The Shocking Research On Sexuality They're Trying To Hide - Michael Bailey

what happened with your recent article? So the short answer is that our recent article has been retracted by the publisher of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior where it was published. Retraction is something I've never had an article retracted before and it's something that I've associated with terrible uh things like fraud, plagiarism, grievous mistakes. None of that is true about our article. Uh, frankly and honestly, our article was retracted because of the ideas and the evidence it presented that angered transgender activists and their allies who pressured the publisher who either agreed with them uh based on politics or chickened out or were worried about business concerns. I can't read their mind obviously, but I will say that the retraction was a sham. Um, I I would also say that the retraction has backfired entirely from their perspective. Our article has gotten far more attention than it ever would have. The publisher Springer Nature Group keeps metrics on this. Our article has been downloaded almost 100,000 times, which is, you know, that's not perhaps a big deal for mainstream media, but for an academic article, that is extreme. Uh, we have received more news coverage. We're about um 40 ranked 40 out of 400,000 articles of about the same age in terms of media coverage. Uh here we are talking, you know, I'm on a big co podcast with you. Uh and uh there have been articles and so on. So I'm not hurting. Uh, I just want people to download and read our article and don't pay attention to the retra retraction notice. It it's meaningless. If people want to get a hold of the now forbidden article, where are the where should they go? Same place they ever did. Our article was published open access. That means we actually had um funding from uh society for evidence evidence-based gender medicine uh segum to um uh publish the article for free reading. You know, most articles, academic articles have a payw wall that non-academics can't get through easily. There's no payw wall. The retraction simply means uh for practical purposes that Springier stamped the words retracted article on every single page of the article which you could it doesn't affect your ability to read it and frankly I uh wear those words as a badge of honor now. That makes it kind of sexy. It makes it it feels like it's a top secret seal. So what's there's someone that's listening that wants to go and search what what should they search for on the internet in order to get this article up in the right form? Uh you so what I search in order to go to the site to keep track on our current metrics. You know I'm really waiting for when we get $100,000 view I'm sorry 100,000 views. Uh, Diaz D I A Z Bailey B- A I L E Y R O G D for rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is what it's about. And then you'll have uh links to choose from. Choose the one that says Springer and that'll take you right to the site. You can read the article right there. Okay. So, we've flirted with it so far. What was in your forbidden study which was so reprehensible that caused it to be retracted and and stamped with a wax seal? I I'll tell you in a moment, but I just want to give a a bit of background. This article was published by me and a co-author, Susanna Diaz. That is not her real name. I don't know her real name. She is the mother of a gender dysphoric child whom she believes has rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is rapid onset gender dysphoria is something we need to talk about. I assume that your audience doesn't necessarily know what it is. It's very important and it is the reason why uh the trans activists came after us. Rabbidon said gender dysphoria is the explanation of the surge in cases of gender dysphoria that has happened over the past decade and especially the past five years. The idea is this a subset of gender dysphoric cases and now it's by far the greatest percentage are adolescent girls who never showed any signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. They were not tomboys. They were not masculine. They did however have issues. A lot of them had some mental health problems. They had some social problems and so on. In adolescence, they tended to hang out with a crowd that was unconventional and progressive and ideological. And they got the idea based on ideology that all of their problems are due to underlying transgender that they never knew of before. They suddenly or rapidly announced or they decided that they were transgender and they announced to their parents. And many of these girls, it's mainly girls about three quarters. There may be some boys too but we should talk about them separately. A lot of them are demanding very serious treatments including medical treatments. They want testosterone which has very serious effects on the body and some of them want surgery like the amputation of their breasts and some of them are getting this. Our evidence in our article uh is entirely consistent with that. We surveyed uh 1655 parents of youth whom the parents believed had this syndrome. Threearters were of the youth were girls. The parents said that indeed these uh youth had pre-existing mental health issues and that the mental health issues actually preceded any indication of gender issues by four years. That's a long time. the youth who were most likely to socially transition. Now, social transition means uh changing their pronouns, changing their style of dress, changing what they call themselves, boy or girl. The youth most likely to socially [clears throat] transition were the ones with the most problems. That was also true for medical transition which was uh thankfully rare. Only about 7% uh had sought medical or had obtained medical treatment whereas about 60% had uh taken many steps to social transition. Parents said after they socially transitioned they got worse. And the best what does what does worse mean? They became less happy. They became less close to their parents. They decompensated. And the best predictor of uh transition was uh that the family had received a referral to a gender specialist. And if parents visited a gender specialist, they usually felt that the gender specialist pressured them to transition their child. So there were some other interesting findings too, but those were the ones that got uh people upset and I think those are probably the most important findings because they are consistent with the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria. Rapid onset gender dysphoria was first proposed by Lisa Litman uh who published the first paper in 2018. She also received tremendous push back. Her the journal where she published her article did not retract it but they did uh make her make changes to her original article and she suffered personal con consequences. Brown University where she was cut off their ties with her. She, you know, she lost contracts with Brown University. Activists