Men and Women are Different (And That’s A Good Thing)

Joe Heschmeyer tackles wide ranging errors about the differences between men and women, revealing the authentic, Catholic view of male/female difference.

Transcription:

Speaker 1:

Despite the fact that well-formed common sense tells us that men and women are different and that this is good. Our world is boiling over with polarized viewpoints on this topic ranging from neuroscientists to gender theorists, from trans activists to Andrew Tate. The subject of male and female difference is hot in the public arena right now, and people are arguing either that men and women aren’t really different or that they are different, and that’s a problem. So in this video, I’m going to highlight four of the most common and I think most dangerous false views, and then lay out a better vision about how we can recognize the difference between men and women and celebrate that fact. The first, let’s look at what goes wrong. The first objection I want to consider is this idea that men and women aren’t really different. That while we may behave differently, that’s purely cultural and that at the bodily level, neurologically for instance, we’re actually basically the same. And so one of the most prominent speakers on this is Dr. Ripen, who is a neuroscientist who is regularly called upon, particularly in the uk, to present the view that basically forget everything you’ve heard. There’s no such thing as differences between the male and female brain, and they’re all basically the same.

CLIP:

I think the most common myths that I’ve come across is that neuroscience has proved in inverted that there are clear cut differences between the brains of men and the brains of women, and that just isn’t the case. When I talk about the pink and blue tsunami, it’s really a reflection of how our culture codes differences between girls and boys. So that right from the moment a child is born, when people arrive with those awful, it’s a girl pink, it’s a boy blue cards, they’re very quickly being introduced to a gendered world. The multitasking versus map reading dichotomy where women are supposedly very good at doing lots of different things at once, and men are brilliant at math, reading and any kind of spatial tasks. And yet when we look at the data that we have for that, we’ll see that how you measure those skills makes a difference. And if we look at the brain imaging data, we’ll find that really there are no clear cut findings. Have we actually found any differences between the brains of men and the brains of women? The answer is no.

Speaker 1:

Now, Dr. Ripkin’s written an entire book called The Gendered Brain making this argument, but we know this to be false. So those comments that you just heard were from four years ago. This year, Stanford medical researchers created an AI model that could reliably distinguish between male and female brains. This would be impossible if there was no difference between them. And what’s more, we’ve known for a long time of four major areas of difference between male and female brains.

CLIP:

Let’s take a look at biology in the brain. When we look at biology in the brain, specifically with the male brain and the female brain, we know that there’s four primary differences. First in processing. And when we talk about processing, the male brain has seven times more gray matter than the female brain. The female brain has 10 times more white matters. We’ll talk a little about how that can impact the behaviors that you might be seeing. Second layer of difference is chemistry. We know that the male brain and the female brain produce the same chemicals, but we produce them at different rates and at different times. So different amounts at different times. It also impacts some of the things that you might be seen. The third difference is in structure when we talk about structure. Structure is the different sizes of different parts of the brain and also the division of labor, how there’s a difference in the division of labor within the male brain and the female brain that impacts behavior, especially the use of words. And then the final difference is in blood flow. And the blood flow impacts how we process different things and how we communicate with one another. So we’ll look at that difference between blood flow.

Speaker 1:

So the real question isn’t are there differences? Because there are clear differences, and we all know this in particularly a neuroscientist like Dr. Rippin knows this. The real question is are these differences biological or are they created by someone bringing in those disastrous pink, it’s a girl or blue, it’s a boy cards and balloons. Now, there are several reasons to be skeptical of that theory, but I want to actually give it credit where it’s due. There is an important role that society plays in determining how you express your sex or as we’re going to see it, how you express your gender. That we don’t want to deny that different cultures have different expectations and people from a very young age learn how to meet expectations. So some of the differences probably are cultural. Nevertheless, there’s very clear reason to believe that this can’t be true of all of them, for one, because there’s different cultures, right?

Some cultures are extremely segregated in their view of men and women that often segregating male and female spaces expecting certain behaviors, particularly from women, for instance, veiling or submissiveness or any number of things. Whereas other cultures are much more egalitarian, treating men and women as basically the same or even interchangeable. And you would expect if this is all cultural, that we would find major neurological differences and behavioral differences in the heavily sex segregated cultures and men and women to be virtually identical in the egalitarian cultures. And we simply don’t find that. In fact, we find the opposite of that for reasons that are a little bit be fondling. So this is a very famous 2008 journal of Personality and social psychology article that talks about how there’d already been previous research even by that point, suggesting that sex differences in personality traits are actually larger in prosperous, healthy and egalitarian cultures, and which women have more opportunities equal with those of men.

So already researchers were aware something strange is going on here. And so the authors of this study researched 55 different nations looking all these different cultures, and what they found was exactly this. Now they’re looking in particular at what are called the big five personality traits and the big five are pretty well rigorously researched. These are important factors in terms of analyzing your behavior and often looking at things like life outcomes and how are you going to do at work and any of these things. The big five are fairly uncontroversial and they’re pretty obviously important. They include agreeableness or agreeability openness to experience neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extroversion. So just thinking in the employment context, there are certain jobs that you are less likely to take if you’re not open to new experiences. There are certain jobs you’re less likely to take if you’re very introverted or conversely, there may be some jobs you shy away from because you’re very extroverted, right?

You don’t want to work all by yourself at a cubicle somewhere because you want to be socializing being with people or you’re very neurotic. So you don’t want a really high stress job, even if it’s high pain or you have very high agreeableness, and so you’re fun to work with, but you’re not going to go ask for a race. All of these things play an incredibly important role in things like male and female wages, for instance. And what do we find when we’re looking at this cross-cultural sample of 55 different countries? Well, on four of them we find marked differences. Women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscious conscientiousness than men did across most nations. Now, let’s caveat that and say if what Dr. Rippin means is simply that you can’t simply have a bifurcated thing and say all women are extroverted and all men are introverted, that’s fine.

