Dear Peter,
I’ve just watched your excellent interview with Kellie-Jay Keen and something you asked her prompted me to write to you.
You ask Kellie-Jay (at 14:00) what she thinks of you using Deirdre McCloskey’s preferred pronouns. Deirdre was previously called Donald.
Firstly, that you asked is so thoroughly refreshing. And that you asked Kellie-Jay, who will give you an honest, forthright answer is great.
Conversations get us places.
I was particularly interested to hear you ask this of Kellie-Jay after the responses you and Matt Thornton discuss in your Viewer Feedback episode of All Things Reconsidered (on the car crash that is NPR, National Public Radio is the US).
In that episode, a viewer put a critique to you that you respond to in good faith. You answered the specific critique and were clearly keeping things short to fit a lot in.
The critique: “you refer to Rachel Levine as ‘she’ and in doing so, you endorse his ideology and give credence to this social sickness.”
Matt answers and you say you agree 100%.
Matt’s response (I’m paraphrasing) is that he doesn’t want to be a hypocrite and will use preferred pronouns on air as he would as if he met ‘her’. He states he has no problem referring to ‘her’ that way and he thinks it’s just polite and wants to live in a world where we treat each other with kindness. That is a very different situation from where there’s compelled speech under sanction, in which case he’d stand against it, and cites Jordan Peterson’s experience. He says it’s silly to think he’s endorsing the ideology by using preferred pronouns.
I have no expectations that I can persuade you (or anyone) directly over to my view via a Substack post. Most of the time, persuasion and changing minds is gradual and requires exposure to information and views we haven’t heard, fully appreciated or experienced directly before plus time to think about it and talk it over further. Meghan Phelps-Roper’s experience is one such example. Not that I’m accusing you or Matt of extremism. Just that changing minds is possible. I should know, I used to be a Trotskyite.
My aim is that what you’re about to read is something you’ll consider in addition to Kellie-Jay’s reply (and anyone else who’s reading it). Perhaps even move across a line (or two).
Where we agree
No to cruelty
I agree that it’s better to live in a world of politeness (and sometimes kindness) than rudeness and cruelty.
However, there’s a heck of a lot of space for other ways of acting between those two opposites and one need not start at one or the other. I interpret the repeat instruction by organisations to “Be Kind” as a form of authoritarianism. I won’t be kind to strangers. I will be civil. I believe women are under more pressure than men to “Be Kind” given the history of women’s socialisation and thus the impact on women and men of being kind expectations is asymmetrical.
Women sit in a complicated place, both acting to avoid physical harm but using their voice to fight back, or to compete both with men and with each other. As a result, there are (usually younger) women who have bought into the gender ideology hook, line and sinker and turn up at protests with the men with their chants, whistles and air horns, whilst the women fighting gender ideology (like Kellie-Jay, and usually older) are using their voices at #LetWomenSpeak events.
The former see themselves as Being Kind, the latter see a scaled up coercive-control tactic for what it is. “Be Kind” is explored further below.
Sex is real
I think we also agree that we know men cannot become women and vice versa, that sex is real, binary and immutable.
You are no stranger to gender studies ("The conceptual penis as a social construct", man, that's funny) and increasingly, the feminists I know (second wave old school) don’t think it’s been that helpful. In Sheila Jeffrey’s work “Gender Hurts”1, she states,
Gender functions as an ideological system that justifies and organises women’s subordination and for this reason it must be dismantled. Women and girls cannot access full humanity and the rights and opportunities of full human status (MacKinnon, 2005) while the idea that there are personality traits and appearance norms that are naturally and essentially associated with girls and women still has social currency and serves to control and limit their lives (p185).
The preferred pronoun of ‘she’ for a man is to demean the past and current experiences of women and the battles they face because of their sex class. It’s a form of sex colonisation that dilutes and diminishes the sex class of ‘women’, so much so, what it means to be a woman is rendered meaningless. If women cannot use language that only describes them, they cannot fight against oppression as a sex class.
Authoritarianism
I agree that compelled speech resulting in sanctions when breached is not a desirable state of affairs. I can think of no good reason for authoritarianism, whether the Chinese kind, the Canadian kind, the Cute kind or any other kind.
Harmful ideology
Neither you, Matt nor I fully endorse gender ideology. We all appear to agree on how it harms children, how cancellation comes at a cost to individuals and to society, and that violence at protests isn’t condoned.
