As you may have noticed, YouTube has taken down this video, claiming that it contains hate speech. We appealed the decision, but to no avail. So we reuploaded the video directly to Substack. You can see it here, along with a statement from Glenn: https://glennloury.substack.com/p/i-feel-therefore-i-am-repost
Typical. I've been kicked off two blogging platforms now because I annoyed angry misogynists in dresses.Thou shalt not dissect, analyze, or criticise the trans movement; thou shalt do what men tell you to do.
I hope Substack maintains their largely 'hands off' policy here. It may be the last refuge for free speech on the Internet.
With due respect (I'm a big fan of Professor McWhorter), I don't think he's been paying attention to this issue very closely. He says some version of "every idiot knows that sex is a binary, and only biological women can get pregnant, etc." two or three times. I don't think that's true. For one, the evidence is in hindsight...they pulled this conversation from youtube. For another, look to Colin Wright, who was banned from paypal (and etsy, of all places) for making it his mission to argue that sex is a binary. They literally tried to destroy his ability to provide for himself by kicking him off of what is supposed to be a dispassionate payment-processing program. Check out his substack post, where he references reputable books and journal entries, written by real scientists, who are making the claim that sex (not "gender") is a spectrum.
From Colin Wright:
The view that sex is a spectrum is no longer confined to university humanities departments and hermetic internet communities. It has now made considerable inroads into mainstream culture, thanks in part to a highly sympathetic media environment. Even prestigious scientific journals such as Nature have given space to authors who argue that “the idea of two sexes is simplistic” and that “biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” Another Nature editorial insisted that attempts to classify an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.” A recent book, The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex, argues this position from cover to cover. Its publisher, a Canadian academic press, gushes that “this transformative guide completely breaks down our current understanding of biological sex.”
Glenn and John, did you know this episode has been pulled from YouTube for “hate speech”? We’ve already seen it, but a friend showed us the link today.
I really enjoyed listening to the conversation. The guests were respectful of the topic and of each other. I was left with a question in my mind about the recognition of gay people versus transpeople. It took a long time for homosexuality to be accepted by as "something you are born with." Transpeople are saying the same thing but instead of sexuality it's gender ie. They were born in the wrong body. And our language only offers two genders, female/woman or a male/man, to pick from. So I respectfully ask, Is that why one born in the wrong body decidedly selects to be one of those two terms, because it's the same language non-trans use to describe ourselves? What is wrong with offering a third gender? A Trans gender? It more describes their lived experience. Is this stigmatizing to transpeople, for fear of lesser status? I don't know any transperson well enough to ask directly and even then, one person does not speak for an entire group. It would be interesting to me to hear a table discussion with trans representatives on why they want to identify with established or traditional language nomenclature.
A movement that advocates medical experimentation on children, to include their sterilization, demands attention. Not that long ago, there was near-universal agreement that kids were off limits. Now, there is a push to normalize not just their mutilation but also the adults who are attracted to kids. "Minor attracted persons," they're called. Five years ago, there was a different term.
That John fears cancelation is precisely why the subject cannot be ignored. The trans group is exactly what it accuses its critics of being, ready to use any and all means of silencing, physically assaulting, and otherwise attacking anyone who does not genuflect to the cause. The only mystery is why the color brown has yet to be added to its flag, for the behavior of these folks is right out of the brown shirt playbook.
As this tyranny of the less than one-percent continues, how many more kids will be sacrificed to this new version of Munchausen's, this new privilege condition that miraculously seems exclusive to relatively affluent white leftists. It's the anorexia of our times, built on the concept of self-loathing and an attack on anything considered normal. There are seemingly intelligent people who are captive to nonsense like "pregnant people" and other Orwellian doublespeak. It's worse than the discarding of merit with academia because compliance requires the acceptance of a lie.
There may well be some bona fide cases of people convinced they're in the wrong body, but not in the numbers that are posted. As with anorexia, this condition brings with it a flurry of attention, social approval from certain quarters, a built-in defense system against anyone who dares to question, but ultimately, few good outcomes as is evidenced by the stories flowing out from people who transitioned and regret it, and the European nations who abandoned this form of "health care."
