 G'day, I'm 9.40 here, so I'm in Manly looking over the Sydney Harbour, it is Thursday afternoon 2.16 p.m. I think it's the 12th of January here in Australia, and I was listening to the subversive podcast hosted by Alex Koshuta and her guest is the academic Michael Bailey, talking about uncomfortable truths in sex research. It's a terrible person if you deny it. It's a dark confluence, but I think these people mostly believe what they say, they believe that before these people talk about gender and clinicians who are pro-transition, they won't even consider alternatives. Treatments and explanations, it's all, everybody is transgender who says that they're transgender. Right, so this touches on some topics that I often like to talk about. It's because people say that there's something that doesn't mean that they are, but you can't just take people's self-representations as gospel truth, and you can't just take expert proclamations as expert truth either. And just because something's popular and trendy doesn't make it true or good either, and you have to look at the incentives that are operating for why people are saying and doing the things that they're doing. So for example in the medical profession, it has a long history of unnecessary surgeries, such as tonsillectomies. For decades doctors were performing tonsillectomies even though the evidence was clear that the overwhelming majority of them were useless. We're medicalizing and providing medication to people with normal human sadness. And this is an opportunity for doctors to get more money, more power, more prestige. And so every profession wants to extend, every profession wants to extend its power, its status, and its influence. Someone identifies their own business. She has been pretending to be a goisle since she's the autonomy that one Hispanic guy can't identify as Jewish. I have no idea who you're talking about, but we all tend to play out aspects of our identity that are in our best interests. So I think you're talking about the congressman from New York, Republican congressman. Did he claim to be gay? Did he claim to be Jewish? Did he claim a whole bunch of things that weren't factually correct? I don't think this is unheard of. When you want something, people tend to exaggerate. So this is normal. When people put something on a resume, it doesn't necessarily make it true. Why would anyone simply accept what a politician says? It's a factor. Like anyone who just accepts someone's claims from a stranger, you're being foolish. And so someone who identifies as the opposite sex or gay or Jewish or whatever, the wise person has some skepticism with regard to people's claims. So we're saying that males pretend to be females to gain advantage sometimes, or it's to indulge a fetish, or it's their genuine lived experience, bro. I hope that you don't, how can I deny someone their lived experience? So someone, their lived experience may say XYZ, that doesn't mean you need to buy into it. So looking out across the bay there to Watson's Bay, about five miles to the right of that is the Sydney Opera House. And then this is downtown Manley you're looking at in the distance. I think they believe it, but it's also, you know, it's nice for them to get paid to help people transition. Right. So helping people to transition their sex is incredibly lucrative because there are so many follow-ups. It's not just a one-time thing. It is a recurring stream of income. So both of those facts make it harder to change one's mind. You know, if you're getting paid to do something, it's harder to consider that maybe you shouldn't be. Yeah, if someone's income depends upon not understanding something, they're never going to understand it. Alright, no one's going to risk their income. Exactly. And I love these people to specialize in one type of mastectomy, one type of resigning surgery. It's a bit hard to work by specialization. Yeah, you can help people live their dreams and you can make a ton of money. Now what's not to love? Does insurance pay for gender transitions? I'm pretty sure that insurance is required to pay for gender transitions. It is also interesting to me that, like you've noted before, most of the people who are public and visible about transgender issues tend to be autogynophobic males. And you can kind of see that. So this auto, auto-gyner thing, that's when men get off on looking at themselves in women's clothing and imagine themselves as women being made love to. So it's a particular type of fetish. Interesting, or maybe this is just a selection bias that you see these guys, but there are very, kind of, people who used to work in very masculine areas. You know, people in the military and there's the CEOs, like, very, very male-typical behaviors, except for the fact that they worship at, I don't know, 45 in the side. It's time for a very big change. So is this a pattern that's visible to you as well, or is this just the fact that, you know, there are many men, people like this, and the most visible people will obviously be the ones that are in high places like Rachel Levine or who knows big names? So I don't think that there's any correlation between autogonyphilia and having feminine interests at all. I think autogonyphilic males, their interests as far as occupations and so on, tend to be as masculine as other males. And so it's not surprising to me that we would see military, ex-military, foreign military people. We'd probably see more than we would expect, and I do think that is probably a selection bias leaders are going to lead. So the stereotype most associated with autogonyphilia is actually computer science