Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Truth About Testosterone
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. When I think about how controversial the subjects of gender and sex have become, how risky it's become to talk about either of those things in public, I weirdly always think back to this old This American Life episode from 2002. At some point in putting together this week's radio show, Alex suggested that it might be a fun thing to do and might illustrate some interesting principles about testosterone if everybody on the radio staff would get their testosterone level checked.

In the episode, which I really don't think could even be brought up at a pitch meeting in public radio nowadays, everyone who works on the show gets tested to see who has the highest testosterone levels. And now for the results, I am opening the envelope. Wow, that's just incredible. Okay, among the men, Rakoff is number one and has like twice the amount of testosterone of anybody in the group. Wow. Looking back with our 2021 goggles on,

It feels almost risque. Wow, but Rakoff has twice as much. As any of us, the gay Canadian Jew living in Manhattan. Okay, we really have to dispense with the Canadian Jew. But actually, that is non-corollary. Here were a group of people playfully being curious about this powerful hormone without fear of being fired for talking about it.

The part that stuck with me most throughout all of these years was this interview they did with a trans man. What's amazing about it is how instantaneous it is, that it happens within a few days, really. The world just, you know, changes. And he was talking about the effects the testosterone had on him after he started taking injections to transition. What were some of the changes that you didn't expect? The pain.

The most overwhelming feeling is the incredible increase in libido and change in the way that I perceived women and the way I thought about sex. His name is Griffin Hansberry, and I remember being shocked by the candor of his description about being on the subway after he started on T. Before testosterone...

I would see a woman on the subway and I would think, you know, she's attractive. I'd like to meet her. You know, what's that book she's reading? I could talk to her. This is what I would say. There would be a narrative. There would be this stream of language. It would be very verbal.

After testosterone, there was no narrative. There was no language whatsoever. It was just I would see a woman who was attractive or not attractive. She might have an attractive quality, you know, nice ankles or something, and the rest of her would be fairly unappealing to me. But that was enough to...

basically just flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another. It was like being in a pornographic movie house, you know, in my mind, and I couldn't turn it off.

I mean, I could not turn it off. I was totally gripped by this because the ultimate mystery, or at least one of the ultimate mysteries in life, if you're a woman, is that you want to know what it's like to be a man. You want to know what it's like to be in the body of a man. And to me, it was so eye-opening to listen to a person who's been on both sides of the divide. I felt like a monster a lot of the time. And it made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot.

And I thought it was so eye-opening, the way he so intimately lets us inside his mind, his honesty, even at the risk of being offensive. Something that happened after I started taking testosterone, I became interested in science. I was never interested in science before. No way. Come on. Are you serious? I'm serious. I'm serious. You're just setting us back 100 years, sir. I know I am. I know I am. All of that feels like a relic of the past right now.

Because today, of course, we're living in an age where even being curious about this subject is a hazard. People aren't crazy to be scared to talk about it because talking about it gets you labeled. It gets you labeled as right wing or bigoted or phobic in some way. But there's nothing bigoted or phobic at all about talking about sex, talking about gender, talking about our bodies and the hormones that course through us and help shape who we are.

To help us cut through some of the nonsense and also to explain to us scientifically how these hormones work, today I'm speaking with Carol Hoeven. She's a lecturer at Harvard in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and she just came out with a book called Testosterone, the story of the hormone that dominates and divides us. The journal just named it one of the top 10 books of the summer.

We talk about a lot in this episode. We talk about the idea of nature versus nurture, why men are the way they are, why women are the way we are, why it's gotten so hard to talk about biology, perhaps especially in science departments, in the academy. And of course, in light of the Olympics happening right now, we talk about the role that human sex differences play in sports and what is fair and what is not fair.

We hear a lot these days about believing science. There's a lot of front lawn science in my neighborhood that declare in this household we believe science. But what does it really mean to believe science, especially on a subject that's so sensitive and one that touches all of us? On this, we can have no better guide than Carol Hoeven. What kind of man? Why do I love you so? We'll be back after this. Please stay with us. What kind of man?

When you love me, no. Why can't I let you go?

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Carol, welcome to the podcast. Barry, it is such a pleasure to be here. You open your book with a scene that I've thought about a lot since I read it. And you're a young researcher, you're at the beginning of your career, and you're in Uganda, and you're sort of out on this expedition before dawn to collect the pee of chimpanzees. And you witness a scene that sort of haunted me. And, well, I could...

I could say what it was, but I'd rather you explain what it was that you witnessed that day and how it connects to the theme of your book.

So I'd been following the chimps around at that point, probably for six months or so in the Kibale forest of Western Uganda. And I'd seen definitely a fair amount of physical aggression, almost always among the males. And that was not unusual. But what was unusual was on this particular morning,

I woke up before dawn and hiked out the mile or so. I can't remember whether it was around one or two miles to find the chimps and where they had slept overnight. We usually left them in the early evening when they were creating their nests high up in the treetops. They make these beautiful beds out by bending the branches and covering them with leaves, and they sleep in those high treetop nests.

And in the morning, they have to go to the bathroom and they pee over the side of their nest and we tried to catch their urine and then pipette it into test tubes so that we could end up measuring the testosterone level of the chimps at that point.

But then I would go after the sun came up and follow the chimps around as they, you know, do what we do, sort of find food, sleep, get into fights sometimes, have sex. And so on this one particular morning, the dominant male, his name is a Mosso, he went off with one female and her two young children. One was a baby and one was a three-year-old.

And Utamba, the adult female, was sitting behind Imoso on a log and she was grooming him. It was just all peaceful and I was very relaxed.

And then things changed so suddenly and Imoso jumped up on the log and he just seemingly out of nowhere just started beating her up. And not just normal aggression that I had already seen before, which is, you know, a slap here, a chest beat or, you know, dragging a big stick and waving your arms around. And so there were displays and there were sort of low levels of aggression. But this was a prolonged...

on her. And she grabbed her baby and tried to huddle over her baby to protect her baby. And I will never forget the little three-year-old Kalimi

who was running around trying to pummel this very large dominant male chimp as he was beating her mom. And this went on for ultimately about nine minutes. He beat her with his fists. He kicked her. He hung from a branch and kicked her that way. And he also got a hold of a stick and started to

beat her over the head and back with a stick. And evidently that had never been witnessed before chimpanzees using sort of weapons as part of a beating that way. And then later on, Time Magazine ran a story on it featuring me and what I had observed and, you know, what had happened with the chimps.

