JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Hi, I'm Joan Roughgarden. That's spelled J O A N, R O U G H G A R D E N.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. You're going to just look at me, ignore everything over here. If you could tell us the date and place of your birth.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I was born on March 13th, 1946 in Paterson, New Jersey.

MASON FUNK:

We're not gonna spend a ton of time on your early years, but I was curious just to know ... We ask all of our subjects to tell us a little about their family of origin and particular, like what values, what was important, kind of, in the family household growing up? What values were emphasized?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, although I was born in New Jersey, I grew up in Indonesia and the Philippine Islands.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

My father was a missionary when we were in the Philippines. He wasn't a member of the clergy, he was a construction engineer working for the Episcopal church in the Philippines, on the Island of Zamboanga. He built a hospital and a church. We returned to the US for about a year, and then my father got

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

a job with the state department, the US state department under contract to the United Nations, and we went to Indonesia, in Bogor and Jakarta, and my father was building houses for the UN. Then I returned to the US and went to high school in New Jersey and undergraduate in New York and graduate school in Boston.

MASON FUNK:

Given that your father was a missionary of sorts, like on the ground type missionary, was that an important value in your family growing up, faith and those kinds of considerations?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, because my father was a missionary,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

our family was aware of the church. I'm not sure that my father was completely happy with the church, however. I think he became somewhat disillusioned as time went on because he found that clergy were somewhat political, and I think he was quite idealistic when he was young. In any case, the Episcopal Church is

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

not an evangelical church, so our attitude towards the Bible is that it's a source of human wisdom that may be divinely inspired, but in no sense is the Bible complete unto itself.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Episcopalians like to say, "You don't have to check your brains at the door when you come to worship." As a result, throughout my life the Episcopal Church has been there in moments of particular crisis. I still worship every Sunday as part of a Christian community.

MASON FUNK:

[Inaudible]

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yes, yes, yes, definitely, Episcopal Church.

MASON FUNK:

My sister is an Episcopal priest. [Inaudible] something very similar. When my dad and parents started hearing sermons against the Vietnam war, we were out, because they didn't like all that politics.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The politics that bothered my father was the internal politics.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The church was to him just another organization, when it came right down to it. There were rivalries and, shall we say, half truths involved. It was the internal politics that bothered him. He didn't feel that the church was really worthy of its ... Or it wasn't living up to its stated ideals very well.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

He used to say that by the time anyone becomes a Bishop, they no longer believe in God, which I thought was a little bit cruel and not necessarily accurate, but it's clear that in order to become a Bishop, you have to really play your cards right. I think that whole scene bothered him a bit. It wasn't the meritocracy that he had hoped it might be.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha! Okay. Awesome. Well,

MASON FUNK:

that's interesting. How and when did you begin to have glimmers of the career path that you would pursue?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Oh, well, when I went to university, my mother wanted me to be a doctor, "My son, the doctor" was of course what she was hoping. When I went to frosh camp, I saw all the other pre-meds and I decided I did not want to live my life with these people.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

These were not the kind of people I wanted as colleagues. Nonetheless, I was signed up as a biology major and I was signed up to take pre-med type courses. But one of the things I found is that in order to avoid being with pre-med students, it was effective to take more advanced courses because pre-meds rely a lot on memorization. If you get into a course that's more advanced,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

that requires more thinking and less memorization, it's actually easier. So I wound up taking advanced chemistry and physics and math in order to evade the pre-meds. That turns out to have been a very wise decision in retrospect, because I wound up learning a lot more. When I was taking a course in microbiology by someone

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

who's long since died, named Wolf Vishniak, he conveyed to me, I was a freshman at the time, a sense of wonder about bacteria and microbes that I never would have imagined possible. He saw them as alive. That seemed funny to say, of course, the bacteria are alive, but

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

he saw them as alive and with personalities. What would ordinarily look like dry biochemistry like this bacterium eats this kind of substrate and excretes some kind of other substrate, it seems very dry. To him, this was a personality profile and he could bring these chemical pathways to life. I wound up doing well in his course and interacting

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

with the conceptualization that he introduced, so that pretty much cemented it. Then I further found out that within biology, there are many sections of biology, but the ecology evolution side has two things going for it. It involves work outdoors rather than in a lab, and secondly,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

it's more conceptual than the other areas of biology and there's a room for theory and for theorizing. Then it became clear that the mathematics that had been developed for how evolution works weren't really well understood by the professors and they were having a hard time teaching it. I was able to understand it and even help explain what sometimes the faculty didn't understand.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

That made me realize that I could probably get a job doing this, that I had an ability to understand this kind of theory and then later on to develop it. That's really why I became a theoretician because there was clearly a need for people who could do that. I was one of the first people who did both mathematical theory and field work.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

30 years ago, it was pretty rare.

MASON FUNK:

I'm guessing if you're also doing theory, you also have the opportunity to unpack some of the places where bias might have crept into what were regarded as kind of like hard and fast truths. Is that true?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, by theory, I mean mathematical theory, I don't mean merely narratives.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

There's not too much bias in the actual mathematics. Where the bias might creep in is where the mathematics is steered, so that the principal entry point for bias would be how the problem is stated. Once it's stated in a certain way, which might incorporate assumptions or prejudices, then as the mathematics unfolds,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the mathematics itself is usually pretty neutral with respect to bias, but where the argument is going. When you do theory, you should think of theory like an argument, but just in a different language, it's like developing a thesis, but in this language it's symbols and formulas, rather than in the language of verbs and nouns and so forth. Just as a sentence

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

or a paragraph could be steered in a certain direction because of a prejudice, so could the math.Even though in the case of sentences, the sentence construction might be okay, there might be a proper verb and a proper noun and so forth. The same thing with the math, the math itself is pretty neutral. But beyond the way problems are stated, the entry point

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

for bias comes in the narratives. Even if you've worked out a whole derivation and a whole proof, then how do you explain that to people? That's where a lot of the bias comes in, the word choice. There are good ways to understand this. People in the humanities get a lot of training

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

in critical thinking and how to recognize bias. I wish that scientists had more of this themselves, because they tend to believe their own propaganda, in a sense, and think that they're neutral and objective when they're human and there are no more neutral and objective than anyone else is. But they don't have the tools to recognize that the way that people are trained in the humanities do.

MASON FUNK:

Because they're theoretically working in a subjective world.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yes, they think they're working in an objective world. Social scientists, too, sometimes are aware of biases, but it's mainly the role of critical thinking to help discern this. I did two majors when I was an undergraduate, one was in biology,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

which traces back to my mother's wanting me to be a doctor, but the other was in philosophy. I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy and that did really hone my skills at critical thinking.

MASON FUNK:

Interesting.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Is it interesting?

MASON FUNK:

Oh, I think so. [Inaudible] I don't know if you told your story so many times, you're not sure anymore.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

But everybody's got a story.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

What's the big deal about mine?

MASON FUNK:

Well, that's a great question. We'll get there. I might even ask you what do you think is [inaudible], but I feel like we should do that a little bit more towards the end. But feel free to question any of my questions. I'm an amateur in your field, at best. I'm a professional interviewer, but in terms of your subject matter, obviously I'm just [crosstalk]

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, I'm an amateur in your field.

