Name: What Started the Cultural Fixation on Gender?
Uploaded: 2021-06-25T17:20:47.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Started the Cultural Fixation on Gender?' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Started the Cultural Fixation on Gender?' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-25. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience what is going on today where this is such a hot topic
like what has happened I mean what has been the shift in our culture is is can
you find a patient zero it was there an initial explosion that led to the domino
effect like what what is it that's leading to such an utter fascination
culture-wide about gender and sex now it's like these these hot these are the
big hot topics of today it's gender sex race and those those things seem to I
guess also sexual orientation gender sex race sexual orientation those three I
mean those four it's just unprecedented in our time that these are the most
widely
talked about subjects across the board with young people and people that are
virtue signaling and people that want to be you know air quotes woke like what's
what's causing this Colin help us out you know it's something I've been
tracking
for for quite some time like a bounty hunter yes exactly well I was always so I
started off in like the new atheist movement and I was arguing against
creationists and stuff and defending biological realities and then that kind
that movement kind of dissipated and or at least is not nearly as prevalent and
they don't know what happened with a new there was I think it's atheism plus
yeah
I mean there's an actually an interesting segue between atheism plus and the
the
modern social justice oh yeah see it now I mean for sure atheism was the first
movement to be infiltrated by all the language we're hearing now of you know
yeah appropriation and the whole you know check your privilege and wire
remember
that yeah I remember watching atheism plus conferences online going yeah this
is
like the the craziest virtue signaling event that I've ever seen in my life
because it's people that don't just want to talk about the concept of agnostic
thinking or atheism they want to also attribute a bunch of social values to
this
movement that makes it kind of like a religion have you heard of elevator gate
yes
yes Richard Dawkins yes involved in that yes yeah that was sort of the the
thing
that sparked off in a big way the the rise of a lot of social justice stuff and
the
fall could you explain it to people that don't know what it was about yeah it
was a
while ago let me see if I can outline it a bit here so there had been some
complaints at a lot of atheist conferences where there had been people
complaining of sexual harassment and there was one specific example there is a
speaker her name was Rebecca Watson she went by Skep chick and she was giving a
talk at this conference specifically addressing sexism and the atheist movement
and she I think she might have said that she wasn't interested in in you know
hooking
up at conferences or whatever and then on the way back to her hotel later that
night she went into the elevator and then someone went to the elevator with her
it
was a guy and as they were going up in the elevator he looked over at her and
just asked her if she'd like to come back to his room for a cup of coffee that's
like
that's literally what he said that's you know that's a euphemism for you want
to come
back and Netflix and chill Netflix and chill yeah and so she said no he didn't
pursue anymore
if they went off to their separate rooms everything was fine the next day on
social
media she blows up the internet trying to say that how terrible this was how
she felt so
uncomfortable in the elevator it was in a tight tight spot you know small
elevator and this
how threatened that she was and it became a really big sort of fissure in the
atheist movement
because some people were saying like nothing really happened they just used a
euphemism for
you know they asked you politely if you wanted to come back and do more you
said no like that's
the end of the story and then there was this atheist named PZ Myers who's since
sort of lost his mind
and on his blog he was talking about this event and then Richard Dawkins in the
comment section
wrote what's known as the dear muslima letter yeah which is he was writing a
sarcastic response to this
as he as though he was addressing some random muslim woman saying like you know
dear muslima you have no
right to complain about how you're treated you know having your genitals mutilated
or whatever
because haven't you heard this one woman her name is Skepchik you know she was
offered coffee in an elevator
and she said no and the guy didn't do anything after that so it was a very sarcastic
way he approached that
and then that just made the whole atheist woman just get engulfed in flames
immediately
it was all the factions split up between the super woke people and the classic
