TRIGGERnometry - "PayPal Banned Me for Stating Basic Biology" - Colin Wright

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

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You know, I was kind of just happily in my lab, working with my spiders and wasp and ants, and I didn't want to have to, like, sit up from my workbench, but I did. So I was actually okay with it destroying my career, because I wanted to be able to speak the truth. They sent me a message through the PayPal system saying that if I want to find out why my account was turned off, have an attorney submit a subpoena, a legal subpoena to find out. They recently also shut down Moms for Liberty account, their PayPal. account. So this is sort of a pattern that they have of people that they disagree with politically on this. I can no longer use Etsy and permanently banned from Etsy and pretty benign.

And so for that to happen to me, for them to like think that I'm sort of beyond the pale, to be treated on par with like a domestic terrorist and do the shut down his ways he can get income. Yeah, it's, it's, it's completely insane. I don't know how we got here. There's so many biologists who've reached out saying that they won't even, they don't even want to like a tweet. They'll send me a DM saying, I like to your tweet but I couldn't like your tweet. Hold on. What you're telling me is that there are biologists at prominent institutions who don't believe that there is more than two sexes, but they will denounce someone like you who says it because they're terrified of the repercussions

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Our brilliant and returning guest today is an evolutionary biologist who's paying quite a heavy price at the moment for saying some very obvious things. Colin Wright, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming to my place. Thanks for having us.

We really appreciate it. Look, man, let's quickly remind everyone everybody who you are. Last time we spoke to you was in the middle of the lockdowns and it was all going a bit crazy. Who are you? How are you where you are? What's been your journey through life that leads you to me sitting here telling us this? So much has happened just since we last chat. So I'll try to maybe jump off from then, a little more in the back. So I'm an evolutionary biologist. I was working at Penn State for quite a while. I studied the behavioral evolution ecology of social insects. I had a lot of colleagues at the time. I had a lot of colleagues at the

and a lot of friends who were also both at my university and just sort of in PhD programs generally. They started saying a bunch of weird stuff about the nature of biological sex. You know, things like there's five sexes or sex as a spectrum or male and female are just social constructs. They're not even real. We just, you know, sort of decide what we call a male and female, but it's really pretty arbitrary. So I initially saw this as just, you know, I had a history of sort of debunking a lot of pseudoscience. I used to debunk things like creationism, intelligent design. And so I just saw this as another instance of like, oh, these people are just wrong about really obvious biology,

which is shocking because a lot of them have PhDs in biology, but nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and criticize these ideas the same way I would have criticized anyone making false claims about biology. Well, I thought I would be met with, you know, scientific arguments and here's some evidence of why sex isn't real. This should be sort of a Nobel Prize-winning discovery of sex all of a sudden male and female. These aren't real categories.

That would have been really shocking to me. But instead of them coming at me with, you know, here's the evidence, here's why these are social constructs, it was you're a bigot, you're a transphobe, etc. So I thought about not even going that direction anymore and just removing myself from the debate completely because it was getting really heated and I was on the market to, you know, applying for a professor to jobs

and things like that at the time. But it really just sort of annoyed me that I had made it all this way into academia. I was about to start applying for jobs as assistant professors. You know, these are at major research universities. And I'm self-censoring on one of like the most low-hanging fruit questions of biology are male and female real. And so I sort of asked myself what would Christopher Hitchens do? And I just decided to just write some more articles on this, just debunking this hardcore.

So that's what I did. There was a big swarm cancellation attempt to get me banned on Twitter to ruin my reputation so I can never get hired. I thought they were probably successful in that, so I ended up leaving academia. I worked for Quillette for a while as their managing editor. I since left that. I founded my own substat called Reality's Last Stand, where I now basically full-time go and debunk a lot of these arguments of people denying basic biology. And then I've expanded a little bit to criticizing the sort of gender ideology and queer theory that's the sort of producing all of this insanity in the realm of biological sex. And I also publish articles from other people too.

So it's sort of like a magazine substack of mostly my content, but anyone can publish there too. Also publishing a lot of case studies going into these Facebook groups with parents, which is this area where parents still have a kid who comes out as trans. Maybe they're four years old, maybe they're 12 years old. And we look at how these Facebook groups are really just sort of these gender ideology cults that take a mom who's really nervous and questioning what the hell's going on with my son or daughter. And these Facebook groups basically just railroad these parents down the road to transitioning their child, you know, getting double mastectomies, having their testicles removed everything. So we're exposing this type of stuff. It's pretty serious as not for the faint of heart. And Colin, when you were saying that you thought, what would Christopher Hitchens do,

number one, I like the fact that you've got a bottle of booze. He would do this. Yeah, he would absolutely do this. But number two, didn't you worry that what you were doing was committing professional suicide? Were you not concerned about that? Well, that was the reason that I sort of withdrew for a while. I had maybe 100 applications out. I actually turned my Twitter.

I locked it down for maybe six months while I was applying for jobs. And when I was writing this one essay, the first one I wrote for Quillette called The New Evolution Deniers, one thing I did, I sent it to my advisor at the time, some of my mentors, and they both came back and they said, this is a fantastic essay, I agree with everything, it's completely right, but you cannot publish this. This will ruin your career. If you do publish it, don't put your name on it. And, you know, to me, when the first thing they said was, oh, this is fantastic and it's true, then to me everything after the but

well if I would have not went ahead and published it that would have just been every reason that I wanted to get into science in the first place and to be a scientist to pursue truth to pursue what's real about biology and the natural world

well all of a sudden it seemed like academia really wasn't what I wanted it to be like do I want to work in an environment that is not going to allow me to say completely obviously true things is that male and female exist. So really, I no longer even wanted to have that job anymore given how much it's changed since I had gotten into it, you know, 12 years ago now at this point. So yeah, so I was actually

okay with it destroying my career because I wanted to be able to speak the truth. Well, Colin, one of the reasons we wanted to speak with you again, obviously we had a great conversation the first time And I feel like we bang on about this trans issue so much now. I almost don't want to talk about it quite as much as we do. But on the other hand, I think it's kind of like the coalface of the whole battle with this progressive mindset. And there are people like you who are now increasingly paying a price, as I alluded to, in the introduction.

