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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now, what is the perfect time? What if I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton?
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, everything and anyone out there who is listening. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. It is my honor and I'm very excited to have as my guest today Martine Rothblatt. Who is Martine? Martine Rothblatt is chairman and CEO of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that she started to save the life of one of her daughters. We will talk about that. We'll talk about a lot of things. The company offers FDA-approved medicines for pulmonary hypertension and neuroblastoma and is working on manufacturing an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. Dr. Rothblatt previously created and led Sirius XM as its chairman CEO and launched other satellite systems for navigation and international television broadcasting. In the field of aviation, her Sirius XM satellite system enhances safety with real-time digital weather information to pilots in flight nationwide. She also designed the world's first electric helicopter and piloted it to a Guinness World Record for speed, altitude, and flight duration. In the legal arena, Dr. Rothblatt led efforts of the transgender community to establish their own health law standards and of the International Bar Association to protect autonomy rights in genetic information via an international treaty. She also published dozens of scholarly articles and papers on the law of outer space, resulting in her election to the International Institute of Space Law and represented the radioastronomy community's scientific research interests before the Federal Communications Commission. She has a bachelor's, JD, and MBA degrees from UCLA, which in 2018 awarded her its highest recognition, the UCLA Medal, and she holds a PhD in medical ethics from the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her patented inventions cover aspects of satellite communication, medicinal biochemistry, and cognitive software. Dr. Rothblatt's recent books are on xenotransplantation, your life or mine, gender identity, transgender to transhuman, and cyberethics, virtually human. She occasionally posts on Instagram, TransBinary, and Twitter, SkyBiome. Martine or Dr. Rothblatt, both, welcome to the show. Thank you for making the time.
Thanks so much, Tim. Just Martine's fine.
All right. And this interview, as my listeners might imagine, was challenging in the best way to prepare for because there are a million and one directions that we can go with just this bio alone, which is of course a snapshot, a distillation of much more that you have done. And I thought we could start in perhaps an unlikely place and that is Alan Watts. I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts and specifically the book The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are. Could you please explain if that is true why that is the case?
Yes, thanks Tim. Alan Watts has a really unique ability to see the dialectic aspect of everything in nature. By that I mean that there's a kind of a yin-yang aspect to everything in nature. And he points out that for example you can't have a crest of a wave without the bottom of a wave. And it has helped me whenever I see things in life that seem negative to be able to look at it in another way and see the positive in it.
When were you first introduced to his work? How did that come about?
I was first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy called transhumanism. Sort of the idea that people can transcend some biological human limitations. A friend of mine, Frank Sazinowski, who is the head of the national organization on rare diseases, pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits. He himself is both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer. But he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits such as Teilhard de Chardin from France and other individuals here in the US. And then from those Jesuits, they referred to Alan Watts. I'm not sure if he was actually a Jesuit, but he undertook some religious training both in China, I think, and in the US. He was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco. I think during the 70s or 80s. I don't know if you remember, Tim, the film Her from a few years ago in which like a computer...
Yep. So I was watching that movie which kind of is interesting to me because it epitomized or it visualized the concept of computers becoming sentient and in the middle of that movie there's a scene in which Alan Watts appears and I stood up in the movie theater and I said, 'Oh my god, Alan Watts.'
Did you ultimately find the presentation in that movie to be compelling as it relates to sort of sentient intelligence?
I did. I thought it was an accurate depiction of a likely way that sentients would begin to arise in our society. Basically, by being very, very useful to people, cleaning up their inboxes, stuff like that.
This may be a good place, and we're going to be all over the place in nonlinear fashion. Bina48. Who or what is Bina48 if I'm pronouncing that correctly?
Yep, you've got it perfectly. So, Bina is the name of my partner and we've been married for about 40 years and when she was 48, we undertook a joint project to try to create a digital simulacrum or a digital copy of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts. And we thought this would be a very nice project as a combination of science and art and to encourage young people, get them more excited about computer science and women in particular, girls in particular. So we contracted with a couple of companies who were experts in both the software engineering side and in the physical modeling of a face that moves exactly like a human face does. You might imagine there's an exhibit at Disney World, Disneyland of like Lincoln and whatnot, something like that, but more realistic. And we built this project and since that time, Bina48 has thrilled audiences all around the world. I'm sure she has inspired hundreds if not thousands of girls to go into computer science and she continues to get better and better, more and more advanced software.
