at home with your sex body, whether it really fits you

or not, and sometimes it's put as whether you

really are a woman, or you really are a man.

The female, the woman struggling to get it out.

Yes, yes.

Which sounds very dualistic to me.

It's picking up on all sorts of remnants of

Christianity and Platonism and God knows what.

You know, it's very tempting for humans to think of the

physical outside and the metaphysically sort of ethereal inside.

This is just a new...

I was quite impressed with, oh, who is the woman, the famous very early,

I'm blocking on her name.

She was a...

Jan Morris.

Yes.

Not a woman though.

I was impressed with Jan Morris's account of what

it felt like to be a woman struggling to get out.

Well, I wasn't because it seemed to, again, fall

back on a lot of monstrous stereotypes about women.

When you read accounts of why trans women transition, they say things like well,

I've always liked lipstick and I've always been a bit dizzy.

Yes.

So you don't buy the people who say that they feel deeply unhappy because they feel.

..

I buy that they're unhappy.

I buy that they're unhappy.

I don't buy that it has the meaning that we have decided now to assign to it.

It means you're really a woman inside.

I mean, how could it possibly?

You're an unhappy man who doesn't feel like you fit with

the norms of masculinity and you think you're better off.

Yes.

Or you find the norms of femininity more easy

to deal with, but it doesn't shift your fate.

So do you think you're helping them, people like that, with hormones?

Approve would be a strong word, but I have no ambitions to stop adults

who've been through a proper period of reflection and know all the risks

associated with these extremely invasive surgeries, drugs.

And I just want to add as well that I think it's harder for older generations to

grasp or new people to this, that when I talk about gender identity and its impact

on women's rights, for instance, know that the other

side are not requiring surgeries anymore for adults.

You could tell me, according to them, you could tell me now that you all have a

female gender identity, that would make you a woman.

You wouldn't have to do anything, you know?

And then you could just go into the women's

changing room on the basis just of your feeling.

So in a way, it's a bit of I don't mind talking about some adult transsexuals who

had their bits cut off, but they're a red herring.

It's not about them anymore.

It's about fully intact males in women's prisons as fellow inmates.

I mean, people are talking about she raped her with her penis.

Her penis was sticking out of her trousers.

And that's the court transcript.

That's insanity.

It's totally cult-like insanity.

We might come back to that.

But children, what's the youngest age that, I know in Britain

it's not so bad, but in America, having breasts removed?

Well, I think there are credible reports that I've seen of 14-year-olds having

mastectomies.

But definitely by 16 that's happening.

And then I don't actually know what the lower

limit for puberty blockers is, but it's young.

Because there isn't one kind of standard approach across America.

So in a way, it's a bit like the Wild West.

There's a surgeon, she's actually Irish, who

works in the States, called Shiv Gallagher.

She has a TikTok, where she gets the very young girls whose breasts she's just

chopped off to pose on TikTok with their mastectomy scars

showing, sometimes with self-armed scars also showing.

And they hold up a copy of her book, Shiv Gallagher's book, which is confirmed.

You know, it's absolutely grotesque, the industry, in the States in particular,

around surgery for T's.

She thinks she's doing good.

Well, that's the charitable interpretation.

She thinks she's ultimately saving them from suicide or whatever the myth is.

But it is, it's really quite... I'm rather hoping

that surgeons like that end up getting sued.

Yeah, I'm too.

Well, I think actually that might happen.

Because, well, the age of consent is an age at which a girl is thought to be old

enough to consent to have sexual relations with a man.

So if a surgeon who had done top surgery on a girl of 14 was

sued, it shouldn't be a defense to say, well, she wanted it.

Because she was below the age of consent.

I mean, there's also...

So, it turns out that a lot of these girls, I mean, boys as well, boys are

having smaller numbers that are having... This isn't America.

It's not as bad in the UK for surgery, although there's the puberty blocker scandal.

