"If I was a trans woman, I would not be pushing for rapists to be in women’s prisons. That is the worst thing we could do. Also going after very young children."

Transcript of Interview with Michael Biggs

The podcast sent out yesterday was recorded in the lobby of a hotel at Genspect conference at Killarney, Ireland in May. I didn’t have my Lavaliere microphone with me and so you can hear some music and crosstalk in the background, which may be a distraction for some. Biggs is also a very fast talker, so there are certain moments where he is not entirely audible. Some commenters have noted these defects.

In deference to this concern, I am making this transcript available to all. Transcripts are typically available only for paid subscribers.

This transcript also involves some editing for clarity to make legible on the page that which is clear when listening to spontaneous speech but doesn’t translate so well into prose, and also to correct misstatements (such as a dropping the “not” in a statement) where the intended meaning is clear.

Wesley Yang

I'm here with Oxford professor of sociology, Michael Biggs. I often describe the field of gender medicine and the movement that it's connected to as a kind of Twilight-Zone-like unreality wherein normative truth-seeking practices have been entirely subsumed by an activist sensibility in order to manufacture what I refer to as an “astroturfed pseudo-consensus”, no more so and no more distressingly so than in the field of medicine.

Professor Biggs is not a medical professional, but he's well versed in quantitative methods and social science. He entered into the debate when he discovered something that Dr. Julie Mason was just documenting herself, which was discovering the Twilight-Zone-like unreality into which the field had plunged. Some of it is self-evident to almost anyone. Colin Wright was discussing a recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, among the most prestigious journals in the United States, that made the facially absurd argument that a sex marker doesn't provide any useful information to clinicians, and actually inflicts emotional or existential harm to the authentic identity of trans and nonbinary identified people.

Therefore, one's gender identification should be put into one's medical records, exhibiting the incredible hacking of our reality sensing system, to a degree almost unprecedented in all of the history of modern medicine. This is a subject that you became aware of at a certain point and made some very important interventions on. Could you recount how you became interested in this subject and what you found when you turned your attention to it?

Michael Biggs

I first saw on Twitter, some people saying, “Oh, they're giving the same drugs to kids as they as they give to castrate sex offenders.” I thought, “That's clearly wrong. And then I discovered it was the same drug used in America, Lupron, a gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist, which is used for puberty blocking. I thought, well, there must be a different dose, because obviously you're not going to give the same dose. It must be one-tenth or one-hundredth, so it's very misleading to say it's the same.” But of course, we did the research and found out that it was the same dose.

It just seemed so counterintuitive to me that you would give those same drugs. I looked into the evidence, and I read the two seminal Dutch articles that were published by quite serious, well-respected clinicians from the Netherlands. My reading of those was that there was actually very little positive evidence. For example, in one of the studies, they started off with 70 healthy Dutch teenagers, and they killed one of them. So their death rate was over 1%, which they mentioned in the article, but it's very much downplayed. To me, that was the most salient outcome of that experiment.

Then I discovered that the gender clinic in Britain had tried to replicate the Dutch results, and they had a press release about it on their website in 2011. Seven years later, I emailed them, asking what happened to this study of the drug, and got no response. I realized that they hadn't published the results, which, of course, really raises a red flag, right? If you have good results, you publish them.

So the very fact that it’s seven years later and you don’t publish the results made me very suspicious. I started digging and found some of the results, and they were not good. That's clearly why they hadn't published them. I wrote a blog about this and a piece in the newspaper on the BBC, and eventually it was one of the things that led to the judicial review in the Keira Bell case.

Eventually that data came to light, but they only finally published the full data one day after the verdict in the judicial review, so they had deliberately not published it until the court case was over.

Wesley Yang

So you got access to their data that they had not published?

Michael Biggs

Well, some preliminary data. Weirdly, they were actually reported to the governors of the Health Trust, so it was actually in the published records online, but nobody had ever looked at it. Some of the results were negative, particularly for girls. There seemed to be an increase in self-harm after puberty blockers. That had to be reported to Governors, but nobody else had found it. I also found some conference abstracts for 2016. You can't get the papers, but in the abstracts, Polly Carmichael, the head of the pediatric gender clinic, said, “We're not getting the same results as the Dutch. After one year on blockers, some of the girls actually getting worse rather than better.” But that was not published.

Wesley Yang

Can you summarize the findings of the Dutch study and what raised your questions about it? Because that study is presented as the sole piece of evidence on behalf of pediatric gender affirming care.

Michael Biggs

What happened in the Netherlands was to essentially create the transgender child, because before then, medical intervention for children with gender dysphoria (or gender identity disorder), was only really started at 18. You had therapy before 18. There were very few gender clinics for children. If they got any intervention at all, it was psychological counseling. Any hormones would come at 18.

The Dutch said, “We give puberty blockers, and we're going to say that they’re reversible.” Puberty blockers essentially stop the production of sex hormones. “So at the age of 12,” the Dutch were saying, “we can just stop the production of any sex hormones until 16. So for four years, you're going to be in this no man’s land, this limbo, and then at 16, if you still want them, you can go for the cross-sex hormones.”

It was a radically new step in bringing the minimum age of medical intervention from 18 down to 12. The idea was that this is very benign and reversible... there's a whole series of discursive claims, which are certainly not true -- that it's reversible, it's a diagnostic tool...so we don't have to tackle the thorny issues of consent for a 12 year old...and then this treatment has been rolled out across other countries, apart from the Netherlands, they don't stick to the minimum age of 12. So hypothetically, it could be a child as young as eight making this decision.

But the idea is that it’s reversible, it's just a diagnostic tool. It's not really a big deal. We don't have to concern ourselves about whether they can consent, because in almost all cases, the child who goes on puberty blockers will continue to cross-sex hormones, and then surgery. In effect, it is the beginning of a lifelong process of medicalization.

But of course they say, “Well, it's just this very trivial, reversible step that can be changed at any time.”

Wesley Yang

They announced what they were doing in 2011, and they allowed some information to trickle out. And that information showed that the girls were getting worse.

Michael Biggs 08:47

They didn't really see it. A few years later, they just said to the media that there's been a great success. We're rolling this out...

Wesley Yang

So they declared victory...

Michael Biggs

Before they had even recruited all the children in the experiment….

Wesley Yang

And then the contrary results came in.

