Trans Rights vs. Women's Rights with Kathleen Stock

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman so continuing my UK theme today's guest is Kathleen stock Kathleen's a philosopher and a writer and she was a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex for many years until she was stampeded out of her job by a mob of angry students as you'll hear in this episode Kathleen's main offense was her views on trans issues which are broadly aligned with people like JK Rowling and Helen Joyce and for these critiques of trans activist ideology she was more or less run out of her University now Kathleen's story didn't make as many headlines in America as it should have but it's really one of the most egregious examples of cancel culture since Brett Weinstein's debacle at Evergreen and though Kathleen and I don't agree on everything as you'll see I think the treatment she's received has been shameful in any event we discuss all of that here we talk about the conceptual distinction between sex and gender and we talk about whether you should respect people's preferred pronouns and I think there's some distance between Kathleen and me on those two topics but we also talk about the conflict between trans rights and female rights we talk about what to do with female only spaces such as locker rooms bathrooms women's sports and prisons we talk about what to do with children who self-identify as trans we talk about puberty blockers hormone therapy and surgical transitions and we discussed the phenomenon of social contagion detransitioners and dissisters so without further Ado Kathleen stock [Music] okay Kathleen thank you so much for coming on my show well thanks very much for having me it's great to be here yes so we uh one thing we share in common is is a love for philosophy I was a philosophy major at Columbia and you were a philosophy Professor for a long time and I want to start there what was your initial area of focus and philosophy and what were the ideas that really motivated you um so my PhD thesis was on imagination and in particular relation to fiction film um and that's pretty early on what I was drawn to partly I think because I was already a voracious reader of fiction and I wanted to do something philosophically in an area I was already enthusiastic about so I was really enthusiastic about fiction and I wanted to understand how it worked philosophically and also how what the imagination was because it's quite a strange faculty if you want to call it a faculty um somewhere between belief and desire uh it's a bit like belief but obviously you don't believe what you imagine most of the time well I would say none of the time um oh sorry all the time but um it's also a bit like desire in the sense in the role it plays in fantasy so there were loads of interesting questions around that that I could ask and actually at the time it was coming up as it were like there was more and more funding going into philosophy of imagination thought experiments um were hot uh simulation theory in the philosophy of Mind was hopped so it was quite a good time imagination yeah it still is sure um well that's interesting and you you also had uh you had some writing about music as well in the very beginning as well you so because of my interest in fiction that kind of tended to put me in contact with people interested in philosophy of art more generally and I somehow managed to organize a conference on music philosophy and music with someone else in Manchester and then a book came out of that which I edited it's called philosophers of music and it had some quite you know big names in it Roger scrutin was in it yeah um uh Paul pogosian uh from NYU like philosophers that well scrutin always talked about music but there were other philosophers in there from other areas that were quite well known but had this side interest in philosophical questions about music and I got a few of those so it was a cool thing to do so I was originally a professional musician before I pivoted to philosophy and people always ask me if I am ever tempted to combine the two to write about music from a philosophical lens and I have to admit I've never been tempted to even though I'm still a pro musician I've never I've always found that um I think at bottom I am a subjectivist when it comes to what music is good at some level so I find it hard to whereas I'm very much an objectivist when it comes to moral truths factual truth scientific truths so I find it more interesting to try to intervene on conversations and debates in those Realms where I believe and objective truths uh then then I find it to intervene in you know your music or Cuisine preferences because yeah yeah but I kind of agree with you about that actually yeah I wouldn't put music and Cuisine quite on the same level but they're not far apart but fiction on the other hand so the kind of questions I was interested in about fiction were not about whether it's good or not it was more like what it is and also its relation to epistemology like because you there's some people that think fiction is just all invented all fun all intent entertainment all the time and has no role to play in um education or moral education even whereas I think it's obviously true that you can read a fiction and learn something about the world so but how given that it's all made up is the question right so were you ever tempted to major in literature or or go in that direction or write yourself my first degree um was in French and philosophy so and that was basically reading nothing but French literature and I enjoyed it a lot um and I think I could have gone into that um so yeah I suppose at some point I was tempted yeah yeah um so so let's get into the stuff that you've been more known for recently which is um you know I I actually from my perception is that the controversy surrounding you're leaving uh University of Sussex over uh your your opinions about gender and trans and all the rest you know we have our versions of those controversies going on in America but you know as large a story as that was here I think it it actually didn't cross the Atlantic quite as much as I would have expected um you know given that we I mean from my point of view America is I don't know a few months or a few years behind the UK on and Western Europe in General on the trans issues in terms of where the conversation is at um but we do you know pay attention you know JK Rowling is a huge flash point in America as well so um I'm I'm sure many of my podcast listeners are aware of of your situation but I I also think that many aren't um but would would be keenly interested in it so I guess let's just start there when did you start running into difficulties or problems at uh with your position as a professor at the University of Sussex um 2018 um but that's exactly when I started to be more open about My Views um although not fully open actually because I knew there would be controversy and I was sort of easing into it trying to be very sensitive so one of the relevant background things is that I was at the University a university in Britain that's based in Brighton and Brighton is the lgbtq capital of Britain okay um I didn't know that like uh I think they just someone was telling me the other day that in a particular part of Brighton 15 of people are lgbtq so the San Francisco yeah yeah 100 so um so and a lot of students come to this University because of that and and I'm a lesbian so that was all working fine but I um had some severe concerns about the direction that trans activism in this country was taking it was very radical position that your identity your claims about your own identity as in I am a woman makes you a woman and not only makes you a woman in some kind of benign sense but then gives you access legally to women's changing rooms sports teams uh prisons if you're convicted of a crime um and if you're a child or a minor puts you on a track to irrevocable changes before you've had a chance to think about it so all of that I was worried about and um I also had concerns about this idea for lesbians in particular and and gay men as well but particularly lesbians because not only was Womanhood been presented as an identity that you could just opt into but also lesbianism was in the sense that if you're a man a male who says he's a woman and is attracted to women then you can say you're a lesbian and you'll be counted by Major lgbtq organizations as a lesbian which is incredibly strange to me that males could be lesbians so all of that and then there was philosophical issues around that because philosophy was being used bad philosophy was being used in my view to prop up these ideas you kind of deconstructionist postmodern turn kind of philosophy where language constructs everything so um I started to speak up a bit about that and immediately um as I knew I kind of kind of knew I would ran into big problems in my University also in the discipline of philosophy and to some extent with the general public um yeah so it wasn't it wasn't a popular thing to do yeah and then when did you end up leaving Sussex and what were the circumstances around sure so in I left last year in October of last year and between 2018 and 2021 um there'd just been wave after wave of hostility public open letters from academics uh endless uh articles about my trans my alleged to transphobia um the colleagues in my University going onto social media all the time and saying I was a danger to trans students meanwhile I was teaching trans students happily as far as I was concerned um you know so I was quite uh used to intense hostility it felt very intense but in 2021 it kind of ratcheted up because a group of students nobody knows who they were actually um decided to orchestrate a campaign to get me out of my job so then they um basically started a campaign physically on my campus where they would put posters up with my name on all over the place saying I had