Your Gender is a Constellation (with Ari Berkowitz)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes, where we explore gender, race, sexuality, and more, trying to understand what shapes us, what divides us, and what can bring us together. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about the sex binary is Dr. Ari Berkowitz.

ARI BERKOWITZ: We all experience from early childhood pressures to be either more masculine or more feminine. We're being boxed in and we're being pressured, and you learn to fit into the box better. And I think if people become more aware of this, and also more aware that we actually have continuous variation in all these traits, maybe we'll feel less pressure to fit ourselves into those boxes in everything we do.

BLAIR HODGES: One of the things that frustrates me most about anti-transgender arguments is how often people claim to have science on their side. They say biological sex is a simple, settled matter. You're either male or female, period. The problem with that is the science is way more complicated and way more interesting than that.

Dr. Ari Berkowitz is a Presidential Professor of Biology and also Director of the Cellular and Behavioral Neurobiology Graduate Program at the University of Oklahoma. And he's feeling frustrated, too. In his new book, The Binary Delusion, he shows how biological sex can't so neatly be divided into two categories. Instead of a simple pink-or-blue identity, our sex involves a constellation of characteristics that vary and overlap. We're talking everything from chromosomes, hormones, and gonads to facial features, voice, and even the brain itself.

The way we understand biological sex has real consequences for how we understand ourselves, how we treat each other, and how much freedom we have to be who we are. That's why I'm thrilled to have Dr. Ari Berkowitz join us in this episode to talk about his new book, The Binary Delusion: How Biology Defies the Myth of Two Sexes.

 

The Widespread Delusion – 02:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: Ari Berkowitz, welcome to Relationscapes.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Thank you. Glad to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: I want to start by talking about how we categorize humans in general. You say that no categories feel more fundamental to who humans are than male and female. That's one of the first ways we start to kind of think about differences between people. And I'm making an assumption here that maybe you had the belief that these are two distinct binary categories earlier in your life. Is that a fair assumption?

ARI BERKOWITZ: I think almost all of us grow up just assuming that male and female means something that is very well defined and sort of inescapable. And this happens really from the moment we're born. We're immersed in this, and I'm no exception to that.

BLAIR HODGES: When did you start questioning that? 

ARI BERKOWITZ: Probably in college. I had a course where I learned about intersex variations, and I think that began to open my eyes to the complexity of biological sex.

BLAIR HODGES: See, that's fascinating that you first started encountering different thoughts about it in college. That seems late in the game. Like, why aren't we learning more about this earlier in life? I think this is still the case for a lot of people that might not encounter these types of ideas, certainly maybe not in middle school or junior high, maybe not even in high school.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. I think the situation's even worse than you implied just there. Most of our college students who are biology majors have never heard of intersex variations until they come into one of my classes, usually as a senior in college as a biology major. So they're not getting it in high school. They're not getting it in intro biology in college.

It's, you would almost say, excluded from the curriculum until then. And of course, when you're teaching an intro course, there's so much you have to cover in so little time. And so there are good reasons for leaving out complexities, but I do think that leaving out these complexities has real harm.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, these are complex, sure, but it seems fundamentally basic to it. And the fact that we aren't covering it earlier means that misconceptions can get locked in way earlier. So someone like you who's an expert comes along and starts explaining it, and it seems like some advanced math or something that we've never heard of before. And we're like, this just sounds—I don't even know where to categorize this because we haven't encountered it. So it seems like a really big problem, actually.

ARI BERKOWITZ: I totally agree. And I think everyone should be introduced to these kinds of biological sex variations, even in high school, maybe through their sex ed class or something like that.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. All right. Well, let's talk about the book The Binary Delusion. For people who haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the differences between male and female, how those categories came to be, what they even mean, and how biology complicates them, define the binary delusion in general. That's the title of your book. What do you mean by it?

ARI BERKOWITZ: What I mean by it is that nearly all of us have an oversimplified view of what biological sex means, what it means to be male or female, or if those are really the only two options. And we don't even really think about it. It's something that we just grow up with. We never question. And that's why I call it a delusion. It's something that most of us have in common that we never even think about. We don't ask what the evidence is.

BLAIR HODGES: And by not asking what the evidence is, it creates this idea that there is just male and female. And we see this playing out in really practical ways when people are like, hey, how should sports teams be divided up? Or what bathrooms do we use? Or this type of thing. And so some of it makes sense, right?

Because when we're thinking about reproduction, we do need certain bodies that can come together and reproduce. So when you're talking about a delusion, you're not saying there's no such thing as sex, right? It's not that. It's that you're complicating what we think of as sex.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. So people often assume that all of the biological traits that we associate with being male or being female go together 100% of the time. And the fact of the matter is they don't. And it's not even clear which biological traits we ought to use to define someone's biological sex, and we don't agree on this.

So biologists in general use gonads to define biological sex—that's ovaries or testes—and more precisely, whether you make small sex cells, sperm cells, or large ones, egg cells. They use this across animal species to define biological sex. But that's not how physicians declare sex at birth. They don't look at gonads, right? They look at genitals.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And then there's an assumption that those will match, but they don't always match. And that's really even just the beginning of what you might look at. You could also talk about the internal ducts that will eventually transport sperm or egg cells. You could talk about hormones and hormone receptors. There's this whole constellation of what we call primary sex traits, each of which could individually be used to define male or female, or they can be used in some sort of a grouping. And there's actually no agreement on how to even define biological sex.

 

Multi-Dimensional Sex Traits – 07:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is exactly where I want to go, to try to nail down a definition of sex. And I think that the root of your argument in the book is that as humans, we have come to define sex based on a collection of traits. You say the problem is these traits are "multidimensional." They don't always overlap the same way in different bodies. They don't fit into a neat binary.

So talk about the traits being multidimensional. You mentioned some of them, but expand on that a little bit more about what we're looking at when we're defining biological sex. And by the way, that seems like a redundant phrase, biological sex. Like, what is non-biological sex? But anyway, I digress.

