Gender/Sex and the Body || Anne Fausto-Sterling

on this podcast. In this series, we try to make sense of the distinction between sex and gender and cover trans issues in a very thoughtful and nuanced fashion. We have balanced discussions from multiple perspectives, including scientists, activists, and a leading feminism scholar. This series will hopefully expand your mind and help you make sense of the current heated debate surrounding the distinctions between sex and gender as well

as transgender issues. The aim is to turn down the temperature on this very heated topic and increase understanding and integrate truth with love. I hope you will listen to this entire series with an open mind and an open heart, and as always, we look forward to hearing your feedback and comments on our website and on the YouTube channel, so that further Ado, I bring you this episode within the Making Sense of Sex and Gender series. Hello, and

welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome doctor Anne Fausto Sterling on the show. Doctor Fausto Sterling is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. Say that ten times real fast. Her books and scholarly articles are referenced widely in feminist and

scientific inquiries. She has received grants and fellowships in both the sciences and the humanities, and in twenty twenty she re released her book called Sexing the Body, Gender Politics, and the Construction of Sexuality with updated research. In this episode, I talked to doctor Sterling about gender slash sex and

the Body. During the sixties, the term quote gender was introduced to make a distinction between a person's biology and psychology, but doctor Fausto Sterling believes that these can never really be separate. She argues that biology influences gender, but that the opposite is also true. Culture and context can influence our hormones and body systems. We also touch on the topics of gender dysphoria, feminism, intersexuality, trans issues, and child development.

This is a really stimulating conversation with a legend in the feminist scholarly space. I really like how doctor Fausto Sterling brings in the science and tries to integrate that with the work she does in terms of feminism scholarship. So this was a great integration of multiple fields, and I hope you find this conversation as rich and stimulating as I did. So, without further ado, I bring you doctor and Fausto Sterling, Hey, and thank you so much

for being on the Psychology Podcast today. You're welcome, happy to be here. Thank you, you are a well Actually, I want you to introduce yourself before I tell the audience I was going to call you a legendary feminist and scholar, but why don't you introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit how you would sort of what sort of identities would you put on yourself? Okay, Well, I'm

a retired professor of biology and gender studies. I taught for over forty years at Brown University, where I was instrumental in starting gender studies at Brown in a time when gender studies was just starting up nationally. It wasn't a thing until we made it a thing. And at the same time, because I'm trained as a biologist and scientist, I have always been interested in the topic of biology

and gender and also in how science works. So after I wrote my first book called Myths of Gender, I became very aware that scientists, even really famous, really smart ones like Charles Starwin, they did their science always in their oracle and cultural context, and so they had a pre existing view of gender that then used to organize

scientific knowledge that they came about. So the field of science and technology studies became a field that was really important to me to understand how our culture and our ways of seeing the world that pre exist our science become part of our science in a way that few people question it. So I also founded at bround the Science and Technology Studies Program, which is broader. It deals with scientific knowledge in many arenas, and it is still

a thriving program. I'm happy to say, congratulations. At what point in your life did you like, how did the feminism and the biology interest, How did those things get linked with you? What's can you trace the development of that thinking within you a little bit? So they really got the science and feminism gut and biology gut link.

Because of my political activism in the late sixties and early seventies, I was active in the anti Vietnam War movement, I was active in the civil rights movement, and then as a women's women's feminist movement began to explode, I

naturally joined that as well. And then I was studying biology, which was always an enthusiasm of mine, and I was a young professor in the early nineteen seventies, and my feminist friends started realizing, as did I, that one of the arguments against feminism, against equal rights for women that was being used time and again, was an argument based on the idea that women were biologically different or, depending on who was saying it, inferior to men, and that

somehow they didn't have the aggression, the know how, the whatever to become really competent in the public sphere. And I say this at a moment when the newly announced president of Harvard University is first time a person of color and for the second time a woman. But that would have been just unimaginable in the nineteen seventies. But my friends turned to me as a biologist and as sort of to say, well, what about these biological arguments or that do they make any sense? Are they true?

