The Female Origin of Species

Quinn: [00:00:00] How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? And why the hell are we just finding out about it now? That's today's big question, and my guest is Cat Bohannon. Cat is the author of the incredible new book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution”. Kat is also a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative in cognition. Kat's essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American, Non Required Reading, The Georgia Review, Story Collider, which we love, and Poets Against the War. Look, for a very long time, scientists ignored everything about the female body, except for how to have sex with it.

And even that, they barely understood. Still mostly barely understand. [00:01:00] They didn't think or care to ask helpful questions like, how did we get here? And what else about the female biological body is different from the traditional male body? Why might those differences matter? And how might they have gotten us to where we are today?

Which is to say atop the animal kingdom, for better or worse, and a huge outlier in about 500 different ways from even our closest primate cousins. Why are we so weird? Thankfully, Kat's book asks all of those questions, and I genuinely cannot wait for you to hear this conversation and read her book, too.

Welcome to Important, Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human, like Kat, who's working on the front lines of the future, or 200 million years of the past, to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone.

Along the way, you and I will discover some tips and strategies and stories you can use to get involved and to [00:02:00] make a better world.

Cat, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me from Seattle today. How cold, you were saying it's chilly for Halloween. It was 80 here yesterday. I'm in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, but it's like 50 today with a drizzle, which feels a little like Seattle.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah. Yeah. Seattle is normally about that right now because climate change is real.

It's actually weirdly cold and the summer was weirdly hot, but we'll find out as time goes on how it all progresses. Thankfully, the smoke season was short this year. Because that's a thing now. Just to open your show with an upper.

Quinn: No, I know. Oh boy, do we bounce back and forth between them. We frame every problem as an opportunity.

But similarly, my wife very truly lovingly tells people that I have the ability to be the bummer in any conversation, which is, people are like, Oh, what a warm fall we've had. And I'm like, don't say it. They're having a nice time. Don't blow it for him. So yeah, I totally get it.

Cat. We like to start with one question. I [00:03:00] think I've asked just about every guest this question, and it's a little tongue in cheek, but it also usually gets something very interesting and thoughtful. Cat, why are you vital to the survival of the species? And I encourage you to be bold and honest here.

Cat Bohannon: Why am I vital to the survival of the human species?

Quinn: I guess you could pick a different species. No one's ever actually mentioned that part before. That's fascinating.

Cat Bohannon: The tricky thing about my book is that I'm covering 200 million years more or less of mammalian evolution. There's a lot of species in there, right?

Because the body isn't a thing so much as something which is happening quite chaotically. Yeah, that you can measure a number of different ways. But what it does do fundamentally is it explodes backward through time, right? Because many of the processes that continue on in you, of course, began a very long time ago, more than 200 million, really, but I took that usefully, arbitrary cutoff date which sounds long, but isn’t, and then on and on, and the branching off, and the ways in which the things which are happening [00:04:00] start to change just a bit, until finally, a hell of a long time later we arrive at humanity, which is 300, 000 years, more or less.

Also debatable, but roughly. How am I vital to those 300, 000 years? I'm not at all, except in the sense that I am one of many who then perpetuate the species in various ways, not only by reproduction, though it's true that technically these are the bodies, these uterus-having bodies, that make the babies, that make the babies, that make the babies.

So literally, this is where evolution happens. Okay, cool. Except, of course, we're a hyper hypersocial species, hypersocial primate species, which means we have these deep, interconnected social lives, which means actually whether or not you're even trying, everybody, whether or not you're actively reproducing, is influencing the trajectory of the species.

So we are all, in fact, equally vital to the species and equally, totally inconsequential because our lives are, what, if you're lucky, 80? Like maybe, like my generation, [00:05:00] probably much more likely to get to a hundred, but let me not jinx it. Let me knock on wood without making that sound, but right. Yeah.

But no, all of us, including the ones listening are essential to the species and completely inconsequential at the same time.

Quinn: That's great. I feel like we're done here. Thank you. That's so great. Well done.

Cat Bohannon: You're welcome for that hot minute of philosophy.

Quinn: No, I really appreciate it. That's the story of my life is my children, I'm sure, similar to yours, never stop asking questions, and I will either try to answer them earnestly, or I will then answer with a minute of philosophy, at which point, like, their eyes have glazed over and they're just walking away, or occasionally I find myself doing that because I said so, or because the sky is blue.

Much to their chagrin. I appreciate that one minute of philosophy. Thank you. Let's talk about your book for a moment, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove Two Hundred Million Years of Evolution”. It is fantastic. So this is going to seem a little strange, but I think it really makes sense. So it is about as comprehensive a book as [00:06:00] it can be without being an encyclopedia, right?

You spent, I believe I read somewhere a decade on it. Is that correct? Like really doing the work?

Cat Bohannon: Yeah, about a decade. That's a little over that when I got the book deal, which actually was the same month of my life, my little life, when I had to pass my qualifying exams for the PhD at Columbia and do my prospectus defense, which involves not simply knowing your stuff, but then deeply trying to please extremely intelligent people you're intimidated by.

So that happened the same month I got the book deal, which was unrelated for the most part to the PhD. So then I was running those in parallel, the book on one side of my brain, but not technically a side, but then the PhD on the other, oh, and I got pregnant a lot during those 10 years.

In many ways, this book is like crawling inside my head in my 30s. Yeah.

Quinn: I don't, I wouldn't want to see a book of that of mine, but I appreciate that perspective. It's like 596 pages or so. It's 15 hours of audio. I did both and I want to come back to the audio, which I'm really [00:07:00] excited about.

But it reads like it's 200, which is both a blessing and a testament to your abilities, obviously. But I feel like I got, I don't know, 800 pages of knowledge out of it. To contextualize the past few months here, we've had on a few folks that I think are really interesting compliments to this or parallels to this.

One was Riley Black who wrote her book The Last Days of the Dinosaur.

Cat Bohannon: Oh my God, she's wonderful. I love her stuff.

Quinn: Outrageous. So talented. We had a wonderful conversation. She's so great. Rachel E. Gross, who wrote Vagina Obscura.

Cat Bohannon: I know, what a beautiful little book. It's so great.

Quinn: Such a beautiful book. Had a great conversation. But there's a third one that doesn't really, it's one of those, like, which of these doesn't seem to make sense. So we had on this author, and his name is Nicholas Dagen Bloom, and he wrote a book called The Great American Transit Disaster. And it is this deep dive into how he got here, which is just a car nightmare, and it's overwhelming evidence that transit divestment was a choice, not a destiny, really, with a lot of choices along the way in a [00:08:00] bunch of different places and a bunch of actors involved. And it's very detailed and it's very comprehensive. And I kept thinking about it while I was reading yours because you've painted such a detailed and emotional and funny picture of how and why we got here, but it's also clear like, in Nick's book, that part of the reason your book needed to exist was because not doing the research or compiling it into a book like this was also a choice we made, a series of choices we've made, right? We have, just like as Rachel has talked about, we have just basically declined to study so much of the female body.

