Modern Wisdom - #550 - Dr James Cantor - The World Of Unusual Sexual Orientations

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Dr James Cantor is a clinical psychologist and sexologist specialising in hypersexuality and paraphilias. There are a broad range of things that turn humans on. Some are common, some are uncommon and some are very illegal. James' study of paraphilias exposes him to some of the world's most interesting and unusual sexual desires with the goal of working out why they exist. Expect to learn how asexuality could evolve at all, why some able-bodied people feel that they should be amputees, why adults like to be dressed up as babies, the link between left-handedness and child abuse, what James thinks about depression in the trans community, why it's become increasingly impossible to have conversations about dangerous sexual desires and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all of MASA’s Chips at www.masachips.com/modernwisdom use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jamescantorphd  Check out James' website - http://www.jamescantor.org/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. James Canter, he's a clinical psychologist and sexologist specializing in hypersexuality and paraffilias. There are a broad range of things that turn humans on. Some are common, some are uncommon and some are very legal. James's study of paraffilias exposes him to some of the world's most interesting and unusual sexual desires with the goal of working out why they even exist.

Expect to learn how a sexuality could evolve at all, why some able-bodied people feel like they should be amputees, why adults like to be dressed up as babies, the linked between left-handedness and child abuse, what James thinks about depression in the trans community, why it's become increasingly impossible to have conversations about dangerous sexual desires, and much more. This episode does get into some pretty spicy and extreme territory when it comes to sexual orientations, and if that is the sort of thing that's going to make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, I advise skipping this one, going back and listening to one of the 549 other episodes that are available,

and I'll see you on Saturday. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr James Cantor, welcome to the show. How'd you be here? Thank you. Your research area, parapheria and associated phenomena. What is parapheria? Well, I study what makes anybody into whatever it is that they're into. When when I started the big question was an including for myself, I'm what made me gay, what makes a gay person gay, You know, I started with the same curiosity that we all did.

I just kind of tripped over the course of my career to an opportunity to start asking the bigger version of that question, never mind gay, what makes, you know, all of the others. How does the brain know what to be attracted to or not to be attracted to? And so that then led me to what the paraphernalia is themselves, which are sexual interest patterns, but not just preferences, not blonde versus brunette or top versus bottom. I mean, people who are, it's meaningful to call these sexual orientations unto themselves. These are interest patterns like exhibitionists, pedophiles, tuturists, some kinds of cross-dressers when they find it sexually arousing. These are profound, profound sexual interest patterns that these people

have. And as I say, it seems to show every, every sign of being innate and immutable. So what's up with that? So the paraphernalia is, you know, we still debate over, you know, does this one count? Does that one count? But the general idea are these other, other than sexual orientation, other than male versus female, all of the other atypical sexual interest patterns that really, really built in practically

born with it kind of interest patterns. So that I guess is my non-technical definition of it, allowing room for, we don't exactly know where the boundaries are What about asexuality the least sexual of the sexual parapherelias? Yeah There's no good simple answer. I don't think it's an it the term is a bit of a catch-all People these days especially are kind of mixing up medical language, you know, when a medical diagnosis where we've identified the cause of something with psychiatric diagnosis, which doesn't identify the cause. Psychiatry is different from other branches

of medicine. In psychiatry, they label the symptoms. We just call the symptom depression or sadness depression, but whether it's caused by one thing or another, that doesn't matter. You get the same diagnosis, as I say. So psychiatry is unlike the rest of medicine, and that it labels just the symptoms. So for the paraphernalia and the others, that's, as I say, kind of an open question exactly where the line goes. When do we diagnose it?

When do we not? Is it in the person's favor? So it's not, as I say, it's not such a simple question. So for asexuals, well, it's not posing a problem for anyone else. And there can be way more than one thing, leading a person to think that that label kind of fits them. Now, it can be somebody just with a low sex drive, you know, but low sex drive is not important upon very sexy label for it. But asexual is something that it's a label they can use all of a sudden they have a support group and people on a haven wave.

The important part, the part that's very easy to be empathetic for is that it socially tells people how to interact with them. And if don't start introducing them to potential, you know, partners, you know, that they're not going to be interested and don't take it personally. So it can serve a certain legitimate social function. Flip side, there are just regular everyday people with regular everyday insecurities about, you know, whatever it is about their sexual life. And rather than risk rejection, rather than play at that game and risk losing, they adopt the label asexual just to get out of the whole thing.

That's not such a healthy reason. If I had such a person in therapy, it'd be reasonable to help a person get over their insecurities. Or for some people, especially on the autism spectrum, there are people who have social skill deficits, and it's really social skills training that would lead to more self-confidence, and so they don't need a label of asexual. And then people just as they get older and sex drive drops, again, will adopt the term kind of as a euphemism for low sex drive. So although they kind of have in common a signaling to the people around them, you know,

how to interact properly or how to interact in a way that they want to be interacted with, we, oughtn't or no scientists should, you know, take it at face valued to me literally that the person lacks a sex drive either. A lot of people can adopt the label for other kinds of reasons. All of which is to say, it's not like we have proof that it doesn't exist either. I mean, if you can be attracted to one pattern, attracted to another pattern, I can imagine attracted to neither, but the last one, and again, because of the very strange seat that I get to sit

in, the other one is that somebody's attracted to something unusual that they don't want to cop to. It could be something really, really problematic like they're attracted to children or they're just attracted to something that, in the particular audience or in front of their family or for whatever reasons, they don't want to be out with it. It's not something that they're going to be sharing with anybody outside, for example, outside of their fetish community. So again, they will adopt the label asexual to kind of cover for their real story. Or people don't want to admit to themselves what it is that they're into.

So again, they give themselves a reason to not be into anything. You blew my mind when you mentioned talking about why there seemed to be more child offenses coming out of the Catholic church and priests that the priesthood, a place where you are, that you take a vow of celibacy, you are tending to be away from most of the people. This is a life of service, this is a life of virtue. That would be the kind of place that someone who is trying to potentially, in some circumstances, hide from a sexuality

that they're a little bit concerned about, might retreat to. I thought, oh, wow, that is such an interesting way to look at why there has been this preponderance in there. And it plays into that as well. Going onto the autism conversation, I'm pretty sure that a bunch of very famous inventors throughout history, Isaac Newton,

I'm pretty sure went through his entire life and remained a virgin. There may have been some religious sort of overtones over that, but how much he was using the religiosity as a cop that justified something that was coming out of him that he perhaps didn't want to face. But yeah, two really interesting parallels that I've seen that figures from history, high performing philosophers, a ton of them, engineers, physicists that didn't want to face anything sexual, is that a byproduct, is that a cop, are they hiding,

and then the priesthood as well, to really interesting examples. Yeah. The priesthood's a funny one, and there's no good way to study it in any objective way. There's just so much politics pulling in every direction. But that's some people use it as a retreat. So my family stops asking me, how come I'm not married to a woman? But not only for pedophiles, but also regular everyday gay men who don't want to

deal with being gay or less known today than prior generations, of course, but saying thing, it was an escape into that context socially acceptable or socially more acceptable way to still circulate in society, be productive in its way, but not have to live. it's living a hidden life. I don't want to say in plain sight exactly, and for some people they're denying the truth of it to themselves as much as denying it to the to the world around them. So for, you know, the gays, when, you know, the ones who do eventually come out anyway, the pedophiles for whom we find out the hard way. But anybody with any real atypical sexuality, again, it provides the same kind of escape, or cover story, I think, is the best term. What's the best explanation that we've got for why male homosexuality exists in humans at all. Oh, this was one of the things that really first got me into this main question.

I didn't do very much research in it directly. I played a supporting role to Ray Blanchard. I was his mini-me. And he was already well on the way of unraveling that one. Another just fascinating story. And I just had a background in the brain by sheer accident. And that I'm doing my internship, you know, at a gender clinic, but it had Ray Blanchard in it. It was one of the chief, you know, scientists pursuing me exactly that question. He was looking at brain development, I'd a background in the brain. And so just the phenomenon he identified that led to the unraveling is called the older brother effect.

