>> that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> good afternoon. welcome to the heritage foundation and our douglas and sarah allison auditorium. for those joining us online we welcome them as well and those that will be joining us on a future location on c-span booktv. for those in-house i would ask

if we check that are mobile devices have been silenced or turned off as a courtesy and for those watching online we remind you you're welcome at any time to send questions or comments, simply e-mailing speaker@heritage.org and, of course, we'll post the program on our heritage homepage as soon as today's events are over for your future reference. leading ou a discussion welcomig our guest is ryan anderson, r simon senior research fellow in american principles and public policy. he's also the founder and editor of public discourse, the online journal of the witherspoon institute of princeton new jersey. he is the author of truth overruled fro, the future of marriage and religious freedom, and co-authored with princeton robert george, the book, what is marriage, man and a woman. he earned his bachelors from princeton and his doctoral degree in political philosophy

from notre dame. these join me in welcoming ryan anderson. [applause] >> thanthank you, john and thanu everyone for coming. today we are in for a treat. while all around us people in power tried to deny the obvious, that men and women are equal but not the same. ashley mcguire has written a timely and important book responded to the drive to abolish male and female. she's a senior fellow with the catholic association, she writes and speaks wild about religious freedom, catholicism and women pictures appeared on cnn, cbs, pbs, fox and bbc. as writing has appeared in the "new york times," "wall street journal," the "washington post," "usa today," time magazine, the weekly standard, the federalist, the new post in the the "huffington post." her new book "sex scandal," she explores the bates about women in the military and women on the

workforce. campus hookup culture and she explores a gentle neutral parenting and gender equitable homemaking. her arguments may not shocked many people in today's audience, but they come with a trigger warning when delivered on college campuses and perhaps we should issue that morning for booktv. her basic thesis, we best protect women's equality and dignity when we stop try to make women and men the same. today she will give us a taste of some of her arguments in her new book. please join me in welcoming ashley mcguire to the podium. [applause] >> thank you, ryan. and thank you very much to the heritage foundation for having me. especially thank you to my good friend roger. i'd like to open with a quote that at least in this brave new internet world of fake news is a treated to plato. quote, strange times are these

in which we lived when old and young are taught falsehoods in school and the person who dares to tell truth is called an lunatic and a fool. i suspect that most of you are here today because you are in address and perhaps best dressed by the rally that it's become anathema to speak the truth about sex. not the sex that most people immediately think of when you hear the word, the sex as it demarcates male and female, two of the most obvious and self evident realities since time immemorial. that right there is become a matter of national scandal, one that continues to put out almost daily. in just a few short weeks since my focus kamal, countless examples making headline news have confirmed just how sql our society has found itself when it comes to sexual reality. the week that my book was released, the boy scouts announced it will essentially go coed by living members of either biological sex to participate. to quote their ceo, we realize referring to birth certificates as a reference point is no

longer sufficient. when i heard this i wondered how long until the girl scouts was pressured to go in the same direction. only to learn after some brief research of the girl scouts had already announced the biological boys could participate if they self-identified as girls. the following week the british medical association published guidelines for employers suggesting that the phrase expectant mother was not inclusive enough. and propose instead the phrase pregnant people. [laughing] in addition to suggesting that people use of the phrase chest feeding instead of breast-feeding, let some of the offended by the fact that women and only women can bear and birth children. this may seem laughable and yet he comes in wake of midwives alliance of north america introducing the phrase birthing individual into their lexicon. when the alliance received angry blowback from some feminist such as iconic feminist midwife item a gas can come one writer

describe yourself as an expectant parent lamented at the "huffington post" for some women have the audacity to quote assert that only women have the ability to give birth and that such capacity is what women should celebrate about themselves. a few days later the iconic dog company like -- doll company, american girl came out with its first ever doll that is a boy. or at least looks like a boy. one woman on the website praised the company for making quote greater strides towards inclusivity because goodness forbid the little girls have a cornered the toy industry all to themselves. finally i offer one more example that is currently making headline news. the still unfolding scandal of nude photo sharing of female marines. as npr resort reported that the pentagon is investigating the image sharing and in the past 24 hours both cbs news and business since i'd have reported members of other branches of the u.s. military were involved in similar activities.