When did you realize, as like you said, a book about your 30s, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do all 200 million years, and every single part of the female body and how it's evolved over time. When did you realize, like, like Nick was like, look, if someone's gonna write about transit, I'm gonna do the whole thing.

When did you do that? Yeah.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah. I first learned about the issue of the male norm in [00:09:00] biology, which is to say that we largely are studying male bodies when we're studying mammal species, whether you're all the way down in rodents, we do a lot of terrible things to rats, or whether you're moving up through dog or pig or non human primate, or all the way up to human clinical trials when we're doing biomedical research, that we're mostly studying males.

I learned about that a few years before I got the book deal, and I kept waiting for it. I kept being like, oh, someone's totally gonna write this. Someone's totally gonna do this book. Like, I'm just chillin' at Columbia, my PhD is unrelated to this. I'm just gonna, I'm waiting. No! Just literally no one.

Literally no one. At all. Anywhere. Back in 2011, 2012. Was doing this. Okay, fine. Fine, fine. I will do it. Now, but the thing is that as I was figuring out how to do such a thing, it seemed to me that quite often when we talk about the biology of female bodies, we're only talking about reproductive organs.

Now, part of that is because in biology, when we're not studying males, it's because [00:10:00] we wanted to ask a question about the freaking ovary, or the uterus, or something very specific to how we think about female bodies, which is down in the crotch zone basically, depending on your species, right? So it seemed to me I was like oh, but I was reading about sex differences in the liver, people.

I was in hepatic function. I was just a second ago reading about sex differences in adipose tissue. I was just because I have one of those minds that once it goes on a topic, it just wants to dig, dig, right? And so, I'm thinking, okay, while it's true that evolution works in ways that especially rewards or punishes things which affect reproductive outcomes.

What I mean by that is like if you get something that knocks on your ability to make babies, that's way costlier from an evolutionary fitness point of view than something that affects your ability to, I don't know, have more than one toe, right? So there's just more pressure.

There's more pressure on a system, right? But it's not the case that everything that's putting pressure on reproduction is coming from the reproductive organs themselves. And it's likewise not the [00:11:00] case that everything else that's evolving is directly tied to reproductive outcomes. It may be a step or two away, right?

So in other words, if we want to talk about sex differences, we have to think of a bigger picture than just the vag. If you want to do it comprehensively I mean, there's nothing wrong with writing about the vag. She's great, but like, there's more to say. So yeah, so I knew that was the case, but I also knew that it can be a lot to think about 200 million years.

It's a hot minute, so how do you actually tell that story? And so for me, I wanted to think about it the way a biologist does, right? The reason I start with early mammals isn't simply that it's usefully the beginning of the narrative time, the beginning of that so-called story, which does help a reader, sure, but it's also because the entire reason we have model species to do things that might eventually produce application in a targeted, something to help out humans, right?

The reason that we do terrible things to rats isn't simply that we don't care about rats. They're cute, but it's true [00:12:00] maybe we care less. It depends if you've lived in New York. I've seen one crawl out of a toaster. That's just my own trauma. It's more that there's an assumption of conservation of traits.

There's an assumption that when you see things happening in a model rat, the assumption is that indeed those analogs may well carry through to our bodies. Indeed there is something to learn here by doing it first in rat. And then if you have an idea of what might go into biomedical application, like you want to test a drug, you're going to move up the evolutionary chain.

You're going to get closer and eventually do human trials. You don't usually start in human trials, right? So in that way structuring the book the way I did with each chapter for a trait evolving when it does in evolutionary time isn't just a narrative device, it's literally how we think in biology.

It's like that's actually what we do when we're testing shit.

Quinn: I love that. It's one of those, if you almost have to do it that way, right? Or else you leave out like you said, because these things happen sequentially and that's how we think in biology, it would have [00:13:00] been a disservice and probably made the narrative much more difficult to tell if you left out earlier things that more recent traits were dependent on or vice versa, right?

To not have the full context of this and then this. There were so many fascinating things that when you think about it, for 10 seconds, it makes so much sense, like standing up made our organs push down on everything else, and that may, how did that affect both male and female reproductive systems, it's like, of course, like, why don't we ever talk about that?

But what does that actually mean in the context? And how long did that take? And what did it mean? All we talked about here is externalities. Like, what did that mean for X, Y, and Z, and you did such a wonderful job of that. Thank you.

Cat Bohannon: And it also means that you get to do the fun stuff that goes against what we often assume of our body to be true, right?

For example, if you don't know anything about the evolution of milk, you may not know that we didn't have nipples for a long freakin’ time. We did not know that!

Quinn: Among the best sections. It was incredible. It just came out.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah! Yeah, just extruded, squeezed out, leaked, if you will, depends on what metaphor is less gross to [00:14:00] you, was kind of gross, but yeah, the duck billed platypus does not have a single nipple, does, however, lactate, and the weird little duck billed babies are just slurping that off of her fur, these mammary patches of hairs that are on her lower abdomen, and they're still hatching from eggs.

Still hatching from eggs, and then licking off her tummy, right? And those are the monotremes. If you don't think in terms of evolutionary time, you'd be like that's some weird shit, but actually, okay, it is some weird shit but, it actually, oh because that's the actual forward motion of time there.

And the monotremes weirdly just kept hanging out in that little pocket of evolution as opposed to what some of our ancestors did.

Quinn: So this is one of the things, if not the thing I loved the most out of the book, is how you contextualized not just Homo sapiens versus prior versions and some of those coexisted for a little while, but also among mammals and primates more specifically, but also the animal kingdom, because again, it's easy to look at other, like you said in a [00:15:00] nutshell at other animals or at the duck-billed platypus, which is like 10 different animals just like literally thrown together.

It's completely ridiculous. It's easy to look at them and be like they're fucking weird. And then to be like, actually, no, you contextualize it. However, also, like, we're really weird. And it's part of the reason we got here, but also, like, it's not ideal in some ways, right?

Cat Bohannon: No, not well designed.

In fact, not designed at all, turns out. Dunno. It's absolutely true. It's weird that we are the way we are, that we, language fails, actually. The word weird isn't quite weird enough, but let's run with that. You know what I mean? For how we're mammals. But it does help us frame things like, is the male nipple vestigial?

Not exactly, sort of, what do you mean by vestigial? In other words, like, the reason it's so weirdly easy for bodies that have a Y chromosome to lactate, is because we’re mammals. And how we build a mammalian[00:16:00] torso basically, a mammalian front chest wall and front abdominal wall in mammals, is so basic to our body plans as mammals that it probably would have been really hard to just get rid of that in the nipple having species on the male body. Like what? No just run with that. That's a good build.

