Brian Earp vs. transgender people

Brian Earp is an American psychologist who has supported anti-transgender activists. Earp has written for anti-trans publication Quillette, most notably a piece promoting and defending anti-trans activist Alice Dreger.

Earp is an editor of the BMJ publication Journal of Medical Ethics.

Background

Brian David Earp was born on September 29, 1985 and grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian household:

In 2004, I graduated from Shorecrest High School in Shoreline, Washington (a smallish town-turned-city outside Seattle in the Pacific Northwest of the United States). My junior year (and again senior year) I won the statewide 5th Avenue Theater Award for “Best Actor” in a high school production. I then spent a year working as a professional actor and singer in the “big city” of Seattle before heading to the East Coast as a first-generation college student.

Earp attended Yale University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 2010, two master’s degrees in 2019 and 2020, and a doctorate in 2021. While there, Earp continued performing on stage professionally and experienced significant mental struggles at the start of the doctoral program. Earp also earned master’s degrees from University of Oxford in 2011 and University of Cambridge in 2014.

Earp is director of the Oxford-NUS Centre for Neuroethics and Society (OCNS) and the EARP Lab (Experimental Bioethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Relational Moral Psychology Lab) within the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS).

Earp served as Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center.

Publications on trans topics

Alice Dreger was an inaugural member of the “intellectual dark web,” a gateway to the far right, for complaining about “cancel culture” and attacking the trans rights movement. Dreger frequently complains that “academic freedom” gets too much pushback from the public, particularly from “the left.” Americans in academia and elsewhere have the right to say whatever they want, and other people have the right to take any lawful steps available to bring consequences to bear, whether it’s boycotts, getting them fired, or delivering unsparing criticism.

Earp claimed “Dreger is widely regarded as being a supporter of trans rights, as well as rights for intersex people, for gender non-conformers generally, and for other marginalized groups.” Dreger is a key figure in the academic exploitation of several minority groups, including conjoined twins, little people, and people with differences of sex development (which Dreger pushed for years to be classified as “disorders of sex development”). Dreger is also a major promoter of several disease models of gender diversity, especially psychosexual pathologies created and promoted by Dreger’s friends. In Quillette, Earp promoted Dreger’s views on the spurious sex disease “autogynephilia,” citing Ray Blanchard, Jesse Singal, J. Michael Bailey, and “Kiira Triea”:

“Dreger has written, in her recent book and elsewhere, about a condition called “autogynephilia.” If you haven’t heard of this condition, you are not alone; but it turns out to be really important. What it refers to is the tendency of certain individuals who were male-assigned at birth to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as a female.

Some of these individuals later transition into being women, which is why this is relevant.

The problem is, some people, including some members of the trans community, strongly disagree with Dreger’s analysis of the scientific evidence on this condition. Just to be clear, Dreger does not do primary research in this area, but as a historian and sociologist of science and medicine, she has written at length about the work of those who do.

Although her primary interest has been to defend the right of these scientists to advance their views without being personally attacked—which has led to further attacks on Dreger herself — she also sometimes discusses the specifics of their theories. And while she doesn’t agree with everything they have to say, she sees their main conclusions as being pretty well supported.

One of these conclusions has become a lightning rod. That is the notion that the sexual arousal aspect of autogynephilia is not somehow tangential to the desire to transition, but is often directly causally related. Specifically, the idea is that ‘nonhomosexual transsexuals experience erotic arousal at the idea of becoming a woman, and this arousal motivates them to become women.’”

In a 2020 piece for Journal of Medical Ethics, Earp and co-authors explored the issue of unwanted puberty.

In a fairly nuanced 2022 piece, Earp outlined the ethical discrepancies around bans on medical care for trans minors:

Some critics suggest the real motive behind the recent bans is not principled ethics, but conservative policing of the sex/gender binary.

Gender-affirming procedures are considered suspect, because they alter a person’s body to align with a gender category other than the one assigned at birth. Males are expected to identify as boys/men, and females as girls/women. Any other relationship between sex and gender violates traditional norms.