ARI BERKOWITZ: No, you're absolutely right. And I tend to say biological sex because people misuse the words sex and gender constantly. And I want to emphasize, when I say sex, I'm talking about biological sex. I'm talking about whether you're male or female or intersex, for example.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: But we have this whole cluster, as I mentioned, of primary sex-related traits that don't necessarily all point in the same direction. We also have a whole suite of what are called secondary sex traits that typically develop at puberty as a result of hormones, androgens like testosterone and estrogens. And these include a long list of things that define our body shape, like breasts, hip width, shoulder width, our coarse body hair on our legs, chest, pubic regions, underarms, face, how low-pitched our voice is, all these different traits.

And we sort of assume that they all go together as either male or female. But if you look at people individually, that's not necessarily the case. For many of us, we're more male-typical in some of these sex-related biological traits, more female-typical in others, and intermediate in still others. So that's why I say that sex is multidimensional and that you need essentially a whole list of axes to accurately describe how male-typical or female-typical or intermediate each of us is in all these different ways.

BLAIR HODGES: You have these really useful charts in the book where you show different traits can vary among different people, and they're kind of these gauges where, okay, someone can have these traits that are—a presumed male, for example, could have traits that overlap more with what your typical expectations about a female would be, and vice versa. These traits, like you mentioned, of height, strength, breasts, hair, voice, what the brain looks like, genitals, and hormones, they all can have variants where some females can have some typical male secondary sex characteristics and vice versa.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. So I got into using these sliding scales because we're all very familiar with these sliding scales from surveys, and you move it to the left or the right or in the middle depending on how you think on a particular issue. And so you can think of each sliding scale as an axis in biology for measuring one trait.

And if you've got several different sex-related biological traits, each is its own axis, each can have its own sliding scale, and you may slide way to the right on one, way to the left on another, and in the middle for others. So each of us, in a way, is a unique combination of these different sex-related biological traits, essentially a unique mosaic of biological sex traits.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I like that image of a mosaic because it's like a different picture. You know, a mosaic is all these pieces put together, and if you step back, then you kind of see it as a whole. But when you zoom in, there can be differences and different arrangements and stuff.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, absolutely. And each of us is different in that way. And I think when you just say male or female, underlying this is this assumption that all the males are the same, all the females are the same, and we're consistent in each of these traits. But when you look at the details, you find something a lot more complicated and nuanced, much as you do for gender as well.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, what you find is that pretty much nobody fits perfectly in whatever a sort of stereotypical definition of a male or a female would be. And not only that, but you point out that a lot of people—well, pretty much everybody sort of alters our bodies in order to lean into binary expectations.

So with things like hair length or hair removal, or like bodybuilding, what we do with our muscles. There's cosmetic surgeries, there's makeup and wigs that, by the way, men and women have used at different periods of time as well. So humans have also had a tendency to try to enhance these characteristics to send signals to each other.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yes. Now, on the first point, I don't want to say that no one is consistently male or consistently female in all these traits, especially as a biologist. There are always some who do, but it's absolutely the case that most of us, often unconsciously, I think, modify our bodies in usually subtle ways to make them appear more masculine or more feminine, to fit in better as a man or a woman in our society.

And in some cases, we do take that to extremes. And in the book, I tend to focus on those cases where people take it to an extreme, because I think they highlight what's going on in all of us, but sort of just dramatized in particular cases, like for bodybuilders who—for bodybuilders in men's competitions are essentially trying to achieve hypermasculinity, to look superbly masculine in every way, and to especially have giant muscles, which are associated with masculinity.

But there's also, of course, women's bodybuilding competitions. And there we have this built-in conflict because in order to win competitions, the women have to of course build up their muscles, but if they look too masculine, they lose. And so they have to at the same time do other things to enhance their femininity, to balance out the too much masculinity they get from big muscles.

 

Primary Sex Characteristics Develop in the First Trimester – 13:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: The big takeaway then that I want people to think about as we move forward is there are all these different things we can assemble together to define male or female, and that humans modify and enhance those things already. Like, that's already going on. We play with that stuff from the beginning. So with that on the table, let's dig more into primary sex characteristics.

You mentioned this already, and your book really helpfully takes us through the development of a human from the moment of conception up through puberty and beyond. And how our bodies develop is really important. And I think the more that people start to understand that process, the easier it will be to wrap their heads around what we're talking about.

So take us to the first trimester, because this is kind of where it all begins, and it says a lot about where humans overlap and what's going on with sex.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yes. So development of biological sex characteristics starts around five to seven weeks of gestation. And there's a particular order of events here that is critical because I think people sort of assume that everything is set in stone from the beginning as far as sex traits go, and that's just not true. So what's set in stone from the beginning is chromosomes.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And typically, not always, but typically, those we categorize as female have two X chromosomes, what we usually call sex chromosomes, and those we categorize as male have one X and one Y. And that's step one. Step two is gonads. Gonads are ovaries or testes, or in rare cases, a combination of the two—ovotestes.

We all start off with identical tissues that are going to become our gonads. If we have a Y chromosome, then we have one gene on that chromosome called SRY, which usually sets in motion a bunch of other genes on other chromosomes that make that initial tissue into testes. If there's no SRY, usually because there's no Y chromosome, then a different set of genes gets activated that makes ovaries from those initial tissues.

So that's step two. So now you've got usually either ovaries or testes. Step three is hormones. And the key hormones here in prenatal development are all androgens. So we can forget about estrogen for this situation. Androgens include testosterone that everyone knows about, and some other androgens as well that play a key role here.

And these hormones get produced by the testes of the fetus, or embryo at this point, but later fetus, and they circulate in the bloodstream as all hormones do. And they set in motion the next set of developmental events, which involve the genitals. Well, external genitals that we think of, as well as internal ducts.

And the genitals also start off the same in all of us. Doesn't matter what your chromosomes are. The only thing that matters is hormones. So if you have lots of androgens like testosterone, then the precursors, the tissue that's going to become the genitals, develop into a penis and a scrotum. If you have less androgens or you don't respond to androgens, then those same tissues instead turn into the clitoris and labia.

So the penis and the clitoris come from the identical tissue, and the scrotum and labia come from the identical tissue. It just depends on how much androgens and androgen response. If you're intermediate in the amount of androgens or intermediate in the amount of androgen response, then you end up with intermediate genitals.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so I mean, if you freeze-frame during the process, it's really interesting. There's diagrams that I've seen where you see how genitals form, and it's amazing once you see it happen. You're like, oh yeah, that's clearly coming from kind of the same place. We all sort of start out a little bit like we could even call it female before the hormones start kicking in and we see more differentiation, how genitals play out, for example.

