The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin | The War on Science Interviews | Day 18

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:Richard Dawkins July 23rdNiall Ferguson July 24thNicholas Christakis July 25thMaarten Boudry July 26thAbigail Thompson July 27thJohn Armstrong July 28thSally Satel – July 30Elizabeth Weiss – July 31Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz – August 1Frances Widdowson – August 2Carole Hooven – August 3Janice Fiamengo – August 4Geoff Horsman – August 5Alessandro Strumia – August 6Roger Cohen and Amy Wax – August 7Peter Boghossian – August 8Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau – August 9Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin – August 10Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan – August 11Karleen Gribble – August 12Dorian Abbot – August 13The topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war. The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship. The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west. I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have contributed to this volume, and we have 20 separate podcast interviews

that will be airing over the next 20 days, starting July 22nd, before and after the last. the book first appears with many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects. The authors we will have interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Budry, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Settel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Woodison, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessandro Strumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau, Alex

Byrne and Modi Gorin, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Grible, and finally Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific integrity stressed by our first podcast interviewer Richard Dawkins. and will once again go over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative consequences that have come from that to issues of how specific disciplines, including mathematics, have been distorted,

and how certain departments at universities now specifically claim that they are social activists and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology has permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Settel will talk about how social justice is hijacked medicine. And also, when it comes to issues of gender affirming care, we have a variety of authors who are going to speak about the issues there and how too often gender affirming care claims are made.

are not based on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. We will talk to several people who, for one reason, another, have been canceled for saying things. Francis Whittleson at Mount Royal University in Canada, and Carol Hoeven from Harvard, who eventually had to leave Harvard after saying on television that sex is binary in biology will be talking to people who've looking at, at the impact of diversity, equity, inclusion in academia, and how it's restricting free inquiry,

and also restricting, in many ways, scientific merit at those universities. And finally, Doreen Abbott, the last contributor to our series, will be talking about three principles he believes are essential to separate science and politics and keep academia free from ideology and more for open questioning and progress and to make sure that science is based on empirical evidence

and where we go where the evidence is, whether it's convenient or not, whether it's politically correct or not, and we're willing to debate all ideas that nothing is sacred, a central feature of what science should be about and what in some sense this podcast is about. So I hope you really enjoy the next 20 days and we've enjoyed bringing it to you. So with no further ado,

the war on science, the interviews. Well, Alex Byrne and Motigoren, I'm really happy you both join me here. I'm really happy you both wrote an article for the Warren Science book about a very important subject, but it's nice to meet you both virtually. It's always amazing to me in the modern world

how one can be a co-author with someone and never actually have met them. Moti and I have actually met. Yeah, Moti and you have, yes. But in any case, welcome. the title of your piece of your article is deafening sounds, bioethics and gender affirming health care. You are both philosophers, one in particular on bioethics. And you may not have watched the podcast, but this is an origins podcast.

And I like to find out how people got to the point where we talk about what they're doing, and in this case about the article. So I want to ask each of you some questions and to get some sense of where you're coming from. And then we'll go through some of the ideas you bring up and I'll ask you about. Alex, you're Lawrence Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT, where I received my PhD a long time ago. And your interest has been philosophy of mind, a subject I spent a little time in my last book and metaphysics. But before we get to how you got to sex and gender, which I want to ask about, I assume you were an undergraduate in the United Kingdom. Did you study philosophy?

Is that what you... Well, I didn't actually study philosophy first of all. I mean, like many people, I came to philosophy later. I actually started off studying physics. Physics? Yes. That's the appropriate thing that anyone should study. I was not really bad at that, so I switched to mathematics. I don't know whether that was the real improvement.

And then I, so that was my first degree. And then after that, I actually worked in advertising in London for a number of years. And I did a second philosophy undergraduate degree at Birkbeck College, London, which at the time was really fantastic for philosophy. That's some really great philosophers there. Yeah, my friend. And so later in life, I've found my way over to the States to a PhD. Well, I often ask people why they didn't study physics.

And now I'm glad to see, I don't have to ask you that. Always amazing. I mean, I very much liked physics. I often, you know, wish I'd been smart enough to be a theoretical physicist. Well, it takes different times. I don't much. Anyway, but it's good to, but I'm always happy to see that, as I say, that people at least lean that way.

And in fact, then maybe answer my next question. But before we do, so just out of interest, my old friend Anthony Grayling, I think, taught at Berwick College, but I don't know whether he was. Yes, I mean, of course, I know, I certainly know of Anthony. I've read a number of his books. I don't think I ever met him. No, I just wondered whether he was there. But anyway, let me, so that's good.

So you did, you had real world experience and then you went back. So you did your PhD in philosophy. philosophy though at Princeton, right? That's right. Yes. Yeah. And, okay. And then I just stayed in this country ever since.

Another friend of mine, Peter Singer, teaches or taught at Princeton. Oh, indeed. I mean, Peter has a connection to this whole issue because, of course, he started, along with Jeff McMahon and Francesca Minerva, the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Yes. And without that journal, there would have been even less pushback against orthodoxy. and yes, yeah. It's gender than there has actually been.

