Modern Wisdom - #622 - David Geary - Why Are Differences Between Men & Women Being Denied?

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

David Geary is a cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychology professor at The University of Missouri and an author. Men and women are different. This should not be a controversial statement, and yet it is. Thankfully David has spent a career assessing differences between men and women in every domain from physical to psychological and behavioural to cognitive. Expect to learn the real reason why women are underrepresented in STEM, why achieving true gender equality in prosperous countries is impossible, the massive differences between men's and women's brains, why strength is not the most compelling argument against trans athletes in female sports, why there has been such a rapid increase in transgender youths and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out David's writing - https://quillette.com/author/david-c-geary/  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

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Geary. He's a cognitive, developmental and evolutionary psychology professor at the University of Missouri and an author. Men and women are different. This should not be a controversial statement, and yet it is. Thankfully, David has spent an entire career assessing differences between men and women in every domain, from physical to psychological and behavioral to cognitive. Expect to learn the real reason why women are underrepresented in STEM, why achieving true gender equality in prosperous countries is impossible, the massive differences between men's and women's brains, why strength is not the most compelling argument against trans athletes

in female sports, why there has been such a rapid increase in transgender youths and much more. This episode is absolutely awesome. David's insights are fantastic. Sex differences are absolutely fascinating. It's perfect. I live for these kinds of insights. There is so much cool stuff in here. There are easy rebuttals for the next time

that somebody tells you the only reason that men and women are different because of socialised and learned responses. It's awesome. I really,, hoping that you're going to remember when new episodes go up. That's not very cool. So go to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the screen or there is a plus in the top right hand corner on Apple Podcasts. I thank you very much. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Woop.

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a 30 day money back guarantee. That's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome David Geary. Why do you think the discussion about sex differences between men and women has become so hotly contested recently? Yeah, great, great question. I think it's always been hotly contested to some extent. It just kind of flares up and then down, just depending on conditions. I think one of the main drivers is there are many individuals who don't want to believe that there's biological

bases to anything. And if there's a biological bases to anything, it's going to show up in sex differences. And there are gender activists who don't want to believe that there are differences between men and women that have a biological basis to them. Therefore, they don't want to consider that those potential differences contribute to socially important outcomes like the percentage of males and computer science for engineering or teaching or whatever it might be. And so you did a bunch of research, right? Looking at STEM and seeing what it was that contributed

to women's lower participation in STEM subjects. Right, yeah. So we looked at, we've looked at a variety of sex differences in a number of things. In one 2018 study, we looked at the proportion of women, college students, who were getting degrees in inorganic sciences. So computer science, engineering, physics, and so forth. And we plotted that against things like gender equality, which is, would be a high gender equal country,

would be one that they tend to be generally pretty wealthy, liberal. There's high levels of female participation and the labor force is women in polarmunt or congress or whatever it might be, a lot of women in higher ed and so forth. So the standard argument has been for the last four or five decades is that as countries approach that type of wealth and liberal openness that basic psychological cognitive and other sex differences will begin to disappear. So we looked at that generally.

We looked across countries and we found the exact opposite of that. That as countries became more gender equal, there was proportionately fewer women going into these inorganic sciences. They were going into other areas, presumably. So the gap in these particular STEM fields actually increased as societies became more open to women participating in a variety of kind of cultural endeavors. Have you got any idea whether this is due to interest sorbilities? Probably a couple of different things. Interest for sure. There are sex differences and interest in science generally and there are sex differences and particularly

interest in mechanical types of things, how inorganic things work. In terms of abilities, probably one of the primary movers is intra-individual strength. So what are you best at reading or math or reading or science or whatever it might be? And throughout the world, girls are generally, their best subject is generally reading, meaning that their comparative advantage isn't fields that are more reading heavy than math or science heavy. Even if their overall levels of math and science are high, or even higher than boys, if their strength is reading,

they're still more likely to go into other fields than STEM related. That's very interesting that it's not necessarily, you could have, let's say that women were better than men in maths on average, but that women were even more better at reading. They're going to be predisposed to do the thing that they are best at.

We all take pride in the things that we feel we're very competent at, and if we have this biological predisposition that is a sex difference, why would it be surprising that we would go away and flourish in those areas? Well, yeah, it's not actually surprising at all, It is not actually surprising at all, but in our mind, because it's just a rational choice. You're going to go into areas in which you're going to have a comparative advantage, where you're going to do relatively better than you would in other areas. So if you're a poor reader and you're reasonably good at math and science, you're probably going to go into a tech field. of math and science, you're probably going to go into a tech field. If you're really good at reading and much better at reading, then tech-related sorts of things, you're probably going to go into humanities or something similar. Why is it the case? Why would it be the case

that females are better at reading and that males seem to be better at maths. Give me the ancestral justification for why men should be better at counting things and women should be better at reading things, given that both of those have only been around for a few thousand years. Right. Yeah, so both reading and mathematics are evolutionarily novel abilities. And so you can't say that well, women evolved to be good readers and many evolved to do math. It just doesn't make sense. And probably if anything, the good mathematicians and recent evolutionary history probably have

had below average reproductive success, you know, just wild guess there. But in terms of reading, if you look at brain imaging studies and cognitive studies and so forth, it is an adaptation of the language system and other systems like theory of mind, you know, understanding characters and so forth understand plots. And women have advantages in certain language areas and they have advantages in theory of mind and so forth. So the underlying basis upon which reading skills are developed, there's a sex difference in favoring girls and women.

When it comes to math, there's no math gene per se. I mean, there is a kind of inherent sense of quantity and so forth, but it's not a very sophisticated skill. And if we look at overall mean differences in math, they're pretty small. Where we see the differences are in areas that involve spatial abilities. So, certain areas of geometry, solving word problems actually has a spatial component to it because you can sketch out their relations in a complex word problem that helps you kind of set up, and solve that problem. And that is driving the sex difference in math levels to a large extent when we see those differences. There are also more men than women at the high end

of math performance. That was at one point a very big gap. It's closed since the 90s. There's maybe three to one men than women at the high end. But it's been relatively flat, so to say. I would imagine, it seems to me that the discussion around, we need to get more women into STEM. We need to get more women into STEM. We need to get more men into heal,

has very much dampened down as the stark difference in college admission and then like completion rate between women and men with two women for every one man completing a four year US college degree ish on average. Seven times more men dropped out of college during COVID than women.

It's huge. I notice that the discussion around pushing women further into higher education appears to have kind of fallen by the wayside. We haven't had that be quite so vociferous as it was. And that seems to have been, I would have said in the last sort of three to four years that I've really noticed it.

