Speaker 1: A couple of weeks ago on X there was a
Speaker 1: kerfuffle that broke out after a professor named Eric Kaufman
Speaker 1: posted a tweet about an article he did for Unheard
Speaker 1: dot com and in the article, he asserts that trans
Speaker 1: identification among young people especially is dropping. Now, this was
Speaker 1: a statistical analysis and it created quite the food for
Speaker 1: all and it took me two weeks to kind of
Speaker 1: pin down our schedules because he is in the UK
Speaker 1: in London, and I, of course am in Denver, Colorado.
Speaker 1: But this weekend we were able to connect and this
Speaker 1: is our chat with Professor Eric Kaufman. Hey, everybody, So
Speaker 1: last week I read an article at unheard dot com
Speaker 1: by a guy named Eric Kaufman. He's a professor and
Speaker 1: he wrote a I mean a tweet that he probably
Speaker 1: thought was like every other tweet he sent out, and
Speaker 1: it had to do with the rate of trans or
Speaker 1: non binary identification falling in this country. I'm guessing that
Speaker 1: he was not expecting it to catch fire like it
Speaker 1: did and created so much debate on X and I
Speaker 1: have to say not just your a duty head debate,
Speaker 1: like real legitimate debate back and forth about the veracity
Speaker 1: of this information and how you interpreted it and all
Speaker 1: of this stuff. But I decided to reach out and
Speaker 1: Professor Eric Kaffman joins me now to talk about. First
Speaker 1: of all, let's start with the data and then I
Speaker 1: don't want to get too far into the weeds about
Speaker 1: the statistical stuff because it's kind of boring for the radio.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna not gonna lie, and I'm gonna share
Speaker 1: your substack that you did on the data analysis so
Speaker 1: people can do a deeper dive if they want on
Speaker 1: my blog so they can link to it there. But
Speaker 1: first of all, Professor Coppman, wait, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Great to be here, Mandy, and I'm joining you from England.
Speaker 3: I'm Canadian originally, but i've lived in London a long time.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to Denver. It's lovely here right now, as
Speaker 1: I'm sure it might not be in London today, but
Speaker 1: we'll find out. First of all, give my audience a
Speaker 1: little bit of your background so we have an idea
Speaker 1: of where you're coming from on this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm a professor of politics or political science at
Speaker 4: the University of Buckingham here in England, and I'm.
Speaker 2: A social scientist.
Speaker 4: I'm very interested in exploring questions that are in some
Speaker 4: ways difficult to explore amongst mainstream academics. And so I
Speaker 4: have a center at Buckingham which has some sort of
Speaker 4: free speech tradition for heterodox social science.
Speaker 2: I've been interested also.
Speaker 3: I'm a quantitative data analyst, and I'm always interested in
Speaker 3: the latest wave from the Foundation for Individual Rights and
Speaker 3: Expressions annual undergraduate surveys, which are absolutely massive they reach.
Speaker 3: The last wave was almost seventy thousand undergraduates, mainly aged
Speaker 3: eighteen to twenty two, across two hundred and fifty of
Speaker 3: the mainly higher ranking universities in the US. And I
Speaker 3: also look at some other surveys that are smaller, but
Speaker 3: where most of the target audience or a large chunk
Speaker 3: of it is is captured by the surveys, which isn't
Speaker 3: usual for surveys.
Speaker 2: And I was just comparing these three sources.
Speaker 3: And I have had an interest in cultural trends among
Speaker 3: young people for a long time, like Gene Twenge, who
Speaker 3: of course sort of came in after my tweets and
Speaker 3: found something very similar. The long and the short of
Speaker 3: it is, I sort of noticed that while there was
Speaker 3: this very pronounced rise and fall particularly this decline pattern
Speaker 3: in the share of young people who say they are
Speaker 3: neither male nor female, that is, identifying as non binary,
Speaker 3: and that has dropped in half more or less in
Speaker 3: this massive sample of over fifty thousand a year from
Speaker 3: the fire data, but also in the smaller but higher
Speaker 3: targeted where you're getting a higher share of your target pool.
Speaker 3: So the Andover Phillips elite prep high school near Boston,
Speaker 3: and then the university, the Brown University student surveys, they're
Speaker 3: all saying the same thing, telling the same story, which
Speaker 3: was of a dramatic decline in non binary identification. Now
Speaker 3: we can come into this question of the relationship doing
Speaker 3: trans and non binary, which is I would argue very close.
