TRIGGERnometry - "Sex is NOT a Spectrum" - Colin Wright

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Evolutionary biologist and Managing Editor of Quillette Colin Wright joins us. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Delivery fees may apply. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a former evolutionary biologist who is now the managing editor at Quillet and we'll get to talking about why he's the former evolutionary biologist. Colin Wright, welcome to Trigonometry. Hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. It's great to have you on, man. Listen, I obviously put a little bit of a teaser in there.

in the introduction about why you're no longer an evolutionary biologist. So why don't you just give everybody a little overview of your whole sort of life? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life to the point where you sit here talking to these two very problematic people? My whole life. So it's a lot. Let's see.

I guess a good place to start would be just like immediately after high school and how I started going down the evolutionary biology route. So I was a pretty terrible student in high school. barely graduated and then I went to community college as a business major where I started basically getting F's in all my classes and failed and I flunked out of community college. Got put on academic probation and they booted me from the college. So I worked in like record stores and restaurants for a while and then I became a real estate agent for, well, I just started to be a real estate agent in 2008 and that's when the market crashed.

And so being a real estate agent wasn't a really great time. especially someone, I think I was 21 or 22 at the time. So, luckily at the time, I had also been sort of involved in the whole, the whole, like, new atheist movement that was in the late 2000s, early 2010s. And I was really involved in sort of arguing against God and stuff like that. And a lot of the arguments kind of would go back to evolution versus creationism. And so I found myself just sort of going to these evolutionary biology textbooks all the time, web resources to read about why these arguments, the creationists and intelligent design

proponents weren't very, very scientifically based. And that sort of got me hooked on the whole evolutionary biology thing. And since I was unemployed, I decided I needed to pick something. And so I decided to go back to college to pursue a career as an evolutionary biologist. So I begged to them to let me back in the community college. And they did. And then I did well there. I transferred to UC Davis. I graduated there with my bachelor's in evolutionary biology in 2012. Then I went to graduate school for my Ph.D. in evolution. And I graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2018.

Then following there, I went to Penn State to start a two-year postdoc. And it was sort of during that time and also during my time in graduate school, where I had realized that there's sort of these things you can't really say on the left as well. So when I was arguing against creationism, intelligent design, there was never this pressure on me from my colleagues to sort of not argue as extremely as I was. Or, you know, I had all these open blogs and I was very open about my arguments. And when I, when I criticized these people, it was always, you know, they would tell me I'm wrong, but they wouldn't say I was a bad person until I started seeing sort of these pseudoscientific ideas

sort of on the left among my colleagues, which I guess I would call like blank slate isom, which is this denial that there's any differences between males and females, personality-wise. Everything is just socialization. And when I started pushing back against those ideas, I started getting a lot of pushback from my colleagues and they were calling me, you know, they would say I'm sexist if I think that there's any sort of innate differences. And so I just kind of shut my mouth for a while. that carried on when I went to my postdoc at Penn State.

But then they sort of up their ante on the insane things they were saying. So whereas before they would say that, you know, personality differences between the sexes aren't real. I now had some friends who were, you know, PhD scientists or in grad school, biologists, and they were saying that biological sex wasn't real as well, or they would say that it's a spectrum, or they would say that there's five sexes or 10 sexes. and these are just insane claims

and I sort of had a history of engaging with bad ideas wherever I see them so it drove me nuts so I basically just had all this pent-up frustration with these pseudoscientific ideas that I ended up writing an article called the New Evolution Deniers that I published in Quillette that sort of went really viral and then I followed that up with an article in the Wall Street Journal called the Dangerous Denial of Sex that sort of blew up and then I...

I had basically students at Penn State saying that they felt unsafe with me being on campus because I was challenging some ideas that they had about biological sex and ideas of gender identity and things like that. So I then ended up leaving academia on my own because I had a lot of colleagues that were basically trying to cancel me. There was a whole internet mob attacking me in my tweets. And so I just didn't feel like I was really in charge of my future and success in academia. I don't think I'd get hired as a 10-year truck with Pester or get tenure, even if I managed to get a job.

So luckily, Quollett picked me up, and that's what I'm doing right now. I'm the managing editor over there. And, yeah, I can actually start thinking more freely now. So you had to leave because there was a dispute about the number of sexes, and you say some of these people were saying there's five, there's ten. Obviously, they're all biggest because we know there's 65. 67. Yeah, sorry, I'm cancelled now as well. Don't forget smoke gender.

