Lordy, how many of us used to love the Science-Based Medicine (SBM) site? I did! It was the go-to place for enjoying the debunking of medical quackery and the scrutiny of dubious medical claims. Started in 2008 by Steve Novella and David Gorski (“Orac”), SBM is affiliated with the Society for Science-Based Medicine.
Sadly, it’s now going down the tubes, having bought heavily, like the ACLU and FFRF, into gender activism. It started with an incident I reported here, involving Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage and a positive review by SBM editor, skeptic, and physician Harriet Hall. Let’s let Wikipedia sum it up:
On June 15, 2021, Science-Based Medicine published a book review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage written by founding editor Harriet Hall. In her review, Hall wrote that Shrier’s book had raised legitimate concerns about the science surrounding drug treatments for gender dysphoria in children and that there was a lack of quality scientific studies on the subject. Several days after the review was published, Novella and Gorski replaced the review with a retraction notice and responded with a review of their own, the first of six SBM posts rejecting Shrier’s claims and addressing the retraction.
Skeptic magazine republished Hall’s review, and she remained one of three editors at SBM along with Novella and Gorski after the retraction until her death in 2023.
That SIX articles were needed to defend the retraction of Hall’s review and criticize Shrier’s book was not only a sign of trouble at SBM, but an almost obsessive act. And this obsessiveness is very evident in the piece below, written by A. J. Eckert, a doctor of osteopathy. Here’s some information about the author from Anchor Health:
AJ Eckert, DO, is Connecticut’s first out nonbinary trans doctor and serves as the Medical Director of our Gender & Life-Affirming Medicine (GLAM) Program. Dr. Eckert has over 17 years’ experience in LGBTQ health care, with 9 years as a provider of primary care and gender-affirming services.
As a nonbinary trans doctor, he has written several articles for SBM on trans and gender issues, including two pieces defending SBM’s removal of Hall’s review of Shrier’s book, and has written on these issues elsewhere.
Click to read Eckert’s piece at SBM (h/t Jez)
What the sweating author is trying to do in this tremendously long piece is express dismay about a book by Helen Joyce, a book shortlisted for the John Maddox Prize in 2023. I wasn’t aware, and can’t find on the web, that Joyce had a book in 2023, but her own site notes that it must have been a 2023 edition of a book she’s already written (and one that I’ve read): Trans.
I’m also an author: my first book, ‘Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality’, was published by OneWorld in July 2021. It was reissued in 2023 under a new title: ‘Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights’.
Although Joyce was shortlisted, she didn’t win; the winner was Nancy Olivieri. What really bothered Eckert was that the reissue of Joyce’s book was even considered for a prize given to “individuals who have shown courage and integrity in standing up for sound science and evidence.” That really rankled Eckert, who, as a gender activist, doesn’t think that Joyce has in any way stood up for sound science and evidence. I’ll give Eckert’s intro, as it gives Luana and me a shout-out for contributing to last year’s “hit” on science by “scaremongering”:
Science has taken many hits in 2023. Anti-environmentalism continues to spread; anti-vaxxers loudly deny COVID-19; some physicians have made themselves comfortable spreading medical misinformation and even urging others to resist public health mandates. An anti-trans paper promoting the many-times-over–discredited theory of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) was published without obtaining ethics approval in a peer-reviewed journal; an anti-vaxx paper was published in a fake journal made to appear legitimate, replete with an editorial board of antivaxxers. Both papers, when retracted, spun a narrative blaming an ideological suppression of science and lamenting about cancellation when the truth is simple: flawed and incorrect science should not be disseminated. Evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja were heavily featured in the Skeptical Inquirer and CSI scaremongering about “the ideological subversion of biology.” At least one-third-33% or more-of trans youth now live in states with unscientific bans on gender-affirming care due to ignorance and the spread of false narratives. At the end of September, Dr. Gorski lamented the likely permanent pause in funding a program designed to counter scientific misinformation and warned of the ongoing war on science-based regulation and public health.