Nobody’s arguing that we agree on that. I’m an extroverted man. I recognize it is true that these are different tendencies based on male and female biology, but they’re not automatic realities. That’s the first thing. But second, we see these marked differences and we see them more marked, not less in egalitarian culture. That’s a major strike against the kind of cultural theory that this is because we’re bringing in the pink balloons. But the second one is what are called toy studies. So the problem with interviewing infants is that they don’t know how to speak and they can’t put words to their experience, and they’ve not even taken a single women’s studies class, so they have no way of articulating their relationship to the patriarchy. Fortunately though, researchers have found some ways around that because one thing infants from about the age of nine months can do is choose to play with toys.

And so in 2016, to give just one of the examples of one of these studies from Infinite Child Development, they took a group of 101 boys and girls and they had them in three age ranges. The first group is from nine to 17 at the age at which infants first demonstrate toy preferences and independent play. So if you put the truck and you put the doll, which one are they going to gravitate towards before nine months? They can’t crawl usually, so they can’t do much. They kind of just play with the toy. You hand them. After that, you see a much more determined baby. And I have a 10 month old, so I’m going to personally witness to that fact. Our baby was extremely chill. We’d do whatever we wanted him to do, and now he’s decided his favorite toy is any electrical wire he can find.

So it’s a new reality, right? So that developmental milestone happens around nine months. So that’s the first group they look at. The second group they look at is from 18 to 23 months, when critical advances in gender knowledge occur, they get their first Gloria Steinem kids reader. No, but I mean in seriousness, they start to recognize that men and women are different. Boys and girls are different, and they start to maybe even have a sense of themselves. And then the third group is from 24 to 32 months when knowledge becomes further established. So they’re looking at these three sequential stages of child development beginning with nine months, and what they found in all three groups was the stereotypical toy preferences that boys and girls were being flagrantly stereotypical. I can’t believe that they would behave this way, but sure enough they do. And I can attest to this, again, my 10 month old, given the choice between his sister’s dolls and his brother’s dinosaur toys, he will overwhelmingly consistently choose the dinosaur toys.

Now, he’ll play with whatever you give him, but when he’s given a choice, when he is in the living room crawling around, you can see the choices that he makes. And that’s anecdotal. Sure. But the point here is that these are studies that back up what many parents will tell you that if you’re in a house with both boy and girl toys, infants tend to gravitate overwhelmingly towards the sex specific toys of their sex. That’s not because you’re forcing them on them, right? Because you could have, I’m not saying we do, you could have a messy living room with different kinds of toys in it, but that’s from nine months on when they’re old enough to crawl after the toys. Before that they can’t crawl after the toys, but they can look at them. And what researchers have found is that girls age between three and eight months showed more visual interest in a doll than a truck, whereas boys fixated more on the truck than girls did.

This is sometimes called the people versus object orientation distinction. So females broadly speaking from three month old infants up to adult women tend to gravitate more towards people. They keep eye contact with people longer from infancy. They tend to be more relational in their approach towards other people, whereas baby boys all the way up to grown men tend to be more fascinated by, for instance, how does the fan work? What can I take apart and put back together again? Or at a certain age, what can I take apart? Those kind of things that object orientation. Now, as you might imagine, this plays a really important role if boys are overwhelmingly more likely to be object oriented, and girls are overwhelmingly more likely to be people oriented. Think about the kind of professions that men and women are going to be drawn to. So for instance, there’s constantly this worry that there’s not enough women in stem.

Now, some of that may be due to sexism in those fields. Other aspects may be that stem is incredibly object oriented. Elementary ed on the other hand, is more than 90% female. I don’t hear a lot of worry about that, but it makes sense that it’s because it’s much more people oriented. It’s much more like caring for small children. So you can see free choices being made in an egalitarian culture that might reflect biology there in terms of that object versus people orientation. Now, the only thing I’d want to add here is that from a parent’s perspective, usually you want them to make more eye contact as babies. So the idea that parents are choosing to engage less with their sons and with their daughter, so their sons will become more interested in engineering doesn’t really make any sense. So all of this, like the toy selection stuff, as well as all of the cross-cultural stuff that we see in terms of the biological differences and the differences in the big five, and then all the neurological differences in terms of the brain chemistry point to the fact that there appear to be real differences between men and women.

But acknowledging these differences can be disastrous for you in terms of your career. So there’s a pretty famous case involving Google with one of the engineers, James de Moore, who suggests that maybe one of the reasons they’re having trouble filling engineering spots with women is because women are less interested in engineering than men are on average.

CLIP:

When Google engineer James de Moore merely suggested that gender differences might explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech, he was fired.

Speaker 1:

Now, I’m not going to get into the weeds on everything with the James Moore situation. In fact, I don’t feel qualified to do that, but I would point out this because he makes a really important point that when we talk about differences between men and women, we’re talking about group dynamics, and as a result, we can expect significant overlap in those groups. So imagine a bell curve and another bell curve, they’re going to have a lot of overlap with them. It’s not like we’re saying again, all women are extroverts, all men are introverts, all women are agreeable, all men are disagreeable. That is not the claim. It’s rather that as you plot those things out, you’re going to see some marked and obvious differences, even though you’re also going to see some overlapping behaviors. So I’ll give you two examples of what I mean by this.

First take Los Angeles, the weather. August is the hottest month. In LA the average high is 85, the average low is 66. In contrast, November is one of the cooler, colder months. The high is only 73, still amazing, and the low is 53. If you were to chart this on a chart, you’d very clearly see when is summer and when is winter. However, if you wanted to say, are there clear cut differences, and by that apparently mean, are there differences with no exceptions, it’s a little bit of a different story, right? LA had two days last year in the seventies in August. Meanwhile in November, they had five days in the eighties. So even though any fool could tell you November is a cooler month than August, there are actually exceptions in both directions when we’re talking about gender behavior or the behavior between the two sexes.

