Oh wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. And NPR. I got it. Okay, I got it.
What up ladies? Hey, how's it going? That's a conan. That's a conan.
It is. Yeah, it is indeed. Hi. Hey, this is Jada Vunrod.
This is a radio lab today. Robert and I invited two folks into the studio, our former producer, Lou Miller, basically started the show with us. She's even in the Sonic ID. Oh, you're right there.
Okay. And we invited her in and also Elise Spiegel, reporter at NPR, because Lou and Elise together are starting a new radio show and podcasts and everyone's very excited about it. It's called Invisibelia. So like a Latin word, what is that?
It is a Latin word. It's a name that my mother came up with. This is Elise talking because she's a French media play historian, so they just like know stuff like that. Under what circumstances did this come up?
We were just, you know, hanging the way that the Spiegel's hang in like her bedroom and I was like, this is what the show is about. It's about all these invisible things. They're invisible, but they're affecting you and what's the name? And she was just like, why don't you just call it Invisibelia?
I was like, and I'm. And for what? Invisible things. So the show promises to be sort of an investigation of all the invisible things that guide our behavior that we generally don't see.
Now, they've been sharing some stories that they've been working on as they're going. And a lot of it is kind of amazing. So we asked them if we could preview one of their stories for you guys. This one you're going to hear comes from an hour that they're producing on the topic of categories, like the different boxes that we put things in our world into.
And the first piece in the show looks at one of the most basic categories that there is. The first question that anybody asks the parent who has a new baby is it a boy or girl? I have to say in my career, I have done a number of stories about a blurring between boy and girl. But the story I'm about to tell you is about a kind of blurring that I had never heard of before.
Hey, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
We were in San Diego, by the way, setting ourselves up to talk. I'm going to make you scoot. Scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot. After we sat down, I asked Paige to show me some pictures of herself from about a decade before.
So there aren't many. In the pictures was a man. A man in an naval uniform. He was very buff, strapping.
Yeah, very military. I had a high and tight haircut. And there they were, those bright blue eyes. You look pretty conservative here too.
Yes, I do. Paige spent the first three decades of her life as a man. But let me be clear from the top. Paige's story is not the transgender story that you typically hear.
Typically, people who are transgender feel like they are one gender trapped in the body of the other gender. Their internal gender identity is misaligned with their biological sex. But it's static. It stays the same.
But when I was talking to Paige, that didn't capture her experience at all. Because when I met her, Paige was flipping. Flipping between the category male and the category female. I flipped back and forth multiple times a day.
I'd say I maybe spend 20% of my time in gay mode and the rest of it in female mode. One morning, Paige would wake up feeling strongly that the gender at the core of her being was female. But then suddenly... It's just kind of like...
There was a change. And Paige was in gay mode. When that happened, all kinds of things about Paige changed. Her posture changed.
Yeah, my weight kind of moves up to my shoulders. Like my center of gravity is kind of up here. More significantly, she told me, there was a real psychological shift. The way I see the world and the way I interpret the world is different.
When Paige was in male mode, Paige was less interested in people. In talking to them, in making eye contact with them. I'm a lot more introverted. I'm a lot more unquieter.
But in female mode, she was much more expansive. And sights, sounds, smells, likes, dislikes. They were all different. When I'm female, all my emotions are like just really vivid, like colors.
Basically, Paige was constantly and very abruptly bounced between two starkly different ways of being in and filtering the world. Paige wasn't able to dictate when or where this happened. I really have no control over it. She'd be sitting in her office talking to her boss and bam, she'd be walking down the street.
Bam. Now, when this happened, it wasn't like Paige was an entirely different person. I'm always the same person. I experienced the world differently.
But I'm still me, I'm in control of myself, I still have my same wants and desires. There was just this profound difference beneath everything. It's just a sense of knowing. Like the way that you know you're a female right now without having to be told.
It's the same way that I know that I'm a female. And when I'm a guy, it's the same way I know I'm a guy. It's just this instinctual knowing of what I am. By the way, right now, are you male or female?
Definitely in girl mode. Yeah. And how long have you been in girl mode right now? About an hour, I'd say.
So maybe you're thinking that Paige seems nuts. Paige herself has had that thought. I thought that I was going crazy. Yeah.
I mean, some people first hear about this. You know, they may wonder if it's associated with any disorder, which is formerly known as multiple personality disorder or a form of psychosis. This is Laura Case, a researcher who has worked in the lab of a very famous neurologist, a man named VS Ramashandran at UCSD. And a couple years ago, they got an email from a woman describing exactly the same kind of experience that Paige describes.
