Speaker 1: Stoller especially tried to build a firewall between sex, which
Speaker 1: he then considered to be everything that biology had to
Speaker 1: do with the world, and gender, which was everything culture
Speaker 1: and psychology and upbringing had to do with the world.
Speaker 1: But what's pretty clear when you really dig into the
Speaker 1: biology is that gender is always changing the biology. Hello
Speaker 1: and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. The following episode is
Speaker 1: part of the Making Sense of Sex and Gender series
Speaker 1: on this podcast. In this series, we try to make
Speaker 1: sense of the distinction between sex and gender and cover
Speaker 1: trans issues in a very thoughtful and nuanced fashion. We
Speaker 1: have balanced discussions from multiple perspectives, including scientists, activists, and
Speaker 1: a leading feminism scholar. This series will hopefully expand your
Speaker 1: mind and help you make sense of the current heated
Speaker 1: debate surrounding the distinctions between sex and gender as well
Speaker 1: as transgender issues. The aim is to turn down the
Speaker 1: temperature on this very heated topic and increase understanding and
Speaker 1: integrate truth with love. I hope you will listen to
Speaker 1: this entire series with an open mind and an open heart,
Speaker 1: and as always, we look forward to hearing your feedback
Speaker 1: and comments on our website and on the YouTube channel,
Speaker 1: so that further Ado, I bring you this episode within
Speaker 1: the Making Sense of Sex and Gender series. Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome doctor Anne
Speaker 1: Fausto Sterling on the show. Doctor Fausto Sterling is the
Speaker 1: Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies
Speaker 1: in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry
Speaker 1: at Brown University. Say that ten times real fast. Her
Speaker 1: books and scholarly articles are referenced widely in feminist and
Speaker 1: scientific inquiries. She has received grants and fellowships in both
Speaker 1: the sciences and the humanities, and in twenty twenty she
Speaker 1: re released her book called Sexing the Body, Gender Politics,
Speaker 1: and the Construction of Sexuality with updated research. In this episode,
Speaker 1: I talked to doctor Sterling about gender slash sex and
Speaker 1: the Body. During the sixties, the term quote gender was
Speaker 1: introduced to make a distinction between a person's biology and psychology,
Speaker 1: but doctor Fausto Sterling believes that these can never really
Speaker 1: be separate. She argues that biology influences gender, but that
Speaker 1: the opposite is also true. Culture and context can influence
Speaker 1: our hormones and body systems. We also touch on the
Speaker 1: topics of gender dysphoria, feminism, intersexuality, trans issues, and child development.
Speaker 1: This is a really stimulating conversation with a legend in
Speaker 1: the feminist scholarly space. I really like how doctor Fausto
Speaker 1: Sterling brings in the science and tries to integrate that
Speaker 1: with the work she does in terms of feminism scholarship.
Speaker 1: So this was a great integration of multiple fields, and
Speaker 1: I hope you find this conversation as rich and stimulating
Speaker 1: as I did. So, without further ado, I bring you
Speaker 1: doctor and Fausto Sterling, Hey, and thank you so much
Speaker 1: for being on the Psychology Podcast today. You're welcome, happy
Speaker 1: to be here. Thank you, you are a well Actually,
Speaker 1: I want you to introduce yourself before I tell the
Speaker 1: audience I was going to call you a legendary feminist
Speaker 1: and scholar, but why don't you introduce yourself. Tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit how you would sort of what sort
Speaker 1: of identities would you put on yourself? Okay, Well, I'm
Speaker 1: a retired professor of biology and gender studies. I taught
Speaker 1: for over forty years at Brown University, where I was
Speaker 1: instrumental in starting gender studies at Brown in a time
Speaker 1: when gender studies was just starting up nationally. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a thing until we made it a thing. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, because I'm trained as a biologist and scientist,
Speaker 1: I have always been interested in the topic of biology
Speaker 1: and gender and also in how science works. So after
Speaker 1: I wrote my first book called Myths of Gender, I
Speaker 1: became very aware that scientists, even really famous, really smart
Speaker 1: ones like Charles Starwin, they did their science always in
Speaker 1: their oracle and cultural context, and so they had a
Speaker 1: pre existing view of gender that then used to organize
Speaker 1: scientific knowledge that they came about. So the field of
Speaker 1: science and technology studies became a field that was really
Speaker 1: important to me to understand how our culture and our
Speaker 1: ways of seeing the world that pre exist our science
Speaker 1: become part of our science in a way that few
Speaker 1: people question it. So I also founded at bround the
Speaker 1: Science and Technology Studies Program, which is broader. It deals
Speaker 1: with scientific knowledge in many arenas, and it is still
Speaker 1: a thriving program. I'm happy to say, congratulations. At what
Speaker 1: point in your life did you like, how did the
Speaker 1: feminism and the biology interest, How did those things get
Speaker 1: linked with you? What's can you trace the development of
Speaker 1: that thinking within you a little bit? So they really
Speaker 1: got the science and feminism gut and biology gut link.
Speaker 1: Because of my political activism in the late sixties and
Speaker 1: early seventies, I was active in the anti Vietnam War movement,
Speaker 1: I was active in the civil rights movement, and then
Speaker 1: as a women's women's feminist movement began to explode, I
Speaker 1: naturally joined that as well. And then I was studying biology,
Speaker 1: which was always an enthusiasm of mine, and I was
Speaker 1: a young professor in the early nineteen seventies, and my
Speaker 1: feminist friends started realizing, as did I, that one of
Speaker 1: the arguments against feminism, against equal rights for women that
Speaker 1: was being used time and again, was an argument based
Speaker 1: on the idea that women were biologically different or, depending
Speaker 1: on who was saying it, inferior to men, and that
Speaker 1: somehow they didn't have the aggression, the know how, the
Speaker 1: whatever to become really competent in the public sphere. And
Speaker 1: I say this at a moment when the newly announced
Speaker 1: president of Harvard University is first time a person of
Speaker 1: color and for the second time a woman. But that
Speaker 1: would have been just unimaginable in the nineteen seventies. But
Speaker 1: my friends turned to me as a biologist and as
Speaker 1: sort of to say, well, what about these biological arguments
Speaker 1: or that do they make any sense? Are they true?
Speaker 1: What should we think about them? And I honestly hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about them very much. So that's when I decided
Speaker 1: to use my skills as a biologist to dig into
Speaker 1: the background of these claims, and that's what led me
Speaker 1: to write my first book, Myths of Gender. And as
Speaker 1: they say, the rest is history. Would you say that
Speaker 1: most of the ideas and myths of gender hold up today?