to be fired or quit um stickers in the bathrooms that I used I had a Manifesto that was full of um kind of wild absurd claims about what I thought which is upstandard like there's just so much ridiculous uh misinformation about what it is I actually think out there so they were saying I was I can't even remember now but you know sort of thing goes I I'm a right wing um and I'm not uh you know how do you identify but I don't identify well I'm I'm I've always voted left and I continue I don't think I could vote for the conservatives in this country so let's just assume you know that there is someone out there listening to this podcast that is actually quite open to your arguments but nevertheless has imbibed some misinformation and just get this out right at the front sure what is it that you uh believe about rights for Trans people well obviously as a philosopher you straightforwardly ask what is a right and so on and rights claims are not rights but I believe trans people as every other person should have all full human rights in terms of protection from violence uh freedom of movement freedom of conscience uh property all the standard ones I would um absolutely defend and in this country um that we have two laws that protect trans people and I've never I've got no objection to either of them so uh we have the gender recognition act which is um offers the possibility to legally change your sex under certain conditions and we have the equality act which names gender reassignment is a protected characteristic alongside sex biological sex pregnancy um age and various other ones race so that's all fine and my objections are not to any of those things my objections were in the context of this new it for you the UK this relatively radical demand that those laws be changed actually the demand was those laws be changed so that identity inner feelings of identity would be the protected characteristic rather than a process um like a surgical process or even a kind of Behavioral process it would be just simply saying I am a woman would mean you were a woman you could get then the idea is you're supposed to be able to get a legal sex change just simply by declaring that you're a woman and actually even without illegal sex change so the the Dogma goes you should have a right to be wherever women are um you don't even need a gender recognition certificate according to the new um Orthodoxy on the left so that's what I was objecting to the the sort of incursions into what I think of as Women's and Children's rights by this new radical position um which is different to what we had before right so this this uh episode won't come out probably for a few weeks so I don't want to dwell too much on news that may change but we are speaking I think maybe 24 within 24 hours of uh of a new story in the UK where you'll be able to summarize it more accurately but Scotland has tried to change a policy in the direction of what trans activists or the the most radical trans activists want making it easier to uh live as a woman in all facets of society with fewer requirements yeah and that has been blocked by the UK so can you talk a little bit about that I mean so I can try and help people through this although it's a bit complicated because of the system the Scottish position in the UK set up which is devolved government so they have some law making Powers Scotland I'm actually from Scotland originally um so Scotland has is governed by the Scottish national party and they have for some unknown reason take an extremely radical stance they had basically been spoon fed by trans activist organizations to go for what's called self-id and self ID is not just happening it's not being pushed just here it's it's everywhere you know it's internationally it's on the agenda in Germany and Spain and um it's already in Canada so um for instance so um Scotland have announced are basically tried to implement or are trying to implement a new law which says will make it much easier for people to legally change their sex the UK situation as it stands is that you have to um have first of all have medical sign off some kind of medical sign-off some kind of assessment of your motives and like why you might want to transition you also have to show some commitment to living as the opposite sex like wearing clothes or you know although no one's very clear what that actually means but there is some commitment built into the law that you have to kind of live as a woman as in look like you mean it um the government Scottish government wants to get rid of those criteria basically make a much shorter period I think it's three months between declaring and getting your certificate they also want to lower the age um at which you can do this I think to 16. um now in England that's not going to be the case at the moment under this government so that was a sort of a two-tier system and the the problem as presented by the UK government and I think this is true is that it's very unclear how this affects women's rights in particular because we also have biological sex as a protected characteristic but um a large number of people now can will be able to change their sex through simply pretty much through self-declaration and then it's really unclear whether they get counted as having changed their sex and therefore protected under sex and gender reassignment or not and this puts women's rights and um trans women's rights as it were if you want to call it rights right up against each other um what's an example of how this might manifest in the in the real world um so well one of the ways in which it um is I mean it's all very unclear and there's lots of argument legally about what it'll mean but for instance comparators so if you're trying to establish a discrimination claim uh for a woman you would one of the things you would do is look for a male in the same situation and say well would this have happened if a male had been involved rather than a female should trans women who's the comparator now for trans women is it a male or a female for instance is the question so I would say um or at least if a trans woman and a woman have a competing claim should we treat the trans woman as as the same sex as the woman or as because you're gonna treat them like a woman then you use them you'd use a male comparison yeah and you wouldn't necessarily you wouldn't certain aspects of the situation would then be obscured and that's the general complaint about treating trans women as women for all circumstances is that you know this is the more heretical part of my view but I'm I'm sorry to say I don't think they are women and therefore I mean literally they're not women they're men who have changed have gone through a legal process to um change their status and it's kind of fiction but they haven't actually changed sex because human beings can't change sex so there are situation features of their situation that might be relevant to discrimination cases for instance that will be obscured if we say oh but it's a woman yeah and so I want to revisit what you just said there sure so uh there's this basic distinction going back a long time now between sex and gender um and some people observe this distinction some people there's there's debate about this but the way it is taught often is that sex has to do with your chromosomes so I'm biologically male and you're biologically female and those are the words that pick out sex and then there's this other thing called gender identity and then people debate whether gender is a straightforward function of sex or whether gender identity is an internal psychological thing and you know a male can identify as a woman and a female can identify as a man and and there's no contradiction there so I I wanna I guess I want to ask you know and I'm provoked to ask this by you're saying that trans women aren't women um so like from my perspective I would have no problem saying a trans woman is not a female I would have no problem with saying that because that's just a straight up scientific fact well transactus would say you're being transphobic many people say that's transphobic but I actually I say that with no hatred or bigotry in my heart I just cannot I mean you know like so you're asking me to deny that there is a phenomenon to be talked about right if I'm going to say a trans woman is female well then there's nothing to talk about right we're just Transformers are just females and it almost you wouldn't even understand why there's controversy surroundings were trans yeah yeah so but if I observe this gender sex distinction I should be able to say oh Trans women are biologically male but you know live as women in society as women is not the same as all women right okay so so talk about what is your viewpoint on the gender sex distinction do you accept that well the first thing to say is that the gender sex distinction is the word gender is multiply ambiguous and and part of the problem in this toxic debate as it is such as it is is that people are using the word gender in different ways so I I recognize the sense in which you're using it but I don't actually think that's the sense in which it gets used consistently um and so that's the first difference so if I just disambiguate a few senses of gender um sometimes it's used as a polite synonym for sex as in you don't want to say the word sex because actually unfortunately the word biological sex is the same it's the same word as having sex and people feel a bit squeamish about that particularly if you're English so um they say gender and if your passport asks for your gender it means female male or male you know it's just so there's that um then there's a sense you've just mentioned which came about you know largely through this work of feminists in the 70s who would say well no gender is nothing to in a sense not nothing directly to do with sex it's to do with presentation it's to do with um behavioral roles it's to do