https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8qti554Tkow
Welcome everyone to Other Voices with Ferveki. I apologize that there’s been one or two Fridays where nothing has been released. That is because I typically have been out of country. I have been doing a lot this summer. I’ve been calling up my Thunderbolt summer. But I’m really happy and excited about this one. I think this, I’m really looking forward to this. I think it’s going to be deep and timely. And I’m here with people who both who have been on my channel before and I’ve had extended discussions with. The first is Rachel Hayden and the second is Greg Enriquez. Rachel, welcome. And it’s great to have you here again. Thank you. It is amazing to be back, literally. I mean, I feel this completely confounded by the fact that I’m here again. It’s awesome. So, yeah, I’ve been on the channel a couple of times, like you said, the first time I was on. I was kind of midway through gender transition for myself. And that process combined with, I guess, the philosophical approach that you sort of helped unleash in me leading toward Agnes Callard and other people really led me to think, maybe I’m on to something here, you know, where I can bring bring a gift of understanding gender in a better way to the culture at large, to help us sort of maybe circumvent some of the culture wars issues we’re dealing with, both in the sense making scene and outside of it and allow people to sort of aspire within a model of gender in a way that we maybe haven’t explicitly spelled out so far. Thank you, Rachel. And Greg, as always, it’s been a bit, my friend, but it has been too long for me. We have projects ahead of us. So but welcome to this important discussion. Hey, it’s really good to be here. You know, gender, I did my master’s thesis on gender differences in body, esteem, self-esteem. It’s one of my really first passions. Feminism was my first passion intellectually. So it’s a really and then I evolved and then found myself in some conflicts in relationship to some of the ideas I was generating. But so it’s really wonderful to be here. I think it’s a super important and relevant conversation. So thanks for having me. So so what we’re going to do is I’m going to turn things over to Rachel. She’s going to sort of do something that I love to do, as Greg noted before we turn on the camera. She’s going to problematize the whole thing. I will then add a bit of extra problematization to it. And then we will take up how to respond to that problematization. So, Rachel, please begin. All right, let’s do it. So, you know, this this came up for me when I was, like I said, going through my own gender transition. I found the the models are like John was calling it the folk epistemologies of gender available to me, extremely inadequate, not up to the task, as Greg would say, of really helping me understand what gender was for myself. You know, that included, as I said, you know, kind of a decadent romantic view that gender is what you project onto the world. And that was really abstract and not connected to anything for me. There was what I call the flat earth view of gender as sort of your sex, as genitals, what people can see. And that didn’t really afford me anything. And neither did the neurological understanding of gender as like, oh, well, your brain is just a different sex than your body. You know, more helpful, definitely more enlightening than a lot of the models I’d seen, but not thoroughly helpful in any sense of me transitioning, transforming to a new person. So going through the basic layers, I guess, will kind of and you guys can feel free to jump in or, you know, whatever along the way. But I thought I’d go through kind of like what happens when you ignore any of the levels of gender. And I’ll be using Greg’s tree of knowledge, especially as a framework for those what I call the levels of gender. So beginning with let’s start with life biology, sheer biology. We can’t ignore sex when it comes to gender. Some, you know, if you do that, you end up ignoring, you know, our animal history. In a sense, you see, you know, mammals starting to behave according to their sex. You see primates starting to model primate, you know, infants, children, juveniles starting to model their behavior based on adults. Usually with respect to those adults of the same sex. Right. So like even though those primates are learning on a mental level, they’re also doing that according to some kind of drive that saying learn from those who look like you in terms of sex. Right. Like that’s something that is happening where they’re generally going in that direction. And we can talk about exceptions later. But, you know, ignoring that part of gender to me, even though it’s one side of the culture, war is a real problem because of that reason primarily. And it also, you know, without sex, we don’t really have any sort of theoretical reason why gender would have emerged in the first place. Like, what what is it doing? Like, is it just floating in space? What’s what’s what are we accepting, so to speak? You know, so along with sex, you have, of course, hormones, another sort of sub layer of gender, I would say. And you’ve got masculine and feminine hormones. There are people like Adriana Fortaniali doing really good work on, you know, maybe how feminine hormone cycles should be taken into account in our culture more to start to balance out our view of masculinity and femininity. And I feel like that’s that’s an important part that could get lost, but it’s sort of a sub layer of the life layer, you know, but something we don’t want to ignore either because that that has its own effects on people. So far, so good. OK, excellent. OK, that’s that’s really in brief life level. So we moving up to Greg’s mental level, the animal mental plane of behavior. Right. So, like I said before, primates don’t just have a gender, they learn their gender from other primates. Chimps, you know, orangutans, they’re actually mentally developing in accordance with what they see around them. So girls learn from from women, boys learn from men usually. And, you know, that’s part of what Greg would would look at as like a missing layer to most of the issues that we face when we’re talking about people these days. Right. So the mental layer between the biological and the cultural. So we see these like bio versus social fights about gender. If we don’t talk about the mental layer, we’re missing like the meat of the sandwich, in my opinion. So along with the fact that, you know, you don’t have any learning without the mental level, you also don’t have any sense of like what could progress toward aspiration on a personal level. So, you know, thinking of that as kind of an exaptation as well, like chimps imitate adults, they grow into their roles. You know, people also imitate adults, you see little kids already, you know, starting to imitate gender behavior. But also, then we have this whole like, how do you become a better person morally, you know, in terms of virtue? And that is really hard to do without looking at the mental level of behavior, having that involved with it. Right. So furthermore, without the mental level of behavior, you have no explanation for the existence of transgender people. And I don’t want to make this video all about trans people, because I think that, you know, hopefully our discussion will be will bring gifts to the culture at large. I think it’s important to look at the fact that there seems to be, you know, there seem to be several lines of convergence toward, I think, what would be a naturalistic explanation of brain gender eventually. From the scientists that I’ve been following, Robert Sapolsky, you know, among them, Stephen Novella, you know, people like that, primatologists, neurologists. We have a lot of evidence for transgender brains looking, you know, looking pretty much like the brains of the people that we say we feel like we are. So, you know, in terms of Robert Sapolsky would say the evidence is pretty damn clear at this point. He’s maybe one of the more. You know, he’s maybe more on that side than some scientists are, you know, in terms of MRI studies, could ever studies pre and post hormone treatment. Our brains tend to look like the gender that we experience ourselves to be, sense ourselves to be. I think that’s an important way of looking at it, because now we’re looking at neural networks. We’re looking at the brain, you know, and the mental level of behavior trades in the currency of neural networks in Greg’s tree of knowledge model. Right. So combined with that, we have a whole slew of primate behaviors beyond the human level. So