The latest example was announced in October, when Irish journalist Helen Joyce was shortlisted for The John Maddox Prize, an initiative of UK charity Sense About Science and the international scientific journal Nature. The eponymous prize is named for the editor of Nature from 1966-73 and 1980-95; according to his obituary, science writer and scientist Sir John Maddox argued for objectivity and rationality in science and once worked alongside my personal favorite James Randi to debunk Jacques Benveniste’s claims about homeopathy and water memory. Sir John Maddox was knighted and worked on the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and Richard Dawkins called him “the last great scientific polymath.” Thus, the John Maddox Prize carries quite a legacy and considerable prestige.
Unfortunately, Helen Joyce was shortlisted for The John Maddox Prize for…
A Closer Look at Nature and Sense about Science’s Decision
Let me put this statement by the board behind the Maddox prize into context:
- Joyce is a prominent member of the UK “gender critical” movement and author of a “deeply anti-transgender” book. “Courage” is not a word I would ever associate with her.
- Joyce did not “highlight the need for further research and evidence,” at least not in any sort of productive way. Physicians practicing gender-affirming care and scientists involved in transgender studies generally agree that there is a need for more research. However, we neither need nor want a gender-critical trans-exclusionist to highlight the areas of need and thus continue the pattern of stigma and research about us without us. We’re on it. What we need are resources and funding, regular and consistent data collection on gender identity, notably absent from prior research, and involvement of the trans community, along with overlooked intersectional minorities previously excluded or underrepresented due to issues such as systemic racism, not lectures from people who deny existing science.
- Trans health and research-all medicine and research-belongs in the realm of science. It is the ignorant meddling of policymakers that harms our work. Gender-affirming healthcare should be between the health professional and the patient (and the patient’s parents or medical guardians, as applicable). Though politics are inextricably linked to trans healthcare—as is the case for all healthcare, actually—that does not mean that politicians should be able to dictate the standard of care in medicine, any more than politicians should be able to force a woman to carry a nonviable fetus to term when there is no chance of the fetus surviving and continuing the pregnancy risks the mother’s health.
- Here, we have on display two scientific organizations espousing the “importance of acknowledging biological sex differences,” an essentialist trope that serves to criminalize, dehumanize, and pathologize trans and intersex people. Their reasoning is also scientifically unsound. The science of biological sex does not mesh with Sense About Science’s comments. Trans people are very aware of biology and how our bodies work, sometimes painfully so. This is not about human biology and its supposed denial; it is about advancing a hostile agenda toward trans people and bad science. Updating gender markers to match one’s identity—which, naturally, Joyce is vehemently opposed to—has nothing to do with denying biology and everything to do with personal dignity, respect, equality, autonomy, and safety. Having the wrong marker on documents means being constantly exposed as trans in a cruel and sometimes violent society and being regularly undermined and questioned about gender. Gender is determined by one’s gender identity, which in turn should determine one’s legal sex designation. As for Nature, it has published multiple articles about the spectrum of sex and the fallacy of biological sex differences. So what gives?
Sorry for the long excerpt, but it tells you what the review is about.
If you’ve read Joyce’s book, like I have, you’ll be baffled at Eckert’s claim that it’s “fiction”. In fact, the piece is a 17-page (as I print it out in 9-point type) defense of affirmative therapy, and an attack on the idea that there are two biological sexes, which Eckert considers “transphobic”. As #4 above notes, Eckert thinks that legal sex designations should be the same as gender identity (which of course can change). But there are obvious problems with that, the most obvious being the existence of “women’s spaces” like women’s sports, jails, or rape treatment. In such cases biological sex does matter, for trans women should not compete athletically against women or be put in women’s prisons; and rape victims should have the option to be treated or counseled by a biological woman.
I’ll give just a few quotes from Eckert as I don’t want to make this too long. Quotes from the article are indented, while, as always, my responses are flush left:
[Joyce] thinks men are infiltrating female spaces, both in restrooms and in sports, and that this is a vast and dangerous issue despite a lack of evidence and a predominance of evidence that sports participation on the correct team is vital to both mental and physical health, especially for trans youth.
The prohibition of trans women in female sports is to assure fair competition for women, not “mental and physical health”.