By contrast, even genital operations that are not medically necessary are approved by conservatives if they preserve the status quo of what is considered ‘normal’ for boys and girls.

References

MisirHiralall, Sabrina D. (May 6, 2022). APA Member Interview: Brian Earp. Blog of the APA https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/05/06/apa-member-interview-brian-earp/

Selected publications by Earp

Notini L, Earp BD, Gillam L, McDougall RJ, Savulescu J, Telfer M, Pang KC (2020). Forever young? The ethics of ongoing puberty suppression for non-binary adults. Journal of Medical Ethics, 46(11), 743–752. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2019-106012

The Brussels Collaboration on Bodily Integrity (2024). Genital Modifications in Prepubescent Minors: When May Clinicians Ethically Proceed? The American Journal of Bioethics, 25(7), 53–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2024.2353823

Zohny H, Earp BD, Savulescu J (2022). Enhancing Gender. Bioethical Inquiry 19, 225–237 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-021-10163-7

Earp, B. D. (2021). Male or female genital cutting: why ‘health benefits’ are morally irrelevant. Journal of Medical Ethics, 47(12), e92–e92. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106782

Earp, B. D. (2021). Debating gender. Think, 20(57), 9–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1477175620000317

Earp BD (2021). Relational Morality. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/325/

Earp, Brian D. (September 2021). Abolishing Gender. In Edmonds D (editor). Future Morality (pp. 35–49). Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780198862086 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862086.003.0004

Earp, Brian D. (2020). What is gender for? The Philosopher. 108 (2): 94–99 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340598169_What_Is_Gender_For

The Brussels Collaboration on Bodily Integrity (2019). Medically Unnecessary Genital Cutting and the Rights of the Child: Moving Toward Consensus. The American Journal of Bioethics, 19(10), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2019.1643945

Earp, Brian D.; Steinfeld, Rebecca (May 15, 2017). How different are female, male and intersex genital cutting? The Conversation https://theconversation.com/how-different-are-female-male-and-intersex-genital-cutting-77569

Earp, Brian D (July 2, 2016). In Praise of Ambivalence — “Young” Feminism, Gender Identity and Free Speech. Quillette https://quillette.com/2016/07/02/in-praise-of-ambivalence-young-feminism-gender-identity-and-free-speech/

Earp, Brian D (February 15, 2016). The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit. Quillette https://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/

Earp, Brian (October 2015). “Female genital mutilation and male circumcision: toward an autonomy-based ethical framework”. Medicolegal and Bioethics. 5: 89. 10.2147/mb.s63709

Vierra, Andrew; Earp, Brian (April 21, 2015). Born this way? How high-tech conversion therapy could undermine gay rights. The Conversation https://theconversation.com/born-this-way-how-high-tech-conversion-therapy-could-undermine-gay-rights-40121

Book

Earp, Brian D.; Savulescu, Julian (2020). Love is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships. Manchester University Press, ISBN: 9781526145413 https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145413/ also published as Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships. Redwood Press, ISBN 978-0804798198

Media

Brian Earp (May 20, 2023). Trans vs. intersex healthcare bills: protecting bodily integrity or policing gender? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bIFLYkjbM

Brian Earp (September 27, 2022). Female, male, intersex, trans—ethics of bodily integrity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg9C7-D-S_E

Brian Earp (January 15, 2020). What is your gender? A friendly guide to the public debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZERzw9BGrs

Two for Tea with Iona Italia and Brian Earp (January 13, 2019). 13 – Brian D. Earp – In Defence of the Foreskin. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/two-for-tea-podcast/13-brian-d-earp-in-defence-1Z08CBq32Qo/

Brian Earp (July 26, 2017). When science gets political. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb7RA4pNF7c

Brian Earp (October 10, 2017). Gender, Genital Alteration, and Beliefs About Bodily Harm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-2aQoTQeA