#622 - David Geary - Why Science Says Men & Women Will Never Be The Same

34:31There's no doubt about that. But I think you might be mean social roles theory. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So social roles is the argument that boys and girls and men and women learn to behave in sex -specific ways. Girls are more communal or nurturing, and guys are more agentic, focused on getting things done, being more dominant and so forth. because they receive either explicit or implicit information from the social environment that they are that basically tells them, oh you're a girl, you're a boy, and this is what girls and boys do, and therefore you adhere to these roles. And the argument then is that that's how all these were basically blank like slate, mentally, psychologically, and then we kind of develop these roles based from learning from others of the same sex.

35:42And that is the argument underlying things like encouraging girls to do this, getting role models, you know, girls and STEM role models, which is fine. I mean, whatever. The problem is it's well overstated. Boys don't like playing with toy cars and blocks and so forth because their parents have implicitly given them those toys for Christmas or they've seen the advertisements, boys playing with these things on television. They like playing with these things because if you're playing with a car, it has a a specific type of motion to it. It's a non -biological motion that captures the attention of what's called the dorsal visual stream that feeds into these folk physics centers that I mentioned previously.

36:42So there is an early bias in what boys and girls look at. Boys look at physical motion and stuff and they're attracted to those types of things. Girls look at faces and the details of objects. more. And that's, I mean, there is some place for social roles, but it's the extent of its influence is really overstated, in my opinion. A lot of people, when they talk about sex differences, particularly whether that be in children or as soon as people grow up to be adults, will come up against somebody who either, in terms of well -meaning or this is just the way that they see the world will use social roles theory as well look of course boys are stronger than girls they're the ones that are encouraged to do rough and tumble play of course boys are more interested in things than people because they've seen it on TV of course boys are expecting to be more dominant because these are the subtle cues that their parents and the media and everybody else is given to them for the people who sit down at Thanksgiving, perhaps with that one brother or sister or cousin who makes a whole process across as an argument.

37:56What are the strongest rebuttals that can dispel this particular myth? Yeah, so there was, well, one, these differences are universal. I mean, it's not just, you you know, US upper middle class families at C .I .I .E. I mean, you see it all over the place. But one important piece of data, well, there are a number of them. I'll tell you one and I'll tell you more if you want. There was a study done a few decades ago that was a fairly large -scale study looking at, you know, a couple hundred parents and how they were socializing their kids. So there were, some of them were traditional parents, you know, they'd buy the girls barbies or dolls or whatever and the boys, you know, car trucks.

38:49And other parents were more, I don't know if they'd be progressive, I mean, they'd be called progressive today back then. They were hippies or whatever they were. They were non -traditional. So they raised their kids say, okay, you know, girls can play with blocks and with toy cars and boys can play with dolls and all of that's fine. It doesn't make any difference. And then the researchers brought the kids into the lab setting and said, okay, is it okay for girls to play with trucks and boys to play with dolls those that were Raised and non -traditional family said yeah, sure. It's fine. No problem.

39:29So their beliefs about what's okay and or what's typical or not typical or whatever Mured to some extent with their parents said But then when you cut them loose and watch how they actually play they still play in sex -typical ways. So their beliefs about kind of what boys and girls should do and there actually was one thing but their actual behavior was sex -typical. There was no difference between how boys from traditional and untraditional families played and same for girls. Meaning that the kids are calling the shots here. They're creating their own environments based on what they find interesting and what they want to do.

40:15Does this show up in primates as well? Juvenile primates? Yeah, rough and tumble play is pretty common in species where males are bigger and more aggressive than females. And those are typically species if we're looking at primates where there's a lot of male, male fighting and competition in adulthood. it. Clearly see that in humans, if we look at human history, it's clearly a lot of physical competition, a lot of violence and so forth. The sex differences in physical size go back at least four million years in our ancestors. It's a long, long evolutionary history of that. Obviously males and females are bigger than females in modern humans.

41:01And we see the sex difference in rough and tumble plight. I mean, it just fits very, very nicely with this evolutionary pattern and this pattern of male on male aggression. I remember hearing a while ago that if you give a juvenile female chimp, perhaps, a sort of a soft toy that resembles a baby that they treat it in a different way to the males, Is that right? Have I made this up or was that correct? That's correct. It was with verborate monkeys and I think it's been replicated maybe with macaques or so. Right. If you give toys, sex typical toys, the human sex typical, a doll and a truck, big like dump truck that they can play with, you do see preferences.

41:54is the females like the dolls more than the males do. The males are also more likely to approach their novel types of things, and so the risk -taking is higher there. Now, there's no toy trucks in MacCack evolutionary history, but again, it could be attractive because of the type of motion in the Dorsal Ventual Stream associated with navigation and just kind of focusing on large scale space. I'm fascinated by the fact that the type of toys, it's not just the fact that that figuratively represents a kind of role perhaps. I would imagine that if you were to look at the sex differences in the trucker community, that it's going to be heavily skewed to one man.

42:47But there's also something innate about that movement back and forth and given the fact that we, you know, go back far enough and we do have a common ancestor there has to be the sex difference which at least was maybe there before we split off and we're seeing this play out with Macax or whatever else it might be. What would you say to the people that say we are more similar than we are different, you know, if you look at the overlap between the dispositions that boys and girls have that men and women have. You know, you've mentioned there one particular example, which seems pretty stark, which is the average female is better than 85 % of men when it comes to, I think it was reading faces or perhaps it was verbal ability.

43:32What would you say to people that say we're more similar than we are different? These sex differences are basically small and it doesn't really matter and David, you're just making a mountain out of a molehill. Yep, yep, yep. I heard that and that's a very popular belief in the field and one that is debated. So if we look at sex differences in certain verbal skills, they're fairly small. So you can say, well, we're more similar than different. Maybe 60 % of women are better than the average guy, not big. But my point was, and other people's point, is if you put the whole package together, The brain is an integrated system that pulls together abilities that you use in tandem.

44:19When you pull together these networks of abilities, that would include making eye contact, theory of mind, sort of things, vocal intonation, and so forth, that's when you get very big differences. That's more of a real life sort of thing. So, if we look at individual personality types of things, like how sociable, how much you like just, you know, festive chatter and talking to people in kind of the warmth component being nurturing, you know, it's a modest sex difference, favoring girls and women in this case. But if we put together the whole pattern of personality, we have much, much larger differences, would not, in this case, not much overlap.

45:04Because this is not just like rolling a six once, it's the equivalent of rolling five sixes in a row, and that suite of traits when bound together trends much more toward women. I had, I had Joyce Banninson on the show at the start of the year and she gave me a really interesting example. I would love to know if you've looked at any of this. She spent forever studying kindergarten kids playing and the games that they play. And she mentioned that if you look at the sorts of games that boys and girls play. These are three, four years old, I think maybe up to five years old. You know, it hasn't been a massive amount of time for socialization to occur, especially in kindergarten.

45:45This may be if you're the eldest child or an only child, the first time that you've actually got to spend any significant period of time with other kids. And she said, if you look at the language they're using, if you look together over shed warfare against cowboys or aliens or something else. And if you look at what girls are doing, they are keeping something alive. It's a rabbit, it's a doll. And the language as well that's used is again very different, sex differently. What have you, have you integrated any of this, this sort of social game playing into your work too? Yeah, yeah, yeah, first, Of course, Joyce's work is great.

46:30I really keep up on it and like reading it. Yeah, that's called social dramatic play. Social dramatic play. Social dramatic play. So kids, when they hit that age, begin to develop a richer imagination. So they can now imagine themselves in different role -taking sorts of different characters in these roles, and then they can now better integrate their roles with the roles of their playmates. So they're basically practicing social interactions in different contexts, being the hero, being parent, or whatever it might be. So it's an important component of development. And the interesting thing there is that the fantasies that boys and girls as Joyce stated develop on their own differ quite dramatically.

