Making Sense with Sam Harris - #314 — The Cancellation of J.K. Rowling

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Megan Phelps-Roper about the new podcast series she hosts and produced, “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling.” The series is also produced by Andy Mills and Matt Boll for The Free Press.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. Well, today I'm speaking with Megan Phelps-Roper about a podcast series she's produced over at the Free Press,

which is the media platform that Barry Weiss and Nellie Bowles and a few others have created. And really the purpose of this podcast is to bring your attention to it. It's a wonderful series titled The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. And if you haven't heard about the controversy that has subsumed the life of J.K. Rowling, Megan and I will explain it. But suffice it to say, this is an episode of the podcast that will pitch me with both feet onto the topics of trans rights and trans activism

and the way in which they collide with women's rights and free speech and other things we value. Given how combustible this subject is, I think I need to say a few things at the outset, some of which I say in my conversation with Megan. First, I have no doubt that gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon, which is to say that some people feel that they have been more or less born into the wrong body, and are made powerfully unhappy by that discovery, and want to transition to one or another degree in their gender identity, and perhaps use hormone treatments and or surgeries to accomplish that, I have no doubt that in many cases this predicament is all too real,

I have no doubt that in many cases this predicament is all too real, and in those cases, these medical interventions should be available to people. And I think it should go without saying that their political rights should be protected. So at least in my own mind, there's nothing that I think or feel or articulate in this podcast that I believe is a symptom of transphobia, much less bigotry against trans people. The problem, however, is that believing these things and being morally and politically committed to them does not resolve all of the difficult questions. There are cases where the rights of trans people seem in direct opposition to the rights of women and girls, and acknowledging that fact is what has gotten J.K. Rowling into such hot water. What's more, there are troubling signs that the

increase in gender dysphoria is not a matter of our simply discovering how many people in the world suffer this condition and have been closeted in the face of widespread intolerance. Rather, there's considerable evidence of social contagion, especially among teenage girls. So insofar as social contagion is an element here, that adds an additional reason to be circumspect before recommending irreversible medical interventions to teenagers. and even with the best of intentions, there are no guarantees that there won't be corner cases that entail real trade-offs, right? And J.K. Rowling's commentary on this topic has more or less lurched toward those. Now, as I say in this podcast, I take her side in a very direct way, far more directly than Megan does, and I don't want to mislead anyone about the series she's produced. It's far more balanced and judicious than the conversation I have with her here,

at least my side of it. Because to my eye, J.K. Rowling has been attacked quite unfairly by people who have been made hysterical under the influence of a political cult. This is of a piece with what I think about wokeness generally, and there really is no better case in which to witness these excesses than the case of J.K. Rowling. Here's a clip from Megan's podcast. Can you talk to me about some of the threats that you've received over the past few years? There have been a lot. A huge amount, as every woman will know who speaks up on this issue, a huge amount of, I want her to choke on my fat trans dick.

You know, like very sexualized abuse. Well, I don't think all of them mean it literally, but attempts to degrade, to humiliate, people might say, well, that's not really a threat. And you know what, up to a point, you're probably right, though it's very unpleasant to be on the receiving end of it, particularly in the quantities I've had it. Then I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house where my kids live, and I've had my address posted online. I've had what the police anyway would regard as credible threats. Yeah. The pushback is often, you are wealthy, you can afford security, you haven't

been silenced. All true, right? All of that's true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women. And I say that because I have seen it used that way. I have seen other women and other women have told me, I literally had someone say this to me the other day. I was told, look, look what happened to JK Rowling. Watch yourself. The purpose of this episode and the purpose of Megan's series isn't to produce any final verdict on the ethical and political questions that this topic raises. It really is limited to carving out the space for a rational, compassionate conversation. And this is something that the activists on the far left and the far right have, until this moment, made impossible.

So, for better or worse, I bring you Megan Phelps Roper and The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. I am here with Megan Phelps-Roper. Megan, thanks for joining me again. So excited to be here, Sam. Thank you. So you have done this, you've created this amazing podcast series, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. And you've done this for the Free Press,

which is Barry Weiss's new media property, which I'm very excited about. People can find out more about that at thefp.com, T-H-E-F-P.com. And this is a, I mean, she has her own podcast, honestly, but you have created this podcast along with Andy Mills. And I don't know if there's anyone else you need to credit there, but you're the woman on the mic. And we're going to talk about all of it. So who else? Do you have any other collaborators here you need to acknowledge? Yeah, my friend Matthew Bull. I feel like I got really lucked out here working with two of, I think, the best in the podcasting business, Andy Mills and Matt Bull. Yeah, they're really wonderful. And actually, I met Andy because of your show, because, you know, when I did your show back in 2015, he was working at Radiolab.