we do see it’s a little hard to talk about because you have, you know, can chimps be transgender? We don’t they don’t have full constructs. We do like we do. But there definitely are chimps, orangutans, you know, other primates who, according to Sapolsky, you know, have the same neurological differences that transgender humans do with respect to their peers. But also, according to primatologists, behave in ways that are at odds with their their birth sex. So they’ll you know, there’ll be a girl chimpanzee. She’ll hang out with the guys. She’ll wrestle with the men early on in life. They’ll kind of train her. She’ll hang out and go hunting with them later on. You know, she’s for all practical purposes in the in the pod. She’s a man, you know, and in some cases, you know, they might be like asexual or something. It’s kind of a different issue, but they are, you know, kind of accepted as such by the groups widely compared to humans. At least that’s what I’m told. You know, and then that, of course, spreads into human cultures where you see a lot of cultures across the globe, you know, having more than two genders, three, four or five genders. You know, of course, those take different shapes and forms depending on the cultural constructs around them. So, you know, I think that’s another converging line of evidence for gender being really, really sort of centralized in the mental level of behavior. You know, you also see things like an argument for the naturalistic or for, you know, being being gay or having a different sexuality, being neurologically based. You see a lot of links between transgender people and being left handed. You see links between gay people and being left handed. You see links between being transgender and being gay, et cetera. You know, there’s there’s that that whole mishmash. So it seems to me and I could go on, you know, there’s like different level, there’s different senses of smell and trans teens, apparently that match, you know, who they say they are. And and other other lines of thinking as well, but I feel like, you know, all in all, it sort of is coming together where none of this might be conclusive evidence. It could all be questioned. But to me, at least it builds a really good case that if we’re ignoring the mental level of behavior, brain structures and what emerges from them, then we’re really missing the boat when it comes to gender. That was very clear, Rachel. Thank you. So I want to add another couple of layers onto the problematization. And then I want to hear Greg’s initial response to both the problematizations. So for me, there’s a couple of issues that come up around this. Rachel, you invoked aspiration and Agnes Callard. And of course, there’s also behind that, L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experience and. The notion that comes up there is the notion of the aspirational self as opposed to the self. So there’s I want to know how that tension sits for you between something like, let’s say, I get it. It’s not just the brain structure is G by E. Right. There’s epigenetics. So there’s also learning going on, as you said. There’s biology and learning are interacting. That’s one thing. But presumably that’s on one end of a pole. And the other end is aspiration, which is I’m going to be other than I constitutionally am. If I can put it that way, I’m trying to put it as neutrally as possible. First of all, is that land OK as as as an issue? Right. So there’s that. How do those how do those two go together? I would point out that we need to answer this question rather than pretending we could ignore it because we have a long established history of people aspiring to significant identities other than their constitutional ones. Religious conversion is a clear case. Salt changes his name to Paul. He describes himself as a new man having a new body, by the way, that’s emerging. But it’s going to be glorified later. But whatever. Right. There’s that the Buddha goes through it. Siddhartha goes through enlightenment, comes out the other side. He’s asked if he’s a god, a messenger or a man. And he says, no, he’s not of those. And they ask him what he has. He says, I am awake. And then, of course, we have the Socratic proposal that we are currently not wise. And we are lovers of wisdom. We aspire to more wisdom. And this is a sea change. You don’t understand what Socrates is proposing and how great he saw that change. If you think it’s just learning, if you think, no, this is a fundamental change. So we have already built into our ontology this existential dimension of human identity that we can fund of human beings, our self transcending beings. We are finite transcenders, as Drew Highland says. We never transcend our embodiment. We never transcend our embeddedness. We never transcend our inaction or our extendedness. We we are always within our finitude, but nevertheless, we are self transcending beings. Of course, as Agnes Keller points out, self transcendence is itself very paradoxical. And this lines up with L.A. Paul’s issues around transformative experience. Because if I just create my aspirational self, then I’m not actually self transcending. I’m just extrapolating and growing. If something other than me introduces the required novelty for it to be genuine self transcendence, then it’s not self transcendence. It’s demonic transcendence or something like that. And then Agnes Keller points out, well, that aspiration actually shows that people somehow resolve that, which means we have to take Straussens paradox as a bit of a modus tolan and say there’s something wrong in our notion of identity that’s generating the paradox of self transcendence. So. One final point. So I’ve sort of added in the sort of the existential tension. Right. We are finite transcenders. How does that look? How does that look? And then the paradox of self transcendence. And then the third one, which is. One of the advantages of the traditional gender, I don’t know what to call it taxonomies. Is that insulting? Is that fair? I’m trying to use neutral terms here. Yeah, I think that’s right. It has a kind of rigor to it. Right. It’s very clear. It’s very demanding. There is clear cases of which you can fail. These are all markers of rigor. The problem is it’s rigor at the price of rigidity. It’s rigor that does not acknowledge everything we’ve been talking about. So my third problem is how do we achieve rigor without rigidity? What does that look like? So those are the three problematizations, the sort of finite transcendence, existential, biological pole. There’s the paradox of self transcendence, even though both of these we’ve made even sacred space for them in our cultures. And then the last one is rigor without rigidity. Is that is that fair enough as an extra sort of dimension of problematization? Lovely. Great. I’d love to start with number three. Rigor without rigidity, because again, Greg’s work has been really helpful in this area for me, kind of looking at, you know, across cultural understanding of gender where, you know, women tend to look more at the relational, communal aspects of things. That’s our salience landscaping. That’s our sensibility. You know, and men tend to look more at the individual agentic aspects of things. You know, what’s going on? What’s the problem? What can I do to fix it? You know, looking at those as equal necessities in our culture, you know, again, we’re talking mental level here, right? This is not our genitals causing us to look at things this way. So just to point that out, but this could give us a basis from which both to aspire individually and from which a culture might might see us, you know, might might use gender as kind of a bifocal, trifocal, whatever focal way of of handling complex issues and getting more depth perception of what’s going on and then taking care of issues, you know, portioning people out one way or another to handle different roles within a society. So we’ve got hopefully individual aspiration tied in with a flexible idea of how problems get solved according to each, you know, separate society over time. So that’s that would be my initial proposal was that, you know, Greg’s way of thinking gives us that flexibility and rigor at the same time to at least form a basis by which I can aspire. You know, I can say like, hey, if I’m looking at an archetypal example of womanhood, you know, I’m using the Platonic virtue ideals from Michael Lafargue for that. But I can kind of say like, what, you know, what is there in a sense of relationality, communality, you know, that could help me do so. And that would not limit us to like being a doctor or a nurse, for instance, or, you