The Vindication of Abigail Shrier

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.

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Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers

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:

Continue ReadingFact-Checking the Fact-Checkers

Response to “I Can’t Lose Weight Because of my Metabolism

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..

Continue ReadingResponse to “I Can’t Lose Weight Because of my Metabolism

MIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI

The following Tweets tell the story of Dorian Abbot's recent cancelation:

What were the ideas of Dorian Abbot that got him canceled at MIT. They appear in Newsweek. He expressed his belief that DEI is unfair and that we ought to be hiring purely on merit. Here are some of his excerpts from his August 12, 2021 Newsweek article:

American universities are undergoing a profound transformation that threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. The new regime is titled "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" or DEI, and is enforced by a large bureaucracy of administrators. Nearly every decision taken on campus, from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI. This regime was imposed from the top and has never been adequately debated. In the current climate it cannot be openly debated: the emotions around DEI are so strong that self-censorship among dissenting faculty is nearly universal.

The words "diversity, equity and inclusion" sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, "equity" does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups . . .

DEI undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates. Some on campus might be surprised to learn that, according to a recent Pew poll, 74 percent of Americans think only qualifications should be taken into account in hiring and promotion, even if this results in less diversity. . . .

We propose an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone. Crucially, this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants, in addition to those based on group membership. Simultaneously, MFE would involve universities investing in education projects in neighborhoods where public education is failing to help children from those areas compete. These projects would be evidence-based and non-ideological, testing a variety of different options such as increased public school funding, charter schools and voucher programs.

I have enchanted many people who completely agree with Professor, but they are afraid to express their views because they would risk damage to their careers (the exact kind suffered by Professor Abbott). The result is that a critically important topic (whether we should be hiring solely based on merit) is not being debated. Another professor, Gordon Klein, recently expressed similar views in a lawsuit he filed against his employer, UCLA. He has alleged that he was punished for refusing to discriminate. On Sept 30, 2021, his article appeared at Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Here are a few excerpts from Why I am Suing UCLA:

My saga — which nearly led to my firing — began on the morning of June 2, 2020, when a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater “leniency” than others in the class. “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates,” the student wrote. (There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the “we” in this case was. . . . I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.) “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” To try to make his case, the student drew on UCLA’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which directs professors to grant preferential “equity” to students belonging to “underrepresented groups.”

I wholeheartedly support these principles as most of us understand them. I think all human beings should be treated the same. I welcome — I celebrate — a diversity of opinions and arguments. And, to say the least, I believe in making room for anyone with the grades and gumption to study at one of the nation’s most competitive universities. But academia has so corrupted these words that they are now hollowed out corpses devoid of their original meaning. Today, “diversity” means ideological homogeneity. And “inclusion” means the exclusion of some from a taxpayer-supported university to favor others deemed more deserving of an educational springboard to prosperity.

Shocked by the student’s email, which struck me as deeply patronizing and offensive to the same black students he claimed to care so much about, I collected my thoughts and, 20 minutes later, emailed back: “Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black half-Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they are probably especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might possibly be even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.”

I wrapped up my reply by citing Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind world where people are judged solely by the content of their character — making it clear that I had no intention of treating any students differently on the basis of their skin color.

By that evening, students were calling for my job. Soon after, they circulated a petition demanding I be fired; within a day or two, nearly 20,000 had signed — without knowing anything about me or taking into account, as far as I could tell, the implications of non-color-blind grading. I was attacked for being a white man and “woefully racist.” On June 5, three days after I was first emailed, I was suspended amid a growing online campaign directed at me.

Here is the federal complaint spelling out Gordon Klein's detailed allegations pertaining to the misconduct of UCLA.

We need to be able to discuss ideas freely, especially controversial ideas, especially at universities, the mission of which has long been to expose students to controversial ideas. In the current climate, however, many people are being threatened and punished for expressing or attempting to discuss important issues of the day. This trend blatantly violates the three prerequisites set forth by Jonathan Rauch (in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge) for enabling us to determine what is true and what is not true. We are nudging month by month closer to a new national principle: Declaration of Truth by Edict.

Continue ReadingMIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI