Modern Wisdom - #654 - J Michael Bailey - Activists Tried To Get This Study Banned

Episode Date: July 15, 2023

J. Michael Bailey is a Northwestern University professor of psychology, researcher, and an author known for his work on sexual orientation and human sexuality. Scientific research has had public scrutiny for a long time. But Michael's most recent study was placed under so much pressure from upset dissidents that the journal formally retracted it. Today we get to find out just why human sexuality is such a dangerous topic to look into. Expect to learn what it's like to be in the middle of a global cancellation furore, what exactly the concept of gynandromorphophilia is, how malleable your sexual orientation actually is, whether lesbians are more likely to become straight again, if bisexuality actually exists, how accurate our gaydars and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Bubs Naturals at https://www.bubsnaturals.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on your first order from Collars&Co at https://collarsandco.com/ (use code: MW15)  Extra Stuff: 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 Jay Michael Bailey. He's an Northwestern University professor of psychology, a researcher, and an author, known for his work on sexual orientation and human sexuality. Scientific research has had public scrutiny for a long time, but Michael's most recent study was placed under so much pressure from upset dissidents that the journal formally retracted it. Today, we get to find out just why human sexuality is such a dangerous topic to look into.

Expect to learn what it's like to be in the middle of a global cancellation furor, just what exactly the concept of Ganandromo-fifilia is, how malleable your sexual orientation is, whether lesbians are more likely to become straight again if bisexuality even exists. How accurate are gay d'ars are? And much more. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Bubs Natural. When I ruptured my Achilles three years ago, one of the products that I relied on the most every single day was collagen protein. Every single morning for two and a half months, I made sure that I got as much collagen protein in as I could.

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menswear. Head to collarsandco.com and use the code MW15 for 15% off your first order. That's collarsandco.com and mw15. A checkout. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome J Michael Bailey. Thank you for having me. What happened with your recent upholstery? So the short answer is that our recent article has been retracted by the publisher of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, where it was published.

Retraction is something, I've never had an article retracted before, and it's something associated with terrible things like fraud, plagiarism, grievous mistakes. None of that is true about our article. Frankly, and honestly, our article was retracted because of the ideas and the evidence it presented that angered transgender activists and their allies who pressured the publisher, who either agreed with them based on politics or chickened out or were worried about business concerns. I can't read their mind, obviously. But I will say that the retraction was a sham. I would also say that the retraction has backfired entirely from their perspective, our article has gotten far more attention than

it ever would have. The publisher, Springer Nature Group, keeps metrics on this. Our article has been downloaded almost 100,000 times, which is, you know, that's not perhaps a big deal for mainstream media, but for an academic article that is extreme. We have received more news coverage. We're about 40 ranked 40 out of 400,000 articles of about the same age in terms of media coverage. Here we are talking, you know, I'm on a big podcast with you and there have been articles and so on. So I'm not hurting.

I just want people to download and read our article. And don't pay attention to the retraction notice. It's meaningless. If people want to get a hold of the now forbidden article, where should they go? Same place they ever did. Our article was published open access. That means we actually had funding from Society for Evidence-Evidence-Based Gender Medicine Segment to publish the article for free reading. Most articles, academic articles, have a paywall that non-academics can't get through easily. There's no paywall. The retraction simply means, for practical purposes, that springer stamped the words, retracted

article on every single page of the article, which it doesn't affect your ability to read it and frankly, I Wear those words as a badge of honor now That makes it kind of sexy. It makes it it feels like it's a top secret seal So what's the someone that's listening that wants to go and search what so what should they search for on the internet in order to get this article up in the right form? So what I search in order to go to the site to keep track on our current metrics, you know, I'm really waiting for when we get a $100,000 view, I'm sorry, 100,000 views, for when we get a hundred thousand dollar view, I'm sorry, 100,000 views, D as D I A Z, Bayley, B A I L E Y, R O G D for rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is what it's about. And then you'll have links to choose from choose the one that says, Springer, and that'll

take you right to the site. You can read the article right there. Okay, so we've flirted with it so far. What was in your forbidden study, which was so reprehensible that caused it to be retracted and stamped with a wax seal? with a wax seal. I'll tell you in a moment, but I just want to give a bit of background. This article was published by me and a co-author, Susanna Diaz. That is not her real name. I don't know her real name. I don't know her real name. She is the mother of a gender dysphoric child whom she believes has rapid onset gender dysphoria

Which is rapid onset gender dysphoria something we need to talk about. I assume that your audience Doesn't necessarily know what it is. It's very important. And it is the reason why the trans activists came after us. The rapid onset gender dysphoria is the explanation of the surge in cases of gender dysphoria that has happened over the past decade, and especially the past five years. The idea is this a

subset of gender dysphoria cases and now it's my far the greatest percentage are adolescent girls who never showed any signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. They were not tomboys, they were not masculine. They did, however, have issues. A lot of them had some mental health problems, they had some social problems, and so on. In adolescence, they tended

to hang out with a crowd that was unconventional and progressive and ideological, and they got the idea based on ideology that all of their problems are due to underlying transgender that they never knew of before. They suddenly or rapidly announced, or they decided that they were transgender and they announced to their parents. and they announced to their parents. And many of these girls, it's mainly girls, about three quarters, there may be some boys too, but we should talk about them separately. A lot of them are demanding very serious treatments, including medical treatments.