Pure, unremarkable, you wouldn't notice it to the naked eye except an epidemiologist studying the data. The more male fetuses a woman has, the more sun she gives birth to, the more likely the latter-born kids males are to be gay. That is gay men on average have more older brothers than they should. The older brother effect. And it's one of those, how could a fetus, how could the development of the brain,

what, how could a fetus know how many fetuses came before it? It was a vet, but consistent. No matter what time, Arab, that Blanchard could find a data set from, no matter what country, no matter in what context, the older brother effect was there. Very strange. Eventually, what he was able to figure out is that, if you remember, you know, wife fetuses,

at wife fetuses, male fetuses and only male fetuses carry a Y chromosome, which is foreign to the mother's system. She's formed of two X chromosomes. So far as her body is concerned, a Y chromosome is a foreign material for which her immune system starts to react. So with every passing male fetus is more exposure to, they're called, if I have a long technical name,

the HY histocompatibility antigens. The substances, right, that the mother's body produces to neutralize the proteins that are coming off the Y chromosome, which is supposed to be masculinizing the fetus. So sometimes those anti-male immune system reactions seem to hold back some of the misguelinization of the male and only the male fetuses. And it happens with every exposure, even to fetuses that were in her body, but she never carried to turn. Aborted fetuses, miscarriages, still in the order they should be in.

So, that's why it runs in families a little bit, but not because homosexuality is inherited, but the maternal immune response is. That is wild. Even though it goes through the women of the family, even though the homosexuality only functions in the males in the family. So do you as a daughter of a mother that had lots of sons, does the daughter retain that knowledge somehow? Not in a direct way that anybody's been able to find.

The best, as I said, the best connection is that her immune system is related to her mother's system. And there are large transfers of material between maternal system and fetus, which is a fascinating, fascinating branch of biology to itself. But nobody's found that in that transfer of material and the mother preparing the fetus for its own immune environment. Nobody's found that the H.Y. histocompatibility antigens go through it.

Why do you think that this would be adaptive? Why would this be around? That's a good question. It could be a side effect. It's easy to imagine that, as I say, it's just a side effect of something powerful about the immune system. And so, you know, it's worth sacrificing, you know, however many potential grandchildren, if the gay ones are less likely to reproduce, that the gains from whatever this difference in the immune system offsets the decrease in reproducibility later.

It's a to evolution, it's a math game. Okay, so if that's male homosexuality, what about lesbians? Women are always a more complicated. When it comes to social stuff. For men, I'm grossly exaggerating. For men, you know, sex is a drive like hunger. There's not a lot we can do about it.

For women, again, I'm over-static in a bit. It's more of a mood. It doesn't have quite the same drive. It's awfully dependent on stress and context expectations for the future all bound into one great big ball where for men it's kind of hot not. You know sex with our worst enemy if they're hot enough. Piece of cake. For women that's just, that's a much more unusual. As I say, for women, it's more of

mood, it's more like a mood. So there are stuff that, so there does seem to be a biological component, and it does seem to be that their brains are shifted in a more masculine direction. more masculine direction. But there are many more women than men who will refer to contextual parts, relational parts, memories of old relationships or prior abusive relationships. They refer to that much, much more as contributing, but and it's unclear is that really contributing to their sexual orientation, the way that men think of theirs, ours, or is that just those memories into fear with how easy it is to get into one mood versus another? Yeah. So when comfort amongst females is such an important part of sex and arousal, something

which has predisposed you to feel comfortable may become a part of your sexuality because that comfort is so intrinsically linked. I had a conversation yesterday at lunch with a friend and he has a girl friend who her first sexual encounter was with one of her female friends when she was in her teens or whatever they felt comfortable, they felt safe and she has now rolled forward into a marriage where she still feels, apparently the husband has absolutely no fears at all that she's ever going to cheat on him with a man, but he does sometimes wonder about what she gets up to when she goes out on holiday or to Hindus and stuff like that. And she's like, they're in a sort of semi-opened thing in any case. But what she says is there is something about that degree of comfort that has sort of stayed with her and given that that was her formative or one of her formative first time experiences.

It does seem like that's left a kind of imprint. Here's another one for you. I don't know whether you've ever come across this. So I have a friend who is bisexual but heavily lesbian. So she mostly sleeps with women and sometimes sleeps with men. We were talking about birth control and she said that she'd come off birth control. I asked what had happened and she said, oh, my sex drive went through the roof and a bunch of other things. One other interesting thing that I found

was that during my ovulation period, I had a big change in sex drive. And so, okay, that's interesting. Well, what happened? She says, well, I'm gay for three weeks out of every month, but for one week out of every month, I turn straight again. Have you ever come across this? Yeah. Dude, that blew my mind. I had to put my fork down. I was like, oh my God, this is so interesting.

Yeah. There's, as I said, women are, you know, and fascinating to that, why complicated? And they're a different, we have one itch. They have different, they have several itches and different itches need scratching in different ways. And also changes for women according to mood or across their, their cycles, dumb sub stuff. That sometimes they'll be, you know, in a kinky aggressive kind of mood or in a kinky super sub mood and with other people or in other situations or they'll be Dom with med sub with women. It's, there's just this cluster and as I

say, and they will have a couple of different ways to roads to Rome. Yes, not yet. Whatever. Yeah. I learned about red deer, Scottish red deer, and the fact that when the females come into heat, the males start deploying tons of testosterone, and they go from being really docile and friendly with all of their male counterparts to these, having these huge antlers and trying to kill all of the other men that they were recently friends with and have been chilling with for the last nine months, then they go create a harm,

super aggressive, and then the women stop being in heat and then everything goes back to normal again, given the fact that the behavior of those animals changes so much due to the cascade of hormones It makes complete sense that small relatively small changes in women would happen when their Profile of hormones changes it just happens to be more consistent than once every year Yes, or perfectly logical or perfectly plausible you know, we're at the far reaches of my, my, my, my real expertise. I've often found it less useful to think about, you know, hormones having this, you know, kind of whatever effect and therefore should have whatever analogous effect across species.

And more, how would this have helped evolution or against it? It's, you know, because then the hormones and what increases or decreases, whatever behaviors of hours, changes species to species in order for us to fit in whatever our, you know, evolutionary network is. So again, in that species, right, the offset of killing off some of the other males must have an evolutionary benefit that offsets that. And again, this is the animal husband's rig is not my thing.

Right. So there's gotta be some niche that it fits for them that didn't work for us, you know, that didn't work for us as we know, that didn't work for us as we came down from the trees. But what that might be, I guess I just hesitate to make all animals analogous to all other animals, you know, disembedded from the evolutionary pressures that God is there. Getting on to some more murky territory, what do you think most people misunderstand when it comes to pedophilia?

Oh, same as when I got into the field, that people confuse pedophilia for a synonym for childnalistation. Because conversations are only about the behavior people have trouble separating that from the sexual attraction pattern. Again, for any listeners who haven't heard it before, Peter Filia is the sexual attraction pattern itself. These are people who are genuinely sexually attracted to children the way the rest of us are to adults, but doesn't mean they

ever did anyone. It doesn't mean they committed any crime or hurt anyone. They just have the sexual attraction pattern, first to their own peers when they're young, but as they mature, they continue to be attracted to whatever age that was where the rest of us develop attractions to adults. And vice versa isn't one to one either. The people who commit the offenses, the actual child molesters are usually not pedophiles. Incess defenders, for example, are usually not into kids. They're using the kid as a surrogate

and they prefer adults, but don't have access to an adult. Roughly about a third, as I say, of offenders against children or genuinely are genuine pedophiles. Not so for child porn. The people who are collecting child porn are genuinely into kids, even though they rarely would have ever touched a kid. Their offense is that indirect kind of offense, where the victim is the unconsenting subject of the picture. So the biggest misunderstanding is that a pedophile is not a criminal. Before he committed an offense, he was an innocent person, and that's the day we need to get to him.

These are people who are usually struggling with it. They know something's wrong, and we want them to be able to come in for therapy, sex drive reducing medications, whatever it will take to help this person, you know, stay crime free. crime free. Unfortunately, because people automatically associate, this is a criminal waiting to happen, they end up bringing all of this stigma and all of the condemnation, which really just drives them underground. So instead of having them in therapy getting whatever they need, they're all alone in desperate, which is crazy to me. You know, that's just that's making the problem worse. So that's a very long answer, but the biggest misunderstanding, as I say, is that people have true, because people only hear about pedophilia in the context of molestation, people, you know,

have trouble seeing that these are overlapping, but non-identical categories. Well, there's such a visceral response to those stories, right? And they do get a good bit of press coverage when it comes out. And I suppose what would be newsworthy about here is a non-offending pedophile who sits quietly in his house. Why is that going to make headlines? No one's writing an article about that, really.