know, any kind of other gendered, you know, roles in a culture that would be a lot more flexible, but have actually more reality to it, more basic, you know, fundamental reality ontologically as to what it means to be a woman or a man, in my opinion. Yeah, that’s lovely. So lots of really good things. So let’s take John’s point about just sort of the depth of transformation. We want to take a reflective, wise stance. It means we want to step out, wonder what our values are, see what we’re facing in relationship to and what would be sort of an optimal human conditional context in which people could get grounded on the one hand and then seek wise transcendence on the other, kind of wrestle with all the complexities associated with that. How would we find an optimal cultural ground in relationship to that? And those problems that John lists are absolutely central in relationship to what would be the context that would afford us to really address that. If we move over to this sort of gender issue in relationship to this, what we definitely want, I mean, John’s talking about really refined philosophical, existential, value based issues. I actually want to then drop into sort of just, I’ll give you a kind of a basic story in terms of like, so I learned, you know, about gender from sort of a pretty simplistic environmental feminist view. Okay, and essentially the view was, hey, a bunch of men got together in civilization and they developed justification systems, right, and they clarified why they were superior and they used that system of justification to legitimize male female role and essentially legitimize domination. And so in that narrative, which you can then see if you certainly if you put on a particular set of lens, I saw it and I was transformed by it. I was like, oh my God, I actually participate in this history. I’m a sexist in certain ways. I wake up to the ways in which I create difference and realize that there was a difference justification that was used for power. Okay, and then you become self conscious of that. You’re like, oh my gosh. In fact, this is really the beauty of the postmodern sentiment is the realization that hierarchical systems of justification create dominance power structures implicitly, and then they fuel energy to those structures and dissipate and diminish marginalized structures. Okay, so this is a really key insight that we need to have. I learned that insight and then I learned well in any biological articulation really is, you know, kind of really helping to support the underlying justification. So then I was really then motivated to say, oh, well, there couldn’t be any real biological differences. Okay. And then that created an either or so that if you started to see biological differences, then that would imply that the social differences were potentially legitimized and then oh my gosh, you got power based issues. So there was a real pressure of ought based justification not to see that. Okay, so that’s one thing I realized. The other thing I realized through my own training is actually we have it’s not just the folk epistemology that we have all wrong. It’s the folk ontology. Yes, our entire ontology is broken. This is what I’ve fallen into in my own problem of psychology. The world, our world of psychology, our felt experience of being in the world, we’re told, and I have a textbook, the number one question in psychology is the nature nurture question. What is caused by our biology and what is caused by society? It’s like that is not the number one question. In fact, that articulates the oblivion of actually the mental animal layer. Okay, so what the tree of knowledge ontology says is that I am a biological organism. I have genes and cells and organ systems that are product of natural selection that operate in a complex dynamic system at the living layer. If I die, that living layer pops. I’m also an animal, a mammal, and a kind of primate. What does that mean? It means that on top of that biological system is a meta organization of a behavioral investment system that engages in recursive relevance realization to coordinate the activities of this system. Where does the basic architecture come from? Well, evolution prepares this system, both in terms of the original investment value structure and it prepares it to learn based on recursive relevance realization experience. Okay, so it’s an online behavioral investment recursive relevance realization to orient towards survival and reproductive success at its most basic level. It does a lot more than that. Okay, but that’s its basic grounding. Okay, so now what I would really want to say is minded animals existed above living organisms in the same way that living organisms exist above inanimate objects. So we go from matter objects to living organisms to minded animals. That mindedness is in another dimension of complexification that we have lost and science is responsible for this. We didn’t lose it originally. In fact, mental evolution was originally the province of animal evolution and comparative psychologists. It then became the province of biologists and we collapsed the entire life system onto both organisms and animals. And this was a parable mistake ontologically. Okay, there’s a difference between a minded animal and a living organism. Go for a walk in the woods and check out the birds, the squirrels and the bees. Okay, they behave totally differently than the flowers and the trees and that difference is mindedness. Okay, now what drives that behavioral investment pattern? Well, like I said, sort of evolution preps it and then learning, i.e. the agent arena relation, the consequences and the upgrading delineates the patterning. Now here’s a fundamental question. Does it matter as a primate whether you’re male or female in terms of reproductive behavioral investment strategies? Ask any primatologist. In fact, Franz de Waal is coming out right now and being like there are super gendered patterns of primates in certain domains. They overlap a lot, but there are definitive gendered patterns. In other words, we can see a masculine and feminine pattern of investment in primates. That’s not reducible in primates to genes and cells. It’s a fundamental emergent layer of learning, but it’s a predisposed learning patterning structure. Okay, so you have to have, it isn’t biology versus society, it’s biology and then living and mindedness animal. And then the last layer, remember when I started with feminism, is the system of culture justification. Now that’s new. This culture person system of propositional networks that legitimize what our possibility is and tell us as socialized beings, hey, this is what you can be, this is what you ought to be, this is what you’ll be sanctioned if you’re not. That entire layer is another emergent layer, the culture person layer on top of the minded animal. So the basic ontology isn’t biology versus society, it’s the bio, psycho, mental, socialized, culture level. That’s the three tiers. Okay, and indeed this gives you your basic architecture. Why would anybody be trans? Why would anybody be trans if it was just biology and society? Because you have your genitals, they see that, and then they label you, you’re a boy. But wait a minute, I feel like a woman or a girl. What does that mean? Well, from this angle, there would be masculine and feminine behavioral investments, propensities. That are shaped by evolution and then felt in a particular way. This person’s picking up these signatures and mind, what I call mind to be space, the implicit, intersubjective way of being in the world, and they are feeling more like the opposite gender. And they start to raise serious questions. Well, where does that come from? The minded animal layer. Okay, and that’s why this can be, and then I can explain where, where would this architecture come from? What does it look like? How does it relate to sexual orientation? How does it relate to the felt’s experience of being? What does it relate to in justification? We can specify all of that. But the first thing I want to say to people is, folks, if you’re just doing society and biology, you got the wrong ontology. There’s a fundamentally different ontology that’s necessary to make sense out of this. And if we’re actually going to build a space where we can really appreciate the complexities of transformation in general, and in this case, the delineating and get rigor without rigidity, we’re better get the basic ontology variables correct. And we haven’t done that in society. That was extremely helpful. So let me try and just bring two things together from what I heard Rachel saying and what you said, Greg, and put it