And we, like, really quickly bonded over our, you know, shared bonded over our shared history in being raised in Christian fundamentalism. And Matt also shares that history. So it's been amazing to finally work with them on something that has a lot of parallels with our upbringing. And Barry and Andy are both refugees from the New York Times. Is Matt also a New York Times refugee or not? No, actually. He worked at Gimlet and then at Spotify. So yeah, lots of history in podcasting and elite media spaces. Yeah, well, it really shows this is a highly produced series. I mean, completely unlike a podcast of the sort I produce. You have a ton of archival audio, which is fascinating. So

it's just this very layered document. And you are really the perfect person to have done this. Your voice is fantastic, as I think some people recognize. You've not only been on this podcast before, but you are the voiceover actress for the Essentials series that Jay Shapiro produced on the basis of my podcast archive. And so your voice is fantastic, but as we will remind people, you have this very unique background, which I think made you the perfect person to interview J.K. Rowling. And I think she more or less acknowledges it in the series. I mean, you can just see that she's really able to open up to you given your background. So I think, but before we jump into the series itself, remind people how far you've come because it's, it is a surprising backstory. Yeah. So I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. You know, I was born and raised

there. We started protesting when I was five years old, and I was a true believer. I was surrounded by people, a very loving, very involved family, highly educated, very logical, analytical people who were just absolutely persuaded that their understanding of the Bible was the one true understanding. And so we went around the country sharing this message of, essentially, you have to obey God or you will be cursed by God in this life and then spend hell in eternity. And the strength of our belief, our certainty in those beliefs, led us to do all kinds of really horrible and to justify all kinds of really horrible, cruel things. I think maybe that some of the most extreme things that people are aware of is the

protesting at funerals, funerals of AIDS victims, funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. funerals of AIDS victims, funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then also, you know, praying for horrible things to happen to people. And we did this believing that what we were doing was, you know, in spreading the truth of God, this was the exemplar of love. This is the very definition of what it means to love other people. And so it obviously gave me the understanding that people can do really horrible things with the very best of intentions. You can seem to have all of the tools that you would need to live a good life and still, because of the strength of your beliefs, end up doing really horrible things. Well, before we jump into the series, I think I'm just going to recommend that people pause this episode and subscribe to it so that it's waiting for them in their podcast app after

they're done listening to us. So they can find it under the title, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. And you've released six episodes at this point. How many are in the series? There's seven in the main part of the series, but we will be back with an epilogue in about a month. And then we're weighing whether to release. We recorded dozens of interviews at this point. And some of them, many of them were extremely moving. And there just wasn't space for them in the series. Because as you say, like we are trying to cover an awful lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. And so we're thinking about

sharing some of those other interviews later for people who want to go a little deeper into some of the things that we discuss in the show. How many hours of audio did you get with Roland? About nine over the course of, I took two trips to Scotland. And so we recorded with her over the course of four days. I have one editorial note or piece of advice for listeners. I think that episode two is probably going to be the least interesting to most people.

This is where you get into the history of the Christian backlash to the Harry Potter series, which was fascinating for me, and it's a very interesting context to what's happening now. And it is one of the ways in which you were so well-qualified to be reaching out to Rowling, because you come from the Christian right, well-qualified to be reaching out to Rowland, because you come from the Christian right, and you understand the other side of the fanaticism that was aiming to cancel her. But I think some number of people will bog down in episode two, so I just want to admonish our listeners, if you listened to episode one, and you love it, and you start to get antsy in episode two, do not abort the series. Just press on to episode three and four because

this is just, it's a truly fascinating document. There's so much that is driving our culture fairly mad at this moment that can be seen through the lens of this topic and measured by what has happened to Rowling personally. So let's turn to that now. Let's just talk about- Well, can I just defend episode two for a second? Yeah, no, I mean, I can just tell you- I know, I'm with you. No, don't get me wrong. I loved it, but I know the experience of listening to three and four, and I don't want anyone to get off the ride before listening to three and four and it's, I don't want anyone to get off the ride before they hit three and four. Yeah, for sure. It's really funny because too,