MASON FUNK:

I appreciate that. That's kind of you. I love the story of that professor and that even as a freshman, you were already, maybe realizing, or this professor was seeing that you had the capacity to leap frog in a way. When did you commit to the notion

MASON FUNK:

of pouring yourself into academia, into research, theoretical research? When did it dawn on you that she might "get into trouble" because you wanted to question some things that seemed unquestionable?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

There are separate issues. I first knew I wanted to be an academic merely because I take, what you might almost consider, physical joy in thinking

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and in scholarship. When I read a paper with a new idea, I find it physically exhilarating, to encounter new things. It just occurred to me I could spend my life dealing with new ideas and finding new things out. My God, this is heaven on earth. I could also see, I was a freshman, no one

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

from my family had ever gone to college, so I had no idea of what a college professor did. Then when I saw these folks, I said, "Well, I can do that. This sounds like a great job." It might be a lot of work, but it's exactly the kind of thing I like to do, which is to read, to understand and to explain.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

That's how I knew I wanted to be a professor, but I didn't know that anything I would do would be controversial, until quite some time later. I started out really very mainstream and my early papers were welcomed as furthering the mainstream. People who were

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

into mainstream narratives about ecology and evolution, were enheartened by what I could find out because it reinforced and solidified what they had thought. I didn't really start questioning stuff, sort of getting into trouble, you might say, until

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

when I started work in the marine environment. The first work I did was solely mathematical. My thesis is solely mathematical. It developed equations which helped people solidify thoughts they had had but didn't have any real basis for.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

So here, there was an actual model, the actual equations, we showed that what they were thinking might be going on really could go on. It made sense and they were logically consistent. The people liked that. Then I started ...

VINCE KEALA LUCERO:

We may want to restart that for a piece. That was amazing, by the way.

MASON FUNK:

Back up and say, you mentioned again that you provided some theoretical underpinnings

MASON FUNK:

to things that people believed that you were providing, this got you some public admiration and appreciation. Can you just recap that?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

When I started out, right after my thesis, my thesis was solely mathematical and it offered an underpinning to what a number of people had been thinking

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and theorizing, but without any really sound basis. I provided this mathematical justification, you might say, for a lot of the ideas that were currently being sort of bandied about, and people like that a whole lot. That was the very initial stage, the first several years after my PhD. Then I started the field work, which was based on

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Anolis lizards throughout the Caribbean islands and here too, much of what I was finding was helpful because there was the belief, at that time, that different species competed with one another for resources and as a result of this, they evolved differences in how they live, in their body size, and in what their choice of prey is,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and so on, to reduce the competition. A lot of the field work that we did showed experimentally that, but with experiments outside, the Anolis lizards actually did compete, and that made people very happy to see that demonstrated. But the first controversial thing I did at that time was that there there's

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

an evolutionary pattern across the islands in the Lesser Antilles and islands with one species have a characteristic body size to their lizards, and islands with two species have species with two different body sizes and both are equidistant from the body size of a solitary lizard. So if this, so to speak, might be the body size of

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

a species on a single species island, on a two species island, one of them is bigger and the other one is smaller, and they straddle the size of the solitary lizard. This is called character displacement. There's a lot of theories, widely accepted theories, as to why this evolves. But we also showed that there were

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

deviations from this pattern and focused a lot on that, because if it's going to be a good theory, it's got to explain the deviations as well as the norms. I think that question is still unresolved as to why the deviations occur. I've published hypotheses about that. But it was clear people wanted to throw the deviations under the rug.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

They wanted to push them under the rug and that didn't sit well with me, still doesn't. From the work on lizards, I started work in marine biology, in the intertidal zone, along the California coast, because I was a professor at Stanford at the time and flying to the Caribbean is really quite a task and it would be nice to have a field site closer to home. Also, there was

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

no theory about the rocky intertidal zone, it was a wide open area. It became pretty clear that, again, we had generalizations being asserted that weren't true. There's a characteristic structure to the rocky intertidal zone in Washington, Oregon, where the players are mussels and barnacles and starfish, and

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

there's certain interactions that occur between them. It was asserted that this sort of community composition and structure occurred generally, but it was immediately obvious that this didn't occur in Central California where I was doing my work. So we published that the existing story, my lab and people with me published it, this standard story wasn't true.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

That made people really mad. We started getting negative anonymous reviews and a fair amount of vitriol. That's what let me realize that yes, scientists don't play straight.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Scientists tell themselves that they're always interested in alternative hypotheses, but they're not interested in alternative hypotheses, in point of fact. They would really rather continue with a standard or an accepted hypothesis, and a counter hypothesis is really viewed as being a troublemaker. After that work, that's when

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I began to work on the evolution of gender and sexuality in animals, leading to the book Evolution's Rainbow. I knew with the publication of Evolution's Rainbow, that shit was gonna hit the fan because that was going to be very controversial because by pointing out the occurrence and naturalness and benefits of alternative expressions of gender and sexuality in nature and offering a survey of

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

how widespread these phenomena are. That this was going to definitely ruffle feathers. I was prepared for the negative response that that evoked, because I had already seen it in the work I had done in the intertidal zone. Intertidal zone has absolutely no political importance to anyone. I mean, who cares if a bunch of scientists are arguing about what's going on in the intertidal zone, but

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

when you get to gender and sexuality in nature, well then a lot of a lot of other fields of knowledge rest on that. If you question the existence of the binary, for example, the gender binary, then what do you do with all the legal traditions which assume there is a binary, do you invalidate decades or centuries of contracts between

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

males and females or men and women? What does it mean to deconstruct something as basic as the gender binary? Obviously, they're going to be a lot of vested interests who will be extremely antagonistic to that effort. So we encountered that and we knew we were going to encounter that.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. That one, at least, you saw coming. You've partially answered this question,

MASON FUNK:

when you mentioned the sentence, anonymous critiques. But I was wondering, in the field of science, when scientists get their feathers ruffled and are offended or vehemently [inaudible], what form does it take? How do they even set about trying to de-legitimize or what's the word I'm looking for?

MASON FUNK:

De-Certify your findings?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

When scientists are trying to delegitimize your findings, there's several ways they can do this. First, they can put up obstacles to publishing it. So if you send it to a peer reviewed journal, then

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

if someone is antagonistic to what it is you've shown ... I mean, it's asking a lot for a reviewer to be positive about a finding that undercuts his or her own work, even if the findings are valid. They have to overlook the impact that those findings will have on their own work, and they rarely do that.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The National Science Foundation likes to talk about funding risky research, but there are two kinds of risky research, one is risky research that, if successful, furthers a dominant narrative, and they love that. But the other kind of risky research is such that if it's successful, it will destabilize

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the existing narrative and the National Science Foundation, because of its peer review system, doesn't generally support that because peer review is an averaging process. When you subject something to peer review, then that paper or proposal goes out to several and then their opinions are averaged. So it's very difficult to get an outlier idea,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

particularly a destabilizing idea through a peer review process, because it's running up against an average sentiment. I've suggested ideas for how the NSF could change its peer review procedures to work around that, namely by setting up dual panels in any one subject area and awarding each panel

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

funds to spend based on how successful it is in identifying new and path-breaking research. If you could somehow reward the panels for being able to identify potentially transformative research, then they would try to do that, and they would go for outliers more because they're the ones more likely to really

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

turn things around. At the moment, because there's no way to incentivize a panel to actually find de-stabilizing and new ideas, they instead coalesce around the central themes. I don't think that will happen in my time, but I think the NSF really needs to look into the theory behind peer review.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

In any case, the way scientists can try to discredit an idea is, first of all, to create obstacles to trying to get it published, then create obstacles in trying to get it funded, and then thirdly, just, even if it is funded and published, not citing it. If you don't cite it, it just kind of gets lost.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Then there are other more subtle ways, just not being given a forum to present it in, but you can usually work around that by starting your own forum. Book review is another way in which scientists can be upfront about what their opinions are,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

with no moderation at all. So sometimes book reviews border on trolling.

