Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes - Diana Fleischman
Diana Fleischman spent nearly a decade at the University of Portsmouth before her current research post in New Mexico, and she brings evolutionary psychology's most uncomfortable findings to the gender debate: why disgust at certain trans-ideological claims may be a genuine moral signal, what drives autogynephilia, and what forces produced the rapid surge in gender-distressed young people. For British listeners navigating the post-Cass, post-Tavistock landscape, her data-first approach reframes questions the NHS and schools can no longer afford to avoid.
Diana Fleischman spent nearly a decade teaching human sexuality at the University of Portsmouth before returning to the United States, where she now holds a research post at the University of New Mexico. Her career has centred on disgust sensitivity — the evolved psychological mechanism that alerts us to disease risk and moral transgression — work that has been cited more than two thousand times. In this episode she brings that research directly to the gender debate, arguing that the instinctive reactions many people feel but are afraid to name are not bigotry but biological information. The conversation opens on a question many British women have asked privately: why does a pregnant person described as a man provoke visceral unease? Fleischman's answer draws on evolutionary psychology. Disgust evolved to flag situations that threaten biological integrity or risk harm to the vulnerable, and a pregnancy that disrupts normal biological categories triggers not just aesthetic discomfort but a deeper moral-harm signal. Her argument is that dismissing such reactions as prejudice is its own form of dishonesty — disgust reflexes, she suggests, process information that consciously held politics are trained to screen out. Fleischman takes a similarly direct approach to autogynephilia — a term describing sexual arousal in some men at the idea of themselves as women — offering an evolutionary framework for how such patterns might arise. The hosts explore what this means for women's spaces and the broader accommodation of gender identity claims. Whether or not listeners accept her conclusions, the exchange models the kind of frank empirical engagement that the Cass Review called for when it found that gender-medicine services had allowed advocacy to displace clinical evidence. The most immediately relevant thread for British listeners is the discussion of what drives the rapid surge in young people identifying outside their birth sex. Fleischman situates this within an analysis of how ideological movements can exploit evolved psychological tendencies around status and belonging. The pattern echoes the epidemiological puzzle at the heart of the Cass Review: why referrals to the Tavistock changed so dramatically in demographic profile over a single decade, and what this tells us about the social, rather than purely medical, origins of that trend. For an audience still working through the implications of Cass, the closure of the Tavistock, and the NHS's attempt to rebuild children's gender services on firmer evidence, Fleischman's evolutionary framework offers a useful scientific vocabulary. Schools are simultaneously navigating revised statutory guidance on sex and gender. In that context, a discipline that takes biological sex differences seriously and grounds its conclusions in data rather than identity politics has a practical contribution to make — even when it arrives accompanied by views on other subjects that many will find hard to accept.