Yeah, yeah. The, you know, if we go back that there's a long literature on kids' liking of school, you know, going back more than 100 years, and girls have always kind of liked school more than boys, sitting there, listening to adults and, you know, being conscientious doing your, you know, that's more, it's easier for girls to adapt to that kind of environment than it is, especially for young guys. They just are not really, it's not really their thing. And as higher ed opened, there were clearly restrictions on in discouragement of women going into college, going back 60 years or so. As those restrictions abated, we had more women flowing

into higher ed than men. Now we have about a 60-40 ratio of completion in the U and a lot of Western countries. Yeah, so bringing attention to that highlights the disadvantage that boys and men now have in educational outcomes. And that might be why, you know, here is much about it because the gender activists don't want people to think about it. But it's a problem. It's a problem on multiple levels.

One is it's distorting the operational sex ratio for young adults, more educated women than men, leads to more competition among women for a smaller base of educated and ambitious. Do you know what I've deemed that? I need you to come up with a meme to describe that. So I've deemed it the tall girl problem. Tall girl problem. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's associated with the delays

and marriage, you know, increased divorce rates, more rejectification, more sexy selfies, more casual sex, more unprotected sex. Right, right. You know, back, back, back to the hippie and disco days, types of things for young educated adults Yeah, you know, which is whatever. I used to blame it on the Bee Gees But apparently it's a little more complicated than that. Yeah, you've got the sex ratio Thing or or or the tall girl thing tall girl problem. It is Yeah, the other problem is is that the US and and a number of other highly developed countries

are losing the industrial base that would provide pretty good paying jobs for working class guys that really got them integrated into the workforce, integrated into the broader culture, so forth. And now a lot of those jobs are disappearing and you have a lot of guys that are probably pretty good at spatial mechanical types of things, but they're not pursuing school. And a lot of them are pulling back. It's a huge number, living at home still, not really engaged socially, not engaged economically. And it's a potential tinderbox for society if things really collapse economically. You are touching on all of my favorite catastrophes and crises here, David.

So, first one, Richard Reeves book of boys and men. Were you familiar with that? Did you get to read that last year? I don't think I've read that. Oh, you would. It's very short. Super short read, only about 150, 200 pages, I think. Fantastic.

So it's, he is a policy-wank guy from Washington, DC, who is looking at structural issues that boys and men are facing, education, employment, and then in the home, you would love that. So first off, put that on your list. Secondly, Nicholas Eberstadt, men without work. Are you familiar with him? No, no. Oh my.

Yeah. Sorry. I've read the basic economic papers, but not the popular press books. Got you. Yeah, so his, he was on the show a couple of weeks ago and he said, there's this cohort of prime working aged 22 to 55 year old men, seven million of which are unemployed and not seeking work. On average, they spend000 hours per year watching screens, 50% of that time is on prescription drugs whilst smoking weed, and 2 thirds of that cohort live in a household which claims at least one disability benefit.

Right. Right. Absolutely wild. Huge, huge problem. That is a huge problem. I mean, partially due to the changes, you know, increases in world trade and changes. And as I said, the manufacturing base. I also wonder if a lot of the cultural, social rhetoric about things like toxic masculinity and so forth and promoting girls

in education, which is fine. But it's often seen by activists as a zero sum sort of game. You don't want to acknowledge any issues that boys have because that might take away from what girls are, the extras that girls are getting. And it's creating a real problem. I couldn't agree more. One thing that you touched on before was the potential Tinder box. Let's roll all of these together. Given the fact that we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men that we've

ever seen, around about 30% of men haven't had sex in the last year, aged 18 to 30, around about 50% of men say that they're not looking for short-term or long-term relationships. We have this massive cohort around about seven million men just in the US, 22 to 55, that are not looking for work, not, and also not employed, also not in education, employment, or training. And yet, we haven't seen the in-kind increase of killings and anti-social behavior, spray painting cars, setting stuff on fire, pushing over granny, etc. What do you attribute the fact that young male syndrome has all the raw materials to occur and yet we haven't seen it? What do you think is going on there?

Right. Yeah. Typically, as you said, I mean, have these disaffected disengaged men, you get higher rates of crime and violence and a variety of other social ills. I think you hit on it. I mean, they have something to keep them occupied. They've got internet porn or whatever they're watching on the screens and they're getting some flow of income, either from disability payments or extended unemployment

or they're living with their parents or something like that. So they are kind of marginally satisfied probably with things, but what happens if the US and these countries go into a massive recession and these benefits and other sorts of things have to be cut. And it's basically they're being paid off to be quiet and just deal with their situation. Oh, that's a very interesting way to frame it.

There is some existential malaise, just this ambient sense that you're not needed. Structurally, socioculturally, archetypally in terms of the role that you play in the wider world. And the, how would you say, rich social safety net financially that a lot of men are offered? Doesn't allow them to buy a palace, but it gives them enough money to keep the porn Subscription and the internet taking over which means that social media can continue to sedate video games etc etc Yeah, I think um, right where I've arrived at is a sedation hypothesis that you've got porn video games, social media that are kind of nerfing the desire for status seeking for goal orientation and for reproduction and giving them a titrated dose. This is enough. It means that they don't need to go

and do it. Therefore, the lack of it doesn't hurt quite so much. It's not enough to be satisfied, but it's enough to not go and burn everything down. It's fascinating. I mean, this is a problem that I'm basically completely obsessed by at the moment. One other thing to just kind of round out what we spoke about at the beginning, is that the gender equality paradox? Is that what we're referring to, the fact that as you get increasing egalitarianism, you have more of a sex difference in terms of what people go into. Right, yeah, so that, we call it

the gender equality paradox in STEM, in this particular article. But you also see larger sex differences in a variety of other things, such as personality, spatial abilities, a variety of things that, you know, as people get wealthier and there are more options, social and economic options available to them, they're better able to express their own individual preferences.

And we've argued that as you're better able to express your own individual preferences, any inherent sex differences or any inherent individual differences will be better expressed in those contexts than those contexts that have for a variety of reasons, more restricted opportunities. So as the real world constrains your choices less by being more free, more open, more degrees of freedom, more opulent, etc. That allows you to fully follow whatever it is that you care about the most. Therefore, these sex differences we seem to see increase. Right. Yeah. What is the response from sex difference denial groups about why the gender equality paradox exists then? Well, um, yeah, when, when we, uh, uh, he's worked so hard and I did this, you know, this 2018 study, you know, we walked through, got through all the data and we thought it was pretty interesting,

but not, you know, we didn't think it was going to be as big of a deal, at least I didn't think it was going to be as big of a deal as it turned out to be, mostly because it wasn't that surprising. And it wasn't that surprising because other people had found like increases in personality, differences and so forth across cultures. But the response to it was pretty negative. We got a lot of emails. The editors of the journal apparently got a lot of emails, including attacks on us and pressure for them to retract the article, so forth. They didn't do that.

