Two Views on Gender Ideology

I suspect that these tweets by J.K. Rowling and Billboard Chris are mostly entire compatible. And I do think the first and worst mistake we made as a society is allowing a decoupling of sex and gender. First, Billboard Chris:

There are two sexes, zero genders, and infinite personalities.

The word ‘gender’ was fine as a synonym for sex when those of us over the age of 30 were growing up. It’s not anymore. Use the word ‘sex.’

Now Rowling:

The word ‘transphobic’, as used here, does not mean an irrational fear or dislike of trans people. It means refusing to use gender identity ideology’s jargon, refusing to parrot its slogans, refusing to accept that sex doesn't matter when it comes to sport and single-sex spaces, refusing to believe a bearded heterosexual man becomes a lesbian when he declares himself one, and refusing to believe an abusive, misogynistic male is a woman because he likes to wear mini-dresses and pout in selfies.

Like every other gender critical person I know, I believe everyone should be free to express themselves however they wish, dress however they please, call themselves whatever they want, sleep with any consenting adult who wishes to sleep with them, and that trans-identified people should have the same protections regarding employment, housing, freedom of speech and personal safety every other citizen is entitled to.

But this isn’t nearly enough for the dominant strain of trans activism, which asserts that unless freedom of speech is removed from dissenters, unless trans-identified men are permitted to strip away women’s rights, with particular reference to single sex spaces like rape crisis centres, prison cells, hospital wards, changing rooms and public bathrooms, until we all bow down to their neo-religion, accept their pseudo-scientific claims and embrace their circular reasoning, trans people are more oppressed, and more at risk, than any other group in society.

This is nonsense. 99.9% of the world knows it's nonsense. The emperor is naked. He might be wearing lipstick, but his balls are swinging in plain sight.

Also consider the following excerpt from J.K. Rowling’s new book, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht:

The thing is, those appalled by my position often fail to grasp how truly despicable I find theirs. I’ve watched “no debate” become the slogan of those who once posed as defenders of free speech. I’ve witnessed supposedly progressive men arguing that women don’t exist as an observable biological class and don’t deserve biology-based rights. I’ve listened as certain female celebrities insist that there isn’t the slightest risk to women and girls in allowing any man who self-identifies as a woman to enter single-sex spaces reserved for women, including changing rooms, bathrooms or rape shelters. . . . I’ve asked people who consider themselves socialists and egalitarians what might be the practical consequences of erasing easily understood words like “woman” and “mother”, and replacing them with “cervix-haver”, “menstruator” and “birthing parent”, especially for those for whom English is a second language, or women whose understanding of their own bodies is limited. They seem confused and irritated by this question. Better that a hundred women who aren’t up to speed with the latest gender jargon miss public health information than that one trans-identified individual feels invalidated, seems to be the view.…

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What (Really) is DEI?

A new article examines the many problems of DEI. Jerry Coyne discusses this article in his own article, "More ideology in science: DEI infects the process for handing out scientific grants". In this post, I want to focus on "What is DEI," which refers to the triply problematic "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion." Coyne's excerpt:

While no reasonable person can oppose the morality of trying to to give every American equal opportunity to become a scientist (and that starts with birth), the mandates that condition federal funding call not for equal opportunity, but for equity—“equal outcomes” so that minoritized groups—not just races, but LGBTQ+, the disabled, women, and anybody said to be disadvantaged because of oppression—are represented in proportion to their occurrence in the general population. Here’s the authors’ construal of DEI as it is actually implemented by the government:

Actual DEI policies do not promote viewpoint diversity, equitable treatment of individuals based on their accomplishments, or equal opportunity for individuals regardless of their identity (e.g., race, sex, ethnicity). It can scarcely be questioned (Krylov and Tanzman, 2024) that DEI programs today are driven by an ideology, an offshoot of Critical Social Justice1 (CSJ) (Pluckrose, 2021; Deichmann 2023). DEI programs elevate the collective above the individual. They group people into categories defined by immutable characteristics (race, sex, etc.) and classify each group as either “privileged” or “victimized,” as “oppressor” or “oppressed.” The goals of DEI programs are to have each group participate in proportion to their fraction of thepopulation in every endeavor of society and to obtain proportionate outcomes from those endeavors. Disproportionate outcomes (with respect to science, such outcomes as publications, funding, citations, salaries, and awards), or disparities, are axiomatically ascribed to systemic factors, such as systemic racism and sexism, without consideration of alternative explanations (Sowell, 2019, 2023). Claims, such as “The presence of disparities is proof of systemic racism” and “Meritocracy is a myth” are propagated widely despite the vagueness of the claims and their lack of support by concrete data. Similarly, tenets that are central to DEI ideology—such as diversity is excellence, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams, and the advancement of women is impeded by biases—lack a robust evidence base, particularly when applied to science (Abbot et al., 2023; Krylov and Tanzman, 2023; Ceci et al., 2021, 2023).

