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

Helen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses.  The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  

Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ's version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left.  What is "postmodernism"?  Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:

  1. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
  2. Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
  3. The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
  4. [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.

Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:

Continue ReadingHelen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Abraham Lincoln, Racist . . .

Oh, I see it is still 2020.  Apparently, fighting a bloody war to end slavery and writing the Emancipation Proclamation are not impressive enough. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Abraham Lincoln, an iconic American hero, could soon be an outcast in San Francisco, his legacy called into question and his name ripped off a high school. Lincoln is one of dozens of historical figures who, according to a school district renaming committee, lived a life so stained with racism, oppression or human rights violations, they do not deserve to have their name on a school building.

Once again, where do you draw your line with the Woke? At what point do you say "Enough"? If we don't speak up about this insanity, haven't we also implicitly voted to tear down the Lincoln Memorial?

Continue ReadingAbraham Lincoln, Racist . . .

Douglas Murray’s Message for College Students

At New Discourses, Calum Anderson notes that Douglas Murray is offering important ideas for our moment in time using incidents from several recent colleges to illustrate. The article is titled, "Why University Students Need to Listen to Douglas Murray." An excerpt:

As is the case with all truly interesting people, the least interesting thing about Douglas Murray is his sexuality. He has been a steadfast voice of reason during an age of unreason, and a formidable opponent of the woke activists who presume to speak of his behalf as an openly gay man . . . Murray specifically chastises employees at Penguin Random House for their attempt to prevent their employer from publishing Jordan Peterson’s upcoming book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. He calls the inability to listen to contrary points of view a “generational phenomenon” which has been adopted by children who believe that “speech is harm, and harm is not harm, that silence is violence and that violence is fine.” Murray was addressing my generation, and despite what may be regarded as a sweeping generalization I am not the least bit offended. Not every twenty-something thinks this way, but the most vocal among us do and that is a serious problem: “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats).

Continue ReadingDouglas Murray’s Message for College Students

Chloe Valdary Discusses Critical Race Theory Training with Christopher Rufo

I’ve followed Chloe Valdary on Twitter for many months. She is nuanced and kind-hearted, the diametric opposite of most advocates of critical race theory. In her hour-long discussion with journalist Christopher Rufo, Valdary compared and contrasted the typical training in critical race theory to the training Valdary developed, which she calls “Theory of Enchantment.” She describes her program as having the mission “to combat racism and bigotry by teaching society how to love.”

It’s not that CRT is ill-intended. CRT is good to the extent that it raises awareness of access of desperate people to material goods, jobs and healthcare. That said, Valdary accuses CRT of reducing human beings to their race. CRT claims that it is seeking equity, but it actually seeks “raw material power.” According to Valdary, CRT’s objectives are different than the objectives of the civil rights generation, which was interested in the inner lives of human beings that transcended race. For CRT, race is the “end all and be all.” CRT is defective in that it tries to reduce society to material things and disparities, ignoring transcendence—the capacity to feel empathy and the recognition of community bonding. CRT ignores the sacredness of life, the beauty of all human beings, and their imperfections and individuality that ultimately lead to “organic diversity.” Valdary points out that CRT claims to improve life, but it knows nothing about human flourishing and is thus “playing with fire.” CRT training is promoting hostile work environments that are “setting up companies for lawsuits.”

[What follows is a transcript I create for parts of the above interview. I cleaned up unnecessary or repeated words and phrases, but I have been careful to accurately preserve the flow and meaning of the conversation.]

Christopher Rufo: Explain white fragility to me.

