Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive).

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

Agreed fully on the JEDI stuff. I was somewhat hoping it was from an April first issue. That was bad.

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?

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

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.

What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior?

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.

On a personal level, linguistic imperialism. For all the rhetoric spewed regarding the impacts of colonialism and cultural imperialism and fervent calls to decolonize various aspects of society, the whites spewing that very same rhetoric have found a way to launder their own modern brand of imperialism into gender diversity and inclusivity by inventing and then imposing new language on that of other ethnic minorities: "Filipinx." This word shows a shocking ignorance of basic facts of Tagalog that it can't be construed in any way other than racist: there is no letter "x" in Tagalog, and the grammar of the language is already genderless. This point becomes readily apparent if you are conversing with a native Tagalog speaker who uses English as a second language, as they will readily confuse the pronouns "he" and "she" in everyday speech, the concept of gendered pronouns being, quite literally, foreign to them. Is this transphobic bigotry?

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

I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos. Basically every culture on earth has deep seated views on gender that don't match reality, and a strong reactionary response when that's interrogated from within the community.

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".

> I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos.

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.

The media is replete [2] with [3] other [4] examples of how poorly this term is received overseas, despite its adoption by a small subset of the western Filipino diaspora. Take this interview conducted by VICE with "Nanette Caspillo, a former University of the Philippines professor of European languages" [2]:

    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 isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven.

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...

I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.

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.)

> I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.

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.

Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo.

> 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]

> 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.

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

I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women".

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.

Huh?

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