Speaker 1: Are there any that don't hold up? You know, we're
Speaker 1: just looking back on that. Where are we at right
Speaker 1: now with a lot of the claims you made in there?
Speaker 1: The arguments I made against the biological claims I think
Speaker 1: hold up today. They probably some of them people would
Speaker 1: laugh at today. Others people still wonder about. They would
Speaker 1: be worded differently today. And I think our whole notion
Speaker 1: of science has really changed in ways that are both
Speaker 1: good and bad. Today. I think the book is still
Speaker 1: relevant and it's quite amazing to me since it came
Speaker 1: out originally in nineteen eighty five, a second edition in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, that the publisher still has it in print,
Speaker 1: so it's still available, So it must be mean something
Speaker 1: to some people. Wouldn't that be something if any of
Speaker 1: my books forty years from now, thirty years from now
Speaker 1: we're still in print. So yeah, it's huge. Congratulations there,
Speaker 1: Thank you. Well. Something that strikes me about you is
Speaker 1: you're obviously very interested in science, your interest in activism,
Speaker 1: but you also use such a knowledge of the history
Speaker 1: of the psychology. I mean, this is the psychology podcast,
Speaker 1: so forget me if I focused on psychology a little bit.
Speaker 1: But I'm amased at the the breadth of knowledge you
Speaker 1: have about how certain terms came to be in what
Speaker 1: years and sort of a broader context of the scientific
Speaker 1: and investigation of things through like the DSM and stuff.
Speaker 1: So can you actually walk our listeners through some things?
Speaker 1: And I can prompt it so we can go in
Speaker 1: pieces here, but it would be really helpful, I think
Speaker 1: for our listeners to hear a little bit about the
Speaker 1: evolution a lot of the terms that we're seeing today,
Speaker 1: such as transgender. But let's go back, you know, to
Speaker 1: like the turn of the twentieth century. Invert, transvestite, ionist,
Speaker 1: I've never heard ionist, EO, ni, T, and sex were
Speaker 1: the most predominant words used in the sex and gender domain.
Speaker 1: Right is that corrected from the nineteen hundred nineteen forties. Right, So,
Speaker 1: at the turn of the twentieth century, group of people
Speaker 1: who we now I think call sexologists, we're trying to
Speaker 1: understand sexual expression in its many forms. That came out
Speaker 1: of a out of a in a view in which
Speaker 1: they assumed that there was a normal state of being
Speaker 1: that was what we would today call binary. That they
Speaker 1: assumed that there were men and there were women, and
Speaker 1: there was an underlying heterosexual assumption in there, what today
Speaker 1: we would call heteronormative, is that healthy men desired women
Speaker 1: and healthy women desired men. The Big compendium was first
Speaker 1: written in the late eighteen hundreds by Kraft Ebbing was
Speaker 1: called Psychologia Sexualists, and it was based on a notion
Speaker 1: on looking at everything that he considered sexual pathology, that is,
Speaker 1: things that were not normal, and it was it involved
Speaker 1: all sorts of sexual expressions, some of which we can't
Speaker 1: imagine even exists today, but some of which are very
Speaker 1: much with us but quite normalized, like homosexuality, and his
Speaker 1: work was taking That book was originally published in German,
Speaker 1: it did get translated into English, was taken up by
Speaker 1: another sort of pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis an Englishman working
Speaker 1: in the first part of the twentieth century, and he
Speaker 1: wrote definitive books on homosexuality, and again he considered it
Speaker 1: to be an abnormality or an unhealthy form of development.
Speaker 1: But both Kraft Ebbing and Ellis and others who who
Speaker 1: wrote as similar modes had homosexuality and transsexuality kind of
Speaker 1: all what we would these we consider these separate terms today,
Speaker 1: They had them all joined together in their minds. So
Speaker 1: they considered a homosexual man ellis U's term invert to
Speaker 1: say that he somehow was psychologically inverted so that his
Speaker 1: brain was more like a woman's, which made him desire
Speaker 1: a man, if you can follow me, but also might
Speaker 1: make him want to cross dress and dress as a woman,
Speaker 1: and that would make him what we would today call
Speaker 1: a transsexual. To the extent that none of these people
Speaker 1: had distinguished people who were heterosexual but cross dress from
Speaker 1: people who are homosexual but crossdress, from people who, as
Speaker 1: today would we would argue, have a gender identity that
Speaker 1: makes them feel like they are a woman inside a
Speaker 1: man's body. The notion of gender identity really didn't become
Speaker 1: part of the conversation until the nineteen fifties and sixties,
Speaker 1: so these terms there were terms. Ianest was named after
Speaker 1: a French count from the I think seventeenth century, somebody
Speaker 1: Dione who cross dressed or who maybe presented as a woman,
Speaker 1: and there are a couple of books out on him.
Speaker 1: But that's where the term ianism. It's a completely unknown
Speaker 1: term today, although if you google it you'll find it.
Speaker 1: If you haven't, you may have. But it was really
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties that John Money
Speaker 1: and also psychiatrist Robert Stoler, began to feel and all
Speaker 1: of these were described. All of these terms were described
Speaker 1: under the term sex, but they began to feel the
Speaker 1: term sex just got people as the only term to
Speaker 1: describe everything they were talking about, got people confused. And furthermore,
Speaker 1: sex also meant could mean eroticism, So it wasn't just
Speaker 1: how you presented yourself in the world or what you
Speaker 1: thought about your body, but it was also it also
Speaker 1: had always other possible meanings involving attraction and types of
Speaker 1: sexual pleasure. So Money decided that he could that sex
Speaker 1: was trying to as a single word, was trying to
Speaker 1: do too much and so he decided to try to
Speaker 1: divide things up. And he didn't invent the term gender,
Speaker 1: but he took it away from a grammatical thing and
Speaker 1: used it. That introduced it as a psychological term. And
Speaker 1: he introduced the notion of identity, that is, how you
Speaker 1: felt about yourself, and Solar elaborated on that, and there
Speaker 1: was a sudden I did a I'm writing a book
Speaker 1: on this right now. I did an n gram, which
Speaker 1: is a study of It's just a quick and dirty
Speaker 1: thing from the Google lets you do looking at the
Speaker 1: frequency of measurements in the frequency of words appearing in
Speaker 1: books over time, and there's and there's nothing for gender identity.