Of course there’s going to be some overlap. And so if Dr. Rippens claim about there being no clear cut differences is just that there’s going to be some warm winter days and some cold summer days. That’s an unremarkable and unsurprising sort of finding. If you were to measure, for instance, the average heights of cats and dogs, I have no doubt that you could find some very short dogs and some very tall cats. But if someone drew from that, well, we can’t really say whether cats or dogs are taller. That would be quite a silly conclusion to draw. So that’s the first category I want to address that you’ll find people who sort of pedantically try to work their way around the fact that there are known and obvious neurological, biological, and behavioral differences between men and women, and that these cannot be reduced to merely cultural factors, but those differences exist for all to see if you’re interested in reading the available evidence. The second group that presents a false vision of this is what’s known as gender theory, and so gender theorists will treat all of this as malleable. They’re going to make a sharp and actually possibly helpful distinction between sex and gender, and then they’re going to screw that distinction up themselves. Before I jump the gun completely, let’s turn to Dr. Judith Butler, one of the most famous gender theorists of all time. To introduce this vision of gender,

CLIP:

I insist that what it is to be a woman or indeed what it is to be a man or any other gender is an open-ended question. We have a whole range of differences biological in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they determine who we are in some sort of final way. At the heart of these controversies is the distinction between sex and gender. What is that distinction? How do we think about it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so what is that distinction? Well, that’s a tricky question to answer. On the one hand, gender theorists like Dr. Butler are going to present sex as kind of the biological reality, which you’ll notice. She said she doesn’t deny. She doesn’t seem to be in the first category. She’s not claiming there are no biological differences or I mean, obviously there’s biological differences between men and women, but you’ll have people downplaying those biological differences. She’s instead focused on the cultural element of gender rather than the scientific or biological element of sex. Think about it this way. You have this biological reality, sex or gender, and then on top of it, you have the way society expects you to behave. This is that whole idea of the pink balloons and the blue balloons and all of this. From a very young age, you are sent cues about what your behavior is supposed to be.

And so theorists often with literally no research supporting them, will make these sweeping claims about how important those social cues are in the formation of a person’s self-identity. In their later behavior, they’ll downplay any evolutionary aspect. They’ll down play any biological aspect and just look at this social dimension. Now, when we’re talking about sex and gender, there’s a few things to note. First, we’re redefining gender Here. Gender’s had a very strange kind of history as a word, so when you’re reading older things, it’s not going to use sex and gender in this way. Originally, gender, which comes from the same word as generation, it means give birth or be getting. This is also where the word genus comes from. If you think about genus and species, that word gets taken into English as a substitute for the word sex. So before male or female was sex, but then as sex began to mean erotic, sexual intercourse, everything else, people wanted a less sexual term, and so they chose the word gender.

So for many, many years, sex and gender meant the exact same thing. It was in the mid 20th century that this change gets introduced. So let’s just acknowledge it. There’s some controversy about should we even treat sex and gender as different, but I think if you understand them properly, this could still work. And I’ll give you a few examples. The World Health Organization argues that gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls, and boys that are socially constructed. So the characteristics of traits, this includes norms, behaviors, and roles associated with being a man, woman, girl, or boy, as well as relationships with each other. They note that because it’s a social construct, gender can vary from society to society and can change over time. Maybe in some cultures, women are expected to be talkative and brash and outgoing, and in other cultures they’re expected to be quiet and submissive and meek, and maybe going from one culture to another, you modify your behavior.

This is at least on face a plausible theory, and I would speak into this that we find this even in linguistic pattern. So I taught an afterschool religion class in Italy in English to Italian students, and as soon as they were done with my class, they would switch back into Italian. And I, again, this is very much anecdotal, but I could tell you that the behavior changed pretty markedly that even as they switched languages, their way of interacting with one another changed the amount of just body language, the whole relationship they had was marked. And so it’s not strange or implausible to suggest that the culture can play an important role in how we live out our maleness or our femaleness. That’s also going to include in addition to the external pressures of culture, the internal decision of, well, how do I want to live this out?

And so all of that’s going to come in the realm of gender, and that’s going to be different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics, things like chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. That is a perfectly satisfying distinction for me. The problem I have with it is gender theorists who will bring up this distinction and will accuse people who believe in two sexes of conflating sex and gender will themselves conflate sex and gender all the time. I’m going to get into that in just a moment here. But before I do, I want to suggest that the Vatican has signaled an openness to using these words in more or less this way. The Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education says in this cultural context, it’s clear that sex and gender are no longer synonyms or interchangeable concepts. They used to be, as we saw, they’re not anymore.

They’re instead used to describe two different realities. Sex is the biological deriving from the original feminine, masculine dyad, whereas gender is the way in which the differences between the sexes are lived in each culture. Now, the Vatican goes on to warn that you don’t want to divorce sex and gender as if they’re totally unrelated. So again, if you think of sex as being male or female, gender is what’s understood as masculine or feminine. But masculine is clearly tied to male. Feminine is clearly tied to female. That is a perfectly sound, coherent distinction between the biological level and the cultural level between nature and nurture if you want. The problem as I say, is that even though people like Dr. Judas Butler present this distinction, they conflate it. So listen again to how Butler introduces this very idea.

CLIP:

I insist that what it is to be a woman or indeed what it is to be a man or any other gender is an open-ended question.

Speaker 1:

You’ll notice she refers to being a man, not as a biological reality, but as a gender. So she’s putting woman and man as genders, not sexist. They’re not being manly or being feminine or being womanly, however you want to say that. Instead, she’s putting the seemingly sexed terms man and woman in the category of gender. This is not a one-off either because she’s going to on and say this.

CLIP:

At the heart of these controversies is the distinction between sex and gender. But what is that distinction? How do we think about it? Sex is generally a category that is assigned to infants that has importance within medical and legal worlds. Gender is a mix of cultural norms, historical formations, family influence, psychic realities, desires and wishes. And we have a say in that. All I was saying is that the sex you’re assigned at birth and the gender that you are taught to be should not determine how you live your life.

Speaker 1:

I’ve got no real problem with how she describes gender. She looks at all the social and cultural dimension to it. But when she talks about sex, she doesn’t say anything about biology. She says it’s what’s assigned to infants, well, assigned by whom, assigned by the culture. So she’s actually made both of these cultural and it’s assigned at birth to infants. Now, anytime you hear this, you should mentally call a flag on the play and say, this person either does not know what they’re talking about or they’re lying to me because sex is not a thing assigned at birth. With the exceedingly rare cases of someone born what’s called intersex, where they might have ambiguous genitalia or they may have a situation where doctors legitimately cannot tell, is this a male or female child? But for the rest of us, in the overwhelming number of cases north of 99%, you can figure out the sex of the child in the womb.