They want testosterone, which has very serious effects on the body, and some of them want surgery like the amputation of their breasts. And some of them are getting this. Our evidence in our article is entirely consistent with that. We surveyed 1,655 parents of youth whom the parents believed had this syndrome. Three quarters of the youth were girls. The parents said that indeed these youth had pre-existing mental health issues and that the mental health issues actually preceded any indication of gender issues by four years.

That's a long time. The youth who were most likely to socially transition, now social transition means changing their pronouns, changing their style of dress, changing what they call themselves, boy or girl. The youth most likely to socially transition were the ones with the most problems. That was also true for medical transition, which was thankfully rare rare only about 7% Had sought medic or had obtained medical treatment whereas about 60% had taken many steps to social Transition parents said after they socially transitioned they got worse and

The best is what does worse mean? They became less happy, they became less close to their parents, they decompensated. And the best predictor of transition was that the family had received a referral to a gender specialist. And if parents visited a gender specialist, they usually felt that the gender specialist pressured them to transition their child. gender specialists pressured them to transition their child. So there were some other interesting findings too, but those were the ones that got people upset. And I think those are probably the most important findings because they are consistent with the idea of Rapidonset gender dysphoria. Rapidonset gender dysphoria was first proposed by Lisa Lippmann who published the first paper in 2018. She also received tremendous pushback.

The journal where she published her article did not retract it but they did make her make changes to an original article. And she suffered personal consequences Brown University where she was cut off their ties with her. She lost contracts with Brown University. Activists cannot stand the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria. And I understand why, because it is threatening to their belief system. They strongly believe that gender dysphoria is always real, and that the best way to proceed is to transition as quickly as possible. And furthermore, that youth are always right when they say that they are gender dysporic, that they are trans, just believe them. All of these are contradicted by only the second major study of this phenomenon, and

there's plenty of work to do, and I don't think that we've got this nailed shut so that everybody is obligated to see this world as we do. But it's an important study and instead of trying to silence our search, it would then better if the skeptical had done their own studies to try to clarify what they thought was going on. But of course, they didn't want to do that. See, if I'm right, with my conception of the sort of two current explanations for what's going on with regards to the increase that we've seen over the last 10 years or so, one theory posits that the world's degree of acceptance of trans people at large has changed. It's called the left-handedness argument online sometimes, which is that during the middle ages, if you were left-handed,

you were often accused of being a witch or a wizard or something and it would cause you to be ostracized or sometimes killed or punished socially in some form or another, which meant that I think maybe only 3% of people were left-handed during the middle ages, but then when left-handedness is no longer seen as wicked and it's socially accepted, I think the true number of left-handed people is closer to maybe 12% let's say. So you see an increase in the number of people who identify as left-handed, I suppose, they can be that true left-handed selves, because there is no longer social stigma attached to it. There is a camp that argues that the rapid increase that we have seen in the number of people identifying as transgender over the

last decade to two decades or so has been due to this releasing of the glass ceiling and and judgment by the group at large. The alternative theory, which is being put forward, is one of social contagion. That explains why females in particular, the F to M transition are particularly susceptible to this. females are more socially aware, socially malleable and influenced. It's part of their sort of intersectional competition and status, measuring apparatus that they have a greater susceptibility to trends around them, because they are, it's important for them to remain part of the tribe in that regard, which would explain, be part of the explanation for why girls seem to be more impacted by this ever-increasing number. It's almost like a mimetic sort of feedback loop that's occurring.

How far away am I and what have I missed in terms of that conception of the landscape? You put it beautifully better than I did. So you should have got me on the paper. I could have been cancelled as well. Yes. You're considered yourself a co-author on future research. Well, actually, I can take it. I get enough stick on the internet as it is already.

Okay, so what is... First question. Is it impossible for these two worlds to exist together? Is there a blending of rapid onset gender dysphoria with the activist's theory about this? Is there a way that those two worlds could coexist? Certainly. And I suspect they do. It's a question of which is predominating. Obviously, we've become much more tolerant of the transgender fairly recently. I wrote a book in 2003 and people back then thought that transsexuals were really weird,

interesting but weird, and people were uncomfortable around them. Now I think if anything, there thought to be cool. And I'm glad that tolerance has increased for the transgender. But I also think that it's important to realize that there may be trade-offs. I don't think we need to be intolerant, but I do think that we need to be aware that attitudes affect what people choose to do. Being transgender is partly a decision that a person makes. Take a very, I'm just a masculine teenage girl.

I like playing baseball, you know, I'll just be a girl. Or she may say, well, gosh, you know, I could imagine being a boy plus, you know, I get a lot of cred if I am transsexual. And also really something we haven't mentioned yet, which is happening, which I think is negative, is the binding up of transgender identity and victim status. And I just think that that's a problem with our world right now that we're promoting victim status, not just among the transgender, but all kinds of phenomena. And I just think it's very negative.

It creates a perverse incentive for people to pedestalize things which are actually negative in the long term. Yes. Self-harm. You know, self-harm gives you a degree of prestige somehow in whatever upside down, bustle world it is. There is now an incentive for people to do a thing which there should be a disincentive for them to do. So, there is social renown now for self-harm or for multiple personality disorder. I don't know whether you saw on TikTok last year, there was a trend of people that would have their others, I can't remember what the word was, it's like the other versions of them would come out.