Unless it was a very interesting expose that said, there is this group of people out there that are worthy of sympathy because of the sort of difficulty that they have to go through to keep their type of sexuality under control in terms of enacting it. So when it comes to what causes pedophilia to arise, how much biological environmental influence

is going on here and why does that happen? We have really solid evidence for the biological contributions, but no solid evidence for learned kinds of influences. I mean, we can't rule it out. I mean, we can never, you know, in science permanently rule anything out. It's always possible for, you know, future evidence to say anything. But so far, we have biology, you know, right down to brain scans, and clues leading to developmental episodes that happened before birth.

The biggest one is hand-edness. clues leading to developmental episodes that happened before birth. The biggest one is handedness. In regular everyday populations, somewhere between 8-10% of people are non-right handed. So far, as brain organization is concerned, and B-dexedness goes together with left handedness. So it's about 8-10% of the regular population, but like 35% of the pedophiles. Absolutely enormous. There's only one thing that makes somebody non-right handed, you know, and outside of old Catholic schools, they didn't make a non-right handed,

they went the other way. The only way that that larger proportion of people are non-right handed is if something is different about basic brain organization and the hemispheric dominance of the brain is established by the end of the first trymaster. That's what causes handedness. That's what causes handedness. So a right handed person is left hemisphere dominant. A left handed person, a non-very left handed, could go either way. It's roughly again about a third of them. It's cross hemisphere and for some it's just kind of 50-50. It's just during early brain development

that one grows faster than the other, but if something happens during development that gets in the way malnutrition of the mother's stress or something, the other hemisphere of them will try to catch up for the lost time of the first one. It takes over some of the functions that the other hemisphere then will try to catch up for the lost time of the first one. It takes over some of the functions that the original hemisphere would have had. And handedness is one of them. So large differences in the population of handedness again is a clue that something maternal stress, something happened early in development. And we're just seeing one of these echoes of, you know, innocuous behavior.

But it's because it's pretty innocuous that we can detect it pretty early in adulthood, but it still tells us something very, very important that was going on before birth. So between the combination of the brain stands showing us exactly where things are different now, and findings like hand-divenessness and other clues saying whatever was different, whatever links of these chains eventually led to pedophilia, the first links were before birth. So when you put all of this together, it's, as I said, this is a biological thing. Could there be things learned in child to sure, but nobody's come up with that kind of smoking-going evidence where there's just no other way to explain it.

Different for child and less station. Childhood events, stress, crises, tragedy can lead during life, during young life, can lead a person to be disinhibited. You know, impulsive, unwilling, you know, anti-social themselves, I was hurt, so it's really not so bad if I do something. You know, so a person who has an atypical impulse, if they came from an abuse of background, you know, that kind of thing can be learned. But of course, for pedophiles, the ones that we find out about are the ones who committed crimes, who were

more likely to have come from an anti-social background. So the association is stronger because that's where that's the area we get to see, but there's this great, big, dark, unknown, never reported. And it's not like they're going to be, you know, clicking yes on any internet surveys anytime soon. You know, so there's just no way we know they exist, but there's no way for us to guess how many. Why would it be the case that the mechanism that mediates handedness would also play a role in what somebody is attracted to in terms of age. And does that mean that there are more gay people who are left-handed, more people into dobb, subdom fetishes and stuff? Does it correlate with anything else? Excellent question. The first part, why would they be connected?

They're not connected in any this leads to this leads to this. I wasn't accusing all the left-handed people of being sexual deviants, no. Everybody always has to say that. And we also have to do the homosexuality, pedophilia, distinction, and all that. Cavillate, cavillate, cavillate, yeah. Exactly. There's no direct link. It's more...

Oh, actually, it's a great example. You remember that old and basically true chestnut correlation doesn't mean causation. We recite that almost reflexively. But when nobody points out is, what does it mean? There are three possibilities. When x correlates with y, x could be causing y. Why could be causing x? Or the one everybody forgets, there's a z that causes both x and y. So they come and go in frequency together, but there's no relationship between them. It's because they both come from the same. So a lot of these correlates that people talk about have that third variable thing. Neither one is causing the other, even though that's always everybody's gut reaction. If they're trying to endorse whatever public policy, we want more of this. We want less of that.

And so they start arguing for connections where most of it is, sorry, there isn't no connection. It's because both come from this other thing. So the associations between hemispheric dominance, handiness and sexuality appear to be one of those. Neither one really is related to the other. It's just that if something unusual goes on during brain development, hand in this is one of the things that changes. And sexual interest pattern is one of the things that changes.

But there's no relationship between the two. That said, hand in this is usually the first thing we look at whenever we examine any new sexual interest pattern that comes to attention. Exactly because it does seem to be different across the broad spectrum of them. It is higher in gay men than straight men, not less men versus straight women. It is higher again in the pedophiles versus the non-pedophiles and it's higher in a couple of the other parapherelias. So again, that doesn't mean any of these is related to any of the others, it's all that same Z. It's all that same something went different during development and these are

just the many different sexual interest patterns that can change and handedness which can oh and handed which can change and one of the triggers of that change is testosterone. In utero. In utero. Again, mostly first trimester, mostly, well that one's really the end of the first trimester. And it's also why more men are non-right handed than women. Because they are more heavily mediated by testosterone. Yep. And so the process to mask your eyes puts the brain at risk for a couple of things. Males are expendable in a population. If you lose pick a number, if you lose 10% of men,

there's more than enough sperm to go around. But if you lose 10% a man, there's more than enough sperm to go around. But if you lose 10% of women, you've lost 10% of reproductive potential. So all fetuses essentially start female, not in that way, trans activists like to say, but developmentally, things don't start shifting into the maldirection to the Y chromosome and proteins don't kick in until a couple of months in. Sexual interest pattern is one of the things that seems to change. We would start with a relatively broad mood pattern that women have in order to bring that over. So instead of being attracted to men, look for curvy reproductive age. So we, males have to go

through that process. Females don't. We kind of start or brains kind of start in that process. So that seems to be why so many more males have these atypical sexualities, but women don't, because they didn't have to go through that process. This is like, this is their right-handedness. Where for some of us, we go through that process, the process isn't perfectly debugged, so we lose a couple of percent to these atypical patterns.

How much conscious control do people have over what arouses them, or what they're sexually attracted to? This isn't acting on it. This is what arouses them. I wanna say zero. I mean, we can distract ourselves

if there is something hot in the environment that we don't want to be caught looking at or you know in certain situations we don't want to accidentally give ourselves an erection in an inappropriate time or place. But that's not changing or not being interested in it. It's avoiding the, avoiding, or at least postponing the stimulus. Very often that just became, you know, masturbation, and meet for later that night. But really, there doesn't, there doesn't seem to be, especially for men.

We can be attracted to stuff despite ourselves. Somebody other than our monogamous partner, somebody other than whatever socially approved stimulus, that happens all the time. But now we can't help if whatever your favorite flavor is. For me, it's ice cream. I can't will myself not to like ice cream. I might have favorite flavors, but...

So when it comes to looking at peter files, there is, as far as you can see, from your work, no conscious control over your ability to decide what you're going to be aroused by. You do have conscious control over whether you decide to act on that, and that's the line that you've drawn between child molestation and pedophilia. But that, I mean, this was something that I learned about this girl that I was dating at university 12 years ago or something, was a doctor and she said, you know, if I could make one change to the way that the world views are the people, one of the ones I think that would be interesting to discuss would be that pedophiles need more sympathy.

And my immediate response as someone that was uninitiated was like, why, how, in the UK, there's like a big deal about non-sredar, about looking out to catch a predator and there's a bunch of people like that. And I was like, after it doesn't take very much thought to realize that if you're someone that doesn't have conscious control over what you're attracted to and you're burnt cursed with a sexuality that the entire world is going to condemn you for that you can't talk to anybody else about and that you can't act on. I mean, that's a kind of living hell. It's hard to imagine a worse curse. I mean, imagining, you know, again, I grew

up, but, you know, gang in the 80s and 90s, you know, and just lucky not to have grown up in the 50s. Now, this, you know, to makes that into a kick walk, the whole conversation seems like it's gotten harder to have now. I've been having this conversation, I've been doing this kind of research for, we're going on 25 years. There was in its eccentric kind of way a lot more tolerance than than now. There was a lot more in media, we didn't have social media yet, which is I think linked. There was a, oh, now I get it. And people immediately went, oh, if people didn't choose this, then it was a very simple step to, well, they didn't choose anything.