There was a commentary on it that did get published. I think just because the editor got tired of getting so many commentaries, he could finally say, well, we're already published one when we're not been doing any others. That showed that the gender equality paradox didn't, well, one, they complained about how we defined proportion of males and females in stem fields, which was just kind of a no, you know, just kind of a stupid thing. But then they took actually a study that he's been and I put together called the Biggie, which was an alternative measure of well-being, sex differences and well-being, rather than the gender equality measure

that most people look at. What we looked at things like opportunities to complete education, overall healthy lifespan, life satisfaction, things that are equally valid for men and women and boys and girls, rather than something like the proportion of women and parliament, which has a gender activist, and it's very female biased. So when we use the female biased measure,

which is what the activist push for in is a better measure of gender equality, we get the paradox. When we look at our measure, which we developed to make it sex neutral, just because the gender equality stuff is biased, they don't find that, which is what we would expect. But anyway, the authors of that made a big deal of that.

They did a hit piece on Heasbird and I and Buzzfeed. Oh, very reputable. A very response there. Yeah, I had never read Buzzfeed. I never even considered it. You'll be parked in between four outfits to wear on your next hot girl walk and 10 dog memes so good that we can't stop laughing. So I'm glad that they really positioned you appropriately there.

Right. Right. Well, they put in there a lot of ad homin and a lot of comments that the editor and reviewers of their comment to the journal said, you got to take out because this is the support they put it in there. But anyway, now there's this Buzzfeed thing and there's this commentary on our original article. So when people bring up the gender equality paradox and STEM, they can now say, well, this has been debunked. See this Buzzfeed. See this fuck off, dude. Fuck off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's how it's dealt with. You know, you get something into the general media in a commentary somewhere or some counter argument somewhere. And then when somebody brings it up, you don't have to discuss the points. You can just say, well, that's already off the table. It's gone. It's been, you know, the... But speed at our 2018. Yep. The speed at all, 2018.

Yep. Yeah. phenomenal. Okay. And one final thing to sort of round this out, you've used participation in STEM. That seems to be, you know, a very obvious, sex difference that occurs as you get more egalitarianism in a society. Are there any other equally strong or even stronger evidence for the gender equality paradox? Well, one interesting thing is the sex difference in height gets bigger.

Which sounds weird. Yeah, yeah. And that has nothing to do with gender equality actually. It has to do with the overall health of the population, the wealth of the population, medical. Oh, so you're saying in a less prosperous, less egalitarian society, or less prosperous society, egalitarian societies tend to need to be prosperous in order to be able to allow people to choose what they want.

Prosper societies have better medical interventions, food, water, sanitation, etc. Which doesn't nerf the height increases that men's natural genetic disposition would have caused them to get. Am I right here? That's correct. The physical sex differences get bigger because the overall health of the population gets better. And so not only are the psychological sex differences expressed better, the physical sex differences are actually larger. That's a very robust effect.

And I'm looking now at whether that particular fact is correlated with changes in sex differences in certain cognitive abilities, suggesting that as physical health gets better, you know, the brain obviously is going to mature better and fully developed with full potential, then some cognitive sex differences should actually increase along with the sex differences in height. And it's hard to study that a little bit because there's really good data on height across the last century and a lot of country and some places across multiple centuries. But the psychological cognitive tests are more recent, so there isn't as good at data. But there's hints of that. The spatial advantages of men and spatial abilities seems to be increasing along with their increases in height. And it often is positively correlated with the overall health of the population.

So healthier populations with bigger sex differences in height usually have bigger sex differences in spatial abilities. The same seems to be true with women's advantages in certain verbal memory tasks and episodic memory personal experiences and so forth they're better at those and as indicators of overall physical health get better The sex difference they are seem to increase as well. So that ties it into if we tie it into height changes We can better link it to actual, an actual biological mechanism. David, you're absolutely blowing my mind here. This is so interesting.

So in the same way as a prosperous society allows men and women to better choose the life pass that they have. It may also biologically, nutritionally, medically, etc. create a foundation that allows men and women to be more of what they are with regards to their cognition, their capacity, their behavior, which is upstream from a society that allows them to choose what they want to do more. So it predisposes them to a particular type, which would be women. I imagine, you know, if you were able to do the best studies in the world, you might even find that women's social networks become more intricate. They become more nuanced and more subtle in particular ways. This is like, this is one of the most interesting things that I've learned. become more nuanced and more subtle in particular ways.

This is one of the most interesting things that I've learned. This is really, really, really cool. Yeah, there are some interesting behavioral studies looking at in developing nations, looking at things like nutritional health, nutritional supplements for kids who are at risk for stunting, you know, kind of low physical growth, poor physical growth, and so you can look at behavioral competitiveness, physical activity levels, which generally favorite boys over girls. And you can look at, you know, how does supplements, you know, how does improving their health

change the sex differences in rough and tumble play, competitiveness and so forth. And the biggest gains are for boys who are receiving these supplements. And the biggest losers are the boys who don't get them. So some of the sex differences in, you know, just physical activity levels and competitiveness are smaller or disappear in malnourished, you know, poor health kids.

But when you improve their health, these sex differences pop up. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Consistent with, you know, their health, these sex differences pop up. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, consistent with, you know, there, there's a biological foundation to this that is rooted in, you know, physical health, including, you know, brain development. When it comes to sex differences in cognition,

what are the most well-established differences in men's and women's brains? Let's get into the nuts and bolts of what's actually going on here. Sure. Let's traditionally psychologist have been studying sex differences in cognition for a century or so. They focused on verbal abilities, generally math and spatial. Let's take math off the table because it's evolutionarily novel.

It's not that interesting. And in verbal is a big field. It can go anywhere from, you know, how quickly you can name animals that start with the letter A versus analogical reasoning. Girls have advantages and one, boys on another. So it's not clear.

So putting it, I've argued that we really need to think about these cognitive sex differences from a broader evolutionary perspective and think about, okay, what is it that is universal across people no matter where they live? Math isn't because you get it in school or you don't get it at all. And so things that are one thing that is universal that women and girls have advantages on or something that I call at least an aspect of folk psychology. These are skills that allow you to interact with individuals on a one-on-one basis, and more importantly, develop and maintain one-on-one relationships. This would be BFF sorts of relationships.