with stereotypes and Norms about how men how males and females human males and females should behave as males and females so that's masculinity and femininity girls liking pink boys like in blue but that can differ from culture to culture and that's what gender means now there's a third sense which actually I think is closer to the way you're using it and and I don't personally think makes any sense which is that Womanhood and manhood agendas but they don't reduce to ma to maleness or femaleness um somehow being a woman is a matter of presenting as a in a feminine way and being a man is a matter of presenting in a masculine way you know actually I think that's profoundly sexist you know why should we reduce Womanhood to lipstick and pink and manhood to being Macho so I would say there's a straight away you've got a reason to say no no manhood and Womanhood are not masculinity and femininity we want to say women and men can be as masculine or feminine as they want like I'm quite a masculine woman in many ways and that's okay so actually it's freeing to say that rather and I find it quite constricting that the idea that you're a wimp you know that what makes them a male a woman is that they like girly things right no so this is this is a point that I've made in the past before as well which is when I was growing up the idea that I got from the authorities in my life was that a boy can be any kind of way sure right and and no doubt there were pressures from all kinds of domains for boys to be a certain way and girls to be a certain way but there was also an understanding that the the real enlightened attitude was to say you can be any kind of boy you can be a boy and wear pink you can be a boy and play with the girls and you're still you can you're still perfectly valid boy you can be a girl that likes to Rough House with the boys and when I was growing up you would call that a tomboy um and that was not a offensive train it was like a perfectionist it's fine a neutral term and uh and that there's a market difference between that and the attitude that actually if you have you know girl typical likes as a boy well then maybe you are a girl right and that is a much that that's an attitude that's more come come about in the past 10 years sure and it's very dangerous for our children particularly our children that would otherwise turn out to be gay or gender non-conforming I mean so that's but that is The Logical consequence of saying that what makes a a male who wears lipstick and dresses a woman is that is there their gender identity understood as their attraction to those things and their identification with those things psychologically so the and just to follow up what the sort of second part of my answer to your question the other problem I see with saying that trans women or women or trans men are men is the word woman is not synonymous with female the word woman functions in our language in and in every language actually there's always a word for woman because it's one of the most fundamental distinctions between humans males and females and men and women it functions to to denote human females past the age of sexual maturity because we have girls we have women we have boys we have men we need those words because girls and women are not the same boys and men are not the same so we need a concept that picks out the human females past the age of sexual maturity and that's not males you know and and that concept Works in millions of important ways in our language all the time because socially there are important differences between girls and women boys and men that we have to be continued to mark so the idea we can just give away the word woman but keep the word female is is not workable I'm afraid and also you know females obviously there are females that aren't human even female and male is a distinction across the natural world so we need more fine-grained Concepts and we have them and they've worked fine for thousands of years to pick out the adult human females and the adult human males and the children so one thing I mean one thing here is before the current ERA of gender ideology and this new um this new idea that um you know a girl that likes boyish things may in fact be a boy it should be educated that way before that came on the scene in a widespread way you still had a very small percentage of people that was growing up as as long as they could remember just felt that they were the other gender and in that case you can dissect out the component of social fad or anything like that because it just was very taboo yeah you know everywhere in the world until recently um what is the what is the best way to approach such a person socially right so like when I I struggle with this because I'm you know I'm perfectly happy to offend the trans radical activist community and just insist on certain facts that I'm never going to lie about no matter who I get aided by because you know you have to be dealing with reality but I also want to talk about the subset of people that are trans with as much respect that is due to them and and um and and and part you know I I struggle with this one because if calling somebody a woman who is who is a NATO male is going to be the litmus test of respecting that person as an individual uh it's something I feel I'm okay doing um even even as I may disagree with the ideology that you ought to be treated legally like a woman in all cases right well so I've struggle I struggle with that too or have done I mean I've so um in my I've written a book about this and I've tried to bring in actually some of my expertise from the philosophy of fiction into this area and it seems to me because it seems to me that the best way to understand claims like trans women are women um my pronouns are she and her or whatever is their fictions the best way to understand the possibility of Legally changing your sex is it's a legal fiction and legal the concept of legal fiction it doesn't just occur there it occurs in other contexts too like sometimes corporations are treated as people for the purposes of particular laws or you know so there's um it used to be that as soon as a woman got married she was treated fictionally as a kind of property of her husband but you know so there's there's a precedent for legal fictions um and oh those are all kind of unpopular well they weren't popular ones yeah well this one isn't that popular anymore but that's partly because of the demands of the radicals you know up until 20 years ago I think people were very happy to just kind of muddle through this because there wasn't this huge hey there wasn't a boom socially in Transitions and and B there wasn't this demand this sort of uncompromising [ __ ] you kind of demand um for accommodation but um in my personal the way I deal with it is I think well okay it's a fiction and I'm happy to go along with fictions much of the time I I fiction plays a really rich part in my life and I think you can get a lot out of interpersonal fictions and it's not just in this realm you know there's there's role play there's um kind of just getting immersed in a great book you know so there's plenty of precedent in our lives for immersing ourselves in fiction and I'm happy to immerse myself in a fiction that this person has um is a is a man or a woman I don't think they are but I can you know entertain that thought relatively unproblematically however what I absolutely object to and what is happening in this country and elsewhere is that we are becoming mandated to accept that fiction I will not for instance I will not extend the courtesy of that fiction to a male rapist in a women's prison you know I will not and I won't really do it with children right because I think it's they haven't quite got the difference between fiction and reality yet they're still learning so it would be very harmful to uh go along with the um presumably probably temporary identifications of children who are playing and trying new things out and always were like as you said like in our generation there was lots of kids who played around with that stuff so so it depends on the context now there are much more hard-line people than me they think you should never entertain the fiction but I'm not I'm not there yeah I mean I think I think we may draw that line in in pretty similar places so for me when I hear people on the right such as Ben Shapiro or others who will say something like well I'm I'm just never gonna call anyone by pronouns that contradict their natal sex because by doing so I am conceding the belief that biological sex is a social construct I am it's tantamount to saying I agree with the whole ideology and it's also tense tantamount to um he might say you know validating somebody's mental illness right whereas I have no problem calling pretty much calling anyone what they want to be called provided that it's like a real English word like he he and she I will call anyone the opposite if they want to if it's a good faith ask and they I will try my best although I will mess up a lot and I will ask for forgiveness but you know I will expect some lenience given how hard that ass that is but I won't go for z or any of these other things most likely um so there is there are people who draw the line there I mean but to me that seems like a matter of again I I guess you you could call it immersing yourself in a fiction although I'm sure that will fall on some people's ears as um disrespectful yeah because everything everything I say fools in some years is disrespective yes it can be helped in this conversation but um yeah I would definitely draw the line right where you drew it not only with prison and children but also with sports oh yeah with many sports but I don't mind saying she can't get on this team right because she's no woman right right me too yeah so so yeah so I mean let's let's just talk about those cases I guess the most let's just talk about the most uh I think