Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes - Diana Fleischman
5 June 2025
With Diana Fleischman
culture-and-ideology
Diana Fleischman brings evolutionary psychology to bear on gender ideology, arguing that evolved disgust responses encode real information that ideological frameworks work to suppress. The episode explores why biology-rooted instincts clash with contemporary gender narratives, what autogynephilia reveals about male psychology, and what happens when institutions demand we override instincts millions of years in the making.
Evolutionary psychology has long been an uncomfortable discipline for gender ideology — not because it is cruel or dismissive, but because it deals in timescales and selection pressures that ideology cannot negotiate with. Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist and Associate Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, has built a career on precisely the questions that make institutions nervous: how evolved mechanisms shape human behaviour, and what happens when social norms demand we pretend they do not. In this conversation, Fleischman begins with disgust — an emotion her research has helped reframe as a sophisticated information-processing system rather than a mere prejudice to be overcome. Her work, which has accumulated over two thousand academic citations, demonstrates that women evolved heightened disgust sensitivity as a disease-avoidance mechanism. This matters directly for gender debates: the visceral discomfort many women report at images of pregnant men, or at male-bodied people in intimate female spaces, is not, on this account, a moral failure to be corrected by re-education. It is an ancient signal encoding genuine biological and social information. The episode asks what it means for a culture to systematically teach people to distrust that signal. The conversation also turns to autogynephilia — the phenomenon of male sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. Fleischman treats it as data rather than as a slur, offering an evolutionary framing and noting that gender-identity ideology has worked hard to suppress the concept, partly because its existence complicates the narrative of a straightforwardly innate female identity. Discussing it analytically, without euphemism, is itself a demonstration of the kind of intellectual honesty the episode repeatedly advocates. Underlying the whole discussion is a recurring theme: the cost of enforced silence. Fleischman is candid about the professional and social pressures on researchers who study sex differences or taboo topics. She frames virtue signalling and outrage as themselves evolved behaviours — strategies for signalling tribal loyalty rather than genuine moral reasoning. From this perspective, the suppression of inconvenient findings is not an aberration but a predictable feature of any ideologically charged institutional environment. What makes this episode significant from a broader cultural vantage point is its implicit argument about epistemology. Gender-identity ideology presents itself as the more compassionate and therefore more correct framework. Evolutionary psychology does not deny compassion, but it insists that reality — millions of years of selection pressure — is not subject to compassionate revision. That tension between truth and comfort runs through every institution now navigating gender policy: schools, clinics, courts, broadcasters. Understanding where our instincts come from, and why certain frameworks are so determined to discredit them, sits at the centre of the current debate.