You'd think about all the skills involved in that, and that would be, you know, language is obviously a good part of it, but also reading facial expressions, you know, making inferences about how they're feeling or thinking based on facial expressions, reading body posture, types of things, vocal intonation theory of mind, which is your skill, it is actually figuring out what's going on with the individual. And if we look at each of those individual skills, girls and women have small to moderate advantages in them. But in the real world, they're working in concert. They're

not just bits and pieces. They're working all together. And if we look at the entire constellation of skills, as they're working together in an interaction or interpreting an interaction, girls and women have fairly large advantages, probably about 85% of them are better than the average guy, or maybe 90% or so. So it's a fairly substantial advantage. There are other areas involved in, you know, dealing with people or groups or whatever, where we see more subtle differences. But it's the one-on-one kind of emotional intelligence. I think some people might call it that.

I think that's what people mean by that. I call it kind of an individual level folk psychology. Girls and women do really well at that. Boys and men do particularly good on what I call folk physics. This is not an academic physics, but it is kind of the foundation for aspects of an academic physics. It involves things like dealing with the physical world, navigating from one place to another, tracking the trajectory of things as they're moving through space, understanding how objects might be manipulated

and used as tools, a mechanical reasoning type of thing. And so boys and men have small, the large advantages in all of those areas. Wow. Okay. What social learning theory? Social learning theory. Well, there is a social learning theory where we learn to, you know, what do you do in this context? You go to a dinner with folks, you know, what are you doing in this context? You know, you go to a dinner with folks, you know, it's your first formal dinner. You've never worn a tie before and you have no idea how to do things. You know, you watch other people and you figure out you kind of imitate what people who seem to know what they're doing or doing.

And so that's a social learning type of thing. And that's a universal as well. I mean, we learn a lot from other. And that's a universal as well. I mean, we learn a lot from other people. There's no doubt about that. But I think you might be seeing social roles theory. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, so social roles is the argument that boys and girls and men and women learn to behave in sex-specific ways. You know, like girls are more communal or nurturing and guys are more agentic, you know, focused on getting things done, being more dominant and so forth. Because they receive either explicit or implicit information from the social environment that they are, that basically tells them, oh, you're a girl, you're a boy, and this is what girls and boys do, and therefore you adhere to these roles. And the argument then is that that's how all these, we're basically blank slate, mentally, psychologically, and

then we kind of develop these roles based from learning from others of the same sex. And that is the argument underlying things like encouraging girls to do this, getting role models, you know, girls and STEM role models, which is fine, I mean, whatever. The problem is, it's well overstated. Boys don't like playing with toy cars and blocks and so forth because their parents have implicitly given them those toys for Christmas or they've seen the advertisements, you know, boys playing with these things on television. They like playing with these things because, you know, if you're playing with a car, it

has a specific type of motion to it. It's a non-biological motion that captures the attention of what's called the dorsal visual stream that feeds into these folk physics centers that I mentioned previously. So there is an early bias in what boys and girls look at. Boys look at physical motion and stuff, and they're attracted to those types of things. Girls look at faces and the details of objects more. And that's, I mean, there is some place for social roles, but it's the extent of its influence is really overstated, in my opinion.

A lot of people, when they talk about sex differences, particularly whether that be in children or as soon as people grow up to be adults, will come up against somebody who either in terms of well-meaning or this is just the way that they see the world, will use social roles theory as well. Look, of course, boys are stronger than girls. They're the ones that are encouraged to do rough and tumble play. Of course, boys are more interested in things than people because they've seen it on TV. Of course, boys are expecting to be more dominant because these are the subtle cues that their parents and the media and everybody else is given to them. For the

people who sit down at Thanksgiving, perhaps, with that one brother or sister or cousin who... Makes sense. ...across as an argument. What are the strongest rebuttals that can dispel this particular myth? Yeah, so there was... Well, one, these differences are universal. I mean, it's not just, you know, the US upper middle class families that see it, I mean, you see it all over the

place. But one important piece of data, well, there are a number of them. I'll tell you one, and I'll tell you more if you want. There was a study done a few decades ago that was a fairly large scale study looking at a couple hundred parents and how they were socializing their kids. So there were, some of them were traditional parents. They'd buy the girls, barbies or dolls or whatever and the boys, car trucks and other parents were more

I don't know if they'd be progressive. I mean, they'd be called progressive today. They back then they were hippies or whatever They were they were they were non-traditional. So they raised their kids say, okay, you know girls can play with with blocks and with toy cars and boys can play with dolls and all that's fine It doesn't make any difference And then the researchers brought the kids into the lab setting and said okay Is it okay for girls to play with trucks and boys to play with dolls those that were Raised in non-traditional family said yeah yeah sure it's fine, no problem. So their beliefs about what's okay and or what's typical or not typical or whatever, mirrored to some extent with their parents said.

But then when you cut them loose and watch how they actually play, they still play in sex typical ways. So their beliefs about kind of what boys and girls should do. And there actually was one thing, but their actual behavior was sex-typical. There's no difference between how boys from traditional and untraditional families played and same for girls. Meaning that the kids are calling the shots here. They're creating their own environments based on what they find interesting and what they want to do. Does this show up in primates as well? Do you have an aisle primates? Yeah, rough and tumble play is pretty common in species where males are bigger and more aggressive than females. And those are typically species if we're looking at primates is pretty common in species where males are bigger

and more aggressive than females. And those are typically species, if we're looking at primates, where there's a lot of male, male fighting and competition in adulthood. Clearly see that in humans, if we look in human history, it's clearly a lot of physical competition, a lot of violence and so forth. The sex differences in physical size go back at least four million years in our ancestors.

It's a long, long evolutionary history of that. Obviously, males and females are bigger than females and modern humans. And we see the sex difference in rough and tumble play. I mean, it just fits very, very nicely with this evolutionary pattern and this pattern of male on male aggression. I remember hearing a while ago that if you give a juvenile female chimp, perhaps, sort of a soft toy that resembles a baby, that they treat it in a different way to the males. Is that right? Have I made this up or was that correct?