Speaker 1: It's flat fi, flat flat, And then about nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: it starts to go up and then it just zooms
Speaker 1: right up, and it's now a very current term. So
Speaker 1: it didn't exist before. Then You can do it. If
Speaker 1: you've ever done an en gram, you can pop the
Speaker 1: term gender identity in there and you'll stay I saw, well,
Speaker 1: I saw the one you came up with, which is
Speaker 1: good enough. I'll trust you. I trust you. I saw
Speaker 1: the one you did and it's fast. You know. It's
Speaker 1: just interesting to think that in the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 1: this term gender but not gender identity, but genders as
Speaker 1: separate from sex was the main sort of thing defining
Speaker 1: that epic. And then in the eighties you do see
Speaker 1: the gender identity, but you see gender identity used in
Speaker 1: a psychopathological way. Correct me if I'm wrong. But when
Speaker 1: I look at the analysis you did around the eighties,
Speaker 1: it started to terms like gender identity disorder started you know,
Speaker 1: the word disorder right start right to creep in there,
Speaker 1: and gender identity disorder of childhood as well starts to
Speaker 1: creep in there. So that's something new, right that you
Speaker 1: start to see around their eighties. That's totally has to do.
Speaker 1: That's all due to psychiatrists developing good old psychiatrists right
Speaker 1: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, and the DSM
Speaker 1: became a thing that psychiatrists started making in the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties and became sort of solidified in the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies as a way of standardizing or trying to standardize
Speaker 1: mental illness in general, so that it gave the psychiatrists
Speaker 1: control and a sort of authority over And this is
Speaker 1: where the science studies comes in. It was part of
Speaker 1: a struggle for authority over who could gets to say
Speaker 1: who's mentally ill and who gets to tell an insurance
Speaker 1: company whether they should pay for treatment that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: And the insurance companies very much wanted this too, because
Speaker 1: they had no way of dealing with the variety of
Speaker 1: presentations of metal disease much broader than things having to
Speaker 1: do with gender. Gender is a tiny subset of what's
Speaker 1: in the DSM. But third edition of the DSM, for
Speaker 1: the first time, began to have hoosexuality listed. But by
Speaker 1: that time there was a gay rights movement, and there
Speaker 1: was a strong movement among psychiatrists too to remove homosexuality
Speaker 1: as a mental illness, to get it out of the DSM,
Speaker 1: and to put it up parallel to heterosexuality as just
Speaker 1: one of the multiple ways of being in the world.
Speaker 1: And so DSM had homosexuality in there in the And
Speaker 1: then also there were psychiatrists who were specialized in sexology
Speaker 1: were starting to see a lot of children who were
Speaker 1: brought to them by their parents because the parents didn't
Speaker 1: think the children were behaving in gender appropriate ways. So
Speaker 1: there were little boys who liked to play with dolls
Speaker 1: and little girls who wanted to climb trees and the
Speaker 1: parents were upset by this. And this is where, to
Speaker 1: the extent that they were brought by parents who couldn't
Speaker 1: tolerate those behaviors to psychiatrists, psychiatrists who wanted a category,
Speaker 1: and this is where the childhood gender identity disorders came
Speaker 1: into being. But that childhood gender identity disorder. Every time
Speaker 1: DSM we wrote itself, which was about every decade, the
Speaker 1: classification and diagnosis changed because it was just never a
Speaker 1: stable thing. So it raised and fell, and there is
Speaker 1: a new one which still has a very mild version
Speaker 1: of it in it. And I predict that when we
Speaker 1: we're now with DSM five, by the time we get
Speaker 1: to DSM six, I think it's going to be gone.
Speaker 1: And it's also going to be considered in the realm
Speaker 1: of behaviors that may cause distress to the child because
Speaker 1: of poor reception by the rest of the world or
Speaker 1: by the child's parents, but isn't considered a pathology on
Speaker 1: the individual child's part. Just to clarify, are you talking
Speaker 1: about gender dysphoria You think that'll be out of the DSM.
Speaker 1: I think gender dysphoria will be out of the DSM
Speaker 1: as a disease. I'm just you know, you know, knock
Speaker 1: on wood, I'm so alive and ten years check with
Speaker 1: me and we'll see if I'm right, because there will
Speaker 1: be there. Already modified the twenty twenty DSM to try
Speaker 1: and clarify gender dysphoria as being something that's not adherent
Speaker 1: in the child, but rather maybe the result of the
Speaker 1: world impinging on the child. So I think it's It's
Speaker 1: also a word that's with us right now, and it's
Speaker 1: a real experience for a lot of trans people, don't
Speaker 1: get me wrong. But the question is what is the
Speaker 1: origin of the experience and what are the better ways
Speaker 1: to deal with it? And whether dealing with is sending
Speaker 1: a child to a psychiatrist, I think is what's at issue. Yeah, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1: And relating to all this, I want to talk about
Speaker 1: another major milestone I noted. It's very interesting. You see,
Speaker 1: the term transsexual is the predominant sort of trans word
Speaker 1: until it looked like twenty eleven to me is the
Speaker 1: biggest spike. And I may be wrong, but it looked
Speaker 1: like that's when really the term transgender really kind of
Speaker 1: replaces the term transsexual, and you don't really see transsexual
Speaker 1: used as much after too, even is that is that
Speaker 1: roughly correct? That's roughly correct? And again transgender. Transsexual began
Speaker 1: to be seen as being not quite the right coinage
Speaker 1: for a word coinage because it suggested that it was
Speaker 1: about sex in that old fashioned sense of the word.
Speaker 1: And once gender identity became an established idea, it became
Speaker 1: a lot of people argued that that what whatever is
Speaker 1: trans it has to do with gender and identity, not
Speaker 1: with sex or sexuality. But also in the you know,
Speaker 1: decade plus since twenty ten, just the whole notion of
Speaker 1: non binary has exploded, and the transsexual, the transsexual umbrella,
Speaker 1: if you were, if you will, has increased to include
Speaker 1: people who are, for want of a better term, classic
Speaker 1: transsexual in the terms as they may be presented in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty as being quite binary, that is, and those
Speaker 1: were the rules if you wanted to get affirming surgery,
Speaker 1: for example, is that you had to really convince the
Speaker 1: surgeon and the psychologists that you really wanted to be
Speaker 1: a woman if you were bored as a man, or
Speaker 1: vice versa. And today things are a lot less binary
Speaker 1: and transgender allows under its umbrella a lot broader range
Speaker 1: of existences. Yeah, you were, I mean a pioneer already
Speaker 1: in that. Let's give you some credit here. Well, you
Speaker 1: wrote a book called The Five Sexes you already you
Speaker 1: know before this, you know, really got into the cultural
Speaker 1: consciousness that gender and maybe even sex could be food
Speaker 1: in some way. You wrote this thesis. But I'm trying
Speaker 1: to understand what you still stand by today regarding that
Speaker 1: and what you don't because you present an original model
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three male female MERM firm and HERM. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like that you stand by that now
Speaker 1: or you are clarifying what you meant by that. Could
Speaker 1: you just clarify to me what you meant? Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I need to clarify it. And I also wrote an essay.