probably the most important case which is children um there's this there's this problem where you know as I said if you ask happy trans adults you just you know ask them to tell their life story many not all but many will tell a story where as soon as they were conscious of themselves in the world they just knew in a way that is irreducible inexplicable not analyzable just a primitive brute feeling that they were the other sex and it was a stable feeling throughout puberty and you know the as soon as they were legally able they switched and so forth now that is the truth it seems to me which is not taboo to recognize currently right if you say that that is celebrated and it is true the problem is that there are all these other people who who you don't hear from as often in the media who had gender dysphoria just as strong as as children or as teens and then it it just gradually went away and they you know developed an understanding of themselves that was compatible with the bodies they're given by nature and they live as their birth sex yeah and then there are other people that do Transition medically because they have strong gender dysphoria and then end up regretting it and detransitioning and having usually lifelong medical serious really really unpleasant side effects as a result of the utter chaos of introducing hormone hormone therapy and surgeries and reverse surgeries that are sometimes um you know that are almost in their infancy as as medical procedures that are not uh well understood even sometimes by the surgeons performing them um and so so how do you you know what do you make of the current conversation about gender dysphoria and trans identity in children and how would you want to intervene on that conversation um well the first thing I'd say is that um and this may sound harsh but hey I'm always skeptical about retrospective narratives I mean if you're interested in literature you should definitely be aware of the underlying narrator and that includes all of us like I'm not saying it's a special reason to be um suspicious but I just think that this whole idea of like since I could breathe I realized that I was in the wrong body of course if you are fully transitioned and happy you might look back and think that but you know I don't know I I think that's a neat explanation um but leaving that disagreement aside um the problem is as you've just identified is that there is absolutely no way of telling none which of those scenarios is going to be the outcome for a child right now and um we also know that there are all these other surrounding factors that make it more likely that transition I mean the the complicate the the so the story of what's happening now so for instance the most blinding the obvious one is that it's now a massive internet Trend so you can't really say that had they not been exposed to their friends or their internet buddies or these chat rooms or these organizations that are now telling them that they might be trans you know if they had them exposed to all of that that they would have interpreted their own experience in that way I think what people need to realize is that there's a real temptation to revert for some reason to a kind of religious quasi-religious idea in all of this that there's a soul like a gendered soul deep in you that is emerging and then the child says I'm trans or I'm a boy when you thought they were a girl that that's just their sort of their true nature emerging and we for some reason as a culture and particularly in the US I have to say there's massive credulity around that the idea that this child would know who they are that early on and that somehow we must capitulate and defer and immediately arrange for all sorts of medical procedures that's crazy because we also know that um if there's a high relatively High proportion of autistic children in this population we also know that if you've got a history of trauma you're more likely to have gender dysphoria we also know that there's a um his children who have a history of being in care or looked after are more susceptible to transition or to thinking that they want to transition than others those are big red flags they should be all telling us there's something uh really not simple straightforward about this and we're a hundred miles away from the idea that your their little soul is just popping out and that now we need to like dress them differently and call them different pronouns and start giving them puberty blockers which as you've just said we know practically nothing about and what we do know is terribly alarming in terms of like things like bone density kidney function height um all sorts of things and then of course once you're on puberty blockers you're almost guaranteed to go on cross-sex hormones like there's a huge like 89 90 or something like that so you're on a pathway you start age 10. there's really it's very likely you will end up um changing your body irrevocably before you even know what that explains that high rate because that's actually surprising to me that's that so few stop so few uh you know stop after puberty blockers well partly I mean evidence in this area at all the evidence that is presented as often very ideological and very bad um and I think it's an interesting development a good development recently that people are proper people with understanding of stats and understanding the difference between a controlled experiment as opposed to a kind of anecdotal sample you know um are starting to look at the evidence but um in my understanding partly is because the myth that puberty block has just kind of paused things and give you a chance to reflect that's that's just not true actually um it retards your development quite obviously it stops you from um quite literally stops your body from developing it also arguably stops your brain from developing because puberty is a really important process in human development all sorts of things happen so you'll be um you'll be different to your friends immediately you will be bodily different and by now you're special you've got this medical process in your life your parents are referring to you as trans your parents may be quite proud of the fact you're trans because it makes you a bit different you know you become this kind of it's psychologically influences you down a certain direction um I think it's although it's not true that every child that's been on puberty blockers will will carry on it's it's best by the time they get a chance to start taking cross-sex hormones they're still very young their prefrontal cortex hasn't even properly developed and they are now different to their friends who have sexually matured so that makes them it seems to me more vulnerable to narratives yeah you know to continuing the path they've already started it's worth considering um other examples of people being influenced by suggestion because you know this this idea that some number of trans identifying kids and especially girls is in natal females are under the sway of a powerful social contagion fat effect this can seem either totally ridiculous to people or totally um or or very offensive uh because of it's It's politicized but I think if you just forget the issue of gender identity for a moment and just look at all of the other examples of social contagion and suggestion that happened that happened all the time like one is the placebo effect obviously it's like this this powerful feeling that when you take a sugar pill your pain actually goes away right and it's such a big problem that we have to organize all of our medical research around correcting for it right so this is just one example there's another another there's an Atlantic article about a year ago about um a a slew of of young girls on Tick Tock oh this is Tourette's yeah yeah actually actually feeling and manifesting symptoms of Tourette's from looking at Tick-Tock influencers that have Tourette's like there's these charismatic people that let you in on their Tourette's and you learn their ticks and it's actually I've seen that you know there's it's fascinating to watch but they're out they also get very famous and then you know if you know you have 14 year old girls basically mimicking not even quite consciously the ticks of their favorite influencers and you see this sudden Spike interrupt Tourette's and doctors are wondering what is this coming from Something In The Water Supply and they end up tracing it to that each of their new Tourette's cases is on Tick Tock following these influencers and often using the same ticks as them yeah so when it's happening to you it feels real because it actually is real right like the placebo effect is real your pain really did go away but it's also the product of yes social influences and it may not be as stable once you are say removed from your peer group you might those feelings may go away yes and I don't think we should expect children to understand this I mean um as you say how could that seem very real at the time and we all can remember what it was like to be in a peer group and to be pressured into thinking or feeling certain ways you'll be look back and think that wasn't really me but I was caught up in something 100 that's just normal what's bizarre is that the adult you know laughed when you said um that the adults might think this is really ridiculous I mean really are there adults out there that don't realize how um susceptible humans are to social contagion as we all stare at our phones on the tube you know all in the same posture all look you know we are constantly in the group of Trends um and you can be swept up in political movements or religious movements and history is absolutely littered with um examples and there's something strange and arrogant about our time that we we think that we're not susceptible to this sort of thing if we do I mean I I'm fully aware of it the clothes we wear everything about us is his influence pretty