C (3:50)

Well, thank you so much.

B (3:52)

The mic is there.

C (3:53)

I have to go get the mic and make sure it works. About a third of the time. Microphones don't work. So is this one working? Yeah. Okay. Is it on? Okay, good deal. If there are any engineers here, I want them to stop what they're doing and work on fixing microphones. So they always work. That would be nice. I'm an economist by origin, but a historian, philosopher, theorist, political philosopher. Amateur, amateur, as was said of Shakespeare. I have small Latin and less Greek. I'm a classics groupie. I follow the band. And I was once a man. Until 1995. My name was Donald. Then I had to choose my name. Well, you know, women, when they get married in lots of cultures, are allowed to change their name. So I was allowed to change my name. So I wanted to keep the D, Donald. D, Deirdre, for the librarians, to help them out. I was once asked by a naive person, are you related to Donald McCluskey? And in those, you know, one of those times we all have. I thought of the funny answer later. Yes, I'm her smarter sister. And I think I have become smarter or wiser. Not smarter. I've become wiser with my experience. And I think that's the. The great experience of the modern world. If we allow it to happen, if we allow the queers, the immigrants, the other people into our lives, whether imaginatively, through autobiographies or novels, or in actuality, we grow as humans. I don't think there's any doubt about that. In fact, in my own country, there's this terrible attack on dei, right? Diversity, equity and inclusion. And my first name begins dei. So I'm quite sensitive on this point, and I think it can be taken too far. But drinking water can be taken too far. Let's not get terribly excited about that. But. But I think there's a defense of DEI in a. In a sensible form, in this. In this form that raises our awareness of other people's lives, which I think is terribly important to become an adult. To become a wise adult. There's a defense that I'm going to make this evening on the basis of what I Call Equality of Permission. I'm just finishing a book for the University of Chicago Press, which will be out, I hope, before the election, to have a great influence in stopping Trump, which would be nice. I don't think it will, but, you know, one can dream. And it's called equality of permission. Now hear the phrase the primary liberalism. By that, by the word primary, I mean two things. It was the first real liberalism in the west or the east or anywhere in large societies. There had been, there had been small liberal societies all over the world, and indeed hunter gatherer societies without a state are just intrinsically liberal in the sense I admire. Exit is very easy. Voice is easy. Loyalty is easy. To use. The categories of a great economist, Albert Hirschman, Exit, voice and loyalty in a tiny little group of 20 is easy to exercise in a nation of 60 million or 335 million or 1 million. It's a dubious exercise. We have to have a representative democracy. It's not clear that the wishes of you all are getting through. I wish that Cadbury's Whole Nut was more available. It's quite irritating. When I get Cadbury's Whole Nut, the grocery stores are often out of it and in the United States they've licensed Cadbury's Hulnut to Hershey's. And it's rubbish. It's not Cadbury's Hulnut. So I believe in equality of permission and accord that the honor of being the first liberalism. Now there was a second wave. This first wave is 1776 when the slave owner owner Tom Jefferson, said all men are created equal. And August of 1789, the in France, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. And all they claimed, all they asked for was equality of permission, being allowed to have a go, as you say in Britain. In Australia they say fair goes, fair goes, mate. First the palms get to bat and then we get to bat and we thrash them. That's their attitude, but it's, it's fairness. It's this fundamental fairness. Now the secondary liberalism, as I would call it, is 1848. Not in Britain, although things, things in politics were happening in Great Britain in 1848, but on the continent. Revolutions all over the place. And they were liberal revolutions usually. But this was the birth time of socialism, European socialism. Not just Marx, but, but others too. But it came to be Marxism. That's one kind of progressive movement of 1848 of the second wave. The other one was fashioned here in Britain, in England in particular was called the New Liberalism. And new meant this. We're going to use the 1880s we're talking about in the United States. It was called Progressivism and it said we're going to use the state vigorously to help the poor. Urban clearance, for example, and planning was a birth there. The reconstruction of Paris, for example, by Baron Hausman or whatever his name was, was of this top down character. In fact, both of these new progressive movements were top down, whereas the first one, equality of permission, was bottom up. Let you do My grandmother, who was not, I say, a certainly not a lefty of any sort as I was when I was a student at the LSE long ago. But she had a libertarian or liberal motto which seems to be very sensible. It said, do anything you want, but don't spook the horses by what she. What she meant is do anything you want. Be queer, change your gender, I don't know, write economics articles even, but don't do big externalities, big things that are really harmful to other people. Don't throw a stick of dynamite into the town square and get the horses. She grew up in the 1890s. Get the horses all agitated and they're running around in all directions. So it's a very, I think, a very kindly and considerate way of thinking about other human beings. You do what you want. I honor. And crucial to this is a certain, not just, well, okay, you can be homosexual or transgendered if you want, but don't talk about it or stay away from me. It has to be more than that. I'm a Christian, a new Christian. I was baptized in 1998. I'm an Anglican. It's great to be an Anglican because wherever English, specifically English, not Scottish English merchants or sailors have been, there is an Anglican church with a service in English. And I believe in the gospel of love. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But I also believe in Rabbi Hillel of Babylon's version of this, about 50 years before this other or rabbi which said, do not do unto others what you would not want to have done to you. These are the gospels of love and of justice. And they're pretty much what I advocate. You can see it's a very unsophisticated politics. Let's just get along is the core commandment of modern liberalism. And of course that means that it's defenseless against hard left or hard right folk who use the liberties of a free society to undermine the free society. That's always been a tension and paradox. So about gender, I would fall asleep when I was 11 praying somewhat more Holy than I became as a teenager, praying for two things. The following morning I would be a girl, miraculously. And that I would not stutter. I've always, since I was small, I've stuttered. 2% of the born men stutter. Half of 1% of the born women stutter. And that's universal. It's true in every culture. Japan, the United States, everywhere. And well, at age 53, I got half of my request. I was able in a free society to change gender in 1995, as my mom said. My mom was very wise. She said, oh, this is wonderful. You've had the experience of a man, a career as a man, which was a big advantage. And then you get to be an old woman, which guys is better, just in case you don't know. So you, Deirdre, are having this larger experience on the name. By the way, it's Irish. Because I'm 2/3 Irish. I could explain why it's such an odd figure. And Donald means world ruler, which would please the current occupant of the White House. That's what it means in old Irish. And there were lots of Donalds in my generation. He's among them. He's three years younger than I am, so he's another of the Donald's. And then Donald Duck came and that spoiled the name. This is how names change. Then I looked at Deirdre and Deirdre, they're not quite sure what it means in old Irish. They think it might mean Wanderer, which I thought, wow, that's perfect. There are two great plays, one by Sing, the other by Yeats, about the myth, the story, which may have a historical basis about the. It's part of the Ulster cycle, the north of Ireland, about Deirdre of the Sorrows, who dies for love. Oh, how romantic. And then in the, in the baby book that I was looking at Michigan Avenue in Chicago, in a bookstore, it rated all the female names that you could take by femininity. And Deirdre was really high. Yes, of course I didn't know what it meant to be a woman. I have a book called Crossing, which is about the three years of my transition. And I was learning what it meant. One of my greatest surprises was female friendship. This varies of course by culture, but in most of the cultures I know, men don't have many friends. They think they do, but they actually don't. Women have lots of superficial friends whom they make very quickly. And a few, because it's a, it's costly, a few very deep friends. I discovered this it was a complete revelation to me as a man. I was quite macho guy like my mother. She was a kind of macho woman, very forceful and you know, she was going to get things done and so on and the. So I was not a feminine man and I wasn't gay, I was straight. I was married for 30 years. I was attracted to women so far as affectional preference, you could say is concerned. But I was. My joke in gender talks like this is to say you're looking at the captain of her American high school football team. I was a guard. In an emergency I might be able to do a cross, cross body block. So there you are. Now there's been aroused in this country from the left essentially and in my country from the right, a hostility to trans women that I'd like to open for discussion here. Kathleen Stock, who's an excellent Scottish origin philosopher, was driven from her post at Sussex University in the philosophy department by complaints of the students against her for not, shall we say, being enthusiastic about trans women. And it happened that Kathleen and I one time a couple of years ago were teaching in the same week at a new university called the University of Austin at Texas in Texas, meant to be a university where things can be discussed as you know, in modern academic life, to some degree in modern political life, some things can't be discussed and that's, that's controversial, let's say. So she and I agreed to have a debate which you can see on YouTube. We debated for an hour in front of the new students to show them what a real debate was, a real disagreement. We still disagree, but I, I count her a new friend among my many, many new remote female friends. I also have some true girlfriends and her view is that trans women shouldn't be allowed in women only spaces. She particularly has in mind changing rooms. But I think she also believes because it seems to fit the loo and in either case what she wants to do now, I'm going to characterize her position as gently as I can. I'm not going to make up some false position that she doesn't have, though I'm going to make fun of it because I don't agree with. She apparently wants to have a copper and a gender assigner in front of every bathroom, public bathroom in Britain and this is to bring in the state. Now I'm a Liberal, I'm an 18th century Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, liberal of that character. Later on, people like Thoreau were such liberals and I don't believe that's wise. I don't believe it's wise to bring in the state in the matter of children declaring that they're of the opposite gender. I don't think the parliament down the street here is the appropriate body to make such decisions. It should be the family. So in the United States, you may know, the MAGA movement has made transgenderism the new hate group. You know, first they came from the Jews. I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't do anything. Then they came for the this and then they came for the that, and then they came for me. And I had no one to speak for me because they were all exterminated. And that is, I'm afraid, the trick that trick is. Yeah, maybe trick is the right word, is what's being used by the conservatives in the United States now. Not conservatives I admire. Like there's a journalist named George Will who's a very sensible guy. No, I mean the hateful crowd that's now in the White House. And I think