I don't know if you have watched the series Black Mirror before, but I find some of their episodes to be very strong. And in one of them, a significant other is effectively resurrected by pulling data and patterns and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social media accounts. So pulling from the cloud and feeding into this simulacrum or model of someone who used to be or in this case still is. How far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly?
Yes, Tim. So I am a fan of the Black Mirror series and there are a few other somewhat similar series that are streaming now, Upload and whatnot. So it's an idea that's catching on and even at a very basic level, social media firms like Twitter for example and probably Facebook as well offer an opportunity that after a person passes away their account can remain active and I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted. So I think this general idea is a trend. It's only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job of copying the human personality. Sometime in this century for sure and maybe in just like two or three decades I think that there will be a digital copy of a person. Another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person who will claim to be the original person and they may make that claim before or after the person died. And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album or is this actually some form of digital sentience?
When you were growing up, who were your role models or inspirations? Was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you were in high school or at the very beginning, let's just call it freshman year of your undergrad as icons worth emulating or lesser-known role models worth emulating. Did anyone really stick out for you?
I think that in terms of authors, I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author.
Sure. Yeah. Stranger in a Strange Land and so on.
Absolutely. It was so brilliant. And then a few years ago when his widow released the uncensored, unedited version of Stranger in a Strange Land, it's like three times larger and like no holds barred. I just savored, you know, every page of that. My favorite book of all of his is Time Enough for Love in which he covers almost every topic under the sun. So Heinlein's characters were somewhat of role models for me, like Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books. In the public sphere, I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy. His positive progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him. So I looked up to him. Those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time.
You seem to be good at many things, of course, just based on the bio alone, but what strikes me is how quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields. And I'd like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio, and that is United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company. She started to save the life of one of her daughters. I'd love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story just because people will want to hear it. And then the follow-up just to plant the seed for it is how you learned biology, because my understanding is you didn't have much in terms of background in biology. That's a huge mouthful of a question, but if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful and we can use that as a jumping-off point.
Sure. So, it's kind of funny that, you know, you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course, but that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school. And here suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running Sirius XM that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness. She can't even walk up a couple stairs to the front door and there are no medicines approved for it. I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the head of pediatric cardiology at Children's National Medical Center in the middle of Washington DC. And the doctor said, you know, this is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises. All the patients die within two to three years. He had only seen two or three other kids with it, and they both died. And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant.
So Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I mean, I didn't know what to do. And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward night after night and myself and Bina would tag team staying there with her was once she fell asleep to go down into the library and to just begin, you know, learning about what was this illness she had which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension and why were there no treatments available for it. So I just began reading and reading and reading. Most of the time I read things I didn't understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words that I never learned in law school or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering. But of course there were dictionaries and I looked up the words in a dictionary and they had college-level anatomy textbooks. So what I didn't know, I just kept going backwards in academia, I guess you would say, backwards in learning or pedagogy until I would even get to like a high school-level textbook that would explain something. And I said, 'Okay, I get that.' And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.
How did you and I know this is a story you've told before but ultimately in searching for possible solutions and you know as we were chatting about before recording there's a lot of luck involved and it doesn't mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation similar to what you experienced but nonetheless you were able to ultimately track down, I suppose it's fair to say, a molecule, a drug of some type. Would you mind describing for listeners the process then of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion this drug or to license it? If you could describe that, I have a number of questions that will stem off of it.
Sure, Tim. So there are a gazillion articles published on every type of medical research you could imagine. I mean it's just a bottomless well. There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals and each of those journals have every year thousands of articles published across them. So it's difficult to find the information that you need. But in law school, we learn a very useful skill. This skill goes by the name of shepherdizing after this type of index that they have in law school called Shepherds. So what shepherdizing involves is when a judge writes a decision like the Supreme Court issues a decision, they drop a lot of footnotes. And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is make footnotes and references. And then what you're supposed to do as a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to. And then the shepherdizing process is after you get all of those references to then look up all of the references in those other articles. And ultimately you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down the references are all circling back around on themselves. So I applied that shepherdizing process to these medical articles. And somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article, they make footnotes and citations to other people's research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those and then I would follow up on all of the references in those.
Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher at Glaxo Wellcome had written in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure and it failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work. But in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did. And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart, which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well, that's exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension. The people who have this disease. I'll make a quick footnote that when my daughter was diagnosed, 2,000 people in the US had the disease because medicines have become so much better and because we've been able to, like you mentioned in the introduction, get all these approvals. There are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it. So, it's likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension. And I read this article and I said, 'Wow, just when I need this tiny stretch of artery, just between the heart and the lungs, this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone.' That was the holy grail that I was looking for. So, I looked at where the author of the article was from. He was from Glaxo Wellcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And I made a beeline down to him and asked him if he could develop this molecule that he'd found for my daughter's disease.
Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom? A big all caps yes.
No, it was actually a big all caps no. Unfortunately, the individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier and the person that I ended up meeting with who was in charge of research and development said that this was just one article. It was an incidental finding. In any event, this disease afflicted so few people. It was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo Wellcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease. And I asked him, his name is Bob Bell. He's now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I asked Dr. Bell, I said, 'What would it take for you to develop this medicine?' He said, 'Well, it probably would take, you couldn't do it. We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in revenue potential.' He said, 'But it's possible you could buy it from us if you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise. I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo Wellcome.' So over the course of the next several months, I created a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel laureate who was formerly associated with Glaxo Wellcome become head of a scientific advisory board and I re-approached Glaxo Wellcome and I said I have all the things that you asked for. Can you sell me this drug and we'll develop it ourselves?
Well Tim, it turns out that everybody I asked said, 'Well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree.' And that's how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper to agree to license this drug to me. Finally, it happened and all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money that I would ever get from this molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time. Also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell's sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time I first met him toward the end of this process and he became a product champion for me within Glaxo. I mean that was just purest, you know, luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say. And then they really didn't think this molecule had any chance at all. And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think. But still, all 15 people had to sign it. After we successfully developed this molecule, we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to Glaxo Wellcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people's lives. It has produced, you know, a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us. And Bob Bell when I invited him to our 15th anniversary and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine and he said this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo Wellcome had ever done.
So in hindsight, what did they miss, right? What accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely?
I think there were probably like maybe three main ones. The first one and I can say this kind of from firsthand knowledge since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical company. The odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one in 100. I mean, the human body is so complicated. It's like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks. And every molecule is like a random key. And the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock that fixed some dysfunction in the body rather than causing some harm to the body is less than one in 100. So, first of all, they figured the chance of this thing working just in general was less than one in 100. Secondly, they thought to themselves, even if it worked a little bit, there's only 2,000 people in the whole country with this disease. They didn't really think that if it worked really well, the number of people would keep accumulating.
Uh, I see what you're saying. If you have these people who would have died otherwise not dying, then that treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow. Is that what you mean?
Exactly. I thought about it like I was getting subscribers at Sirius XM. You know, people said to me, 'Oh, Martine, you'll be lucky to have 100,000 subscribers.' I said, 'Well, if I keep them and I get another 100,000 the next year, then I'll be up to 200,000 and then maybe 400 and 800,000. Now we have 30 million.' So they didn't think in that subscriber mindset. That was the second problem. The third problem is that they didn't really imagine that the health care system would pay something like $100,000 per year for this medicine. And at that time, this was in the early 2000s, about 20 years ago. I think the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps $10,000 a year for a patient or $10,000 for a course of treatment. Because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy, there are many, many medicines now that cost over $100,000 a year, mostly for rare diseases. And the health care system pays for them because so few people have these diseases that even though the medicines are expensive, it's a drop in the bucket compared to diseases like hypertension or common illnesses, asthma that afflict tens of millions of people. So, the health care system doesn't really mind paying a lot of money if it's a rare disease. And the people at Glaxo Wellcome were clueless about this. They were actually looking for the big billion-dollar blockbusters, not for the rare diseases. So those were their three omissions. They failed to be Alan Wattsian. You know, they failed to see that because something is big underneath that means that there's something else that's small. And that was what Alan Watts would always say. He says something is good only because something else is bad.
At the very least, I mean, it's a valuable thought exercise when you're looking at the assumptions that you're making. And what an incredible story. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in fact in The 4-Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multi-mineral greens complex, probiotics, and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available from travel packets. I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So, adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.
You mentioned Sirius. We haven't spent any time on Sirius just yet. When did you first fall in love or become intoxicated or enchanted by satellite systems or electrical engineering, I suppose, but you can take whichever one is more interesting to tackle.