Someone who experiences the switching back and forth. And while on the one hand they were dubious, we get a lot of interesting emails in our lab, emails from people, cleaning all kinds of wild sounding experiences. On the other hand, they study the brain and they have seen brains do all kinds of things. They've seen brains that suddenly stop recognizing faces, brains that think their owner has a mysterious limb.
So they were curious. Here's a person who goes back and forth in terms of what their brain seems to be telling them about whether they're male or female. How fascinating would that be to look and see what could be changing in the brain or in their environment to be causing that shift in identity? So they decided to look into it.
Over the past couple years, Case has found dozens of people with this experience. And Case has started testing them in different ways, including giving them psychological screenings. And what she found was that as a group, these people are not mentally unstable. They simply don't have dissociable disorder.
None of them had any form of psychosis or anything like that. They ruled out bipolar, schizophrenia, and saw some other interesting things. They were actually a little bit more ambidextrous than the general population. Basically, they found enough to suggest that there might be something neurological going on.
So they published a very, very small study, a preliminary sort of report in a journal called Medical Hypothesis and then started on another study. But we're not ready to talk about the data from that study. I did, though, get one tidbit about this from Case. And again, this is very, very, very preliminary.
But she found that the same person will perform differently on certain tests depending on whether they are in male or female mode. For example, she gave the same person these mental puzzles. Test, spatial, and language abilities. And Lulu, you know how men are really good at, supposedly, men are really good at kind of spatial directions?
No, like spatial manipulation. What does that mean? I don't know how to explain it exactly, but like you're a woman, so you wouldn't understand that very well. I wouldn't understand it very well, right.
Like take a geometric shape, rotate it in your mind, stuff like that. Okay. They found when they gave these tests to these people, when they were in their different states, they had different abilities. Oh, wow.
So like when they were men, they performed more as men, and when they were women, they performed more as women. Oh, yeah. We did see some differences between gender states that were intriguing, but not conclusive. Anyway, here's the point.
There's some evidence that the shifts these people say that they are experiencing could be real, which brings us back to Paige. You know, I wake up in the morning like I'm a male and a female. I wanted to talk to her about what it was like to move in this way between categories. So let's just start with like your childhood.
Now Paige didn't start off this way. She started off as a hate who really didn't even have that experience that you sometimes hear about where people describe feeling from a very early age, like their trap in the wrong body. I mean, I love playing with J.I. Joes.
And as a teen too, he was a boy obsessed with the things that most boys are obsessed with. I always thought about women. You never thought you were. Uh-uh.
Still, Paige says there were these strange, momentary flashes that were disturbing. I remember looking at girls and not just being attracted to them, but thinking that I was supposed to be them and wishing that I could kind of go over to the girl group and be accepted because that's where I felt I should be. But at least not so really inconsistent. It's not.
I didn't always feel that way. So Paige grows up, graduates from high school, goes to college, and then really starts to struggle. The flashes are still there, college is hard, Paige drops out and begins to feel really, really lost. And then in a somewhat odd place, Paige finds relief.
In the Navy. I love the discipline of it, the structure of it. First of all, for some reason, those flashes go way down. Why?
I don't know. I saw myself as being more of a guy than I ever did before. But really, it was while stationed at a naval base in Japan, that Paige found relief in a way that will be familiar to many of you. I walked around the corner and I saw her and she was just kind of bouncing around and she's very energetic.
It was love at first sight. Immediately I knew that there was something special about her. And even though Paige had never been a very aggressive person, Paige completely went after this girl. I was smitten.
I was immediately smitten. And it worked. We were just like this. We were so in tune with one another.
I mean, we knew each other so good we could communicate with a series of clicks. Like what do you mean? And like the other person would answer back and be like, you know what we were like getting at. And sometimes it would mean like, do you mean like how are you or it could just be acknowledging that you're there?
So began the best chapter in Paige's life. I can't believe you're recording this. They get married, they get married, they get California, got a home, a car, a steady job. I had everything that I ever wanted.
Okay, what does that mean? It depends on the context. And then Paige turns 30 and all of a sudden starts feeling really, really tired. I mean, just coming up the steps I would run out of breath.
So Paige goes to see the doctor. And eventually what they finally figured out was that my body thought it'd be a really fun joke on me to stop producing testosterone. Basically at 30 years old, I had the testosterone level of an 80 plus year old man. So the doctors put Paige on testosterone replacement therapy and very quickly the exhaustion went away.
Physically I felt like I had before. But the flashes, they're back with a vengeance. I would have those feelings again where I thought I was supposed to be female except it wasn't, there wasn't anything subtle about it. It was a very strong feeling that something had gone terribly wrong in that I was not supposed to be male.
