Heather E. Heying's Blog

Phil Illy is an autogynephile. That is, he is a straight man who is attracted to the idea of himself as a woman. He attended the recent Genspect conference1 in a blue velvet dress and long blue gloves. The outfit, including its blueness, was striking. It was difficult to ignore. Sure enough, it was not ignored. There has been fury on-line and off about his presence at the conference.

The rad fems (and many others) say: Absolutely no. No way. A man—and clearly a creep, at that!—being celebrated in a space that already holds people with deep trauma from exactly this sort of cosplay? Reprehensible. This is damaging to those who are most at risk. Why are we encouraging this public display of fetish?

People in the other camp argue: Phil Illy knows that he is a man, and is in no way confused about this. He is honest and open, and not a creep at all. He has written a whole book about autogynephilia (AGP). We should be a big tent, welcoming of all, or at least, welcoming of those who are self-reflective, and who see the same reality that we do.

Which is it? Who is right?

The night before the conference began, many of us were in the vicinity of the hotel bar, and I saw a man walking around in a dress. I would later learn that this was Phil. I did a double-take. I asked the woman sitting next to me—am I seeing this correctly? She looked, nodded. Yep. I was unnerved. What did I not know? Did this person believe himself to be a woman, or not? Why did the answer to that question matter to me?

The next night Phil approached my table, offered me a copy of his book, which I accepted, and we talked for a bit. I came away with some answers and intuitions: No, he does not think that he is actually a woman. And no, he does not seem like a creep. None of my hackles were raised. I detected no malice, no glint in the eye, no smirk, outer or inner, that he was having one over on all of us. Of course I could be wrong about these things, as anyone’s intuition can mislead them. One of the despicable truths about gender ideology is that women are being told to stop trusting the very intuitions that we have always relied on, when walking alone, when entering a bathroom or a locker room or a parking garage, when approached by a person we do not know. It is not bigoted to cross the street if you feel a tingle at the base of your skull as you see a man approaching you. It is smart. I have traveled far and wide, often exploring places alone that women are expected not to explore alone, and I have honed my intuition, although I am well aware that I can and do make mistakes. Nothing about Phil alarmed me.

Assuming that I am correct about Phil—that he is not a creep, and that his intention is not to force himself into women’s spaces—is that sufficient to land me in the camp of the big tenters?

It is not.

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Public Service Announcement:

Sex is binary. Male and female exist not as points on a continuum, but as discrete states. Males produce small, motile gametes (sperm, or pollen if you’re a plant which, if you are reading this, you are not). Females produce large, sessile gametes (eggs)2.

Gender, which in other organisms we call “sex role,” is not binary. Gender is downstream of sex, and does manifest on a continuum. Gender is the software of sex3. In humans, because we are more software than any other organism on the planet, gender is particularly flexible, both across and within individuals.

We are fated to be the sex that we are born as. We cannot change that.

We can change how we behave, though. Our gender, aka our sex role—that is something that we have considerable dominion over.

Illy’s book is long—nearly 600 pages, plus another nearly 100 pages of end matter—glossary and references, mostly. I have merely skimmed it.

In his book, Illy attempts a careful, scholarly investigation of the condition that he understands himself to have—again, autogynephilia (AGP). I respect him for this. And his hypothesis—that AGP is the underlying cause for a large percentage of the people we now see transitioning—seems plausible, at least for young men. He has taken heat from the trans community for holding this position. But an unstated premise of the book is that what goes on in people’s heads is inherently something that the external world must pay heed to. This I do not accept.

Illy discusses not just AGP, but what he sees as its match in the opposite sex, autoandrophilia (AAP). AAP is the state of being a straight woman who has turned the object of her attraction inwards, and so is attracted to the idea of being a man. This, I believe, is a false symmetry. Just as male and female homosexuality are not identical, and typically neither emerge from nor manifest in similar ways, so too should we not expect confusion about gender identity to manifest similarly between the sexes. We are, after all, different.

I am a straight woman who has never thought nor wished that I was a man, but who has been gender non-conforming in many ways throughout my life. Opening Illy’s book to his section on autoandrophilia, therefore, may have been setting myself up for disappointment.

On p127 of Auto-Heterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, Illy writes:

“Autoandrophilia enables people to experience mental shifts into a masculine headspace in response to stimuli that reinforce their sense of masculinity or manhood….Initially, autoandrophilic mental shifts tend to be short-lived. They often first arise through crossdressing, being “one of the guys,” or imagining being a boy—all of which may lead to feeling confident, strong, or self-assured.”

The first part of this sounds like psycho-babble to me. The latter part sounds regressive and misogynistic.

I feel confident, strong, and self-assured. In fact, I am confident, strong, and self-assured. Hearing that feeling that way means that I may be thinking of myself as a man is neither helpful nor empowering. It is the opposite.

Earlier in the book, we are told that men who “behave like women” (“behavioral autogynephilia”) can benefit women who share spaces with these men. One man who calls himself a transfem says: “I treat my wife very well, because I take care of almost all the housework.” He does the housework because he sees himself as behaving like a woman. We are further told that “as a child another transfem delighted in caring for her baby sister, which eased the burden on her mother” (p96). Again, childcare was enjoyable for this boy because by engaging in it he felt that he was behaving like a female.

So: if you are confident, strong, and self-assured, you are manifesting manhood. And if you engage in care-taking and domestic work, you are manifesting womanhood. Manly men don’t clean. Womanly women aren’t confident. Manly men don’t parent. Womanly women are weak.

This is bollocks. I rather thought that we were over such insipid and restrictive tropes. Clearly, I was wrong.