Note that several important claims, including the assertion that underrepresentation of minoritized groups is due to ongoing systemic racism (which would be illegal) and that diverse scientific teams consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. Neither claim is supported by evidence.

My own opinion (and that of the authors; see below) is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to do science, and choose for advancement those who do the best work. That might not result in equity, but it does allow equal opportunity. I recognize, of course, that we’re a long way from giving different groups equal opportunity, which must begin at or even before birth. But equal opportunity is the only permanent way to solve the problem of disproportional representation in science (or any endeavor). Effecting that will be hard, and requires immense effort, money, and empirical tests of educational systems, but once it’s in place, unequal representation would reflect other things, like behavioral differences or differential preferences among groups.

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UCLA Medical School Teaches that Weight Loss is a “Hopeless Endeavor”

Hmmm. Then I know a bunch of people who have done what it is impossible to do.

Sibarium further reports:

All first year students are assigned an essay by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," who "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers guidance on "resisting entrenched fat oppression," per the syllabus

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The Fall of Scientific American

From Spiked:

When you come across the longstanding magazine, Scientific American, you could be forgiven for assuming that scientific truth would play a pivotal role in its output.

But not any more, it seems. Scientific American, founded in 1845, is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It has previously featured work by Albert Einstein, among others. However, in recent years, it appears to have been taken over by contributors who consider themselves activists first and scientists second. The magazine’s ethos now includes the express aim of ‘sharing trustworthy knowledge, enhancing our understanding of the world, and advancing social justice’ (my emphasis). It has also started to intervene in electoral politics, too. In 2020, Scientific American broke with a 175-year history of non-partisanship to endorse Joe Biden in the US presidential election.

Worst of all, when its articles touch on questions of gender and biological sex, Scientific American seems to have abandoned objective facts entirely, in favour of trans-activist pseudoscience.

Steven Pinker agrees:

As Jonathan Haidt warned, universities (and here, science magazines) can only have one telos. To do otherwise gives rise to a conflict of interest that corrupts the main mission.

If one wants to know what sex is or how many sexes there are, just ask a real life trained biologist, such as my friend Luana Maroja, who has no conflict of interest. She takes pride in being a real-life legitimate biology professor who know that there are two (and only two) human sexes because there are two (and only two) types of human gametes:

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Ideology is Hollowing-Out Academic Biology

At Skeptical Inquirer, Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja have written about the damage ideology is doing to the field of biology. Like many well-written articles today by people with their eyes open, this is not fun to read. It is never easy to read about the ideological capture of universities or the corruption of entire fields of study or the fact that numerous intelligent good-hearted people are increasingly afraid to speak up. I had the same reaction when viewing this 2022 video by Lawrence Krauss: "Is Woke Science the Only Science Allowed in Academia?"

Here is the Summary of the new article by Coyne and Maroja, "The Ideological Subversion of Biology."

Previous research indicated that corrective information can sometimes provoke a so-called “backfire effect” in which respondents more strongly endorsed a misperception about a controversial political or scientific issue when their beliefs or predispositions were challenged. I show how subsequent research and media coverage seized on this finding, distorting its generality and exaggerating its role relative to other factors in explaining the durability of political misperceptions. To the contrary, an emerging research consensus finds that corrective information is typically at least somewhat effective at increasing belief accuracy when received by respondents. However, the research that I review suggests that the accuracy-increasing effects of corrective information like fact checks often do not last or accumulate; instead, they frequently seem to decay or be overwhelmed by cues from elites and the media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

Here we give six examples of how our own field—evolutionary and organismal biology—has been impeded or misrepresented by ideology. Each example involves a misstatement spread by ideologues, followed by a brief explanation of why each statement is wrong. Finally, we give what we see as the ideology behind each misstatement and then assess its damage to scientific research, teaching, and the popular understanding of science. Our ultimate concern is biology research—the discovery of new facts—but research isn’t free from social influence; it goes hand in hand with teaching and the public acceptance of biological facts. If certain areas of research are stigmatized by the media, for example, public understanding will suffer, and there will follow a loss of interest in teaching as well as in research in these areas. By cutting off or impeding interest in biology, the misrepresentation or stigmatization by the media ultimately deprives us of opportunities to understand the world.

[More . . . ]

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