cannot stand the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria. And I understand why because it is threatening to their belief system. They're strong. They strongly believe that gender dysphoria is always real and that the best way to proceed is to transition as quickly as possible. And furthermore, that youth are always right when they say that they are gender dysphoric, that they're trans, just believe them. All of these are contradicted by the [clears throat] idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria. And our study was strongly consistent with the existence of rapid onset gender dysphoria. I will admit that ours is only the second major study of this phenomenon and there's plenty of work to do and I don't think that we've got this nailed shut so that everybody is obligated to see this world as we do. But it's an important study and instead of trying to silence our research, it would have been better if the skeptical had done their own studies to try to clarify what they thought was going on. But of course, they didn't want to do that. see if I'm right with my conception of the sort of two current explanations for what's going on with regards to uh the increase that we've seen over the last 10 years or so. One theory posits that the world's degree of acceptance of trans people at large has changed. It's called the the left-handedness argument uh online sometimes, which is that uh during the Middle Ages, if you were left-handed, you were often accused of being a a witch or a wizard or something. Uh and it would cause you to be ostracized or sometimes killed or punished socially in in some form or another. Uh which meant that I think maybe only 3% of people were left-handed during the Middle Ages. Uh but then when left-handedness is no longer seen as wicked and it's socially accepted, I think the true number of left-handed people is closer to maybe 12%, let's say. So you see an increase in the number of people who identify as left-handed. I suppose uh they can be their true self, their true left-handed selves uh because there is no longer social stigma attached to it. There is uh a camp that argues that the rapid increase that we have seen in the number of people identifying as transgender over the last decade to two decades or so has been due to this um uh releasing of the glass ceiling and and and judgment by the group at large. Uh the alternative theory which is being put forward is one of social contagion. Uh that explains why females in particular, the FTOM M transition, are particularly susceptible to this. Females are more um socially aware, socially malleable and influenced. It's part of their sort of intraexual competition and status um measuring uh apparatus that they have a a a greater susceptibility to trends around them because they are it's important for them to remain part of the tribe in that regard which would explain or be part of the explanation for why girls seem to be more impacted by this uh ever increasing number. It's almost like a mimemetic uh sort of feedback loop that's occurring. How far away am I and what have I missed in terms of that conception of the landscape? You put it beautifully better than I did. So [laughter] you should have got me on the paper. I could have been cancelled as well. Yes. Yes. You're consider yourself a co-author on future research. Uh well I actually I can take it. I I I get enough sleep on the internet as as it is already. Okay. So [snorts] what is first question? Is it impossible for these two worlds to exist together? Is there a blending of rapid onset gender dysphoria with the um activists theory about about this? Is there a way that those two worlds could coexist? Certainly, and I suspect they do. It's it's a question of which is predominating. Uh obviously we've become much more tolerant of the transgender fairly recently. Uh I wrote a book in 2003 and people back then thought that transsexuals were really weird. Interesting but weird and people were uncomfortable around them. Now I think if anything they're thought to be cool uh and I'm glad that tolerance has increased for the transgender, but I also think that it's important to realize that [clears throat] there may be tradeoffs. I don't think we need to be intolerant, but I do think that we need to be aware that attitudes affect what people choose to do. Being transgender is partly a decision that a person makes. Take uh a very, for example, a very masculine female. Well, she might decide, well, you know, I'm a just a masculine teenage girl. Uh, I like playing baseball. You know, I'll just be a girl. Uh, but or she may say, "Well, gosh, you know, I I could imagine being a boy. Plus, you know, it's I get a lot of cred if I am transsexual. And also really something we haven't mentioned yet which is happening which I think is negative is the binding up of transgender identity and victim status. And I just think that that's a problem with our uh world right now that we're promoting victim status not just among the transgender but all kinds of phenomena. And I just think it's very negative. It creates a perverse incentive for people to pedestalize things which are actually negative in the long term. Yes. Self harm. You know, if self harm gives you a degree of prestige somehow in whatever upside down bar world it is, there is now an incentive for people to do a thing which there should be a disincentive for them to do. So you you there is social renown now for self harm or for um uh MP uh multiple personality disorder. I don't know whether you saw on Tik Tok last year, there was a trend of people um they would have their others. I can't remember what the word was. It's like the other the other versions of them would would come out and I'm a this person and I'm a that person. Um which again, you know, I I'm pretty sure who was the guy that created eugenics. Who was the dude that did it in the 1900s? Uh Francis Galton. Francis Galton managed to make himself go insane by worshiping a doll as a deity. Right? My point being that you can you can induce all manner of crazy psychological maladies if you believe them hard enough that I so I don't want to weigh in on Golton because I don't know what you're just talking about and I do know a fair about fair amount about Golton but what the other thing that you said the key thing is absolutely true and really important and really fascinating that if people believe they can enact all kinds of things. And when I say enact, I don't mean they're pretending exactly. They're acting as if they're acting in accordance with their beliefs. This is not the first goaround for multiple personality disorder. We had an epidemic in the uh early 1990s that was associated with an epidemic of recovered memories of sexual abuse. This was young women typically who went to therapy with a therapist who believed in this, who persuaded these women that their fathers typically had sex severely sexually abused them repeatedly over years despite these women