The Daily Signal - Biologist vs. Southern Poverty Law Center

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Ph.D. biologist Colin Wright is publicly inviting the Southern Poverty Law Center to debate him on the subject of what the SPLC calls "anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience," specifically on the transgender issue. The SPLC released a 41,000-word report claiming that "the controversy over trans health care is manufactured to reinforce both white supremacy and the political goals of the Christian Right." The report claims to reveal "anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience," but it does not seriously address the concerns of critics of the transgender movement. The report mentions Wright, a Manhattan Institute fellow, as part of the movement pushing "pseudoscience." "It's almost not really worth responding to," Wright tells "The Daily Signal Podcast" of the SPLC report. "It is such a poor, poorly put together document, riddled with typos." "Most importantly, it justs makes all these accusations that I'm peddling 'pseudoscience,' that type of thing," he adds. "It doesn't engage with any of the actual arguments and the substance of what I'm saying, or what anyone else mentioned in the report is saying. There's not really anything to respond to." He calls the report "completely ridiculous." "It's purely just a smear piece," Wright says. "They just want to garner attention and stir outrage." Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today.

We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, January 22nd. I'm Virginia Allen. Biologist Colin Wright is publicly inviting the Southern Poverty Law Center to debate him on the subject of what the SPLC calls anti-LGBQ plus pseudoscience. The SPLC released a 41,000 word report claiming that the controversy over trans health care is manufactured. to reinforce both white supremacy and the political goals of the Christian Right. Well, Mr. Wright disagrees and wants to have a conversation with the SPLC on the topic. The Daily Signal's Tyler O'Neill is sitting down with Wright today to discuss what exactly the so-called anti-LGBQ plus pseudoscience is and what a debate on the topic would entail. Stay tuned for Tyler's conversation with biologist Colin Wright after this.

Hi, I'm John Carlo Conoparo. And I'm Zach Smith. And we host Scotus 101. It's a podcast where you'll get a breakdown of top cases in the highest court in the land. Hear from some of the greatest legal minds. And of course, get a healthy dose of Supreme Court trivia. Want to listen? Find us wherever you get your podcasts or just head to heritage.org slash podcasts.

This is Tyler O'Neill, managing editor. at The Daily Signal. I am honored to be joined by Colin Wright, Biology, Ph.D., and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, author at Reality's Last Stand, very impactful substack, a very important voice in the gender-critical supporting of biology movement. Colin, it's great to have you with us. Thanks for having me on. I'm happy to be here and at the conference we have going on. Yeah. So you spoke earlier today about what we know biologically and why it conflicts with the gender ideology narrative. Would you, you know, just summarize that briefly and talk about your own personal experience as, you know, a PhD student and then in academia facing the headwinds on this

movement? Yeah. So I, as you mentioned, I was just a normal academic, I guess, as you would say, I'm a biologist. I was studying social behavior in social insects and arachnid societies. That's what my main area of study was. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. It was all. It was all. Only until maybe around 2016 when I first started hearing my colleagues and they're sharing articles on Facebook making weird claims about the biology of sex. And by sex, I'm talking about this, the existence of males and females, not like, you know, sexual selection or anything like that. They would just share articles about there being five sexes or that sex is a social construct or that sex is a spectrum or, you know, any number of sexes besides two. And I initially started pushing back against this stuff as a scientist would.

saying that, oh, this is just purely incorrect, and here's what sex actually is, here's why there's only two. This is a universal across every single, you know, sexually reproducing species. And the response I was getting back was very non-scientific, because very anti-scientific. It was, you're a bigot, you're, you're, you know, even a racist. They would call me for making these arguments. That's ironic.

Yeah. And so I initially, it was just really flabbergasting to see this type of response from my colleagues. And then when I looked sort of more under the hood, because at first I was just coming from pure, like, I'm just a biologist talking about biology, what is motivating this position they have, because it's clearly not scientific. Otherwise, they would just be giving me scientific arguments. And then, you know, there's this whole political apparatus behind it. There's concerted movement by activists coming from, you know, various humanities, disciplines like queer theory that are trying to just sort of muddy the waters about what males and females are. And it's difficult to address just, you know, using, just trying to engage with them. they're doing a political project. I'm doing sort of a scientific truth-finding project here.