out again. The question, we still have to wrestle with these more fundamental issues. But I think Greg’s point about the ontology is a great portal through which we can pass. Now this may be overly simplistic. So I’m asking for charity, but I heard from both Rachel and so mindedness, but I also heard salience landscaping. And I also heard implicit problem solving in their relational versus individual agentic and you know, there’s adaptivity at the mindedness level that is not reducible to strict biological adaptivity. I heard that from Greg. And he invokes something that I’m somewhat familiar with recursive relevance realization about that. So is it Is there an implicit proposal and this could be wrong. I’m so I’m putting before the question that gender is something like a transjective schema of salience landscaping directed towards certain kinds of perennial problems. That yet. Let me can I want to differentiate two meanings of the word gender here. Okay. Yes, at the mental and I can then specify with a fair degree. We’re talking at the mental level. At the mental level. There’s also, of course, gender roles, which are which we’re not talking about. So I just want to say some people, many people use the word gender to refer to the justified roles of male and female in a society. That’s not what we’re referring. We’re talking about the embodied primate level. Right. And I’m privileging that given your exactly. And then the answer is going to be absolutely. And I think I think I can place recursive relevance realization in relationship to the influence matrix and I think that’s a great point. I think we can actually refer to the influence matrix and specify precisely what the epicenter of this landscaping difference is, but we can go down that road if we want to. So the answer is absolutely. I want to hear what Rachel thinks of that. And, you know, in a much more Basic way at a similar understanding of gender is like kind of the lens, the mental lens most closely linked to sex, you know, by which we define our social roles and act accordingly. But very similar, but the transjectivity part of it, you know, extremely important to me, of course. And I also wanted to bring in the problem solving part, because part of my questioning of a lot of the ontology now, especially at the gender role level is a labeling idea that what we’re doing is labeling things as they are. Which I find problematic about all of human cognition. Well, that’s just that, right. Whereas I like to understand what’s the functionality and what is the, what are the sets of problems that are being addressed, because then That gives me some purchase on explaining why the phenomena exists. And so I, part of what I was trying to do with that is say, well, You know, you’ve got a schema of salience landscaping that is solving perennial types of problems and and the idea that you probably, maybe this is in there, you need opponent processing between these two. Sounds also like that’s in there. And then that really starts to ground the ontology at a level, a functional level, a mindedness level above the biological and but still keeps it distinct from the labeling process that societal level. That’s what I was trying to do with my proposal. Great. So let me jump in there and then say, actually, I want to suggest within that we can actually delineate two layers within the mind of mindedness that’s in doing different kinds of salience landscaping related to this. One is a animal mammal sexual orientation line, I would argue. It’s more embodied. It’s a felt sense of salience landscaping of what am I sexually attracted to. That’s your sexual orientation. Okay, then there’s a relational layer, which is very relevant for us as human primates. Okay, we talked about this in terms of Thomas Sello’s work. And this is what the influence matrix and you talk maps. This is the relational agent arena field relation. Right. Right, right, right. And the basic thing that when you look through the world through the ends of the influence matrix, and then you look through the gendered patterns, something really pops very clearly. Okay, and that is there’s a fundamental difference around the salience landscaping of the figure ground relation on relation. I’ll say that again. There’s a fundamental difference gender difference in the salience landscaping in relation to relation. What do I mean by that? What I would argue, and I’ve seen this clinically, I’ve seen this personally, I’ve seen this cross culturally is the following. The genders I modally distribute around the way in which they place the figure ground relation between problems and relations. Okay, this gets back to it. So I’m traditionally masculine in this perspective. I’m structured this way. I’m basically a cisgender male. The way I see the world is here’s a problem in a relational context. If the problem interferes with the relational context, I will bring the relational context as the figure and then we will discuss it. And I care deeply about my relations. But if there’s a problem, I focus first on the problem and then consider the relational context, the ground of that. My experience with women across a wide variety of different contexts is that the ease with which the relational implication is then created as the figure, meaning what does this carry about us and each other, is so much more readily accessible as the figure rather than the ground that they then place virtually every communication in terms of the implication of the relational field. In other words, it’s much more relationally field dependent, okay, versus more relational independent in terms of the activity. So over and over and over again, I’ll see couples as a therapist where the guy’s doing something and the woman is experiencing this as interfering with the relational implication. He’s too self-centered, not paying attention. She asks about it in an indirect way, why are you doing this? With the obvious salience landscape in her head, well, of course, this should be obvious to him that this impacts the relationship. And obviously, I’d be upset with that because any person should be able to see this. Actually, it’s women that can see this. And hyper masculine men can’t see that at all. They don’t know what they’re going to implicate unless you tell them directly. So over and over again, you see misconstruals. And then you see the whole way in which people orient themselves in terms of occupation, interest, etc. And then the short answer is, well, why would this be the case? Go to primates. Who takes care of the relational field? We’re unbelievably weird as human males. Actually, we don’t care about our young. This goes back to attachment, parental investment theory, and the whole structure of reproduction in relationship to why you would attend to the relational field in a radically different way from a feminine architecture relative to a masculine. So that’s the basic structure that I would argue is that there’s a fundamental primate difference. There’s a sexual orientation issue. But the layering of the relational salience landscape, there’s a lot of evidence for this across a lot of empirical studies, is quite different in terms of the epicenter, figure ground problem relational field structure. So that’s brilliant. And that seems to map onto stuff Rachel was saying earlier about sort of relational versus individual agent centric, but it sounds better way of putting it as maybe relational centric and problem centric. That’s a totally reasonable way of labeling it. Okay, so it seems to me then that however this might have emerged for selective reproductive reasons, that is has a functionality beyond the sexual domain. It can be exacted up to doing all kinds of problem finding and problem formulation in an opponent processing fashion. So right, you know, the problem solvers are going to be achieving goals, but the relational people are going to be constantly pointing attention to the context in which the problem solving has to occur. And so you want to be constantly capable of figure ground reversals. Getting the yin yang symbol here. Yes, yes, that’s what I was working towards, which seems to be a clear acceptation beyond anything having to do with the sexual domain and saying no, no. We can see all of our ontology that way. We’ll put that question aside. But what we can see is, you know, there’s these two broad orientations that interpenetrate and interdepend in an opponent processing fashion for how we can be adaptively related to the world. How does all of this land with you, Rachel? Is this? Yeah, it’s glorious. It’s very, yeah, very, very rich to me. I feel like, you know, you’re putting