What should we think about them? And I honestly hadn't thought about them very much. So that's when I decided to use my skills as a biologist to dig into the background of these claims, and that's what led me to write my first book, Myths of Gender. And as they say, the rest is history. Would you say that most of the ideas and myths of gender hold up today? Are there any that don't hold up? You know, we're

just looking back on that. Where are we at right now with a lot of the claims you made in there? The arguments I made against the biological claims I think hold up today. They probably some of them people would laugh at today. Others people still wonder about. They would be worded differently today. And I think our whole notion of science has really changed in ways that are both

good and bad. Today. I think the book is still relevant and it's quite amazing to me since it came out originally in nineteen eighty five, a second edition in nineteen ninety three, that the publisher still has it in print, so it's still available, So it must be mean something to some people. Wouldn't that be something if any of my books forty years from now, thirty years from now we're still in print. So yeah, it's huge. Congratulations there,

Thank you. Well. Something that strikes me about you is you're obviously very interested in science, your interest in activism, but you also use such a knowledge of the history of the psychology. I mean, this is the psychology podcast, so forget me if I focused on psychology a little bit.

But I'm amased at the the breadth of knowledge you have about how certain terms came to be in what years and sort of a broader context of the scientific and investigation of things through like the DSM and stuff. So can you actually walk our listeners through some things? And I can prompt it so we can go in pieces here, but it would be really helpful, I think for our listeners to hear a little bit about the evolution a lot of the terms that we're seeing today,

such as transgender. But let's go back, you know, to like the turn of the twentieth century. Invert, transvestite, ionist, I've never heard ionist, EO, ni, T, and sex were the most predominant words used in the sex and gender domain. Right is that corrected from the nineteen hundred nineteen forties. Right, So, at the turn of the twentieth century, group of people who we now I think call sexologists, we're trying to

understand sexual expression in its many forms. That came out of a out of a in a view in which they assumed that there was a normal state of being that was what we would today call binary. That they assumed that there were men and there were women, and there was an underlying heterosexual assumption in there, what today we would call heteronormative, is that healthy men desired women

and healthy women desired men. The Big compendium was first written in the late eighteen hundreds by Kraft Ebbing was called Psychologia Sexualists, and it was based on a notion on looking at everything that he considered sexual pathology, that is, things that were not normal, and it was it involved all sorts of sexual expressions, some of which we can't imagine even exists today, but some of which are very much with us but quite normalized, like homosexuality, and his

work was taking That book was originally published in German, it did get translated into English, was taken up by another sort of pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis an Englishman working in the first part of the twentieth century, and he wrote definitive books on homosexuality, and again he considered it to be an abnormality or an unhealthy form of development.

But both Kraft Ebbing and Ellis and others who who wrote as similar modes had homosexuality and transsexuality kind of all what we would these we consider these separate terms today,

They had them all joined together in their minds. So they considered a homosexual man ellis U's term invert to say that he somehow was psychologically inverted so that his brain was more like a woman's, which made him desire a man, if you can follow me, but also might make him want to cross dress and dress as a woman, and that would make him what we would today call

a transsexual. To the extent that none of these people had distinguished people who were heterosexual but cross dress from people who are homosexual but crossdress, from people who, as today would we would argue, have a gender identity that makes them feel like they are a woman inside a man's body. The notion of gender identity really didn't become part of the conversation until the nineteen fifties and sixties,

so these terms there were terms. Ianest was named after a French count from the I think seventeenth century, somebody Dione who cross dressed or who maybe presented as a woman, and there are a couple of books out on him. But that's where the term ianism. It's a completely unknown term today, although if you google it you'll find it.

If you haven't, you may have. But it was really in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties that John Money and also psychiatrist Robert Stoler, began to feel and all of these were described. All of these terms were described under the term sex, but they began to feel the term sex just got people as the only term to

describe everything they were talking about, got people confused. And furthermore, sex also meant could mean eroticism, So it wasn't just how you presented yourself in the world or what you thought about your body, but it was also it also had always other possible meanings involving attraction and types of sexual pleasure. So Money decided that he could that sex was trying to as a single word, was trying to do too much and so he decided to try to

divide things up. And he didn't invent the term gender, but he took it away from a grammatical thing and used it. That introduced it as a psychological term. And he introduced the notion of identity, that is, how you felt about yourself, and Solar elaborated on that, and there was a sudden I did a I'm writing a book

on this right now. I did an n gram, which is a study of It's just a quick and dirty thing from the Google lets you do looking at the frequency of measurements in the frequency of words appearing in books over time, and there's and there's nothing for gender identity. It's flat fi, flat flat, And then about nineteen sixty it starts to go up and then it just zooms right up, and it's now a very current term. So

it didn't exist before. Then You can do it. If you've ever done an en gram, you can pop the term gender identity in there and you'll stay I saw, well, I saw the one you came up with, which is good enough. I'll trust you. I trust you. I saw the one you did and it's fast. You know. It's just interesting to think that in the fifties and sixties, this term gender but not gender identity, but genders as separate from sex was the main sort of thing defining

that epic. And then in the eighties you do see the gender identity, but you see gender identity used in a psychopathological way. Correct me if I'm wrong. But when I look at the analysis you did around the eighties, it started to terms like gender identity disorder started you know, the word disorder right start right to creep in there, and gender identity disorder of childhood as well starts to creep in there. So that's something new, right that you

start to see around their eighties. That's totally has to do. That's all due to psychiatrists developing good old psychiatrists right Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, and the DSM became a thing that psychiatrists started making in the nineteen fifties and became sort of solidified in the sixties and seventies as a way of standardizing or trying to standardize mental illness in general, so that it gave the psychiatrists control and a sort of authority over And this is

where the science studies comes in. It was part of a struggle for authority over who could gets to say who's mentally ill and who gets to tell an insurance company whether they should pay for treatment that kind of thing, And the insurance companies very much wanted this too, because they had no way of dealing with the variety of presentations of metal disease much broader than things having to do with gender. Gender is a tiny subset of what's in the DSM. But third edition of the DSM, for

the first time, began to have hoosexuality listed. But by that time there was a gay rights movement, and there was a strong movement among psychiatrists too to remove homosexuality as a mental illness, to get it out of the DSM, and to put it up parallel to heterosexuality as just one of the multiple ways of being in the world.

And so DSM had homosexuality in there in the And then also there were psychiatrists who were specialized in sexology were starting to see a lot of children who were brought to them by their parents because the parents didn't think the children were behaving in gender appropriate ways. So there were little boys who liked to play with dolls and little girls who wanted to climb trees and the

parents were upset by this. And this is where, to the extent that they were brought by parents who couldn't tolerate those behaviors to psychiatrists, psychiatrists who wanted a category, and this is where the childhood gender identity disorders came into being. But that childhood gender identity disorder. Every time DSM we wrote itself, which was about every decade, the classification and diagnosis changed because it was just never a

stable thing. So it raised and fell, and there is a new one which still has a very mild version of it in it. And I predict that when we we're now with DSM five, by the time we get to DSM six, I think it's going to be gone. And it's also going to be considered in the realm of behaviors that may cause distress to the child because of poor reception by the rest of the world or by the child's parents, but isn't considered a pathology on

the individual child's part. Just to clarify, are you talking about gender dysphoria You think that'll be out of the DSM. I think gender dysphoria will be out of the DSM as a disease. I'm just you know, you know, knock on wood, I'm so alive and ten years check with me and we'll see if I'm right, because there will be there. Already modified the twenty twenty DSM to try and clarify gender dysphoria as being something that's not adherent in the child, but rather maybe the result of the

world impinging on the child. So I think it's It's also a word that's with us right now, and it's a real experience for a lot of trans people, don't get me wrong. But the question is what is the origin of the experience and what are the better ways to deal with it? And whether dealing with is sending a child to a psychiatrist, I think is what's at issue. Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. And relating to all this, I want to talk about

another major milestone I noted. It's very interesting. You see, the term transsexual is the predominant sort of trans word until it looked like twenty eleven to me is the biggest spike. And I may be wrong, but it looked like that's when really the term transgender really kind of replaces the term transsexual, and you don't really see transsexual used as much after too, even is that is that

roughly correct? That's roughly correct? And again transgender. Transsexual began to be seen as being not quite the right coinage for a word coinage because it suggested that it was about sex in that old fashioned sense of the word. And once gender identity became an established idea, it became a lot of people argued that that what whatever is trans it has to do with gender and identity, not

with sex or sexuality. But also in the you know, decade plus since twenty ten, just the whole notion of non binary has exploded, and the transsexual, the transsexual umbrella, if you were, if you will, has increased to include people who are, for want of a better term, classic transsexual in the terms as they may be presented in nineteen fifty as being quite binary, that is, and those were the rules if you wanted to get affirming surgery, for example, is that you had to really convince the

surgeon and the psychologists that you really wanted to be a woman if you were bored as a man, or vice versa. And today things are a lot less binary and transgender allows under its umbrella a lot broader range of existences. Yeah, you were, I mean a pioneer already in that. Let's give you some credit here. Well, you wrote a book called The Five Sexes you already you know before this, you know, really got into the cultural consciousness that gender and maybe even sex could be food

in some way. You wrote this thesis. But I'm trying to understand what you still stand by today regarding that and what you don't because you present an original model nineteen ninety three male female MERM firm and HERM. But it doesn't sound like that you stand by that now or you are clarifying what you meant by that. Could you just clarify to me what you meant? Yeah, sure, I need to clarify it. And I also wrote an essay.