Speaker 1: I wrote that essay in nineteen ninety three and it
Speaker 1: kind of shocked a lot of people, and its people
Speaker 1: still use it in the classroom, and it's sort of
Speaker 1: it catches people's attention, catches people by surprise, which I
Speaker 1: think is a good thing, and that it makes people
Speaker 1: stop and think. It was focused primarily on the question
Speaker 1: of intersexuality and the practice of that money pioneered of
Speaker 1: trying to make people who were born with as physical intersexes,
Speaker 1: that is, they had components of male and female parts
Speaker 1: in their bodies, trying to make them binary, usually through surgery,
Speaker 1: but also through a regime of trying to raise them
Speaker 1: as one or the other, either as a male or female,
Speaker 1: with no space for just being what they were, which
Speaker 1: was something in between. So I wrote that essay as
Speaker 1: a provocative essay, sort of along the lines of the
Speaker 1: old Jonathan Swift modest proposal essay, which this generation or
Speaker 1: many generations I guess are familiar with. It was a
Speaker 1: proposal about in which he ironically proposed that we could
Speaker 1: deal with the overpopulation problems. Who was an answer to Malthus? Really?
Speaker 1: I mean this is when it was written by eating children,
Speaker 1: and no one really believed that he was arguing that
Speaker 1: we eat children, but understood what the understood that it
Speaker 1: was an ironic answer to the question of overpopulation. Similarly,
Speaker 1: there was a great deal of irony in my naming
Speaker 1: of these terms, and it still didn't do the work.
Speaker 1: I don't think that needs to be done. And in fact,
Speaker 1: if we could have this interview in a year when
Speaker 1: I finished writing my final chapter, I have like a
Speaker 1: much neater answer for you, because I'm trying to work
Speaker 1: through work towards a theory of development that is more
Speaker 1: continuous or graded. With regard to gender development, the five
Speaker 1: sexes is still it's not dichotomous anymore, but it's still
Speaker 1: very disjoined. So you have just, you know, five things,
Speaker 1: no transitions between them. The things are based on making
Speaker 1: fun of the medical people who are still trying to
Speaker 1: hold onto a binary. So I think the essay now
Speaker 1: is still useful to make people stop and think, but
Speaker 1: it isn't where I'm trying to go right now, which
Speaker 1: is to come up with a theory of developmental psychology
Speaker 1: of human development starting with infants that looks as gender
Speaker 1: as something that develops along a continuum, if only we
Speaker 1: would allow it to. Do you see there any valid
Speaker 1: distinction anymore between sex and gender. It sounds like you
Speaker 1: don't really see that as a valid distinction any It's
Speaker 1: interesting I've also come around to and I'm not the
Speaker 1: only one. There are a few other people working in
Speaker 1: this field, scholars in this field, and we've invented a
Speaker 1: new term just what we need, a new term gender
Speaker 1: slash sex and JET or which I run it together
Speaker 1: and I say gender sex and we did this. I
Speaker 1: did this because it became a parent to me. Money
Speaker 1: tried to build kind of a we're a stoler especially,
Speaker 1: tried to build a firewall between sex, which he then
Speaker 1: considered to be everything that biology had to do with
Speaker 1: the world, and gender, which was everything culture and psychology
Speaker 1: and upbringing had to do with the world. But what's
Speaker 1: pretty clear when you really dig into the biology is
Speaker 1: that gender is always changing the biology. You know everything
Speaker 1: from studies of hormones that show that a soldier's testosterone
Speaker 1: drops precipitously just before they're entering into battle, so fear
Speaker 1: makes your testosterone drop. There are diurnal rhythms having children,
Speaker 1: having children. There's there's all series of new studies along
Speaker 1: those lines by some anthropologists interested in this that show
Speaker 1: how the testosterone of single young men who are who
Speaker 1: are looking for mates UH have a higher average testosterone
Speaker 1: than than men who not only who have had children,
Speaker 1: but who are actively parenting. So so the act of
Speaker 1: actual physical and physical nurturing, you can see evolutionary reasons
Speaker 1: for that. You can see smart evolutionary pressures for that.
Speaker 1: You can absolutely absolutely so what you see are things
Speaker 1: things that we've thought of as sort of true biological
Speaker 1: markers like test black, testouser and other hormones are not
Speaker 1: sort of independent constants, but they they change with the
Speaker 1: both they're different culturally, but they also change with the
Speaker 1: behavioral context which a person finds finds himself. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, if you think about, say how gender
Speaker 1: in upbringing changes the actual biology. The examples of the
Speaker 1: one things like how much practice is you had throwing
Speaker 1: a ball that leads you to be able to quote
Speaker 1: throw like a boy? And in what culture have you
Speaker 1: had it. I have a colleague who's anthologist who studies Kapaweia,
Speaker 1: which is a very masculine considered martial arts for them
Speaker 1: in Brazil. But the Kaboeistas that he studies, if they
Speaker 1: do other sports at soccer baseball is not a common
Speaker 1: sport for them, they quote throw like girls. According to
Speaker 1: what we would say in the United States States, they've
Speaker 1: never practiced that kind of overarmed throwing. And that's a
Speaker 1: long neuromuscular sensory response that you developed through practice and
Speaker 1: over time and with responses and even with very careful
Speaker 1: physical guiding. I mean, I've watched and you can you
Speaker 1: can find it online, even a few images of learning
Speaker 1: to throw in which usually it's a male figure, presumably
Speaker 1: a father with a child, literally leaning over them from behind,
Speaker 1: embracing them and raising one arm to show to physically
Speaker 1: help them model the motor activity that is involved with
Speaker 1: overhand throwing. So that's gender on the one hand, wanting
Speaker 1: your son usually not always, but usually to throw that way,
Speaker 1: and physically helping them lurnrom the sensory motor motions nerves
Speaker 1: that become permanently implanted in the nervous system. That's biology.
Speaker 1: So they aren't really separate. And there are very few
Speaker 1: things I think that exists that are quote pure biology,
Speaker 1: that are cultural, that are immune from cultural modification. And
Speaker 1: it's not just because you think you should do something,
Speaker 1: but it also has become imprinted within your neuromuscular system.
Speaker 1: You know, I really want to make sure I understand
Speaker 1: your arguments today. They might differ from some of the
Speaker 1: assumptions I had, So let me just lay out some
Speaker 1: of the assumptions I had, and let me know what
Speaker 1: your perspective is, how it's similar different. That was an impression.