But when you read the testimonies of these girls in a book like Abigail Shrier's

book, Irreversible Damage, which I've read,

yes, they haven't had sexual relations yet.

You know, they're living in an online world where they're not really materially

connected to other people only through the medium of the internet.

And of course, that can distort things very much.

And many of them are sort of giving away their future bodies and their future

fertility in some cases, you know, having 18-year-olds

having radical hysterectomies, moving their ovaries.

And of course, now we are seeing girls, women coming out the other side,

25, 27, in absolute despair of what adults let them do.

And adults did to them, really, because they

just should never have been allowed to do it.

Yes, Jonathan.

Do you feel that it's like a craze?

And when you were at school, we had crazes for

certain kinds of toys or certain kinds of marbles.

Things have got a lot worse.

Things like that.

Which of course is a well-known phenomenon, but it looks horribly like that to me.

So it is, undoubtedly.

Some element of this is what the term is social contagion.

You use that word because the trans activists side are often so desperate to

smear you, they'll say oh, you're saying, you know,

it's a contagion, you're saying it's a disease.

But no, it's a social contagion.

It means that things spread like wildfire through populations, adult populations,

I don't know, children population, trends, and actually you know, this is a.

..

as research by Jonathan Haight is highlighting, teenage girls in particular

are becoming more and more mentally distressed.

He hypothesises because of smartphones, so you can track when smartphones arrived.

Teenage girls got a lot more miserable, self-conscious and suicidal.

And basically if you're a teenager and you're miserable and you don't know what

that feels like to some extent, you look around, in the culture around

you, you have a way to express your distress.

So 10 years ago when I was teaching at university, quite often girls would come

in with short sleeves on and you'd see like, cuts all the way down there up,

scars, because there was a trend for cutting.

That was really obvious, you know, lots and

lots of girls were cutting at a certain point.

Then there's also like the pro-ana movement, which is a...

I mean, anorexia happens, but there's a trend

for anorexia that has been at various points.

It's been enhanced by online, kind of pro-anaerexic sites.

So we know that there's an interaction between the

internet and what girls do to hurt themselves, basically.

And this is another one, to be honest.

It just is.

I mean, it has some positive elements.

It gives some kids who are very awkward and friendless, or feel friendless,

a whole new online community, so they feel very... they feel cool and they've got

like some kind of social cachet in their schools.

Quite often, if they change their pronouns, then they become more

interesting, and it does have those effects.

That's all fine, but if they end up in a medical pathway, if they end up in a

gender clinic disrupting their endocrinological system, taking

cross-sexual loans, and eventually, potentially,

cutting off body parts, that's not fine.

We need to stop them, but instead, the wider

society is saying, we need to affirm you.

Carry on.

We will absolutely observe your pronouns.

Yes, you are.

Whoever you say you are.

What about the suicide scare?

I'm a bit sceptical about that, but I don't know much about it.

Well, you should be sceptical, because it's an extremely crude weapon

that has been deployed for years, almost decades, those who wish to see

children affirmed in their incongruent gender identities.

And so, for instance, Suzy Green, who is the...

who for ages was the CEO of Mermaids, this terrible charity in the UK that

basically only exists to facilitate the access of children to these interventions.

They wanted to lower the age at which they got them.

They wanted to make it faster.

They always smeared any critics as transphobes.

And Suzy Green, for a period of a decade, was on sofas, chat show sofas,

in the press, saying better...

you know, she had a son who she took to Thailand, aged 16, to have him operated,

came back as a girl.

And she would say better a trans... I can't...

better a trans daughter say than a dead son.

And that was the mantra that everybody said.

And then sometimes you see these wild claims, like 50% of trans kids,

trans kids, have attempted suicide.

Totally false.

And if you look down at where the evidence had come from, it would be some kind of

snowball sampled survey of online trans identified children.

And it would be, have you ever had a suicidal source?

Yes.

I could say yes.

Most people could.