a lot of people think, you know, like, like what you thought, like that, that, that maybe we are on a digression here. And in fact, I think so many of the things that we hear about, you know, first of all, a lot of people just love that, you know, kind of refresher on the 90s. It's really fun, I think, for a lot of us to go back and remember some of those things and, you know, through the lens of the present and to realize that so many of the things that we see, you know, part of the culture war right now have their origins in the 1990s. And seeing the echoes of those things, I think, is really fascinating. And it was really interesting to go back and recognize that the Christians, it's easy to look at the Christians in the late 90s and the early 2000s who were, as you say, trying to cancel J.K. Rowling,

like part of this backlash where they are burning her books. They become one of the most banned books, according to the American Library Association. And so they're kind of a constant target. And you say, oh, these are just religious fanatics. But when you actually look at the culture and what was happening at the time, it makes a lot more sense. And it's kind of trying to help us understand that we are still today, we're doing the same thing. We are human beings responding to the context and the society in which we are living. And to just to not look at people and recognize the context in which they are having these reactions, it's short-sighted. Yeah. Yeah. And you're talking to people who thought that witchcraft was real, right? I mean,

they want to cancel her because they believe in witchcraft and they think that her books somehow advocate for it. And you have the President of the United States, George Bush, denying her some, I forget which award it was, but the White House didn't want J.K. Rowling to get some award because George Bush was concerned that she was advocating witchcraft in her books. It's just incredible. But anyway, I stand by this admonishment because I- I'm with you. I'm with you. People kind of get bumped. I had to drag a few people to episode three after they got bogged down in episode two. And one was a teenager who really did need to hear this whole series. So let's talk about what's happening to Rowling. How would you... Well, actually, just one question about the Christian piece of it. Do you remember what your reaction was to the Harry Potter series? I mean, was it on your radar when you were in the Westboro Baptist Church?

series? I mean, was it on your radar when you were in the Westboro Baptist Church? Yeah, definitely. And it's actually kind of funny because my family was not part of that backlash at all. We targeted people for a lot of things, but my dad is the one who brought home the first Harry Potter book and insisted that I read it. He thought that I would love it. So he's an elder in the church and we saw it, this is just fiction. And I remember thinking that the people who were upset about it were, are they dumb? Do they not understand what fiction is? So this is actually one of the things that was so interesting to me when Andy Mills first called me about this a little over two years ago now. And he reminded me about that original, that Christian backlash

to J.K. Rowling. And we got off the phone and I immediately started researching that and going back and looking at it with fresh eyes. And it was really, really fascinating, the language that they used. And anyway, sorry, I don't want to digress too far, but we didn't participate in that at all. We were major fans, like my siblings. I'm the third of 11, and we passed those books around and discussed them endlessly. And I actually, you know, I included this in my letter to J.K. Rowling, the fact that I was standing on the picket line balancing these massive books because I was such a fan. I didn't want to quit reading. Amazing. So yeah, we didn't participate in that. Okay. So J.K. Rowling is,

I think it's, it really is not, it's strange to say it, but it is not an exaggeration to say, I mean, I think it is literally true to say that she's probably the most successful and most beloved author in my lifetime in the English language. I mean, I just, I don't know who could stand a chance of being in first position if it's not her. I mean, I can't think of any other author for whom, you know, bookstores need to open at midnight. So lines of hundreds of children, hundreds of children on her pub date. And there are literally theme parks opened in celebration of her characters. She's really one without a second as an author. So she was uniquely placed to weather the storm that has been directed at her. And I think it's also safe to say that

a lesser author, even just a normal best-selling author, would have completely lost their career over what has happened to her. So the fact that she's still standing and is relatively unscathed, we'll get into the details of just what has happened to her personally and professionally, I mean, we'll get into the details of just what has happened to her personally and professionally. But, you know, if anyone looks at her case and thinks, you know, you can draw the lesson that, you know, there is no such thing as being canceled because, look, she's still doing her thing. I mean, I don't know who else could runs on banks here in the U.S. And, you know, we're recording now when the instability of our financial system is still everywhere in the news. And I do view this, you know, what's happened to her in particular on social media as a kind of bank run on a person's reputation.