never having any uh memory of this. And of course these memories, these recovered memories were false. They didn't happen. Uh and a subset of these women uh also came to believe that they were multiple [clears throat and cough] personality disorder. And I I think that this what's happening now with ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria, is uh the same thing. And the women the the the big difference is that the girls this is happening to are getting it younger 14 15 16 instead of 24 25 26 and they're getting it from their peers rather than than a therapist otherwise I suspect uh the same kinds of people are involved at both epidemics both times why why Would it be the case that there are um psychological risk factors like OCD, autism spectrum disorder and a few others? Why would they be predictive of ROGD? Autism gets thrown around a lot as very common. I I am not as impressed as many people are by the evidence for autism. Uh, for one, the diagnosis of autism has become so vague, I don't even know what it means anymore. It's become quite o overdiagnosed. Um, the youth in our study uh did have an excess of formal diagnoses, but they were very general, anxiety and depression. Um, why would women with these emotional problems have this susceptibility? Uh, I'm not sure. Uh, the 1990s epidemic, these were somewhat older individuals and so they had more time to get accurate diagnoses. And the number one associated diagnosis was borderline personality disorder which is associated with identity disturbance. Not knowing exactly who you are, what you want to be, being manipulative, being prone to extreme emotions. Uh now do I have an explanation why it's they who uh are most susceptible to these false ideas? I don't think I do. I don't think I do. I had a conversation with David Giri a couple of months ago and uh David lucky you. Fascinating guy. Absolutely fascinating. phenomenal episode. And one of the things that I learned when speaking to him, he was the first person that introduced me to the concept of uh rapid unset gender dysphoria. Um the group that uh the another ideology that would be associated with some of the people who seem to be suffering rapid on gender rapid onset gender dysphoria would be a denial of biological differences between men and women. The fascinating thing that's oddly sort of recursive and cyclical and almost ironic if it wasn't so um odd is that the very reason that we have a sex difference in the number of F toM transitions is precisely because of the biological difference between men and women. It is the biological difference between men and women that predisposes these very gulls to the uh increased susceptibility of transition and that's the same group that is denying it. So it's both the supply and the demand and the denial kind of all rolled up into one. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. They they have a very uh strange set of beliefs that are mutually contradictory. For example, they they believe in the idea of innate gender identity that may be hidden and so on, but if it's an innate gender identity then and that men usually have one and women usually have another, [clears throat] that's got to be a biological difference. Uh yeah, I I uh I I think that their science is not very um coherent scientific. I don't I don't think that's going to be a very uh useful way to persuade them. What are the given you've had this relative landmark study you know one of only two massive end size of whatever it was 1655 pairs 1655 parents reporting on each parent reporting on a child of theirs. Yeah. Got you. Yeah. Um what what do you what are the implications of this moving forward? What have you thought about sort of next steps and such? Well, our ne my next step I'm a you know I'm an academic I'm a researcher I'm not a clinician. Uh I think that we need to get uh better and more detailed evidence and I'm involved in uh what I think is going to be a really important uh study that is about to launch this summer. It's in collaboration with Lisa Litman, who is the person who first studied rapid onset gender dysphoria, and Ken Zooker, who is uh one of the world's leading experts in gender dysphoria. Uh all three of us have [laughter] been cancelled at least once. Uh so we're uh the collabor cancelled collaborative collaboration but uh we also are experts who are unafraid to stay in here. We in this study we're going to be recruiting both um gender dysphoric adolescents directly and their families. And we have a a very extensive survey about, you know, mental health and gender, feelings about gender, history of gender, steps taken toward transition and so on. Uh we hope to enroll thousands and we're going to follow these people up over five years at least to see how they turn out and to see how that affects happiness. Are the ones who transition going to eventually be happier than the ones who didn't? For example, that's that's a big question. Fascinating. Yeah. Fascinating. I suppose it's one of those things where um being able to spin explanations without the scientific backing can be done at lightning speed, but being able to test the hypothesis with science is actually a pretty arduous task. So you are always going to be playing catchup behind whatever the wake is that's left in terms of people's bros science. That's exactly right. We sometimes have been frustrated ourselves. The scientific process is slow in part for bureaucratic reasons. We have to be very careful to get ethics approval for this which by the way was the reason the ostensible reason not the true reason the ostensible reason why my latest article was retracted. What's the story there? What what what was the reason that they gave you? The reason was this. Susanna Diaz is not an academic. She just went ahead and put up a survey. She's allowed to do that. She's allowed to publish such a survey. I am an academic. I have constraints. Any research that I do, I have to get approved by something called an institutional review board, IRB, for ethics. Now, the data were already collected. It's too late to go through IRB. I checked with my IRB and they said, "Well, she didn't have to and you seem to be okay being a co-author on this." But Susanna had not done this very legalistic thing that was a conventional informed consent which is basically this is exactly what you're going to be doing. Do you consent? That is what Springer uh said was lacking. That's why they retracted the article. Here's why that's ridiculous. She made it very [cough] clear to parents what the survey was about. They agreed by actually completing the survey. The last line of the survey said, "We're going to publish this online when we get enough data." And that's something that Springer also said. She said, "You didn't tell them that their data were going to be published." Well, of course they want this published. They believe these parents are sick of ROG being shoved to the side, being silenced. That's part of the reason why they wanted