The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan | The War on Science Interviews | Day 19

Episode Date: August 12, 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 Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Wooderson, 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 is 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 Hoven 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, and inclusion in academia, and how it's restricting free inquiry, and also restricting, in many ways, scientific merit at those universities. And finally,

Dorian 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, how lucky am I? Both Judas Sousa and Alice Sullivan are here to join me to talk about their chapter in the war in science, that gender wars and academic freedom.

And it's a pleasure to have both of you here. Thanks for showing up. Thank you. Thank you for having us. It's, I'm really glad you contributed to the volume, and we'll talk about that more in a bit. I want to talk about obviously your piece. but you may not be aware this is a

the origins podcast is about origins and I always like to find out where the people I'm talking to sort of began and how they got to the point of where they are how they got to the point of writing this article so Alice I'll start with you and then Judith I'll talk to you a little bit Alice you're a professor of sociology

what first of all is that what you studied as an undergraduate and graduate student or did you do something else and drift into that field? So my undergraduate was in philosophy, politics, and economics. Ah, P.P.E. They're famous. Yeah. So I'm one of those.

And then I took a master's and then a PhD in sociology. And I'm, you know, sociology is a very fragmented and divided discipline. but my career has been in quantitative sociology primarily. And that's a big part of what really got me into this because I could see that data was being affected. We were being told that you're not supposed to collect data on sex anymore. And that seemed to me very bizarre. Yeah, I was a scientist.

When I hear data, my ears pair up, I think, okay, maybe that's real. And as someone who's suspicious of a lot of fields. And you've been head of research at UCL's Social Research Institute. Is that right? Yeah, I'm not in that role anymore, but I was in that role for years. And before that, for 10 years, I was director of the 1970 British Birth Cohorts Study, which is a major study of everyone born in a particular week in 1970.

and we follow them up every few years. So, you know, very, very engaged in data collection, population data, longitudinal data. And, you know, I was familiar with postmodernist ideas and so on, but I never expected them to come and invade my world. Yeah. Well, isn't that interesting? It's often saying you wouldn't feel safe as an academic,

when the real world invades. You know, but your original interests in sociology, besides quantitative methods, which I love hearing, is social and educational inequalities, which is interesting because, you know, you come at this from obviously someone who's interested in just that, social educational inequalities. And now in some sense, it's kind of ironic because now in some, now you're pointing out that many people's claims about inequities are actually perhaps not that at all. and it's interesting to sort of come around it from the backside.

Right, exactly. I mean, I worked my entire career on inequalities, and I think inequalities are really, really important. Yes. In order to take them seriously, you have to be fact-based and you have to have clear categories. You know, without clear categories, you can't monitor inequalities and you can't compare categories.

So the idea that somehow the way to tackle inequalities is to abolish the categories, it's just doesn't make much to me. I love that. Okay. Before you go, I always have to ask the question. So you went, you did your undergraduate in the famous sort of liberal arts degree now, PPE. My step's audited too. It seems to be the catch-all area now.

Right. But if it doesn't catch all, what always amazes me is, I always ask the question to people, why didn't you go into science? I mean, into physics. I've always wondered, were you always interested in politics or sociology? Or did you, you know, anyway, I just always interested. I was always interested in society and politics. And I don't know if it's about the way it was taught when I was at school.

But, I mean, now I completely agree with you. Science is amazing. Why was I not more interested in science when I was a kid? And I think it just comes down to it wasn't taught in a very inspiring way. And so it never occurred to me, but you're actually right. Were your parents, were they, did they have an academic background or what did they do? Yeah, so my dad worked for an organization called the Workers' Education Association. So he left school at 14 and was a trade unionist and got sent to London to do a little course.

And when he was there, got some A-levels, which is all kind of, you know, our school leading, yeah, the uni entry qualification. And then ended up as a mature student going to the LSC and meeting my mom, who is Spanish and she had come over to London. getting away from the Franco regime and ended up also studying in London. So, yeah, so they were very glistical. I mean, you know, my dad was a Trotskyist, as my parents kind of staunched socialists. But in a very, very much not a postmodernist way.

So it was kind of feet on the ground. And so my dad actually did do, my mom's a Basque. She's from the bus country, San Sebastian. And my dad did a PhD as a very mature student. So when I was a teenager, he did a PhD in Basque nationalism. So, yeah, he kind of, he was always very kind of academically inclined in a way, but he was not an academic. Okay, well, that's, okay. Even working on education.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, yeah, you didn't fall far from the tree in that regard, but it's good. and okay, well, good. I have a lot more question, but I think, given there's two of you, I'm going to leave it there. Judith has been quiet over there. Judith, I don't know what your background is. My academic background, I did.

So I did philosophy as an undergraduate and I did an MBA in philosophy. I was trained in a very analytic tradition of philosophy. but I was always interested in the areas of philosophy that had to do with questions in the real world, questions about ethics, morality, politics. So at some point I sort of stumbled on the area called philosophy of education, which is not often taught in philosophy departments, although most of the people working in the field are philosophers, it tends to be situated within education faculty. So I came to London to do a PhD in philosophy of education at as a university.

as it was then the Institute of Education, which is now part of UCR. I was always interested in the way our ideas about education intersect with our ideas about moral values, political values, how questions about what is a good education, what is an educated person, are somehow, I think, imbulcated in and by questions about what is a good society. So I think all great political philosophers, starting from Plato, were also in a way, philosophers of education.