things in the words better than I could for sure. And it makes a lot of sense and starts to like expand my thoughts of gender because I really, you know, this is we didn’t get into the problematization of on the cultural level too much. But if we ignore gender as a cultural construct, then we ignore our ability as people, like the true people and not just mammals, to exact gender into something that can be flexible, you know, for use by our societies, as well as something that we can use for our personal aspirations in a moral and virtue sense. And, you know, this is the work of Michael Anderson and others, the hand and others. The brain is an acceptation machine. The cerebellum has been accepted out of sensory motor balance for conceptual balance and all kinds of. So the evidence also for this acceptation proposal, I think it’s a plausible proposal because we have a lot of evidence that the brain is primarily doing this. So, I guess, how does that looks like we’ve got a sort of core ontology we can work with. Again, we’re leaving this a little bit loose for now because I still want to play with this. And I want to try and then come back to the problems I posed because it seems that that’s they relate between this sort of mindedness level and what we might call the socio-cultural level. And these were the issues again about the existential constitutional pole. I changed biology back to constitution because I think it’s a better term. But I mean by constitution is the biology environment dynamical link, right? Niche construction and all that kind of stuff where we realize that the division between nature and nurture is also not going to really apply well. So we’ve got the constitutional existential. And like I said, we give we have a way of making space for significant existential transformation of identity. I gave examples of religious conversion, sapiential transformation, etc. Self transcendence. And so. What then does our this core ontology, how can it help us address these problems around a proper a right? A ratio religio, a right connectedness of a properly apportioned connectedness to these. So let me try and give one maybe helpful suggestion as an analogy, but it’s a very close analogy. It’s an adjacent analogy. This is Paul Tillett and Paul Tillett talks about the fact that human beings are not necessarily connected. So let me give you a classic example, and I think it actually overlaps with this a bit. He says, you know, human beings are bound in an irresolvable way. And so, you know, I think that’s a very good example of how we can actually address this. And I think that’s a very good example of how we can actually address this. He says, you know, human beings are bound in an irresolvable and I would say a point of processing, but an irresolvable tone odds between individuation and participation. Right. That we need to belong to the group. So we transform our identity to belong to the group. But if we did, but we then fear we’re disappearing into the group and we withdraw and we individuate and we try to, right, specify an identity that is independent from the participation. But then we start to lose touch. We get, we feel alone. We feel alienated. So then we participate and then we just go, we do this. And then he said, any attempt to resolve that will cost us our humanity. And he was proposing an existential model of, right, he’s an existential theologian, of not trying to resolve it in some Cartesian fashion, but instead enter into a proper appreciation and appropriation of it. To actually not put your identity in the individuation or the participation, but actually in the tone-offs to locate identity there. And I’m wondering if that could help us with the constitutional existential polarity that we’ve been talking about. I think, okay, can I make two linked proposals in response? Please, that was just what I said was designed just to provoke. Okay, yeah, this is, this is spot on with the way I’ve been thinking in a really weird roundabout way. Proposal one is kind of like we have something, you know, like selective restraints at the cultural level. Like we’ve got a culture that creates categories of gender, decides what they are, you know, what roles they have, what clothing they wear, you know, that kind of thing. Maybe there’s two, maybe there’s three, who knows, you know, that kind of thing. And then at the individual level, we have something like enabling constraints where we’ve got all this variation happening, you know, biologically, mentally, and these are interacting, right? Obviously the culture is affecting our mental level and vice versa in some ways. So if individuals step two outside the bounds of what culture says your gender is, then, you know, that can be a problem for the individual. But if enough individuals are now not within those bounds, then culture needs to respond and say, oh, we’re getting this wrong. This needs to update somehow in order to solve. And of course, according to whatever external problems we’re facing as a group, right? So that’s proposal one, kind of how this dynamical system could be evolving in gender. And then for the individual, you know, you can see us as sort of, I like to say, like living in the dynamic tension between that cultural construct level and grouping and our individual, you know, genetic gendered behavioral predispositions, as they’re called sometimes. And learning to live with that tension, you know, creatively, so to speak, where, you know, to me, the freedom of gender, as well as for a lot of things, is that ability to harness that dynamic tension, right? Not to like resolve it, like you said, John, in one direction or the other, but to like, it really, you know, of course, it’s got opponent processing to it. So there’s power in that. It’s not something that we should just reject. We can’t just reject the cultural categories and say, oh, those are just stupid and power based and dumb. So we need to get rid of them. Like what primates or what human cultures have ever gotten rid of gender completely? I don’t think that’s really like maybe it’s possible, but I don’t see that as happening. So I would rather see us aspire within this model where we’re like harnessing this dynamic tension between me and the world, so to speak. And then, you know, looking at what is potentially really potential for us, right? Because in aspiration, according to Agnes Kellard, you know, the potential to which you aspire has to be a real potential. Boy, I could never truly aspire to be a man effectively. I tried. It didn’t work out so good for me. So it needed to be something real. And I needed to have like an archetype sort of to aim toward as well. And, you know, those are kind of lacking in our society as a side note, as we know. But then I can like use that archetype to kind of look at as a North Star and I can use my own, my soul, so to speak, who I really am right now and where I am. So that’s my second proposal. So, Greg, if I could just quickly reply to that. So that’s that’s very, very good point of convergence. I like the virtual engineering model. I think that’s right. And I think it also maps onto Aristotle’s virtue cultivation model. And so I think there’s we can if we there’s some strong convergence there. I guess what I would then say is to see the particular dynamic tension or the tonus. I’m going to propose tonus is the word for dynamic tension. Right. To see that not as an anomaly or an outlier, but that all of human identity in all of its dimensions is tonus. And therefore, we shouldn’t be sort of hyper reacting to this one tension. We should be putting it within the constellation of there’s so many of these tensions. And right. So, of course, there is right. The individual relation participation, there’s constitution and existential. And again, I think Highland’s argument that Plato was right. I think Highland’s argument that Plato was his whole philosophy in some way was arguing for finite transcendence that we have to resist polarizing. We’re just finite. We’re bound. We’re determined or a Promethean. We could transcend into we can transcend our embodiment and we can transcend our and we can come to like in Plato was always right. Trying to say no, no, you have to keep the tone us between the two, or you actually, and you have to make it central to your conception of what a good human life is. If you want to actually stay true to the ontology of persons. And so I just wanted to say that any, any attempt to any attempt to pathologize this one tone us needs to give me a reason how it is fundamentally ontologically, not cultural ideologically fundamentally ontologically different from all of the