"Advocacy positions designed to promote an understanding of and equity for historically marginalized people" you could have stopped right there asshole. Woke is an acceptance of other frames of reference besides your own. Woke is not any of that other horseshit you mentioned. How the left allowed woke to be hijacked and rebranded as anti-white anti-straight anti-Christian anti-American is nothing short of mind boggling and yet another illustration of their continuing will to lose. You want us to shut up? Maybe we will shut up and let the Nazis do all the talking. When their end game comes to fruition and they ethnic cleanse (peaceful or otherwise) your black asses then maybe then you will wake the fuck up.
Christine Ford had a story to tell and she told it. E Jean Carroll has a story to tell and she is telling it. That it is in both cases he said she said does not deny their right to tell it.
While I've always believed that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth about being assaulted as a teen, I am much less confident that she actually believed her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were true. To a large segment of the population, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court constituted an existential threat to the reproductive rights of women. I find it very easy to believe that a woman that would under normal circumstances never make a false allegation against an innocent man nor ever give perjured testimony before Congress, might see it as her duty to do what she could to protect a woman's right to choose. It may be that her testimony was completely true and that Kavanaugh participated in a horrible crime as a high school student that should have disqualified him from being a judge, much less a Supreme Court Justice. Perhaps, he was so supportive of his female clerks because he felt so guilty about what he had done. But given that there was no objective evidence they had ever met, that she couldn't even give the date she was allegedly assaulted making it impossible for Kavanaugh to prove he wasn't there, and that there was significant motive for her to lie, I don't believe her allegations should have kept him off the Court.
As for the issue of whether a transgender woman is really a woman or really a man, I have to agree with Professor Goldblatt. Just because a man feels like he is really a woman on the inside does not make him a woman. Whether gender dysphoria is categorized as an emotional disturbance or a mental illness, objective reality is different from their preferred gender identity. But just because their feelings do not reflect reality doesn't mean the polite decent thing to do isn't to treat them as the gender with which they identify. A transgender person doesn't have the right to force a person to treat them that way, but under most circumstances nothing productive is served by arguing with a transgender person that they are not the gender they believe themselves to be. I think that is the position that John was staking out. But there are situations where objective reality is important. Transgender women seeking to compete in women's sports is one area where reality matters. Locker rooms are another. Women and girls should not be compelled to share a locker room with a biological male. Female prison inmates should not be housed with transgender female inmates with working reproductive organs. There are inmates in Washington State that have been sexually assaulted by biological males that identify as women.
The problem with transgender activists is that they consider anyone that believes that there is a difference between a transgender woman and a biological woman is a trans-phobic bigot. Everyone, especially transgender youth, deserve to be treated with compassion, understanding, and respect. I think that usually means treating them as the gender they identify as, but there are times when objective reality must be taken into account.
Bottom line: How does transgenderism improve a civilized society. How does this horizontal issue improve the lives of Black folks in this unforgiving capitalistic market system? 🤔 Thank goodness African countries, to say the least other countries, are rejecting these European sexual perversions. All roads lead to Rome, wherein the Roman empire eventually collapsed when healthy vertical issues intersected with subjective horizontal issues.
58:52 “If my arguments are used to discriminate against anyone, then the person who’s doing the discriminating is misunderstanding the argument I’m making.”
“Discrimination” in and of itself is not evil. Some forms of discrimination (i.e. racial) are unjust whereas some forms are just: we NEED to discriminate between males and females in certain contexts (bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, rape crisis centers, etc) just like we NEED to discriminate between adults and children in certain contexts. Or for that matter, when it comes to issuing diplomas, between students who meet all the requirements for graduation and those who don’t. And as far as dealing with people who violate sexual boundaries, why shouldn’t we discriminate against them?
Yes. We need to be clear in our language that there is wrongful and rightful discrimination. We rightfully discriminate in sex uncertain contexts. Yet at the same time, as it pertains to this issue, we privilege the demands of certain members of each sex over the needs of the opposite sex, which can only be seen as wrongful sex discrimination.
One of your best discussions so far, Dr. L! BTW I think the next 'iteration' of silly self-identification will be the 'Otherkin' - those who identify as not-real creatures like fairies, vampires, elves, orcs, etc. The 'furries' are fairly close but I've not met any yet who demanded you treat them like they're really a fox or cat or whatever.
When the Otherkin day comes I myself will identify as Lady Startwinkles Fluffybunny Silvermoon, Rainbow Empress Goddess of the Universe and I will expect everyone to address me by my *full* name and title, every single damn time. Failure to do this will result in a severe cancellation on Twitter, and the cutest sqwudgy-wudgiest hissy tantrum you've ever seen.