and that online bulletin boards were being used to either sheer or solicit nude or explicit photos and videos of women in the military. a visit to one of the image sharing sites confirm it was still active this was just from a day or two ago. in each of these examples women in particular get the short end of the gender-neutral stick. underage girls are potentially endangered by a policy that places them in close quarters potential overnight with prepubescent boys and certainly the case of the boy scouts, adult men. pregnant women are in offense for celebrating the essential contribution to perpetuating humanity. a company called american girl is not inclusive if it doesn't also market to boys. and women in our armed forces are systematically degraded and violated in the aftermath of made people to military policies that included opening all combat roles to women and forcing the marines to make its infamous boot camp coed. we have indeed become completely

scandalized by sex and in my book i argue it is women are the most to lose in the world marching onwards towards general -- gender to tell the is not equal outcomes. it almost twice as effect of disempowering women by holding them to mail standards against which were almost always doomed to fail. end remained of my time i would like to step back and talk a bit about the language of the debate in the gender wars. i would like to give what i i think are three of the most powerful examples of what happens to women in the world that deny sex and then speak briefly about how it is we got to this place and a bit about what i think there's still costs or hope. as george orwell put it, if thought to wrap slings, language can corrupt oster one board has had a corrosive effect on social thinking surrounding sex and that word is gender. i am asked about the difference between the meaning of sex and gender and a basically boiled down to this. sex means something. gender means nothing.

sex has a definition, a uniform one that you can find jus adjust in the medical textbook or scientific resource. it means male and female as denoted by once chromosomes and genitalia, period, full stop. the definition of gender is something even the gender identity movement is struggling to pin down. i did example of facebook which in 2015 experimented with moving away from the boring scientifically straightforward choice of male or female pick the social media platform expanded offer 70 something selections that included choices like pan gender, true spirit. facebook was not expecting to get raked over the progressive goals for this inclusive gesture rather than price, the company cards endless criticism preparing to include this gender of that eventually went up replacing all of the options with the simple fill in the blank which eventually became other. one professor addressed the question of how to put down

boundaries run the meaning of gender in the expansive number of choices once site is not relevant. he wrote quote once we start the problem of gender is weakly recognize only two of them, the obvious question to ask is how many genders when we have to recognize in order to not be oppressive? how many possible gender identity are there to ask the only consistent answer to this is 7 billion, give or take. there are as many possible gender identity as there are humans on the planet, gender can be frost or the son of the music or the sea or jupiter or pure darkness. your gender can be pizza. but what becomes of women in the world where we have the same legal status as pizza? i'm going to read briefly from the opening of my chapter on the military. which i think highlights what happens. in february 2010 vincent of defense robert gates announced and nady would lift its

long-standing ban on female sailor serving aboard submarines. women had been permitted to serve aboard surface ship for more than a decade that submarines presented a unique challenge to the navies ongoing integration efforts. cramped quarters, minimal privacy and tours as long as three months at sea. the navy was worried locking up a group of men and women in a small metal tube underwater for three months might cause less than ideal things to transpire between the sexes. that's exactly what happened to the uss wyoming was one of the first submarines to bring women sailors on board, and was one of the first submarines to see a woman receive our dolphin and become a submarine officer. the navy proudly announced that sex integration aboard subs was smooth sailing. but in 2014 and we would begin circulate aboard the uss wyoming. women above uss west virginia was at videos were being filled.

a formal investigation confirm the appalling truth. a ring of male soldiers, sailors have been collaborating for more than a year to film female sailors in the showers and share those videos with fellow shipment. this was not just a one-time prank that went viral. this was a calculated and collaborative effort that implicated dozens of men who stood guard and covered for one another while they use they had electronic devices like ipods to film women. on one three-month patrol reports revealed come every single woman above the uss wyoming was filmed naked every single time she took a shower. the incident should invent a shocking wake-up call for senior military officials. women were systematically violated for months on end because the policy agenda built on blindness, tore down long-standing. designed to protect both women and the integrity of the navy. but rather than hit the pause button the navy gave the perpetrators i slap on the wrist

