Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes - Diana Fleischman
Evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman joins Stella O'Malley to explore what our biological instincts reveal about the current gender debate. Drawing on research into disgust sensitivity and sex differences — work that has accumulated over two thousand academic citations — Fleischman argues that the gut reactions many people feel around gender ideology carry real information. For Irish listeners living through rapid, evidence-light shifts in law, healthcare and school curricula, this conversation offers a rare framework: evolutionary science as a tool for naming what many sense but few feel safe saying aloud.
Diana Fleischman is an American evolutionary psychologist and Associate Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, with a research background in human sexuality that spans nearly a decade at the University of Portsmouth. Her work on disgust sensitivity — exploring how and why women evolved heightened responses to potential sources of harm — has been cited more than two thousand times and has materially shaped scientific understanding of sex differences. She joins Stella O'Malley for a conversation that is, by design, uncomfortable. The episode takes seriously a set of questions that most public discussion refuses to engage with honestly. Why do many women experience an instinctive aversion when they encounter images of pregnant people who identify as men? Fleischman's answer draws not on politics but on evolutionary biology: disgust is an adaptive mechanism, and moral disgust in particular tracks genuine concerns about harm — including, in this case, harm to a child. The intuition, she argues, is not a prejudice to be educated away; it is information. Fleischman also addresses autogynephilia — the pattern in which some male-born individuals experience sexual arousal at the idea of themselves as women — and explores what evolutionary frameworks might reveal about its origins and prevalence. She examines how the MeToo movement, whatever its intentions, disrupted established mating norms in ways that produced unintended consequences for both sexes. These are not talking points; they are research questions that mainstream discourse has largely declared off-limits, and the episode treats them as worthy of serious inquiry. For Irish listeners, the relevance is close to home. Ireland has moved with striking speed to enshrine gender-identity ideology in law, in school curricula, and in healthcare guidelines — often well ahead of the evidence base and without the kind of frank public debate this episode models. Stella O'Malley, as a practising Irish psychotherapist, has observed the clinical consequences of that speed firsthand. The conversation with Fleischman offers a vocabulary — drawn from evolutionary science rather than ideology — for naming what many people sense but find difficult to articulate in a culture where the social cost of honesty has risen sharply. Fleischman is candid about her own unconventional choices and makes no attempt to package her views for easy consumption. That honesty is itself part of the episode's argument. She draws a consistent line between the comfort of social conformity and the discipline of following evidence wherever it leads — a distinction with particular weight in Ireland, where cultural pressure to signal the correct values has historically silenced dissent on more than one frontier. The episode does not offer simple answers, but it insists that the questions are legitimate and that our evolved instincts deserve honest explanation rather than polite suppression.