47:36And in fact, the vocabularies of boys and girls begin to differ in the second year of life in terms of what they talk about. How so? What did they talk about? You know, so, you know, a stereotypical thing. So, you know, unsurprisingly to me. So 18 -month -old girls are more likely to focus on clothing and boys on objects. in terms of just kind of free, free discussion sorts of things. But the boys integrating themselves into a, they typically integrate themselves into larger groups. Joyce probably talked about this as well. And these groups, as you said, are in some type of conflict with something, you know, Indians or dragons or whatever it might be, and they're coordinating and integrating their behavior together.

48:30That is, in my opinion, a component of rough and tumble play. I mean, there's individual rough and tumble play, but there's also coordinating your activity so that you are more functional as a group. And if we look at between group conflict and traditional contacts, and we look at it historically, it is coordinated activities of males, fighting the coordinated activities of other groups of males. That's male -male competition. It just goes beyond one -on -one. It goes to a group level type of thing. And these early play differences that Joyce talked about, we've wrote about 20 years ago, saying that this is preparation for this.

49:16The boys are creating these groups because these are the groups they're going to grow up with and later in some cases fight with or cooperatively hunt with. It makes complete sense to anybody with a semi -functioning brain as to, ancestrally, why boys, males would have this predisposition for practicing warfare and why girls would be interested in people, they would be playing doctor or drama or veterinary or whatever. family. How does this manifest or what is happening that's causing this to manifest? We can understand why, right? We can understand the ultimate reason for why this is happening.

49:57But what is it that's inside of a male that causes him to think let's pretend that we're fighting cowboys? Yeah, they know they aren't necessarily thinking anything. They're engaging in things that they find fun. So if we look at disorders or just individual variation in either prenatal exposure to testosterone or postnatal spikes, the first six months of life there is a big spike in testosterone. So there's a second dose there in addition to prenatal dose and girls have some fluctuating exposure to to estrogens during that six month period as well, although it's more variable than with guys. But in any case, these hormonal influences are at least partly contributing to these sex differences in play.

50:56So girls who have more had more Androgens early in life, you know, prenatally engage in play behaviors that are closer to boys than girls. also they're kind of in between those. So it's a mix of activity. So there's clearly a hormonal component to it. And I think the way that works is in terms of what captures your attention. You know, biological motion is probably going to capture the intention of a baby or something. We'll capture the attention of girls more than boys. Whereas the physical motion is going to capture the attention of boys more than girls. All you have to do is have a small attentional bias and built -in reward systems that will keep you focused on that and keep you engaged in related activities and then it can kind of build from there.

51:52So the mechanism is heavily driven by Androgen exposure to testosterone primarily and that's one of the key differences. Is there anything else going on here is a protein folding in the brain, are there particular areas of the brain that are larger, smaller atrophides, hypertrophides in one form or another? Yeah, I mean, probably there are sex differences in certain very basic areas of the brain associated with aggressive sexual and that type of behavior. And there are some really interesting sex differences in overall patterns of brain organization. So if you look at gray matter and white matter, if you look at one small part, maybe there's no difference or maybe there's a difference.

52:41And if there is a difference, it's probably not going to be huge on average. But if you look at the whole pattern of the brain, you get quite substantial differences. So you can take a brain pattern of a 10 -year -old and predict whether that brain belongs to a boy or a girl about 93 % of the time. Almost as good as you can by looking at an adult face of a male and a female. So you huge difference. And that's FMRI? That would be MRI, just structural differences. What people really need to look at is the coordinated activity of brain areas. So certain brain areas that are linked together are going to fire together spontaneously.