it's an entailment of liberty, as my grandmother said, to do what you want, but don't scare the horses. And I hope you don't think that Deirdre Nansen McCleskey scares the horses. I haven't caused any revolution, write my books and carry on, teach. So this, I think, is the correct attitude. So what I'm warning you against is the coercive power of the state. Here I'll start to conclude, and I think we grossly understate how, how dangerous the coercive power of the state is. A great political philosopher at Harvard, Judith Schlar, spoke of a liberalism of fear, by which he meant fear of the state. And that's about right. Fear of the state should be in everyone's heart. States have ever not been the friend of queers in northern Europe for a hundred years. The terror against homosexuals, male homosexuals. They didn't much bother. The bother the women in the south of Europe, in the Mediterranean, including Greece. Homosexuality was viewed as a sin by the church, but was not a crime. No one went to jail in France or Italy or Greece or Spain for being homosexual. And that's what states do. They get captured by particular hating groups who then go after the Catholics or the Jews or the queers or the this or that, the blacks and do bad things, do coercive things. I'm an economist, I admit, so I love diagrams. So I'm going to draw for you, in conclusion, a diagram. Here. Here's not the board. We're not going to use the board that apparently causes the universe to collapse. It's like in. Among the Hasidim, they. They believe that if you move the pen this way, it might be the first coming of the Savior, that every human action mattered for the universe. And apparently this is among them. All right, here's the diagram. Now, I'm going to pretend I'm behind the diagram by the magic of electronics. And we're going to. I'm going to draw it so it faces you. Okay? Just so that you don't have to translate, here's a diagram we're going to have on the Y axis. Now, I don't want to frighten you, but let's go back to high school. The Y axis, the up and down axis. We're going to measure human flourishing, and you can give various more or less sensible definitions of flourishing from all the way from vulgar things like income to spiritual improvement and so on. Human flourishing. And there's going to be a zero about here. That's negative human flourishing. Think of. Think of George Orwell's last warning just before he died Young, 49, in 1984, where O', Brien, the party man, says, if you want a vision of the future, think of a boot on a human face forever. That's negative human flourishing. Then there's positive. We have it here in Britain. That's good, especially because you have Cadbury's Whole Nut. And then along the X axis, we're going to have amounts of coercion. I don't go with the common philosophical claim these days that harsh talk is coercion. I don't believe that persuasion is coercion. I think it's very important to keep a bright line between physical coercion and verbal coercion. Coercion over verbal persuasion. Physical coercion, verbal rape demeans the seriousness of actual physical rape, the actual violence to a person that that entails. As we used to say as kids, sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Now, of course, they do hurt us. When I was. Hadn't had my cheekbones. These are my cheekbones. I paid for them. When I hadn't had my. When I didn't look like a woman, even though I'm still big and I couldn't pass very well. This was in Holland, and it hurt to be read, as we say, as a man in a dress. Every cell of my body screams xy, xy. I wish they would shut up, but they won't. But I can tolerate all that. But I can't tolerate the police hauling Me away if I try to go pee in the ladies room. Okay, so there's this, this sharp line. So coercion. Now there's private coercion, crime. That's why we have police and should. I'm not an anarchist. I believe having coppers, I wish they didn't have the drug laws, but, you know. Anyway, I want the police to show up. If a gang of thieves comes to my front door, I Want to call 999 and get the cops there. So here we are, we've got positive, zero, negative coercion. Now, what most economists appear to believe is that additional regulation, additional tricks, which I can show you on a blackboard, will improve human flourishing. So they believe that the curve starts below zero. As it does, if your 3 year old boy proposes to walk in front of a truck in the street, driving along, you just grab him, you coerce him. You don't initiate a liberal discussion on the virtues of being alive. This is stupid. You grab it. So, okay, in fact, I saw on the news today that smacking is again an issue in England. It's already been outlawed in Wales and Scotland. Smacking, your kid, your boy. Okay, so it starts low. And economists were to believe it goes up and up and up and up. And if I at the LSE or MIT can think of a new trick, we can go up and up and improve things. This is what Achemolo believes, but it's what most economists believe. Believe. But we liberals, we believe, as every economist should, in diminishing returns. We believe that state coercion shows diminishing returns, sometimes shockingly, sometimes just mildly. We believe the curve doesn't go up and up and up. But watch, it goes like this and it starts going down. So I urge you, the purpose of these qualitative diagrams have to just make you think of the trade off here. I urge you not to intervene in gender and sexual and behavioral dress and whatever things people do. Because that's a case of the curve going down. And I don't want the curve to go down. I think the great achievement of this first, this primary liberalism that I described here is the abolition of slavery. That was its first big accomplishment. It was an accomplishment also of evangelical Christians, the combination of the two. And I think we're in a freer condition than we were in some ways in say, 1830. But we must not throw it away. We must not, in our enthusiasm for social engineering, for my own field of economics, think that we can always go up a hill of happiness. We've got to be realistic as well as liberal. So thank you very much. And let's converse. I'm gonna sit down now. Look, I almost disappear. I'll try to sit straight. Unfortunately, I still have male proportions, so my, my trunk is long.