Speaker 1: There's no such thing as a third sex that there's
Speaker 1: from an evolutionary point of view, sex is purely about
Speaker 1: reproductive function, and that's why it evolved. Two gam meets
Speaker 1: two sexes and that's it. But the gender, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, is something different, and it's merely a social
Speaker 1: construct and can be anything you want it to be
Speaker 1: if you believe in it, which some people don't. But
Speaker 1: that we are ultimately sexed bodies and everything else might
Speaker 1: be personality differences. So those are some foundational assumptions I
Speaker 1: had about the biology of sex, and that maybe there's
Speaker 1: a valid distinction between medical sex and evolutionary sex, and
Speaker 1: that could be an interesting level of nuance that we
Speaker 1: could talk about where medical sex seems to be more
Speaker 1: complicated than just genitals because it involves hormones, chromosomes and
Speaker 1: other sex organs versus from a strictly wided sex evolve
Speaker 1: point of view for reproductive functions. But I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear your thoughts on some of that because those are
Speaker 1: some of my assumptions, and tell me if you think
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. Right, So, even this is one of the
Speaker 1: problems Money had with the term sex and why he
Speaker 1: started dividing it up into kinds of sex. So and
Speaker 1: also let's be clear that we're talking about humans not
Speaker 1: even all vertebrates have the kind of sex as humans have.
Speaker 1: So if you go out into the animal and plant world,
Speaker 1: you have three sets as horseexes, five sexes, you have
Speaker 1: all sorts of things. You have environmental set. We're talking
Speaker 1: about humans, so let's just say humans shipulight that we're
Speaker 1: talking about humans here, and we have money encountering and
Speaker 1: this comes back from his work with intersex children and adults,
Speaker 1: encountering people who were born and identified and raised as
Speaker 1: women who might have a Y chromosome, so they might
Speaker 1: or might have no second chromosome. They might be XO,
Speaker 1: or you had men who have an extra X. And
Speaker 1: it turns out that these sex chromosome differences are actually
Speaker 1: surprisingly common if you look at You can find that
Speaker 1: out by looking at countries that keep birth Universal birth
Speaker 1: registries like the Scandinavian countries record the chromosomal composition of
Speaker 1: everybody at birth, and you find and you find a
Speaker 1: lot of hidden differences that people don't even know exists.
Speaker 1: So he said, so he said, all right, we've got
Speaker 1: chromosomal sex and that doesn't necessarily German whether you're a
Speaker 1: man or a woman. And they said, well, but we
Speaker 1: have the fetal gonatal sex. We have the gonads developing
Speaker 1: during during fetal development, and those start out as being bisexual.
Speaker 1: That is, a young embryo prior to six weeks of
Speaker 1: after fertilization have undefined fetal gonads, and they have both
Speaker 1: sets of potential accessory organs, the you know, the they
Speaker 1: have both the potential fallopian tubes in urus, and they
Speaker 1: have the potential the potential epididymus and those those kinds
Speaker 1: of things. And then as development proceeds in one direction
Speaker 1: or another, due primarily to hormones, the fetus produces that's
Speaker 1: fetal gonad fetal hormonal sex. They begin to produce fetal
Speaker 1: gonads and have fetal gonatal sex and so on, and
Speaker 1: they're like he found. He described about five different levels.
Speaker 1: And what was interesting to him and what he established
Speaker 1: is that they don't necessarily all agree with each other.
Speaker 1: So you can have somebody with a chromosome one chromosomal
Speaker 1: sex and a different gonatal sex. And then they get
Speaker 1: identified at birth basically in terms of their exterior gonads,
Speaker 1: and as long as those appear clear clear to a physician,
Speaker 1: they get called either a boy or a girl, and
Speaker 1: only if they're unclear to a physician. Do people investigate
Speaker 1: further and so forth? So what you choose to define
Speaker 1: as the sex that that you want to refer to
Speaker 1: someone as, or that they live their lives as within
Speaker 1: a generation may depend on any number of things, not
Speaker 1: necessarily the presence of eggs or spur So that's so interesting.
Speaker 1: So do you is your argument that, like you would
Speaker 1: view intersex individuals, which is very very very small percentage
Speaker 1: of the population, but they do exist and they are important,
Speaker 1: And of course we don't want to say that just
Speaker 1: because they are small parts part of the population that
Speaker 1: are not important. But would you are you seeing conceptualizing
Speaker 1: them as a different sex, because some biologists would say
Speaker 1: they still fall within one of the two sexes among humans.
Speaker 1: That's a tricky question because it is tricky. It is tricky. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a tricky question because I wouldn't I guess
Speaker 1: I would resist trying to categorize them. You could have
Speaker 1: I would rather and this is also an interest, a
Speaker 1: really important term turn in methodology. I would I would
Speaker 1: want to know how they would categorize themselves. Interesting and
Speaker 1: all the movement of scholars who are studying intersects and
Speaker 1: transgender non binary individuals in which rather than say going
Speaker 1: in with a questionnaire in which we've said, which are
Speaker 1: you male female intersects, it's they're doing qualitative work to
Speaker 1: get categories to find by the people who are actually living.
Speaker 1: And again it might be a contextual category. You might say,
Speaker 1: how do you define yourself in terms of reproduction? So
Speaker 1: and you know the phenomenon again it's a it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's rare, but now quite well, you know, not so
Speaker 1: uncommon of someone who's a a female to male transgender
Speaker 1: who decides to have a baby, and so they stop
Speaker 1: taking hormones and become pregnant. So you have to ask,
Speaker 1: I think understand how to address these categories which we
Speaker 1: are now recognizing out in the open exist in the world.
Speaker 1: You may need to ask the people they involve how
Speaker 1: they would consider themselves. So does that trans man who's
Speaker 1: having a baby, what are they are they thinking themselves
Speaker 1: as the mother, as the fathers, as the parent. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think new language will evolve, but it's sort of
Speaker 1: I don't think it's up to the biologists to say, well,
Speaker 1: we have these categories and here's one you need to
Speaker 1: fit into. But rather we're recognizing that the original binary
Speaker 1: categories we have aren't working for a segment, even if
Speaker 1: it's a wall set of people, and that we need
Speaker 1: new categories for an expansion. That seems to be a
Speaker 1: major point that maybe we'd stuck double click on. It
Speaker 1: seems to be like there's a there's an additional sort
Speaker 1: of care for inclusivity, a care for humanitarian belonging that
Speaker 1: is that is accompanying this twenty eleven onward sort of
Speaker 1: shift in language and things. I think that's what the
Speaker 1: heart of a lot of what you're getting at, because
Speaker 1: I'm trying to understand this from like a psychology If
Speaker 1: you do look at psychology surveys, at least ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent of people, if you ask their gender, it will
Speaker 1: match their their ga meat, you know, will match their
Speaker 1: evolutionary sex. But I think what a lot of people
Speaker 1: are Maybe you're saying a lot of people yours, and
Speaker 1: I want you to obviously tell me what you are
Speaker 1: actually saying. I don't want to put words in your mouth,
Speaker 1: but it seems to me like there's a there's something
Speaker 1: going on here where we're saying, well, there are a minority,
Speaker 1: but you know, they're being marginalized and they still matter,
Speaker 1: and we want to make sure that we can have
Speaker 1: them still be inclusive in our society, and maybe they've neglected.