You know, it achieves a certain contagious hysteria, and then it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling process where, because everyone is criticizing this person, because everyone is defecting, everyone is washing their hands of the person who's come under the focus of the mob, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to defend him or her. It becomes reputationally too toxic to even be associated with the phenomenon. And you're using the obvious analogy of a witch burning, but the speed and crown dynamics of it, it really does remind me of a run burning, but the speed and crown dynamics of it, it really does remind me of a

run on a bank. And, you know, this is, you know, she reputationally, she was a very big bank. I really think the biggest. And so she has, she is still solvent, but it really has been amazing to witness. And first, why did you want to make this series? And how would you describe what has happened to JK Rowling? So we wanted to make this series to investigate the, I mean, because obviously when you look at just her history, you know, she has been an absolute force in the culture for, you know, more than two decades at this point. And the world has changed so much during that time. So in Witch Trials, we are using her story as a way of exploring those changes. And, you know, we're investigating these two very vocal backlashes that she's faced. You know, first from the Christian right, as we talked about, and then now from the, you know, progressive left who accused her of transphobia.

And it's really not about shaming or blaming people for being angry with her or vehemently disagreeing with her or condemning her. And it's not about proving that she's right. It's really about trying to understand where people on all sides of this conflict are coming from in a scrupulously good faith way. I mean, and I can just explain just a little bit more, like anybody who's followed this conversation at any depth, I would say, because at the very beginning I was watching, you know, I saw those tweets, you know, first frame of reference for that conversation in general. And then, and just specifically, like why it ignited such a firestorm. I'm reading her tweets and trying to understand why, you know, a criticism of using the phrase people who menstruate is causing people to respond that she, that JK Rowling is calling for the genocide of trans trans people and so i just i was coming from a place of relative ignorance like i don't understand what's happening here and really wanting to understand and i think her story just touches on so many of again of these changes like the changes in the internet over the past 20 years

you know initially people saw it as this, you know, kind of maybe even a, you know, a path to some kind of utopia where, you know, we are connected with people all over the world. And this, you know, connection is inevitably going to be a very good thing. And it's going to give everyone a voice. And it's gonna, you know,

what it will do for democracy will be this incredibly positive thing. And we've seen that shift quite dramatically over the last decade. And trying to understand how is it that now that it seems like the barrier to entry, to give everyone a voice, why is it that so many people are now self-censoring? Why is it that the most extreme positions are being conflated with, you know, sort of any kind of dissent on or difference of opinion? And so, like, it's trying to understand, you know, all of these dynamics, like, including, like, what social media in general is doing to public discourse, you know, incentivizing extremes and amplifying some of our worst impulses and flattening context. And so there's so many elements that we're trying to get at in this seven-episode series. So obviously, it's a lot of ground to cover.

Yeah. So let's just remind people what has happened here, because I would assume more or less everyone knows the general shape of it, but how would you describe what kicked this off? How did the controversy begin, and what is the logic of it? I guess I'll just set you up by saying that there's an interesting conflict between women's rights and trans rights. And there's also an interesting tension between trans rights and gay rights. And it's just, you know, unless someone has spent a little time focused on this issue, you know, these are, this might sound like surprising claims, but the structure of the controversy is really framed by those underlying conflicts. I mean, there are just certain situations where you are opposing what most women, certainly most feminists, would consider a concern for protecting the rights of women with these new rights for members of the trans community.

In particular, biological men who identify as trans or non-binary. I mean, we'll talk a lot about trans and non-binary people here as you do in the series, but really the issue with women's rights is not biological women and girls deciding to become non-binary or men. It's those who are moving in the opposite direction, you know, biological men who now identify as trans or non-binary. So with that as set up, what happened with J.K. Rowling? So in, I think I'm going to start with the, there was this one tweet that she posted in December of 2019. Maybe that is the place to start. There were little things that happened before,

but really the first time she publicly weighed in on the discussion around sex and gender came in December of 2019 with the case of a woman named Maya Forstater. And this might feel like it's a little bit in the weeds, but it is ultimately the thing that causes her to decide to weigh in. And the short version of that case is that Maya Forstadter lost a contract that she, her employment contract was not renewed at this nonprofit because of public statements that she had made. And the statements that she made were in response to a proposed change in the law in the UK. And so she brought this case before what's called an employment tribunal in the UK to say, I am a citizen of a democracy. I should be able to say that biological sex is immutable and not lose my employment over