I wrote that essay in nineteen ninety three and it kind of shocked a lot of people, and its people still use it in the classroom, and it's sort of it catches people's attention, catches people by surprise, which I think is a good thing, and that it makes people

stop and think. It was focused primarily on the question of intersexuality and the practice of that money pioneered of trying to make people who were born with as physical intersexes, that is, they had components of male and female parts in their bodies, trying to make them binary, usually through surgery, but also through a regime of trying to raise them as one or the other, either as a male or female, with no space for just being what they were, which

was something in between. So I wrote that essay as a provocative essay, sort of along the lines of the old Jonathan Swift modest proposal essay, which this generation or many generations I guess are familiar with. It was a proposal about in which he ironically proposed that we could deal with the overpopulation problems. Who was an answer to Malthus? Really?

I mean this is when it was written by eating children, and no one really believed that he was arguing that we eat children, but understood what the understood that it was an ironic answer to the question of overpopulation. Similarly, there was a great deal of irony in my naming of these terms, and it still didn't do the work.

I don't think that needs to be done. And in fact, if we could have this interview in a year when I finished writing my final chapter, I have like a much neater answer for you, because I'm trying to work through work towards a theory of development that is more continuous or graded. With regard to gender development, the five sexes is still it's not dichotomous anymore, but it's still very disjoined. So you have just, you know, five things,

no transitions between them. The things are based on making fun of the medical people who are still trying to hold onto a binary. So I think the essay now is still useful to make people stop and think, but it isn't where I'm trying to go right now, which is to come up with a theory of developmental psychology of human development starting with infants that looks as gender as something that develops along a continuum, if only we would allow it to. Do you see there any valid

distinction anymore between sex and gender. It sounds like you don't really see that as a valid distinction any It's interesting I've also come around to and I'm not the only one. There are a few other people working in this field, scholars in this field, and we've invented a new term just what we need, a new term gender slash sex and JET or which I run it together and I say gender sex and we did this. I

did this because it became a parent to me. Money tried to build kind of a we're a stoler especially, tried to build a firewall between sex, which he then considered to be everything that biology had to do with the world, and gender, which was everything culture and psychology and upbringing had to do with the world. But what's pretty clear when you really dig into the biology is

that gender is always changing the biology. You know everything from studies of hormones that show that a soldier's testosterone drops precipitously just before they're entering into battle, so fear makes your testosterone drop. There are diurnal rhythms having children,

having children. There's there's all series of new studies along those lines by some anthropologists interested in this that show how the testosterone of single young men who are who are looking for mates UH have a higher average testosterone than than men who not only who have had children, but who are actively parenting. So so the act of actual physical and physical nurturing, you can see evolutionary reasons for that. You can see smart evolutionary pressures for that.

You can absolutely absolutely so what you see are things things that we've thought of as sort of true biological markers like test black, testouser and other hormones are not sort of independent constants, but they they change with the both they're different culturally, but they also change with the behavioral context which a person finds finds himself. And at the same time, if you think about, say how gender

in upbringing changes the actual biology. The examples of the one things like how much practice is you had throwing a ball that leads you to be able to quote throw like a boy? And in what culture have you had it. I have a colleague who's anthologist who studies Kapaweia, which is a very masculine considered martial arts for them in Brazil. But the Kaboeistas that he studies, if they do other sports at soccer baseball is not a common

sport for them, they quote throw like girls. According to what we would say in the United States States, they've never practiced that kind of overarmed throwing. And that's a long neuromuscular sensory response that you developed through practice and over time and with responses and even with very careful

physical guiding. I mean, I've watched and you can you can find it online, even a few images of learning to throw in which usually it's a male figure, presumably a father with a child, literally leaning over them from behind, embracing them and raising one arm to show to physically help them model the motor activity that is involved with

overhand throwing. So that's gender on the one hand, wanting your son usually not always, but usually to throw that way, and physically helping them lurnrom the sensory motor motions nerves that become permanently implanted in the nervous system. That's biology. So they aren't really separate. And there are very few things I think that exists that are quote pure biology,

that are cultural, that are immune from cultural modification. And it's not just because you think you should do something, but it also has become imprinted within your neuromuscular system. You know, I really want to make sure I understand your arguments today. They might differ from some of the assumptions I had, So let me just lay out some of the assumptions I had, and let me know what your perspective is, how it's similar different. That was an impression.