Michael Biggs

Yeah. And then it was like, “Well, we don't really care.” Take into account that they’re getting huge pressure from parents and kids to offer these treatments. Britain had actually lagged behind other countries in not offering [these treatments] because it was quite resistant back before 2010. Then there was a huge demand from parents who said, “We want these lifesaving medications.” Some children from Britain went over to America, to Boston, to get these medications privately. From the point of view of the gender clinician, there's a lot of demand, and we will give the kids and the parents what they want.

Wesley Yang

The Dutch study was a different cohort than the British study, right?

Michael Biggs

Yes, totally. They are kids who went to the Amsterdam gender clinic.

Wesley Yang

They went in the 90s, and they tended to be boys. Is that right?

Michael Biggs 10:09

The first use of puberty blockers was around 1988, but that was very idiosyncratic. It was used more systematically from the late 1990s. But really, it starts in the early 2000s, when it becomes a part of the policy of the Amsterdam clinic. The cohort that is the subject of the central study, which supposedly shows the benefits of puberty blockers, were recruited in the early 2000s.

Wesley Yang

Okay, but they were mostly boys?

Michael Biggs

About half and half, I think.

Wesley Yang

The new teen girl cohort had not overwhelmed the clinic.

Michael Biggs

No, puberty blockers came before that really big shift. It had already started to shift, but it hadn't shifted.

Wesley Yang

It was two to one, males to females, and then it reversed.

Michael Biggs

Yes. It's important to emphasize is that it's not that fewer boys showed up at the clinics. Gender dysphoria is now being greatly increased among boys, but hugely, massively increased among girls. So that's why you get the sex ratio,

Wesley Yang

How much awareness did you have any of this?

Michael Biggs

I didn't have any idea of it. In fact, why I got into this whole subject of trans is because I'd seen in a Guardian newspaper article an increase in the number of trans kids. I didn't even read the article. I gave this as an exercise to my students in the master's degree program in Sociology at the University of Oxford. We have this little exercise: we give them some phenomena; we say, “Okay, you're a sociologist, now explain this. Don't read what sociology says is the new thing. Your job is just to come up with some ideas.”

We had a good discussion for an hour or so and passed different ideas; and some student said her boyfriend was a teacher and that a lot of friendship groups were declaring themselves trans. We talked about social networks — a very mild discussion.

After that, an American graduate student came up to me and said, “Things were said in that discussion which should not have been said.” That was my first encounter with wokeness. And it wasn't just her. Two German students also emailed me afterwards. I’d said, “What explains this trend?” and they said, “The word trend is a taboo word.” I said, “The trend is just a line upward or downward on a graph, right? That's sociology. That's what it means?” No, no, it could be saying it's false or it's not respecting the lived experience of trans people, or whatever.

That was my first encounter with this kind of student woke activism, saying that we couldn't discuss things.

What I said to them was, “Well, those are interesting points. Why didn't you raise them in the seminar? Don't come to me as an authority to tell me to police the seminar.” It was a real cultural clash. In some sense, I was seeing a new culture that I had not been aware of, coming into my classroom.

And that's the first reason I got involved in this issue, because I realized there's something going on here. There's a difference. There's clearly a climate of feeling that you can't say certain 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.

Wesley Yang

You're fortunate in that this phenomenon only emerged for you in 2018. But you had some awareness of the Nicholas Christakis meltdown at Yale.

Michael Biggs

But it was in America.

Wesley Yang 14:05

It hadn't actually reached your shores. Is that right? .

Michael Biggs

I suppose you could, in retrospect, see there were signs, for example, the Charlie Hebdo. I was a devoted subscriber to the London Review of Books, which is the high class literary intellectual magazine. I remember somebody had written them after Charlie Hebdo, and said, “Why don't you say something about this terrible attack on literary freedom,” and the editor wrote saying “they're Islamophobes.” It was very much, “This is Islamophobia.”

The fact that literary people were actually killed, the important thing is to not give credence to Islamophobia. So that was my previous alienation from what I saw as my liberal left-wing tradition. It's like, wait a second. You're saying that it's right to shoot cartoonists? Because you're in a protected class of Muslims? So that had already begun to estrange me from that tradition, or that evolving radicalizing tradition.

Wesley Yang

Up until that moment, you felt that there was a consensus within academia about free speech and academic freedom? And you did not expect it to be infringed upon in your lifetime, because there was no countervailing force that was present very much, or to the degree that would it actually threaten your freedom to investigate something as a tenured researcher at Oxford University.

So you were saying, “Okay, here's this phenomenon we're going to talk about.” And you're looking at the increasing numbers, you're looking at the changing sex composition of those identifying into trans identity. And the kids, on the basis of their sociological understanding, apply their tools to it. They also were providing some testimony, because it was contemporaneous to them. They were saying “we’re seeing these clusters….”

Michael Biggs

Exactly. Yes. Also, we're talking about online media. I can't even remember the discussion, apart from this woman who said, “My boyfriend teaches, and you can see identifiable clusters, and that networks of kids where all of a sudden, three of the friends identify as trans -- which we know is true. It's very prominent with other social phenomena. There’s nothing bad about saying that that happens, that ideas diffuse through social networks. I mean, that's pretty standard sociology.

Wesley Yang

So on the basis of their own observation, they were manufacturing what would later be published as the social contagion thesis, and the ROGD thesis, because people see it. It is in fact happening. That was a one-day discussion. A little exercise. Do you remember what the letter said?

Michael Biggs

I do. There was some exhortation to educate myself.

Wesley Yang

So they were speaking from out of this other consensus. To have that imposed on you was quite shocking.

Michael Biggs

Yes, it was. And it was a real culture shock. And of course, as a teacher, I'm sort of upset or worried. I want the students to be happy, and if the students are unhappy, then I want to address that.

When I was in graduate school, I was very heavily invested in the trans stuff as an onlooker, or an ally, as you might say, today. I was also in this weird position of having this young woman who didn't know I was pro-trans before she was born. That was also a sort of dissonance, right? Where I consider myself at that point a very staunch pro-trans person. To be seen as potentially hosting transphobic discussion was a jolt.

Wesley Yang

So you've been an OG trans supporter, but you had not gotten the memo that denying certain social phenomenon was what it meant to not be a transphobe, and acknowledging the existence of social phenomena is what it meant to be a transphobe.