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Earlier yet in the book, Illy describes more ways that autogynephilia manifests, quoting a Hungarian physician from 130 years ago (pp 71-73).  The physician—a man—“feel[s] like a woman in a man’s form…feel[s] the penis as clitoris…the scrotum as labia majora.” Beyond the delusions that his body is not what it is, the physician had “a sensory shift which made her feel as though she had the senses and perceptions of a woman.” Already, I admit, I am on alert. Men and women are likely, on average, to have differences in sensory and perceptive capacities. But having perceptions that are more typical of one sex or the other does not make you that sex. Those perceptions just make you a bit—or a lot—outside of the norm for the sex that you are. “Outside of the norm” and “belonging to a different category” are not the same thing.

Again: sex is binary. But everything that we might attribute to gender, to sex role—how we think and behave, how we remember things and what we like to do, our abilities and our interests—none of this is binary. Men are, on average, taller than women, but short men aren’t women. Men are, on average, more interested in math than women, but female mathematicians aren’t men.

Listening in on the thoughts of this male doctor from the late 19th century reveals how much of his delusion is based on cultural norms:

“Her stomach rebelled against every deviation from a ‘female diet.’…Her skin felt feminine; it had become sensitive to both hot and cold temperatures, as well as direct sunlight. She resented social norms that kept her from using sun parasols to protect her sensitive face skin and took to wearing gloves as much as possible, even while sleeping.”

I don’t have any reason to doubt that the physician felt the way that is being described, even if I don’t understand what some of it means. What I disagree with is the stereotyping of men and women, the normalization of mental confusion, and the religious conclusions thinly veiled as scientific ones. At Genspect and elsewhere, I have discussed some of the scientific findings that male and female brains are, in some regards, on average, different. This is true. It is replicable using modern scientific tools. And it is irritating to some people. Too bad, though: reality is not always what you want it to be.

However. Having autogynephilia, we are told on p69, “can feel like having a female soul.” This, in contrast to a scientific hypothesis, is an unfalsifiable claim. It is untestable, and reveals the religious nature of the belief. I am not opposed to religion. But I insist that your religious beliefs not infringe on my (secular) freedoms.

Name a thing, and it becomes real—this is the postmodernist thinking behind many modern arguments. Once the thing is made real by its name, it comes to seem ever more true. And voila, the slippery naturalistic fallacy is manifest: name X, point to the reality of X on the basis of its name, conflate X’s reality with its inexorability and its goodness, and in turn, force the acceptance of X.

There is plenty that is real that we need not accept, indeed, that we must not accept. Consider rape. Rape is an evolutionary strategy. Understanding its evolutionary origins will help us decrease its prevalence. We want to decrease its prevalence because it is deplorable. Similarly: slavery, genocide, and all of the rest of the totalitarian tendencies that spread through populations. These are evolved strategies that we can, in part, understand with an evolutionary toolkit. And as nobody but those inflicting such barbaric acts on others benefit from them, we should try to eradicate them. Understanding is not accepting. Sometimes, understanding is in service of the exact opposite.

Understanding fetishes like autogynephilia is, I would argue, just such a thing. By rejecting the fetish, we are not rejecting the human being who has it, but we are rejecting its public display. Again: understanding is not the same as accepting.

I will no doubt be accused of thinking that anything non-heterosexual or reproductive is a fetish. Will be accused of being “vanilla,” even. Here’s the thing: No. Humans have long since evolved into beings who have sex and engage in sexual behavior for non-reproductive purposes. Many of our closest relatives do as well (see bonobos). Just as food for us is about more than nutrition, so too is sex about more than reproduction. We are so social, so tightly bound to one another, that we have elaborate feasts that go on hours—days even—when we could have gotten the benefit of the calories and nutrients in a few minutes. So, too, do we have sex that extends far past the boundaries of what is necessary to make a baby. We play games, create fictional scenarios, engage in fantasy. This is not just evolutionary (which again, does not mean that it is good). In the case of our expansive sexual appetites and repertoires, though, they are not just evolutionary, but also, often, good for individual humans. But not always.

Not everything that has evolved is good. Nor does it follow that anything that people currently believe, no matter how much of a community they have found on-line, or how many university professors have written scholarly articles about the phenomenon, is either evolutionarily robust, or good. We live in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change that we ourselves have created has out-stripped even our capacious ability to keep up with it. And so, when assessing any bit of 21st century behavior—or indeed, much of what emerged in the 20th century—it is necessary to keep an eye on that truth: just because many people are doing it, does not mean that it is the right thing to be doing.

We are under no obligation to normalize such feelings. Indeed, we are obligated to do the opposite. We do not cheer for the self-mutilation of a sad girl, or for her attempts to starve herself. We do not celebrate confusion.

Normalizing fetishes and other rare mental states is bad for society, because it provides a template for the confused. The internet, we are told, has been a boon for people who did not know that anyone else in the world felt like they do. The internet helped gay children in fundamentalist communities, neurodiverse kids in small towns, artistic types born to families that favor money over creativity, to find their people. The flip side of this, which affects far more people, is that once niche identities become named and organized on-line, anyone can find them. And then, young people searching for meaning—or more often now, searching for identity, a weaker tea by far—come across something they did not know existed, and if any of it fits, they think: ah yes, this has been me all along.

It is our job as adults—as parents, as teachers, as health professionals, and just as responsible members of society—to protect the children. Providing them a menu of fetishes to choose from, to identify as, is not protecting them.

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In Me, She, He, They: Reality vs Identity in the 21st Century, I wrote:

We are dealing with the interface between long standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time. That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions. No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions.

Genspect is doing necessary work, navigating perilous waters and welcoming diverse people and views. They expect adults to come to their own conclusions. Running a conference on non-fraught topics isn’t easy; literal gate-keeping on a topic so explosive has to be nearly impossible. I was honored to be a speaker at their conference, and see them, unflinchingly, as a force for good.

What of Phil Illy4, though? He was an attendee of the conference, is a man who understands what he is, is exploring it both in a scholarly fashion and a human one, and is also displaying the fetish for all.

Even if it is true that any particular man will not behave in a predatory way to women, the public display of fetish opens up doors to predators who would. We had a social contract that did a good job of keeping women safe. Public display of fetish begins to dismantle that contract.