B (38:13)

Thank you very much. Deidra, that was a very thought provoking talk. And I thought it was very interesting how it was a mix of personal experience and kind of thinking about more general things outside the first.

C (38:30)

Well, I think that's as scholars, as social scientists, I think we should be doing that all the time.

B (38:37)

So now we're at the part where we kind of open things to questions. And I want to remind me and everybody else that there's people online as well. And I want to remind the people online that you can ask questions through the button, the Q and A option and then we can have people here ask questions. And I guess given that your talk was both personal experience and kind of talking about liberalism and permission to be curious, are you open to both types of questions?

C (39:08)

Sure, except all the questions have to be friendly or I'll be offended. So no. Have at me.

D (39:19)

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

B (39:48)

So anybody who has a question, Armand, you just raise your hand and we have the microphone. Maybe I'll start just with one question I had. I mean, because at some point I think you addressed it in the last diagram you did. But in a sense, there are several things in your talk that were working at the same time. So first thing, I was interested about your characterization between the US and the uk. And you started by saying that the struggle against your kind of liberalism is coming from both the left and the right.

C (40:24)

Yes, very much so.

B (40:25)

And the characterization is in the US it's more from the right. When it comes to plants.

C (40:29)

Yeah.

B (40:29)

When it's in the uk it comes from the left. And then at the same time you have a recurring theme of the state.

C (40:38)

Yeah.

B (40:38)

And coercion by the state.

C (40:40)

Y.

B (40:42)

And when it came to toilets or changing rooms.

C (40:47)

Sure.

B (40:48)

You're arguing argument was the state cannot intervene.

C (40:51)

Yeah.

B (40:52)

But when it comes to dei, your arguments. Because it is something that the state does as well.

C (41:00)

Well, so my question is these are.

B (41:03)

Sometimes conflicting kind of.

C (41:05)

Well, I, I don't, I don't Want the state to enforce dei? Let's be quite straight about that. I want us to enforce dei. I want us individually out of our ethical convictions. One thing that I think is deeply missing from, for example, theories of economic growth is that there need to be changes in the hearts of people and for real revolutions to happen. And so I. Look, I'm against segregation in the south, and I'm very willing to use the National Guard for that purpose. I'm not willing to use the National Guard to protect thugs from grabbing brown people off the streets of Chicago. I'm sending them to San Salvador. So I don't want the government to be doing it. You know, there's a kind of a myth on the left, even, I think, on the right, that the big corporate monopolies, that's the big problem in society. I don't think so. I think the big problem is the monopoly of violence that we must give to states.

E (42:34)

Okay, thank you.

B (42:35)

So anybody with questions from the audience.

C (42:38)

I've stunned you into silence.

B (42:40)

Okay, we have a few. Can we start with the person there with brown sweater?

C (42:47)

When you raise your hands, put them up high so we can all see it.

B (42:50)

Okay. And can I remind you just to say who you are and your affiliation?

F (42:54)

Okay. My name is Mita Mara. I'm professor of economics at University of Naples in Italy.

C (43:02)

I can't hear you very well. Can you hold the microphone very close?

F (43:05)

Okay. I'm professor of economics. Think of Mick Jagger, University of Naples in Italy, in Southern Italy. And I'm now visiting fellow at Canada center here at lac. I really liked your presentation, but I. I was wondering, you mentioned early in your presentation, exit voice and loyalty from Hirschman. And I was thinking of the feminist movement. How vocal, how they fought for liberty. Now I was wondering, how do you then conceive of affirmative actions like policies for. From the state to open new spaces for minorities, for women, for any group in society that could be just vulnerable groups or again, minorities.

C (44:11)

I'm very sorry to say I didn't understand what you said.

B (44:13)

Sure. Maybe I can repeat the question. You tell me if I'm. I'm saying it right, so. And the name is Mita Mika from Naples. She's visiting lse. She's a professor of economics.

C (44:27)

From where?

B (44:28)

Naples.

F (44:28)

University of Naples.

B (44:29)

Napoli.

C (44:30)

I was just there. I gave a talk there about three weeks ago.

B (44:35)

Her question takes you back. Her question starts from the start of your talk where you talk. Talked about voice and loyalty.

C (44:44)

Yeah.

B (44:45)

And then goes on through the feminist movement.

F (44:49)

Through the feminist movement. You know, we you know, women achieved.

C (44:57)

Smarter. If he tries to say, let's. Let's wait for a second.

B (45:01)

And then the feminist movement, the success that they had was given their voice and their activism.

C (45:07)

Yeah, that's right.

B (45:09)

And then at the background of all this, the backdrop of all this, is thinking about affirmative action. And what do you think affirmative action is? A way to treat.