Speaker 1: Tell me your thoughts. I'm going to make you a
Speaker 1: bet that if you did a survey of people between
Speaker 1: the ages of say ten and thirty, and you didn't
Speaker 1: say which of these categories do you put yourself into,
Speaker 1: but rather, how would you describe your sex? How would
Speaker 1: you describe your gender? What words would you've used? That
Speaker 1: you would find probably a majority that said man or
Speaker 1: a woman, but you would and but you would also
Speaker 1: if you then added in the same question about gender,
Speaker 1: you would find probably thirty or forty terms. Because this
Speaker 1: has already been I'm making a bet because studies like
Speaker 1: this have already been done right in this generation. So
Speaker 1: there's something intation is redefining every I mean a couple
Speaker 1: of them. We're redefining everything. Reason they are redefining everything,
Speaker 1: and in these terms. And so if you do a
Speaker 1: preset survey in which you've already determined what the categories are,
Speaker 1: you may get that ninety nine percent. But if you
Speaker 1: lead to an open survey in which you say, you
Speaker 1: tell us what the categories are, you're going to get
Speaker 1: this huge range of answers, and I think that's very telling,
Speaker 1: and that it's that using qualitative, open ended methods is
Speaker 1: something that the psychologists and sociologists are are learning how
Speaker 1: to do and they need to get much better at it.
Speaker 1: I hear you. I'm trying to think of so many
Speaker 1: different perspectives on the table. What are your thoughts on
Speaker 1: the feminists that are labeled TERFs who believe that that
Speaker 1: this is actually causing their women as a biological category
Speaker 1: to be erased, like their perspective, what do you what
Speaker 1: do you make of their perspective? Well, I've thought about
Speaker 1: this quite a lot. I hate the term because it
Speaker 1: refers it includes that term radical feminists, which has very
Speaker 1: specific historic meanings to me but not to the modern
Speaker 1: generation though I don't used the term. But I've thought
Speaker 1: a lot about about where that intense feeling is coming from.
Speaker 1: And one of the things it's coming from is I
Speaker 1: think actually a limitation on the part of feminists and
Speaker 1: feminism to being clear what it means about sex and gender.
Speaker 1: That is, feminism in the seventies and eighties really use
Speaker 1: those terms as a way of separating sex in biology.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, biology and culture in order to make strong
Speaker 1: representations that we had to change culture to let women
Speaker 1: into the world. But by doing that, it did reinforce
Speaker 1: the notion that there is this underlying biology and that
Speaker 1: there is a single category called women that has some
Speaker 1: biological leaning. And I think, what's happening now, and I'm
Speaker 1: guilty of that. I was certainly guilty of that in
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties myself. I hadn't thought through those terms.
Speaker 1: Maybe it wasn't the moment to do it, although there
Speaker 1: were a few people who were raising those issues back then.
Speaker 1: But what's happening now is that there's the trans rights movement,
Speaker 1: and people who support them have moved beyond this notion
Speaker 1: that there is a single biological category called women that
Speaker 1: makes political sense and so, and they're also moving towards
Speaker 1: inventing a new science of gender, which involves these kind
Speaker 1: of new methods with talking about Whereas the people who
Speaker 1: argue against transgender rights and the who grew up in
Speaker 1: this older feminist movement are clinging to a kind of
Speaker 1: static belief in science, and clinging to biology is the
Speaker 1: way in which their identity has been defined. So to
Speaker 1: have that challenged is brightening to them and feels like
Speaker 1: going against many things that they've fought for, many of
Speaker 1: the rights they'd fought for in the past. So I
Speaker 1: think there's developed two kind of incommensurate points of view
Speaker 1: about what gender is, where it comes from, and what
Speaker 1: women are, And right now I don't see how to
Speaker 1: make them agree with one another. It's so I thinking
Speaker 1: to be an ongoing debate. Yeah. I asked the artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence chat bock what is a woman and the way?
Speaker 1: I was curious, how do how do they reconcile it?
Speaker 1: And they said both. They said it could be either
Speaker 1: biological female identified a birth as female, or someone with
Speaker 1: a general identity of female. What I guess I want
Speaker 1: to ask you is don't you see there being a
Speaker 1: meaningful difference? And I don't know what the terminologies wound
Speaker 1: up being, but don't you see a difference between a
Speaker 1: biological female and someone like for instance, if I already
Speaker 1: say to you right now, I've just decided this second,
Speaker 1: I'm now female and that's my identity. That's not exactly
Speaker 1: the same as a woman who has gone their whole
Speaker 1: life up to this point, you know, being treated as
Speaker 1: a female due to their biology. Do you do not
Speaker 1: see that as a meaningful distinction. I think that's what
Speaker 1: a lot of TERFs are angry about. I agree with
Speaker 1: you that it's not the same, But the question is
Speaker 1: what how encompassing is or useful is the term woman
Speaker 1: in that sense? For there's a new book out, I'll
Speaker 1: plug it. You may want to interview him by Paisley Kura.
Speaker 1: See you are our age, they are a lawyer, they're
Speaker 1: in New York. He'd be easy to get called sexes
Speaker 1: as sex does. And what that new is look at
Speaker 1: the categories of sex as defined in different aspects of
Speaker 1: the law, and what they argue is that it's completely functional.
Speaker 1: That is, sex is defined one way on a birth certificate,
Speaker 1: is defined a different way legally on a driver's license,
Speaker 1: and a third way in marriage law, and that the
Speaker 1: law doesn't have a consistent definition of sex as if
Speaker 1: the law itself doesn't and it's completely cotextual. So what
Speaker 1: Kura arnues is that we have to let go of
Speaker 1: this notion that there's a universal definition and learn to
Speaker 1: deal with multiple definitions in context. And so back to
Speaker 1: the bathroom question. For me, the counter question is where
Speaker 1: is it safe and for who to go to the bathroom.