Smoke gender, very important. But we're actually already starting to confuse sex and gender, which is something we need to talk about. And it's always a frustration of ours that whenever we talk to somebody like you, we've had Diana Fleischman, Jeffrey Miller, Brett Weinstein, all of these people, invariably, we have to go back to very basic things. But we're going to have to do that because it's been so muddled and so muddied. So how many sexes are there? So far we've only counted two in the animal kingdom. Some species are asexual, so they only have, you know, one, they're just females. But if there's more than one, there's only two, there's never been found three.

Or, you know, so no more than two, basically is the short answer. So where does the confusion come from then? Confusion comes from, well, there's a big conflation between gender and sex, for one. And there's all different types of gender, or the all different types of definitions of gender. but a big part of the confusion comes from people confusing these secondary sex characteristics with primary sexual anatomy. So I'll give you an idea of the difference. So the primary sexual anatomy comes down to your gonads.

What type of genitals do you have? What is your biology organized around for the production of either sperm or ova, basically? So that's what defines an individual sex, you know, a flesh and blood individual. But then individuals also go through puberty. So when puberty comes along, we develop what are called secondary sex characteristics. If you're female, you'll grow larger breasts, you'll become sort of more curvy, the way your fat is deposited over your body. Males will get, you know, facial hair, they kind of get more square jaw, more upper body strength, kind of more square bodies. these are differences not of sex itself, but of sort of sex-related characteristics.

They're highly influenced by sex and testosterone. And so people see that there's sort of a variation of bodies, and they confuse that with being a variation of biological sex itself, whereas you can have a bunch of variation in the way bodies look, but you still have two sexes that are sort of underlying all that variation. And Colin, you know, there's frequent. people who say that there's more than one sex and they would use the example of intersex people. Could you give a brief explanation as to what an intersex person is and why that is not

a third sex? Yeah. So an intersex person is someone where there's some ambiguity of their genitalia or their gonads or there's like a mismatch between their outward appearance of their sexual phenotype and their internal reproductive anatomy. This only occurs in about less than 0.02% of the population. So almost every single individual is, you know, over 99.98% of everyone is clearly male or female. And they don't differ to each other in degree. I like to use an example of sort of flipping a coin, for instance.

So if you were to flip a nickel, one out of every 6,000 flips will land on its edge. A nickel has a, you know, heads and tails. Heds and tails don't come in degrees. You know, you're not, when you get a heads, it's not like 30% heads or 60% heads. It's either all heads or tails. But you will get that one out of 6,000 where you'll land on sort of the edge of the coin. And that's a real outcome. But just because there is sort of this intermediate outcome doesn't negate the existence of the categorical male or female or heads or tails that we have on a coin. So that's kind of the way to think about biological sex and intersex individuals. It's not a perfect analogy, but I think it goes sort of a long way to show how you can have

intermediates and still not have sort of a spectrum of sex. You know, we're all not just varying degrees of maleness and females. We're almost all mostly either all male or are female, and maybe there's some of the middle that are sort of ambiguous. And I mean, I don't want to sound judgmental because I definitely don't mean it in that way. But is it accurate biologically to say that people who are intersex, that is an abnormality in their development. It's not like a third like normal option. It's just something that happens in the same way that people can be born, you know, with one leg or one hand or whatever. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep. Specifically,

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and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to some developmental error, if you will, or there's a condition that they have that makes it so their genitals don't, develop, you know, fully. You know, that's basically what it boils down to.

We have these two different types of reproductive anatomies. They serve a function, but creating any sort of a bit of anatomy, whether it's a hand or an eyeball or, you know, gonads or something, these are complex developmental processes that if you have just one little, you know, genetic defect or a mutation that's sort of neutral in some sense, it can throw a wrench in the developmental process, and you're going to get maybe a non-functional outcome or maybe an ambiguous outcome. Now, there's an issue people have is you'll say, you know, and I hear people say it a lot, I'll say that there was, you know, an error during sex development,

and then they'll immediately say, if, you know, they're arguing from an intersex position, they'll say, oh, you're calling me an error, or if you say that it's a, like this, you know, they'll basically just confuse you talking about their condition, as being sort of a developmental error, with them being an error like as a person. And that's just, those need to be divided and separated completely because, you know,

even though someone might not be 100% male or female, they might kind of be somewhere in the middle, they're still 100% human. And that's sort of how we need to see these individuals and treat them with, you know, the dignity and respect that we'd give anybody. Well, that was my point when I said I wasn't being judgmental.