other tone offices, the till it can others were talking about way before this issue came on to the table. As being fundamental to end to human nature going back to play dough. We’re finite transcendence. And any view. This is part of the problem with what I have with some of the views that Rachel recommended sorry not recommended criticized against her recommendation. So she was using them as a foil for her recommendation, like the, what they tend to do is, is they polarize. They say, it’s all transcendence we can just be whoever we say we are right, or it’s all finite you’re just born with it that’s it, just accept it there’s nothing you can do about it. Is that fair to say to you Rachel that a lot of the ones you rejecting are precisely because they were polarizing in that way. Yes, and I would, you know, extend that to the, you know, beyond any transgender issues or, you know, in that sense like to the culture at large because I really feel like we can we can, you know, re inhabit gender in a way that is, you know, good for this man good for this women, you know, and in a way that doesn’t exaggerated at the expense of other differences like you pointed out many times john, like, we’ll tend to we tend to get into these big like oh what’s the fundamental core difference between the genders and they’re just so different and they can’t possibly understand each other and it’s you know it’s like okay though that put you know that like really gets rid of our humanity in a huge way but Yeah, also like people are needing that they you can tell that people need a sense of gender a lot of the time, you know, to aspire within and I think that’s why it’s getting, you know caricatured so much in our culture like people are losing it and some people are wanting to jettison it completely, like you said and just be Promethean about it. And that’s adding fuel to the fire and so people are like no I need this I need a strong sense of gender and I need to really you know feel it and I’m saying yes we can have that it can be flexible according to the culture. Yeah, that’s lovely. I mean, this raises a number of different things. For me, one of the things that raises a transcendent naturalism. In our relationship to how we would then position ourselves. Oh, I just want to say for that for a sec, Greg, that’s a cool move. That’s a cool move. That’s a very cool move that one glad you appreciated that john I dropped that in there for you. Yeah, yeah. The other thing I’ll say to Rachel’s point and then I’ll come back to some of the things that sort of, at least a you talk ontology would really support a constructive opponent process around some of these issues as opposed to it, and what would identify a destructive component process. So when I talk about gender, the salience landscape in the frame is really key somebody like john might help us recognize that one of the things I actually do when we enter into a conversation I didn’t mentioned it right away but I’m glad it came up is the gender disparities hypothesis this actually is proposed by a woman hide the professor hide and basically emphasize listen, everything is a, you know, everything is placed in relationship to what is its comparison, we get into gender and you start pulling them apart you say oh my gosh, you want to absolutely dialectically contain that with, oh my gosh, we’re, you know, we have sweat glands we have two nostrils there’s an enormous amount of that actually brings us together and creates an enormous amount of similarity. And we are much more alike than we are to any other organism so so let’s be very clear that the gender similarities is really key and then it’s within that context that we can then frame difference which then places it in the network of all the other dialectical tensions. It doesn’t eliminate it, but it doesn’t then place it as the thing that needs to be clarified and then the thing that needs fundamental separation around I mean those are, those are the kinds of rigid justifications, either obliterating them or utilizing them and making them foundational that I think would be obviously in advantageous for us to afford all cisgender trans people alike the opportunity to achieve the kind of transformational aspirational affordances that’s what we want in a society. As a clinician, all one of the things I really look for is what are the constructive opponent processes how do you create this, the, the real tenor. Yeah, that’s appropriate between systems and then how do they otherwise go wrong. Okay. So for example, to me when in fact when you look at the thing called the influence matrix. It’s a self other dialectical dance that affords then relational value and social influence between people and creates virtuous cycles, where you have, for example, a nice relationship between love and support and challenge and competition that creates an edge of growth but at the same time a context of love. Okay, so a nice dialectic between power and love. Okay, or a dialectic between dependency and connectedness and independence and autonomous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead, what you often see is in these things go bad you get a dominant submission hierarchy, get love hate, you get hyper dependence or counter dependence. I would argue you can look at the personality disorders as really rigid, reciprocally narrowing strategies in fact this is Karen who and I talks about them like somebody who is a narcissist. It’s me me me and me over you as the rigid reciprocal narrowing self other relation. Right. Okay, or the dependent does the worst oh you you you and not me at all. So these are these are examples of extremes of self other out of balance that then create destructive opponent process on the primate relational landscaping. Okay, if we move up to the culture person layer this whole issue of justification of what is my identity, john we talked about this my identity from me to the world, and to the world to me. Yes, exactly. And how do I control you know navigate that individuation, and my identity is my ego and that’s private and then there’s a public persona, the navigation what how other people experience me the harmonious individuation and assimilation to that in that particular dialectic those constructive dialectics are what we’re looking for I would argue both at the person and the primate level, and the structure sort of shine some lights on what would be constructive opponent process versus what would be more destructive and problematic. Yeah, and that rigidity. Greg like, you know, link to link to the systems of power like you said before I think is you know what has caused us a lot of our problems right now and as what caused a lot of people to have their aspirational gender, like, sort of amputated from them. Sorry, my Mac is deciding that it’s gonna abduct my my screen here. It’s helping you capture your identity. Totally I’m like, thank you for letting me know that I have a text on my phone now and getting rid of the zoom screen. Okay, yeah, it’s, it’s very helpful. So you know, we end up you know amputating our sense of gender it’s a harsh word but I feel like that’s what’s happening to a lot of people like I asked women and you know what they think about gender and it’s all problem problem problem right and I live in a bubble of certain types of people but you know they’re they don’t think about gender fundamentally as like part of what they are they think about it as an issue that besets them negatively you know and I actually reached out to Agnes Callard is kind of a fangirl moment for me and I was like, you know, thank you for all of your aspirational theory it really helped me with gender and she said absolutely. I think gender can be aspirational and I think trans people are in the cutting edge of this most of the time with you know in terms of recognizing this but a lot of cis people do it too and they don’t realize it. So and I think that is just really important so yeah. So, to as Greg’s point about the aspirational similarities, which is part of the argument I’ve been making to with the connect this drawing the analogies to religious and sapiential conversion of identity and transformation, the aspirational similarities should be emphasized here. So, now this is this is a very delicate question and I’m asking it because you are both responsible and reflective people. It sounds though, because this is towards a specific question of rigor without rigidity. Rigor is dependent on some kind of normative structure. And what that means is failure has to be a real possibility or there’s no rigor. Okay, so here’s the question and I’m trying to ask it from a very like