And you've just recently had a situation where not only have you been pushed out out of your career path, you're not doing science anymore, you're doing something else. But actually, you are now being prevented from being paid for the work that you do by the payment systems that are supposed to just be the lubricant of the market. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's been pretty nuts. So I left, I was working at a place called Fair, and I left that job because I wanted to go full-time on my substack to tackle the gender. sex denials and stuff, because to me that's just the eye of the storm. It's the craziest stuff.

That's where I want to focus all my attention. But then that's kind of a scary thing because then I'm completely reliant on payment processors. Substack uses Stripe. They're pretty good. They've kind of routinely come out pro-free speech and things like that. But I was also using PayPal to solicit donations of people. If they didn't want to just subscribe to my substack, what they want to.

to give me donations directly, monthly one-time donations or whatever, they could do so through PayPal. So I had received an email from PayPal, just out of the blue, just saying you can no longer use PayPal. I think that was the subject line. And I thought this had to be completely, oh, that maybe my credit card is not working or I need to update something. And then going through, you know, trying to turn it back on, well, everywhere I went led to like a dead end. So I called like the, the help desk, just something is clearly amiss here. And they said that, you know, they would put me in touch with somebody who'd be able to tell me what's going on, expect an email. Well, I never got an email. They sent me a message through the PayPal system saying that if I want to find

out why my account was turned off, that I would need to submit, have an attorney submit a subpoena, a legal subpoena to find out. So, yeah, that's all I know. They didn't say any reason why my account was shut down in the first place. So we can only imagine. They've done the same thing to Ian Miles Chong. They recently also shut down Moms for Liberty account, their PayPal account. So this is sort of a pattern that they have of people that they disagree with politically on this. And it puts me in a precarious position because I'm completely reliant on these systems.

I don't work for a company. I work for myself. And so I need to have a way where people can pay me directly or through some sort of system. So it's really kind of a scary thing where just some intern at PayPal or maybe it's at Stripe now. I hope they're as robust as I'm hoping they are. But, you know, just a single click and they can just turn off my entire income. And have you been able to appeal or challenge in any way? Are you considering following the legal route?

I'm considering going and actually just making them give me the reason. So doing the subpoena route. So that's sort of in the works, but we're not quite there yet. And then also, so it wasn't just PayPal, but I also had an Etsy store. You know, it wasn't like a big part of my income, but every once in a while I'd sell a What is Etsy? Oh, yeah. So Etsy is like this online store that people can set up their little shops.

It was originally known for people selling like homemade goods like they'd knitting or something or they'd make earrings with rocks or something like that. Sounds like it should be banned anyway. Exactly. And then it sort of expanded more and now you can just host, you can say, tell anything you want to, shirts, mugs, a lot of people use it for that, just because it's got like low fees for people who are hosting their stuff. And then they sent me an email saying that I could no longer use Etsy and permanently banned from Etsy. Now, they did give me a

reason. They said that my merchandise was, I think the wording was supporting and glorifying hatred against protected groups. But if you actually saw the merchandise that I had on there, it was, I literally only sold three things. I had, so my substack is called Rehontag. reality's last stand. So I had some mugs that just had the words reality's last stand and they had a male and a female symbol. I had another logo that said Defender of Reality and it had male and female symbol. I guess these are hate symbols now. Yeah. And then I had my political cartoon the poster I gave you of the one Elon Musk tweeted out that just showed you know how from my perception sort of the left had gone really left and the center had moved past me and now I'm perceived as being on the right. So that's there's nothing hateful there. But apparently this was considered glorifying violence against minorities. I did try to appeal and they said, nope, we stand by our decision.

Meanwhile, they do sell things that say, like, you know, kill turfs. They have things that are like turf stoppers, and a turf is someone who, like, criticizes gender ideology. It stands for trans-exclusionary, radical feminist. And they have things that are clearly glorifying violence against those types of people. But I can't sell just like a mug that has the name of my... my substack on it, apparently. And Colin, what do you say to the argument that these are private companies?

They can do whatever they want. If PayPal doesn't want to work with you, why should PayPal be forced to? Same with Etsy. They have no legal obligation to do so. What are you complaining about? So there's actually some nuance to my criticisms for both of them. So Etsy, you know, it's annoying. I have to move my merchandise to some other.

but I can do it. I'm setting up on it's square right now. So it's just an annoying process. I don't have merchandise like in my closet or anything like that. It's sort of print on demand. So it's not like I have to lug stuff to a new warehouse or anything like that. But it is a little more sinister when it's payment processors because they portray themselves as these apolitical things. We're just you know letting people send money to you. And so it's a little more intimate than just, you know, I got to sell my mug somewhere else. So that is, I think, a conversation needs to be had about that, especially because, you know, I'm fortunate I didn't have a whole lot of people sending donations through a place like PayPal or through PayPal. But what they did, you know, it takes a while, you get people that will give you recurring donations over time.