I thought Dr. Goldblatt's take on trans identification as a mental illness was interesting, and since I'll likely be listening to this show again so I make sure I didn't miss anything, I'll pay close attention to that piece. I wonder though, if he ever comes back, whether he could address the contribution of transgender porn and sexual fetishism to the rise of transgender? There's a whole 'nother hour in that one.
I enjoyed this discussion greatly. I really wish you all had not gone into the Trump/Fox/election issue as you did. I have no patience for Trump or Fox on it, but it is absolutely not irrational to have deep concerns about the many oddities and anomalies in the 2020 vote. I believe Trump lost and should have conceded immediately. But I also think skepticism about such matters as the Zucker Bucks money, the impact of the media suppression of stories about the Hunter Biden laptop, the massive increased use of absentee ballots, etc., raise legitimate questions that render any absolute certainty about the election results unacceptable. In any case, none of it has much relationship to the epistemological issues around the claims of trans people to actually BE the sex they claim to have switched to.
On that score, I only wish a bit more time had been spent on the idea of what a genetically male individual can even know about what an actual woman is as opposed to knowing the culturally shared images and stereotypes of what a woman is. In particular in the case of kids, what is the "man" a ten-year-old girl, say, thinks she will become? Brad Pitt or Henry Kissinger, John McWhorter or Glenn Loury? How much, that is, of the actual nature of the opposite sex is in any way at all accessible to such a child? I think what is accessible and what they are "identifying" as are largely culturally shaped stereotypes, not anything close to the realities of the opposite sex.
Your point about the ten-year-old girl even has a tie-in to the lived experience part of the discussion. She has no complete access to the lived experience of any man--from Pitt to Kissinger to McWhorter to Loury to me or to you.
This is, by far, the best summarization of the problems with transgenderism. I have widely read and listened on this topic and this conversation was brilliant. Thank you!
As you may have noticed, YouTube has taken down this video, claiming that it contains hate speech. We appealed the decision, but to no avail. So we reuploaded the video directly to Substack. You can see it here, along with a statement from Glenn: https://glennloury.substack.com/p/i-feel-therefore-i-am-repost
Typical. I've been kicked off two blogging platforms now because I annoyed angry misogynists in dresses.Thou shalt not dissect, analyze, or criticise the trans movement; thou shalt do what men tell you to do.
I hope Substack maintains their largely 'hands off' policy here. It may be the last refuge for free speech on the Internet.
With due respect (I'm a big fan of Professor McWhorter), I don't think he's been paying attention to this issue very closely. He says some version of "every idiot knows that sex is a binary, and only biological women can get pregnant, etc." two or three times. I don't think that's true. For one, the evidence is in hindsight...they pulled this conversation from youtube. For another, look to Colin Wright, who was banned from paypal (and etsy, of all places) for making it his mission to argue that sex is a binary. They literally tried to destroy his ability to provide for himself by kicking him off of what is supposed to be a dispassionate payment-processing program. Check out his substack post, where he references reputable books and journal entries, written by real scientists, who are making the claim that sex (not "gender") is a spectrum.
From Colin Wright:
The view that sex is a spectrum is no longer confined to university humanities departments and hermetic internet communities. It has now made considerable inroads into mainstream culture, thanks in part to a highly sympathetic media environment. Even prestigious scientific journals such as Nature have given space to authors who argue that “the idea of two sexes is simplistic” and that “biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” Another Nature editorial insisted that attempts to classify an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.” A recent book, The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex, argues this position from cover to cover. Its publisher, a Canadian academic press, gushes that “this transformative guide completely breaks down our current understanding of biological sex.”
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
Glenn and John, did you know this episode has been pulled from YouTube for “hate speech”? We’ve already seen it, but a friend showed us the link today.
See pinned comment.
Thanks!
"There is no reason we can't discuss them" John said, but Google disagrees; the video was deleted for "hate speech".
See pinned comment.