And so that's what kind of started me down this path. And then once I looked at to see, well, you know, it's not just that people are wrong about biology, but there's major consequences, not just for individuals, but for society as a whole, when you're denying fundamental aspects of our biology. I mean, I used to argue against creationists and intelligent design proponents back in the day as an evolutionary biologist because I think evolution is very important part of our, who we are as species as individuals. And so you can't deny fundamental truths without paying a large cost. And we're seeing this in, you know, most specifically and most horrifically, I think, in what we call gender affirming care medicine, whereas this idea that sex isn't any one thing, that sex is a

spectrum, that sex is something that exists on multiple levels, and that your brain sex can be out of sync with your physical sex, and this can be cured by giving you hormones and surgeries to make your, you know, your body sex align with your mind sex. And, you know, to me, this is just a wildly aggressive and anti-scientific and horrific, grotesque, any other word you want to throw at it. And so this is sort of what I've been focusing on because it's incredibly important. No one else is really talking about this to the same degree. And I'm just hoping we can restore some sanity in this debate and just, you know, focus on what's true because that's, that needs to be your guiding principle.

Even if you care about social justice or whatever, like you can't be just unless what you're doing is first true. And so that's what I'm, that's kind of my approach to things right now. Yeah, I saw, I think I saw it. journal article where in a scientific journal where a researcher described someone talking about their, you know, gender affirming care as a form of art, which I really thought kind of hit the nail on the head with what some of this actually is. Yeah, that's the, so this idea of gender affirming care, you know, they're coming at it and saying that this is life-saving care, that they need to have this

otherwise, they'll commit suicide. But then when they ask kids or adults, you know, about gender affirming care and what they'd like to have done. It is really just whatever they want to do cosmetically. And there's cases where you start, you know, saying you have dysphoria. And they just give you this huge list of things. You can have body contouring. You can have your breast removed. You can have implants. Put in there, you can, you know, it's just anything you want to do. They put the patient in the driver's seat, not only to just self-diagnose into this condition called gender dysphoria, but then they're in total control over any procedure that they have to modify their bodies. You know, I think people, if their adults,

should be able to pursue body modification surgeries. You know, this is something that a lot of people do. This is, you know, a voluntary cosmetic surgery. I think that's, most people are okay with adults having cosmetic surgery. But the thing that makes the gender affirming care so bad is that this is covered by insurance as though it's life-saving, and it's clearly not. There's, there's not any good evidence to suggest that people are committing suicide and concerning numbers if they're not given full access to any body modification surgery that they would like. When you talk about the anti-biology aspects of this, you know, you define sex. I remember when I was a kid, they always taught us X, X, X, X, Y, and that was essentially

the end of what they said. And I think it's more complicated than that, but it's also very simple, and this movement is denying it. Yeah, it's, what we learned in school is mostly correct, but there are some nuances that are important to just keep track of. So one important thing to keep track of is this distinction between how sex is determined versus how sex is defined. So a lot of biologists mix us up too, I argue with them daily. Well, they'll say that, well, we all know that sex is determined by chromosomes, or sometimes they'll use that as, you know, a way to say that, you know, people commonly say that sex is determined by chromosomes, but that's not true.

It has, it's determined by all these other different factors together. So the main issue here is that when biologists talk about how sex is determined, we're using the word determined in the, the way that a developmental biologist would talk about it, which is how, you know, when we say a tissue is determined, it's about how a tissue is sort of put on a trajectory to develop into a certain appendage or organ, things like that. So when we talk about how sex is determined, what we're saying is there's a bunch of different organisms and some of them determine sex by things like chromosomes, where the genes on your chromosomes cause an embryo to develop down a pathway that leads to being males or females. Some other organisms like alligators and other reptiles, they don't use sex chromosomes.

They use temperature, and the temperature that they're incubated at is what caused them to develop into males or females. These are what we call sex determination mechanisms. These are the upstream causes of one's sex. It's not to be confused with how sex is defined. So how sex is defined is based on the type of gamete, either sperm or ova, that in organisms' reproductive system is organized around to produce, essentially. And that is the universal definition. This applies to humans and alligators and birds and any other organism that reproduces by fusing two different gametes.

So they try to confuse people by saying, well, sex is determined by chromosomes. Well, that's true. It's not defined by chromosomes. And so that's a really important distinction to make, you know, the mechanisms versus sex itself. Yeah. And when it comes to the movement, it's interesting, I think when you talk about the development of gametes, you know, small gametes, sperm, male, large gametes, eggs, female, generally. you know, it's almost like the transgender movement if they were to successfully transplant working set of, you know, gonads to produce gametes into another person, would that be a full

change of sex or would that not? I would maybe put an asterisk by that person because I guess functionally speaking, like they would be acting as a male organism if you could, you know, transplant like a full male reproductive system on a female. But generally in biology, when we talk about, you know, what an organism is like, you know, you can't paint stripes on a lion and call it a tiger. You know, even though tigers have stripes, you know, we talk about, you know, their phenotype is already developed. We've already seen what their genes produce, you know, the combination of genes

