Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes - Diana Fleischman
5 June 2025
With Diana Fleischman
Global
Evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman joins the Beyond Gender hosts to examine the biological roots of disgust, autogynephilia and sex differences. Drawing on research that has accumulated more than 2,100 academic citations, she argues that evolved psychological mechanisms — not prejudice — explain reactions that gender-identity ideology tends to dismiss as bigotry. Her framework offers an evidence-based counterpoint to affirmative assumptions now embedded in clinical guidelines and law across Ireland and the wider Anglophone world.
Diana Fleischman is an Associate Research Professor in evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, whose peer-reviewed work on disgust sensitivity has shaped scientific understanding of sex differences over the past two decades. Her central finding — that women evolved heightened disgust responses as a pathogen-avoidance mechanism — has real implications for how we interpret the strong emotional reactions many people have to certain gender-identity practices. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, she applies that framework to questions the mainstream rarely asks plainly. The episode opens with what Fleischman identifies as a core problem in public debate: the systematic suppression of discomfort rather than its examination. She argues that disgust is not mere prejudice but an evolved signal carrying meaningful information. When many women report visceral reactions to images of pregnant men, Fleischman suggests those responses encode both a biological norm-violation signal and a moral concern about potential harm to children. Dismissing such reactions as failures of tolerance, she contends, forecloses exactly the kind of honest inquiry that good evidence demands. Autogynephilia receives sustained attention. The term, coined by sexologist Ray Blanchard, describes a pattern found in some male-born individuals: sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. Fleischman examines it through an evolutionary lens, exploring how it might connect to broader patterns in male psychology. The concept appears in peer-reviewed literature and was once incorporated into diagnostic classification frameworks, yet it has been largely expelled from mainstream clinical and media discourse around gender identity — a disappearance the hosts treat as a data point in itself. The conversation also considers the unintended social consequences of the MeToo movement, the evolutionary function of virtue signalling, and the mechanisms by which certain empirical claims attract intense social punishment. Fleischman is candid about the speculative dimensions of evolutionary psychology, and careful to distinguish descriptive findings from normative conclusions. That honesty is part of what makes the exchange useful: the discussion models how to hold uncomfortable evidence without either dismissing it or over-extending it. For anyone following debates about gender policy in Ireland — where the Gender Recognition Act 2015 operates on a self-declaration model and where HSE guidance on gender-affirming care continues to evolve — Fleischman's work matters because it represents a body of scientific literature that is rarely brought into those policy conversations. Evolutionary biology and psychology offer explanatory frameworks that sit awkwardly beside affirmative ideology, and clinical or legislative decisions made without engaging them are poorer for it. The Beyond Gender hosts, each approaching the material from a therapeutic or research background, press Fleischman on the evidence while keeping the conversation grounded in what can actually be known.
