Alice Dreger || Fuzzy Categories

Doctor Deregor is a historian, bioethicist, author, and former professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. Doctor Dreger is widely known for her academic work and activism and supportive people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and those with atypical sex characteristics. In her observations, it's often a fuzzy

line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. A key question guiding a lot of our work is why do we let our anatomy determine our fate. Doctor Dreger is the author of multiple books, including one of us, Conjoined Twins, in the Future of Normal and Galileo's middle Finger, Her Heretics, Activists, and the Search for justice in Science. Alice Dreger, so great to chat with you today. Thanks for having me. Oh, I don't know. It was so hard for me to get through that bio. But I'm

very impressed with you. I want to say, I want to start off by saying and your thoughtfulness, and in reading a lot of your work, I came up with a list of three postulates that I thought we're both totally on the same page with. And I think that's always kind of good when you're starting a discussion with someone to kind of start maybe on where we are in common. And so I'm going to list these three things and then feel free to tell me if I've

mischaracterized what page you're on. But I feel like these are three commonalities. So one my notice, we're both scientists and activists, and we don't see these categories as necessarily mutually exclusive. That's the first one. The second one is we both believe that the right starting point is with the truth and not leading with a political agenda. And the third one is we're both interested in highlighting the humanity of those in the margins, whether it's physical anatomy

in your case or my case. I'm very interested in the mind and brain. You know, those withwarding disabilities are in the gifted population, et cetera. Is that a fair three things, I think so, I mean the only thing is historians like me, there's a question about whether or not we're scientists. In the American system, we're usually thought of as people in the humanities, although in the German

system we're called scientists. So what I always tell people is that history kind of bridges the arts and the humanities and the sciences, and it's in the sense that we follow data, we follow evidence, So in that sense we're in the sciences. We're interested in individual human experience, so in that sense, we're like the humanities, and we do art in the sense that when we bring forward what we found, we have to kind of make it interesting,

and so there's an art to bringing it forward. So I think we're kind of all over the place that way as historians. But yeah, we're definitely data driven in the same way that social scientists are data driven. Okay, lot to find my first postulate. We both have. How about this we both have appreciation for the scientific method, and we are activists as well. How about that. I think that works absolutely. Okay, So I want to start

with your dissertation, your PGD yesterdation. Take me back there and tell me what that topic was, because that, in a lot of ways that laid a foundation right for your later thinking. So do you mind taking me back there? I did. Yeah, I'm just laughing because most people don't bother to look at what I did. Well, I like to really nice, very detail. We're here when I prepare

for my guests. So yeah, Well I'm also laughing because there was one time I published a pinion piece in the Atlantic and it pissed off Rush Limbaugh and he ended up going to my CV and reading out my dissertation title on the air. And my brother there happened to be listening to it with his morning coffee, and he like calls me and says, Rush Lava is reading about your dissertation on the air. Well, maybe I could be a good counterbalance in the spirit upon which I

want you to read your dissertation topic. Well, mostly I was concerned that my brother was listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I realized you know, if he needs to get his blood moving, he listens to irritating people. So that makes sense. So if I remember correctly, my dissertation I

think was called oh gosh, doubtful sex, doubtful status. What was the rest of it, hermaphrodites in medicine and science from eighteen sixty eight to nineteen fourteen, I think, And so what what I was looking at was what happened to people whose body types were not standard male or a standard female, and what happened to them in science and medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, so late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds in France

and Britain. And the reason I was interested in that was because I was interested in looking at what happened in a politically quite traditional and conservative to sex to gender system when you had people who presented with body

types that didn't fit those meat categories. So you're right, that is where my work started, and that brought me into an activist world because people who had been born with those same conditions one hundred years later had started to contact me and say, you know, we know you're writing about this historically, but would you look at what's going on today, And so I became active in the intersex rights movement because I was brought it was brought

to my attention by those folks, and I became active in that movement in the mid nineteen nineties, and that led me to more generally explore the question of what's the relationship between our bodies and our personal and social identities, and what should be the role of science and medicine and mediating those relationships. So there's various things that mediate that relationship. So who gets to tell you what your body means? Sometimes it's a religious organization like a church.

Sometimes it's the state telling you what it means. Sometimes it's medicine, and sometimes it's science. And in my work, because I'm a history of science and medicine, I was especially interested in places where science and medicine would be the determining factor in telling us what our bodies mean. Right. And when you talk about this intersection between the body and identity, you know, the psychologists mean interprets that is

the relationship between the body and mind. Right, you know, it's a very interesting it's interesting the different ways that those things can come apart, or those things can you know, in the general population we have all sorts of correlations, and some people focus so much on the general trends and then kind of treat those who have these kind of really unique mismatches, so to speak, although that's probably a terrible word to use, actually, but in ways that

they come apart that, the question is, you know, how can we show them a humanity right and fit them within a larger scientific framework, yes, and a social framework, because where the real danger comes in is not that scientists can't make sense of you, because you know, if a scientist can't make sense of you, but your life is fine, it doesn't matter. Where it matters is if the social system can't make sense of you. And in a system where science is very powerful, as in our culture,

then it really matters. If science can't make sense of you and it's public, then there's a question about your identity socially. So that's what can happen, and that is what happened in the late nineteenth century with regard to people who were what we today would call intersects, people who are between male and female types biologically, whose bodies came into question. It's a mind body thing, but the

mind is not the only place where identity exists. So your our identities exist in other people's minds, So it matters a lot in terms of how people think of us. So, for example, right as a female, I might feel fully empowered. I might feel fully confident, fully capable of doing whatever.