Michael Biggs

Yes, exactly. And of course, I had been interested in the trans stuff and engaged with it in the 1990s, and then had not followed it at all. Because I was in Boston, I was involved with certain people in the community there. I had not seen how it had changed radically. Nobody before 2000 was saying trans women are women. Nobody was saying that we need to let young children transition. It was a quite a different phenomenon back then.

Wesley Yang 19:32

Your awareness came all at once through social media, a couple of Guardian articles… Something's changing – we’re giving chemical castration drugs to children, and they are in fact the same drugs in the same dosage...

Michael Biggs

Yes, exactly.

Wesley Yang

You realize, oh, there's a there's a new culture that's on the rise. You had been secure in the belief that your traditional standard notions — traditional to the left, our understanding of free speech and academic freedom.

Michael Biggs

Also, we’re on the side of truth, it’s those right-wingers who are distorting and they've got this really ludicrous ideology. People on the left, we just want the truth. That's the foundation of our tradition.

Wesley Yang

That becomes the old left tradition at the moment of ideological succession. You thought it was in the ascendancy, and it was in the ascendancy. How did you come to realize that, from the perspective of the administrators and of the cultural environment that surrounded you, those people were in the right, and you were the problematic person? I guess you didn't know that at the time.

Michael Biggs 20:58

I said, “You should have said that in the seminar.” I think it was a relatively very minor issue, but it should have alerted me.

And then I read Alice Dreger’s book about attacks on Michael Bailey, who had written a book about autogynephilia. And so then I realized it's not just students. It's part of a broader phenomenon.

And then there was the Hypatia affair, where a young philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel, who said, “Well, we’re pro-transgender, why can't we be pro-transracial, which is a perfectly legitimate philosophical thought experiment published in a philosophical journal. And then there was a massive campaign to vilify her. And again, I'm thinking, this is really bad, so I've got a stand for academic freedom. Those are the things that radicalized me if you like.

Wesley Yang

By the time that happened, had you already done your deep dive?

Michael Biggs

No, I was still just putting my toes in the water. I was getting more interested in this and becoming more concerned, intellectually, about its implications.

Wesley Yang

And then you realized that this whole practice that has suddenly scaled up rests on a foundation of one study. Was that shocking to you?

Michael Biggs 22:40

Yes, it was. Particularly when you see that it's so hard to get any contrary information out. And of course you have all these saying this is good…

It's not like other medical scandals, where patients come with a symptom, and the doctor gives them a treatment which turned out to be bad. In this case, the patients come wanting that treatment. It's not that the gender clinicians are forcing these kids and parents to have this. As a result, clinicians are under pressure.

Fortunately, in Britain we have a more diverse media including right-wing media, like The Daily Telegraph and the Times. The Daily Telegraph was the newspaper that first publicized my call for the release of the data, “Oxford professor accuses Tavistock clinic…”

I had to go to what I would never before have read -- I would have read The Guardian. But the Daily Telegraph was the one willing to write this up as a story, whereas the Guardian would never touch it.

Wesley Yang

Was that a difficult step for you to take?

Michael Biggs

No, it's fine. In Britain we’re fortunate that most of the pushback against transgenderism has come originally from left wing feminists, so older feminists from the second wave . There's no evangelical right. The cultural war is a very different phenomena than it is in America. That's partly why I resent that American students take my seminar and tell me I have to explain myself and so on. It annoys me that because of American imperialism, you don't understand that here, I'm on the side not of right-wing evangelical Christians, but left-wing lesbian feminists. But they bring their belief that everywhere is just America, and so they come to Britain, and they see me as sort of a Trumpite, a Trump supporter.

Wesley Yang

So they've done takeovers of your seminars?

Michael Biggs

There had been various kinds of exposés of my views run in the student newspaper. The biggest flashpoint was allegations a Twitter account that was viewed as transphobic that was linked to me. I was accused of running this account, and then the students in the same course a couple of years later said, “You have to explain yourself. What are your views? We need to know.”

Wesley Yang

Were you were running the Twitter account?

Michael Biggs 25:43

There was no official complaint. I said to them, “If you have evidence this was me, and if you think this account was transphobic, you should make a formal complaint.” And no one made a formal complaint. But I think what was interesting there is that there was a lot of vociferous speech from students about transphobia, and so on. Basically, a struggle session for two hours.

But then after the session, several students came to me and emailed me privately, saying either they supported me on the substance, or they said, “I don't know what's going on here, but you've got a right to whatever you think.” One of those either substantive or procedural agreements with me, but they would not do it in public. So there was an interesting asymmetry there.

The campaign against me was very much public. There was a petition circulated in the student rooms. A student would go from student to student and say, “Will, you sign this? Would you support trans people? Will you sign this petition to discipline [him] or sanction [him]?” So of course, it was hard for students not to. How do you not just sign that? Somebody was going to set up a petition to support me and was told, “Don't do that. It could be very bad for you to do that.”

Public opposition, but private support is an interesting asymmetry there.

Wesley Yang

Preference falsification. But you knew that your private support was robust.

Michael Biggs

It was probably about a 50/50, but the 50% who supported me, or at least didn't oppose me, were hidden. I kept telling people in my department, “Here's another email supporting me,” because otherwise they would not have known that.

Wesley Yang

Did your department and the administration contemplate investigating?

Michael Biggs

There was one meeting, but there wasn't really much of a case. I think the head of the department was very good and realized that this is not something they really wanted to engage in. As I said, there was no formal complaint. I think, robustly, we’re a department which is not particularly woke. We actually do quantitative positivistic empirical research. We don't do the kind of social justice-y research sociology is often associated with. From his point of view, there's a discussion, there's a debate. People have different views. That's part of living. Normal scientific discussion and deep political discussion.

Wesley Yang

So the values that you thought of as in ascendancy continue to be in the ascendancy, at least for now, within your department and your university.

Michael Biggs

I think the University of Oxford is definitely one of the best universities in Britain for standing up for academic freedom, as there are a lot of stodgy old people.

The concern is, what happens when the young woke people filter up from postdocs to junior faculty? What will happen eventually, as they take power?

Wesley Yang

Do you see that happening around you?

Michael Biggs 29:24

Yes. Not so much from experience, but just looking at the data on the attitudes of young academics. I have compiled a lot of data from America and Britain about that. There's just such a shift in attitudes, and when that demographic bubble comes up of young people with totally different attitudes… Fortunately, I’ll be retired or dead, but I don't feel particularly optimistic about the long term.