No one's denying these people's humanity or anything like that. But I guess what I'm saying is if we know that some people are born with six fingers, we don't then say the number of fingers on a human hand is a spectrum. We just go that some people are born that way. It's not the normal way of developing. It doesn't reduce the value of that person or the value of their hand. Francis is looking incredibly tense at this point.

Am I? Yes. That's my concentration phase. What are you concentrating on, mate? Actually, I was thinking, Anne Berlin, she was born with six fingers. That's why they called her a witch and they burnt her. Oh, no, they didn't burn it. They decapitated it. Good old days. Anyway.

So, yes, Colin, so we've talked about sex. Now, the bit where it gets much more complicated, I think, is gender, right? So how many genders are there? You know, it all really goes back to what you define gender as. So as a biologist, I tend not to say what gender is just because there's, so many different definitions. So you'll have sort of this radical feminist point of view where they look at gender as sort of the societal norms and expectations that society puts on individuals

based on their perceived sex that sort of whips them into these sexual roles, basically. Like you have a submissive, you know, in the kitchen, taking care of kids, women role, and then a more dominant head of the household, you know, male role. Those are how some individuals conceive of what gender is. some people talk about gender as just innate differences in personality and preferences between males and females. Some people in the trans community see gender as sort of this internal identity and feeling of masculinity and femininity and how well you identify with these sort of stereotypical gender roles or sometimes even is reduced to a feeling of, you know, I just feel like a man or woman on the inside and they're not really defined in any big way. I tend not to say like what gender is. I usually ask people, what do you mean when you talk about gender?

So I can then know if they're confusing gender and sex or something because people can do the gender thing if they want to. I only really have an issue when it like oversteps into my field, which is biology. And they're they're confusing some certain terms. And, you know, a lot of times you'll hear people say that male and female are gender identities now. And that's just where I kind of draw lines. Like, no, male and female, these are signs. terms actually mean something very, very specific. And I refuse to relinquish the language in some of those realms because it just creates mass confusion, which is evident if you go on Twitter

for any amount of time. And Colin, we often hear this sentence being used or this phrase, you know, where gender isn't a social construct. Gender is a social construct. Can you just break it down in police and layman's language what that actually means and whether you agree with it or not? Yes, so if we're talking about gender, some people will say it's a social construct, meaning that as a society, we sort of enforce certain norms and expectations according to somebody's biological sex. And I kind of mentioned before, like masculine and feminine sort of gender roles. That's sort of what people mean sometimes when they talk about gender being a social construct. There's people who talk about sex being a social construct as well. And when they talk about that...

This is the way I'd do it, Mike. Yeah. So that's... I love the way you just looked at you and went, yeah, that's never happened to him. Good. Carry on, Colin. Sorry, I apologize for that. Oh, no worries.

Then there's people who will move away from gender or they'll complete gender and sex, and sometimes they'll even outright say that both gender and sex are social constructs. And they sort of make this error, as I mentioned before, of confusing these secondary sexual characteristics that are sort of on a... a spectrum to some degree, you know, if we're talking about secondary characteristics like body

shapes as opposed to your actual sexual reproduction, reproductive anatomy. And they'll make this point, they'll try to say, you know, because intersex individuals exist and they're sort of ambiguous and we have some individuals that are, you know, have very feminine-looking bodies who are actually males and you have more butch-looking, you know, masculine females and they're actually females, this means that sex itself is sort of also a social construct. Because if you can't draw the line anywhere along these different body forms, then any place you decide to draw a line is arbitrary, is their argument. But as I mentioned, just because we might have some ambiguous cases,

like the edge of a coin doesn't mean heads and tails doesn't exist. We still know that, you know, we might not know in some intersex individuals where that line might be for an individual, but there's still no question for, you know, over 99.98% of individuals, that they're clearly either 100% male or female. Have you ever been abroad and fell out of place because you didn't speak the language? No, because I voted Brexit, mate. Brexit means Brexit. I know that when you go on holiday, sometimes you don't speak the language. It can feel really awkward, a little bit like Francis talking to a woman. Do you want to learn another language?

