Hi friends. This post has a massive content warning. We are following a published piece of anti-trans pseudoscience starting with its funding source. In this case, the source in question is Jeffrey Epstein, and emails from Epstein constitute the major sources for this post. Thus, this post contains references to pedophilia, sexual abuse, and transphobia. Please exercise your own discretion in deciding if and how you engage with this material.
On a whim, I decided to search for “transsexual” in the Department of Justice’s repository of documents from pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I wasn’t sure what to expect. The first woman to accuse Epstein of sexual abuse was a Latina trans woman, Ava Cordero. In response to Cordero’s allegations, the media mocked her, and Epstein continued to abuse young girls over the next decade. It seemed plausible that my search would turn up something notable.
My search yielded five documents. Two referenced “transsexual” in the CV of an expert witness in Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2020 criminal trial but was largely unrelated to the court proceedings. The other three documents were emails between Epstein and evolutionary biology Robert Trivers. These emails (and others) chronicle anti-trans pseudoscience in the making.
Trivers is best known for his theory of “parental investment,” first posed in 1972. The theory suggests that the investment of an animal parent in its offspring is a way of ensuring the parent’s own long-term, multigenerational success through the survival of its genes. As such, differences in parenting behaviors could be explained by the level of “investment” provided. According to Trivers, females perform more parenting because they have invested more to generate the egg cell (which is larger than a sperm cell and more critical to the survival of a fertilized embryo). Males, then, parent less because sperm are small cells that can be generated en masse, expended quickly, and then regenerated… The latent misogyny is, uh, not-so-latent.
Trivers has received numerous awards, despite his parental investment theory being disproven. (If you want to read more about why, I recommend trans biologist Joan Roughgarden’s 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow.) Yet, the theory remains cited in some fields, and I was taught it as fact in my undergraduate animal behavior class.
The first known correspondences between Trivers and Epstein was in 2009, after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea. Epstein invited Trivers to his house in Florida to discuss his work and paid Trivers’ travel and accommodations. Trivers, like all researchers, needed money. Research is expensive: salaries, materials, publishing fees, and more. Over the years, Trivers frequented Epstein’s Florida home.
Trivers is unsure how or when Epstein began funding his work, but by 2015 Epstein bragged to Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky) that he was Trivers’ “major funder.” Concurrently, Trivers publicly justified Epstein’s pedophilia in no uncertain terms (which I will not reproduce here). After Epstein’s death in 2020, Trivers expressed no remorse at taking money from a pedophile sex trafficker.
Emails between Trivers and his benefactor shed light on the nature of their relationship. In a 2016 email, Trivers thanks Epstein for “extra money” and appointment as an advisor to Epstein’s foundation. He also signals that he ready to do as Epstein urged him, taking on unnamed theoretical work. Epstein responded: “i want to see you [sic] piece on transgender in the bio world.”
Two months later, Trivers contacted Epstein again and communicated that he is “getting to the end of ‘transsexuality’”. Trivers goes on pontificate about the benefits of fucking trans women, using dehumanizing language to refer to transfemmes like “organism” and “the new morph(s).” To end, Trivers asks Epstein for more money to finish his research on “the proposed topics.”
In 2018, Trivers and Epstein again communicated about trans theories. Trivers draws on dehumanizing language, delighting in the idea that trans people represent “novel phenotypes.” He then describes the design of an experiment to test his theories. Next, he reiterates his attraction to trans women and explicitly erases trans men - all while using his porn algorithms as evidence. Trivers ends the email by claiming that trans three-year-olds are receiving hormone treatments, a false anti-trans scaremonger.
In one email, Trivers pulled off the Triple Crown of transphobia. He is clearly a chaser who wants to use his status as a researcher to naturalize his own sexual appetites. His behavior also negatively colors his work on parental investment theory because, to me, it sounds like he just wanted an excuse not to parent his five children.
Epstein explicitly funded Trivers’ work on trans people over Trivers’ other research interests. For the record, those other research interests were quite racist. Trivers wanted to theorize an evolutionary reason for honor killings in non-Western cultures and to investigate the musculoskeletal physiology of Jamaican sprinters. These bizarre interests remained a sticking point between him and Epstein, especially after Trivers started trouble while briefly employed at Chapman University.
Details are sparse, and I could not find public record of the incident. But, Trivers’ (unsuccessful) attempt to exculpate himself can be found in the released documents - a shocking email to Chapman’s then-president. In the email, Trivers denies exposing himself to an female victim (whose name is redacted), referring to her as “Miss.” Thus, it is possible that she was a student of Trivers. In his defense, Trivers cites his age and the woven construction of his underwear as the reasons the allegations should be ignored. He also attempts to provide character witnesses by cc’ing “three close friends,” including Epstein (a convicted pedophile).
