The Transgender Revolution with Helen Joyce [S2 Ep.30]

[Music] huh [Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman if you're hearing this then you're on the public feed which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements you can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to colemanhughes.org and becoming a supporter this means you'll have access to episodes a week early you'll never hear ads and you'll get access to bonus q a episodes you can also support me by liking and subscribing on youtube and sharing the show with friends and family as always thank you so much for your support welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman so i've been waiting for the right moment to discuss gender identity sex differences and the transgender revolution and that moment has come my guest today is helen joyce helen is a staff journalist at the economist magazine and has been an editor there since 2005. she also has a phd in mathematics from university college london helen just released a controversial new book called trans when ideology meets reality now this is one of those books that is likely to be misrepresented on twitter and in some media as transphobic but is in fact a deep and thoughtful attempt to navigate all the complex issues at the intersection of gender identity and public policy helen and i discuss the difference between gender and sex we discuss evolving definitions of gender the different waves of feminism we talk about gender dysphoria and related phenomenon like autogynophilia we talk about trans identity as well as gender neutrality we talk about hormone treatments puberty blockers and de-transitioning we talk about the age at which people should be able to make these kinds of decisions we discuss gender pronouns we talk about the logic of sex-segregated spaces such as locker rooms bathrooms sports and prisons and finally we talk about the phenomenon of social contagion as it applies to gender identities this is one of the best conversations i've had in recent months on this podcast so i hope you find it interesting without further ado helen joyce [Music] helen joyce thank you so much for coming on my show well thank you for inviting me so um so before we get to your book um which i'm really excited to discuss can you just give my audience a sense of who you are and how you came to be interested in trans activism and gender dysphoria and all those related issues i mean i can but i don't think any of it's going to make very much sense because i've taken some very unusual twists and turns in my career so i'm irish i'm in my 50s i wanted to be a dancer when i was a little girl i went off to dancing school and that didn't work out so i went into the maths degree instead and then i thought i wanted to be an academic so i did a maths phd and even some postdoctoral work and that didn't work out either really so i moved into public understanding of maths so i worked at the university of cambridge editing a magazine there and then for the royal statistical society editing another magazine and in 2005 i applied for a staff job at the economist writing about education and i've been there ever since in a series of jobs education and i went out to brazil and lived in sao paulo in russia about south america now when i came back from brazil i did a job called international editor which was commissioning and writing thinking you know long reads each week basically on an incredible range of topics and one fateful week a commissioning editor said to me why do kids keep coming home and saying you know such-and-such is non-binary we're such and such as trans and i said no idea never heard of this i look into it and that would have been about 2017 i'd say and it just intrigued me so much in so many ways that um here i am nearly four years later still going on about it yeah um there's there's been a revolution in uh what what the concept of gender means and how it relates to biological sex and i've i think i i don't think i've ever spoken about this on my podcast but it's something i've been thinking about you know since i was a teenager and uh so i'm 25 now you know in 2012 roughly i would have been a sophomore in high school or a junior in high school and that that was the first moment i remember really through tumblr and through my friends at school being exposed to a very very confident ideology that seemed like a like an update on what i had been sort of taught to believe about gender and um and and then obviously after that i went to colombia where where that seemed to be sort of the default the default ideology and met many people that were especially gender non-conforming gender non-binary even more so than than trans per se and had a lot of opportunities to talk and think through these issues and and had friends that were um gender non-conforming and i i was always sensitive to the aspect of it that was a social contagion because i had witnessed that firsthand with many of my friends um but but this is something i i've really been wanting to to speak about uh for that reason because i think it's it's very important and there's a there's a a very strange and disturbing lack of of honest discussion between people who may be on different sides of the issue uh there's a lot of like shouting and um just like twitter dunking but very little idea that there can be good faith disagreements on these things which matter um because many kids are just getting one version of of the truth and anything that's skeptical of of the sort of trans activist ideology is labeled bigotry and no doubt there is lots of bigotry towards trans people in the world and that's something i'm sensitive to but i think uh it's really important to to talk through these things as honestly as we can so i'm excited to try to do that with you i think it's amazing that you're doing it because precisely that and it leaves people to imagine straw man versions of their i don't even want to say opponents i'm not opposed to anyone living the way they want i mean you know because i think you read the book that um in the introduction i say it's not a book about trans people it's a book about an ideology an idea and you know people can have all sorts of different ideas and live in the world together getting along fine i mean i'm an atheist that's very minority worldwide and you know religious people don't agree with each other either and yet we rub on so that's all i want i just want public policy to be such that people aren't forced to conform to other people's evidence-free belief systems and also that children aren't told lies about what it means to be human and what's possible to do to the human body yeah so we'll get there but um let's start with some basic concepts here the concepts of gender and sex are central to this whole conversation and uh there's been evolution in in our understanding of those terms that you trace somewhat throughout the book so can you talk a little bit about that so really the word sex properly understood hasn't evolved at all um i mean we know what sex means it's the two types that humans and other mammals come in but also not just humans and mammals lots of animals and lots of plants as well and there are you know there are um tiny organisms that that are that are not sexed they you know bacteria they just reproduce but bigger animals have two ways two reproductive strategies and it was darwin who worked out how those two strategies fitted into evolution in his theory in his book um the the origin of species he said there were two ways that we evolved one was natural one was select sexual there were the two types of selection and the sexual selection works on us as sex beings who must try to reproduce and and really that's all there is to be said about the basic idea of what sex is it's the the small gametes people that we call male the large gametes people that we call female and you know people obfuscate this by saying oh intersex people but i mean they don't say that about eyes and there are some people born with just one you know or some people born with six fingers and we don't worry about that when we talk about the definition of how many fingers or eyes humans have you know these are exceptional cases they don't destroy the idea of what sex is so sex is that physical reality and it has lots of consequences some of those consequences are natural consequences the females are the only ones who get pregnant but lots of them are social and that's what i would have meant by gender five or ten years ago that gender was the social consequences of sex some of them perhaps innate like you know people do have reasons to think that there are genuine on average differences between males and females lots of them societal some of them big impositions like in gender issues some people feel it's a prison some people find it as an expression or a performance but gender is much more fluid and separate from sex i don't know that does that help i mean it's such a strange word gender it means such different things to different people right yeah this is um this is exactly to me it gets to the heart of one of the deep puzzles with the trans activist ideology as it relates to the kind of feminism that i think i grew up with and that still makes sense to me today like the the style of feminism i was raised in was the notion that whether you're a male or a female you can be any