and pres present towards its net goal and integrating nuclear powered virginia class attack subs which eventually all enlisted ranks and submarines. in a more stunning move then defense secretary ash carter and as the pentagon would be opening every single combat role to women. elite forces were not excluded in the process had to begin in 30 days. even more stunning, secretary carter referred to gender integration on submarines as an example of previous success in this department. he failed to mention the ongoing media fallout about the shower spine. the marines resisted this move because they are sexes that because they had spent time in ten mental dollars of taxpayer money studying what happens in mixed sex combat units. the findings of the marines study were devastating for proponents of sex integration to mixed gender units performed worse that all male ones by significant margins in every single metric. over all male units fared better

to 9% of the time in the area speed which the marines considered one of the two most important metrics for combat readiness. all male squadrons were faster than mixed sex squadrons in every single tactical movement. all-male units were noticeably more accurate in their aim with every single weapon system. the male units engaged targets were quickly and scored more hits than mixed gender. the study found a male infantry was no formal rough looking performed with greater accuracy than women who had received formal training. but the study went beyond measuring speed and accuracy and considered the physical impact of placing women into combat roles alongside them. those findings were equally devastating. women in the city suffered injuries at a staggering six times the rate of their male counterparts. not only were women more likely to develop an injury related to the grueling work but they're also slower at getting an injured marine off the battlefield and especially

concerning results. one female marine pointed out the high stakes involved, and i quote, no one questions went on in female athletes in the nfl, nba, nhl, et cetera. authentic athletes of the elite of the elite. -- olympic athletes. she goes on to say that our great sports and achievements the lights and nations on the line. if you move slower one day you don't get bumped off the metal standard you could die or get someone else killed. former marine put it more bluntly, the only possible outcome of this policy is more dead marines. in short while women are now given an equal opportunity to fight on every front line, we know they have an equal chance of surviving without injury. briefly i want to give you more examples about a sex point society, approach harms women. the next is a modern college campus labeled as one of the most dangerous places for women

in america. no one suggest this is something to you with coed housing which is long become a norm in most college campuses. something like 90% of of college dorms in america are coed. many 54, many by hallway, many by bathroom and increasingly many by room. schools are trending towards coed dorm rooms despite statistics published by our own federal government that found in 2014, for example, 74% of all reported rapes at college, 82% reported on campus rate a rate % of what they termed on-campus fondling happened in student housing. another extensive study conducted over the course of a decade on rape and sexual assault and colleges in massachusetts found that 81% of reported rapes and sexual assaults took place in the dorm versus just 9% in houses and apartments in a stunningly low 4% in fraternities.

and yet schools are pressing forward with even more sex integration, often force even in the most private spaces. in the book i give example of harvard university which in the aftermath of former president larry summers daring to propose that are some aspects of our maleness and femaleness that are not social constructs. the school went on a gender equity campaign that sought in part to address the campus rate issue by telling students that it would be punished if they participated in a single sex clubs. never mind as the "wall street journal" noted the school had an equal number of such clubs for males and females pick students were in these clubs would be ineligible for things like school endorsement for scholarships and sports teams captain seats. the school was not prepared for the response which included hundreds of female students, many of them victims of sexual assault, angrily marching through campus claiming that the school was taking away their safe spaces. and launching a a tour to campan

with hashtags such as assault is not our fault, and hear her harvard. the schools reaction was to call the women discriminatory by issuing a public statement that dripped with condescension. quote change is difficult and is often met initially by opposition that was true with past steps to remove gender barriers at harvard, and yet few today would reverse those controversial decision. we continue to believe gender discrimination has no place on campus. in other words, women are sexes for demented single-sex safe spaces even with a bit assaulted on account of their sex. or as one of my favorite columnist and harvard graduate put it, harvard told its women to go where the rates are. the less example i will give is that of girls and women sports because advocates of title ix and demonstrates the legal erasure of women under the mantra of equality. godmother took title ix,

legislation that ship to draft quote the most important step for gender equality since the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote. title ix which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, not gender but sex, helped pave the way for women sports which greater opportunities for millions of women and girls. its passage saw a 1079% increase in fema participation in sports which did not take away from boys and into sports which to grew by 22% in the same period. multiple generations of girls such as myself have since grown up experiencing athletics as a means to build self-esteem, leadership skills, friendships, and for some a path to scholarships and lucrative professional opportunities. title ix was design to correct for an equal opportunities for women wear no sports team was offered for a girl she could play with the boys, and schools had to prove that they were making a good effort to invest

equally in both boys and girls sports. but now under the gender through regime title ix is being co-opted to permit boys to play on girls sports teams. the phenomenon went mostly unnoticed until 2011 when male high school senior will higgins competed in the girls state swimming in massachusetts. he won the 50-yard freestyle race and broke the record with a time that would not have even qualified him to compete in the same race in the boys division. the lead paragraph of a boston globe article covering the controversy that ensued was orwellian. quote from the governing body that rightly -- regulates high school athletics is taken close look at the current versus renting next gender swim teams and also address the issue of boys breaking girls swimming records. several otherwise qualified to compete at the state level.