Joyce is no scientist. Joyce’s Twitter bio includes the line “show me the 3rd gamete & we can talk.” Joyce considers the term “TERF” a slur. It is evident throughout the painstaking reading of her online footprint and book that she labors under confusion, ignorance, and lack of scientific knowledge. And, of course, Joyce believes that trans activists are suppressing research.
I like the third gamete quote because it is indeed the presence of only two types of gametes that is the definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. And yes, “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is indeed a slur by gender activists against “gender-critical feminists” like Joyce. Here’s the very first result I got when I googled TERF. DEROGATORY!
Another quote:
Joyce doesn’t understand why she’s seen as transphobic; in one interview, she claims,
“So according to them, I’m transphobic for just saying human beings come in two types, male and female…that’s transphobic.”
No, Helen. That’s not why you’re transphobic. Asserting two sexes is just incorrect. You’re transphobic because you claim that individuals cannot ever change biological sex, and anyone who disagrees with that statement is just frightened of activists. Your analogy is:
Again, Eckert is wrong here. There are two sexes and no, you cannot change your biological sex—not unless you can change your developmental system so that it can make gametes different from those produced by your natal sex.
There’s a lot of guilt by association; here’s one case, combined with a false statement:
Natasha Loder was a judge [of the Maddox prize] both this year and in 2018 and, like Joyce, works for The Economist. According to her Twitter, Loder believes that campaigning for women’s rights means restricting trans rights, that the European consensus on treating trans youth is shifting due to weak evidence, and that gender-affirming care is experimental (false on all counts).
In fact, in nearly all European countries at present, the use of puberty blockers in children or adolescents—part of “gender-affirming care”—is indeed considered an experimental treatment, used in only very rare situations.
Two more bits of juvenilia. Eckert loves to give pejorative middle names to the people Eckert doesn’t like. To wit:
Joyce’s anti-trans origin story is not original (unoriginality is her ongoing theme). Like Abigail “I made the term ‘irreversible’ popular to use in trans medicine even though it’s nonsense” Shrier—Joyce wrote her book a favorable blurb, prominent on the back cover—and Lisa “I created a new Satanic panic with rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which despite all efforts, still doesn’t exist” Littman, Joyce became randomly aware of transgender issues with no prior knowledge of our community and became concerned about it/this/that, whatever that means.
Finally, here’s a labeled photo to show Eckert’s guilty-by-association trope:
- Professor Kathleen Stock, philosophy don who quit Sussex University amid gender row. Author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters For Feminism
- Maya Forstater, co-founder of the Sex Matters campaign group
- Alison Bailey, co-founder of the LGB Alliance
- Helen Joyce, journalist, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and activist with Sex Matters
- Liane Timmermann, activist with Get The L Out– Lesbian Not Queer campaign group
- Angela C Wild, businesswoman and creator of Wild Womyn
- JK Rowling
- Suzanne Moore
- Julie Bindel, journalist and women’s rights campaigner, author of Feminism for Women
This is Helen Joyce, the person short-listed for a prestigious science award.
What a bunch of TERFs! Joyce is right behind J. K. Rowling, so clearly some of the TERFiness has rubbed off.
I won’t go on further; you can look at Eckert’s piece (but beware of their references, which are cherry-picked), and judge for yourself. Eckert’s article is an unholy gemisch of false accusations, misrepresentations, and almost unhinged fulmination—all because Joyce’s book was short-listed for a science prize, and didn’t even win! This is not an evenhanded or even-tempered review, but a way-too-long rant against those people who are simply calling for caution in “gender affirming care”. What a shame that Science-Based Medicine has sunk so low!
ADDENDUM FROM READER JOOLZ (given with permission):
Eckert: “[Joyce] thinks men are infiltrating female spaces, […] despite a lack of evidence”.
There IS evidence. Plenty. I attach an image with some names. They can all be googled, eg: Shawn Hallet or Jacob Guerro.This information has been shared with activists many, many times. But they ignore it and continue with the same false assertions.It’s frustrating. It’s like fighting fog. They insist TW [trans women] are safe, and that ‘you are trans if you say you are’, but when I mention the 436 TW prosecuted for rape over a 7-year period in England and Wales, they say ‘those men weren’t trans’. How convenient 🤦♀️
What a bunch of TERFs!