In these moments Paige would look down at her body, this hard torso covered in hair, and feel utter disgust. Imagine you woke up and your body was a cockroach. It was really unsettling. Did you start talking to your wife about it?
No, I was terrified. I thought I was going crazy. I didn't want her to think less of me. And it was something that I kept inside.
Paige started telling me that occasionally, during this period, to ease this feeling of disgust that came over her when she flipped into female mode but had a male body. She would secretly put on women's clothing. She felt a need to cover this body that felt so wrong with clothes from the right sex. I was just trying to do anything I could to make myself feel more female.
So I started asking questions about this. Do you remember the first time you decided to do that? But suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changed. I don't want to talk about it.
So after that would happen. So like you... Do you need to take a break? Yeah, I'm cool.
Yes, you're cool. You wanted to break your neck or your nose? Paige got up and disappeared around the corner. I could hear the faucet running in the bathroom.
And when she came back she wanted me to know something. If it matters I flipped back in a gay mode. Okay, so is that why you don't want to talk? It's just kind of like...
It's just different now. You flipped into a gay mode. Was it when your eyes closed that you flipped into a gay mode? I don't know.
So are you in a gay mode right the second? So is it hard to answer questions? Mm-hmm. Okay.
I'll be okay. I'll be okay. I'll be okay for a while. Neither of us quite sure what to do.
It did feel like there was a difference in Paige. Even in the way that she talked. So how are you doing? I'm good.
Are you male or female? No. Okay, is that okay? Yeah, let's do this.
Actually we're going to do it in just one minute after we take a quick break. This is Candice currently calling from her bicycle. Radio Lab is supported and part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.
More information about Sloan at www.sloane.org. Thank you. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life. I've never been a big fan of FEMA.
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This is Radio Lab bringing you a preview of the new NPR show in Disabilia and we'll continue with our story about Paige Evan-Droth. Here's Elise Spiegel to pick up the tale. Paige explained that the next chapter of her life involved finding a name for what was going on with her. By gender.
People who consider themselves both female and male at the same time. She found it on a by gender website and though only a small portion of the people on the website described flipping like Paige, it felt like this could be an explanation. The way I felt was other people felt that way and it was real. It wasn't just some weird psychological construct.
But with this validation came a horrible realization. Paige had to tell her what. I told her that I needed to talk and so I sat down in separate chairs. I think I was on a couch and she was on a recliner.
Paige was terrified. She was certain that her marriage would be over. She was very visibly upset. Sorry.
I was just begging her to not leave and to accept me for who I was. I couldn't. I had lived for her for so long and I didn't know who I could live with her. But to pay to surprise, her wife said it's okay.
She told me that everything was going to be okay and that we're going to make this work and she wasn't going to give up on me. Paige couldn't believe how lucky she was. Together they walked into this space between categories. Some mornings Paige would wake up male, the husband her wife had married.
That man would put on male clothes. Go to work. Other mornings Paige would wake up female, a woman trapped in this strange body. And they were doing it, helping each other through life in this odd space.
But one problem remained. As much as the two of them could get used to the idea of flipping, Paige couldn't get used to the physical experience of it. I came out of the shower one day and I'd gone in and I came out in female mode. She was standing there beginning to dry off.
And I saw myself in the mirror and I was so disgusted that I threw up. These kinds of feelings happened all the time. Now Paige had come across a potential cure for this, a sort of home spun remedy that some of the bi-gender folks had written about online. It involved hormones.
Paige would go on estrogen to make her body more endrogynous. Bring my body to an endrogynous point where I could present both as either male or female. Apparently it would reduce the shock of being thrown between categories so violently if her body was in a permanent state of in-between. So Paige decided to try it.
She began estrogen treatments. And it worked. The first time I got my first injection, I just felt this immense relief like I was finally on the right track. There was no longer the same physical discomfort.
But as Paige finally was becoming comfortable in her own body, Paige's wife started to turn away. They began sleeping in different bedrooms. It was almost like we were becoming strangers. And there just came a point where I realized that she wasn't suddenly going to accept you.
She tried really hard. But it's really difficult. When things don't have a clear category, that's scary. For us all.
They're a sheep we don't recognize. I felt like a monster. I felt like an terrible alien creature that had come down and taken over her husband's life and taken him away from her. One night I heard her crying in the bathroom and I asked her if everything was okay.
She said no. And she said it's over isn't it. And I think the next day she told me to move up. I mourned for my marriage the same way.