Now, and that's good to know. Yes, in fact, we'll mention that at some point. It's really important that people can publish in a place that allows this discussion to happen. And it's really tragic that I was with Peter recently and we both agreed that ideally the journals should go out of existence because it won't be necessary in the future. Well, of course. I mean, it's like particularly bizarre that philosophy papers are getting published in the Journal of Controversial. ideas, you would have thought every single philosophy journal would, you know, have as it

subtitle the journal. That's what it's supposed to be. Exactly. And you make that point in the article, which you'll get to. The last thing I want to ask, and I don't know if it's because you studied physics, but I found it interesting that your positions have always been in sort of scientific institutions. You're a postdoc at Caltech and then moved MIT.

That's right. Is that just an accident or is that a predilection? I think it was just an accident. But it's very nice being, I like being around scientists. Yeah, no, I Yeah, no, it's Generally more Generally more level-headed

And evidence-based than humans Well, I like to think so Although when I did my PhD in MIT The only The great thing about MIT is You didn't have to take any classes At least in physics You just had to pass exams

But the only class I actually took Was sort of a flaw Well, it wasn't, it was from a philosopher It was Noam Jomsky's class On American Foreign Policy But in any case Okay, great. Now, last thing

Sorry, Morty, we'll get to you how did you get to sex and gender? And I do want to briefly talk, you wrote a book called Trouble with Gender, Sex, Facts and Gender Fictions, and it was cancelled. So maybe we could talk about that for two minutes. Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, I think I got into it because somewhat indirectly,

as I'm sure you'll remember, there was a huge farce in philosophy in 2017 when Rebecca Tuval published an article in the feminist journal Hypatia called In Defense of Transracialism. And, you know, superficially, Rebecca's message seemed all very progressive that, you know, we should extend the rights and courtesies that we, of course, do and should to transgender people to any transracial people. But, of course, that's not how it was received. and Rebecca was set upon by her colleagues who basically tried to completely destroy her reputation

and have the article retracted, which fortunately it wasn't at the end. So I, along with like many philosophers in the profession, was completely horrified by that. And so just out of interest, I started looking into the literature on sex and gender. I'd always been interested in sex differences anyway and evolutionary psychology, that kind of thing. Well, since your philosophy of mind, it's a reasonable. Yeah, that's right. And so I started thinking about these issues and writing a few things for online magazines and so on. And just a little later after Rebecca's cancellation, there came the cancellation of Kathleen Stock, who I was...

We'll talk about that. I was at the University of Sussex. And Kathleen's cancellation lasted for about three years, at the end of which she was driven out of her job. And I was just absolutely astounded by the fact that. fact that her main cancellers were leading philosophers in the profession. I mean, I just couldn't believe it.

So, then I just got more and more interested in this topic and started writing more and more about it and had, yeah, various little cancellation episodes myself, although nothing as serious as Kathleen's or Rebecca's.

And anyway, the more I delved into the philosophical literature, the appalled I was by the generally very low quality of the philosophy. So I thought I could write a inaccessible trade book about sex and gender. And so that's what I did. And Oxford University Press contracted it and then... That's right. I had a contract from Oxford University Press, and then they declined to publish it on the grounds.

Claiming it was not appropriate for Oxford University Press. Yeah, well, than like sufficiently sensitive or respectful or something like that, even though I'd like bent over backwards to be. The typical argument. It's not, they don't, they never have the guts to say why. They always just couch it in some ridiculous argument, like it's not appropriate for us at the current time or some ridiculous thing like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Well, it's, um, and we'll, we'll hit on all these topics, including the low quality of philosophy about this issue that is published. But I don't, but, but Modi has been sitting by so patiently. I want to go to him. Your origin story, it better be good, Mosey. Before to hearing it. Anyway, I know, yeah, so you're a philosopher. I mean, you're really a bioethicist. That's your prime, prime work.

But you study philosophy, I assume, and unlike Alex, maybe we're not fortunate enough to do it and start a degree in physics, I assume. I did not start a degree in physics. I knew very early on that it wasn't smart enough for that. So I didn't even venture an attempt there. No, I under my majors as an undergrad, we're in philosophy in English.

And then I took about six years off working various jobs in California. Dot com jobs as that first dot com bubble was bursting. So getting laid off and collecting unemployment for a while and then getting another job with another company that would soon go out of business. And then decided to go to grad school. And yes, I ended up with a, you know, a PhD. in philosophy and then had a postdoctoral fellowship at a medical school. And so that was two years of, you know, taking courses with and getting to know the

empirical bioethics literature quite well and learning about, you know, bioethics from the inside. And so my focus since then has been largely in biomedical ethics. Okay. Is that where Kaplan was, our at Pena? He was at Penn. He was already at NYU when I got there. I think he was at my university before that. I think that's how I knew.

But anyway. I think, I don't know if he founded the department there, the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Penn. But he had been gone already for at least a few years when I was. But I knew there was a big program in it there. Yeah. Yeah.

No, Zika Manuel was directing the program when I was there. I was chairing the department. Okay, that's interesting. And then you move from there to Colorado State where you are now. That's correct. and I've been here for about 10 years. And, yeah, that's right. How did you guys start to collaborate?