as of the globe summed up the situation, athletic officials are limited in what they can do. in the eyes of the massachusetts interscholastic athletic association, there's no stopping boys because they love mandates equal access to sports for both genders. if they but wants to swim and is no boy swimming program offered he is allowed to swim with the girls. the same issue came up for debate in pennsylvania in 2013 prompted by a surge of boys playing on girls sports teams. one survey conducted by the pennsylvania interscholastic athletic association found approximately 30% of schools reported having boys on a girls sports team. gender equity in sports means blindness to sexual difference. pennsylvania then attorney general said athletic equity is required either pennsylvania equal rights amendment and era will not allow a rule barring voice and participating or

playing on girls sports teams. just as a era will not allow rule barring girls from participating or playing on boys sports teams. the general counsel for the pennsylvania interscholastic athletic association summed up the issue up with a series of questions. when equal treatment creates fundamentally unequal and unfair competition, should gender blind equity trump fairness? if boys and girls can each do without limitation placed sports designated for the other gender, does the remaking of legitimacy in having teams classified by gender? is not sure the classifications be merged and all teams be considered coed since gender is not a limitation on which team a student place? such an approach would likely devastate female athletics of high school levels and is not a realistic or at least a practical option, he wrote. i haven't even gotten to the question of biological males who have self-identified u as senios competing on girls teams or the

issue as wa we saw last week ofa biological female who self identifies as a boy taking male hormones of performance enhancing drugs and competed against girls as they are. i don't need to because it's obvious that in every single scenario girls sports loses out. so how did we get to this brave, new gender fluid brave world? had it would reach the point where legos are banned from classrooms for gender equity reasons, or a father daughter dance is canceling known inclusive? where our politicians are sosa considering making america's daughters register for the selective service, where rape crisis center fighting in court to buy -- to bar biological mission entering and workload not every rate is agenda motivated hate crime, end quote come as a judge put in her voting against the singer kaisha whsuitor for her boss at sony fr using his authority over to systematically sexual assault her. this indeed is one of the most common questions i get, how did

we get here? in my book i argue this is been unfolding before us for decades. i trace the origins all the way back to the sexual revolution when secondly feminist begin arguing our maleness and the mullahs are socialized socialize constructs, that the differences between the sexes are the source of social inequity. it women could eradicate what makes us different from men, then we would have achieved social equality within the topic this mentality givest contraception, the hookup culture and abortion, to name a few. get the problem with this thinking was that from the get-go it assumed there was something inherently flawed about women and of the male mold was a ideal against which all things should be measured. this i argue in the book has had the effect of empowering men all the more an objective by integrating women. don't believe me? offer a quote from one man come in early self-professed feminist hugh hefner. in the interview with esquire he

said women are the major beneficiaries of the sexual revolution took a permitted them to be natural sexual beings as men are. as for feminism should have been all along. unfortunately, within feminism does than a puritan probation as anti-sector. playboy is the antidote to puritanism. in the 1950s and 60s there were still states outlawed birth-control pics i started finding court cases to challenge that. at the same time i helped sponsor the lower court cases that eventually led to roe v. wade. i was a feminist before that was even such a thing as feminism. that's part of the history very few people know. now we are living at the logical extremes of the argument that a biological sexism random accident and all perceptive devices between the sexes in particular the reproductive differences are arbitrary and socialized. we are on the final frontier of this logic. is it all of a forthcoming book