The fact that Phil is not himself a creep thus does not render his behavior harmless. He is breaching a social contract by walking around in hyper-feminine garb, causing people’s brains to throw errors and—for women—to become hyper-vigilant about what it means and how to react. The indirect effects of a man—even a good man—walking around in stereotypically female dress, in an era when other men who do this expect to be allowed in to female only spaces, to be treated as if they are women—are negative. I suppose that this is too bad for Illy, and others like him, that they should be expected to curtail their behavior because of other bad actors. But it is far worse if he does not curtail his behavior in public, far worse for the 50% of the population who are now on high alert at all times, protecting ourselves and our children against the compulsions of a few.

Phil Illy’s twitter profile picture. You can find him here.

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1

Genspect envisions a world in which “people are free to present and express themselves in a manner that is healthy, safe and not constrained by gender stereotypes.” The Genspect conference was excellent, as is the organization in general. I wrote about the conference some in last week’s post, here. Genspect took a metaphorical beating after, in the wake of the conference, they tweeted positively about Illy and his new book; they have since deleted the tweet and offered up this post. The on-line dust-up was ugly, angry, and raw, as too many are. Ultimately, what happened was mostly friendly fire; the casualties, such as they were, were largely unnecessary.

2

More precisely, although the precision is only really necessary when engaging sophists, females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Here is where I have written about what a woman is the most concisely.

3

Bret Weinstein and I discuss this in the “Sex and Gender” chapter of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.

4

Illy has been on Benjamin Boyce’s podcast twice. The conversations are interesting.

The West is spasming, gasping for air. But it is not too late. We can save the West. Music and dogs might help.

My last stop after several weeks of travel brought me to Denver this past weekend for the Genspect conference. Genspect is an organization focused on a “non-medicalised approach to gender diversity.” The conference was heart-breaking and hopeful, both. Many people have their eyes wide open, and are energized and activated to do everything they can to stop the barbarism of using hormones and surgery on young people who don’t feel at home in their bodies.

I spoke to many parents of beloved children who are in crisis. Their children—adolescents and young adults—believe themselves to be the sex that they are not. One father of a young man who believes himself to be female blames himself. The anguished father said “We brought it in to our house. We were good liberals. We sent him to summer camps that, now we can see, were indoctrinating him. We dropped friends when they disagreed with us. We modeled this behavior for him.”

The mom added, nodding sadly, “Everyone had a little bit of Trump Derangement Syndrome back in the day.” Many of us did, yes, us good liberals. Some have still not recovered.

But this is not their fault, those parents. I told them that. Yes, we must take responsibility for what we have said and done. And we must correct our errors. But there are so many forces in play here: Endocrine disruption, financial forces, the schools and the media, and larger societal forces yet.

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Endocrine disruption is coming at us from the water that we drink and the air that we breathe, due to the insecticides and herbicides and hormones now flowing into our water supply. Given that atrazine is common in American water, and its presence is known to turn frogs hermaphroditic and demasculinized, why do we imagine that it has no effect on humans? And phthalates and BPA and more, in our food and our fragrances, our containers and our clothes, are also known to disrupt endocrine function. No wonder that some young people are legitimately confused.

Perverse financial interests exist for anyone who profits from turning healthy young people into patients for life. That is what medicalized trans ideology does: puberty blockers are temporary, but cross-sex hormones are forever, and over time, there are more and more drugs required to deal with the effects of being on cross-sex hormones long-term. And if you get “bottom surgery,” there is no end to the medicalized life you will now forever live.

Cultural forces are encouraging children to never become wise to reality. The genderbread person and other nuttery is all over the schools now. Drag queens are reading stories to little ones. Porn is available to all, degrading to both mind and soul. The young are adrift, unsure, scared to interact, and a solution is offered up, a solution to all of their problems: transition to the sex that you are not, and all of your problems will be solved. It comes with a dopamine hit, or several, as an eager community surrounds those who transition, excited to have another in their midst. And the cross-sex hormones must bring euphoria at first, regardless of whether you are a man receiving estrogen or a woman receiving testosterone. A high is a high, and these are powerful drugs. But powerful drugs lose their power over time, the high ever further out of reach. And looking for external solutions to internal problems rarely solves those problems.

As to those larger societal forces: they are Marxist, if you are to believe James Lindsay (and if you don’t, you should consider why, because he is nothing if not careful and thorough). James had this to say at Genspect this weekend: “The thing is not the thing. It’s not about gender. Or race. Or Covid. Or Ukraine. Or Israel….They are not what they appear to be. The thing is not the thing. It’s about revolution.” Consider that we may be being driven out of our minds in service of someone else’s revolution. What would those who would destroy everything build in its place? I hear nothing constructive from the would-be destroyers. They just know that this thing that we have, the West, is not for them.

And yet, in places near and far, the flame of the West is alive.

Across every domain we have these same problems, over and over and over again. We are being damaged and dysregulated by the poisons being poured into our water and air and mouths; those who would control our behavior, who “offer us help” and implore us to “follow the science,” have financial interests outside of our view; we are less connected to one another than ever before, hiding behind screens and avatars; our institutions are torn apart by incompetence, attention-seeking, and the very human desire to be part of the in-crowd. But there is a very good chance that the crowd that you are being told you must be part of is not, actually, the crowd for you.

Resist and desist, rather than remain and defame those who would be skeptical of the new orthodoxy, whatever it is this week. Come through the looking glass, and find those who have resisted compliance, and fought affirmation1. There are many of us. We disagree about many things. But we cherish freedom, and we welcome newcomers.

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My sign-off for DarkHorse, which seems more apt than ever, is this:

Be good to the ones you love;

Eat good food;

And get outside.

To which I would add two things: music and dogs.