for some odd reason. And, you know, we want to study this more objectively, but we haven't been able to. So I was just thinking, most Jews, for example, have worked in white collar professions since the 15th century. And I'm thinking that if you work in a white collar profession, if you work in an abstract profession like computer science, that you're probably far more comfortable living in an abstract world. And so you're probably more open to all sorts of things that people who work in blue collar professions would find incomprehensible, like including sexual transition. So probably the nature of, you know, computer work. I mean, look at our own Elliot Blatt. I mean, he's like wide open to all these possibilities that, you know, ordinary hard-working blokes like you and me just find astounding. But that is the stereotype that I kind of feel like transsexuals are highly disproportionately computer scientists, which is one of the most nasty provocations. Yeah, I mean, this is a well-known and accepted here at the Subversive Podcast. We're not finding it, they can have it. I also, maybe this is a bit, you know, not necessarily very scientific, but more esoteric. But it does feel like something correlates with an attraction to disembodiment. You know, being a computer programmer, you're essentially, you know, relegating yourself to being a brain in a bath. Right, the smarter you are, the more you live in an abstract world. And probably the more pleasure you have thinking, right? Because if you're particularly athletically gifted, right, you'll do a lot of things, you know, with your body playing sports. And, you know, we all tend to do what we're good at. And so if we're good at thinking, good at living in an abstract world, then we're going to hang out there much more than, you know, if our primary skill was, you know, playing golf or catching fish. Sending out impulses, receiving them, structuring data sets, you know, moving pieces around in kind of virtual space. You're not necessarily very connected to your body. You're, you know, it's easy to see yourself as a me too. It's easy to see yourself as customizable, especially because a lot of these guys have interest in fantasy role play and games that, you know, do exactly that. They take you out of your body into this character type life. And I can see how someone who does that for years, decades upon decades, can see, okay, this situation that I'm in is not very comfortable. You know, I feel dysphoric, you know, even I feel dysphoric about stuff in my life essentially, you know, sometimes I have a bad time. Right, so if you live in an abstract world, right, the more likely you are to get disconnected from your body, the more likely you are to fall from all sorts of things that are like way outside of reality. Like you think that reality would usually begin with being, you know, in touch with what's going on with your body. If you've got a headache, if you're feeling free, if you're feeling energetic. Maybe blame it on the meat suit, and then you might want to start customizing it. It seems accessible if you're already in that mindset. So the developmental process that I believe happens with ontogonophilia and transsexualism is as follows. First, I believe ontogonophilia happens and that happens during adolescence, same as other sexual feelings. And it typically, most often happens the way I said, where a boy will discover, it turns him on to imitate a woman and wear sexy underclothes and so on. And that hypersexual aspect of ontogonophilia lasts, you know, just analogous to hypersexual or male development generally, you know, adolescence and on. But as that persists, again, a subset of ontogonophilic individuals, they start creating a female identity and becoming attached to it. And so it is no longer strictly sexual all the time. So I think the bigger issue here is that we all tend to become like what we desire, right? So, you know, the more we're attracted to something, like the more we create this, you know, abstract fantasy, the more likely we are to move towards it. But it is something that does preoccupy them and not just what they want to have an organism. So it's the creation of a different character, of a different role essentially. I think in one of your papers, you know, that there's kind of a third type, maybe kind of the asexual, transsexual sounds like that. You know, someone who's kind of transcended the primarily sexual domain that this didn't came from. And then they just fell in love with the character so much that it's not really about sex. They just kind of like being Cheryl and they like the whole customization of Cheryl. So, you know, I think a lot of people would like try to transcend reality. They try to transcend the body. They just want to live in this abstract world or, you know, a second life online. And that's a real good way to get into trouble, right? The reality begins with your body, what's going on inside of you. Your body houses your brain and your feelings. I feel like the person who is so autogonophilic that there is no less available to anybody on the outside that's all inter-directed. They may think of themselves as asexual because they're not attracted to other people, only to this inverted self. Now, autogonophilia is the most, and autogonophilia are the most common manifestations of erotic, target, identity andversion. The general thing is that become amputates and they want to amputate a healthy limb. Well, if you study these guys, it turns out, guess who they're attracted to? Amputates. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so the author Neil Strauss, when you read his book on love and relationships, he talked about how his father had an amputee fetish and had this enormous collection of amputee movies. And he married his mother who was a cripple and that was a large part of the attraction for him. The attraction we've studied, then attracted to amputees we studied, then attracted to animals. Guess what happens to a subset of them? Become furries. And then we're attracted to morbidly obese people. Guess what happens to a subset of them? Yeah, yeah. So these people, I think that these three categories that we're studying are more in common with autogonophilic males than autogonophilic males have in common with the other kind of sexual. I don't think that autogonophilic has anything in common with femininity, really. And that's one of the main reasons. Wait, what about Rachel Levine or Caitlyn Jenner? I mean, they seem like the epitome of the feminine to me. Since then, the people who tried to ruin me back in 2003 did so. I injured that narcissistic. They have to think of themselves as really like women as Mary says they're not. My eyes. And Elias says nicotine promotes insomnia. Well, when do you chew it, right? I mean, you probably shouldn't chew it afternoon so that you can come down. How long does the nicotine high last? I'm noticing some of these people. I mean, you can see that there's effort in this surgery and everything, but just, it's just sad in the sense that just from the skull shape, just the proportions of the face, everything, you know, like the wonderful cover you have for your book. I mean, this is essentially the general feeling that that cover evokes is every time a normal person who's not completely indoctrinated, you know, beholds, and I don't get a lot of gunfellic mail, who, you know, is trying, everyone's trying to protect their feelings, but, you know, it is what it is, unfortunately. Yeah. And, you know, gay men, girls think are naturally feminine. I don't work with them. Right. So Michael Bailey says there are two types of transsexuals, one type of the homosexual, who just as always felt ultra feminine. So this is, like, for him, a logical combination of how he's felt his entire life. And then there are these auto, auto type of transsexuals who essentially fall in love with themselves dressed and acting as women. Oh, he'd shoot at around 3pm. Okay, what time were you able to get to sleep? How long does the nicotine high last? I don't know if RuPaul is now a sheary, but before RuPaul was RuPaul, RuPaul was a very feminine boy. And I think we're born that way. And in that sense, I do think that someday we might find that there are parts of the brain that kind of like women's brain. But I think that when we are able not to see anything similar murdered by some autogonophiles, especially those in denial, is that, well, women are autogonophilic too, wearing sexy clothes and so forth. This came from a study by Charles Moser, which he asked basically that, you know, imagine you're like getting dressed for a date and you're wearing sexy clothes. Does that sexually arouse a female? Do you know a few of these? His respondents became like 30 respondents said yes. But recently, during the past year, we did a big study of this question, comparing autogonophilic males to natal females and to natal males without autogonophilia. And the differences between autogonophiles and natal females were huge. Natal females do not sit around and say, oh, I'm so turned on by the idea of being a woman. It's not a thing. No, there is something that I think is similar. I mean, obviously, not speaking from science, but just kind of observations throughout my life and just being a woman. It's this idea of... Okay. So Eliot says he doesn't get high from chewing nicotine gum. It's just a lift and the boundaries between the lift and the lack of lift are not yet clear to him. Kind of being regarded from the outside. You know, the idea of a man seeing you as attractive. That is exciting for a woman. You know, that's why the whole makeup, the whole thing and the whole... So we're looking at here at Sydney Harbour. We've got about, what, 50 yachts sailing across the harbour. At the same time, we've got a ferry coming through. So what's going to happen when the ferry runs into these yachts? The process of it is interesting, but the end result is you kind of, you don't arouse yourself. The idea that someone else finds you irresistible. That's what's arousing in the spin-down. Right. So the normal person does not arouse himself, right? It's that someone else finds him or her arousing. That's the turn-on. Right. Right. Yes. And, you know, the questions on the auto-medicine scale of the true and the metric, including have you ever been sexually aroused by the idea that you are a woman? By the fact that you have a female body? Is that, you know... Yeah, that's where you can kind of say you. Yeah. But, you know, I appreciate them trying. Nice try. What do you think about, you know, because it's been documented, there's definitely quite a lot of kind of viral spreading of certain types of transgenderism on the female side. I think Abby Goldschar wrote a book about this and that it kind of propagates almost like a meme, you know, people to hang out in these circles. You know, all the girls in the class are suddenly transgender. But what do you think about this as a more general thesis? Because, yes, let's say teenage girls are easily influenced, but the idea that having all of these parapherias out there in pornography on the internet, easily accessible by everyone of every age at every stage of development, you know, I know a lot of parents are