burn down the binary put in a recent article, the ultimate goal of the gender identity movement is to demolish quote the entire federal binary structuring of the world. this is the real struggle. but is it is possible to ask in my book i conclude on a more positive note pointing to the fact even suicide on one end is trying so hard to deny sexual reality and institute widespread forced androgyny become on the other hand, it is recognizing sexual difference is perhaps more than ever before. in the field of medicine, scientists, doctors and researchers are realizing they won't hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding how important sex is too good medicine. pharmaceutical companies have learned famous conclude both to include both men minimum and drug trials. as a female and male bodies might react completely particularly to the same drug. in popular culture of the gender reveal party is all the craze, and if it were expecting parents make a big to do eat at a party

or on social media about the sex of their unborn child. the internet's most visited parenting website experienced a 900% increase in threads on gender reveal parties in just one year. in 16 month stretch you designed even large increase in gender regal videos uploaded to the site. single-sex education is making a major comeback. in 2004 there were only 34 single-sex public schools in america. in 2014 that number has exploded to 850. and that does not include private and parochial schools for colleges. even some toys are getting agenda makeover with lego introducing a line of legos tailored to girls. only to see the line become one of the best-selling, tripling their sales and making progress towards closing that much threaded gender gap. it's disney castle set a death star for girls, and quote 4080

piece step towards gender equality. the kind of step would make a girl scream uncontrollably on christmas morning. in many cases women are unsurprisingly the drivers for more single-sex spaces such as women only gems, female only shared working spaces, and even recreational opportunities like women only ski clubs. sociologists are beginning to understand the different ways women engage the workforce of society for the good of all. l gates attributed his decision to give with almost all of his fortune in the world to the women in his life. and in a piece for the near times in title why men need women, sociologist adam grant documents and newes use positivs women influence men. my favorite was the finest male ceos pay their employees less on average when the firstborn is a son but more if the firstborn is a girl. the reality is to go one of the most complex celebrities in hollywood, beyoncé, that quote

humanity is acquired both men and women and are equally important and need one another. men and women consummate each other in essential ways and we need not be threatened by what makes us different. to the contrary, the authentic equality between the sexes thus omit on both sides of the debate are seeking is only to be found by starting with recognizing, accepting and celebrating what makes us different. as the timeless adage goes, each for their own. thank you. [applause] >> so i think now i'm happy to take questions anybody might have. >> first of all, thank you very much for the talk. my question is -- iq. my question is does clearly we do take it for granted that there are natural differences between men and women, but how would you argue that making

someone on the other side? .. so to give an example in our culture men don't wear skirts but in other cultures, they do. but that's an example of something that's socialized but still does not get to the core of being a man or being a woman. in the book i give an example of the study that came out when my book was going to press about toys. it was a study conducted at the university of london city center and they found that

they were doing studies on like, babies as young as nine months old and found that when you put a truck or a cooking pot in front of a girl and a boy, the boys overwhelmingly went for the gendered toy and the same thing applied to the girls so these scientists who had absolutely no skin in the political game, even they said this shows very clearly there's certain aspects of our sex that's not socialized. bi actually encourage people to go read the speech that got larry summers fired because he goes into this a lot as well, thoughts about the research especially with boys and girls that find that yes, there are certain aspects of culture there are social and he talked about for example women not excelling at least in equal levels, at certain high levels because of sort of innate differences between men and women, especially women's desire which has been documented extensively by the foundation to spend more time

with their kids so i think certainly you can look at within male and female this and find the whole spectrum of experiences. there are still at the end of the day of patently obvious in the biological differences that anybody in the medical field will tell you are immutable. the phrase that i kept coming across was something that mayo clinic uses to talk about sex which is they are with you. they are with you from the moment of conception to death and those are some of the deeper chromosomal hormonal reproductive realities but now we are actually trying to deny they are real. >> my question is when we talk about the nuclear family, how can we protect women and champion the unique contributions in society but also empower fathers and tell them they have an important role to play ? >> again, i think this is

where some sociologists are making important contributions like brad wilcox and others like him who are finding first of all, the effects on children growing up without one or the other and the more common scenario you see our children growing up without fathers. the problem with our society is starting to celebrate the idea of the single mother and i think this gets back to what i was talking about with the sexual revolution, and i think we're celebrating something that women are doing that menus to do is be the providers for their family. so when that number came out that four in 10 households are run by single mothers, that was a celebratory moment for strands of feminism because they saw women replacing men but the reality is, you have to look hard at all to find extremely well-documented research of the effects of women of raising children without a father.