C (45:20)

To help. No, I'm against affirmative action, but I point to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to be appointed to the American Supreme Court. She was one of the very first law students graduate law students at Harvard. Female in the class of 800 men. There were six women or some absurd number like that. And when she got out of law school, she couldn't get a job. Why was that? Because she was a woman. And so she became a law professor. And then she was a very successful advocate for decades for women's equality of permission. That's all she ever asked for. Don't give me equal opportunity, which is impossible to achieve because of our. Because we're various as humans and we can't. You know, most of the people in this room speak two languages. I don't. So how are we going to make us equal in opportunity? Drive nails into your heads until you forget English? No, no. So opportunities, impossible. Equality of outcomes, impossible. What's important, what's possible tomorrow, and Associate Justice Ginsburg said this over and over again, is we take away the obstacles to women, just the obstacles, make it, I don't know, legal for women to be airline pilots. And the problem is, I don't need to tell anyone in this room this. Once a government program gets going, it's very hard to bring it to a conclusion, to an end. You might have made a sensible case for affirmative action in 1960, but. Well, you know, I'll take a personal case. I was a Harvard Undergraduate, class of 64. You could have filled the freshman class at Harvard with the Bronx High School of Science graduates alone. You could have just moved them. They were mostly Jews. You could move them to the freshman class of Harvard. Needless to say, that didn't happen. There was a clause in all the privates, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard from the the 1920s on preventing Jews from getting in on an equal basis. You know, I'm an economist. I believe in opportunity cost. I believe that if you do one thing, you can't do another. So I think it's much better that we change our hearts, not our laws.

B (48:38)

Okay, thank you. So there's a few more hands and online people. You also have opportunity to Ask questions. The person in the back there with.

C (48:52)

A jacket, by the way, while that's coming, every sentient Italian knows governo ladro. See Thief state. I don't know why all Italians aren't classical liberals.

B (49:13)

Just please state your name.

G (49:15)

Yeah, sure. My name's Joshua. I'm a member of the public just visiting the IC this evening. Thanks very much, Professor McCloskey, for your talk. I think I shared most of your concerns and your view, but I see that there's a problem. I think you have this kind of thing of, you know, we need to preserve liberal speaker.

C (49:41)

I'm not understanding the thing you're saying.

G (49:43)

Okay, that's quite right.

C (49:45)

I think it's my fault, I'm sure. But if you would articulate carefully my.

G (49:51)

Worry concern is with that.

C (49:58)

If we.

G (49:59)

Don'T have the state to sort of defend our liberal values. And I completely agree with you that in general state coercion tends to be bad if there's too much of it. But there seems to be kind of like a reduction in like the popular liberal sort of consciousness over the last 10, 15, 20 years. You see the rise of populism. How do liberals win the argument against that? That seems to be a real problem for bringing about what you want to.

C (50:38)

See in the world.

B (50:40)

Can I just repeat it so that everybody can hear? So the question is about. He started by saying that he agrees with most of what you're saying, but he's concerned about the practicality of what you suggest. In particular in the last 10, 15 years with populism and anti liberal sentiment and political movements. He worries that maybe we do need the state in order to save liberalism.

C (51:06)

Well, it's a terribly important question and I write now, I'm an economist, historian, et cetera, et cetera. But my main passion now is to defend liberalism. Although tomorrow, by the way, I'm going to be talking in economic history about English open fields and enclosures. So now for something completely, completely different. But yes, and what we need to do as people who don't want a boot on the human faces forever is again to change our hearts, to appeal to young people, to make liberalism cool again, to make, I like to call it adultism. Because all the other political philosophies, some of which you probably believe, treat people like children, treat the state as the parent, right, as the mama and the papa. And that is true of ancient tyrannies, it's true of modern, modern governments. When it rains, people turn to the state. And it would be, I think, attractive to young people to Be told no, no. What you want to be is a grown up, don't you? Oh yeah, I want to be grown up. Maybe that would work. We need Mick Jagger to come back and sing songs of freedom. We need the artists to come on our side in a serious way. The makers of films, the makers of rock music and so forth. So those are my hopes. I think populism shows itself to not work out well. But the trouble is we've had that experience in Germany and Italy and to some degree in communist countries and people don't seem to get the message. People say, let's try tries socialism, central planning socialism, harsh communistic type socialism, as though it's never been tried. Remember that. Thank you.

B (53:47)

Any more questions? There were a few other hands up earlier.

C (53:51)

Put your hands up high. That's good. Okay, there's some in the back with a good high hand again.

B (53:57)

Name and affiliation and speak close to the microphone.

H (54:00)

Yeah, my name is Sam and I'm a student here at lse. So my question is, in places where we're seeing rises and extremist views, why are queer rights so often villainized and cyclically, especially when, you know, it dates back to the beginning of written history for India, Greece, especially currently in places where religious justification is being cited as encouraging this action as a moral imperative, even with, you know, the Bible, including stories of same sex lovers being healed by Jesus. So there is kind of a precedent for, as you said, the, the doctrine of love. And if the point is to have increased divisiveness within the society or the community, why are we not seeing a consequent rise in support, but rather, you know, hate or aggressive action kind of taking precedence?

C (54:53)

My ears must be going to hell. I have a ear piece that I bought at home which I haven't put together. And I really got to get it together because I couldn't understand most of what you said.