53:28And that kind of helps build that network and keep it kind of well functioning. So if you look at those spontaneous brain activity studies, and there aren't that many with really young kids yet. But there's least one during the prenatal period where you can put mom in a scanner and get brain activity indices of the fetus. And we see sex differences there in brain activity patterns at about six months prenatally. And there was a recent study looking at, I think it was two and three month olds also showing differences in spontaneous brain activity patterns, but exactly how those are related to some of these sex difference we were talking about, we don't fully know that yet.

54:22If it was 93 % at 10 years old, what is it at six? Like three months prior to birth and six months after birth? Yeah, they didn't do that. That was a somewhat different technology and approach and they didn't do those particular analyses. Probably it's going to be smaller because probably the differences get bigger with age, but they didn't look at it yet. I think nine or ten is the youngest that I've seen. Look at that. There's a number of these studies with adults and it gets up to 95 % or so. Do you know how accurate they could be at predicting the sex of the embryo though? Oh, yeah, they didn't do those analyses.

55:07Okay, I understand. Okay, fine, fine. Evidently what the researchers are amongst another number of things trying to achieve here is say, well at age nine and ten, you have had, you know, social social roles theory comes back in again. perhaps you have been socialized into a mode of thinking, which has caused structural changes in the brain, these structural changes then basically beg the question by being the detector thing that is supposed to be detected. And people say that's what a male brain looks like because we have never seen a male brain which hasn't been socialized as a male brain. Despite the fact that there are a wide variety of families that raise children in traditional and non -traditional progressive and non -progressive ways, unless someone is going to say somehow that the brain of the embryo three months prior to being born has somehow been socialized, the sex differences that we see.

55:58And, you know, I'm being like overly explicit here to just really try and hammer the point home that there are structural changes that manifest into real world significant differences, is not only in disposition, not only in tendency, interest, capacity. It's a whole suite of things that occur. And David Bus, mutual friend of ours, was recently on Rogan. And I knew I had it, it was absolutely Adam. And the Rogan was going to bring up sex differences. Sure enough, as was predicted, that ended up happening. the most interesting thing that I've learned about sex differences in the last year is differences in throwing accuracy amongst children.

56:49Can you please red pill everybody that's listening on the differences in throwing accuracy among children? Sure. So, yeah. So, you find differences in throwing accuracy, throwing distance and velocity. So, even in preschoolers, boys are throwing more. They can throw farther and with higher velocity, higher speed and so higher kinetic energy than girls can. It emerges very early, as I said, the preschool years and becomes extremely large by 19 early adulthood or so where there's very little overlap between men and women. Maybe a little bit, but not much. It is a very big difference. It is correlated with differences, you know, the shoulders are built differently.

57:48The forearm are longer in men, relatively relative to overall size in women, that that difference is evident prenatally. It is associated with the sex difference in this dorsal stream sort of thing, the ability to track moving objects, you know, to hit something. that's you have to have the cognitive system in brain and cognitive system in place in order to hit something accurately And if somebody's throwing something at you you want to be able to track it coming in so you can dodge it Oh, yeah, didn't you looked at a study to do with how effective males and females are at dodging projectiles coming at them What can you tell us that study?

58:32Yeah, so Some people have argued that or in fact the initial argument and and maybe it's still the argument that The male advantage in throwing distance, accurate speed and all of that sort of thing is due to shared childcare and male hunting. And of course, there is a big sex difference in hunting engagement in traditional context. No question about that. But in addition to that, men are better at dodging things. So in this particular study, you couldn't do it anymore, but the researchers, if I remember correctly, got one of these tennis ball shooting machines

59:19and decided to shoot them at undergraduates to see what would happen. I'm sure the professors had a fantastic time when they were aiming at the annoying child in the front row that keeps on distracting them during their lectures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, unfortunately we can't do that anymore. But I'm sure it was at fairly low speed and you know, so nobody would get hurt and so relatively easy task. And so they just looked at the number of balls that could be blocked. And men blocked most of them. In fact, there was a ceiling effect in women who were not as successful at that. And that's obviously a defensive mechanism.