And the headline was wife beaters of Kibale. So, you know, they anthropomorphized the event pretty seriously. Obviously they're not married and we don't know what the relationship to that kind of aggression in chimps and similar kinds of aggression in humans is, but it does, you

come to understand that there are some important parallels there. And that perspective of trying to understand the origins of all kinds of aggression, whether it be male on female, male and male in humans, that project can be enriched by really looking at what happens in non-humans, particularly non-human primates, and then really getting at what testosterone does, because it is at the root

of these sex differences in behavior that have a lot of parallels between chimps and humans. And obviously chimps don't share any aspect of human culture. Yet we see these really

powerful parallels in the way that the males and females behave in both species. And it's not limited to comparisons with chimps. Of course, these similarities exist across, you know, between humans and many, many other species. The subject of your book, the subject of testosterone or T as it's often called in the world that I travel in, it's become like

Such a lightning rod in the culture war. Before we get to that, though, I want to just like give myself sort of an education in the basics, which is explain what testosterone is and explain to us what testosterone determines. Because to me, the stereotype is.

you open your book with, right, of this hyper-aggressive chimp in this case, but, you know, could be human male animal, as being sort of like aggressive and super horny. There's this idea that that's all because of high testosterone. And I guess I want you to just kind of clear up, separate out the myths and the facts for us on what this thing is and what it determines. So

Testosterone is a reproductive hormone, just like estrogen. And reproductive hormones, their main job is to help animals, including humans, do what evolution has designed us to do, which is convert energy into offspring as efficiently as possible. And just let that sink for just a minute because that is...

what we are motivated to do. We're driven to acquire energy, right? We're hungry, we get food, and what we do with that food, we have to survive, of course, in order to reproduce. But if we don't reproduce, our genes go nowhere. So we have to be driven to get energy, to survive, and to have sex and form pair bonds in humans. So estrogen in females, because female mammals are the ones who have to

gestate and lactate the offspring and use their bodies to grow and nurture the offspring. Females need more fat, for instance, than males, and they do accumulate about twice as much fat, but they also need, if they're going to be in this situation where without somebody else's

taking care of the offspring, the offspring will die if the female doesn't engage in certain nurturing behaviors. So females have to have not only these physical characteristics, but some sort of a predisposition, more than males, to be nurturing.

So estrogen has a relationship to that suite of characteristics that help females reproduce in mammals and in other animals too. But mammals are interesting partly because females have to provide the parental care, but also because we are one of the 5% of mammals in which males provide sometimes very intensive parental care. And in humans, as anyone can see, some men are incredibly involved

parents and are extremely nurturing and really bonded to not only their partners, but their offspring. So male humans are capable of a high degree of parental behavior and are not as aggressive, anywhere near as aggressive as something like male chimpanzees who have to fight for every mating opportunity, roughly, and really fight for status and use physical aggression to do that. So human males...

you know, relative to females benefit reproductively from getting more mates and they can get, they can increase the number of mates they can acquire. I'll just not, not that they possess women, but, um, through, um,

status competition, which is not always physical, but in an ancestral environment, it probably was more physical, which is why human males are larger and stronger than females. So testosterone starts working in utero where the testes produce high levels of testosterone that is pubertal levels. And that sets sort of the stage in terms of developing the reproductive physiology and

differentiating the genitalia. So a penis rather than a clitoris, you need testosterone to develop a penis, the associated internal plumbing, and then there's some actions in the brain. This is called the organizational effects of testosterone during this prenatal period. And to some degree in the few months directly after birth, testosterone also rises. But

These effects of testosterone are starting to coordinate the body and the brain to support males in engaging in reproductive behavior that's likely to be adaptive. And that starts with little boys, even though they have the same androgen levels at most ages before puberty. As girls, they are definitely already masculinized, and everyone can see that. And it's not just in humans, that boys like to tackle each other

and really enjoy sort of rough physical play to an extent that girls don't. That doesn't mean that girls don't do it. I did a lot of that. I played baseball and climbed trees. And so it's not, again, that there's this total separation in behavior, but on average, there are different patterns.

And that seems to be due to testosterone because we see almost the exact same patterns in many, many non-human animals. And if you manipulate the testosterone levels of a male fetus, if you reduce them, then he will play more like a female. And that could be in chimps, that could be in rats,

and you could take a female and increase her testosterone levels and she'll do more tackling and rats do something called boxing where they get up on their hind legs and try to pummel each other and they look like they're having fun. You can't see a smile on their face or anything, but...

This does seem to be due to early testosterone exposure. Just to be super clear, boys and girls, men and women, we both have testosterone in us. It's just the amount that a boy has is so much more than even the most testosterone-laden girl. Is that right? Yes, a boy fetus. And then...

Shortly after birth, the levels equalize and then they start to differentiate again before puberty around 9 or 10, even 11 sometimes. Okay. So like testosterone doesn't cause a man to...

run after a woman or a boy to want to tackle his best friend. But it's sort of like a boy or a man's threshold for before they might become aggressive or violent or express horniness is like lower, somehow lower bar. That's exactly, exactly right. And that's exactly how I like to put it, that the bar for these kinds of behaviors is much lower and that

It's expressed in a given environment and the environment that we're in where boys, if they have the option to play with other boys or girls, they're typically going to want to play with other boys. And if it's possible for them to go tackle each other, that is something they're going to want to do that girls aren't necessarily, you know, going to favor as much. So it's not...

you know, it's hard to say it's causing that behavior, but you do see these patterns that are totally consistent cross-culturally. You might see that the size of the sex difference budges around or the exact way that people express that behavior is different, but you see that general pattern in all cultures. And that bar analogy is great because that applies especially to physical aggression where,

you know, if a woman is threatened, the bar for her to risk her own safety or life to confront the aggressor is much, much higher. And that I do believe is directly caused by testosterone because it's adaptive for her to live a long, healthy life where it might be more adaptive for a male to confront a threat and try to gain status or mating opportunities. Because evolutionarily we're animals and that's, that's,

That's the reason for it, right? That's right. That's right. And just an important caveat, again, is how two caveats, how important the environment is in shaping these behaviors. It's not that our nature's

necessarily changed by the environment. But the sort of path from what you feel you want to express and the actual expression of behavior and the consequences of those behavior, those are different things. So I think we retain our natures, but the culture really budges around how those are developed and expressed. So Carol, I know you teach at Harvard. I assume you live in Cambridge.