There's no such thing as a third sex that there's from an evolutionary point of view, sex is purely about reproductive function, and that's why it evolved. Two gam meets two sexes and that's it. But the gender, on the other hand, is something different, and it's merely a social construct and can be anything you want it to be if you believe in it, which some people don't. But that we are ultimately sexed bodies and everything else might

be personality differences. So those are some foundational assumptions I had about the biology of sex, and that maybe there's a valid distinction between medical sex and evolutionary sex, and that could be an interesting level of nuance that we could talk about where medical sex seems to be more complicated than just genitals because it involves hormones, chromosomes and other sex organs versus from a strictly wided sex evolve

point of view for reproductive functions. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of that because those are some of my assumptions, and tell me if you think I'm wrong. Right, So, even this is one of the problems Money had with the term sex and why he started dividing it up into kinds of sex. So and also let's be clear that we're talking about humans not even all vertebrates have the kind of sex as humans have.

So if you go out into the animal and plant world, you have three sets as horseexes, five sexes, you have all sorts of things. You have environmental set. We're talking about humans, so let's just say humans shipulight that we're talking about humans here, and we have money encountering and this comes back from his work with intersex children and adults, encountering people who were born and identified and raised as women who might have a Y chromosome, so they might

or might have no second chromosome. They might be XO, or you had men who have an extra X. And it turns out that these sex chromosome differences are actually surprisingly common if you look at You can find that out by looking at countries that keep birth Universal birth registries like the Scandinavian countries record the chromosomal composition of everybody at birth, and you find and you find a lot of hidden differences that people don't even know exists.

So he said, so he said, all right, we've got chromosomal sex and that doesn't necessarily German whether you're a man or a woman. And they said, well, but we have the fetal gonatal sex. We have the gonads developing during during fetal development, and those start out as being bisexual.

That is, a young embryo prior to six weeks of after fertilization have undefined fetal gonads, and they have both sets of potential accessory organs, the you know, the they have both the potential fallopian tubes in urus, and they have the potential the potential epididymus and those those kinds of things. And then as development proceeds in one direction or another, due primarily to hormones, the fetus produces that's

fetal gonad fetal hormonal sex. They begin to produce fetal gonads and have fetal gonatal sex and so on, and they're like he found. He described about five different levels. And what was interesting to him and what he established is that they don't necessarily all agree with each other. So you can have somebody with a chromosome one chromosomal

sex and a different gonatal sex. And then they get identified at birth basically in terms of their exterior gonads, and as long as those appear clear clear to a physician, they get called either a boy or a girl, and only if they're unclear to a physician. Do people investigate

further and so forth? So what you choose to define as the sex that that you want to refer to someone as, or that they live their lives as within a generation may depend on any number of things, not necessarily the presence of eggs or spur So that's so interesting.

So do you is your argument that, like you would view intersex individuals, which is very very very small percentage of the population, but they do exist and they are important, And of course we don't want to say that just because they are small parts part of the population that are not important. But would you are you seeing conceptualizing them as a different sex, because some biologists would say they still fall within one of the two sexes among humans.

That's a tricky question because it is tricky. It is tricky. Yeah, it is a tricky question because I wouldn't I guess I would resist trying to categorize them. You could have I would rather and this is also an interest, a really important term turn in methodology. I would I would

want to know how they would categorize themselves. Interesting and all the movement of scholars who are studying intersects and transgender non binary individuals in which rather than say going in with a questionnaire in which we've said, which are you male female intersects, it's they're doing qualitative work to get categories to find by the people who are actually living. And again it might be a contextual category. You might say,

how do you define yourself in terms of reproduction? So and you know the phenomenon again it's a it's uh, it's rare, but now quite well, you know, not so uncommon of someone who's a a female to male transgender who decides to have a baby, and so they stop taking hormones and become pregnant. So you have to ask, I think understand how to address these categories which we are now recognizing out in the open exist in the world. You may need to ask the people they involve how

they would consider themselves. So does that trans man who's having a baby, what are they are they thinking themselves as the mother, as the fathers, as the parent. I mean, I think new language will evolve, but it's sort of I don't think it's up to the biologists to say, well, we have these categories and here's one you need to fit into. But rather we're recognizing that the original binary categories we have aren't working for a segment, even if it's a wall set of people, and that we need

new categories for an expansion. That seems to be a major point that maybe we'd stuck double click on. It seems to be like there's a there's an additional sort of care for inclusivity, a care for humanitarian belonging that is that is accompanying this twenty eleven onward sort of

shift in language and things. I think that's what the heart of a lot of what you're getting at, because I'm trying to understand this from like a psychology If you do look at psychology surveys, at least ninety nine percent of people, if you ask their gender, it will match their their ga meat, you know, will match their evolutionary sex. But I think what a lot of people are Maybe you're saying a lot of people yours, and I want you to obviously tell me what you are

actually saying. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me like there's a there's something going on here where we're saying, well, there are a minority, but you know, they're being marginalized and they still matter, and we want to make sure that we can have them still be inclusive in our society, and maybe they've neglected.