much unless you're a massive eccentric and have no social awareness whatsoever it's influenced by our social environment um but as you say for children this is terrible because they are playing exploring finding out about the world and um that the evidence does seem to suggest as far as it's pretty limited but you know that many would desist many would desist if they were just left alone and also the other bit of evidence that's interesting is that social transition makes it less likely that you'll desist so merely social transition merely calling a child by her preferred pronouns or um changing the name at school makes it less likely that they'll desist so we kind of validating what could have been a temporary thing and making it permanent by our acquiescence interesting yeah so that I mean that's a that's an argument for the Ben Shapiro position of not the children of just like you know putting putting ten toes on the ground and calling someone a he when they're asking I think it should be right I absolutely think so I think it would help if it was if Ben Shapiro not that I know the guy obviously but I'm assuming he's not going to be perhaps some unfair but you know I would like it if we could also say wear what you want you know have your hair anyway um be if you're same-sex attractive that's not a problem you know I mean I um would like if we're going to insist on reality then we should also make sure that our version of reality isn't ideological in the other direction and doesn't actually covertly slip in quite rigid views about what boys and girls should be right so the argument that would come at this point from not just trans activists but well I guess mainly from trans activists but is compelling to a wider group of people too I I gather is that trans people and and trans teens in general are very susceptible to depression and suicide and all of that is made worse when they can't socially and medically transition there's absolutely no evidence for that so so try to If I Were a person that believed that strongly yeah I would be hearing our entire conversation through that life that's intentional what do you say how do you convince a right person who believes that what would you say um I would say first of all you know you have been it's not a surprise if you're one of the wider people have been convinced wider audience have been convinced by this argument that's not a surprise because this is used like a hammer to push through almost everything in the trans activist movement suicide the sca the Specter of suicide is terrorizing parents and terrorizing children uh sorry well maybe children too but teachers you know into just going along with this and it's you knew you need to unpick this well first of all the stats that are quoted are wildly off you know sometimes it's like I've seen 50 of uh trans teens contemplate suicide you know where did they get their evidence from was it a self-selecting sample and what are the questions like and there's a difference between thinking occasionally you know a thought crossing your mind and actually you're crazy it's crossed my mind so I'm not negating since the problem of suicidal ideation I'm just saying we need to make lots of distinctions and there's a difference between ideation and attempts and there's a difference between attempts and success and we need to like have stats on all of that for start um if you take for instance the um the waiting list I think it's the waiting list but anyway if you look at um and a colleague of mine has done this looked at uh actual suicides on a given cohort of people under the care of the gender identity clinic in the UK called the Tavistock that was the one for children he concluded that based on that sample um being trans did increase your risk of suicide attempts by a factor of five okay now the next thing you need to do is say okay but what are the other comorbidities in this cohort so for instance autism increases your risk of suicide um depression and anxiety increase your risk of suicide quite obviously anorexia increases your risk of suicide attempts and there are clusters of uh health problems mental health problems in this population very often right so that's the next step to go okay but we need to we can't just take out this particular start and not look at the context having a smartphone and being a teenage girl increases your risk you know and there's actually if you look at the um the rates of suicide in teenage girls not trans identified teenage girls just teenage girls they've since smartphones arrived they have gone up quite radically okay so all of that is to suggest there's a mental health crisis in children generally the next and final or I don't know final but the third and most obvious pieces of puzzle is to say Okay so we've got we totally agree trans identified teens and I would always say trans identified I would not say trans teens as if that's like a you know a permanent fact about them because we don't know [Music] there's a mental health crisis in trans identified teens as there is in the wider group where's the evidence that socially transition is going to help them you know how why is the causality that way around or sometimes we hear oh it's because of transphobia you know we've got no idea why these kids are troubled but we have some idea that they are also many of them autistics many of them are same-sex attracted many of them have wider emotional problems we need to do proper exploration of their situations but there's just no straightforward move from oh socially transition them and their problems will be fixed just none so it's a bizarrely oversimplified propagandistic cudgel that is being used to terrorize people into acquiescence for a severely ideological program so I mean I I'm not a parent but I often think what would I do faced with this as a parent faced with a kid that adamantly feels that they are the other gender and wants to be called as such treated as such and in the limit put on puberty blockers hormone therapy Etc this is a position that a lot of parents are in they don't know what to do um and uh I mean it's to me the balance that's being struck right now is at schools which uh in in America certainly and I believe the UK are overwhelmingly populated by teachers and administrators from one side of the political Spectrum rather than balanced many kids are getting the very simple message well not just from school also from social media from YouTube influencers from tick tock and I've seen videos of people who you know who say this basically the answer is as simple as transitioning right like if you transition you you know the door to happiness will just spring wide open and you will all of your problems will be solved um and you know that is an extremely attractive message to an angsty teenager that has probably worse mental health issues than the average teenager um who doesn't like their body who you know like the this um selling that dream to a teenager is enormously attractive so I have no idea what I would do as a parent is my my point but what I would really want to convey is I would want to say okay those YouTubers and tick-tockers you're watching that are give you know leading these impossibly perfect lives where they're happy all the time I just want you to balance that with narratives of people who have de-transitioned you know wrecked their bodies become infertile because and we're equally convinced as those other people that this was the right thing for them and if you can look both of those narratives in the face and make the decision you want to make at 18 then perhaps there's nothing more I can do as a parent because everyone is their own person they're going to make their own decisions above a certain age but I feel the media currently the mainstream media if unless you're outside of Fox News and explicitly right-wing media you know social media you're getting one narrative and um the other the other uglier parts of that reality are kind of down regulated for teenagers oh yeah definitely um I mean I feel awful for parents in this position and I don't you know it's only by the grace of God that I'm not in the position too I have children um I have teenage children so but I know they're friends and some of their friends are in this position so it's awful because 30 years ago um you could have been for instance a lesbian a young lesbian who thought she was a boy and actually a lot of my lesbian friends did go through a phase of insisting they were called by boys names and trying to pee standing up and play with the boys you know and and their parents just said okay they were kind of liberal parents they were like fine we'll call you George or whatever and then they grew out of it um but now parents can't really just do that casually anymore um they it's all been subsumed into this massive Firestorm uh culturally where if you go along with it then your facility I think you are facilitating something that's probably potentially harmful and if you stand up against it you're you know you can be banished from your friends group you can be prosecuted in some places it's insane so um I know a lot of parents either because I just know them by accident or because they seek me out who are in agony like Agony because they're not particularly right-wing they're not particularly um socially conservative but they just don't want having sort of looked after their children tried to give them the right food protect them from kind of all sorts of harms have the best chance they just don't want their children to like cut their breasts off or um take drugs that will give them facial hair for the rest of their lives when they're convinced that these kids do not yet know what this really means and they don't know what to do and they also often they cannot speak about it because they protect their children's privacy you know they still care enough about their children privacy not to go on the