skeptics
and yeah that was it never recovered really and right after that is when atheism
plus came out
which was atheism plus social justice which really just was woke democrats who
happened to be atheists
basically and all the new conference topics were just like intersectionality
and maybe some vague
reference to you know disbelief or something so
uh the atheist movement never recovered from that it was it's gone downhill and
now we've seen how
the same type of activism has moved in and taken over you know evergreen state
college and has led to
what brett and heather have gone through and then it sort of erupted all over
erupted all over the country
and what we're seeing now so that was sort of a the canary in the coal mine for
a lot of what we're seeing now
what do you think is causing it like what i mean a lot of people have theories
on this but i want to
know your personal one like what is why is this a thing today yeah well there's
so many different
aspects to the ideology so in the specific area of i guess the whole sex denial
thing i think there's this
sort of this allergy to to the word discrimination in a way where we've been
told that discrimination is a
terrible thing always but i mean it might sound controversial but
discrimination just means that
we're distinguishing between two different things in a certain context where we
think of discrimination
yeah i'm discriminating in this certain this certain thing i mean if you if you
have a children's sports
league that discriminates against adults and most people would say that that's
a good that's a good
type of discrimination right but we've just sort of adopted this idea that
discrimination is really bad
and so now when we talk about uh trans women in sports or something you know
they think they're
being discriminated against and what you'll see in the headlines is you know
women and girls are not
able who are trans are not able to play in sports for women and girls what they
fail to mention is that
it's not the fact that they're trans that is the reason why they're not being
able to compete it's the
the fact that they're you know biologically male and that's the the thing that's
being kept
uh that we're trying to discriminate against not the fact that they're trans
because
trans is just like a state of mind that they can have they declare that they're
trans
you know you can't verify it empirically in any way and um so there's just
there's no
reason to segregate sports by
just a state of your mind basically anymore that you would want to segregate
sports by
political ideology or something else that's completely irrelevant so i think an
aversion to the
the concept of uh the idea that discrimination is bad just across the board is
is holding us back
from having more productive conversations and then i know you've had people
like james lindsey on and
they've they talk about just the the critical theory the queer theory that's
out there where it's just
meant to just pick apart anything anytime there's they see a binary they need
to deconstruct it and
deconstruct it and there's it's based on this uh epistemology of relativistic
um you know relative truth
um blurring borders between other things systems of power this is sort of the
ideology that is is taken
root in a lot of different areas in society and and it's really been coming to
a head in the last few
years on on many topics too on the whole sex and gender debate we have the
critical race theory stuff
we have the post-colonial you know decolonize the curriculum and you know it's
just spreading out of
control and then people who who are not who are who are not the post-modern
type people who are you know
have the enlightenment values and and we're modernists in the way we approach
the world we think that
you know if something's true if it corresponds to reality and there's certain
truths that uh can't
really be denied by anybody a lot of us are pushing back and because we've
seemed to have lost a lot of
a foothold in the institutions it's now resulting in you know people getting
canceled yeah it's a strange
time in that regard where it just it seems like no one knows exactly what our
our cultural framework
is anymore for discussing things and every time the the it gets pushed further
and further along you have
to kind of catch up with what you're allowed to say and what you're allowed to
talk about and what's
okay like it didn't used to be controversial to say there are two genders there's
only two genders but
if you say it today you could get fired from your job i mean that's a real
thing you can get discriminated
against you can not the discrimination's bad as we've discussed but you know
what i mean it's like
it's this is a new thing to to get to a position where talking about biological
facts you really
shouldn't you have to discuss the societal agreement the cultural agreement we
have about like how we view
or you know this is what what the the push is or what you know this idea of uh