We probably agree on much else (like kindness to dogs) but let’s move on.
What’s in a pronoun
English third person pronouns are sexed
I cover issues with language in detail in my previous post here:
And I highly recommend Exulansic’s article in American Mind, “What’s in a pronoun?”
In summary, 3rd person pronouns in English refer to animate referents (living beings) by their SEX.
Further, the so-called “singular they” is only such in a social-pragmatic sense when we don’t know the individual’s SEX. “Who was that at the door?” “I don’t know but they left a leaflet”.
That social-pragmatic element proves very difficult for people with communication disabilities as do pronouns that clearly don’t match the sex of the individual.
There hasn’t been much consideration of preferred pronoun use and disability in the wider debate, so let’s go there.
Communication Disability
Gender > Disability?
There are millions of children and adults with cognitive, psychological, and physical conditions that result in a communication disability.
For example, a child with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or an adult with Aphasia following a stroke. Many people have a learning disability. Some have sensory disabilities impacting on communication.
English as an additional language (or not speaking it at all in an English-speaking country) is not a disability but it is disabling when not sufficiently proficient. And many people with communication disabilities have English as an acquired language.
All of the following affect children and adult’s ability to process regular pronouns:
ADHD/Autism/Neurodevelopmental disability
DLD and Childhood Aphasia
Selective Mutism
Hearing Impairment and d/Deafness
Auditory Processing Disorder
Aphasia
Apraxia of Speech
Dysarthria
Dysfluency
Cognitive-Communication Disorder
Dysphonia
I cover this in detail in my previous Substack posts here:
and
Examples
James
James has had a stroke at the age of 27. He was working as a retail manager before he acquired the physical and brain injuries from the stroke. He spends 18 months working hard on his rehab after a long stay in hospital. Physically, he has some weakness in his leg but functions just fine, even if he’s not running a marathon anytime soon. As for his speech and language, he’s left with the mildest of slurred speech (dysarthria) and a mild agrammatic aphasia; this includes processing pronouns2.
He gets a part-time job in a coffee shop as he’s trying to get back into regular paid employment again. One day, a man walks in who identifies as a woman. James takes his order and lets him know the server will be over shortly. When the food is ready, he points over to the customer and says to the server, “It’s for him at table 10”. He meant to say “her” as he didn’t want to lose his job. He’s aware this customer would prefer to be called by female pronouns. His brain is still affected in the Broca’s area that processes grammar and language expression is still inconsistent; he gets it wrong. The trans-identifying man hears the pronoun ‘him’ and immediately stands up and shouts, “How dare you? How dare you? I’m a woman! My pronouns are she/her! And what are you, drunk?” He insists to the manager that James be sacked.
Should James or the manager then have to declare James’ disability? Does James deserve any kind of sanction or the sack? What does employment law say?
Declan
Declan is in his late teens. He has Asperger syndrome, and does not present with the level of emotional maturity most would expect at his age. He also has anxiety and depression. However, he is a carer for another man and functions effectively enough in everyday society.
One day he sees someone he recognises as looking different. He can’t help but call out a couple of times, “Are you a boy or a girl?!” This someone is a Police Community Support Officer.
That PCSO makes sure that Declan goes to court and is prosecuted.
Declan’s Asperger syndrome and other contributory factors are not seriously considered.
What pronouns should Declan be expected to use of the PCSO throughout that process?
This example actually happened34. In Wales.
The final part in my Substack series on preferred pronouns and discrimination in the UK is here:
And just as I was finishing up this letter, this tweet appeared in my feed:
Hypnosis
Stroop and Derren Brown
There’s another effect of using “she” for men repeatedly. And it’s a hypnotic one.
Words have meaning and they rewire the brain. In a now quite famous piece on the Fair Play For Women website, Barra Kerr wrote that “Pronouns are Rohypnol”.
The author outlines the cost of using preferred pronouns to oneself as a perpetual Stroop test. Now imagine trying to do that when you’ve got an underlying cognitive disorder, or communication disability, or mental health problem or speak a different language.
And the cost of hearing and reading preferred pronouns by others. When you correct back in your head the sexed pronouns you should have been hearing and reading, you have a viscerally different reaction.
The author is right,
they change our perception, lower our defences, make us react differently, alter the reality in front of us
Rohypnol is a sedative drug.