to participate in the first place. So that that's the reason they gave. uh I don't believe it for a second but you know in our new research that we will be launching soon we went through all the IRB uh procedure we are so covered that uh there's not going to be any chance of any problem like that moving on to some of the other work that you've done what is the typical sexual orientation of F2M and M2F people who identify as friends. Well, I want to start with what was typical 20 years ago and before which which was pretty well established back then. Most F2Ms, that is natal females who wanted to become men, first of all, they were um adults before they were able to achieve that. There was no transitioning of children or even adolescence. Um almost all of the female to males were female attracted or in the vernacular of sexology homosexual female to ma male transsexuals uh though about 10% were u attracted to um men for male to female these are natal female I'm natal males who want to become women. There were two types. The first type was the the type perhaps we are most familiar with, the kind that comes to mind immediately. It would be a a male who was feminine from early childhood. little boy who wanted to be a girl who became an adolescent who was basically a girl and then uh when he could get surgery he did in adulthood. That type uh was male attracted and sexology called that a homosexual male to female transsexual. Uh, Jazz Jennings. I don't know if you know who Jazz Jennings is. She's a reality TV show. Uh, I have considered her that type, though I'm less sure now for, uh, various reasons. But the other type is at least as common, but it is quite unfamiliar because nobody talks about it. And it is autoophilic maleto female transsexualism. Autoinophilia is a sexual orientation I guess whereby a man is sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman. Most of these natal males are attracted to other people in the world and they're attracted to women. But they are also attracted to and sometimes much more attracted to a woman that they create inside themselves. It starts typically in adolescence where they will put on their mother's panties and bra, look at themselves in the mirror and masturbate, fetishistic crossdressing. Many of them will have fantasies about having breasts and a vulva. And some of them will actually do what they need to to get those autoagonophilia is very controversial because trans activists have tried to sweep it under the rug. They're embarrassed by it. I'm not I I don't judge these people. Also many autoagonophilic transgender persons it experience the theory as a narcissistic injury because it really means a lot to them to think of themselves as like women. The theory says they're not like women. their men with this weird sexuality and so that hurts their feelings. Um, so I published a book in 2003 called The Man Who Would Be Queen and uh only about a third of the book was about adult transsexualism, including autoaganophilia. And the trans activists back then, a few of them got so mad at what I wrote that they tried to ruin my life. Uh, briefly, I thought they might. Uh, but you know, they did back then. Uh, what is happening to our paper now, they they caused a stryend effect. So more and more people have heard of autoagonophilia including persons with autoonophilia and I want to stress that many of the many autoonophilic males are great people in my experience if they are open and honest They're admirable. I have many autoophilic followers on Twitter. I have some autoophilic friends and so on. Um, and the these people are angry at the activists who have tried to censor any discussion about agonophilia. It has prevented us from knowing things like the best way that autoagonophilic individuals should live their lives. Should they transition? Should they not transition? We don't know. The study studies haven't been done because people haven't even felt free to ask the questions. Is there a natal female equivalent? Have you ever come across anyone that is the opposite of autogyophilia? [clears throat] This is controversial. And that should be that should be the preface for [laughter] every single sentence that you say. This is controversial, I would say, scientifically. I don't think anybody is politically upset about this, at least yet. give it time. So the word for that would be autoendroofilia and I know um transgender uh persons who insist that there really is autoendrophilia. Uh there's a guy who uh named Phil Illy I L Phil Illy I L Y I think he's about to publish a book called uh autoheterosexuality. Very smart guy. Uh but he believes uh that autoendilia uh occurs commonly among transgender females. I am less convinced. You know, I'm I'm being a hardass scientist. You know, I maybe, but I I I kind of doubt it because male and female sexuality are so different. Autoaganophilia is something that requires a male type sexuality which is very focused and fixed and strong. And autoaginophilia occurs kind of sporadically. A a a male finds out on his own and becomes even though he's never heard of it before. It dominates his early sex life. And I'm really kind of skeptical that that happens in natal females. But we'll see. We'll see. Does that if someone and if it's common that somebody that's never heard of it before kind of stumbles upon this thing, this particular interest, this orientation, does that suggest that there is a biological disposition precursor? I would bet more money than I have that we will find that eventually. I think agonophilia is strongly biological. Now, can I prove that? No. But what is going to make a 14-year-old boy decide to put on his mother's panties and go into the bathroom and look at himself and become aroused and so on. Nobody teaches him that. You know, there's a lot of I should hope not. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of interest now uh especially among uh gender critical types about uh something called sissyhypno porn which is it's a type of pornography consumed by autoanophilic males and they're saying that this porn is creating autoanophilia well I I don't believe it I I feel like these guys have this interest and they're finding the porn I I don't think anything plausibly is going to raise this idea in somebody that doesn't already have the interest. The other word that I learned when looking at some of your work is gyandromorphilia. One of the longest words I think I've ever said in my life. What's gyandromorphilia? Gyandromorphilia. So, I'm going to say a word that I I think is fine, but um some people are touchy about it. Gyandomorphilia is sexual attraction to shemales. What I mean by a sheale is a nato male transwoman who has both breasts and a penis. still um you know I I assume see it I can see I can I can see it in my mind's eye. Yep. Well, it it's not hard to find it online. That that is a kind of pornography I have come across. Uh, and it actually is uh quite a common form of pornography and even I think just