record about it so they're trapped in a system where no one's speaking for them very few people speaking for them or the people that are speaking for them are like Ben Shapiro or whoever and they don't necessarily even relate to that worldview otherwise it's terrible so um it's hard to find people speaking for them with empathy and yeah yeah and that's why you actually seek it out right like unless I had just because I'm the type of person that goes into rabbit holes like this unless I have spent had spent an hour on d-trans Reddit just reading people's stories right I would have probably very little picture yeah of what you know what many of these stories are like right and you get just all these stories of people saying I was I was exactly as convinced as all of the most vocal TR I was I was as convinced as your best friend who's trans that I was trans when I was 16 right yeah um and you know it occurs to me I think this is I've noticed this I that often um it is lesbians that are most outspoken about this issue because you maybe you know so many people that you know turned out to be lesbian but would today be categorized as trans so you are more alive to phenomenon perhaps it's that's definitely part of it the other part of it is that um there's a trend for social transitioning within the lesbian world and um especially for Butch lesbians um so and you know you can say Well they're adults that's fine but I find and is fine for any individual I'm not gonna try and argue them out of it but I feel like we're losing pride and self-acceptance as lesbians like it's okay to just be a same-sex attracted woman who presents as a woman and I'm actually really happy with this myself um I don't see many Role Models around me um and I think younger lesbians don't see them and also the word lesbian is now fallen out of favor you've got to call yourself even as I say it it feels slightly Antiquated yeah of course it does because it's this because of the I think because of the cultural affect tends to that is there you know there is a kind of distaste for gay people and lesbians it attaches to the words eventually so people try to get rid of the words so now lesbians hope that they will be cooler if they're subsumed into the queer umbrella with you know or their non-binary they're not really women so you know how can they be how can that cultural affect attached to them but that I'd rather just say look who are same-sex attracted women it's okay you know and actually it's fun yeah I mean so the word Queer as I knew it between the ages of roughly 18 and 24 you know when I was in college it was a bizarre word because it actually did not denote any particular sexual orientation or gender orientation or like all the other words gay lesbian trans non-binary they all had I could give you their meanings if even if in the case of non-binary I may not fully understand the meaning I could give you a sentence on what all of these things mean queer seem to just be a kind of vague a bit like emo right like queer actually you didn't have to you could be a heterosexual cisgender queer person and what that meant essentially was that you like have like a kind of like a cool funky sense of like how you dress and like you use words like folks and do you have like very left very annoying yeah yeah exactly but but in you know many many girls like I knew went through a queer phase or like they that is like kind of the personality that they settled on like you would with emo or like a jock or any of these kind of archetypes right so it became an archetype and yet it's a part of an acronym that includes legitimate sexual orientation identities and uh and trans identity yeah it's a terrible stage of Affairs I mean yeah I mean how strange would it be to have it be like LGBT Emo or LGBT you're getting there I wouldn't be surprised we've now got asexuals um in the umbrella uh which is defined as just people you know you don't even have to be completely disinterested in sex you can also just be interested in sex sometimes and other times not which is pretty much everybody so all right you know the whole thing is uh industry my favorite is the word for a person that's only uh sexually attracted once they feel an emotional connection okay what's that again I call it a human female but there is actually a word for it yeah everything's an identity including as I adverted to earlier the original sexual orientations of gay man and lesbian and no identities you know trans men can go into gay clubs and get annoyed that they're not being treated as gay men even the fact they haven't got uh the the full equipment as it were um and you know males are dressing up in Preposterous outfits and going onto the internet and saying they're lesbians because they are attracted to women I would say that's a heterosexual male you know they're opposite sex attracted literally but the fiction is that they're lesbians and what's of course you can just dismiss this as all absolutely crazy internet ephemera but the depressing thing is that our institutions the ones that have were supposed to stand up for lesbians and gay rights for instance have capitulated completely so if you go on to um glad website or Stonewall in the UK website and look at the definition of lesbian it can include males pretty much they have they have in other words they are treating sexual orientations as inner identities as well so it's all become an identity soup so why not add um people that wear interesting clothes and have blue hair right you know why not it's just another identity it's all personalities now in Aesthetics it's it's not about actually politics anymore so I have an acquaintance who um who I think in in her telling became a turf um I should say trans exclusionary radical feminists which is you know often used as a term of abuse for for someone like yourself or Helen Jordan even a radical feminist so sorry or JK Rowling but and so she she is a lesbian and she experienced during college that there was you know a bile a natal male who uh was trans um so you know you would call a woman and was basically guilting her into feeling that she should be willing to have sex with her right the I would say him right just to be clear yeah well she she you know this person with a penis wanted a woman to have sex with them whatever you want to call him and was using just the total tactic of guilt and manipulate the age-old male tactic of however I can get you into bed but you know in this in this version it was inflected with a you're a bigot if you don't have sex with me yeah and this experience was she felt that she could not even complain about this because the uh you know the culture at Columbia and Barnard was such that to complain about this openly would be to social risk yeah to to risk cancellation and and to risk just being branded that way why heterosexuals no doubt that's the thing that really sticks well there's many things that stick in my Crow but one of them is that to be lectured by heterosexual women about you know your sexual orientation as a lesbian and it's usually women you know telling you that you should be tugging the line um yeah so that's the other reason why lesbians tend to be at the Forefront discussing this is because as I said there are now um trans women not who only not they say they're lesbians but they also say that you're a lesbian I'm a lesbian why don't you why aren't you interested in me are you transphobic and just so everyone understands this you know you need to think about it we're lesbians in the original sense or a sexual orientation excludes males and there's a male telling us that they're a lesbian too and therefore and that the only reason you know of course they'll say things like well you've got a choice you know of course you've got a personal choice but if your reason is that I'm uh a male then you're transphobic um now that's not going to have any effect on me except extreme irritation but it might have a big effect on a 17 year old girl who's just discovered that was just finding out about her sexuality and it um in queer circles you know that obscures all the social dynamics that can happen there which are 100 structured around biological sex and and all in old ways like males badgering females for sex except now that they're women it's uh supposed to be you know supposed to be different somehow it's not different it's the same so that's all you know it's well the other thing to add again is if this was just going on in kind of Youth groups and there's not much we could do about it it would be bad enough but our institutions again Stonewall in the UK for instance the head of Stonewall is on record as saying that if you are a lesbian who um excludes trans women from your dating pool because they are trans women as in because they are male um this is analogous to what she referred to as sexual racism and that would be the idea that you exclude uh people of his own ethnicity from your dating pool and that's racist so you can ask questions about whether sexual racism is a thing but assuming that you think sexual racism is bad the head of the lgbtq organization in Britain telling lesbians that they're as bad as sexual racists for not wanting to lead with trans women that's where we are yeah which is insane so we've spent a lot of time I think and complaining about the beliefs and the extent to which those beliefs have been adopted of the radical trans activists I'm curious actually how many trans people feel that they are spoken for by these beliefs because you know one one thing I've noticed on the issue of race which is more my my typical hobby horse is that anti-racist activists always claim to be speaking on behalf of black people in general and then when you look at the polls you often find that they speak on any particular policy issue for a minority right like the example I've used a billion times to pour to death my podcast listeners is at the height of 