I do. And I imagine you live in a context sort of like me, which is to say, like hyper blue America, where even the idea of saying something in polite company like, yeah, of course, boys tackle each other more than girls do. Or, yeah, boys are more interested in physical pursuits than girls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We could do dozens of examples. Those things have become commonplace.

third rail things to say out loud. Why is that? What is so threatening about the idea of there being difference?

between males and females or boys and girls? Yeah, I mean, so there's two things. One is the observation of differences. So more people can agree that these differences exist because we see them. That's really hard to deny that the differences exist. But I think what is implied by that statement is that the differences have roots in our biology, in our genes, something like that. So it is that sort of taint of...

biology on difference that is threatening to people. And, you know, there's a few different reasons, I think, why those kinds of explanations are threatening. And one has, one of the reasons is the fact that women historically have been shut out of many opportunities and heavily discriminated against. And some of the reasons that have been used to support, I think, some of that discrimination are grounded, have been grounded in science.

However, I do not see clear evidence that people's biases against women are driven by

facts that they find in science. I don't really think science has much to do with actual people's treatment of women. I think they just have their stereotypes and they stick to them. Or fake science, right? Like the idea that women are weak and hysterical and, you know, hot house flowers and all of that. All of those things might not be science with a capital S, but they were kind of like

I don't know, they had the ornamentation of science. Yes, but then you have to ask, well, how influential was even that weak science in terms of social inequalities, right? And people's attitudes.

So there's that. But then there's also some just errors of logical reasoning that people are making and a fear that the truth will be used to subjugate women, maintain the patriarchy, et cetera. So there's two things. One is, well, suppose that's right. Suppose that the truth will be used by some people in positions of power to maintain that power. You know,

What do you do in that situation? Do you lie? Right. Do you use bad science? That seems to be what's happening, unfortunately. And that's a bad strategy. I hope I don't have to articulate exactly why that's a bad strategy. I don't think... Well, the thing you're expressing is a really, really prevalent argument right now, which is like the argument basically says because...

America and our liberal democracy is so brittle and because the threats of all of these various isms are so stark and because we're sort of in this incredibly precarious place, this argument was made, of course, much more strongly when Trump was president, we sort of have to suppress the

things that would give sucker or fuel bad actors. Exactly. And I feel like this subject fell into that cavern, I guess is the word for it. Yes. And that's just one problem. That is a big problem. It's hard to understand how smart people who want to advance some of the social agendas that I agree with

Like reducing whatever barriers there are to equality. I'm not in favor of, you know, equal outcomes for everything. I don't think that's ideal. I don't want that's not something I want to fight for. I want to fight for equal opportunities. So in other words, you're a liberal, right?

Yeah. I mean, the old kind. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. Of liberal. And so this idea that science should be downplayed or distorted and not even just science, you know, it's just the facts, the truth, reality.

I mean, this isn't the, I don't study all of that stuff, but I do have an incredibly strong intuition that that is 180 degrees the wrong way to go. What we need to do is the exact opposite and do a much better job educating young people in particular about critical thinking, the scientific method, statistics,

so that they can understand what the implications of scientific information are. And we're doing the opposite, we're telling people that their feelings

are an indication of reality in the external world, that they should rely on their feelings rather than logic and deduction to understand the world. Say more about that. Like, I'm really curious about that. What would be the feelings in this realm? Okay, I have a great example. This is something I wrote about in my book, and it happened to me, so I get it, because this is how I started out.

I was in a graduate seminar. My first one of, I think one of the first couple of graduate seminars I was in as a grad student at Harvard, I had imposter syndrome. I didn't think I belonged there. Sorry. I always get a little teary when I talk about this. And we were reading a paper on the evolution of rape in the scorpion fly. And the author of the paper used

the example of the scorpion fly to hypothesize about the evolution of rape in humans. The scorpion fly, if he cannot acquire the resources necessary to attract a female, he has a special appendage he can use to pin her down and rape her. And the hypothesis that I was supposed, it was my turn to talk and I was supposed to be analyzing the data, presented an argument in the paper in light of that hypothesis as it applied to humans.

And I am emotional and I have been sexually assaulted and I was hurt and angry and felt small. And I will never forget that feeling. And that when it came my turn to talk, I just said, like I'm saying right now, I just said, this guy is an asshole. And I said it out of hurt and anger. And I thought he was an asshole. He's just the guy who wrote a paper that he

thinks where he's trying to defend a hypothesis, right? And if rape is an adaptation in humans, I would like to know that rather than avoid that really uncomfortable truth. But what happened in that seminar, this was in

like 2001 or something. So that was back in the day before trigger warnings and all that. And the male professor just kept saying, instead of like, "Oh, are you okay? Do you need to leave? Do you, you know, blah, blah." He just said, "Well, what do you make of the hypothesis?" He kept trying to refocus my attention to the argument and the data and the hypothesis. So he was respecting me. He was respecting me as a scientist.

And I am so grateful to him for teaching, having the courage really, I guess, or just being British, a British man, to teach me that lesson that I could be a scientist. And even when something feels uncomfortable and feels wrong, it's so easy to reject it just out of hand. Instead of saying, yes, I'm

I'm introspecting right now and I see that this hypothesis is making me uncomfortable. I'm going to put my emotions over here and I can think about them later and, you know, indulge them later. Right now, I'm going to try and analyze rationally what I make of this hypothesis so I can understand the world a little bit better because that is what is going to make me a stronger, more powerful person and a better science educator."

And that is what I tell my students, that they, like in my courses, they will encounter things that make them uncomfortable. I am totally open to hearing what they have to say, why they're uncomfortable and helping them learn to analyze the data and what their, you know, preconceived notions of how the world works. They can bring those into the class, but let's challenge each other and let's never shut anybody down who's working hard to understand the world. We'll be back with Carol Hoeven right after this.

You just brought up one subject I definitely wanted to touch on, which is what it's like teaching about this subject in this moment at a place like Harvard. Like I kind of can't imagine an environment where like cutting through the noise and the bullshit about sex differences, gender, hormones would be harder right now than on a college campus. And

I'm really curious about how your students respond to it and what preconceived notions they come into the class with. Yeah. First of all, I have the best students. And I don't mean they're the smartest students. I mean, they're just wonderful people who are coming to terms with themselves in the world. And they're in this transitional stage. And they're intensely curious about

And I do get a lot of students who are gay kids, trans kids, gender questioning kids, non-binary. They want to know what is going on. People with differences of sexual differentiation, they want to understand. They have a thirst to understand the biology, the evolutionary biology of their own lives and their relationships. And so that's sort of one thing.

you know, reason that some people take my class. And, but otherwise I have a lot of sort of social justice-y kids coming in who are just really motivated to make the world a better place and they want to do the right thing. And a lot of them are initially sort of irritated, um,

and/or resistant to biological explanations because they feel like this is gonna shut down the conversation about culture and discrimination and the barriers that people face to access certain opportunities, et cetera. And I love when they push back and they're open and we have discussions and we are learning together and we're looking at evidence and having conversations.