And all we can ever do with anyone is find whatever proportions and fantasies according to what we can do, you know, write down to, it's not possible to do some of these either because it'll hurt somebody or it's just not possible in physics. And so we find some fantasy way, you know, and that's, you know, one rule, one ethic, one print, and one principle to rule them all, you know, so there was, that was a story that was possible was possible. I'm getting this award. It hasn't been officially presented to me yet. I'm getting this award to It hasn't been officially presented to me yet. I'm getting this award distinguished contribution from the association for the treatment of sexual abusers

in no small part for having brought this conversation to public light. But it's even though it was accepted then several documentaries made about it. It's a harder conversation now because that conversation takes 60 seconds of nuance for the, oh now I get it. That doesn't fit in a tweet. And nobody really wants the correct answer, even though everybody else is saying, you know, that's actually how we're going to defeat actual child molestation, or even if we find a way, if we can figure out what in the brain it is, maybe we can prevent it from developing

in the first place. Right. Everybody's saying, the answer is actually there, but people are using social media just for its brochure signaling. I'm going to show you what a job protector I am and they're making the situation worse by driving underground. The people we want coming in and getting into therapy and so on. So because I find there's much less honest conversation and social media is just, as I say, the virtues signaling, the message is a much harder one to get out today than

it was 25 years ago. I have no idea where we're going to go with it. And it cuts across political spectrum. It's not left or right. It's attention seekers, no matter what motivation they have for the attention, both left and right, they pride themselves on just how bad they can be to the pedophiles, both sides making the problem worse. I'm gonna guess that the concern many people have is that by opening up this conversation and making it less taboo,

you are somehow giving a stamp of approval or at least relinquishing a stamp of disapproval in some form or another misunderstanding about the difference between a non-offending and an offending pedophile and that as soon as you don't condemn it in the worst possible way, the most vehemently that you can, that's the same as being complicit or supporting or that's that's the story they give. I'm a little more cynical little too cynical to accept that on face value. Again, because basic humans haven't changed now versus 25 years ago. What has changed is now when they

say it they're saying it in front of the entire universe. I don't think they genuinely, I don't think the genuine fear is if we don't condemn it, it's they're going to feel free to do whatever they want. It's that if I don't condemn it, I'm not going to look good. It's an opportunity to stand on the shoulders. Purchase signaling. Exactly. Nobody, you know, except this idiot is going to say, hang on a second, you're actually making it worse. Right, there are very few people sitting in a place to be able to say, you know, they're only a handful of experts and

were the ones who can say, actually treating them like human beings is what's going to cause, is what prevention is going to come from. If you give somebody nothing to lose, they're going to act like somebody with nothing to lose. Yes, yeah, I had a conversation with Andrew Gold and he went to the German group. The prevention project Uncle Field?

Yes. And there's three risk characteristics. I think the first one is being around children, the second one is being inebriated, and the third one is feeling rebuffed from society like you have no one to turn to. And like, well, it's a personal choice to control the first two, although you could

environmentally assist, I suppose, by stopping them from going to an off license or a children's pool. But the third one is almost exclusively done by society to the offenders. And yeah, I mean, that's a to say that your response to this conversation is potentially causing greater externalities to the exact group that you're supposed to be trying to defend and protect is a difficult point to get across, right? It's the same reason, similar sort of reason to much nicer than I am. I'd love it was possible to get the point across 25 years ago. The difference now is so much of the conversation is people who don't care what the point is.

They just want to look like they are, you know, whatever hero badge protecting children, doing the research and the work that now they have perfect confidence in their gut reaction. Here's an interesting thing. Most victim groups at the moment are one of the easiest ways to give yourself the status of empathetic performative carer is to stand up for a victimized group. And yet it seems like nobody is choosing to do it for this particular group. That if you manage to reframe the debate, you may be able to use the dynamic that you're seeing online

of people wanting to thumb finger wave for a group and look at how virtues I am because of that. If you were able to change the way that the conversation is framed, you may actually be able to utilize that desire in a positive way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I guess you've got to redirect the stream incredibly accurately and very carefully.

I think two things are going on and they're not going to let each other exist. One is, again, when it was possible to walk people through to the aha, it's often very helpful to go through step by step. As I said, start with plain vanilla gay, go through you know, whatever the different kinds of kinks. Well, what about, you know, what we're talking about? Why don't you give us the, let's say that there's someone that's still slightly unconvinced and you've got your whatever 60 seconds or two minutes to walk someone through from start to finish to get to the art moment. What is it? Again, it's pieces of what we've said

already. Starting with a basic idea that sexual orientation, especially for men, is a hard-wired innate immutable that didn't pick it or we didn't pick it and it's not going to change. Cautunk. Now, so what are we there for? What means a civil right? Are we there for allowed to get married? Yeah, sure. Habsets and absolutely with anyone we want? Well, no, they have to be consenting.

Anywhere we want? Well, not exactly public places. There are restrictions. Okay, and, yeah, kinksters. All right, we're now playing with the meaning consent because part of the hotness is that it's non-consenting and so on, but we have to make sure it's for real is. So it becomes a little bit more complicated, but we can overcome that to make sure nobody's getting hurt in a way that they don't mean to be getting hurt. All right, somebody who's turned on, it's a rare,

rare and fascinating sexual interest pattern, apotemnophilia. These are people who feel like amputees trapped in the body of a four-limbed person. And they want and try and sometimes succeed at having a limb taken off. If they're otherwise, you know, and until the healthy and productive in society, there are indeed successful, productive cases of it. Okay. Well, if it's an adult, control over their own body, if we don't do it, they're going to hurt themselves anyway. But the basic

idea that it's built in, they didn't pick it, it's easy to be sympathetic for such a person. It's easy to think, you know, they're, but by sheer luck, you know, go, I could have been born with that combination too. What, what, what, what do I wish society would have done with me? And so we get to the more and more stigmatized, more and more yucky, and more and more uncomfortable, and sooner or later we end up with pedophiles, where now we're talking, there are zero potential partners or situations we can create that would be safe for,

or in which there can be a consenting partner. So we're gonna go give range harder and harder until we sooner or later or, you know, some real, real people with sexual satism, again, the fantasies would hurt another person. Can't be done. So now it's a matter of fiction, fantasy, movies, written stories, cartoons, dolls, whatever. So once a person starts with, again, plain vanilla gay, you're just born with it. Well, where's the line between which one of these do we help? Again, we use consent and harm to another person to decide which of these we can act out and which ones have

to stay in fantasy. But where in this line do are we switching from, yeah, okay, you're allowed to share drawings versus not. Scientifically, of course, there is no objective line. So far, society is concerned, well, if we're switching to fantasy, so nobody's getting hurt anywhere on the line, all right, so it's not out. Sympathy because I could have been born that way too.

Well, look at that. That also works for the whole. The only thing left is stigma. Okay, so we're okay with them for as long as they're not stigmatized. Wait a second. That isn't that how we got LGBTQ and your letters to begin with? And this is where my, you know, most infamous tweet ever is, is when I start challenging people, if it's not just according to stigma, well, then if we don't include P, we're hypocrites. What's, you're saying we stigmatize it up to my group, but no further?

We stigmatize it only when it becomes popular and no further. Well, that's not leadership. That's not rights principles. That's just this year's new version of what's popular in this year's fashion and but it's hypocritical to boot when it... Now, as I say, and I know exactly how that's taken people, like taking that little thing, so, oh my god, a pedophile apologist. It's just that this is entire. I hesitate to say rainbow, but let's go wide, wide wide range according to stigma to

Stigmatize not stigmatized and you know I can understand why some of these got stigmatized but if That's the only Reason as long as they keep it in fantasy what what's the objective other way to decide that doesn't end up with us being hypocrites? And by the way, for the people acting out on the ones that I can't act out on, you know, if we take away the compromised masturbation toys. Again, we're just making them more desperate and congratulating ourselves for stigmatizing it so much. We drove it underground, where nobody can do anything with it.