2020 Gallup pulled black Americans and just asked a simple question do you want more police less police are the same amount only 20 percent answered less which was the BLM position sixty percent answered the same and 20 answered more so fully eighty percent of black Americans did not share the position of defang and defund and minimize the police but you would never know that if you were just watching the news and you would assume that pretty much black people in general just all agree right yeah and I wonder if there isn't something like that going on here too like what percentage of just like trans people walking around the street living their lives are party line on all this stuff yeah right I think that's a really good question and I think there is diversity of opinion um but I will just before I say that I want to point out this analogy with the race case which is that um first of all remember that this basically the trans um category as as popularly defined now is so broad that all you need to do to get into it is say I am non-binary or I am a man or whatever it is so you don't need to there's nothing else except what you say which means um you know there's obviously a disinology with race yeah fair right um now there's been a massive influx in the last 10 years into the trans category as I've just defined it and it's mostly young people um most of whom so some of whom will alter their bodies many of whom will not even it's just kind of attitude or as you say a haircut or whatever um so they are much more likely I think to sing from the same him sheet because they kind of got into it partly through because of the alleged politics of it and the kind of Liberation and you know the system and we're victims as well that's a big thing like giving yourself a kind of victimhood um that gets you out of all the guilt that you no doubt feel for being white middle class uh privilege I used to joke when I went to Colombia that if you especially Barnard was a particularly radical it was the women's college um connected to Columbia right across the street that I used to joke that if you were just a straight white girl you had to find something yeah of course because or else you were just going to be uncool for four years and you can't just be on cool for four years right so you gotta you gotta find something you better be queer or learn to juggle or have a talent or you know what I'm saying at some point that's gonna learn to sing that cannot persist like when the whole class is non-binary then eventually we'll have to swing back to sure um it's actually because Trad or something right right that may already be close to having to help us I mean what we ideally want is that we didn't keep swinging yeah it was extremes where we could kind of just say you don't have to keep posturing away right but anyway um the diversity of opinion that does exist I think um although it's very hard to establish definitively is between what would I would call Old School transsexuals um that is people way before all this radical trans activism who had operations took hormones probably many of whom pass as it were and um so have been have being as they say using women's bathrooms for years and changing rooms for maybe not changing rooms because I think people are often self-conscious about their bodies and like state but um you know they've been passing and they've been and many of their colleagues might not even know that they're trans and now the ones that I know um again it's not a it's not like a random sample or anything because they make themselves known to me but they are Furious about what's happening partly because they think look I went through all this pain and suffering and social rejection and all of it how can you say that you're a woman just because you feel like one is not enough you've got to do something they think to earn the status so that that's a divider I see all the time however how you would establish that it's very difficult because a lot of um old school transsexuals don't want to come out you know that was the whole point they wanted to assimilate that's right um and also there's just not enough for a big a big survey of population level data you'd need like lots of data and I don't know how you'd get it and again the bodies that are sort of that the government and political parties kind of um devolve responsibility to lgbtq organizations to tell them what to think and they're not doing that research they really aren't it's not in their interests to do that research because this whole thing's a massive Cash Cow for them so they're going to keep uh pushing The Narrative of um of victimhood and suicide and you need to capitulate to our demands and you need to radically restructure all your institutions because it keeps them in business so let's talk a little bit about the issue of sports uh Leah Thomas has been the recent flash point here the swimmer from Penn who was who's a born male and swam as a male and was certainly talented but not top tier as a male swimmer and then transitioned and was recognized as having transitioned by the college swimming Association and then competed as a woman and did extremely well did much much better what's a surprise um and um obviously this brought out this was a huge controversy because you know you had people arguing on TV that to have been you can cancel out all the athletic benefits of being a male with say you know two years of um you know testosterone suppressed suppression and uh and so forth and you know you have experts you know so-called experts kind of making these claims that there's no lingering effects of having gone through a male puberty that would give you any benefits in a sport like swimming um and but you know beyond the more ridiculous and claims that there's just the problem of what to do here because I'm a person you know I want to create a society where a person can be trans and be an athlete and compete in the sport and do that right but I do not want to create a society where every world every new world record holder in the women's category is a natal male yeah which is where we'll go so how do you you know how do you view that issue and you know what's your prescribed policy solution well so it's completely false that two years or no you know any number of years of testosterone suppression will cancel out the benefits that a male puberty gives you athletically speaking it gives you um bigger lungs broader on average you know they're always exceptions but that's how we establish the rules is by looking at the averages and it gives you faster twitch muscles um denser bones you know there's just a range of uh sporting advantages that males who've been through a male puberty have over females and that's why the performance gap between them is so consistent and it's why for instance you know the fastest woman in the world will be beaten by 700. College males you know in certain Sports it's it's just a absolutely predictable and consistent because it's based in biological capacities um now of course for some sports you don't even the the governing bodies are not even requiring you to reduce your testosterone they're just saying that you're it's like a magical formula I am a woman gets you into the team and that's obviously incredibly unfair on women but it's also dangerous in contact sports like rugby there's a big push in Britain to get males into Rugby teams it's absolutely Bonkers uh you get tackled by a massive male as a woman you will potentially break your neck yeah um so it's like the sort of I you know I don't know the kind of if people go along with this then they truly are embedded in a cult as far as I'm concerned because it is so obviously unfair and crazy the at some level that there has to be some litmus test of common sense of reality if you're watching a UFC fight with someone born male something males I mean they're just male yeah beating the crap yeah out of a woman yeah breaking their job it's it's I I almost feel you get to the point where I I I'm so upset by it I I can hardly even argue about it right yeah at that level it seems like and also to imagine being the competitor in that situation and feeling proud of having one that way I know it's something I struggle with my head around that I mean I met um the mother of of one of Leah Thomas this competitors and I listened to her um talk about what happened in that situation and how you know because if you come up in the college circuit at that level which is an elite level then you know every all the names of everybody yeah and suddenly there's this new name Leah Thomas and they're like who's this we've never heard of this person and they're all sitting in the changing room and this I'm sorry I'm just gonna say man walks in and they have all these complicated swimsuits that involve you know like their high performance swimsuits that involve getting completely naked and then having to pull them on again and then working out ways to get towels over them so that they can't um can't be seen by this man in the changing room you know there's a man in the pool and there's a man in the changing room and this is a good example where we need to say that because a certain kind of credulous probably non-sporting person who doesn't give a [ __ ] about how this goes down is engaged in a fantasy that this is a woman in the pool and a woman in the changing room and it really isn't and it matters on a number of levels to say that out loud um I'll go along with the fiction this is another situation where I would be more comfortable saying a male well it's an adult human male it's adult he's not a child he's not a boy he's a man right you know and if he was a boy he wouldn't be beating them the reason he's beating them is because he's been through puberty and he's a man and that's why I think it's really important to retain that concept what we should do about it you know I want I want trans people to be able to