Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes - Diana Fleischman
5 June 2025
With Diana Fleischman
Global
Evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman brings a body of peer-reviewed research — spanning disgust sensitivity, sex differences, and the psychology of autogynephilia — into direct contact with the contemporary gender debate. Her work, accumulated across more than two thousand academic citations, offers an empirical framework for reactions and phenomena that politics tends to dismiss rather than explain. This conversation examines what evolutionary science can contribute to questions that clinical reviewers across Europe are also, in their own way, beginning to ask.
Diana Fleischman is an Associate Research Professor at the University of New Mexico whose academic career has been built on the study of disgust as a domain-specific evolved emotion. Her doctoral training at the University of Texas at Austin, supervised by David Buss — a foundational figure in evolutionary psychology — preceded nearly a decade of research and teaching at the University of Portsmouth. The body of work she generated there, particularly on why women demonstrate systematically higher disgust sensitivity than men, has accumulated more than two thousand citations in the scientific literature. That is not a marginal figure, and the findings are not marginal findings. Much of this episode turns on what those findings might explain. When women report visceral discomfort at the sight of a pregnant trans-identified female, the instinct in mainstream discourse is to pathologise the reaction. Fleischman's framework inverts that move: she situates the response within well-documented research on moral disgust as a harm-detection system, one that encodes concerns about welfare and rule violation before deliberate reasoning has engaged. The empirical literature on disgust as a functional emotion is robust and largely insulated from the political controversy surrounding its applications here. Autogynephilia — the term introduced by sexologist Ray Blanchard to describe sexual arousal in some male-bodied individuals at the image of themselves as female — receives extended and unusually direct treatment. Fleischman offers an evolutionary framing for the pattern, situating it within broader male sexual psychology. Whatever one makes of the speculative elements, the underlying construct has a documented history in the academic literature on paraphilias and gender dysphoria. It occupied a place in mainstream clinical taxonomy until political pressure reshaped what researchers and clinicians were willing to discuss in public. This episode is a reminder that suppressing a concept does not resolve the clinical realities it was developed to describe. Fleischman also addresses the rapid demographic transformation in gender clinic referrals — the sharp rise in adolescent presentations, predominantly among females, that health authorities in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have each flagged in formal systematic reviews as warranting serious scrutiny. The evolutionary psychology lens she applies — examining social contagion, peer-status dynamics, and identity signalling — adds a dimension that clinical evidence reviews have largely set aside. It does not replace the clinical evidence; it contextualises it. The episode is also an honest reckoning with how difficult it has become to pursue this kind of work in academic settings. Fleischman is candid about the professional costs that researchers studying sex differences and paraphilias have faced, and about the gap between what the data show and what institutions currently permit researchers to say aloud. For a site tracking the evidence underlying the European debate — from the Cass Review's conclusions about the weakness of the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine to the Swedish and Finnish decisions to restrict hormonal interventions in minors — this conversation matters because it traces some of those questions back to their scientific foundations.