And I'm a this person and I'm a that person, which again, I'm pretty sure, who was the guy that created Eugenics, who was the dude that did it in the 1900s, Francis Galton? Francis Galton managed to make himself go insane by worshipping a doll as a deity, right? My point being that you can induce all manner of crazy psychological maladies

if you believe them hard enough. So I don't wanna weigh in on Galton because I don't know what you're just talking about. And I do know a fair amount about Galton, but the other thing that you said, the key thing, is absolutely true and really important and really fascinating that if people believe they can enact all kinds of things. And when I say enact, I don't mean they're pretending exactly. They're acting as if they're acting in accordance with their beliefs. This is not the first

go-around for multiple personality disorder. We had an epidemic in the early 1990s that was associated with an epidemic of recovered memories of sexual abuse. This was young women typically who went to therapy with a therapist who believed in this, who persuaded these women that their fathers typically had severely sexually abused them repeatedly over years despite these women never having any memory of this. And of course these memories, these recovered memories were false, they didn't happen. And a subset of these women also came to believe that they were multiple personality disorder. And I think that this, what's happening now with R.O.G.D. rapid onset gender dysphoria is the same thing. And the women that the big difference is

that the girls, this is happening to are getting it younger, 14, 15, 16 instead of 24, 25, 26. And they're getting it from their peers rather than a therapist. Otherwise, I suspect the same kinds of people are involved at both epidemics, both times. Why would it be the case that there are psychological risk factors like OCD autism spectrum disorder and a few others. Why would they be predictive of ROGD? Autism gets thrown around a lot as very common. I Am not as impressed as many people are by the evidence for autism.

For one, the diagnosis of autism has become so vague. I don't even know what it means anymore. become quite over diagnosed. The youth in our study did have an excess of formal diagnoses, but they were very general anxiety and depression. Why would women with these emotional problems have this susceptibility? women with these emotional problems have this susceptibility. I'm not sure the 1990s epidemic these were somewhat older individuals and so they had more time to get accurate diagnoses and the number one associated diagnosis was borderline personality disorder,

which is associated with identity disturbance, not knowing exactly who you are, what you wanna be, being manipulative, being prone to extreme emotions. Now, do I have an explanation why it's they who are most susceptible to these false ideas? I don't think I do. I don't think I do. I had a conversation with David Geary a couple of months ago. And David, fascinating guy. absolutely fascinating phenomenal episode.

And one of the things that I learned when speaking to him, he was the first person to introduce me to the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria. The group that, another ideology that would be associated with some of the people who seem to be suffering rapid onset gender dysphoria would be a with some of the people who seem to be suffering rapid onset dysphoria would be a denial of biological differences between men and women. The fascinating thing that's oddly sort of recursive and cyclical and almost ironic if it wasn't so odd is that the very reason that we have a sex difference in the number of F to M transitions is precisely because of the biological difference

between men and women. It is the biological difference between men and women that predisposes these very goals to the increased susceptibility of transition and that's the same group that is denying it. So it's both the supply and the demand and the denial, it kind of all rolled up into one. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, they have a very strange set of beliefs that are mutually contradictory. For example, they believe in the idea of innate gender identity that may be hidden and so on. But if it's an innate gender identity, then, and that men usually have one and women usually have another, that's got to be a biological difference. Yeah, I, I, I think that their science is not very coherent. Scientific.

I don't think that's gonna be a very useful way to persuade them. What are the, given you've had this relative landmark study, you know, one of only two massive end size of whatever it was, 1600 and 55 pairs. massive end size of whatever it was 1655 pairs. 1655 parents.

Okay. According on each parent reporting on a child of theirs. Yeah. Got you. Yeah. Um, what do you, what are the implications of this moving forward? What have you thought about sort of next steps and such? Well, I, my next step, I'm a, you know, I'm an academic,'m an academic researcher, I'm not a clinician, I think that

we need to get better and more detailed evidence, and I'm involved in what I think is going to be a really important study that is about to launch the summer. It's in collaboration with Lisa Libman who is the person who first studied Rabidance at gender dysphoria and Ken Zucker who is one of the world's leading experts in gender dysphoria. All three of us have been canceled at least once. So we're the... canceled collaboration, but we also are experts who are unafraid to stay in here. In this study we're going to be recruiting both gender dyspork adolescents directly and their families and we have a very extensive

survey about mental health and gender feelings about gender history of gender steps taken toward transition and so on. We hope to enroll thousands and we're going to follow these people up over five years at least to see how they turn out and to see how that affects happiness. Are the ones who transition going to eventually be happier than the ones who didn't. For example, that's a big question. Fascinating. Yeah, I suppose it's one of those things where being able to spin explanations without the scientific backing can be done at lightning speed, but being able to test the hypotheses with science is actually a pretty arduous task.

So you are always going to be playing catch up behind whatever the wake is that's left in terms of people's broadscience. That's exactly right. We sometimes have been frustrated ourselves. The scientific process is slow in part for bureaucratic reasons. We have to be very careful to get ethics approval for this, which by the way was the reason, the ostensible reason, not the true reason, the ostensible reason why my latest article was retracted.