it definitely on children growing up without one or the other, especially girls growing up without fathers but more and more evidence is coming out and if you start to read the news with this filter in your mind you will see every day there's some article that men who are raising families without a women in their life are more prone to aggression so i think relying on the huge body of research that's out there that shows the social costs to both sexes and children of this but also i think sort of celebrating the distinct roles of fathers and mothers and i think that's still very much possible in this postmodern world where you have any number of arrangements where both couples may be working full-time, you may have have stay-at-home dads or moms. instead of sort of being

threatened by that as conservatives, it's important to realize that even in all these different scenarios there's still at the end of the day distinct contributions that men and women are making their homes. >> first of all, i think you are really harsh to pizza. greg d'angelo, president of loch ness republicans and i really want to ask what is your opinion on any of these, let me back up. statements about an opposition to these constructs of gender identity was based on their vagaries. what your opinion of any of those issues change if there was a more specificity to what constituted gender identity, in other words if the student had a note from a therapist, advisory opinions from acounselor , a doctor's note that stated that they had a recognized medical

condition of gender identity dysphoria. with that change any of your opinion on those issues? >> probably not because for many reasons, one, i don't dispute the reality of gender dysphoria. i think that's a real medical condition and i'm certainly not a psychologist or a psychiatrist but i don't dispute that that's a real thing. but you know, as somebody who spent the better part of my adolescence wishing i was a boy, because i didn't identify with what i saw as, what i perceived as sort of the social constructs regarding femininity. i was more likely to be in the politics club with the guys and wasn't super into girly things but i'm glad that no sort of psychologist or doctor every pushed me in that direction. i'm increasingly hearing stories of parents with children for one reason or another i wound up in sort of psychology and i read that psychologists now cannot, i

think they're not even allowed to sort of therapeutically treat that situation. in other words, if a seven-year-old says i think i'm a boy, they have to run the test so i'm concerned at how some of these medical associations and get politically hijacked in the book i talk a lot about other things that i think the medical and doctor community are signing off on that are not okay like plastic surgery for young girls that don't even have gender dysphoria other things like that. i certainly think there's a real need to be sort of charitable in our approach to people who are going through that and in recognizing that that is a very hard and difficult thing to go through but especially when it comes to children, i get very uncomfortable. i just think childbirth is a hallmark of childhood, it's confusion. and that is a natural and normal thing and i think we

are not going to help children by essentially encouraging that confusion, especially when we get it sort of a stamp of the medical community. if that answers your question. >> yes, my name is deepak and the question is involving this movement of the subject, do you think that president trump would issue an executive order that no factor should be used but any vaccine, what other people see, as a taxpayer i am offended that my money is going to just because somebody is confused and can they change my sex and when actually i am so i don't waste if that person wants to do that, more power to him but i just think it should be used for that purpose.

my question is again, do you think donald trump can issue an executive order about this? >> i think it's conceivable. i think if there's one thing president trump has made clear it's trying to eliminate wasteful government spending so i can see that falling into that category. >> hi, my name is tom booth and i'm a trained special forces operator, spent eight years in special forces at a detachment and i'm a comment veteran as well and i'm still heavily plugged into this community and we have concerns now, special qualifications theoretically is for women to attend. the problem is that special forces operator, my rep said she weighed 180 pounds and i weighed hundred 90 pounds and there's all sorts of other weights and a composite of 320 pounds moving on three legs. and i go down, the woman sitting next to me, a very pretty woman but there's no possibility she could put me

in a fire terry and get me away from the fire. so when is the other physical things to go with it and special operations right now is carrying the fight, we're the ones taking the casualties in syria, iraq and afghanistan. the rest of the military has been standing down. we are sent to the workplaces to meet the worst people and is an ugly world we live in. and where's the sanity to this? why do we have to force this down our throats? and how does this raise combat effectiveness, how does it help us? you think there's any potential military will stop this nonsense soon? >> ask for your question and thank you for your service. i think it's certainly plausible and i think you raise a lot of the issues that, i was shot during the research on my chapter in the military as to how many active members of the military were speaking out against what was happening which i think is sort of uncommon for a big part of