Tell me your thoughts. I'm going to make you a bet that if you did a survey of people between the ages of say ten and thirty, and you didn't say which of these categories do you put yourself into, but rather, how would you describe your sex? How would you describe your gender? What words would you've used? That you would find probably a majority that said man or a woman, but you would and but you would also if you then added in the same question about gender,

you would find probably thirty or forty terms. Because this has already been I'm making a bet because studies like this have already been done right in this generation. So there's something intation is redefining every I mean a couple of them. We're redefining everything. Reason they are redefining everything, and in these terms. And so if you do a preset survey in which you've already determined what the categories are,

you may get that ninety nine percent. But if you lead to an open survey in which you say, you tell us what the categories are, you're going to get this huge range of answers, and I think that's very telling, and that it's that using qualitative, open ended methods is something that the psychologists and sociologists are are learning how to do and they need to get much better at it. I hear you. I'm trying to think of so many

different perspectives on the table. What are your thoughts on the feminists that are labeled TERFs who believe that that this is actually causing their women as a biological category to be erased, like their perspective, what do you what do you make of their perspective? Well, I've thought about this quite a lot. I hate the term because it refers it includes that term radical feminists, which has very specific historic meanings to me but not to the modern

generation though I don't used the term. But I've thought a lot about about where that intense feeling is coming from. And one of the things it's coming from is I think actually a limitation on the part of feminists and feminism to being clear what it means about sex and gender. That is, feminism in the seventies and eighties really use those terms as a way of separating sex in biology.

I'm sorry, biology and culture in order to make strong representations that we had to change culture to let women into the world. But by doing that, it did reinforce the notion that there is this underlying biology and that there is a single category called women that has some biological leaning. And I think, what's happening now, and I'm guilty of that. I was certainly guilty of that in the seventies and eighties myself. I hadn't thought through those terms.

Maybe it wasn't the moment to do it, although there were a few people who were raising those issues back then.

But what's happening now is that there's the trans rights movement, and people who support them have moved beyond this notion that there is a single biological category called women that makes political sense and so, and they're also moving towards inventing a new science of gender, which involves these kind of new methods with talking about Whereas the people who argue against transgender rights and the who grew up in this older feminist movement are clinging to a kind of

static belief in science, and clinging to biology is the way in which their identity has been defined. So to have that challenged is brightening to them and feels like going against many things that they've fought for, many of the rights they'd fought for in the past. So I think there's developed two kind of incommensurate points of view about what gender is, where it comes from, and what women are, And right now I don't see how to make them agree with one another. It's so I thinking

to be an ongoing debate. Yeah. I asked the artificial intelligence chat bock what is a woman and the way? I was curious, how do how do they reconcile it? And they said both. They said it could be either biological female identified a birth as female, or someone with a general identity of female. What I guess I want to ask you is don't you see there being a

meaningful difference? And I don't know what the terminologies wound up being, but don't you see a difference between a biological female and someone like for instance, if I already say to you right now, I've just decided this second, I'm now female and that's my identity. That's not exactly the same as a woman who has gone their whole life up to this point, you know, being treated as a female due to their biology. Do you do not see that as a meaningful distinction. I think that's what

a lot of TERFs are angry about. I agree with you that it's not the same, But the question is what how encompassing is or useful is the term woman in that sense? For there's a new book out, I'll plug it. You may want to interview him by Paisley Kura. See you are our age, they are a lawyer, they're in New York. He'd be easy to get called sexes

as sex does. And what that new is look at the categories of sex as defined in different aspects of the law, and what they argue is that it's completely functional. That is, sex is defined one way on a birth certificate, is defined a different way legally on a driver's license, and a third way in marriage law, and that the law doesn't have a consistent definition of sex as if

the law itself doesn't and it's completely cotextual. So what Kura arnues is that we have to let go of this notion that there's a universal definition and learn to deal with multiple definitions in context. And so back to the bathroom question. For me, the counter question is where is it safe and for who to go to the bathroom.