Now, you're both a question. I mean, you know, in this area, there's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was basically hardly any of us, so... It's hard not to end up meeting people who share puzzlement and just, you know... Yeah. I don't remember... I think we didn't we meet at the GenSpeck conference?

in Denver. That's how we met in person. But had we been in touch before then? Yeah, I think so. Or social media. I don't remember. But you've written, is this the first article

you've written together or no or no? Yes. Oh, wonderful. Well, I'm very happy. Only so far with other. Yeah, we have something in the works. Well, anytime we can bring people together, I love that. I should say also, I mean, I read before I was really,

I mean, had been thinking about these issues, but hadn't written anything. I read some of Alex's early words. that he had published on gender identity, for example, on Medium, he has a great essay on what is gender identity and was, of course, following some of the same things going on in the profession that Alex just described with Rebecca Tuvel and Kathleen Stock. I had actually started to get a bit puzzled on some of these issues during my postdoc because somebody came in with a guest lecture on some, you know, sex and gender issues. And they struck me as perplexing, given my understanding of feminism, which I learned.

very quickly, I guess, is outdated at where, you know, we don't reject stereotypes and social norms but try to embody them. I thought that was very puzzling and I asked about it and was got a very hand wavy response that didn't make much sense. So I started already thinking about these issues at that time and then asked a trusted senior colleague whether this was an area that was prudent to sort of investigate and what I was told was that, you know, it's a complex area in bioethics and I had better learned very well both the conceptual stuff but also the empirical stuff. And so that's what I got in touch with people on the empirical side of things, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, and once you start talking to them, you realize that

the empirical work is just as confused and ill-founded as some of the conceptual. work and philosophy that Alex just alluded to. Okay, that's a good, I think a good segue to now talk about what you guys were writing out. Let me, let me read some sentences from the opening of your article. The first sentence says the, quote, affirming health care model for gender distressed youth is endorsed by the medical establishment in the United States, but many European nations have retreated from it. Something we'll come back to. Anyway, then you say this controversy would be expected to attract the interest of philosophers and bioethesis, with a diverse range of opinions appearing in academic articles.

However, when philosophers and bioethicists have ventured into print, they have almost invariably endorsed the affirmative approach, which involves life-changing medical interventions on children with psychological problems. As we'll explain, this is a sign that the process of academic research and writing is not functioning as it should. I don't know if you want to elaborate on, but I think the idea is, is that philosophy is supposed to involve, well, as science, a dialectic, that scholarship moved forward by ideas being attacked and either surviving and not surviving. And that was a surprise

to both of you, I assume, that when you started to look at the literature, that it wasn't what you thought it would be. I mean, I think it would have been a surprise to us if we'd looked back in 2017 or something. I don't think it's at all a surprise to us when we used started writing the paper. I mean, there's an interesting contrast between the debate or lack of debates in philosophy and bioethics over gender-affirming care and abortion. So, even though, I think it's fair to say, most philosophers who consider the issue are very much pro-choice, nonetheless, that is a subject. that you can freely discuss in philosophy

and you can write articles without much of a problem defending the view that abortion is immoral or it's the same thing as infanticide or something. That does seem to be some genuine debate within philosophy. I'm sure mostly knows more about this than I do.

You can and people do publish on the ethics of abortion. And when you teach the course, you try to make as compelling as you can views on all sides of the issue so that students can recognize that whatever you do think in the end about the legal or moral right to an abortion,

there really are important moral considerations to consider on all sides. And you try to be charitable to one's opponents, And that does not happen when it comes to pediatric gender medicine. And so that's a significant difference. And it's a radical difference because it's the case now where even entertaining certain questions or supporting certain policies renders you not only wrong or misguided in the way that many liberals think pro-life people are, but somehow really, you know, borderline evil.

Yeah, yeah. It's a, well, let's, as we start going, delving into this, as you do in your article, let's sort of define, before one could talk about gender affirming, we want to talk about what it means. And, and you define gender dysphoria as an extreme aversion to one sex body. And the important thing is that it can be early onset, as you point out, or late onset, mostly in heterosexual men, it's point out. But starting around, there's something new that happened around 2015. You say starting around 2015, clinicians notice that a new person, you know, clinicians notice that a new person, you know, presentation of adolescent onset gendered dysphoria, mostly affecting girls. This was labeled rapid onset gender dysphoria by a certain physician and ignited an explosion of activist-driven controversy. And it's this treatment of gender dysphoria

and children and this adolescent, this new burgeoning area of problems that didn't have before, and that you really want to look at. And as you say, until compared to recently, it wasn't routine to involve medicalization or even social transitions.

That wasn't treated. And so, I think you say that there was something called the Dutch Protocol, which was, which governed things before sort of 2015-ish or maybe even earlier

that got to be changed. So maybe you could expand upon that. I mean, there was I'll just say something and then I said a bit of a motley. So very recently there was a New York Times podcast called The Protocol, which is well worth listening to, which is all about the Dutch protocol

and how it came over and was transformed into a much more liberal regime where the guardrails had completely dropped once it hit these shores. So children, with early onset gender dysphoria were first treated with puberty blockers. Actually, the first one was treated in the late 80s. Is that right? Eighty-nine. It was just a single case. Yeah. And more of them were treated in the 90s. There were various rationales for pausing,

for pausing puberty. One rationale was that if the child later transition, had hormone, cross-sex hormone treatment and then surgery, then they would be better able to pass as a member of the other sex. That was one rationale. Anyway, the Dutch had fairly strict restrictions on who was eligible for this treatment. You had to have had persistent gender dysphoria from a very early age, a supportive family, no serious psychopathology. other than the gender disorder itself.