59:59If other males are using projectile weapons, the ability to track and dodge that is an important component of the male -male competition. That's my argument. Which came probably before hunting. What is the suite of traits that we're talking about here when it comes to throwing accuracy, throwing velocity, dodging, seeing things moving through the air, etc? Yeah, so yeah, so so we have the throwing component to it. It has you know the behavioral component actually throwing something and hitting it accurately. It has physical components to it, you know the upper body upper body strength is big sex difference.

1:00:40They're the architecture of the shoulder and arms. There are, there's brain areas associated with motion detection and integrating motion detection with physical movements as in blocking something or throwing something. And so there's brain and cognitive systems involved there. That you see physical systems, the behavioral component, the brain and cognitive component, and guys are better on all of those components or at least most of them. integrated together, you get quite a large sex difference. So this, learning that, and it was specifically the accuracy thing that really drove it home to me, is for me now one of the more compelling justifications for us thinking about transgender athletes in sport a lot more carefully, because everybody has heard to death someone talking about how a biological male shouldn't be able to step into the ring with a biological female after a Euro -Eastrogen and testosterone suppression and then punch their face into the ground.

1:01:52It's self -evident and a lot of the arguments that I've seen stem exclusively from, well, we can reduce power by X amount, by putting them on this particular type of hormone blocker, testosterone and Androgens aren't all that drive power. Then someone comes back and says, well look at bone density, look at muscle mass, look at all of the time that you've gone through puberty, blah, blah, blah. That's done. Like it's interesting. I guess it was interesting, but it's no longer interesting to me. What is much more interesting to me are the fundamental capability differences, especially when it comes to things like accuracy.

1:02:27Because if, let's say, for instance, that you were to have a biological male that is going into the, what is it, the baseball, NBA, NBA, what's the baseball league called? Is there a whim as lead? Yeah, there must be. I've got to imagine so. But the same as the WMBA, right? OK, so let's say that Male goes into the WMBA. They're not taller. They're not bigger. They're built the same on average as the average female basketball player. Because I would imagine that female basketball players probably pretty tall, taller than me, taller than you. But what we're saying is that there is a fundamental capacity, capability, difference that biological males have with just the way that they see throwing and spatial rotation generally.

1:03:15Not just to do with the physicality of the architecture of the shoulder, changes in forearm length, etc. But the way that their brains are able to see the world of throwing overall. This also explains to a degree why the WNBA may be significantly less popular than the men's division, not because women are smaller and something else and something else, but they have a predisposition that is, oh, you could say that male's capacity is overclocked and it is supercharged comparatively with women. So this to me is the most, or one of the most compelling reasons because it gets beyond this sort of messy conversation about power and it gets more into fairness and it's why it's so compelling.

1:03:59and I've never really heard anyone do a full treatise on this area of transgender athletes in sport. Let's say that there was a sport where you had to do lying detection or you had to manipulate different social groups or you had to be able to detect facial cues or something. If you were to have female to male transitioners in that sport, they're going to absolutely dominate the league, even if they have taken testosterone for ages and they're walking around with the sociosexuality through the roof and the sex rides really high or whatever. I just found this, it's really fascinating. I think this is really, really interesting stuff.

1:04:36Yeah, yeah. Yeah, some of the spatial differences and the perceptual differences that I mentioned are more strongly related to prenatal, you know, an early postnatal hormonal exposure than actual circulating testosterone. So you can, the men's circulating testosterone isn't really highly correlate with their spatial abilities, but the earlier exposure seems to be what's important there. So yeah, you can decrease muscle mass a little bit by reducing testosterone, but there's other things you're not going to change that people have, as you said, people have talked about. How big are the differences between navigating from one place to another?

