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Transcript:
Over the holidays, there was some news out of the UK that I wanted to highlight, lest it be lost in the news black hole that is Christmas and New Year: the British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC, the oldest, largest public broadcaster in the world, forced the resignation of a popular science communicator because of his support of trans people.
Since 2009, comedian Robin Ince and physicist Brian Cox have hosted a show for BBC Radio 4 called Infinite Monkey Cage, which, for my American audience, is similar to Neil Degrasse Tyson’s StarTalk: over a half an hour, scientists and comedians discussed topics like the apocalypse, cosmology, or how a person becomes an astronaut. Over the course of more than 200 episodes, the show won several awards and attracted a large and loyal following, allowing them to even go on international tours to do live recordings.
During a live recording on the evening of this past December 12th, Robin Ince made this announcement to the audience.
Ince followed this up with an Instagram post where he expanded upon his thoughts:
“I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show,
A show that I named and helped develop over all those years.
Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry.
These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter
“In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices.
Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or ‘Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices’.
I chose the latter.
It broke my heart.”
…
“I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world.
From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too.”
This should horrify you. Obviously, if you’ve followed my channel for any length of time, you already know that the UK is “TERF Island,” a land infested with transphobic bullies posing as concerned feminists who simply must examine the genitals of every person entering into a women’s restroom, for safety or whatever.
And you already know that the mainstream media, over there and also here in the US, constantly amplifies the pseudoscience used by transphobes to incite hatred against one of the most vulnerable populations amongst us. In fact, just last week Trans News Network published an interview with former New York Times editor Billie Jean Sweeney, who alleged that in 2022, a new editor at the Times began pushing a series of anti-trans stories designed to win awards, filled with disinformation meant to stoke fear and disgust of trans people and healthcare (which the New York Times, of course, rebukes).
But that doesn’t mean we should all just shrug off what the BBC has done to Robin Ince: they haven’t JUST platformed anti-trans voices the way the New York Times and many other outlets do regularly. In this case, they have silenced the speech of a 16-year veteran host, allegedly because of his support for trans people voiced off air, on his own platforms.
I have to admit that I have a bit of a personal investment in all of this. I don’t know Robin Ince very well, but I did get to spend some time with him when I lived in London right around the time that he started his show. At that time, he was a successful stand up comedian, and each holiday season he would host a show called Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People. These were big, fun variety shows that featured secular performers celebrating the holidays through comedy, music, and lectures. They were funny and entertaining, but also educational and inspiring. I had the great pleasure of getting to hang out backstage at those shows and interview many of the guests, which included Stewart Lee, Jarvis Cocker, Dara Ó Briain, Tim Minchin, and Robin’s eventual Infinite Monkey co-host, Brian Cox.
So, seeing Robin take such a principled stand so many years later was a real blast from the past. I was sad that his career as a BBC radio host was ending in such a horrible manner, but also proud that all these years later he was still standing up for what was right and good in this world.
And so after I read Robin’s post, I started reading through news articles to get some more information. I saw the news hit The Standard, the Sun, the Metro, and the Guardian, where the only additional information I could find simply said that BBC sources “said they did not recognise his version of events.”
As I combed through these articles, I was increasingly aware of a hole in the reporting. A Brian Cox-shaped hole.
If you aren’t in the UK, or a science nerd, you may not know how ridiculously famous Brian Cox is. You may have even assumed until now that I’ve been referring to the guy from Succession, and also those McDonald’s ads for some reason. No, this Brian Cox first became famous in the UK not for his brain but for his keyboard playing as part of the rock band Dare and later for the hit dance group D:Ream, who had several hit albums in the 1990s. When D:Ream disbanded in ‘97, he finished up his Doctor of Philosophy degree and became a particle physicist.
Thanks to his boyish good looks and charming personality, Cox went on to become a very popular science presenter on British television and radio, hosting many different popular series before landing on Infinite Monkey Cage.
I met Brian when I moved to London and I liked him a lot–he was friendly, self-deprecating, smart, the whole package. He and Robin had fantastic chemistry, so I wasn’t surprised that their show was a hit and would continue for sixteen years.