This is what's funny about gender reveal parties. They're usually planned after the mom has an ultrasound and you can see the fetus's genital shape. That seems the most obvious way to know what a person's sex is, but not always. And why is it not always the most obvious way to find out?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Well, it is the most obvious using ultrasound, but that doesn't mean it's correct.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah.

ARI BERKOWITZ: It goes back to how do you define biological sex? The evolutionary biologists would say what matters is whether you have ovaries or testes, not what your genitals are. But it's easier to see the genitals, and of course at birth it's easiest to see the genitals. That's what the physician uses to assign sex at birth.

So we all tend to focus on genitals, but biologists will say no, you should be focusing instead on the gonads. I do have to correct one thing you said, though.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, always.

ARI BERKOWITZ: For decades, biologists and biology textbooks and physiology textbooks have said female is the default. That's what you get if nothing happens. We now know that's really not true. And it could even be argued that the idea that female is the default kind of fits with a cultural expectation that goes back centuries that females are more passive and males are more active.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: The reality is there's a whole set of genes that turns tissue into ovaries, and if those genes don't act, you don't get ovaries. And it's basically about the same number of genes as turn the same tissues into testes. So the way I think of it is you have an ovary gene team and a testis gene team, and they kind of battle it out and compete to see—because they actually inhibit each other—to see which one will get the gonads. But both of them are active processes.

 

Intersex and Differences of Sexual Development – 20:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Cool. Okay, that's really helpful. And it takes us into talking more about intersex bodies, because there's not a binary set of bodies that people mature into. There's intermediary bodies, intersex folks, differences of sexual development. And when I've brought this up to people to kind of point out that bodies differ, what the response usually is from someone who's not interested in learning more about this is, oh, those are just defects. They don't count. Talk about that kind of a response.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, I get that a lot as well. I think there's two important things to think about here. One is, what do we mean by normal versus abnormal? And the other is percentages. What percentage of the population does this apply to? Because both of those things figure into someone's thinking when they say, oh, that's just an abnormality.

I think they're implying, number one, it's medically abnormal, and number two, it probably doesn't affect very many people.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: So let's look at each of those two things. Well, what makes something medically abnormal? That's actually a really hard question to answer. So we all have lots of variations. We all have lots of genetic variations, including what we call mutations. Mutations are not something that only happens in a small fraction of people and is a medical abnormality. They're something we all have many of.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: So then the question is, well, which mutations should count as a medical abnormality? Well, one answer is if you need medical treatment for your condition or your variation. Most intersex people do not need any medical treatment, so that's an important thing to realize.

A second approach to that would be to say, well, we're talking about reproductive traits here, so if you can't reproduce, then it's an abnormality. Well, most intersex people can reproduce. A lot of this depends on how you count because there's all these different kinds of intersex variations. And some people count this one but not that one, and so on.

So then we get to the question of percentage, and my students in my courses have brought this up a lot. Well, what percentage is intersex? And they've even told me, some of my students, well, if it's above 1%, then it's not an abnormality. If it's below 1%, it is. I don't know why 1%, but for me, you just have what we would say in biology is a distribution, a sort of bell curve of some type.

And people can measure in different places on this, and it's really arbitrary where you draw the line and say, okay, the center of this is normal and the tails are abnormal, but where are the lines between normal and abnormal?

Okay, but people want percentages. It's really hard to say because, again, it depends on how you count. So there's an often-cited percentage of 1.7% of people being intersex, which comes from Anne Fausto-Sterling's book and paper in the year 2000, where her students looked at a lot of publications and tried to figure out, or estimate really, the percentage of each type of intersex variation.

When they did this, most of these variations are quite uncommon, but one on their list is quite common. And that's late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH, which they estimate is about 1.5% of the population just by itself. So that's a lot of people.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ARI BERKOWITZ: There's another intersex variation that Anne Fausto-Sterling discussed in that section of her book but did not include in the list for some reason, which is called hypospadias. And hypospadias is when your phallus, which is the word for both a penis and a clitoris, which is usually determined by length to be either a penis or clitoris.

When that phallus is long enough that we would generally count that as a penis, but the urethra, which we think of in males who have a penis as extending to the tip so that you pee from the tip of the penis, that urethra actually ends somewhere else along the base of the phallus.

And it could be anywhere along the base, from sort of near the tip to sort of near the base. And of course, if it were a clitoris, then the urethra would end just below the base, just below the clitoris. So you have continuous variation in where the urethra ends in hypospadias.

These children are almost always categorized as male. They're assigned male at birth. But unless they get a surgical correction, they often can't pee standing up. They have to sit down to pee or pee like a girl, some people would say.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. I pee sitting down most of the time, by the way. [laughter]

ARI BERKOWITZ: Okay. So of course that may make some boys feel less masculine.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And there's a stigma attached to this if you're brought up as a boy.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, for sure.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Now the question is, do you count that as intersex? Well, I mean, a lot of people would say, well, that's a penis more or less, so that's a boy, so it's not intersex. Does it depend on exactly where the urethra ends? You might say, well, if it ends sort of near the tip, eh, close enough, we'll call that normal. You're a boy, you're not intersex.

But what if it ends really close to the base? Okay, now that's kind of hard to say. Well, then you could literally draw a line along the phallus somewhere and say, from here on out, we'll call that normal, and from here on in, we'll call that intersex. But where you draw that line is arbitrary, and different people may draw it in different places.

If you count everyone who has hypospadias, okay, how many is that? Well, it turns out different countries report extremely different percentages of hypospadias, going from, I think it's 0.006% or something like that in Malaysia, to 4.6% in Denmark.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And the US is somewhere right in the middle of that. Well, which is the right number? Is it really that different in different countries? Maybe, but I think more likely a lot of that variation is in the reported percentage.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Because it's likely that in countries where there's a severe stigma attached to having that variation, that it's less reported. So my bet is that Denmark is closest to the truth across the world, 4.6%. So do you choose to count that or not? If you do and you add that into the 1.7% that Fausto-Sterling estimated, now you're above 6% intersex.