1:05:17Yeah, good question. They are, I would say, they are most of them are kind of contrived situations. They're moderate to large. I would say men are better, you know, just kind of dead reckoning sort of thing. You start from some place and you wander around in the woods and then you try to figure you're on how to get your way back without explicitly just backtracking the exact same way you were, get the quickest route back, and better and that. I don't remember the exact effect size, but it would be noticeable difference. Map reading is different as well. Interest in maps is different. We could see quite obviously why it would be the case that men need better spatial rotation.

1:06:08they need better navigation over a broad ranging kind of distance because if you're going out and on average men Ancestrally hunted more than women therefore Will the beast goes from right to left. I have spear will the beast plus spear plus throwing plus trajectory Plus how the fuck do I drag this back home hashtag where is home as well also what about female sex differences that give them capacities that men struggle with and and also why would these be there? What is the evolutionary justification for why they would have them? Yeah, so the sex difference is in the folk psychology or emotional intelligence that I talked about earlier.

1:06:53Women have advantages in. Probably related to a couple of things. One of them is women are and girls want to develop a social support network that for social emotional support and social and other types of problem solving, men form networks as well, but they're usually cast oriented or competition oriented networks. So if you hang out with all your friends watching, you know, the WNBA or the Super Bowl or something, maybe the Super Bowl will be better, watching the Super Bowl and you were this last time rooting for the Chiefs, all of you, and they win. You're all kind of bonded together, even if you didn't talk about anything during that time, you drank beer and did whatever you're going to do.

1:07:44That's kind of a shared activity that kind of helps link male groups together. You can have lots of guys there. You can't, you know, it doesn't have to be limited to two people. Girls and women form relationships more based on the dyadic interactions and the social and emotional support talking through issues, talking about what's important to them and so forth. And the dynamics of this are very different between males and females. I covered in my book on sex differences. But one component of it is that to develop and maintain these BFF relationships, you have to be very sensitive to the emotional state of your girlfriend, your best friend, you have to read things and so forth.

1:08:44She may not want to really bother you by talking about problems you know, problems with her boyfriend or mom or whatever that might be, but you can pick up that something is not quite right. And you know a lot more about her than guys do about their friends. You say, oh, you haven't trouble with your mom again. Is it such and such a sort of thing? So that's the theory of mind sort of thing. You're picking up subtle, nonverbal cues, picking up on it. That's exactly what the girlfriend wanted you to do. and that engages you in the talk that hopefully will help to resolve that type of issue. So that, most of the intelligence is really important for these relationships.

1:09:28It's also important for dealing with and metting out something called relational aggression. So the movie Mean Girls, maybe you've seen that. So, you know, kind of kind of bitchy. Girl, you know, subtle put downs, gossip and spreading lies. It's basically designed to disrupt the social networks of competitors. Undermind their same -sex friendships and make them unattractive to boyfriends. Would be boyfriends. And it is most effective if it's done in a way that is plausibly deniable. That is you do it very subtly. You know, I'm really worried about so -and -so because I think she's seeing three guys who are drinking a lot of that sort of thing.

1:10:26And so because it's more, you know, when guys are mad at each other, they'll make eye contact and they'll push or yell. I mean, you have to figure it out. I mean, it's usually obvious if they're really upset. But you have to have these subtle social skills to pick up on that relational aggression so that you can counter it. And so I think the combination of relational and also have these subtle skills to use it to manipulate other people. I think the combination of the social support friendships and the female female competitions, relational aggression is really the basis for the female advantage in these skills.

1:11:12It seems to me that the heavier brow ridge that men have, the bigger jaw, the bigger hands, these are our weapons, right? This is how men would have done that. Inter -sexual competition, it would have been inter -group warfare as well with different tribes, etc etc. The ability to understand and manipulate social dynamics, language ability, reading facial expressions, that is female weaponry in regard. Now it's also defensive, offensive, affiliative, you know, co -eulitional, all of that. But I just, I love thinking about conceptualizing things in this way that But because women on average weren't getting into physical altercations, because they are more fragile sometimes could be with child if they die the danger of the child being on their own is significantly higher.