So Michael Biggs, a sociologist at Oxford, looked at the waiting list at some point a

couple of years ago for the Tabstock gender identity training

for children and tried to see how many suicides were there.

And he concluded, I think, that if you were on that waiting list, then relative

to the general population, your risk was raised by five, like five times more

likely to commit suicide, just based on that list, which is not...

It shows something.

However,

all sorts of things raise your suicide risk.

Autism raises your suicide risk.

Anorexia raises it a lot more than that.

And of course, trans identified girls quite often

have a history of autism and anorexia as it happens.

So the causality is completely murky.

Just because you've got a child who's trans identified, it might be a symptom of

some other problem that may also make her suicidal.

We just don't know.

And then as the research I just mentioned, Jonathan Hay, is showing teenage girls are

generally the suicide rates are going up in attempted suicides.

So we've got there's nobody denying that this is an extremely distressed cohort.

Absolutely not.

But this is a cohort that has a disproportionate number of same-sex

attractive girls and boys, autistic girls and boys, children who've been in care,

looked after children, children who have a history of sexual abuse.

It's a big category.

And any one of these factors might make them more miserable.

And the other bit just to mention is, there's absolutely no evidence that

socially transitioning them or medically transitioning them makes it any better.

And it was only ever proposed as a kind of like emotional blackmail tool.

They'll kill themselves unless you give them the drugs.

That's just not true.

People who promote that kind of idea it seems they've got a very strong motivation

to persuade others to join in the club, so to speak.

Is it a kind of self-affirming?

I mean, I think about that a lot.

I mean, there's some... I don't know about conspiratorially minded, that's a bit

unfair, but there's people who think, you know, this is just... this is making

money for people, you know, that's why they have such a strong motive.

It's making money for pharmaceutical companies,

it's making money for insurance companies.

Surgeons, well, it is.

It's a market.

But I don't think...

I mean, I think there is a market, but that's not why these people are so committed.

I think my own feeling is that as a parent, anyway, once...

and this is not... I don't feel...

I'm not one of those people that criticises parents who've gone along with

their children's identifications, because I think

they've been put in an impossible situation best of them.

But once you've done it, especially once you've started making sure your child has

puberty blockers, you know, so you've disrupted their natural healthy puberty.

Doctors have done it, but you've agreed.

And then the information starts coming in.

There's no evidence this actually does anything physically or mentally that's good.

It may have...

it may have caused problems with bone density.

It seems like it probably has.

It may have slowed down important cognitive processes that come around puberty.

Basically, my point is, how are you going to live with yourself?

You cannot afford to let that information in.

It's an absolutely terrible thing to realise.

And you thought you were doing something good.

So I think these people quite often are very motivated to keep clinging on to the

fantasy and to shut out any counterfeit evidence because of the guilt.

And I feel for them.

I'm not like one of those people that says it's all in your fault.

I think society's created this.

I don't blame most parents because they were badly advised.

I do blame medical councils.

I do blame professional associations.

The people that were supposed to look at the evidence here and just kind of looked

away and said, oh, those people over there are handling it.

And those people over there were nuts.

They were nuts.

I've read somewhere that perhaps in religious people

would rather have a trans child than a gay child.

Is there something of that?

I think

in some communities that has to be a factor.

And in fact, if you look at a TED talk that Susie Green did, this woman who took

her son to Thailand and came back with a daughter in ____.

She took him to Thailand because the surgeon would do it.

Exactly.

It was illegal.

And actually since then it's become illegal in Thailand.

you can't get a two in Britain until you're 18.

So anyway, if you look at the TED talks, the TED talk that she did, Susie Green,

she makes it quite clear, although inadvertently, that her husband was very

uncomfortable with this child's boy and he was very feminized.

Like girls' toys, little boy.

He was probably gay.

And if he wasn't gay, he was a feminine boy.

And the husband didn't like it.