that. And so it was largely a free speech issue at that point. And it wasn't just about Maya Forstadter. It was about the precedent that that set, that anybody in the UK, if they will state that opinion, that biological sex is immutable, and then they would have to risk losing their job if they were going to express that opinion. And that seemed unconscionable, I think, to J.K. Rowling. And so she weighed in and she posted this, I think, what a lot of people, even people who initially, a lot of people initially read it as, you know, support, unequivocal support for trans rights. Do you want me to read the tweet?

Sure. She said, dress however you please, call yourself whatever you like, sleep with any consenting adult who will have you, live your best life in peace and security, but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. Hashtag I stand with Maya. Hashtag this is not a drill. And so what what she's saying there is she's trying to say, I don't think there's anything wrong with trans people. We should still be able to express these beliefs that us, you know, there are people who think that to have any concerns about this, you know, as you put it, this conflict between or potential conflicts between the rights of women and the rights of specifically, it's almost like,

also, like you said, it's almost always trans women, the rights of natal women and the rights of trans women. Like that is seen as in and of itself transphobic by a lot of people on the left. Yeah. So it was a free speech concern as well, and she was reacting, as many people have, to this fairly Orwellian denigration of our language, right? Rather than refer to women, even in the context of scientific journals now, you see these tortured phrases and i think the one she reacted to on twitter at one point was people who menstruate right and she said you know didn't we used to have a word for that you know was i could help me here is it yeah and she was right so she was obviously people could have viewed that as snide but and she said she said

it was flippant yeah but it's also i mean there's so many people are at the end of their patience with this fixation on language, which, I mean, there is something, you know, I view it as not only wrongheaded, but sinister to sort of rule out certain kinds of thought. I mean, it's the very essence of what we mean by Orwellian, right? I mean, Orwell has earned this place in our language, not only because of his novel 1984, but because of his quite famous and deservedly so essay, Politics and the English language. I mean, this is a tactic for making it hard to think about, much less say, certain things. I mean, you seize control of the words we use to name things. And it has been so programmatic and clumsy coming from the left of late, and yet it's been so successful. I mean, the style guide for the Associated Press, and you've got places like Stanford University coming

out and offering lists of forbidden terms, right? And this is now far beyond the trans issue, but this goes to race and many of these other variables. This is not the way we make cultural progress. Anyway, her reaction as a writer to that is completely understandable. But what she then came to focus on more than anything, it seems, is the rights of women to have protected spaces, like domestic abuse shelters and changing rooms and bathrooms. And I mean, if I'm not mistaken, that's where things really heated up and where she expressed most of her concerns with respect to the trade-offs between protecting the rights of vulnerable girls and women and

the rights of trans women. Yeah. I mean, I just want to go back just for a second on the language thing, because obviously it's important to, we understand that the people who are advocating for these changes in language are really trying to make it more inclusive. Like they, they are coming at it from very good intentions. They want things, the world to be better and for, you know, racism and sexism and transphobia for all of these things to, you know, to, and using language to accomplish these, you know, positive aims in society. But also, as you just said, you know, one of the reporters that I, that I spoke with, Michelle Goldberg, you know, she, you know, she's covered

this topic for a long time. And she told me that, and I thought this was very well put, she said that the seeds of the backlash are contained within the effort to suppress questions and dissent and to this effort to kind of force a consensus when it hasn't been reached organically through conversation and persuasion, which is how pluralistic societies function. pluralistic societies function and so this kind of top-down imposition of these changes in language which a lot of people i mean myself included i i didn't have any sense of any real sense of of like what what is why not essentially like why not do this and you know you hear one of the one of the main issues is as you just said, it makes it difficult. It can be very difficult to talk about specifically the biological differences between males and females and between natal women and trans women. It seems like all of the language has become politicized in some way. So the choice to use one word over another. And so it's been a huge issue in this series trying to talk about all of these things in a way that the term we keep using

