Diana Fleischman
Evolutionary psychologist and academic researcher
Diana Fleischman brings an evolutionary lens to the gender debate that challenges both progressive orthodoxy and knee-jerk dismissal. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, she argues that the unease many Irish people feel around gender ideology is not bigotry but biology — and that understanding disgust as a signal, not a shame, may be essential to an honest national conversation.
Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist whose research into disgust sensitivity, sex differences, and human mating behaviour has accumulated more than two thousand academic citations. She has held academic posts in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and is known for her willingness to apply evolutionary frameworks to questions that mainstream academia treats as untouchable — including the psychology of gender nonconformity and autogynephilia.
In the episode Disgust, Dating, and Autogynephilia: An Evolutionary Psychologist's Taboo Takes (June 2025), Fleischman joins host Stella O'Malley to examine what our biological instincts reveal about the current gender debate. Drawing on decades of research into disgust as an evolved emotion, she argues that the visceral reactions many people experience around gender ideology are not mere prejudice but meaningful signals — information about norm violation and social cohesion inherited from deep evolutionary history. The conversation ranges across autogynephilia as a phenomenon understood through evolutionary psychology and the way taboo-enforcement operates in ideologically captured institutions.
For Irish listeners, the episode lands with particular force. Ireland's public institutions — from the HSE to the Department of Education — have adopted gender-affirming frameworks at speed, often without genuine public deliberation. Fleischman's approach offers Irish parents, school counsellors, clinicians, and policymakers a vocabulary beyond the binary of bigot or believer: one that takes evolved psychology seriously as evidence, not anecdote. That reframing speaks directly to the practitioners and professionals Stella O'Malley addresses throughout this podcast.
What distinguishes Fleischman in the wider gender-critical space is her empirical discipline and refusal to moralize. In a country where public debate on gender has repeatedly collapsed into accusation rather than argument, her citation-grounded, scientifically curious tone models the kind of rigorous, good-faith exchange that Ireland — its clinicians, its schools, its legislature — badly needs.
