What Started the Cultural Fixation on Gender?

What is going on today where this is such a hot topic? Like what has happened, I mean, what has been the shift in our culture? Can you find a patient zero? Was there an initial explosion that led to the domino effect? Like what is it that's leading to such an utter fascination culture-wide about gender and sex now? It's like these hot, these are the big hot topics of today. It's gender, sex, race. And those things seem to, I guess also sexual orientation. Gender, sex, race, sexual orientation. Those three, I mean, those four, it's just unprecedented in our time that these are the most widely talked about subjects across the board with young people and people that are virtue signaling and people that want to be air quotes woke. What's causing this, Colin? Help us out. You know, it's something I've been tracking for quite some time. Like a bounty hunter? Yes, exactly. Well, I was always, so I started off in like the new atheist movement and I was arguing against creationists and stuff and defending biological realities. And then that movement kind of dissipated and, or at least is not nearly as prevalent and they don't hold as much power. What happened with the new, there was, I think it's atheism plus. Yeah. I mean, there's an actually an interesting segue between atheism plus and the modern social justice movement. Oh yeah. I mean, I see it now. For sure. Atheism was the first movement to be infiltrated by all the language we're hearing now of, you know, appropriation and the whole, you know, check your privilege and all that stuff. Well, I remember that. Yeah. I remember watching atheism plus conferences online going, this is like the craziest virtue signaling event that I've ever seen in my life. Cause it's people that don't just want to talk about the concept of agnostic thinking or atheism. They want to also attribute a bunch of social values to this movement that makes it kind of like a religion. Have you heard of Elevator Gate? Yes. Richard Dawkins involved in that whole? Yes. Yeah. That was sort of the thing that sparked off in a big way the, the rise of a lot of social justice stuff and the fall. Did you explain it to people that don't know what it was about? Yeah, it was a while ago. Let me see if I can outline it a bit here. So there had been some complaints at a lot of atheist conferences where there had been people complaining of sexual harassment and there was one specific example. There was a speaker, her name was Rebecca Watson. She went by Skepchik and she was giving a talk at this conference specifically addressing sexism in the atheist movement. I think she might have said that she wasn't interested in hooking up at conferences or whatever. And then on the way back to her hotel later that night, she went into the elevator and then someone went to the elevator with her. It was a guy. And as they were going up in the elevator, he looked over at her and just asked her if she'd like to come back to his room for a cup of coffee. I was like, well, that's literally what he said. That's a euphemism for, you want to come back and- Netflix and chill. Netflix and chill, yeah. And so she said no, he didn't pursue anymore. They went off to their separate rooms. Everything was fine. The next day on social media, she blows up the internet trying to say that how terrible this was, how she felt so uncomfortable in the elevator. It was in a tight spot, a small elevator. And this how threatened that she was. And it became a really big sort of fissure in the atheist movement because some people were saying like nothing really happened. They just used a euphemism for, they asked you politely if you wanted to come back and do more or you said no, that's the end of the story. And then there was this atheist named PZ Myers who's since sort of lost his mind. And on his blog, he was talking about this event. And then Richard Dawkins in the comment section wrote what's known as the Dear Muslima letter, which is he was writing a sarcastic response to this as though he was addressing some random Muslim woman saying like, Dear Muslima, you have no right to complain about how you're treated, having your genitals mutilated or whatever, because haven't you heard this one woman, her name is Skep Chick, she was offered coffee at an elevator and she said no and the guy didn't do anything after that. So it was a very sarcastic way he approached that. And then that just made the whole atheist woman just getting engulfed in flames immediately. It was all the factions split up between the super woke people and the classic skeptics. And yeah, that was never recovered really. And right after that is when atheism plus came out, which was atheism plus social justice, which really just was woke Democrats who happened to be atheists basically. And all the new conference topics were just like intersectionality and maybe some vague reference to, you know, disbelief or something. So the atheist movement never recovered from that. It's gone downhill. And now we've seen how the same type of activism has moved in and taken over, you know, Evergreen State College and has led to what Brett and Heather have gone through and then it sort of erupted all over the country and what we're seeing now. So that was sort of the canary in the coal mine for a lot of what we're seeing now. What do you think is causing it? Like what I mean, a lot of people have theories on this, but I want to know your personal one. Like what is why is this a thing today? Yeah, well, there's so many different aspects to the ideology. So in the specific area of, I guess, the whole sex denial thing, I think there's this sort of this allergy to the word discrimination in a way where we've been told that discrimination is a terrible thing always. But I mean, it might sound controversial, but discrimination just means that we're distinguishing between two different things in a certain context. Where we think of discrimination is like prejudice. I'm discriminating in this certain thing. I mean, if you if you have a children's sports league that discriminates against adults and most people would say that that's a good that's a good type of discrimination. Right. But we've just sort of adopted this idea that discrimination is really bad. And so now when we talk about trans women in sports or something, you know, they think they're being discriminated against. And what you'll see in the headlines is, you know, women and girls are not able who are trans are not able to play in sports for women and girls. What they fail to mention is that it's not the fact that they're trans. That is the reason why they're not being able to compete. It's the fact that they're biologically male. And that's the the thing that's being kept that we're trying to discriminate against, not the fact that they're trans, because trans is just like a state of mind that they can have. They declare that they're trans. You know, you can't verify it empirically in any way. And so there's just there's no reason to segregate sports by just a state of your mind, basically, anymore, that you would want to segregate sports by political