which is sort of staying in line and not questioning things from above but it was clear there was a lot of arguing going on about all this and i think the military is a good example of you know, i talked to a lot of people in the military and many of them made the argument that women can't rise in the ranks in the military unless they have combat experience and that this is something that's holding women back. and so i think rather than trying to force women to do things that on average, certainly there are women who are exceptions to the norm but they are rare and even in the studies that brings it, the women that they chose, they sort of selected an average range of performance for men for the study but chose sort of the top one percent of women. and even those women still, some of the women spoke out because i believe it was

carter or, it was one, maybe it was ray mavis who said the study has been rigged and that they had chosen the standout women and the women were on the excuse me, i am a standout woman and that's insulting and everybody was insulted by the idea that the study was ray area but i think, it was interesting because i looked at not just the military but firefighting and police and firefighting as a similar issue as you do with military combat which is that basically the quality that you most need is visible strength and life, the ability to carry somebody wounded off the field, the ability to fire a giant tortoise weapon with extreme accuracy. things that women struggle to do and not just that but actually by pushing women into these roles we are putting them at greater risk because we know what their bodies can't even sustain carrying around the pack in the firefighting chapter i talk about women going

through the training where they are coming out and winding up on disability because it was so hard on their bodies to have to carry around all this equipment. but contrast that to other types of first responders such as police where actually women, as soon as you give them a gun they are sort of on equal playing field with an assailant or their fellow police officers and that so much of what policing is about is the escalating violence situation, skills where women bring something to the table and the men don't and i talk about the fact that a lot of people are saying maybe the solution to our problem is police brutality, it's getting more women in there but they know if it's me against some 250 pound guy, just like a physical fight you going to beat me so i got to use my wits to talk them down out of the situation. but i do think that, i think it was general mathis actually was very outspoken against all this. he's on the outs but i certainly think his reservations about what was happening were shared and i think this photo scandal is

really getting the attention of even the left-wing media about wait a minute, maybe we are accelerating too fast with this but i think it's unfair to women at the end of the day to say that you are not equal soldier with a man. unless you can perform the most sort of extremely physically rigorous roles which even in the militarynot all men are physically qualified to do. so are sort of a women soldiers to the highest , most macho male standards. which is setting them up to fail, setting them up to more be more likely to injure, more likely to die and potentially risking everybody's lives as well as our military readiness. so i think it is certainly plausible that this administration will take a closer look at the really rapid changes that happened under the last military. >> i don't know if you know,

do you have a recommendation for this state and for the rules and for the athletes involved? >> but the female school wrestler, trying to become a male taking drugs, taking, giving him an unfair advantage but the state is saying, you have to compete as a female? i know i was disturbed when as a baseball fan, with athletes getting an unfair advantage . but i mean, what is your evaluation of that? >> i certainly think there should be a hard and fast rule about biological sex competing with each other. >> and you know, i had a whole section on this in the book but what's interesting is that even in a lot of

left-wing feminists agree with that, especially women who sort of pioneered female clinics because they can see really the argument for having women's sports dissolved really fast as soon as you are arguing that sex is not a valid category for essentially separating the sports in terms of teams but i mean, the case of the wrestler was interesting. i think people got confused, they thought it was a biological male competing against other females. we've seen other cases of this in different sports but this is a biological female taking testosterone and i think these athletic institutions already have ruled against taking performance-enhancing drugs but i feel like rules are already in place and you

know, were going to throw them all to the wind and let everybody take it performance-enhancing drugs and whatever whatever sex play whichever team they want which is the direction that we are going but we are going to observe the rules we have in place. and you know, that to me is sort of the simple solution to that. >>. >> can tony, cnc press. this problem specific to the united states or is it an international problem and a cross-cultural problem? >> in terms of legal and social policy, i don't, i certainly know in a lot of western countries you are seeing similar issues crop up. i'm not sure quite to the colorful degree you are seeing in the united states but i give the example of the british medical association also falling prey to some of this pc sensitivities about how we talk about pregnant women so you know, i can't really that, i don't have the best answer to your question

but i think it's certainly permeating much of the western world if you will. >>. >> based on this argument how would you reconcile the need to recognize these biological differences which between men and women and the potential outcomes of that. >> with this struggle in this movement for equality of opportunity. like so i think that argument, the argument that you made is great. one potential fallout i can see in places like saudi arabia, one justification for women about being able to drive a car is women are more prone to talk on the road so i could see some downfalls thereto. >> okay, that's a good and interesting question and i think one thing you're seeing in the united states is some of these quests for social equality being undercut by the gender neutrality and