But could this be more similar to hypnosis? Not the watch on a chain back and forth hypnosis, not even clinical hypnosis (whatever that is) but the kind of hypnosis the mentalist, Derren Brown practices. In a New Yorker piece by Adam Green, he describes meeting Derren and being thrown into confusion;
Just then, Brown emerged from the hotel, waved, and walked over to the table. This seemed to offend the man. “Excuse me,” he snapped. “We’re having a private conversation, and it’s extremely rude of you to listen in.”
“No, no, it’s O.K.—he’s a friend,” I explained. “He’s supposed to meet me, and—”
At this point, Brown and the man looked at each other and started laughing. Brown introduced me to Michael Vine, who has been his manager since the start of his TV career. Vine left, and we sat down to order breakfast. I told Brown that I felt like one of the unwitting participants in his TV specials, who are often put through bewildering, elaborately constructed scenarios—part social-science experiment, part con game—designed to make them do things they ordinarily wouldn’t, whether good (take a bullet for another person) or bad (push a man off a roof). He laughed and said, “It’s a classic hypnotic technique—you induce confusion. You were so baffled by Michael that you were just trying to make sense of it, trying to find something that you could hang on to. And that makes you very responsive and suggestible.”
When Brown puts audience members into a trance, he often starts by introducing himself and then withdrawing his hand when they reach out to shake it. “They’re coming up onstage and they’re already a little bit baffled, looking for direction from me, and then when you drop something that’s very automatic, like a handshake, it throws them into disarray,” he explained. “When I interrupt the handshake, put my hand on their foreheads, and say, ‘Look at me. Sleep. All the way down, all the way deep,’ they just go with it.”
When you use preferred pronouns, it’s baffling, confusing, disorientating. You have to work harder cognitively to make it happen, and the listener/reader has to work harder to understand it. The more you’re exposed to it, the more others make you accept it, the deeper the trance you end up in.
Lying
Is it true?
If English third person pronouns refer to a person’s sex, is it lying to use an opposite sex pronoun? If so, is it a great big whopper of a lie or a white lie? Does it matter?
Dawkins once said in an interview,
I don’t much care about what’s good and evil, actually I care about what’s true
I don’t know if he uses preferred pronouns. He certainly knows the difference between the sexes. I’m with Dawkins, I care about what’s true. So I make an effort not to lie.
In Sam Harris’ book “Lying”5 he asserts that telling the truth in situations where others would lie would actually benefit society. He also uses preferred pronouns, (in this podcast episode) which is an interesting contradiction. I agree with him on the whole. I find that the fewer lies we tell, including the white lies, the better. There are ways to tell your in-laws you won’t be coming for Christmas.
I agree with Matt Walsh when he says that people, who identify as Trans and insist on being treated a particular way, need to hear the truth. For him, this helps them more than being affirmed.
The law lies (what’s fit to print?)
These examples from the UK illustrate how smart people are baffled by language that does not reflect reality and results in real world harms.
Wrong comparator
Anya Palmer, Barrister provides detail of a case in which a man, who identifies as a woman, used a female staff changing room in an NHS hospital and exposed himself. No-one had asked the women if it was ok for him to use that changing room.
He was challenged in the workplace, he complained, and a Tribunal found in his favour. Except the Tribunal used the wrong comparator in this discrimination case:
…the tribunal in this case did as it was told by the ETBB [Equal Treatment Bench Book] (and/or any diversity training the judge may have had) and referred to the claimant throughout as “a transgender woman” and using the pronouns “she” and “her”. And in doing so it forgot that this polite fiction did not mean the claimant was in fact a woman.
So when it came to look for a non-transgender comparator, it assumed the comparator would be a non-transgender woman.
The comparator should have been a man.
Unfortunately, the NHS Trust did not appeal. Fortunately, it does not set precedent in law. It does confuse Employers and Tribunal panel members though.
Those poor women had been subjected to a naked man in what should be their single sex space. And language misuse means it will happen again.
Be courteous to your assailant
In 2017, Maria MacLachlan, aged 61, was assaulted by a man at London’s Speaker’s Corner. Her assailant was “Tara Flik Wood”, a man who identifies as a woman. It left Maria traumatised and with panic attacks.