A truly magnificent group of women. Stock writes beautifully and won both of the debates she took part in at the debating societies of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Forstater won a key employment appeal tribunal setting a precedent that the belief that sex is binary and immutable is protected in UK law. She runs the campaign group Sex Matters with Helen Joyce. Bailey won an employment tribunal against her employer for belief discrimination (helped by Forstater’s case) and co-founded the LGB Alliance, which advocates for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people’s rights. Helen Joyce – the subject of this article and a great interviewee on the topic of gender identity ideology and its conflicts with women’s rights. Timmermann has been courageous in fighting for lesbians’ rights to exclude men with gender identity issues. Wild’s Wild Womyn sells excellent “TERF”- supporting merchandise. Rowling – nuff said! Moore was driven out of The Guardian because of her support for women’s rights against the attacks of transgender rights activism. Bindel is a veteran women’s rights campaigner and with her partner, lawyer Harriet Wistrich, helped get rape within marriage outlawed. I believe that Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who has been ostracised by her party – and has received no support from its leader Kier Starmer – was also present at the lunch. The restaurant that hosted them was vandalised shortly afterwards by the usual suspects. The owner, who runs one of the oldest and best Italian restaurants in London, just asked for nominees for a special event to reward gender critical campaigners with a free lunch as a New Year’s gift. I believe he has offered invites to everyone nominated.
Bright, brave, bold women!
That Eckert screed is dreadful. Let no one ever say that you are biased in not letting the other side have its (looong) say!
I should say that Jack Turban’s claim, referred to by Eckert, to have debunked Lisa Littman’s theory of rapid-onset gender dysphoria has been itself been debunked by two re-analyses of his data set, the 2015 Transgender Survey.
Kulatunga-Moruzi: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(23)00416-0/fulltext
Sapir, Littman, and Biggs: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02754-9
Michael Biggs is on the board of Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce’s campaign group Sex Matters.
Excellent piece. I could write an essay about how much I agree with you on this. I used SBM all the time, but, since the nonsense about Irreversible Damage, I won’t click on it. This has thrown into doubt every single thing I’ve ever read on the site.
I was active in the skeptic movement and Gorski was a hero of mine, but how the mighty have fallen. I’m almost glad that my other hero, James Randi, died before he could become a disappointment. I like to think that he wouldn’t have succumbed to irrationality, but I thought the same about Gorski.
Thank goodness we still have you, Dawkins, Shermer and others.
Gorski has been going downhill for a long time. I stopped reading SBM and Gorski’s blog many years ago when he decided to follow his leader, Peezus, down the intersectional rabbit hole. Consequently, I’m not at all surprised he should try to hide his oppressor status by adopting the protective camouflage of consorting with loons like Eckert.
‘Peezus’ 😁 Haven’t heard creepy PZ called that before. Very appropriate. If I’d known PZ was a friend I’d have abandoned the SBM ship sooner.
I lost respect for Gorski and Novella when they supported religious exemptions for vaccinating school children, lest they be thought anti-religion. (They apparently don’t take this position now.) For them it seems image trumps science.
I used to read SBM regularly up until the Shrier book review and aftermath. I have not been there since, but today I did look through the comments on this article. I’m not see most of the people who used to post comments every day. I think they lost many of their old readers.
You think Eckert’s article was bad. Read the comments under it. It seems to have acted as a siren-call for the trans-identified and their allies, nearly all of whom have taken Eckert’s hysterical nonsense uncritically and sympathetically. Before the rise of this movement, I had never realized how selfish and stupid such a large swath of humanity could be.
I wrote an earlier comment on this post but deleted it because it was way too snarky. Thanks for the reminder about how important the quality of comments can be to sites like SBM (and this one by comparison).
It’s odd that the TERF acronym had to be invented. That it had to be said that there was a subset of feminists who, when they advocated for the hard-fought rights of women, did not actually mean men. Huh.