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Go to babble.com.com.uk-U-K slash play and use the promo code trigger on your six-month subscription. That's B-A-B-B-B-B-E-L.com.uk forward slash play and use the code trigger. And we're not going to explain how to spell the word trigger, because that would be patronising. And Colin, we seem to have reached this point. will not seem to. We have reached this point where we're talking about different sexes, different genders. Now, when I went to school, which wasn't that long ago, despite my appearance, it was a very hard school. Yeah, it was a hard school. But it was, you know, we were taught,

there were two sexes, sex and gender was the same thing, and that is a, just, that is a scientific fact. And there is nothing that you can do to dispute that. How have we got to this place now? Well, you go up to the average person on the street and say how many genders are there, and they will have a meltdown and probably run away. I think you can thank Judith Butler for a lot of that. She had a book called Gender Trouble, where she sort of brought up this gender as being a sort of a performance. And if you look at just where you're coming from politically,

conservatives tend to, they don't distinguish between sex and gender. If you look on a, if they're filling out a form and it says, you know, or gender, well, they're going to, and the options are usually male or female, they're just, you know, that just means biological sex to them. If you then talk to people on the political left, you know, they have this much more complex notion of gender that can be either the social construct kind or the identity kind or the behavioral difference kind. And it's just this big mess. And sometimes they'll even conflate it with biological sex. So yeah, it's just a complete mess. And that's why whenever you get into a conversation about sex or gender, you just need to ask

to define the terms. What do you mean when you say gender? What do you mean when you say sex? And then you can have a sort of a yardstick where you can compare, you know, the actual concepts that are being discussed rather than talking past each other using terms in completely different ways. Well, one of the things I'd probably disagree with you on in terms of left and right, I would say the main position is position of sort of people who are not on political Twitter, which would be a very significant portion of the country, who have no fucking idea what we're talking about, actually. That would be the mainstream opinion on this issue, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. When I say it's not really right and left, I mean, I think most people on the left

probably use gender to mean sex as well. It's just more of a fringe, the identity, politic, left, the critical theory type people. Those are the people who are, you know, the social justice activists. They're the ones who are making all the confusion around sex and gender. Right. So the other issue that, that gets talked about a lot. And I do think it's important. We've had a number of transgender guests on the show, and we've discussed that with them,

and there are people who are very much of their opinion that gender dysphoria is something that's caused by developmental issues and other people that say that there's a male brain and a female brain. And gender dysphoria, just for people watching, and correct me if this definition is wrong, is the feeling that your body does not match your gender. In other words, you have a male body, but you feel that you're a woman, right?

Is that broadly accurate? Yeah. It's not even just a feeling, but there's, you know, it comes with a whole lot of anxiety and anguish too. Sure. It's, you just feel like, you know, you can't live your life this way. You just, it's, there's a lot of torment that goes hand in hand with it. That you need to justify the medical intervention type of things. Right.

So it's incredibly disconcerting. Certainly, no, no one would seek to deny that. Now, the question that always interests me when I speak to people in your former line of work, biologist, evolutionary biologists, is the main debate seems to be is, in order to say that you have the wrong body, that presupposes that you can have a sort of male brain and a female brain to some extent, right? So certainly a lot of people make that claim. Is there such a thing as the male brain and the female brain? So it's a complex question.

There's not like a single thing that you can boil down, like what a male brain is. Like you can't look at just a scan of a brain, you know, and not know who it belongs to and know with absolute certainty, like, oh, it's got, you know, this one thing. It's definitely a male brain. I mean, you're going to talk about chromosomes if you want, but, you know, for talking about strictly anatomy and things like that, you're not going to find a single factor. but a lot of people are kind of confused on what it is. Scientists mean when we'll say, you know, a male brain and a female brain.

We don't mean that they're like these categorical things. So their brains between males and females aren't like biological sex itself where there's, you know, you either have the anatomy or you don't. It's more like the anatomy of human faces. Okay, so you can look at a human face and you can, with a high degree of certainty, say, that person looks like a male, that person looks like a female. And they've done studies where, you know, people are, I think, in the high 90% range where if they could just look at a face that's, you know, the hair is kind of back and they

can't, all they can see is the face and the features. High 90% accuracy that you can actually correctly assign them to male or female. You can guess their sex. But is there any, like, one part of a face that is definitional of having a, a male face or a female face? Well, no. What you have is you have slight differences in a bunch of different traits. So when testosterone acts on your body,

it's going to sort of act on all your traits simultaneously and push them in certain directions. So males have the more squared jaw. We have kind of closer set eyes. They're further set back. There's all sort of these little features on a face that sort of our brain does this multivariate analysis when it glances at someone.