But if in the culture around me people look at me and see me as female and therefore inadequate, that will ultimately impact my life, particularly if there are laws and social norms that specifically are used to hold me back. So it's not just our individual minds that matter. It's very much the minds around us that matter. So one of the big questions I pose in my work, especially in the book One of Us, is the question why not change minds instead of bodies? Historically speaking, what's happened

is people who don't fit. Once the age of surgery came about, historically speaking, which was in the early twentieth century, surgery became very safe. What happened was people's attitude was, well, this person doesn't fit, so let's change their body. And I try to raise my question in my work of why don't we change people's attitudes instead of changing people's bodies. If what's going to happen is introducing risk with no purpose.

So there's some stuff for which obviously you want surgery, like if there's a life threatening condition, you know, if there's something that causes pain, obviously you want to do surgery. But in many of the cases I look at somebody has a social socially challenging body because they don't fit the social system, but there's nothing wrong with them. And so in those instances, I ask the question, and why

don't we change attitudes instead of introducing risk to that individual? Well, what is a criterion for something being wrong with a person anyway? Right? Like does everyone agree on that? It can be difficult to figure it out, right because obviously, if a person has pain, or if they have a condition that's going to interfere with their ability to enjoy life or it's going to shorten their life, then we

can pretty easily say that that's a health condition. But where it gets fuzzy is if they look different and they end up being treated differently because they look different. So conjoin twins are a great example, and that's why I look tot conjoin twins. Visually, they're very different looking. I mean, our minds are used to categorizing one person

per and so conjoined twins are really confusing. And I always remember when I was working on I Can Joined Twins book, my son was very little, and there was one day when he was about probably about three years old, where I had laid out on the dining room table all these different photos of conjoined twins because I was trying to decide which ones to include in the book, and my son came upon this whole montage of photographs of conjoined twins and he looked at them, and then

he looked at me and he said, what's going on here? Because his mind couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. And that doesn't make him bigot it or buys it makes him normal, right, It makes them typical, and that

he expects one person per body. So when you have people whose faces don't fit the normal, or their arms or legs don't fit the standard of how many we expect to see, or they're conjoined or anything like that, it causes us to do a sort of double take and to begin to question, well, does this person fit in this category or that category? And that's where surgeons feel like, well, why don't we make this simple and just change their body so that those questions don't get raised.

But the problem comes in when the surgery you're doing actually introduces unnecessary risk. We have to ask the question is it really going to leave the person better off? And surprisingly, if we look at conjoined twins, a lot of times it doesn't leave them better off. And that's true with a lot of different surgeries done for social norming purposes. Absolutely, I see such a great parallel here between my own work and work on let's say, just

children with autism. I think that's a good parallel. Now, sometimes you do see that language like how can we fix autism? Or you know, like what's wrong? You know, it's a treat as a deficit automatically, you know, if you're a psychologist, I try to like coach psychologists, And

how should you tell the parents the news? You know, like the traditional model is you know, a very like negative thing, like you know, we have to break it to you your child has auto And I'm like, well why you say, Like, we have discovered your child is extraordinarily unique in the way that they perceive the world and they could potentially have great potential for being like a scientist someday or like telling the truth, or you know, just like a matter of framing in a lot of ways.

You know, in a culture like the one we have, where there's a very clear message about what makes somebody socially acceptable or socially superior, there is a strong feeling among especially pediatricians who see themselves as advocates for children, that one of the best things that they can do is to try to norm them in the statistical sense, try to make children statistically normal. And they're not doing that out of an uncharitable place. They're doing it out

of a charitable place. But as you point out, it's often misguided, because first of all, it's often not possible right to just magically take somebody who doesn't fit a social norm and make them fit. But the other problem with it is is that it leads to a sort of expectation that that's what we should want out of our children and out of our peers in society. And I think that's where the really pernicious message comes in, is the idea that that's the best we can want

for people. It seems like in many instances the best we can want for people is something better, which is to say we can accept variation, and we can not only tolerate variation, we can actually see value in variation. So what's really interesting to me is that historically speaking, can join twins have tended to live in small towns by choice, And I think the reason is that when you're in a smaller place, there's less of that sense

of the oppressive sort of statistical norm coming down on you. Right, because you're in a small number of people. Therefore by sheer numbers, because of the denominator and the new warrator, you're not that different. But also everybody gets to know you, and once everybody gets to know you, it's not really a big deal. So when there was one time when I went to go see Lauri and Rieba Chappelle, who are conjoined at the face, Dory now goes well, Riba

was original named Dory. Now she goes by the name George. But leave all that aside. When I went out to dinner with them, everybody in their town knew them, and so nobody flinch, nobody acted weird, everybody was cool. The waitress knew them. And so what that suggests to me is that if we're in smaller spaces, people learn to adjust and adapt and it's just not that big a deal.

It's when we get this sort of large social system that we have today, with so much social instruction on what's acceptable, that we end up in a situation where people feel really abnormal and they're in the very negative sense, not just the statistical sense, but in the pejorative sense of abnormal, and that's not really good for us. I would say, in general, the good side is right. The good side is the Internet because it connects us all allows us to find people who are like us, who

otherwise we would never meet. So I mean, I'm able to connect families with conjoin twins with each other, which historically speaking wouldn't have happened. In most cases, people with intersects have been able to find each other and create a social movement. So that's the upside of this huge social system is that people can find each other or and create communities that didn't exist before, and that does

empower them. So the autism communities, for example, that exists today would not have been able to exist one hundred years ago, and that's a really great upside of it. The problem with it is the oppressive, constant message that we are unacceptable that's right, or like that they're broken and need to be fixed. As you've pointed out this language that's used. Can we go into some other really fascinating cases you just talked about conjoining toins could talk

what androgen sensitivity syndrome and congenital adrenal hyperpleasia. Did I say this right? Yeah? Those are two different types of intersex conditions, very different from each other. So one androgen insensitivity syndrome. That's when you have a person who begins as a male embryo, so you have an x Y chromosomal basis, and in fetal development, usually the Y chromosome causes the gonads to develop as testes, and so this