And then it was brought to the U.S. by a clinician called Laura Edwards Leeper, who worked at the... Boston Children's. Yeah, Boston Children's, the gender, not the gender management service, but the gender, multi-specialty service. Yes, that's right. That's around 2007. Yeah, that's right.

Right, around 2007. And the story of the story that the podcast tells, the New York Times podcast tells, is that, well, the Dutch approach was good and rigorous and actually helpful, beneficial to, uh, cautious. Yeah, cautious, beneficial to these children's mental health. But then, not surprisingly, once it got to America, the more freewheeling America, you know, some kind of Wild West, um, uh, version of medicine broke out. and now, as I said before, all the guardrails have dropped, and this is very bad. So the story they tell is that, yeah, pediatric medical transition is good if it closely follows the Dutch protocol, but it's not so good and indeed positively harmful if we follow the more child-led general. that's right. The gender affirming child led.

Yeah, I'll live in the driving seat. Yeah, let's get there. I mean, it sounds to me like the proper analogy is that the Dutch had kept their finger in the dike and the Americans pulled it out. Yes.

Right. That is the story of, that's the story that the podcast tells. Okay. Now, sorry, and then, but just to add,

just to add to that, the mere fact that there is this discussion on the New York time. podcast shows you that there is something to see here, something of great interest, which, you know, on which one could take a number of different positions. And, of course, that's exactly what is not happening. Yeah, that's right. In the POSPie journals. This is clearly, as you point out, and I think I have a great quote from me later on.

This is a topic that if it was ever a topic for ripe for philosophers to debate, this would be it and there isn't that debate happening. Instead, I'm shocked at this person, Diane Arnshaft, who is the director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco's Child and Adolescent Gender Sender. God forbid, I would say, if I believed in God. But anyway, but you have a quote, so she describes, defends the U.S. approach as follows,

and I think this is quite remarkable, so I'm going to read your quote. The gender affirmative model is defined as a method of therapeutic care that includes allowing children to speak for themselves about their self-expressed gender identity and expressions and provide support them to evolve into their authentic gender selves, no matter at what age. Intervention should include social transition from one gender to another and are evolving gender non-conforming expressions and presentations, as well as later gender affirming medical interventions, puberty, blockers,

cross-sex hormone surgeries, etc. And she conceives of this authentic gender self. And I can't help but mention, you know, this, her gender creative child book that you talk about with gender creative children and gender Priuses, half girl, half boy, gender ambidextrous children, gender tutzi roll pops. And this idea that, that I guess children are in a position to, fully understand their gender, especially before their pubescent, is remarkable to me.

I just, I find it absolutely remarkable that the people who work with children would think that. And so I would ask you to comment. Am I missing something? I don't think you're missing anything in noting that there's something strange going on. And if you talk to people in psychiatry and psychology who have studied child development, they too recognize that something has gone wrong. I mean, not all of them, but the ones who are willing to talk candidly will acknowledge that we've known for a very long time that young children, even adolescents, are going through profound periods of identity development and so on.

And so to say that, you know, a six-year-old or even a 12-year-old knows with certainty, right, who they are, we don't make those sorts of claims with respect to any other characteristics of a person generally. Like, you know, a 12-year-old might want to be a physicist, and then they've come to recognize that, in fact, they aren't as good at math as they had hoped to be. Or they might, you know, there's lots of changes. That's a more superficial change having to do with. you know, a professional aspiration, but the same goes for even the kind of person that you take yourself to be. That is in flux, our whole lives to say nothing. I know some, I have to say, I know some people, some good friends and women who were tomb boys and when they were younger, felt like they should be a boy until, of course, they hit puberty and then they felt like

quite differently about it. Well, what we don't, this is a, I mean, one of the things that we, I don't think we allude to this in the chapter, but we don't give the actual numbers. So the original Dutch protocol, that's the sort of backbone of this entire medical practice, initially they had 70 youth that they were initially, that they initially put on puberty blockers. And of those 70 youth, only one was heterosexual. And so what, you know, what was known and reported for years is that many kids who are young and gender nonconforming, they just come to recognize via sexual development that they're gay, their same sex attracted. And they're intervening with the process of sexual development by prescribing the blockers. And so what happens there, arguably, is that people.

psychosocial, um, psychosexual development is impacted, right? So rather than growing up to be, um, you know, a butcher lesbian or an effeminate gay man,

they, you know, they come to identify in a different way and with medical procedures in place come to appear a different way. Um, so that's a, plausible story about the risks of intervening with, um,

uh, child and adolescent development. and forgetting that kids don't always know who they are. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I want to move ahead a little bit. You point out that all major medical associations, U.S. endorses gender-referring model.