And it says those are the features that are kind of correlated in this, you know, this syndrome of a male-looking face, and then females have sort of a syndrome that looks like, you know, a female face. But there's some individuals, you know, we're not 100% good at guessing someone's sex based on just looking at their face. So there is some sort of middle ground. So same thing with brains. So you can't just look at a brain and say, this is a male brain, this is a female brain. Brains are these complex. You know, they have multi-trait organs. And so you need to look at all these different traits simultaneously. And when you do that, you can make sort of these predictive models with computers that can accurately assign them to male or

female. So we're talking about just sort of tendencies as opposed to any single defining trait that makes it a male and female face. So, oh, sorry, brain. So that's sort of how to look at them. There's overlap, but it's a strong, like, bimodal distribution of what makes a male brain and a female. brain. I tend to just talk more about masculine or feminine traits. Is your brain more masculized or feminized? And that can be across the many different axes at once. But the reason I ask you the question is a lot of people make the claim that to have gender dysphoria is to have the wrong brain. What is your view on that from a scientific point of view? There's just no good scientific evidence and basis for the claim that you can have sort of a brain that's mismatched for your body.

So our brains are made up based, you know, they're developed based on your in utero testosterone, also testosterone after, during puberty. And those are going to affect the way your brain looks. But if you're a biological male, like you have a male brain, even if it's a highly feminized male brain. It's not like these categorical different things that are floating out there and you can find a female brain somehow lands into a male body. That's just sort of this Cartesian dualism that I think science has pretty much done away with at this point. So given that, then what is your explanation of the phenomenon of gender dysphoria? You know, it could arise just due to having a highly feminized brain that's in the body of a biological male.

I mean, you talk to a lot of homosexuals who in youth, they sort of had these gender non-conforming behaviors. You had tombboys. And they did that experience some degree of gender dysphoria because they tended to like the, you know, tombboys like to do the behaviors and activities and have the preferences that boys tend to have. and you have some boys that tend to migrate and feel more comfortable doing the sort of activities that little girls tend to do on average. And they experience some degree of gender dysphoria. Now, that's not saying they're trans. I'm saying that's sort of a type of dysphoria.

But being trans is a different psychological condition that goes above and beyond sort of having these gender non-conforming types of behaviors. It's persistent. It begins very, very early in life, and it just really, remains through puberty and it's this severe discomfort they have in their body. So it's a whole different thing. It doesn't mean they actually have a male brain and a female body or vice versa. But it's a psychological condition where they really feel like it is and it causes them stress. And that's a real thing to treat and people should get help for and we should be sympathetic to

those people who are dealing with it. And Colin, I really wanted to talk to you about the science element of all this. And again, going back to my school days, there were two sexes, man and female, all the rest of it. Aren't we in quite a worrying place for science where you have scientists who are reputable saying things that are 62 genders or whatever else? Isn't that showing that actually the subject is in crisis? I think there's a big problem in academia right now because, I mean, if you just, if you go back to the things that I wrote that got me in hot water, I just said the most boilerplate things I can imagine saying as a biologist. There's two sexes and they matter in some contexts like sports or what prison you go to

or something like, you know, these shouldn't be controversial statements. There, it's more controversial when you go into the gender thing, but at base, I mean, I got people trying to cancel it just for saying that sex is. isn't a spectrum. And, you know, that's if people want to disagree, they can, but they don't really just disagree. They come for your careers and they want to make sure that you can't get a job anywhere. And I know for a fact that a lot of my colleagues agreed with me, I mean, I didn't just come out and publish my first article for Quillette out of nowhere. I made sure I checked with a lot of my colleagues, and my mentors all looked at it, and they said this is absolutely correct. But you probably

shouldn't publish it because it could be harmful for your career. And then I just had to reflect on why did I become a scientist in the first place? You know, I did it because I wanted to pursue questions and pursue truth and mentor students. And I thought being a professor would be a good way to to be able to sort of have that intellectual life, I guess, of spirited debate. And when I sort of realized that that wasn't the case, it was definitely eye-opening and it's really concerning about the current state of academia because it's only it's only gotten worse since I've left. And so you came to academia. You were a mature student. You came relatively recently to it. Was it very much different when you started off your academic career? And did you see it suddenly

go downhill by increments? Or was it almost like a sudden change, almost out of nowhere? It was incrementally. So I started to going to school as a biology major in 2008. And at that time, you know, this whole, you know, there were people who you consider by disease standards pretty woke, but it wasn't a really big thing. And they hadn't sort of made it totally mainstream in any big way. I still felt like I could speak my mind on certain issues about six differences. And it wasn't until I got to my undergrad. So at UC Davis in the early 2010s,

when I really started to see this behavior. And it has just really ramped up ever since then, and especially in the last, I think, just three years, it's gone incredibly fast. And then post-George Floyd, you know, all this other issues have sort of just spiked as well. And they've sort of just blitzed the institutions with this ideology. And no one wants to stand.