They're happy. Do you actually think that the P should be an LGBTQ? Do you actually think that the P should be an LGBTQ? I use that phrase and I use it purposefully to be provocative, but the question I always want to provoke and what I want to provoke is what exactly does it mean to be in there? Popular? Well, it formed because it wasn't popular. Is it a group of, well, didn't have any choice just to the best you can with what you have? Again, you know, again, openly gave myself, I'm very aware of the ancient history of it, but just shoving the stigma down to the next group further down the stigmatization list? Yeah, I guess it feels a little bit like people that use the, if you're feminist then

you should be pro male as well as pro female because feminism is supposed to be for equality. The question around what is the LGBT group for? Is it for including non-typical sexual orientations into a movement so that they feel less alone? If I don't know what the broad philosophy, I don't even know if there is one. But if that was the case, then I know, maybe there is a case to talk about that. I can see why there would be, among many, many, many reasons why people would push back against that, the existing vestigial concern that some men that a gay are secretly pedophiles that are hiding it

and that lumping P in with G would be a little bit close to home. I think a lot of people have a lot of different reasons. And again, because now in the social media age, it's disproportionately the number of people who were just used for their own purchase signaling. There are also people who, of course, are victims of child molestation. They don't know and don't really care if their perpetrator was genuinely a pedophile or not, doesn't matter.

To such a person, can I blame them for having trouble separating, I have nothing but sympathy for that situation. But I think where a lot of people get, I think for a lot of people, the conversation they're not having is that to so many folks, being in the LGBTQ alphabet, translates necessarily to a specific set of rights. Now, they're often really thinking gay rights can get married, gays in the military in the US, you know, I can get my wedding cake made at whatever baker I want, you know, just basic civil rights. But if that's it, well then why do we have B in there? Because they already had half

of those, the only part that's relevant to the B's are the parts that are like the G's anyway. Well, to the T's belonging there because, you know, GLB doesn't need any surgery for any of this, doesn't matter. Okay, so the A-sexuals, what rights is it that the A-sexuals are going for? the asexuals are going for. So people just kind of stick in, add to the letters just to show off how many letters they know. Really, it's just a list of, you know, look how hip I am. Groups that are supposed to be cool to be either a part of or to recognize you, so, but mostly people actually in their heads are thinking basic civil rights and are just adding on other letters as I said, just out of being pedantic. To me, it's a list of the actual A typical sexualities who vary in a wide and broad way in

their needs and their features. For some it's getting married, for asexuals that doesn't matter, for bisexuals that only half matters, for intersexuals that even depends on the kind of intersexual you are. For cross-stressures it means I'm not exactly sure. And for some people it means, can we not condemn them at a 10, at, you know, every time we hear of them drive them underground and instead make it possible for them to get therapy instead of passing mandatory reporting laws? Right. And so it's, to me, just this constellation of different ways to be sexually different,

each of which has its own needs and features. I'm the one who sounds LGBTQ and everybody else's, you're only allowed in the group if you make me look good. Isn't that the popularity contest we were supposed to be fighting against? People are only willing to fight for a group after it looks good. Well I mean you see certainly a part of that with every month when Pride month comes up or every year when Pride month comes up and you see that AMD technology associates in America changes their profile photo to a rainbow colored flag, but that the Middle East division doesn't change. And the same thing goes for Mercedes-Benz and BMW and all of these

different companies. Well, why? Well, it's because it's a cheap virtue signal to fight a war where the battle's already been won and where it's still to be done. And maybe this is new territory, maybe at some point in the future this will, but I do think that, you know, to try and think of something like applied here, there would be a way potentially to utilize the performative empathy desire that we have at the moment that's prevalent on the internet

to weaponize that, towards this group, and to utilize that so that people actually feel like it is something that's virtuous to be done, but there is a hell of a lot of stigma to get out of the way first. So going back to the actual behavior, I know from speaking to Diana Fleischmann that they're at hebophilia, and what's the other one that isn't hebophilia? What's before hebophilia? E-fibophilia. Yep, and is the one before that? isn't hebophilia? What's before hebophilia? E-fibophilia. Yep, and is the one before that?

For adults, teleophilia. Right, okay. Explain what those are and what are the age brackets that are typical for pedophiles to be attracted to. Yep, it sounds much more technical than it needs to be. But as you might imagine, when we do research in these populations, there are ranges. There are ones who are attracted to very young kids, pre-pubescent kids, up to about age 10. How does that? Relatively rare. 10 to 15% ish depending on how you measure them. It's not like they check these off on a survey.

So usually we kind of infer it from their sexual offense pattern from child porn and their computer or the most important and the most objective way is something called a phallometric test. It's essentially, you know, laboratory test. We put a blood pressure cuff on their penis and show them stimuli of adults, children, male and female and record what they react to. Very sensitive, very accurate test. How do you get showing a research participant, images of children, to judge the arousal response past an ethics board. I want to say more historical at this point than anything else. The lab doing this work was founded by Kurt Freund, who was doing it in the 1950s and 60s, predating ethics boards.

And he was working with sex offenders and demonstrated the accuracy of the test and how it was superior to the kind of clinical opinions that physicians were making, psychiatrist were making. So of course, he continued doing research on a continued publishing audit, including information about its diagnostic accuracy. So with that, that was sufficient for the ethics board

to continue to do the research. Also, it was completely transparent to the correctional facilities. Most of the people taking the test were sex offenders, already convicted and being released to parole on probation. And then the test was part of a clinical decision to decide, you know, is this a genuine pedophile for whom we would use sex drive reducing medications and the kinds of therapies associated with helping them deal with it? Or was this an incest pattern somebody with, you know, loose boundaries or disinhibited or drug using? And so those

are the kinds of ways to help this person not commit an offense. So it was a clinical test in a correctional setting. And again, transparent to each of the several ethics committees, the police themselves and so on, and even predated the board. Okay, so round about 10 to 15%. Yep. Our definite pedophiles into pre-pubescent kids. Then if they're into pubescent kids, roughly age is 11 to 14, you know, is the next chunk

of them, and those are the ones that we call hebeophiles. And in doing research in order to try to figure out, is there a pattern here related to age, interest pattern? You know, if we have now three points, we can start making a line. If I have just pedophiles and non-pedophiles, I just have two points. But if I have three points, now I get to start seeing patterns,

even though only a relatively few of them are gold-plated solid pedophiles. Then the group after that, again, not much of a corrections problem, but into 15, 16 year olds, and those were called e-fibo files. And the age of consent was, I think, it was 14 until about 15, 20 years ago. So again, it wasn't illegal

so it never really came to clinical attention. Then the sexually attracted to regular everyday adults, 17 and up in the lab where I did this work. That was Telia, Philia, and then, way at the other end, which really should have become my next research and a question, Geronto Philia. Oh, like grandma and grandpa.

Wow. Yep. How common is that? In today's. Have you got any idea? Uh, seems to be a handful of percent, but it's really, really tough. It's tough to tell. It's tough to tell, and it's tough to tell even when it's genuine.

I mean, how much of it is sexual attraction, how much of it is, you know, kind of gold-digging mixed in, and how much of it, especially for young people, is really something that doesn't get talked about. And I wish I had the time to write about, especially for young people, if they're into something different, young people are also into a broad range of stuff. Just the color flesh is good enough. Group of pubes and boys can get directions and masturbate in each other's company without effort. Not a whiff of gay about any of them, it's just right, when sex drivers so high that end any, any double do you? But as we mature and grow older, it really starts to have to be our thing in order to work.

And so I think that narrow wing or as we get older in our sex drive decreases, it has to be close to our favorite thing in order to go to hit the bullseye. Right. So, I think some people perceive, well, I could do anything. And so, an older person or younger person at the periphery when we're young and our sex drive is high, but if we're in a phase of life where it has to be our favorite thing, it stops being. So, I have to wonder how many of these older younger couples

are really a younger person just who hasn't yet. What, I mean, I rode in. Maybe we need to start to take the young playmate models that date the 70 year old billionaire with a little bit more of a pinch of salt, perhaps, if they're one of these gerontophilias or whatever the older attractors or older people think, perhaps they need their movement as well. Perhaps there needs to be two Gs, I don't know. Again, they're adults, you know, do what they like, but it's rare in women. Again, for women,

the look of the person is just one thread in a complicated ball or whack. So if the person, you know, and confidence is often a big part of it and the how much it's money is up to question, but a lot of it, you know, confidence and security that comes along with money is often a big attractant. What is the common offending the gender of the person that's usually being imagined if it's a male pedophile? Is it tending to still be heterosexual? Majority heterosexual, but not as much of a majority as you would guess. For offenders against adults, practically all against women. For offenders against children, 60%ish,

so it's majority or female, but not really the almost exclusive. And significantly overrepresented in terms of male to male attraction. Correct. Still some question, why? There is some truth to a person who's a sexually atypical one way is often sexually atypical in other ways. So if somebody is attracted to children, you know, they're closer to 50-50 than the, you know, 2-3%, 97% for regular adult gays.