It’s not something that you’re assigning, it’s something you’re discovering, and it’s not something that’s happening at birth. It’s happening, happening well before birth because you already have, for instance, testosterone at work. And boys, you have the difference in sexual development already in the womb. This is nothing about, I’m looking at your baby and I really feel like that baby’s going to look better in pink than in blue, so I’m going to go, girl, that’s not how this works, that that all. So this is something that the Institute of Medicine actually treated a couple decades ago, 2001, so about a quarter century ago now almost in a book called Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health. And the subtitle is asking Everything does sex matter. And the reason this should matter is because when we’re dealing with things like someone’s medical care, it matters whether they’re biologically male or female.

Now, Butler even acknowledged that, that in legal and in medical context, sex does matter, but this is not something that’s simply assigned because it wouldn’t be of any medical importance if a doctor just randomly chose this is rather a reality that is discovered. So as Institute of Medicine, this is actually their committee on understanding the biology of sex and gender differences. I’m going to just save the Institute of Medicine from here on for the sake of brevity. They explained that in discussions about the determinants of human sex type behavior, especially gender identity, have recently become highly visible because of a scientific and popular count of a prominent case. So this is no longer a recent popular case, but this is an important element in the sex assigned at birth kind of debate. And the case was a boy with what’s called a 46 XY karyotype.

So he has a Y chromosome with male typical development who they go to circumcise him and it’s botched and they sever his penis. And so the doctors decide just to completely remove the penis and have him raised as a girl, and the parents go along with this. It does not work at all. The child is never told that this happened and yet never adjusted to the female assignment. Sex reassignment was requested, and the individual is now reported to live successfully and happily as a man. So I bring this up to say there’s a case of sex actually being assigned at birth. I mean, this is clearly biologically a male that doctors decided to just have raised as a female without the child knowing, and yet the child still realized they were not female because biologically they were aware something else was afoot. So if you claim sex is just assigned at birth, what do you do with a case like this where there clearly is a biological sex that is being misassigned?

In other words, you’ll notice in Butler’s distinction, both those categories are externally created categories by one group assigning this to you at birth and then expecting certain things from you based on the designation they assigned to you. There’s no actual room there for biology. There’s no room there for the kind of scientific realities that she kind of begrudgingly acknowledges. The Institute of Medicine goes on to say, because this individual is a normal genetic male who was exposed to male typical hormones in prenatal and early neonatal life, this case lends credence to the view that gender identity is determined by early hormones that act on the developing brain and argues against of you that rearing sex, meaning how your parents raise you is the main determinant of gender identity. So in a situation where you’re biologically one thing, and mom and dad tell you you’re another thing, biology wins out over the cultural thing. That’s what we know scientifically. And yet, gender theorists still pretend that the opposite is true. Now, Butler by her own telling of the story is not alone in this. She’s part of a long lineage of people trying to downplay and deny the reality of sex.

CLIP:

Simon de Beauvoir was an philosopher and a feminist philosopher who wrote the second sex in the 1940s. The basic point was that one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one that the body is not a fact. She opened up the possibility of a difference between the sex you’re assigned and the sex you become.

Speaker 1:

So think about those two claims. First, the idea of the body is not a fact. I mean, if the body is biologically real, which of course it is, the body is a fact, it’s a fact that we have to deal with. Now, your body may frustrate you at times. It may inconvenience you at times, it may be sick, it may not be the shape that you desire it to be. It may have features you don’t like in it, but the body is a fact and you simply don’t have absolute domain over it. That’s not a point about gender. That’s a point about basic human botts. The nature of corporality is that we are not totally free to just have our body be whatever we want it to be. I wouldn’t have chosen this, but second, you’ll notice that she talks about this going from the sex were assigned.

Again, a misnomer to the sex that you become. But the whole point allegedly between the sex gender distinction is while gender is this culturally conditioned potentially fluid category, sex is fixed in biological and permanent. And remember, she started this by saying, I don’t deny the biological reality. But then she goes on to suggest that if we just try hard enough, we can change the biological reality. Now, I think this is madness that I think what she’s done here is presented a dichotomy between sex and gender. That’s really a divorce between sex and gender in which she downplays the biological reality of sex by introducing gender and then conflates sex and gender. So it all becomes cultural. This is a way of getting around the pesky reality of the body, the pesky reality of biology, the pesky reality of the fact that XX and XY chromosomes really exist and really matter. And what this is at heart is a war on language itself to make it impossible to express the basic reality. She claims she’s trying to make clearer with this distinction. So the point of distinguishing sex and gender is, well, we don’t want to be opaque. Know when we’re talking about femininity and when we’re talking about being female, separate out the biological from the cultural fine, but then don’t turn around and say things like this

CLIP:

By appearing speaking, acting in certain ways, reality changed and it has changed. We are seeing the changing of terms. We no longer speak about family, woman, man desire sex in the same way. Even the Cambridge dictionary acknowledges that something has changed.

Speaker 1:

I think you should be alarmed by her kind of cackling laugh about getting the dictionary definition of woman to change from being a term for an adult human being, an adult female human being, excuse me, clearly sext term, very clear what a woman is to this new second definition that isn’t about sex, it’s about gender identity and it doesn’t mean anything. So the new definition is an adult who lives and identifies as female, though they may have been said to have had a different sex at birth. What does that mean? They were said to have had a different sex at birth, did they not? Is this a biological reality or not? And my point here is what’s increasingly becoming the case is it’s impossible to speak clearly about the nature of these biological realities and that this is not accidental, that she and others like her are intentionally working to undermine the meaning of words like man and woman and family in any of these terms, because they get in the way of their agenda and their vision of reality.

They believe if they just change our language, they can change reality itself. She literally said that in the last clip. And so I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to compare it to newspeak. In George Orwell’s 1984, in the appendix to the back of the book, he explains that this idea of this dystopian new language was to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of OC English socialism, but also to make all other modes of thought impossible, create a language such that you cannot clearly express a thought. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and old speak forgotten, a heretical thought, that is a thought diverging from the principles of OC should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. And that is what Butler is describing.