What's the story there? What was the reason that they gave you? The reason was this. Susanne Diaz is not an academic. She just went ahead and put up a survey. She's allowed to do that. She's allowed to publish such a survey. I am an academic, I have constraints, any research that I do, I have to get approved by something called an institutional review board IRB. I checked with my IRB and they said, well, she didn't have to. And you seem to be okay being a co-author on this. But Susanna have not done this very legalistic thing that was a conventional informed consent, which is basically this is exactly what you're going to be doing. Do you consent? That is what

Springer said was lacking. That's why they retracted the article. Here's why that's ridiculous. She made it very clear to parents what the survey was about. They agreed by actually completing the survey. The last line of the survey said we're gonna publish this online when we get enough data. And that's something that Springer also said. You didn't tell them that their data were going to be published. Well, of course they want this published. They believe these parents are sick of R-O-G-D being Shove to the side being silenced. That's part of the reason why they wanted to participate in the first place So that that's the reason they gave I

Don't believe it for a second But you know in our new research that we will be launching soon we went through all the IRB procedure we are so covered that there's not going to be any chance of any problem like that. Moving on to some of the other work that you've done, what is the typical sexual orientation of F2M and M2F people who identify as trans? Well, I want to start with what was typical 20 years ago and before, which was pretty well established. Back then most F2Ms, that is, natal females who wanted to come men. First of all, they were adults before they were able to achieve that there was no

Transitioning of children or even adolescents Almost all of the female the males were female attracted or in the vernacular of sexology homosexual female the male transsexuals though about 10% were attracted to men. For male the female, these are natal male, I'm sorry, natal males who want to become women, there were two types. The first type was the type, perhaps we are most familiar with, the kind that comes to mind immediately. It would be a male

who was feminine from early childhood, little boy who wanted to be a girl who became an adolescent who was basically a girl. And then when he could get surgery, he did an adulthood. That type was male attracted and sexology called that a homosexual male, a female, transsexual. Jazz Jennings, I don't know if you know who jazz Jennings is, she's a reality TV show. I have considered her that type, though I'm less sure now, for various reasons. But the other type is at least as common, but it is quite unfamiliar because nobody talks about it and it is autogynophilic male to female transsexualism. Autogynophilia is a sexual orientation, I guess, whereby a man is sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman. Most of these natal males are attracted to other people in the world and they're attracted to women. But they are also attracted to, and

sometimes much more attracted to a woman that they create inside themselves. It starts typically in adolescence where they will put on their their mothers panties and bra, look at themselves in the mirror and masturbate, fetishistic cross dressing. Many of them will have fantasies about having breasts and a vulva and some of them will actually do what they need to to get those. Otagonifilia is very controversial because trans activists have tried to sweep it under the rug.

They're embarrassed by it. I'm not. I don't judge these people. Also, many otonophilic transgender persons experience the theory as a narcissistic injury because it really means a lot to them to think of themselves as like women. But I'm saying in the theory says, not my theory, it's something that I endorsed, but I didn't come up with it. The theory says, they're not like women, they're men with this weird sexuality. And so that hurts their feelings. So I published a book in 2003 called The Man Who Would Be Queen and only about a third of the book

was about adult transsexualism, including Otagana Filia, and the trans activists back then. was about adult transsexualism, including Otagonifilia, and the trans activists back then, a few of them got so mad at what I wrote that they tried to ruin my life. Briefly, I thought they might. But, you know, they did back then, what is happening to our paper now.

They caused a strison effect. So, more and more people have heard of autogonophilia, including the many autogonophilic males are great people. In my experience, if they are open and honest, they're admirable. I have many autogonophilic followers on Twitter. I have some autogonophilic friends and so on. And these people are angry at the activists who have tried to censor any discussion about agonophilia, it has prevented us from knowing things like the best way that agonophilic individuals should live their lives. Should they transition? Should they transition? Should they not transition? We don't know. The study studies haven't been done because people haven't even felt free to ask the questions. Is there a natal female equivalent? Have you ever come across anyone that is the opposite of auto-gain affiliate?

This is controversial and that should be the preface every single sentence that you say. This is controversial. I would say scientifically. I don't think anybody is politically absent about this at least. Yeah Give it time. So the word for that would be auto-androphilia. And I know transgender persons who insist that there really is auto-endrophilia. There's a guy who named Phil Ili, I-L-L-Y, I think he's about to publish a book called Auto-Header Sexuality. Very smart guy, but he believes that auto-endrophilia occurs commonly among transgender females. I am less convinced. I'm being a hard-ass scientist. hard-ass scientists. You know, maybe, but I kind of doubt it because male and female sexuality are so different. Otagonifilia is something that, a male finds out on his own

and becomes even though he's never heard of it before, it dominates his early sex life. And I'm really kind of skeptical that that happens in needle females, but we'll see. We'll see. Does that, if someone, and if it's common that somebody that's never heard of it before, kind of stumbles upon this thing, this particular interest, this orientation, does that suggest that there is a biological disposition pre-cursor? I would bet more money than I have that we will find that eventually. I think Otaganafele is strongly biological.

Now can I prove that? No. But what is going to make a 14-year-old boy decide to put on his mother's panties and go into the bathroom and look at himself and become aroused and so on? Nobody teaches him that. You know, there's a lot of interest now, especially among general critical types about something called cystic hypnoporn, which is, it's a type of pornography consumed by autogonophilic males, and they're saying that this porn is creating autogonofilament. Well, I don't believe it. I feel like these guys have this interest and they're finding the porn. I don't think anything plausibly is going to raise this idea in somebody that doesn't already have the interest. raise this idea in somebody that doesn't already have the interest? The other word that I learned when looking at some of your work is Guy Nandromore Fulfillia,

one of the longest words I think I've ever said in my life. What's Guy Nandromore Fulfillia? Guy Nandromore Fulfillia. So I'm going to say a word that I think is fine, but Some people are touchy about it Guy Nander Morpheelia is sexual attraction to she males What I mean by a she male is a natal male Trans woman who has both breast and a penis still.

