The Hurdles Faced by Science Teachers

Biologist Luana Maroja, is deeply concerned about hurdles science teachers are facing. Here article is "An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science: What scientists are able to teach and what research we can pursue are under attack. I know because I’m living it.". Here is an excerpt:

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. . . .

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary.

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes.

Even medical schools and the Society for the Study of Evolution have issued statements suggesting that sexes are on a “continuum.” If this were true, the entire field of sexual selection would be baseless, as its bedrock insight lies in the much larger female investment in reproduction, explaining the demonstrated choosiness in females (who have more to lose) and competitiveness in males (the “abundant” sex in most species, one male can fertilize multiple females). Published papers (see here, for example) ask us to be “inclusive” by limiting the sex discussion to the few species of algae and protists (such as amoebas) that have equal size gametes—even when that has no relevance to any animal or vascular plant.

In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.” I had a colleague who, during a conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in insects because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of “sexual conflict”—the idea that male and female interests differ and mates will often act selfishly; think of a female praying mantis decapitating the head of the male after mating—because it might “traumatize students.” I was criticized for teaching “kin selection”—the the idea that animals tend to help their relatives.

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CDC Misconduct and Coverup

For two years I have been amazed at the news media's non-interest in the origin of the COVID virus, especially given my presumption that many news outlets serve as the lapdog for the U.S. government. Here is a summary of where we are, as well as an itemized list of significant events, including what appear to be cover-ups of the lab origin story. First, from Reason Magazine, Zach Weisssmueller and Regan Taylor have this to say (this is an excerpt) in their article, "The Lab Leak Deception: Public Officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp":

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

The above article refers us to this timeline compiled by Emily Kopp: "Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." Here are some excerpts:

In February 2020 — about a month before a pandemic had been declared — five top virologists huddled to examine aspects of a rapidly emerging coronavirus that seemed primed to infect human cells. (The furin cleavage site kept one virologist up all night.) A few days later, they concluded the virus had not been engineered. In March, their conclusions were published in Nature Medicine.

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Colin Wright Warns of the Danger Posed by Innocuous-Seeming Requests for “Pronouns”

I have no business telling any adult what to do with his or her body. That is their own business. It's a different story with children. We need to make sure that our children (and their parents) are not being given false information that leads to irreversible physical damage to their bodies (cross-sex hormones and surgeries), in many cases leading to sterility. There are real cases of gender dysphoria but, historically speaking, they have been rare (1/10,000) and they have overwhelmingly been boys. Today, almost 2% of teenagers are claiming to be transgender and they are overwhelmingly girls who tend to fall into social clusters, which would not be expected if dysphoria were truly a medical condition.

What is going on and why should be be concerned? Much of the left-leaning news media cheerleads for those who promote gender ideology and totally ignore the numerous and growing cases of those teenagers who detransitioned--who permanently altered their bodies, often through double mastectomies then, years later, declared that they were, indeed, the sex aligning with their chromosomes, their gametes and their sex organs readily apparent at birth. It's not rocket science to figure out the sex of most people (intersex cases are extremely rare). These stories by numerous detransitioners are extremely difficult to read. They are stories of deep regret, stories of how these teenagers got caught up in a fad encouraged by their peers, and enabled by well-meaning activist school teachers and counselors, as well as almost instant access to cross-sex hormones, often at Planned Parenthood. The parents are often concerned that they must allow their children to transition based on commonly touted but false statistics and unsubstantiated claims that suicide is the only other option.

Biologist Colin Wright recently wrote "How to Make a Trans Kid." It is well-written and accurate upon my own extensive readings. I recommend reading Wright's entire article. Here is an excerpt:

Most people understand the terms “man” and “boy” refer to adult and adolescent human males, respectively, and that “woman” and “girl” refer to adult and adolescent human females, respectively. These are not “identities,” but terms that describe objective facts about one’s age and biological sex.

Gender ideology, conversely, is a belief system asserting that what makes someone a woman or a girl, or a man or a boy, has nothing whatsoever to do with their sex, but is based entirely on the social roles and stereotypes with which they “identify.” Therefore, a person who identifies with feminine roles and stereotypes is a girl or woman, and a person who identifies with masculine roles and stereotypes is a boy or man—regardless of their biological sex. According to gender ideology, people who do not identify with the social roles and stereotypes typically associated with their sex are considered “transgender.”

That’s Gender Ideology 101. If it comes across as completely insane, that’s because it is.

Gender ideology has therefore proven to be a hard sell for many adults who rightfully view such ideas as regressive and sexist. After all, this worldview entails that a woman who does not fully embrace femininity is not actually a woman, and a man who does not embrace masculinity is not actually a man. If this sounds similar to the regressive and oppressive system that women’s and other human rights groups fought for decades to overcome, that’s because it is. But it’s actually much worse, since it also promotes the idea that a “mismatch” between one’s sex and “gender identity” can be medically “corrected” with hormones and surgeries.

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Reading the Polls Regarding Transgender Ideology

Are you trying to interpret polls regarding transgender ideology? At City Journal, Leor Sapir warns us about the terminology and the numbers:

Last April, a Marist poll commissioned by the organization Do No Harm asked 1,377 Americans about their views on the infiltration of “social justice” ideology into medicine. One question asked whether “minors who identify as transgender and want to undergo hormone treatment or gender transition surgery” should be able to do so “without parental consent,” “only with parental consent,” or not until adulthood (regardless of parental consent). Only 10 percent of all adults surveyed said that minors should be able to access these interventions without parental consent. Twenty-five percent said that parental consent should be required, and 60 percent said minors should never be subject to hormonal or surgical interventions in this context (5 percent were unsure). These findings more or less track with those from a recent New York Times/Siena Poll on (among other things) teaching “sexual orientation and gender identity” content in elementary schools, and it is reasonable to assume that the same people who believe it’s unacceptable for teachers to introduce first-graders to, say, the concept of “non-binary” also think that 12-year-old children should not be given puberty blockers for feeling like they were “born in the wrong body.”

It’s useful to compare the Marist poll with yet another recent poll, this one by Pew, which deals with gender-identity issues, as a way to illustrate the importance of how questions are phrased. The Pew poll asked whether it should be “illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition.” Note how this phrasing avoids specifying the procedures (hormones and surgeries), uses terms like “professionals” and “medical care,” and shifts the focus from the procedures themselves to the issue of state involvement in the doctor-patient relationship. Unsurprisingly, public opinion was more evenly divided in the Pew poll, though a plurality still favored restrictions: 46 percent said they support making it illegal for providers to administer medical intervention, 30 percent opposed it, and 22 percent were undecided.

Sapir also warns us about the euphemisms. He lists these in particular:

“Hormone replacement therapy.” A person administered cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen), usually through periodic injections, is not having his or her hormones “replaced;” rather, hormones are introduced to counter the effects of the body’s natural hormone production.

“Gender dysphoria.” For those going through or after puberty, the relevant experience here is usually a strong aversion to one’s body parts (such as breasts) or to the body’s natural processes (for example, menstruation).

“Cisgender.” Activists define this as “identifying with the sex one was assigned at birth,” but what this word really means in practice is the lack of debilitating distress associated with one’s sexed body. To be “cisgender” means to feel comfortable, or comfortable enough, with your body and its natural processes such that you don’t seek to make it appear like that of the other sex.

“Children know their gender identity.” This language obscures the key question of whether even sincere and stable cross-gender feelings—or indeed any feelings—in fact amount to “knowledge.”

“LGBTQIA+.” The sole purpose of this acronym is to enable activists making radical claims about human nature and society to piggyback off the far more broadly accepted claims of gay rights.

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