Let's just run with that. That's all good. And likewise, should such a mammal need to lactate for one reason or another later on. They got that. Now, that said, for any of your listeners who have a Y chromosome and are not trying to lactate, if you do start lactating, you may well have cancer and go see somebody about that.

But if you're trying to, it actually turns out to be quite simple.

Quinn: I love that. As opposed to, what is it? It's like the first two weeks of when the embryo is developing, like there's the little bit of the tail and then it goes away. Like at some point it was like nobody needs the tail anymore.

But like you said, nipples hung around because, one, half of everyone, just over half of everyone still needs them, and sometimes the other half, like, can actually find them useful, which is crazy, so why not [00:17:00] keep it around? It's pretty efficient.

Cat Bohannon: Not just decorative little fun spots on your chest, like, actually, maybe.

Also, not to say sexuality isn't a deep part of our health, it absolutely is. I just mean that not all of our sexy time directly has to do with babies, but sometimes it does.

Quinn: Sure. So I really love, we've reached the stage of parenting where my wife and I, who are very imperfect. She's a thousand times more capable than I am in more or less everything, but the point where now we do the thing where we correct our children's grammar at the dinner table and as usual, like for us, they do not enjoy it.

But it's why I really loved the very specific wording of your subtitle and how that goes through the book. It's not 200 million years of the female body in human evolution. It's how the female body drove 200 million years of evolution. And again, that's a really specific perspective. At what stage was that in the book proposal while you were also doing your PhD?[00:18:00]

That it was, hey, this is actually what drove it and still continues to do so, how did you get to that specific angle of it?

Cat Bohannon: So subtitles are a thing that often get workshopped with a number of different players later on in putting a book out. We had the first part of the title, Eve, for a very long time, because that's the frame, right?

That we have an Eve for each chapter, which is a last common ancestor or an exemplar that is like the last common ancestor for that specific trait. Okay, cool. So we know about the Eve. The subsequent framing, I knew I was going to do 200 million years, so that's early mammalia forms forward, but I wasn't sure about the idea of drivers until I had been in the research for a while, right?

And that way I let my own research path guide me. Because often what seemed left out of the story of our evolution was the idea that the female would be a driver. We seemed like a secondary character a lot of times. We seemed like, I guess we put some sperm in a thing. We were just we were there.

Quinn: She's a rib, right?

Cat Bohannon: We were there to be fought over. That seemed to be a big story a lot of writers [00:19:00] like to do, I guess we lactated, but we weren't like major players and that's, one, not really how evolution usually works with sex species, but also two, definitely not how it works in mammalian species, where we have this extra weird, buggy, taxing thing that we do to make the babies the way that we do.

Where females are really, really drivers in many cases of whether a species is going to go one way or another. So, I was like okay many of the stories of how our bodies came to be the way they are absolutely female bodies being not just passive members, but drivers of this evolution.

Quinn: When did you figure out sort of the storyline of how you're going to incorporate that with these various Eves over time, again, some of which are a little more famous than others, and some of them are not, as archaeology and anthropology go along. So, tell me about deciding, like, each of the chapters, like, hey, this is the most important piece of the puzzle for this period, and defines the rest.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah, absolutely. In some ways it was quite simple, in that[00:20:00] we have taxonomy. Thanks, Linnaeus. And so we are Homo sapiens, which isn't simply a useful, cute term that's, a vague bit of Latin, but is also a concept that we have in biology that says, ah, we are a member of these groups, and the traits of these groups place us as such.

It's a categorization, yeah? Most basically, or at least for the sake of this book, we are mammals, which in paleontology we say, okay, that begins roughly here. There are lizard like mammals or mammalian like lizards, the Theraspids before. But you know, lactation seemed to be really where I wanted to start this story 'cause that's where our strategies for baby making really started to shift in this deep, fundamental way. Before we were kind of weird lizards, still laid eggs and didn't actually have a really big story. So it's like, okay. And then going up the tree as it were, not in a teleological sense, but just here's where shit changed kind of thing.

We, okay, we're mammals. Okay, sure. So, we make milk. All right. But now we're gestating internally. Now we're not laying eggs [00:21:00] externally. That's the next big step in our story for how we're changing our body plan, how we're changing what we're doing, especially for the female, but also the female for everybody else.

That's going to be when we split off into marsupials and placentals, and marsupials, for those who aren't familiar, pouch, us, no pouch. Yeah? Okay. Kangaroo, not a kangaroo. Yeah? But actually, as you see in the chapter really big stuff changed internally also associated with that, including now we only have one vagina instead of multiple, which is, fun. Personally, I regret it. Could have had uses for multiple vaginas, but I'll stick with the one I suppose, no choice. Yeah, and on up the tree. You get to your primates, which is why we have the sensory array we do, some of us call that a face, right? We arrived later into the hominins and now we're walking upright we go and we go when we go and these are all key branching moments that place us not only where we are in the taxonomic tree but in many cases also are where we say ah, this is something that's really deep and [00:22:00] true of humanity. Ah, this is something that's important in what we are and what our bodies are, both in deep biology, but also in how we conceptualize ourselves, right?

But since we've neglected for so very long to say, ah, and this is why female physiology is really a major feature of this thing, right? Not because gender isn't diverse, for God's sake. Gender’s all over the place, it’s wonderful, the glittering array of diversity is there.

It's not that there isn't intersex folk. Yes, absolutely. It's fantastic. It depends which tissue you're asking questions about. However, the most basic variable, the most clear and obvious thing that we've been neglecting is just that binary right there. And just like we have two eyes in order to triangulate points in the distance, right?

You need to actually have a good understanding of the basic sex differences before you can triangulate an understanding of all the glittery array of what’s intersex and more complicated than that.

So it was always the plan, then, to divide up the chapters in such a way. What I [00:23:00] ended up writing about in the chapters was shaped by my deep dives into the literature, right? To see what seemed to be the most important story and what was just super fucking fun to write about or what was something that was still under debate, but I felt like the debate was important, like I let the research drive me there, but the basic frame of what are these chapters going to be about that I had from the beginning.

Quinn: So you were very candid and objective in the ways that you described that so many of the, when we talk about the paleontology and the biological changes over time, so many of the things in these, the Eves, the mileposts, like you said, the big things that really set us apart over time that we did were soft tissue, which is not a lot of what we dig up, right?

So that's a lot tougher. Again, when were you just like, Oh, I'm also dealing with the hardest version of this, which is like, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of uteri and boobs laying around or anything like that. There's not a lot of mammalian tissue that has survived.

Cat Bohannon: [00:24:00] When did I realize I might make bad life choices? Is that what we're getting at?

Quinn: Yeah, that's my other podcast and it's daily. It's usually just by myself.