Speaker 2: But that's a whole other question. I think it's arguing.
Speaker 4: More or less that trans has declined a lot amongst
Speaker 4: young people.
Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting because the Andover is obviously a very
Speaker 1: elite prep school, and then you have Brown that's not
Speaker 1: exactly a slouchy university. And in my experience, and maybe
Speaker 1: you have not observed this, or perhaps you have children
Speaker 1: of high achieving parents seem to have these trans identities
Speaker 1: at a much higher rate. Look at Hollywood, you have
Speaker 1: Hollywood actresses who say all four of their children are trans,
Speaker 1: which is statistically ridiculous, but that's where we are, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, so it seemed to me that the surveys
Speaker 1: and andover and brown may hold more weight just from
Speaker 1: my I own observations in my mind, because you're dealing
Speaker 1: with the children mostly of elites. This does not seem
Speaker 1: to be a problem for people in poverty who are
Speaker 1: worried about how they're going to eat the next day.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think, well, I don't know, it's not as
Speaker 4: clear a cut as that, because I mean, you're right
Speaker 4: that the political trendiness of these things tends to break
Speaker 4: on the elite campuses and prep schools first. However, it
Speaker 4: is quite astounding to see that in fact, trans and
Speaker 4: also queer sexuality or bisexuality sort of nonconformists, so in
Speaker 4: other words, not gay or straight, but these other sexualities.
Speaker 4: I mean, they've gone through the same rise and fall
Speaker 4: pattern in the data. Doesn't seem as though the elite
Speaker 4: are experiencing this more than people from a lower social
Speaker 4: class background. So it looks as though this is cutting
Speaker 4: across all class and in fact, a lot of the
Speaker 4: data even shows it's somewhat more likely from a lower
Speaker 4: class background that you will identify relay. Yeah, which surprised me,
Speaker 4: but it is really striking, and it's there also for
Speaker 4: bisexual and queer, and so it's I don't think this
Speaker 4: is just an upper class phenomenon.
Speaker 1: No, Well, I would use I have a sixteen year
Speaker 1: old daughter and at her high school, we're in an
Speaker 1: upper you know, we're in a more affluent school district,
Speaker 1: and a lot of her friends are from more affluent families.
Speaker 1: Not all, you know for sure, but every one of
Speaker 1: my daughter's friends identify somewhere on the queer spectrum right now.
Speaker 1: None of them are actually engaging in same sex relationships,
Speaker 1: but they identify on the queer spectrum because it's celebrated
Speaker 1: in schools, and if you want to be part of
Speaker 1: the in crowd, then you've got to have some kind
Speaker 1: of rainbow stripe, right, you can't just be a normal kid.
Speaker 1: So I would be thrilled because I just think it's
Speaker 1: it's challenging to be a teenager anyway, right, It was
Speaker 1: challenging when you were a teenager, challenging what I was,
Speaker 1: and now we have thrown this gender sexuality stew at
Speaker 1: these kids and forcing them to sort of stake a
Speaker 1: claim in order to belong instead of it being authentic, right,
Speaker 1: And I think it's damaging, honestly to the gay movement.
Speaker 4: Oh, I totally agree with you on that. And there
Speaker 4: are more and more gay people who are really upset
Speaker 4: about trends and also particularly the surgery aspect and kind
Speaker 4: of fixing, so called fixing kids who are gay, making
Speaker 4: them making them a different sex. But I think that
Speaker 4: where I think what I think is going on is
Speaker 4: certainly those who identify as politically liberal or ideologically liberal
Speaker 4: are more considerably more likely to identify as trends and queer.
Speaker 2: So I think what I would say is where.
Speaker 3: You have a school environment that is very kind of liberal, there,
Speaker 3: you're going to get higher identification. So I think that's
Speaker 3: the big difference, not so much the last background. So
Speaker 3: you could have somebody who's from a you know, whose
Speaker 3: family is relatively poor, the father is a librarian, and
Speaker 3: the mother maybe works in the post, I don't know,
Speaker 3: but as long as they're liberal, there's going to be
Speaker 3: a higher chance that, you know, the kid identifies as
Speaker 3: trans or queer or one of these other identities.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that does seem to be a pattern. But
Speaker 2: what is really interesting.