not exactly cleared up or cleared in about all the pornography that their children are watching. So, people are exposed to a lot more of this imagery and these concepts and these possibilities than ever before. And do you think that this might push the spectrum into, you know, people actually wanting to live out this stuff more than back in a time when these fantasies were just not available, you know, this type of... No people weren't accepted with these ideas from the outside. Pornography is so much that it's, you know, providing people with pornography is a reflection of male desires. It's just normal males' desires made explicit and then heightened. So I do think it is pornography that's turning people into transgender. So, is it certainly a thing that is being perhaps most, perhaps, almost all of the adolescent girls whose gender dysphoria began during adolescence would not have transitioned gender dysphoria 15 years ago? Right, so almost all the adolescent girls who are transitioning now would never have done it 10, 15 years ago. That's how powerful society is. We think that we're doing and thinking all these individual things, but often we are simply saying and doing things that are fed to us by our community. I think it's entirely a social construction, entirely a new phenomenon. I think you're asking about, like, autogonophilia. I understand that autogonophilia is associated with the kind of pornography called sissy porn. Even though I study autogonophilia and I'm not from across the sissy porn, I think you actually have to seek it out. And if somebody seeks it out, I'm suspicious that it is an exogenous cause. I wouldn't be this way if I hadn't seen it. I think it's more likely that somebody's looking for it. I do think that it is possible that social or as a cultural influence on the decision to transition among even more traditional kinds of transsexuals, autogonophilic and homosexual transsexuals, and it would be like this. Being trans is cool now. It's not something to be ashamed of. And if you have the desire, you're more likely to find somebody encouraging you to transition than to find you discouraging, at least outside your immediate family. Yeah, and it's a, I'm not saying an easy way, but it is one way of, you know, someone who might be like a white male but not in an extremely good social position, you know, kind of a low status type person who, you know, maybe feels like a set of a disembodied with things too. Does anyone seriously raise their social status by becoming a transsexual? Ask them for a friend. I mean, you may have fantasies and delusions that you may have to raise your social status with that sort of transition, but I think it actually happens in the real world. Get a different type of status to get into a community that, you know, might find him or her more interesting and more compelling. So, yeah, I mean, I can understand that there are lots of incentives like that. If something's high status, the people will come and they'll get their own somehow. I think that the autogonophilic explanation to some autogonophilic males automatically takes the status away from autogonophilia. So if that's the reason why I'm doing it, then I don't want to do it. But not all. There are some autogonophilic males who, who? Yeah, I find too. A lot of desires simply disappear when you understand what's happening. I simply get inside into something and I find transformative. So I had a therapist who said Dennis Prager had such a profound influence on you and you were writing this website to try to show him that you can have an influence on him. And it's like, oh wow, I think there's something to that. And it just removed all need or necessity to talk about Dennis Prager and my therapy anymore. So that happened about 20 years ago. Desire to transition remains even after they've accepted autogonophilia as an explanation for their desires. For those people, I'm not sure it's a bad decision. You know, if you know why you want it, if you know the costs and the benefits, then I'm not going to raise much of an objection. I'm more concerned about people who don't understand why they want to do it. I'm more concerned about autogonophilic males who have not even heard the concept of autogonophilia. I know there's a large community of transitioners in the female space where you have these girls who started on puberty bloggers, maybe they had mastectomies, things like that early on in their teenage years. And then they realized, oh, this is a great mistake. They're trying to wind back the clock. But is there such a thing in autogonophilic males? I could imagine that having the surgery is a very serious step to take. And if you're doing it for the wrong reasons or you don't have a good picture of your mind, of a good theory of what exactly is going on with you, you might have second thoughts after the fact. But I haven't really heard about many of these cases. The data from so-called regrets, people who wish they hadn't had sex-recycling surgery, most data that we have are relatively old, say, 30 or 40 years. And they're mostly from clinics that were very careful and didn't let people transition unless they had had a couple of years living as the other sex to make sure that that's what they wanted. And those data did suggest a higher rate of regrets among autogonophiles versus sexual transsexuals, but it was a pie. It was, let's say, maybe 10% were autogonophiles. We read it versus, you know, 3% the other time. But we're in a whole different world now. Nobody is making people live for two years as the other sex before they get medical intervention. And it wouldn't