Change the nature of biological words so that they become gender expression, and we’re seeing the effects of this. So back in 2018, there was a woman who put up a billboard that just gave what was then the dictionary definition of woman, adult, human, female, and it was taken down because it was allegedly transphobic to literally just give the dictionary definition. Likewise, it’s not only the Cambridge dictionary that now has gender along side sex in all of its descriptions. Take for instance, the Mary Webster dictionary. The definition for boy number one, A one is a male child from birth to adulthood, very clear sext, biological reality. Second, a child whose gender identity is male, what does that mean? Because male is sex and not gender. That’s literally where we this whole distinction from. So how does that work? So I would just suggest this doesn’t make any sense.

Then you say, okay, what then is male? Because that seemed like a very clear biological term. Well, unfortunately it also doesn’t mean anything because it can mean either sex or gender, and they’re now distinct, they’re distinguished. They’re not even necessarily related. So for male, number one, a one of relating to or being the sex that typically has the capacity to produce relatively small, usually motile gametes, which fertilize the eggs of a female biological reality. You can use it to describe a male animal, a male human being, male, anything that has dimorphic sexuality. But then there’s a new definition. One B, having a gender identity that is the opposite of female. So male either refers to a real biological, external observable reality that you can find in the animal world or in the human world. You can find a body and say it’s male or female, you can do a genetic test.

You can look at the brain, you can look at blood work and you can say male or female, or it’s a purely subjective internal state of gender identity. Those are not the same definition. Those are not even compatible definitions. If the whole point was we need to distinguish sex and gender, redefining all of the sex terms to also be gender terms now makes this nonsensical. And another place we see this, of course, is in the switch from using the term transsexual, the older style to transgender. It is again, conflating sex and gender, the very thing allegedly being distinguished. So mere Abrams social worker has a piece in Healthline about the appropriate uses of the terms transgender and transsexual. Now, remember what’s going on here is someone who is biologically one sex prefers the gendered norms appropriate to the other sex. So a boy who wants to wear a dress classic kind of example, they do what in a particular culture is the gendered behavior of the opposite sex. This was called being transsexual before. Now, obviously you can’t change your sex. So this creates this question of are we transing sex or gender? And the answer is the main difference between transsexual, between the word transgender and the word transsexual has to do with the way it’s used and experienced. Many transgender people report having negative associations with the word transsexual.

The word transgender is an umbrella term that describes those who have a gender that’s different from the sex male, female or intersex or binary gender, boy or girl they were assigned at birth. So notice they’re using male and female there as sex, but boy and girl, which is just the underaged, prepubescent male and female of a species as gender, not as sex. You see how this is from this perspective of clarity of thought, absolutely a disaster. Now, all of this came roaring back into the headlines recently because of this controversy in the Olympics. I’m only going to touch on it very lightly

CLIP:

Medical looks and see the laboratories that this motion is made.

Speaker 1:

The reason I’m touched on it very lightly is I think it actually presents a different question than a simple transgender question, because what appears to be happening, although no one is speaking so forth rightly, that they’ll just tell us this directly, is that this might be what’s called a DSD case. And the reason I think that is because the IOC, the International Olympics Committee in the press briefing originally said, I repeat here. This is not a DSD case. This is about a woman taking part in a women’s competition. And the IOC then corrected that to say this is not a transgender case. That correction makes it sound like this is in fact A DSD case. Here we have to go slightly into a little bit of the deeper weeds. So Dorian Lamb Coleman has a very helpful pair of pieces about this. In it, she talks about how with these DSD cases, you have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, but because of a mutation disorder that they may not express themselves as would normally happen in these cases.

So you may have external genitalia that are not distinctively male or female. This is when we talk about sex being assigned at birth. Where this comes from the mid 20th century are these cases. There are a handful of cases where a baby is born and it’s not immediately clear if they’re male or female. In the older practice was for doctors just to make a decision and then surgically operate on the newborns to give them more recognizably male or more recognizably female genitalia. This of course, creates some problems because that’s just talking about the external genitalia. You also have internal, so you have ovaries or testes. When puberty happens, you can have this tremendous surge of testosterone, which is obviously relevant for something like professional sports. But as Lambot Coleman says, athletes who are legally identified as female who have one of the listed 46 XY conditions can compete in certain events restricted to women if they drop their T levels into the female range and usually do that with birth.

So in this case, we don’t know for sure, but it certainly sounds like that’s what’s happening. What I’m struck by is the back and forth between the two regulatory agencies. First, you have the International Boxing Association, which until recently was the governing organization for boxing in the Olympics, and they explained that Iain Khali failed a gender eligibility test due to the presence of certain chromosomes. Now, they’re not allowed to tell you Iain Kalif has an xy, but that is very clearly what that’s referring to. There’s no other way you’re going to fail a chromosomal test, but for medical privacy reasons, they’re not allowed to just say the obvious thing. They can only say, this person does not at the biological chromosomal level meet the criterion of a woman. Now, I think there’s a perfectly reasonable debate to be had to someone who is biologically but not phenotypically female, and I’ll get into that in a minute.

What I raise this to do is to point out the absurdity of the other perspective. The IOC doesn’t say, we’re fine with people who are biologically but not phenotypically, women competing in our sports. Instead, they say, as with previous Olympic boxing competitions, the gender and age of the athletes are based on their passport. Now, think about this. This is boxing. So boxing is segregated by weight as well as by sex, because even a relatively small difference in weight can make a tremendous difference in the amount of force behind a punch and can actually be dangerous to smaller, lighter boxers. Even boxers were excellent at their sport, Welter weights. You don’t want to put them in the same category as the heavyweight, but imagine if instead we just said, well, what weight does it say on your driver’s license? We’re going to do that instead of having a weigh in.

That’d be nonsensical. And so my point is that the IOC finds itself where many people today find themselves unable to explain what a man is or what a woman is. And so just defaulting to this farcical kind of cop out of, well, what does your passport say? You could literally have Mike Tyson go and be an Olympic boxer and just put female on his passport. There’s no reason under the IOCs rules that you couldn’t do that. I think people recognize this is a bit absurd. Okay, so that’s very much in the news. I wanted to at least address how this is an outgrowth of some of the things that we’re getting wrong. But now I want to turn to those who are only too happy to say men and women are different, but think that it’s a problem. So the third group are going to be those who think men are bad.