Cat Bohannon: I had this really wonderful paleontologist, Dr. Advait Jukar. And because I took long enough on the book, I started working with him when he was still a grad student and working down at the Smithsonian.

And then I was still working and he was doing his postdoc up at the Yale Peabody. And now he's driving his own lab and he's out in Arizona, but he does most of his digs in India. So he's wonderful and he's a mammal guy, just conveniently. And he's the one who helped me pick the Eves. He helped sitting on the floor of my Upper West Side apartment in New York with a whole lot of takeout dumplings.

We were just going through the literature and figuring out, okay, who's the best exemplar here? Who do we know a lot about, both about their ecology, but also what do we know and what have you. And he helped me really dig in to get that frame of not just which species or, sometimes genus to pick, but also like, okay, what claims can we make and what can't we, [00:25:00] in the rocks versus clocks debate?

What do we know from molecular dating? What do we know from estimates of mutations in DNA and of what little we know there, and since he's more of a rocks guy and he's like, also, what do we have in terms of a pelvis? What can we actually learn here? What do we know? So, one of the ways that we estimate egg laying versus not egg laying anymore is not simply when genes for lactation arrive or estimated to arrive.

That's the clocks debate if you like. That's what we're doing by genetic dating. But when also do we see these basic changes in pelvic structure? That tend to be associated with one or another trait, right? So, I had to basically use both to arrive at, okay, here's where that's going to go.

Quinn: Sure. The pelvis, it's changing because not just because of a function, but also it's going to have to accommodate a different infrastructure inside, right? A different jigsaw puzzle because we're standing up or whatever it might [00:26:00] be. It's not just in isolation, nothing in this closed meat bag of ours happens in isolation.

Cat Bohannon: And a lot of it does end up, even in paleontology, they'll tell you a lot of it can be back solving from living species now, right? Where we literally look at basic pelvic structures among all mammals. And then we see what may have been derived from earlier forms by looking at fossil structures.

And that's part of how we determine where is this fossil that one has now found in the greater tree of life, right? Where do we put that? So we're both looking at what we've got now and estimating back, but also looking at other fossils and estimating forward. And it's a complicated process. And I'm glad that's not my specific job because it sounds hard.

Quinn: No, thank you. Thank you. But no, thank you. I think I mentioned this briefly, offline usually in an offhand way. I am privy to how very rough humans can have it for conceiving, caring and delivering babies. I'm thankful every day to have that perspective, personally, and on the wider world. [00:27:00] And would also like to not have it from some scars.

This book was the first time our, not just my and my wife's generally, but Homo sapien situation was put into context with the rest of the animal kingdom. And this really stuck out to me, and I haven't really been able to stop thinking about it in a world where, again, we call this science for people who give a shit, and so many of our problems or opportunities are because we're not doing basic shit, but we already have the technology or the tools or the processes for and meanwhile, everyone's like, there's a technological solve for this. And it's like there is an argument here that gynecology might be our most important invention when you consider how relatively terrible humans are compared to apes at reproducing and delivering babies. It seems as though gynecology, which correct me where I'm wrong here, again it was 200 million years, seems to go back thousands of years, might really be as important as it gets here.

So talk to me about [00:28:00] that understanding, because if we don't solve that, I'm not sure we're here, right? And you can't say that about every one of our innovations.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah, you wouldn't think that we would be bad at making babies. We have just recently hit 8 billion of us alive at the same time. Now, remember that of course, there will always be more dead people than there are presently living people, because that's how time and death work.

But besides the basic recycling of material in the planet, it is absolutely true that there are, oh my God, so many human beings right now. So it would seem on the face of it that we are good at it and no, we are objectively terrible at this. Compared to most other primates our pregnancies, births and postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to crippling and sometimes deadly complications than they are for those other primates, than they are for most other mammals. We actually suck at this. Now let me put a little star in that and say it's really [00:29:00] sad to be a squirrel monkey. We're sad for her. Her fetus is likewise about 17 percent of her body weight when she comes to term.

So that's a problem for her and she's just suffering through that and that part of it is that she's real small, she makes big babies, but she also shares what we call the obstetric dilemma. We as human beings try to fit a watermelon size thing out of a lemon size hole. And if you've met fruit, that doesn't work so well, right?

Okay, so that's your mechanical problem. But actually, unlike the squirrel monkey, we have it a little bit worse in that our placentas are incredibly invasive. They dip all the way down into the mother's bloodstream. They're really, there's just this mesh of blood vessels interacting between the placental wall and the uterus in the human species and a few others, right?

And that's where you really get your complications, not simply because of the tearing when it has to detach. The majority of deadly outcomes are deeply tied to hemorrhage, [00:30:00] the sad and horrible thing. And we're doing the best we can with the miracle of gynecology to save it. But the thing about gynecology that I want to frame here is we're not just talking about the last couple hundred years where you've got a human woman on her back and maybe there are some stirrups and stuff and an unfortunate history with racism and eugenics.

So we'll just put that aside because that sucked, right? No, we're actually talking about the deep history of manipulating female fertility in order to help more females survive and thrive and more offspring survive and thrive. So Lucy, 3.2 million years ago, Australopithecine, furry little bitch, she's great.

She had a midwife. She had the exact same, well similar, obstetric dilemma that we do and I'm not the first to claim that. So the assumption is that she would have likewise needed midwifery to survive her terrible birthing process. But gynecology, as I'm defining it, extends outward from there. It's also behavioral workarounds that up or [00:31:00] down regulate fertility in a way that helps that local group better survive in their given environment, right?

So that's things like birth clustering, maybe your local food supply, your local culture, better rewards having more babies early on in your reproductive life, and then taking the time to raise those babies without the complications of having yet more of them along the way. Maybe you're going to be more like a chimpanzee and space it out every four to six years, which the majority actually is.

Today's hunter-gatherer societies do, which is not to say that they stand in for the human past, every living culture is by definition contemporary. However, maybe a hunter-gatherer lifestyle better rewards spacing out your kids over a lifespan which is often gained by extended breastfeeding because it downregulates your ovulation, makes you less fertile when you breastfeed.

Okay, or maybe there are other ways of working around that, but those are all behavioral, right? Those are all putting your hands on the levers of [00:32:00] reproduction that are shaping your reproductive destiny. And there are also pharmaceutical interventions, which a long time ago are just plants, right?

Because, which actually is where aspirin comes from too, but it's where all of our drugs come from, the plant world having wars with one another, and so now we get things like medicine. Okay, fine. So, there are many different cases of primates seeming to use pharmacological interventions in their bodies.