So depending on how you count, it could be a really significant proportion of the population.

BLAIR HODGES: That's a lot. I mean, redheads make up about 2%, you know, estimated. So it would be three times as common as seeing redheads around?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. So again, it just depends on how you count. I don't tell people how to count. I give them the options. But I think it shows you that there's continuous variation in these traits, and you can arbitrarily draw a line here and there and categorize people on one side or the other, but it is an arbitrary decision.

BLAIR HODGES: With hypospadias, can that happen with someone who has testes or someone who has ovaries?

ARI BERKOWITZ: It could, because again, the genitals depend only on hormones and responses to hormones, not on the gonads. So for example, in congenital adrenal hyperplasia, that condition that affects about 1.5% of the population, if we're including late onset, the androgens are not coming from the gonads. They're coming from the adrenal glands.

If the adrenal glands, which normally make a little bit of androgens, make a lot more androgens because basically they're not making some other hormone as much as they should be, and some of those precursors are being shuttled into the androgen pathway, they make more androgens, they go into the bloodstream. At that point, they're the same as gonadal androgens, and they make the genitals a certain way.

And that includes how long the phallus is as well as where the urethra ends. Those both depend on androgens and androgen responses. On the other hand, if you have a Y chromosome and testes but you have zero response to androgens, which is a different variation, then you will have typically female genitals.

So you will not have a penis, you will not have hypospadias, you'll just have a clitoris. But if someone looks at your gonads, you actually have testes. So they can go in different directions.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, bodies differ. There's different bodies happening here.

Also, you say the XX and XY chromosomes aren't necessarily the whole story either. There are other variations there, and I think a lot of people don't know that. I also think a lot of people don't realize that females have testosterone, that males have estrogen. The hormones that help the body develop in different ways are shared between the sexes. It's not one has one kind and one has the other, right?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. So we all have estrogens, we all have androgens like testosterone. People often say estrogen's a female sex hormone, testosterone's a male sex hormone, but that is really way oversimplified. And actually, a lot of people don't know that the estrogens that females typically make in their gonads, they first make androgens, testosterone, in the ovaries, and then most but not all of that testosterone is immediately converted to estrogen in a single chemical step in neighboring cells.

 

Medical Care and the Binary Delusion – 29:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: With all of this complexity, this is one of the reasons why some people oppose infant genital surgeries. There seems to be a reaction to genitals that don't look quote-unquote normal, and surgeons have developed ways to quote-unquote fix those genitals, which has actually caused a lot of problems for intersex people.

And you say that the irony of kind of protecting those surgeries, which lawmakers do when they claim that they're passing laws against surgeries for trans children, they protect intersex surgeries, that it's not actually about medical care, but it's about upholding the binary delusion and forcing these bodies into more stereotypically male and female bodies.

ARI BERKOWITZ: That's right. So since the 1950s in the US, infants that have genitals that look intermediate almost always have surgery while they're small children to attempt to make their genitals look either more typically male or more typically female. It's almost always more typically female because, as a surgeon famously said once, it's easier to dig a hole than to build a pole.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And so the reason for doing this, getting back to what's an abnormality and what requires medical treatment, it's not for a medical reason. It's for a social reason. The only functional difference, for example, someone who's assigned male at birth who has a very short phallus, and maybe the urethra doesn't end at the tip, the only functional difference they would have is they would have to sit down to pee.

That doesn't mean that they have a medical problem, but nonetheless, physicians have seen this and almost panicked and said, okay, this person has intermediate genitals, we need to fix this, or this child is going to suffer for social reasons, not medical reasons.

And so they've encouraged parents to provide their consent on behalf of their infant to have that phallus cut off even shorter and have their testes removed so that they can be brought up as female and they'll fit in better. Or if they have hypospadias, then they've gotten parents' permission to reroute the urethra to the tip so they'll be able to pee standing up.

Often these surgeries don't go so well. They have complications. They need to have follow-up surgeries. They may have lifelong pain. They may have loss of sexual sensation as adults. So there are real problems associated with doing these surgeries, and yet they're still done, and it's incredibly well hidden. People don't talk about it. Their physicians have often told parents, don't talk about this.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: People will not understand. You want to keep this a secret. And so it's been an incredibly effective secret for generations now, and it continues to happen. I can't tell you how often because hospitals don't release their numbers on these things. So I've talked to societies that advocate for intersex people, and they don't know the numbers.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: So it's a well-hidden thing, but it does still go on. And it is remarkable to me that even while no one's talking about this, they're making a point in state laws that have been enacted in most states in the U.S. since 2021 that make it illegal for an adolescent who's transgender to get not only surgery but also just hormones or puberty blockers, to make that illegal even if it's a 17-year-old who wants to do this and their parents support them in doing this and their physician supports them in doing it.

It's illegal for that to happen. And the same laws, if you look carefully, have a paragraph saying this does not apply to someone who has what they call a disorder of sex development, and they list what sorts of things they mean, but basically an intersex child who can still get the same surgery, exactly the same surgery in some cases, as an infant or a small child.

Now, why is that there, and why is no one talking about it? As you say, I think it's because the people who have enacted these laws, they're not looking to prevent surgeries from happening on genitals. They're looking to make sure that the surgeries that happen preserve the sex assigned at birth.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: So that we all stay in the category we were placed in at birth, whether it suits us or not. And they're quite happy to have parents make that decision on behalf of an infant or small child, as long as it preserves and sort of standardizes the genitals of a sex assigned at birth, and at the same time prevent anyone from moving out of the category that they were assigned to at birth.

BLAIR HODGES: And a lot of intersex advocates themselves have come out and said they wish it never happened, that they didn't have any choice in it. And as you said, it caused problems, and maybe it's something they would look at later in life if they'd like to or whatever. But I think your observation that the goal there is to uphold the binary delusion is spot on.