That's correct. It was with vervet monkeys and I think it's been replicated maybe with macaques or so. So, right, if you give toys, you know, sex typical toys, the human sex typical, a doll and a truck, big dump truck that they can play with. You do see preferences. The females like the dolls more than the males do. The males are also more likely to approach their novel types of things, and so the risk taking types of things, and so the risk-taking is higher there. Now, there's no toy trucks in MacCack evolutionary history, but again, it could be attractive because of the type of motion in the Dorsal, Ventral Stream associated with navigation and just kind of focusing on large- scale space. I'm fascinated by the fact that the type of toys, it's not just the fact that that figuratively

represents a kind of role perhaps. I would imagine that if you were to look at the sex differences in the trucker community, that it's going to be heavily skewed to one man. But there's also something innate about that movement back and forth. And given the fact that we go back far enough and we do have a common ancestor,

there has to be the sex difference, which at least was maybe there before we split off and we're seeing this play out with Macaxe or whatever else. It might be, what would you say to the people that say, we are more similar than we are different? If you look at the overlap between the dispositions that boys and girls have, that men and women have, you've mentioned there one particular example,

which seems pretty stark, which is the average female is better than 85% of men when it comes to, I think it was reading faces or perhaps it was verbal ability. What would you say to people that say we're more similar than we are different, these sex differences are basically small and it doesn't really matter and David, you're just making a mountain out of a molehill. Yep, yep, yep. I've heard that. And that's a very popular belief in the field and one that is debated. So if we look at sex differences in certain verbal skills, they're fairly small.

So you can say, well, we're more similar than different, maybe 60% of women are better than the average guy, not big. But my point was, and other people's's point is if you put the whole package together It's you know the brain is an integrated system of You know that pulls together abilities that you use in tandem and when you pull together these networks of abilities That would include you know making eye contact Theory of mind sort of things vocal intonation, and so forth, that's when you get very big differences.

And that's kind of more of a real life sort of thing. So if we look at individual personality types of things, like how sociable, how much you like just festive chatter and talking to people in kind of the warmth component being nurturing, you know, it's and talking to people in kind of the warmth component being nurturing, you know, it's a modest sex difference, favoring girls and women in this case. But if we put together the whole pattern of personality, we get much, much larger differences, would not in this case not much overlap. Because this is not just like rolling a six

once, it's the equivalent of rolling five sixes in a row. And that suite of traits when bound together trends much more toward women. I had, I had Joyce Bendenston on the show at the start of the year and she gave me a really interesting example. I would love to know if you've looked at any of this. She spent forever studying kindergarten kids playing and the games that they play. And she mentioned that if you look at the sorts of games that boys and girls play, these are three, four years old, I think maybe up to five years old, you know, hasn't been a massive

amount of time for socialization to occur, especially in kindergarten. This may be if you're the eldest child or an only child, the first time that you've actually got to spend any significant period of time with other kids. And she said, if you look at the language they're using, if you look at the games that they're playing, boys are binding themselves together over shed warfare against cowboys or aliens or something else. And if you look at what girls are doing they are keeping something alive It's a rabbit it's a doll and the language as well that's used is Again very different sex differently What have you have you integrated any of this the sort of social game playing into your work to?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, first. Joyce's work is great. I really keep up on it and like reading it. Yeah, and yeah, that's called social dramatic play. So, kids... Social dramatic play. Social dramatic play. Yeah.

So, kids, when they hit that age, begins to develop a richer imagination. So they can now imagine themselves in different role-taking sorts of, you know, different characters in these roles, and then they can now better integrate their roles with the roles of their playmates. So they're basically practicing social interactions in different contexts, being the hero, being parent, or whatever it might be. So it's an important component of development. And the interesting thing there is that the fantasies that boys and girls as Joyce stated develop on their own differ quite dramatically.

And in fact, the vocabularies of boys and girls begin to differ in the second year of life in terms of what they talk about. How so? What did they talk about? Yeah, so, you know, a stereotypical thing. So, you know, unsurprisingly to me. So, 18-month-old girls are more likely to focus on clothing and boys on objects. And, you know, in terms of just kind of free, free discussion sorts of things.

But the boys integrating themselves into a, they typically integrate themselves into larger groups. The Joyce Parley talked about this as well. And these groups, as you said, are in some type of conflict with something, you know, Indians or dragons or whatever it might be. And they're coordinating and integrating their behavior

together. That is, in my opinion, a component of rough and tumble play. I mean, there's individual rough and tumble play, but there's also coordinating your activity so that you are more functional as a group. And if we look at between group conflict and traditional contacts and we look at it historically, it is coordinated activities of males fighting the coordinated activities of other groups of males. That's male-male competition. It just goes beyond one-on-one. It goes to a group level type of thing. And these early play differences

that Joyce talked about, we've wrote about 20 years ago, saying that this is preparation for this. The boys are creating these groups because these are the groups they're going to grow up with and later in some cases fight with or cooperatively hunt with. It makes complete sense to anybody with a semi-functioning brain as to ancestrally why boys, males would have this predisposition for practicing warfare and why girls would be interested in people, they would be playing doctor or drama or veterinary or whatever.

Damn, like, how does this manifest or what is happening whatever. How does this manifest? What is happening that's causing this to manifest? We can understand why. We can understand the ultimate reason for why this is happening. What is it that's inside of a male that causes him to think, let's pretend that we're fighting cowboys? Yeah, they aren't necessarily thinking anything.

They're engaging in things that they find fun. So if we look at disorders or just individual variation in either prenatal exposure to testosterone or postnatal spikes, the first six months of life, there is a big spike into stosterone, so there's a second dose there, in addition to prenatal dose. And girls have some fluctuating exposure to estrogens during that six month period as well, although it's more variable than with guys. But in any case, these hormonal influences are at least partly contributing to these sex differences in play. So girls who have more had more Androgens early in life,

prenatally, engage in, have play behaviors that are closer to boys than girls, so they're kind of in between those. So it's a mix of activity. So there's clearly a hormonal component to it. And I think the way that works is in terms of what captures your attention. Biological motion is probably gonna capture the intention

of a baby or something. We'll capture the attention of girls more than boys, whereas the physical motion is going to capture the attention of boys more than girls. All you have to do is have a small attentional bias and built-in reward systems that will kind of keep you focused on that and keep you engaged in related activities and then it can kind of build from there. So the mechanism is heavily driven by Androgen exposure to testosterone primarily and that's one of the key differences.

Is there anything else going on here? Is there protein folding in the brain, are there particular areas of the brain that are larger, smaller atrophides, you know, hypertrophied in one form or another? Yeah, I mean, probably there are, I mean, there are sex differences in certain very basic areas of the brain associated with aggressive sexual and that type of behavior. And there are some really interesting sex differences in overall patterns of brain organization. So if you look at gray matter and white matter,

if you look at one small part, maybe there's no difference or maybe there's a difference and if there is a difference, it's probably not gonna be huge on average. But if you look at the whole pattern of the brain, you get quite substantial differences. You can take a brain pattern of a 10-year-old and predict whether that brain belongs to a boy or a girl, about 93% of the time, almost as good as you can by looking at an adult face of a male and a female.. So you huge difference. And that's FMRI. That would be MRI, just structural

differences. What people really need to look at is the coordinated activity of brain areas. So certain brain areas that are linked together are going to fire together spontaneously. And that kind of helps build that network and keep it kind of well functioning. So if you look at those spontaneous brain activity studies, and there aren't that many with really young kids yet, but there's at least one during the prenatal period, where you can put mom in a scanner and get brain activity indices of the fetus. And we see sex differences there in brain activity patterns at about six months, prenatally.