You know, I can see it in my mind, I, yep. Well, it's not hard to find it online. That is a kind of pornography I have come across. And it actually is quite a common form of pornography. And even I think just plain old normal straight men get into that sometimes. But they're different than the kind of men who need that and prefer it. And for example, I had a girlfriend at one time, whose ex-husband had that preference. And in order for them to have sex, they needed to bring a picture of a

she-mail on the computer screen so he could look at it and become a rouse. That became a problem for her. I can imagine that that would create complications, yes. Yeah, but that's, you know, some other just plain old, I think mostly just plain old straight men, they just, I think don't have the hang up about the penis being there too. This is what, you know, back in the 90s, you know, on Alan Partridge, which is a famous British comedy show, one of his friends that turns out was going to Thailand and he comes

back and all he wants to hear about is the lady boys. Right. He all he wants to hear about is lady boys. Tell me about the lady boys. He keeps on saying. Yeah. That's right. The lady boys, that's what they are.

They still tour as lady boys of Bangkok in the UK. I don't know if that's the same in the US, but I mean, there's posters everywhere for lady boys of Bangkok. To my knowledge, they don't come here, but you know, there are female escorts that you can find online. I knew in writing my book, the 2003 book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, I actually, at that time, knew some transsexual prostitutes, some of whom had worked as she may all prostitutes, and then they got surgery and continued to work as female prostitutes. Opening up to as many markets as possible. Yeah, well the one that I'm thinking of preferred the men who liked women to the men who liked women, to the men who liked females, I think she thought that the ones who liked females, I don't know, they treated her differently as a very interesting. So this is an obvious follow-up, which is, is this a new category of sexual orientation? Are these people closer

to gay? People are they closer to straight people? Great question. And so I can answer the second part of that question. They are very close to straight people. They're not at all gay. Guys who get into she-mails. So if we bring these guys in the lab and we show them pornography, featuring just women and the kind that we use in this situation is two women having sex with each other. Female, female porn and male, male, male porn and those are the kind best kind of Stimula because if somebody gets aroused there's no ambiguity about who they're getting aroused by Guys who are into she-mails get aroused to the females, but not the males

But they get slightly more aroused to videos of two she- two females getting it on. And that's a little different than typical straight men who get more aroused by two females and two females. But neither, a guy named, a guy named Morpha Fophiles nor regular straight men get aroused to men getting it on. Right.

Next, next obvious follow-up question to that is, I've heard you say that heterosexual women are genetically indifferent. What does that mean? I would say not just genetically indifferent. I think that their conscious feelings are indifferent in the laboratory to erotica. So, if we bring women into the lab and we show them the same kinds of stimuli, two men having sex, two women having sex. Straight women show an indifferent pattern of genital arousal. They get equally aroused to both by both and they say they get equally aroused by both. Now they don't get that aroused psychologically. They don't straight women do not get as aroused to watching either kinds of erotic stimuli that I just mentioned as either straight men do or gay men do.

as either straight men do or gay men do. But it is interesting that they seem to show this flat pattern. Lesbians in contrast do show both a genital preference and a subjective preference for female stimuli. Is there a vestigial arousal among lesbians for men? Lesbians do get more aroused by male stimuli than they do to nature scenes. But what about do they get more aroused to gay men than gay men do to lesbians? These questions are hard to answer. These are the studies that we need, Michael, these are the these are the hard charging questions that we need. Well, they're hard to answer because the kinds of apparatus that you must use to measure genital arousal in men differs from that that you must use to measure it in women. And the best evidence that we have, we've taken it out of the genitals into the brain. We've done FMRI scanning of people looking at erotic stimuli. And it pretty much shows the same patterns as the genital stuff does.

does. And your excellent question, I think I'm going to have to hold off answering because I don't remember. That's fine. So we kind of, I remember I had a conversation with Christina Duranty and she taught me about a study where they brought women into a lab and they sat them down opposite two different guys. One guy was really nerdy and one guy was kind of a bad boy leather jacket and sort of like coughed hair and stuff like that and they analyzed the verbal responses and the physical responses that women had to each of these different men.

Now they had a Oscar-winning film writer, some award-winning film writer, write the script that the gentleman actor was using. So it's like, you know, if you were going to cut it, the cool guys, like if you come with me, I'll show you the best night of your life. And it's going to be really cool. But I don't really care. So it kind of, it doesn't really matter so much. But very, very high status prestige, prestige prestige. Whereas on the other hand, the other guy was something else. Now, the interesting thing is it was the same guy. The same guy was playing both roles. They just styled him differently in his mannerisms had been adjusted. One of the most interesting takeaways was there was a number of lesbian female attracted women who were in the

study. And when they looked at their behavior with the lowest status man, it seemed relatively straightforward. When they looked at their behavior with the highest status man, even though they had a self-report of not being attracted to him and their verbal behaviour wasn't particularly forthcoming, their non-verbal behaviour was much more flirtatious. So they were playing with the hair more, they were kind of leaning in, they were pouting a little bit more, and what that kind of suggested to me, which I think kind of leads into some of your work, is that even for women who are not attracted to men, for a very long time, men have been the gatekeepers to so much with regards to survivability, reproduction, protection, resources, etc. That it feels like even exclusively female attracted women just keep this skill set