When in Prague two weeks ago, after the launch of the Czech publication of Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide by Institut H21, several of us went to a pub and stayed late. Two Czech men with opposite politics sat across from me, disagreeing, laughing, drinking. I only met them that night, but I feel confident in saying that they are both good men. In part I have that confidence because I watched them describe positions of almost polar opposition—on Trump, on what is being taught in schools, on guns—and they listened to one another, and to others at the table who disagreed or agreed, and they did not dissolve into puddles or erupt in fury. How many places would that be possible in America now?

The director of Institut H21, the amazing Adam Ružička, had brought a guitar that evening, in the hopes that we could sing around an actual campfire after the book launch. Weather did not permit, but he broke out his guitar in the pub instead, and began to play Czech folk songs, of which there are many. I heard estimates that all Czech people know the words to at least thirty folk songs, which they can and will sing along to, given the opportunity.

Adam pulled out his guitar and began playing, and in short order a young man at the next table pulled out a violin and joined. The joy grew, and the singing got louder. A few women from a neighboring room came in and began to dance. And at the third table in the room, a man pulled out an accordion and joined in as well. I know—I must be making this up. Exaggerating. But I am not.

Everyone but us two Americans were singing along, including the men who had been arguing amicably just moments before. When one song ended, another began. The guitar was handed around and played by others before being returned to Adam’s capable hands.

It was late though, well after 1am. The pub was on the bottom floor of a residential building, and it was a Tuesday. The bartender came in from the other room and asked Adam to keep it down. The noble subversion of the Czech spirit kicked in then, inspiring Adam to raise the decibel level considerably, encouraging even more raucous singing, before finishing with a flourish.

Later, the bartender would tell Adam that in his position, he would have done the same thing.

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As for dogs: they may yet save us. I say this as a dedicated and life-long cat lover, but also as an animal behaviorist and an evolutionary biologist. Cats are delightful in part because they aren’t fully ours; the domestication process is still underway, and some cats, at least, don’t seem convinced that it was such a good idea to sign up with people in the first place. They are well capable of striking out on their own. Some of the joy of interacting with cats is that they are still partially wild.

In comparison, we have been co-evolving with dogs for longer than with any of our other domesticates—three times longer, in fact. We have had dogs in our lives three times as long as we’ve had agriculture. In many ways, they have made us who we are, as much as we have made them who they are. Cats, bless them, aren’t going to save society. But dogs just might.

Dogs are common on the streets of Prague, and in the parks. Leashes are not. Almost the only dogs that I saw leashed in Prague were ones that clearly needed it, dogs that were straining at their leashes and pulling their owners around. This was a tiny minority of dogs. Most dogs walked and ran free, greeting other dogs, investigating smells, and exploring nooks and crannies. Dogs met other dogs, and then their people met, too. This happens with leashed dogs too, but is even more fluid and easy when the dogs are free to do what dogs do.

We should trust organisms with whom we have teamed up. It works well to let them do their thing. It makes little sense to chain them when we walk with them, so long as we have come to agreement about how they should and will behave in public. The mandatory leash laws that are nearly ubiquitous in the United States misunderstand dogs, and give their humans a pass—why bother working with your dog so that he is trustworthy enough to go into public as your partner, if he’s just going to be leashed anyway? A similar argument could be made for children. Parenting that both demands adherence to societal safety standards andencourages exploration is possible. It is, in fact, the only sane way to go about raising a child, or having a dog.

On a trail outside of Denver, I saw a blur of black bounding through the sagebrush, and shortly came upon a woman standing on the trail looking aggrieved that her dog had raced off. But she wasn’t aggrieved, not really. She knew her dog, and he was a good dog. She was concerned about what I would think, because the trail was clearly marked with regard to the necessity of leashes. I told her he was gorgeous, racing free in nature, and he, seeing his human interact with a stranger, decided that this was more interesting than the faint scent of deer, and bounded back to greet me. Such a good boy.

Don’t follow the science, because it’s generally not science at all if you’re being asked to follow it. But do follow the dogs. They know a few things. And despite everything, they are on our side.

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1

I wrote about the need to not comply and not affirm at Natural Selections, in “Public Service Announcement to the Mama Bears: Defend Your Children”, and at DarkHorse we turned it into “Do Not Comply / Do Not Affirm” merch as well – available here.

I am in Prague, about which there is much to say, but I do not have time to write much now. Bret and I are here for the publication of our book in Czech, which the remarkable Institut H21 has brought into the world. The baptism of the book, a Czech tradition, in which, yes, there will be a bottle of champagne opened in celebration, and then poured over one copy of the book, takes place in under two hours.

We have met some tremendous people here, and rekindled hope in the survival, even thriving, of the West, due to what we are seeing in and learning about the Czech Republic. And we have done several podcasts and interviews, the most recent one with Brain We Are.

During that podcast, Bret was talking about campfire, which of course is a theme of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. The following thing occurred to me as he spoke, on what I will call the fractal campfire.

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A strangely warm but decidedly fierce October storm came in during the night, whipping up both sea and air into a frenzy. The wind gusts and swirls, and even the trees are rocking back and forth, yet it was totally dry and 25° above freezing even early this morning, when things are usually at their coldest. Now, though, now the rain has come. It beats at the windows, streaks flowing across the glass at angles that change by the minute. Most of the birds have stopped trying to fly in this surge, but three gulls are out there. Three gulls fighting the wind, stalled but aloft. Three gulls who are not winning by the usual metrics, but they are not exactly losing, either. They are holding steady. In winds this strong and erratic, one can hardly be expected to make progress. Holding steady in a storm like this is, I suppose, a kind of winning.

I returned this week to one of the most haunting lyrics I know, sang it on DarkHorse, even, where we discussed the oeuvre of Roger Waters and of Pink Floyd more generally. We discussed their work in light of the blatant anti-semitism that the world is now facing; in light of Waters’ own muddled, inconsistent positions on same; and in light of Pink Floyd’s often heart-wrenching lyrics.