Thanks
I really enjoyed listening to the conversation. The guests were respectful of the topic and of each other. I was left with a question in my mind about the recognition of gay people versus transpeople. It took a long time for homosexuality to be accepted by as "something you are born with." Transpeople are saying the same thing but instead of sexuality it's gender ie. They were born in the wrong body. And our language only offers two genders, female/woman or a male/man, to pick from. So I respectfully ask, Is that why one born in the wrong body decidedly selects to be one of those two terms, because it's the same language non-trans use to describe ourselves? What is wrong with offering a third gender? A Trans gender? It more describes their lived experience. Is this stigmatizing to transpeople, for fear of lesser status? I don't know any transperson well enough to ask directly and even then, one person does not speak for an entire group. It would be interesting to me to hear a table discussion with trans representatives on why they want to identify with established or traditional language nomenclature.
A movement that advocates medical experimentation on children, to include their sterilization, demands attention. Not that long ago, there was near-universal agreement that kids were off limits. Now, there is a push to normalize not just their mutilation but also the adults who are attracted to kids. "Minor attracted persons," they're called. Five years ago, there was a different term.
That John fears cancelation is precisely why the subject cannot be ignored. The trans group is exactly what it accuses its critics of being, ready to use any and all means of silencing, physically assaulting, and otherwise attacking anyone who does not genuflect to the cause. The only mystery is why the color brown has yet to be added to its flag, for the behavior of these folks is right out of the brown shirt playbook.
As this tyranny of the less than one-percent continues, how many more kids will be sacrificed to this new version of Munchausen's, this new privilege condition that miraculously seems exclusive to relatively affluent white leftists. It's the anorexia of our times, built on the concept of self-loathing and an attack on anything considered normal. There are seemingly intelligent people who are captive to nonsense like "pregnant people" and other Orwellian doublespeak. It's worse than the discarding of merit with academia because compliance requires the acceptance of a lie.
There may well be some bona fide cases of people convinced they're in the wrong body, but not in the numbers that are posted. As with anorexia, this condition brings with it a flurry of attention, social approval from certain quarters, a built-in defense system against anyone who dares to question, but ultimately, few good outcomes as is evidenced by the stories flowing out from people who transitioned and regret it, and the European nations who abandoned this form of "health care."
"Advocacy positions designed to promote an understanding of and equity for historically marginalized people" you could have stopped right there asshole. Woke is an acceptance of other frames of reference besides your own. Woke is not any of that other horseshit you mentioned. How the left allowed woke to be hijacked and rebranded as anti-white anti-straight anti-Christian anti-American is nothing short of mind boggling and yet another illustration of their continuing will to lose. You want us to shut up? Maybe we will shut up and let the Nazis do all the talking. When their end game comes to fruition and they ethnic cleanse (peaceful or otherwise) your black asses then maybe then you will wake the fuck up.
You are appropriately named.
Christine Ford had a story to tell and she told it. E Jean Carroll has a story to tell and she is telling it. That it is in both cases he said she said does not deny their right to tell it.
I found this episode the best one yet. Thank you Glenn, John and Mark!
While I've always believed that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth about being assaulted as a teen, I am much less confident that she actually believed her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were true. To a large segment of the population, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court constituted an existential threat to the reproductive rights of women. I find it very easy to believe that a woman that would under normal circumstances never make a false allegation against an innocent man nor ever give perjured testimony before Congress, might see it as her duty to do what she could to protect a woman's right to choose. It may be that her testimony was completely true and that Kavanaugh participated in a horrible crime as a high school student that should have disqualified him from being a judge, much less a Supreme Court Justice. Perhaps, he was so supportive of his female clerks because he felt so guilty about what he had done. But given that there was no objective evidence they had ever met, that she couldn't even give the date she was allegedly assaulted making it impossible for Kavanaugh to prove he wasn't there, and that there was significant motive for her to lie, I don't believe her allegations should have kept him off the Court.
As for the issue of whether a transgender woman is really a woman or really a man, I have to agree with Professor Goldblatt. Just because a man feels like he is really a woman on the inside does not make him a woman. Whether gender dysphoria is categorized as an emotional disturbance or a mental illness, objective reality is different from their preferred gender identity. But just because their feelings do not reflect reality doesn't mean the polite decent thing to do isn't to treat them as the gender with which they identify. A transgender person doesn't have the right to force a person to treat them that way, but under most circumstances nothing productive is served by arguing with a transgender person that they are not the gender they believe themselves to be. I think that is the position that John was staking out. But there are situations where objective reality is important. Transgender women seeking to compete in women's sports is one area where reality matters. Locker rooms are another. Women and girls should not be compelled to share a locker room with a biological male. Female prison inmates should not be housed with transgender female inmates with working reproductive organs. There are inmates in Washington State that have been sexually assaulted by biological males that identify as women.