We’re going to get into, women are bad in a moment, but let’s talk about those who think that men are bad. We find this in many aspects of the sciences where if you find a sex difference, that’s a problem. If it turns out that the difference men, it’s not a problem if it turns out that the difference favors women. So for instance, if you’re doing some work in neuroscience or evolutionary sciences of any kind, and you find some reason to believe women are make better leaders, they’re more organized, they’re more whatever else, especially if it’s something that’s contrary to popular gendered stereotypes, you can publish that by all means. But if you find something that says men are actually better in whatever the realm is, that’s controversial. Now, that may sound like just my personal ran, but let me turn it over to Dr. Corey Clark, who’s done research in this field and has found this to be true.

CLIP:

So I wrote this paper, I think this is this se Coad article, I think, yeah, yeah, a year or two ago that reviewed a lot of the recent research on looking at gender biases in psychology. And a lot of the time you see exactly the opposite. So people are biased in favor of women across a lot of different domain. They often treat women better than men. They like women better than they like men. Women get punished less than men for the same things when there’s a scientific finding that portrays men better than women, people are biased against it in relation to scientific evidence that portrays women better than men. So people want women to be better than men. And so this idea that society is sexist against women and we have to be vigilant about potential harm to women, I think potentially actually stems from the very fact that we care so much more about women than we do about men. And when we discover these biases against men, no one really cares and they don’t make the headlines.

Speaker 1:

All I think I really need to say there is that this isn’t just in your imagination if you’ve noticed this sort of thing, Dr. Corey Clark’s point is, yeah, there’s good research suggesting that this exists, that there are gender biases, but the gender biases are actually against men, particularly here in academia and are often fueled by the fact that people are extremely worried about there being lingering biases against women. And this is not a new phenomenon. You might be saying, oh, this is just 2024. We’re coming off of decades of bias against women. But Christina Hoff Summers was making this point at an elementary level a quarter century ago.

CLIP:

So there’s a new movement sort of sweeping the country to save the males. Well, do American males need to be saved? Do they need to be rescued from their masculinity? I don’t think so. I don’t agree that the nation’s boys are in crisis. I see no evidence for it. I mean, of course some boys are in trouble in serious trouble, but so too, or some girls, when you look at genuine social science research, what you find is that the vast majority of boys are mentally healthy. I mean, being a boy is not a defect. It’s not a disorder, not something you have to recover from.

Speaker 1:

So the problem there should be clear to see. It’s recognizing that men and women are in fact different. They have different preferences. They might be biologically different in some important ways, but it’s viewing those differences as bad, viewing the maleness as something that needs to be fixed or corrected or demonized. I want to pair that with its polar opposite, the view that women are the ones who are bad. I want to turn here to one of the most famous men on planet earth and or Tate. Now, Tate is kind of notorious for being a sexist, and he’ll deny this, but then he says things like this

CLIP:

Female are barely sentient. Even the good ones, in fact, especially the good ones.

Speaker 1:

No, that sounds pretty awful, but maybe I’m just not giving him enough time to explain his point. Let’s see what he has to say.

CLIP:

I analyze the chessboard and I decide which move is best. I’m perspicacious. Females don’t do that. Females grow up listening to their parents. Then they get in some friendship group or to start watching tv, and they believe what society tells ’em to believe, and they either keep those beliefs or they throw ’em away. When they meet a man they like, then they talk, gobbly go, and then they die. Females don’t have independent thought. They don’t come up with anything. They’re just empty vessels waiting for someone else to install the programming Ching, and then they become conservative, liberal, feminist, whatever.

Speaker 1:

Tape

Is kind of a psycho to say that women are barely sentient, that they’re just empty vessels. And I want to stress that. You can say, oh, you’re just choosing this really fringe figure. Last year, the most recent year for which we have data around the world, Andrew Tate was the third most Googled person on planet earth. He beat Taylor Swift. He beat Donald Trump. He beat Pope Francis. He beat any world leader you can think of unless that world leader is DeMar Hamlin or Hawkeye. He is number three globally. Now, admittedly, part of that is that he was arrested and he was arrested in Romania, a country that he said he moved to because he was worried about me too as a movement, and then he was arrested on charges of rape and human trafficking. I know it’s shocking that a man who views women simply as empty vessels with no thoughts might treat women as empty vessels with no free will, but that’s kind of the place we find ourselves in.

You have women who are disdainful of men, men who are disdainful of women who recognize that we’re not the same, but treat that as a problem, treat that as a deficiency in the opposite sex or something that has to be solved. What do we say in response to that? I want to lay out a positive case. Positive case is pretty simple first, men and women are different. This is, again, completely clear. Sexual dimorphism is what this is called, and it’s among the most striking of phenomenon across various species. We hear from a 2021 scientific reports article, and human sexual dimorphism is no exception to this. We are dimorphic, as are other mammals, and in our case is associated with meaning biological and psychosexual characteristics like sexual maturity, reproductive potential, mating success, general health, immune responses, socio sexuality, perceived age and personality attributions. These things are connected in and in some cases rooted in your sex.

They’re not unrelated features of your personality. They’re very much part of who you are and who you understand yourself to be. The institute of Medicine, which I mentioned this article or this book before, talks about this as well, and it points out that the notion that there are biological differences between the sexes is most evident and comfortable when applied to the reproductive system. Very few people have trouble with the fact that men and women have different anatomy, but as they point out, this is also true at other levels of biological organization, from the biochemical to the behavioral that every cell in your body is sexed for the majority of the population as well as a substantial fraction of scientists. Not all known differences are obvious, and not all of those that have been suggested or suspected are easily explainable in biological terms. We don’t always know why men and women appear to be different at all of these different levels of reality.

So for instance, in the way the XX chromosomes work at the cellular level, we don’t necessarily have a good explanation for why it works in the case that it does, but we know that it does. We know that men and women’s bodies are different from the cellular level and even below all the way up. And so it’s easy as they point out to look at things like we get that men are the ones who develop prostate cancer and only females develop ovarian cancer, but it’s not at all clear. They say why it is that females are more likely than males to recover language ability after suffering a left hemisphere stroke, or why females have a far greater risk than males are developing life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias in response to a variety of potassium channel blocking drugs. That’s just one example. But the point is it’s not just a simple, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, women are all like this.