So that was sort of the niche that I developed my academic career in. Oh, interesting, you know, actually it's interesting because I was just talking to another one of the authors, Peter Bogosian, who's an outspoken philosopher. His background, actually, he actually did an education degree and actually worked on an education of prisoners and prisons, and that was his degree. So it's interesting to, well, it's very natural when you think about. philosophy of education to think about educating the public among other other things and what and and and and we'll talk about in you know your piece is

also about as many of them are about about the impacts and of ideology and the attacks on education and free speech and thinking so kind of naturally you guys would both get get upset of what's going on did you did you again as a philosopher what got you interested in philosophy in the first place? I think I rather stumbled upon it. I did my undergraduate degree in Israel, the University of Tel Aviv, and you weren't allowed to have a single major there. You had to have two majors. And I was interested in American. That's almost American. Similar to the American. So I was really interested in language in linguistics, but I had to think of another degree to go along with my

linguistics degree. And philosophy just sounded interesting. Yeah, well, they do. I mean, My friend, Nome Chomsky's a linguist, but he's always also a philosopher. Right. So I don't think there was a moment at which I really, you know, as a child or an adolescent, sat down and thought, oh, I really want to study philosophy. Although I've always been interested in, I guess, questions of meaning and value. Now, linguistics can also be fairly mathematical. Right.

Were you mathematically oriented at all? No, not at all. Okay. I'm going to put with kids who always try with maths at school. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, okay.

Now, you sort of, I guess the last thing I want to talk about, although it'll frame this piece, is how the two of you got together. I don't know that. I mean, we knew each other as colleagues, because we worked in the same faculty. I think we both became aware of what was going on in the sort of debates around gender, gender,

ideology, set space, rights. We sort of became aware of it, I guess, at the same time and angry about it for similar reasons, although perhaps through different roots. I mean, my awareness of it came actually because of my rather esoteric academic interest. So as a philosopher of education, I did my PhD research on anarchist education. I've always been particularly interested in libertarian and alternative education. And I used to always go to the anarchist book fair, which is an important event.

in London. And it was at the anarchist book fair that I saw a woman who I later realized was Helen Steele, a well-known activist in anarchist and environmental activist circles, being physically threatened and harassed for giving out leaflets about a feminist meeting. And I knew nothing about what was going on at the time, but tried to get a hold of one of the leaflets to see what it was that had caused her to be sort of, you know, basically bullied out of this venue. And that was when I was alerted to the fact that there was this public consultation going on in the wake of the decision by the then Tory government to consider amendments to the Gender Recognition Act. And I just sort of started reading about it and thought, what, what? What? What's going on? What? Like, this can't me. This doesn't make sense. And try to find other people who are articulating what it was that was so problematic, which is when I became aware of, women who'd be sort of dealing with these issues for a lot longer than I had and who were

already out there with very, what I thought were very clear and strong feminist arguments. And I guess we met, we first started talking at an event where we were both. I think we first started talking about it at a trade union meeting. Yeah. That's my recollection, which is kind of ironic given the way that the union has behaved on these issues. but yeah, we were at a trade union meeting and another colleague, our woman called Holly Smith, brought it up

and we were both like, someone's talking about this, you know, because no one was talking about it. I mean, I assumed that being colleagues in a university, in departments where we were used to having debates and disagreements and exploring concepts and ideas, that we would be able to, like all the other ideas

that over the years we sort of put on the table and discuss that we would be able to just put this one out there's like, hey, what do you think? This sounds odd. What are you thinking? I don't understand. And instead of which we were met with the most astonishing sort of silence or far worse than silence, just a clear message that this was not something you could talk about. Yeah, I think that really sets the framework of this war. And it is a shock to many academics.

And one of the reasons we, you know, this book has a lot of purposes, but one of them is to try and get, is to speak from within academia and not to criticize what's going on from outside, but to have academics from a lot of different fields and a lot of different political backgrounds speaking out about the problem. So that our colleagues can hear as well as the public. You know, there's a lot of people who criticize, especially in the United States, from outside. But it's really important, I think, for people to speak out and many academics for reasons what we'll talk about in your article are afraid to for good reason. And I'm very proud of you both for speaking out and for being part of this. Let me read the beginning of your piece. Okay. This chapter focuses on a set of issues at the front line of these conflicts, namely questions

regarding sex, gender, and gender identity. As a philosopher and a sociologist, we aim to elucidate the costs of curtailing discussions on fundamental demographic and conceptual categories. We argued these costs are educational, the broadest sense, constricting the possibility of shared learning and knowledge production, which are vital to a functioning democracy. That's a beautiful summary. But, and then you, then you really go,

immediately go into the problem. For, for gender identity campaigners, simply asserting that sex exists as a meaningful category, something it should be not controversial as all, as distinct for people's self-declared gender identity is deemed transphogic. So, sorry, dream transphobic. It's early in the morning here. The slogan functions as a demand to adhere to the