And I don't always find that among older people who are like, you know, around the grad student age, I will say. So there's a difference there that can sometimes be uncomfortable because I'm not in that same kind of relationship, say, with graduate students. But with the undergrads, there's just a lot of mutual respect and openness. And I couldn't be prouder of my students.

Yeah, sometimes there's disagreement, but it's like we work through it and that's just how it should be. And I have, yes, had a few complaints over the years about, you know, language, particular language that I use. And I'm happy to have conversations about language, but I don't want to compromise on language if it sacrifices scientific clarity. It's really important to me not to just pick up on linguistic trends that confuse people about the science. So I kind of

I'm open to those conversations, but I really need to be convinced to change language. That is like super encouraging to hear, both because I hear, as you can imagine, from professors who write me and say that they're scared to be in classrooms with 19 and 20 and 21 year olds that can blow up their life if they use the wrong word. Yes. And I'm editing a story right now by the journalist Katie Herzog about the way that medical schools are...

I'll give you an example. The story opens with an anecdote from a medical school in the University of California system. And the student who's Katie's source relays an experience she had where she was in a lecture about immunology. And during the PowerPoint, the male professor says,

Stopped the PowerPoint, went into edit mode, and changed a sentence. And the sentence had described a 45-year-old male who complained of shortness of breath. And he deleted the word male. And the reason that he deleted the word male is because in the context of this particular medical school, according to this source, acknowledging biological sex is itself considered transphobic.

So like, that's what I'm hearing a lot of. So hearing that that's not touched at least your classes. It has touched it a little bit. And I do have a, I guess I feel so strongly about maintaining scientific integrity, but being open to

to alternative viewpoints and really working with my students. But I'm so sort of committed to this cause that I would risk my job. I, you know, I'm 55, we're financially secure. And I just, I feel like I'm in a position not to cave into that. And I will not.

But Harvard, I've had a couple things come up and the people in Title IX have totally backed me. A student accused me of misgendering someone who had a, in this case, it was a disorder of sexual differentiation and the person looked, was female but looked very masculine and I referred to the person as a she because I was trying to illustrate the effects of testosterone on their body.

body. And this person complained and I talked to people in the Title IX office and they were just, this was a few years ago, but they were totally supportive. And I felt that Harvard really did support me. And that could be changing. We'll see what it, you know, I taught through COVID last year and we'll see what happens when I get back onto campus this year. Were you on campus when

I forget the exact year, I think it was 2005, when Larry Summers, who was then the president, was pushed out over comments he made about disparity. Yes, and I wrote about that in the book because at the time I had just defended my dissertation, which was on sex differences in cognition and testosterone, exactly what he was talking about.

And I gave an article to, sorry, I gave an interview to the Harvard Crimson at the time saying that I supported him, which was a highly unpopular view at the time. And I, because he was at a-

So first of all, this is a closed conference with, and the goal of the conference was to determine the causes of and ways to address under-representation of women in STEM fields. Science, what is it? I don't even know what it is. Science, technology, engineering, and math. And so he was there to give a talk to contribute to this cause. And he...

Definitely pissed a lot of people off by suggesting that some of the, one of the contributors to the underrepresentation of women in STEM might be choice, that they are choosing to spend more of their energy on parenting, for instance, and step out of the workplace for a while. And that might disadvantage them. He did allow for discrimination, but the thing that really,

got people upset was that he talked about differences in the distributions of, I think what he called talent. So for almost every trait that, um, shows sex differences, there are, you know, there's overlapping bell curves, right? So like with height, there's a very large difference in height and

But if you're 5'9", you know, there's going to be a huge amount of overlap, right? A lot of men are 5'9", a lot of women are 5'9", so you have overlapping bell curves. But if you're 6'6", you're way out on the high end of the male range.

tail of the distribution, right? There's almost no women who are 6'6", right? So the further out you go on those tails, you will see more men on the very high end and the very low end, and not just for height, but for cognitive abilities. So while there's

you know, huge overlap, obviously in cognitive abilities, uh, between the sexes when you get out to the very high end of like, um, abstract reasoning, mental, not even mental rotation is another, is what I studied. And there's large sex differences in the mean there. But even if you have the same mean, if you just like in whatever, uh, however you measure engineering, uh,

ability. You'll have many more men at, on the very, very low end and many more men on the very, very high end. So it just means that the male bell curve is flatter, you know, like a wider, flatter mountain than the female bell curve, which will be taller and narrower. So just by virtue of the fact that you have this sex difference in the distribution of traits, which

is hypothesized to have something to do with men having XY sex chromosomes in every cell instead of XX sex chromosomes, and they are susceptible to...

having genes that give them rare traits be expressed rather than sort of covered up with the genes on the other X chromosome, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean, what I'm hearing is more male idiots, more male geniuses. Yes, thank you for saying that much more clearly. But especially... Which, by the way...

As a, if you're an aspiring female genius and you're listening to Larry Summers, like I can understand why people were triggered by that. Yes, of course. Because you, women want explanations that...

allow them to see the path to equality, right? And if you say, well, this is genetic or this just, you know, this has to do with the chromosomes, then it's very upsetting to people who've been spending their lives trying to make it easier for women to access the same opportunities as men. So it is understandable, but he's also right. I mean, that is a fact and that could contribute to the pattern that we see.

Well, I've been thinking a ton about this phrase recently that I think my wife coined, but I'm not going to take credit for it because I think it was her, but it might have been me. This idea of like not fair, but true. Like there are so many things that are just shitty and unfair, but that doesn't make them untrue, you know? Yeah, but I mean, in this case, I don't even, it's unfair in that males are overrepresented in society.

careers that pay more, right? So you don't make a lot of money if you want to work with people and teach or take care of babies or be an artist, you know, those pay less. And that seems unfair. But if you're a really skilled engineer, yeah, you're going to make more money because partly because it's a rare talent, but also because you're probably going to work for some big corporation. One of the things you write in your book, um,

is that one of the things that drove you to research testosterone and to write this book, you say, I long to understand men. Do you feel like understanding this hormone, tell me how it's helped you understand men?