Whether or not that's true in that case, if you take this set of ideas and you just

put them down in a conservative Christian or Muslim or any community where there is

a suspicion of gay relations and you don't want that for your child and you say,

oh, did you know your child could be born in the wrong body?

That's a thing now.

And did you know that you can correct that?

And then a child comes out and says, a boy says, I think I like that boy over there.

It might be tempting to say, well, maybe you're not a boy, maybe you're a girl.

And that would make everything okay.

I get the feeling that there's rather some age divide.

I hear stories from publishers that young people in the publishing house are

refusing to work when somebody's booked that kind of thing.

Is there a kind of divide between older and younger people?

Yes, I think there is.

It's a generalisation which has many exceptions.

So I'm finding more and more that young people come

up to me and say, you know, we're sick of this.

I mean, we're sick of the wider kind of repression

around talking about this stuff, honestly.

We're sick of being made to give your pronouns.

So some young people are getting fed up.

And equally some older people are just a hundred percent gone with it all and are

perpetuating that problem.

But in general, yeah, lots of young people go along with this.

young people have always gone along.

I would have gone along with it.

You know, I didn't know anything.

You know, I didn't know how important fertility

might be in the life of a woman when I was 18.

And I didn't know, I didn't understand the world well

enough to see the problems that are so obvious now.

And that's just the way age and experience works.

I don't blame the kids at all, but I blame the adults for acting like

children are now these kind of under teenagers and

twenty-somethings are like wise sages from another realm.

So I keep meeting older generations who say, well,

maybe the young people are onto something here.

Maybe they understand what we can't.

Are you crazy?

Thank God no one took that attitude to me.

I don't want to mention names, but I love to mention names.

I can think of two prominent scientists, whom I

have great respect, who are going along with this.

And I think it's their sucking up to their children.

I'm sure it is.

And actually, I mean, I think it's fascinating.

When you find someone of the older generation who's really very vocal about

this, especially, there's usually a trans-identified relative in the picture.

And as I think Maia Forster said to the British.

Well, Maia Forster said to me at one point something like, for every one

trans-identified child or teenager, there's probably a

hundred adults around them that feel they can't speak out.

So the teachers, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins.

And it is becoming more

Is the tide turning?

I think in the UK things are really changing because the CAS review has

undermined the idea that there was this really strong evidence

base for puberty blockers, the use of puberty blockers.

For anyone who understands medical evidence and reads that report,

they will see that the data collection was terrible, there was no follow-ups,

there's been all these egregious lapses on behalf of

the medics involved and the psychologists involved.

But also there's just no real evidence for social transition

being a help or medical transition or giving a puberty blockers.

And that's definitely made a change in Britain.

And also the level of women's rights in Britain, I don't know, six years ago I

would say all political parties wanted self-ID.

They wanted this idea that like change all the policies so that if a man says he

feels like a woman, he can get into the changing room of the

sports team or the domestic violence shelter or whatever.

And now the only party left that still seems to be for it is the Lib Dems.

Labour's abandoned it.

Tories have abandoned it.

Labour's abandoned it.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, Labour's coming round, thank God, but only through the hard, hard effort,

hard-won effort of Labour women who've been suffering God knows what kind of

abuse to make these points over and over again.

And mostly the Labour hierarchy have ignored them, but now they're seeing

there's an electoral disadvantage to not being able

to say what a woman is when you go into an interview.

I got into trouble a few years ago because I made a comparison

between identifying with a race and identifying with sex.

I didn't actually make a point myself.

I simply said discuss.

You kind of did make a point though, didn't you?

If you invite discussion, that's tantamount.

I mean, the point is that actually if you think about race

in America, so-called black Americans, it is a continuum.

It really is.

Sex is definitely binary.

Race definitely is not.

Race really is a continuum, and therefore on the face of it, it would be more

plausible that you could identify with a different race, identify with different sex.

It just goes the other way round.

Oh yeah, you can't.