MASON FUNK:

You've mentioned Evolution's Rainbow, if you could, as possible, just give us a brief, [inaudible] like a jacket cover synopsis of what Evolution's Rainbow is about. That would be a good starting point just to have that on tape.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

All right. Evolution's Rainbow

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

is the book that I wound up publishing based on looking into gender and sexuality in nature. In the preface to the book, I mentioned walking in my first gay pride parade. It was in San Francisco, it started at the Civic Center and marched down to the Ferry Building. In later years, I think the parade marched in

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the opposite direction, but the year I was in that's the direction it took. That was my first encounter with a gay pride parade. Of course, I had read the statistics that about 1 in 10 people are gay, but that wasn't my experience. It wasn't true that 1 out of every 10 people I knew was gay.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

It's clear that the social circles are quite different. The social circles that gay people are traveling in don't completely overlap the social circles that straight people are traveling in. Depending on which social circle you're in, you'll get a different picture of just what the percentages are. But I found the 1 in 10 to be believable

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

once I marched in the gay pride parade, because there was a huge number of people there on both sides of the street, about six people deep. There were people hanging from the little balconies on the houses as you walked by. I said, well, now this is a lot of people.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I knew that in biology courses, same-sex sexuality in particular, gender wasn't even on the radar screen, but same-sex sexuality was being described generally pejorative terms as some kind of aberration and some kind of trait that was being opposed by natural selection and would be an evolutionary impossibility.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Its mere occurrence indicated that it would be a sort of a transient evolutionary phenomenon that, should it occur, natural selection would weed it out and we'd be left with nice straight species everywhere. But I knew that this was too large a number.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry. Aeroplane.

[Break]

MASON FUNK:

you were saying you knew that ... This is referring back to the fact that you've been in this pride parade and you're like, ah, there's something happening here.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. I knew that the number of people that were there was inconsistent.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

A number like 1 in 10 is inconsistent with any evolutionary narrative of disability. That what we're really dealing with was what biologists call polymorphism. If you just think about birds or

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

familiar animals like a dog or cat or so on, you'll see a variety of different colors or of different shapes. This is just natural variation. The same thing is true for sexual orientation then, that it's in the same order of magnitude as

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

variation of color or shape or other traits. If it were deleterious and being opposed by natural selection, as the narrative at that time had had it, and still there's some places where people think that same-sex sexuality is being opposed by natural selection. If it were, then it would be rare like a genetic disease is rare.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Any trait that's opposed by natural selection and then just keeps popping back up by mutation is like one in a hundred thousand or 1 in 10,000. They're really low numbers. Look at hemophilia for example, which is a deleterious genetic disease. You get these sorts of numbers for a trait that is being opposed by natural selection. But when you get

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

traits that are in the percentage of 10%, even one to 10% to 50% of the population, then you know that there are some selective advantage, some evolutionary advantage to that trait, as well as to the other traits. That the population's mixture represents a balance of what's favoring one trait vis-a-vis what's favoring another trait, and then they come into an equilibrium. I knew that

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

immediately, when walking in that gay pride parade. I knew on the other hand, there was a huge discrepancy between that realization and the stories being taught in biology courses. That made it clear that the mission was going to be one of redoing or rethinking basic biology

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

about gender and sexuality, to take into account the reality of the situation and to divorce it from narratives of unnaturalness and other pejorative framings. That's what then led to, eventually, after about three years or so from that, Evolution's Rainbow.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

When I started, I thought it was just going to be a small pamphlet that would review the species in which same-sex sexuality was known, and the species in which sex changing was known, because it was known in a couple. As I got into it and got into the primary literature, it was clear that the numbers of species involved in these phenomena was huge.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Some of the book of Evolution's Rainbow is just laying out the extent of the diversity in gender and sexuality. But another part of it, concerning animals, has to do with critiquing the way in which that diversity is described, because this is where the entree for the bias comes. I remember one interesting case

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

about some rams in the Hills of Montana or something like that. These Rams have bachelor groups, groups of all males, and there's a lot of same-sex male sexuality in these. There was this one investigator studying it and refused to report it in his first year. In his second year, he said,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

"Well, I had to come to terms with myself that my animals were gay." He finally forced himself into acknowledging what his own data showed. This kind of thing kept happening because people studying animals in the field identified with them in a way, and if they're doing something that makes you uncomfortable, then you might not report it. You should report it,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

but you might not, or you might drag your feet on it. It was clear that the extent to which there were same-sex sexuality was vastly under reported. Then there's the interesting case just in Holland, in the Netherlands, a couple of weeks ago, looking at Bonobos at a zoo there, it's very hard to see Bonobos because they're in the ... Bonobos are one of the chimpanzees.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The two chimpanzees are our closest relatives, and this is one of the two chimpanzees. It's in a zoo in the Netherlands. I was there with some camera people. We were watching them, and there's so much female same-sex sexuality by Bonobos. It's really quite obvious, if you watch it at the time that the food is just being released in the morning

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

when there's some tension, and then you find all the tension being relaxed as these different females who might be arguing about one little piece of food, then rub genitals with one another, and then everything is happy thereafter and life goes on. The extent and the social context of same-sex sexuality

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

is extremely general and varied. It's clear that same-sex sexuality has evolved multiple times in different species because the genital organs generally have multiple functions, just like every other organ has multiple functions. It's not only for

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the delivery and receipt of a sperm, in a heterosexual meeting, that has a lot of other functions socially as well. It means that theories that emphasize mating as the driving force in evolution are missing the point because it's only one of the driving forces.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Evolution's Rainbow covers this a lot. It reviews the variety of gender and sexuality in animals. It criticizes the way in which those phenomena have been reported. Now, there are two other sections to the book, large sections. The second section is all about the physiology of the development of gender and sexuality in people and animals,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

but mostly people. The third section is all about people. It's about the comparative anthropology of gender and sexuality in different cultures, including some from ancient history at the time of the Romans, as well as contemporary forms, such as the Mahu in Polynesia, including Hawaii, and

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the forms in India and in other places. It wound up being a very interesting book to write, an exhilarating book to write, because I knew I was getting into new territory that no one had had the courage to put together in one place. People writing about gender and sexuality would of course be accused of being gay or closeted gay

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

or something, but I was already out as trans. There was no way I could be attacked on that basis, because it was already established of course, people who didn't want to hear what I had to write, said that I was furthering a gay agenda, but that was impossible in a way, because I was just quoting the original literature. But then they said, well, I was picking and choosing, But then, people who ignore this

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

are also picking and choosing, they're choosing to ignore it. The book is still selling. This is 15 years later. At the time, I thought it was going to be superseded by something else in about five years, but it hasn't been.

MASON FUNK:

In other words, you thought some other person would take it to the next level.

MASON FUNK:

What did you think would supersede the book?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I did think that people would take the challenge that diversity in gender and sexuality raises and do something about it, instead of avoiding the challenge, which is what they kept doing, and still doing to a large extent.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I also suspected that there would be more cases. Of course, there have been more cases, but they could be added. For example, there could be another edition of Evolution's Rainbow with more cases included, but it wouldn't change anything, it'd just be a curiosity to have a few more species mentioned.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

But I guess I just thought that there would be either a counter synthesis; someone would take the same phenomena and render it differently than I had, or that someone would take the same narrative I had,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the same point of view I had, and develop it better and further. That would have been, I think, the more likely possibility, but it's still the third rail, I think. I don't think many evolutionary biologists and ecologists really want to touch diversity in gender and sexuality. We have to remember that from the standpoint of straight people and cis people,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

this is a niche topic. Now, those in the LGBT community, this is sort of part of our daily lives. It's very real and alive for us, but people who are cis and straight and may not even know more than one or two gays altogether, and may have never met somebody who's trans, that inability of science to accommodate and to deal

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

with the reality of these phenomena is just moot. We have to remember that. That's why I've been trying to help people understand that the critique of how the diversity in gender and sexuality is discussed, the critique of that is a fundamental issue in evolutionary biology. That critique traces

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

to some of Darwin's work called his theory of sexual selection, which is the theory that's always invoked when trying to explain the peacock's tail and why the peacock has a big tail. If that theory tracing to Darwin turns out to be discredited, and it's that theory which underlies the belief in the binary and the belief in standardized sex roles, if that's challenged and discredited, then that's

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

a significant chunk of Darwin's writings that are, it's not evolutionary biology generally, but it's Darwin's writings on that topic in particular, but it's a big topic.