B (55:04)

Let me try. But I also have problems hearing, believe it or not. But let me try and kind of restate a little bit what you said. So I think the question is, is kind of asking why is queer rights such an important topic or contextual topic in certain places? And I think another question there is why don't you hear support as loud as you hear kind of the other side?

H (55:39)

Is that about right? I was thinking, you know, why are queer rights more cyclically kind of brought up as an issue that contradicts religion? And if the point which, you know, sometimes I think the point is to increase divisiveness, then why are we not seeing that Consequent rise in support being as loud as hate.

B (56:01)

So it's about the cyclicality of this issue over history. Why now? Why is it such a big thing now? And it wasn't like, look at history.

C (56:12)

Well, it's. It. It's a good sign that we're no longer killing each other in the. In Europe over the doctrine of transubstantiation. There's, There's. There's one movement in the right direction. It's a good thing that the reign of terror against gay men in northern Protestant Europe has finally ended. Good. Mark that up. Good. It's a good thing that people like me can exist and are not, I don't know, taken in charge by the police. That people. That people don't support each other is very sad and important. The old formula. I don't. I hate what you say, but I'll defend to the death. You're right to say it. That kind of talk, I think, should be standard, certainly in universities, and it tends not to be these days. That was. That was Kathleen's experience. She was. She had to resign. And so again, I'm making an appeal to your heart. To the heart too. And if all it was was a vague utopian hope that we'd all start caring for each other, I wouldn't have much optimism about it. But in fact, it's happened before. In the early 19th century. Liberalism of the sort I'm talking about accomplished great things in this country. Catholic emancipation, the ending of earlier, the ending of the slave trade, then the abolition of the slave slavery in the British Empire. The slaveholders were compensated, I admit, and free trade, which was wonderful for the working class. So these changes can happen. My own Christianity can be a tool of violent oppression and hateful anti Jesus talk such as many of my fellow Americans indulge in. Or it can be a great support to what you and I both want, which is for people to care about each other, to love each other.

B (59:12)

Thank you. Any more questions? Oh, yeah, several. So the person here with a pink red cardigan.

E (59:26)

Hello. Thank you very much for your talk. My name's Ejea Trayani. I'm an interloper. I am not an economist. I came here because I'm quite.

C (59:36)

Then I won't speak to you.

E (59:38)

It's okay. It's my first confession. We can speak to each other. I write about gender. And I found your talk very interesting in relation to one particular part, which is the moment where you said that when you were a man and you had that experience of a man, you Sort of suggested that there were opportunities offered to you, that when you decided to become a woman, it gave you a different positioning. And I was thinking about that in relation, because for me, I think questions of gender exist or gender mixture or challenges exist in our bodies. And if you take feminists, for instance, where the body of a woman can be raised and nurtured with potentially masculine ambitions and questions of equity are always profound, the physical transformation of the body is a choice. But you might be with that tussle on the inside. As you said, when you were growing up as a little boy, you always dream that you were a girl. So I could say the reverse for feminists, where you're born a girl, but actually you want some other position within hierarchies and institutions of society. The thing that I wanted to ask, because that's slightly labored, I apologize, is that you didn't actually, you spoke about the state, but you never spoke about the institution of the family and the power structures that dominate society around our gender expectations and the inaccessible domain of the slipperiness of gender mixtures in the bodies of people. Whether or not I'm transgendering or I'm a woman that wants to perhaps be more dominant, more strong, more masculine or inverse in that sense scenario. And I'm wondering about, as I said, I'm not an economist, but the economy of the power of the family within the dynamic of this friction, which is about the resistance to the normative reactions of gender performativity and how that economic system of the family is actually the DNA of the power structures that manifest in other institutions. More your opinion on that, or whether or not you think I'm being unreasonable in that? Because I think the core of what a family is, what a mother is, what a father is, what a son, what a daughter are, and then when they get muddled, how they affect the economics of. Of our social constructs. What your opinion is on that, perhaps.

C (62:48)

I'm beginning to conclude that it's the sound system that's the problem, because I think I would have understood you if it hadn't been amplified.

B (62:56)

So let me try. Although, yeah, it was a long question.

C (62:59)

It's not your fault.

B (63:00)

Injustice.

C (63:02)

You got to improve the sound system in this auditorium.

B (63:04)

The question is my suggestion. The question is how does the institution of the family shape and counteracts against some of the things that you were talking about?

C (63:16)