The problem with transgender activists is that they consider anyone that believes that there is a difference between a transgender woman and a biological woman is a trans-phobic bigot. Everyone, especially transgender youth, deserve to be treated with compassion, understanding, and respect. I think that usually means treating them as the gender they identify as, but there are times when objective reality must be taken into account.
Bottom line: How does transgenderism improve a civilized society. How does this horizontal issue improve the lives of Black folks in this unforgiving capitalistic market system? 🤔 Thank goodness African countries, to say the least other countries, are rejecting these European sexual perversions. All roads lead to Rome, wherein the Roman empire eventually collapsed when healthy vertical issues intersected with subjective horizontal issues.
It doesn't do anything for the lives of Black folks, but it does move some white men a few spots up from the end of the DEI line.
Hunchbacks and dwarfs?
Great discussion. More of these please!
58:52 “If my arguments are used to discriminate against anyone, then the person who’s doing the discriminating is misunderstanding the argument I’m making.”
“Discrimination” in and of itself is not evil. Some forms of discrimination (i.e. racial) are unjust whereas some forms are just: we NEED to discriminate between males and females in certain contexts (bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, rape crisis centers, etc) just like we NEED to discriminate between adults and children in certain contexts. Or for that matter, when it comes to issuing diplomas, between students who meet all the requirements for graduation and those who don’t. And as far as dealing with people who violate sexual boundaries, why shouldn’t we discriminate against them?
Yes. We need to be clear in our language that there is wrongful and rightful discrimination. We rightfully discriminate in sex uncertain contexts. Yet at the same time, as it pertains to this issue, we privilege the demands of certain members of each sex over the needs of the opposite sex, which can only be seen as wrongful sex discrimination.
One of your best discussions so far, Dr. L! BTW I think the next 'iteration' of silly self-identification will be the 'Otherkin' - those who identify as not-real creatures like fairies, vampires, elves, orcs, etc. The 'furries' are fairly close but I've not met any yet who demanded you treat them like they're really a fox or cat or whatever.
When the Otherkin day comes I myself will identify as Lady Startwinkles Fluffybunny Silvermoon, Rainbow Empress Goddess of the Universe and I will expect everyone to address me by my *full* name and title, every single damn time. Failure to do this will result in a severe cancellation on Twitter, and the cutest sqwudgy-wudgiest hissy tantrum you've ever seen.
I thought Dr. Goldblatt's take on trans identification as a mental illness was interesting, and since I'll likely be listening to this show again so I make sure I didn't miss anything, I'll pay close attention to that piece. I wonder though, if he ever comes back, whether he could address the contribution of transgender porn and sexual fetishism to the rise of transgender? There's a whole 'nother hour in that one.
I enjoyed this discussion greatly. I really wish you all had not gone into the Trump/Fox/election issue as you did. I have no patience for Trump or Fox on it, but it is absolutely not irrational to have deep concerns about the many oddities and anomalies in the 2020 vote. I believe Trump lost and should have conceded immediately. But I also think skepticism about such matters as the Zucker Bucks money, the impact of the media suppression of stories about the Hunter Biden laptop, the massive increased use of absentee ballots, etc., raise legitimate questions that render any absolute certainty about the election results unacceptable. In any case, none of it has much relationship to the epistemological issues around the claims of trans people to actually BE the sex they claim to have switched to.
On that score, I only wish a bit more time had been spent on the idea of what a genetically male individual can even know about what an actual woman is as opposed to knowing the culturally shared images and stereotypes of what a woman is. In particular in the case of kids, what is the "man" a ten-year-old girl, say, thinks she will become? Brad Pitt or Henry Kissinger, John McWhorter or Glenn Loury? How much, that is, of the actual nature of the opposite sex is in any way at all accessible to such a child? I think what is accessible and what they are "identifying" as are largely culturally shaped stereotypes, not anything close to the realities of the opposite sex.
Your point about the ten-year-old girl even has a tie-in to the lived experience part of the discussion. She has no complete access to the lived experience of any man--from Pitt to Kissinger to McWhorter to Loury to me or to you.
This is, by far, the best summarization of the problems with transgenderism. I have widely read and listened on this topic and this conversation was brilliant. Thank you!