MASON FUNK:

You would think that there was some ambitious ecologists out there who, like you said, wanted to take your work and make their own mark. But you sound surprised that nobody really seems to, you mentioned, yeah, for a lot of people, this is

MASON FUNK:

a niche topic, the ramifications are not niched.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yes, that's right. They're not. Well, I am surprised. I think that's still because it's a third rail. I don't think evolutionary biologists are prepared for the repercussions of discrediting sexual selection theory.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Too much is invested in sexual selection theory type explanations. To abandon that is almost unthinkable. The other thing too, is that a lot of this depends on your perspective. To power holding cis white males, the sexual selection narrative

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

is reinforcing. The sexual selection narrative is kind of a genetic classism. It privileges those that are supposed to have the best genes. In the sexual selection narrative, there's always a hierarchy of genetic quality in a population. It's the females who are supposed to be looking around for the males with the best genes. That's why they're supposed to be selecting for the peacock's tail because

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the peacock with the big tail is supposed to have the best genes and the females are supposed to want that. That's classism, that's genetic classism. If you're on the top of your class in your society, then you relate to this. Okay, you've got the money, you've got the power. You might even think you have the best genes and that this is all just right. The way nature works.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

A lot of scientists are members of powerful cis straight white men, okay. They hold the levers of scientific power. Now, on the one hand, it's self-serving for these folks to keep going along with sexual selection. But on the other hand, you have to give them credit that they can't see it any differently.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

So asking one of these people to criticize sexual selection is like saying we need an alternative hypothesis for sexual selection. One of them will look at you and say, "Why? Why? It works the way it is." It's like looking at the sky and the sky is blue, and you say we need an alternative hypothesis for the sky being blue. Well, we don't need an alternative. The sky is blue.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

That's the way it is. For a lot of these folks, sexual selection theory is the way it is and the sexual selection narrative is correct.

MASON FUNK:

But they don't see it as [inaudible] self-reinforcing.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. Of course, it is self-reinforcing. Most of the critiques of sexual selection theory have either come from feminist writers

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

or LGBT writers and usually from the humanities and social scientists, who are able to discern prejudice better than scientists can discern prejudice, which as we were talking about earlier. Getting scientists who are trained in critical thinking is a hard call and it's hard to find. Scientists are trained in data analysis.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Scientists think they're doing science when they're working on a big data set and analyzing it statistically and now applying artificial intelligence methods of classification to it and all these techniques of data analysis, but critical thinking isn't there.

MASON FUNK:

It was occurring to me, especially since the waning days of the Trump presidency and the advent of COVID pandemic, so many people raise the banner of science, as if science was absolutely infallible. People who were behaving in certain ways, it was because they were denying the science. It was this whole route. I only thought about this in line for this interview. This whole round of basically saying science is the gold standard, and if you only

MASON FUNK:

follow the science, we'll all be fine. But that doesn't really address the question that science itself can perpetuate biases.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. I don't know what we do about that problem because as you say there are a lot of science deniers out there. They have a vested interest in discrediting the objectivity of science. So you find the people who can't

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

accept global warming. Like, hello! Then you find the people who can't accept vaccines. Hello! It's absolutely stupid. But these folks have a vested interest in discrediting science. That makes the scientists defensive because they don't want to show a weak link anywhere. This happens, for example,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

in the teaching evolution controversies, where if you admit that there's anything wrong with evolutionary biology, then maybe the Texas board of education is going to take evolution out of the curriculum, so we can't acknowledge that there's anything wrong with evolutionary theory. This is a real problem, having scientists fearful of being open about

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the state of the art or the state of the science, you might say. It's very difficult because the public wants answers too. You could see this with Fauci saying, well, we just need another month or two of data before our sample size is big enough for us to conclude that the vaccine helps or not. And everyone's saying, well, what the hell is taking so long? We want the answer now.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, we still have to wait for enough data for the sample size to be big enough. So you find on the one hand, people are really impatient with scientists being open about what they don't know, they really want it right and they want it now. Then you find the scientists themselves, when they do open up about what they don't know, they're attacked for not having it fast enough. Or

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

it's then used by anti-science folks to try to discredit the entire activity.

MASON FUNK:

I mean, yeah, all of Darwin's theories, it was such a pitch battle for so many decades to overcome all the religious resistance from community of people of faith, so to speak, that I can understand, in a way, why they are afraid that they're [inaudible], because it's all

MASON FUNK:

side of the troupes are waiting to rush in [crosstalk] weakness.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

And they are, more so than I ever would have imagined, but the advent of the Trump mafia has made it clear that there are people hanging, and not just fundamentalists, it's just the whole rural anti-science, anti elite contingent. But hopefully we'll get past it

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

because in the history of our country, we've had the know-nothing party and we've had other occasions in which ignorance has seemed to triumph and we've gotten through it. We'll have to hope. But I mean, in the even longer view of history, remember we did go into the dark ages after the fall of the Roman empire. It's not inconceivable that what we think of as civilization could actually

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

disappear for several hundred years and before coming back again. We'll see.

MASON FUNK:

Well, let's see if we can find a more optimistic topic to talk about. There's plenty still, obviously. I wrote this question, I'm just going to read my question as a launching point.

MASON FUNK:

You've argued, well, actually I want to talk with the Genial Gene. Let me read you this question. You talked about Evolution's Rainbow as transformative and stabilizing, and it sequel the Genial Gene as sort of like a reconstruction, putting things back together. We haven't talked about the Genial Gene, so could you maybe bridge from Evolution's Rainbow to the Genial Gene and why you wrote the second book?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah, I wrote

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the Genial Gene, because

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start with Evolution's Rainbow. I wrote Evolution's Rainbow ....

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Okay. I wrote Evolution's Rainbow, and it covered a lot of ground, but the one criticism of Evolution's Rainbow, which I thought was well-founded, was that it seemed negative. It was deconstructing Darwin's theory of sexual selection, which was leading to mistaken

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

understandings or mistaken narratives about the diversity of gender and sexuality. But what was to take its place? If I criticize and critique sexual selection theory, then what? So I wrote the book, a sequel, called the Genial Gene, and it's an attempt to develop an explanatory framework that's a rival

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

to sexual selection theory, an alternative, and that's equally expansive. Sexual selection theory, which begins simply with females choosing males for the best genes, has over the last hundred years been expanded into a large narrative about everything from the evolution of sex in the first place to the dynamics within families

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

to social structure generally in a society. It's been taken up by the evolutionary psychologists to explain human behavior and human motivations, always in terms of stories, not in terms of real data or science in the usual sense.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The Genial Gene offers a counter narrative from the origin of sex, all the way through to family organization and social structure. It's an attempt to put the pieces together; if Humpty Dumpty fell down and it all fell apart, let's put Humpty Dumpty back together again and do it right. That's what the Genial Gene is supposed to do. It's my best effort

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

to try to reconstruct after the deconstruction.