Profoundly. I mean, I have a whole chapter, two chapters in my book that I mentioned that's coming out from Chicago on the family, because libertarians, as we unfortunately call ourselves in the United States, tend to ignore the family because they're men mostly, right? And this is crazy because we all grow up as children and we have mothers and fathers, or mothers at least, or anyway, grandparents or caregivers, and we learn love from them. This terrible thing that Ceausescu did in Romania of deciding that more women needed to be in the labor force. And so we're going to make them, this is the state in action. Make them go to work in the market, as though being a mother was not work. Go to work in the market because we want GDP to go up. And they put the kids into orphanages virtually. And it was just devastating to the mental health, a whole generation of Romanians. So, you know, this is. So families matter and substitutes for families. How the school system works, obviously, that's in a way a substitute for a family. Lots of things are substitutes for something else in society. It happens all the time. So, no, I think the family is very, very important and that it's often a site of oppression, the pater familias. Under Roman law, the father had the right of life or death over his children, not just his slaves, that. That goes without saying, but his children. And they sometimes exercised it. As Bolsonaro, this fool in Brazil said, if my son were gay, I'd execute him. He said, well, that's the problem of the family. On the other hand, the wonderful stories of families that have helped, what can we say? Unusual people. People talk about battlefield courage, but imagine being the daughter, I mean, the mother of a severely handicapped child. And one sees them to get up every morning to do that. That's courage. So the family, like most human institutions, like states even, can be. You know, it's like, what was the girl who had a curl in her forehead? And when she was nice, she was very, very nice. And when she was bad, she was horrid. That's the family for you, as we know in endless novels.

B (66:36)

Thank you. We have a question from the online audience.

C (66:40)

AUDIENCE.

B (66:42)

So this is from Bridget. She says, although I am a socialist, in my view socialism should have a considerable place for liberal views in many spheres. This applies to the freedom of people to be trans if they choose. But there are, as Stock says, clashes with feminism in certain areas. For example, I think Stock is right. The trans women should not compete in women only events such as running or swimming, because due to their earlier physiology, they may still retain an advantage over women despite their transition. Larger hearts, muscles, for example. Would you agree with that?

C (67:20)

Completely. I think that's a no Brainer. And here's how to do it, here's how to think about it. If a male person XY genes says through his whole childhood, I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I want to be a girl, and so on. And if his family, in consultation with as many experts as it can assemble on the matter, decides to give him hormone blockers, say at age 10, before puberty, then he develops she muscles, so to speak, doesn't develop male. Male muscles. Be absurd to let me as a post puberty male with as you can. I mean, look at me, I'm tall, I have male muscles. Although thank God, they're not as big as they once were. You know, I've got all the secondary male character in my voice. I had an operation that was supposed to make it better. It didn't. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's just common sense that you don't like. You don't let someone who at age 18 decides, he decides that he's a she and I'm to trying, perfectly willing to have him transition. That's cool. Go ahead, dear. But he shouldn't be able to compete in swimming. It's just obvious. Otherwise you can't have women's sports. Think of women's football, soccer. You suddenly bring a male superstar into it. Come on, it's ridiculous. So no, I completely agree with that. I just think that there's a fearfulness about this changing room stuff, which is truly kind of silly and especially about the loo. I mean, for God's sakes, I don't go into women's bathrooms to peer up women's skirts or something crazy or to rape someone. I go in there to pee. And would, would it be successful for me to go into a men's room now come on, stop it. And, and anyway, bringing the cudgel of the state. We must always remember that the state is an instrument of coercion and needs to be. Max Weber in 1919, properly, correctly define the state as an institution with the monopoly of violence over a certain area. We don't want competing states, a bunch of mafiosi running around trying to be the state. We want one government, British government, period. And then we want to watch it very closely.

B (70:35)

Okay, thank you. I think we have a few more minutes for a few more questions. So if people have questions, I'm happy to maybe to take few of them together and then we can. Okay, so we have a person in the back with glasses.

C (70:56)

This woman here in the middle has had her hand up a lot, so let's make sure she's in the list.

I (71:02)

My name is Krisha and I'm a student here at the lse. And from your personal experience, do you think queer rights gain more traction because of cultural participation, economic participation, or legal transformation? And how do these variables change as you go from the global north to the global South?

C (71:25)

Going to have to depend on my.

B (71:27)

Colleague again, so can you just say that again? So queer rights, how do they relate to.

C (71:34)

Why don't you say it without amplification and see how it works?

I (71:38)

So what is the most important when it comes to queer rights gaining traction? Is it just cultural participation of people overall, actual legal transformations of laws, or in economic participation? And is this different in the global north and the Global South?

C (71:57)

You can tell that's a lot clearer than the other, but I still didn't quite get it.

B (72:01)

Okay, so I. I got it. I hope. Let's take two more questions and then we can answer. So people raise your hands if you.

C (72:09)

The woman in the middle with the black hair. Yeah.

B (72:12)

Okay. And then the last one would be the person here raising his hand.

J (72:18)

Hi, my name is Ella. I'm a student at lse and I wanted to ask a question like regarding maybe the overlap of equality of permission and hormone therapy for trans individuals. I know you mentioned regarding trans women competing in women's sports and whether, like, that should be based on whether they had hormone blockers as children or not. My question isn't necessarily related to that, but more so to. For access to hormone therapy for trans individuals, do you see that as equality of permission or equality of opportunity? Like in the sense of if it's, sorry, intervention by the state allowing trans people to have access to hormone therapy, would you see that as a quality of permission that wasn't state intervention, or would you see that as state intervention? And what's your perspective on that?

C (73:29)

Okay, you understood that? Yeah, there was a core phrase.

B (73:32)

And then we have the final question here.

I (73:36)

Hi, I'm Abby. I'm LSC student.