You're absolutely right that I fell in love and I was intoxicated by satellite communications. It seemed to me kind of magical that we can put a machine way out in space and that a machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet. And my first real moment of first love, if you will, was at a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian Ocean. And I had left UCLA to travel around the world, really hitchhike around the world. And I found myself in the Indian Ocean on a set of islands called the Seychelles and on these islands at the top of the mountain in the middle of one of the main islands there was a NASA tracking station and I went up into it and I was probably a pretty grungy 19-year-old at that point in time but the engineers inside there were kind and patient with me and they explained to me how their satellite antenna were communicating with satellites in all different orbits around the Earth and even all the way out to Jupiter. And I asked them, I said, 'Would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there and have it broadcast information back to the entire Earth?' And they said, 'If you made a powerful enough satellite, then the receiving equipment on Earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand.'
And I could have kissed the guy. I just said, 'Wow, that's the purpose of my life.' And I made a beeline back to UCLA. I changed my major to communication studies. I did an undergraduate thesis on direct broadcast satellites. I did a joint JD-MBA degree where I published multiple articles on satellite communications. I worked at Hughes Aircraft Company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then, and helped design a satellite to cover South America, and then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal, which was Sirius XM.
What did it feel like, if you can remember, to have that answer given to you or that direction rather given to you, the purpose given to you at that age? I mean, did it feel a certain way? That type of conviction or that type of belief? What do you recall?
Yeah, Tim, it's the best feeling. It's the best feeling. And actually, I don't think it really has anything to do with age. I've felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Teslas and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output. And there's a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power, between kilowatts and horsepower. It's almost one to one, not exactly. And I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in terms of their horsepower. So right away I said, 'Wow, this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter.' And I had that same kind of this is the purpose of my life. It's to make an electric helicopter. So you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life. I think probably the best way to describe it, Tim, would be like a lightning bolt to your soul.
You know, I was asking about biology earlier but I would be very curious since you mentioned also that there were no, well the requirements as such in undergrad did not require you to take any additional biology classes. If you were trying to teach, let's just say, a class, and you could pick the age, or it could be a set of classes, scientific literacy, right? Being able to have enough basic fluency to provide more surface area for those lightning bolts, if that makes any sense. When you're looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engineer or reading a scientific study, do you have any thoughts on how we could cultivate more scientific literacy, if that's the right phrase to use?
Yeah, I think that's a great phrase to use. I think what's necessary is that you have to relate science to people's everyday lives. And one of the greatest people at doing this and to go back to the beginning of the interview when you asked me who was a role model...
For me, I should have said, you know, Carl Sagan was like an amazing, amazing role model to me. I watched the Cosmos series over and over again. And Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific concepts and relate them to people's everyday life. And if you remember watching those series, the iconic image of him taking a dandelion and blowing it and describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas throughout the galaxy. Those type of step-by-step instructions, ladders to get from one place to another, is the way I think to build scientific literacy. And I would ask my students to think about anything that's important in their life, whatever it might be. And from whatever they said was important to their life, I would then begin wrapping that in kind of layers and layers of basic scientific concepts that pertain to what was important to them.
Are there any, how should I phrase this, not science fiction authors per se, but science authors or elucidators of science who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience? If someone is listening and they see their blind spots, which I know by definition is kind of impossible, but if they recognize they don't have enough scientific fluency or as much as they would like, but they want to try to cultivate that, do you have any recommendations for them?
Yes, there's a lot of books like that. One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn, and he was one of the most famous historians of science, and his book is perennially in print. It's called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And in this book, he goes through about 10 different revolutions in science where everybody thought the world was one way and then kind of like a crazy person, you know, would say, 'No, I think it's like a different way.' And gradually set about proving it's a different way and created a revolution in science. And he explains this in very lay terms. He takes you through the science of gravity, for example, with Isaac Newton, science of relativity with Einstein, electricity with Maxwell, and so on in a very step-by-step fashion to make the science accessible. And his main point in writing this book is to teach people critical thinking, to teach people to question authority. Ultimately, all science is about is just saying why, why? Like every two, three, four-year-old kid knows how to do that, right? Why? Why? Why? And I think Thomas Kuhn does a great job of that in his book.
I should also point out, and please feel free to correct me if I'm oversimplifying, but the why why is not just for four-year-olds. It's not just for scientists in lab coats or whatever people envision scientists to be. It's also extremely helpful in situations like those you found yourself in with Glaxo Wellcome and attempting to license. I mean, constantly pushing for explanation and clicking on those footnotes to go to the footnotes to go to the footnotes to ultimately get to some point of leverage where you can move things around. It seems like it's also not just an intensely interesting and academically rewarding approach to thought, but an immensely practical approach to life. At least that's how it seems from reading so many of your stories.