1983’s The Final Cut was Pink Floyd’s final album before Rogers left the band. The title track from the album begins with these four lines:

Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes

I can barely define the shape of this moment in time

And far from flying high in clear blue skies

I’m spiraling down to the hole in the ground where I hide

It seems to many that all is lost. How can we possibly recover actual civilization from this trajectory, these battles between enemies both ancient and new. Many people are hiding. What is this? What is the shape of this moment in time?

Others, though, others have a vicious clarity. They are giving in to excruciating, exquisite rage. What a delicious release it is, to hate other people with a passion that cannot be derailed. How fucking dare you tell me not to bring vengeance down upon my enemies. Now you are my enemy, too. Be warned.

We are being played. Yes, there will always be conflict. Yes, resources are finite, and far too many people have far too few of them. Yes, people will come to different conclusions about what to do based on what their priorities are, who they know, what they are being told, what lives they themselves have lived. But there are forces that profit by keeping us confused, wary, and at each other’s throats. Those forces are profiting now.

Some of the chaos and hysteria that is downstream of the barbaric attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7 was predictable. People in both camps are willing to conflate civilians with the terrorist organizations or governments that claim to represent them. Israelis are not their government; only one Israeli is Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinians are not Hamas; a large fraction of people in Gaza are children. But while condemning the rape, murder, and kidnapping of festival goers should have been easy and obvious for everyone, it was not. Many, instead, are celebrating the brutality of Hamas.

My friend Holly has pointed out that we got here, in part, by ignoring far too many warning signs. “Welcome to the world of intersectionality,” she writes. “Anyone with any identity characteristics that rank high on the oppression scale is due respect, trust, deference, and entitled to have their feelings catered to, to the fullest extent possible.” The forces that profit from our exquisite rage only need convince us that having dark skin or being Palestinian, for instance, are the most deserving identity characteristics. Add the divisive ideology of the moment, and voila: bickering on a scale to end civilization.

That postmodern inflected identity politics would spill off campus in explosive and awful ways was predicted in 2018 in testimony before Congress by Bret Weinstein, my husband and partner in nearly all things. This was not long after he and I were ejected from our own campus for objecting to racism that was passing itself off as the opposite. Now, finally, the wealthy donors that so heavily fund our elite institutions have woken up, and are beginning to pull their funds. And now, finally, the institutions are beginning to listen.

What “the left” has become in recent years is a vengeful, hateful ideology that prioritizes immutable characteristics, and would have its way through authoritarian means. Black Lives Matter is racist at its core, but many liberals were fooled by the name it gave to itself1. Some of those liberals erected “don’t hurt me” walls to protect themselves; others spilled onto the streets. There is some truth to horseshoe theory.

Yasmine Mohammed is a prominent human rights campaigner who, at 19, was married off to a member of Al-Qaeda by her mother. She had an interview published this week which I hope has reach. In it, she reports that her father, now dead, was from Gaza. Gaza was his homeland. He was also a loving man, a generous man, and his heart broke for the inability of the region to find peace. He blamed Hamas for this failure. Mohammed’s mother, in stark contrast, is filled with hatred—for Jews, but also for apostates. When Yasmine left Islam, her mother told her that she would have Yasmine killed.

The anti-semitism of sheltered white Western liberals does not have the same origins as the anti-semitism of Yasmine Mohammed’s mother. But hatred finds common ground, and from there, it grows.

All is not lost. We have lost our way, to be sure, but all is not lost.

Holding steady in a storm like this is a kind of winning.

Perhaps we all need to begin with ourselves. If you find yourself spiraling down to the hole in the ground where you hide, what would it take to bring you out? Other than rage, what brings you delicious, exquisite sensations? There is still much truth and beauty to be discovered and created in the world. We would all do well to seek it, and preserve it.

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More lyrics from Pink Floyd that resonate now. This is a postcard that I made in a Book Arts class in college.1

I was myself fooled by Black Lives Matter in the early days, when it seemed to be doing the obvious: demanding justice for black people. BLM first came to my attention after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot (young black man) Trayvon Martin in 2012. NYT reported on the acquittal here.

“The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom. Hundreds and hundreds of years before Islam was even invented.”

– Melanie Phillips on Triggernometry

I have no special insight on this madness. I know what I see on-line, but I don’t how much of what I see is real. None of us do. I am concerned that it is not what it seems—that it is, somehow, even more than what it seems.

I wrote a long rambling piece about my personal relationship with Judaism, but it doesn’t belong here, not now. For now, I will just say this:

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In 1913, the people living on the northwest coast of Greenland were described as “probably the most exquisitely carnivorous people on earth1.” They subsisted almost entirely on the meat of whales, seals, seabirds, and fish, of which the dominant species were halibut, capelin, and salmon. They ate almost no carbohydrates at all. And yet, they thrived.

More than half a century later, in 1971, researchers found that these same people had extremely low levels of heart disease, and no diabetes at all. Rather than engaging in collective hand-wringing about how people with such awful diets could possibly be so hale and hearty, the health of these “exquisitely carnivorous” people was attributed to just one part of their diet: fish. And so was born a new dietary trend.

People should eat more fish, we are told, specifically fatty fish like halibut and salmon. It is chock full of omega-3 fatty acids, notably the unmemorably named DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid). We are assured that these are good for our heart. Eat more cold-water fatty fish. You’ll be glad that you did.

Arctic char in Greenland. Photo by Dan Bach Kristensen for Getty.

Okay, but what about the people who live inland and don’t have easy access to fish? What about the people who just don’t like how fish tastes?

Enter: fish oil. It’s got all the benefits of fish, without any of the costs!

Reductionism is seductive—so easy, so smooth, so very quantifiable. Fish might be good for you, but what parts of the fish, and why? What if some parts of fish are bad for you? Are all species of fish equal, or all species of fatty fish? Wouldn’t you like to be able to titrate those benefits and know exactly what you’re getting? Do you want answers to these questions, like the modern person that you are, or do you want to live in the past, gorging yourself on fish and just hoping for the best?