being has testes that are starting to produce testosterone. But in these circumstances androgen insensitivity, the body has no responsiveness

to masculine hormones. And so the consequence of that is that even though internally the being has testes, externally they're going to develop genitally to look quite female, and in terms of their brain development, they'll develop actually even farther female than the typical female, if that makes sense, because they're not having any reaction to any male hormones and so when they're born, these girls look like typical girls, grow up as usually typical girls, and it's only often

the case that when they reach puberty that somebody realizes something's going on. And the reason is they're developing in terms of their sexual maturity, but they're not menstruating, and when somebody doesn't examine on them, then they discover that they don't have overason side. They have testes inside and they have no uterus. So then what are they, Well, they're women, they're girls, and women who happen to have

testes inside. The testes are functioning as normal testes, but the hormones they're making are not having any effect, and so when that happens, you develop along a more typical female pathway. In the case of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, that's called CACH. This can affect boys and girls, and it's

actually a fairly common genetic condition. It's when our glands that are in the back of our body, called the adrenal glands, kind of are in too high a gear and that causes a greater level of the hormones that are the masculinizes hormones. We all have these, We all have these glands, and in females you can tell that they're working because we get hair on our arms and our legs as we get older, and we get pubic hair,

so that all of that is androgen sensitive. We make some male hormones, but if you make a large amount of them, you can end up in the intersext spectrum. And so for female fetuses that have this condition, they can get exposed to lots of male hormones as they develop, and so internally they'll be female, they'll have ovaries and a uterus, but externally they'll develop. They can develop anywhere from typical female to the typical male to anything in between,

and so you don't have two sets of genitals. You don't end up with two sets of genitals, but you do end up with something in between. So you end up with something between a clitterist and a penis and something that's a vagina that's sort of in between. So the consequence of that is that you can have a child who is internally female but looks quite male or looks intersex. So this is two of the possible ways to have intersex conditions, but there are in fact about

thirty six forty different intersex conditions. Has anyone put thought into mapping this onto like all the different pronouns that currently exist that are out there, is there is there a correspondence? Can you talk a little about that? No, Because though hormone issues are issues of identity, right, And so when we're talking about AIS and we're talking about ch we're talking about anatomy, not identity. And I know

that sounds weird, but it's true, right. So, Yeah, for a woman who is born with androgen sensitivity syndrome, she's a woman unless I mean, it's very, very practically unheard of for the most part, for a woman with complete androgen sensitivity syndrome to feel like anything other than a woman. She's been raised as a girl. She's a woman in terms of our identity. So there's no pronoun issue for her. It's true internally she's got testes, but that doesn't really matter.

She's always been a girl, she's always been seen as a girl. She has a social identity as a woman. It doesn't shift. And the same might be true for somebody with CAAH that they're either raised as a girl or raised as a boy and it doesn't really impact their identity. Now that said, you can have a person who's transgender, who can have typical male or typical female anatomy but feel that the gender assignment given to them

is wrong. Or you can have somebody who has an intersex condition who is also transgender in the sense that they also feel as if the gender assignment given to them is wrong. And in some of those circumstances, folks will choose a pronoun that is different. Increasingly, people choose what we've thought of historically as the plural they or them, which I think historic is likely in English just to increasingly become a non gendered singular pronoun. I think that's

where English appears to be going. So the pronoun usage is more about gender identity. When we're talking about sex development, we're talking about sex development, not gender identity. If that makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. So I do think that English is going to go in the direction of accepting them and they as a singular pronoun. We. It hasn't officially happened yet, but you'll hear it in

a lot of people's language already. Even before the transgender movement became big, people got tired of saying he or she and so they began to use them as a singular pronoun, and I think that that's where English is going to go. And people need to recognize languages do evolve, and so it's not that surprising that English would evolve in some circumstances. There are languages, by the way, that have no gendered pronouns. So Chinese, for example, historically did

not have a gendered pronoun. You figure out the gender of the person based on the context, but not based on the word itself. What do you make about people like Jordan Peterson who argues like, well, people who want to use pronouns, they need to recognize this, this is the way things have been for the past, you know, throughout the course of human history, and like they're trying to revise the language. So I'm wondering, like, when you hear that kind of argument, how do you respond to that?

His argument sounds so jurassic to me? And the reason is, you know, I'm old enough. So I'm fifty two, and I'm easily old enough to remember the days when those of us who are feminists were trying to change the

habit of using he as the standard singular pronoun. So people would say, when you go to a doctor, he will ask you some questions, and we would say no, it should be he or should be And at that time, this was in the nineteen seventies, people would constantly say to us, well, he means both, just get over it, right, and we would say, no, he doesn't mean both, because we know from psychological studies, if you say he, people imagine it he. They don't imagine a he or a she.

So we were asking for language to change, to use she or he or he or she. And we were also asking, for example, to stop using the language, for example, of mankind and to instead say humankind. And we were, for example, asking that instead of saying congressman, we would say congress person or congresswoman or congressman. That there would not be a singular approach to that. For example, we used to say chair person all the time, and now or chairman all the time. We tried chair person. Most

people now just say chair chair of a department. They won't bother with chairman. At the time, people told us, get over it. It's the way language has always been. It's not going to change, right. But it did change, And if we know it made a difference, we know that psychologically it makes a difference to people to be offered she or he and to be offered chair as opposed to chairman, because they are more likely to imagine a woman or a man. So I think he's being

really silly when he things language doesn't evolve. Language, in fact, has always evolved to shift with culture. It's why we don't speak Shakespeare in English, right, we don't speak Old English because English evolved and English will continue to evolve. Chinese, by the way, evolved, so Chinese didn't used to bother with indicating specific gendered pronouns as he or she today it does in writing in literature, and the reason it did is it had partly to do with westernization of literature.