And the argument that's given, and one hears often, and you discuss it at some length, is the notion of preventing suicides among young people. And this claim is made, as you point out, including, I think, by the American Medical Association, that there is an association between gender affirming care and lower odds of suicide. And that claim is made, as many things are made in the case of gender and many of the things we talk about in this book, the antithesis of science is making claims without evidence.

And this is a claim for which often quotes are given to articles which don't even refer to suicide. So I want you to illuminate that a little bit because I think it's an important issue because a lot of people think, well, if we can prevent suicides, that's a good thing. But most of the work that's been done here, apparently, has been done not related necessarily to suicide directly. So either of you or both of you comment. I mean, I think there was one, there's been one study, a finished study, I think, which directly examined the link between gender affirming care and suicide and didn't find any,

significant link once psychiatric comorbidities were accounted for. But it is it is certainly bizarre how I mean we quote the then assistant secretary

health Rachel Levine and the Biden administration saying just flatly that gender affirming care is suicide prevention care And it's, it is quite baffling why Rachel Levine thought that, or presumably she thought, yeah, this is all backed by evidence or something, but just what she was looking at, I've no, I've absolutely no idea. Well, you wouldn't see, it seems to me, and I've seen this a lot, not just in the case of gender, but in case of other racism and other kind of ideological assertions, that what happens is, is one person says it, and then the next person references the first person that said it,

and the third person references the last two people. And it looks like there's a site, and you see the citation. There's a lot of citational circularity that goes on. Actually, this was pointed out by Hillary Cass in April 24, cast review that lots of these clinical practice guidelines, which seem superficially independent or actually nothing but. they just draw on each other. Well, to, I mean, to be maximally charitable, it is true that youth who are, who identifies

LGBTQ, et cetera, do have higher rates of suicidality. That's true. But it doesn't follow from that, of course, that X or Y intervention can reduce that, Nor does it even follow that what's accounting, what explains the higher suicidality is being the L or the G or in this case the T. So I think what they're looking at is these kids are vulnerable. They're at higher risk. That's true. Yeah.

And parents really are worried about their kids because these kids really are struggling. So there's, you know, there's a lot of their self-harm going on. They're psychiatric inpatient hospitalizations going on. They're struggling socially. these kids really are at risk, but the inference from that, you know, at risk, from them being at risk to, let's cut off their breasts when they're 15 years old. You need some serious argument between that premise and that conclusion, and that's what's missing. Yeah. Okay. Now, you point out, however, that's, and anyone who's followed this publicly knows about this, I guess, that when it comes to real studies that in Europe, in particular the cast report, the cast review

became well known as the first basically ended up closing the National Health Services Gender Identity Development Service, which I think carried out a number of these puberty blockers. But it's also been supplemented by studies in Sweden and Finland that all again argue more or less that not against that kind of intervention but that there's not sufficient evidence to support that intervention. I think is the correct way to say it.

So you want to comment on that at all? Just briefly, I mean, what we've seen coming from some Scandinavian countries, namely Finland and Sweden and then the UK, was they commissioned, you know, systematic reviews. And so rather than looking, you know, what you'll see in the American media often, there's all these studies pointing to great benefit. And they point, and indeed there's a pile of studies. Now, with a systematic review, do in accordance with, you know, principles and evidence-based medicine is they apply certain

methodological tools to compile, synthesize, and assess the quality of that evidence. And when they do that, they've all, you know, the independent researchers commissioned by Swedish health authorities, Finnish health authorities, and UK health authorities. And now we've got also researchers in Canada who've recently published just the macroos, they all find the same thing. which is that the evidence for benefit for outcomes is really, really weak. I mean, the studies are just plain shoddy. And you can take, you know, there's these studies that get cited repeatedly. And if you show them to somebody who's a methodologist or even somebody, I've shared it with colleagues,

what do you think of this study? And they're immediately aghast. And then they're having, I mean, they don't even know anything about you. They don't have any opinions on it. They just look at the methodology itself and they find that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there were also, interestingly enough, big problems with the original Dutch research.

That's right. The foundation of the of the Dutch protocol. So it's not just sort of subsequent shoddy American studies, but the original Dutch research, it didn't have a control group for one thing. Yeah, well, as you pointed out with everyone but one being non-eterosexual, that itself is an interesting. Yeah, sorry, just to go back to that,

I mean, that makes it all the more bizarre that the progressive members of our profession are all on the gender affirming side because, like, naively, you would have thought they would have been up in arms saying, oh, we're just trancing the gay, trancing the gay away. This is terrible. In fact, these are treatments. These are treatments that threaten, in some cases, absolutely destroy reproductive, you know, fertility. Well, yeah. Generally speaking, when we're carrying out interventions that threaten fertility, sexual function, but especially fertility, and the group of people are a kind of, you know, socially marginalized group, let's say they're African American or they're Jewish or they're gay, worries about things like eugenics will arise, right? Well, you're targeting sterilizing treatments at a vulnerable group of. people and yet and people love to make arguments from eugenics. I mean, you mentioned Peter Singer before. Many people have lost their jobs because people say. To be clear, I'm not making that argument now.