MASON FUNK:

If Darwin's theory was sexual selection, and you posited a theory that is loosely called social selection, and that's what you're kind of positing in the Genial Gene. What is the essence of the difference? What is the essence of social selection in terms of how it's different from the purely

MASON FUNK:

survivalist model of sexual selection?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The sexual selection narrative begins with mating, it's all about mating and females choosing to mate with the best males. It ignores what's the most important element of evolution, which is the delivery of offspring to the next generation. It starts with mating and takes the offspring, rearing and

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

delivery into the next generation for granted. My alternative, which I've called social selection, begins at the offspring delivery phase and works back to mating, and views mating as ancillary or instrumental to the delivery of the offspring, and that courtship amounts to a labor negotiation. It's not a male showing off his good genes to females, it's the male and the female

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

bartering with one another sometimes as to who does what, or actually trying to come to an understanding as to what's important. My model for this has tended to be albatrosses, in which the male and the female look nearly identical, and they collaborate in raising young. They raise one young at a time and they live for about 30 to 40 years apiece. I think that should be a better starting point than the peacock.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

When albatrosses court, they court a great length over a couple years, and then even after they formed a permanent pair bond, then when one goes out to feed, feeds for a while, comes back, brings food to the nestling, then they interact a whole lot. Then the other one flies away, again. Now, in a system like that, it's, in principle,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

possible that during courtship, the female could say, well, the most important thing is to get food. And the male might say, well, the most important thing is to watch out for predators like the cat over there, and they might disagree on priorities. If they disagree, then they should keep looking for other mates, until they find someone with whom they have a shared opinion about what needs to be done to deliver offspring to the next generation.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

That's what the courtship is all about, and it is not about males showing off good genes. Sexual selection is entirely wrong on that. Social selection is all about the social interactions that lead to offspring delivery, and it foregrounds the offspring delivery, and backgrounds the mating as merely instrumental to this occurring.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Then that narrative starting with mating and so on, just extends to all the other issues that sexual selection theory also covers, like why there is sex in the first place. In my account, it's because it's an agreement to share genes, that's what sex is all about. Sex is cooperative from day one because it's an agreement to share genes. Otherwise, individuals could reproduce clonally.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

We have clonal species, we know that's possible physiologically. There has to be some advantage to sexual reproduction. On my account, it has to do with the advantages of gene sharing. And then it goes on and on. I've analogized family life to what economists call a family firm. In economics, the purpose of a family firm is to make money for the family.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The purpose of an animal family is to make what? To make offspring for the family. The internal organization within a family might resemble the internal organization within a family firm in economics, and I've tried to see whether or not that kind of theory would transfer. Social selection is an entire framework, an alternative framework to viewing

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

reproductive activities, reproduction, generally speaking, to that of sexual selection.

MASON FUNK:

But then, at some point also, you get same sex sexuality kind of nature, which is not reproductive by nature, right? Inherently not reproductive, but also seems to contribute, in some way, shape or form, according to your theories, to, like you mentioned the phrase, common goals. Things happen that

MASON FUNK:

ultimately strengthen the species in same sex sexuality ...

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Ask it again.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. So you've also posited ... Then we get to the question of

MASON FUNK:

same sex sexuality, which has no apparent reproductive function, but I think your theory is that it also contributes, in some way, shape or form, to the survival and thriving of the species. [inaudible], but I'm just curious how that comes in.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah, one of the issues about same-sex sexuality is

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the supposition that it is not reproductive. Now a particular instance of same-sex behavior might not, in and of itself, contribute to reproduction, but it's usually part of a pattern, a social behavior that contributes to reproduction. Now, in the Bonobos,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

for example, where there's a lot of same-sex sexuality, all of those Bonobos who are participating in this also have offspring. In fact, almost all of the same-sex sexuality is by animals that also participate in heterosexuality when it comes time to actually mating, that's actually producing an offspring.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The albatrosses, for example, which have same sex couples and raise a young, obviously, there had to be one mating event somewhere, or they wouldn't have an egg to raise together, but they're nonetheless bonded and raise an egg together. This issue of whether homosexuality is

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

exclusively homosexual, that's kind of rare, even in humans, that's rare. In most human society, so far as I could tell, people who engage in same-sex sexuality also have offspring or have children at a rate that's not all that much different from heterosexuals. Heterosexuals may not have offspring either, a good many of them don't.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

It's hard to get straight with the reporting is on this. If you go to India, for example, where there's a lot of same-sex sexuality between some males, and then those very males will be married and have children at home. It's not as though there will be an absence of reproduction. Now,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the other thing is that sometimes, the individuals who are gay and exclusively have same-sex sexual behavior will be part of a social group in which they're contributing to the families having a high reproductive output. We were talking

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

earlier about family organization, and the objective of the family, the evolutionary objective of the family is to leave a large number of offspring. If some members of the family don't actually produce those offspring, fine, they help get them reared and delivered into the next generation. A lot of the same sex sexuality, which is exclusive is by either people or by

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

animals who are part of social groups, it's the social groups that's involved in delivering the offspring.

MASON FUNK:

We certainly see a lot of that. Well, two points, one is like in my immediate family, my husband and I are like the favorite uncles and [inaudible] uncles. We fill roles that nobody else is filling. Secondarily, your comment about people having same-sex behavior and still getting married reminds me of a friend of mine from Mississippi, who, when he came out as gay,

MASON FUNK:

his mother said, "Why can't you just get married like all the other men around here and just be gay on the side?"

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

It's like in India.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Okay. Well, that was super helpful. Then, in the realm of gender, in a similar way, I would assume that, I mean, it's very different topics obviously, but gender fluidity and the lack of a true binary, the way our society, obviously, has constructed it.

MASON FUNK:

Can you talk about some of what you brought forward in the Genial Gene around the topic of gender fluidity and so-called transgenderism in the natural world? Is that possible to do?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

As you say, they're not really comparable issues. I think of gender,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

especially gender expression, as a marker of occupation. If you look, for example, at the two-spirited people in North American Indians,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

it's quite interesting that if a boy identifies as a girl, then he takes a social test in public. Anthropologists have described this in nice detail that when there's a boy who looks like

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and shows every indication of wanting to be and acting like a girl, then they'll do a certain ceremony, call everybody together and they have a ceremony. The boy goes into a tent, in the tent, if I recall correctly, there's like a bow and arrow

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and a basket. Something that a woman would use and something that a man would use. They set the tent on fire and the person has just enough time to grab one of these. If he grabs the basket, then he's accepted

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

as a woman and is then socialized and raised as a woman and participates in women's activities. If he grabs a bow and arrow, well, then he's a guy and he's going to be riding stallions and shooting bows and arrows. It's that choice of occupation which is what gender expression is. Gender identity is which

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

you see yourself as, but gender expression is the choice of occupation, I think. There are other cases. In the animals, I talk a lot about the multiple gendered animals. Where there are three genders of males and one gender of female, and each gender has a characteristic

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

activity or niche, you might even say. The transgender phenomenon in humans is ... I think most of the focus of the discussion about transgender in people has been about gender identity, not gender expression.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

If you're allowed to have a gender identity as a female, then there doesn't seem to be much trouble going ahead and getting permission from society to act like one, the issue is why did you choose to identify as a gender different than your sex at birth? I think there's very useful information that's coming out about this. Both in Evolution's Rainbow

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and in subsequent writings, I've theorized that gender identity is materially a locus in the brain that can be thought of as a lens. When a baby wakes up, opens its eyes and it looks out, what does it see and what does it ignore? If the baby

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

is born male but doesn't see his father, but sees his mother, or conversely born female and sees the father and not the mother, that would lead to the acquisition of the traits that you see through the lens. That's the gender identity. Now, where did that come from now? Dick Schwab, in the Netherlands,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

has what I think is compelling data on this, which is subsequently being confirmed by others. It's that when the embryo develops, the testosterone environment, the hormonal environment determines the shape of the genitals in the first place. With testosterone, the primordial phallus grows into a penis. Without the testosterone,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

then the primordial phallus grows to a smaller shape, and it becomes the clitoris. It's the same initial structure. Now, fast forward to the end of pregnancy, that's when the brain is developing. If the hormonal environment has changed, then that could, and Dick Schwab theorizes, has stated the effect that the gender of the brain,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the brain is gendered, then could be different than the gender in which the genitals developed. If the testosterone is high initially, you get a penis. Testosterone low at the end, you get a female brain. Within that feminine brain is a lens that points at a female, at the mother, and

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

conversely, for trans in the other direction.

MASON FUNK:

When you say points at, do you also mean identifies with, sees that person and views that person like a mirror?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah, I guess. Yeah, identifies with, sees, connects with and then starts to emulate.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

The experimental test for this theory would come from, and I suggest this as well, dueting songbirds. Now there's some songbirds in which the male sings one song and the female sings another song, and they interdigitate, it's really lovely to listen to, beep beep beep beep, and they go back and forth. The male sings one kind of song, and the female, another song. Now, this is a interesting

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

system in which you could study the acquisition, both of cis and transgender identity, because when the chick hatches, whose song is the chick going to learn? If it's a male chick and it learns its father's song, then it would be the acquisition of male cis identity. If it's a male chick and it learns the mother's song, then it would be a transgender identity.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Either way, you'd be studying the development of the gender identity, cis or trans. I think that'd be a great experimental system, and I've been hoping somebody picks it up and works ... Because people do know a lot about songbirds and learning songs. The problem with the existing studies is that they've been done on species in which only the male sings. There's a lot known about learning songs,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

but if it were only done on a dueting species, we'd get a lot more out of it.

MASON FUNK:

Dueting species, but then you mean species where there's both male and female songs

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. In a duet. As they say, one goes, beep beep beep beep. They go back and forth, in a duet.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. That's fascinating.

MASON FUNK:

In the canyon where we used to live in Los Angeles, we would have owls calling to each other across the canyon, during mating season. It was just always so magical. I don't know if that's a good example of a dueting species. I was assuming they were [inaudible] female. I don't actually know that for a fact. [Inaudible] or two females. Okay. Let me catch up a little bit. Well, here's another question

MASON FUNK:

I wrote out, this may be a little bit repetitive, but you had written that the categories of male and female are not "stable or comprehensive". And I thought that was such a brilliant kind of summary of the problems, the two problems with these two fixed categories. Can you break that down for us a little bit, why they're not stable? The reality they're not stable, effectively

MASON FUNK:

taking that statement and kind of expanding on it.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. I have written that the categories of men and women or male and female?

MASON FUNK:

Male and female. I think I wrote that correctly, "The categories of male and female are not 'stable or comprehensive'".

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I should've said man and woman. Biologists define the male as the maker of small gametes,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and the female as the maker of large gametes, and there's not much room for play in that. But it's the categories of men and women, which are then socially constructed, they're the ones that are not stable. What a male does, or I guess I should say, what a man does, depends on the society they're in,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

what tasks they're expected to carry out. Similarly for a woman, the tasks vary through time.

MASON FUNK:

But didn't you all also argue that even at the level of fixed, I mean, I understand the [inaudible], the many versus the few, so to speak. But I had the impression that you were also saying

MASON FUNK:

that there's also changeability and instability in that organization within nature, at the biological level.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

No. I don't think so. I mean, the instability is not in the definition of male and female, but whether or not the sperm, the small gamete, is produced

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

by only one type of individual. That's why there can be multiple genders of males. Each gender has a different occupation but they're all males because they make sperm. But then on the other hand, you can see in most plants and majority of plants and under water, in the ocean, about 50% of the invertebrates and vertebrates

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

are hermaphrodites, in which any given individual makes both egg and sperm. That's where it's unstable as to who makes eggs and who makes sperm. But the male function is to make sperm. The female function is to make eggs. What's unstable would be whether the species has only males and females, or males and females and hermaphrodites,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

or males and hermaphrodites or females and hermaphrodites. How it's partitioned, how the manufacturer of these two different gamete sizes is partitioned among different body types is what's not stable.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. Okay. That's alright. I'm going to skip forward. I think we've covered the science pretty well.

MASON FUNK:

We're going to switch gears entirely. In 2000, you ran for elected office in San Francisco, saying that some "ecological thinking could help with some of the problems facing the city". I'm fascinated by that. If you could tell us that story and why you ran for office and how you thought your particular way of thinking and training could help with social issues?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

When I moved to San Francisco, I didn't know anybody and I couldn't figure out how to meet people. Then one day I was walking by ...

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, just for background, was this post-transition?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Oh, yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, okay. Let's just include,

[inaudible] when you moved to San Francisco, having transitioned, and then caring on.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

After my transition,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I moved to San Francisco. When I got there, I didn't know anybody. I didn't know particularly how to go about meeting anyone. I was walking by a coffee house one afternoon and I saw piles of people in this coffee house. It was just really full. These are all my neighbors, here they all are. What's brought them all together? There was somebody running for office in there. He was holding forth, might even have been Mark Leno.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

He was there and everyone was listening intently, and they're all really engaged. I said, well, I guess the way for me to meet people is to run for office, so I decided to run for office for supervisor from the South of Market District, District 6. It was great. It really worked. I did wind up meeting a lot of people; the other people were running for office, a number of the local politicians,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

met the different political groups within San Francisco and gradually got the lay of the landscape. I had to develop a platform, of course. I mean, this was serious. In principle, I could have won. I did do fairly well for having lived in the city for all of six months.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I did say, I think, at one point that the city could use some ecological thinking. What I had in mind was the problem of the homeless at that time, because each of us candidates was being asked, "What are you going to do to solve the problem of the homeless?" I took a population perspective, and that's what I mean by ecological thinking. I was thinking of the homeless as a population rather than focusing on individuals. The key thing

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

to reduce the population of homeless is to reduce the input rate to the population. Not spend quite so much effort on those who are already homeless, but really make sure that fewer become homeless. You can identify those who are about to become homeless because they're living in their cars or they're living in very low rent SROs,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

these single room occupancy flats. They're very susceptible to becoming homeless because if the rent goes up by about $5 a month or something, that can be just enough to throw them onto the street. They're the folks to help a lot, and to put a lot of effort into them because if you lower the input rate to the homeless population, then gradually the homeless population will shrink just through attrition. Now, of course,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

from a humanitarian sense, you need to provide welfare and support to those who already are homeless and try to help them out of becoming homeless. But it gets increasingly difficult to move people who are homeless back into the homed population because they lose a lot of social skills and work skills when they're there, and they can have health problems, including mental health problems. So it becomes

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

more and more intractable to focus on the people who already are homeless. But the people who are about to become homeless, it would be the point at which to apply the maximum financial intervention. That's, in a nutshell, how I think the problem of the homeless should be tackled, and that would be an ecologist perspective on it.

MASON FUNK:

That totally makes sense.

MASON FUNK:

Obviously, in 20 years since then, 21 years knocked out

[crosstalk]

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

And no one has thought about it ecologically.

MASON FUNK:

Friend of mine is like the homeless

[inaudible] is flying all over the state because he wants to throw some of his millions. I want to share this idea with her, just in case.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Please do.