ontological position that claims about people's gender identity. Trump claims about their biological sex. And as you next describe, this whole issue and now results in people being declared transphobes, whether they're, whether they've written about Harry Potter or or be or less famous than that. And the kind of things that get you to announce as transphobe include the following, that humans like all mammals have two sexes, male and female, that females are the sex that produces large immobile gametes called ova, that males are the sex that produces small mobile gametes called sperm, that women are adult human females, that women do not have penises, that homosexuality is same-sex attraction, that only women have cervixes, that a trans women who

transitions as an adult has not always been female, the kind of things that are biological facts, but are now the subject of controversy. And so one ask you to just sort of expand upon these statements. Either of you? I mean, as you say, these are biological facts and they haven't changed. and that seems self-evident to me. Of course, our understandings of sexuality and people's relationship with various ideas about sex, about gender, the extent to which people do or don't conform to various gender stereotypes or roles, those things shift the whole time, historically, socially, culturally. And obviously, you know, as a sociologist of course, for us, we,

We have to be aware of that. We have not covered with that. But what seems to have gone wrong in recent is that those two areas have sort of just become very blurred. And I, you know, as a philosopher, I kind of trading concepts. And I'm not one of those people who thinks that concepts have some sort of independent truths in a kind of clotonic sense that they're kind of out there objectively in the world. But we do need to rely on conceptual data. definitions and classifications in order to make sense of the social reality that we're living in and that we're talking about when we teach, when you do research, when we try and campaign for social justice or whatever it might be. So I just find it very baffling that the demand that we hang on to clear conceptual definitions is interpreted as some kind of, you know, threat to a more flea.

fluid understanding of how people position themselves in the world or how they identify. None of us have, neither of us have any problem with people, you know, choosing to behave or dress or explore their sexuality in whatever way they choose. As long as they're consenting adults, that's really not the issue here. But that's completely separate from the need to hold on to these biological facts. And I think that it's exactly the same issue. And data as in philosophy, we need categories. You can't collect data if you don't have clear categories.

You can't do a philosophy if you don't have clear categories. And in terms of data collection, I've always argued, yes, gender identity is important to a certain set of people. That's really important. We should study it. We can collect data on that as well as collecting data on sex. But it's this demand to erase sex as a category that's really strange. And I can't think of a precedent for that where a group has come along and right. Rather than saying, you must collect data on us, we want to be seen in the data too, has said,

no, you need to stop collecting data on this because we don't like it. Yeah, we'll get that. I mean, the idea that somehow ideas are so dangerous that you can't, you can't check to see if they're right or not is an attribute to science, to scholarship, the whole idea. Two things that you point out and you've experienced. one that, you know, all of scholarship, I would argue, but in particular science is based on empirical data and finding out and then analyzing it. And the second part of it is having open debate where ideas are attacked and the good ones survive. And both of these are deemed to be dangerous, too dangerous to have,

which is you might expect that outside the academy, but to have that a central part of inside the academy is what is the real problem and you can't have scholarship progress or knowledge dissemination unless you allow those things. Now you talk about the suppression of research. You talk about the extreme tactics used by gender identity campaigners. And you talk about I just about Jay Michael Bailey, about Lisa Littman, Kathleen Stock. Could you could you sort of briefly summarize the kind of things that have happened to them and when they're in their work and what they've experienced as academics? Well, to take Kathleen Stock, for example, she very famous case. Yeah, she experienced a very well documented campaign of use at the University of Sussex student

protest demanding that she'd be fired. She wasn't fired, but the environment. Maybe you want to say, Why were they demanding that she'd be fired? You know, just what did she say that was so erratical? Well, she was simply articulating the fact that sex is an important category and that we can't just give up those guys. If we give up the category of male and the category of female, we are losing something really pretty important. I would say in and not what she was saying.

And obviously, because she's a lesbian, that there was also an issue about, well, how can we talk about same-sex attraction if we can't talk about sex? So it was the categories of sex and also the categories of sexual orientation that are attached to those. And when you read what she's written, it's so reasonable and so inoffensive, one would think, that the kind of rage that was unleashed against her is, I mean, I just found. it incomprehensible. And I think part of the explanation is that the people who were enraged were never reading her work and did not actually know what she had said. That's standard thing. To denounce people without actually knowing what they say or anything other

than a headline. And speaking as identity, I think Kathleen, I think Cassie stock is a lesbian. Yes. Right. And that's the other thing that is in principle, if you didn't know what was going on, would be shocking. You'd think that she wouldn't be denounced in that way. But in fact, of course, gender, what we're now called gender critical studies arguing that, in fact, sex is a real category. If you're a feminist, a traditional feminist, and in this case, lesbian, is now viewed as trans-wholvic, the idea that, yeah. And it's not a coincidence that the women who have been most attacked by the gender identity

movement have been lesbians. You know, Julie Bendell, Kathleen Stop, Joe Phoenix. We actually, this evening, we had an event on about the recent Supreme Court judgment in the UK about the meaning of sex. And the title of the event is what the Supreme Court judgment mean for lesbians. And we have Julie Bindle and Joe Phoenix on that panel. We have designed her.