And for that you can first of all, you you might actually use real data, not the scare stories that you see on Twitter, but you have you have to balance, uh, the possibility of assault and what it comes down to. I did a little graphic on this. I haven't published it yet, still working on it. In what you have, the real danger is fueled feared by women who are posed to trans people using their bathrooms. So they are

scared of being assaulted by somebody with a penis. But on the other hand, trans women are they're also scared of being assaulted by people with penises if they go into a man ethic. So you have uh so, so you come down to, rather than worrying about who's a man and who's a woman a woman in that context of use of public bathrooms, who is in danger and why? And what which dangers are the are the real or frequent ones? And then how do we mitigate the danger

that cares for everybody. I mean, you've got you've got to care for the old group. I really like that a lot. There seems to be a moral panic on the right. They don't view it as a moral panic, And maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it's not a moral panic, but it's just I guess the way I'd receive it. Let me okay, fair enough, but specifically about surrounding bathrooms, sports, and I will say jails. I want to add jails to this because there are some good points I see.

Some of them make you know, I'm off roll bone right about specific specific instances of maybe a rapist who too makes pretend that they're trands in order to get into a women's prison, that they can commit more things. And I don't think I see it as a moral panic because I don't see that as a widespread thing, but it is. It does happen. Sometimes we have to admit it does happen. Sometimes, you know, terrible things have happened in the world. I agree with you, And there

are bad people in the world. And the question is do we make rules that govern all people in a category based on one bad person. I mean, if we wanted to do that, we'd have we'd be immobilized because any one of you and I both belong to categories of groups of people in which there are some bad people, uh and some dangerous people. And what do you do?

You avoid them? You try to get the police to deal with them, you uh, and and in each of these cases, I mean, the right wing in the US right now is just using this as a way of trying to steamroll people to vote for them and and to sort of make bona fides for themselves as being good right wingers. It's, as I say, I think it's

totally cynical. Cynical. Well, I guess this stuff is. So if you have someone in a jail who has a known record of being a rapist and of accomplishing rape by virtue of disguis, you know, of pretending to be transgender and gaining ancests. So what do you do? You can put You could say, okay, everybody says I should believe your trends, or you can say, look, I need this rep event in front of me, and yes, maybe you'll be in danger in immense prison, but that may

be a solitary confinement for that person. I mean, a prison regime is a particularly terrible regime, and it's probably true to say that there are a few prisons that are very well wrung up with that regard. So I mean, I think I read one of these cases too, and that person that I read about had a long record. I mean, this was not a hidden thing about their behavior, So why would you put them That doesn't seem like a good idea. Yeah, correct, it just doesn't seem like

a good idea. Yeah, if they have a history, no, absolutely, you know there are like hot blooding issues and I think I just I've made the case we need to really do a better job separating the issues that that really are complicated and there are no easy answers. I don't think the thing in sports is just snap your fingers new answer. What's best for everyone? What's fair for everyone? But issues that aren't should I think shouldn't be terribly controversial.

Are if a trans individual it wants to live their best life, and by living their best life they change pronouns and maybe even as out going having surgery. Who am I to stand in that way? But then we've talked about children and then that's and that's out. Then we get a hot blood an issue. Right. But I think there's just some issues that to me, as a society of dignity and humanitarians humanitarianism, they shouldn't be controversial.

But I see everything being lumped together as one big thing, and it's just and it becomes politicized, and it's it's frustrating. Is it frustrating you too? It is, I mean and scary to me too, And it's making you know, it's really and it's hurting people. That's the other thing. It's not it's not maybe not hurting you or me, but it's hurting the people who are affected by these laws. I mean, I think both the question of how do you address gender non conforming children, non binary children, how

do you address sports? But they are more complicated. But again if you address some contextually, I mean sports allowing allowing kids fourteen year olds display on the play on the same sports team is a different question from who gets to participate in which group, but prefessional sports and even the sports versus Yeah, right, So one thing is how do you let you a child, a fourteen year old have sports activity and sports experience in their high

high school or junior high school or whatever we call it, the stays middle school. That's all. That's a different question than who gets to be on an Olympic team as a man or a woman. But even there, you know, the the international sports people can't handle it because they have someone like Caster Semenya, who is a woman has always been known as a woman, but who has a naturally high testosterol level. And this is where we get back to all of a sudden there and there and

she is out running in certain categories. She can't even do all of the running categories of other women. So you know, she's a natural variant, as is say Mark Phelps, who won all these swimming awards because he had unusual He had an unusual gene that affected his shoulder muscle development. Though was he not really a fair swimmer because he had this natural variation? Now that Olympics, in that level of sports, has all sorts of people with physiological differences