 

Are Male and Female Categories Still Useful? – 35:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Before we move on to secondary sex characteristics, though, I did want to ask about the utility, the usefulness of male and female categories in general, because one thing I hear is like, oh, they're trying to do away with sexual differentiation altogether. They just want some weird woke future with no males and females and blah blah blah. But from a biological standpoint, are male and female categories still useful in spite of knowing that there's variance and that there's overlap and so forth?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, so it depends is the answer. So if we're talking just about biological sex, not about gender—

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Then clearly it is useful in certain circumstances. For example, if you want to make a baby with someone, you want to know that one of you is going to contribute sperm and one of you is going to contribute egg, and that you have the bodily machinery to make this work. Otherwise, you're going to have to do something else, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ARI BERKOWITZ: So in that situation, it makes a lot of sense. But as we've seen, those things are not necessarily correlated with other sex-related biological traits, not even necessarily with your genitals.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Okay, now in other circumstances, what we're really talking about is not so much male and female, but man and woman genders. And you may have situations where you want to make something exclusive to men or exclusive to women, whether it's a bathroom perhaps, or a sporting event. And so then we're getting into different issues, issues like in the case of a sporting event, does this person have an advantage because of their sex category or not?

And that's going to depend a lot on the details, right? Because having a Y chromosome by itself gives you zero advantage in athletic competitions. Yeah, I'm not in the NBA. Right. So being tall obviously gives you an advantage regardless of your biological sex, if you're talking about basketball. But you really have to get into the details to say, does it make sense to allow this person into this sporting event, and is that related to their sex category or something else?

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, good. That's Ari Berkowitz. We're talking about his book The Binary Delusion: How Biology Defies the Myth of Two Sexes.

 

Secondary Sex Characteristics – 37:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, Ari, so let's talk about secondary sex characteristics. You say that these also help flesh out why the binary is a delusion. Let's talk about some of these. Sports—we were just talking about sports. Let's kind of continue on that. So height, skeletal structure, and muscles—people will point to average differences between men and women and say those prove the binary, right?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. So here it's key to pay attention to the difference between having an average difference between two groups of people and every individual being different. So you often hear the term sex difference, and I think what most people imagine when they hear that is that all the males are over here and all the females are over there and they don't overlap.

When biologists actually say we found a sex difference, that's not what they mean. What they mean is that the average male has a statistically significant difference from the average female. And so you have to kind of get into statistics to make sense of that. But what that typically means is if you get a large enough pool of males and a large enough pool of females, then you can find that the averages of the males and the females differ by enough that it's not random.

You can say, well, there's something going on there. But that doesn't mean it's a big difference. It could be as small as, let's say, 2%. And if it's that small a difference, it may not be very meaningful even on the average. But beyond that, it tells you nothing about individuals, because where you have a statistically significant sex difference but it's a small one, you also have a lot of overlap between the group of males and the group of females.

I try to show this in the book with curves that are overlapping, and you can see how much overlap there is. Even with height, we all know that on average males are taller than females as adults, but it turns out a large percentage of the population is in this overlap region where if you only knew their height—for example, my height is 5'7"—if you only knew that, you could not predict whether I'm male or female just based on that. You basically have a 50/50 shot in that example.

And so there are a lot of what we call secondary sex traits, which develop at puberty as a result mainly of androgens and estrogens, that have a lot of overlap between a group of males and a group of females, so that if all you know about a person is their value on that one trait, you couldn't tell whether they were categorized as male or female.

 

The Human Voice – 40:32

 

BLAIR HODGES: The overlap is really interesting to me because there's a lot of variance, for example, between women as there is between men and women. We see variance between women and other women, between men and other men, not to mention folks when we bring gender into the equation who might identify as non-binary, or when we're thinking about intersex folks as well, that there's a lot of variance between them.

You have these helpful charts where you show the overlaps. And humans, male and female, do have a lot of overlap in a lot of these areas, with one big outlier, which I thought was interesting, and that's the voice, right?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yes, absolutely. So on the overlap, most of us probably think, oh, so males are taller than females, males are stronger than females, females have larger breasts than males, and we don't really think beyond that. But if you start looking at the individual level, we can all probably think of individuals we know where we know some women who are stronger than some men we know.

We may know some males who have larger breasts than some females we know. So when you get into the individual level, you begin to recognize that, okay, there are these overlaps. And someone can be more male-typical in one respect, more female-typical in other respects, and so on.

Now, voice is kind of an outlier. It approaches what biologists call a sexual dimorphism, which, if you're using the term correctly, which a lot of biologists don't, means that you actually have two forms that don't overlap. You have the male form and the female form, no overlap. In general, with humans, we don't have sexual dimorphisms with no overlap like that. You could argue maybe in genitals, but that's just because we assign sex at birth based on genitals. Voice gets really close to that.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: But what we're talking about here is sort of a natural speaking voice of an adult when they're not thinking about how they're speaking. And if you can get someone in that situation, you can measure the voice pitch, and if you do that for adult males and adult females, there's almost no overlap in voice pitch.

It's something like 2%. It's been between 1% and 5%, so very little overlap. On the other hand, the same people can raise or lower their voice pitch at will and often do it unconsciously in various circumstances. So if a man is sexually interested in a woman, he will speak in a lower voice without even realizing it, and a woman may speak in a higher-pitched voice without ever realizing it.

When there are situations of competition, men will often speak in a lower voice without realizing it. And if you look at even things like people running for political office who are of the same gender, it's often the case that someone with a lower-pitched voice will do better. And some women have actually tried to make their voices lower-pitched, like Margaret Thatcher did this through voice coaching, to project power and succeed better in elections.

So we do all these things to manipulate our voice pitch, but if you can avoid all that and just kind of measure it baseline, it's true that we have very little overlap. Another interesting thing on voices is that for bilingual people, it depends on which language they're speaking in. So this is clearly culturally dependent.

So there is more or less overlap in voice pitch depending on what culture you come from and what language you speak.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. So with men's vocal cords, I'm looking at the book here, they tend to be like 60% larger than females on average. We're talking about averages, which helps explain the difference in the deepness. That's a bigger percentage difference than the percentage of difference that we see in genital size, for example, between men and women. Like, it's a really big difference.

 

The Human Face – 44:53

 

BLAIR HODGES: Then there's sort of some very small, subtle differences that are really interesting that tend to map out across men and women. I'm thinking about faces, and some of the most subtle differences are on faces. But you also say that humans have become pretty adept at looking at a face and being able to make a guess about someone's sex.