1:12:09Therefore make sure that you don't, how would you say, explicitly, obviously accuser to really do something that could cause you to be on the wrong end of a very sharp stick from either the husband of the woman that you just pissed off or the woman herself. So you need to be able to manipulate social groups. You need to be much more subtle and you need to dance your way through this. You need to use colloitional tactics. You need to so seeds of discord venting as an example of this. And because of that, you have to have a predisposition. You have to have these capacities to be able to make yourself capable.

1:12:48Whereas Because for men, everything's out in the open. You got a problem? Let's sort the problem out. We don't need to have that quite so much. Yeah, men engage in relational aggression too, and they play politics, and some of them are very good at it. But the politics is to organize large -scale groups for collective action sort of thing, rather than manipulating the social dynamics within a smaller kind of social network. But yeah, you're right. Yeah, you have to be very good at that To navigate all of these complex social relationships in a way that doesn't provoke retaliation Yes, when it comes to the current trends that we're seeing this increase in transgender especially youths What's your assessment of the situation?

1:13:43Why do you think it is that we've had such a rapid increase in the happening? Right. Yeah, so I wrote that quote article that you mentioned on that. And if we look at it historically, well, so let's step back. Let's look at brain patterns that I mentioned before where you know, you take a 10 -year -old, you can predict 93 % of the time whether it's a boy or a girl. If you take an adult, you can predict 95 % of the time whether it's a man or a woman. So the brain patterns for guys are kind of bunched up in this area, but there are some individuals that kind of go out on the curve. So there are guys that have female typical marine patterns, not a lot of them, but they're there.

1:14:31And there are girls who have women who have male typical marine patterns. So it's not, you know, kind of out of bounds to think, well, you know, maybe for for whatever reason, you didn't see the sex typical shift in brain development for whatever reason. So you're going to get, it would make sense that you have some guys who really like girl things, but they're kind of forced to be boys and to do boy things and they would develop gender dysphoria and the same thing for some girls. And so if we look at early trends sexual in individuals they had a pattern of sex atypical play so they the boys are playing and liked girl things and so forth expressed wanting to be a girl had this dysphoria depression and discomfort with being a boy or a girl if it's the the reverse of that.

1:15:38In those individuals, if they're carefully screened and so forth, would be fairly rare. But if they transition, most of them do okay. They're okay with it. So the D transition rates are 1 or 2%. So it's like, yeah, it worked for them. But now jump before to the last, you know, while it started maybe 20 years ago, especially last 10 years, or so the number of individuals who are claiming to be transgender has really spiked way beyond the numbers you would expect based on these brain patterns for example. And the demographics of these individuals have changed as well. typically it was disproportionately more men than women and they had a history of gender dysphoria.

1:16:31Now we're getting more women, especially adolescents than men. And most of them, as far as I know, don't, I mean, some of them do, but a lot of them don't have this history of gender dysphoria and sex atypical play patterns and other sorts of things that have historically been reliable markers of transgender issues and doing well with the transition if that's what they chose to do. So there's been this huge spike as you know and it's been argued that social media has driven a lot of it. And I think that's right. And I argued that adolescent girls in particular may be at risk for these negative social media influences because during that time, early adolescence, late adolescence, they're really trying to develop this social support network.

1:17:36They're really trying to develop this, you know, a couple of BFFs and feel included and integrated and socially supported and emotionally supported and so forth. That's a really important thing. Now guys go through a similar thing, but they want to be part of a bigger group that works together and so forth. But the girl networks, I think, are more susceptible to social contagion and going along with ideas that maybe are more important than the ones that are going to be a part of a bigger group that works together and so forth. aren't a good idea, just to fit in and to be part of the group and not to get excluded or rejected from the group, which is a bigger concern for girls than it is for boys.