When I talk to friends, they say, “Oh, come on, don't be a drama queen. I have a friend who said, “Oh, at my college there was a very good philosopher who was very, very pro-free speech and you think, “But he's retired by now.” They don’t understand what the shift in the young generation is like. I think a lot of people look around at their peers and they say, “If you want to say rapists shouldn't be in women's prisons, obviously that's a fine statement.”

They don't realize that for young people it is completely unacceptable to say that statement, and those young people are going to eventually be in positions of power.

Wesley Yang

It's more just the consensus of that generation. It is not a matter of DEI mandates, although that may hasten things.

Michael Biggs 30:53

University of Oxford belongs to Stonewall, which is the LGBT organization. I've used Freedom of Information requests to find out...Every year, our university has to give 30, 40, 50 pages of information to Stonewall to say, “Here's what we've done.” For example, every year we have to highlight one lesbian and gay speaker, one bi speaker, two trans speakers...(And you can see the hierarchy within the LGBTQ movement.)

We're begging Stonewall for approval in order to go up in their rankings. I've called on the university to leave the scheme because I don't think it's appropriate at all to be part of this completely unelected lobby group. The University Union of Academic Staff — that’s a union, and most people don't belong to it, and of course, most people don't belong until the election.

If you say, “We're going to recognize the President of the Union, yes, that a democratic person, they can speak for staff even though only a minority of people voted them.

But the Stonewall is completely unelected. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people didn't come together to elect Stonewall. It's just a lobby group that set it up itself and is funded by public money. Someone called this a self-licking ice cream cone. It's this thing where the government public bodies pay Stonewall to tell them what to do. Even though University of Oxford is not particularly woke, it’s still signed up to all these things. We have a trans policy and so on, which I wasn't even aware of until I started getting into this stuff. The Administrative rules and regulations have changed, even though the culture in Oxford hasn't yet changed, particularly.

Wesley Yang

What have you done further on the subject?

Michael Biggs

One strand of my research is on the medical stuff, puberty blockers. Another strand I've written more sociologically about is the important impact of Queer Theory on prison policy in Britain. I think it's such a nice case, because you never think of Queer Theory, Judith Butler. I read Judith Butler in the 1990s. Obviously, it was important at that point as academic theory, but really, to put it crudely, it’s kind of intellectual masturbation. I didn't think much of it, but if people in English literature find it useful, that’s fine. Whatever. Performativity, gender… That’s great.

But it's literally informing prison policy in Britain. That was really a shock to me. Or in England and Wales, where they’re actually quoting Butler. Or key transgender activists who say that their primary influence was Judith Butler are now advising the prison service to change the rules to eliminate sex and replace it with gender identity.

I have an article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which is probably the only journal that would publish it, that’s just a straight sociological case study of policy change and how Queer Theory, human rights policy or human rights ideas also, was behind this fundamental shift in prison policy.

At the high point of that policy, what was important was the feelings of the rapist. If the rapist felt like a woman, then you needed to make sure that his feelings are respected. And that was driven by activists. Not all of them are trans, but part of this is inspired by Queer Theory.

And what was also interesting in the case of Britain, is that it happened under a Conservative government. This is not Joe Biden or New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. That's not really surprising, right? These are left wing parties. Why shouldn't they implement left wing policies? But these crazy queer policies were being enacted under a Conservative government, which shows us the power of these ideas.

Also the Foucaultian way in which power is not necessarily the sovereign at the top. It's all these bureaucrats and administrators. These are professional activists and activist professionals, who are making these fundamental changes, when the government is either asleep at the wheel or it's not really interested.

Wesley Yang

So the untransitioned man who used the penis that he still has in order to rape a woman...

Michael Biggs

This is why I got into this particular subject. I went to a seminar at Oxford, All Souls College, a very traditional college, the wealthiest College in Oxford, and this queer woman criminologist gave this crazy talk about how transphobic it was for these dissident feminist groups to not want the rapist, Karen White, in the women's prisons.

No men's rights activist, even the most misogynistic, hardcore, would ever say that, and yet a queer criminologist is saying that it's terrible for these dissident feminist groups to publicize this. Fair Play for Women (https://fairplayforwomen.com/) had a picture of this unshaven, pudgy, really rough looking bloke, on their little leaflet, and they said, “Yeah, meet Karen. Do you want Karen in a women's prison? Karen is a rapist who was put in the women's prison where she sexually assaulted prisoners.”

The criminologist said, “I'm going to give you a trigger warning. These are horrific transphobic materials for a poster that was produced by this terrible group.” What is this? This guy's a horrible, really evil, nasty bloke. Why are you supporting him as a queer woman? I still can't quite fathom that they're choosing the worst kind of men to support. She could have said, “He was not really trans,” or “there could be some exceptions.” And, “99% of trans people are nice and peaceful trans women, and they should be in women’s prisons, but maybe there's 1% who shouldn't.” But she was carrying the logic, that ideology, to its absolute absurdity.

Wesley Yang

With self-ID, words have magic that will do things that no amount of medicine can actually do. It is dispositive of the case. And we want to be very rigid about that. And we're going to apply it in all instances, and in particular, this instance, so that all other instances that are short of this are encompassed within this.

Michael Biggs

Yes. Judith Butler has this concept of performativity. But what I say in this article is to delineate two ways of thinking about that. One is dramaturgical performativity, that's how you look. And it's certainly true. Sociologists have pushed this point of Judith Butler, that sometimes we judge sex, not by looking at chromosomes, or cells or whatever, we look at the person. It’s certainly true that there are some men who can perform femininity well enough.

So maybe a lot of people might think they’re women. You could say gender depends on this performativity, through dramaturgical performativity, what you give off — the tone of your voice, how deep your voice is, your dress, and so on….

That slides into what I call illocutionary performativity, which is just, “I say what I say.” In the first phase of the prison policy changes, you had this very attractive transsexual who was put in a woman's prison. That was dramaturgical performativity, because you could say, “Well, this person really didn't really look like a woman. Very, very tall, with ginormous breasts and long hair. You could say, “Well, there's a performance of femininity there.” There's gender performativity going on, in that dramaturgical sense, but it then ends up being just simply “I say it.”

That's where, ultimately, the activists have said that I can have a full beard and be dressed in the most manly way and have a deep voice and being manly in every respect, including, for example, raping women, and if I say that I am the word, I'm a woman. And that's everything. That is everything.