surprise me to have more regrets when, in fact, I expect that we will have more regrets among the adolescent females who transition with these. As far as autogonophiles, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what we'll find. Yeah. I mean, only time will tell. I think this en masse surgery campaign has, I think, only got going in the last few years. So, yeah, it takes a while for people to wake up from the party. There's another subject that you've written on, and that might be even more controversial, especially for my audience. It's pedophilia, which, you know, on the right is a bit of an extra spicy thing. And I understand why. I mean, I'm viscerally also very affected by it. I have children. It's, you know, something I want to think about. And I understand why people have this visceral reaction. So, whether it's pedophilia or homosexuality or whatever your urge is, like I think any man with a high sex drive experiences all sorts of urges, urges for which he can find no appropriate moral expression. And so, I think that the condition of the conservative who understands that human nature is not basically good is much more at ease with the wildness inherent in human nature and, therefore, with its need for suppression or transformation. There's no deeper instinct than that of protecting a child, especially if you're someone who has one. So, you take a little bit of a kinder tone here because you know people who have these instincts who study the phenomenon, who are closer to the fields in which these things happen to me. These are monsters and projections on the walls. And I hope I don't shred of everything for this phenomenon. So, that's kind of where I'm starting from. So, how you doing? Yeah, we generally don't have any empathy for people who have problems that we don't have, for people who have desires that we don't have, for people who have challenges that we don't have, for people who have life experiences that we don't have, for people that we can't relate to, for people in our groups. We generally don't have empathy with whom we share something in common. I'll let you just say why maybe I should stop in my case or why there should be any sort of attention, positive or interest paid to this field. Okay. Thank you. The first thing that I want to say is that we must distinguish two things. Pedophilia, which is a sexual interest in children, from child molestation, which is sexually abusing children. Not all pedophiles, molest children. Yeah, pedophiles who have organized to mutually support each other so that they will live child celibate lives, they will never touch children. Yeah, so people who get together to, you know, encourage each other to live an upright life, right? They acknowledge their tendencies in a self-destructive, anti-social, damaging direction and then support each other to abstain from that behavior, right? That is a holy group. I find that admirable because, you know, they do have their desire, their sexual attraction to children is just as strong as heterosexual men's attraction to women, homosexual men's attraction to men. And they also, you know, they have that shame at some point. It's not that you think that they should be pedophiles. I just think that they should not be ashamed of having feelings that they're not going to act on in the middle of their lives. That's quite it. Yeah, I mean, that all sounds good on the face of it. I think the primary pushback to that would be that, you know, these things are at least stigmatized for a reason in the sense that it feels like, you know, am I going to trust that this is the case? You know, because this is a bit of an honor system type thing where they're organizing, they say they're not going to do it. How can I be sure, you know, how much of an integration into society can you allow, you know, maybe there is a case to be made that, okay, if this is your sin, you might need to be exiled from the rest of us in one way or another. There might be, you know, chemical castration. You know, call me crazy. That might be an option. There are different methods, different levers that we can pull but there has to be a clear line between you and my children that has to be in force 24-7 and I don't, I mean, I might have a nice person but I'm not that nice. Yeah, I don't think that they're lobbying to maybe sit in your children or to live as a community of pedophiles who are known to be pedophiles. I think that they're mainly wanting to just support each other and be left alone and believe me, there are people trying to harm them as a community, which I see as very unfortunate. Again, I think that we should, there's stigma against harming children and we should keep that. I'm not sure stigma against attraction in children or say it would make any difference because I don't know, I think whether a male is essentially attracted to children or not is determined by the time he's born. So I'm just curious, he's attracted to children for this society or would she want him to be, someday it might involve some kind of brain surgery but we're an example about sectorized reduction castration. It can help somebody who has a risk. Like my first introduction to this topic was that I was an expert witness for a pedophile who had actually molested two girls by using a toy gun into his party country. Okay, the wind is just killing the audio quality so I will talk to you later. Another critical distinction typically blurred between pedophilia versus uberphilia. Yeah, yeah, big difference between, you know, what age, right, pre or post puberty. So that's Alex Koshuta there talking with researcher Michael Bailey.