Mine are like that. No, but there is a real difference at the bodily level, at the neurological level, at the biochemical level, at the cellular level between men and women. And so to pretend that’s not the case is just to deny the scientific reality. So to put the case positively, we can say at the first level, there’s biological sex. This is the presence or absence of a Y chromosome that addresses, by the way, the different disorders that can happen. So biologically, if you’ve got an xo, an XX or an XXX, you’re a female, you don’t have a Y chromosome. Biologically. If you have an X, Y, you’re a male. But also if you have an XX, Y, you’re a male, and if you’re an XY, but you don’t have the SRY needed to have your Y chromosome develop male external genitalia, you’re still biologically male.

But then the biological reality, male or female then manifests in what’s called phenotypical sex. This is the external signs of being male or the external signs of being female. And sometimes, as we saw with the Olympic controversy, you have a DSD where someone who is biologically of one sex will not develop the clear phenotypes of that sex, A woman who does not look like a woman, a man who does not look like a man. And this raises a reality that we have to determine, well, what do we mean by calling them a man or a woman? And that is a legitimate question and one that I’m frankly going to step back from because I think that in different contexts, people could reasonably come to different conclusions. It seems to me the case that a sport like boxing, the fact that an XY individual has testosterone at much higher levels than an XX female does, suggests that they probably shouldn’t be boxing.

But there are other categories where a person may not even realize that as a result of A DSD, they are biologically of a different sex and they understood themselves to be. Those are really hard and complicated cases. Those are a small, small handful of cases. So we can leave those cases alone and recognize the reality is biological sex is in the background, phenotypic sex is in the foreground, and then personality traits, health factors, all those other things flow from that. Flow from the biology and the phenotypes. Hope that’s clear. That’s the kind of positive case. Well, why then celebrate the fact that men and women are different? Why celebrate the sexual differences? And I would suggest you can think about it in terms of an orchestra. You don’t want an orchestra where everyone is playing the same instrument. Even if it’s a beautiful instrument like the violin, you certainly wouldn’t want it with something like the tuba.

No offense, tists. But the fact is the orchestra is more beautiful by having a diversity of sound that there is a legitimate diversity to having men and women that we are different enough. That is something that enriches both of us, frankly, the fact that there are people in this world who are more focused on interpersonal dynamics and the fact that there are people in this world who are focused on solving technical problems and working out the objects and everything else should be mutually enriching. The fact that there are people who are extremely feminine and extremely masculine should be extremely enriching. The fact that there are women and men should be something that we glorify in rather than condemning them for not being like us. In this, I would suggest a second that we need to avoid reductionist stereotypes. One of the things that I’ve heard in regards to trans issues is that in no small number of cases, those who identify who are biologically male, who identify as female come from a background with an overly restrictive sense of masculinity.

And I’m sure there’s probably a parallel case and the opposite direction. I’ve not heard that. But if you imagine if you come from a household where you’ve got a lot of machismo, and if you don’t like monster trucks and wrestling or whatever, you’re not really a man and you’re a boy who doesn’t like monster trucks and wrestling, the message you may be constantly receiving is not, I need to fit into this small gendered box. The message you may be receiving instead is, oh, I’m not a man. I must be a woman. I’m not male because I’m not interested in any of that stuff. So here I want to share small, short personal testimony. My dad is way more athletic than me. He was playing soccer back when that was not very cool in the US and was actually invited to come and try out for a professional team. He then met my mom. The rest is history. He didn’t go out to the tryouts, but the point is he’s really good at sports. He was a runner. He’s still, even though he shouldn’t be, he a runner.

I did not inherit one of those genes. And my dad thanks me to God was very accepting of the fact that I was very different from him in this regard. He did encourage me to get involved in martial arts, and it ended up being amazing for me, not because I learned martial arts or got really interested in that, none of that happened, but there was a particular time I was, I want to say in class, I don’t even know what to call it. I got a karate thing, and the sang shared this story about one of the Samurai who was a poet. And it was a light bulb moment for me because as a young boy, I thought of poetry as like a girl thing. So to realize that there was this concept of masculinity that was broad enough to include samurai and poets, and they could even be the same person, was incredibly liberating.

Many times what has to happen when we’re putting forward. The fact that there is a gender binary is busting out those overly restrictive categories and say, yeah, maybe you like some things that are atypical for your sex. That’s fine. Maybe you’re a woman who’s really into monster trucks, cool, weird, whatever. I don’t really give into it, but great or vice versa. You can affirm that and recognize that you are still a man, still a woman, just because you have some varying sort of interest. Think about it this. If someone says that they’re a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa, and you ask them why and they tell you, let’s say someone who is biologically male, but they feel like they’re actually a woman because they don’t like sports and they like caring for children, you should like caring for children. You don’t need to like sports, and that doesn’t automatically make you a woman.

That’s the idea. So in this section, I would suggest bust out of the overly restrictive gendered stereotypes that may be self-imposed or culturally imposed and realize that maybe the issue isn’t that you’re trans or that sex and gender aren’t real, but just that you like different things than other members of your biological sex. Third, we should accept the gift of our own sex. Now here I’m going to turn explicitly to the thoughts of several popes, three popes who I think do a really good job. The first is Pope Benedict the 16th who back in 2011 talked about the importance of ecology, how we relate to nature, but then suggested that we can’t separate this from the ecology of man. That man too has a nature that must be respected and cannot be manipulated simply at will. Contrast it with Judith Butler’s vision where like you can change your sex, you can change your gender. Benedict says, man is not merely self-creating freedom. He’s intellect and will, but he’s also nature and his will is rightly ordered. If he respects his nature, you’re not just a tabula rasa blank slate. You have a nature and your will and intellect flow from your nature. They don’t control it, they don’t dominate it.

So if you respect your nature, listen to it and accept yourself for who you are and recognize you didn’t create yourself. That is when your will is rightly ordered. And this way and in no other Benedict says true human freedom is fulfilled. I want to then connect this to Pope Francis who builds upon this thought and let out Toi where he talks again, the theme is the environment and that this is connected to this ecology of the body. And he says, it is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings, and then accepting our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the father and our common home. In contrast, thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our bodies, turns often subtly into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.