Yeah, well, she was anyway. But that's now being, we've just had a letter around denouncing the event and saying, you know, shouldn't be allowed to go ahead at UCL. And people should boycott it. And of course, this email comes precisely. from the LGBTQ plus networks. Yeah, it's a strange.

A lot of this, if you'd written about it in advance, people wouldn't believe it. That's what always amazed me. I mean, what's going on. It's like war is peace. I mean, it reminds me of that, you know, somehow that if you say it often enough, you begin to believe it.

The Lisa Littman was also attacked for a book she wrote, Is that right? A paper initially. Paper, a paper. And the paper, I forget what it argued. She was trying to explore what the broader social reasons were for the sudden spike in the number of adolescent girls presenting at gender identity clinics. Of which there has been a huge rise since 2015.

The numbers have just gone way up, which suggests that there may be, that it may not be biological, that there may be a sociological reason behind it. Well, she was, yeah, that was, that was her hypothesis that perhaps there is an element of social contagion. And she set about to try and, you know, explore that with, with her research. Yeah, so she came up with this concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria that she was noticing happening among peer groups. And there was a campaign to have her paper retracted, essentially because people didn't

Some people didn't like the findings. Yeah. And it's interesting. One of the other people in the book talks about the fact that, yes, a doctor, that a lot of the stuff that's applied to youth now when we talk about gender affirming care is based on studies that weren't actually involved in youth. That rapid gender dysphoria, rapid onset gender dysphoria is a recent phenomenon. and a lot of the work that people are using to justify it are in fact related to people who are adults and and it really isn't the data, which is the key point on which you can justify policies. And of course, the Cass report, which we'll get to as part of that. I think the thing that's unfortunate and that you elucidate are the different tactics that are used to try and sounds people.

campaigns and complaints to departments and share people and institutional leaders. And you point out that, and this is again ubiquitous, that institutional leaders are part of the problem. They so rapidly succumb to any hint of social media controversy instead of defending academic freedom and integrity. Petitions, wide petitions that are petitions among the activists, but you can and it gives the impression that they represent a broad base but but but may not but they're the most vocal and then physical threats even against people is that that happens as well

right against all the people you're sorry go on yeah I mean all that is true and it's well documented in our paper what I would like to say those I think these these types of pushback and attacks that you've mentioned they're the ones that make the headlines because they often our physical lay off past area. Often the people at the receiving end of them are public figures. But I think when we're talking about academia, the way the silencing works is much more insidious. And, you know, one of the reasons, if not the main reason,

that we were able to write the paper and other, other publications that we have done is because we were both, at the time that we started speaking out about this, we were both in secure, fairly senior academic positions. And, you know, if you're in a secure academic position, with the equivalent of what you in the US tenure, you don't have to worry so much about, you know, having the occasional paper rejected or not being invited. Well, that used to be the case.

Okay. But I think the- But I think the problem is that a lot of the ways in which this, this silencing, the silencing tactics work is, is much more subtle and it's much more dangerous for junior and, you know, starting research. Because it's just, you know, you just don't get invited. to join in the kind of networks, research opportunities,

publication opportunities, that are crucial for developing a career in academia. If you get frozen out of those networks, your academic career can be killed. And I think that's often what happens, that someone is just labeled as a bigger or a trans vote because they put their name to some letter, defending academic or whatever it is,

obviously, sex is real. And they find themselves frozen out of those kind of opportunities and networks. And so that are more kind of headline grabbing, I think that's. Yeah, because it's a social activity. And academics are notably, what people don't realize is academics are notably timid people. Academy is kind of a safe haven. And while people think of bold ideas, that's different than being bold individuals.

And it's part of the problem. Many academics would just rather keep their head down when they see this rather than risk being attacked. or heaven forbid speaking out publicly, which is even much more, much scarer. And in that regard, I think the important thing, I was just at a meeting in the UK,

actually, on this subject. And an American speaker talked about a game called cooties, which you may not remember and maybe it didn't play it when you were a kid. But it was basically, you know, if you had cooties,

which is like being sick, a disease. If someone touched you, they'd have it, then they'd try and touch someone else. Yes. And if you touched someone who touched someone who had cuties, then you had cooties.

Yeah. And part of that, you get attacked for simply defending the academic freedom rights of other people who have been attacked. Not defending their position, but defending their right to say what they have to say is enough to give you cooties. And you've talked about the fact that you've had that personal experience that speaking out to defend academic rights has affected you personally. Why don't you elaborate on that a little bit? do you know? I mean, yeah, I think it has it definitely affected us personally

but after putting our names to I think the first thing I put our notes was a letter in the Sunday Times that was defending the academic freedom of women and it was I think mostly women academics like Kathleen Stock had been attacked for their views

and it didn't even say anything substantive about sex and gender simply said we need to be able to work in a climate where I can openly discuss and disagree on ideas about sex and gender. It was something fairly locked on. I had a petition organised by student telling, calling all trans students to avoid my lectures because I was dangerous. And, you know, this was a bit sad, I thought. Obviously, I had trans students in my lectures and seminars over the years and it's never been any issue with it.