the compliance force
compliance into this ideology you have to you have to accept what we view now
as sex and gender yeah
there's like a language takeover yeah and even when you said just earlier a
second ago that there's you
know there's two genders well they've just co-opted the that word gender and so
what used to be the case
and this is something that i was on board with i was a good you know considered
myself progressive
was a lot of people would say that sex and gender are different things sex
referred to your
reproductive anatomy your biology and gender referred to just the way you
identify you know you can
identify as a man or a woman or you know if they want to expand that whatever
that means um it has to
do with identity it's sort of like sex is your hardware uh gender is your
software where you can be a
male and identify as a woman and that was something that i was sort of willing
to get on board with and
i was like okay why do we need to have the same you know we already have male
and female to refer to
sex why do we need to also use man and woman maybe we can just let you know the
those people have have
that because as a biologist it didn't really my my defense didn't really go up
because as long as we're
we know what sex is then that's fine i can i'll be willing to manage that and
then slowly over time
that distinction became more and more blurry where now they would say instead
of it identify as a man
or a woman they say identify as a male or a female and they're using the sex
terms where they used to
use gender terms and then i'd started seeing on my facebook popping up people
with phds in biology
sharing articles like there are five sexes or there are seven different sexes
or sex is a social
construct and this was as i started pushing back against that i thought there
must have been talking
about gender identity but it became very clear that you know they're talking
about actual sex itself and
that there's you know every different chromosomal arrangement that someone can
have like if you're
a klein filter male or something you have x yy uh chromosomes that you're a
your own unique sex now
rather than just you know a variation within within the male the male sex do
you have a theory as to
what caused all this or as to why it's it seems to be progressing it's not it's
not like they reached a
point and they went okay i think we made our point let's uh let's sort of
normalize this and have it
be accepted into the the common you know thoughts of people but that's that's
not what's happening
it says like it keeps getting weirder and weirder and weirder it's like they
keep pushing the envelope
about what it means yeah there's no one to put on the brakes really i mean they're
within the institutions
and the people who would normally want to speak up um like like i did they get
called names they you know
i was looking for tenure track positions and i had people post on on job boards
in my field that
thousands of biologists look every day that i was a transphobe and a race
scientist that they just
threw in on top of things just to you know throw a bunch of slurs at me and see
what sticks and try to
uh poison the well for my my my potential hiring and so people see that that
happens and then they
just they just don't want to do it they stay quiet right and then so all you
hear is the the loudest
voices the most activists uh they come out and they'll they'll just say this
type of stuff and then a lot
of people don't want to say anything because they're generally confused because
of the jargon that's being
used um and then they're kind of do a human shield aspect where they're they're
portraying themselves
as sort of the next evolution of lgbt rights or in the terms of critical race
theory where then this
next civil rights movement and so no one wants to be on the wrong side of
history even though they
don't understand what people are saying sounds nuts but who are they to really
judge what this is they
just they don't want to be called a racist because that's the worst thing you
can be called
they don't want to be called a transphobe because we all want to be accepting
people
and fortunately i think a lot of people are sort of beginning to see that and
they're willing to
stand up a little bit more now and at least call it like it is saying that
these people have a really
bad concept of what biological sex actually is no there's not seven sexes no
sex isn't a you know a
bimodal distribution where we're just varying degrees of maleness and femaleness
you know we can we can
definitely say for you know 4 999 people out of out of 5 000 that they are unambiguously
male or female
and you know we can account for the one percent that's not but um that doesn't
make all of us sort
of in question of what what our sex is catch new episodes of the joe rogan
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What Started the Cultural Fixation on Gender?