MASON FUNK:

This is a little bit of a left turn, but

MASON FUNK:

one of the issues that is very current these days, and we encounter this in OUTWORDS as we interview lesbians, radical lesbians, transgender women, is the so-called, I dare say calling a war between so-called TERFS and transgender women. We bump up against this. We've interviewed people all across this spectrum. I'm wondering, off the top of my head,

MASON FUNK:

it's a really random sort of amateurish thought, if some ecological thinking could be applied to this problem as well. Now that I understand what that means, I'm not quite sure that holds up at all.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Actually, a Spanish edition of Evolution's Rainbow is going to come out in a couple of months, and the Spanish publisher

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

asked me to contribute a preface motivated specifically by the concern that TERFS have raised about proposed transgender legislation in Spain. I did write a few sentences. I didn't want to comment about the specifics of the legislation in Spain, because as a foreigner, I don't have the standing to do that.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

But the issues that the TERFS raise is not new. I transitioned over 20 years ago and the same fears were being raised at that time.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

My response to this is several fold. First of all, I just don't go places where I'm not welcomed. If there's a group of women who don't want me there, I don't go there. I don't take it personally because we have the right of association, and people can associate with whom they want. I don't bang on the door and try to get into organizations

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

that don't want me. But more importantly, the question is one of fear, in a way. One shouldn't be afraid of transgender women, they're not going to erode the institutions

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

of which women are justly proud. Transgender women endorse women's rights and a feminist perspective. The causes for which we women are fighting

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

are enhanced with an enlarged membership. It reminds me of the problem of the discussion with gay marriage. People felt that having gays married would destroy the institution of marriage, but to the contrary, it enhances and strengthens the institution of marriage. It's an endorsement by same-sex couples of the institution.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Transgender people who are also endorsing the gender to which they identify, and are often spending a great deal of time and effort trying to make their transition work. They wouldn't do that if they didn't really care.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I guess my advice to TERFS is, don't be afraid. Now, there's another thing too, which is there needs to be, I think, all around, a little bit of tolerance for what you might say, stage of development. When people have just transitioned,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

they often carry with them the baggage of the socialization they had. So you'll typically find newly transitioned trans women acting like men and being offensive in doing so. Conversely, you'll find newly transitioned trans men acting still like women, and

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

you don't know quite what to do about it. You typically might expect a guy to carry his weight, and you might find a newly transitioned transgender man backing off and not being assertive enough. You expect one to hold forth. You look at one, okay, you're the guy here, what are you going to say about that? And they back off, and you wonder, like, you're not there yet.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

You haven't learned how, as some would say, to enact the role you have identified with. Conversely, as I say, the transgender women, sometimes, they don't know how to act, especially because they weren't raised as women. They won't have any idea of how to dress. Oftentimes, they adopt

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

over the top clothing, and sort of adopt what I call a streetwalker chic. But this passes with time. So one needs just a bit of tolerance about this. But overall, allowing gender expression to come out of the closet

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

will strengthen the objectives of the activist movements for each of the genders.

MASON FUNK:

I thought you also were going to say that sometimes when someone has recently transitioned, that they become very political, and that also can kind of get in the way that they may be a bit more insecure in their new gender identity and therefore, maybe more prone

MASON FUNK:

to wanting to go places where they're not welcome or take up battles that ...

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah, I wouldn't say that as a generalization, because most people after they transitioned are very timid on either side. I transitioned 20 years ago,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

so a lot's changed since then. The non-binary folks are really a new category since the time that I transitioned. I don't know how many people identify as non non-binary,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

and I don't know how they're going to frame their path through life. There's so many ways in society in which a binary is seemingly enforced. You have to declare on so many different forms, whether you're male or female, there must be a million forms

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

that would have to change if it's going to be male, female, or don't specify, or something else.

MASON FUNK:

But I feel like I'm seeing much more of that when I fill out forms, even on the state of Hawaii and flying over, do a little survey, dropdown menu, male, female, decline to state. But you're right. I think the path of the gender nonconforming and nonbinary people, is still very much tbd.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. I want to switch topics again. How do you, especially since we referenced your father having had a relationship with the Episcopal church, and you haven been raised in that tradition, can you talk about, because it seems like it continues to be an active part of your life, your faith journey. Can you talk about that? It's always one of the most fascinating parts, for me, of people's stories. Well yeah, I've continued to be

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

a participant in the Episcopal church. It was very important when I was first coming out, as I was able to identify a congregation in San Francisco, The Church of St. John The Evangelist, and it had a mostly gay congregation, and the minister was gay. There was a gay Bishop, now deceased, Otis Charles.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

They were there. When I transitioned, I thought that I would have to wind up, I mean, I didn't know if I'd be fired. I didn't know if I'd lose my family and so forth, I needed to develop a support system, and I was able to find that at that church.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Throughout my life, there've been times when I've just had to go somewhere and that the church has been there. I remember one time being stuck in Nantucket, no in Martha's Vineyard, of all places, because I had taken a sailboat out to Martha's Vineyard from Woods Hole, where it was then a student and got stuck. Didn't know where to stay or anything. I just went to the Episcopal church and they put me up for the night. So it's always

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

been a place for me to go. Also, in San Francisco, after the minister left at St. John's, I moved to St. Gregory of Nyssa, which has a significant gay population, maybe 50% gay and straight.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Then moving here to Hawaii, I've continued to worship in an Episcopal congregation. I wrote a little book called Evolution and Christian Faith, which tries to help people of faith understand what evolution is all about. It draws on passages in the Bible which are the elements of contemporary evolutionary theory.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Now, there's no place in the Bible where it's put together as a theory of evolution, but the notion of random mutation is present in a parable of spreading the mustard seed. The notion of selective breeding is present in the parable of Laban and the sheep, if I recall, different colors of sheep and God driving

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the population of sheep in one direction. There's a lot of breeding that goes on in the Bible, selective breeding of livestock. You just put together random mutation and breeding, you pretty much get modern evolutionary theory. It goes on to other points in there.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I worked on that when I was at St Gregory's and some members of the congregation were readers of it, so I could work on the manuscript with them. I continued to be active in the worship here in Hawaii. But, I must say, from the standpoint of an evangelical Christian, I don't count as a Christian.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I worship with a Christian community. I consider myself a Christian, but I acknowledged that to a fundamentalist, I would not be one because of my view of the Bible and other theological points which I think are unnecessary. In the creeds, for example, we're being asked to believe in certain things

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

which seem unnecessary to the word of Jesus. There's a lot of ad-ons in the church which you don't have to subscribe to. If you did, if you regarded those as requirements, then I'm not there.

MASON FUNK:

So what happens during Sunday worship when you get to the creed?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I say the beginning of the creed. I definitely say the Lord's prayer, but

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

the creed is another matter.

MASON FUNK:

My college roommate at Stanford, we were both very much Christians in high school and college, and he's still a minister, but he helped me a couple of years ago. He just debunked the whole notion of personal salvation, like not in the Bible, because I was really -- Anyway, it's a longer story. [Inaudible] have that conversation on camera. I loved your idea of a coming out liturgy. That's something that I read. You want to talk a little bit about that?

MASON FUNK:

You might've said that the indigenous Americans have ... You mentioned they have the rites for people, but the general lack of liturgy and ritual within our lives, including perhaps around the act of coming out. Does that resonate with you at all?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. I did, I think it was in Evolution's Rainbow, suggest that people in our society

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

really could use a coming out liturgy as one of the official liturgies in the prayer book. Because coming out is a major traumatic event for both gays and trans people, it would be very helpful to be endorsed by your community at the time of coming out. It's every bit as important as marriage.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I'm told that there might be such a liturgy that's been formulated, but I don't think it's in the prayer book, but I've asked some people about this. Apparently, if a liturgy was brought to the general convention and may or may not have been approved or voted on. I don't think there's opposition to it.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Church politics is an extremely slow business, and I don't get the impression that it's a priority of the current Bishop in charge. He's more concerned about racial issues than LGBT issues.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Well, excellent. We have four questions

MASON FUNK:

that we ask all of our interviewees, so you can be as [inaudible]. The first one is, if you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Do what you were doing

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

under the circumstances. I mean, my survival mechanism was to be a nerd. We talked about that, that my way to avoid pre-meds was to take hard courses because you're not going to find a pre-med in a hard course. Similarly, I think it served me well to really focus on scholarship