in the locker room somewhere where if they need to deploy it because the chieftains come over and she's just finished up with her girlfriend that nobody knows about secretly in a cave somewhere that she can still kind of turn it on. And I thought that that was really interesting. That is really interesting. I wasn't familiar with that. Also, I think that lesbians, women who identify as lesbians are not as exclusively female attracted as gay men are male attracted, even if they might deny that lesbians are more likely than gay men to become non-lesbian relapse. They go back, yeah, there's a researcher named Lisa Diamond who has studied something she calls female

fluidity, which refers to women's greater propensity to, I don't know, become romantically interested in somebody regardless of their natal sex. Not all women do this, and there are some, you know, that's a gold star lesbians who would never go for a man. But I think there are more lesbians who have the capacity for sexual attraction to men. Okay, so in your opinion, then, is male sexual, men's sexual orientation is more fixed and it's more malleable.

Absolutely. And that's that's part of the reason why men, but not women, not many women have parapherias, which are these weird sexual interests. Another guy that feel as a parafilias, but some others are, for example, pedophilia, sexual attraction at children. What's the, what's the amputee one? What's that one?

That is called acratomophilia. Thank you. Yeah. Right. Yes, which we've been studying. Yeah, right. Yes, which we've been studying. There's an zoophilia attraction to animals. Lipophilia, which is attraction to morbidly obese people and the guys who are into them tend to be just normal-weight guys. And we just, we have a paper that is about to be published, it's accepted and I'm working on the proof now, which I think is, he modestly says, I think it's very

interesting, but we studied, we studied guys into amputees, guys into animals, and guys into the really huge fat people. And for each of these three kinds of perifilias, a lot of these guys also have the inversion. They are sexually aroused by the idea of becoming a fat person and animal, which, you know, and I think we have about 10 guys and to amputees who've actually managed somehow to get amputations. Wow. So I first learned this from Dr. James Cantor and spoke to him about it and he described it in this really lovely way, which was a lot of the sexual, let's just call a lot of the parafilias that people have and the odd fetishes that people are turned on by is reflected both outwardly and inwardly. So there are people who are attracted to amputees. There are people who see themselves as amputees. They have their limbs. They have all of their limbs, but they feel like they should not.

They feel like they shouldn't have that. He also, I don't know whether you believe that this is true, said that there are people who are attracted to children, and there are people who see themselves as children. There are men often who want to be dressed up as babies. We did the first study of this. Kevin, my PhD student, Kevin Sue, and I did a first study of auto pedophilia. And that's right. And the most ethical form of pedophilia. Yeah, and when a really interesting finding of that study was that some of these men are attracted to boys,

some are attracted to girls. Well, the guys who are attracted to girls are sexually aroused by the idea of being a little girl, not a little boy, which is interesting. Hmm. So you have, that is a great way to prove that the relationship outwardly and inwardly is the same because otherwise you wouldn't have this relationship between the two. That's so interesting. Why is everyone not a sex researcher? Why is everyone not doing paraphernalia sexually? I feel the same way. Yeah. So interesting. Oh, okay. So in your opinion, does bisexuality truly exist in

men? Like how accurate do you think the stereotype is that bisexual women are really straight and that bisexual men are really gay? In, I think it was 2005 we published a paper that failed to find evidence that male bisexuality truly existed where by that I mean that men in the laboratory would show arousal to both men and to women. That did not make us popular. We were, you know, you got us into the news, but not liked. We have kept studying this by we, I and my then graduate student now, he's a professor in England, Geralt Rieger, and we've gotten several hundred several hundred subjects in the lab.

And two years ago, we publishedceedings of National Academy of Sciences a paper in which we showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that male bisexuality truly exists. There is a subset of bisexual men who clearly produce a rousal to male stimuli and to female stimuli. Most of them are somewhat more rous by one sex than by the other. They're not exactly predominantly gay or predominantly straight bisexual month. Yeah, but they're a bit bisexual. Yes. So I now believe for sure in male bisexuality.

At the same time, if you talk to gay men, just ask them this question, did you ever say you were bisexual? About half a gay man will say, yeah, then you say, well, were you really bisexual and they say, no. So it really does happen that some men misrepresent being bisexual, but it also seems to happen that some men are bisexual as I would understand that. And this is a small cohort and also it's difficult to stress test whether this is the thin end of the wedge. En route to becoming a fully fledged member of the gay community or whether you're actually going to just stop at the letter B. Yeah, that's interesting.

or whether you're actually going to just stop at the letter B. Yeah, that's interesting. What about environmental influences on sexual orientation? So we have, at the moment, in Korea, a very sort of sex negative culture, which you'll probably be familiar with, where there is the four B's movement, women who are recanting, I can't remember what the four different B's stand for it in Korean, but it's men and patriarchy and family and work or kids or something like that. And it is downstream of a whatever less than one birth rate and it's everything's career is just a mess. But that seems like whether it be outright celibacy, slash abstinence or turning to lesbianism, I don't know whether that's true. That is a sexual orientation response to an ecological or environmental cue, right? Something has happened that has changed maybe the sex ratio,

maybe the make value of the potential available partners that are around downstream from that. We have declining birth rates across the West too. We have an increase in cohort of high performing women and an e-crucing cohort of underperforming men. Hypogamously, that means that maybe women are going to be struggling to find men that are of the mate value that they would desire, even though we're in a society which has been the most sort of sex-positive, ostensibly than it's ever been.