I mean, it's interesting because a couple of days ago I gave a talk at Cornell

University with a fellow philosopher called Rebecca Tuvelle.

Yes, she made that point, yes.

Rebecca wrote this article.

It's very famous.

People can look it up.

There's a famous furore around it because she argued that if there are good reasons

to treat trans women as women, then by roughly the same sort of

reasoning, we should treat people like Rachel Dolezal,

who is this white woman who is presented as black.

We should treat her as black or as trans black.

And when that article got published, people

went crazy because she got it on both sides.

She got it in the neck from trans activists and people in the anti-racist

movement because neither side could accept this argument.

But of course, the reason they couldn't accept it, according to me, especially on

the people who are anti-racist, is that everybody

knows that there's no such thing as trans-racialism.

But they couldn't, you know, it's a modus, so to put it in technical terms,

it's a modus tolens, not a modus ponens.

That's a philosopher's joke.

But she's saying if P, then Q, P, therefore Q.

In fact, it's if P, then Q, not Q, therefore not P. So in other words,

it's not, there's no such thing as trans race.

There's no good reasons to treat Rachel Dolezal as black.

And there's no real good reasons, except in sort of interpersonal context,

to treat trans women as women.

Well, I made the comparison and was deprived of an honor by the American business.

Yeah, because they don't, these people don't understand the issues.

All they hear is, oh, he's being mean.

He's being mean, he's being kind of subversive.

But the deeper context here is if we can't talk about these things properly,

you know, well, it's the reason why this medical scandal involving children has

just happened, because we weren't allowed to talk about it.

We weren't allowed to raise these up.

We weren't allowed to toss it out.

Why weren't they being mean to Rachel Dolezal?

I mean, she... Oh, they were.

Oh, they were.

They were.

But I mean, what I mean is, why make the difference between being mean?

I mean, they don't have an answer.

I mean, basically, the answer is that Rachel Dolezal didn't have like a massive,

well-funded NGO system behind her to push her point forward.

Whereas, because of the gay rights movement's successes, their righteous

successes, getting gay marriage through, they had

a lot of street cred, they had a lot of influence.

And then when they decided to push through trans

women or women get over it, this is literally true.

Yes.

Institutions crumbled because they had such reach.

And if there had been a parallel universe where some sort of, I don't know,

anti-racist organization had suddenly decided

to push trans racism, who knows where we'd be?

Trans species?

Yeah, who knows?

I mean, yeah.

Well, anything more we all talk about.

Well, you said we might get back to women's rights.

I mean, I don't know if there's talks about sport and things like that.

Yes, yes.

LGBT.

LGBT, I get.

T seemed to me a bit of an outlier.

Doesn't really belong.

Well, it's not.

I mean, yes, I think it's an outlier too.

I mean, you can see how there's a continuum.

Lots and lots of lesbians and gays present in

what are called gender non-conforming ways.

You know, I'm a lesbian.

I'm dressed in men's clothes a lot.

I have very short hair, you know.

So there's a continuum in gender bending amongst the rainbow.

But trans now is so wide, including things like being non-binary.

And since, in fact, it became defined in terms of a feeling, really, you're trans

if you feel like your sex is somehow inappropriate, then it became more and

more detached from the L and the G and the V, which is

to do behaviour, like sexual orientation, behaviour.

And in fact, most trans women, that is men, who identify as women are heterosexual.

And they have a fetish.

I mean, that's the other thing that I might as well say

because no one, you know, in polite society refers to it.

But there is a fetish called autogynephilia, which a man may have,

where he gets an erection.

He gets a round through dressing as a woman.

And we used to know this because we were called cross-dressing.

And there'd be jokes about, like, men stealing their wife's knickers and things.

And we didn't think it was because they wanted to express their inner womanhood.

We knew it was a sexual fetish.

But we have collectively, that's become impossible to say.

And yet, you know, there are activists out there

and writers like Andrea Long Choo and Grace Lavery.