Pretty much everything about this story makes me very sad: Harriett Hall died; Science-Based Medicine can no longer be counted on; people like Eckert who have no allegiance to facts or reason attacking others for “not following the science.” Alas.
I was sad too as I didn’t know Harriet Hall had died. She was amazing. I went to TAM 2013 in the US and had the privilege of meeting her. It was very brief, I just offered a handshake as she didn’t know me from Adam! I wanted to show my appreciation. Wish I’d asked her to sign my copy of her book.
Harriet and I used to get together every TAM for either lunch or dinner. She was a class act.
She used to peer review medical studies for one of the journals and knew how to spot potential problems in the study sample, method, statistics, conclusion, etc. There’s no way she would have totally lost her sharp eye when reading Shrier’s book. SBM’s response was shocking. Even she was shocked.
That must have been great. I’d wondered about her reaction to having the review pulled. Part of me thinks she should have left, but she was one of the founders of SBM so it would have been hard to walk away, especially when so many people benefited from her writing there.
Any new medical book needs a sharp, skeptic, eye on it, and she gave it that. Can’t believe Gorski removed her piece completely. I’d have had more respect for him if he left her piece up and just added his own beside it.
Science evolved out of the recognition that human beings are biased — and they are especially likely to be biased when closely involved in the outcome. Our tendency to see what we expect to see and come up with explanations which flatter those expectations can only be countered by presenting our work and conclusions to people who don’t already agree with us.
Transgender individuals telling critics of Gender Identity Theory and the treatments built up to support it to stay away from the topic because “we’re on it” is about as unscientific a statement as someone could make. People who identify as transgender are too close to the issue to be reliable. They don’t have divine access to an objective capacity to give a perfect history, diagnose the problem, analyze the causes, and present the treatment using the authority of their own subjective certainties about themselves any more than do those with recovered memories, multiple personalities, or direct knowledge of God.
It is not “stigma” to assume they could be wrong and explore that possibility. It’s science.
And face it, anybody who thinks that sex is a “spectrum”, or that a person can change sex, is suffering under the weight of “a false fixed belief that is not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence”, i.e., delusional, by definition.
We need to make #IstandWithTERFs go viral on X. It has got to become disreputable for any organization claiming to support science to get on the Puritanical FAKE Left anti-science bandwagon!
Eckert’s claim about Europe is especially puzzling, and especially disappointing to see that it was allowed to go unchallenged/unedited on the SBM website. The European countries that have pulled back from medicalized transition for youth (Sweden, Finland, England) have all done so as a result of their each having conducted systematic evidence reviews, and other European countries (eg Norway, Denmark) are moving in a similar direction, partly in response to these evidence reviews. This is all well known by now. Why would SBM let Eckert’s claim pass unchallenged? It’s not 2014 anymore–we have a much better understanding of the evidence base today.
RE: “Why would SBM let Eckert’s claim [about the changes in transgender youth healthcare in Europe] pass unchallenged? It’s not 2014 anymore–we have a much better understanding of the evidence base today?”
Probably for the same reason that the New York Times let columnist Lydia Polgreen claim (emphasis added):
Lydia Polgreen: A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/opinion/dewine-trans-rights-ohio.html
See, children are no longer allowed to self-diagnose in some European countries because of the dastard political right and because of cost containment measures.
No scientist, prior to the recent prominence of transgenderism, would have said there are more than two sexes. Science Based Medicine is basing its position on politics. Not science. Going against your whole point like that pretty much makes you a blatant hypocrite, and as joolz said above, it throws doubt on all of what they say.
Does anyone know how Harriet Hall reacted to their removal of her book review? I’m sorry to hear she has died.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/transgender-controversy/
That’s a very calm and factual response.
My impression — that was Harriet Hall’s way: calm and factual. And I’m mega-double-plus bummed out to read this stuff about Science Based Medicine, formerly a go-to site for sanity.
I’d like to expand on that first bit by saying that were it not for transgendered people and their activists, the whole claim that one can literally change sex would never even come up, even as a hypothesis. Except by maybe taking stem cells and reprogramming them to make the other kind of gametes. I ‘spose it’s sort of possible then. Like some fishes do.