in the way anymore because they'll just get cancelled immediately. And what responsibility do you think universities have for what's happening in wider society, but also issues such as, you know, children, transitioning, etc.? I mean, I think a university just needs to uphold academic freedom, freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity, just not trying to suppress ideas because they might be politically incorrect or something. I mean, we have this, there's this lip service that academics will pay to these ideas. They talk about tenure and how good tenure is because tenure allows you to, you know,

speak your mind freely and gives you this academic freedom. So we see these things as values, but that's sort of contradicted to the way that we treat pre-tenure faculty. You know, when when you don't have tenure and you're saying controversial things, people just are so quick to want to cancel you and keep you from getting tenure. So

what's the point of having tenure and saying that we value this when you're basically weeding out all the individuals who would need tenure when they get it because you know, if you're making sure that these people who need tenure and never get it because they're weeded out before they can even get it.

So everyone who gets tenure now are just the ones who never were going to say anything controversial in the first place. And to me, that's just a highly contradictory set of values that needs to be addressed. And it's mind-boggling that the position you expressed seems pretty sensible and reasonable to me, and I think to most people. And that is now controversial within a scientific discipline. What does that say about your former colleagues? What percentage of them do you think, Is it a case of there's a few people who believe all this woke stuff about sex and gender and then a very large count majority? Or is it now at a point where actually the people who buy into this stuff are becoming a big chunk of the professoriate?

So it's hard for me to know because I have a limited experience. I started a grad school, University of Pittsburgh, and then I finished it in Santa Barbara. And so I have sort of my own experience from being in those institutions. And it seems like there's a pretty big generational gap where you have some of the older professors basically are they agree with what I would say about biological sex and all this stuff. It's the younger grad students, the postdocs, some of the newer younger professors that are getting jobs there that are sort of parroting these, these woe. ideas of the sex spectrum and, yeah, basically. And it's quite a bit in my experience. I mean, I'm not going to name any names,

but I worked with a lot of scientists when I was in grad school and as a postdoc. And almost maybe over 70% of everyone I've ever collaborated with has basically tried to distance themselves from me and my views around biological sex. Some of them have even had to contact me and say, you know, hey, I need to call you out on Twitter just because my colleagues are around me, and they've noticed that we've co-authored papers together on spiders and ants, and they're asking questions about our relationship. And so I need to just go out and publicly say that I disagree with you.

And so that gives you sort of an idea of this mutual policing that's going on in these departments, where they didn't even say anything controversial. They were doing the right thing, but they're getting pressured and feel the need to denounce me just because they're worried about the splash damage from someone that authored a spider paper with them in 2015. That's just shocking to me. And every time I hear about what's going on in the universities, we've got it in the UK as well, I always think why are they not bodies at the university, heads of departments, so on and so forth, who don't stand up to these people. That's the million dollar question. It's just there, there's a lot of spinelessness going on.

And, you know, they, to some degree, I understand it because academia is not like some other jobs. I mean, it's, it's incredibly competitive. Whenever you are applying to a just a postdoc job or even a faculty job, hundreds of applications are going into each one of these things. To even be qualified to be a professor, you need to go to school for 10 years at a minimum. almost more likely 15 or so because you need to get your, you know, your four years of undergrad, your five years in grad school, you need to do between two and four years of a postdoc. And that's just to get the interview and maybe get a tenure track position. And then you've got six more years when you get that job of research before you're going to go up for tenure.

So some of these people are, you know, if they're not tenure, they have 20 years invested in such a narrow topic, like the biology of flower beetles or something. that's, they're not going to get many jobs doing anything else. They've dedicated 20 years to this. And it's just, it's easier just to, to acquiesce. It's easier just to cave into the mob, because if you push back, they'll, they'll try to cancel you. And, you know, you're, you slipping up one thing can just nullify 20 years of intense research

and competition and publisher parish. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's just a, it's just a field that's ripe. to have individuals scared into silence and not say anything because there's stakes are way too high. And I find this really, really depressing. It is. The fact that, you know, that you say a biological and scientific truth, which we all know to be accurate.