And if they cut that off, I can't just start charging those people somewhere else. They have to sign up again somewhere else. And fortunately, it was shut down early on when I didn't have, you know, I wasn't relying on a lot of this income from donations directly. But what if they shut it down three years, five years in the future where it had grown and I'm relying on that as a certain, you know, component of my income. For them to just be able to cancel it completely, you know, that's, you know, right now they're allowed to do it as a private company. But they do serve the role of sort of like what a bank would normally be doing and how you're getting payments. So I do think they should be considered sort of like a public service. And the moment that politics gets involved in payment processors, that's just going to turn

the heat up of the culture war to 11. It's really, really bad. Well, this is why I wanted to speak with you, Colin, because I hope you're going to be okay. I think you will be for the moment. But the precedent that this sets is actually very serious because... Because, I mean, I don't even know that if you go to prison for a crime, you get your bank account shut down. And you've committed no crime and these companies are unilaterally shutting down your account in order to disincentivize and discourage you from speaking about something that you feel strongly about.

And if we, as you say, go down that path, we're very quickly going to find that people are having their electricity switched off because they tweeted something that the electricity company doesn't approve of, which is one of the reasons I was so keen that we come out here and speak with you to raise awareness of this issue. So I suppose, I guess my question is, how do you see this continuing? Because if we go down this route, like I say, we're going to be shutting off each other's electricity before long. Yeah, I mean, I think we've seen some of that with the whole things in Canada with like the trucker protest.

You know, they were shutting down people's bank accounts for just being at some of these trucker protests. So, you know, it's a really scary time. I don't know where it's going to go, but I think we need to do everything we can to sort of lower the temperature on this stuff. Because, I mean, it's people's livelihoods. This is, I mean, a lot of people are doing this now. There's sort of this new economy, especially during COVID, everyone switched to being online. We were relying more on things like Stripe and PayPal and any other of these payment processors. We know that, you know, Patreon, they had a big fiasco, I think it was in 2018, where they originally came out, they even went on Dave Rubin's show, the CEO did, saying that, you know,

you're completely fine, we're never going to shut you down. Our policy only happens to apply to things that occur on Patreon, and then, you know, what is it, a year later or something, he kicked off some people because of stuff they did off Patreon. So while I'm, I feel relatively comfortable with Stripe, that's what powers substack, who knows? You know, what if they get a change of management? What if all of a sudden they decide that they want to switch their policy up? I mean, these are just personnel decisions at the end of the day, like who's there. It matters the composition of who's running these companies. And that can change really dramatically.

So, you know, if we don't really try to classify these things as sort of just a general service provider, like a telephone company or something, yeah, it's sort of a weird, I guess, I don't want to go and call it terrorism, but it is a way to really just chill speech on so many, so many levels because, yeah, it's... And designed to do so, by the way. Yeah, exactly. It's designed to stop you from speaking your mind. With a click. Exactly. Well, look, it's not for me to say,

because I appreciate that it's not an easy thing to do, but I do hope that you do pursue the legal subpoena route. And I'm sure people would be willing to help if you were to go down that route, because as we will probably go on to talk about some of the things that are happening in the UK now around the trans issue, we've seen that when legal challenges are made to some of these decisions,

actually found unlawful and people, you know, establish a precedent. Do you have plans to do that in terms of the subpoena and kind of going down that route? Yeah, I'd like to pursue that avenue. I've been speaking to a few lawyers about it, but we're sort of just talking at this point. Well, I hope you do. Yeah. Hey, Francis, do you want to protect your privacy? Cool, so I do.

Now that I'm an international celebrity who's appeared on hit shows like the Joe Roe's, experience, I have to protect myself from vicious people looking to tear me down. I'm the Michael Jackson of the internet. Not the celebrity I would have gone for, but trust is important when picking a VPN. I don't trust anyone after she left me. She took everything. Francis, remember what your lawyer said. Good point. You can trust Express VPN because they don't sell your data to advertisers. They've even created software called trusted server that means they can't store any data at all.

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Business Insider, The Verge and many other tech journals, rate ExpressVPN as the number one VPN in the world. Go on, Francis. Protect yourself with ExpressVPN. Use our link, ExpressVPN.com slash trigger today and get an extra three months free on a one-year-old. package. That's expressvpn.com slash trigger. Visit expressvpn.com slash trigger to learn more. She took everything. Do you know what I find baffling about this entire issue is number one,

we all know what the truth is. Number two, trans women are women. Exactly. And trans men are men. But why is it so toxic? Yeah. I mean, it was really shocking to me because I think as far as extremists on Twitter goes, I'm pretty low on my extremism. Yeah. You're pretty chill. Yeah. I'm much more extreme than you, I think.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not like a provocateur. I'm not like dunking on people. I'm not telling people they're groomers. Like, I think you should be allowed to say that. But, you know, I'm not there for the cliques, really. I'm there to try to just say, like, here's what biological sex is. Here's why this argument's wrong. I'm pretty benign.

And so for that to happen to me, for them to think that I'm sort of beyond the pale, to be treated on par with like a domestic terrorist, maybe to shut down his ways he can get income. Yeah, it's completely insane. I don't know how we got here. Why do you think they're doing it to you? You know, I'd like to think it's just because I'm really effective possibly because I'm kind of hard to villainize in many ways

because I'm not the stereotypical right-wing pundit type person. You know, I was kind of just happily in my... in my lab, working with my spiders and wasp and ants. And I didn't want to have to, like, sit up from my workbench, but I did. And so, and now I'm devoting, like, all my time to this one topic. And so I'm really not the type of person you'd expect to be involved in these sort of culture war issues, if you can call it. To me, it's not even, I'm not even a culture war.

I'm just someone talking about biology, and that's what I try to do. So, I don't know, maybe that's being really effective. maybe that's the type of voice they want to shut down because I'm sort of the gateway to people who are pretty reasonable on the left who want someone who's clearly not just, you know, wearing a MAGA hat, trying to tell them, you know, what male and female are or something.

And Colin, was there a specific moment where you thought to yourself, hang on, this is genuinely mental now? It was mental from the beginning, you know, when people were saying there was five sexes. I mean, that's mental. And when was this, Colin? This was, I was probably seeing this in like 2016-17.