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Ladies and gentlemen, step right up, step right up, and learn how to put your health back into your own hands. Come a little closer now, that’s right. Allow me to introduce to you the magical, magnificent (and marketable) cure that will finally bring you relief from your aches and pains. Have doctors ignored you, dismissed you, or left you to wallow in your own pain? Have you been left battered and bewildered at the doorsteps of the very professionals who say they want to help? Leave the disrespect behind, and the worry. Allow me to introduce you to fish oil! Fish oil is a space-age anti-inflammatory, combining the wisdom of the ancients with the most modern technology, allowing this precious substance to be harnessed at a low, low price that you will have to see to believe. Supplies are limited, however, so get yours today. Right now, I am authorized to provide a very special offer of two bottles for the price of one! That’s 100% off your second bottle! But wait—there’s more! Pay with cash, and we’ll throw in a third bottle for free. Absolutely free! Only you can take control of your health. If you don’t, nobody will. Have a twinge in your chest? Feeling weak in the knees? Worried about sudden death? Never fear. Fish oil is here!

For a while there, the claims associated with fish oil were a marvel to behold2—fish oil has been proposed to help prevent schizophrenia and eye disease, ADHD and asthma. Still, there are some promising avenues to explore. If a diet high in fatty fish can help mitigate the risk of heart disease, why not isolate the property in the fish that is so helpful, package it, and sell it on its own!3 Shelf stability is awesome, after all. Fish oil is one of the most common dietary supplements taken in the United States. Eh, the fact that supplements themselves don’t seem to have the same heart healthy effects as eating actual fish shouldn’t stop you. Check out the reduction in pain and stiffness that you will experience on fish oil supplements if you have rheumatoid arthritis!4

So a diet rich in fatty fish is probably good for you, but attempts to isolate the valuable elements in fish resulted in supplements whose hype exceeded their promise. What’s an enterprising pharma company to do?

Photo credit: Maria Korneeva for Getty

Enter: Vascepa.

In November 2019, an article published in the Washington Post seemed to suggest that fish oil was being resurrected. “FDA panel endorses wider use of fish-oil drug to protect against heart problems,” the headline reads. But it turns out that the “fish-oil drug” in question is not the same thing as fish oil. The first two paragraphs of the article clarify:

A panel of experts unanimously recommended Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration allow wider use of a fish oil-based drug to treat people at high risk for heart attacks and strokes even when they are taking cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The 16-0 endorsement of the FDA advisory committee puts Dublin-based Amarin Corp. one step closer to widespread distribution of Vascepa, a drug the company has said could be worth billions of dollars annually. The FDA, which usually follows such guidance, could make a long-awaited final decision next month.

Fast forward to 2023, and find fish oil getting battered in the popular press. The same Washington Post that wrote excitedly about the “fish-oil drug” in 2019 now reports that “Marketers overstate fish oil claims for heart health, study shows,” and “Fish oil claims not supported by science.”

And yet Vascepa is going strong. The FDA did indeed approve its release, and now, the skilled marketers at Amarin Corp are working to distance themselves from the seedy underbelly of fish oil. That seedy underbelly isn’t all that seedy, of course, being merely the vague sense consumers increasingly have that maybe fish oil is not a miracle cure after all, and maybe, actually, just eating real fish once in a while is a better choice. But the marketers at Amarin, poor dears, have an even more difficult challenge than that, for the truth of Vascepa is that its only active ingredient is a slightly tweaked version of one of the two most recognized omega-3s in…fish oil. Remember DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid)? According to Vascepa’s website:

FDA-approved Vascepa is made up of one active ingredient: icosapent ethyl (IPE), which is an innovative form of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)

If “EPA” sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an omega-3 fatty acid. IPE is the only active ingredient in Vascepa and is considered the reason behind the significant CV benefits Vascepa can deliver.

Well gee, an uninformed person like myself might read that and think—if IPE provides such significant cardiovascular benefits, why not go ahead and take fish oil after all, which has a) the omega-3 that IPE is based on, a molecule doesn’t need to be synthesized in a lab and has never been suggested to be toxic, and b) contains DHA as well, another omega-3 which also sometimes seems to be associated with cardiovascular benefits.

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Not so fast, buster. Some of the myriad reasons that that would be a bad thing to do are conveniently listed right here, also on the Vascepa website:

To summarize their argument: you should use Vascepa because the FDA says you should use Vascepa, as do some medical societies! Plus there’s this swell study5—funded by us!—that shows that our product is better than placebo at preventing heart damage. Oopsie though, we used a placebo that itself causes heart damage6. When people without conflicts of interest undertook a similar study,7 except that they used an actual placebo, all benefits of our delightful drug disappeared. Damn.

Reasons that the good people at Amarin would have you avoid fish oil supplements include that the FDA remains unconvinced, the American Heart Association isn’t in favor of supplements, and fish, from which fish oil comes, were never intended or approved to treat heart disease. They’re fish, after all, not medicine! You see, the only medicine that could possibly be effective is one that was created by people with a profit motive.

Note that there is no science backing up any of these claims. The one study they have was self-funded and used a toxic placebo, and every other reason they trot out is based on authority: trust us, because the FDA says so. Trust us, because the American Heart Association (AHA) says so. Trust us, because unspecified medical societies say so.

Science and medicine aren’t supposed to take marching orders from authority, ever, even actually trustworthy authorities. In addition, though, consider the obvious:

In a system where science is being bludgeoned to death and those who are witness to the crime either yell about it and are shoved into a corner, or remain silent and continue to collect their paychecks,

where the only “evidence” necessary to make scientific or medical claims is to refer to the recommendations of organizations (e.g. FDA, AHA) and publications (e.g. Science, Nature),

in an era when those same organizations and publications are strapped for cash and looking for new ways to stay afloat,

those organizations and publications will absolutely get gamed. They will become corrupt. They will get captured. And so they will remain in existence, sort of. Still draped in the aura and gravitas of their former reputations, they may look like the august sheep of old, but are very much wolves on the inside.