So we know that languages all over the world in fact do evolve, and one of the places they evolve is around the way that they manage gender, the way they manage age you know, who they think of as a child versus an adult, for example, who they recognize as citizen or non citizen, the kinds of language that evolves there. So the truth is language does change, and there's nothing wrong with language changing it It reflects a

culture in evolution, and humans evolved. But cultures evolved too, and so his attitude, this is the way it's always been, has this sort of attitude that the only thing that evolves is biology. But the fact is culture evolves, and culture probably evolves much faster, so it's more likely to be changing the language than changing our bodies, which to

me makes sense. I don't have a problem with it. Yeah, I think that, and I'm trying to wrap my head around all the different perspectives that are out there now.

So I think the logic there is that there's this kind of attitude of like we're talking about such a small minority of the population that people like Jordan, I think, focus on the statistical like sort of averages and say, well, it seems ridiculous that like a point zho one percent of the population are trying to change the language is going to just confuse the majority of the masses, and

that seems like it's not a viable solution. I think that would be the rational sort of response you would say, And I certainly don't want to like try to like channels a person right now and what they would or would not say, that's not fair to him or you. However, I think in my understanding, because I'm really trying to understand and really get to the root of these factions or these disagreements. If I had to, like say, what

in the world do I personally think? You know, I am all about trying to see how we can kind of like include people on the margins and have a healthy integration of them to society. It's nothing I'm going to get like furious about. But there are people who do get fears about it and would make the argument that it seems silly that why should we cater to such a small minority of the population. So what you

make it? Yeah, it strikes me, as you know, just one of those basic forms of respect that if possible, we should try to accommodate people in terms of recognizing their self identities out of a form of respect. The other thing is, I think it's it's one of those things that people older than me struggle a great deal with, and people much younger than me have absolutely no problem with. So I see in my son's my son is seventeen.

I see in his generation a real ability to just change the pronoun they're using for somebody and the gender attribution for somebody with really very little difficulty. They just do it very fascily and without a lot of anxiety. What I'd have to say to somebody who is very rigid and hostile towards this, I think we have to recognize that whenever we are attributing an identity to somebody else, we're also attributing an identity to ourselves. Identities are not

done singularly, They're done in dialectic. So the reason I know I'm a mother is because I have a child. The reason my child is a son is because he has a mother. The reason I know that some people are black is because we say that some people are white. The reason I know I'm female is because we identify some people as male. So when we are reacting in a way that is hostile, what we need to recognize is part of our anxiety is coming from a place

of having our own identity implicated. And I think that there's not enough attention paid to the person who's uncomfortable trying to process why am I so uncomfortable? So for me, for example, you know, I've learned, because of my own work, to recognize that if I come across somebody who has a body type or a behavior type, that I find very disorienting. What I do now is ask myself, why does my own identity feel like suddenly ambiguous in response

to this? And if I can process that and calm myself down, then I can often react to that person in a way that is much more charitable and much more generous than if I just react to it in a phobic fashion. So, for example, if I come across somebody, for example, who is somewhat demented, and they're reacting to me in a way that seems to confuse who I am, so they're attributing the wrong name to me, or they think I have a relationship with them that I don't have.

I mean the thing of one old man I met once who I was having a perfectly normal conversation with him, and then suddenly he slapped his leg and said, so you want to be a navy wife, and I said no. I realized he didn't know who I was, and he had been acting to me in a way that he thought I was somebody dear to him and I didn't really know him, and so all of a sudden, my own identity felt very uncertain and unstable because I thought I knew who he was and who I was, and

I did calm myself down enough to recognize, Okay, he just threw me for a loop, but that's me being thrown for a loop by his specific health issues. I could calm down enough to react to him in a way that was not phobic and hostile and didn't cause my anxiety to go into high gear because I'm like, who is this guy talking about? And sorry that it

has nothing to do with who I am. So I think one of the things that younger generations are getting better at is not reacting to those ambiguous moments with quite as much phobia. And maybe that's because they're exposed to a lot more variation than we were, but maybe it's also because we've taught them to respond to things

in less hostile fashion. I mean, the anti bullying campaigns, I gotta be honest, they seem to be working, and they seem to have helped a lot of kids process the idea that they can accept, you know, mainstreamed kids variation among their own population in a way that they don't have to be worried, they can handle it, and they don't have to worry about it quite so much. So it seems to be a very different generation from say, the ones of my parents in that passion. You know,

it does. But to say that there's only like a monolithic generation, you know, there is a serious cultural war going on right now between those that really see the progressive you know, wanting to you know, even like wordsly inclusion. They're kind of viewing that as like a really bad thing. And then you have those on the other side, obviously, who don't view that as a bad thing. So there seems to be within this generation there seems to be

a very very strong cultural war going on. Yeah, and I never thought I'd be this young to say, but clearly my generation is going to have to die for progress. I thought i'd be eighty when I was saying that, But I'm fifty two and I'm saying that now my generation is going to have to die for progress to happen. You know, some of it's just going to take time

to happen. But it certainly was the case in the past that, for example, interracial marriage is absolutely not tolerated anywhere in the culture, and now it's very widely tolerated. I mean, there's still certainly lots of areas where it's not tolerated, but there's far more toleration. Same thing with same gender marriage, we see far more toleration of that.