i'll start with that first, give the example of yvonne cattrall and the paid maternity leave plan that she helped her father put out. she outweighed over the cold because it actually emphasize women and in fact i think it was just about women area the plan that she had proposed, there was nothing in their forefathers or maybe it was less and a lot of people were very angry with her that it didn't offer equal leave for fathers and mothers and she was look, what women go through is different than what men go through and just saying that was actually hugelycontroversial. almost all of these women's magazines and even , they just went after her for that. to the point that i think she was a little sort of frustrated, like why am i even defending this reality but it was interesting that not long before that, a study had come out that found that in the university setting, when you offer male professors and female professors identical paid

leave, it actually hurts women which makes sense because essentially, all you're really doing is sort of just like paying everybody a little bit more while keeping everything equal in society and men havesort of , women physically, emotionally are much more vulnerable for a long time after childbearing, especially if they're doing breast-feeding, things like that so it actually gives men a leg . because they're getting six months time off but they're not breast-feeding, they're not getting as much as the women. they're certainly not still struggling to walk around, things like that. >> so i think actually, a lot of these issues that are considered more progressive requests for equality between men and women are not attainable, especially even just the idea of not being able to discriminate against women for getting pregnant. >> we can't even say pregnant women, how are women going to be able to make claims and

this is where your seeing less feminists lineup with social security's in agreement that we are all sort of concerned about the status of women in a world where sex is not a valid category. what happens to race? this is a crazy question but not because the reason rate is considered such a heinous crime is because the one sex taking advantage of the other sexually in a way that's particularly egregious and i give the example in the book of the judge in a case making this weird, i'm not sure what she meant but it gets at what i think we are all sort of concerned about is obviously there's cases of sexual assault by men against men but certainly there's not, rate is a one-way street but it's in a world where we are all the same in other words. so to the point about saudi arabia, i think we have to sort of differentiate between what are, i mean that's an

example of i think, i think a lot of people get concerned that oh, you want to take us back to the 1950s where he had the super gender roles and women were excluded from all these places. no, the reality is we have to understand the things about us that are the same which is our intelligence, our ability to make political choices, voting. our ability to contribute to civil society, participate in civil society. we do that in different ways but at the end of the day there's sort of baseline rights that have to be in place in order for us to equally contribute in those ways so that's recognizing what the same about us. which certainly there are a category of things that are truly the same about us but i'd say that there's much, there's certainly a broad section of qualities about us that are quite different. we require society to recognize that in order for men to not be able to oppress women.

any other questions? i wanted to make one more point about your question about socialization and gender because i do actually think, i talk about this in the book, the principal structure and how there's certain aspects of socialization that people are uncomfortable with four good reasons. but i also look, i go back and forth in my mind about how much of that is consumerism and corporatism. it's not exactly what you asked but i don't want to say that it's totally unfair to always be concerned about sort of external pressures on boys and girls to be a certain way and for example, it's funny that my cover is a barbie because i don't let my daughter play with barbies, i just don't like barbies and i know that barbie has actually tried to rape remake itself and redo the body so it's not completely worked image of a woman and that's not to say

that i'm all for playing with a doll but even the disney culture, i think a lot of parents are vigilant about this and this is interesting again where you are seeing social security conservatives and left-wing feminists, social conservatives might not like seeing the sexuality, especially in ways females and disney are portrayed as hypersexual and damsels in distress andyou see the same thing on the left . but then, i never let my daughter see frozen and somehow i don't even understand, she knows all the words to frozen , as a frozen doll and so i think this sort of like in a inclination for girls to celebrate their individuality and that tends to manifest in to the culture but then the aspects of it that, the princess culture is a multibillion-dollar industry.and it's hard to escape for parents so this is just to say that i think this

wave of questions about some of that does not mean you are raising questions about should girls adjust to be princess or the other way around but i think that was another thought i had. >> please join me in thanking ashley. >>. [applause]. >>. >>. [inaudible conversation]. >> tonight on afterwards, rhode island senator shelby white house examines how government is impacted by corporate money and special interest groups in the book captured, the corporate infiltration of american democracy.