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The real reasons that Amarin would have you use Vascepa are these: in 2021, Vascepa brought in over $550 million dollars net for Amarin in the United States, and Vascepa is the only product that Amarin makes. Once you know this, the story begins to make an easy, smooth, and so very quantifiable kind of sense.

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An Inuit fisherman and dog sled driver in Qaanaaq, Greenland, chops halibut to feed to his hungry dogs. Photo by Justin Lewis, for Getty.1

As cited in Bang, Dyerberg & Nielsen 1971. Plasma lipid and lipoprotein pattern in Greenlandic West-coast Eskimos. The Lancet, 297(7710): 1143-1146.

2

The site where this list came from, healthline.com, is awful. I would not rely on their analysis for anything.

3

To be fair, fish oil may also be a better companion than actual fish, or at least than their heads are. As has been widely accepted for years now, fish heads “can’t play baseball. They don’t wear sweaters. They’re not good dancers. They don’t play drums.”

4

This is a claim without citation on the Mayo Clinic’s website: “Studies suggest fish oil supplements might help reduce pain, improve morning stiffness and relieve joint tenderness in people with rheumatoid arthritis. While relief is often modest, it might be enough to reduce the need for anti-inflammatory medications.

5

REDUCE-IT trial, with toxic “placebo”: Bhatt et al 2019. Cardiovascular risk reduction with icosapent ethyl for hypertriglyceridemia. New England Journal of Medicine, 380(1): 11-22.

6

This means, among many other things, that the people who orchestrated the REDUCE-IT trial induced heart damage in their control group. Ridker et al 2022. Effects of randomized treatment with icosapent ethyl and a mineral oil comparator on interleukin-1β, interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, oxidized low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, homocysteine, lipoprotein (a), and lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2: a REDUCE-IT Biomarker Substudy. Circulation, 146(5): 372-379.

7

STRENGTH trial, with actual placebo: Nicholls et al 2018. Assessment of omega‐3 carboxylic acids in statin‐treated patients with high levels of triglycerides and low levels of high‐density lipoprotein cholesterol: rationale and design of the STRENGTH trial. Clinical cardiology, 41(10): 1281-1288.

I once woke up on top of a snake.

I wasn’t in danger, and neither was she. He? I forgot to check. At the time, my expertise included being able to sex snakes—that is, to ascertain what sex they are—without too much embarrassment for either me or the snake. In this case, though, I didn’t do it.

I was in the middle of a five-month field season on Nosy Mangabe, a tiny island off the east coast of Madagascar, which is itself a massive island off the east coast of Africa. The vast majority of species on Madagascar are found nowhere else on the planet. On the island with me were two Malagasy “conservation agents,” who lived in a miniscule cabin and whose job it was to clear trails and monitor the occasional comings and goings of fishermen in wooden pirogues and sailors in decrepit boats laden with cloves. Nosy Mangabe was a nature reserve, and nobody without permits was supposed to make landfall there, but sailors often came on land.

I was in Madagascar trying to decipher the sex lives of poison frogs, but I got a lot more education than that. The first time that I happened upon a group of naked sailors bathing in a stream, I was as surprised to see them as they were to see me. I did not break stride. Continuing down the trail, I heard rustling behind me, and looked back to find the four men, still quite naked, tip-toeing behind me. They all leapt behind trees when I looked back, in a failed attempt to hide themselves, which was more amusing than worrisome. I felt like they were no threat to me. Luckily, I was right.

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Sex

We live in an age of utter nuttery:

Journalist Róisín Michaux posted a picture, taken at the Free University of Brussels, of a sticker in a bathroom that reads “Real straight men fuck trans women.”

The maternity and neonatal health providers at a hospital group in England’s National Health Service have decided that “vaginal birth” offends birthing women who don’t think they’re women. So as not to offend the deluded, “frontal birth” is the term the providers at NHS are now using. To me, this invites the question of what other kinds of birth are available. Has anyone tried an ass birth?

At the shallow end of the pool, an actress who played Princess Diana in The Crown declared herself “non-binary” in 2021, and has now begun to show up places in her underwear (sort of—it doesn’t really look like underwear to me). Look at me! She is screaming to the world. Look at me! Oh, sorry: They is screaming to the world.

In pitch perfect response, onto the scene comes Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and host of the podcast “You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist.”

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In 1984, an ad for President Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign declared “it’s morning again in America.” Under Reagan’s leadership, the ad continued, “our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

I wasn’t buying it. I was a teenager then, not yet old enough to vote, but I didn’t like Reagan one bit. I especially didn’t like his VP, George Bush, former head of the CIA, patently involved in skullduggery of all sorts. In the first election for which I was eligible to vote, in 1988, I voted for Jesse Jackson in the democratic primary. Months later, when Bush won the White House, I wore a pin that read “it’s mourning in America.” It felt like dark times. Little did I know.

I have never missed voting in a presidential election, although my enthusiasm and hope have waxed and waned. I always voted blue, except when I voted green. In 2020, I voted for neither of the decrepit clowns on offer.1

But I still agree with some of what the Democratic Party stands for. I am still pro-choice (although the excitement that some democrats show for abortion has always been repellent to me). There are other policies on which I have changed my mind, but the Democrats have not. I no longer see the virtue or value in affirmative action, for instance. There are yet other positions that the Democrats have that seem to be incomplete and shallowly held, primarily there to polarize an angry base—gun control comes to mind. But mostly, in today’s Democratic Party, I see a dangerous suite of policies being thrust upon a loud and confused populace by an incompetent leadership.

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Joe Biden is running for reelection. His campaign slogan, as found on both his official website and his twitter banner, is “Together, we can finish the job!”

What job is that, Joe?

Is the job that you hope to finish the selling out of the American people to Big Pharma?