loving position. I’m trying to help. Right. Is it possible for people to fail around this in significant ways, Greg you directly were implying it about, you know, parasitic reciprocal and you’re not being a part of processing that’s become adversarial or internal conflict versus and Rachel, it seems to me you’re also in implying it to some degree with, you know, there are certain models for this that are wrong that are not helpful that could actually misdirect people. So, again, please take this being asked with a very open heart, I’m not trying to be condemning in any way, but if we’re proposing rigor without rigidity, we need a principled way in which we can tell people that they’re getting it wrong they’re doing it wrong they’re mistaking they’re mis-shaping. I don’t know quite what the word is. So, and I am just asking the question, I’m going to now stand back and I want to hear. So, I, first of all, before you do I have acknowledging that I’m putting you both in a politically precarious place. And I want to honor that. And I want to tell you that, you know, I, again, I’m trying to provide a supportive a context. But if we do really want to get the rigor without rigidity we need to talk about this. And I’d like to talk about it with two people who I think I can talk well with it about. Is that fair enough? That’s totally fair. Great. Greg, can I jump in once real quick and then please take it away. Okay. It’s a hot potato. Go ahead. Yeah, I know. I want to kind of like maybe, maybe lower the temp a little bit on it by saying, we see this all the time people say, oh he’s just a boy in a man’s body. Right. Like, you see, oh she is still a little girl. She never really became a woman. Like, and you could say, well, that’s just, you know, a way of saying didn’t meet this child did not become an adult but it, I get the impression and I see that a lot that it’s very gendered when people make that criticism specifically. Right. That we’re unconsciously doing that it’s just that we don’t have a good gender system in place to really afford better, you know, chances to do that. So, yeah. Yeah, I’ll go ahead. I just want to make sure. Rachel was was my bringing up the question something legitimate in your eyes. I mentioned this to Agnes Keller to I was like, you know, this seems very gendered to me in, in terms of aspiration like, you know, when you say he’s just a boy in a man’s body. There’s like an image at least to me that comes to mind, you know, I think to a lot of people this kind of like irresponsible play and just like never take you know never look at family and stuff like you know what I mean that kind of thing. Yes, that comes up really easily. Okay. Yeah, so I’ll take the question. So when we say we can get this wrong, or mistaken. This is a very delicate thing. Definitely. But I think that our massive confusion about sort of even a gin. I’m really talking about it just a general ontological map of gender across the life mine culture. There’s a lot then of development. But here’s what I’ll say. So I’m a clinical psychologist. So you work with the first thing about a clinical psychologist is that you want to honor patient you recognize they’re vulnerable or the client, you want to hold a particular structure you want to recognize marginalization so I want to say that in relationship to dominant narratives. I think that it’s an obligation for those of us in this particular role to be very careful about dominant narratives. Yeah, be sensitive to that. At the same time, I’ll say this. Okay. One of the core developmental identities. I mean one of the core developmental tasks is the cultivation of a particular kind of identity. Meaning, I would argue an egoic identity. That is the socialization process that you say, oh, this is what I am. This is how I fit into the world. This is how I make sense out of self other dialectical tensions not necessarily in those academic words but in essence. And then we’re talking about individuals who are finding themselves in a particular place of category and looking for a dramatic transformation potentially. Okay. So, what kinds of things would we want to identify that would be indicative of individuals that we would want to cultivate this transformation around. Okay, against issues what would be false positives. Okay. So here’s the in the in the 1980s. I’ll just use an analogy and we can think about this in the 1980s repressed memories were all the rage and clinical psychology. Okay, it’s like if you were injured. And I mean if you were having struggles and you were anxious you were insecure, chances are was almost the message, you were physically abused and just can’t remember. And what this did at one level is well meaning is like, hey, we’re going to give you a narrative to help you understand your neurotic suffering condition. Okay. And at that level, he’s like, oh, here’s a narrative that then I can latch on to. But let’s face it, folks, if you give individuals a narrative that actually has no correspondence in reality, and then has all sorts of implications with regards to what it would mean. If this were the actual cause, and then you start justifying your life based on this being the answer. There are a lot of problematic consequences that emerge in the wake of the repressed memory movement. Yes. Okay. And that’s a really dangerous thing. That’s not to say it’s never right. Okay, and I’m not drawing a direct analogy, what I am saying is, hey, if it’s easy, and the argument is that the only reason we have two genders is because some socially repressed memory insisted it upon us, and that if you feel you what you need to do is you need to express whatever gender identity you have and you’re a 12 year old girl. Okay. Looking for a particular narrative that allows you to make sense out of the world. And if you look at the history the development of that identity is shaky. Okay, and it’s grabbing a hold of particular kinds of elements, there are lots of reasons that society after society created rites of passage and a traditional socialized narrative that afford people the way to grow into us role. If you obliterate all of that and afford just whatever the subjective experience of being is to narrate the real truth, irrespective of the identities of other people, it is a disaster at the abstract level. Okay. So at all all of these things point to the idea of, yeah, okay. I’ll just say it there are reasons that somebody with, and I’ll use my clinical label term, a borderline or history on it kind of identity structure might latch on to a particular narrative as the right thing for them. When in fact that’s a defensive character armor justification that actually doesn’t speak to the issue that gives them an explanation. If that were the case and you were to try to follow a transformational path, based on that system of justification in that constitution, that’s going to be a mistaken identity. Sorry. First I want to play with the analogy. Part of what was wrong, and you know, and Elizabeth loft has got into a lot of trouble, but she was vindicated with time. She kept saying, actually, the ontology of memory that is presupposed by this narrative is not true. That is not how memory functions. Right. This is how memory functions. And therefore, if you are putting this narrative on top of the incorrect ontology, you are going to mess up a lot of people’s lives and a lot of people’s lives were messed up. And this, this meshed with the satanic panic of the 80s. And we know about what we now know looking back. Right. And hindsight, hindsight always blinds us to the fact that we will look back on this period also, and point out things that were going crazy wrong that we’re not seeing right now. So first of all, I just wanted to play with that. So, part, part of what we could say is, and where there’s more responsibility than is any narrative that does not mesh with a well thought out and independently established ontology is probably going to go wrong in very very powerful ways. That seems like right on to me and I feel like you know you guys know a lot more about developmental psychology than I do. This is an area where I think gender could use some some real work you know because we haven’t looked at is gender ontologically developmental in many ways and I think it is of course I think it is with primates, and I think it’s you know includes aspirational with humans. And I mentioned this to a local professor in my area and she said, Oh yeah that total actually that makes sense. We, everything else in our you know she’s an anthropologist everything else in humanity looks you know developmental, but we, we can’t politically talk about