Wow. So especially the getting into the transgender literature was, that was very powerful seeing what happens when, so imagine if you could just start, um, taking male levels of testosterone and experience what that feels like, right? You would have, um,

totally different appreciation for what it's like to be a man. And when someone who's born male transitions to live as a woman and blocks their testosterone, they have this incredible insight on what it's like, you know, to live as a woman and not, for one thing, not be so preoccupied with sex. That is one of the things that really

But another thing that changes is emotional expression. And so it does seem that, well, again, there are lots of men who are extremely emotionally expressive and lots of women who are not.

this is a pattern that we see on average. And it did understanding testosterone for one thing, helped me accept my husband for his relative lack of emotional expression and his sort of apparent inability to access his inner emotional, you know, and to talk about his feelings and emotions. And I had always found that frustrating because,

And once I let up on that... And you said he's British too. So that's like double whammy. Yes. And letting up on that just because I had that explanation, that really did help me in our marriage. And also understanding my own history with men that's been painful because of sexual assault and other issues. Yeah.

Just having some sort of insight into where that comes from. It doesn't mean that I accept it or that I blame myself or anything like that, but simply having explanations gives me more power to make decisions about my own life and to understand the people around me. And hopefully I'll be

more effective in, you know, trying to advance the causes that I believe in because I have a better understanding of human nature. And so I find that all, you know, super powerful and I'm, I'm glad I have tools to understand the world. I wonder if in the trans literature you were reading, did you ever read the book Conundrum by Jan Morris? I didn't.

Okay. Well, you should, I mean, I highly recommend this book. It's Jan Morris is a famous travel writer who died, I think maybe two or three years ago on an Island off of Scotland in, um, at the age of a hundred. And Jan Morris had this like unbelievable life where she was like in the Royal air force and all she climbed Mount Everest. And it was an unbelievable life. And, um,

was trans and transitioned in the 1970s in Morocco and kind of famously was married to this woman called Elizabeth. This book had a really big impact on me. And then after she transitioned and became a woman, gay marriage was illegal. And so they were together, but technically not married. And then gay marriage passed and they're like in their 90s and they got remarried. Oh, that's so great.

But it was very powerful reading the description of how the emotions and the urges changed. And, you know, just a few weeks ago, I was out to dinner with a friend who's trans female to male and is on testosterone and has had top surgery. And

Is someone I'm super comfortable with. And so I can ask questions like, what the hell is this like? Like, tell me everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, he's like, Bear, the idea that like, you know, like this is the most powerful experience. Like he's euphoric. He's strong. He's running like five minute miles. I mean, this was someone who was incredibly physically strong before, but he's

Listening to people that have been on these hormones that can explain what it's like has been just very, very impactful on me and my understanding of who we are and the differences.

Yeah, no, that was one of my favorite parts of the book. And I had a great time doing that research and interviewing the trans people for that chapter. So I interviewed a male to female transgender person, female to male, a non-binary 12 year old who had just started puberty blockers and somebody who had detransitioned female to male back to female about, you know, what their experiences were like.

crossing that testosterone line. And in one case coming back and being able to report on it as a woman having gone over to the male side and then come back. And like you, I just found that

really powerful, especially in conjunction with all of the other research, everything else that we know about testosterone, especially in non-human animals, it just all fits together and it all points in the same direction. It is incredibly powerful. Culture matters a lot, but we see these cultural patterns that we see

Partly because of testosterone. Men are bigger and stronger and have more power in the world. So I want to talk about the debate over trans women in sports. The Olympics is going on. And I've been thinking and following this lawsuit out of Connecticut in which these three high school girls are suing for the violation of their Title IX protections. And there's a bunch of bills going

that have been passed in various states that the proponents insist are about protecting women's sports, critics say are transphobic. And I think the ACLU has been among the loudest critics of such bills. You know, on their website, they have this article titled, Four Myths About Trans Athletes Debunked. One of the facts includes trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports.

And they cite various factors like height or if your parents paid for private coaching. There's this doctor that's cited in the article that says, a person's genetic makeup and internal and external reproductive anatomy are not useful indicators in athletic performance. You, to me, Carol, seem like the perfect person to answer this question, which feels so charged and so like mired in, I don't know, like,

propaganda narrative rather than facts. Like, based on your research, is it in fact true that trans athletes, let's say specifically male to female, don't have an unfair advantage in sports?

So I get to take the unfair out of it. Fair, I think, is something for other people to decide. But if you just keep it to do they have an advantage. So going through a male testosterone-driven puberty, yeah, that's where the sexes start diverging in athletic ability. So males have twice as much muscle.

um, during and after puberty as females, females have twice as much fat. So even if you don't count all the other advantages like bone strength, hemoglobin, body size, et cetera, just the difference in the amount of fat you have to carry, it doesn't help you in sports unless you're talking potentially about like

long distance swimming or something where, you know, fat can help you float. You, if you have twice as much muscle as someone else, which at the elite level, that is going to all other things being equal, that's going to give you a, you know, minimum 10 to 12% advantage. Uh, so just imagine if you, you have two people with the same

lean mass and you force one of them to carry 20 pounds of dead weight or even 10 pounds of dead weight, like who's going to be at a disadvantage, right? It's the one who has more fat. Fat doesn't fuel power and speed and strength, right? Muscle does and hemoglobin levels do. So

testosterone causes energy to be converted into muscle preferentially over fat. Estrogen causes energy to be converted into fat over muscle. And that is because that is what helps each sex reproduce. So men have

have natural athletic advantages because they go through a male puberty. They have increased bone density, so they have stronger bones. They have a larger body size. They are at least typically 40% stronger, especially in the upper body. And all of these things converge to make it so that at the elite level, the men just...

completely dominate women in most sports. And that is why obviously we have a male and female category. And this is particularly clear in tennis. And I talk about this in the book. So you take two top athletes, Serena and Williams is one of the most powerful athletes, you know, talented, powerful athletes in the world, um,

But she was on David Letterman, and he asked her what would happen if she played one of the top men's tennis players. And she explained how she would lose badly to the reigning world champion Andy Murray. And here's what she said. Wow.

Actually, it's funny because Andy Murray, he was been joking about myself and him playing a match. And I'm like, Andy, seriously, like, are you kidding me? Because for me, tennis and men's tennis and women's tennis are completely almost two separate sports. So I'm like, if I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes. No, it's true. It's true. It's a completely...