kind of way you want and still be a male or a female you can be a boy yeah you can be a boy who likes pink you can be a boy who likes dancing and hates sports and that's totally okay you can be you can be a girl that doesn't like to wear dresses you can be a girl that likes to play with the boys and not wear dolls and that is totally okay no one should ever make you feel like because you're a boy or a girl you have to conform to what the majority of other boys and girls happen to be interested in so it was just an ideology that put individual self-expression and freedom at the at the forefront and was a rebuke to older notions more rigid notions that if you're a girl you've gotta get married be a homemaker raise the kids all of these rigid formulas that um you know although many women did thrive in them many many women were completely suffocated by them so this this ideology was just a a rebuke to that which said gender is essentially an empty concept there are there are as many ways to be a man as there are men there are as many ways to be a woman as as there are women and and then there's this other concept of gender which is more which is central to the trans activist ideology which says something importantly different in a way it's the opposite of that idea exactly it's the inverse it takes outside you and puts it inside you right he said you know it says if you're a boy that doesn't like sports or you know likes to wear pink and i realize i'm wearing pink as i say this not i didn't even plan that i just like this shirt um that actually you may not be a boy right like all of these gender is not an empty concept in in this view it's actually very much uh um a concept with content and uh and the up the upshot of that is um that it encourages you to potentially make changes in some cases to your body to to conform to uh a notion of gender and and you know i i've also noticed people who transition from male to female or female to male the gender they transition to they tend to take on very stereotypical um characteristics of that gender right you don't find people transitioning to female and then being um what what you would used to call a tomboy um very very often which is uh curious but and highlights how how different this notion of gender is than the kind of sent the one that really centers just be however you are and that's okay um so can you does that distinction make sense to you yeah i think the the earlier notion of gender you could sort of rehabilitate it if you said look you know our sex bodies have important consequences for us as social beings like really important and some of those consequences will mean that men and women's lives are importantly different not all again i'm just talking about averages and you could call that gender you know women being more interested in babies which is hardly surprising given that we grow them and you know things like that you see you could have there was a word there was a meaning for the word gender that could have been meaningful and then there's this other meaning that also could have been meaningful but i find totally uninteresting which is this performative notion this idea like when you're doing drag drag or um you know when you're subverting the norms you're doing something important and political that you're you're queering categories and this is in itself a liberatory thing to do and that strikes me as so unbelievably facile that i just don't know how it's been centered so much in universities in the past 30 years but what i think has happened in the past i mean on the fringe maybe in the past 30 years but it's really sprung into the public consciousness between the last ten and five years and then it's really taken off it's part of a broader move to take broad identity categories and put them inside people you know people turn into walking collections of identities it wasn't common when i was young even as a young woman to say you identified as something you know i don't i didn't identify as irish i just am irish and it seems so odd to me that people think that you can identify as something that you're not but once you start thinking about people as collections of identities there's nothing really stopping you you can start saying you know identifies this that the other and then this seems to be the really important thing and i would say that you know i i do have to push back a little bit at the idea that trans people um are very stereotypical in their gender expression the thing is they have to be if they want people to understand and read what they're trying to do like i could wear anything i like and people can still see i'm a woman because i just am a woman but if it was very important to you that people understood you as a woman you wouldn't be able to just wear what you liked you'd have to really damn well try right so that people understood what you were aiming for so i don't think i don't think that the criticism you sometimes hear of trans people as being you know incredibly stereotypical and they buy into it all is pretty is very fair i think they just it's just what you have to do when you're trying to present yourself as something that basically you want right that's a good point i think um i want to zero in on on gender dysphoria and and what it is and what we know about it scientifically at this point so can you can you give a definition of gender dysphoria i think the best way you could describe it is very deep discomfort with the fact of your sex body and the activists have moved away from that in the last several years it used to be a condition for getting treated in a gender clinic that you were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and they would do these tests and which included asking your parents if you were a child or asking people around you you know had you tried to present yourself had you said really no i'm a girl if you were a little boy you know and that it causes you enormous distress you can imagine that would be very distressing it was very rare as well it's become much more common and i think it's because we're creating it i think our culture is creating it i think our culture creates a lot of dis-ease in people's bodies in lots of ways to do with using computers too much getting out into nature too little and exercising too little uh you know living very atomized lives and gender dysphoria for me is one of the ways in which people can be very uncomfortable with their bodies and its social contagion as well which you mentioned you saw it and then the final part of this weird fast metastasizing ideology is that for trans activists now you don't even have to have gender dysphoria they'll say you know there are just people who are just gender variant so people who are perfectly happy and feel no distress feel no need to change their body you don't want to medicalize medicalize at all but still say i'm really a member of the opposite sex or i'm really not a member of my sex i'm something else so that's just pure identification yeah i mean one thing i i think i've observed is that there's a pretty big difference between the trans phenomenon and the gender non-conforming phenomenon so gender non-conforming means you accept to me anyway these are the best i can do in my definitions and i accept that people have different definitions gender non-conforming just means that you don't feel you fit with the picture of what people have of men and women and who the hell fits those pictures perfectly right and in particular gay people often feel that they're a really particularly bad fit there's a strong connection between being homosexual and um having you know really strong feelings of gender dysphoria in childhood and uh really not it it's not just a stereotype that butch lesbians go around in dungarees or you know that meant that the gay men like drank they do they more often than is average um so that's gender non-conformity to me gender conformity to me is an entirely liberatory thing it's accepting the truth of your body but refusing to let it limit you in what you choose to do and not worrying if that means you stray out of the blue box right into the pink box or vice versa trans is the opposite trans is saying that the boxes are what we are and if you were someone who was put in the blue box when you were born they use this strange expression gender assigned at birth or sex assigned at birth which of course doesn't happen i mean you know i've been pregnant twice and i knew what sex both my kids were when i was 20 weeks pregnant they just looked on an ultrasound um but they say that you know if you're if you're sex assigned at birth didn't suit you they mean like the pink box of the blue box doesn't suit you you go into the other one so to me it's very gender conforming it's just that it's taking the gender to be real and moving to the other gender or something like that right [Music] big news in shoes rothys is now selling men's sneakers and men's driving loaders you've probably heard your wife sister mother daughter or friends talk about their love of rothy's women's shoes well now they've brought their sustainable materials washable design and innovative craftsmanship to men's shoes looking good and feeling great just got easier thanks to rothy's innovative approach to shoe design from the unbeatable comfort to the fact that you can wash them these shoes check every box if you