Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Welcome to the Quilett Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay.

In keeping with the very serious and intellectual nature of this podcast,

I will start things off this week by quoting at some length from an august academic article entitled The Conceptual Pines as a Social Construct, published in 2017 by the peer-reviewed journal Cojent Social Sciences.

Here's the abstract to that article.

Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises,

the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct.

We argue the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ,

but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.

Through detailed post-constructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change,

this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ, and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance."

End quote.

Now if you think that maybe what I just read sounds like a lot of absurd gibberish, well you're right. The article was published

by Credulous Editors, but the authors had actually submitted it as a hoax, one of a number of similarly nonsensical hoax articles that comprised the so-called

Grievance Studies Affair of 2018. Other articles written by hoaxers Peter Bogosian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose included

Going In Through the Back Door, challenging straight male homo hysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use.

And Stars, Planets and Gender, a framework for a feminist astronomy.

...