Wesley Yang

One would think that all people would reject such claims, and yet the set of people who are not rejecting those claims include prison administrators, the President of the United States, the chairman of Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, all of the entities that control the commanding heights of the global economy. How does one square this Twilight Zone-like unreality with the full reality of the things happening on the ground?

Michael Biggs

I think partly it’s a matter of controlling of the amount of information that comes out. Obviously, in Britain, fortunately, because we have a more diverse media ecosystem, including right wing media, the rape cases like Karen White become public knowledge. There are lots of these cases, but in America, you see them on a radical feminist YouTube channel, or maybe the right-wing outlets like The Daily Wire, but the mainstream media like the New York Times and the Washington Post are not going to report on that. So sometimes the information about the bad effects are suppressed. That's one thing.

I think another thing is that at this point, there are a lot of trans kids. A lot of people have a trans kid or a trans nephew, or trans niece. So they're really concerned about this kid. “I want to protect my kid.” For example, some of the Gendered Intelligence training that was done in Oxford was initiated by someone who had a partner with a trans child. Often, private information is shared among some activists that are on our side about this particular official or this particular university administrator: we actually know that they have a trans kid or sibling or whatever.

So there are often people with direct personal stake in it who either view themselves as being “I really want to push the trans stuff because my kid depends on it” or they say, “Maybe I'm a skeptic, but there's no way I'm going to destroy this relationship by giving succor to transphobes.” I think that's one of the ways in which the movement is surprisingly successful, is that you have people with personal investments in it.

I think the other thing is, it's very hard, in our current climate, to say no to vulnerable groups. And there's no doubt that if you believe you're trapped in the wrong body and have this terrible gender dysphoria, you are a victim, you are vulnerable. For somebody who's in that position of privilege, a “cis” person, like you or I, it's very hard to look them in the face and say, “No, I don't agree with your claims.” Whether that be the case with refugees, on all different dimensions of privilege and victimhood, it’s very difficult if somebody accuses you of transphobia. It’s very difficult to say, “I think you're wrong, or I don't care.” The instinctive response is to say, “Oh, I'm so sorry, what can I do to be a better ally?”

Wesley Yang

We see these graphs about the explosive growth of use of the term “racism,” and so on. But those are terms that also have been around for a while.

Michael Biggs

But they didn't have the same kind of punch as they do now.

Wesley Yang

But transphobia does not have a prior existence. It was astro-turfed into place, and yet it became a thing that had always been a great sin for which a person could sacrifice their career and livelihood, all at once. Even in the year 2018, you did not know the perils that were associated with it. You came to learn the whole extent of the perils. You were protected to some degree by the residual ascendant belief about what was normative within the academy. That's there for now but has eroded really rapidly in the last five years. But you do feel you're going to be able to keep doing your work. It’s among the most fascinating, and also disturbing, sociological phenomenon in the history of developed nations.

Michael Biggs

When I was in graduate school, I'd read anthropology of some Australian aboriginal tribe or pygmies in Africa, and you realize it's such a completely different culture with just weird beliefs. And you think, gosh, these people, how can they have such weird beliefs or attitudes? Then I discover, in 2018, these fairly crazy beliefs — more crazy than any aboriginal or pygmy has come up with — are being promulgated in my institution by my people. They’re not foreigners. They’re people who look like me and share the same cultural heritage as me. And yet they have these completely bizarre beliefs. You realize the power of culture.

Wesley Yang

Being at EPATH and then being here, it’s the same people. It's educated, middle class, first world people who share almost everything, except there is a divergence as great as that between us and the tribe where every boy's rite of passage is to give fellatio to the older men. There is that tribe. How did that massive discontinuity emerge out of nowhere around the year 2015, and then divide the world into, at least from the perspective of power and authority, good and evil. When in fact, the thing that is trumpeted as the good, rests upon a nugatory scientific evidentiary basis while making claims of being science, and medicine.

Michael Biggs

But I think once you establish the infrastructure — I think feminism has done quite a lot. You said there's no precedent for this, but in some ways there was.

I have a piece in Quillette about how feminism itself has laid the foundations for this. Of course, now I'm allied with a lot of left-wing feminism. I'm very glad to be, and of course, they’ve often suffered the worst attacks by, ironically enough, young women. That also seems very frightening, to see these older feminists, being attacked viciously by these young women. What kind of culture creates that sort of hatred of the mother or the grandmother? That's also sort of odd. But anyway, we were just talking about how families are now worried about their kids being taken away from them if they don't affirm, if they don't get medical treatment. In some countries, that's a real threat. And how terrible that is.

What I want to say is, “But that's what feminism wanted.” Feminism wanted to destroy the family, at least the radical portions.

Wesley Yang

It's also the lived experience stuff, right? Establishing the authority of lived experience as counter-knowledge. And that somehow that suborned the state itself.

Michael Biggs

Yes. Although the strange thing about lived experience is it’s only some people's lived experience. It's the lived experience of a small group of people who only have particular demographic characteristics. So if you have the right demographic characteristics, but the wrong views, then your lived experience doesn't count.

Wesley Yang

Go back to the feminists.

Michael Biggs 48:41

Feminist started out by saying, in the 1970s, that sex didn't matter and that it’s all patriarchy, it's all socialization. That maybe there's some differences in genitals or maybe women might gestate children, men don't, but apart from that, there's no differences. And I think that argument in the 1970s was probably salutary, because the dominant culture so exaggerated biological differences.

Saying a woman couldn't run the marathon or women can't be doctors, their brains aren't good at that. Obviously, that was wrong. I think when this feminist denialism of biology started, it was a good corrective to over-emphasis on biology.

Of course, now it has taken over. It has become a dominant orthodoxy. It ironically ended up actually harming women and girls. In some ways, transgenderism is piggybacking on the success of feminism. It has been so successful, that transgenderism says, “Well, there's no such thing as sex.

Wesley Yang 49:49

So we see a series of pathological corrections. Title IX said that there had to be as much provision of sports for women as men. But in practice that meant because the football team is huge, if you don't have reach numerical parity between men’s and women’s sports, you have to get rid of the men’s wrestling team.

Whereas you couldn't have a more reasonable construction of what it meant to give people equal opportunities. The question should have been -- “Are there women who are not able to compete in the sport that they want to?” If the answer is no, then maybe you can have more male athletes in total as a result of the huge football team. Simple as that. That’s a reasonable thing the vast majority of people would say is a reasonable solution. But people who had a very rigid notion of equality did not allow that to happen.