Chloe Valdary: Okay, I will. I will caveat this by saying that a lot of these terms are completely incoherent. And so I will do my best to explain what my understanding of these terms are. But I think some of these are beyond explaining. White fragility is basically this idea that if you are a white person your very existence perpetuates white supremacy. You're living in a fundamentally white supremacist environment. If you disagree with any of that, then you are just demonstrating your fragility. And so disagreement is a double bind, essentially. Disagreement is proof that you are a racist. That's the cause of white fragility. It was made most popular by Robyn D'Angelo who wrote a book called white fragility. What happened was Robyn D'Angelo had a series of racist ideas about black people and projected them onto other white people. And she essentially said, oh, I'm having all these racist ideas about black people. I hardly know any black people. And she somewhat expressed that in some of her comments. It's like, I'm going to go and assume that every other person that looks like me, extensively, also has these views and projects them onto other people. And if you don't agree with it, then you just proved my point. It's a very, somewhat pathological disposition, I think.

Christopher Rufo: It's like in high school, when one of your friends is like, Oh, yeah, man, you know, I'm feeling this way. Everyone feels that way, right? Everyone has this. Actually, no, it's just you.

Chloe Valdary: Yeah. Yeah,

Christopher Rufo: White fragility discourse is a way for progressive, elite institutional white people to, in a kind of critical language, center their own experience. The most important thing is happening is my own kind of internal experience, my own internal deal, my own internal shame and, in a way, elevate that experience above actually anything productive or tangible.

Chloe Valdary: I set up what I like to think of as a practice. The purpose of the practice is to teach people that, from a psychological perspective, racism often flourishes or occurs when individuals are operating from a space that is informed by a lack of holiness. What I mean by that is on a very, I say, psychological spiritual level, what we perceive often of others is what we perceive of ourselves. What we do in our program, is we train people, first, how to develop that sense of inner contentment and inner wholeness based upon three principles. First principle is to treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. We help our clients work through what it actually means to be a human being, which sounds really obvious and cliche, but it's actually one of the most profound things, I think, one of the most beautiful things, most sophisticated things. How does one deal with this thing that is the human condition? How do you deal with vulnerability? How do you deal with mortality? How do you deal with imperfection? How do you make peace with these things so that they don't control you? And how do you deal with emotional regulation? We teach stoicism for example, in the course and how you reckon with your own potential. You are trying to live up to your own potential. So the first third of the full training is really about teaching people how to make peace with these things, make peace with themselves and the human condition

The remaining two-thirds is all about, okay, now that you know this about yourself, understand that every single human being you meet is dealing with these same issues, because this is what is universal. So human experience. Now we can work on developing that capacity for empathy, developing that capacity for compassion, for curiosity even for people you meet who don't look like you and have different opinions from you, because diversity comes in many different forms. Diversity is itself a very diverse thing, right? So that's really the process. And then the actual pedagogical experience is very rich because it uses pop culture to teach all these things. I believe in bringing the past with the present, having the past in conversation with the present. We use articles and essays written by James Baldwin, speeches from Dr. King, Maya Angelou, you know, folks who came before us who were part of that civil rights generation who had a lot to teach us, not merely about race, but about the human condition itself. And working through issues on race, being rooted in an understanding of the sacredness of the human being. This is what these great leaders brought to us. There's also stoicism. We also bring in a really multicultural, I'd say, curation of different things. So there's snippets of Disney films that folks have to say, in words, to understand human condition. There is music, a study of different aspects of theme song and hip hop. There's a rich conversation between the past and the present that transforms the client's relationship to both, transforms the client's relationship to themselves, and to their neighbors, and to those around them. That's what the process is like.

Christopher Rufo: How do you how do you deal with race? This is a fraught concept, something that is difficult to discuss, and for most folks, even more difficult to discuss, as it's been highly politicized. How do you address it in a way that cuts through in a way that is rooted in the kind of the kind of philosophical foundation that you've described, but then actually gets to this as an issue.

Chloe Valdary: We tackle race by specifically using texts. I'll just give you a quick example. James Baldwin's essays are taught in the very first part of the training. Our clients study the essays, which are on race, but are again, rooted in that understanding that something transcends race and that something is sacred about the human being. And that works through the challenges of race, through that paradigm of understanding the sacredness of the human being. By absorbing those texts by these individuals, knock on wood, James Baldwin doesn't get canceled by these individuals. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingChloe Valdary Discusses Critical Race Theory Training with Christopher Rufo