Wow. And then it wasn't in 2018 until I actually wrote about it. I just wanted to stand to the radar because every time I tried to touch it, it was an electric fence. But really my criticisms early on about how just crazy these arguments were. It was just a scientific disagreement. It was like these people were just wrong about what makes a male and a female. And then so my first articles really show that. They were just like, here's what a male is, here's what a female is.

And it wasn't until later that I said, well, let me look at where this is coming from. So I looked at the queer theory. I looked at the gender ideology that's producing this. And that's just when it got really bonkers. It's just like, this is just completely detached from reality. And it's, you know, when you're denying such a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a homo sapiens as a human being, such as we're a species that has two sexes, like every other mammal, you can't just get away with denying that

and not have insane things crop up. Like this matters for males now competing in female sports, males being transferred to women's prisons because they just identify as a woman and then raping women who are in those prisons are impregnating them and, oh, now we've got to move them out and shuffle them around. These are the kinds of things that happen

when you're denying just these fundamental aspects of human biology. And then, as I mentioned, I think before the show, I've been talking about going on these Facebook groups with these parents who are having their kids go through gender medicine. You know, kids, sometimes we had a mom talk about her four-month-old being trans because when she says the word boy to her daughter, a boy kind of makes a, or the daughter sort of makes a weird frowny face. And so now they're talking about, you know, transitioning this kid,

parents talking about getting their 11-year-olds on puberty blockers, trying to rush them to get double mastectomies or to have their testicles removed. It's, I mean, it's been, it was insane to begin with, and at every step along the line, it's just gotten more insane. So, yeah, it's all crazy. It's all crazy. So you use these terms like queer theory, gender theory, and all of this. Can you explain what queer theory?

he is, because I don't have the first idea. I've heard of it. It doesn't seem to me like any type of, I don't know, serious investigative subject. I don't know if those are the right words to you. So explain to us what this actually means. Yeah. So someone like James Lindsay or Helen Pluckrose, they could give you the full, like underneath where everything and the intellectual history of this, all to sort of boil it down, I guess, to what, how this, how it manifests in the real world here. It's basically just this idea that people are creating binaries in the universe, male or female, gay or straight, things like this, and that these actually aren't realities, that people reify these realities through language in order to maintain and preserve their own

power in a certain situation. So they'll say something like, you know, white colonialists invented the idea of biological sex because they wanted to oppress women and they'll even include racism in this thing too and how they've masculinized black women or things like that so it's completely insane it's just it's all using sort of this

Foucault who's a postmodern philosopher who thinks that power dynamics are fueling basically everything we know about reality and the way we use language structure reality. So they'll take something like biological sex that we know I was defined by like your reproductive anatomy, and they'll say, well, here's an example of a person who's got some sort of ambiguous sexual anatomy. Well, this calls in a question the entire premise that there's only two sexes. They basically just try to like blur every single line that they can possibly find

in order to, you know, and if they can find one way to blur something a little bit, they'll just extend that blur to the entire picture and say, we have no idea we're talking about. We're just drawing these lines arbitrarily everywhere. But the fact that they even know to think, to go to the intersex people, to use them as an example, shows that, well, they actually know where that line is, because otherwise they wouldn't know to go to that line. So the fact that they know where to go to try to, like, blow up these categories, shows that the categories themselves are pretty robust because they know exactly where the line is,

and that's where they tried to drill in their ideology too. And we were speaking to support of ours earlier in this trip about, and he actually said that this postmodernist stuff came to the hard sciences first. I don't know whether that's accurate, you're nodding. Is that accurate? So, yes. So there was like the Alan Sokol, he was, I think, a physicist.

And there were a lot of these postmodern journals that would, you know, just using these new age. jargon, postmodern type, you know, they were completely nonsensical. I can't even, like, come up with them. There's online generators where you can just, like, generate titles for postmodern papers like this, and you can't tell the difference. It's like, here's a real one, here's a generated one, you can't tell. And so he ended up submitting a paper that was completely made up, just a bunch of jargon words, and he was able to get it published, and I think a pretty substantial, well, postmodern journal at the time. And so that was the first,

like sokol hoax of he punked these postmodern journals and showed that they're actually completely devoid of all intellectual rigor whatsoever so that was a big blow-up and he's kind of they kind of the postmodernism went away it was laughed out of the room basically and then it kind of came back in recently well it's been in the universities but it's been in like these humanities departments but it's crept its way into biology and a lot of other places by sort of cloaking themselves in rainbow flags, where before it was just sort of like this crazy ideology, you could criticize it, and there was no social repercussions for criticizing it. It's just, this is crazy

jargon, ha ha. But now it's like, when you criticize the jargon, since it's sort of, like, reathed in a rainbow flag, and it's being used as sort of this LGBT, you know, infused in all of their new ideologies. Is that how it happens, Colin? Because, look, I imagine most biologists didn't go into biology to pretend that there is a million genders. I mean, they would have all been taught, I imagine, at school, as we were, about the basic biological nature of humans and other mammals, as you say. So how have we got to a point where someone like you, who continues to believe that and advocate for that view, is pushed out?

Is it cowardice? Some of these people are the actual converts in your... these departments and universities, why have we got an ideology that doesn't make much sense in terms of the science, taking over the hard sciences that we've all been learning for hundreds of years? I think a lot of people don't believe it. I mean, I'm thinking specifically I had some colleagues who I was very close with, who I know don't believe any of this stuff, or at least they didn't beforehand.

I have, you know, in just our private communications, we used to make fun of the same type of stuff. Some of them got jobs at universities, and two weeks later, pronoun showed up on their bios. And then I had even some of them, one in particular, I'm thinking of, send me a text one day knowing that, because I was sort of getting more popular on Twitter, talking about, you know, the sex and debunking the sex spectrum, things like that. And he just told me that I have a lot of colleagues that are reaching out to me, seeing that we had co-authored papers together on spiders and wasps and ants and things like that. And they're questioning me about, you know, you know, our relationship.