But why, in all this reporting, did Brian not volunteer any kind of statement on his friend and co-host of sixteen years being ousted by the BBC? Why did no news outlet even seem to ask? Where was he, when Robin was on stage telling the live audience that the show they were watching would be the last?
Here’s the fact of the matter: I don’t know. I don’t live over there anymore, and I’m not running in those circles anymore. But I do have a suspicion.
Back when I met Brian, I also met his wife, Gia Milinovich, who I found equally delightful. She was an American ex-pat who moved to the UK and, like Brian, became a TV presenter. I hung out with her several times and was impressed by her intelligence and her passion, especially for women’s rights.
I moved back to the US a few years later, but I kept in touch with Gia by email and social media. But around 2013, I started noticed something strange: Gia was posting more about sex and gender, and even hosted a panel discussion for the Soho Skeptics called “The Battle over Gender:”
“Insults, threats and abuse have been hurled between trans activists and radical feminists for the past few years. The general public knows little if anything about the raging war between them; not the reasons for the hostilities nor the extent of the damage. Neither side is innocent.
“The battle is about an idea: Gender. What is it? Is it socially constructed? Is it an innate male or female self that exists separately from one’s biological sex? Most importantly, who will get to define it? Also, are trans* activists biological essentialists? Or is it the radical feminists who are the biological essentialists? What the hell is biological essentialism anyway? And finally, can we just agree that we all hate Richard Littlejohn and get on with getting on?”
The panel got a less than enthusiastic reaction, particularly from trans people and those who support trans people, leading Gia to write a blog post defending her beliefs. I suddenly realized that in the “battle” between trans activists and radical feminists, Gia considered herself the latter. I also realized, reading her post, that she did not actually understand a lot about biology, sex, and gender.
To be clear, I actually sympathized with her. I had some of her same misconceptions, but I had the benefit of speaking to some experts on the topic who corrected me before I did something like, I don’t know, host a panel about the topic. For instance, she described sex as being that “female as “XX and [having] ovaries” and male as “XY and [having] testes,” while gender is a purely social phenomenon.
“During the panel,” Gia wrote, “I tried to use the words Male and Female when talking about sex and Woman and Man when talking about gender. Again, we are mammals. There are Male and Female marmosets and Male and Female humans. There aren’t, of course, Woman and Man marmosets. One is biology, one is culture.”
She mentions early on that hormones are a part of sex, but then drops it to focus on the idea that sex is purely about chromosomes and genitalia, and thus cannot be changed. But we CAN change genitalia. And we can change hormones, which in turn change the brain.
I used to have the exact same, very common misconceptions about sex and gender. In fact, I was recently reminded of this because I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, wherein a god named Om finds himself inhabiting the body of a small tortoise and desperately trying to find a way to get back to being an all-powerful god. In Chapter 51, Om is talking to his single believer, Brutha, and begins waxing on about how the winners of battles never wax on about the glory of victory because they’re left to see what the battlefield looks like. Brutha is puzzled and says, “That doesn’t sound like god talk,” he hazarded.
“It’s this tortoise brain.” “What?” “Don’t you know anything? Bodies aren’t just handy things for storing your mind in. Your shape affects how you think. It’s all this morphology that’s all over the place.” “What?” Om sighed. “If I don’t concentrate, I think like a tortoise!”
(Thanks to Micah on Bsky for transcribing the Discworld quote! Follow him!)
Pratchett really nailed it. I mean, he probably wasn’t thinking about trans people, there, but it did remind me that our bodies influence our brains and our brains influence our bodies. Our culture influences our biology and our biology influences our culture. Researchers have long known that you can’t just boil things down to chromosomes and forget about genitalia and the hormones that affect our brains and every other part of us. And anthropologists have understood for many years now that you can’t just separate “biology” and “culture” as if each one doesn’t influence the other. To say that sex is biology and gender is culture overly simplifies sex, gender, biology, and culture!
Back then, Skepchick was still a large network with many writers, and those who specialized in this topic saw Gia’s post and asked if they could rebut it. One of the people who educated me the most on this topic, Will Robertson, is a medical anthropologist and at the time he was the editor of our LGBTQ+ sister site Queereka. In emails, I asked that he be polite and said that I was sure that she was just uninformed, like I was, and would change her mind when shown the actual science.
