This article was just published in Science, one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, but one that’s embraced wokeness with an iron grip. And so it tries to fuse science with progressive social justice, as if the former somehow buttresses the latter.
I’m not going to discuss this article in deth, as it’s short and readers can absorb it very quickly. I just want to give a few quotes from it (below). Click to read:
I believe the point of the piece is to celebrate the complexity of science because it buttresses the complexity of gender identity. The author, who says she/he is bisexual (no pronoun is given) has no time for cut-and-dried answers, but, after learning about astrophysics, embraced it because it’s “the kind of physics that doesn’t have all the answers, the kind of physics that disagrees with itself, the kind of physics that is messy and chaotic and, God forbid, fun.”
To quote the author:
Now, I realize the power of my identity. Being nonbinary means challenging the status quo every day. It means everything can and must be questioned. It means exploring things others take to be fundamental in new ways from new angles. In my everyday life, my gender identity compels me to find unconventional solutions to difficult problems. I turn over unseen stones. I try unorthodox methods. I wrestle with big, fundamental questions. All of these things make me a better scientist.
Physics is always evolving, and gender is, too. When we understand that things are more complex than they appear, we learn. When scientists embrace the complexity of the universe, our science can only improve.
But of course the object lessons of science, regardless of one’s gender, is that it’s often complicated, that there are very many questions that remain unanswered (and what answers we get lead to more questions, and that, indeed “everything can and must be questioned.” The bit in quotes is in fact the foundation of science. Remember that the motto of Britain’s Royal Society is “nullis in verba” (“don’t take anybody’s word for it”).
Science can be used to support your emotions or preconceived ideas, but it is an empirical endeavor that carries no inherent ideological or moral lessons. Nevertheless, it can and has repeatedly be twisted to lend itself to different—and conflicting—points of view. If you study bonobos you learn that nature is kind and empathic, If you study chimpanzees, on the other hand, you learn that nature is vicious, with members of one species tearing their fellows limb from limb. And don’t ever study the behavior of Adélie penguins!
This nonbinary thing is probably one of the most stupid fads of this century. Most people who think about gender stuff will quickly realize that yes, we may use broad language to describe gender for conversational clarity, but the truth of gender is complicated and there can be masculine women and feminine men and everything in between. This does not have anything to do with sex, which is binary.
Instead of accepting this like most rational people do, the nonbinary people take a completely insane left turn and end up with a kind of conspiracy theory that does claim to have all the answers, is not messy and absolutely abhors being disagreed with. Men are masculine, women are feminine and if you don’t fit those strict rules you’re a third category. They take an imagined binary that’s mostly a straw man and just turn it into a ternary instead.
Sorry, but there are nonbinary people out there, people attracted to individuals of both biological sex. I don’t know why you’re saying they’re “insane” and that they imagine their dual attractivity. You’re wrong, and I don’t know why you’re going after them.
I don’t think Scorch was critiquing bisexuality: attraction to individuals of both sexes. “Non-binary”, I take it, is something quite distinct from bisexuality, though Scorch could clarify the meaning intended.
GCM
Yes, I can’t speak for Scorch but there’s a big difference between bisexual (about sexual orientation) and non-binary (the belief that you don’t fit into human dimorphic sex categories, usually despite not having an intersex/DSD condition).
Currently, “nonbinary” often doesn’t mean “intersex”. It can mean more like “doesn’t conform at all to the general idea of what’s manly or womanly”. If you remember the term “metrosexual” from a few years ago, it’s that sort of coinage. There could have been a similar sort of reading on “metrosexual” then – i.e. what is that nonsense of being attracted to “metros”, is that like having a fetish for public transportation? But words often have usages not strictly related to their roots. Yes, it can confusing. That’s language.
The article didn’t come across as bad to me. School physics can be taught in boring rigid way. Finding out there’s a much bigger world in science than plug-and-grind formula can be a revelation to people. There’s nothing wrong with expressing that, and using it as a metaphor for other realizations.
I obviously mean non-binary, not bisexuality. I struggle to find the sentence in my post that would lead to this confusion, especially since the article in question also was not about bisexuality.