And I was like, oh, well, I mean, you can just tell them, I don't agree with Colin on these things, but we did good work on Anson Wasp, and that seems like it should be a pretty easy conversation to have. But no, he's like, no, I need to denounce you on Twitter and social media. It's like, okay, I mean, I'm fine people criticizing my ideas, but, you know, this public denunciation process really shows the mutual policing that's going on.

Colin, so hold on. We're talking about all this stuff like it's like normal. What you're telling me Hold on What you're telling me Is that there are biologists At prominent institutions In the center of learning

Of the Western world, the United States Who don't believe That there is more than two sexes But they will denounce someone like you who says it Because they're terrified of the repercussions For that career Is that what you're telling me? 100%. Yeah

I know a lot of people reach out I mean you should see my DMs There's so many biologists Who've reached out saying that they won't even they don't even want to like a tweet. They'll send me a DM saying, I liked your tweet, but I couldn't like your tweet. Because, I mean, the mutual, you know, social policing that's going on,

they can't say these things. So, I mean, isn't biology quite important? Like, I'm not just talking about the trans issue. I mean, biology seems to me like quite an important discipline for understanding medicine and, you know, helping us move forward in all sorts of ways. So if we've got people who are pretending there's more than two sexes and denouncing other colleagues in public, what impact is this going to have

on human progress? Well, the impacts are massive. As I said, this is a fundamental aspect of our biology. We've seen places like the New England Journal of Medicine, probably the most prestigious medical journal in the world, published papers about how we shouldn't even put sex on birth certificates anymore because this is irrelevant information, despite the fact that there's just these reviews that are only from a couple years ago and a... in the past talking about all the sex differences and how heart attacks and how cancer and,

you know, the list goes on and they conclude of how sex needs to be one of the first variables that you know about somebody when you want to talk about how to give them proper medical care. This is all being erased now in certain areas, mostly Canada, but US big time as well, replacing biological sex with your self-proclaimed gender identity. But, see, this is the thing. All right, man. Easy. Easy, breathe.

We've been on the road a long time. Yeah, we've been on the road a long time. Look. But this is science, Colin. This is scientists. That's why I'm no longer there, yeah. But you can't say there's five genders if it's not true. It's like saying a man can turn into a fish

if he just identifies as a fish. I completely agree. It's so bonker. I mean, I talk about it really casually. just because it's what I do now, but I'm fully aware that it is just completely like weapons-grade insanity. It's completely bonkers. And what does that mean for science as a whole and for society and for society? Yeah.

I mean, one of the thing that pissed me off most was, you know, I not only wanted to do research at the frontier of knowledge and push, you know, push knowledge outward, but I wanted, I was inspired to be a scientist by really great science communicators. like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, people like these who are just amazing science communicators. So I wanted to be that person. I wanted, you know, in public trust in science, you need to have these really great educators to do this. But then we have the same people who are saying that, you know, sex is a social construct,

something that children know is a false statement. They know what males and females are. The same people who are saying that, you know, who are missing, whiffing the bat on the balls right there, on the T, they're just whiffing on that, and then these are the same people who are saying, you know, who are doing something like, you know, disease epidemiology, or they're doing climate models that are just orders of magnitude more complex than males and females are real. And we expect to believe these people what they say about this. Now I'm not going to, I don't

want to say like we shouldn't believe anyone, I'm just saying that if the public can see that they're getting this question wrong, what is the male, what is a female, what is a female, They're just being lied to in their face. How can you expect them to look into these same people's faces when they tell you anything about vaccines or anything about a virus that is spreading across society, what policies are the best thing, anything about climate change, you can't trust anybody.

And I think just what the biological sex debate is doing is it is making people just throw up their hands and say, we can't trust any of these people. And I don't blame them. And that's why I just, I'm trying to get people back to the basics on what science is. You know, I didn't want to be in the sciences anymore, talking about things on the frontier of, you know, social insect behavior, knowing that half of my classes maybe thinks that there's five sexes.

And Colin, I know this is not strictly speaking your discipline. So if you don't want to answer, don't. But what is your view of the idea of the existence of gender identity? Do you believe there is such a thing? No, not in the way that it's usually defined by like a lot of the gender. Okay, well let's break it down, right? So the idea of gender identity is basically the sex. Your body is male and my body is male and your girlfriend's body is female.

But she can feel like a man and I can feel like a woman and then that's what makes her a man and that's what makes me a woman if that's what I feel. That's how I would describe it. Yeah. Is that accurate? So I've heard people tell me that they definitely have this feeling that they would call a gender identity. I don't know if they're just like identifying with their femininity or masculinity. I don't know what that means. Like, to me, like I don't identify as a man.

I guess that makes me non-binary by that definition. Like I'm just, I'm a biological male and I define a man as an adult human male. So that, then that label applies to me. me, I don't know what it means to identify as it. Just like I don't identify as straight, even though the label applies because I'm not attracted to men, I'm attracted to women. It's not an identity, it's just a descriptor of my preferences, you know. I'm a man, it's a descriptor of the fact that I'm an adult human male. So based on that, there is no such thing as gender identity.

Yeah, well, there's some trans people that they have gender dysphoria. Yes, that's what I was going to ask you about. That's just like a, that's separate though. That's a whole, that's, they have a condition. where they feel that there is this incongruity. It doesn't mean that you and me who don't feel an incongruity have a gender identity. The only reason that we don't call ourselves trans or we don't feel dysphoria is because our identity

and our bodies matches. They have an actual psychological condition that's making them feel like when they look in the mirror. There's this sort of disconnect there. And this is the same regions in the brain that light up when people are like anorexic, for instance, and they look in the mirror and they're rail thin, but they think they're fat.