No, I know. I know. Given the ease with which people invoke the risk of eugenics, in this case, somebody would have made that argument and yet nobody has. Even if it doesn't work, it's an argument worth considering. Well, I mean, I think now that segue is lovely to the next quote from you guys that I was going to do before moving on, which is you say the ingredients for a lively and wide-ranging philosophical discussion debate about the nature of sex and gender, autonomy, and paternalism, and the meaning

and moral salience of human diversity, the relationship between mind and body, the scope of first-person authority, the aims of science and medicine, the nature and normative significance identity, are laid out. And what we find in the philosophical and bioethics literature, as well as in the public-facing contributions from scholars, it's surprising and limited. And I think that's the point. it's sort of you're one is surprised at both the limited aspect and of course you suggest arguments for that in a bit but the other thing you point out which is unfortunate is that is that ironically it's the branch of the discipline known as feminist philosophy that's exhibited maximum intolerance of dissenters and go for you know and and anyone who departs from the orthodoxy being called

transphobic and I would therefore be remissed. not to ask you, well, and in fact, what the tactic, while there are two tactics, which is openly attack, as we'll talk about, but the other tactic, which is just so frustrating from a scholarly viewpoint is the no platforming argument, that these people do not, that you can't put them in debate because they're not even worthy of debate, that the idea, so that one can't have a discussion, which is, again, the whole point of scholarship. So, so let's talk about a few examples. And I think the first is Kate Mann

that you bring up. So why don't you Alex or Vody? I don't know what's to talk about it. Yeah, sure. So we give this example of Kate Mann's discussion in her

recent book, unshrinking how to face fat phobia. Of both bariatric surgery for obese adolescents, which is endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics,

and gender affirming care, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and so on, which again is endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. And it is very striking how Kate's attitude to these two things it is completely different.

So in the case of bariatric surgery for obese adolescents, she's very alert to the possibility of, you know, cherry-picking studies, the fact that bariatric surgery itself, just like any surgery, any major surgery, has like huge downsides and so on. I have no position. I don't know enough about bariatric surgery for adolescents. but I can clearly see that, you know, there's some issue there. And she even mentions suicide, I think, in the context of bariatric surgery.

But then when it comes to gender affirming care, her view is, yeah, look, this is just like life-saving medicine that enables trans kids to be who they are. And then she cites this completely crap study, toured off 2022, which has been like raped over the cold. by Jesse Single and others. It's like the worst, the worst study. And here, you know, it's obvious that motivated reasoning is at work. It just couldn't be, it just couldn't be finer. And, yeah, Kate has, she was actually a graduate student at MIT, so I know her.

She is an absolute leader in feminist philosophy, one of the new generation of feminist philosophers. She'll be around setting the agenda for years to come. And she thinks that people like Motie and myself are just a bunch of bigoted transphobes who don't know what we're talking about. Well, okay. And that's part of the problem here. You give many examples, and I want to obviously encourage people to read this.

But the other example you talk about that struck me is Robin Demboff. Dembroth, Robin, Denbroff. Dembroth, yeah, Dembroth, yeah. Dumbroff. So, eliminate that example a little bit. I'll let Motie talk about Robin. Robin is also not a fan of mine, I should say. That's an example where we were wanting to describe.

how discussions in the academic literature and biomedical ethics lean very, very heavily in one direction, and it's almost impossible to find critical views, skeptical views, alternative views. And so there was a paper published in the American Journal of Bioethics, which is a leading journal in bioethics in 2019. It's now outdated for a number of reasons. It was outdated when it came out,

but that's another story. arguing that these are life-saving medical interventions. They provide great benefit. And so parents who refuse to consent for their kids should be treated as negligent. And the state should intervene and make the interventions available, even if the parents don't consent. Anyway, so that was the thrust of the paper. Fine, as we say, it's a provocative thesis.

And priest argues for it very. clearly and one can raise objections. And then A job, the journal will publish, it was a target article, commentaries. And Robin Dembrough was one of the philosopher commentators. And so that's why we focused on the responses that were written by philosophers or bioethicists with serious philosophical training. And what you find is a chorus all saying, yes, you're right. These are great. The state should step in. with some philosophers just saying you didn't go far enough. That was the diver. The view was either, but there was nobody saying, well, wait a minute, whereas there were

some papers that raised some critical questions, but none among our colleagues in philosophy. So that was where Dembrough came in. And same thing, Dembrough advanced claims about suicidality, that they're just completely, completely unsupported. Okay. Now, now you make, it becomes clearer in the article what the origin of this lack of debate is likely to be, and it's not surprising, perhaps, given the times. You know, you say there's in a sense of philosophy to defend the seemingly indefensible to have, you know, heterodoxy.

But you say, when heterodoxy brings threats to one's reputation, character, or even livelihood, the pragmatic calculus starts to look very different. If the threats are external, they may be resisted if support from professional colleges strong. It's a different story when the threats are coming from inside the house. And you recount two cases. One, you've already mentioned, but I would like you to at least recount these two cases. Kathleen Stock, a very public case and also Holly Lofford Smith, I guess, to show that basically the problem of speaking, there is a problem of speaking out and writing a kind of heterodox article that should provoke interesting discussion, but instead provokes attacks and, in fact,

attacks on one's own, not just reputation, but one's own position. and that tends to clam people up. So Kathleen Stock first. Briefly, I mean, I don't want to, you know, illuminate the whole, this is a great length, but people may not know what happened to her. Moshe, do you want to? Go ahead. I mean, you saw a little bit.