We see far more toleration of kids being mainstreamed. So I do think that I know it doesn't feel like we're making progress forward because when we hear from people objecting, they sound very loud. But historically speaking, I'll tell you as a historian, we are getting better and better about recognizing that anatomy is not destiny, and that identity is a complicated thing that doesn't get determined in any simplistic fashion from anatomy, except in the sense that if you're dead,

you're dead. That does still happen. But even there there's some blurrs things. Yeah, you've talked about how that's blory too. Yeah, yeah, that's flurry too. It's weird. Death is socially constructed, which I never would have thought would be the case. But

death is socially constructed. It's freaky lot of this stuff. Yeah, it gets, as you've noted, the farther our science goes, you know, in a way that free You didn't say it this way, but the free cure things are going to get in terms of what we need to confront us as a society, and the more we may have to admit that certain rigid categories are not as stable as we thought. They're a lot fuzzier than we thought,

and not just in terms of sex. And I thought we could maybe turn our attention to some other areas where you know, the logic can be of the same logic can be applied. One point you made, which I think is a really great point, is the fact that we all share ninety five percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, right at least at least Now that's an interesting race. A lot of question what does it mean to be human? Yeah? Yeah, no,

I think it's a very tricky question. You know, the people on the abortion debate want a debate like when does human life begin? And to me, that's not an answerable question, right, that's not there's never going to be an answer to that. That's not political because the fact is life nature Sure, it doesn't care about our desire to have these clean political categories for legal purposes. It throws a variation all the time, and it stumps us

when it comes to who is dead. When it stumps us as to who is alive, when what counts as a person, and it's going to begin to stump us more and more, I think with regard to the animal categorization humans versus other types of animals. And to my mind, one of the most scary places where identity is separating from anatomy is in our actual identities with regard to

online identities. So it's very it's increasingly easy and increasingly common for somebody to take your identity and they can completely take it and remove it from your anatomy in the sense that they can create a whole other person that appears to be you that is not you, and take credit in your name, literally financial credit in your name, can have an online identity. You know what we see

with regard to the Russian bots creating false identities. There's a Twitter account that pretends to be me that isn't me, And I've tried to get is that right? Twitter to shut it off, but they won't and I don't Yeah, and I don't know who it is. It could be. I've tried to figure out since the Russian bot stuff came about. Is it possible it's that Facebook has an

identity for me. I've never joined Facebook, but there's a Facebook page with my name and my biography, and I used to think it was something nefarious, but now it's become clear, since Facebook was invested and investigated to some extent by Congress, that that's actually a page that Facebook put up. I'm important enough apparently that Facebook feels I have to have a Facebook page, and so they've created one in my name, but I don't have control of it.

People have liked it. Five hundred something people have bothered to like that page thinking it is me, and now those people have probably had their political affiliation scraped off of my identity based on that. I mean, it's that kind of thing is really to my mind, it's the most disconcerting because historically speaking, the one thing we could count on was that your body and your identity were at some level connected, and that's becoming less and less the case. So that, to my mind is sort of

the weirdest part of the future. And where that's going to go, I don't know. So I'd like to return a second to this first proposition that we both value the scientific method and we're activists, and then actually the second one that we both believe the right starting point is with the truth and not leading with a political agenda.

And I think when you get in that kind of position, it creates all sorts of confusion to those who lead with the identity politics, because you can say one thing and people will think you're on their side, and then you say another thing based on the data that sounds like completely not on their side, and so that people that wanting to kind of pigeonhole you is one thing or another, like she's Alice is on our side or

she's not on our side. It can be very confusing to people who lead with not the truth, but lead with the identity politics. I think you could even drop up the word identity there, just lead with politics. It's not even about identity per se, just politics. Yeah, well, that's interesting because a lot of this is framed in terms of the phrase identity politics. That's that word is being thrown around a lot these days. It is, but I think, you know, in some ways, I think it's distracting.

So I run a nonpartisan newspaper for my city, which is East Lansing, Michigan, and I founded it because we had no news here and so city government could get away with anything. And it's it happens to be a one party town. It's a Democrat town. It's a blue town. I call it Little Chicago as a joke, but it's a very one party town, which means you can get away with a lot of stuff. And if there's no news, then nobody knows what's going on. And I'm a Democrat.

I vote Democrat most of the time. I mean, I can't remember the last time I didn't, you know. But my feeling was that people shouldn't know what their government is doing. So I found it a newspaper, and it's a citizen journalism newspaper that runs for the people of the city. We run on a non profit system. And I'll tell you, people are constantly saying to me that they're totally confused because I'll report, you know, something negative

about this person. Then I'll report something positive about them or negative about attax, and then I'll report some positive thing about that tax. And they'll say to me like, we don't know what the side you're on, and I'm like, well, I'm not on a side when I'm reporting, because my goal is to report in a way that I think intelligent people would want to know about X, Y or z. So you know, I have a managing editor who functions

very excellently. A woman named Ann Nichols functions as our managing editor, and she and I will talk about Okay, so this thing came up, is that something people would want to know about, and if we think, you know, more than ten people would want to know about it, we'll report it. So, for example, she does our marijuana reporting for us. Right now, there's a big legal issue

with regard to marijuana and knee landsing about legalization. You know, I'll report on taxing or and financing, and people will say to me, you know, I thought you were pro development, but then I thought your antidevelopment. I thought an was pro marijuana. Now I think and we say that you're not supposed to care what we make right. So I

don't think it's just identity politics. I think in general, in any political realm, people have come to assume that you should take a side, and you should only tell people the facts that accord with your side. But I take very seriously the idea that I should be bringing forth facts that matter, even if they undercut politically what I would like to see, because reality based government is better. Reality based policy is better than pretending that my data

is somehow clean when it's not nonpartisan. So that's where I'm coming from. That's why I think the word identity is in some ways distracting, because I think it's just politics that cause people to want to have tribal sides. Yeah,