hate when your favorite white sneakers or light-colored shoes get dirty rothy's men's shoes are for you their 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favorites today the other difference i've observed is most trans people i've met i think probably all of them have had serious gender dysphoria like a you know and a kind of a true deep suffering at the fact that they had a body that didn't fit um whereas you know it seemed to me gender and that kind of thing is can be subject to social contagion and is to some degree but it seems there's even a difference there between you know gender non-binary where it seems to me there's a lot of people that kind of vaguely feel uncomfortable in their skin in the kind of normal way in the way that even probably i and most people i know or like you know at least half or more men of men i know don't totally feel like men all the time and we have everyone has at least a few things about themselves that really make them feel out of touch with their gender you know and and so there's a there's a there's a there's a way in which you can be convinced that your normal creaturely anxiety and the sort of everyday low-level identity crisis that we call life can be made to seem as a like a problem that that needs to be solved by asking people to call you they for instance and that seems like talking about in a distinct way from being trans and having deep seated gender dysphoria do you does that distinction make sense to you or do you see it differently um i mean you know having gender dysphoria is real like it really it really has consequences it feels terrible even if we've created it culturally you know it's all very well to say that like smoking is a cultural disease too well so so so when you say that do you you don't mean that all gender dysphoria is is created culturally do you mean it's amplified and i think some of it's definitely created um especially when people start in their teen years so so isn't it true though that pretty much there's always been a very small percentage of people that have has gender dysphoria and it's probably you know at its core is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is being amplified very much by the culture now and as far as we know um all the studies that were done before the very recent turn to um which i can explain and gender affirming treatment for children suggests that most children with gender dysphoria grow out of it and most of them are gay so there's a really strong connection between not surprisingly when you think of it between thinking that you're a bit different from everybody else when you're three four five six seven but absolutely not understanding why like why you aren't like the other boys and the other little girls and if people don't interpret that to you as oh that means you're really a boy or really a girl like the opposite of what you were born you know it can be deeply unpleasant and intensely awful and you may need support from doctors and so on but if they don't tell you that what usually happens is that before or early in puberty oh right no i get it now i know why i always felt different i am different and it's fine i'm just gay so yes there it is a normally occurring phenomenon but it's really quite linked to sexuality there have probably always been some people for whom that answer doesn't fully satisfy them they still feel very awkward in their bodies and there are various and traditional cultures like samoa or um where they have a third category in which they put males who are so super gender non-conforming and also gay and and that's a sort of i mean it's not trans it's cultural appropriation or you know cultural imperialism to call this trans it's a really culturally specific phenomenon but what they're doing is they're saying these are people who can't live comfortably being seen by the world as just any old member of their sex there's something so different about them that we have to accommodate them so i think that would be the nearest that you'd get although i'm told that it's not standard for the faffini and samoa to feel any gender dysphoria or any dislike of their body they just need to be allowed to live in a very different way from most other men so yeah i think we make the discomfort i was very struck by one researcher who knows a great deal about it has been studying it for about 30 years and he said as far as they can tell for children the gender non-conformity comes first and the discomfort comes when they are taught by the world around them that their non-conformity is unacceptable so you've got some sweet little boy who wants to dress as elsa and prance around the place you know and he wants to grow his hair along and his idea of the upright instrument plays the heart and so on and so forth and then his dad says you know you're no son of mine and forcibly cuts his hair and makes him come hunting and go and watch football or something that poor kid you've created the gender dysphoria he was highly gender non-conforming but you've turned it into gender dysphoria by doing that and then you know it may be that this has become so deep rooted i know trans people who say this is what happened to them that there's nothing much that they can do as adults except transition there's no way they're going to be happy but they think that it could all have been different if they had been accepted right at the beginning so i don't i don't accept this notion that gender dysphoria is this naturally occurring phenomenon with a base rate right it's a hugely complex phenomenon that interacts with our and our cultural ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman our acceptance of non-conformity what it means to be non-conforming like does it mean that you're cast out of your sex and i do and on top of that is this recent social contagion which mostly hits teenagers i wrote about the teenage girls in my book but there's a growing cohort really fast coming up in that past couple of years but boys and these kids are taught gender dysphoria online yeah and they're told to contemplate their genders they they make themselves ill by thinking about it all the time yeah i think i um that's the kind of thing that might just sound crazy if you're not if you haven't been if you haven't seen it but i think i was probably a part of the very first cohort to be deeply embedded in that tumblr culture really early you were really early yeah yeah when it went wham right yeah um so a couple different things here so one thing i wanted to address is the issue of pronouns and and calling people by their pronouns uh you know they're people like ben shapiro who who'll say being asked to refer to someone by their preferred pronouns is a concession to the belief or requires my belief that biological sex isn't real like what what i'm saying when i address a trans person by what they want to be called is that i believe the whole attendant ideology the trans activist ideology which not even all trans people would necessarily agree with um but like you know and uh it's it's always seemed to me i'm i'm happy to call someone what they want to be called if if i know that that's a way to make them feel comfortable in my presence and to validate that i you know everything else held equal i want them to feel freer around me and and in the world and if they want to talk about what we think about biological sex well then i'm going to be honest about what i believe and but it's just it's always seemed to me needlessly rude to not call someone what they want to be called even if you know even if it's as simple you know i i i would call you by a nickname if it were important to you right um it gets a little tricky with they because it's so easy to forget but still it's like i'm going to make an effort to be polite and i'm curious what you think of because that this is a point of tension in the culture right now so what do you make of the the request or the demand of people to call you by preferred pronouns so i mean it is a demand um it's a demand i'm happy to accede to for someone that i know and i'm in the presence of it's just too conflictual otherwise i mean to me it's a bit like calling a catholic priest father you know i don't believe and i'm not going to tell him i believe and if he says you know when did you last go to mass i'll say god that was a long time ago and you know didn't believe any of it i wouldn't start with that and i wouldn't like pointedly keep saying mister you know that would just seem bizarre and um when i've had friends who were trans with to stay in my house or things like that of course i use their preferred pronouns if i wasn't going to i wouldn't have invited them i think but the problem is that it's not just a courtesy it's a truth claim now and so when somebody says my pronouns are she her they're not asking you for a polite concession they're saying i'm a woman and that's not just a personal claim it's a societal claim it's something that fits them into public policy in a role that's fundamentally not correct not you know not not um objectively correct so we live in a world where not much is sex separated anymore and that's great like women aren't kept out of all the things they used to be kept out of and you know there's men who were midwives and nurses and nursery nurses and things too and that's great but there are still some things where we do them separated