plain old normal straight men get into that sometimes. But they're they're different than the kind of men who need that and prefer it. And for example, I had a I had a girlfriend at one time whose ex-husband uh had that preference. And in order for them to have sex, they needed to bring a picture of a shemail on the computer screen so he could look at it and become aroused. that became a problem for her. I can imagine I can imagine that that would create complications. Yes. Yeah. But that's, you know, I some other just plain old I think mostly just plain old straight men. They just I think don't have the hangup about the penis being there too. This is what you know back in the 90s you know on Alan Partridge which is a famous British comedy show one of his friends it turns out was going to Thailand and he comes back and all he wants to hear about is the lady boys. He all he wants to hear about is Lady Boys. Tell me about the Lady Boys. He keeps on saying Yeah, that's right. The lady boys. That's that's what they are. Yeah, they still tour as Lady Boys of Bangkok in the UK. I don't know if that's the same in the US, but I mean there's posters everywhere for Lady Boys of Bangkok. To my knowledge, they don't come here, but um you know there there are um she escorts that you can find online. Um I I knew in writing my book uh the 2003 book called The Man Who Would Be Queen. I actually at that time knew some transsexual uh prostitutes, some of whom had worked as she male prostitutes and then they uh got surgery and continued to work as female prostitutes. Um opening opening up to as many markets as possible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the one that I'm thinking of preferred the um the men who liked women to the men who liked she males. I I think she thought that the ones who liked she males. I don't know that they treated her differently as as a very interesting. So this is this is an obvious uh followup which is is this a new category of sexual orientation? Are these people closer to gay people or are they closer to straight people? Great question. And so I can answer the second part of that question. They are very close to straight people. They are not at all gay guys. Guys who get into she males. So if we bring these guys in the lab and we show them pornography featuring just women and the the kind that we use in this situation is two women having sex with each other female female porn and male male male porn. uh and th those are the kind best kind of uh stimula because if somebody gets aroused there's no ambiguity about who they're getting aroused by. Um guys who are into sheales get aroused to the females but not the males but they get slightly more aroused to videos of two sheales getting it on. And that's a little different than typical straight men who get more aroused by two females than two shemales. But neither gyn gynomorphiles nor regular straight men get aroused to two men getting it on. Right. Next ne next obvious follow-up question to that is I've heard you say that heterosexual women are genally indifferent. What does that mean? I I would say not just genally indifferent they're I think that they're conscious feelings are indifferent in the laboratory to erotica. So if we bring women into the lab and we show them the same kinds of stimula, two men having sex, two women having sex, straight women show an indifferent pattern of genital arousal. They get equally aroused to both by both and they get and they say they get equally aroused by both. Now, they don't get that aroused psychologically. They don't straight women do not get as aroused to watching either kinds of erotic stimula that I just mentioned as either straight men do or gay men do. But it is interesting that they seem to show this flat pattern. Lesbians, in contrast, do show both a genital preference and a subjective preference for female stimuli. Is there a vestigial arousal among lesbians for men? Lesbians do get more aroused by male stimula than they do to nature scenes. What about do they get more aroused to gay men than gay men do to lesbians? These questions are hard to answer. Uh these are the studies that we need, Michael. These are the these are the hard hard charging questions that we need. Well, they're hard to answer because the kinds of apparatus that you must use to measure genital arousal in men differs from that that you must use to measure it in women. And the best evidence that we have uh we've taken it out of the genitals into the brain. We've done uh fMRI scanning of um people who looking at erotic stimuli and it pretty much shows the same patterns as the genital stuff does. and your excellent question. I I I think I'm going to have to hold off answering because I don't remember. [laughter] [gasps] That's fine. So, we kind of I I remember I um I had a conversation with Christina Duranti and she taught me about a study where they brought um women into a lab and they sat them down opposite uh two different guys. One guy was really nerdy and one guy was kind of a bad boy, leather jacket and sort of like quafted hair and stuff like that. and they analyzed the verbal responses and the um physical responses that women had to each of these different men. Now, they had a Oscar-winning film writer, some award-winning film writer write the script that the gentleman actor was using. So, it was like, you know, if you were gonna cut the cool guys, like, if you come with me, I'll show you the best night of your life and it's gonna be really cool. But, I don't really care. So it kind of it doesn't really matter so much. Very very high status. Prestige, prestige, prestige. Uh whereas on the other hand, the other guy was something else. Now the interesting thing is it was the same guy. The same guy was playing both roles. They just styled him differently and his mannerisms had been adjusted. One of the most interesting takeaways was there was a a number of uh lesbian female attracted women who were in the study and when they looked at their behavior with the lower status man, it seemed relatively straightforward. when they looked at their behavior with the highest status man, even though they had a self-report of not being attracted to him and their uh verbal uh behavior wasn't particularly forthcoming, their non-verbal behavior was much more flirtatious. So, they were playing with their hair more. They were kind of leaning in. They were pouting a little bit more. And what that kind of suggested to me, which I think kind of leads into some of your work, is that even for women who are not attracted to men, for a very long time, men have been the gatekeepers to so much with regards to survivability, reproduction, protection, resources, etc. that it feels like even exclusively female attracted women just keep this skill set in the locker room somewhere where if they need to deploy it because the chieftain's come over and she's just finished up with her girlfriend that nobody knows about secretly in a in a cave somewhere