It's a completely different sport. The men are a lot faster, and they serve harder, they hit harder. It's just a different game. And I love to play women's tennis, and I only want to play girls because I don't want to be embarrassed. I would not do the tour. I wouldn't do Billie Jean, any justice. So, Andy, stop it. I'm not going to let you kill me. That is Serena Williams. And the fact that she's basically saying it's just no contest, right?

all other things being equal at that elite level, the best man in the world will just blow away the best woman in the world. And that is how it is across any number of sports. And it is because he's stronger. She says he is.

you know, serve so much harder. And that is a fact. And when it comes to like pitching in baseball, so women throwing a ball is hard and, you know, the top women in the world throwing a ball, the top man, there's a 50% difference there in speed and power. And that's just a huge advantage that it's not practice. It's not that women aren't trying hard or practicing hard enough. You

going through male puberty is the result of going through male puberty. And so it's like that thing I'm saying, not fair, but true. That does feel like not fair, but true. But the point with the trans women is that those benefits of puberty are

While the muscle mass and the strength diminish when you block testosterone, the hemoglobin does go down to female levels. So that is the one thing that goes down to typical female levels in male to female transgender people who've gone through a masculinizing puberty. So there you lose some power. But the reduction in muscle mass

which again in the upper body is something like 40% higher in men. There's only after a year on average of blocking testosterone, a 5% drop in muscle longer than a year. It's something like five to 10%. These reductions are totally variable. But on average,

a trans woman will retain a significantly more muscle mass, bone strength, and body size and have, you know, have more lean body mass, which is the thing that you want to focus on for athletic ability. But I should say that doesn't mean that all trans women are going to beat a

all-natal women in direct competition. Laurel Hubbard may not win the gold, but that's, you know, she may not be in the best shape of her life. You know, she's a little bit older, so she might not be at the top of her game. And it may be- We're talking about the New Zealand- Sorry, the New Zealand weightlifter in the Olympics. So-

There's no question that the science shows us that there is an advantage that is retained in strength and speed and height, if that matters, which in many cases it does. That's retained. So on average, yeah, there is an advantage. But the question about whether it's fair, you know, first of all, Laurel Hubbard is

and are, is following the rules. So she's not cheating. So I want to be clear about that. You know, it's, if you think that this is unfair, your problem should be with the IOC, um, the international Olympic committee that sets the rules that says that she is allowed to compete in the women's category. If she reduces her testosterone to five nanomoles per liter for at least a year prior to competition, um, sorry, 10 nanomoles per liter, which is in the male range, rough. That's at the very low end of the male range. So I'm not sure why it's

regulations allow it to be that high. Well, when I started to first pay attention to this question of testosterone levels kind of determine fairness, let's say, in gender-separated sports competitions was over the runner Castor Semenya. And the whole argument there, right, was Castor Semenya was probably intersex, but

That kind of didn't matter as long as Castor Semenya had a female, a normal, I don't need, I'm not going to use the right words here, so forgive me, but like a standard female level of testosterone or somehow within that sort of spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. Did you buy that? Is that fair? Yeah.

Again, I don't want to get into what is fair. I can just talk about the facts of that. Okay, let's say an intersex person. So intersex is a complicated term. And with Castor Semenya, one thing that's discouraging is the way that the media is representing her case as simply being one of a woman with naturally high testosterone levels.

But the fact is that she is subject to the world athletic regulations for athletes with

DSDs or differences of sexual development. So in order to qualify to be able to compete in the female category under these rules for the DSD rules, in most of these cases, the athletes have XY sex chromosomes and internal testes. And the reason that she has testosterone levels in the male range is because she has testosterone

internal testes that haven't descended most likely that produce typical male levels of testosterone. And that testosterone most likely masculinized her to some degree during puberty. And it's confusing people

to refer to her as like, just basically like Michael Phelps, you know, she's just somebody who has this natural variation, but it's really not the same as Michael Phelps. There's a qualitative difference there in that there are testes that produce male levels of testosterone. And we know the advantages that that testosterone brings, um,

And she has refused to lower her testosterone to five nanomoles per liter, which is also almost twice as high as the typical female level. So they are making an allowance there. But even in that case, so that would significantly diminish her athletic ability. But again, it's not clear that that would erase any advantages that she had accrued from going through a masculinizing puberty. Yeah.

So the difference between a Castor Semenya and a Michael Phelps, and I totally remember that comparison being the one that was put forward, was, you know, Michael Phelps had arms the size of an eagle. Like he had this like unbelievable wingspan. Yeah. Explain to me again, why is it that the Castor Semenya comparison is not fair?

Because she doesn't have ovaries. So she did not develop in utero and in puberty and in adulthood with ovaries and extremely low levels of testosterone and high levels of estrogen. So she has a very different phenotype. She has XY chromosomes. She does. She has to. Almost all of the conditions that...

qualify for her falling under these specific DSD regulations. You can find this if you go to the worldathletics.org website. There's a press release that describes these conditions, and these are XY sex chromosome conditions where people have internal testes. So in the most common DSD that athletes experience,

who identify as female but fall under these regulations is 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome. And in this case, these people are

have XY sex chromosomes and internal testes, but in utero and for the most of their lives, they're unable to convert testosterone into the androgen, which is called DHT, that is necessary basically to grow a penis. And without that, they are born with a, what looks like a vagina, but without a uterus and fallopian tubes and ovaries, etc.,

So they have genitalia that look female. And if they're in a place where they can't be diagnosed and treated, which a lot of these athletes are from very remote areas of the world where these conditions are more common and they're not, you know, maybe not well understood and they're sexed as girls, right?

Then they're raised as girls. They, you know, identify as female and they might be incredible athletes for when they're competing against other females. But there's, you know, a reason for that. And what's interesting is the.

Androgens that they produce from their testes in utero don't masculinize the genitalia, which is what causes them to be sexed as girls, but the testosterone is able to act in the brain and does tend to masculinize their behavior. So

People who are sexed as girls with this condition are much more likely to want to play with the boys and engage in rough and tumble play and are eager to play with boys' toys and report feeling that they didn't feel like typical girls growing up. I remember really clearly, I don't know if you remember this, when...

Ariel Levy and The New Yorker wrote that initial profile of Caster Sabenia. This must have been like at least a decade ago. And it was so powerful and moving. And when they described the kind of humiliating things, like the just like the medical exams where she was kind of forced to prove what she was, it was heartbreaking to me. And I have to say that. It is heartbreaking.