I appreciate that makes sense. It does make sense. It must be frustrating to be who you are in the sense that you know, like up to this point in the interview, I feel like almost everything you've said, a Republican or someone writers to hear what you're saying and just roll their eyes every second and be like, oh, she's so politically correct. But you get in trouble. You know, you've gotten in controversies from people on the left for not saying exactly what they want you to say, because

you lead with the truth. So you know, how does it feel to you know, just must be frustrating to not have that sort of truth seeking appreciated at all times. Right, Well, I think that there's a core group of people who do appreciate it, and that you can you can cultivate appreciation of it. So one of the things we've done with the newspaper is to cultivate an appreciation of non partisan reporting. You know, nowadays people in the city, about

six hundred people in the city. They have donated, some of them quite a lot of money to keep the organization going because they are really committed to the idea that while we may bring forward news, they don't want to hear that news is not supposed to make you feel better. It's supposed to make you more aware, and so they Yeah, they've actually become very frustrated in my experience with the New York Times, a CNN, with Fox News, with the Wall Street Journal, because they see a lot

of frankly, very biased reporting. And so I think you can cultivate in people a sense of wanting some organizations to really bring forward what is honest, not what is skewed, to make you feel better. So I think there is a possibility of doing that. But yeah, no, I'm old enough right to remember the days when if you said biology that homosexuality was inborn, people said you were a Nazi.

In the seventies, it was absolutely true in the eighties that if you brought forth the argument that homosexuality was probably to some degree inborn, people would say that you were contributing to a eugenicist point of view, and that it was going to lead to a on a side of gay people. And then things totally shifted completely in the two thousands and the standard line became being gay is totally it's about being born that way. That's all.

You're never allowed to question it. And you know, I was saying something different, as were a lot of people looking at the science, which is, we've good reason to believe that there is a biological contribution to sexual orientation, but it doesn't explain everything. There's more than just a biological contribution in terms of theosis. There's nuance. There's also more than one way to be gay, and more than one way to be straight, but certainly more than one

way to be gay. That especially among males, for example, we see multiple ways you can end up with a gay man. In terms of biology, it's not just genetics.

You can have inborn effects. So what I find is that like, people really want to believe that the truth is on their side, and it would be nice if they would understand that the truth is like a referee, right, that science needs to be like a referee and to say here's what I see, and yeah, referees are human and we're human and so we're going to be wrong

some of the time. But the ideal is that we say, well, this is, you know, you were over the line or you weren't over the line kind of thing, the way the referee does. And that's what we should try for as much as possible. And that's where peer review helps, because if peer of you is functioning correctly, what happens is people have a really excellent check and balance system

on knowledge, and in democracy is functioning correctly. The same thing. Voters, if told the truth, should be able to vote for the best person or the person whose ideology they agree with. You know, they should at least know what the persons likely to do so that they can be represented. But increasingly in a system that's very driven by a media system that's profit moded and that that functions off of clicks and popularity, what you get is silos of knowledge,

and they're not really silos of knowledge, of silos of ideology. Yeah, silos of ideology. Okay, did you see a difference between the kind of activising you do and the kind of extreme left activism this emerging intellectual dark web movement or railing against Do you think that there's utility in kind of distinguishing between, like, I don't know, a healthy form of activism and a form that is become so ensure

that it can become pernicious. Yeah, there's a lot of dumb activism across the board, you know, So there's stupidity is not limited to any particular political group. There's lots of stupidity across the political spectrum, and certainly the left can have it as well as the right can have it,

even the center can have it. I think what makes activism better is when it's reality based and when it's actually aimed at a goal, where the goal is not self agredizement, but is rather some specifical like for example, gay marriage right, so the right to marry whoever you want to marry as long as there're a consenting adult, or for example, the right to have bodily autonomy so that somebody doesn't change your gentle enount without your permission

unless there's some really dire medical situation that calls for it to save your reproductive health or your life something like that. Right, there should be a specific goal in mind. I think what we see a lot today because of the way the internet functions is a lot of vacuous, ideologically driven activism that doesn't actually have a purposeful goal,

And to my mind, it's very sad and worrisome. Because we have a global crisis, namely global climate change, we also have various global health crises that we're facing, for example, antibiotic resistance. We have issues about food provision, for example. So we have a lot of things that we could actually be working on and could be activist about that I think would really matter to a lot of people.

But what you get, particularly in the United States, is this sort of vacuous identity politics space activism where people on all sides of the political spectrum kind of want to yell at each other all the time. And to my mind, it's a sign of enormous privilege. You can pretend global climate change isn't happening because it's not going

to affect you for a while. You can pretend anti antibiotic resistance is not happening because odds are you in the West, you're going to be able to get to a medical system that's going to get you the best kinds of antibiotics and it's not going to immediately affect you. But more and more we're seeing these things, and these could be things we could actually be working on in a meaningful fashion, but not a lot of activists are doing it. They're not working on those those big issues.

They're working on issues of you know, wanting to shame each other and yeah, yeah, humanly so glorify, which is exhausting. Yeah, it's really really tiresome. Yeah, it is quite tiresome. For that reason. I read a really interesting article from Medium just today, just right before our chat today, so it's like fresh my mind that this is the title, The Left are burning their own house down over identity politics

and the intellectual dark Web. And the core argument in this article is that we have to be very careful of what they or political postmodernism, which is the premise that there is no objective reality, even scientifically speaking, everyone's reality is unique, which means all reality is crafted by

our own cultural influences. And this person argues that political postmodernism, if appliet in certain ways, becomes an engine of war and genocide, and that that's precisely what the intellectual dark Web thinkers are worried about when they rail against postmodernism and identity politics. It sounds like you probably agree with that, Is that right? Yeah, I certainly think it is a problem that some stuff on the left has become unmoored from reality. But we could say the same thing about

the right. Right, Holocaust deniers are absolutely unmoored from reality. People who think that the reason slaves were not liberated is because they didn't rise up are unmoored from reality. So Kanye West, didn't you make that hark? Yeah, I'm thinking Kanye West, Right, These people are not reality based. So the problem of the postmodern attitude, dude, where you kind of decide what is true based on what you want to have be true, is not just a problem

with the left. It's absolutely also a problem with the right. I mean, I would absolutely say holocaust denying is a postmodern reality ignoring idea and a very dangerous one, an extremely dangerous one because it denies what is possible in terms of genocide and where genocides come from. So it's

a very great point, you know. I think what's going on in the intellectual dark web is that most of the people who identify with that began on the left and then discover that the left could be stupid, and so they're fighting against the stupidity that is on the left.