Speaker 3: I thought, and one thing I think that's occurred. You know,
Speaker 3: when these things came off social media and off campus
Speaker 3: in the twenty tens, mid twenty tens, you had everybody
Speaker 3: talking about trans and queer at the same time as
Speaker 3: they were talking about you know, white privilege. Yeah, some
Speaker 3: of the woke terminology.
Speaker 4: What seems to happen have happened to over is these
Speaker 4: things have now decoupled to a certain extent. So for example,
Speaker 4: whether we look at red state campuses or blue state campuses,
Speaker 4: they show the same trend I mean, blue state campuses
Speaker 4: and in fact liberals as a whole were more likely
Speaker 4: to identify as trends were queer, so they were always
Speaker 4: higher than the conservatives. But there was a certain level
Speaker 4: of it even amongst conservative students and even on red
Speaker 4: state campuses.
Speaker 2: And in both cases we've seen a big drop off.
Speaker 3: So on the bluest of blue campuses, the Oberlins, you know,
Speaker 3: there's been a massive.
Speaker 4: Decline in you know, like twenty point decline in the
Speaker 4: share of non binary at Oberlin in the last two years.
Speaker 4: So even in these very very liberal environments, it's become
Speaker 4: a lot less fashionable. So I don't think it is
Speaker 4: connected necessarily to political shifts, even though you're right that
Speaker 4: somebody who comes from a more liberal background is going
Speaker 4: to be more likely to identify this way.
Speaker 1: I've been speculating about why this drop might have occurred.
Speaker 1: I've been spitballing myself since I read your tweet, and
Speaker 1: I think there's maybe a few things in motion here.
Speaker 1: One is that fads rise and fides fads fade, right,
Speaker 1: So that's I think that's a choke of it. But
Speaker 1: I also think that the amount of information that is
Speaker 1: getting out now by d transitioners who are talking about
Speaker 1: the permanent, long lifelong effects that they are now dealing
Speaker 1: with because of their transitions, their medical transitions, I do
Speaker 1: think people are more knowledgeable about what the negative ramifications
Speaker 1: could be. And it doesn't seem like, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: get a piercing and.
Speaker 2: It'll close up.
Speaker 1: You know, it's far different now, and I do think
Speaker 1: that that maybe sort of factoring into it. Have you
Speaker 1: done any sort of introspection about why you think this
Speaker 1: is Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: It's really difficult.
Speaker 3: One thing we know is that over the last two
Speaker 3: three years, public opinion has turned against the transactivist position
Speaker 3: that people born males should have access to women's sports
Speaker 3: and women's spaces, and you know, gender surgery for reminders
Speaker 3: and all of that stuff has become less popular and
Speaker 3: substantially less popular, and that's true in Britain's well, and
Speaker 3: so there's been a turn against in public opinion, including
Speaker 3: amongst young people. Now, what is not so clear, it's
Speaker 3: hard to know, is that part of the same trend.
Speaker 3: That is, because it's become you know, politically less popular
Speaker 3: to advocate for the transactivist position and gender ideology, has
Speaker 3: that had a knock on effect on how people identify,
Speaker 3: how young people identify, I mean, that could be what's
Speaker 3: going on. Gene Twinkie's analysis was quite interesting because she
Speaker 3: did this, I mean, I also looked at generations and
Speaker 3: found the same pattern that the youngest generation were less
Speaker 3: trands than the older let's just say, the older gen Zers,
Speaker 3: who are aged twenty two, the seniors were a bit
Speaker 3: more likely to identify as trands than the freshmen.
Speaker 2: She found the same thing even more dramatically.
Speaker 3: So it seems like the newest, the youngest people, newest generation,
Speaker 3: if you want to call it, that are falling away
Speaker 3: from this more so, but I think it looks to
Speaker 3: me like a fashion that's kind of gone out of
Speaker 3: It's gone out of fashion. Exactly why that is is
Speaker 3: very difficult for me, because it doesn't look like these
Speaker 3: young people are moving to the right, are becoming more
Speaker 3: religious necessarily, but they've they've stepped away from the non
Speaker 3: conforming gender and sexual identities to a large extent.
Speaker 2: And that's interesting.