You know, the same regions in the brain light up for those people as for people who, you know, identify as trans-genital. So it's a condition in the same way, let if we said, you know, there are people who believe that they have an arm that they don't need, for example. Yeah, yeah.

That does not mean that we have like a body, integrity, identity. It just means this person has a particular condition that makes them feel this way. Yeah. Okay. So some people might have what they consider to be a gender identity,

but I think most people probably don't. They just, they're a man because they're an adult human male and they recognize that fact. You know, the thing that worries me as well, Colin, is just how powerful this ideology is. And it just seems that all these comparations, they use it, you know, academic institutions. It seems now everybody has got pronouns in their bio,

even if they're, you know, a retired MMA fighter with a beard, they've got pronouns he, him. Why is it so powerful this ideology? I think a lot of it is sort of what I mentioned earlier, how it's cloaked itself in the rainbow flag. It's a lot of just like this social, mutual policing as well that's going on. You know, the pronouns, I wrote a piece about this for the Wall Street Journal, about why you shouldn't participate in these pronoun rituals that I call them,

because it really is sort of like a wedge for gender ideology to get in there. because what it tells you, what people are saying when they want to ask your pronouns, is they're saying that there's something different. There's a gender identity and then there's your sex. So when you ask somebody, what are your pronouns? I can clearly identify your males. So if I'm asking you, what are your pronouns? That's saying that there could be some other, your brain might be different in some way.

You might identify as a woman or something. And so what that does is it sort of greases the wheels for gender ideology. So if you were to say that, you know, if I might respond that, well, my pronouns are he, him, I'm just saying that because I'm an adult human male. That's what I think. That's, I'm using sex-based pronouns. But since the gender ideologues, the way they define males and females is according to, like, these social rules and expectations based on your sex.

So, you know, I'm responding based on what my sex is. What they hear is that I identify with these stereotypes of masculinity, et cetera. And so that's not what I'm saying. And that ideology actually reifies these sexist notions that you can't be a man unless you're masculine and you can't be a female or woman unless you're feminine. This is something that, you know, I think a lot of the feminist movement had worked tirelessly to dissociate these notions of womanhood and manhood from these stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. And the gender ideology comes in and just fuses them back together again. And pronouns is one way that they're doing that. It's one way that they get their foot in the door to sort of normalize this disconnect between

your sex and your gender identity across society. Most people are even asking you what your pronouns are, like at a university or at a corporation. You probably don't even know what they're doing. They're just told this is an inclusive language to use. But it should be resisted because that is normalizing this gender ideology and that sex and gender are these wildly different things and that you can be a male but you can really be a woman. Hey Francis, do you believe in diversity and inclusion?

Of course I do. My dating history is filled with diversity and inclusion. I am nothing, if not, an equal opportunities employer. All your previous partners do seem to be of the same sex. I'm not that inclusive. But if you are worried about the polarising effect of diversity and inclusion in workplaces, then you have to attend the counterweight conference on liberal approaches to diversity and inclusion. We've had people from Counterweight on this very show to talk about how this can be achieved. They're great people who want to improve society.

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We promise there won't be any lectures with titles like Why Painting Your Bathroom Why is a Microaggression? It's an online conference on the 22nd to the 25th of September. Go to cw.h-h-e-y-s-U-M-I-T-com and use our code Triggerpod 20 at checkout for 20% off an all-access pass. Go to cw.tw.hysummit.com and use our code Triggerpod 20 at checkout for 20% off an all-access pass. Where are we in the attempt to challenge some of this? In the time that Francis and I've been traveling around the US the last couple of weeks,

we've seen in the UK quite a bit of progress being made. We've seen the shutting down of the Tavistock Clinic. We had Marcus Evans, a whistleblower from that clinic on the show. And that was shut down because there were concerns that children were being railroaded down the path to transition when it wasn't the right answer for their particular. problems. We've seen the Meyer 4 starter case recently in the UK, the Allison Bailey case, and on and on and on we go. It seems to me that we are making some progress in the UK, thank God. Where are you in the US? Nowhere near where the UK is. You know, the UK is really inspirational

and we're hoping that we can point to the UK and a lot of other European countries because a lot of, you know, Finland and Sweden, they've changed some of their gender policies, backed away from this a firm-only approach and, you know, therapy first and that type of thing. Because a lot of people on the left in the U.S. like to point to European countries as to be like, oh, how progressive they are. And so if they're changing their policies, maybe that'll make them think, like, maybe we should put on the brakes a little bit. Well, we are progressive by comparison to the U.S., which is not insane.

Yeah, exactly. The U.S., we're making some progress on the sports front. Like, there's been some organizations that have come out and updated their... policies on, you know, how males can compete in female sports. But really past that, not much. Yeah, I can't, there's some lawsuits that are being done right now in California about males being transferred to female prisons. But everything is still very much moving towards the affirm only, you know, we have

Biden administration, Biden come out there. The best thing you can do is affirm your transgender child. Rachel Levine, the transgender admiral health person, saying the same thing. This is just wildly incongruent with some of the review studies that have been taken place in the UK and Finland and Sweden. And the only place in the U.S. that has done a similar nonpartisan review had been Florida. And then they've also concluded that this a firm-only approach needs to be backed away from. and they need to sort of do more explorative therapy before we put kids down this pathway

to irreversible surgeries. In the UK, we've got heroes like Kira Bell, who I'm sure you know of, who went quite a lot of the way through her transition before realizing that it was desperately wrong and being left. Unfortunately, really severely harmed by these drugs, do you think that the real pushback will happen

when we get a wave of detransitioners in the US, suing these clinics, suing these surgeons, et cetera. That's the moment when people are going to wake up, when it's actually going to hit them in their pocket. Yeah, as soon as the lawyers start swarming, there needs to be sort of a precedent-setting lawsuit, I think, that goes through.