“I learned about quantum mechanics, where anything can happen.” – K. Rasmussen
If this were true, there would be no laws of quantum mechanics; but there are, so it isn’t. There is no quantum-mechanical counterpart of “genderfluid”—”lawfluid”. Neither deterministic laws nor probabilistic ones are “anything goes” laws that don’t place any constraints on what can happen.
By the way, aren’t bisexuality and sexual “non-binarity” two different things? (I dare to assert that the latter is a form of postmodern “gender fiction”.)
Yes, they are very different things, as JezGrove points out above.
Bisexual = I am sexually attracted to both men and women
Non-binary = I am neither a man or a woman, but something else
You can be bisexual but not non-binary, or vice versa.
Declaring oneself “non-binary” is a way of claiming to be special, so you see things in different ways and have lots of great insights, whereas people who are in the boring, staid, binary pigeonholes couldn’t possibly have creative thoughts.
Makes one wonder how science managed to make any progress before being non-binary became a fad.
It does come across as a person patting that person’s self (selves?) on the back, not for having actually accomplished anything at all, but just for claiming to be someone who doesn’t fit into traditional gender roles as that person perceives them, and then acting as if this a reflection of the cosmos at large or that it gives any insight into the physics of the large-scale universe. Get over yourself, I say.
Yup, this sort of thing seems very common these days. People merely declaring themselves to be interesting, rather than doing something interesting.
Well said, Robert. “Get over yourself” is the perfect retort. Though, as a Yorkshireman, I might just be tempted to append “… and bugger off an’all”.
I like your addendum!
Dang, Rasmussen stretches their trope thinner than filo dough.
Of all the ways that people can be divided into two groups (and there are many) one appears to be operating here. If you are the sort of person that privileges one aspect of your life over all others (gender identity, religious belief, race, rationality, politics) then trying to justify inclusion of other aspects will strike the other sort of person as a poor choice.
Sure science is fun an nulla verba for sure. Learning that questions engender more and require a skeptics look is real. My resident friend said I was cynical when I questioned many articles in my field of orthopedics. If I felt lacked power or proof I was skeptical
I don’t know how one finds out they are non binary, but those troubling should enjoy their discovery
Don’t know how that’s woke, but the meaning of woke seems to change regularly
Here’s a thought experiment.
In a deterministic world everything has a cause, then so do non binary genders. If the cause was identified, lets imagine a food supplement to pregnant mothers reduces the incidence of non binary genders dramatically, would we encourage pregnant mothers to take this supplement? Answers on the back of an envelope please.
More of a biochemistry wonderment, than an astrophysical one, but it is all one.
There are numerous ways to feel like one is able to think openly and outside of the box when it comes to exploring the natural sciences. Being non-binary may be one of them, I suppose, but so is…
> Being wrong about something, and learning to admit it.
> Having more than one interest in the natural sciences, and discovering the many parallels between them. The rules of nature do cross paths rather frequently, after all.
So in that light, I can promise you that everybody is special.
Generalizations are necessary for constructing a model of reality. Thinking that one has to explain every nuance and detail of a topic both muddles one’s own thinking and makes it nearly impossible to explain it clearly to others. And if some of those details blur the edges of the general explanation, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate it.
So, for sexual dimorphism of humans, the existence of a few exceptions doesn’t mean that it’s not true, and that instead there’s a spectrum in which most people are sexually ambiguous and fluid, as some people argue. Biology is biology.
That doesn’t mean that those few who don’t fit the general model should be mistreated. They’re real and should be respected.
“I turn over unseen stones.”
Unfortunate choice of words.
Yes that as my favourite part too.
Woke. I just reread John McWhorter column in NYT on woke, aP.2021. Woke has changed meaning now an epithet more a condemning slur, like wokeiness used by politicians
I think I recall it used years ago with similar suggestion that woods are dunces. Long before the 1712 project and the guilt ridden supporters who bought their books. The revolt against that woke was fierce but now the meaning is morphed. I’m not sure theAAAS or the New England journal,are woke. Both described the lack of love of science, push for activity to make the world. Better place and, oh my, allow a grad student to post their feelings about gender identity.
McWhorter thin as words ever change their meaning or nuance the whole concept will fall out of use .