Another part of it is that there's just less sexual differentiation in pre-pubescent children. sexual differentiation in pre-pubescent children. If your brain is attracted to, you know, a child-like form, change a haircut. There's not much morphological difference between a seven-year-old boy and girl, but there's a huge morphological difference. You can see it, you know, across the room between a 20-year-old, you know, young man, young woman. So it's also easy to imagine that the brain just doesn't care as much if it's attracted to children as when it's attracted to adults because the shapes are... That's dimorphism, yeah, interesting. Okay, so this is a conversation that I had about a year ago, and I continue to try and have it in the right company when I can.

Are child sex dolls ethical in your view? Yes. In that I've never heard, and I've been a part of many such debates, I've never heard anybody give me any kind of an argument that holds water. It's either, oh my God, that's going to cause pedophilia, neither stack of brain scans that says, no, it won't, or they're just kind of grossed out, which is not an ethical concern. So what did the brain scans tell you? Again, the way that the brain is different and the way that it formed, this isn't anything a person chose.

It's not a person, anything a person can re-choose or roll the dice again. There's not areas or volumes of the brain that change with exercise or dyslexia skills. These are, as I say, in every meaningful way, it's like a sexual orientation. It's just kind of built in, born with it, and all we can do is accommodate it. So if we have something that might help, no good evidence that it'll hurt, and the only argument that anybody can give is their emotional discomfort, Well, if emotional discomfort were a good enough reason, we'd be back to the anti-gay days. Do you have any evidence to say that it's not a gateway drug? Evidence to say that it's not, that's not a question science can answer.

A question science can answer. It's called proving the null hypothesis. In science, we start with these things are not related until somebody shows that they are. It's not possible to prove that things are not related. You would be able to. Because it's always possible that somebody later will produce evidence that there is. So as I say, let's say that you introduced a bunch of child sex dolls into a non-offending group of pedophiles and you then saw a greater increase in the number of real, the amount

of real world harm that went on because of the introduction of them. There's, uh, nobody's ever seen that kind of pattern, but I'm not sure any jurisdiction yet has had a situation where they weren't available. All of a sudden there was whatever legal precedent. Now they are available. So all of a sudden there are 10,000 of them. And we can look for an uptick. There's never been that kind of natural experiment. The only offense which happens in any frequency, that co-occurse in any frequency, is

total pornography, use, downloading, hoarding. When somebody, there are people who just, you know, threw internet stings, that's the extent of their crime, you know, usually there's a very, very thorough investigation of, you know of any children in that guy's environment. And rarely do they find anybody who was physically or one-on-one interfered with it, that relatively rare. The other way around happens with some co-occurrence. When an actual hands-on offense comes to light and then they go through the guy's computers then as I say more often a couple of percent of the time a substantial chunk of those

they will find a child born. So if we were going to guess our best educated guess would be a similar would be a similar pattern that it would be elevated. Somebody willing to break a law is also going to be willing to break a smaller law, if I can call the child, offense that, but to do the relatively innocuous things before they go the distance. But of the ones who write, find, also, a pro-social fantasy is written stuff, fiction, whatever. Somebody who finds an inoffensive way of doing it, nobody's found a connection going the other way. That's interesting to think about the fact that a fiction, a story, which is written, or I guess illustrations as well, perhaps, is a way... What are drawings?

Yes, drawings would be a way to... I mean, it's a difficult question to work out. Should there be an ethical, no-extinality way to help people in this community suffer less whilst minimizing real-world harm. That's one of the most difficult questions ethically that I can think of. Yup. And it doesn't fit in a tweet. It does not fit in a tweet. It does not fit in a tweet.

No, 260 characters is not long enough for that. But it's a fascinating consideration that, okay, do you want people to suffer unnecessarily? And as I say, it's the final domino in the series, because the entire sexual, again, I'll use the word spectrum of everybody's whatever they're into all of the kinks. This is the hardest one. If we can unravel this one, all the others are, I don't know, deluded as the right word, but a simpler, less fraught version of this toughest one. Let's delve into the spiciest one then. What about people who feel like they're living in the wrong body? What's going on there? Never in my life, I shouldn't say that.

The biggest thing that surprises me by the trans controversies is how fast they've taken over. I mean, we've seen other situations in healthcare and medical healthcare where the people who are supposed to be in charge and making sure things stick to the evidence, there have been slips in the past, multiple personalities, the satanic, panicked, recovered memories, and even physical medicine. Stints, meshes, feeding babies formula instead of mothers nursing their children. I mean, medicine has for some situations made this mistake before. I was surprised, alerted, shocked to see one happen.

I want to say that I was surprised to see one happen in my own field, but it sucks. We have so many so controversial issues, it's always a matter of time. But the thing that surprised me is that unlike, you know, breastfeeding and recovered memories and so on, how fast this one pretty literally went viral. That's the thing that shocked me, how quickly it's moved. People, at the particular phrase phrase being born in the wrong body, you know, perfectly Resinable here and there as I get as a metaphor But people are taking Metaphores as literal truths people are taking subjective evidence and making decisions on it that we normally would preserve for the most solid and objective

on it that we normally would reserve for the most solid and objective evidence. We're sending into surgery to operate and remove healthy tissue, but giving it the same bar of evidence that we would use for taking out a tumor. All of which is on top of, even though everybody keeps saying, oh, you need mental health professionals and you need a robust diagnosis, nobody knows how to do that. We can't predict which of these kids, if any, or of what proportion will benefit versus not. So we have the least knowledge, the least outcomes, and the least ability to correctly pick out which one in these hundred will benefit and we're applying the most dramatic interventions available to us. I mean, it's often been one of the advocates for transition for adults who have lived part of their life, know what they're sacrificing, but we had much more solid evidence for them than for children, but we're treating child cases as if we had the level of evidence

and the objective, you know, reliable indications that we just don't have. If in the future we do, great. If we come up with a good way to pick out the correct one and not misdiagnose the other 99, great, but we're not there yet. We're operating on the wrong ones. I'm going to guess as well that because this has had such rapid takeoff, especially when it comes to I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get to, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get , I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to

get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going who go through gender reassignment surgery or who take hormone blockers to stop themselves going through puberty or to limit puberty once it begins. Okay, what are the life outcomes in terms of satisfaction like for these children when they become adults? And you know, this is a political football that is easy to be kicked around by whichever side. You know, the right will happily roll out somebody that wants to detransition and say that they should have gone through a ton more consent. And then the left will roll out some young 14-year-olds that took their life because they felt like they weren't whatever.

And you just go, okay, I want to try and cut through some of the bullshit here. I guess that looking at what happens over longer-term studies would be one way to do that. Take a longer-tud a longitudinal study of it, but given that we don't allow children to vote, smoke, drink, have sex, drive a car, in the UK you can't buy an energy drink until you're 16 years old, you can't buy a red bull until you're 16, you can't have sex, but you can change your gender. Like that, that to me, it, there is a risk that you're running in trying to find out whether this is right or not in allowing a big swath of children to go through something which could potentially damage them. But on the other side of that, what if this turned

out to be like the, the pedophile debate that we're having early run and it's, oh, well, maybe the outcomes in this are absolutely great. I don't think that that's going to be the case. I think that I would be unbelievably surprised if it was. I have no idea. Well, okay, let's start off. Have you got any idea what is happening in the brains of people who are transgender?

Is there anything that's a signature which is going on? Are there any common threads? Yes and no. The studies of the brain in trans populations, the study of the brain in sexual in sexuality have found. Homosexuality is on the brain, gender identity is not. But very many trans people are also homosexual, relative to their birth sex. So depending on who's in your study, you'll get different confusing mixes because the stuff in the brain that's there because of homosexuality is easy to mistake for stuff in the brain for transactuality. But when you pile it all together, homosexuality is in the brain, both male and female, gender

identity is not. But some of the studies compared homosexual transactuals with heterosexual cis people and said see transactuality in the brain when, no, what they found was homosexuality in the brain. So that's the, as I say, people will cite whichever part, whichever studies line up with their, with their belief system. Now there are other things in the brain. There are other, that's the part that's relevant for children.