Oh, but you now claim that “we’re going to keep standing up to Big Pharma, and we’re not going to back down.”

Fascinating. Remember when you had the federal government spend north of 30 billion dollars on unsafe and ineffective new drug treatments that were marketed as vaccines, and then further helped Big Pharma with endless PR, throwing good money after bad, and mandates that reached nearly every corner of the economy? Do you know how many people lost their jobs, their families, their lives, as a result of those actions?

Do you care?

Or is the job that you hope to finish that of reducing the size and influence of real science such that it can be drowned in a bathtub?2

Your NIH and CDC perpetrated hoax after scientific hoax on a scared and gullible American public, bureaucrats hiding their lies behind lab coats and advanced degrees.

Your FDA pretended that a drug that has long been designated an essential medicine by the WHO was only for horses, and its lawyers then tried to backtrack in court. They were—thankfully—roundly slapped by a judge this week.

Your Office of Nuclear Energy at the DOE hired a dude with kinks so public—including pup handling—that the crime for which he was ultimately fired seems tame by comparison. Sam Brinton, deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition, was fired after he was discovered to be in the habit of stealing women’s suitcases at airports and then parading around in their clothes.

But hey, what has science ever done for us?3

Let’s finish the job.

Or is the job that you would like to finish that of confusing all Americans into believing that up is down, two plus two is five, and what they can see with their own eyes is less trustworthy than what the internet assures them is true?

You talked with and promoted a young man who had made several prior attempts at becoming famous, but the one that stuck, for which Dylan Mulvaney was invited to the White House, was cosplaying as a girl. You promoted a different man who is cosplaying as a woman to assistant secretary of health; Rachel Levine has since been celebrated by USA Today as one of their “Women of the Year.” In the world you are shepherding in, women aren’t even the best at being women anymore. You have denigrated women’s rights to single-sex spaces in locker rooms and bathrooms, domestic abuse shelters and prisons, while shaming those who resist. In your administration, ideology and platitudes matter, but women do not.

The schools are overrun by ideologues who are certain that parents need to sign waivers in advance if their children are to receive antibiotics, but if a girl declares that she’s a boy and chooses a whole new name and identity for herself, well, the parents don’t need to know that, do they.

To the steady drumbeat of claims of a healthy economy, the cost of living has skyrocketed. Everything from electricity to eggs has become wildly more expensive. And forget about buying a home—the prime rate has nearly doubled under your watch, putting mortgages out of reach for many. Every federal agency spends resources on “diversity equity and inclusion” while ignoring the working class, and most of the middle class, too.

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Congratulations, Joe. You’ve managed a lot. There are many citizens in the canoe with you.4 But there are many—many—who would once have embraced your world, but now see it for what it is. It is a shell game, a farce, and it’s not at all clear who is in charge. We the people deserve a leader, not a puppet.

We deserve a country that privileges reality, democracy, and merit, over fantasy, authoritarianism, and equity. We could do without the influence peddling, too.

In the run-up to 2024, we are being set up for another face-off between the same decrepit clowns as last time.5 Are we really to believe that this is the best that America has to offer? Even when, with our own eyes, we can see Bobby Kennedy Jr. standing right in front of us? And Vivek Ramaswamy? And so many more?

“Let’s finish this job,” you say in your campaign video. “I know we can. Because this is the United States of America, and there’s nothing, simply nothing, that we cannot do if we do it together.”

Gosh, Joe. It kind of seems like the job that you want to finish is the United States of America itself. In which case, I’m afraid you may be succeeding.

Compare Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan to that of Biden forty years later. It’s morning in America is hopeful, forward looking. Whether or not it actually felt like morning in America then—and I now believe that I was more cynical about Reagan’s leadership and legacy than was called for—the message was one of possibility. In comparison, Let’s finish the job seems resigned, plodding.

Let’s finish the job is a slogan for people at the end of their lives, for a party at the end of its reign, and for a country at the end of its glory.

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Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail, 1980. Getty / MPI1

Credit to Bret Weinstein for this apt description of Joe Biden and Donald Trump

2

With apologies to Grover Norquist.

3

Apart from the aqueduct and sanitation and roads that is. And irrigation. And medicine…Scientists are like Romans, I guess. Monty Python, as always, ahead of the curve:

4

Evergreen’s equity canoe lives on. See Mike Nayna’s three-part documentary for the story, and Benjamin Boyce’s 24-part catalogue of the insanity that took over a college that we both once loved.

5

The ferocity with which the democrats are going after Trump has to give a person pause, however. He may well be decrepit, and a clown, but he is also seriously under their skin, which might suggest that he is capable of revealing things about them that they cannot abide. The whole escapade makes it look like the democrats are far more concerned about themselves than they are about the American people. That said, I have seen nothing to suggest that Trump isn’t also primarily concerned about himself.

Self-delusion is in the news. I’m not talking about the obvious stuff, where whole swaths of the world seem to be nodding sadly and saying—man, that guy just cannot see what the rest of us see about him.

No, I’m talking about the middle ground scramble1, where talking heads and power brokers and would-be intellectuals see vaguely that they have been wrong, and work to position themselves as if they hadn’t been wrong. It’s tricky, though, because they need to do so without stepping outside of the Overton Window, wherever it happens to be right now. You have to feel for these people. It’s a delicate game, figuring out how to be precisely current, saying everything up to but nothing beyond what you are allowed to say today. It’s an entirely social game, one with little if any reference to the reality of the topics being discussed. Time being zero-sum and all, it must cut into these people’s ability to get other things done—things like learning something about the reality of the topics being discussed.

This week in Things That Caught My Eye: higher ed’s half-assed embrace of scientific dissidents; Megan Rapinoe’s confused feminism; and some truly awesome parenting.

Natural Selections comes to your inbox (nearly) every Tuesday at 8am Pacific. Starting now: Half the time, these will be essays, freely available to all. Other weeks, “Things That Caught My Eye” will arrive, for paying subscribers only.

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