and their interaction with the environment. You know, you have, you know, birds, if it's like a red-throated or whatever, just because you, you know, change the color of its red throat, it doesn't mean it's no longer a red-throated sparrow or something like that. You know, its phenotype is already manifested. You will always be a male or a female, even if you, you, you know, you, lose your genitals in a horrific car accident, if you have them removed and replaced with something else, you know, there's a whole other conversation about like the transhumanist, you know, transplants and what we can do in the future, and, you know, we can maybe put asterisk by someone saying that this is, you know, this person's functionally acting as a male now because they've had

this transplanted system, but, you know, from a purely biological point of view, this, their sex hasn't changed, even if say that they've had a sort of a whole interesting sex transplant going for them. But that's a whole other thing. We'll deal with that when we get there. For now, that is not something we're capable of doing, and we're probably pretty far away from that. Yeah. And I want to get more into your personal story, you know, having gotten your PhD in biology, and then, you know, are you looking to get back into academia? Or do you think that's really difficult, mostly unlikely, because of the ideological push that we've seen on this issue? I think that ship has sailed for me, being in academia. yeah. You know, I would like to maybe, I'd be open to do some sort of teaching in a university setting, probably not going back to studying spiders and wasps or anything like that. I mean,

Yeah, I mean, it is fascinating. I mean, it would be interesting to have some sort of lab dealing with sex differences in the biology of sex or something. You know, I'm not saying I'm completely closed off to the idea, but right now the stuff I'm doing is, I hesitate to call it activism because I'm just making clear statements about the nature of biology. But I I am, you know, doing expert testimony for court cases where you have activist groups trying to distort what it means to be male or female. I just think right now that is where I need to spend my time. I think it's the most important thing to be doing right now because there's so few people doing it. Changing one sort of line of text and legislation is worth, you know, a thousand op-eds that I could be writing on this topic.

So in the future, hopefully if we return to sanity, I could start teaching somewhere or doing something else, or at least expand what I'm doing now. but currently no plans to get back into academia anytime soon. And the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization I wrote a book about, has this new report out that they called The Captain Report. It's some absurd acronym like countering anti-scientific, pseudoscientific narratives on transgenderism or whatever. And I believe they mentioned you. They've mentioned, you know, many of the prominent scientific critics of gender ideology. Have you responded to that report?

What do you think of, you know, it seems to me like this is the essence. SPLC, leveraging its history as it often does, to try to silence ideological opponents. I haven't responded to it. I mean, I've mentioned it on Twitter or X. It's almost not really worth responding to. It is such a poorly put together document. I mean, riddled with typos, there's almost not even a sentence or two you can go through without finding typos. It's really, really bad. And most importantly, it just makes all these accusations that, you know, I'm peddling pseudoscience, that type of thing. It doesn't engage with any of the actual arguments in the substance of what I'm saying or anyone else mentioned in the report is saying.

There's not really anything to respond to. It's purely just a smear piece. And I just think giving it any attention is, you know, that's kind of what they want. They just want to garner attention and stir outrage because they're clearly shopping for donations at some point here. So I just mostly ignore it. I mocked it once on Twitter just because it was completely ridiculous document. But if anyone from the SPLC wants to actually have a conversation with me about anything

that I've ever said on this topic, You know, if you think I'm peddling pseudoscience, expose me in front of a huge audience. Let's have a one-on-one conversation. You're a moderator of your choice. I'm just here to have a conversation about the biology of sex. So let's have that conversation. Let's do it. I'm here to talk about it.

Well, you hear it here first. Well, thanks so much, Colin. Thanks again for joining us. Where can people follow you? You can follow me on X, formerly known as Twitter, at Swipe Right. It's Swipe and then W-R-I-G-H-T. I write for a substack, realities last stand.com. And then you can find my writing in City Journal.

It's run by the Manhattan Institute, the Wall Street Journal, and other places. I do a lot of podcasts as well. So I think if you Google me, you'll be able to find a lot of my work. Thanks again. Thank you. And that's going to do it for today's episode. But a quick announcement before we let you go, we will not have a top news edition today, Monday. The entire Daily Signal team is in an all-day meeting today, discussing strategy for how

we can make the Daily Signal even better and bring you even more great content. But we will be back with you for top news tomorrow on Tuesday. And of course, we will be back with another interview edition tomorrow, Tuesday morning. If you have not had the chance in the meantime, take a minute to leave the Daily Signal or rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you like to listen. We love hearing your feedback. And it's really helpful for us as we continue to move forward and bring you content that you love. Thanks again for being with us today.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow morning. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Kate Trinco. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.