And there was a recent study looking at, I think it was two and three month olds, also showing differences in spontaneous brain activity patterns. But exactly how those are related to some of these sex differences we were talking about, we don't fully know that yet. If it was 93% at 10 years old, what is it at six? Like three months prior to birth and six months after birth. Yeah, they didn't do that. That was a somewhat different technology and approach.

And they didn't do those particular analyses. Probably it's going to be smaller because probably the differences get bigger with age, but they didn't look at it yet. I think nine or ten is the youngest that I've seen. Look at that. There's a number of these studies with adults and it gets up to 95% or so. Do you know how accurate they could be at predicting the sex of the embryo though? Oh yeah, they didn't do those analyses. Okay, I understand. Okay, fine, fine, fine. Yeah. I don't know.

Evidently, what the researchers are amongst another, a number of things trying to achieve here is say, well, at age nine and 10, you have had, you know, social, social roles theory comes back in again. Perhaps you have been socialized into a mode of thinking, which has caused structural changes in the brain, these structural changes, then basically beg the question by being the detector thing that is supposed to be detected. And people say, that's what a male brain looks like, because we have never seen a male

brain which hasn't been socialized as a male brain. Despite the fact that there are a wide variety of families that raise children in traditional and non-traditional progressive and non-progressive ways, unless someone is going to say somehow that the brain of the embryo, three months prior to being born, has somehow been socialized, the sex differences that we see. And, you know, I'm being like overly explicit here to just really try and hammer the point home, that there are structural changes that manifest into real world significant differences, not only in disposition, not only in tendency, interest, capacity. It's a whole suite of things that occur. David Bus,

mutual friend of ours, was recently on Rogan. And I knew I had it, it was absolutely adamant that Rogan was going to bring up sex differences. Sure enough, as was predicted that ended up happening. The most interesting thing that I've learned about sex differences in the last year is differences in throwing accuracy amongst children. Can you please red pill everybody that's listening on the differences in throwing accuracy amongst children? Sure, so yeah, so you find differences in throwing accuracy, throwing distance and velocity.

So even in preschoolers, boys are throwing more. They can throw farther with higher velocity, higher speed, and so higher kinetic energy than girls can. It is, it emerges very early. As I said, the preschool years and becomes extremely large by 19 early adulthood or so, where there's very little overlap between men and women. Maybe a little bit, but not much. It is a very big difference.

It is correlated with differences. The shoulders are built differently. The forearms are longer in men, relatively relative to overall size in women, that that difference is evident prenatally. It is associated with the sex difference in this dorsal stream sort of thing, the ability to track moving objects, you know, to hit something, that's, you have to have the cognitive system in brain and cognitive system in place in order to hit something accurately.

And if somebody's throwing something at you, you want to be able to track it coming in so you can dodge it. Oh, yeah. Didn't you look at a study to do with how effective males and females are at dodging projectiles coming at them. Can you tell us that study? Yeah. So some people have argued that, or in fact, the initial argument, and maybe it's still the argument that the male advantage in throwing distance, is due to shared child care and male hunting. You know, and of course there is a big sex difference in hunting engagement in traditional context.

No question about that. But in addition to that, men are better at dodging things. So in this particular study, you couldn't do it anymore, but the researchers, if I remember correctly, got one of these tennis ball shooting machines and decided to shoot them under graduates to see what would happen. I'm sure the professors had a fantastic time when they were aiming at the annoying child in the front row that keeps

on distracting them during their lectures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, unfortunately we can't do that anymore. But I'm sure it was at fairly low speed and you know, so no, we would get hurt and so relatively easy task. And so they just looked at the number of balls that could be blocked. And men blocked most of the fact number of balls that could be blocked. And men blocked most of them. In fact, there was a ceiling effect in women. We're not as successful at that. And that's obviously a defensive mechanism. If other males are using projectile weapons, the ability to track and dodge that is an important component in mail mail competition.

That's my arguments, which came probably before hunting. What is the suite of traits that we're talking about here when it comes to throwing accuracy, throwing velocity, dodging, seeing things moving through the air, et cetera? Yeah, so we have the throwing component to it. It has the behavioral component actually throwing something and hitting it accurately. It has physical components to it.

The upper body, upper body strength is big sex difference. They're the architecture of the shoulder and arms. There's brain areas associated with motion detection and integrating motion detection with physical movements as in blocking something or throwing something. And so there's brain and cognitive systems involved there. That you see physical systems, the behavioral component, the brain and cognitive component, and guys are better on all of those components or at least most of them. Integrated together, you get quite a large sex difference.

So this, learning that, and it was specifically the accuracy thing that really drove it home to me, home to me is for me now one of the more compelling justifications for us thinking about transgender athletes in sport a lot more carefully because everybody has heard to death someone talking about how a biological male shouldn't be able to step into the ring with a biological female after a Euro-East region and testosterone suppression and then punch their face into the ground. Like, you know, that's itself evident. And a lot of the arguments that I've seen stem exclusively from, well, we can reduce power by X amount, by putting them on this particular type of hormone blocker, testosterone and Androgens aren't all that drive power. Then someone comes back and says, well, look at bone density, look at muscle

mass, look at all of the time you've gone through puberty, blah, blah, blah. That's done. Like, it's interesting. I guess it was interesting, but it's no longer interesting to me. What is much more interesting to me are the fundamental capability differences, especially when it comes to things like accuracy. Because if, let's say, for instance, that you were to have a biological male that is going into the, what is it, the baseball NBA? NBA, what's the baseball league called? Is there a whim as lead? Yeah, there must be. I've got to imagine so, but the same as the WNBA, right? Okay, so let's say that the MAL goes into the WNBA. right? Okay, so let's say that Male goes into WMBA.