Okay, okay. I'll say something more. Yes, I was going to ask you, Alex, you brought it up earlier. Yeah, so. Yeah, so there was something called the 2004, January, a Recognition Act in the UK. And around 2017, 2018,

the then Conservative government was proposing to amend the Act to essentially usher in a form of gender self-identification.

And there was a lot of opposition in the UK to that coming to a significant extent from people on the left, feminists, people in the trade union movement and so on. And Kathleen started to raise some objections herself to the Reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. And it didn't take long for mainstream feminist philosophers to start attacking her for that. and then things just ratcheted up and got worse and worse and they culminated.

So in the 2021 New Year's honors list, she was awarded the OBE, the officer of British Empire. This is the gong that I myself am angling for. That sounds so great. She was awarded that in the New Year's honors list. It was for contributions to philosophy. The contributions to like free speech. Yeah. Yeah.

Incidentally, I mean, a trans woman firefighter was among the honorees. So it's the onlystice people get gongs in the UK. And then after that, there was an extraordinary open letter. basically organized by leaders in feminist philosophy, which is essentially addressed to the then queen complaining about Kathleen's OBE and like accusing her of causing various kinds of violence and harm to trans people and so on and impeding, life-saving, gender affirming care and what, it was the most absurd thing you could imagine and yet it was signed by about 800 people. And then at her home university, the University of Sussex, protests on the ground started to intensify.

I'm not quite sure what the... And there had been... Just to interject, just to interject, breathe. And, you know, throughout this period of time, of course, there are calls for her to be fired. Students are claiming to feel unsafe. Unsafe in a problem. On campus with her there because she's a bigot that makes her. makes them feel that you have to eradicate, you know, transgender people.

These sorts of these sorts of claims had been advanced already for, you know, a couple of years. And to make it, you know, I'd like to go on longer, but I limited time. So, you know, eventually she was pressured out of her job. Yeah, that's right. She resigned Lacer and she just couldn't take it. And then there's the next one, and we'll do this even quicker, is Holly. Lofford Smith, who wrote an article on, or was the book, it was a book, gender critical feminism. Gender critical feminism.

Okay. Mocha you should talk about Holly, but let me just point out that, I mean, not the sexual orientation is relevant to whether your views are correct or not, but just in this general context of the supposedly progressive feminists attacking people, like Kathleen and Holly, both Kathleen and Holly are lesbians. Yeah. And, you know, so it's like, yeah. Yeah.

We see as a, you know, it's a good thing to have more members of certain minority groups in the academy. And yet when Kathleen Stock was pushed out, that was a cause for celebration among many people in philosophy. Yeah. Well, we just lost a lesbian and, you know, a lesbian philosopher. Yeah. Yeah.

So, right. So the story with Holly briefly. She wrote a book called Gender Critical Feminism. She had a contract with Oxford University Press. There were efforts to get OUP to withhold publication of that book. There were a couple open letters, one written by staff at Oxford University. Yeah, the union representing Oxford, the staff. Yeah, another by a collection of scholars who had in one way or another, you know, some relationship

with Oxford University Press, having written for them or having edited, whatever, a very broad understanding of having a relationship with Oxford University Press. And she had to seek legal, she had another book in the works, also under contract and had to seek legal representation and received legal support so that her second book on gender critical feminism was indeed published. But she also faced, I mean, there was vandalism. She had security for a while at her university. diversity in Melbourne, windows were broken, the same sorts of claims about her mere presence

there making it unsafe because she, you know, endorses the elimination of transgender people and is a, you know, it's kind of a genocide that she's advocating for and so forth. She was not pressured out of her job, fortunately, but there were, that was, you know, that was the intent. There were certainly efforts, and she fortunately, you know, there was certainly efforts. you know, was able to keep her job. And I think the key point in a really important sentence in your article is after this, as every authoritarian knows, suppressed dissent can be indistinguishable from widespread

consensus when observed from the outside. So, and, you know, so people aren't seeing the other side and therefore they're thinking, okay, well, everyone agrees that this is good. And you said we've heard firsthand from colleagues who, that while they think the issue is drawing sex, gender, and health are interesting and important, they're unwilling to engage with them publicly out of fear of social and professional appropriabrium. But, you know, the academics are basically terrified most of the time, and so it doesn't help when there's actually a reason for it.

But the other argument, and I want to do it very quickly, and you point out, is this even more, I mean, that's awful. But from a scholarly perspective, the notion of non-platforming, of non-engagement, which is almost a position. You know, as you point out, Mark Lance wrote, inside higher education that, quote, to produce arguments in this context that trans women are not women or trans lesbians are not lesbians,

is not just a view we can easily reject as confused and offensive. It's complicit with systematic violence and active encouragement of oppression. And he urged that those who treat this like an intellectual game should not be engaged with, they should be told to blank, blank, blank. And even the American Philosophical Association,

when there was a panel on this, did not have, they were unable to find enough philosophers and bioethicists to participate on these no-platform grounds. And in fact, one of you was Modi, I think, likely called an anti-transactivist, and this would have been the first panel.