Usually for parasites, cueing one leaf or another, that's known to help you purge worms from your butt, for the most part. Or sometimes the shape of the leaves, that's a thing that my book gets into. But there are also cases which are really tantalising, which seem to be tied to up or down regulating female fertility, even in primates, where you're eating a lot of estrogenic leaves, which actually are not only promoting sexual behavior, but also seem to be upregulating your fertility, which times according to local food supply. We've seen that in a number of primates. So [00:33:00] that's really interesting. And then there are other cases of primates eating plants that seem to have a bordifacient properties, down regulating your fertility. For a biologist that seems a little nuts, like, why would you want to do that? It's hard to say why. We shouldn't assume that they're thinking about things the way we are, or even presume consciousness. But they're doing it is the point. So, all of our things that we call gynecological behavior right?

Whether we're talking about medications, or local cultural behaviors, or direct things like helping that kid come out in an obstetric scenario, right? Or reducing your postpartum bleeding, all that stuff doesn't come from nowhere. It's not de novo, right? That's the thing when you think about the evolution of behavior.

Basic plans are already laid down before you start doing more human-like things with those previous behaviors. Yeah. So the reason it's so important, though, because I didn't quite answer your question, the reason it's so important is because if we suck at making babies, which we do just objectively work terrible at this, full stop, literally full stop because we may well have gone extinct.

If we hadn't found our workarounds, if we hadn't figured out how to work around this inherently hot garbage thing that we have to make babies with then it's very likely that we would not have been a great success story. Which goes counter to a lot of what we assume about what women are for.

Scare quotes around that. But also simply what it took for us to stop being a prey species of hominin and start being something that we measure more like a success. Maybe it wasn't the spears and the hunting really at all in the beginning. Maybe it was collaboratively finding solutions and workarounds to all of the ways that we were very much dying every time we tried to make babies.

Quinn: Thank you for all of [00:35:00] that context. I appreciate it. Part of my realization in doing this work, because most people come to us asking, how can I help? And it is usually rooted in affordability, access, or quality of air, food, water, healthcare, shelter, maybe power. And how those are all inarguable for all of us.

Doesn't matter if you're Oprah or me or anyone else. They're inarguable. But we've both made them less accessible, less qualitatively good for you, if not bad for you, less affordable, et cetera, et cetera. That's just most of society and externalities go from there. Creating and carrying and delivering and then the postpartum part of having a baby, if it actually happens, which often it does not, pretty much checks those boxes as well, on the list of like things we have to do. Not that any one person has to have a baby, but you get the point. Or else if we don't, the whole project stops. And there's been times you always read these reports every few years in paleontology. It's like, Oh, in the Ice Age, we were down to like [00:36:00] 1200 people. And you're just like, Jesus Christ. Can you imagine the pressure if they had the actual context of like, you've got to figure this out. There's only so many. But these two chapters weren't in the, this one did not follow the one we just talked about, but I really, I love these big sort of unanswered questions, right?

And the question about menopause is so fascinating to me. And it ties into that idea of what are women for, right? It's this idea of like, why does it exist when so few other animals have the same setup? And the way, again you built this narrative talking about like, Oh, it's this big open question, but hey, chimps are actually similar, but they die after 35 or maybe 50 in captivity.

And then you're like that's interesting because we used to die after 50 at a certain point before we got into agriculture a few thousand years ago or washing our hands and antibiotics. You can just go to Our World In Data and see life [00:37:00] expectancy jump. So that's interesting. But again, the bigger context, which I love, and what I loved in Riley's book and Rachel's and yours is the context of biology moves much slower than those things, than these sociological changes of, we need midwifery. What is your biggest takeaway from this idea of like, why does menopause exist for Homo sapiens?

Because there's the grandmother theory and all these different things. I love scratching all, at all of them, but I'm really not sure. It's so just fascinating.

Cat Bohannon: I think the reason that human beings have menopause is because our species in general evolved a number of different mechanisms to enable a longer lifespan.

Okay. And the ovaries haven't caught up. They're still running an old monkey plan. Actually, quite literally, that our ovaries are senescing, they're aging in [00:38:00] roughly the same way as they do in just about any primate across our lifespan, right? That we have, it's not that it takes exactly the same time, because indeed some primates die well before something like 30, but in roughly adjusted for lifespan, and this is tied to Susan Albert's work in 2013, and Hawks before her, this may well be the case that menopause isn't something originally that is selected for.

It's not that we are selecting to turn off the ovaries and then keep going, but rather it is revealed over time as we keep living longer, because remember our bodies aren't just one thing. They're not always running the same program as it were, right? So if your ovaries are still aging at an earlier, in an earlier pathway, roughly the same rate, but the rest of your body has somehow evolved ways which are supported by behavior, right?

But of all some basic mechanisms to resist aging to push off old age in a way that a chimp is not quite as well able to [00:39:00] then menopause is something that's revealed. It's like the worst, like, magic trick. The worst door prize for having stuck around the party longer.

Quinn: Congrats, you get to live longer, however.

Cat Bohannon You pull the cloth off the magic, and they're like, now you have menopause, ladies, enjoy. But the real trick of that is that you're just not dead. That's actually the story of menopause.

Quinn: And that's the trade off.

Cat Bohannon The trade off is, congratulations, lady, still alive every single year that you are, which is great.

And we have bodies that are slightly better at that than most typical male bodies. Because for some reason, it's really biologically expensive to have testicles. But that's another story.

Quinn: Boy, that chapter was very revealing as well. Made me feel great. Yeah.

Cat Bohannon: You're like, great, so why do I have these two little death nuggets?

Like, what's going on down there? And, it's complicated. It's complicated, but for the most part, yeah, female bodies slightly better and by many different measures at this longevity game in mammals, we get more frail, we human beings when we pass menopause, which is paradoxical, but again, still not dead like [00:40:00] that.

Still liking the not dying thing, right? So we have menopause because well, both because it may be useful in deeply social species, to have elderly members who are able to communicate knowledge in one way or another, because you don't always have to have language for that, to younger members of the group, when that social knowledge about the local environment is something that you need to have because you need to communicate things that didn't happen except for a really long time ago that the younger members weren't alive for.

Quinn: When the earth shakes, this is what to do.

Cat Bohannon: Exactly. Exactly. Or this food has run out because of a drought that hasn't happened in 30 freaking years.

Most of you weren't alive then, but I happen to know where the other food source might be. Which is also what's going down in orca, right? That are also menopausal the way we are. They're not helping take care of the grandkids that so much, right? They are leading the pod to other food sources that the others may not know as well.

Okay, cool. So that's what menopause is [00:41:00] for. Menopause is for old age being useful in social species. That doesn't mean it wasn't useful for other reasons as it became revealed. That doesn't mean it wasn't useful necessarily to be available for extra child care with our extra needy babies. I have two young kids and my mother-in-law has been watching my kids as I go on book tours.

So I have deep personal investment in that idea. It's wonderful and she's very nice to me more than anyone that could really deserve. But, originally evolved? No. Originally evolved because old people know stuff. And that helps.