They're not taller, they're not bigger, they're built the same on average as the average female basketball player, because I would imagine that female basketball players probably pretty tall, taller than me, taller than you. But what we're saying is that there is a fundamental capacity, capability difference that biological males have with just the way that they see throwing and spatial rotation generally,

not just to do with the physicality of the architecture of the shoulder, changes in forearm length, et cetera, but the way that their brains are able to see the world of throwing overall, this also explains to a degree why the WNBA may be significantly less popular than the men's division, not because women are smaller and something else and something else, but they have a predisposition that is, you could say that male's capacity is overclocked and it is supercharged comparatively with women.

So this to me is the most or one of the most compelling reasons because it gets beyond this sort of messy conversation about power and it gets more into fairness and it's why it's so compelling and I've never really heard anyone do a full treatise on this area of transgender athletes in sport. What is it? Let's say that there was a sport where you had to do lying detection or you had to manipulate different social groups or you had to be able to detect

facial cues or something. If you were to have female to male transitioners in that sport, they're gonna absolutely dominate the league, even if they have taken testosterone for ages and they're walking around with their social sexuality through the roof and their sex drives really high or whatever. I just found this, it's really fascinating. I think this is really, really interesting stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the spatial differences and the perceptual differences that I mentioned are more strongly related to prenatal, or an early postnatal hormonal exposure, the actual circulating testosterone. So you can, the men's circulating testosterone isn't really highly correlated with their spatial abilities, but the earlier exposure seems to be what's important there. So yeah, you can decrease muscle mass a little bit by reducing testosterone, but there's other things you're not going to change that people have, as you said, people haven't talked about. How big are the differences between navigating from one place to another? Yeah, good, good question. They are, I would say, they are, most of them are kind of contrived situations.

They're moderate to large. I would say men are better. It's just kind of dead reckoning sort of thing. You start from some place and you wander around in the woods and then you try to figure out how to get your way back without explicitly just backtracking the exact same way you were, get the quickest route back, men are better than that. I don't remember the exact effect size, but it would be noticeable.

Difference, map reading is different as well. Interest in maps is different. We could see quite obviously why it would be the case that men need better spatial rotation, they need better navigation over a broad ranging kind of distance because if you're going out and on average, men, and cesterly hunted more than women therefore, will the beast goes from right to left? I have spear, will the beast plus spear plus throwing plus trajectory plus how the fuck do I drag this back home, hashtag where is home as well? Also, what about female sex differences that give them capacities that men struggle with, and also why would these be there? What is the evolutionary justification for why they would have them? Yeah, so the sex difference is in the folk psychology or emotional intelligence that I talked about earlier. Women have advantages in.

Probably related to a couple of things. One of them is women are and girls want to develop a social support network that for social emotional support and social and other types of problem solving, men form networks as well, but they're usually cast oriented or competition oriented networks. So if you hang out with all your friends watching, you know, the WNBA or the Super Bowl or something, maybe the Super Bowl will be better. Watching the Super Bowl and you were this last time rooting for the chiefs, all of you, and they win, you're all kind of bonded together, even if you didn't talk about anything.

During that time, you drank beer and did whatever you're going to do, that's kind of a shared activity. That kind of helps link male groups together. And you can have lots of guys there. You can't, you know, it doesn't have to be limited to two people. Girls and women form relationships more based on the dyadic interactions and the social and emotional support talking through issues, talking about what's important to them, and so forth. And the dynamics of this are very different between males and females.

I covered in my book on sex differences. But one component of it is that to develop and maintain these BFF relationships, you have to be very sensitive to the emotional state of your girlfriend, your best friend, you have to read things and so forth. She may not want to really bother you by talking about, you know, problems with her boyfriend or mom or whatever that might be, but you can pick up that something is not quite right. And you know a lot more about her than guys do about their friends. You see how, oh, you haven't trouble with your mom again. Is it such and such a sort of thing?

So that's the theory of mind sort of thing. You're picking up subtle, nonverbal cues, picking up on it. And that's exactly what the girlfriend wanted you to do. And that engages you in the talk that hopefully will help to resolve that type of issue. So that, motionality is really important for these relationships. It's also

important for dealing with and metting out something called relational aggression. So the movie Mean Girls, maybe you've seen that. So you know, kind of kind of bitchy girl, you know, subtle put downs, gossip and spreading lies, it's basically designed to disrupt the social networks of competitors. Undermind their same-sex friendships and make them unattractive to boyfriends, would be boyfriends. And it is most effective if it's done in a way that is plausibly deniable. That is you do it very subtly. You know, I'm really worried about so

and so because I think she's seeing three guys or drinking a lot of cool. Yeah, that that sort of thing. And so because it's more, you know, when guys are mad at each other, they'll make eye contact and they'll push or yell. I mean, you don't have to figure it out. I mean, it's usually obvious, if they're really upset. But you have to have these subtle social skills to pick up on that relational aggression so that you can counter it. And so I think the combination of relational, and also have these subtle skills to use

it to manipulate other people. I think the combination of the social support friendships and the competition, female female competition, this relational aggression is really the basis for the female advantage in these skills. It seems to me that the heavier brow ridge that men have, the bigger jaw, the bigger hands, these are our weapons, right? This is how men would have done their intracetual competition. It would have been intergroup warfare as well with different tribes, etc., etc. The ability to understand and manipulate social dynamics, language ability,

reading facial expressions, that is female weaponry in regard. Now, it's also defensive, offensive, affiliative, you know, a co-alitional, all of that. But I just, I love thinking about conceptualizing things in this way that because women on average weren't getting into physical altercations because they are more fragile, sometimes could be with child if they die the danger of the child being on their own is significantly higher.

Therefore, make sure that you don't, how would you say, explicitly, obviously, accuser to really do something that could cause you to be on the wrong end of a very sharp stick from either the husband of the woman that you just pissed off or the woman herself. So you need to be able to manipulate social groups. You need to be much more subtle and you need to dance your way through this. You need to use co-alitional tactics. You need to sow seeds of discord venting as an example of this. And because of that, you have to have a predisposition. You have to have these capacities to be able to make yourself capable. Whereas for men,

everything's out in the open. You got a problem? Let's sort the problem out. We don't need to have that quite so much. Yeah, men engage in relational aggression too, and they play politics, and some of them are very good at it. But the politics is to organize large-scale groups for a collective action sort of thing, rather than manipulating the social dynamics within a smaller kind of social network. But yeah, you have to be very good at that to navigate all of these complex social relationships in a way that doesn't provoke retaliation. Yes. When it comes to the current trends that we're seeing, this increase in transgender,

especially youths, what's your assessment of the situation? Why do you think it is that we've had such a rapid increase in the happening? Right. Yeah, so I wrote that that call that article that you mentioned on that. And if we look at it historically, well, so let's step back. Let's look at brain patterns that I mentioned before, where you know, you take a 10-year-old, you can predict 93% of the time with a boy or a girl. If you take an adult, you can predict 95% of the time, whether it's a man or a woman. So, the brain patterns for guys are kind of bunched up in this area, but there are some individuals that kind of go out on the curve. So, there are guys that have female typical marine patterns, not a lot of them, but they're there.