And suddenly you get cancelled for it. And it comes to a point that, do you think the Trump needs to step in? Do you think the government needs to step in to make sure that if the university can't police itself, then surely the government has to do something? That's a big question. You can tell he's on the left, can't you call it? Yeah, I mean, we do have... Get the government in there. We do have the academic freedom. And so I do have a problem with saying, like, what you can study, what you can say. Like, you know, people should be able to say that sex is a spectrum. And I want this, I just, I want the university to be this more.

liberal open environment to ideas where no ideas are censored. We're all just doing science and using evidence and reason to back our claims up. That's what should be the case. Now, there's a whole other argument for the sort of critical theories type stuff that you have in the humanities, and are they actually doing, is it real scholarship? You know, are they just laundering ideas and passing off, you know, they're just citing crap study to make another study and to have this house of cards basically of publications where you look at this massive amount of literature and it looks impressive, but it's just built on the shakiest foundations where they don't actually think that you can objectively know anything and everything is relative. I can see some case

for having some defunding of these areas, but I don't think we should be telling faculty what they can or can't say specifically. But ultimately, a bad idea is a bad idea, is a bad idea. And these bad ideas have consequences. I don't want to be operated on by a surgeon who believes that gender is a spectrum. I'm sorry if that makes me a bigger. I just think with subjects like science, it's all very well, you know, English and whatever else and history. But with subjects like science, where it's an incontrovertible fact, isn't it incredibly toxic for someone to be spouting nonsense?

sense. Yeah. So the thing that we need to get back to is just sort of championing this liberal science free exchange of ideas, marketplace of ideas. The issue isn't that people are saying totally absurd thing. I mean, people have said absurd things forever. But it's sort of the ideology they have around this where they're in a place of power where they are able to sort of censor other people from dissenting. They don't want this marketplace of ideas. They think they have this truth, and they're trying to shut down debate on these issues.

And that's the concerning part, is the authoritarian dogmatic aspect of their ideas. You know, people can be wrong. Like, I'm sure I'm wrong about things, and I think they're wrong, and it's not so much a bad thing that you're wrong, as long as you're willing to, you know, subject your beliefs to scrutiny

and have other people feel like, they can actually say, actually, I don't think that's entirely true, but right now they won't accept that type of even modest pushback, you know, for example, me saying that sex isn't a spectrum. That's a scientific claim, you know, that's, and it's one that I'm willing to support, and with, you know, with a bunch of evidence and multiple species across, you know, plants, reptiles, and mammals to make that argument. But they don't engage with the argument. They just try to get me out of academia.

I'm just out of sight, out of mind. That's the problem. And do you sense that the pendulum has started to swing back? For example, in the UK, we had a review of the Gender Recognition Act, which is a law to do with how you can claim your transgender, et cetera, and actually, I think due to a lot of the pushback, the idea that you can self-I-D. In other words, if you say, I'm a woman, that means you're a woman, irrespective. of what you look like, what surgery, whatever.

That actually got removed. So there seemed to be some movement into a more or more sensible position. Do you feel that that's likely to happen from here and in, or is there some way to go? I think people are definitely starting to see with these ideologies and the effects that they're having. For a long time, they've somehow just been able to fly under the radar and they've just been propping up and people were shocked when they saw them and they thought that they might just be these anomalous things you didn't have to worry about. And because of that, no one

paid some serious attention until now it's becoming a really big problem. It's going to depend on the specific issue. I think a lot of the gender issues with rapid onset, gender dysphoria, puberty blockers, those, you know, should we give cross-sex hormones or blockers to children? There's all sort of a bunch of questions there. I think that will be. probably be addressed a little faster just because it's a little more a little easier to address, especially when there's children involved in this whole thing. The UK's already doing better. US is lagging behind it. We're just not nearly as organized on that front. I think some racial issues will probably take a lot longer to remedy, just especially in the wake of the whole George Floyd

and Black Lives Matter era that we're in right now. But I do think that people are starting to push back against some of these, you know, the postmodern critical theories type thing. And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, but it's going to get worse because we're seeing their reaction to real pushback. At least people are starting to identify the problem we're pushing back and they're sort of throwing an even bigger fit, which is good because at least the discussion is happening. You know, Trump called out critical race theory by name and by no means a Trump supporter. I'm not going to vote for him, but I think that was a really good thing.

because he put a name on it. He gave us something to talk about. And now you see the critical race people they're starting to backpedal and talk about. It's just, you know, racial sensitivity training and they're already changing their arguments. And that's a good thing. You know, we just need to keep the discussion going

because for the longest time, they've just had complete control over the discussion. And I think we're sort of trying to regain some of. And I think there is some back and forth happening that I'm at least excited about and hopeful for. And Colin, what would your advice be to these academics who find themselves in a similar situation to you? Would you advise them to take your route to stand up to say what you believe in?