I'd treat them like I would any other student. That was the first we brought in a bit. Then there was, I can't remember the exact sequence. At one point, there was a threat that we had, like, yeah, there was a threat of violence. Was that during the conference? That was true. Yeah, I mean, there's been so much earlier. Yeah.

At some point, there was a poster displayed with my picture on it in the toilet in the, in my work. Yeah. Also, just down the corridor from my office, someone had put up a poster with my face on it. a holling near fascist and saying I was I was danger to students. And I mean, which, which toilet was. It doesn't matter. I wouldn't even ask you.

No, it made we feel very nervous about coming into it. There were several weeks when I was actually, yeah, physically scared to come into the place that had been, you know, my comfortable work environment for the past 15 years. Because there were, you know, other cases in which the threats had become much more violent and it suddenly didn't feel like a safe space. And that's a really uncomfortable feeling. Yeah, and it's amazing that one could be made to feel unsafe

in what should be the safest environment for that kind of activity. And in fact, the other thing is that you get targeted. The important thing is once you're targeted, you literally have cooties and anything you say. So you point out that colleagues have used to work with you and you've been disinvited from topics on topics that have nothing to do with sex and gender. So, I mean, it's like once you've been labeled, then everything you say is suspect. Right.

And you're no longer allowed to be part of the team, which is, again, just remarkable. But also the guilt by association also works the other way. So I know that colleagues have had massive amounts of flack for inviting me to talk and or for publishing my work. You know, so one journal editor told me that she'd had so much grief because she published an article by, me that, you know, it makes it very difficult to ever think about publishing something on that topic again. And so you can see how even when that's not a big story because they didn't manage to do any, you know, have the piece retracted or anything. And yet, behind the scenes, it's having a chilling effect. I recently had a case, and this isn't in the public domain,

but a colleague invited me to speak at another university. And this colleague has now been suspended from work, essentially because of the blowback for inviting me. And so then there's this huge guilt that you're also, anyone who associates with you is also facing consequences. And that's just horrifying. Well, yeah. I mean, it's that the notion that, I mean, it's a religious notion that heresy has to be stamped out,

that somehow any discussion is dangerous. and if anyone encourages that discussion, whether whatever their own views are, that they themselves have to be sounds as well. And in fact, this is the key point. I mean, this non-platforming thing that you talk about, that as you say, activists have also targeted events

involving individuals who have quote-unquote gender-critical views, which means they think sex is biological, even when these views are not the topic of the event. And, you know, as this conference on prison reform, you point out, that was canceled after present pressure from activists because the wrong person was speaking. You mentioned Joe Phoenix, who had a plan talk on trans rights in prisons, was canceled. And you want to elaborate in her case because I think it comes up several times. Right, so Joe Phoenix won an employment tribunal case, which was incredibly important. She took the Open University to an employment tribunal saying she had been discriminated against

because of her gender-critical views, in other words, the very basic ordinary people that are two sexism, that they're real and they matter sometimes. And that was obviously building on the Maya Fostata case where Maya Fostata established that, so belief is protected in UK law as, you know, one of the things, you can't discriminate against people based on their sex, based on the sexual orientation, their race, et cetera, et cetera. And belief is one of those things. So you can't be fired because you're a Christian or an atheist. But what Maya Fawstata established was that you can't be fired for believing there are two sexes. And so, and if people would have guessed that you would need to establish that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's important. As a belief, as a belief.

But that's, but it's actually, although that sounds a bit crazy, like it's not really a belief. It's just a recognition of reality. But that has been hugely important because, of course, the people are scared of losing their jobs. That's it, that you make, that means you don't really have free speech. Even if you have free speech in principle, if you can be fired, you don't, and if you need, when I'm living, you don't have a speech. So Joe Phoenix's case took the four-starter precedent and applied it to the university sector, and that has actually been hugely important. Yeah, no, in fact, it's led to something very important which can be used for that.

But one example, though, that you point out that I want, before I get to that, because I think, I think this, I think it's the Rindorf report from the Essex. but this gets back to you at least Alice your background it says that the assaults on academic freedom do not operate within traditional intellectual and professional parameters

academics who have never used population data have lobbied to prevent the UK census from including data on sex so the idea is that people who haven't even been evolved or use this think it's so dangerous that people shouldn't even even use it And I think that's a really, that shocked me. And you said, based on that, you've had personal experiences of equity, diversity,

inclusion, or we call it diversity, equity, and inclusion in the States. Can be used by activists to generate barriers to research and discussion on sex and gender. You've both had personal experience in a variety of ways, some of which you illuminated on here. But is there any other kind of experience you've had in that regard where your own research has been stymied because of DEI, either within the institution or outside of it? So, I mean, I think the way in which the DEI aspect works is partly through these staff networks. So I've certainly had experiences of being net platformed, including in the very early days of this, my first experience of being no platform was by the National Center of Social Research.

And it was a research method seminar about collecting danger on sex and gender. And there was a complaint from this group. And they just gave into it. And they actually, not only they're no platformed me, but they canceled the entire event because they thought that by canceling the entire event, I wouldn't notice that it had been no platform. And they'd get away with it, which didn't quite work out like that. And I've also, you know, I've been there platformed by the Canadian government.