is a normie listener, right? Somebody who is not the uninitiated essentially into this conversation. And it's not in an effort to denigrate trans people or to choose one side or another and to be respectful of everybody involved. But it is extremely hard to walk that line. And it is not because we, again, not because we don't respect everyone, but because so much of the language has become politicized in that way. And I think one of the things as well is just this, the question of, are there times, like it's essentially, are there times when biological sex is implicated in a way that makes it more important or, you know, more, I don't know if that's the best way to put it, that it's more important than gender. And, you know, because essentially like that is, that is the, I think one of the,

one of the biggest changes that is being advocated for. So when we talk about men and women, we are talking about gender identity rather than sex. But, and I feel like I'm going to go down a rabbit hole here a little bit, so maybe I shouldn't. But there is no consensus on that. So, for instance, even in the New York Times, you'll read trans female or trans male, and they don't mean a person. It's just very, very hard to parse is all I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, I guess one thing to acknowledge is that your series is not just a straightforward defense of Rowling, right? I mean, your series is more balanced than I will sound in this conversation. I mean, I just take Rowling's side in this in a very straightforward way. I think she's been maligned as a transphobe and a bigot. And, you know, from what I can tell, she's none of those things.

And, you know, what's more, it's, you know, I acknowledge that many of the people, even most of the people who are attacking her are doing it from a place of, you know, as you say, it's their version of compassion, right? They think they are mitigating human suffering, and they think Rowland is increasing it, whether by intention or not. And I'm fairly sure they're wrong about that. But I do view many other people in this space to be bad actors of a different sort, or at least more conflicted than just attempting to do something good, but going about it in the wrong way. So to say that everyone has good intentions, I think it's a bit of a stretch for me. I frankly think there's a fair degree of mental instability and even, Frank, mental illness in the activist community. I mean, really in all activist communities. But I would say in particular, this one, from what I can see. I mean, it's just the level of viciousness and hysteria is, you know, it's hard to know what to compare it to. And it's, you know, it's one of the reasons why

I have avoided, you know, I've been among the people who've more or less avoided this issue, because it's just not worth it, right? It's just, why do you want this experience that J.K. Rowling is having? having. Yeah, I mean, it's that dynamic that you're describing, though. What's really fascinated me was that, so before I ever wrote the letter to J.K. Rowling asking if she would do this, before I'd even

decided to do it, I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people and a lot of people specifically in the LGBT community and then specifically a lot of trans people. And LGBT community and then specifically a lot of trans people. And it was wild to me to realize that most people from as far as I can tell, do not hold those extreme positions that you see in a lot of activist communities, specifically on Twitter. And realizing how much more, it's much more reasonable. Like the, the, the sense of

it is like, and even the idea, you know, the, the importance of having the conversation. Like I talked to many trans people who were like, we believe that the lack of a conversation here is harming our interests far more than people like JK Rowling and, and many who even agreed with her and they understood her concerns and shared them. And sort of like the need to have the conversation to navigate, you know, what is fair, for instance, in women's sports? What is, you know, how do we navigate, you know, single sex spaces and, you know, women's prisons and, you know, childhood transition, all of these things that J.K. Rowling has expressed concerns about,

many of those concerns are shared by many other trans people. It's just that the effort to suppress the conversation, I think it comes from, I think it's largely a fear-based response. There are a lot of people who are genuinely anti-trans. There are a lot of, there's, you know, violence against them, threats of violence, all of the laws that are being passed targeting, you know, the trans community. And even when they're not passed, actually, just feeling like you are the constant target of people with power. It kind of, I think that's partly what's driving this, you know, kind driving the extreme nature of this conversation. But talking to so many other people, it made me realize there is actually a lot of space for it, but it doesn't seem that way because of this very distorting effects of places like Twitter. Yeah, and you've found some reasonable people who are quite critical of Rowling, too. I mean, I'm recalling the trans woman Natalie Wynn, otherwise known as ContraPoints on YouTube. And when I was on Patreon, I used to support her channel, although I sort of lost touch with it in recent years.