When the case came to court, the Judge expected “as a matter of courtesy” that Maria refer to her assailant as either “she” or as “the defendant.” Maria reports that her experience of court was worse than the assault itself.
I tried to refer to him as “the defendant,” but using a noun instead of a pronoun is an unnatural way to speak. It was while I was having to relive the assault and answer questions about it while watching it on video that I slipped back to using “he” and earned a rebuke from the judge. I responded that I thought of the defendant “who is male, as a male.”
The judge never explained why I was expected to be courteous to the person who had assaulted me or why I wasn’t allowed to narrate what happened from my own perspective, given that I was under oath. His rebuke and the defence counsel’s haranguing of me for the same reason just made me more nervous and I so continued to inadvertently refer to my male assailant as “he.” In his summing up, the judge said I had shown “bad grace” and used this as an excuse not to award compensation.
This was in fact, a Judge asking Maria to lie under oath.
The guide for Judges has since been updated but remains highly biased.6
Her penis
The newspaper, the Daily Record had a headline that stated,
Scot flashed her penis and used sex toys in public leaving onlookers shocked.
The Daily Record got so much criticism, they eventually changed the headline. They didn’t correct the pronoun though. They just removed it.
He’d previously been on the sex offenders’ register for assaulting an underage girl.
Adam Graham (“Isla Bryson”) is a rapist. The Times saw fit to publish,
A transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis as she went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow
and Sky News reported,
Transgender rapist Isla Bryson jailed for eight years for attacks on two women when she was a man. An urgent case review was ordered by Scotland’s justice secretary after Isla Bryson, 31, was housed at an all-female prison following her double rape conviction last month
Every use of the word ‘her’ is an insult to women.
In UK law, it requires a penis to rape. Only one sex has a penis. And only one sex is responsible for the majority of sexual assaults and rapes.
You’ve worked in men’s prisons. You know what it’s like.
Women prisoners have often been victims of rape and sexual assault. In The Telegraph, it was reported,
Women prisoners who call transgender inmates ‘he’ or ‘him’ face extra jail time. Under equality rules, offenders who use terms deemed ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ could have additional days added to their sentence
25% of women in the UK experience sexual assault or rape as an adult7.
Over 30% of female prisoners report a history of sexual abuse. Almost 60% of women reported experiencing domestic violence8.
Close to 1 in every 5 male prisoners have been convicted of a sexual offence. That’s about 14,000 male sex offenders; almost 20% of the male prison population in England and Wales9.
And still the women, many of whom are victims of male violence, and already in prison, are punished further.
When is it a virtuous lie?
I’ll be honest, I’ve lied. I’ve lied to patients. I’ve lied to people with dementia. I’ll give you example; an elderly lady in hospital kept asking for her husband. He died 5 years ago. She can’t recall this. Every time anyone tells her he’s dead, she grieves all over again. Thoroughly distressing. When I tell her the clock on the wall is wrong and he’s still at work, she relaxes and can be distracted to keep her from becoming distressed again. People with dementia remember how they feel, they don’t remember the information that made them feel that way. Lying helps to change the feeling from negative to positive.
That’s not the case for people who identify as Trans. It’s more effective for their well-being to receive therapy that truly addresses their issues. They need not be affirmed for that.
Preferred pronoun use is a form of affirming. Affirming is joining the person in their delusion.
#BeKind
Who deserves your politeness and kindness?
Every time you choose to refer to a man as “she”, you tell that man you’re happy to be polite to him but not the billions of women, who don’t agree with gender ideology and are actively hurt by its real world outcomes. Or if billions of women is too abstract, any woman in your life whom you love and care about who doesn’t agree with this either.
Women tell me they get especially upset about preferred pronoun use as they feel ignored and that their experiences and concerns are belittled. It’s the opposite of polite to them. You may not believe you are endorsing gender ideology when using preferred pronouns, but you are telling the majority of women who you choose to be most polite to when you use a preferred pronoun.
Choosing to call men by “she” is an active political choice, whether you embrace all of gender ideology or not. I get the objection that pronoun use ≠ accepting gender ideology in full but in using them, you concede ground to a harmful ideology. It’s like waves eroding the shoreline over and over, losing ground.