gender that way. You know, like, she just straight up told me that and I was like, Well, I can, I can get away. To a good extent, but you know, I think I think that if we’re blinded to that ontology or potential ontology and I don’t want to. I mean, this is either all right. You know, but that if we don’t think about the developmental layer, then we could get into real trouble in similar ways to what Greg’s talking about. Thank you for saying that because I think if the politics prevents us from examining the ontology that is not a moral stance that is the in an immoral stance, it pretends to be a moral stance, but it’s actually an immoral stance. So yeah, I think, I think that that’s very well said. And I’ll just, I’ll just say, when I went through this in terms of, oh, we have to be super careful of the justification systems and the power structures and coming back to this, then that’s part of what I will give rise to them. Well, what are the meta justification systems and for me that’s being that which enhances dignity and well being with integrity. It’s like, okay, that’s what we’re fundamentally after. Okay, we’re not we’re not after. Yes, there may be ideological commitments, political activism commitments, but ultimately what we really want to hopefully the tenor and tone awesome the intersecting dialectics from my vantage point would be singing to those tunes, ultimately, and so I’ll just say that that’s certainly when I sort of say okay what am I what kinds of structures from I really trying to advocate for. And I said, oh, hey, feminism is really important. It’s ultimately because of dignity and well being integrity as as part of the underlying structure so to me that’s zoom out axiologically, and are like okay at least we can stay the grounding, and of course truth, you know in relationship to ontology and all that is part of that equation. But it means we, I mean, that’s, this is really tricky. And first of all, thank you for saying that we all share that, I think, here. But it means we need to look at people who are if we’re going to talk about specifically about transitioning like Rachel, who is exemplary. Look at look at the authenticity. Look at it. Look at the growth in reflection look at the growth in virtue. Right. And then, I presume, if I, especially if I’m not wearing particular ideological glasses and Greg, you made this a possibility that people are transitioning and that’s not what we see happening. We can see their narcissism gets exacerbated, or, or their histrionic. We need to, we need to be able to look. Because if we can’t look we can’t tell when it’s fitting the ontology, and when it’s actually, you know, not fitting the ontology. And so, I’m trying to request for all parties, like, so we can really help people. Could we get to a place where we can carefully respectfully and with compassion but nevertheless, with realistic eyes can we look to see, because if we don’t, we can’t get the rigor. If we don’t have the rigor, then we’re ultimately bound to, you know, all of the problems that come from that lack of rigor that we’ve been pointing to repeatedly throughout this discussion. So I’m trying to make a request, is this a possibility for us. Is this a possible. And I get it, there’s serious concerns because, you know, psychologists looking at this they use the label they use that to marginalize they did all kinds of egregious things. And that has to be the case. Right, we are not. We are finite transcendence we are not absolutely bound to our history, we can transcend it we can’t transcend history, but we can transcend a particular history, and I’m asking if that’s possible for us. I hope so. Yeah. That was beautiful. Thank you and you know it’s yeah like I appreciate that these conversations are extremely risky for everybody involved and extremely necessary to do as well. And to really to look with clarity like you said, you know, before we can look at better aspirational practices rituals rites of passage. Different models for people to aspire toward, you know, all that stuff. You know, I mean, before or concurrently with that we need to be looking at the ontology. Yeah, I think we have to do it concurrently. I think we have to because we also have a project we’ve all implicitly agreed on is we want to reduce suffering for large groups of people, that’s not in question. So I think that’s why we have to do it concurrently. And we have to be open to self correction on both in both directions. And, because, in the end, I want to. I want to help people in a way that has a reliably good chance. Well I want to attempt to help people in a way that has a reliably good chance of actually helping them. So, yeah, I’ll throw out, you know, again this may sound a little technical but I really think you’re going to put you know what we want. What I certainly think is the best sort of framing for this is a transjective dynamic view. And what I mean by that is, certainly, well, you talk says hey, think about us as sort of process oriented creatures that are investing influencing and justifying. And then, you know, we’re recursive relevance relevance investors then we engage in relation to others and we influence them and they influence us back and then we build systems of justification, we then have to think about the transjective consequence of all of that. Yes. That to me is sort of the minimum ontology that our field john has not handed to people in any way that’s coherent. There’s no synoptic integration that says what kind of creatures are we we’re actually investing influencing justifying creatures. And it would be really nice if we could actually then we actually had that then you say oh and in fact I could go back and be like, hey, this, you know the feminist insights really key it points this justification influence and investment dynamic, and there’s like, any ideology that’s then going to come along and basically say we know this to be true is then going to be very vulnerable to exactly those kinds of dynamics, right any ideology then that a priority says we know what the road to heaven is yeah good luck, you know, with any ontological claims of what can’t be true because then it can be used to justify. So we’re going to preemptively describe what has to be based on what we feel ought to be. We can immediately if you have a dry dynamic transjective you immediately like, no, that’s a problem. That’s a down the road very quickly that’s going to be a problem. So if we actually can just come in with that kind of framing we, I think we’d be safer in relationship to the kinds of open deal logos that we can then engage with. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. I think we’ve brought this to a good place but as always I’d like to give my guests, the chance for the last word my last word will be, I think this was a very productive. And I think we got into it, there was, we were really drawing each other out in powerful ways so I think we were into some deal logos at points. So my last request to anybody watching this is, take this with the care and carefulness with which we undertook it and within which we wanted to present it. So now, Rachel and Greg last words. Yeah, you know, getting this is feels to me like we’re getting the ball rolling. Yeah, it feels really great. I mean we’re we are, you know, the care is required because we’re in crisis and we need to respond as best we can with that and I’m hoping that individuals out there whether you be you know cis trans doesn’t anything you know, can start talking about yourself in aspirational terms with regard to your gender potentially if that’s your thing you know if it’s not cool but like, at least like okay what are my models what am I looking toward what are the virtues I can cultivate within this. I would, I would love to see that for to be given to everybody because I feel like people are really, you know, just sorely missing that they’re in a lot of pain because of that. Totally agree and so yeah the overall attitude here is a loving compassion attitude for self or others, cultivating what might be optimal, or at least better than current state of affordance. And so I’ll just yeah, I’ll just sort of the take on this certainly goes way beyond gender is my basic message is hey we’re living organisms, or mental animals were cultured persons. It’s a really basic ontology that believe it or not science is screwed up at least my discipline as let’s see if we can distribute that basic vector, and then understand our conditions, understand our dilemmas through those minimum, those ontological vectors. Thank you so much. Rachel and Greg. Thank you, John. Thanks for having us great.