Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

But what is he on about here?

Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior."

(a) The (marked!) editorial is in no way a refutation of the concept of the normal distribution.

(b) It's written by a currently-publishing tenured life sciences professor (though, clearly, not one of the ones Singal would have chosen --- or, to be fair, me, though it's not hard for me to get over that and confirm that she's familiar with basic statistics).

(c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.

It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††, another for him to dip his toes into HBD-ism. Sorry, dude, there's a dark stain on Wilson's career. Trying to sneak that past the reader, as if it was knee-jerk wokeism, sabotages the credibility of your own piece.

Again, the rest of this piece, sure. Maybe he's right. The Jedi thing in particular: major ugh. But I don't want to have to check all of his references, and it appears that one needs to.

† term used advisedly

†† this is what Singal is principally known for

And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribution?

I think his views are culturally orthodox, outside of liberal-left members of the laptop class.

Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990427

Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

More generally, this graphic has an astute depiction of the problem: https://i.ibb.co/ZcMWLvM/no.jpg

I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.

If it’s a small number, then presumably it’s not worth fighting over and sport can just have Open and Female categories?

Actually, most of those "potential" trans turn out to be actual trans. That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.

> It's a "problem" way overblown by anti-trans activists.

I get that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.

The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.

Therein lies the rub. Some sure do, but most 13 year old girls don’t.

Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.

This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.

https://www.shewon.org/

However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.

It is a wedge issue, simply. It benefits entrenched interests because it allows them to anger and control people, just like they do with the War on Christmas, the War on Guns, Welfare Queens, Baby Killers, Wokeism, DEI, and so many other catchphrases that collapse nuanced issues to a sports slogan.

This entire discussion is grossly disappointing. So many otherwise intelligent people thinking they are debating issues, when they are being played like a fiddle.

The reason it's not surreal is because it's so banal.

Wilson viewed Rushton as a case of scientific freedom. I.e. research shouldn't be suppressed for socio-political reasons.

You're allowed to disagree with that. But you should understand that the scientifc freedom side isn't racist, even if ends up on the same side as racists.

I don't know what to make of you accusing Singal of "dipping his toes into HBD-ism". Maybe you just phrased that wrong. But it sounds like you're saying "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist". Is that how racism works?

> First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

That’s at best sloppily written, regardless of what one thinks about Wilson. The normal distribution is a mathematical tool; it doesn’t “assume” anything about some particular concrete topic like measuring humans.

>>>

While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.

The strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base on the care of children and young people are often misrepresented and overstated, both in scientific publications and social debate.

The controversy surrounding the use of medical treatments has taken focus away from what the individualised care and treatment is intended to achieve for individuals seeking support from NHS gender services.

The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.

The use of masculinising / feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.

And there has never been a shred of proof of her being trans. Exactly my point.

> et that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.

Yes, better for women with high testosterone to get death threats now for winning in the Olympics instead of thinking if this is really a problem.

Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution?

And that criticism has come from medical boards in the UK and globally, I believe?

Anyway, that's also only for children, which feels politically like a wedge issue. The NHS is very slow at providing HRT and I rather doubt they're treating more than a hundred children for gender dysphoria in any way rn.

Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.

But my son at age 5 asked me “Daddy do you think I’m a boy just because I have a penis?” This is because his woke kindergarten teachers started teaching this gender nonsense and that’s where I had to start teaching my kid about how all this was nonsense.

Where I draw the line is when I am told to lie to myself and my children that there is more than 2 genders and that a man is actually a woman if he thinks he is a woman. I refuse to do that and the fact that the activists have crossed the line into absurdity is where I fight back. I will not let my children grow up in an anti-science world like that.

As a person entirely out of the "trans debate" it almost always seems to me like right wingers or anyone who is asked to change anything at all catastrophizes it beyond all sane response.

The mild "huh that slightly bothers me" and the "they are TRYING TO CHANGE MY CHILDREN!!!" seem to be conflated to the point of making no sense.

Going from "I noticed a trans person" to "this must be stopped!" makes no sense whatsoever.

Sorry but you're repeating disinformation that has already been refuted by the lead author, and is obviously incorrect if you read the Review itself.

http://archive.today/ea0Vi

> Dr Hilary Cass, 66, told The Times last week that one activist had begun posting falsehoods about her landmark review of the treatment of trans children before it was even published.

> She was referring to Alejandra Caraballo, an American attorney, transgender woman and instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.

> On April 9 — the day before the Cass review was published — Caraballo claimed it had “disregarded nearly all studies” because they were not double-blind controlled ones.