Epstein, likely upset that Trivers’ behavior could lead to heightened scrutiny of his ongoing sexual abuses, gives Trivers the cold shoulder for almost a year. Their communication resumes in earnest around March 2019 with Epstein again urging Trivers to work on “transgender biology” because “people would be interested.” The identity of these “people” remains unknown.
The following year (2020, four years after Epstein’s initial suggestion and two months before his death), Trivers finally publishes his work on gender: a universal theory of gender identity. The theory fixates on the ratio of one’s digits, specifically the relative length of the pointer finger and the ring finger (known as the 2D:4D ratio, where D stands for digit). The 2D:4D ratio has been suggested as a proxy for fetal testosterone levels. A high ratio (i.e. a longer pointer finger compared to the ring finger) is associated with low fetal testosterone, while a low ratio (longer ring finger than pointer finger) is correlated with high fetal testosterone.
Using data from the BBC Internet Study, the Trivers’ team compared the 2D:4D ratios for cis and trans people, finding that the ratio was predictive of someone’s gender identity (rather than their sex assigned at birth). They conclude that fetal testosterone levels likely drive the development of gender identity, including “transgendered belief,” as a hard-wired biological determinant. This theory privileges testosterone as a developmental organizer of complex human traits.
Importantly, this theory is falsifiable. It can be disproven by anyone whose digit ratio does not predict their gender identity. Conveniently, I am such a person. My ring finger is longer than my pointer finger which, under Trivers’ theory, predicts that my gender is male. Yet, I am a woman.
Take a moment to glance at your fingers. You may also disprove Trivers.
Trivers was not the only (or the first) researcher working on digit ratios and (trans)gender identity. But, his stature in the field, his psychosexual obsession with trans women, and his funding source make him stand out. Trivers was aware of the political implications of his research and even marketed a 2016 talk in London to appeal to the anti-trans movement and media sentiment.
Anti-trans activists groups got what they wanted, too: a new, pseudo-biological way to police gender that (falsely) asserts sex/gender as an immutable product of biological determinism. For example, a 2022 paper from the anti-trans group Sex Matters cites digit ratios in denying the autonomy of trans adolescents.
Overall, this ordeal highlights the pipeline to push out pseudoscience. To recap: Epstein funds Trivers’ research and suggests specific topics of study. Trivers becomes obsessed with trans women as sexual objects and seeks a universal biological explanation of gender identity. He asks for more money and publishes his findings. Ultimately, Trivers’ theory is easily falsifiable. Despite this, hate groups pick up the pseudoscience and use it as justification for their regressive policies.
Importantly, this playbook is general. In this instance, it was Epstein and Trivers. Another bigoted benefactor and lackey scientist could invent another pseudoscientific theory. For example, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) paid a team of Canadian researchers to question the evidence basis for treating trans adolescents. The researchers eventually denounced the use of their work in anti-trans activism.
There is a role for academic institutions to tamp down on pseudoscience networks. Money funding academic research must go through the recipient’s university bureaucracy. Universities should provide greater due diligence and use discretion in deciding whether to accept funds. If Rutgers University gave greater scrutiny to Trivers’ funding, it may have uncovered the ties to a known pedophile and sex trafficker. If McMaster University researched ‘SEGM’, it would have known it as an SPLC-designated hate group. Neither university should have accepted these funds.
The researchers, of course, bear much of the blame as well. Their ethical lapses are glaring and, in Trivers’ case, numerous. Science has a long history of misogyny, cissexism, and white supremacy. Rigorous reform is needed to change its culture of impunity and shift the foundations of knowledge away from these poisonous ideologies.
postscript
In a world where trans existence is precarious and anti-trans pseudoscience runs rampant, it may be tempting to follow in Trivers’ footsteps in search of a theory which can justify our existence. A theory like this could provide a “natural” basis for trans identity, hidden somewhere under the surface of the skin.
However, I fear that this is a perilous intellectual path to follow. First, any theory would be used to police the boundaries of gender in ways that reproduce cissexist logics. Remember, Trivers pitched his work to gender critical audiences who understood it as a way to deny trans identities. Second, human traits like gender are incredibly complex and do not arise from a single causative agent. Last and most importantly, we do not require justification for existence. Our lives have inherent meaning and worth outside of the gaze of our oppressors.
In fact, the question of why are people trans is rather uninteresting to me. Instead, we should ask questions that improve our lives: working to overcome systemic (including economic) barriers that prevent trans people from receiving adequate and empowering health care, understanding the physiological effects of HRT to improve health outcomes, and embracing the many ways of embodied being across eukaryotic life. This epistemological foundation can take us much farther than Trivers the chaser ever could.
from the archive