participate in sport but frankly they already can this is a fantasy a victimhood as well okay Leah Thomas performed before against the males and I believe he wasn't he was pretty mediocre um he can he or she if you'd rather come perform again and in the in the mail category why that's where he belongs because that would be fair why don't I just have a some kind of a third category fine and actually I've argued in other contexts like for that I guess I like for instance um they should be separate prison wings for trans women I think because they are it is difficult to put them in a male prison but it you know there's not quite the same risk that's the thing I mean I do understand in many contexts that there is a real social need for a third option because you can't put a transition to trans woman in a male prison and not and they are very vulnerable there yeah so we need to think about that at least but that doesn't apply in sport you know there's no danger it's just there may be your identity is not being respected and I am old-fashioned enough to not really care about identities being respected in some content the one tweak of that is though if you are take if you are you know suppressing testosterone it's like steroids in Reverse well if you are but if you are right is Leah Thomas suppressing testosterone I believe so I I could be wrong when they competed I believed I believe so but even so I mean genetically physically the massive shoulders oh sorry pretty male yeah no no doubt the lung capacity the bone structure just the lingering effects of I'm totally with you on that and I've even you know this is a I follow certain you know commentators in the sort of bodybuilding community that that actually probably in a way sort of know the most about the effects of testosterone because a lot of them are just taking exogenous testosterone to get huge you know like when these guys get get crazy for these Hollywood roles in two months right they're they're taking yeah almost always they're just taking some exogenous testosterone to up their levels and um their athleticism and and so the the effects of you know slightly more testosterone and slightly less testosterone are pretty well understood it makes a huge difference right that that's why it's that's why it's against the rules to doing like every sport except Jiu Jitsu it that's steroids right if you take a little bit of extra testosterone and it's no it actually it doesn't matter whether that Excel is that's exogenous testosterone or the testosterone your body naturally produces right so it makes a big difference but you know their their if if I'm not mistaken there was a time when you know the rule was like to compete as a trans woman your your T levels had to be like here yeah but they were that bar was like way higher than it would be in a in a biological woman like you were allowed to have t levels that were almost like a low testosterone male yeah which are still way higher than most women have absolutely and now I believe it's hard to keep up by and I've not checked out recently but I believe that the the official position now that the governing bodies the world governing bodies is that they removed that requirement but then kind of devolved it down to individual sporting bodies in particular Sports to make a decision in other words they are fudging it because it's now become incredibly uh complicated all of a sudden I mean another thing to say that and why I'm possibly sounding a bit irritated about this issue in particular is that I just think it shows how little people care about women's sport I mean they don't care about I mean America they care about it more than they do here um but you know it's not as well funded it's uh many professional you know one of the one of the um women that just won the the women's football World Cup in England went back to her job in a cafe the next day you know is they have they're traveling uh standard class sometimes paying for their own travel you know there's just all this stuff that they have to put up with anyway and then to have um biological males Waltz in sometimes very late in their careers after having a pretty mediocre career elsewhere Waltz in start winning awards for being brave you know as well but given by male sporting bodies um and you know the the we see the ones that actually end up competing against males but we don't see the ones that got pushed out and didn't even before qualification as a result it's just it's very irritating no it is I mean I I if if I were a woman or a parent of a woman that's been waking up at 5am for 20 years training yeah I would be livid and it's being done in the name of Justice yeah I I believe it and there's so many of them are are afraid to speak out about it like on so many issues because you then you know you're just you're risking your job you're risking your reputation you now are going to have to become the person that talks about this in order to salvage your career right like you're gonna have to make it your whole thing you can't just say no this upsets me right because then well yes you'll be discredited on every other issue but um I mean what I do think is very impressive is that the older generation of women athletes are really coming out to talk about this on behalf of the younger women still caught up in the system who can't afford to lose their sponsorships or their places um I wish that that model was happening in Academia or um medicine or other areas where there's a lot more cowardice so I mean the one thing you say about women athletes is they're brave and strong and they are fighting I think the older women athletes in particular are really inspiring in this area so what is your uh what's your current status right now so you're no longer a professor at Sussex what are you what are you up to these days and how have you managed to land on your feet and and are you are you are you doing okay I'm doing good um I've got a portfolio career now I'm not going back to uh Academia full-time yeah I don't want to uh I I'm a founding faculty fellow at the uatx which is this new University Venture um that Barry Weiss uh started in Austin and they're building a university there so I have taught in a summer school there I'll be going back um this year and I'm very pleased and proud to be associated with that project I'm on the left obviously there's quite a lot of people on the right involved as well but that's great it is really Barry's a good friend yeah well it's a great idea and I'm happy to be involved with that um but I'm also writing so I really enjoy writing not for an academic audience anymore thank God but a general one I have a column for a British online publication called unheard where I write every week um I do other bits and pieces I'm also got something exciting in the pipeline I can't quite talk about yet but I'm gonna do so yeah I've got loads on and I'm happy and a bit liberated to be honest well that's good to hear so before I let you go um can you give my audience your Twitter handle and or website and or anywhere else you want to direct them sure so my Twitter handle is Doc c s t o c k k so it's got two k's at the end um I write an unheard uh every week you can if you just go to unheard you'll see um my columns where I hold forth on a variety of culture War style issues and other things too and I've got a website called cassidystock.com but I don't really do much with that anymore because I just can't keep up with it all so all right Kathleen well it's been a pleasure and um oh I've got a book though oh yeah yes um so my book's called Material Girls Where reality matters for feminism you unfortunately such as the it did very well in the UK it's all tens of thousands of copies and it's been translated but I couldn't get a deal in the States because everybody treated it as transphobic as far as I can see so what it is out is available on Kindle in and Kobo in the states or you can order it from the UK if you want but I would just get it on Kindle yeah and I basically try to go through the philosophical ideas Behind These radical claims we've been talking about in a skeptical way that sort of explains them well I'm of the belief that uh you should buy books that get banned yeah even if you won't read them as as a resistance to the trailer it wasn't banned it just wasn't never got started but right it had been published in this day so no doubt well yeah I mean Abigail schreier's book was you know not on Amazon for exactly quite a while and these are you know these are serious books these are not I mean not that it should matter it shouldn't even matter whether they're serious books really but these are not hacks these are serious in my view people making serious arguments about consequential issues that are getting ruled out of bounds because a small you know a small number of people are extremely offended by it and and this is I mean it's ridiculous this is not how we approach religious offense at least most of the time this is not how we approach any other kind of offense right if you get 10 of the population that says I hate this we don't ban it right we don't take it off Amazon no so I encourage people to support you if only to to fight that Trend and also because you bring a lot of substance and and seriousness to this issue um thank you and we as I often argue we we should be Kinder and more open to the blasphemers and inheritics of our age so um yeah let's end on that note thank you Kathleen thanks very much that's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email to check out my other social media platforms click the cards you see on screen and don't forget to like share and subscribe see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 215,045

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music, trans, transgender, lgbtq, kathleenstock

Id: grcKIUrEh0o

Length: 93min 27sec (5607 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023