Levine
As the original critique was concerned with Levine, a man with immense power, let’s look at what he espouses. In his own words:
Trans youth are vulnerable. We really want to base our treatment and to affirm and to support and empower these youth, not to limit their participation in activities such as sports, and even limit their ability to gender affirmation treatment in their state
We know that many of these children would desist without affirmation and those who have undergone treatment suffer irreversible harm.1011 The Paradox Institute has just produced a useful leaflet summarising the myths of gender affirming care here. It’s a bigger medical scandal than anything I can recall, bigger than lobotomy and bigger than the UK’s appalling Alder Hey organs scandal12, amongst others.
In Levine’s case, this is my thinking (and I think that of many who critiqued yours and Matt’s pronoun use in that video):
Levine (man) - in a position of power - is an autogynophile - wants to be called “she” - promotes mutilation and sterilisation of minors.
Women - “She” is the pronoun for women only - women do and have not exercised power in the same way as many men globally and historically - the majority of women do not support mutilation and sterilisation of minors.
I come down on the side of reality and with women and calling Levine “he”.
McCloskey
The following is not a critique of your friendship but the disconnect between behaviour related to gender ideology and still receiving others’ kindness in the form of preferred pronouns.
As Alice Dreger points out in her article of 200813, McCloskey was a key player in attempts to ruin Michael Bailey, an American psychologist, behavioural geneticist, and professor at Northwestern University, who published "The Man Who Would Be Queen".14 It’s a complicated story but well worth a read.
She states,
Dissatisfied with the option of merely criticizing the book, a small number of transwomen (particularly Lynn Conway, Andrea James, and Deirdre McCloskey) worked to try to ruin Bailey.
And that
charges [were] made against Bailey that he had behaved unethically, immorally, and illegally
Despite being put through hell by Conway, James and McCloskey, he remains amazingly polite in using “she” for men including these three individuals. The hurt in his voice is evident in this clip below at 19:06. I can only speculate on his continued use of preferred pronouns but he’s clearly been through hell.
At the time of writing, the top comment below this video is a complaint about preferred pronouns. I think there’s an interesting study to be had here. How often are top comments on preferred pronoun use whether from gender-criticals or trans-activists? This is perhaps because preferred pronoun use is strongly emblematic.
You told Kellie-Jay that McCloskey used the women’s toilets. It’s an invasion of women’s boundaries and spaces and also does not warrant respect in my view.
So, similarly to Levine, I see no need for kindness and wouldn’t expect it of anyone else in this context, especially women.
In fact, I can’t put it better than Sarah Ditum;
But then, kindness is gendered. Women are the ones who are supposed to be kind, to give of themselves, to play the universal mother and make other people happy. People find it particularly shocking when a woman refuses to be kind: there’s something unnatural, offensive about a female mouth declaring that the limits of her care are here and she will not be giving any more.
I resent the demands for kindness partly because they fall particularly on me due to my sex, but also because I think that kindness is lacking. It is an inadequate virtue. If all you mean by “kindness” is “the absence of cruelty”, then I suppose I am for it because I am against harassment and violence and telling people they deserved their heart attack because they were mean about Jeremy Corbyn. But in reality “kindness” is used to mean “the absence of criticism”. It means a kind of pandering.
The absence of criticism.
It makes so much sense to me why women are having an almost visceral response to preferred pronouns (in addition to making perfectly reasoned arguments against them). Civility over kindness any day. And civility is entirely possible without the use of opposite sex pronouns.
Nazi!
Some scales are plain wrong and one thing does not naturally lead to another. One example of this is Allport’s 1954 Scale of Prejudice much loved of the UK’s College of Policing. Sarah Phillimore touches on its ridiculousness here:
In brief, tweeting “my dog will call me Nazi for cheese” does not lead to genocide. Even if the British police think it does.
Nor do women calling for the protection of women’s rights lead to genocide. But it’s this belief that has led to women rights activists being called Nazis. It’s quite the pipeline: “we want to clarify in law that “sex” means “biological sex” → “Evil Nazi Terfs, you want us all to die, it’s genocide!”
The irony here is that whilst there is no evidence for Allport’s scale, its use has escalated authoritarian practice in the British police and is embedded across social media.
So, does pronoun use, voluntary or coerced, lead to an escalation in ideological capture and behaviours? Here’s a meme.
Give an inch, they take a mile? Anecdotally, it appears so. And we’re told lived experience is important, no? What’s that if not anecdotal evidence?