uh that she can still kind of turn it on. Uh and I thought that that was really interesting. That is really interesting. I wasn't familiar with that. Also, I think that lesbians women who identify as lesbians are not as exclusively female attracted as gay men are male attracted. Even if they might deny that uh lesbians are more likely than gay men to become non- lesbian. uh you know relapse to go back. Yeah. There there's uh a researcher named Lisa Diamond who has studied something she calls female fluidity which refers to women's greater propensity to um I don't know become romantically interested in somebody regardless of their natal sex. And now not not all women do this and there are some you know let's say gold star lesbians who uh would never uh go for a man but I think there are more lesbians who have the capacity for sexual attraction to men. Okay. So in your opinion then is males sexual men's sexual orientation is more fixed and women's is is more malleable. Absolutely. And that's that's part of the reason why men but not women not many women have paraphilas which are these weird sexual interests as paraphilia but some others are for example uh pedophilia sexual attraction to children. What's the what's the ampute one? What's that one? Uh that is called acrymophilia. Thank you. Yeah. Right. Yes, which we've been studying that there's um and and zophilia attraction to animals uh lipophilia which is uh attraction to morbidly obese people and the guys who are into them tend to be just normal weight guys. Uh and we we just we have a paper that is about to be published. it's uh accepted and I'm working on the proof now which I think is he modestly says I think it's very interesting uh but we studied we we studied guys into amputees guys into animals and guys into the really huge fat people and for each of these three kinds of paraphilas a lot of these guys also have The inversion they are sexually aroused by the idea of becoming yes a fat person an animal uh which you know and and I think we have about 10 guys into amputees who've actually managed somehow to get amputations. Wow. So I first learned this from Dr. James Cantor and spoke to him about it and and he described it in this really lovely way which was um a lot of the sexual let's just call a lot of the paraphilas that people have and and and the odd fetishes that people are turned on by um is reflected both outwardly and inwardly. So there are people who are attracted to amputees. There are people who see themselves as amputees. They have their limbs. They have all of their limbs but they feel like they should not. they feel like they shouldn't have that. He also uh I don't know whether you believe that this is true said that there are people who are attracted to children and there are people who see themselves as children. There are men often who want to be dressed up as babies. We did the first study of this. Kevin, my PhD student Kevin Sue and I did a first study of autopedophilia and That's right. Uh and the most ethical form of pedophilia. [laughter] Yeah. And one a really interesting finding of that um study was that men some of these men are attracted to boys some are attracted to girls. Well the the guys who are attracted to girls are sexually aroused by the idea of being a little girl not a little boy which is interesting. [snorts] M so you have it that is a great way to prove that the relationship outwardly and inwardly is the same because otherwise you wouldn't have this relationship between the two. That's so interesting. Why is everyone not a sex researcher? Why [laughter] is everyone not doing parap paraphilia sex? I feel the same way. It's so interesting. Oh, okay. So, in your opinion, does bisexuality truly exist in men? Like, how how accurate do you think the stereotype is that bisexual women are really straight and that bisexual men are really gay? In I think it was 2005, we published a paper um that failed to find evidence that male bisexuality truly existed where by that I mean that men in the laboratory would show arousal to both men and to women. uh that did not make did not make us popular. We were um you know it got us into the news but not liked. We have kept studying this by we I and my then graduate student now he's a professor in England Geral Rigger and we've uh gotten several hundred uh several hundred uh subjects in the lab and uh two years ago we published in proceedings of NA National Academy of sciences uh a paper in which we showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that male bisexuality truly exists. Um there is a subset of bisexual men who clearly produce arousal to male stimuli and to female stimula. Most of them are somewhat more aroused by one sex than by the other. They're not exactly It's a predominantly Yeah. gay or a predominantly straight bisexual man. Yeah. Yeah. But they're they're a bit bisexual. Yes. So I now believe for sure in male bisexuality. At the same time, if you talk to gay men, ask just ask them this question. Did you ever say you were bisexual? About half of gay men will say, "Yeah." Then you say, "Well, were you really bisexual?" And they say, "No." So, it really does happen that some men misrepresent being bisexual, but it also seems to happen that some men are bisexual as I would understand that. Understood. But it's a a small cohort and also you it's difficult to stress test whether this is the thin end of the wedge on route to becoming a fullyfledged member of the gay community or whether you're actually going to just stop at the letter B. Yeah, that's interesting. Um what what about environmental influences on sexual orientation? So we have at the moment uh in Korea a very sort of sex negative culture which you'll probably be familiar with where there is the four B's movement women who are recanting I can't remember what the four different B's stand for it's in Korean uh but it's it's men and patriarchy and family and work or kids or something like that and it is downstream of a whatever less than one birth rate and it kind of it's everything's career is just a mess But that seems like uh whether it be outright celibacy/abstinence or uh uh turning to lesbianism. I don't know whether that's true. Um that is a sexual orientation response to an ecological or environmental cue. Right? something has happened that has changed maybe the sex ratio, maybe the um mate value of the uh potential available partners that are around. Downstream from that we have declining birth rates across the west too. We have uh an increasing cohort of high performing women and an increasing cohort of underperforming men. Hypergamously that means that maybe women are going to be struggling to find men that are of the mate value that they would desire. Even though we're in a society which has been the most sort of sex positive ostensibly than it's ever been, I think that there is a bit of a sex recession going on. There's a great um uh article in the Atlantic about this. So with all of this folded