And there are girls who have women who have male typical marine patterns. So it's not, you know, kind of how to bounce to think, well, you know, maybe for whatever reason, you know, you didn't see the sex typical shift in brain development for whatever reason, you didn't see the sex typical shift in brain development for whatever reason. So you're going to get, it would make sense that you have some guys who really like girl things, but they're kind of forced to be boys and to do boy things and they would develop gender dysphoria and the same thing for some girls. And so if we look at early trends sexual individuals,

they had a pattern of sex atypical play. So they, you know, the boys are playing and liked girl things and so forth, expressed wanting to be a girl, had this dysphoria, depression and discomfort with being a boy or a girl if it's the reverse of that. In those individuals, if they're carefully screened and so forth, would be fairly rare. But if they transition, most of them do okay. They're okay with it. So the D transition rates are 1 or 2%. So it's like, yeah, it worked for them. But now jump forward to the last, you know, while it started maybe 20 years ago, but especially the last 10 years,

or so the number of individuals who are claiming to be transgender has really spiked way beyond the numbers you would expect based on these brain patterns for example. And the demographics of these individuals have changed as well. Typically, it was disproportionately more men than women, and they had a history of gender dysphoria. Now we're getting more women, especially adolescents than men. And most of them, as far as I know, don't, I mean, some of them do, but a lot of them don't have this history of gender dysphoria and sex atypical play patterns and other sorts of things that have historically been reliable markers of transgender issues and doing well with the transition if that's what they chose to do.

So there's been this huge spike, as you know, and it's been argued that social media has driven a lot of it. And I think that's right. And I argued that adolescent girls in particular may be at risk for these negative social media influences, because during that time, early adolescence, late adolescence, they're really trying to develop this social support network. They're really trying to develop this, a couple of BFFs and feel included and integrated

and socially supported and emotionally supported and so forth. That's a really important thing. Now guys go through a similar thing, but they want to be part of a bigger group that works together and so forth. But the girl networks, I think, are more susceptible to social contagion

and going along with ideas that maybe aren't a good idea, just to fit in and to be part of the group and not to get excluded or rejected from the group, which is a bigger concern for girls than it is for boys. And so I think we have a recipe for, combine that with social media and all the media attention, general media attention

to these issues, it's now become a political signal rather than a kind of a personal desire. It's like you support this because you support all progressive sorts of things or against it because you're against all progressive sorts of things. It's really created an environment that I think is gonna be detrimental and is being detrimental to a lot of adolescent and young adults, especially girls. And this

would explain why you have seen a sex difference in the number of F to M as opposed to M to F transitions or desires for transition because it, you would presume that there's a left-handedness argument that gets used. I'm not sure if you've heard this used before, where during the middle ages, people that were left-handed were seen as more likely to be witches. So, people hid to the fact that they were left-handed. I think it was around about 2% of people a few hundred years ago said that they were, whereas now it's around about 10 to, it's the teens percent, I think,

of the population that are left handed. So the argument is when you stop demonizing people for being their true self, being fully left handed or being a male that identifies a female or vice versa, left-handed or being a male that identifies a female or vice versa, that people open up. That would be the explanation for why you would see this rampant increase, the fact that we are more, as a society, more accepting of it, but that wouldn't explain why you have this massive increase in F to M as opposed to M to F. That's right. And this sex difference appears to be explained way largely by the raw materials that we went through, women's desire to fit in.

They're a greater social cue ability to absorb that. It also explains why you don't have a completely random distribution of people across the entire United States. One person out of every 10 schools, one girl out of every 10 schools, one male out of every 30 schools, let's say, across the US, it's five girls in one class that all sit at the same table together during lunch. That's right.

Yeah, you see these clusters. Or in the one school district, I think 10% of the kids, I don't remember what the male female breakdown was, claimed to be transgender non-binary or something, which makes no sense. The other issue that has changed is the regret and detransition rates are going up from fairly rare, one to percent or so, to depending on what you look at, the stopping of hormonal treatment can be one out of three or so. So the rates of people kind of changing their mind is going up, suggesting that the transgender, the dysphoria, so forth, wasn't really related to that. It was due to some other issue.

What I find particularly fascinating and kind of morbidly ironic about this situation is that the biological sex differences that men and women have are providing the raw materials to cause increasing volumes of men and women to recant their own sex, or at least their own gender identity. So it's almost like a supply and demand of what's going on is happening in a community of people that deny that there are any sex differences. Yeah, it's a mess. Right. So, yeah. So you're saying that the adolescent women's girls susceptibility to social contagion has a biological basis to it, which I think it does.

And that biological basis makes them more prone to claim that they're really a guy. It did lie that there are only sex differences. And deny it. They're there. Yeah, it is. It's amazing. People can spend stories, for sure.

David Geary, ladies and gentlemen, David, I've absolutely adored this. It's been booked on my schedule for about two or three months now and I've been looking forward to it. It's delivered more than I could have hoped for. First off, what are you working on next and then secondly, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work? Right. So, related to sex differences, keep up.

I published a third edition of my bookmail female Came out in 2021 so it's it's pretty pretty up-to-date and I'm pretty anal about Documenting things because I know it's controversial and you got to kind of oversight things On the sex differences thing that the thing I've been working on on an office, I have spare time, other things to do, is this tracking sex differences and cognition and behavior, as they are related to the sex differences in height. So suggesting, as I mentioned, populations get healthier, sex differences

and height get bigger. If there are other biologically-based sex differences that are related to, you know, the health of the brain, for instance, then we should see other differences in spatial abilities, verbal abilities, memory abilities, and so forth emerging. So I work on that on. I've been working on it, often on that for a long time. And it's hard to get kind of knockout evidence for it,

but there's something there. I just, you know, the data isn't quite there, but I have a number of articles on sex-specific vulnerabilities based on evolutionary theory and basic biology that if anybody emails me, I'm happy to send. David, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for today. Great, thank you, thank you.

I really enjoyed it. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. So, so good from David, that I absolutely love learning about sex differences and those insights I think are incredibly valuable. They help us to understand why we are the way we are, which is the most important insight I think that we can learn on a road towards self-development. A parting thought from Alex Homosi this week, the rare people in your life who root for you to hit your goals are more valuable than the goals themselves. I'll see you next time.