Speaker 1: I got to tell you, I I you know, we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about this, and I am one of
Speaker 1: those people who is loud and verbal about not saying
Speaker 1: that children should not have access to these surgeries. And
Speaker 1: to me, it's incredibly sad because, as I've been saying
Speaker 1: for years, part of this is a fad. Part of
Speaker 1: this is social contagion. I absolutely believe that part of
Speaker 1: this is social contagion. But it is going to have
Speaker 1: lifelong negative impacts on people who are just struggling with
Speaker 1: their mental health. And that's not to say trans people
Speaker 1: don't exist, That's not what I'm saying at all. But
Speaker 1: I'm saying that we swept up all of these other
Speaker 1: people who just needed therapy and a lot of it,
Speaker 1: and maybe some help and assistance to sort of bring
Speaker 1: their their you know, disconcerted nature together and we've medicalized people,
Speaker 1: and I find that very depressing. I do want to
Speaker 1: ask you something that's not directly about this story, but
Speaker 1: what must it be like to find out that you're
Speaker 1: a right wing professor after a tweet gets six million
Speaker 1: views and people are coming to attack you because they
Speaker 1: don't like the outcome of your data.
Speaker 4: Well, Mandy, I have to say, because I aren't kind
Speaker 4: of already out as more or less.
Speaker 3: A conservative professor, I've been used to this kind of
Speaker 3: thing in in my previous university. I got it pretty
Speaker 3: heavily during the Greater Wokening, so that on its own
Speaker 3: doesn't really bother me too much. It was interesting to
Speaker 3: see the hit pieces in the attack lines, and then
Speaker 3: to see that once the sort of attack line seemed
Speaker 3: to not be working where the pivot was so one
Speaker 3: of the pivots was okay, they tried to go after
Speaker 3: me for you know, not using the statistical tool of
Speaker 3: waiting my data. Now, once that looked the guy, the
Speaker 3: person who sort of attacked me for that, once they
Speaker 3: are sort of graphs were looked at more closely, it
Speaker 3: was obvious that that attack line wasn't going to work.
Speaker 2: One of the other pivots, however.
Speaker 4: Is to say, oh, well, but the reason this is
Speaker 4: happening is because of DeSantis and.
Speaker 2: Trump and you know, the discrimination.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's creating a hostile environment for people to be trans.
Speaker 3: So they're back in the closet again, and that's what's
Speaker 3: going on, and it's not about the fashion.
Speaker 2: And that kind of prompted.
Speaker 3: Me to sort of do another tweet thread where I
Speaker 3: kind of said, you know, it is kind of interesting
Speaker 3: because if you look at this fire data, people who
Speaker 3: identify as non binary are actually more open.
Speaker 4: About they feel freer to talk about transgender issues than
Speaker 4: everybody else, and especially conservatives, they self censor less than
Speaker 4: the average student.
Speaker 2: There's absolutely no evidence.
Speaker 4: That there was a major shift in twenty between twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four and twenty and twenty five.
Speaker 2: It was just a continuation of what was going on before.
Speaker 3: So effectively, there's zero evidence there's a chillier climate to
Speaker 3: be trends on campus, you know, on these very liberal overall,
Speaker 3: the average campus is about five you know, fifty percent
Speaker 3: liberal twenty percent conservative.
Speaker 2: So I think that argument really doesn't hold water at all.
Speaker 1: Professor Eric Kaufman teaches at the University at Birmingham. I
Speaker 1: saw the greatest bar fight of my life in Birmingham
Speaker 1: one time, playing at a snooker hall. It was quite
Speaker 1: spectacular and just like you'd see in the movie. So
Speaker 1: I hope you get to see your your bar fight
Speaker 1: soon in Birmingham, maybe not at the university. Professor Kaufman,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for the time. I'm sharing both
Speaker 1: the sub stack that you did sort of to address
Speaker 1: these statistical accusations because as I said, it's it's very dense.
Speaker 1: No way we could translate that on the radio, but
Speaker 1: it's easy to read if you want to understand kind
Speaker 1: of a deeper dive of what Professor Coffman was talking about.
Speaker 1: And I'll also share your X handles so people can
Speaker 1: follow you on X as well, because there's a lot
Speaker 1: of good information there. But I very much appreciate your
Speaker 1: time today and.
Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much.