Speaker 1: And for that you can first of all, you you
Speaker 1: might actually use real data, not the scare stories that
Speaker 1: you see on Twitter, but you have you have to balance, uh,
Speaker 1: the possibility of assault and what it comes down to.
Speaker 1: I did a little graphic on this. I haven't published
Speaker 1: it yet, still working on it. In what you have,
Speaker 1: the real danger is fueled feared by women who are
Speaker 1: posed to trans people using their bathrooms. So they are
Speaker 1: scared of being assaulted by somebody with a penis. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, trans women are they're also scared
Speaker 1: of being assaulted by people with penises if they go
Speaker 1: into a man ethic. So you have uh so, so
Speaker 1: you come down to, rather than worrying about who's a
Speaker 1: man and who's a woman a woman in that context
Speaker 1: of use of public bathrooms, who is in danger and why?
Speaker 1: And what which dangers are the are the real or
Speaker 1: frequent ones? And then how do we mitigate the danger
Speaker 1: that cares for everybody. I mean, you've got you've got
Speaker 1: to care for the old group. I really like that
Speaker 1: a lot. There seems to be a moral panic on
Speaker 1: the right. They don't view it as a moral panic,
Speaker 1: And maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it's not a moral panic,
Speaker 1: but it's just I guess the way I'd receive it.
Speaker 1: Let me okay, fair enough, but specifically about surrounding bathrooms, sports,
Speaker 1: and I will say jails. I want to add jails
Speaker 1: to this because there are some good points I see.
Speaker 1: Some of them make you know, I'm off roll bone
Speaker 1: right about specific specific instances of maybe a rapist who
Speaker 1: too makes pretend that they're trands in order to get
Speaker 1: into a women's prison, that they can commit more things.
Speaker 1: And I don't think I see it as a moral
Speaker 1: panic because I don't see that as a widespread thing,
Speaker 1: but it is. It does happen. Sometimes we have to
Speaker 1: admit it does happen. Sometimes, you know, terrible things have
Speaker 1: happened in the world. I agree with you, And there
Speaker 1: are bad people in the world. And the question is
Speaker 1: do we make rules that govern all people in a
Speaker 1: category based on one bad person. I mean, if we
Speaker 1: wanted to do that, we'd have we'd be immobilized because
Speaker 1: any one of you and I both belong to categories
Speaker 1: of groups of people in which there are some bad people,
Speaker 1: uh and some dangerous people. And what do you do?
Speaker 1: You avoid them? You try to get the police to
Speaker 1: deal with them, you uh, and and in each of
Speaker 1: these cases, I mean, the right wing in the US
Speaker 1: right now is just using this as a way of
Speaker 1: trying to steamroll people to vote for them and and
Speaker 1: to sort of make bona fides for themselves as being
Speaker 1: good right wingers. It's, as I say, I think it's
Speaker 1: totally cynical. Cynical. Well, I guess this stuff is. So
Speaker 1: if you have someone in a jail who has a
Speaker 1: known record of being a rapist and of accomplishing rape
Speaker 1: by virtue of disguis, you know, of pretending to be
Speaker 1: transgender and gaining ancests. So what do you do? You
Speaker 1: can put You could say, okay, everybody says I should
Speaker 1: believe your trends, or you can say, look, I need
Speaker 1: this rep event in front of me, and yes, maybe
Speaker 1: you'll be in danger in immense prison, but that may
Speaker 1: be a solitary confinement for that person. I mean, a
Speaker 1: prison regime is a particularly terrible regime, and it's probably
Speaker 1: true to say that there are a few prisons that
Speaker 1: are very well wrung up with that regard. So I mean,
Speaker 1: I think I read one of these cases too, and
Speaker 1: that person that I read about had a long record.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was not a hidden thing about their behavior,
Speaker 1: So why would you put them That doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: a good idea. Yeah, correct, it just doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: a good idea. Yeah, if they have a history, no, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you know there are like hot blooding issues and I
Speaker 1: think I just I've made the case we need to
Speaker 1: really do a better job separating the issues that that
Speaker 1: really are complicated and there are no easy answers. I
Speaker 1: don't think the thing in sports is just snap your
Speaker 1: fingers new answer. What's best for everyone? What's fair for everyone?
Speaker 1: But issues that aren't should I think shouldn't be terribly controversial.
Speaker 1: Are if a trans individual it wants to live their
Speaker 1: best life, and by living their best life they change
Speaker 1: pronouns and maybe even as out going having surgery. Who
Speaker 1: am I to stand in that way? But then we've
Speaker 1: talked about children and then that's and that's out. Then
Speaker 1: we get a hot blood an issue. Right. But I
Speaker 1: think there's just some issues that to me, as a
Speaker 1: society of dignity and humanitarians humanitarianism, they shouldn't be controversial.
Speaker 1: But I see everything being lumped together as one big thing,
Speaker 1: and it's just and it becomes politicized, and it's it's frustrating.
Speaker 1: Is it frustrating you too? It is, I mean and
Speaker 1: scary to me too, And it's making you know, it's
Speaker 1: really and it's hurting people. That's the other thing. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not maybe not hurting you or me, but
Speaker 1: it's hurting the people who are affected by these laws.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think both the question of how do
Speaker 1: you address gender non conforming children, non binary children, how
Speaker 1: do you address sports? But they are more complicated. But
Speaker 1: again if you address some contextually, I mean sports allowing
Speaker 1: allowing kids fourteen year olds display on the play on
Speaker 1: the same sports team is a different question from who
Speaker 1: gets to participate in which group, but prefessional sports and
Speaker 1: even the sports versus Yeah, right, So one thing is
Speaker 1: how do you let you a child, a fourteen year
Speaker 1: old have sports activity and sports experience in their high
Speaker 1: high school or junior high school or whatever we call it,
Speaker 1: the stays middle school. That's all. That's a different question
Speaker 1: than who gets to be on an Olympic team as
Speaker 1: a man or a woman. But even there, you know,
Speaker 1: the the international sports people can't handle it because they
Speaker 1: have someone like Caster Semenya, who is a woman has
Speaker 1: always been known as a woman, but who has a
Speaker 1: naturally high testosterol level. And this is where we get
Speaker 1: back to all of a sudden there and there and
Speaker 1: she is out running in certain categories. She can't even
Speaker 1: do all of the running categories of other women. So
Speaker 1: you know, she's a natural variant, as is say Mark Phelps,
Speaker 1: who won all these swimming awards because he had unusual
Speaker 1: He had an unusual gene that affected his shoulder muscle development.