I think that's especially with Weinstein, Eric. Yeah, yeah, But if they had begun on the right, they might have rejected the stupidity on the right right, But we would not be paying attention to them because the mainstream media does, in fact skew left, and so it's paying lots of attention, and certainly the New York Times, which is a very these days, a very left of center publication, is paying a lot of attention because it kind of feels scary

in your own house. But the postmodern attitude, you know, my husband often says, and I don't think he's wrong, that postmodernism started with Reagan, where Reagan would basically just say stuff that was kind of wishful thinking, and the press would attempt to say that isn't true. But Reagan, you know, in his sort of slightly demented state, would honestly believe the stuff that he was saying about the good and the evil and all the rest of it.

And so in many ways, you know, the Iraq War was a postmodern war in the sense that it was based on fundamental untruths about had what in terms of weapons of mass destruction. So this is not something that is only a product of identity politics. This is a worldwide phenomenon that I think George Orwell very well predicted that it was going to get to the point where basically propaganda was going to become so endemic that it would be very difficult to tell what the truth was

and what was not true. And that's where we are today. We're at the point where it can be extremely difficult to tell what is real and what is false. Online and even on television, it can become you know, fake stories take off before we even realize that they're fake,

and they don't quite die, they linger. So this is an international, across the spectrum problem, and for the Dark Web to be complaining about, particularly the left and particularly identity politics, strikes me as sort of an inch deep. Let's talk about the deeper problem. And that's why the piece I wrote for the Chronicle prier Education I talked about the meat, plantscapes that I see is the post modern, post apocalyptic media landscape where thoughtfulness and non part isn't

reporting go to die. And I really mean that. I mean this is the problem here is much much greater than a problem of people complaining about gender pronouns. It's much greater than that. So yeah, And there's a quote from that article which was called why I Escaped the Intellectual Dark Web, that I've been quoting in all my social media because I really like this a lot. Opinion is not scholarship, it is not journalism, and we are

dying for lack of honest, fact based slow inquiry. We are dying, like we are getting to the point right where literally people are beginning to die because we are failing to recognize the harms that we have introduced. So again, I would say global climate change, you know, with not only the fact that some people are literally losing their land to water. I mean Alaska is melting, right, This

is no joke. The polar bears are dying, the Alaska is melting, and that's going to create a huge issue for the people of Alaska and for the ecosystem of Alaska. The coral reef is dying, fisheries are dying. We have a situation at the same time where again I would bring up antibiotic resistance, where we have a situation where we've put so much antibiotics into the food system that we've created a situation where we're creating super bugs all

over the place. Because of the combination of all these things, we're beginning to create ecosystems that are becoming incredibly dangerous to the species that normally including us, that would normally survive in those ecosystems. I literally meant we are dying because we are not doing the science and taking it seriously. And there are people doing that science, but we're not paying attention to it very much. Instead, what are we

paying attention to? We're paying attention to the latest small study of this identity issue or that I read the Neyic Times, for example, and they'll be reporting on a study that had twelve people on it because it's about

running and what it does to your knees. And it's a stupid, lousy study that shouldn't even be reported on because it's an observational study with a small n And I'm wondering, well, where's the study here in terms of telling us about what really matters to millions of people, Like where's the information about tuberculosis and what's happening right now with the evolution of tuberculosis. Where is the discussion of what we're doing in terms of introduction of levels

of problematic. So, for example, I've become gluten intolerant. I think there's a really interesting question here about why the hell many of us would be this, right, Like, there's something going on in the system. It doesn't make sense that it's simply the case that this number of people would have had this in the past and they just didn't realize it. Right, It's not possible, I don't think in terms of a public health issue. So why are we paying no attention to whatever's going on in the

food supply chain? That is probably or maybe some other issue with the microbiome. I mean, I think there's I think people are literally dying of C. Difficile, right, They are literally dying of malaria. We are literally getting sicker and sicker in terms of lyme disease, in terms of celiac, in terms of all of these things. And so when I said dying for, I've literally meant dying, I just

mean longing for. I meant we are dying for lack of science, easier to get lost in the junior high pettiness of and I think a lot of it is ego driven on all sides, you know well, and tribal life is very compelling. You know, it's very we evolved. I think it's fair to say we evolved to have a certain need to reiterate with tribe ring all the time.

And so the consequence and that had to do with kin relationships and survivability, and so the consequence of that is we're constantly drawn into these dramas about who am I and who are you? And are you friend or foe? And we spend so much moreships it's easier to get drawn to that then deal with real problems, real issues that are humanitarian issues. And you know what's great is

when people spend that on sports. I mean, I mean that really like when they spend that need on sports and they want to be cheering their own team in a sports way. But unfortunately, we don't seem to have enough of that to or you know, our favorite band, our favorite sports, our favorite televisision show is not enough to assert those tribal borders, and so we end up doing it around identity and around politics and around other things.

When I mean, the good news is most of us are na neegation war, so we're not enacting it in a way where we're killing each other. But the bad thing is that I think we have to constantly draw borders and it's a stupid human behavior that wastes a lot of time. And it's to my mind, it's frankly a more male behavior in certain ways than a female being. Okay, I actually wanted to talk about that, if you don't mind.