So we moved from squeezing out the men's wrestling team to now destroying women's sports altogether. One pathological correction replaced by another pathological correction, pushed by the same people, on the basis of the same principle: that the “cis” woman is privileged relative to the trans woman.

Michael Biggs

Yes. Although now it's often the feminists who have pushed for the first being eaten up by the second.

Wesley Yang

Yes. It's the same people — the feminists who have gone down the intersectional slide. That means sacrificing our daughters to your son's gender identification.

Michael Biggs

Yes. One of the important ways in which Britain was different was this social media site called Mumsnet, which, because it wasn't run by feminists, allowed feminist discussion of unorthodox, anti-trans or pro-gender-critical, pro-sex-realist ideas to flourish. Before this became mainstream, they helped to mobilize women. I've read women saying, “I can't have this argument with my daughter. I keep telling her, ‘Isn't it terrible that boys are beating girls in girls’ sports?’” But the daughters say, “But Mum, there's no differences.” And the mothers are saying, “My daughter is now saying there's no differences, women can do anything.” There's a bit of, “Well, you've raised your daughter to believe that there are no differences and that we as women can do anything and girls can achieve anything. So, in some ways you have created this monster that is now, devouring you.”

Wesley Yang

The girls approve of that devouring. The younger generation. Not all of them do. Riley Gaines doesn't. She was associated with right-wingers. In the US, in our polarized system, once right-wingers oppose something, then it strengthens and consolidates the progressive consensus.

These things swept through left wing activist spaces, and then they swept through academe, and now they're surfacing at the level of national politics.

And when it's Republicans and right-wing evangelicals that oppose it, then it strengthens progressive control. And it's progressives who control American institutions and progressives who control Black Rock and Vanguard.

It’s the most extraordinary memetic warfare, all on behalf of a population so small that, demographically, it doesn't even exist -- in terms of the votes cast -- and yet people have sentimental attachments manufactured through “I Am Jazz,” or through these books, are enough to activate it. It's a virus It controls the whole mechanism of progressive ideation and progressive governance.

And the question is, can democracy prevail? Because most people's opinions are rooted in reality in a way (that the lead consensus has now departed from) that no one has ever had to question before. No one has ever had to make an articulate defense of it before. Everybody just assumes this is true, that questioning is crazy because it is.

So the views are not universally held, but super-majority held -- but weakly held -- whereas they're up against these factions that are super invested in them, and who are able to control certain choke points within society. It's a new kind of bureaucratic administrative takeover….In some ways, prior movements against sexism, racism, and homophobia partook of these kinds of tactics on behalf of goals that we all recognize to be worthy. But the danger was that in the process of building that infrastructure we created a machine that could be hijacked by something that was not so benign.

Michael Biggs 55:31

You could argue that one of the worst effects is that some of the people who have been most affected by transgender ideology are women, and gays and lesbians. Those are the most clear victims of this.

Wesley Yang 57:56

Right. This is the point I make about successor ideology; you cannibalize the prior subjects of progressive reform.

I take this further than some people do. There's an equilibrium at the end of history that you may well have met: You are free and equal to the extent that our system is able to provide those things and of course, economically and so on, is not able to. The further progression of something that is said to resemble progress actually only involves cannibalizing progress...like normalizing paraphilias, and so on. That's all that remains after you reach the terminal boredom at the end of history.

You have to manufacture causes into existence by taking a category that doesn't even really exist, redefining it as something that any troubled person can identify into, and then telling them that the people that don't want to give them everything that they're asking are hateful transphobes. And that the state and the oligarchy are on the side of these victims, and that hateful masses have to be placed under further control and denied any democratic legitimacy.

It's all part of this. There is a political and sociological theory that I grope for in an improvisatory way that has not been written, but that is all encompassing. That's the Successor Ideology book that I want to write. I'm not quite equipped for it. One has to be a master of many fields in order to do it, but I think I can sketch it out and allow others to do that work. Not that anyone would want to. But you think back, you would have been a British left-wing sociology student in the 90s....

Back then you'd have these debates — Terry Eagleton versus Judith Butler, right? These like figures who are like, “Look, this is intellectual masturbation. This is not real engagement with the material reality. And we know that this sterile, scholasticism is not going to make any difference in the world.” Well, it turns out that it was the intellectual masturbators that transformed the world.

Michael Biggs

Exactly. I think, if you'd gone back to 1995, and told Judith Butler, “Do you know that British prison policy in 25 years’ time will be shaped by your ideas?” I think she would say you're a lunatic. You’re absurd.

Wesley Yang

That militates against the very notion of the cis-heteronormative society that we live in. Of course, that term didn't even exist for her because the term “cis” didn’t exist. We can coin these terms in 2008, and they can become the basis of primary school education in 2020. How does one push back against all that?

Michael Biggs 59:11

I think Britain has led the world in pushing back for various reasons.

One is Mumsnet. One is the more diverse media ecosystem. Another is probably a lack of Christian evangelicals. There's not that kind of homophobic, pro-life...British conservativism is much weaker and less reactionary. Therefore, in some ways, Britain has really lead the way and has escaped that terrible polarization which you see in America, as you've sketched, whereby if anybody criticizes the ideas, the Democrats become invested in it and it becomes more and more fundamental to the left-wing identity.

But it's not clear what's going to happen. A lot of trans stuff, and wokeness more generally, is embedded much more now than it was under Labour, despite 15 years, or whatever it is, of Tory rule. The conservatives make noises about culture war occasionally, saying, “Oh, we're going to push back against this stuff.” But of course, they never really do, or they do in very minor ways. We've got no idea what's going to happen when Labor comes in. Labor at the moment seems to be committed to a very pro-trans stance, but Keir Starmer (leader of the Labour Party of the UK) is maybe wobbling a bit on that.

Wesley Yang

There's one head of state that was asked the question, “What percentage of women don't have penises?” And then there's one head of state who said, “100%.” It was asked of another leader who equivocated more than anything.

Michael Biggs

Yeah, Keir Starmer said over 99% or 99.9%, or whatever, so he's equivocating. The hope is that he realizes, that as this becomes more salient, it will alienate voters. Just before the pandemic, I was one of the experts lined up to talk to Labour MPs about the lack of evidence for transgender medicine for children. The scheme, as lobbyists had laid it out to us, since we couldn't email or write to the Labour MPs, because that would be sifted by their staff, was that we had to literally come up to them when they're walking through the lobby of Parliament, and hand them a piece of paper. That was the only way of getting through.