The UK has that with Kiribel. We don't have anything like that in the US at the moment. I don't know if you've been driving a lot in the US. You probably see a lot of these signs. You know, have you been injured at work? Call me. I'll get you your money. You know, there's all these, you know, we're a really litigious society in the U.S.

Yeah. And, you know, I've been talking to some lawyers who are really kind of pivoting because they think this is going to be a big area, sort of the gender medicine, people being damaged in the next couple years and coming out and saying that, you know, why was I allowed to chop my breasts off at 13? And so I can imagine billboards that are going to be, you know, were you transitioned at, you know, a young age, were you put on blockers? were you given a mastectomy when you were a child? Once that happens, once the lawyers start swarming,

I think it's going to be game over for that. I mean, that's, yeah. Colin, I don't know about you. I sometimes, you know what really worries me about this? And obviously, it's the children, it's the women who are being raped in prison, it's all of that. And that's terrible, it's awful, really is.

And also, on top of that, I just want, it's kind of, I'll be honest with you, I'm just being very honest with you, It kind of undermines my faith in humanity quite a bit because I go, well, if a significant number of people are prepared to go along with this, like, what else can we be persuaded to go along with in the name of ideology or just to avoid being fired from our universities or whatever? Do you sometimes feel like this is kind of a sign of just like a society that's gone a bit mad? Yeah, I mean, I've been really, I guess, saddened, I guess, by the fact that so many people can listen to these obvious

falsehoods about biological sex, things like that, and just take it and just swallow it and parrot it without even thinking. Like it's one of the most insane things I can imagine someone actually believing and then throwing back out there and then also not even just to be, it would be one thing if it was just people online saying this stuff, but to have institution after institution being completely captured by this. I mean, I have an article I'm working on that looks at sort of the main scientific institutions that we have and also the human rights institutions and how they're defining what it means to be transgender now and how in the literal definitions of the Planned Parenthood Human Rights Campaign, they talk about how your transgender if your gender identity doesn't conform with your sex assigned at birth, but then they also say, or your gender expression. So gender nonconformity basically is how they're defining being trans now. And then you go to the places like the CDC, Center for Disease Control, in the U.S., to the Endocrine Society, to the American Psychiatric Society.

They are all defining transgenderism according to gender nonconformity now. If you just don't define what the roles and expectations that society assigns you based on your sex, this is how they're defining it. and all these institutions right now. So they've been captured. And it makes people like me sound like this Alex Jones tin hat because parents say, what do I do? And I can't say, talk to your doctor. Go to the CDC website.

Go to the American psychiatric website because they've all been captured. And I sound like, you know, I got this twirler on my head. But you can't because they have been captured by this ideology. And so I don't know. I mean, people just have to think for themselves now, and that's kind of frightening to be completely abandoned

by all the institutions that we're supposed to trust. And that means that society is in a very dangerous place. I mean, this is like collapse level. I don't see how it can be stopped, really, because they're captured. You can't even get a foot in the door because you just get kicked out. Well, the UK hopefully setting some examples

that can give cover, perhaps, you know, that can encourage certain states at least to start to look at some of these studies. You're not persuaded that's going to happen? I don't know. I mean, I've heard people say that the U.S. is particularly crazy because they have sort of this financial incentives, like the health care is sort of a free-for-all. Yeah. You know, that makes sense of, you know, if you have a centralized health agency like in the UK, they can be more equipped to sort of push back against these things because they don't have like just these independent companies that are competing for this stuff.

But then you look over at Canada and they have public health too, but they're all completely captured because, you know, their far right is still like to the left in the U.S. So it can go either way. You know, if your society is like super far left on everything and you have a nationalized health care, then you're in bad luck. If you have a system like in the UK where it's nationalized, but they're just a little more, I guess, reasonable on certain things or there's a little more bipartisan going in there. That can work out well. The U.S., it could go either way depending on where the money is. So, yeah. It could also be, Colin, like in the U.S., you just need some

angry lesbians on it. Yeah, I mean, those, they've been doing a lot of stuff in the UK. They're incredibly organized in Turf Island. Sorry, that was a cheap joke, but I... But we're being flippant, but it's true. A lot of lesbians have been at the forefront of this pushing back. Because they know that they would have been that kid who was probably very tomboyish as a girl. They would have been targeted by gender ideology

from a very young age and told that they were probably a boy because of their more masculine preferences and behaviors. And Colin, how much of this do you think is about technology? You know, we were just on Joe Rogan show, and this is one of the things we were discussing, because I have a feeling that, of course, ideology is important and a very powerful tool.

But how much of this is to do with the fact that we are now approaching the stage where we have drugs that can sort of block puberty and we have surgeries that we can now do that can sort of imitate the genitals of the opposite sex? How much do you think this has been enabled by the creation of new technology? Yeah, I mean, those are things

that, I mean, they're big innovations, I suppose, if you want to call them that. I think, you know, I'm all for people to choose whatever pathway. If you want to have a vaginoplasty and have it make a look, or I guess they would call that a phalloplasty and have it make a look like a penis, you know, if you're over 18 and this is something you want to do, I mean, maybe even not then, because you, you know, you still should have doctors that are not just saying, like, whatever you want to, want to do, but if we want to treat it the same way we treat like breast implants or something where you can do these elective surgeries, I think maybe some people should be allowed to do that.

Really, it comes down to whether children can consent to those. Yes. And, you know, they'll say something like, you know, well, some kids would benefit from having their puberty blocked because, you know, people like, you know, there's a lot of trans women who went through male puberty, and I'm sure that they would have appreciated not having these secondary sexual characteristics that are hard to reverse so they don't, so that they would pass better. Like, yeah, they would probably be happier.