that are far away from the norm. So the question of how trans said to that, it's I agree, it's complicated, but it's not unknowable. There have been standards set up. It's not crazy. You know. You raised an interesting point that was raised in another interview I did with a trans binary individual who they made the argument, well, there are interesting questions about fairness and sports generally, like it, are certain people so good that they shouldn't, you know,

be competitive? Why is everyone picking on the trans people? And this was their point, And I feel like that's similar to kind of what you're saying, Is that right? You know, I think it is similar, And I think that there's so many other factors that go into success in sports, including mindset training, you know, when you've been

ill the night before. I don't think that if you have trans women competing in certain or a trans woman could competing in certain sports, that they suddenly are going to beat out all of the all of the non non trance women who are competing with them. I just they might win an event or two now and then, but I don't think they're going to be so different, especially as they're following the rules that the international authorities have set up idle about horma regulation for trans competitors.

But then on the other side, I had doctor Carol Louvin on my podcast recently as well, who studied the science of testosterone and Harvard, and she she says that there's it really does matter, you know, like testosterone does cause really unfair advantages on the whole. Don't they hear that perspective as well? Yeah? I think to you find I could refer to you to other experts of testoster who would argue victoriously with her about that look, that

might be an interesting sort of it it would get them both. Yeah, afterwards, I can give you the name this and work of some other people, because that's not appreciate that I've seen this, this doctor's word and I just I don't think she's right, but I'm not you know what he's talking about? Okay, Yeah, I'm not the person to make the counter arguments, but there are people out there the shoe and who are who are good at it. Well, I want to be

very respecting your time today. You've given me almost an hour here already, but I want to just leave it open now for you. Is there anything else you want to say? Like, what are you excited about right now? I know you're working in a new book. Good luck, good luck, thank you. I know how hard it is to write a book. Did you want to just talk any more about your you know where your your theory it is right now and just leave our listeners with

any final thoughts. Well, the book I'm writing is trying to look at how development works in both a biological and psychological sense, from infancy on and how gender but a especially focusing on the first three years of life because that's what I've been working on how gender is part of development from actually before birth and how it

sort of is always there. So and I'm trying to work to sort of get rid of the old series which are inherently binary, and figure out how we can think about developmental psychology of young children in a more continuous way. But I've also wanted to give a shout out to a whole lot of new scholarship that's coming out by trans scholars and that I've been I've really influenced my work and spill. It'd be down in some

ways because I have to stop and read it. It's not work that I've read previously, and it's coming out quite regularly, and it's really interesting, solid work that's re theorizing this whole field. Yeah, I can't keep up. It seems like every week there's a new gender that has been added or something right there is you know, it's like it's hard to keep up. But you'll be doing a great service if you can summarize a lot of this and uh and and put it so I can

just read your book at least for the time being. Well, it would be helpful. That'd be helpful. I do love footnote no, and I probably will because I'm really nerdy. I saw you make a call for the end of the study of sex differences in psychology, and I thought that was fascinating. But I've published papers on sex differences, right, and and so that was that made me pause and

I was like, oh, that's interesting. So do you do you really think that that language needs to leave the field of psychology and that we just maybe talk about what did you call it? Gender slash sex gender sex? Yeah? I think it does believe the field. Wow, I mean that's pretty that's a pretty bolder bit put the clean there, my friend. Yeah. Yeah, Well, I've come at it slowly, but I'm I'm I'm locked into it now. So interesting.

I had a biologist say to me, well, yes, it is a sex as a binary from the evolutionary point view, but evolution also made a lot of variation within each sex, and and we need to make that point as well, that it's not just the just there being a binary of sex doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of variation within each sex. That so I think maybe we also should make that point as well. I think that's a very important point, and that's it's one I want to try and sort of bring up to the surface

more as I write in this book. Well great, wow, Well, it is such an honor to have you here today. I just want to say that the historian of science, Evelyn Hammond's describes you as quote one of the most influential feminist scientists of her generation, So to have that on my podcast is quite an honorary. So yeah, I don't know if did you hear that. Did you hear that you were described as such? I well, I don't know if I've heard it or not, but I do

know Confessor Hammond, so I'm very honored that she said that. Yes, Zewei, thank you so much for being on my podcast and offering your valuable perspective. You're very welcome. I look forward to seeing Slash hearing it. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com

or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain behavior, and creativity.