> Double-blind studies see patients randomly given either medicine or a placebo, with neither the patient or doctor knowing which.

> In a post on Twitter/X, Caraballo accused Cass and the review team of holding trans healthcare to an “impossible standard”. This was because, she said, transgender patients could not take hormones “blind”, as the effects of any hormones would fairly quickly become obvious.

> Her tweets were contradicted by the publication of the Cass review hours later.

> During a systematic review, researchers looking at studies on transgender healthcare found no blind control ones — so used another system altogether to determine study quality. Cass told The Times last week how difficult it would be to use blind control studies in relation to trans patients, for the same reasons identified by Caraballo.

> As for Caraballo’s claim that the review team “disregarded nearly all studies”, Cass pointed out that 60 out of 103 studies reviewed were used for the conclusions. They were studies deemed to be of moderate and high quality on the effects of puberty blockers and hormone treatment.

> Despite this, Caraballo’s post has been viewed 871,000 times and has not been deleted.

This is unfortunately quite a typical tactic of activists like Caraballo. They will deliberately lie to further their aims, relying on people who are unaware that their lies are lies to spread this disinformation.

There are a lot of other orgs though and especially if you're in an area with a lot of trans people and it's a more active issue, I'm interested in what other groups have had to come up with. Like I said if the goal is preventing sexual violence I can't imagine that moving trans women into the mens prison is going to be effective either.

https://thekitetrust.org.uk/our-statement-in-response-to-the...

The amount of myths circulating about the review prompted the publishing of an FAQ page which deals with some of the more egregious examples (e.g. the claim that 98% of studies were rejected).

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...

And again I say this as someone who is a member of a rigorous religious tradition that does not have any real flexibility about this. Nonetheless I've had to come to accept it because, as you say, the science.

Rather the article is critiquing the specific use of the normal distribution in assessing population and sub-population statistics. I do think that this critique is kind of nonsensical because the normal distribution assumes nothing of the kind -- a person who is of average height, a "default height" human, is a concept utterly distinct from the concept of a person who is of average weight, a "default weight" human.

Also, it's taking a particular position to characterise gender dysphoria as merely a subjective feeling of unhappiness. I do not have any fixed position on what exactly gender dysphoria is, but I believe many trans people see it as far more than just that.

Only if you use some definition of “intersex” that has nothing to do with the “two ovaries and a penis” you mentioned before.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

Did you just make this up or did you have a specific disorder of sexual development in mind? Presence of two ovaries suggests it's a female DSD anyhow.

> Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair.

This figure is controversial and includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. The true prevalence is more likely between 0.01% and 0.02%.

The trans discussion is separate to this anyway, as it involves individuals without any DSDs who demand that others treat them as if they were the opposite sex.

The fact that she was raised as a woman in Algeria (a notorious hotbed of wokeness) should tell you something.

Also, while it is gross to pick over people's bodies like this, I have to point out that you omit to note that her testicles are internal.

There are trans-identifying female athletes who don't take testosterone and compete in women's sports, recent example in the last Olympics being Hergie Bacyadan in women's boxing. There's no exclusion on participation as long as the same rules as for everyone else are followed.

But what is "female"? The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition, which ruled her out of some previous competitions that had conditions around that. Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests? Especially when it gets into kids' sports territory, this gets very iffy very fast.

The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?

If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.

On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327

Cases of genuinely ambiguous sex are vanishingly rare, and are nothing to do with trans identities which are differences of social gender that do not change the underlying biology.

There was a (successful) effort to push misinformation regarding the report.

I think people on the right (outright bigots excepted) would say they do have sympathy, and it's for kids who have been influenced by the media or whatever to think that they are the opposite gender.

> However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.

And I think the response here is that not taking action is also one-way, causing irreversible changes, like to the bone structure.

The current political climate sucks for agender people.

This implies that Khelif is not female but is male, and went through male puberty, therefore having the male physical advantage in sport caused by male sexual development.

The actual graphic:

"Lesbians must have sex with me!"

Get the fuck out of here. This is nonsense.

It's one thing to say: "In my view, EO Wilson's association with Rushton is defensible and should not be considered a stain on his career".

It's quite another to say: "That, and I believe it so much that I cannot take seriously anybody who disagrees with me on this, I shall call them and their viewpoints names such as 'surreal' and make grandiose claims that their opinion is so ridiculous, it requires a cultural change at this magazine".

The latter is what was said.

I see no conflict between holding both of these ideas:

* EO Wilson's association with Rushton isn't a problem, and it wasn't about him supporting those ideas themselves, it was about supporting the idea of 'let ideas be, do not censor them'.