And it's a topic where you want a discussion, especially if it's controversial. And the idea from this supposedly scholarly society is no. I mean, there's a very similar example in the book later on from Elizabeth Weiss, an anthropologist and archaeologist, that, you know, in the, in the, I think was in the American Anthropological Society, rather than have a panel on sex and skeletons, they basically said, no, we don't want to even discuss it.

And it's just, you know, that is what is, one of the purposes of our book is that, is that this is happening in science where the process of science is being undermined by this ideological, by ideology, and it's hurting because you cannot, science can't proceed without open debate. And the same is true for philosophy, of course.

and and and and I want to I I I wish that we could spend more time but I I want to you make a series of recommendations and I'm going to I'll list them rather than go into them in detail as as as I was hoping to do with you guys what one is that hey philosophers should have some backbone but you say that's useless because they're not going to or particularly in their present context have some balls as you put it um but you you say that publications probably shouldn't necessarily include the authors autobiographical Biographical information or personal narrative, it affects things. And journals should explicitly promote the citation and engagement of opponents instead of the opposite.

And you give an example from a paper on gender identity. It said we have avoided citing other arguments here because we take them to be openly transphobic and we resist giving them more uptake. So we don't want you even look at those articles. And then peer review. But oddly, can I just interject. They could have reject. I don't want to dominate it. They could have just said nothing.

Yeah. So what's the point of saying, well, there are these arguments. They're transphobic and they're terrible. And then not having any citations. That was a decision. And what they're doing there is signaling. Yeah. Right?

What side they're on. They're the good people. There are these bad people out there. They could have just said nothing and remain silent and not even gestured at the other. But they chose to do that. So even there you see there's a kind of, a tribalism being signaled there, right? Yeah, and absolutely.

And the last thing you say is public philosophy that if his problem is inside, speak out, which of course even requires more courage. And you guys are doing it, and I appreciate it. And but we can, one can try and reach the public directly. Because if informed, my experience is generally, if it properly informed the public often makes the, you know, has the right attitude.

But the big problem is getting information. And if the debate isn't even happening, happening. The public can't be expected to it. Now I'm going to give you guys the final word in two ways. I'm going to read a quote from you and then I'll give you any of if you want to make a comment on it. In your last paragraph, you said the events of the last few years have shown that the scholarly norms of philosophy are much more fragile than one might have hoped. Even though this came as something of a shock to the present writers, perhaps it should not have. Spend time around professional philosophers and you will realize they have no special immunity to fashionable political trends.

the latest unreplicable social science research peer pressure, motivated reasoning, and the temptations of status. And the last line is a re-quote or an adaptation of another quote. The price of the Healthy Academy is eternal vigilance, which I think is one of the reasons we publish this. And I think it's a wonderful piece that's important. And I'm just going to give you, if you want to add anything to that, I want to thank you for writing it. And it's a really important, and I want to thank you for hearing the courage to speak out as both philosophers and bioethicists on this issue. Anything you want to add? Well, just a couple of things.

I mean, first of all, it doesn't really require that much courage. I mean, compared to, you know, the sort of courage exhibited by firefighters when they dash into a burning building or something. I mean, if you're a tenured professor of philosophy and you say some controversial things that draw, nasty comments on social media that doesn't really require that much courage. And the other thing is that, yeah, as we say, at the end, there's nothing sort of exceptional about philosophy. Philosophers are just as subject, unfortunately, to peer pressure and external influences and other incentives as any other members of the Academy. It is a shame. Yeah.

It is, you know, when should add, it doesn't take courage, as much courage if you're established in your career and have tenure, although we've learned in many fields, tenure doesn't really mean anything if the decision is eventually that you're an embarrassment. Your views are embarrassing. But one can imagine for junior faculty, it may be a little more time. Yes, of course. Yes, I didn't mean to, no, I think, yeah, for some junior people that really does. And they are the future. For someone, especially for someone like myself, I mean, I'm tenure, fancy, fancy institution.

Okay, whatever, people are going to say horrible things about me behind my back. But that's really the, well, I agree. And I wish more academics felt that way because I've had, it's amazing that's, the sense of fear is deeper than you may even imagine. maybe not in this area, but when I've written about this publicly, I've had many academics write me when I've written in, say, the Wall Street Journal or something. And I get lots of letters, usually under almost always in a private email account,

and often under an assumed name, saying I don't want my colleagues to know I think. And boy, when you hear that in academia, you wonder what's happening. So, and that's why, that's one of, I mean, that was a big motivator for me in wanting to put an internal book together, not criticizing academic, from outside, but from inside. And anyway, it's been a pleasure to talk to both of you and actually physically sort of meet you both. I hope we get together.

I'm hoping we'll actually have an event in Cambridge and maybe and a few other places around the country where we can bring some of the writers in. But thank you. Thank you again. That would be great. Thanks very much, Laura. Thanks, Lawrence, for hosting this. Hi, it's Lawrence again.

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