Quinn: I love this perspective of it being revealed over time, it's a little bit like and again, you talked about how guys and cancer, woof, but this idea of, again, I'll put the Our World In Data life expectancy stuff. They've got a great chart with like certain innovations health wise for health span as they describe it over time and how we made these big jumps because you get to this point like with [00:42:00] cancer, right?

Which is of course there's 10, 000 different environmental factors why you can either have a cancer turned on or gain it in any way. But in many ways, it's just aging. It's part of who we are and what we do. And then you've got these questions like, why don't elephants get it as much? Anyways, different conversation.

But when we were dying at 30s and 40s, and maybe a little later than that, the percentage of the population who were going to get it was far fewer because we weren't living as long and so the percentage of female bodies that were going to get this menopause, which turns out has been programmed in for a while, like, just didn't get it because we didn't go that long.

But like you said, there are these societal co-benefits that we cultivated along the way, like midwifery, like the orca grandmas who are like, I'm not raising your kid, but I will show you, when the water gets too cold where we should go for the food because I'm the only one who knows, you're welcome.

And that is fascinating to me. It is hopeful to me in a world where we talk about, look, the U. S. [00:43:00] has atrocious maternal health statistics, right?

Cat Bohannon: Particularly for people of color. Yes.

Quinn: It's a nightmare. We had Representative Lauren Underwood on. She's got her Momnibus package that she has been working on forever, of course, because women of color are three to four times as likely to die in the year after.

And from her home state, women of color are six times more likely to die. If you saw that in anything else, twice as bad, you'd be like we've got a national emergency here. Six times. We're just letting that roll. The point is, again, making, carrying, delivering, and the year after, specifically especially for mental health, is a nightmare as it is, even with gynecology and all of our technology and all these innovations we've talked about, thousands of years of midwifery. Apparently Bonobos do it too. It's really great.

However, it's still really hard. And then we choose to make it harder for some people. And again, I see which you were just [00:44:00] talking about as hopeful, because again, part of my job here is framing problems as opportunities, as we can really do these things and make them better, because look at what we did when we had so much less information than we have now.

Cat Bohannon: Yes, absolutely true. There is no human being alive today who is truly untouched by the evolution of gynecology. There is absolutely no human society today that doesn't have some version of it, right? It's simply not the case. And there is no feral wolf boy, who is totally untouched by human culture and every human culture has some version of this, which also means that if we can accept it as something that is deeply true of who we are and what we do as a species, then it is always the most natural thing to support it. It is always the most true thing of humanity to promote it. And any given, good OBGYN will tell you it's not just the moment you're pregnant that shapes your reproductive destiny. It's not just that moment. If you're a person who can become pregnant, right? [00:45:00] It's actually your entire lifespan ahead of that time, which means that you actually get to help save lives at many different points along that path.

And that is also true for interventions to help save people of color who are vastly neglected in the OB sphere. Now, it's not simply because of not taking pain seriously, and it's not simply because of issues of access and just straight money. Absolutely, in our country, that's a thing, and we know that's a thing.

It's also true that racism itself is incredibly taxing on the cardiovascular system from birth, right? So since pregnancy is such a heavy load on bodies that become pregnant, yeah, on the cardiovascular system, part of what may be shaping some of these trajectories isn't just the moment of what goes down in the hospital when you're pregnant and give birth and have postpartum recovery if you're a person of color who's given birth, yeah?

It is [00:46:00] also everything that's happened to your literal heart being a person of color in a racist society over your lifespan, right? So, we say, for example, that women live longer than men in the U.S. Yep, we do. Some of that is a basic mammalian trait, right? It's not just jobs, it's not just lifestyle, it's also a basic mammalian trait.

However, as a white woman in the U.S., a white cis woman, I live, on average, ten years longer than the average black man in my country. Okay, so that isn't simply the basic mammalian trait. You can't actually tease apart the intersectional influences here, right? It is also what goes down with gun laws.

It is also what goes down with access to good medicine across a lifespan. It's also literally what all of that extra drip of cortisol over a lifespan that's encountering racism is doing to that cardiovascular system from birth forward, right? But the reason that's hopeful, as that should not sound hopeful, but the reason that's hopeful [00:47:00] is that means that every single time you work to make a society better, you're actually literally impacting these outcomes.

Every single time you find a site where you can do a thing, you're actually improving health. Even if you don't think you're directly working on health. So that's awesome.

Quinn: Yeah. That's a lot of what I say to people and it can drive them crazy or empower them, which is most of our issues or choices we've made or continue to make.

And we can make different ones. And that's great. Not that saying that it's that easy, of course, often it's very complicated. But the beauty of a bunch of interconnected systems, which now are so wildly connected in biological and societal ways that we can't even often visualize them, is that every time you improve a weak link, somewhere else in the chain is indirectly improved as well.

And when you're looking at gynecology, or health access, or Medicaid, or gun control, or racism, or maternal health. Every time you improve a piece of that, so many other things get better. We had a lovely woman, [00:48:00] Simmone Tate, a couple months ago, and she was, she worked in tech, and then she had a miscarriage, and they were like, okay, you had a miscarriage.

Have a nice day. If you check out, don't worry, you don't need a follow-up appointment. And then she's on the street, and she's going, wait a minute. Like, where is the standard of, oh, you go down this lane, here's all the support mechanisms, and this is the postpartum, which often doesn't include giving birth part of this thing, or you can't, you're not fertile enough, or you discover you can't carry a child, whatever it is, we're so poor at that, that she said fuck it, I'm a tech person, I'm going to train as a doula, and then she built a company called Poppy Seed Health, and it is 24/7 texting and it is all certified doulas, midwives, and nurses for anything, for conceiving, carrying, post-delivery, if you weren't able to deliver, whatever it might be, because again, as you said, we've got all these societal and biological things that we make it difficult, and then [00:49:00] all of a sudden, if you've never been around or been or tried to support someone who has, like, real postpartum depression.

Holy shit. And the fact that we're not accounting for that at every turn is it's a crime, but that's an entirely different thing. Anyways, I just really appreciated, again, the fun context of these things that you so illustrated and how over these two hundred million years, we've continued to deviate in certain ways and often alone.

Where everyone else stuck on the same track. But also these more serious things that helps me consider my own work. And again, like, how did we get here? Why did we get here? And why do we keep making these choices based on who we are and what 51 percent of the population clearly needs?

Which, like you said, is care for the systems of your body that are so very different from men and aren't just about sex or babies or both. So anyways, I really appreciated that. I want to come back to maybe my most important takeaway, which is, have you ever considered being an [00:50:00] actual professional audiobook reader?

Because I got, I read as usual when I've got one of these or when I've really got to deep research, I did audio and I also did Kindle so I can do my highlights and all this other shit. Sure. And I wasn't 20 minutes into this. I think it really stuck out to me because I was driving and it was the part where there was some quote, and maybe you have this more top of mind, where they talked about, it was about lactation and breastfeeding and something, something, something, they should breastfeed with wolves?!