by sex like sport like showering and open showers um and those things when somebody says my pronouns are she her what they mean is you've got to let me into the women's sports you've got to let me into the women's changing rooms and then i'm not okay so i think when people say it's just a courtesy they haven't thought through the implications of this wholesale insistence on a truth claim and that's and i think i'd probably become more hardline as a result because i see that ground was given needlessly or out of politeness or without or thoughtlessly even and now we have people calling rapists she because what we call she and then they want to be in women's jails and they're being put into women's jails so it was probably the the the end of the wedge there was the pronouns but you look at a person and you think you're suffering and you know why would i mind if you change your name to you know susie and say or she her like that's fine it's no skin off my nose but if susie she her is a rapist and says they want to be in a women's jail yes i mine very much so it has to be that it's understood that this is a courtesy this is not a truth claim and that's the distinction i would make yeah yeah i'm struck by your religious analogy like i would i would you know i would call someone reverend if they were irreverent without believing christianity and if they if they insisted that they wanted to create a a christian state or enshrined christianity in the law well then we'd have a conversation in which they would realize how much of an atheist i am but i wouldn't say you weren't willing to call them reverend anymore if they kept pushing if they were changing laws so that it became illegal for you to express your atheism at some point you might say i'm sorry i'm not going along with the reverend stuff anymore right i'm wiping it all out right but but i would i would always want really to preserve the distinction between addre you know calling someone what they want to be called and taking on their you know even if even if trans activists want to blur those lines i would want to insist on keeping the bright line i agree and i had to decide in my book what i was going to do because i talk about a lot of trans people in the book even though it's not exactly a book about trans people there are particular cases and you know in particular historical ones and i've been criticized from both sides on this and it's an experience you may be familiar with but you can't you know you can't you can't do right for doing wrong sometimes and there are plenty of women who feel that i made needless concessions by on occasion referring to trans women as she and what i said to them is one of the things that i object to most in this movement is its totalitarian insistence on saying that the world is the way it wants the world to be even the world self evidently isn't that way they're trying to make a new world in in this linguistic way you know that you know not only is this male person female they have always been female not only can male people become female or be understood to be female and vice versa that has always been the case we just didn't realize it until half a second ago so they're bringing their utopia into existence by language and then insisting all of us speak their language and that's not how language and discourse works so who would i be to say that my words can be forced out into the world and that everyone must hear them the way i want them heard and the fact is that the people i wanted to read my book were people who are undecided who think there's something weird going on here you know think gosh i need to know more about this there's something about this that's bothering me i was very surprised when i saw there was a bloke in the women's olympics uh weightlifting you know what's going on what's going on with the kids what's going on with all this stuff i wanted that person to read it and if i had gone he he he he about trans women that person wouldn't have read it and would have thought i was mean so i have to accept the world that's out there as much as i'm insisting other people accept the world that's out there and the world that's out there requires me to think how do i speak to communicate how do i get people to read my book and listen to what i'm saying and understand it so for me the bright line was that at no point in the book should somebody be confused about what sex somebody was that said i'm not going to go around the place needlessly misgendering people right yeah i mean i think though you walk the line in in the perfect way which is to refer to someone as like a natal male and then thereafter as a woman if it's if it's relevant right yeah or i'll say trans one mostly a trans woman that's right right and i'll say she when i have to refer to them again and that's fine i'm not i'm not about being mean to people i don't mean to be rude it's just we've gone beyond politeness being enough here you know when we have children who are being put on medicalized pathways that lead to sterility and when we have american governors putting rapists and murderers of women in women's shelters and women's prisons the time for just being polite is long past yeah so let's talk about the issue of of children because this is something that it's extremely important for us to not mince words about uh because you know we're talking we're talking about a very you know a very non-obvious problem to solve which is that some people are genuinely going to be made happier by giving themselves hormones that change their bodies and obviously other people are going to regret that decision and we can talk about sort of what percentage falls into either category but certainly some people are happy with with that decision and it's ju it improves their quality of life to a degree that no one should want to deny them um but then there's this this problem of how early is does it make sense to allow someone to start to to make such a drastic decision right and and if you think of the the kinds of decisions we'd be comfortable with kids making like would you if there was some bizarre experiment where your 12 year old kid had to pick their spouse for life at the age of 12. i would go ballistic would you even let your kid choose what four-year college they're going to attend to when they're 12 years old this is a decision like your entire life does not hang on which four year college you go to but even that just because of how mercurial child psychology is right like when when i was 11 i was sure i wanted to be the next allen iverson i wanted to be a basketball player when i was 12 i was sure it was baseball or something and you know even sooner than that i was the kind of kid that that uh i hated the notion that boys couldn't like pink because it seemed so arbitrary to me so i i didn't even truly like pink but i just liked being a a gadfly and and and upsetting what the the kind of arbitrary ideas people had right so you know hopefully we we all sort of know what it's like vaguely to be a child although we can't can't really fully remember but we remember this sort of mercurial nature ever shifting nature of our beliefs the lack of solidity and so you know it really becomes a problem to say that a kid has free reign over a potentially permanent decision like taking hormones during puberty which which can make you sterile in some cases yeah so i mean you started by saying that it makes some people happier to take hormones and for adults we do have some idea that that is true it's not an enormous improvement but it was never meant to be an enormous improvement because this is a hard road to walk down like being being an adult who has been gender dysphoria for many years this is not an easy world to live in you know you're never going to get exactly what you wanted which is basically to be born different so it made people a bit happier and that's what we're hoping for great for children we actually don't know because nobody's done the sort of test that would allow you to say that the only sort of test that would allow you to say that this makes people happier is something called a controlled trial so where some people get the thing and some people don't it should be randomized so you don't you know pick the great candidates to get it from the rubbish candidates to not get it or something and that's never been done there's never been a randomized controlled trial there's never been a controlled trial at all on using puberty blockers or hormones in childhood so we literally don't know and this is when we do know that gender dysphoria normally goes so you're you're talking about treating people that probably about 80 percent of them if you just left them alone would be fine and you haven't ever checked to see if it actually makes people happier what does happen is that um it seems to lock in persistence so in the technical language they say you persist if you continue being gender dysphoric you desist if you stop and if you would have expected eighty percent assistance that turns into you know two percentage assistance if you socially transition the child and give them puberty blockers and i really mean two percent some clinics have literally never seen a child desist that they put on puberty blockers so the puberty blockers interrupt the process whereby your developing body and your developing mind teach you what it was that was