Obviously, we’re not going to meet at a cafe. There's going to be safe houses somewhere around Parliament that the MP would be ushered into, and then it was totally off the record. This is how the Labour Party operates, because the activists are young, keen, enthusiastic. They’ve imbibed all the doctrines of transgenderism. There's one Labour MP who was very vociferous, Rosie Duffield, who has been attacked as a result of it who is on our side. But everybody else is either silent or very much “trans women are women,” “trans kids need medical treatment.”

Wesley Yang

But you are educating people.

Michael Biggs

Well, that scheme was foiled by the pandemic, but there are lots and lots of Labour Party member activists who are, feminists who have tried to put these views forward and are having marginal success. I think is what will change the Labour Party's view, is if it becomes enough of a salient issue. The Tories are beginning to win public sentiment. One of the problems is that, “Well, the majority of people don't believe this.” But for the majority of people it's not salient.

So you support the Tories on this particular issue, but this issue is not relevant for your life. But as it becomes more prevalent, and particularly when you see your school teaching your kids that, then I think it becomes more salient. And as it becomes more salient, I think the majority view is going to become more important.

We saw this in Scotland, where the very woke, progressive Scottish government tried to push forward gender recognition through to bring self-ID. That led to more opposition, because then people realized the implications.

Fortunately, it turned out that there was at the precise moment the Scottish government was pulling this, there was a male rapist, Isla Bryson, who when he was charged as a man who had raped a woman, he suddenly said, “I'm a woman.” Then the media can ask the question of the politician: “Do you think this rapist Isla Bryson is a woman? Does she belong in a woman's prison?” Once they’re cornered, the politician looks really bad.. They can't say this rapist is a woman, so once the media is able to have the courage, or audacity to put forward that question, then the whole policy seems ludicrous.

But what happens in most countries, like New Zealand where I'm from, or America, is that that question is never put to politicians, so the politician never has to answer that question.

Wesley Yang

The rubber will hit the road. More and more people's 10-year-old girls are going to be defeated in sports and become totally discouraged as a result of a boy crushing them. The idea is that democracy can then serve as a check — that’s a question.

Michael Biggs

That's the optimistic scenario.

Wesley Yang

Only 25% of the country is Democrat or Republican in the US. Party affiliation by generation is in the high single digits, favoring Democrats for both millennials and Baby Boomers. But for Gen X, it's plus-20 Republican.

Why is that? Because Gen X are the people whose kids are in school. They're getting older, but also are people who know that Critical Race Theory and radical gender theory are not just made up, right-wing, moral panics. It's happening because it’s happening to their kids.

There is an overall bourgeois moral revolution that is being led and imposed top down upon children. It's based upon ideas that are inimical to pluralism, liberalism, democracy, reason, fairness, truth-seeking. It's explicitly opposed to all those things that are very much in the grain of Anglo-American democracy. They aim to be an assault on it. They are undertaking an assault on it. And they're doing it in a way that is insidious to an exceptional degree. It's the people who are on the gender frontier who were most clearly exposed to it. That was the kind of vector of my interest in it in first place. It actually has become a child mutilation...it's become a child sacrifice cult. And the consensus of our medical establishment supports this. I never dreamed I would witness such a thing in my lifetime.

Michael Biggs

Exactly. But again, from the 1960s, the idea of radical gay rights and feminism was to destroy the family. There's no intentionality here, but this is the method by which there is a destruction of the family going on. You have social workers, and teachers, and doctors and clinicians taking children away, in effect. In some cases, actually taken them away from the family, but at least radically alienating them from the family and also forcing parents to support this with the rhetoric of “either you have a dead daughter, or a live son,” or the other way around. But like you said, either you support your child's transition or you're completely estranged from your child. You have to believe in this ideology, or at least pay lip service to it, or you lose your kid. That's the choice. Predominantly, I think, the protagonists in this are women. These are feminized professions: social workers, teachers, clinical psychologists, whatever. That's why I find it annoying when feminists say, “Oh, it's all about patriarchy.” No. This is the unintended consequences of some aspects of feminism.

Wesley Yang

You've stood up in the face of this and, and it happened incrementally. You said, “Hey, I'm allowed to research this,” and “Oh, my God, what's happening with puberty blockers?” And then it's gone further, and, “Look! Oh, my God, what's happening with prisons? They’re citing Judith Butler on behalf of the defense of men with penises who have raped women.” And you've become aware of the enormous apparatus of power that you're up against. It's still constrained, where they have to allow you to continue to operate as a tenured professor, but it's clear that the powers that be have decided. Maybe they can be restrained by democratic politics, but you're just a guy and a few other guys, and other people. How do you feel about that prospect? Because there is what the majority believes, and then there's the truth. Those two things are both powerful, but the truth in and of itself actually doesn't prevail on its own.

Michael Biggs

I'm sort of I'm cautiously optimistic, from Britain, at least. I’m from New Zealand, so I look at what's happening there. It's very, very grim, and I think I'd be incredibly pessimistic. I'm very glad to be in Britain. I think it speaks a lot about British democratic culture that you can have these discussions in ways that you can't in many other English-speaking countries.

Wesley Yang 1:11:06

On the other hand, Britain’s police are investigating people for misgendering, so Britain is this cradle of liberty, Anglo-American governance, but at the same time, they don't have the First Amendment and they are investigating people for thought crimes.

Michael Biggs

Yes, that's true. The police are a kind of exception.

Wesley Yang

On the other hand, you have you have a prime minister with the courage to say....

Michael Biggs

Yes, it takes courage to say that a woman can’t have a penis.

Wesley Yang

This is going to be an important political question, going into the future. Do women have penises? Everybody has to be asked this. And they have to stand and be counted.

Michael Biggs 1:11:51

Exactly. But there's also a large number of people who are vested, actually physically, in transgenderism. Now that there's been some successes or pushback in Britain, you can see among the transgender activists there's a kind of genocidal rhetoric of “They’re going to kill us,” or, “We’re subject to genocide.” There are tweets saying, “All my trans friends, we have go-bags. We're thinking about where we flee from the genocide.”