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

at that time. I wouldn't really do anything differently. When I came out, the whole notion of being transgender was really foreign. I mean, gay was just being acknowledged. When I was a child, I remember this, and I think Eisenhower was president, so it shows how old I am.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Eisenhower was president and one of his cabinet members or his national security advisor, all of a sudden had to be fired in this hush hush. I asked my father why, and he said he was found in the bathroom with another guy or something like that. I said, "Well, I don't get it." "No, no, we can't talk about it." So being gay was itself

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

not even speakable. The notion of being trans was as preposterous as saying that the law of gravity doesn't exist. What do you mean trans? Someone from my age only gets a chance to experience a transition quite late in life.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

There's no possibility of doing something early, because it would be inconceivable. Now that the reality of trans people seems to be acknowledged at least, to some extent, even if not approved of, at least acknowledged, someone's in high school or as you say, 15,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

pre-puberty, I don't know, with the earlier transition, then the longer the life you get to lead in the gender of your identity. That's a good thing, No matter what,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

you have to be very cognizant of the consequences of transitioning. The question arises of how someone who's 15 could have the kind of judgment necessary to make such a major change. I don't have enough experience talking with 15 year olds who are contemplating

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

changing their gender. I mean, I did meet some people who knew, absolutely knew, when they were 10, 15 years old, that they were in the wrong gender. But in my experience, that's a minority. There are a lot more who seem to be really quite puzzled at the whole situation. You know you're not a guy because you don't like anything that guy's like

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

And you can't connect with guys, you don't have any instinct for how to be a guy. You try to be a guy and you can't figure out how to do it. That doesn't mean you conclude you're a woman, it just seems confusing. Maybe you'll get over it. If there's somebody who's 15, they might just get over it, but they might not.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

It's a very hard call. I don't have enough experience with people who are 15 to really offer a concrete advice. I can just kind of flesh out what's involved.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Thank you. It's interesting because it's a more nuanced answer than we sometimes get, so I appreciate it.

MASON FUNK:

One of our interviewees a couple of years ago, this is the second 'four final questions', she used this term that I'd never used myself, "a queer superpower". She believes that people, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, that we all have some kind of characteristic in common that enables us to be ... It really gives us the value that you've been talking about, the social value that makes us valuable

MASON FUNK:

beyond our so-called passing on our genes, if that happens or doesn't happen. Something that we add to the social fabric. She had ideas when she said "queer superpower" of what that looked like, what that trait was. Do you relate to that idea at all? If so, do you see kind of a common thread through all these people that make up the so-called LGBTQ community?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, yeah, I think there is,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

in most LGBT people, a certain kind of empathy. I wouldn't say it was a superpower, but I think

[inaudible] it's a power of empathy. I think the one unifying feature of all LGBTQ people is the experience of coming out. That's such a traumatic experience and everyone has had.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I think that's the main one. I don't mean to say that we're the only people who can have a shared traumatic experience, because I think refugees have that. Look at the people who've come from Vietnam on little boats, they've clearly had one hell of a traumatic experience. Refugees, generally, have had an experience. I think people who've come through the war

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

have an experience. Veterans of combat can have an experience. But the LGBT people in particular, I think have the coming out experience as a shared point of empathy.

MASON FUNK:

Do you think that in turn makes us more empathetic towards other people? Not necessarily of the community who have not had coming out experiences,

MASON FUNK:

but does it extend to other things?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I think so. I'm not sure about that, but being able to see it from the other person's point of view is really important. You can definitely meet insensitive gays and obnoxious trans people, so I'm really hesitant to generalize,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

but I think anyone who's gone through traumatic experiences, not just LGBT people, if you come out of it, you're better for it.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I agree. Third of the final four. Given the fact that you've given many of your interviews, what made you say yes to tell your story today?

MASON FUNK:

Why is it important [crosstalk]

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Well, you kept getting in touch.

MASON FUNK:

I mean, honestly, you told your story so many times, do you feel like you're just telling the same stories you told before? What value does it have for you personally, I guess is my question?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. Well,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I guess, the one thing ... Maybe this is your fourth question, is there anything I'd want to add? That's the fourth question?

MASON FUNK:

No, but we can go there anyway.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Oh, here comes Rick.

MASON FUNK:

Rick, we have one more question and then we'll be done.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

But Vince wants to ask a question.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, that's true too. We'll be as quick as we can. You can add whatever you want to add.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I guess, the reason I wanted to do this was to explain what I feel my contribution is to LGBT activism, because there are a lot of LGBT people who have been very active

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

on our behalf, and I think we should all do what we can do best. I feel what I can contribute is to reform the science that's been used to pathologize us. That's where I can help. I hope that's appreciated because I don't think we're going to get the kind of equality we need unless people can't

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

continue to turn to science as a possible justification for a pathology. If they look to science and say, science pathologizes them, there must be something wrong with them. We always trust science. We go with science. We've got to make sure that the science about us is right, and that it's no longer used as a stepping stone for pathologizing. Similarly, with respect to the Bible, the other thing

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

we're accused of is that it's sinful. That's why it was important to go into the Bible and find out what the Bible actually said about gender and sexuality. A big part of Evolution's Rainbow, the third section has to do with uncovering the presence of transgender people within the Bible, and the presence of, of course, gay and lesbian people in the Bible. And it's there,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

if you take the Bible seriously as a record of humanity, then we're going to be there, and we are, by golly, and not talked about in pejorative terms, generally speaking. None of the trans people are because they're called eunuchs, and they're endorsed by the prophets and by Jesus himself. You just have one or two passages from Paul which are

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

critical of same-sex sexuality, but that's in the context of being critical of sexuality generally. There's nothing special about same-sex sexuality relative to any other kinds of sexuality in those passages, and this needs to be brought out. So it's that two-pronged attack, you will, on the basis of the critique that's

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

constantly being thrown at us, or the insults, that we're unnatural and that we're sinful, and neither is true. That's what my contribution is to our cause.

MASON FUNK:

That's fantastic [inaudible]. Vince, do you have any questions?

VINCE KEALA LUCERO:

I guess the use of pronouns has come up recently. I started noticing more and more in my work, and

VINCE KEALA LUCERO:

I never really understood it. How would you explain it to somebody who has no idea, or how should people who don't know what is approach people in the gay community [inaudible]?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Oh yeah, you're right, that the use of pronoun identifiers as part of your signature

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

is a new development. I don't do that yet. I just simply sign my name, I don't put it in parenthesis she/her/them, whatever. From my point of view, it really isn't necessary, but I think it's useful for people who are in the early stage

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

of transition when it's not clear that they have gender markers. The day after someone says, "Okay, I've transitioned, I've gone from male to female, start calling me 'she'," and you look at the person and you don't see any sheness about her, and conversely, if you find somebody who's transitioning to a guy, and the day after he transitions,

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

there's just nothing remotely in the gender markers, then you'd have to supply an aid. You'd have to say, "Well, okay, I may not look like a guy yet, and I'm just starting my testosterone, give me six months. But please call me 'he', in the meantime." I think that's the main use of those.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

But after people have transitioned for quite a while, it seems superfluous to put it there.

MASON FUNK:

If that were the case, what would be the benefit of someone like myself, I put pronouns in my email signature, what would be the use of people who have transitioned a long time ago, or who don't plan on transitioning using their pronouns, including pronouns, for example, in their signature?

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

I don't know what the value would be. Maybe there's something I'm not aware of.

MASON FUNK:

I think, in my case, it's because when it becomes more general, then the people who aren't using pronouns aren't sticking out like sort of thumbs as people who have recently transitioned, who don't look weird

MASON FUNK:

for having to state their pronouns.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN:

Yeah. Fair enough.

MASON FUNK:

If everybody states their pronouns, which to a lot of people seems really weird, then the people who are stating it for a more specific reason, like, "Hey, I just transitioned yesterday," then they don't seem so odd. That's my theory, that's why I do it.

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