What is Passing for Science These Days at Scientific American . . .

If you are looking for science at Scientific American, you'll need to look a litter harder. This is from a Scientific American article titled "It's Time to Take the Penis off Its Pedestal: A culture of phallus worship has slanted the science in crucial and sometimes unexpected ways."

Yet thanks to the assumption that anything large and powerful must be male, a phallus with more imposing qualities—like the hyena’s—gets dubbed a “pseudopenis,” "masculinized" or “malelike.” Those who spend a lot of time with human genitalia see it differently. “What I’ve come to realize is that everything a man has a woman has; everything a woman has, a man has, anatomically,” says Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender affirmation surgeon in Palo Alto who has done more than 2,000 male-to-female surgeries. “The penis is just a large clitoris. In fact, I don’t know why they don’t just call it a large clitoris.” Here’s why: because human biases shape scientific knowledge, and much of what we know about our nether regions has been shaped by lazy, antiquated stereotypes about what men and women are.

On Twitter, biologist Colin Wright is barely holding it together after spotting this article. That's probably because he specializes in writing "old-fashioned" biology article suggesting antiquated things like his claim that there are two biological sexes and that men are different than women. And see here.

In the meantime, back at Twitter, "M" responded to Wright's Tweet with this:

And then "Prominent Public Figure responded with this:

And there were dozens of other responses whose witticisms rivaled in intensity their frustrations of seeing Scientific American's loss of respectability.

Finally, I wanted to know more about Rachel E. Gross, who wrote this "science" article. To my dismay, I noticed that she also wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, though (thankfully) not recently. She has even written about the challenge of getting evangelicals to understand evolution, but that was before her apparent conversation to the religion of Wokeness.

Continue ReadingWhat is Passing for Science These Days at Scientific American . . .

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to Decide Who Qualifies as a “Woman” Athlete in Idaho

Is a particular person was a "woman"? For most of my life, everyone I knew would say that the question is answered by considering what kind of genitals that person had. For many people, the answer to that question is no longer answered purely by biology. And to make the discussion all-the-more confusing, transgender activists insist that "intersex" conditions are relevant to this discussion while others consider intersex a red herring.

Lindsay Hecox v Bradley Little [Governor of Idaho] will weigh in on this issue.  This appeal is pending in the Ninth Circuit (and perhaps headed to the United States Supreme Court). The context is transgender sports competition involving students in Idaho. A new Idaho statute is the focus of this lawsuit. The following excerpt is a description of Idaho law taken from the appellate brief of Idaho (the Defendant):

The statute at issue is the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, Idaho Code §§ 33-6201 through -6206. The Act excludes members of the male sex from participating in sports designated for athletes of the female sex due to males’ physiological advantages, consistent with settled Ninth Circuit law . . . . The Act also permits male and co-ed teams, both of which are open to members of either sex. See Idaho Code § 33-6203.

To ensure the Act’s protections for female athletes, the Act provides that if a dispute arises over a student’s sex and eligibility for female sports, the student may establish female sex in one of three ways: through a high school health examination and consent form signed by a health care provider, which all student-athletes must submit; through another written statement signed by the student’s health care provider; or through a sports physical examination, in which the health care provider relies on one of three specified criteria to determine sex. See Idaho Code § 33-6203(3). See also ER 417-19 (Idaho High School Activities Association Health Examination and Consent Form); IHSAA Rule 13 (requiring high school athletes to submit form). The Act does not provide any sex-verification procedures for male or co-ed sports, because they are open to all, regardless of sex. In support of the bill, the Idaho Legislature made a number of findings based on court decisions, scholarly publications, and scientific studies recognizing the physiological advantages members of the male sex have over their female counterparts. Idaho Code § 33-6202(8)-(11). The Legislature also described the Act’s purpose:

Having separate sex-specific teams furthers efforts to promote sex equality. Sex-specific teams accomplish this by providing opportunities for female athletes to demonstrate their skill, strength, and athletic abilities while also providing them with opportunities to obtain recognition and accolades, college scholarships, and the numerous other long-term benefits that flow from success in athletic endeavors. Id. § 33-6202(12).

Plaintiffs describe the Idaho law at page 8ff of their brief.

A federal trial court granted an injunction, holding that the above law violates federal law. See the Idaho Brief at pp 6-7 and the Plaintiffs' brief, pp. 2-4 for more detail. This is a fascinating set of briefs for many reasons, one of them being that if you read both briefs, it is often hard to believe that they are describing the same lawsuit. That is because the crux of the case is whether one of the two plaintiffs, Lindsay Hecox, is more accurately described as male versus female. Consider Hecox's descriptions in the two briefs:

[From the Plaintiffs' Brief, p. 15: "Lindsay is a woman athlete living in Idaho who is transgender." Plaintiffs' brief includes a photo of Lindsay:

[From Defendant Idaho's Brief] "One plaintiff is Lindsay Hecox, who is transgender, and whose sex is male but whose gender identity is female."