And in general, I feel that the debate over trans women in sports is

is a kind of heartbreaking debate because it kind of pits two virtues against each other, like virtues that I think are both very important. One, which is, you know, the word fair keeps coming up, but let's just say fairness or an even playing field. And then the virtue of inclusion. Yeah. Like on the one hand, it seems just cruel to exclude people who desperately want to compete and do something that they love. And on the other hand, like if...

That very inclusion, which I think we would agree is a good thing, might relegate

people born female to never winning a competition again. I'm just curious how you think about this debate as someone who understands the science in a way that I simply don't. Yes. Okay. So I think the science is clear. I think that in most of these cases, there is on average, you know, that going through a male puberty brings an athletic advantage. The problem for me, and I, I, I'm

Feel this very deeply. The problem for me is that people are, the activists who are trying to support the rights of, say, trans people or people with DSDs are trying to win their arguments via the science. And this is causing people to close their minds to the human rights arguments that we should be listening. I want to hear the best argument possible.

from those activists or from those people or from the parents of, you know, if my kid was trans, I assume that I would feel very strongly. I mean, I don't know how I would feel, but if, if, if he were a trans girl and a super athlete and really wanted to compete, I imagine I would feel very strongly that, uh, you know, I would advocate for her and, uh,

I'd have a totally different perspective on this. And I believe that that perspective needs to be heard, and we're not hearing it. We're not hearing the best human rights case yet.

because everybody's arguing with the science and people know basically that they're being, I don't want to say lied to, but they're being misled and they know something isn't just right. So they're pissed off and they're pissed off at, say, people like Laurel Hubbard or the trans girls who are trying to compete in high school. You know, these are very different situations. But I want to hear with an open mind what...

what the best argument from that side is, from the human rights part. I'm done entertaining the arguments based in science. They're extremely misleading and detracting from a quality conversation about a real issue with real people's lives at stake on both sides. And we need to, you know, have compassion and an open mind and reasonable discussions that are evidence-based.

But in addition to, you know, opening our hearts to, like you're saying, this is just, it is tragic. And even it makes me uncomfortable to even have to talk about Castor Semenya's sex chromosomes, you know, or genitalia or something. So I don't even want to, you know, talk about her specifically, but we also at the same time are being fed this.

A bunch of kind of garbage from journalism. Yes, exactly. Exactly. When did you start to see that steaming pile of garbage on the subject that you know so much about? Do you remember the specific like incident that you were like, oh, wow. I mean, it was, I think, Castor Semenya that really got my attention and I investigated that. And then I started really paying close attention to the way that

the sort of feel good explanation that this is just simply a woman who's being discriminated against, just kept being repeated by a handful of extremely vocal activists who were getting the science wrong. That's when I really started to pay attention. That planted a seed in me to want to speak out because it's just very, very confusing to people. They're not getting good information. And again, they're not considering

That the human rights issue. And again, I think that's where we need to be focused is to with, to have compassion for people with differences who want to participate, who want to be accepted. That is the most important thing to me, but that we have informed conversations based in reality and we can do that. And it doesn't mean that

the facts are unfair themselves or that talking about the facts means that we don't care. I mean, that's just not true. We can acknowledge the facts and we can have compassion and try to find compassionate, workable solutions. Yeah, and I think there's dishonesty here.

is just tragically going to backfire because... Yeah, it already is. Let's just take, like, the war on basic English with regard to describing men and women and trans men and trans women. Like, when I see mainstream news sources describing women as people with uteruses or people who menstruate or breastfeeding as chest feeding or vulva havers, like...

That does not make me feel inclined toward to agree with their position, a position that I think by every normal measure I'd be sympathetic to. Exactly. I completely agree with you. It's just this fear of science and facts and biology and changing the language just doesn't ever work.

in the long run. You know, the truth will come out and we can use all the different kinds of words that people are offering and we can pick them up and be shamed if we're not using them properly, but it's just creating massive confusion and people are insulted and alienated and turn off from causes they would otherwise be sympathetic to.

What's the conversation like about this in the world of academia and science? Because some of the people that have written the books that you call out in your own for sort of peddling bad, faulty, propagandistic science are themselves celebrated professors. So like how intense is this debate inside your world? It's intense. And, um,

I have friends at Harvard who are part of the, there's something called the Gender Sci Lab, and I'm friends with them and I respect them and I like them. But we are coming from this issue from two totally different perspectives. And it is frustrating. What's their perspective? That for the most part that

biology and hormones are just not as important as we think they are. And I think that there's something, the next part of this is that we need to be paying much more attention to cultural influences that shape gendered behavior. And I agree that that's incredibly important, but I don't like the strategy of constantly picking apart every study that shows human nature and biology plays a powerful role

in something like unequal outcomes in STEM. That's a critical perspective in kind of picking apart research and trying to find alternative explanations that really incorporate more of a cultural component than a biological component. And I guess it's the overall perspective that I have a problem with. Are you regarded as a thought criminal on your own campus?

Well, I haven't been back on campus since I wrote the book. I certainly haven't gotten any support whatsoever from those people, which, and, or from a lot of the people in my own department. Uh, and I know that there are people in my department who don't like that I'm

writing and saying that sex is binary, that male and female are real categories. You know, they want me to say that sex is on a spectrum. Happy pride. I mean, literally this is, you know, it's as though, no, seriously, these are the tweets like with the pride flag, happy pride. We as evolutionary biologists should be teaching that sex is on a spectrum. And this is- Is it? I mean, like-

Where are they getting... So are they saying that because intersex people exist? No, they're getting that because the people I'm criticizing in the book are saying things like, well...

You know, you can have all kinds of different sex chromosomes. You can have XY sex chromosomes and you can have a vagina. There's, you know, that's a spectrum, right? There's a spectrum of sex chromosomes. There's a spectrum of genitalia. But so what? Like there are sperm and there are eggs. There are two sexes. There's no intermediate gametes.