In other words, there was this big movement in the 20th century to have this utter dominance of nature. I’m not suggesting it started then, but it sort of succeeded that you can create a plastic world and sure you and your descendants are going to have microplastics in your lungs fine, but you can create this crazy artificial reality and now we’ve taken artificial reality in another dimension, this digital direction. If that’s your relationship to the world, that’s just a problem to be solved, a thing to be overcome and manipulated at will, then it’s not surprising that you’re going to treat your body the same way. Instead, a healthier approach is to learn to accept the body, to care for it, and to respect its fullest meaning that’s the heart of any genuine human ecology.

Francis sin goes on to say, this also means valuing your body and its femininity or its masculinity and that this is necessary if you’re ever able to recognize yourself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way, we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God, the creator, and find mutual enrichment and he warns. It’s not a healthy attitude that would seek to cancel out sexual difference because we don’t know how to confront it any longer that there is a problem in the relationship between men and women. We see that problem in the Andro Tates of the world. We see that problem in the institutional sexism against men. We see that problem in the unease that scholars have about recognizing men and women as being different or the desire to quash any recognition of that reality or treat it as something malleable.

This is showing our unease with the reality of the male female dynamic. So how do we instead celebrate these differences? I want to end where I began this thought and here I want to turn to this theme of givenness. Given this, I’m taking this from Pope St. John Paul ii. He says that only someone who has dominion over himself can become a sincere gift for others if you are out of control, if you’re not in a good relationship with yourself, you can’t really be there for other people. That’s a core kind of idea. He touches on that theme quite a lot. But then he’s going to take this text from Genesis chapter two in which Adam is alone in the garden and God says, it is not good that the man should be alone. I’ll make a fit helper for him. And then God brings every beast to the field, every bird of the air to him, and Adam names him.

He develops a relationship to them. And the act of naming the real relation exists. The difference between the food that you eat and the pets you have in your home is often in name. So in naming, it changes the nature of the reality there. And yet none of them is inadequate help. None of them is a companion in the sense that he needs. And so from Adam himself, God takes a rib and creates woman, and Adam says this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. And the idea is that there is inequality, but a difference between man and woman that she’s coming from the side of Adam, not from his head, not from his feet suggesting either a superiority or an inferiority, but it’s taken from his side suggesting inequality, but nevertheless a difference.

And the fact that they’re made for one another. Reflecting on this Pope John Paul II says, woman is given to man so that he can understand himself. And reciprocally man is given to woman for the same end. They’re to mutually affirm each other’s humanity, awed by its dual richness. A lot of being a man is really made clear by meeting a woman. And I’m sure this is true in reverse as well, that things that you sort of take for granted about the experience of maleness become obvious when you contrast it with femaleness and just as whoever discovered water, it was probably not a fish. When you’re completely swimming in a thing, you’re often blind to it. So John Paul II says, on first, beholden created woman, men must have surely thought God gave you to me. And in fact, he says something very similar to that in Genesis 2 23.

But then the Pope says awareness of gift and Givenness is clearly written into this biblical creation account for man, woman is first an object of awe and wonder. That’s how we should read Adam’s response to Eve. There’s this awe and wonder. Now this meditation on Givenness is a little spicy, it’s a little controversial. And I say that in the sense that he wrote this, but it wasn’t released until after his death. And I think one of the reasons for it is he takes this idea of givingness very seriously. What does it mean for a man to be entrusted to a woman or a woman to be entrusted to a man? And he suggests that everyone, regardless of his station in life or his life’s vocation, every man, even a celibate, even a priest, whoever, every man once at some point hear the words which Joseph Nazareth once heard.

Do not be afraid to take Mary to yourself that just as Joseph is called in a celibate way to care for the Virgin Mary, you might be called in a special way to take care of some woman. And what does that mean? Well, he begins by saying, do not be afraid to take means do everything to recognize the gift, which she’s for you. The only thing you should worry about is fearing that you try to appropriate that gift. That is what you should fear. As long as she remains a gift from God himself to you, you can safely rejoice in all that she is as that gift that there may be someone placed in your life that is of the opposite sex. And you can rejoice in that difference. And by the way, he’s speaking to men about women here. I think everything he’s saying is true in reverse as well.

But then he goes on to say, what is more you ought even to do everything you can to recognize that gift, to show her how unique a treasure she is. Every man is unique in there. I think it should be every person is unique. Uniqueness is not a limitation, but a window into the depths, perhaps God wills that it be you who is the one who tells her of her inestimable worth and special beauty. I love this reflection that one thing you can do as a man in relation to a woman or vice versa, is to tell them about their special beauty. Something that you can appreciate more by the mere fact that they’re different from you. And he says, if that’s the case, don’t be afraid of your predilection. A predilection is like a preference. And he’s aware some of the people he’s writing to here are going to be priests and you’re telling them, you might have a calling to go tell some woman how beautiful and amazing she is. That could go wrong in a lot of ways.

But he says, not if you’re healthy about it. Loving predilection is or at least can be, participation in that eternal predilection which God had in man who he created. That is God has a special preference for us. If you have grounds to fear that your predilection might become a disruptive force, don’t fear it in a prejudicial way. The fruits themselves will show whether your predilection is for the good. So know your own heart. Don’t let this be a veneer to just romantically pursue someone you shouldn’t be romantically pursuing. But there’s a healthy way of relating to the opposite sex. And I would suggest this way is sext but not sexual. I’ll give you an example of my daughter. You saw an embryonic picture of her earlier. Here she is now from a couple of days ago at age four. She and I have a very close relationship and it’s different than the relationship my wife has with her.

And one of the differences is precisely that I’m her dad. So when I tell her she looks beautiful in a dress, it means something different than when my wife does. The relationship is clearly sext. Having a dad is different than having a mom. And vice versa. And this is something that’s to be celebrated and something to be rejoiced in is clearly not romantic, right? It’s not creepy, it’s just normal healthy behavior. But in our culture that’s lost sight of that, that doesn’t know how men and women ought to act in a sex, but non-sexual way, this is the thing that I would suggest we need to recover. This is how we learn to celebrate the fact that men and women are different and that it’s a good thing for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.