different about you and settle it all down and allow you to mature into your own sex and your own body and the only way that we can think of doing these really remarkably huge interventions in children that would not be acceptable in any other circumstances the only children who are given medicine that sterilizes them are children who would otherwise die of cancer literally i mean it's the only ones there's no other situation in which would sterilize a child it's you know only if they're going to die otherwise and yet this medicine is given and it does if you go on puberty blockers early and you skip your own puberty entirely and then go on across sex hormones you will be sterile so they are giving children medicines that will sterilize them and the only way you could think that that was the right thing to do is if you believe in the innateness of this gender identity idea it has to be something that you were born with and that's the most fundamental part of you rather like a sexed soul and then when somebody says when a child says mummy i'm really a girl. you understand that as the child expressing something that is a permanent innate truth about themselves and why wouldn't you then help as opposed to understanding it in a developmental framework which is this is how this child feels now and the evidence shows this is not how the child will probably feel in some years time how can we help that child to be happy and well in between yeah so um how widespread is the the phenom phenomenon in in uh america canada britain in the english-speaking world in the world in general of putting kids on puberty puberty blockers is this because you know i i fear it could be it could be exaggerated it could be under-exaggerated and i want to have a clear picture of there are no good statistics no one's collecting them and we have them here in england because there's only one clinic and some some thousands of kids um are seen a year now at the um single gender identity development service jibs it's gold and not very many of them go on across sex women on puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones at 16. so it's not it's not a large phenomenon here although the activists are pushing for much much much more of it at the moment it's actually halted because of a high court case in which a judge reviewed the treatment pathway and said that no child under 13 and probably very few children under 16 could possibly understood what it would mean to give up your future for fertility permanently and so a child simply can't consent to this treatment so judge has now said that here in america i mean it could be loads certainly thousands and maybe tens of thousands because you've got like dozens and dozens of really big full-service gender clinics in america pediatric gender clinics i mean and there's a mapping process trying to find just by a report all the places that will give out um puberty blockers blockers or hormones to minors and i mean there's really hundreds they're up they're up at 300 i think now that they found because in some states you don't have to get parental consent but your parents insurance has to pay so a 13 year old can go to a planned parenthood clinic get puberty blockers or hormones there the parents insurance will pay but apparently not even be told and certainly doesn't have the right to to oppose it yes i mean it's not it's not an exaggerated phone and it's a big thing this is really happening big time i mean if you compare it to lobotomies america ever only ever committed and fifty thousand lobotomies and we still remember that as one of the most grotesque medical scandals of the twentieth century yeah maybe on that yeah so um another another aspect i wanted to touch here was um you know i don't know how this condition fits into gender dysphoria because it seems to be actually a distinct thing that also goes under the umbrella of trans but but is notably different which is autogynophilia and this is um you know this this is um the sexual arousal that some men feel at the idea of being themselves women and and i've known some men that have had this and occasionally men who have this transition to being women and it's not it seems distinct from gender dysphoria and that they don't feel like they're trapped in the wrong body it's that they they get off to the thought of themselves being a woman and it's so it's arousing but i think that can cause gender dysphoria so would you say that's that's a kind of gender dysphoria or is it something distinct so i mean the best study that gives us a base rate for men finding cross-dressing now this is a separate thing i'm not talking about being trans here and was a study in sweden a while ago and it reckoned that about three percent of men find cross-dressing sexually exciting and i mean most of those men they don't think they're women they don't want to be women this is just a masturbatory aid basically right and but a much more extreme version of that is when when the transformation that's regarded as arousing is physical it's not about clothes and that is something that um 20 years ago or 15 years ago there were societies for men who felt like this and it was a fascinating article written by amy bloom in the atlantic i think sometime like 2005 called conservative men and their conservative dresses she went on a cruise ship that was all across it was a cruise ship i think it was she went anyway to this meeting of middle-aged very conservative very you know business-like men whose whose greatest joy in life was their extreme transformations into women and their poor wives had to go along with this anyway she talked to them it was very interesting but now those men are told if they go to visit a gender clinic that they're trans and that you know i think a lot of them would already have had some element of gender dysphoria like to feel such an intense desire to be very different creates gender dysphoria and some men are okay with just the clothes i mean i interviewed from my book i interview dan lawrence who's a very well-known trans woman who wrote about um being an auto kind of and got hundreds of testimonies from other autogynophiles and what anne said to me was and it was really about the genitals for her they had to go it just you know life couldn't couldn't be born with with male male sex body this is a person you know was a father had kids was married um and felt a lot happier afterwards it has to be said so some trans people a lot of trans activists say that this doesn't exist but i mean these are the people who tell you that we all have to believe everyone's identities that they're the ones who say you know who am i to dispute somebody's identity and then there's people like ann lawrence and many many others giving testimony that this is how they feel and suddenly they're told no you know you're not allowed to say that is it what why is that why why is i um because in in the in the trans activist version of the world in what i call gender identity ideology gender identity is not a sexual thing at all right it's like it's like your true inner self and and they use metaphors like you know born in the wrong body or a pink brain and a blue body or things like this these are very simplistic versions no one sophisticated would say those but children i told them as an explanation of what it means to be trans they don't say and there was a quote from ray blanchard who's the guy who created the word autogynophilia and who studied a lot of them you know it's one thing to say i've decided to be my true self and you know i've been hiding myself for all of these years and you know from monday i'm coming in and i'm calling myself and maddie and you know i expect you to call me she and you most people will be very sympathetic like in most workplaces i think people will be very accepting of that and there might be an issue if you want to use the women's showers but generally speaking people want to accommodate you but imagine coming in and saying you know i've been masturbating in my wife's clothes for the last 20 years and it's not enough for me anymore but that's not going to work is it right that doesn't elicit as much respect any respect and that's sad i think by the way i don't see i i i wish that we could be less prudish and um you know not make people hide what's true about themselves i don't think we get anywhere by not being honest and i know two people now who are self-described autogynophiles who have gone through surgery to transition and both of them are much happier for being honest like one of them in particular really felt when he as he was you know went and decided to transition um that it was because he really was a woman he believes the whole thing he believed everything the gender clinic told him and he was very aggressive about it like anyone who disagreed was told that they were a bigot and now ten years after transition much happier by the way and with much better mental health like she says um you know i know i'm a man and i know i've there's there isn't a woman inside this is a mental health condition i did this to make myself feel better it had big costs for other people in particular her family um but it was autogenophilia it was it was a sexual um it was sexual and origin yes so i mean do we know what percentage of of male to female transitioners are in this category as opposed to a sort of different it doesn't