There's male and female, and then there's the traits that are associated with male and female, like sex chromosomes. You can, in fact, be an XY person who is female. That's if you don't have the gene on your Y chromosome that causes your

gonads to differentiate into testes. So it is possible. Your sex chromosomes don't define your sex. They're very strongly associated with sex, you know, as is your genitalia and your hormones and the way that you present yourself and the way that you behave and everything else. Those are just, you know, and like breasts, those are strongly associated with sex. They don't define sex. That's a fact and I will not stop saying it no matter what anyone says.

does to me. And I just don't like the idea that you should alter the facts of biological reality in your effort to, you know, advance your social cause of like pro-trans or pro-people with intersex conditions. You can do that anyway. You know, having two sexes doesn't prevent anyone from supporting these causes. I totally support those

causes. But it doesn't mean that I have to do it via altering reality and misrepresenting what sex is. You can have two sexes, of course, and fight for the rights that you believe in. So when these colleagues, these other evolutionary biologists are tweeting, sex isn't a binary hashtag. Well, this is actually grad students. Okay. Grad students. I'm calling them out. Do they

Do they know that that's not true and they're saying it anyway? Or do they somehow actually... Like, give me the most... No, I think they believe it. Help me get in their head. I think they believe it. I think they want to believe it. I think they feel that...

They've been convinced that maybe they just haven't thought super carefully about it, but I think they're convinced that because of intersex conditions, because there is so much, there can be, you know, variation in sex chromosomes, you know, there can be females who don't have breasts or males who do have something like breasts, that this means that

Sex is on a spectrum, but they're confused about what sex is. And there's lots of confusion now about... They're conflating the idea of what gender is with sex. Well, but I wouldn't even call, like, there's gender expression, right? But there's also gendered physical traits. So the only thing...

Physical traits that matter for sex are the body plan for the gametes. That's all that matters. If you have testes and you're going to be designed to be producing sperm, that is a male animal.

you know, and, and if you are going to be producing eggs, that is a female animal or large gametes opposed to small gametes. That's it. All these other things can be different. You know, maybe you can be a male with a small body size and, and low muscle mass, and maybe you don't even produce testosterone, or maybe you don't even respond to testosterone, et cetera. But that doesn't mean that you're not male. It means that you have, you might have some condition or you're

different in some way, or you have a different kind of gender expression, but it of course doesn't mean that you're no longer male or that there are five sexes or three sexes or that it's on a spectrum. Is it on a spectrum in any other animal? How many sexes are there in other animals? No, there's, there's male and female. And these same people who are doing research on non-human animals on sex differences in non-human animals are unwilling to then say, they're willing to say, okay, they're male and female bonobos or whatever, but they're somehow, um,

In humans, sex is on a spectrum. I want to just broaden out and talk about the dangers of politicizing science because, you know, we've been talking about the way that the science of sex and the science of testosterone has been hugely politicized and turned into this lightning rod in the culture war. But I feel like we've all just lived through a year and a half of watching what happens when science gets politicized.

You know, where we were told just to choose one of dozens of examples that don't gather in groups, don't gather in groups, social distance, social distance, except if you're protesting the right thing. And I think watching that...

and I could point to dozens of examples, was really, really harmful in terms of getting people who are, let's say, skeptical of the vaccine to trust the vaccine or skeptical of health authorities to trust health authorities because all of a sudden it felt like, wait, are we getting real scientific information or are we getting politics? Right. How have you been thinking about that over the past year? Well, the exact same way that...

the politicizing of science is confusing people. They don't know who to trust. I mean, mostly I feel sad and I'm not, you know, all I can do is my part to stand up for what I believe in and fight for, you know, what I think is right.

But it is, I am discouraged that this science in particular has become so politicized. People are losing, I think, respect for the one thing that we used to be able to agree on, which was the scientific method and facts and our faith in the scientific method. And I think that what is a shame is it does seem like

the respect for science is really declining, people don't know who or what to trust anymore. Science itself, the production of science is politicized. So it's not just the way science is disseminated through the media, right? Which is a huge problem. That's sad that we've kind of lost that safeguard that we could trust the media to be unbiased. So there's that, and I've heard you talk about that so eloquently.

But the other thing that's happening is the academic institutions and the journals that publish the science are falling... Retracting papers. Yes. They're falling victim to the same social trends and publishing, just like you've noted in journalism, publishing what seems to be favored by their consumers. So the kind of studies that make...

people feel good or that downplay, you know, by the role of biology and sex differences or whatever, but it's happening there. The institutions that we used to trust are, have succumbed to this, uh,

just really depressing social trend and people don't know where to turn. And all I can do is teach. And now, you know, I have this book that I'm really trying as hard as I can not to cave and to stick to my guts here and what my brain tells me through my research reality is. And it's just a constant...

of, you know, making sure that I am not doing it too, that I'm not changing the way I write or what I say, because I'm scared of what the response will be. If I don't want to participate in that, you know, I want to push back against that and it's hard and I'm a little nervous, you know, but, uh, it's so important because we have to stand up for

People who are able to have to stand up and defend science, defend what they believe in, defend the right to have open conversations and to demand the truth and better, you know, reporting from journalism and better teaching in colleges and administrations. You know, I don't understand what exactly is going on, but people need a backbone. Where does that conviction come from in you? Because I have to say, when I read your book and then I saw where you taught, I was like,

And then I saw you do a bunch of interviews and just the plain spokenness and frankness was just like a breath of fresh air. Where does that

conviction come from? It's something that I think is annoying about me as a person, and I'm being totally honest. No, is that I tend to speak my mind to a fault. And I know that it's a fault and I try to inhibit it, but I'm just a very honest, direct person. Integrity is really important to me, but it's not like a value that I hold necessarily. It's just how I am. It's easier. It's more efficient.

I can't stand also bullies. I just think bullying, trying to bully people into an opinion gets me worked up and it gets me wanting to defend other people or what I believe in. I'm a fighter in that sense. So I think it's mostly just my personality, but I also love science so much. I'm so passionate about it and I love teaching and it's the worst thing in the world to me to have that

taken away and to have just mass confusion and people don't know where to turn and who to trust. So really, if I can do anything about that, I will. And I will just try, you know, it's having people like you in the world who are also really vocal about, you know, fighting for what is right and resisting these trends where people are just caving to the masses and feeling, you

The more people who can do that right now, the better. And you have inspired me to speak out and stand my ground. You know, I'm always open to disagreement and I'm open to evidence. You know, free speech is incredibly important to me. I'm not sure where that comes from, but I, I feel like I'm in a position now where I'm able to take that risk. If there is a risk, you know, we'll see what happens. Um,

And I feel like people who are in that position who feel as I do and you do should also fight right now for what they believe in and uphold the institutions that used to have integrity and be unbiased, et cetera. Carol, I can't think of a better note to end on. I feel like you just said everything I believe better than I ever could. So

Thank you so, so much for making the time and I hope you'll come on again. Thank you so much. And really thank you for all of your work. I'm a huge fan and keep it up. Thanks for listening. See you next time.