So someone might point to that and be like, see, that proves a binary, because you can look at a face and kind of have a good sense of whether they're male or female.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, so faces are interesting because the differences are subtle, and it's not any one thing. And even if you look exclusively at people who—biologists who do this for a living, or physicians or surgeons who work on faces—they disagree on what the key features are of the face that makes it more masculine or more feminine.

But there's a list of like six or eight features, something like that, that collectively seem to make the difference. And of course, you can digitally manipulate images these days. And so you can manipulate these individually or collectively, and it tends to take a whole set of features to make someone look more masculine or more feminine.

So to some extent, we're making guesses when we just glance at a face. We're just really good at it, but we're actually picking out a combination of very subtle features. And once you know that someone is a man or a woman, you can take an image of their face and you can digitally modify it to make it more masculine or more feminine, and it will have no effect on your perception of whether that person looks like a man or woman once you know how that person's categorized.

So you're also using your memory and you're sort of prejudging what someone's face should look like when you categorize a face as that of a man or a woman.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like context clues, like what clothes are they wearing, or what does their hair look like, or—

ARI BERKOWITZ: Sure. So all these experiments are done when they attempt to remove all those context clues from images, because the context clues by themselves are so dramatic and revealing that we usually rely on them, I think, more than anything else to categorize sex. If someone has a beard like you do, then they're gonna instantly say, okay, that's a man, and nothing else will probably matter at that point.

 

The Human Brain – 47:20

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about brains too, because you say that more than any other part of our body, our brains kind of make us who we are. And male-typical and female-typical brains are quite alike. I have an episode on this with Dr. Daphna Joel, who talks about the brain mosaic. So folks can refer to that to learn more there.

Where we can really dig in here with you is that it might not only signal sex differences, but maybe even gender differences. And there's ways—I love how in the book you talk about how the brain develops really early on that might actually have an impact on gender identity in some way.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, and I have to say, this is a little bit speculative because it's really hard to get good data on this kind of thing, and maybe say a bit about why. But our human brains are largely the same independent of biological sex. But there are some key, very, very tiny regions that do show sex differences on average, and these are in and around a pea-sized brain region called the hypothalamus, which sits at the base of our big cerebrum that we're all familiar with.

And this makes sense because the hypothalamus, not just in humans but in vertebrates in general, controls a whole long list of really fundamental functions like hunger and thirst and blood pressure, and also sex drive and sexual behaviors.

And we know originally from work on rodents that prenatally androgens shape the hypothalamus, and in particular subregions of the hypothalamus. Now we're talking about really tiny regions, something like a millimeter in length, and they can be larger or smaller based on whether you have more or less androgens prenatally. And then that effect can last into adulthood, where it can have an effect on sexual behaviors and functions.

We know that well for rodents. We know it much less well for humans.

BLAIR HODGES: It's harder to study that.

ARI BERKOWITZ: It's harder to study. So in a rodent, you can manipulate it. You can give it extra testosterone or block testosterone prenatally. You're not going to do that in a person.

BLAIR HODGES: Uh-huh.

ARI BERKOWITZ: You can then look at its behavior as an adult. You can then remove its brain and slice it up and look at it. You're not going to do that in a human unless they say, after I die, you can have my brain.

So if you look at a living person, everyone knows about brain imaging these days. You get these really cool pictures. They're based on typically changes in blood flow in the brain when someone's doing something. That's functional magnetic resonance imaging. Or just the static anatomy of the brain. That's structural fMRI—sorry, structural MRI.

BLAIR HODGES: Like the London taxi drivers that have the huge hippocampus. It's like a physical area that's bigger, right?

ARI BERKOWITZ: So you can measure these things. The problem is the spatial resolution in a living person is limited for these kinds of images to somewhere around one millimeter. And so you're getting right to the edge of what you need to measure to measure subdivisions of the hypothalamus, which are incredibly tiny.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And for that reason, it's hard to make meaningful measurements in a living person and correlate that with either their sex, their gender identity, or their sexual orientation, right?

However, if you take their brain after death, you can then slice that up, look at it under a microscope, and then you can much more reliably and precisely make measurements of these hypothalamic subdivisions and correlate them with the person's sex, or perhaps their gender identity, or perhaps their sexual orientation, if you knew that.

And so studies like that have been done, but on very small groups of people.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And there aren't very many of these studies. And so that's why I say we have to be very tentative about conclusions. But there is some evidence from those studies that on average there are differences in some of these hypothalamic subdivisions based on sex, based on sexual orientation, based on gender identity.

And so it's an open question whether it's all three of those or just one or two of those that are really making the difference in the sizes of these brain areas.

And the other thing to point out is if you look at the sizes of the brain areas after someone's death, you know, after they were seventy or eighty years old or something, that doesn't tell you the cause at all. So it could have been the prenatal hormones that 100% determine the size of their region. But it also could have been anything that happened later on because our brains are constantly changing, and so it's impossible to know for sure.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, brain plasticity is kind of the biggest reason we can't really pinpoint things more accurately, or at least yet we haven't come up with a way to do it. But I mentioned the London taxi drivers, and that's like they saw this region of their brain that was larger, and the question is like, did they become taxi drivers because that region of the brain is great with directions and spatial reasoning and mapping?

So, oh wow, they became taxi drivers because they were really good at that. Or did years of driving the London streets develop that area of their brain in a different way?

 

Why Are Some People Transgender? – 53:11

 

BLAIR HODGES: So yeah, when it comes to trans folks, I was interested that you noted in the book how genitals and the brain don't develop in utero at the same time, that they're developing on their own sort of timelines.

And so it could make sense that genitals could begin to develop in a way that might be assigned male at birth or female at birth, where the brain undergoes a different thing. There's more androgen present or whatever, that could kind of tip the brain in a different direction, so that we have a person who has certain reproductive sexual characteristics that differ from how sexual brain areas might be developing too.

Right. Did I understand that correctly? And I know you caveated it by saying it's really hard to pinpoint, but that is the theory, right?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yes.