C (73:39)

Why don't you put the mic down, Say it.

I (73:42)

Okay. According to the current situation. Well, Trump administration and Supreme Court ruling putting trans people in a more vulnerable, vulnerable position, where do you think the curve will go? And from this point of situation, how do you think to make liberalism cool again?

A (74:06)

Thank you.

B (74:07)

Okay, so I think we have three questions and let me try and help you out here. So, Krishna, right? Krisha, Sorry, Krisha was asking about the traction that queer rights get and what is, what is important for this tractor, is it cultural participation? Is it legal kind of forms of changing the laws and stuff like that, or is it about economic participation?

C (74:37)

I think it's highly culturally dependent and can change very quickly. Look at how gay marriage came to be. Now typically the British bureaucrats were bloody minded about it, but Spain was the first country in Europe to allow gay marriage. Espana, it changed so quickly. In my own country, it is head spinning. In 1990, it was just off the table. No one would consider the marriage of two men or two women. What do you mean married? And then it was reformulated as a matter of equality of permission. Because I think most people believe in, in equality in this sense. They don't necessarily believe that Mr. A should be taxed to subsidize Ms. B. But we all, you know, it's in the Abrahamic religions, in Buddhism and lots of other faiths that the human soul is equal, that your soul is equal to mine in value. So when it was phrased that way, bang, it changed. So these things can change. I mean, when I was a kid being gay, you know, if, if I had shown signs of being gay, my parents didn't know about my trans desires. But if I had shown signs of being gay, that would have been really a problem. Even though I had very liberal parents. My father was a professor. So what's the second one?

B (76:52)

Thanks. The second question by Ella, I think was about access to hormone treatments. Is that something when the state does that? Is that kind of permission, access to permission, equality of permission, or is that state intervention?

C (77:12)

No, I don't think the state should do it. Look, there's a myth that maybe some of you are not a myth, but a misapprehension, which many of you may have, that gender change is very, very expensive. Expensive? It's not. It's really cheap. And it's particularly cheap for females to males because if any born woman here in this room would start taking male hormones, her voice would crack, she would get more muscles and her personality would shift. I've seen it happen with my female to male friends in about six months. Whereas you can't undo male secondary sex characteristics. I once had a big red beard when I was a student here in swinging London. 67, 68, I had a red beard when the, when the Italian barber was asked to cut it off, he said, bella barba. It hurt him so much. Okay, so it should be done privately. It shouldn't be state expense. I see no reason for that. It costs about as much as a small car, a really small car, either way. And when I see all these cars on the street, I think, geez, why didn't these people change gender? I said, oh, oh, they don't want to.

B (78:59)

Thank you. And I think the last question brings us back to Trump and what's happening to trans rights in these days. I guess the question was about where we are on the contrary curve that you told us, and what can we do to make your style of liberalism cool again?

C (79:21)

Well, to go back to the first question, we can make it cool through the artists. As I said, it's through changing the heart.

B (79:31)

By the way, Mick Jagger is an LSC graduate, so Mick Jagger is an LSC alumni in some sense.

C (79:37)

I'm aware of that. He was around when I was here. I didn't ever know him, but I knew his roommate. Can you believe that? No. In fact, this is amazing. I got an honorary degree from the Free University of Brussels, which is just one of the universities there. And a co honoree was a man who is a professor of education here at, at the school. And we fell to talking and I told him about being at the LSE in 67, 68. He says, oh, yeah, I was Mick Jagger's roommate. That's, that's my connection with Mick. But it's that kind of person who speaks to our heart. Novels, memoirs are important too, that we've. But I've lost track of the last question again. What was it?

B (80:40)

So you were starting answering what would make it cool, which is the artist. And the second one, where are we on the curve in the U.S. well.

C (80:47)

Where we are in the curve is we're going down now. And I'm very frightened by Trump. Fortunately, he's. He's doing it very quickly, every day, virtually, and certainly every week. He does another outrageous step towards authoritarianism, and it's frightened many Americans. Not vast numbers yet, but he's frightening people. If he was smart, like Putin, Erdogan Orban, he would do it slowly. It's the old joke about the frog in the water. Heat the water a little, and the frog says, oh, this is nice. Heat a little bit more, a little bit more. Oh, this is okay. It's getting a little warm. Eat it more and the frog boils, and then you eat it. And that. That's how the smart authoritarians do it. And he's not smart. He's got an amazing ability to see what people resent, what a certain group of Americans that we've insulted through the state by bossing them around and treating them like children instead of respectable adults. And he can see that he's a bad man.

B (82:25)

Okay, on that note.

C (82:28)

Trump is a bad man.

B (82:30)

We're out of time.

C (82:31)

It is cloudy in London. I mean, what else is there to say?

B (82:35)

So thank you very much, Deidre. I think myself and all of us here and online, I think, really enjoyed the talk, but also the conversation that we had. And I'm sure lots of people have more questions. And we can talk about it outside here and we can talk about it over dinner. Thank you. Thank you very much.

A (83:02)

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