All language subtitles for Kathleen Stock and Richard Dawkins Question Modern Gender Identity

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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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