First, I want to say about the London taxi drivers, in the initial study, the ambiguity that you just mentioned was a real problem. And so they did a follow-up study where they actually followed a new set of London taxi drivers from the moment they began studying, which takes years, to the time that they became taxi drivers or failed the test, and then they correlated those things and they showed that this part of the hippocampus only grows larger during the period of studying and only if they succeed. So they really nailed that down.

But the reason they were able to do that is because the hippocampus is a relatively large area of the brain.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you can get an image of it.

ARI BERKOWITZ: You can measure it in a living person. I know it sounds the same as hypothalamus, but it's very different.

BLAIR HODGES: It's bigger.

ARI BERKOWITZ: The hypothalamus, which is a different structure, is much, much smaller, and you just can't do the same things with it. But yes, regarding what might happen prenatally that could affect either your gender identity or your sexual orientation, we know that the brain develops later than the genitals prenatally.

So the leading hypothesis for how you could get a disconnect or a mismatch between genitals and what you might expect for gender identity and sexual orientation is that either the amount of androgens is different at these different times prenatally, or it could be that the androgen receptors are different in the tissues that will become the genitals and those in the brain.

Either or both of those could account for a sort of mismatch in what you get in those two places. And the hypothesis is, if you have less androgens or less of an androgen response in the brain, that could mean that even though you have testes, you may have an unexpected sexual orientation. You may be attracted to males. And/or you may have a different gender identity. You may feel more female than male. You may feel non-binary.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. One of the biggest takeaways from the book for me is when biologists point out the variety of differences, that humans vary in our bodies, in our physical bodies, it makes sense to me that the experience of gender would do the same thing. Gender is more cultural. I know it's more of a cultural thing. But to me, it always overlaps with what our bodies are, right, in some way.

And so it makes me think all the more that, of course, of course there's gay people, of course there's trans people, of course it makes sense, because biology itself is a—people are constellations.

And so instead of seeing queer people as defective, I think the easiest way to understand it and the most accurate way to understand it is a normal part of human variability that we should expect based on how our biology works.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yes, absolutely. And I think it's fascinating that as a culture we treat sex and gender differently from other kinds of variations, right? We all recognize how much people vary both biologically and in their personalities.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And skills and so on. We know some people are short, some are tall, some are strong, some are weaker, some are hairy, some don't have much hair.

BLAIR HODGES: Some are tone-deaf, some can sing.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Right. And we don't think anything about that. We treat that as expected, right? We expect there to be variation and continuous variation. You could be anywhere along any of these axes. We expect that for everything except sex and gender. And that's just a societal thing. There's nothing different about the biology there.

The biology shows continuous variation for biological sex traits, just like all these other things. But we force people into one of two categories—

BLAIR HODGES: And—

ARI BERKOWITZ: We sort of won't let them out of one of those two categories. And that's totally a societal thing. It is not a biology thing.

 

Everyone Is a Constellation – 58:16

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's right. And this speaks to the challenges that we face in this moment and going forward, because as you lay out throughout the book, many of us are biologically more typically masculine in some ways or more typically feminine in other ways. And we all have a constellation of traits that make up our sex identity.

And you say when more people recognize that fact, that it will not only benefit trans and non-binary folks, which even if that's all it benefited, that's good enough. But you also say it could hugely benefit everybody else as well. And I wanted you to kind of expand on that. Like, once we start to see this variation as a normal and acceptable fact of life, how could that change things for everybody?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that we all experience, from early childhood, pressures to be either more masculine or more feminine in really everything we do. And we may not even be consciously aware of this, but we're being boxed in and we're being pressured to make ourselves different in some way, either biologically or how we behave or how we dress or how we talk.

I can remember in junior high school, a boy said to me, do your nails need to be cut? And I looked at my hand in a certain way, and he said, no, that's how a girl looks at her nails.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh yeah, I can't remember which one it is.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, a boy looks at it like [holds hand out]—

BLAIR HODGES: Do you put your hand flat in front of you, or do you curl your fingers? You kind of make a fist.

ARI BERKOWITZ: So if you're a real boy, you'd make a sort of fist.

And I didn't know that, but you hear these things constantly, and you learn, consciously or not, to fit into the box better, to behave and act in a certain way so that you are perceived as more masculine or more feminine.

And I think if people become more aware of this and also more aware that we actually have continuous variation in all these traits, maybe—this is a hypothesis—but maybe we'll feel less pressure to fit ourselves into those boxes in everything we do.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. That would be nice. It takes pressure off of everybody.

ARI BERKOWITZ: I would hope so!

 

Defeating the Delusion – 01:00:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: Looking at the circumstances right now, we're at a time when it's a highly politically charged thing where people really are into the binary. Do you see ways that we can help shift the public discourse about that? What are your thoughts as a scientist who's approaching this scientifically, but you're also in the classroom talking to students?

So what do you see happening in that environment that might change people's minds or open their minds to these possibilities instead of locking in on the binary delusion?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Well, my premise, and really the reason for writing the book, is that more information is helpful and that starting or provoking further conversation on these topics can only help. Now, maybe that's overly optimistic. I know there's certainly some people out there who don't really care what the actual biology is. They're going to think whatever they think, and I can't reach them.

I would like to think there's a larger group of people who just don't know about these things because, frankly, we don't talk about these things much. Biologists talk about these things among themselves. Some biologists, anyway. But a lot of these things are kind of hidden from the public outside of biology.

And you see some of these anti-trans state laws. They have huge support, in particular laws that prohibit transgender kids from playing sports that align with their gender. They have like 70, 80% support from the public.

BLAIR HODGES: And they're playing out in about 20 or so, 24 or so—

ARI BERKOWITZ: It's like 29 states right now.

BLAIR HODGES: Twenty-nine. Okay, so yeah, in the twenties.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, it's really high. And I have to think that much of that is due to people not really understanding the reality. And now I'm hoping that more discussion of the facts, both biological facts and cultural facts, will be valuable in shifting people's understanding of this.

For example, transgender athletes. Everyone seems to think that women's sports and girls' sports are dominated by transgender athletes, and it's just not true. There's been one transgender woman in the Olympics ever, as far as we know. 

BLAIR HODGES: No gold medals by anyone who's trans—

ARI BERKOWITZ: No, no medals of any kind by anyone transgender. Intersex women, yes. Transgender women, no.