* Singal is wildly inappropriate with this, and the plan as stated is cancel culture/crazy politication of a magazine.

In:

> "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist"

You've made an evident mistake. It's instead:

> Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he might also be and we should look into that, Singal called that very thought of questioning Wilson's association with Rushton as ridiculous - and THAT means he's a racist'.

Maybe still wrong but not nearly as crazy as you seem to think it is.

The "War on Christmas" effects a greater sense of persecution while framing it as a nonexistent conflict. There is no War on Christmas. I can say Merry Christmas or not, and it will not effect the wedge issue because it is and never was about saying Merry Christmas to others.

https://x.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1858611351901663550

https://x.com/ItsYonder/status/1858673181315506307

This is nonsensical. This isn't "defusing" it, this is authoritarianism and literal capitulation to the absurd demands that are meaningless

People say "Happy holidays" now because they know some people don't celebrate Christmas and they want to be nice, friendly, and pleasant to them as well.

If you have a problem with people saying "Happy holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas" you are a fucking baby.

They are only industrial strength memes to create anger and distrust, thereby placing people in more manipulable mental states. You starve them by ignoring them, regardless of the merits. Most of all, don't react with anger.

I think it is reasonable for a woman to want a shared nude space to be free of people with penises, regardless of what that person identifies as, for simple logistics reasons of not being able to be sure if someone is being deceptive.

Same as has happened previously with other male athletes in women's sports, such as Caster Semenya who also has 5-ARD and also competed in the Olympics, back in 2016 in the women's 800m track event, winning gold. The silver and bronze medals were taken by males too.

Khelif does not identify as trans, and described such accusations as "a big shame for my family, for the honor of my family, for the honor of Algeria, for the women of Algeria and especially the Arab world."

I'm an atheist and this is my approach. I think their religion is complete nonsense but Christmas is a wholly inoffensive Holiday, which is celebrated in a fashion by many secular people anyway. I think the "Happy Holidays" thing is needlessly antagonist. In principle it should be fine but a lot of people take it the wrong way, it is known that many people take it the wrong way, and therefore if I said it then I would be saying it with the knowledge and acceptance that it's going to bother a lot of people (hence, antagonistic.)

I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat.

Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel but then still get defensive when people say you hate other people based on their identity.

I responded to this because I read a biography of EO Wilson recently. It's strange to say his association with Rushton was a stain on his career because his career was massive. He published an absurd number of papers, did lots of field work, discovered many new species, wrote many popular science books, and was influential as an early conservationist. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly kind person. His link to some racist is a footnote, not a stain.

It's worth asking why it's even coming up. Here are a few possible reasons:

1. A number of left-wingers attacked Wilson following Sociobiology and it's been open-season on him ever since

2. It's trendy to call famous white scientists racist

3. Highly accomplished people cause envy in others which leads to tendentious attacks

However. Cultural attitudes are propagated by people who's livelihood is frequent publishing. In that scenario, I think teams "what's to talk about?" and "it's not that complicated" are always going to lose to team "I've got a lot to say about this."

I'd said something like, I don't think claiming an identity is enough, there has to be some sort of dysphoria. And then followed up with another comment like, if they want to keep the cock intact, then they're not actually trans women, as a genuine trans woman would want rid of it even if she couldn't afford the surgery.

This was enough to get me called bigoted and transphobic, and then permanently banned with no recourse, which surprised me because I'd disagreed with people there on the details of a few other topics in the past. Yet somehow this was too much.

It still baffles me how this is the one of the few issues that gets people on the left so riled up that they can't even bear to hear any dissent.

Most of the criticism of the Cass Review comes from the US. Most of Europe has either stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for minors or never did in the first place. The UK is joining the consensus among the majority of developed countries regarding treatment of gender dysphoric youth, now the US and Canada stand as the sole outliers.

As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.

Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

Examples like Judit Polgar (who was around the top 10 players in the world at her peak) do indeed prove that chess is nothing like (physical) sports in this way. In physical sports like basketball, soccer, etc. the best women in the world can’t compete against even moderately athletic amateur men. A famous example is the fact that the US women’s national soccer team practices against young teenage boys (and routinely loses). In chess it would be like if the best woman was rated 1800 or something.

This isn’t meant to disparage women in sports — they really do have a categorically different kind of body from men, and pushing those bodies to their limits is just as impressive as it is for men. But they don’t appear to have categorically different kinds of brain, at least insofar as it matters for chess skill.