And it's exactly the same process. Yeah, do you want to add anything? No, I mean, my experience is somewhat different and bizarrely the events that I've had cancelled have been tossed that I was scheduled to give that were on, you know, 19th century social anarchist schools and sort of like nothing to do with communism or sex or gender, but whoever was organising me then got wind of my dangerous views

and decided I was personal and groton. So, yeah, that was. That's been my experience. Yeah, it's amazing how people feel like if you're dangerous, any proximity to you on anything you may say might infect someone. I've seen it happen so many times on the grounds of safety, that this is not a safe environment because, you know, you may be speaking on 11 dimensions as a mathematical physicist,

but somehow, nevertheless, your bad ideas are going to infect the audience in some other way and people have to be protected from you is remarkable. Now, you talked about Professor Phoenix, and was it also in this Rindorf report, which basically said the university was behaving it incorrectly, there was also a presser Rosa Friedman, who was invited to take part, who was, you want to just elaborate on that a little bit?

Well, she was talking about the whole... Yeah, that was a separate event. This was a second on Holocaust Memorial Day. So it's another great example of she wasn't talking about sex and gender. She was talking about something else entirely. And, you know, to no platform a Jewish professor on Holocaust Memorial Day. I mean, well done. Yeah.

Well, I think the, this, now this Rindorf report was, was, generated by the University of Essex, is that right? And basically it said that what had happened was wrong. And I think it said that the university failed to act in line with their commitment and policies academic freedom. So it wasn't a government report. It was a university report. Is that right?

That's right. But now you point out, and I think it's important, that there is a new legal framework in the UK, which is important. The UK has a lot of problems when it comes to free speech. But there was a report which is not new, the Education Reform Act of 1988, which states that academic staff have freedom within the law to question and test receive wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their job or privilege as they have an institution.

It calls on, it enshrines a positive and proactive legal duty on universities to promote and protect freedom of speech on campus by requiring that universities shall take steps as are reasonably practical to ensure the freedom of speech within the law, secure for member students and employees of the establishment and for visiting speakers. And it was strengthened by the Higher Education Act of 2023, which requires England to take. exception to ensure freedom of speech on campus. So this has been around for 30 years, and yet it's clearly not been used. And I think the, I think the, there's some optimism. I was just reading about, I guess there's now a free speech czar from University of Cambridge. I think I was just hearing about yesterday whose job it is now to monitor academic freedom in the UK. Is that right? Right. So we had academic freedom in principle. enshrined in law, but there was no mechanism to uphold that right. And this is why, you know,

the case, the legal cases you've heard about are all based on the 2010 Equality Act and people being discriminated against. None of them are actually explicitly based on academic freedom. So what the Higher Education and Reading and Speech Act gives us, and the, of this the student's complaint scheme is a mechanism through which academics can actually complain when universities are not upholding their already existing legal rights. Have there been any... Well, just to say that that's, well, maybe not ideal, I think it's preferable to leaving it up to individuals to take very lengthy and expensive and emotionally draining employment

tribunals against their employment. Yeah, exactly. and biased and it's very difficult and a very difficult environment for someone to come and complain individually and try and generate a tribunal and all the rest. But if there's a, if there's an, official kind of mechanism, it does make it easier. Has there a bit, I guess it's been early, too early has for this to have been employed already. It is too early. Yeah. I think it comes into force in August. Yeah, it hasn't actually come in, coming to a third time. Now, I want to come back because the point that you, you know, why is this

important. And you point out, as empirical social sciences, philosophers, we rely on conceptual distinctions between sex and gender and our teaching and and and our thinking. And, and that underpinning just remind people how science or scholarship is done. It's a social activity. It's based on, as you point out, thinking aloud, putting forward ideas that you expect people who attack. And then you can have a discussion. And people, it's all right. It's all right. It's based on, as you point out, thinking aloud, putting forward ideas that you expect people to attack. And then you can have a discussion and people, it's all right to attack ideas. Attacking people is not so good, but attack ideas, it should be at the heart and soul of academics. And, and, and it's really what, what is responsible for knowledge generation and education. So this isn't some peripheral activity

that's being attacked. It's something at the very center of, of, of, of, of scholarship. Right. But, but beyond that, If, as you point out, which I, you said something that really struck me that if this is indeed controversial in some way, and obviously it is societally, that should demand more discussion, not less. That if there's an idea that's controversial, that's the kind of thing you'd think would academics would want to jump on and explore because there are different view perspectives or one, you know, it's a sensitive area and you'd think you'd want to explore that. But instead, there's a desire to shut it down, which is the opposite of what academia. should be doing. And I think that's a really important point. But then you make the point and maybe you want to sort of talk about this a little bit more.

This isn't just important within academia. It's important for society and democracy. You want to elaborate on that? Yeah. I mean, in the UK context, all of this became, you know, extremely controversial when the government was. was consulting on proposed changes to the law. And this is the previous conservative government.