together, how how malleable is sexual orientation in response to the local environment? And could you foresee a future given where we're at sexually and with the mating crisis at the moment that this could continue in the future? [clears throat] This is another one of those times when it's important to distinguish male and female sexuality. And this is what I'm going to say is speculative because this hasn't been established and there's a lot of disagreement. But my gut sense is that men's sexuality is not going to be responsive to cultural pressure much. I I say much because there are parts of the world where men will have sex with other men, other males. Let's not call them men. If the males are presenting as very feminine and perhaps transgender. So for example in Samoa there's a natal males who are considered a third sex called the fafina and you got the lady boys and Thailand and so on. It's pretty common for just plain old straight men to have sex with these natal males. Now, I don't think that makes them gay. They're not having sex with men. They're seeing these people as femaleike. But I don't think there's anything any kind of cultural change. Even if I could build society from the ground up that would make straight men want to have sex with each other. Uh I think women are likely different and more responsive to cultural factors. Uh and perhaps also things like um bad experiences with men. there's a uh you know this belief that uh one route to lesbianism is being mistreated by men. We don't know that's true, but I find it plausible. But I don't think that uh women mistreating men is going to make them go gay. No, that's fascinating. One thing that I've been considering a lot is you've been talking about the thin line between what being gay means physically and what it means in terms of appearance. You know, there's an interesting question. Is a very voluuptuous big boob, big lips, long hair, um, Thailand lady boy type presenting person, more female than a very shaven head, uh, sort of more androgynous body type, but vagina owning woman. And there's a really interesting question going on here, you know, that you highlighted there. It is in Samoa. It's referred to as a third gender. You know, there's a lot of um accusations from the left of genital fetishism, which you might have heard of, which is that you're actually being uh you're addicted to the genitals as opposed to the pres presentation. But there is an interesting question given that our sexuality is so easily fooled. We are such rampant sexual beings that a 6 in x 4 in screen that has a small depiction of sex happening on it is enough to fool our brain to think there's some sex happening here. No, there isn't. There was some sex happening there a long time ago and now you can see around the side of it. You know that it's not here. You know that you're not getting any of this. It's and that that illusion is responsible for the internet. Correct. [laughter] Correct. Yeah. So my point being that you you already concede as soon as you accept the fact that porn is an effective stimuli, you accept the fact that it is not exclusively about the action, it's about the presentation. Right? Is it just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, all the way down to the more female presenting, regardless of whether it's a XX or XY chromosome person, it it really starts to blur the line between what is and is not classed as a a same sex or an opposite sex attracted sexual orientation. Yeah, I think that all we have for the most part are are senses or and you know, men especially, but humans in general are very visual species. And um you're absolutely right that some trans women, even those who still have a penis, uh can look uh quite they look like really attractive women. uh although often you can kind of see the remnants of their maleness and their bone structure or something like that. But uh yeah, I and I I think that in those cases, men who don't feel attracted to them or say they don't um that's more likely to be uh mental um you know, some kind of aversion, an idea like that person is a man, not a woman. So despite the fact that they look like a really attracted woman, I can't go there. Um, yeah, it's so fascinating because I've seen this, you know, I've seen this argument happen on on dating shows or on uh right-wing commentary channels and stuff like that around uh, no, because that would be gay. I'm like, is it is it more gay to have sex with what looks like a nine out of 10 woman body shape, size, voice, presentation, actions, everything with a penis than it is to have the exact opposite, all of the presentation factors of a man, could be on testosterone, could be all of the rest of it, but has a vagina. That it and it's a really really fascinating question. you know, the sort of it falls in line with a number of other arguments. The sort of more biological essentialism side of things, especially the people that would say, um, unless you can change your chromosomes, and even not then, if you're a natal male, I'm calling you a man. If you're a natal female, I'm calling you a woman for the rest of time. Um, so it's a a suite of beliefs, I suppose, all of which interplay with each other and would also cascade down from there. But um yeah, it's a it's a really really fascinating consideration around what it means. And this is when you get into the deeper and deeper into the layers of paraphilia and and the nuances of sexual orientation. It all kind of starts to break apart. It's like the quantum level of of uh sex research, I suppose. Yes. Yes. We we are going on the outskirts here. Um what about people's gayars? Do you think that most of us have an accurate gaydar? Yeah, this is again something we've studied quite a bit. Uh, and yeah, people have a much better than chance uh gayar. Now, it's not perfect, but they are much better at than chance at discerning whether a man is gay or straight. and they rely so gay men, you know, just their outward appearance in the West currently is not necessarily very feminine. Although I I I think gay men might present themselves more attractively than straight men, but it's more things like movement, you know, and speech. Speech patterns are Yeah. You found that there's there's like a gay accent. There's a gay accent. Yes. What is the gay accent? [laughter] We So we we know it when we hear it. and and you know actors can often effect a gay accent even if they're straight. Uh there's interestingly there's uh a lesbian accent too. I I think a gay accent may tend to be more expressive and gay men articulate more clearly than straight men and lesbians have the opposite. They're less expressive and they don't articulate as clearly. Do you think is that in any way gay men modeling female speech patterns? Are there any parallels there? Yeah, you you asked great questions and you know so nobody knows and I I think there are two at least two good hypotheses there. One is that unconsciously growing up gay men, you