If you wanted to make a distinction between sex as in male and female and something else,

if you wanted to distinguish, for example, being female from being feminine,

or being female from obeying society's rules for females or something like that,

then like the worst possible word to pick to make that distinction would have been gender.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom. Quick announcement to let you know that if you are a founding member of this podcast, we will be having a Zoom hangout on Sunday, March 17th at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific Time. We haven't done one in a while, and I owe you one. So that is when it will be. And of course,

if you are a regular paying subscriber, which is great, by the way, thank you. And you want to

upgrade to founding member so you can enjoy this perk. You can do that at any time by going to

megendom.com and upgrading your membership.

Okay, my guest is Alex Byrne.

Alex is a professor of philosophy at MIT, who, until recently, was an innocent man,

just a simple philosopher of epistemology and metaphysics.

But a few years ago, he became interested in,

wait for it, gender. And he wrote a book about it. It's called The Trouble with Gender,

and it covers a lot of things. But above all, it wrestles with the linguistic confusion of gender.

What does the word even mean? What did the

philosopher Judith Butler, whose 1990 book, Gender Trouble, kicked off decades of debate and

cognitive distortions, mean when she said sex was different from gender? What about social

scientists like Anne Fausto Sterling, who came up with the idea that there are five sexes?

Alex discusses all of that in this interview. He also talks about how the UK acquired the nickname

Turf Island, about the ordeal of getting this book published, and what it's like to be married to

another controversial researcher of gender, the evolutionary

biologist Carol Hoeven, who wrote an entire book about testosterone, and who recently paid us a visit

...