Adults show a completely different pattern. When I say adults, I mean people who didn't really start becoming gender dysphoric until adulthood. They knew they were different. They had, you know, some, they were a little bit odd sometimes, especially socially when they were young. But basically heterosexual, usually married, almost always male. How do wife has kids? And then in their 30s or 40s,

decide, you know, before it's too late. A Caitlyn Jenner kind of a profile would never have picked the person out of a crowd, not a whiff of femininity about them until they get to a point in life where, you know, before it's too late, I got to try this. Completely different pattern, completely different pattern from the highly effeminate or tomboyish ones in kid where they stick out like a sore thumb and when they can have his gay you go surprise surprise. That adult onset type also seems to have a brain signature to it, but unrelated to sexual orientation unrelated to homosexuality. It's related to a pattern unto itself and related to a parapheralia. The

trans community hate hate hate hate this idea because it makes that kind of trans person seem less genuine when the evidence doesn't say that. The evidence act usually is much stronger for their transition than the kids. But it's called auto-guinephilia. These are kind of like men who are not just into searching for the brain looking for women in the environment. It wants to project signals of that femininity to the environment. It's like they're attracted to the woman within. And that motivates a large chunk of cross-dressers, not the drag queen knee type, but the more, you know, it's part of their sex thing. For people with other atypical sexualities, again, it will often have a cross-dressy or fetishy

element to it. And for some people, you know, it's strong enough and concrete enough that they actually live perfectly healthy, perfectly healthy, launches female. And that fetish is called autogonophilia, dirty word in large chunks of the trans community. And a popular idea in other chunks, take your pick. Okay. So they also seem to be different to the brain, but because of the parapheralia, rather than because of the sexual orientation. And I think because they're mostly the activists, they want to treat the children the way they wish they were treated when they were that age, even though these are unrelated phenomena. They have nothing to do with each other. So the brain is in there,

but it's not in there and the, uh, you have a trans brain. That's, that's not it. It's, you have a gay brain. And for some people, it's kind of like you're so gay, you really might be happy. You're living as the other sex. And for some people, it's, yep, you're really autogonophilic. You might be so autogonophilic, you might actually be happy you're living as the other sex. So unrelated motivations, they just, when they describe their subjective experience, they use the same words. Like the patient comes in,

duck, I have a headache, stress headache, head injury, migraine. They will all say headache, their descriptions will sound the same, but the best thing for these people are completely unrelated to each other. I have a friend who is trans and we threatened slash encouraged her to go to a strip club at some point. And the fear in her eyes are at the potential of having to see a lady potentially naked in front of her was huge. Is that... Your friend was trans, which way?

So male to female still with the male bits. Okay. But just did not want to see a vagina at all. That seems like, I don't know what that is. That seems like the opposite of what organic failure, but it's not. It's definitely feminine, or.

Yes, very, very much so. Yeah, yeah, I see that pattern. Why? What's going on there? going on there. When I run into people like that of my gay friends, you know, breasts are one thing, but the vagina is just icky. Yeah, okay, I know what you mean. What about the correlation between the transcommunity and autism? Fascinating. I think this is another one of those Z producing both X and Y. I

think the thing in the brain that's atypical, the part of the brain that manifests social relatedness, mirror neurons, our natural herd instincts, something unusual with, as I say, the social instincts, which include the sexual instincts. And with that a bit off, you know, that gives us autism, can also give us borderline personality disorder,

which is again, very extreme hyper-emotional kinds of relationships. And in a certain kinds of fetishes and autogynophilia, which again is just a neurologically-based social set of instincts. So I think of that massive tissue didn't develop in the usual way. These things start correlating because they're all related to that same clump of social neuroanemony. What did you mean when you said that gender identity is not in the brain if autism is something which is in the brain?

Am I being thick here? It, you know, autism is in the brain and it's auto-gainophilia, the sexual interest pattern that's in the brain. Okay. But having that sexual interest pattern and just using it as masturbation fantasy, living a perfectly happy life versus I have it and want to change my body. Okay. So it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds to me a little bit like your

proposed stance when it comes to people that are trans is that it is an overshooting of continuation of sexual orientation, like just way, way, way beyond where we see gay or lesbian at the moment. Is that right? Yes. Sometimes we'll leave a joke about it. Remember the Kinsey scale, zero to six. Now and then you'll meet somebody who's an 11. Right.

Okay. That's an interesting way to frame it. Okay, so autism. So the difference between hit and homo is very big, but the difference between cis homo and trans homo is very slight. So we can detect these differences, but we can't distinguish these two from each other, maybe in the future we will, but right now. And this is why a lot of my gay friends, Douglas Murray, Andrew Doyle, both of them have concerns around the trans movement being rehabilitated homophobia.

And I think it's Andrew that uses this example of a guy who is a father and he had a son that was super-affeminate and wanted to transition and wanted to become a girl. And then they, I don't know whether they went through surgery or not, but they certainly at least renamed this boy into a girl. And they interviewed the father afterward. And he said, you know what it is? I'm just really happy that I don't have to see my little boy mincing around the garden anymore. And you go, oh, that's just homophobia.

Like, you just really didn't want a gay son, and for you, it's easier to believe that you've got a trans daughter than a gay son. I hear that story a lot. Again, I don't want to say, I have no idea, but proportion of cases that represents, but I hear that story and that kind of story

over and over again, that there's some secondary reason or there's some tangential motivation that makes this a path of least resistance rather than the best among the options. Is it India or some Arab country that's got the highest rate of trends? Iran. Iran, yeah, because you're not allowed to be gay, but you can be trans. So this is that's like a government mandated bureaucratic version of that. Okay, well, I mean, that the fact that you see it as a almost like a single continuation, like a single continuum, sorry, from trans female to trans male with everything in between and it's just sexual orientation, sexual orientation takes you so far.

The degree of a version to the other sex is so great that you sometimes want to almost re, you do want to repurpose your own body in order to fit the way that you see the world. It's fascinating and it goes together with several of the other fetishes, the parapherelias. We often think of these them as having three dimensions. You know, attracted to male versus female, attracted to old versus young, and attracted to, you know, person out in the environment versus being that person. And so we also get people, you know, if they're attracted to young the purifiers, we also get, you know, the age play fetishists, you know, the diaper fetishes, they want to be the child.

They're a child That's turned inward. So, we have, as I say, so you can be attracted to women in the world, you can be attracted to the woman inside. You can be attracted to children in the world, you can be attracted to the child inside. So as I say, and my guess, fantasy on my part, is that this is a mirror neuron thing. This is part of our social neuro anatomy. That's just tweaked or twirked or not quite right. And it has these various side effects.

Now, of course, the idea of projecting sexual receptivity, well, that long predates our species. So the cross wiring between what sexual clues to give off and what sexual clues to be on the lookout for, these are parallel nerve fibers. It's not hard to, you know, if they didn't myelinate properly, if they didn't de-sify properly, if there were just two few of them, they work like, it's like a hologram. If you take out half a hologram, you don't get half of the picture, you get the whole picture, but a bit blurry. That's how the brain works. So if you just are missing a few

of the neurons, you know, if it's a lower density, you know, these can't distinguish as clearly what I'm supposed to be projecting versus what I'm supposed to be on the lookout for, and we kind of get these. And that's why if you're into one sexual atypicality, you may be into several others at the same time. So as I say, these interest kind of clump somebody who's attracted to amputees, stump fetishes, they're called. And then the one with a long funding name, Apple, Temda, Philia, they want to be the amputee. So interesting. I don't know why everybody is in a sex researcher. It's, I feel like I should have been in a different life.

Okay, so what about the relationship between the trans community and suicide? Because this a lot of the time is, seems to be one of the side because this a lot of the time is seems to be one of the propositions that's put forward about why transitioning is so important. That's it's really really what can I say out loud. Unfortunately, it is to understate it. How the situation and the myth of the situation, and this is another one where the myth of that situation can easily be making the problem worse. Nobody was talking about trans and suicide until 2018, and it started with a particular paper. First author's name was Tuming.

Survey, which claimed, you know, headlines all over, you know, large proportion, 40 percent, you know, of these kids, you know, attempt suicide or ideas about suicidality. Oh my God, we have a correlation and everybody was after the causality races. We have a correlation, after the causality races. We have a correlation, transphobia is causing these people, these kids to commit suicide. Not with the paper said, in fact, practically the reverse of what the paper said and the paper itself, and then the headlight's describing the paper, getting it backwards. The biggest, biggest, biggest mistake people are making is that they are confusing suicide to be a synonym for suicide delity. Again, to the public, those are synonyms. To an expert, these are different phenomena. Suicide, very, very rare, mostly male, mostly middle age, mostly impulsive, and mostly with

lethal means in a person with a sincere intent to die. Suicidality is the ideation, the threats, the calls for help. It represents an indication of distress, not an intent to die. Mostly female, mostly adolescent, mostly uses, I don't want to say insincere, they are sincere cries for help, but what they need is attention and therapy. It's not an intent to die. Less lethal. Rarely lethal at all. Lhality is elevated. I mean, it's higher than baseline, but it's not the 40% of these kids are going to kill themselves, which is the emotional, political manipulation of it. That's not true.