know, some of them they had somewhat feminine gender identity and they did model. Uh the other is that there's something about gay men's brain which is somewhat feminized and produces this speech pattern. Nobody knows. Well, when it comes to the uh ability to present clearly, my speech coach that I use for the podcast is gay. Uh classically trained in theater, classically trained in improv, uh for not just an outrageous communicator. And probably the best communicator that I've had on the show is Douglas Murray, who is also a a him and Miles, my speech coach, are like two peas in a pod that have never met. Um but just phenomenal like out of this world precision with his ability to um remain cool under pressure uh to be able to communicate in a very precise way. Um to be able to use inflection and drama and whimsy and to then be able to pull it back without being uh fragile just phenomenal. And so yeah I I I wonder Andrew Doyle as well satist from the UK that runs the Tatania McGrath uh Twitter account. I wonder I wonder whether um being gay is a competitive advantage in the world of online commentary perhaps. Um but yeah, it's all of that stuff's so interesting and you're right as well that you kind of I I don't think I've been around sufficient lesbians to be able to say that I would I could pick up on that. Um the only real things that I ever notice with lesbians are sort of the it's the dress. I think that lesbian lesbians seem to dress significantly more differently to normal women than gays do to normal men. Yeah. The the plaid shirts, the baggy jeans. Um Yeah. Gay gay men uh dress somewhat differently, more stylishly at least. It's just better usually. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Very funny. What was that paper that you did about male mate value being more malleable than female mate value? Well, that's an old one. Um, yeah, the student who was the lead author on that was interested in the ex explaining the sex difference in the in depression. Women are more likely to get depressed than men are. And she hypothesized that it could be because, you know, women's mate value is more tied to their looks, which she said you can't do that much about, whereas men it's their accomplishments, which you can. And um and she got some evidence for that. I'm not sure that I that that's you know an old paper and I'm not sure I believe the theory because you know if women if women really can't do that much uh about their looks what's the cosmetics in industry doing I mean uh and you know it's it's not that easy for a man to go out and double his income. So um anyway, but that that's what the paper was about. Yeah. So I find I I had a conversation with Ed Hagen as well recently and Ed did a study where they controlled for upper body strength when looking at differences in depression and anxiety. And when you control for upper body strength, the differences between men and women get smaller and smaller and smaller and then essentially go away. Um, and the the the reason that I was interested in discussing uh malleability of mate value is that it's it's a common discussion that's had on the internet and it's born out of a contest between men and women about who's got it worse. It's like, well, it's easy for you because you just need to go and get a boob job, but I can't make myself any taller. And women would say well it's easy for you because you know at 21 I reach my peak sexual market value and it's all downhill from there and you get to continue to acrue status and resources and it's very much sort of um two people talking different languages that the sexual brains that the sexual attraction mechanism that works for men what they want from women and for women what they want from men are not the same. It's not you can't play uh a a balancing act here. There is no ability to work out the equity. There's no exchange rate between these two. Like how many boob jobs is 3 in of height worth? Do you know what I mean? Like there is no way of us doing oh well you could wear high heels and put makeup on but you can go out for 5 years and increase your earning potential by 40%. Like what what does that even mean when we're talking about this? Um, I had a theory, which I may be total horseshit, so I'm going to try and bring it back up again. I had a theory that um, male mate value to the individual to the individual is more malleable and to the group is less malleable and female individual mate value is less uh, less malleable and to the group it's more malleable. that you basically have as a man there are more degrees of freedom that you can move yourself on. Uh and there is a longer timeline that you can do it on specifically because of the fact that you know a guy who's 35 is more attractive than a guy who's 25 to most women on average. And I don't know when that peaks probably in your mid mid to late 30s perhaps. Um, but even then, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio has been uh acquiring and disposing of under 25 year old girlfriends regularly for like two decades now. Um, so with sufficient status and and resources, you can continue to cycle through that. Um, but yeah, what what do you what's your mindset at now when it comes to malleability, especially with us facing this mating crisis and and people having concerns around uh being able to be seen by the other sex? Well, I I think that in the sense that I understand you, I think we're probably very malleable. The culture has changed tremendously, you know, in a fairly short time. And I it's going to guessing it will change tremendously still. I hope it changes back in certain ways cuz I'm not that happy with certain things now. But that's a different question than do I know how to change it and I do not. Um and that that has to do with male male female interactions as much as academic freedom both of which well the latter concerns me more now. Michael Bailey ladies and gentlemen Michael I really really appreciate your work. Any opportunity to dig into people that are looking into sex is is fascinating for me. I've immensely enjoyed talking to you. I I hope that we get uh more chances either in person or back here, whatever. Pleasure. I have a laundry list of things that we didn't get to talk about to do with sexual arousal patterns, virtuous pedophiles, uh the birth order effect of homosexuality. So, we can absolutely run this back. Let me know once your new paper is out. Uh as a reminder for the people who want to check out your article and also follow you online and stuff like that, where should they go? Where would you want to direct them? I am a boring academic. Uh we you can go to Google Scholar and search for J. Michael Bailey or there's something called research gate where uh you can find lots of my papers as well or email me uh at my uh university address. It's jm- bailey b a i l ynorthwestern.edu and uh and I'll try to help you if you need it. Uh yeah, nothing fancy for me. Michael, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.