So they wanted to introduce gender self-identification in law. And we heard a consultation about it. And so the idea that in the context of a consultation about a change in the law, people are not allowed to talk about it? I mean, that blew my mind. It's, I mean, exactly. In my area of physics, well, it has implications, but happily, I like to say what I've done in my entire life, none of it has any direct impact on humans.

But education and scholarship should be the basis of public policy at some level, at least to inform public policy, not to make the policy, but to inform public policy. And the fact that you can't do the research in which public policy is based is inevitably going to come back and bite you in various parts. anatomy because if you make public policy in the absence of empirical evidence, then you're bound to find their problems. Now, in fact, there was a proposed legislation in 2004, the Gender Recognition Act, which allowed individuals to change their legal sex on the basis of self-ID without meeting any diagnostic

or other criteria. And in fact, that it's worth noting, as you point out, that transgender people are already protected from discrimination under the 2010 Equality Act, which lists gender reassignment as a protected characteristics. And then so that those acts have then caused lobbying groups to campaign to remove legal protections for single-sex spaces and an effective erasure of sex as a category in language law and data. So this is falling over.

So on the one hand, you have this new laws protecting African Freeman. On the other hand, you have these gender recognition acts that basically allow people to say, identify as they want, independent of their biology, and cause them to want to then impose their own reality on others. There's a problem there. We'd have the Gender Recognition Act, but the proposed change was to remove. all the gatekeeping from that. So we still have the Gender Recognition Act, but they lost the, you know,

it was assumed that this was just inevitable, oh, of course, this is international breast practice. You know, we're going to have gender self-identification in law. That did not happen. And I suspect that maybe the reason that this has played out somewhat differently in the UK than it has in the US is precisely as you said, gender reassignment is a protected characteristic

under the Equality Act, distinct from sex. So we can say, yeah, men and women are protected. And also, if you're transgender and someone fires you from your job because you're transgender, you're protected. And absolutely 100% support that. And I haven't heard anyone arguing against those kinds of protections. Everyone should be protected. And we don't need to remove protections based on sex in order to protect people based on transgender status.

or people from legally undergoing gender reassignment, which they are, which is, you know, legally. Well, speaking of gender reassignment, I mean, this is a big area. And we have a number of articles in the book that's talking about gender reassignment therapy, especially in the States, which is now at this point sort of differing from Europe and England. And what's made a big impact on that is the cast report in the UK. You want to just elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, so the cast report was a really significant government commissioned report into the evidence base for gender identity treatments for minors that are offered near Jets. And so the whole area of gender medicine, drugs like puberty blockers, the whole process by which children presenting at gender identity clinics with, you know,

a sense of gender dysphoria or confusion about their own sex bodies or whatever the diagnosis was. That whole area was subject to scrutiny by Hillary Cass was a pediatrician with expertise in this area. And it was essentially a review of all existing studies and data and, yeah, the accumulation of research to date that led to the conclusion that as several people had been warning, I think, for some years, they just. just isn't a sufficiently robust evidence base for clinicians to be prescribing these kind of

treatments to minors who are experiencing some form of gender dysphoria, treatments that put them on medical pathways, or even the sort of approach of affirming their gender, so-called social transition, which is allowing children to carry on behaving as if they were the opposite sex to their nation sense. I mean, again, the fact that there is, I mean, the central part of that report, which has been really influential in, and I think even around the world and now, well, hopefully maybe even in the United States, but is the fact that there isn't enough, there's no evidence on for most of the claims that have been made.

And it argues for more research, right? It argues that, you know, that in fact, it doesn't say this is wrong. It argues that it's no evidence on, you're making a dramatic decision on a young person's life and the absence of evidence. So there should be more research. But at the same time, arguing for more research is then often viewed as transphobic, as you point out. And that's the vicious circle. Yeah. It's like the gender identity lobby is demanding pure faith and to demand evidence is itself heretical.

Now, you know, the last part, I found this. particularly important. In the last part of your article, you talked about the Equality Act of 2010, making unlawful to discriminate against people on the basis of nine protected characteristics, and then many of them. And then you point out gender critical beliefs, which is basically not, which is basically the statement that sex is biological, not that gender doesn't exist or anything. Gender critical beliefs are defied to the UK as being the belief that biological sex is real, important, immutable, and not to be conflated with gender identity. and you talk about people who've lost their

jobs for expressing gender critical views and and and and but that should be protected it is illegal to discriminate against individuals because of their gender critical beliefs this is just not just bad but but according to that law should be illegal right yeah and I thought for the forest data case established essentially yeah and and

And there were damages, did you say? Yeah, Maya Forstetter lost a job over expressing gender critical views. She lost in the lower tier employment tribunal, and then she appealed, and she was successful, and her employer was found to have discriminated against her unlawfully, and so she set that precedent that gender critical views are protected. Well, one hopes that would be a useful legal precedence. But near the end, coming back to something we talked about before, and this is really part of the problem.