seem to be um standard from culture to culture because what you're giving up by stopping being a man and becoming a woman varies from culture to culture so if you're a gay man it may be that losing male privilege and i'm talking now about a very traditional society you know somewhere that really women stay home whatever giving up male privilege if you're a gay man may well be worth it compared with you know being an absolute outcast and never being able to you know live sexually so that would be the case in traditional cultures like mohakka or samoa until recently when they become more westernized um i don't think you'll find much water gynophilia there though you'll probably find some cross-dressing if you look but very hard to find like how would you know this is not something people do openly or talk about right but i mean you know these are heterosexual men they're men who desire women and desire themselves as women you don't have to transition for sex and in fact if you transition you're going to lose you know status jobs the chance to marry as a man the chance to be you know inherit or whatever so you it does it doesn't even just go down that path like i think men in those cultures would would stop themselves from even thinking in that direction and and then the count um at that rey's clinic it was about two-thirds of water gynecologist and the others were basically gay men who were just you know really had always been very effeminate and always understood that to mean that they were really meant to be girls and you know you sort of look at them and you think i know what you mean when you say you have a woman inside i mean it's nonsense but you know what they mean but the other ones you don't know what they mean because it's this complex sexuality basically so um so let's talk about the the practical consequences for for society uh and sex segregated spaces i'm thinking of really just bathrooms locker rooms and i guess sports anywhere that women get naked um or are vulnerable so that would count for me and doing medical exams or um sleeping so dormitories you know in places like uh youth hostels so anywhere women are vulnerable and then places where people feel more comfortable and private i mean i've had men say to me you know we don't want women in our changing rooms either i know you don't they'll be really embarrassing you're horrible you're not in danger though it's not right it's not the same scary thing however you know privacy and dignity matter so so places where privacy dignity and safety are at issue plus places where strength differentials really play a role so that's sports so those are the those are the places that we're talking about yeah so let's let's first focus on on the first category forget sports for a moment just just you know bathrooms and locker rooms and yeah um this is an it's an interesting like the reason we separate these things in the first place i i i think i just never questioned until a few years ago when this became more of a cultural issue and i've also had you know at columbia and at barnard in particular i have you know if you're if you're visiting the dorms at barnard as a guy there are no male bathrooms it's like an all-women school so you just if you're hanging out with someone there you go to the bathroom and you're in the bathroom with other women yeah and and i was in that situation many times and it was probably the first time in my life i had shared a bathroom with a woman um and it was awkward every time i i felt i i can't fully describe how i felt but it was like i felt like i was doing something wrong simply by being there and i could sense that all the women there that i didn't know felt exactly the same way like a not that they were seriously afraid that i was going to do something necessarily but just more alert which is more alert exactly exactly yeah and i was aware of that i was having that effect on them simply by existing yeah um but i can't point to anything bad actually happening in a concrete way other than the mutual discomfort um so that varies from society to society of course i mean there really are societies where people are just much more open about sex bodies i lived in finland for two years and it's really very standard like every finnish home has a sauna and it's quite standard to um have guests to your home sauna with you and everyone sounds together male and female naked in the home now if you go to a hotel they would usually segregate the sounders and they'd be completely naked as well but they would be male and female segregated there so and then you know you go to ireland running from and you know it's a very it's a very body private sort of culture like too much so and you know a lot of people will even in a single sex changing room will you know use the towel and hover behind it and not want anyone to see anything you know so partly it is cultural yeah but i don't think it's entirely cultural there's a reason that we do these things and you know a friend of mine said to me when they make you say these things they make you sound obscene like i end up being the one who talks about rape and i'm the one who ends up having to say penis and i'm the one who ends up having to say masturbate i don't want to say any of these things i never used to have to when we just were able to use the words man and woman to me male and female people and we haven't pretended those words have no meaning but the fact is that women are far more vulnerable to rape to sexual assault the most common male sexual crimes are in fact flashing and voyeurism non-contact crimes and like lots of men do those things most women will tell you that the first time they saw a penis wasn't related to them in any way was some bloke flashed them on the street or when they were little and those things happen so women when they're naked and when they are in vulnerable positions generally don't want any men around thank you very much and it's not okay to say oh well how many rapes have there been it's not we shouldn't have that's not the test of my level of comfort it's not that i you know until i'm raped i can't say that i'm uncomfortable i'm not comfortable being looked at people that i don't know i'm not comfortable with some guy who's clearly getting off on this situation i'm not comfortable with someone who likes making me feel uncomfortable you know so there's all these situations where you know you're just not going to be able to use public spaces if you can't be sure that there are no men in them and this is even more true for women from certain and quite traditional religions so if you're an orthodox jew or an observant muslim or an observant sikh it is just the case that your religion and your beliefs mean you can not be in close proximity with people of the opposite sex who are not related to you so if we say that places like changing rooms public toilets and so on that the female ones can admit male people we are also saying that those women can't be in the public sphere they have to go back into the home yeah so so one thing that occurs to me here is um you know [Music] part of the difference between places and spaces that like the finnish sauna are sort of more open about these things is the notion that there's a self-selected pool of people that would even be there to begin with versus a stranger setting yes where so like the more strangers there are the more you're gonna want sex segregation yeah i mean i'm in a house now with men like i'm married to a man i have two sons of course i don't have sex segregated bathrooms at times why on earth would i am they're my relatives yeah and i think like one of the one of the questions this raises is like obviously the most men if they had an option of being in an all guys locker room would choose the all guys locker room like okay because that's just like it's you know especially if you're at you know if we're talking about high schools it's like all of us men remember an era during puberty where we just had got erections all the time for no reason at all to an uncomfortable degree and to have that happen in a context where there are girls around and your body is not even it's like you're insecure it's it's like a nightmare most men would not choose that you know and even if they were aroused would would choose would want prefer to express that in a different more appropriate setting most yes i'm curious what like the self-selected group of natal males that transition to women um in what way are they different from uh from from the majority of men and in how that have implications for how much discomfort women feel around them especially a generation of women who grew up where being trans was was more normalized like would they feel that same level of discomfort for the one trans girl in their class that they would for a horde of 10 guys in the locker room i mean if it's someone you know obviously it's just less of an issue yeah um a lot of women would say that you know if you go back long enough to you know gay clubs in the 1990s you know lots of women would you know a lot of their friends were gay or whatever and you know your gay men friends were like kind of almost one of the girls they might come on the hindu and they might go out partying with you and if that if that guy looks around and knows i'm coming into the women's loop with you you don't feel threatened but the point was that it