Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes - Diana Fleischman
5 June 2025
With Diana Fleischman
Global
Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, brings peer-reviewed science to questions the gender debate routinely avoids. Her highly cited research on disgust as a sex-differentiated evolved response challenges the view that discomfort with gender-ideology claims is mere prejudice. She discusses autogynephilia, the dramatic rise in gender clinic referrals among adolescent girls, and the social mechanisms that suppress inconvenient data. At a moment when the UK is rebuilding gender services on an evidence footing following the Cass Review, her framework clarifies what the evidence actually says — and why it has been so hard to hear.
Diana Fleischman is an Associate Research Professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, trained under David Buss at UT Austin and with nearly a decade of teaching experience at the University of Portsmouth. Her research on disgust sensitivity has accumulated more than 2,100 academic citations and has reshaped scientific understanding of sex differences. In this conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts, she applies a Darwinian framework to questions that mainstream gender discourse has largely placed off limits. Central to the discussion is the evolved function of disgust. Fleischman's work demonstrates that women have developed heightened disgust sensitivity as a disease-avoidance mechanism — a finding with significant implications for how we interpret public reactions to gender ideology. Rather than dismissing such reactions as prejudice, the evolutionary lens treats them as informative signals. The discomfort many people report when confronted with, for instance, a pregnant gender-dysphoric male may reflect deep intuitions about reproductive biology and potential harm to a child, not mere bigotry dressed up as instinct. The episode gives serious attention to autogynephilia — a pattern documented in the sexology literature in which some males experience sexual arousal at the image of themselves as female. This concept has been largely sidelined within gender-affirming medicine, yet it carries direct relevance to safeguarding debates in the UK, particularly around male-bodied individuals accessing women-only spaces or services. Fleischman places it within an evolutionary account of male sexuality, arguing it deserves scientific scrutiny rather than institutional silence. Fleischman and the hosts examine what she calls the trans explosion — the dramatic rise in gender clinic referrals, particularly among adolescent girls, that prompted the NHS England-commissioned Cass Review. The Review's final report, published in April 2024, found the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine alarmingly thin and concluded that psychosocial factors, including social influence, had been underexplored by clinicians. Evolutionary psychology offers a complementary framework for understanding why adolescent females may be especially vulnerable to identity-based explanations for distress — and why services that uncritically affirmed those explanations failed their patients. The conversation returns repeatedly to the professional cost of intellectual honesty. Fleischman's willingness to discuss unpopular data openly — including how outrage and virtue signalling function as social dominance mechanisms — mirrors a pattern visible in UK institutions. The Cass Review itself documented how clinicians and researchers who questioned gender-affirming practice faced professional and reputational consequences. Science cannot self-correct under those conditions, and the UK's belated reckoning with gender medicine is, in part, a consequence of that enforced silence.