But the thing is, how can you tell which kid is going to grow up and be, grow up to still be trans? And how many kids are we willing to incorrectly put on puberty blockers and transition, you know, what's the sort of the type 1 error, the false positive rate that we're willing to deal with? I think just because some kids might theoretically be happier when they grow up, I mean, some kids who have body dysmorphia might be happier if you chopped a leg off. Maybe there's a kid out there who would think that. Do I think that means we need to find that kid who would be really happy with their legs chopped off?

And then how many kids are we going to be happy with chopping their legs off to save those kids who would have been happy as adults being legless? I think we can step back and say, you know, some kids are good. going to probably just have to be unhappy as adults and wish that they had gone these things. I don't think that necessarily means we need to do everything we can to find those people if it means that there's going to be some bycatch where other kids are going to be incorrectly transitioned. And it's such a good point, Colin, because it just seems that more and more young girls are identifying with this particular ideology, whereas when I was a teacher, when I was teaching secondary school 10 years ago, unfortunately the mental illness,

for girls at that time, teenage girls, is, and was anorexia, bulimia. But now it seems to have gone to, they identify as trans. Yeah. That's, I mean, largely I think that's because, well, we've changed the definition of what it means to be trans to encompass just common gender nonconformity. When you look at the rates of gender nonconformity in males versus females, females are more gender nonconforming on average than males are. So we talk about this, you know, this dramatic rise in the number of people. kids who are identifying as trans. And then we also talk about, oh, the sex ratio is also flipped. It used to be more boys. Now it's more females and people to think this is a big mystery.

Well, why is it? Well, if you change the definition to gender nonconformity, you have more females who are more likely to be gender nonconforming. Well, that explains the dramatic rise and the sex ratio flip right there. And there we are. Colin, I'm going to be honest to you, man. Like, we have talked this issue to death. We really, really have. But I think the point that we were kind of exploring with you about what this means for science is actually the one you know the kids and the people who are going to be affected by this that's tragic but the consequence for society more broadly is just terrifying to me so and of course then there's the financial

stuff that we talked about earlier as well so first of all I hope you continue to do the work that you're doing and everybody should check out your substack and support you if they can but I also do hope you pursue the subpoena route and you get a legal situation there, because this is how it's happened in the UK. And it's a lot to put on your shoulders. I'm not saying you have to be the guy that does it, but that's the way we've seen it happen in the UK.

So I hope there are people who are watching this, who are perhaps in your position as well, who either want to help you or want to pursue that because that is the way that I think this is likely to end. Anyway, thank you for giving us your time. Thanks for coming on the show. as always, what is the one thing that we're not talking about? Because we are talking about this now. Let's be honest.

The trans issue we are talking about. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. What is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? So this is something that some people are talking about. But I think it's really an important thing about how we kind of are able to be in the moment we're in right now with regarding trans issues. Like how did this just blow up?

where trans issues were nothing. Now all of a sudden, it's this multi-billion dollar industry. How does this occur? I think we need to sort of step back and take a look at how nonprofits are structured. You mean, you look at these places like the human rights campaign, like the ACLU. You can see their messaging when they were trying to fight back against largely conservatives who were against gay marriage. Gay marriage was an extremely popular thing.

I'm very pro-gay marriage. And so they got tons of funding. billions of dollars in these organizations to combat gay marriage. And then what happened? 2015, I think of what it was? It became law of the land. They won. Well, what do you do?

You know, most of their money was in these issues. And you can look at, like, just the next year of these organizations of, you know, how much they were paying for gay rights stuff, how much did they use the word gay in their messaging. And you can see just overnight it flipped. Where all these billions of dollars, because, you know, they're not just going to shudder their doors. You know, we won, okay, you know, they have payrolls, they have, people are making a lot of money off this. It's a non-profit, maybe at the level of the organization or whatever, but people are

still making money doing this stuff. And so they just shunt all their money into the next issue. They have to find, they have to create a big issue, even if there's none that exist at the time. And the issue they have to make, they have to justify it being worth all the billions of dollars that they got for Game Air, so it needs to be just as important as that. So that has all been shifted to the whole trans issue, which is why we have this enormous apparatus, this organized system that everyone is just scrambling now to recover from. I think this is just sort of a natural pathway that a lot of these nonprofits take when society is actually improving, you know, the big wins that you have, these cathartic releases that you have are getting smaller and smaller because

is you sort of asymptotically approach an ideal state. And so then it becomes enticing to do like just the opposite. Well, what's the new best idea? What's going to give you that cathartic release? Well, let's maybe go back a few notches now and say that, you know, just the opposite is true. Sex is not real. These are social constructs.

Actually focusing more on race is better than color blindness. You know, all of a sudden, just the opposite of progress becomes enticing and is what these organizations. do because you know they need to find something huge to push back on I don't know how we solve it but it is seems like the natural course that a lot of these nonprofits take where they just they have to survive somehow they have to find a way to justify these billions of dollars that they're getting and it really just wreaks havoc on society when they when they have nothing else to do so they need to make make something up it's what they call St. George in retirement syndrome

where he goes around killing snakes instead of having defeated the great dragon anyway Colin, thank you so much for coming on. I remind everybody where they can follow you and follow your work. So you can follow me on Twitter at SwipeW-R-I-G-H-T. That's Swipe W-R-I-G-H-T. My sub-stack is where I sort of debunk a lot of the sex and gender arguments. It's realities-laststand.com. That's pretty much where you can find me.

All right. Thanks for hosting us and letting us use a space to record this interview with you. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another interview like this one or our show, all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And we have also got questions for our locals. So come and support us on locals and you'll be able to ask questions to all our fantastic guests and Colin on our locals. And for those who you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

Are the evolutionary biologists like Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins coming to your defense or reaching out to you or are you on your own when you're speaking out about this issue.