The low foundations of his obedience
But we need to look at two aspects here. The coercion of pronoun use and the voluntary use of pronoun use. You and Matt have been clear that you don’t go along with the first but will the latter.
Others have made excellent arguments and described the situation regarding coercion well, I recommend:
And there are many others.
The line between coercion and voluntary use of pronouns is not always clear. To what extent is it a voluntary choice when there’s such social pressure, especially on women, when cancellation still happens, when there’s grooming and propaganda aimed at children and young people in education?
James Lindsay recently stated on the Ezra Levant Show
That's something you don't see anywhere short of religious or cult conviction, and I think that's the way you can get their attention. We see that the way people get pulled into this cult though is through moral and kind of social requirement […] I saw a colouring book that's used there in Ontario, somebody sent me today, with children. This colouring book that's paid for by the Canadian government, and it's of course just horrific and the last letter, Z,...is for 'Ze' 'Zir" pronouns. And it talks about the importance of initiating people through their pronouns. And so what you do is you get these children thinking, 'this is what's socially acceptable to do, this is what it means to be a good person’
This is a good point; pronoun use = socially acceptable, and thus the obverse must be not using pronouns = socially unacceptable. We know that social pressure works. It’s what used to keep men out of women’s toilets. It’s now used to gaslight and instill fear of exclusion and ostracism. Social conformity is a strong human instinct.15
This is also demonstrated in Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless.16 Is yours and Matt's use of pronouns a placing of the Greengrocer's poster in the window? You've both said No to coercion but Yes to politeness and kindness. BUT, is that drive to be polite and kind also a form of social coercion, being seen as the 'nice guys'? You may or may not personally fear (further) cancellation but rather you don't want to be seen as cruel? Hence, polite. Kind. At the risk of repeating myself, kind to whom? To gender-critical women, this looks a lot like the Greengrocer’s poster in the window, when they’re making reasonable requests to refuse.
Whilst not promoting gender ideology nor being coerced directly when choosing to use preferred pronouns, you are choosing to swim in that sea, helping to make those waves, waves busy eroding the foundations of reality and the language we need to understand that reality and live in it safely and fairly.
Conversely, using pronouns that match a person’s sex maintains those foundations, a breakwater, if you will. Will you help us maintain that breakwater?
Thanks for reading.
Yours sincerely,
LP.
Readers who are not aware of Peter Boghossian and Matt Thornton can find them and their excellent work here:
Peter Boghossian: @peterboghossian
Matt Thornton: @aliveness_ape
YouTube Channel
https://youtube.com/@drpeterboghossian
Books
How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay
The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World by Matt Thornton
Amongst others.
And much more via your favourite search engine and library.
Enjoy the rabbit hole.
Jeffreys, S. 2014. Gender Hurts, a Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Routledge, New York.
Arslan, S., Devers, C., Ferreiro, S.M., 2021. Pronoun processing in post-stroke aphasia: A meta-analytic review of individual data. Journal of Neurolinguistics. 59, 101005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2021.101005
Harris, S. 2013. Lying. Ed. Harris,A. Four Elephants Press, Los Angeles, CA.
Shrier, A. 2020. Irreversible damage: The transgender craze seducing our daughters. Regnery Publishing.
Barnes, H. 2023. Gender identity services in the UK are on pause as evidence comes under scrutiny BMJ; 380:p509 doi:10.1136/bmj.p509
Bauchner H, Vinci R. 2001. What have we learnt from the Alder Hey affair? That monitoring physicians' performance is necessary to ensure good practice. BMJ. Feb 10;322(7282):309-10. doi: 10.1136/bmj.322.7282.309. PMID: 11159638; PMCID: PMC1119560.
Dreger, A.D. 2008. The controversy surrounding "The man who would be queen": a case history of the politics of science, identity, and sex in the Internet age. Arch Sex Behav. Jun;37(3):366-421. doi: 10.1007/s10508-007-9301-1. PMID: 18431641; PMCID: PMC3170124.
Bailey, M.J. 2003. The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, Joseph Henry Press.
Berns, G.S. et al. 2005. Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation. Biological Psychiatry, Volume 58, Issue 3, 245 - 253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.04.012
Havel, V. 1978. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe. [Online] Available from: https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/01/the-power-of-the-powerless.pdf [Accessed 16 April 2023]
I hope that he does read it and comments.
tl;dr