Will’s post was such a clear and polite explanation of what Gia got wrong that I couldn’t have been more proud. I won’t get into the details but if you’re confused or just curious about the interplay between sex and gender, I highly suggest you click through to read Will’s post in full. But I’ll briefly quote his closing lines:
“Culture is just as much a part of being human as biology is. In fact, it is impossible to disentangle culture from human activity. Our biology does not exist outside of our experience of the world—we experience the world with and through our bodies. Culture is not just some imaginary shared delusion that has no impact on our lives. Culture is a real process that has profound effects not only on our own biology but also on the environment and the global ecosystem within which we exist. And many aspects of culture are measurable and testable—just look at economics!
“All explanations of reality—including science—are cultural. They utilize language and involve processes of shared meaning making. This is a frustratingly common belief amongst skeptics, that somehow explanations of reality are the same thing as the reality they are describing. But that’s simply not the case. And that’s what’s wrong with the above statement from Gia. She is using a “cultural creation” (science and biomedicine) to explain reality while simultaneously telling us not to do exactly that. Until essentialists acknowledge the myriad ways that their culture seeps into their constructions of sex/gender, we will keep having these same arguments over and over.”
Unfortunately, I was dead wrong about Gia reading that clearly written explainer from an actual expert on the subject and changing her mind. She kept posting more and more angry, transphobic stuff to the point where I muted her on social media. Eventually, I tried to check in to see if she was any better and realized she had blocked me, despite the fact that I personally never said a single word to her. A few years ago, I saw that she had joined the Advisory Group of Sex Matters, a nonprofit that advocates for banning trans women from public life, with huge recent successes like last year’s anti-trans UK Supreme Court ruling, for which they were specifically thanked by the court. They celebrated with a letter to the CEO of NHS England demanding an end to gender affirming care, bragging that “Children under the care of all gender services, both NHS and private, must now be told that they will never be able to access spaces or services for the opposite sex, no matter what legal or medical steps they take now or in the future.
“Passing as the opposite sex ceases to be a desirable goal to present to children when they will never be permitted to use spaces or services for the opposite sex, and may in future be restricted in employment in roles such as police officer or nurse.
“Instead it becomes a major, permanent social problem for those young people. We have always argued that it was unethical and a breach of human-rights principles to promise [young people] that they could intrude on other people’s privacy, safety and dignity … by using spaces for the opposite sex.”
Sex Matters was founded by famed transphobe Maya Forstater, pictured here smiling with Actual Nazi white supremacist Nina Power. In her introduction to the Sex Matters Xitter feed, Gia states “Biological sex is a reality that exists independently of our cultural interpretations of what it is and what it means.”
So she chose to learn nothing, even all these years later.
Gia appears to have left Sex Matters last month, though I’m not sure if it’s because she no longer aligns with their important mission of stopping trans women from hanging out at a particular pond in Hamstead Heath or perhaps if she would just no longer wish to be part of the ongoing Charity Commission investigation into Sex Matters, based on noted transphobe Richard Dunstan’s public assertion that one of their critics enjoyed being sexually assaulted as a child.
And that’s why, while I was surprised that no one else seemed to be wondering why Brian Cox hadn’t offered any supportive words for his friend and co-host of sixteen years being forced to resign because of his advocacy for trans people, I wasn’t actually surprised that he remained silent, though Robin has said that they remain friends.
Unfortunately, supporting trans rights is an increasingly unpopular position amongst Brits these days. Robin Ince chose good science and compassion for a marginalized group over his own career. It seems as though Brian Cox may have gone the other way–possibly an even easier decision considering that he’s married to one of the people who has actively made the UK less safe for that marginalized group. I find that to be overwhelmingly disappointing, but instead of dwelling on that, I’m going to celebrate Robin.
Robin had a book come out last year called Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity, and I highly recommend you all buy it immediately. You can also sign up for his CosmicShambles newsletter, and follow him on Instagram or BlueSky and tell him what a good person he is.