Both sides agree that Lindsay is "transgender." As you can see, Plaintiffs claim she is "a woman" while Idaho states that the "sex is male."

I haven't yet read every word of every brief, but I have reviewed a lot of the filings.  In case anyone is interested in following along to see exactly what is being claimed as far as the "facts" or the law, you are welcome to click on the links below.  My focus is biology, but the Plaintiffs claim that biology does is not determinative.

Continue ReadingNinth Circuit Court of Appeals to Decide Who Qualifies as a “Woman” Athlete in Idaho

Keira Bell’s Case is Unfreezing News Media that Have Been Reluctant to Discuss Rampant Transgendering of Teenaged Girls

The legal proceedings regarding Keira Bell are forcing the reluctant news media to begin discussing this serious issue regarding a vulnerable population of teenage girls being cajoled into harsh medical treatment for undiagnosed gender dysphoria. The silence of the news media has found synergy with bad science and dangerous medical practices.  Here's an excerpt from Quillette article titled "Like It Or Not, Keira Bell Has Opened Up a Real Conversation About Gender Dysphoria":

The policy reckoning we are now beginning to observe has been a long time coming. And Ms. Bell’s role is an important one, as trans activists have long sought to discredit or ignore the growing ranks of desisters—those, such as Ms. Bell, who once presented sincerely as trans, but later reverted to an identity consistent with their real biological sex. Even media that formerly had toed the progressive line on the issue of gender dysphoria are now finding the courage to run articles about vulnerable girls—many of them autistic, depressed, or socially insecure—who suffer regret after a period of trans self-identification.

Continue ReadingKeira Bell’s Case is Unfreezing News Media that Have Been Reluctant to Discuss Rampant Transgendering of Teenaged Girls

Planned Parenthood Falsely Suggests that Doctors “Assign” a Baby’s Sex at Birth

In his recent article, "Is Sex 'Assigned' at Birth?," evolutionary biologist Colin Wright criticizes Planned Parenthood's claims that a doctor "assigns" a baby's sex at the time of birth. As Wright points out, a doctor merely notices and reports the baby's sex. Planned Parenthood's website makes as much sense as claiming that an obstetrician "assigns" a baby's two-leggedness or "assigns" the eye color of a newborn.

There's good reason to believe that Planned Parenthood intentionally misused the word "assign," given that this word appears 19 times on Planned Parenthood's highly problematic webpage, "Sex and Gender Identity." Here is an excerpt:

Sex is a label — male or female — that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate . . . . Instead of saying “biological sex,” some people use the phrase “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.” This acknowledges that someone (often a doctor) is making a decision for someone else. The assignment of a biological sex may or may not align with what’s going on with a person’s body, how they feel, or how they identify.

Wright's article is a patient and focused response to yet another instance where activists are attempting to use ideology to rewrite biology. Wright's counter-measure consists of serving up the kind of accurate biology lesson that most high school science teachers have uncontroversially delivered over many decades. That lesson goes something like this: "Here's a male mouse. Notice the penis. Here's a female mouse. Notice the vagina. Here's a diagram of a male human and a female human. Same thing. Quiz tomorrow."

Real-life biology is something that many Critical Justice Activists have self-trained themselves to find irrelevant. They also find real-life biology incomplete--those biology books keep forgetting to talk about feelings when they discuss gonads! Many of today's Woke students don't like hearing any blunt talk that they are human animals or that it is Nature (not a doctor) that calls the shots regard to a baby's sex. Wright explains:

The claim that biological sex is “assigned at birth” is very misleading as it draws a false equivalence between transgender and intersex people, and suggests that identity, as opposed to reproductive anatomy, defines one’s biological sex.

Rather than being “assigned” at birth, sex is simply recorded at birth using genitalia as a very reliable predictor of underlying gonad type. The fact that doctors, on very rare occasions, are wrong in their assessment does not therefore immediately call everyone’s sex into question.

Planned Parenthood employs many highly educated and careful writers, so the wording on its website was not an accident. Planned Parenthood consciously decided to use the word "assigned" to falsely suggest that arrogant doctors steeped in scientism shoot from the hip whenever they designate a baby's sex. That's how I read their ideologically-laced webpage. They take this position despite the fact that the sex of almost every baby is determined about nine months prior to the birth. And once the baby is born, figuring out whether Nature chose pink versus blue is truly simple. Truly, a doctor merely needs to take a quick look. This process of sexing was perfected thousands of years before the patriarchy got around to inventing the multitudes of modern baby doctors, those people who arrogantly determine one's sex by looking at gonads.