There's not that many jobs that quite like, my friend. Or would you say go down the other route? You know, you've worked 20 years for this. This is your career. Don't risk it. I think everyone's situation is going to be. be really different and you need to be able to do what you can in your own capacity. I mean, I'm a single guy, don't have kids. You know, I have a family that could have supported me if I needed to, you know, just be homeless for a while. You know, my, my low point isn't as low as some people's could be, for sure. If you're, if you have a family to take care of and you need to pay the bills, you know, I can imagine, yeah, you don't want to just go on and start tweeting that sex

as a spectrum and, you know, just to lose your job and, you know, was it really worth it? Probably not. But there are probably some things you can do in your daily life. You know, if you try to get, you know, if you're a professor, try to get on some of these diversity committees, these boards, and just ask a lot of questions and make them really explicitly detail what exactly they're saying. What do they mean? Define the terms.

Be a dissenting vote in some of these, you know, but try your best not to be in people's faces and as much as you can do is all that we ask because I think we do have a collective action problem where most people are probably in agreement but if people just keep standing up one by one then they each get shot and keeps everyone from wanting to stand up themselves so I think more and more people are finally seem to be more willing to speak up and that hopefully that continues and Colin the last question that I'm going to ask is a and it's something that I wanted to ask you before was would you do it again if you had the chance again would you still stand up and speak out yeah definitely it's just I mean that's why I wanted

to be a scientist in the first place that's why I went down this route 12 years ago to be a scientist because I wanted to be able to challenge ideas and debunk things and that's just sort of in my blood, I guess. And that's what I continue to do. And I got luckier than most. I was able to get a job at Quillette afterwards. You know, the publication that led to my demise in academia is kind of an interesting circle there. But yeah, I would definitely do it again.

No question. I think I have more control over my own future success now, whereas before I'd have to just just stay completely silent in this competitive job market. And right now, academia is not doing too well, even just offer the job market-wise. But I couldn't have just been happy just studying my wasps and spiders and not speaking up about things I think are important. Well, the last question I'm going to ask is the last question we will ask all our guests, Colin,

which is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? That's a big question. I think it's getting increasingly difficult to sort of voice our support for good ideas or condemn bad ones without encountering people who accuse you of some sort of betrayal to either the political right or left, depending on which side you tend to gravitate towards. But I consider myself sort of more of a moderate and a centrist. And I think this describes probably most people, you know, if we're being honest about it. So I think we need to be talking more about the importance of making strategic alliances, and how to make progress in political environment and atmosphere that's so polarized. It's essentially, you know, we have this duopoly going where you give support for one idea on one side and you're that person.

Or if you disagree with something on the other side, you know, you're a bigot or something. Like when I voice support for critical race theory or sorry, against critical race theory and supporting Trump's decision to do that, you know, there's a social cost you pay for agreeing with Trump. But if we demand this ideological purity while living in this sort of polarized environment, we won't make progress on issues. And it's bizarre because being someone who is really involved in sort of the atheist community back in the day, the people I argued against were evangelical Christians. And these are the people that I find myself more and more on the same side of the

debate with right now, not on evolution, but on, you know, critical race theory on these gender, sex issues. And I'm making all these alliances with people that I never thought that I would have, you know, been on their side on a certain thing. And it's, it's having this amazing effect of, you know, they're becoming more human again. We're finding out how many things we actually do have in common. And it's extremely refreshing just to sort of make these alliances with people and having certain values on certain issues. You can be in conflict. with other issues, but, you know, if we want to get things done and have enough people to do it, I think we need to talk about strategic alliances. You know, there's, obviously, there's a limit to that.

Like, I wouldn't march with, you know, the KKK or something, just because they're also, you know, for or against, you know, the sex spectrum or something like that. So there's, there's some. There's some lines that can be crossed. So you need to consider some aspects of somebody. But I think we should probably put our, drop our defenses at least a little bit. so we can get some progress. That makes sense. Colin, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Make sure you head over to at Swipe Right on Twitter and follow Colin there and obviously his work at Quillet as well. And we will see you very, very soon with another interview or another brilliant live stream. All of them go out 7pm UK time.