Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Cordelia Fine, professor in the History and Philosophy of Science

Program at the University of Melbourne, author of books like delusions of gender and testosterone rex.

Professor Cordelia Fine, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today.

Oh, it's a great pleasure. Thank you for having me, and I've never heard the testosterone

Rex said with such enthusiastic bite, so thank you for that.

I'm trying to bring some drama, you know.

So we're here to discuss what comes up in a lot of the work that you've done

over the past decades or so, which is biological gender essentialism

and stories that are told about the inherent or hardwired

differences between men and women and what their implications are. These stories are often

grounded in evolutionary psychology. They are quite popular.

You hear it stated, and also stated as scientific fact.

Often the narrative is that those who would deny the clear, strong, hardwired differences between men and women are rejectors of science.

They are postmodernists, neo-Marxist, feminist ideologues who can't handle the hard truths

about a biological reality. We're here to discuss that story today.

And I thought perhaps one place we could start

is actually not with the story as it's told today,

but the story as it has been told over the course of the history of science.

Because one of the things you do in your book is you start to unsettle our belief

in this story, partly by going over all of the stories that have been told in generations

past and showing how silly a lot of them look in the rearview mirror. Yes, that's right. I mean,

...