I can feel Wright's frustration as he spells out the facts of life for activists (as well as for those of us who are unnerved by the vocal Woke mobs). This effort by Wright is merely the most recent of a series of basic sex-ed lessons he has been offering (see also here and here). It's unfortunate that any of his articles were necessary, but I'm relieved to see that he is out there offering accurate biology bit by bit, to try to keep us all on the rails.

What is my main reason for writing this article? Because new parents should never be made to feel any hesitation or shame when they announce "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!" We have all heard many people announcing and celebrating the sex of their newborns. On every occasion that I've heard such an announcement, I'm certain that there was no hint of any animosity toward people who have undergone the process of transgendering. Announcing a baby's sex is always a perfectly appropriate thing to do, no footnotes and no asterisks needed. These joyous moments have no relevance to the hyper-sensitive feelings of transgender activists. In fact, if there were activists in my presence right now, I would urge them to each put one finger in one their own ears so the following information might stick: "When new parents joyously exclaim 'It's a girl!', this is an undeniable biological fact that has absolutely nothing to do with you. It's about the baby."

Since Planned Parenthood twice mentioned "intersex" on the above webpage, it's worth asking how often doctors get it wrong when they tell the parents what sex they have observed in the newborn baby. The answer: almost never. As Wright discusses, the reproductive anatomy of a baby is unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Many activists seem to think that it is insensitive to bluntly announce the sex of a baby because of "intersex." They claim this even when only 2 out of 10,000 newborns are diagnosed with intersex conditions. They claim this despite the fact that intersex conditions have absolutely nothing to do with the issue of transgendering. I suspect that transgender activists keep bringing up intersex conditions because it confuses and extends what would otherwise be swift endings to bad arguments.

Planned Parenthood, an organization claiming an expertise in medical matters, needs to get its medical facts right, then revise its webpage accordingly. There's a lot of work to do. One thing they desperately need to be add is this: For the great majority of people, biological sex robustly aligns with gender. This fact is not something shameful, insensitive or mean-spirited. It accurately describes most human beings, except in Planned Parenthood's namby-pamby world of biology where this is a fact that must not be uttered. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingPlanned Parenthood Falsely Suggests that Doctors “Assign” a Baby’s Sex at Birth

Intersex Conditions Are Not Nearly as Common as Red Hair

I subscribe to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright's new Substack Newsletter, Reality's Last Stand. In his most recent article, "Intersex Is Not as Common as Red Hair," Wright deals with a claim commonly heard from LGBTQ+ activists, the claim that 1.7% of people have intersex conditions, supposedly making it as common as having red hair. Most activists make this claim without any ill-intent. They want to show that intersex conditions are common and the people with these conditions should not be seen as abnormal. The "facts" touted by the activists, however, don't add up.

Many LGBTQ+ activists get their information from a book titled Sexing the Body, by Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), who got her number from a study asking people to physically describe "idea" males and "ideal" females.  For example,

Their “ideal female” has two X chromosomes, functional ovaries that result in normal feminizing puberty, intact oviducts attached to a functional uterus, cervix, and vaginal canal. This ideal female must also have labia minora and majora present, and a clitoris that ranges between 0.20 and 0.85 cm in length at birth.

These "ideal" definitions fails because they include "many conditions that cannot be considered intersex in any clinically relevant sense." The central error was to equate “differences of sexual development” (DSDs) with “intersex.”  To illustrate Wright referred to a chart of Fausto-Sterling's data (that was created by Twitter user @zeno001):

Using this data, Wright points out how misleading the 1.7% claim is.

. . . 88% of Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure is taken up by one condition: late-onset adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH). These individuals have completely normal male or female genitalia at birth that align with their sex chromosomes. The sex of these individuals is not ambiguous, so to label LOCAH as an intersex condition is a far cry from what most people and clinicians conceptually envision the term to capture.

The next most prevalent DSD on Fausto-Sterling’s list iclude any chromosomal deviations from classical XX and XY (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, etc.). However, these conditions do not result in ambiguous genitalia and therefore cannot be considered intersex in any clinically relevant sense. . . . .

Lastly, vaginal agenesis, the next most common DSD on the list, is not generally considered an intersex condition, as girls with this condition are genotypically XX, possess perfectly normal ovaries, and can even become pregnant and birth their own children following vaginoplasty. They are unambiguously female.

When these common DSDs are removed, and intersex conditions are more precisely defined as “conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure drops dramatically. According to Sax, “Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling's estimate of 1.7%.”

With Wright's facts-first approach, the 1.7% claim commonly touted by activists bears no resemblance to reality.  As Wright reassures readers, this overstated statistic has no bearing on our duty to treat all intersex people as fully human. They are due the same kindness and respect as any other person. That should never be an issue for anyone, of course.

Continue ReadingIntersex Conditions Are Not Nearly as Common as Red Hair