These are trans identified males, trans women, who would freely admit that

they get a massive, you know, thrill from being perceived as a woman in a better

commas or going into the women's changing room.

So all of that, again, we cannot talk about it.

It becomes a highly relevant when we're saying, are we going to change our

policies in this institution so that anyone who identifies as a woman can come

into this changing room or this dormitory or the shelter?

And it's bizarre to me that we have just allowed, through the loss of nice words,

and like everyone being kind and inclusive, to allow, you know,

male fetishes to get off on being in women's spaces is bizarre.

It seems to me utterly extraordinary.

I mean, I don't know.

It feels heretical to say these things out loud,

you know, because I know how much the backlash is.

I know what the backlash is that you say, but it is true.

Yes.

I have nothing to say.

Sorry.

You're probably thinking I'm going to cut this bit out.

Well, no, I mean, I think we have to be brave.

I think so too.

Let's be clear as well, you know, I'm relatively relaxed.

As a person, I don't, you know, you want to have a

fetish in your own room, your own home, go for it.

You know, I'm not coming from an observed position.

I'm coming from a basically a sensible, left-wing positions that happens.

But basically just have to protect vulnerable women and girls in places where

they undress and they sleep and they're vulnerable to sexual predation from males.

And that doesn't just mean rape.

That means voyeurism, flashing, exhibitionism,

you know, all of the things that men can do.

Not all of them, but some of them in changing rooms and bathrooms, in dormitories.

And we've just got rid of them relatively basic safeguards that we had by going for

these policies, crazy policies that define legitimate entry

in terms of inner feelings that no one else can verify.

What about men taking women's sports records?

Yes, once you, you know, once you capitulate or go along with this sort of

fantasy that a man can become a woman by inner feeling, then, of course,

in any domain where physical prowess determines

access to goods, the man's going to win.

And there's a 10%, a predictable 10% performance gap between males and females,

adult humans, females and males of the same age, roughly.

You can, you can just map it out.

You can see it in graphs.

You know, the woman's world record in 100 meters could be beaten by college seniors.

You know, there's just hundreds and hundreds of them.

And then there's, so there's the issue about fairness to do with speed and

agility and the things that testosterone at puberty

give you that you just can't get rid of afterwards.

You have longer limbs, you have bigger lungs, you have faster twitch muscles,

you have a whole range of advantages.

And even if you took estrogen for two years, reduced your testosterone a bit as

a man, you'd never be able to undo the basic

genetic advantages you've got through puberty.

And then there's the issues of safety for women in contact sports.

So, you know, there are males playing rugby in female rugby teams.

And of course, some of the women players are going along with it.

They're frightened not to actually, you know, you can lose

your career at elite level if you stick out about this.

And some of them are trying to be kind.

But the fact is, it's a real danger.

Someone's going to break their neck in rugby or bad tackle

in football or, you know, all of those contact sports.

And then there's the issue of fairness.

Women's athletes at every level from elite to amateur care about sport.

They train for years, you know, getting up at six in the morning.

Their parents drive younger athletes around to sporting competitions.

They really put so much effort into these things.

And then a man rocks up, says, I'm a woman, gets in the pool or onto the

track, beats them or sometimes doesn't beat

them because they're clearly not even trying.

You know, so occasionally they get they come second or third and then say,

see, you know, it's just a farce.

It's an absolute farce.

And we spent a lot of time in the 80s and 90s getting rid of doping, you know,

and we didn't think it mattered that only a few people don't.

Yes, they did.

Whereas now we hear arguments like, well, it's only a few.

You know, why can't we let them have this?

Isn't it nice?

Are we being kind?

It's just so unfair.

Well, it remains to be seen who's on the right side of history.

I think there is no right side of history, unfortunately.

That's just to me.

I think you are on the right side of history.

Fingers crossed.

So thank you very, very much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me on.

I'm so pleased.

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