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Trans activists’ campaign against ‘TERFs’ has become an attack on science

#1
C C Offline
https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-a...n-science/

EXCERPT: . . . But at least the effort to push back against anti-vaccination conspiracy theories is seen as a respectable form of discourse. In other spheres, it’s not so easy to speak common sense.

Consider, for instance, last year’s saga involving Rebecca Tuvel—who was hounded by trans activists and scholars after applying a theoretical application of transgender ideology to the idea of “trans-racialism.” Scandalously, the article in question was edited post facto so as to remove the name “Bruce Jenner”—in response to the claim that these two words served to “dead-name” the person now known as Caitlyn Jenner (despite the fact that Caitlyn Jenner herself repeatedly refers to “Bruce” in interviews). To cite the historically verifiable fact that someone named Bruce Jenner once existed is now seen as a sort of religious heresy. And like all heresies, it must be ritualistically expunged—not because it is factually wrong, but because it is seen as morally wrong.

In August, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was criticized for removing a news release about a peer-reviewed study published in PLoS One by one of its academics—Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher at Brown’s School of Public Health. Littman’s article, titled “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,“ discusses the phenomenon by which social media and peer pressure seem to have fuelled the recently observed trend by which young teenagers (typically girls) suddenly declare themselves transgender. The paper infuriated transgender activists, who claim that the entire notion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a transphobic invention. Both Brown and PLoS One also were attacked as Brown’s enablers.

While no one could offer any evidence that Littman’s results were wrong, PLoS One issued a statement acknowledging the complaints about the study, and promising “further expert assessment on the study’s content and methodology.” Meanwhile, the dean of the School of Public Health, Bess H. Marcus, claimed that concerns over methodology had incited the university to remove the news article from the university’s web site. She added that members of the university community members had “express[ed] concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” In other words, Marcus is worried that facts might be used to undermine ideologically hallowed “perspectives”—also known as “opinions.”

As former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier noted in Quillette, the whole spectacle raises important issues of academic freedom at Brown. But it also symbolizes how severely transgender activism has undermined the efforts of clinicians and researchers who have sought to investigate the issue of gender dysphoria. There is perhaps no other area of human behaviour where ideologically motivated actors have been so successful in creating what are in effect no-go zones for academics, and even for facts themselves.

[...] The extraordinarily aggressive nature of today’s trans activism means that women’s spaces are now being invaded by male-bodied individuals across the board—from rape-crisis centres, to gym locker rooms, to prisons. It also is turning many female athletics competitions into a joke, because male-bodied athletes who identify as transgender often can best female competitors. Rachel McKinnon, the aforementioned anti-“TERF” activist, also presents as a world-class female cyclist. This month, McKinnon gleefully ascended the podium at the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championship, alongside the women who won “runner-up” status. As third-place (some would say second-place) finisher Jen Wagner-Assali tweeted, “It’s definitely NOT fair.” But like other activists in this field, McKinnon seems to inhabit a fantasy world in which the difference between male and female athletic performance dissolves amidst the great “complex and messy and beautiful” diversity of human body types more generally. Everyone involved in the sport knows this to be nonsense, but are fearful to say so, lest they be called—in McKinnon’s own words—“transphobic bigots.”

Even in disciplines far removed from athletics or the white-gowned world of hospitals and clinics, pressure to toe an extremist line on transgender issues is undermining academic and intellectual freedom. The journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (PPR) recently published two articles—one by trans academic Rachel McKinnon (College of Charleston) called “The Epistemology of Propaganda,“ and another by Jason Stanley (Yale), “Replies”—wherein the epithet “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is casually flung about to attack women who oppose a trans-maximalist agenda. The attack on women contained in these articles was so scathing that a group of philosophers were moved to publish a guest post in the philosophy blog Daily Nous entitled “Derogatory Language in Philosophy Journal Risks Increased Hostility and Diminished Discussion,” pointing out that TERF is “at worst a slur and at best derogatory.” (It has also been pointed out that McKinnon’s paper contained at least one flat-out falsehood—the claim that there is no case on record of a transgender woman sexually assaulting a woman in a female-only space.)

One of the dark ironies informing the trans extremists’ case against their opponents is the insistence that people like me—women—must call themselves cis women. For all their fixation on self-identification and self-selected pronouns, these same activists demand the right to apply made-up terms to others. And if you reject those terms? Well, that’s just taken as more proof that you’re a “TERF.”...

MORE: https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-a...n-science/
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#2
Syne Offline
Just par for the course nowadays. Rolleyes
Leftists increasingly rail against scientific findings when they come into conflict with their ideology.
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#3
Yazata Offline
(Oct 22, 2018 08:53 AM)Syne Wrote: Just par for the course nowadays. Rolleyes
Leftists increasingly rail against scientific findings when they come into conflict with their ideology.

Reportedly the federal government is readying a new policy to overturn the Obama-era "trans" craziness.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/...-ideology/

The NYT writes:

"Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by the New York Times."