And the president of the NCAA two years ago testified before Congress that as far as he knew, there were 10 transgender athletes out of more than 500,000 athletes in U.S. collegiate sports.

So it's simply not true that girls' or women's sports are being dominated by transgender athletes, but everyone seems to think it's true because that idea has been effectively promoted by certain people in power without evidence.

And so I'm hoping if people attend more to the actual evidence, biological and otherwise, that opinions are shiftable to some extent.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, we know they're shiftable because those numbers have risen. The prejudice has risen over the past five to eight years, and that's trackable, and it's because of public messaging. So my theory on this from a media standpoint is public opinion is shiftable on this. We literally just saw it happen.

We went from the bathroom bill in North Carolina that was widely criticized, and the NBA was gonna pull out the All-Star Game, and it cost the state a ton of money, and then they backtracked on it, et cetera, to now states doing bathroom bans. Idaho's got a ban. Texas has a ban. Utah is trying to do this.

So public opinion has shifted. We know that it can shift. The question is, are we going to be able to play that game? Are we going to be able to send the right messages to take the narrative back?

And the reason the sports stuff matters to me is because I think of it as, I call it like a backpack bill. On the outside, it just looks like a bag, but then they stuff it full of all this other stuff like bathroom bans and whether someone can change the gender marker on their driver's license or get a passport or all these other restrictions.

And they're using sports as—or you'd call it a Trojan horse, I guess. They're packing it in with all this other stuff to hurt the lives of trans folks. And as we've talked about throughout this episode, trans folks are just another normal variant of human experience that is being discriminated against.

And so I'm not totally without hope yet that books like yours and other public speakers and pundits and influencers and teachers and maybe even podcasters can make some interventions to get the word out on this stuff and help bring public opinion back.

And that's what I'm holding out for. And I'm not going to stop working for it myself, and I doubt you will either, regardless of what happens. So trans people are going to exist regardless of how many laws are passed.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I don't know whether we can succeed in shifting those percentages in an important way or not, but like you said, I'm certainly going to keep trying, and that's all I can do. I'm not a politician. I'm not going to run for office. I'm not going to try to make new laws.

All I can do is write about and discuss these things and hope that more people will pay attention to the evidence and talk about these issues, and that will shift opinions.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Ari Berkowitz. We're talking about The Binary Delusion: How Biology Defies the Myth of Two Sexes. Ari is a Presidential Professor of Biology and director of the Cellular and Behavioral Neurobiology Graduate Program at the University of Oklahoma.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:06:18

 

BLAIR HODGES: Ari, we always like to close with Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises. So this is a moment for you to reflect on the book itself.

Now that it's out, is there anything that you look at and that you wish you could adjust about it? Any regrets about it? Or what was the hardest part about putting the book together? Or was there anything new? This might just have been a compendium of research and stuff you've been doing for years, so maybe there's not a lot of surprises for you.

But which of those three speaks to you in this moment? Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises?

ARI BERKOWITZ: Well, there were definitely challenges. I started on this project in 2019.

BLAIR HODGES: Hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And I initially did a lot of reading of books and a lot of reading of scientific journal articles, taking a lot of notes. And I began writing a book proposal. And then I shopped it around because I knew I had to get an agent to get it published in something other than a university press.

I shopped it around the next year, 2020, with maybe a dozen agents sequentially, and nobody said yes. And I think a problem was I had too much biological detail in there, and I was focused on making sure I got everything right and didn't leave out important things so that someone who studies, you know, a biologist who studies differences associated with sex and that kind of thing, would look at it and wouldn't be able to find anything wrong with it.

But that's not the way to write a book for a general audience.

BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Then I kind of put it aside for years, and what I did is I started writing some short online articles for The Conversation and for Psychology Today. And then in 2021, I created a new course called Diversity of Biological Sex Characteristics, which I'm now teaching for the fourth time. And going through those processes kind of got me to a different mindset.

Then in early 2024, I came back to it and I just started fresh. I didn't look at my notes. I didn't look at my articles and books. I just wrote the whole thing out of my head.

And then having written a draft, I went back to all the articles and books and notes, added the things that really needed to be added, corrected things where I'd made a mistake, added all the citations.

But doing it that way, I feel like I was able to write it much more conversationally for a general audience of non-biologists.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, for sure.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And that made all the difference because then I went back to trying to get an agent, and I was able to get one pretty quickly and further develop the proposal and get a publisher. So that was a big hurdle for me, even though I had previously written a biology book for a general audience that was published by a university press.

This was a big hurdle in doing it a different way that I had to get over. And then I guess the other big hurdle is the current one, which is having written and published a book for a general audience, how do you actually get people to find out about it?

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

ARI BERKOWITZ: And that, I know I'm not an expert in publishing, but it seems to be an enormous hurdle in general because the vast majority of books that get published, almost no one ever hears about. And so it's a real challenge sort of to get through the gatekeepers of the publishing world to get people to just find out that your book exists so that if they're interested, they can read it.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I'm trying to do my very small part. I highly recommend this book. I agree with you that the tone's really conversational. It gets technical in places, but I never felt completely lost throughout the book. I felt this was a good introduction to a lot of these ideas. Your graphs and charts that you include weren't confusing to me.

They helped distill the ideas rather than complicate them further. And I also felt like you were responsible in signaling where things were theoretical and more hypothetical, and where things were pretty darn set in the science as we have it now.

So I highly recommend the book. I think you did a terrific job. I enjoyed your voice throughout the book. And then of course, having the opportunity to talk to you about it, it's been awesome. And I appreciate you taking the time to do it, Ari.

ARI BERKOWITZ: Well, thank you. I appreciate your comments on the book, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

 

Outro – 01:10:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. Check out some Fellow Traveler episodes if you enjoyed this one. I recommend Daphna Joel's episode. It's called "The Incredible Brain Science About Sex and Gender." You can also check out Matthew Gutmann's interview. It's called "Testosterone, Y Chromosomes, and Other Manly Excuses."

If you're enjoying Relationscapes, please take a second to rate and review it in Apple Podcasts, or you can also rate it in Spotify.

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Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you here soon on Relationscapes.