Perrin Ireland

speaker

296 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Perrin Ireland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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How to Be a Better Human · Why should you care about animal sex? (w/ Perrin Ireland) · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

So sex is which animal makes which gamete or sex cell.

Sex is which animal contributes sperm to a copulation.

Sex is which chromosomes an animal has.

And then I talked to a different scientist who would have accidentally stumbled on a finding that upended that.

And it was really cool to be with these really smart people that have devoted their lives to these animals who were staying in that humility too.

And to get comfortable with them in, there's not an agreed upon definition inside the academy of biological sex, which means when we see it used outside the academy to restrict human rights, that's a lie.

That is not some scientific classifiable statement that's being used.

And I think Sam Sharp put it the best when they said to me, you know, each scientist knows what sex means for their study species.

We just don't all do the work every time of clarifying what specifically we mean when we say the word when we go back out in our journal papers or to speak to the community.

Well, so hyenas have been in long term relationship with indigenous peoples in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years.

Right.

And the way that they've been talked about

is sort of in this liminal space.

They're shapeshifters.

They're moving between worlds.

Sometimes they're not trusted for that reason.

Sometimes they're revered for that reason.

And Aristotle is really obsessed with them because the legend about them when he is doing his research is that they're hermaphrodites.

And this is a word that is still in use in science that we never use to apply to humans that is often used to describe an animal that has multiple sexual functions in one body at one time.

And there's different ways to categorize hermaphrodites within the sciences.

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