I see it over and over again is that institutional leaders are so risk-averse, are so averse to potential bad publicity because they're no longer education leaders. They're more salespeople. In the states, their prime job is to raise money from donors and therefore any bad publicity is dangerous and much more dangerous than merely infringing on free speech rights or the legal rights or due process of a faculty member of a student. You say the trend for university administrators

to police the boundaries of academic freedom within the parameters of risk assessment and reputational damage rather than seeing academic freedom as a matter for academic community is central to the problem. And I think unless academic leaders get some spying, or other people have referred to other parts of their anatomy. They, they, that, that is part of the problem. And as long as academics are afraid, and as I say, many with good reason, you point out, junior,

junior academics are afraid to speak out because they don't have the security of tenure. And other ones with tenure have lost tenure for speaking out. but if there's this culture of fear, then if people don't speak out, then nothing's going to be done. But one could hope that if at least of academic speak out, then then academic leaders will face another problem. Instead of just being worried about the social justice activists on Twitter, if the faculty as a whole speak out, that's another problem for them. And I think that's probably, my own feeling is that the only way for this cultural, this culture war, if you wish, to change is for most faculty to say there, but for the grace of God, go I, and I have to do something.

I can no longer hide in my foxhole. I have to speak out. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And part of the problem is the declining power of academics and the decline in, you know, most universities don't really have any demonstration. democratic academic governance. And so academics don't even have the voice within their institutions on the whole to do anything. And that's, I think that's at the heart of it.

People assume that all the problems are kind of caused by academics. And in fact, academics have so little power in universities now. I would add also that the comments you made about academic leaders, I think the same goes also for journal editors. publishers. Yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's lots of examples we talk about. Yeah, I mean, the publishers journal, it's not, it's, it's universities,

media, scientific publishers, I mean, you know, the nature and behavior saying they will not, they, nature behavior said they wouldn't publish articles that might potentially be viewed as pausing harm, even if they're correct. And, and then scientific institutions beyond universities, the National Institutions, the Health, the United States and other things that make claims about basically critical social justice rather than science. And you also, and one of the reasons that in this volume we try to have such a broad set of not just fields, but academics of both stripes, is that this whole area, to speak about this, you're often claimed to be, and you talk about this, labeled as right wing.

It's amusing to me that I'm off a called a right-wing pundit now as someone who's never who's been left wing most of my life but it's important to have people from all political persuasions and this volume we have people from say, well-known people from say Richard Dawkins and Stephen Picker at one hand to say Jordan Peterson and the other

as this is not a right or left-wing issue this is an issue of scholarship and science and I think it's really important that we not, that be labeled as right wing and therefore, you know, because most of academia is not right wing and therefore, but label this, you know, it can be ignored. And that's a very dangerous thing. And I know, and I'll speak about this,

and we've had several American people speak to it, this. And as you know, I added an addendum to my address. of the book, in the United States, there are now attacks on universities that are definitely right-wing. And one of the worries is when this book comes out in the United States, and then, by the way, I'm happy to say there's a UK volume that's coming out shortly thereafter, that it'll be viewed as well. This isn't the real warm on science. The real war on science, you know, you're attacking the quote-unquote left-wing culture wars when there's really also this horrible effort to hurt universities. And that's a very different, it's true. It's true.

that that war exists and we decry that too and we have to. But this is an internal problem and that's why we're speaking out internally. The external problem needs to be held at the ballot box and everywhere else I think. And I mean have you been called right wing? Have you been called

right wing? Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, we've actually been called a session, but it sounds like a world fashion. Yeah, I've been a left activist for all my life and it is a bit more. But I should also say that I find these trends wherein precisely as a left-wing activist, because to me, by abandoning a material historical analysis of society, the left has opened the door to this kind of nonsense. And it baffles me that

people who purport to be on the left can sort of align themselves with views that have just abandoned or structural material analysis of historical and biological reality. So I find that, you know, actually closer to a sort of weird neoliberal individualism than to a traditional left-wing politics. Yeah, it's a good point. And a number of people have talked about here that this attack now, that all universities are woke and all university resters are left-wing and therefore all knowledge is suspect the right wing has is a reaction to what we've been trying to talk about.

And it's an overreaction, but it's a reaction. And some people say it's Shadmchamcoid while you act for it, and now you're getting it. But that doesn't help anybody. And let me read your last line, give you the last words by quoting you. Many academics have only recently been aware of the political project to deny the material reality of sex and its implications. This chapter focuses on the threat to academic freedom in the case of sex and gender, not because it is a hard case, but because it's an easy one with implications across the disciplines. If we cannot defend academic freedom in such a case, we cannot defend it at all.

And I herald you and congratulate you and thank you not just for your peace, but for your own efforts to defend what should be at the heart of scholarship and knowledge and knowledge generation. And you make the case forcefully here, and I'm glad you came here and agreed to spend some time chatting with me. it's a pleasure to meet you virtually in two dimensions, maybe someday in three dimensions. But thank you for being on this. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And then. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the

perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and I do. that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society in the 21st century. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also leave us private feedback on our website if you'd like to see any parts of the podcast improved. Finally, if you'd like to access ad-free and bonus content, become a paid subscriber at originsproject.org. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation as a non-profit effort committed to enhancing public literacy and engagement with the world by connecting science and culture. You can learn more about our events, our travel excursions, and ways to get involved at originsproject.org. Thank you.