This is, as I say, genuine psychological distress for which they need therapy. Unfortunately, what it's being used as is essentially, give me what I want or I'll kill myself. Oh my God, that makes up whatever they were asking for, a medical necessity. No, when a kid has a tantrum, giving them the lovely pop will keep them quiet for a minute, but that's not good parenting. It's, we need to deal with the tantrums on the... Now, the 40% ish, that's not a trans thing. GLBT in general, it is an adolescent stress thing, adolescents with any mental health problem in the book. Roughly 40% if you ask them,

some time in their life will have had some suicidal ideation. I don't want to say it's normal. Again, it's a cause for therapy. It's not, they're on their way to death if we don't do anything. Also, the idea strikes me as a bit weird that, you know, people are saying, you know, it's 5, 6, 7% of the population, 40% of them are suicidal. And no one ever noticed until five years ago? As I said, the whole story's a bit crazy. Anyway, so the story is about suicideality, kids in genuine distress. But they keep saying, you know,

when they put out a survey saying, oh my God, it's the kids who transition, not as distressed. And as I say, we're going from the correlation to causality races. Atta, atta, atta, atta, all of the clinical criteria, you know, you need a robust psychological assessment. And if a person with, you know, profound mental health issues, you have to take care of those, those first. So those kids wouldn't be getting transition services. They're

getting filtered out by the gatekeeping system. So what happens when I take a survey of everybody? I get all of the people some of whom were rejected because they weren't healthy enough and I get the ones who transitioned from who the poorest functioning ones were filtered out. So when I take a survey, the ones who transitioned have higher, have higher mental health. Not because transition gave them higher mental health, it's that the ones with better mental health were allowed to transition in the first place. They were pre-selected. Yeah, this pre-selected group. That's why you can't go from correlation to causation. That's why it seems like it's lower suicidality and so on. Even though transition is not the common link.

The common link is general mental health, peer functioning and family functioning. So the association, the association, as I say, with suicidality and trans-hydolescence, there's a correlation, but not a causal one. This is an indication of distress, indicating people in Gen... as I say, who needs psychotherapy? The studies with which suggest improvement? These kids weren't getting just hormones. They were getting therapy at the same time.

We have no way of knowing, you know, their mental health improved because of the pills or it shots or the mental health improved because they were getting mental health treatment. We can't guarantee that that was the source of the improvement, but we sure should figure that out before we start removing healthy tissue. I suppose if the concerns of people on the internet about

poorly researched transitioning for children occurring quickly over the next few years, you will end up with a little bit more of a control for this because you're not going to have children that are being screened as thoroughly. This gatekeeping does seem to be slipping away unless I'm reading the wrong things on the internet, which I'm most certainly probably am. My point being that you're going to be able to control at least a little bit more for how much mental health robustness the individual has and also the amount of therapy that they go through if the rumors about their trans and the kids with you walk in you give them a hundred grand and they go out of there with a vagina plastic or whatever. If that's the case then you

would have the opportunity to study this more. Would that be right to say? The way things seem to be going internationally, I don't think it's quite that pattern. Europe has already figured this out. Finland, Sweden, the UK, France, Spain is now grappling with it. They've now pretty much put an end to the social transition on demand and one after another, their healthcare departments are saying, you know, hormones and blockers only as part of a registered experiment.

This is no longer in a treatment, of course, as a matter of course. So your absurdity put a stop to it and now any liberalization of that gatekeeping will be one experiment at a time, which is where we were 10 years ago before all this went crazy. In the US, the customer knows best. These clinics aren't recording outcomes because they already keep claiming lots of success

and nobody wants to document the lack of success. So if the patient goes away, they don't want to go find that patient and find out that it was a patient who regretted it. Sure enough, the insurance companies and so on and so on and now, you know, the political activists and all of the people whose faces are on the line, you know, and we're off to the races. and all of the people whose faces are on the line, and we're off to the races. So with the political and financial pressures so enormous in the US, it's hard for me to imagine a real world scenario

in which an honest attempt to gather a matched control group will exist. There are gonna be, my patients were still here, which are whatever percentage happy ones. And then the who knows what proportion we will never find out. And they don't want to find out lost to follow up. We're not going to call them regretters.

They just stop coming back for their shots. Well, I think that what you're seeing is perhaps yet another externality of what happens with a paid-for medical system with the incentives aligned like you've got in America. The only country in the world, I think, except for Australia, where drug companies are allowed to advertise on television. And for someone that lived the first 30 years of his life in the UK, coming out and hearing ask your doctor about at the end of an advert is so bizarre. Like, well, don't ask my doctor about this thing. I tell him what's wrong and he tells me what I'm

so it's not, I don't go and record. It's not like a barbershop. I don't get to go over a pick and mix. I'm going to go and say, oh, yeah, I've heard about this particular drug. I really think that I should take it. So, yeah, I think that part of it. I almost wanted to run it. It's like I want to do mock commercials. American medical system with a patient knows best. Yep. Yeah. It's very bizarre, very, very, very bizarre. And I kind of get this sense. One of the next battlegrounds that I could see if I was to make a little bit of a prediction. I would think that circumcision is going to be something which will become a more of a hot topic over the next few years. In the UK circumcision outside of the Jewish community is basically not a thing. In the US,

non-circumcision is basically not a thing. Like, way, way, and I tweeted about it the other day because Bill Maher had posted about it on his podcast. It just like, like some of Braille's stuff, but this was such a brainlet take. It was completely insane. And I tweeted about it and a bunch of people came up in the replies and it seems like there's a big financial incentive there as well. Like a huge financial incentive for procedures, circumcision procedures to go ahead. I was like, who's making money off tiny little foreskins, but apparently there is a market for everything. And that's another one of them. So yeah, when the incentives get aligned in this way, all manner of weird oddities and

strange externalities come out on the other side. That's, I would not be at all surprised if a circumcision is in the distance. Or we're at the end of circumcision, no wait a second, let me work on this. There's a better, I haven't found it yet, but there's a better joke in the end. The end of the end. The tip of the end. The end of the tip.

But for the American system, that question hasn't been asked nearly in the way that I think it should. Not circumcision, but it's even though within the US, they keep saying, all the American medical associations, yada, yada, yada, yada, they're missing the key word. The key word is all the American medical associations, which are now pretty isolated relative to the rest of the world. That's the question in the rest of the world with socialized medicine. There's a committee deciding this and deciding where the money goes and what meets what level of criteria. you know meets what level of criteria in the US, they, we depend on, you know, these professions to self-regulate. Well, they dropped the ball on this one really at and being perfectly explicit.

Not for the children's interests, for their own guild interests. Doctors don't want the government telling doctors what to do. Period. At the moment, it happens to be about trans children, but the medical establishment is not protecting or doing anything, but trans children. They're just keeping there from there being the beginnings of a slippery slope of the government telling doctors what to do. That's what all of these medical associations are agreeing on. This just happens to be the issue of it. This just happens to be the issue over which they're saying it. None of them have engaged in any of the kind of systematic scientific review Europe has, but the US has not. You know, their policies just don't cite the research or everybody keeps saying, decision

has to be made by a mental health professional. Have you noticed that the mental health professionals don't have a treatment? All of this is left up to guesswork really. And again, they've said explicitly, when WPath removed, removed, there are no more age minimums. Took all of them, all of them out. At age minimums were whichever kind of transition. Zero citations cited for justification, but what the person in charge of the chapter said was they didn't doctors getting sued in case they gave whatever transition to a service to a kid under that age. I'm sorry, but isn't that what standards are for? So it's a document that essentially says, use clinical judgment, and you shouldn't be held responsible for the outcomes of your decisions. If the medical systems, the medical establishment has not been able to see through to the science on this, what can, what should, right.

So to me, it's, if you can't figure this one out, if you can't be trusted with this, what can you be trusted with this, what can you be trusted with? And so it's time for the US, as I say, to do what the rest of the world has done and take out all the middle people. And it's not like the US has great healthcare outcomes to be proud of. Dr. James Canter, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do online and keep up to date with you, where should they go? Uh, that's a good question.

Usually Twitter or jamescanter.org. James, I appreciate you. Thank you for the day. Pleasure's mine. Offends