Yes. You know, when you discover something, what's happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain, and it's lighting up the pleasure centers, too. So, I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a realization about something, coming to an inspiration about something, which is why books and reading are so magical. Another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job of explaining concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler. She wrote a lot of books. One of them very well known is Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents. And in these books, she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority. So I'm not sure what it was that my parents did. I don't really remember them specifically encouraging my questioning of them. In fact, I do remember my father discouraging it. But nevertheless, what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture, and the American culture is a culture of questioning authority. I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci when people were asking him why is it that Americans won't do these basic public health steps to stop the pandemic, and he said, 'You know, American culture does not like to be told what to do. American culture is dyed-in-the-wool question authority.' So there could probably, you'd be hard-pressed to find another country where it would be, you know, more difficult to get people to follow a single rule for everybody than the United States. So, it's that American cultural ethic of questioning authority that I know is like deep in my mental DNA.
So, we were chatting just a few minutes ago about realizations, inspiration. I'd like to ask if we flash back to, well, we could flash back to any point in time that you choose really, how did you relate to or think about gender in your youth? And you can choose what youth means, and I guess I'm wondering if there were any flashes of realization or if you came sort of pre-installed with a certain orientation or way of thinking about it or feeling about it. Whatever you could say to speak to your experience of gender when you were younger, I would love to hear it.
Sure. So, you know, it is related to this question of authority. Tim, around teenage years, I had a constant vision of myself, not as a male, but as a female. And of course, I said to myself, 'WTF, why am I thinking like this?' You know, I can't imagine anybody else is thinking like this, but nevertheless, the thoughts were real and the feelings were real and the feelings were visceral.
Could you describe the feelings? Because I think I'm certainly very interested in what form that takes. Is it a discomfort of some type? Is it a longing? How did it feel for you?
So, first I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different for every single transgender person. And talking about my feelings, I don't want to give the impression that these are going to be the feelings of other transgender people, because as a community, we're as heterogeneous as anybody else. So for me, it was really a matter of just visualizing myself in a female form, and there was not any dislike of my male form. Again, it was kind of very Alan Wattsian in that I saw myself as male only because the opposite of male was female. So I could also see myself as female. And this was the way my mind was working. And when I say I saw myself, it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment. Obviously, I knew boys' and girls' and men's and women's bodies were different. So, I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman wherein I was very much trapped in a male body. It was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be. So, the authority was, 'No, this is not possible. People are only male or female, and never the twain shall meet.' So again, this American Paul Revere-ish question-authority mindset got me reading, and I found once again that there was a vast literature on transgenderism, transsexualism, Native American people who were two-spirited, communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female. So even though this was never something I learned in junior high or high school or elementary school or really anywhere in American culture in, say, the 1990s, I learned through books that humanity was not either strictly male or strictly female. And as I began to question authority, I began to say to myself, 'Why can't I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female?'
I'd love to ask a follow-up question to that, which is when I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female, they think of the physiological differences that you might put side by side looking at physical characteristics. When you say not totally male or female or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories, do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits or what we would often find labeled as such, or do you mean something else?
I mean predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you refer to. Now, often times those masculine and feminine traits are just a short hop, skip, and a jump from masculine and feminine apparel.
Okay. Depending on how people dress, they're a short hop, skip, and a jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles, in an age, you know, that was the time of Prince and Boy George and whatnot. And then you get to, you know, masculine and feminine manicures. Like, why can't a guy paint his nails?
And then you get to next questions of, you know, secondary and primary sex organs, and some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology. And I found that there was actually a vast literature, following again footnotes to footnotes, references to references. I was like, 'Oh my god, it is possible to in fact alter your physiology to match your psychology.' And what appears to be the most intelligent researchers in this area are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do for people who feel that they are kind of, quote unquote, trapped in the wrong body.
Do you, from say zero to 100%, how well do you feel you have your physiology matching your own psychology at the moment?
What were the biggest or the most important decisions, actions that you took? Did any surprise you to have a disproportionate effect on increasing that percentage?
No. I think that, you know, every part of the transition process kind of fell in place. It was not something that happens on a day. It's kind of you get to a point of diminishing returns. So over a period of years I gradually transitioned, and I think even to this point I'm still in a transition process. I kind of went from a pure male to a more, I would say not pure, but I would say, you know, knocking on the female door, to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as trans-binary, meaning that I embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely.