the Joe Rogan experience what is going on today where this is such a hot topic
like what has happened I mean what has been the shift in our culture is is can
you find a patient zero it was there an initial explosion that led to the domino
effect like what what is it that's leading to such an utter fascination
culture-wide about gender and sex now it's like these these hot these are the
big hot topics of today it's gender sex race and those those things seem to I
guess also sexual orientation gender sex race sexual orientation those three I
mean those four it's just unprecedented in our time that these are the most
widely
talked about subjects across the board with young people and people that are
virtue signaling and people that want to be you know air quotes woke like what's
what's causing this Colin help us out you know it's something I've been
tracking
for for quite some time like a bounty hunter yes exactly well I was always so I
started off in like the new atheist movement and I was arguing against
creationists and stuff and defending biological realities and then that kind
that movement kind of dissipated and or at least is not nearly as prevalent and
they don't know what happened with a new there was I think it's atheism plus
yeah
I mean there's an actually an interesting segue between atheism plus and the
the
modern social justice oh yeah see it now I mean for sure atheism was the first
movement to be infiltrated by all the language we're hearing now of you know
yeah appropriation and the whole you know check your privilege and wire
remember
that yeah I remember watching atheism plus conferences online going yeah this
is
like the the craziest virtue signaling event that I've ever seen in my life
because it's people that don't just want to talk about the concept of agnostic
thinking or atheism they want to also attribute a bunch of social values to
this
movement that makes it kind of like a religion have you heard of elevator gate
yes
yes Richard Dawkins yes involved in that yes yeah that was sort of the the
thing
that sparked off in a big way the the rise of a lot of social justice stuff and
the
fall could you explain it to people that don't know what it was about yeah it
was a
while ago let me see if I can outline it a bit here so there had been some
complaints at a lot of atheist conferences where there had been people
complaining of sexual harassment and there was one specific example there is a
speaker her name was Rebecca Watson she went by Skep chick and she was giving a
talk at this conference specifically addressing sexism and the atheist movement
and she I think she might have said that she wasn't interested in in you know
hooking
up at conferences or whatever and then on the way back to her hotel later that
night she went into the elevator and then someone went to the elevator with her
it
was a guy and as they were going up in the elevator he looked over at her and
just asked her if she'd like to come back to his room for a cup of coffee that's
like
that's literally what he said that's you know that's a euphemism for you want
to come
back and Netflix and chill Netflix and chill yeah and so she said no he didn't
pursue anymore
if they went off to their separate rooms everything was fine the next day on
social
media she blows up the internet trying to say that how terrible this was how
she felt so
uncomfortable in the elevator it was in a tight tight spot you know small
elevator and this
how threatened that she was and it became a really big sort of fissure in the
atheist movement
because some people were saying like nothing really happened they just used a
euphemism for
you know they asked you politely if you wanted to come back and do more you
said no like that's
the end of the story and then there was this atheist named PZ Myers who's since
sort of lost his mind
and on his blog he was talking about this event and then Richard Dawkins in the
comment section
wrote what's known as the dear muslima letter yeah which is he was writing a
sarcastic response to this
as he as though he was addressing some random muslim woman saying like you know
dear muslima you have no
right to complain about how you're treated you know having your genitals mutilated
or whatever
because haven't you heard this one woman her name is Skepchik you know she was
offered coffee in an elevator
and she said no and the guy didn't do anything after that so it was a very sarcastic
way he approached that
and then that just made the whole atheist woman just get engulfed in flames
immediately
it was all the factions split up between the super woke people and the classic
skeptics
and yeah that was it never recovered really and right after that is when atheism
plus came out
which was atheism plus social justice which really just was woke democrats who
happened to be atheists
basically and all the new conference topics were just like intersectionality
and maybe some vague
reference to you know disbelief or something so
uh the atheist movement never recovered from that it was it's gone downhill and
now we've seen how
the same type of activism has moved in and taken over you know evergreen state
college and has led to
what brett and heather have gone through and then it sort of erupted all over
erupted all over the country
and what we're seeing now so that was sort of a the canary in the coal mine for
a lot of what we're seeing now
what do you think is causing it like what i mean a lot of people have theories
on this but i want to
know your personal one like what is why is this a thing today yeah well there's
so many different
aspects to the ideology so in the specific area of i guess the whole sex denial
thing i think there's this
sort of this allergy to to the word discrimination in a way where we've been
told that discrimination is a
terrible thing always but i mean it might sound controversial but
discrimination just means that
we're distinguishing between two different things in a certain context where we
think of discrimination
yeah i'm discriminating in this certain this certain thing i mean if you if you
have a children's sports
league that discriminates against adults and most people would say that that's
a good that's a good
type of discrimination right but we've just sort of adopted this idea that
discrimination is really bad
and so now when we talk about uh trans women in sports or something you know
they think they're
being discriminated against and what you'll see in the headlines is you know
women and girls are not
able who are trans are not able to play in sports for women and girls what they
fail to mention is that
it's not the fact that they're trans that is the reason why they're not being
able to compete it's the
the fact that they're you know biologically male and that's the the thing that's
being kept
uh that we're trying to discriminate against not the fact that they're trans
because
trans is just like a state of mind that they can have they declare that they're
trans
you know you can't verify it empirically in any way and um so there's just
there's no
reason to segregate sports by
just a state of your mind basically anymore that you would want to segregate
sports by
political ideology or something else that's completely irrelevant so i think an
aversion to the
the concept of uh the idea that discrimination is bad just across the board is
is holding us back
from having more productive conversations and then i know you've had people
like james lindsey on and
they've they talk about just the the critical theory the queer theory that's
out there where it's just
meant to just pick apart anything anytime there's they see a binary they need
to deconstruct it and
deconstruct it and there's it's based on this uh epistemology of relativistic
um you know relative truth
um blurring borders between other things systems of power this is sort of the
ideology that is is taken
root in a lot of different areas in society and and it's really been coming to
a head in the last few
years on on many topics too on the whole sex and gender debate we have the
critical race theory stuff
we have the post-colonial you know decolonize the curriculum and you know it's
just spreading out of
control and then people who who are not who are who are not the post-modern
type people who are you know
have the enlightenment values and and we're modernists in the way we approach
the world we think that
you know if something's true if it corresponds to reality and there's certain
truths that uh can't
really be denied by anybody a lot of us are pushing back and because we've
seemed to have lost a lot of
a foothold in the institutions it's now resulting in you know people getting
canceled yeah it's a strange
time in that regard where it just it seems like no one knows exactly what our
our cultural framework
is anymore for discussing things and every time the the it gets pushed further
and further along you have
to kind of catch up with what you're allowed to say and what you're allowed to
talk about and what's
okay like it didn't used to be controversial to say there are two genders there's
only two genders but
if you say it today you could get fired from your job i mean that's a real
thing you can get discriminated
against you can not the discrimination's bad as we've discussed but you know
what i mean it's like
it's this is a new thing to to get to a position where talking about biological
facts you really
shouldn't you have to discuss the societal agreement the cultural agreement we
have about like how we view
or you know this is what what the the push is or what you know this idea of uh
the compliance force
compliance into this ideology you have to you have to accept what we view now
as sex and gender yeah
there's like a language takeover yeah and even when you said just earlier a
second ago that there's you
know there's two genders well they've just co-opted the that word gender and so
what used to be the case
and this is something that i was on board with i was a good you know considered
myself progressive
was a lot of people would say that sex and gender are different things sex
referred to your
reproductive anatomy your biology and gender referred to just the way you
identify you know you can
identify as a man or a woman or you know if they want to expand that whatever
that means um it has to
do with identity it's sort of like sex is your hardware uh gender is your
software where you can be a
male and identify as a woman and that was something that i was sort of willing
to get on board with and
i was like okay why do we need to have the same you know we already have male
and female to refer to
sex why do we need to also use man and woman maybe we can just let you know the
those people have have
that because as a biologist it didn't really my my defense didn't really go up
because as long as we're
we know what sex is then that's fine i can i'll be willing to manage that and
then slowly over time
that distinction became more and more blurry where now they would say instead
of it identify as a man
or a woman they say identify as a male or a female and they're using the sex
terms where they used to
use gender terms and then i'd started seeing on my facebook popping up people
with phds in biology
sharing articles like there are five sexes or there are seven different sexes
or sex is a social
construct and this was as i started pushing back against that i thought there
must have been talking
about gender identity but it became very clear that you know they're talking
about actual sex itself and
that there's you know every different chromosomal arrangement that someone can
have like if you're
a klein filter male or something you have x yy uh chromosomes that you're a
your own unique sex now
rather than just you know a variation within within the male the male sex do
you have a theory as to
what caused all this or as to why it's it seems to be progressing it's not it's
not like they reached a
point and they went ok