Intersex as defined by genuine ambiguity of someone's sex is around 0.02% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

> Leonard Sax, in response to Fausto-Sterling, estimated that the prevalence of intersex was about 0.018% of the world's population,[4] discounting several conditions included in Fausto-Sterling's estimate that included LOCAH, Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY), Turner syndrome (45,X), the chromosomal variants of 47,XYY and 47,XXX, and vaginal agenesis. Sax reasons that in these conditions chromosomal sex is consistent with phenotypic sex and phenotype is classifiable as either male or female.[4]

Imane Khelif has an X and a Y chromosome. She has 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which leads to the development of a pseudo-vagina and internal testicles. Crucially, though, the hormone levels are the same as typical males. In terms of upper body strength, red blood cell count, bone density, etc. Khelif is the same as other males.

She wasn't disqualified due to hormone levels. She was disqualified because the International Boxing Association's criteria for participating in the women's category is having a female karyotype (no Y chromosome).

> Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests?

Chromosomes can be checked with just a mouth swab.

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-the-us-popu...

I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).

A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.

I still feel the discourse is overblown. Would have preferred to see those lines as jokes, though. That said, will look into "slate pitches." Strong chance I am just ignorant in a new way here.

This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with.

My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and in the Philippines, is that very few people, especially amongst the older generations, have ever heard of Filipinx; of those who have, nobody respects the term as valid, and indeed many regard it as colonialist.

From an opinion piece in The Philippines' newspaper of record, the centre-left [0] Philippine Daily Inquirer [1]:

    The practice of gender-neutralizing all gendered words began in the 1960s with the purpose of supporting gender equality. Though we may see Filipinx as
    something to be celebrated for its obvious acknowledgment of gender neutrality borrowed from the Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States, we
    must resist such adverse essentializing of our identity.

    If we use Filipinx here in the Philippines, many people would probably react in shock at such a strange word, and would immediately resist such naming.

    Absurd as it may seem, these Filipino-American digital natives prove once again the naming power of the American establishment to co-opt identities in their
    own sense. Haven’t we learned from history? The Philippine revolutions, the massacres, the campaigns for sovereignty, our fight to wield the Philippine flag
    and sing the national anthem? To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.

    What could be more gender-neutral than the Philippine languages themselves spoken by our fellow Filipinos?

    We, the Filipino virtual community, have to resist this Western hype and instead empower our languages in the Philippines. We are all Filipinos. Our
    concerns are deeply rooted in our social realities than in the post-postmodern neutralized revision implied by Filipinx.

    While it is intended to promote diversity, the word instead sparked arguments about identity, colonialism, and the power of language. 

    Right now, most people in the Philippines do not seem to recognize, understand, relate to, or assert Filipinx as their identity. Therefore, “the word
    [‘Filipinx’] does not naturally evoke a meaning that reflects an entity in reality,” [...]

    “Filipinx has not reached collective consciousness,” Caspillo said, perhaps because fewer people have heard of and relate to the new term.

This just sounds like a justification for tolerating double standards and self-contradiction, to the tune of "rules for thee, and not for me."

> There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

Beyond the question of Rachel Dolezal's transracial identity as discussed in Tuvel's paper, there is also the recent Canadian headline regarding a self-identifying Indigenous group that has received tens of millions in federal cash [5]. Is this group Inuit, or is it not? Who decides? Would you, in their words, "want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?” All because you refuse to respect their self-identification and long-documented history as an Indigenous people?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Daily_Inquirer

[1] https://opinion.inquirer.net/133571/filipino-or-filipinx

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...

[3] https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/features/filipinos-fili...

[4] https://tribune.net.ph/2022/08/08/why-filipinx-is-unacceptab...

[5] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-self-identify...

Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures.

Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.

(By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)

Cass meeting with DeSantis staffers [1], for one

[1] https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/cass-met-with-desantis-pi...

> Notably, Hilary Cass met with Patrick Hunter, a member of the anti-trans Catholic Medical Association who played a significant role in the development of the Florida Review and Standards of Care under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.

Merry Christmas to you.

> A followup email from Hunter indicates that he met with Cass on September 22, 2022 (ECF 184-1). Even as Paul Vazquez wanted to invite Cass to the Board of Medicine hearing as a subject matter expert, Hunter felt that would put her “in a difficult position”:

Why downplay this link in a discussion about the politicization of science?

Also, that quote is not appearing anywhere in the linked article. Did you post the wrong link?

Again, is the mere fact that Cass - whose job is to advise governments on healthcare - met with someone in government supposed to disqualify the review as politically motivated? What, specifically, did this DeSantis staffer change in the Cass Review?

This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association. Given that Cass' job is to advise government on healthcare, meeting with government staffers is hardly surprising.

Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]:

    “Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk
    about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com.

> Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral.

Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background.

    Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language
    itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from
    the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1]

You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy.

Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism.

[0] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-n...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla

Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood.

Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.

Linked in the article, about her meeting with Hunter

https://genderanalysis.net/2023/11/new-trial-exhibits-in-doe...

> This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association.

Call him a "government staffer" all you like, let's call it what it is: her meeting with an explicitly religious interest group

Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender. I was assigned male at birth, I look stereotypically male, everyone assume I'm male and addresses me as such, but honestly, I don't care one way or the other and if I was female instead I doubt I would care. Let's say 50% fall here.

Another group of people strongly identified with one gender or the other, and can't imagine it being any other way. These people care deeply about gender because it is an important part of their identity. Let's say the other 50% fall here. Most of them are happy because they present as the gender they feel they are, and everyone treats them as such. In a small percentage, there is a mismatch and it makes their life hell.

I suspect the typical mind fallacy makes it very hard for most people to understand those that fall into the other group. And for those that are in the "happy with their gender" group to understand those in the "unhappy with their gender" group.

It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.

The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.

Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.

So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).

My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.

[1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

This is not to say that I don't think there should be a rebuttal of any social sciencey claim, but that it should - and can - be done socratically.

it's like any topic you think is simple until you research even a bit of it and go 'oh'

I’m the same. But, and this is a huge but: it’s my privilege to be able to think this way. I know that there are people who simply isn’t allowed to do this.

The same thing with skin color. I don’t care. However, my brother has a darker skin tone, he simply cannot have that luxury to not care, because other people force him. For example, when he wasn’t allowed to buy stuff at the nearby bakery because of his skin. He had to move to a country where people care less, because he didn’t want to put up his kids to the same. (Btw our country of origin is Hungary)

As to privilege.. whatever man. The simple fact is that Christians are the predominant religion where I live and they are touchy about this matter in a way other people aren't, so why should I go against the flow? Just to spite people I feel no real animosity against? To undermine a holiday I enjoy? Literally why.

I know plenty of trans women who don't wish to have extensive bottom surgery. Given that you don't have expertise in the field and have basically invented your beliefs from whole cloth, I think you should revise them accordingly and take it as a learning experience about the value of study.

More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).

As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.

In hindsight, I'm not surprised my horribly misogynistic English teacher lied about this.

This is the problem I have with the more militant trans activists. You’re trying to remove a meaningful distinction from other people’s thoughts. Regardless of the words you use, a biological male who identifies as a woman is not the same thing as a biological female.

You don't have to say that apples and oranges are the same. What's based more in religious/patriarchal ideas than in rational evidence is the belief that men are like apples and women are like oranges (or that men are from Mars and women are from Venus). There are some differences that the patriarchy magnified into a monstrous set of institutions (coverture! implied consent! vomit). We're on the path to slowly undoing it, but progress isn't monotonic that's for sure.

(By the way, calling a trans woman, especially one who has medically transitioned, a "biological male" is both an HR violation and not rooted in evidence. It is really frustrating to hear your basic dignity being talked about by people who are as confident as they are ignorant. When I was still cis-presenting and didn't fully understand what my trans friends were going through, I didn't spout off my thoughts like a fool. I took the time to learn.)

This is my issue with lots of things being said about politics and language. Language is a tool. There is nothing patriarchal in "woman", nor in the use of the default "unmarked masculine" (this is the technical term) that is present in many languages. The unmarked masculine may even be interpreted in a matriarcal sense: the feminine has detached from the "general human" as someone "special", "more important" than the man. But these are all speculations that are all valid and all silly at the same time.

How we _use_ language is another story though. For example, using the masculine with the consequence (intentional or not) to exclude women from a job ad is definitely not acceptable. The unmarked masculine has the problem of being ambiguous, but the ambiguity can be solved (with the added cost of redundancy) by repeating the same words with the feminine or simply by specifying who the message is referring to (example: "madame et monsieur"). This is common sense, but it's worth reminding people to be careful about it. What is not common sense (IMHO) is to ask all speakers of a certain language to change a thousands years old morphology because someone misuses it, and not even providing valid alternatives.

Other examples of politicised language can be found in the words that are used to signal virtue, or to offend, often completely changing the original meaning of the word to the point that it becomes a political slogan with no meaning at all. I have dozens of examples, including the same word "patriarchy", but I can also mention "fascist", "communist", "feminist", "violent" etc.

Some people enjoy this show, some use it as a very convenient way to bring attention to some topics (or themselves), others, like me, find it confusing and extremely tiring and a reason for disconnecting from politics rather than embracing it.