Wesley Yang

They have conditioned their existence on access to women's private spaces and sports. “If we don't get these things that is genocide.”

Michael Biggs

Yes. Of course it's absurd, but it's also in some sense true, because their social life depends on that social identity.

Wesley Yang

Because if they're truly recognized as the sex they claim to be, then all of those things come naturally to them. And the denial of that recognition is the annulment of their identity claim, and if their identity claim is the seat of their selfhood. I think we, the Western world, made promises to them.

Michael Biggs 1:13:12

Exactly. And, of course, many of them have transitioned on the NHS. And explicitly, the NHS, the public health system in Britain, says we're going to give you these medical treatments, but as a result, if you're a man, you're going to have estrogen, maybe genital surgery, and you have the right to go into women’s spaces.

In fact, I've heard that sometimes they will say, even before they've been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they'll say to a young man, “Well, try using the women’s toilets and see if that feels good for you. And if it does, then maybe you have gender dysphoria.” So in some sense, the NHS has told people that they can transition, they have a right to do so. And of course, if you've invested years and years of your life in this process, perhaps surgeries and taking drugs, you're going to say, “I was given this promise by the state, by this publicly funded health system. And now there are a group of people who are wanting to take that away from me.” So you can see why that feels so bitter to them.

Wesley Yang

The die-ins and the stuff that is happening in the US, is that happening here?

Michael Biggs

Not quite so much. There have been some protests and so on, and there have been some quite aggressive protests. For example, there was a showing of a film, “Adult Human Female,” in Edinburgh. They've tried to show it a couple of times at University of Edinburgh, and both times, students and staff and queer allies from outside the University managed to shut it down.

Fortunately, we don't have access to guns. We don't have American’s extreme cultural violence. But I do worry when I look at these tweets by transactivists. They are creating a culture of fear, which ultimately, it's hard to see how it won't end up in some kind of violence.

Wesley Yang

There is this shattering stupidity of having to organize around the idea that women don't have penises. They are fully committed to the shattering stupidity that women do have penises. But it's very hard to not think that it's beneath your dignity to have to take a stand and also risk everything on behalf of that proposition. Yet, we're rapidly approaching the moment where every resident of the Western world will have to take a stand on that. And there's this Twilight Zone-like unreality and absurdity about that. You got there a little bit earlier. I got there a little more recently, but everyone will get there. It’s a matter of certainty. There's no way we can avoid it.

Michael Biggs

Exactly. Yes. Perhaps there is a messy compromise possible, where we say, “Well, we won't put the rapists in women’s prisons, but maybe if you're a man, and you've committed some crimes which are non-violent, you’ve had genital surgery maybe…” Personally, I wouldn't agree with that policy, but maybe there could be some cases or maybe different rules for toilets and for prisons.

If I was a trans woman, I would not be pushing for rapists to be in women’s prisons. That is the worst thing we could do. Also going after very young children. There are some transsexuals who are more moderate, looking for compromise and perhaps even agree more on our side, like some transexuals at this conference, but they’re such a tiny minority, and they're stigmatized by their own community. They face skepticism, perhaps from our community as well. I feel very sorry for them. There's just so few who are willing to come out and say, “Different ideas are possible,” or, “Maybe we shouldn't be medicalizing children,” or, “I transitioned as a adult, and I'm happy. Adults can do that, but not children.” But these moderate voices are very atypical in the transgender community, unfortunately.

Wesley Yang

Yes, because it exists as the community by virtue of this activist agenda. It doesn't exist otherwise. It's an anomalous practice in a gray area of medicine. That's what it was until very recently. And there are people who put themselves through that. And to manufacture them as a coherent protected class involves torturing the meaning of all those things. But it turned out to be the case that it had this tremendous utility, because real marginalized populations have actual needs that may not coincide with what the what the Borg wants to do.

This is entirely a creation of the Borg. So they're entirely at the sufferance of the Borg. Thus, to be this is to be the activist. That doesn't always turn out to be the case. People transition and you have figures like, Richie, they’re just normal people. In the end, there's colloquial reality that ends up reasserting itself, because it is a quotidian phenomenon. We have a group of people who have been persuaded that removing their genitals is not the most extreme act of violence you could commit against yourself or another person. They see it as the next step in a treatment path because medical doctors are telling them that what it is. That turns out not to rest on any evidence.

Do you have a concluding statement?

Michael Biggs 1:19:34

The last project that I have engaged in research on is on the 2020 census in England and Wales. They asked a question about gender identity. The question was extremely badly formulated. I was planning to write a paper about suicide rates and imprisonment rates based on this data, which came out in January. I wrote the paper over Christmas. When I looked at the data from January, I knew that the data were wrong. The question was, “Is your gender identity the same as your sex registered at birth?” The reason that question was created was to pander to transgender activists. If you wanted to find out the transgender population, just say, “Are you transgender?” Then people who are transgender will say yes. And then you can ask them, what sort of transgender: trans man, nonbinary, whatever. That's good. Get more detailed classification. If you're not transgender, you say no. If you don't understand what it is, you're going to say no, because if you asked me something and I don't know what it is, I probably am not it.

But instead of that they use this incredibly vague question, which assumes there's a gender identity and assumes that sex is registered at birth. What I discovered is that what the best predictor of transgender status, according to this question is whether you don't speak English very well.

So there's this massive contamination of data on the Census. I've now got the Office for National Statistics to do an investigation on other data that are produced. It's contamination of everything, including the very statistical reality which is used, not just for social science purposes, but also to allocate funding.

What alerted me to the problem was that all the places with the highest transgender population were the places with lots of Muslim immigrants. According to the census, 1 in 67, Muslims is transgender. So obviously absurd. We know that 1 in 67 Muslims is not transgender.

Yet, they will have real consequences because local governments in the areas with high immigrant populations will say, “We've got a lot of trans population, we need to fund more and more trans services for this completely nonexistent population. So that's an example of the way that the very statistics on which government and society is run is contaminated by very strong diversity agendas.

Wesley Yang

So this giant Twilight Zone-like unreality is just going to repeat itself over and over again, and in ways that ultimately end up to the detriment of children, of women, and the functioning of society as a whole. This is a complete absurdity, but it's just a taste of what's to come.

Michael Biggs

Or more optimistically, it'll be a high peak, and then either we'll roll it back, or we'll have some sort of messy compromise, where neither side is particularly happy but there’s a more sustainable equilibrium.