I can't remember what it was.

Cat Bohannon: Oh yeah. Metlinger. Yeah. This German guy, he’s nuts. Yeah.

Quinn: It was the way you ended the reading on, like, a question, as, like, with wolves? Where I was, like, who, because I love my audiobooks, and I thought, who's this reader I've never experienced before?

Because now I'll just find readers and just go do their books. And I was, like, It can't be her, right? She can't do both of these things. And then I found out, I was like this is fantastic. I was so, that's why I've been so excited about this [00:51:00] conversation. Cause I was like, this is who she is.

Cat Bohannon: I’m so glad you liked it. It's the first time I had ever done anything like that. And it was like a home studio, not mine, up in Northern Seattle, which is to say there are many such studios where basically the basement of some guy's house is now a pro studio because bands and that's a thing. So it was a pro studio, but I was on a folding chair and like I had an iPad of my book, which was only visible to one of my eyes and I had a mic and I was like, all right, we got this.

We got 16. Okay, baby. And that's how that went down. And I flubbed, oh man, like every other paragraph it felt like, so editing's amazing. Yeah, so no, I've just never done it so I'm glad it worked. I'm glad it worked. I did the best I could.

Quinn: But I’m actually really curious about that part of it because again, we've got people who and I've read amazing books that aren't so great with the reader or the reader makes the work even better and this and that, but often it's not actually up to the author.

Most of the time it's not up to the author, it's up to the publishers. They go, no, we got these people and Steve is correct for this, whatever it is. [00:52:00] How did you get to actually read your book? Is that something you fought for? Or they were like, we're not paying for a lady to do this. Or how did you get there?

Cat Bohannon: Definitely the former, not the latter. Fought is too strong. It was more like I told my agent and my editors at Knopf, I was like, yeah, I should do this. I could do it. I'll do it. Why not do it? And then they thought about it, and then they found a director and the producer, and then they heard my recorded voice.

They were like, yeah, okay, cool. Yep. And it was pretty much like that. It was more like that. They would have definitely hired a guy, or probably a cis woman usually, in this case, because of the topic. But no, they said yeah. And so, then we were off to the races.

Quinn: And then you were in a basement for weeks on end?

Cat Bohannon: And then I was in a basement for a couple of weeks. Just, like a whole lot of time each day, just learning how to be a voice on a mic. Which was interesting. Which was fun. It was fun, actually. Before I was doing lab work, and doing my computational analysis for my PhD. I was a poet, I got an MFA in poetry and I taught poetry and I performed and [00:53:00] I was in some really bad bands in the late 90s because anyone who had any part of puberty in the 90s has been in a band and it was not a good band.

And that's just how we were teenagers in the 90s. And so like I was used to the sound of a voice is what I mean. And a lot of times when I write, the prosody and the cadence is very much it's just in there, man. It's just cycling through those rhythms. So in that sense, I had more of a sense of it maybe than some writers, but I don't know, maybe just luck.

Anyway, I'm glad you liked it.

Quinn: No it's not at all. And it comes across in the print as well. I started newspapers. It is in the writing. It's very conversational. It's very thoughtful and very introspective, but also playful when it can be. And so I love that in isolation, but also for those of you who are audiobook people, it's a fantastic read.

So I enjoy every version of it.

Cat Bohannon: Thank you so much, and it's so flattering to hear someone who's heard both. One of the things we had to do was decide which of the many footnotes to incorporate into the main script, which we pretty much had to [00:54:00] decide on the fly. I tried to get my producer to do that, and she's like, I'm just gonna include all of them then because I can't be that person.

So I had to decide literally as I'm reading, like, no, okay, we're cutting that one, or oh, we're gonna keep this one, because there's a lot of jokes in the footnotes, a lot of jokes, so we had to decide where, which ones would actually still work or were worth doing or, et cetera. So yeah, so that was a process too.

Quinn: And again, that's one of those really fun things about being an adult where you realize like you're like, I'll do this thing. And then you just don't realize the 45 other decisions that come down the line. So, whenever my kid's like, Oh, I can't wait for puberty and when I get a job, I won't have to do chores.

And I'm like, my friend, I can't tell ya, it's the Billy Madison thing, like, stay here as long as you can, because all of a sudden you're deciding which of your precious footnotes you have to cut or include in the audiobook that you're in some guy's basement who thought he was doing grunge, and he's not, and now he's 60, like, it's a whole, and it never stops.

Cat Bohannon: Totally. Yep. Although, I will say, I don't think I'm nostalgic for any particular part of [00:55:00] my life. I'm one of the weirdos that way. It's not like there's a part of childhood that calls out to me like, This was awesome! I was like, that was differently weird.

Quinn: Yeah, and that's what I've tried to express to my kid is, when he, and he'll have it easier just because he's so far straight and he's white and he's got healthcare and like, middle school is gonna be rough for everyone, but it's much worse for a lot of folks, so maybe don't wish for it. It's easy to think back to glory days and trivialize that, and then maybe go back and be like, no, I was just massively insecure at the time.

Cat Bohannon: Oh my god, so much, so much to prove. Yeah, totally. And it's very important to always like denigrate your past selves because that's how we maintain the illusion of progress. Because I am definitely awesome now because I just told you how I was terrible then, right? Because very clearly with the perspective that I have that I was terrible, now I'm great.

Yeah. So much has been learned.

Quinn: I find that is really increasingly helpful and I found, I'm 41 in a couple weeks and I have found just over the past couple [00:56:00] years how much more that is both proactively helpful, but also just generally like I'm like, oh what a moron, he of 10 or 20 or even truly like six months ago was and now what I've always enjoyed but now embrace much more is just like, I don't care.

Like I don't, on the one hand, like my poor wife, I just wear like T-shirts of like 5Ks I've run in. So I did try to pick out an adult outfit sometimes so it doesn't feel like I've completely given up. But, no one has less FOMO than I do. And these things where before I was just like, why didn't I get invited to this house party that this person has?

No, thank you. No, thank you. Anyways. Anyways, this has turned into a very different conversation, but I enjoy it nonetheless. I have like three more questions I ask everyone. It's not quite a lightning round, but it is. And then you're out of here. Does that work?

Cat Bohannon: Sure. I'm ready. Let's go.

Quinn: You're a hero.

Thank you so much. Kat, when was the first time in your life when you realized, and you've done so many different things from poetry to, like you said, computational stuff to this, when you [00:57:00] realized you or your posse or whatever it might've been, had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful, whether you noticed that in the moment or afterwards.

And we're like, oh, look what we did. We have kids who did it in band or model UN or their first time in a lab or whatever it might've been. I'm just always curious because we always have, again, when people come and say, how can I help? It's really helpful to say to them like when have you helped before?

