Colin Wright is a biologist who often writes about sex and gender. He often pisses off people by claiming that there are only two sexes (and see here). But now, according to Instagram, he has also engaged in "hate speech." Here is his Tweet where he explains what happened at Instagram:
You can read the entire thread here.
Abigail Shrier has taken a lot of heat for sharing well-documented information and raising important questions about transgender treatment and therapy. For example:
Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage has created quite a stir. When it was first released in June 2020, Amazon refused to allow the publisher to run sponsored advertisements of the book. After Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier on his podcast, some Spotify employees demanded that the episode be taken down. More recently, Target took the book off its shelves in response to a complaint from a person on Twitter, but later put it back due to other complaints from free speech advocates. Several others have declared the book to be transphobic and harmful to the trans* community (just skim some of the reviews on Amazon)—a particularly hot take among those who have not read the book.
A few days ago, Shrier published an article discussing interviews she has conducted with two well credentialed experts. Shrier's expressed motive is to help families with teenagers who are struggling with how to proceed. Shrier's interviews vindicated many of the points she made in her previous writings, including her book, Irreversible Damage. Here is an excerpt from "Why Marci Matters: Dr. Marci Bowers’ and Dr. Erica Anderson’s Candor Could Help Thousands of Families":
On Monday, I published probably the most important piece of my career thus far: an interview I did with two top gender medical providers – vaginoplasty expert and gender surgeon Dr. Marci Bowers and child psychologist at the UCSF gender clinic, Dr. Erica Anderson, who spoke candidly about risks of current treatment protocols guiding transgender medicine.For the first time in the U.S., top gender medical providers collectively acknowledged four facts: early puberty blockade can lead to significant surgical complication and also permanent sexual dysfunction; peer and social media influence do seem to play a role in encouraging the current, unprecedented spike in transgender identification by teen girls; and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) – of which both Bowers Anderson are board members – has been excluding doctors who question current medical protocols to its detriment.
But the bombshell – the point made to me in interviews with so many endocrinologists, but never by any providers of transgender medicine – was that “orgasmic naïveté” is real and it’s a problem.
In Bowers’ words:
When you block puberty, the problem is that a lot of the kids are orgasmically naive. So in other words, if you've never had an orgasm pre-surgery and then your puberty's blocked, it's very difficult to achieve that afterwards. And I think that I consider that a big problem, actually. It's kind of an overlooked problem that in our informed consent of children undergoing puberty blockers, we've in some respects overlooked that a little bit.
This Tweet by Christopher Rufo summarizes what too often passes for journalism in the left wing media. This misconduct by NSBA and the AP are apparently behind Merrick Garland's unwarranted letter suggesting (without offering any examples) that parents passionately complaining at school board meetings about Woke Ideology and masking mandates for children are acting as domestic terrorists.
What's really going on? Reason sums it up:
Has some great number of teachers, principals, and district leaders come under violent attack? Of course not. What both the Justice Department and the concerned school boards are really talking about it is the increased number of recent community meetings that have featured angry feedback from parents. These parents are sick of COVID-19 mitigation efforts that have relegated actual students to afterthought status within the education department: the farce of virtual learning, mandatory closure when asymptomatic cases are detected, ceaseless masking. Young people who have the least to fear from the pandemic—the severe disease and death rate for the under-18 crowd is extremely low—have been forced to make tremendous educational and social sacrifices to bend the curve of COVID-19. Families are fed up with a public education system that puts the needs of students last, and they are speaking up about it.
Many parents are also increasingly concerned about the curriculum in their schools. Garland's memo garnered widespread attention in conservative media circles yesterday after it was shared on Twitter by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who works to expose what he has termed "critical race theory." As I wrote previously, whether or not CRT is literally being taught in many K-12 schools hinges in part on a semantics argument. CRT, the obscure academic theory positing that the structures of U.S. society are racist to their core—and thus it is impossible to separate or ignore racism when confronting other issues—is not exactly sweeping U.S. kindergartens; but CRT—the tendency to reduce individuals to crude racial stereotypes that is pushed by divisive and misguided anti-whiteness gurus like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi—has certainly become an important component of corporate and university diversity training, and is, to some extent, trickling down to K-12 instruction.
The above explanation by Reason anticipates the deception offered by the NYT version of the Garland letter:
The attacks faced by educators, the organization wrote, include verbal attacks for approving Covid-19 safety policies such as masking, as well as physical threats stemming from false allegations that schools are teaching “critical race theory,” a legal framework primarily taught in graduate school that examines racism as a social construct embedded in policies and institutions. In recent months, some parents and politicians have invoked the phrase in seeking to restrict teaching about racism in public schools.
[Emphasis Added]
Whatever you'd like to call it is beside the point, but Critical Race Theory" is often used and for good reason. Contrary to the NYT assertion, it is not a "false allegation." Many parents are justifiably angry that many schools are doubling down on race essentialism and many other simplistic, divisive and destructive racial training teaching K-12 students, for example, that all black students are oppressed and all white students are oppressors.
The NSBA tactics and the AP false claim that it fact checked the NSBA are entirely predictable. Rather than face the fire of understandably outraged parents, NSBA would rather shut the parents up with claims that they are "terrorists" rather than have meaningful conversations.
One more thing about the nomenclature. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has it right about "Critical Race Theory":
Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes:
[R]egardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.
James Lindsay would summarize the Woke strategy as two-fold:
How often do you hear this excuse for obesity: [Person] cannot lose weight, no matter how little they eat, because of their low metabolism." Well . . . bullshit. Here's a few excerpts from a NYT article titled "What We Think We Know About Metabolism May Be Wrong: A new study challenges assumptions about energy expenditure by people, including the idea that metabolism slows at middle age."
Everyone knows conventional wisdom about metabolism: People put pounds on year after year from their 20s onward because their metabolisms slow down, especially around middle age. Women have slower metabolisms than men. That’s why they have a harder time controlling their weight. Menopause only makes things worse, slowing women’s metabolisms even more. All wrong, according to a paper published Thursday in Science.
Dr. Klein said that although people gain on average more than a pound and a half a year during adulthood, they can no longer attribute it to slowing metabolisms.
When it comes to weight gain, he says, the issue is the same as it has always been: People are eating more calories than they are burning..
Disturbing information from a woman who has held a seat on the largest school board in NYC:
