Michael Biggs is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oxford University and the author of a series of important studies of pediatric gender medicine in the UK. The studies created much of the evidentiary foundation now on the academic record about the still very young field of pediatric gender medicine today. The publicity surrounding his research in turn served as the impetus for the governmental inquiry into that country’s only pediatric gender clinic, culminating in the issuance of an order shuttering the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in July of 2022.
Biggs’ studies revealed, among other things, that a longitudinal study launched by the Tavistock into the effects of puberty blockers on gender dysphoric youth had resulted in increasing levels of depression and suicidality in those whose psychic distress the drugs were ostensibly being used to relieve. The service hid the results that proved that the ongoing practice was harmful on balance and continued undeterred by evidence with the dramatic expansion of the practice outside of the research context that was its initial pretext to be permitted at all.
In other words, Biggs had proven that the Tavistock knew it was doing harm when it practiced “gender affirming care.”
Biggs began his investigations into gender ideology soon after being admonished by an American student in a graduate seminar he led that featured discussion of a Guardian article on the rising number of transgender identified youth. “Things were said in that discussion that should not have been have been said,” Biggs recalled the student warning him.
“That was first my encounter with this kind of student woke activism, saying that we shouldn’t discuss things… As somebody whose job is to look into things and look into truth and look into reality, it's my job to probe that. If you tell me I can't look into something, that’s when I want to look into it.” It did not take long for Biggs to discover what was being hidden behind the demands not to look — a vast complex of spurious dogma and corrupted research that did not survive reasoned scrutiny. He has swiftly set about dismantling this corpus in dryly understated but ruthlessly unsparing prose.
I met with Biggs at the Genspect: the Bigger Picture conference in Killarney, Ireland in April, where he gave a presentation on his puberty blocker research. I had a wide-ranging conversation with him about the trajectory that brought him into the gender issue and the wider sea change in attitudes enabling the ongoing takeover of academia by acolytes of the ongoing non-electoral politics of institutional capture that we refer to at Year Zero as the Successor Ideology.
As always, a full transcript will be made available to paid subscribers. I’ll also be turning this interview, along with close readings of some of his key papers into a feature story, and posting an abridged video version of this interview to both the Substack and my YouTube channel for the visual leaners in the audience…
"I first saw on Twitter, some people saying, 'Oh, they're giving the same drugs to kids as they as they give to chemically castrate sex offenders.' I thought, “That's clearly wrong. And then..."