I would mourn for like, you know, the death of, you know, my mother or someone who I was really really close with. You can kind of see right now. It's really hard to talk about still. Sitting there in Paige's apartment, the afternoon light fading in the window behind her, I was just struck by how hard her situation was.
It's not just the fact that Paige wasn't in one clear gender category. She was stuck between categories in other ways as well. In the weeks before and after our visit, I had called around trying to get a handle on how to make sense of this experience that people like Paige describe. I had spoken to all kinds of people, therapists, historians, gender researchers, but it seemed like a lot of the people that I spoke to were convinced that the experience I was describing didn't really exist.
There's no way they're actually flipping between genders. I was told by two different gender researchers in two different European countries. These people are just psychotic. Both of the men who told me this had worked in gender research for their entire professional careers and they sounded extremely confident.
A gender therapist in San Francisco was also skeptical, but she had a different reason. These people are actually just normal, trans-gendered people, she explained, in the sense that they are experiencing the same things that any transgender person experiences. They've just developed a different way of describing it. Same experience, different labels seem to be her argument.
In other words, it's not just that Paige was existing between genders. The problem was even more profound. Most of the people that I talked to didn't seem to believe that the experience that Paige was saying that she had was real. Like, why do you think this happened to you?
Where does this come from in you? I don't know. I've stopped asking myself that because it doesn't matter anymore where it came from. I just kind of am what I am.
When we talked, Paige seemed as mystified by what was happening to her as anyone else, and her experience, she concluded, was her experience. There wasn't that much she could do about it. My biggest worry is that I'm never going to really fit in to, like, female spaces or male spaces. I'm afraid that I'm going to be living the rest of my life in some kind of weird gender twilight zone.
What will you do then? I don't know. I'll keep on doing my best. More than a year after we first met, I called Paige up on the phone and wanted to check in and see how she was doing.
And it was clear from the very first moment she answered that something was different. Her voice sounded different. Higher. Hi, can you hear me?
Hi, yeah, I can. Turns out, about six months after I went to San Diego, the flipping started to fade, and eventually Paige had settled full time into being a woman. The last time Paige had flipped into being psychologically male was in the fast food restaurant Five Guys. And she said it took her completely by surprise.
I've gotten so used to constantly saying, like, I am, you know, now, as a woman, that I thought it had stopped, and I remember I flipped really hard. It was really bizarre. I felt like I was wearing a really uncomfortable sweater or something like that. Now Paige couldn't really explain why the flipping had stopped any better than she could explain why it had started.
She said she thought the estrogen hormones she'd taken to make her body more androgynous probably had affected her. And Laura Case, the researcher who's been studying people like Paige, agrees that hormones do affect the brain. But still, there was no way to be absolutely certain. But there was one thing that Paige seemed absolutely clear about.
Living in one category, even if it's a category that's often discriminated against like transgendered women, is way better than having no category. Oh my goodness, yes. It's so much easier. It's so much more manageable in the world.
To me, it makes so much more sense. Now Paige knew what she was supposed to do, where she could place her foot. She didn't have a wife, but she did have that. What I really want to know is that I had never heard of anybody like this.
I didn't know this was in the human experience. Are there a lot of these people? Is there like a teeny teeny handful or is this a very... So I have spoken to maybe sex people who have alternating gender incongruity, who flip, who are there by gender and they kind of move between their genders in this way.
Because there are lots of different ways of being by gender, right? Just click thing. I never... Yeah, I think it was surprising.
I mean, the other people you spoke with, was it also sudden like that? Yes. And that too. Yes.
Any idea what causes those sudden flips? That's exactly what Laura Case is trying to understand. I think she has about 26 of these people that she has been talking to. And so she has been talking to these people, but I don't know that it's clear yet.
It could be biological or it could be a different kind of disorder. It could simply be a different way of conceptualizing an experience that a lot of different people have. We can't even say this is a condition with a strong, in sharpy marker declaration of now there's a name and now this exists. There could be hundreds or thousands of people privately sitting with this.
And if that name came out, maybe they'd suddenly have a place. But the name right now itself is like in gray translucence. What is the name again? Alternating gender incongruity.
What you're saying is this is really a mystery. You don't really know what happened in the story, really. Nor did the scientists. I mean, that's it is in no category.
All right. All right. Talk to you later. If you want to check out Invisibile, you can tune in on the radio.
They'll be airing a bunch of episodes on a couple of hundred stations in the next few weeks. But the best way to find them is to go to iTunes or Stitcher or whatever and check out the podcast. They have hours coming up about fear about trying to control your thoughts. It's all pretty fantastic.
Check them out. Invisibile, thanks for checking us out. Radio Lab. We'll see you in two weeks.