ideology or something else that's completely irrelevant. So I think an aversion to the the concept of the idea that discrimination is bad just across the board is is holding us back from having more productive conversations. And then I know you've had people like James Lindsay on and they talk about just the critical theory, the queer theory that's out there where it's just meant to just pick apart anything. Anytime there's they see a binary, they need to deconstruct it and deconstruct it. And there's it's based on this epistemology of relativistic, you know, relative truth, blurring borders between other things, systems of power. This is sort of the ideology that has taken a root in a lot of different areas in society. And and it's really been coming to a head in the last few years on many topics to on the whole sex and gender debate. We have the critical race theory stuff. We have the post-colonial decolonize the curriculum and it's just spreading out of control. And then people who are not who are who are not the postmodern type, people who are have the enlightenment values and and we're modernists in the way we approach the world. We think that if something's true, if it corresponds to reality and there's certain truths that can't really be denied by anybody, a lot of us are pushing back. And because we've seemed to have lost a lot of a foothold in the institutions, it's now resulting in, you know, people getting canceled. Yeah, it's a strange time in that regard where it just it seems like no one knows exactly what our cultural framework is anymore for discussing things. And every time it gets pushed further and further along, you have to kind of catch up with what you're allowed to say and what you're allowed to talk about and what's OK. Like, it didn't used to be controversial to say there are two genders. There's only two genders. But if you say today, you could get fired from your job. I mean, that's a real thing you can get discriminated against. You can not the discrimination is bad as we discussed. But you know what I mean? It's like it's this is a new thing to get to a position where talking about biological facts, you really shouldn't. You have to discuss the societal agreement, the cultural agreement we have about like how we view or, you know, what the push is or what this idea of compliance, force compliance into this ideology. You have to you have to accept what we view now as sex and gender. Yeah, there's like a language takeover. Yeah. And even when you said just earlier a second ago that there's you know, there's two genders. Well, they've just co-opted the that word gender. And so what used to be the case, and this is something that I was on board with, I was a good, you know, considered myself progressive, was a lot of people would say that sex and gender are different things. Sex referred to your reproductive anatomy, your biology and gender referred to just the way you identify. You can identify as a man or a woman or if they want to expand that, whatever that means, it has to do with identity. It's sort of like sex is your hardware, gender is your software, where you can be a male and identify as a woman. And that was something that I was sort of willing to get on board with. And I was like, OK, why do we need to have the same, you know, we already have male and female to refer to sex. Why do we need to also use man and woman? Maybe we can just let, you know, the those people have have that. Because as a biologist, it didn't really. My my defense didn't really go up because as long as we know what sex is, then that's fine. I can be willing to manage that. And then slowly over time, that distinction became more and more blurry, where now they would say instead of that identify as a man or a woman, they say identify as a male or a female. And they're using the sex terms where they used to use gender terms. And then I'd started seeing on my Facebook popping up people with PhDs in biology sharing articles like there are five sexes or there are seven different sexes or sex is a social construct. And this was as I started pushing back against that, I thought there must have been talking about gender identity, but it became very clear that now they're talking about actual sex itself and that there's, you know, every different chromosomal arrangement that someone can have. Like if you're a Klein filter male or something, you have X, Y, Y chromosomes that your your own unique sex now rather than just, you know, a variation within within the male, the male sex. Do you have a theory as to what caused all this or as to why it's it seems to be progressing? It's not it's not like they reached a point and they went, OK, I think we made our point. Let's let's sort of normalize this and have it be accepted into the common thoughts of people. But that's that's not what's happening. It's like it keeps getting weirder and weirder and weirder. It's like they keep pushing the envelope about what it means. Yeah, there's no one to put on the brakes, really. I mean, they're within the institutions and the people who would normally want to speak up like like I did. They get called names. They, you know, I was looking for tenure track positions and I had people post on on job boards in my field that thousands of biologists like every day that I was at transphobe and a race scientist that they just threw in on top of things just to throw a bunch of slurs at me and see what sticks and try to poison the well for my my my potential hiring. And so people see that that happens and then they just they just don't want to do it. They stay quiet. Right. And then so while you hear is the the loudest voices, the most activists, they come out and they'll they'll just say this type of stuff. And then a lot of people don't want to say anything because they're generally confused because of the jargon that's being used. And then they're kind of do a human shield aspect where they're they're portraying themselves as the next evolution of the LGBT rights or in the terms of critical race theory within this next civil rights movement. And so no one wants to be on the wrong side of history, even though they don't understand what people are saying. Sounds nuts. But who are they to really judge what this is? They just they don't want to be called a racist because that's the worst thing you can be called. They don't want to be called a transphobe because we all want to be accepting people. And fortunately, I think a lot of people are sort of beginning to see that and they're willing to stand up a little bit more now and at least call it like it is, saying that these people have a really bad concept of what biological sex actually is. No, there's not seven sexes. No, sex isn't a bimodal distribution where we're just varying degrees of maleness and femaleness. You know, we can we can definitively say for four thousand nine hundred and ninety nine people out of out of five thousand that they are unambiguously male or female. And we can account for the one percent that's not. But that doesn't make all of us sort of in question of what what our sex is. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.