1:18:16And so I think we have a recipe for, combine that with social media and all the media attention, general media attention to these issues. It's now become a political signal rather than a kind of a personal desire. It's like you support this because you support all progressive sorts of things or you're against it because you're against all progressive sorts of things it's really created an environment that I think is going to be Detrimental and is being detrimental to a lot of adolescent and young adults especially girls and This would explain why you have seen a sex difference in the number of after M as opposed to M to F transitions or desires for transition because it you would presume that there's a left -handedness argument that gets used.

1:19:13I'm not sure if you've heard this used before, where during the middle ages people that were left -handed were seen as more likely to be witches. So people hid to the fact that they were left -handed. I think it was around about 2 % of people a a few hundred years ago said that they were, whereas now it's around about 10 to, it's a teens percent, I think, of the population that are left handed. So the argument is, when you stop demonizing people for being their true self, being fully left handed or being a male that identifies the female or vice versa, that people open up, that would be the explanation for why you would see this rampant increase, the fact that we are more, as a society, more accepting of it, but that wouldn't explain why you have this massive increase in F to M as opposed to M to F.

1:20:03And this sex difference appears to be explained a way largely by the raw materials that we went through. Women's desire to fit in. They're a greater social cue ability to absorb that. It also explains why you don't have a completely random distribution of people across the United States, one person out of every 10 schools, one girl out of every 10 schools, one male out of every 30 schools, let's say across the US, it's five girls in one class that all sit at the same table together during lunch. That's right. Yeah, you see these clusters, or in one school district, I think 10 % of the kids, I don't remember what the male female breakdown was, claim to be transgender, non -binary or something, which makes no sense.

1:20:57The other issue that has changed is the regret and detransition rates are going up. From fairly rare, 1 to percent or so, depending on what you look at, the stopping of hormonal treatment can be one out of three or so. So the rates of people kind of changing their mind is going up suggesting that the transgender, the dysphoria, so forth wasn't really related to that. It was due to some other issue. What I find particularly fascinating and kind of morbidly ironic about this situation is that the biological sex differences that men and women have are providing the raw materials to cause increasing volumes of men and women to recant their own sex or at least their on gender identity.

1:21:53So it's almost like a supply and demand of what's going on is happening in a community of people that deny that there are any sex differences. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mess. So, right. So, yeah. So you're saying that the adolescent women's girls susceptibility to social contagion has a biological basis to it, which I think it does. In that biological basis, makes them more prone to claim that they're really a guy. It did lie that there are any sex differences. And deny it. They're there. Yeah, it is. It's amazing. People can spend stories for sure. David Geary, ladies and gentlemen, David, I've absolutely adored this.

1:22:47It's been booked on my schedule for about two or three months now, and I've been looking forward to it. It's delivered more than I could have hoped for. First off, what are you working on next? And then secondly, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work? Right, so related to sex differences, keep up. I published a third edition of my book, Mail, Female, came out in 2021, so it's pretty up -to -date and I'm pretty anal about documenting things because I know it's controversial and you got to kind of oversight things. On the sex differences thing, the thing I've been working on on and off is I have spare time, you know, I've other things to do, is this tracking sex differences and cognition and behavior as they are related to the sex differences in height.

1:23:43So suggesting, you know, as I mentioned, you know, populations get healthier, sex differences in height get bigger. If there are other biologically -based sex differences that are related to, you know, the health of the brain, for instance, then we should see other differences in spatial abilities, verbal abilities, memory abilities, and so forth emerging. So I work on that on, I've been working on it often on that for a long time. And it's hard to get kind of knockout evidence for it. But there's something there. I just, you know, the data isn't quite there. But I have a number of articles on sex -specific vulnerabilities based on evolutionary theory and basic biology that if anybody emails me, I'm happy to send.

1:24:36David, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for the day. Great. Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.