So it was nice to hear her again. She's very critical of Rowling, but I don't know how much you spoke to her, but in terms of what made it into your podcast, she seems quite reasonable. So I wouldn't put her on the far fringe of this activist culture that is showing these kind of cult-like and puritanical traits. This is why the witch-burning analogy is so appropriate. I mean, it really has a cult-like hysteria about it, where there's the scapegoating of heretics, there are blasphemy tests, there's just, you know, no one is far left enough to be immune to being, you know, castigated by the mob if they make one wrong move. Maybe so Natalie Wynn herself was attacked by the trans community for not aligning with every one of its

points of piety. It's somewhat mysterious that it has achieved this level of cultural influence given how fringe a phenomenon this is, right? I mean, this is the very essence of a fringe issue, you know, whatever its actual political and ethical importance. I'm not disputing that this is something worth paying attention to and that the rights of trans people are worth safeguarding, etc. But how has this become the 20 megaton issue? Which again is sort of under the radar for, you get the sense that it's under the radar for much of the culture. It's like, it almost requires that one be too online to know every, you know, permutation of what we're talking about here. And yet, in terms of its actual influence at Fortune 500 companies and our universities and our science journals and every media company, I mean, it has a truly overwhelming influence now at HR departments everywhere.

Yeah. And I think it's really interesting. It obviously comes, I should say, obviously, but from my sense, you know, people, it was very, it seemed very clearly, and I was one of these people to whom it seemed very clear that trans rights, this was the next frontier, right? In the, you know, LGBT activism, you know, same-sex marriage was decided, the right in this country to same-sex marriage in 2015 came down from the US Supreme Court. And so this battle was won in a very real and important way. And trans rights was the next frontier. And it was not obvious to, I think, to a lot of people that there could be any, a lot of people compare the trans rights movement to the, you know, the gay rights where, you know, George W. Bush, when he was, you know, describing why he was against same-sex marriage, you know, it's about defending

marriage. Like we have to defend, and so likewise with trans rights, we have to defend women's spaces. Women are at risk if we don't defend these things. So I think it comes from this desire to protect this vulnerable minority, which again, is a very good instinct. It's obviously also part of our social nature. We want to be part of a group and there's this appeal and the desire to be righteous. And yeah, it's like all of this stuff, we talk about this in episode three, And yeah, it's like all of this stuff, like we talk about this in episode three, how, you know, none of these ideas originated on Tumblr. But we had four different people, two internet historians, Catherine Dee and Angela Nagel, as well as Helen Lewis, who is a reporter at The Atlantic, and then also Natalie Nguyen herself. and saw how they migrated from Tumblr to Twitter, where every, you know, as Natalie put it, like basically every journalist in the world, many of them are on Twitter and really caught fire there. So it's no longer, it's like, you know, we're having this conversation on the biggest public platform where many powerful people, and I want to say it's not the right word exactly. I actually, let me pause for a second because it's, I was about to say infiltrate, and that sounds really, that's not what I mean. But they really caught fire in these institutions

that had and have a lot of power. Yeah. That was a piece of internet history that I was completely unaware of, and it was fascinating. I had no idea that Tumblr was the crucible in which all of these woke terms got annealed and refined and made ready for export to the rest of culture. And then so, you know, microaggressions and all the rest. Safe spaces, trigger warnings. Yeah, all of it got sent into Twitter where every journalist and politician was just waiting to have their brains addled by this new orthodoxy. Before we go further, I think it should go without saying, but the truth is saying it is completely meaningless for the people who are most activated by this ideology. I'm completely convinced that the trans phenomenon is real, which is to say that gender dysphoria is real, and we absolutely want to protect the rights of people in that situation at whatever stage of life. And I'm completely convinced that in certain cases, medical transition is the most compassionate and rational thing for a person to do. There's nothing about what I'm saying here, explicitly or implicitly, that should be considered

a denial of that fact. So I just think we should have an ethical and political commitment to protecting the rights of everybody. And we should acknowledge that this is a real phenomenon, which like homosexuality or other aspects of human difference, human variation, that we should just acknowledge and find some way of incorporating into a tolerant society. I certainly don't doubt that J.K. Rowling is also committed to that, and it's fairly obvious when you hear her speak at length that she is. But the question is, how do we navigate these odd collisions that seem to be zero-sum, at least in certain cases, between the rights of one beleaguered community and the rights of another?