So apparently schools that have boys' and girls' bathrooms won't be at risk of federal civil rights lawsuits. Schools that refuse to allow male transvestites onto female sports teams won't be at risk of Justice Department lawsuits.

The NYT continues:

"The Department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable." The agency's proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by the Times. Any dispute about one's sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing."

and...

"The sex listed on a person's birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person's sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence."

The new Rule still has to be approved by the Justice Department, and it is expected to go to Atty. Gen. Sessions before the end of the year.

Breitbart says:

"The NYT article did not say how the federal rule will work with state laws, many of which allow people to change their legal sex. Some states require individuals to undergo genital surgery before they change the sex marker on their official documents, such as drivers' licenses. The proposal does not suggest agencies should stop people from trying to live as members of the opposite sex, but requires the agencies to defer to biology when documenting peoples' sex."

"In 2017, Sessions' department discarded Obama's transgender policy statements. At the request of women prisoners, Sessions has also ended Obama's support for mixed-sex prisons in early 2018. Also, the Pentagon has already announced it will use biology as a "bright line" when documenting the sex of a potential recruit."

"President Donald Trump's Pentagon chief is reversing the pro-transgender policy set by former President Barack Obama and will reject soldiers or recruits who demand to be classified as members of the other sex."

https://www.breitbart.com/midterm-electi...-ideology/
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#4
Syne Offline
Yep, saw that elsewhere. Good, we need to get all this subjective identification nonsense out of public policy.
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#5
C C Offline
(Oct 22, 2018 06:52 PM)Yazata Wrote: Reportedly the federal government is readying a new policy to overturn the Obama-era "trans" craziness.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/...-ideology/

[...] The NYT continues:

"The Department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable." The agency's proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by the Times. Any dispute about one's sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing."

and...

"The sex listed on a person's birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person's sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence."


There's already a stream of opinion editorials and articles coming out attacking it.

Against a Federal Registry of Genitals: The paradigm is somewhat similar to saying that automobiles come in two forms: cars and trucks. This is a worldview that is easily challenged by the existence of SUVs and station wagons—neither of which would suddenly disappear, even if government officials tried to make up a definition that excluded them. Yet this is the paradigm that the Department of Health and Human Services is preparing to use to define gender, according to a memo reported in The New York Times today: “The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with ... Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”

The social sciences have for some time been incrementally watered-down, anyway, by weak-willed administrations and researchers who suppress or amend findings that would upset popular sensibilities; and who bow adjustment-wise to criticism from ideological factions and mindsets. As well as pre-condition the inquiries of surveys to favor certain results and interpret statistical data in ways which mitigate disapproval from the aforementioned. These remaining scientists who remain loyal to methodological / processing standards and still express their concerns like this will gradually fall to the wayside or be compromised, too. (If counter-efforts like the above keep advancing or winning via arousing sentimentality, outrage vigilantism, moral-shaming, and concocting new concept vocabularies facilitating their aims / authority seizures.)

A future possibly somewhat resembling the Soviet kowtowing of science to ideology (below). Creationists and any far-right pseudoscience orientations (as well as apolitical ones) can cash in on the entrance wounds opened up by an era of post-traditionalism, too; they just have to maybe be more subtle about it or not raise the ire and focus of the non-Breitbart media culture. This isn't solely about radical-left PowerGrab opportunism, when it comes to feasting on the falling carcass of science standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed...viet_Union

Suppressed research in the Soviet Union refers to scientific fields which were banned in the Soviet Union. All humanities and social sciences were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism. These tests were alleged to serve as a cover for political suppression of scientists who engaged in research labeled as "idealistic" or "bourgeois".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_an...viet_Union

Although the sciences were less rigorously censored than other fields such as art, there were several examples of suppression of ideas. In the most notorious, agronomist Trofim Lysenko refused to accept the chromosome theory of heredity usually accepted by modern genetics. Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he managed to talk Joseph Stalin in 1948 into banning the practice and teaching of population genetics and several other related fields of biological research; this decision was only reversed in the 1960s.

~
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#6
Yazata Offline
(Oct 22, 2018 09:11 PM)C C Wrote: There's already a stream of opinion editorials and articles coming out attacking it.

That's predictable.

Quote:Against a Federal Registry of Genitals

Except that there isn't any "Federal Registry of Genitals". Nobody's proposed one. That's just bullshit.

All they are doing is establishing a definition of what a person's "sex" means and how it is legally determined whenever there's some issue regarding it. (There typically isn't for most people.) A person's sex is determined for legal purposes by what is recorded on that person's original birth certificate. In the small number of cases where that's problematic (such as babies born with ambiguous or hermaphroditic genitalia I'm guessing), genetic testing can be employed.

The big change is that for federal legal purposes sex is going back to being defined biologically, not by whatever a person happens to feel more in tune with at the moment.
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