I think that there is a bit of a sex recession going on. There's a great article in the Atlantic about this. So with all of this folded together, how how malleable is sexual orientation in response to the local environment and could you foresee a future given where we're at sexually and with the mating crisis at the moment that this could continue in the future? This is another one of those times when it's important to distinguish male and female sexuality. And this is what I'm going to say is speculative because this hasn't been established and there's

a lot of disagreement. But my gut sense is that men's sexuality is not going to be responsive to cultural pressure much. I say much because there are parts of the world where men will have sex with other men Other males. Let's not call them men. If the males are presenting as very feminine and perhaps transgender, so for example in Samoa there's a natal males who are considered a third sex called the fafafina and You got the lady boys and Thailand and so on. It's pretty common for just plain old straight men To have sex with these Natal males now. I don't think that makes them gay They're not having sex with men. They're

seeing these people as female like. But I don't think there's anything, any kind of cultural change, even if I could build society from the ground up, that would make straight men want to have sex with each other. I think women are likely different and more responsive to cultural factors. And perhaps also things like bad experiences with men, there's a, you know, this belief that when route to lesbianism is being mistreated by man, we don't know that's true, but I find it plausible. But I don't think that women mistreating men is going to make them go gay. No, that's fascinating. One thing that I've been considering a lot is you've been talking about the thin line between

what being gay means physically and what it means in terms of appearance. There's an interesting question. Is a very voluptuous, big boob, big lips, long hair, Thailand, lady boy type presenting person, more female than a very shabin head, sort of more androgenous body type, but vagina owning woman. And there's a really interesting question going on here that you highlighted there. In some over, it's referred to as a third gender. You know, there's a lot of accusations from the left of genital fetishism, which you might have heard of, which is that you're actually

being, you're addicted to the genitals as opposed to the presentation. But there is an interesting question given that our sexuality is so easily fooled. We are such rampant sexual beings that a six inch by four inch screen that has a small depiction of sex happening on it is enough to fool our brain to think there's some sex happening here. No, there isn't. There was some sex happening there a long time ago and now you can see around the side of it. You know that it's not here. No, there isn't. There was some sex happening there a long time ago, and now you can see around the side of it. You know that it's not here. You know that you're not getting any of this. That illusion is responsible for the internet. Correct. Correct. So my point being that you

already can see, as soon as you accept the fact that porn is an effective stimuli, you accept the fact that it is an effective stimuli, you accept the fact that it is not exclusively about the action, it's about the presentation, right? Is it just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, all the way down to the more female presenting, regardless of whether it's an XX or XY chromosome person. It really starts to blur the line between what is and is not classed as a same sex or an opposite sex attracted sexual orientation. Yeah, I think that all we have for the most part are senses and men, especially, but humans in general

are very visual species. And you're absolutely right that some trans women, even those who still have a penis, can look quite, they look like really attractive women, although often you can kinda see the remnants of their mailness and their bone structure or something like that, but yeah, and I think that in those cases, men who don't feel attracted to them or say they don't, that's more likely

to be mental, you know, some kind of aversion, an idea. Like, that person is a man, not a woman. So despite the fact that they look like a really attracted woman, I can't go there. Yeah, it's so fascinating. So I've seen this, you know, I've seen this argument happen on dating shows or on a right-wing commentary channels and stuff like that around commentary channels and stuff like that around, no, because that would be gay. I'm like, is it? Is it more gay to have sex with what looks like a nine out of ten woman body, shape, size, voice, presentation, actions, everything with a penis than it is to have the exact opposite. All of the presentation factors of a man could be on testosterone, could be all of the rest of it, but has a vagina that it and it's a really, really fascinating question.

And you know, this sort of it falls in line with a number of other arguments, this sort of more biological essentialism side of things, especially the people that would say, unless you can change your chromosomes and even not then, if you're a natal male, I'm calling you a man, if you're a natal female, I'm calling you a woman for the rest of time. So it's a suite of beliefs, I suppose, all of which are into play with each other and would also cascade down from that.

But yet, it's a really, really fascinating consideration around what it means. And this is when you get into the deeper and deeper into the layers of parafilia and the nuances of sexual orientation. It all kind of starts to break apart. It's like the quantum level of sex research, I suppose. Yes, yes, we are going on the outskirts here. What about people's gay dars? Do you think that most of us have an accurate gay dars? Yeah, this is again something we've studied quite a bit.

And yeah, people have a much better than chance gay dars. No, it's not perfect, but they are much better at than chance at discerning whether a man is gay or straight and they rely. So gay men, you know, just their outward appearance in the West currently is not necessarily very feminine, although I think gay men might present themselves more attractively than straight men, but it's more things like movement, you know, and speech, speech patterns are... Yeah, you found there's like a gay accent.

There's a gay accent, yes. What is the gay accent? So we know it when we hear it and actors can often effect the gay accent even if they're straight. There's interestingly, there's a lesbian accent too. I think gay accent may tend to be more expressive and gay men articulate more clearly than straight men. And lesbians have the opposite.

They're less expressive and they don't articulate as clearly. Do you think is that in any way gay men modeling female speech patterns? Are there any parallels there? Yeah, you ask great questions and you know, so nobody knows and I think there are at least two good hypotheses there. One is that unconsciously growing up, gay men, you know, some of them they had somewhat feminine gender identity and they did model. The other is that there's something about gay men's brain, which is somewhat feminized and produces the speech better. Nobody knows. Well, when it comes to the ability to present clearly my speech coach that I use for the podcast is gay, classically trained in theatre, classically trained in improv, for not just an outrageous communicator, and probably the best communicator that I've had on the show is Douglas Murray,

who is also, him and Miles, my speech coach, are like two peas in a pod that I've never met, but just phenomenal, like out of this world precision, with his ability to remain cool and depression, to be able to communicate in a very precise way, to be able to use inflection and drama and whimsy, and to then be able to pull it back without being fragile, just phenomenal. And so yeah, I wonder, Andrew Doyle as well,

Satur is from the UK that runs the Titanyu McGrath, just phenomenal. And so yeah, I wonder, Andrew Doyle as well, Saturist from the UK that runs the Tatanya McGrath, Twitter account. I wonder whether being gay is a competitive advantage in the world of online commentary, perhaps. But yeah, it's all of that stuff so interesting, and you write as well that you kind of, I don't think I've been around sufficient lesbians to be able to say that I could pick up on that. The only real things that I haven't noticed with lesbians are sort of the, it's the dress. I think that lesbians seem to dress significantly more differently to normal women than gay's due to the hair short, the pod shirts, the baggy jeans. Yeah, gay men dress somewhat differently, more stylishly, at least.

It's just better usually. That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, very funny. What was that paper that you did about male mate value being more malleable than female mate value? Well, that's an old one. Yeah, the student who was the lead author on that

was interested in the Explaining the sex difference in the Depression women are more likely to get depressed than Men are and she hypothesized that it could be because You know women's mate value is more tied to their looks, which she said you can't do that much about whereas men, they're accomplishments which you can. And she got some evidence for that. I'm not sure that I, that's, you know, an old paper and I'm not sure I believe the theory because, you know,

if women really can't do that much about their looks, what's the cosmetics industry doing? I mean, and you know, it's not that easy for a man to go out and double his income. So anyway, but that's what the paper was about. Yeah, so I find I had a conversation with Ed Hagen as well recently and Ed did a study where they controlled for upper body strength when looking at differences in depression and anxiety and when you control for upper body strength, the differences between men and women get smaller and smaller and smaller,

and then essentially go away. And the reason that I was interested in discussing maliability of mate value is that it's a common discussion that's had on the internet, and it's borne out of a contest between men and women about who's got it worse. It's like, well, it's easy for you because you just need to go and get a boob job, but I can't make myself any taller. And when I was there, it's easy for you because at 21, I reach my peak sexual market value and it's all downhill from there and you get to continue to accrue status and resources. And it's very much sort of two people talking different languages

that the sexual brains, the sexual attraction mechanism that works for men, what they want from women and for women, what they want from men are not the same. You can't play a balancing act here. There is no ability to work out the equity, there's no exchange rate between these two. Like how many boob jobs is three inches of height worth? Do you know what I mean? Like there is no way of us doing it. Oh well you could wear high heels and put makeup on but you can go out for five years and increase your earning potential by 40%. Like what does that even mean? When we're talking about this,

I had a theory, which I think maybe total horse shit, so I'm gonna try and bring it back up again. I had a theory that male mate value to the individual, to the individual is more malleable and to the group is less malleable, and female individual mate value is more malleable and to the group is less malleable. And female individual mate value is less malleable and to the group it's more malleable. That you basically have as a man, there are more degrees of freedom that you can move yourself on.

And there is a longer timeline that you can do it on, specifically because of the fact that, you know, a guy who's 35 is more attractive than a guy who's 25 to most women on average. I don't know when that peaks, probably in your mid to late 30s, perhaps. But even then, Leonardo DiCaprio has been acquiring and disposing of under 25-year-old girlfriends regularly for like two decades now. So with sufficient status and resources, you can continue to cycle through that. But yeah, what do you, what's

your mindset at now when it comes to malleability, especially with this facing this mating crisis and people having concerns around being able to be seen by the other sex? Well, I think that in the sense that I understand you I think we're probably very malleable The culture has changed tremendously You know in a fairly short time and it's gonna guessing it will Change tremendously still. I hope it changes back in certain ways because I'm not that happy with certain things now.

But that's a different question than, do I know how to change it? And I do not. And that has to do with male female interactions as much as academic freedom, both of which, well, the latter concerns me more now. Michael Bailey, ladies and gentlemen, Michael, I really, really appreciate your work, any opportunity to dig into people that are looking into sex is fascinating for me.

I've immensely enjoyed talking to you. I hope that we get more chances either in person or back here, whatever. I have a bunch of... I have a laundry list of things that we didn't get to talk about to do with sexual arousal patterns, virtuous pedophiles, the birth order effect of homosexuality so we can absolutely run this back. Let me know once your new paper is out. As a reminder for the people who want to check out your article and also follow you online and stuff like that, where

should they go? Where would you want to direct them? I am a boring academic week. You can go to Google Scholar and search for Jay Michael Bailey or there's something called Research Gate where you can find lots of my papers as well or email me at my university address. It's J.M. Huyfen, Bailey, B.A.I.L.E.Y. at north.edu and uh and i'll try to help you if you need it uh yeah nothing fancy for me Michael i appreciate you thank you thank you Yeah, I'm fed