Go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, it was really interesting to me to, as I was speaking with many trans people, to realize, and I mentioned this earlier, that they share, many of them share the same concerns that Rowling does. So, I mean, and you hear in episode six, Natalie talks about women's sports. You know, she has this question herself, like, what is the line? And it's like the idea of simply denying that there is any conflict or that there is a battle worth fighting here and calling people bigots for having those concerns. I think those tactics are understandable and I think I understand after all these conversations

where they're coming from, but I don't think that suppressing the conversation is the way forward because we've seen, I would say, a major backlash to trans know, when I look at the people who I've fallen out with over political issues in recent years, I mean, the people who got captured by the right and by Trumpism, and these people who, frankly, have clearly lost their ethical compass

in that they're now unable to pay attention to anything other than the problem of, you know, wokeness, for lack of a better term. The reason is, it is things like, I think in one of your episodes, there's a headline that J.K. Rowling refers to, which was, I believe, woman convicted of exposing her penis. The fact that we're, I mean, it really just seems like the gaslighting of a whole society, right? It's just, if we're going to insist that a biological male who's done absolutely nothing to transition is a woman simply because he calls himself a woman, right?

For the purposes of going into a prison, you know, or for the purposes of going into a woman's changing room. or for the purposes of going into a woman's changing room. And we're not going to dignify the concerns of women and girls who are placed into that situation as anything other than their own closed-mindedness and their own bigotry, right? It's like it's just going to drive people crazy for obvious reasons. And it's going to make them single-issue crazy for obvious reasons. And it's going to make them single issue voters for obvious reasons. Just as a purely, I mean, whatever you think the underlying ethics are, purely as a matter of, you know, practical politics, it's just disastrously stupid to be

insisting that we use language in this way. So yeah, I mean, I just know people who I literally can't have relationships with anymore because they've been driven so crazy by this kind of issue. And it's understandable. I'm not sharing their monomania happily, but this is a place where it's pretty clear we need to hold the line. And if we can no longer use the term woman or girl in any straightforward way, if we have people insisting that you can't put a baby's biological sex on its birth certificate

because that could be misgendering them, and that we need to be open-minded as to whether we've had a boy or a girl until this child's seventh birthday or whenever it is that they can be counted upon to know what sex they are. I mean, this is just as an opportunity cost for a society. The fact that any time is being spent getting tied in those particular knots is going to drive people crazy, I think, for obvious reasons. Well, I think it's the, again, it's back to, is there a time? And if so, when are they? That biological sex is more important or should take precedence over gender. And I think that those lines, I mean, it depends on the situation, right? In some instances, it does, it would be fine, I think. And I don't, I should say, a big part of the series, as you say, like, it does, it would be fine. I think, and I don't, I should say a big part of the series,

as you say, like it is not a defense of J.K. Rowling. It is an attempt to kind of lay out what has happened so that people can have the conversation. We see this as the start of a conversation. We're not trying to litigate all of the issues because that's not our job. I think it's trying to set it up so that other people can have these conversations because the lines don't have to be, I think, so black and white. It does appear in some cases, I think you're right, that maybe it is zero sum and decisions have to be made. But there's actually far more, I think, space for conversation. There are some sports where sex doesn't matter as much. And in fact, I listened in on an interview with Diana Nyad, where she, who's, oh God, I'm going to try to gloss this

incorrectly. She swam from Cuba to the coast of Florida. So this kind of very long distance swimming. And she said, essentially the biological differences between males and females, you know, kind of disappear at a certain length. And so all I'm saying is that there are lines that can be drawn and things that can be done to accommodate. You know, one of the things about sports could be, you know, you have a, instead of men and women, it's females and then an open category. So anybody can, so it's something that doesn't, you know, misgender people. Like, I don't know what the right answers are in all of these things, but they're conversations that need to happen. And that I think, I think there is space for them. was the realization that many gay people are kind of despairing about the fact that for a long time they were getting this criticism from the right, this shaming, kind of endless shaming and being

targeted by the right for their sexual orientation because they are same-sex attracted. And there are, I don't want to say it's not all activists and it's not all trans people at all, but there is a certain strain of activism that, you know, accuses gay people of being genital fetishists, for instance, if they are same-sex attracted rather than same gender attracted. And, you know, talking to these gay people who feel despairing about the fact that they spent decades fighting the right over their right to be proud in public who they are. And now it's coming from the left, people that they saw as allies. And so there is a lot of, it's not just women whose rights, who feel that their rights are at stake. And you can really go down a lot of rabbit holes.

Think about just all of the places in society where sex matters. And it's these very fundamental things. Sex and dating and parenting. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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