When have you done something that someone was just like, thank you. And how do you extend that? So I'm curious what yours was.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah. I came out of the closet nearly as soon as I realized it cause I was a little oblivious to the implications of doing so, when I was fifteen in Indianapolis, Indiana, because that's where my dad had his lab then, and coming out in the mid-nineties in Indiana is not the same as New York.

Let me just put that. Put a little pin in that and just say, very different countries, yeah. And then, and the thing is that in Indiana, in the 1990s, there were no government supports for queer kids. There was nobody who was gonna [00:58:00] save our butts if something went down. No. We had to save each other.

Cause the grown-ups weren't doing it. Okay? There was no cure for AIDS then. No. HIV was very much a death sentence in the 1990s. And indeed, what I did is I joined IYG, the Indianapolis Youth Group. We were one of the first major queer youth groups in the country, actually. And we ran a national hotline, a peer crisis hotline for queer youth that went throughout the United States.

And queer kids would call in, and sometimes we were the only ones they had ever talked to about their experiences. And we would connect them to care, to the best of our ability, when we were able to. And sometimes we would just be peers who offered an ear. And we saved a lot of lives, man. We saved a lot of lives.

We didn't save all the lives. There were people even in my group that we lost in a number of ways, whether it was to suicide, or to drugs, or to street life, because a lot of people were kicked out of their homes for being queer in Indiana, right? So, we were also a whisper network [00:59:00] of connecting kids to the right foster care homes that would be safe.

Because again, in 94, 95, 96, there's no government agency tracking that shit. The only way you knew if a foster family was going to be safe for a queer kid is if a group of queer kids already knew. And that's how you then had a moment of intervention, right? So that's how I spent my adolescence.

That's what I was doing while my boobs were coming in. We were saving each other because no one else was going to save us. And we had a few key, amazing adult mentors who helped found the group for queer kids. And unfortunately, one of them, when I was 15, did actually die of AIDS. He had kept it secret from the group for various reasons, but when he succumbed to pneumonia, we buried him.

And that was part of my foundational experiences. So now that I have passed the age of 40, I am officially an elder queer. We used to just call it old, but now we call it elder queers and, we have that weirdly intergenerational thing in the queer community, right? For those of us who were there then and the [01:00:00] younger, adorable baby queers who weren't there, right?

Just like in the 90s, we had our elder queers who were saving us as best as they could, and we didn't know what it was like for them. We never expected in my group, we group of teenagers then who were queer, to actually live past 40 because it just, sexuality was deeply tied to the idea of risk and death.

And then of course bigotry at every turn. And we just, we didn't know. So, for many of us in my generation, arriving at 40 was a hell of a thing. And then being able to arrive now, and I'm 44 now, that it's, I think I'm still processing that I made it to 40, frankly. And somehow, miraculously never contracted HIV.

I know people who have. But of course, it's a different story now, right? Was that the moment I knew that I could enact change? Yeah, when I was able to help the group get a kid who was on the streets because her freaking parents kicked her out for being a [01:01:00] her, when the parents didn't quite understand that, and then connecting that kid to care and finding safe places for that kid to be and turn into a grown-up.

Yeah, it's a hell of a thing. It's a hell of a thing to know that you can use your own shirt to wipe the blood off your friend's face. And that kid's going to be okay, it's not abstract for my generation. In the way that it can be sometimes on spaces like Twitter. You know what I mean?

It's not a performed virtue. It's the work on the street. And that's very much my understanding of how change happens. It's, sometimes it's from the safety of your desk. Sure. A lot of good things can be done from a desk. But a lot of times it's actually walking out. And yeah.

So I think that was certainly foundational for me in what good work can do.

Quinn: That was beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate it. And thank you for doing that work. I'm a cis white man, but I, growing up in Virginia, which I love, was complicated even where I am now, which is where I was raised in Williamsburg.

It's fairly purple, has often been fairly [01:02:00] purple, but at the same time there was the, the born again kids who did the prayer circles across the street and kicked out their siblings when they were gay and yeah, it was a very different time. Not to say anything is easy for anyone right now.

By any stretch of the imagination or practicality. But it was just such a different time. And like you said, for your mentors, their experience was even more. different, of course.

Cat Bohannon: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Kids still getting kicked out though. Yes. The power of change and activism, but kids still getting kicked out though.

But thankfully now more institutions to support them. Thankfully now more grownups who care, right? Thankfully now more people who understand that this is the good work to be done. And that's the beautiful shift.

Quinn: Yeah, 100%. We're big fans of and supporters of the Trevor Project. And folks, if you're listening and you're struggling, they are an incredible [01:03:00] organization and you can give them a shout for just about anything.

Last one. And then we're going to get you out of here, Kat, in all of your free time. A book that you've read, I don't know, in the past year that has either opened your mind to a topic you haven't considered before or has changed your thinking on something. In some way. And we've got them all up on Bookshop, where everyone should buy your book.

Cat Bohannon: This was a few years back now, but Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I think I'm getting that title right. Absolutely beautiful book. And please look it up and make sure I'm getting the title right. But B O O, Katherine Boo. That it's not simply, a beautiful book in that aesthetic sense, like, oh, this is gorgeous writing.

But yes, also, it's also a beautiful act of human compassion. She embedded herself in a community in slums in India and wrote about that community and their lives. And in a way that [01:04:00] was not a white messiah for once, in a way that was actually beautiful and sensitive and deeply true and deserves all of the praise.

She is not the only one and she is not by no means the most authoritative voice on what it would have been like to live there. There have certainly been voices in the communities themselves writing about their own lives, but she did it so goddamn well, and so I strongly recommend that book for anyone who reads books, frankly.

Quinn: It's on my list. It's called The Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Death and Hope. Yep, Death and Hope in a Mumbai University. It came out in 2014ish, it looks like, or at least the paperback did. That's awesome. We'll put it up there as well as your book, Eve, which is just truly, it's just fantastic. I loved it so much.

Anything else? Where should people follow your other work or pay attention to you in whatever way you want them to online?

Cat Bohannon: Hello, where's Kat? I don't use [01:05:00] the Twitter, X, God, whatever, very much. I do have it. I sometimes do things there. But you can always go to my website. Which is my name, CatBohannon.

com. There are three N's in that Bohannon if you ever get confused. So at CatBohannon. com I am keeping up a running list. I'm starting to get behind, but running list of the various things that I have been doing. And so you can certainly check out there.

Quinn: Awesome. Thank you for this. This was just so wonderful.

Again, when I was like, Oh, she's the audio book reader. This is going to be great. And it is fulfilled every expectation. So thank you for your time and your work. Thank you for putting up with me, which is always the biggest task. I really appreciate it. And that's it. That's all I've got.

Cat Bohannon: Thanks. Thanks for having me on.