was never a right for men to come into those spaces and it was women's right to say no this isn't okay so if there was one woman in there who said you know no i'm not comfortable well that guy would have to leave like if that you know if there was a group that came in and they'd a guy with them like other women might say no this isn't okay you know and now because we say that um identity claims trump everything else and that anybody anybody at all can say they are male female neither both whatever gender fluid one one day one the next and there's no outward marker of that well that means anyone can use any facility so you could really just be a trans woman like there isn't a special category of male that's trans women it's a any male can be a trans woman yeah so now they're just aren't single sex faces like guaranteed single sex spaces and if you think like what men are going to take advantage of this hmm you know it's like the saying that the people who want to be politicians are precisely the people we don't want running the country people who you know you you're not going to do that you'd be embarrassed to go into the women's toilets right but but you know some guy who you know is working up to a major career as a flasher yeah that guy would be quite happy too yeah yeah so um so let's talk about sports this is a this is another cultural flash point um you know i i i'm gonna take for granted that most people agree that men tend to be stronger physically than women i know there's they don't i mean they're mad so i mean you can find fringe academics with outside outsized cultural influence that will argue against what is one of the most sort of obvious facts of being a human mammal on earth but i'm just gonna take that for granted that you know anyone who's been alive long enough has noticed that the boys just tend to win the arm wrestling contests like pretty effortlessly and then that that and that has consequences for for sports um on the on the other hand on the other hand there is there is an interesting paradox here to me which is which i'm not sure i've ever talked publicly about before which is um you know there are these sports like boxing where we separate out people by weight class not just by gender yeah because we recognize that actually gender is not the only way in which the genetic lottery so stacks stacks the deck for certain people and not for others that it's just a tradition that you're not gonna fight someone who's a hundred pounds heavier than you even if you're both men because it wouldn't be a fair fight um and yet you know in other situations such as the nba we don't have an nba for very tall men in an mba for very short men maybe there's just one nba for the same reason that sort of boxing separate for weight classes is reasonable but whether we do this in any specific case is to some extent a matter of just the tradition of the sport itself right so so the reason that we have classes in sports which can be age classes as well like under 11s under 13 15 18 over 35 over 70 or you know there's all these age classes as well is because what you're doing in playing sport and i'm talking now about competitive not necessarily professional competitive but like someone's going to win and someone's gonna lose is you're trying to pick the person who is best right and what best means depends on the sport a hugely depends on the sport and of course what's who will be best really does depend on their innate characteristics so in the book i talk about michael phelps who was born with everything that you could want as a swimmer but the guy you know his hands just reach out further than anyone else and he's got his enormous feet he's superlatively flexible ankles that are like flippers and you know he probably has a bunch of other things like um his blood can be more oxygenated than most people so he's like this perfect physical specimen who was just able to beat all other men when he was at the height of his career and now imagine you had a woman who had all of those things she could be beaten by thousands or tens of thousands of men but the thing is she's a phenomenon she's really amazing she's got everything that you're looking for as a swimmer but she doesn't have testosterone fuel puberty so the reason we separate it is because half of humanity can be incredible but you won't ever see that if it competes with the other half of humanity because quite ordinary men can beat superlative women and that's the same in boxing because upper body strength and this is a weightlifting as well upper body strength um is is so variable with size and weight and also very very variable between men and women like it's the biggest gap isn't what we can do with the upper body so you know if there weren't many men who wanted to be boxers we wouldn't have weight classes and the fact is only the very big men would be able to be boxers but boxing's immensely popular people like watching flyweights they like admiring their nifty footwork and you know how scrappy they are whatever i hate boxing so i've now gone to the edge of how i'm able to pretend i know what i'm talking about so that's why there are weight classes because you know there are these these little guys who are just amazing they're everything that you would want to see in a boxer but they happen to be small and you're never going to see that guy he's never going to get to compete he's going to be beaten by some big flabby guy you can just punch him in the face and that's that and with basketball if there was a demand for it yeah of course there'd be hype classes but nobody actually really wants to watch five foot four guys throwing the basketball around if they did it would make a lot of sense so so in basketball i wonder about that i wonder if it existed if it might not have more of an appeal yeah maybe because you know you know watching a guy like shaq play watching there's something more one dimensional about a seven footer that can only be what you mean as opposed to watching allen iverson do all the tricks and i think partly it is a matter of what's been done yeah the momentum of of of certain sports and it's also the way it's all become so extraordinarily extreme like a generation ago or two generations ago you didn't have to be seven foot to be in the nba right but now you know the selection process like finding the people who have the perfect genetics you know finding somebody and like someone biles for example like obviously the woman is an absolute phenomenon but on top of everything else she's tiny and that's an incredible advantage in gymnastics i was reading this amazing thing about her she can fit one more trick onto the mat than anyone else she's competing with because she's so unbelievably tiny so you know if that was common if there were loads of gymnasts who were five foot ten like women who wanted to compete then you were going to have to do classes like height classes and gymnastics but at some points there just aren't enough people to make it worthwhile right and also people choose their sports depending on their body type right like if you're seven foot you're just not going to go into you know gymnastics you're going to go into basketball and if you're built like a you know a steam train you're going to go into american football and and so you know there's sports for all these different body types and that's fine but what they would not be if we didn't segregate sport by sex is there would not be sports for women because then everything women would just lose but the only things women could do would be ice skating and gymnastics because they're more flexible and you know things like polo where it's the horse that does all the work yeah and then god forbid you're a woman that's really into any of the sports that men tend to be better at i mean men are better at nearly everything just because they're much stronger so i mean i was i i had no i had no idea until i researched it just how big the physical differences are between men and women is actually most of it's not visible on the outside like obviously you see you know right and and it's just like the vast majority i mean i i hope most women have not been in a full-fledged fight with a man and most men have never exactly so you never actually get the occasion to to witness unfortunately unless you're a victim of physical abuse which many women are and you mentioned these academics who have these ridiculous theories and i look at them and i think you've never talked to a woman who's been eaten up down and sideways by her husband have you obviously not you know you've no idea so the upper body strengths the punching power is especially that the thing it's the thing that is the single biggest difference in physique there isn't as much of a difference in leg strength actually no that's right really it's really about upper body and the thing about a punch is a punch combines several aspects of strength so it's the shoulders it's the back it's the arm it's the hands like men's hands and wrists are much much stronger than women's so a punch combines three or four um advantages of men over women and all of them quite big so one once one study i read um they just got untrained men and women to punch as hard as they could and there was no overlap whatsoever the very weakest man punched harder than the very strongest woman and the average man punched 150 more strongly