Speaker 1: Though was he not really a fair swimmer because he
Speaker 1: had this natural variation? Now that Olympics, in that level
Speaker 1: of sports, has all sorts of people with physiological differences
Speaker 1: that are far away from the norm. So the question
Speaker 1: of how trans said to that, it's I agree, it's complicated,
Speaker 1: but it's not unknowable. There have been standards set up.
Speaker 1: It's not crazy. You know. You raised an interesting point
Speaker 1: that was raised in another interview I did with a
Speaker 1: trans binary individual who they made the argument, well, there
Speaker 1: are interesting questions about fairness and sports generally, like it,
Speaker 1: are certain people so good that they shouldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: be competitive? Why is everyone picking on the trans people?
Speaker 1: And this was their point, And I feel like that's
Speaker 1: similar to kind of what you're saying, Is that right?
Speaker 1: You know, I think it is similar, And I think
Speaker 1: that there's so many other factors that go into success
Speaker 1: in sports, including mindset training, you know, when you've been
Speaker 1: ill the night before. I don't think that if you
Speaker 1: have trans women competing in certain or a trans woman
Speaker 1: could competing in certain sports, that they suddenly are going
Speaker 1: to beat out all of the all of the non
Speaker 1: non trance women who are competing with them. I just
Speaker 1: they might win an event or two now and then,
Speaker 1: but I don't think they're going to be so different,
Speaker 1: especially as they're following the rules that the international authorities
Speaker 1: have set up idle about horma regulation for trans competitors.
Speaker 1: But then on the other side, I had doctor Carol
Speaker 1: Louvin on my podcast recently as well, who studied the
Speaker 1: science of testosterone and Harvard, and she she says that
Speaker 1: there's it really does matter, you know, like testosterone does
Speaker 1: cause really unfair advantages on the whole. Don't they hear
Speaker 1: that perspective as well? Yeah? I think to you find
Speaker 1: I could refer to you to other experts of testoster
Speaker 1: who would argue victoriously with her about that look, that
Speaker 1: might be an interesting sort of it it would get them both. Yeah, afterwards,
Speaker 1: I can give you the name this and work of
Speaker 1: some other people, because that's not appreciate that I've seen this,
Speaker 1: this doctor's word and I just I don't think she's right,
Speaker 1: but I'm not you know what he's talking about? Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not the person to make the counter arguments, but
Speaker 1: there are people out there the shoe and who are
Speaker 1: who are good at it. Well, I want to be
Speaker 1: very respecting your time today. You've given me almost an
Speaker 1: hour here already, but I want to just leave it
Speaker 1: open now for you. Is there anything else you want
Speaker 1: to say? Like, what are you excited about right now?
Speaker 1: I know you're working in a new book. Good luck,
Speaker 1: good luck, thank you. I know how hard it is
Speaker 1: to write a book. Did you want to just talk
Speaker 1: any more about your you know where your your theory
Speaker 1: it is right now and just leave our listeners with
Speaker 1: any final thoughts. Well, the book I'm writing is trying
Speaker 1: to look at how development works in both a biological
Speaker 1: and psychological sense, from infancy on and how gender but
Speaker 1: a especially focusing on the first three years of life
Speaker 1: because that's what I've been working on how gender is
Speaker 1: part of development from actually before birth and how it
Speaker 1: sort of is always there. So and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: work to sort of get rid of the old series
Speaker 1: which are inherently binary, and figure out how we can
Speaker 1: think about developmental psychology of young children in a more
Speaker 1: continuous way. But I've also wanted to give a shout
Speaker 1: out to a whole lot of new scholarship that's coming
Speaker 1: out by trans scholars and that I've been I've really
Speaker 1: influenced my work and spill. It'd be down in some
Speaker 1: ways because I have to stop and read it. It's
Speaker 1: not work that I've read previously, and it's coming out
Speaker 1: quite regularly, and it's really interesting, solid work that's re
Speaker 1: theorizing this whole field. Yeah, I can't keep up. It
Speaker 1: seems like every week there's a new gender that has
Speaker 1: been added or something right there is you know, it's
Speaker 1: like it's hard to keep up. But you'll be doing
Speaker 1: a great service if you can summarize a lot of
Speaker 1: this and uh and and put it so I can
Speaker 1: just read your book at least for the time being. Well,
Speaker 1: it would be helpful. That'd be helpful. I do love
Speaker 1: footnote no, and I probably will because I'm really nerdy.
Speaker 1: I saw you make a call for the end of
Speaker 1: the study of sex differences in psychology, and I thought
Speaker 1: that was fascinating. But I've published papers on sex differences, right,
Speaker 1: and and so that was that made me pause and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that's interesting. So do you do
Speaker 1: you really think that that language needs to leave the
Speaker 1: field of psychology and that we just maybe talk about
Speaker 1: what did you call it? Gender slash sex gender sex? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think it does believe the field. Wow, I mean
Speaker 1: that's pretty that's a pretty bolder bit put the clean there,
Speaker 1: my friend. Yeah. Yeah, Well, I've come at it slowly,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm I'm locked into it now. So interesting.
Speaker 1: I had a biologist say to me, well, yes, it
Speaker 1: is a sex as a binary from the evolutionary point view,
Speaker 1: but evolution also made a lot of variation within each sex,
Speaker 1: and and we need to make that point as well,
Speaker 1: that it's not just the just there being a binary
Speaker 1: of sex doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of
Speaker 1: variation within each sex. That so I think maybe we
Speaker 1: also should make that point as well. I think that's
Speaker 1: a very important point, and that's it's one I want
Speaker 1: to try and sort of bring up to the surface
Speaker 1: more as I write in this book. Well great, wow, Well,
Speaker 1: it is such an honor to have you here today.
Speaker 1: I just want to say that the historian of science,
Speaker 1: Evelyn Hammond's describes you as quote one of the most
Speaker 1: influential feminist scientists of her generation, So to have that
Speaker 1: on my podcast is quite an honorary. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if did you hear that. Did you hear
Speaker 1: that you were described as such? I well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I've heard it or not, but I do
Speaker 1: know Confessor Hammond, so I'm very honored that she said that. Yes, Zewei,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for being on my podcast and
Speaker 1: offering your valuable perspective. You're very welcome. I look forward
Speaker 1: to seeing Slash hearing it. Thanks for listening to this
Speaker 1: episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react
Speaker 1: in some way to something you heard, I encourage you
Speaker 1: to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com
Speaker 1: or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also
Speaker 1: put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube
Speaker 1: page as well, so you'll want to check that out.
Speaker 1: Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show
Speaker 1: and tune in next time for more on the mind,
Speaker 1: brain behavior, and creativity.