I thought you made a really interesting thought provoking point in your ted talk about the Founding fathers and then what would the Founding mothers look like? And I think this is so relevant to the intellectual dark web, to a lot of these ideas, a lot of these factions, because I saw George talk, and you know, I thought he had a lot of really interesting things to say in is talk. One thing he said the state should

stay the hell from the individual. Now, that might be part of it, that's certain was the Founding Father's attitude, right, like protect from the monarchy. However, you argue that maybe there needs to be a balance there of not just you know, protecting us from the state, but also learning how to care for each other. Is that right? Yeah? And I'm very drawn to the idea of that original American ideal, which is that the state exists largely to

protect the individual from the state. It's sort of a paradoxical way of thinking about a democratic system, but it's a very beautiful way to think about it, which is the state exists in order to keep the state out of our faces. But at the same time, I do think that it was set up in a way that was a sort of male typical approach to looking at the world, which had to do with resources and property

and had less attention paid towards basic care. And if we had a system that paid more attention to relationships in terms of care relationships that for example, we would have national health insurance. By now, we would not have a situation where people had to live in fear of losing a job means also losing an ability to survive

physically and have your children survive physically. So the fact that we have, you know, this balkanized system of health insurance, means that some people can get life saving treatment that other people simply cannot get. And it's not often very expensive or even very high tech. Often it's pretty basic stuff. But it can be very difficult for people who are caught in the in between. And strangely, in the United States, the people caught in between are the working poor. They're not.

If you're very poor, the state covers you. If you're middle class, you often have some coverage, and if you're wealthy, you have a lot of courage. It's the people who are in the lower end, the middle middle part of the middle class who get caught and have in an adequate healthcare protection, and a lot of them are really in rough shape. And I wonder to up if we had a system where we had more of the characteristics

that cross culturally. We see females paying attention to which is kinship relationships rather than just resource relationships, and also thinking more carefully about care. Would we have a situation where we were more rational with regard to making sure people had a very basic level of care. So, for example, we would have I think potentially better public school systems.

All four year olds, for example, would have school, because we know from the studies very very clearly that having four year olds in school makes an enormous difference in

their lives. We don't know why four year olds are these almost magical moment where if you catch them and you provide schooling to them, and I'm not talking about intense schooling, just basic pre K schooling, It increases the likelihood that they'll be employed later in life, decreases the likelihood of being imprisoned later in life, increases quality of

health relationships, all sorts of things. I mean, this has been studied all over, Yet in many places in this country, the only people that can get pre K care in terms of government supported is the poor, the most poor, because it's through the head Start program. So why is that?

And I think that if we had a more rational system that paid more attention to care and spent less time worrying about individual property ownership, we might have a system that was better for everybody, that basically made everybody better off, and having everybody better off would leave us in a better position. I think that's a beautiful place

to end. And I just want to say, you know, I resonate with your dual almost on equal footing desires for getting at the truth, getting things right, not ignoring that, not ignoring the truth, but also in the care. So you're kind of a good balance of these things, you know. I think we should start the intellectual lightweb, you know,

or some sort of web. Can there be a web that I even know if web is the right word, But some movement where people are not you know why the intellectual only part to it, people who are equally concerned with not just getting at the truth. But I wonder, like, where are the people like you, you you know, like, you know, really like, don't treat these as dichotomous things. You know, you're either on this one hand, getting at the truth or you're a social justice warrior, which is the term

that's used a lot as a pejorative thing. But can you be both? Yeah, I think you absolutely can. That's why, you know, that's the real reason I wrote the book Galio's middle Finger, was to point out that the fundamental things that people who pursue truth and pursue justice we care about the same basic stuff, which is, if we want to do it well, we care about truth and we care about justice. We care about both of those things.

And so it's funny to me because that book, galios middle Finger sometimes gets construed as being you know, anti social justice warrior. But that's not that book. That book absolutely takes seriously the idea of activism as incredibly important to the health of democracy and to the health of

all of us. So, you know, the book traces my own activist work, and other people's activists work showing why it functions as a check and a balance on people who might otherwise do really abusive research and produce really abusive policies. So I do think there's a way to do that. And you know, as I said in the piece I wrote in the Chronicle last week, I actually

think the intellectual lightweb is academia. I think that what's troubling is that we have had a loss of job security, and that reduces whether or not people who have unpopular things to say can stay. And so that's where, for example, Brett Weinstein, Heather Haying, for example, get driven out and that's quit too, right, Well, yeah, I quit because my dean censored me. And you know, I I might go

back to academia. But it is true that I worry that the ways in which academia is being overtaken with a sort of problematic culture, which is about corporatization and about money making and about branding, really cheapens the kind of intellectual possibilities that are available. I know, I know

we have to survive on money. I'm not pretending that universities don't have to think about money, but the way in which they're thinking about money is deeply troubling at this point, and I think counterproductive in a lot of ways. So I think an intellectual lightweb is something to go for. And I don't actually think there is a dark web, right these people are out in the light. I don't know. I just I think it's this fashion thing and the

fashion shoot that went with it. Even though the photographer is incredibly talented, The New York Times photographer incredibly talented, did beautiful photographs, but I just think it ended up looking like a fashion shoot that was kind of silly and cheapens the ideas that we're trying to get towards. I appreciate your perspective immensely, and thanks for like talking through this stuff with me. I certainly I'm still trying to wrap my head around what I think of the

intellectual dark way. I just I know that I'm personally striving for something that is like intellectual dark web plus like something that doesn't make fun of social activism but also distinguishes between healthy social activism. And so you see, I like the complexities of this, but who like, thanks for listening to me, because no one else will listening to this stuff. Keep doing that now, that's good stuff. I appreciate it, Scott. Thanks Allan. And it's about process, right,

process is what we do. It's good. Yeah. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and

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