than the average woman the average man did i don't mean fifty percent more i mean 150 more that was the gap so 2.5 times the punching strength yeah so obviously this is really relevant for mixed martial arts yes where where i know joe rogan has gotten into trouble for just really defending the complete sex segregation of the sport i think i think all sex all sports apart from the little things like polo and yachting or something maybe although in yachting you know upper body strength matters a lot too they all have to be sex segregated and you know i don't even understand what's so difficult about this because it's not a statement about anyone's gender identity i happen to come from a very sporting family i'm very unsupporting myself but i have brothers and sisters who are international standard cricketers and in particular one of my brothers and one of my sisters or two of the best cricketers ireland has ever turned out and um you know the difference is huge but my point here is that women play on the men's teams all the time so my sister when she was captaining ireland captaining the women's team she would play on a men's club side uh at the weekend like an amateur side and at her very best she played on the men's club's first side and then she played seconds because she couldn't get a good enough game otherwise right so it's completely fine for women to play in men's teams so why can't trans women play in men's teams it's fine it's not a statement about somebody's gender identity nobody was saying my sister had to be a man to play in those teams i'm not insulting anybody now we just play according to our sex right and it's it there's an asymmetry too like i would if if a trans man i in a natal female wants to you know do jiu jitsu with like elects to do jiu jitsu with a man that is willing they're the hard people that's fine because if they take testosterone they can't compete as women because it's doping right right right if they want to compete with the men yeah yes i don't see a problem with that no i don't either but they're not going to be competitive yeah that's their choice quite likely yeah quite likely but you know if there's a one in a million chance they shock the world then i'm i'm all for that person you know yeah i'm all for the freedom to fail in that scenario or the freedom to prove yourself i mean i think that trans women can be accommodated completely fine in men's sports like what's the issue you know they're male and this is the category for males i think trans men who have taken testosterone are likely to find that there isn't anywhere that they can play competitive sports successfully i i don't have a good answer to this but i know the answer isn't that they take testosterone and compete with women right so and i guess the last the last space where this is seems really relevant to me is prisons yes and prisons are a a really unusual space in society they are they're unique in in many ways um and our prisons are you know many of them are just horribly governed and they are sort of black boxes we don't want to appear into i mean i i just i just saw a story about a poor woman that was that um went to jail eight months pregnant and tried to notify guards of of going into labor and had to deliver her own baby yeah right because of just the incompetence of of the of the system um so like we're talking about places that can't keep they can't keep drugs out they can't ensure the safety sorry run by gangs yep run by gangs it's it's um it's really it's really a mess and um so so can you talk a little bit about the the gender and trans component of what has gone on in some prisons and how widespread this is so i was surprised to discover that people have been putting trans women in women's prisons for a long time like 30 or 40 years in canada australia some parts of the us but always post-operative so people have undergone genital surgery no longer have male hearts and you know i don't think that's necessarily all right in the sense that you know are they really sure that all the women feel that this person is a woman i mean nobody seems to have asked on the other hand i can see that they felt that wasn't someone who could be in a men's prison and you were talking about a very tiny number of people so i can imagine making that decision but there's this weird thing that happens in human rights or supposed human rights discussions where it's never enough and it always iterates so first you move the people who are post-operative and when at this time this is 1980s 1990s um you used to have to go through a real life test it was called you had to live in role if you wanted to get surgery you had to dress as a woman and present yourself as a woman for a year or two before they would do the surgery and of course a man who wanted to do that in prison couldn't because he was in a men's prison so they successfully argued through some legal cases in different countries in particular canada and some parts of the u.s that that man should be allowed to move to women's prison so he could live and roll but then why should he have to have the diagnosis and now we've got to the point very recently in some american states in california the governor had signed this one into law pretty recently and it was a pledge too that they're just going to ask everybody's gender identities when they're sent to prison and if they say that they're women they're going to be put in the women's prison so this is i still can't believe this is happening i just can't believe this has happened i mean there are no no feminist and no women's organizations except a few tiny brave little groups of women who are vilified by everybody else fighting this and there are these big organizations um like now and um i don't know all the american ones but then people like the aclu who say they're for human rights and they're actually literally putting rapists and murderers of women in women's jails folks just blokes this is when i will not use preferred pronouns thank you very much like if some man who's a serial killer of women or was beaten his wife to death says that his gender identity requires him to be held in a women's prison that's the point of which i'm like nope that person is not she i just don't understand how people who call themselves feminists can possibly not be screaming from the rooftops about this yeah so um i guess i guess uh there's a a lot of what you said and and other people like jk rowling and um chimamanda adichie sort of get labeled as turfs as trans exclusionary radical feminists um do you do i imagine you get this sometimes and yeah of course but you know i mean so does that mean i'd stop saying it like does this mean like one of the cases one of the people i interviewed for the book told me about was a bloke who had murdered his wife because she had come home and found him wearing her clothes i'm sorry for that man that man is ashamed of something you shouldn't be ashamed of but anyway he was so ashamed that he murdered her by throttling her with a piano wire he nearly cut her head off and did it so viciously and he now says he's a woman and he's in the women's jail and not only that but all the big human rights organizations and civil liberties organizations in the state backed him being transferred to a women's prison and that's the point we get to when i come back to the preferred pronouns thing if i had said there was this woman who murdered her wife by decapitating her she said she wanted to be in a women's prison you'd been going out yeah well you know there are some very violent women the fact is this is a man and that's when my courtesy runs out when i'm talking about someone who murdered his wife like that well it runs out of fear but before that but definitely it's run out there yeah well um on that note i think we we can bring this conversation to a close it has been uh it's been really good to finally be able to talk about this stuff and i i want to direct my audience towards your book um can you can you uh tell them where to get it so it's called trans when ideology meets reality and it actually came out in the states two days ago when we're talking so on seventh of um september and it's been distributed by simon and chester very kindly so it should be available in wherever you buy your books really it is the english edition um i just have to say to you coleman i couldn't be a bigger admirer i admired you anyway but i really admire you for being willing to talk about this because it's so easy not to it's so easy just to say there's a million other things i could be talking about and there are but if everyone says this then the hardliners get to do what they want without any scrutiny because everybody else is saying this is too difficult or this is too dangerous i'll get vilified or whatever so you know absolutely kudos to you yeah well i appreciate it and right back at you thank you very very much all right take care if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my new content as always thanks for your support [Music] you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 112,039

Keywords: #ConversationswithColeman, #CwC, #ColemanHughes, #HelenJoyce, #genderdysphoria, #genderidentity, #genderpronouns, transgender

Id: WDFXPlv-R_s

Length: 82min 25sec (4945 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021

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