“AJ Eckert, DO, is Connecticut’s first out nonbinary trans doctor…”
Is “they” also a competent doctor? That’s what interests me most when I need a doctor.
Seriously, how can one be both “nonbinary” and “trans”? I guess I don’t get it before I have my degree in queer postcolonial astrology. 😉
LOL@queer postcolonial astrology
Good one!
I’ve taken that funny phrase from an article in the Washington Times:
“An Israeli comedy show recently mocked the university‘s pro-Palestinian students, calling the college “Columbia Untisemity” in a sketch featuring two left-wing “students” with pink and blue hair.
“I major in queer postcolonial astrology,” one of the performers says. “Jews make the world dirty. And no, I’m not antisemitic, I’m racist fluid.””
Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/10/columbia-suspends-anti-israel-student-groups-over-/
Damn Jerry, you made me go click on SBM and one of the commenters posted a link to your bio on rationalwiki and let me tell you I had no idea what an actual scumbag you are! You should be very proud.
[disclaimer: satire. You do have a bio there, and it is unbelievable that any site that proclaims rationality would publish it]
“And yes, “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is indeed a slur by gender activists against “gender-critical feminists” like Joyce.” – J. Coyne
I’m on the side of gender-critical feminists, but it should be mentioned for the sake of objectivity that there is evidence that “TERF” was originally coined and initially used as a purely descriptive, non-pejorative term. (However, it is now used as a slur by most opponents of gender-critical feminism.)
“As suggested in an interview between two feminist activists for online news journal “Trans-Advocate”, the term “TERF” appears to have been first used in a US-based feminist blog in 2008:
—
C.W: From what I can see, yours is the earliest use [. . .]
T: L [. . .] and I are pretty sure that we started using trans-exclusionary radfem (TERF) activists as a descriptive term in our own chats a while before I used it in that post.
(Williams, 2014 )
—
The term “TERF” quickly spread to other trans and feminist blogs (Williams, 2014) and now is established in everyday feminist speech. Other feminists, however, have contested the term, viewing it as “hyperbolic, misleading, and ultimately defamatory” (Williams, 2014). Still, the first user is clear that this was not the case: “It was not meant to be insulting. It was meant to be a deliberately technically neutral description of an activist grouping” (Williams, 2014 ).”
(Hines, Sally. “The Feminist Frontier: On Trans and Feminism.” In /The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism/, edited by Tasha Oren & Andrea L. Press, 94-109. New York: Routledge, 2019. p. 96)
Here’s Hines’ full reference:
“Williams, C. (2014). TERF hate and Sandy Stone. The Trans Advocate. Retrieved from http://www.transadvocate.com/terf-violence-and-sandy-stone_n_14360.htm”
I couldn’t find the original source of the Williams quotes via this link, but I found it via that one:
https://www.transadvocate.com/terf-what-it-means-and-where-it-came-from_n_13066.htm
As early as 1991, radical feminists at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival explicitly excluded trans-women. TERF was a descriptive term at first, as you say.
I remember that kerfuffle and it was instructive to review the history. The person excluded in 1991 was a post-operative transsexual who had had genital surgery and was living as a woman. How he was detected is not clear—the festival encouraged nudity in its open-air all-woman venue. He might have been known as an activist and recognized from his face. He objected that the festival’s mission to be a space for “womyn born womyn” was unjustly exclusionary of people like him who no longer had male genitals. Especially since bearded women living as men were being admitted.
A culture war ensued, with many feminist and lesbian organizations taking his side against the festival organizers. This was long before the term “transwoman” was in use to describe men who merely identified as women and had intact genitalia. Excluding them would not have been controversial but they weren’t a thing in 1991 anyway. As the bickering wore on, the festival’s policy came to be seen as transphobic against women with penises. Eventually in 2015 the festival organizer threw up her hands and abandoned the festival, around the same time as BLM and trans activists were co-opting and ruining Pride festivals. It just wasn’t fun and about music (or womyn) anymore.
There is still a women’s music festival on the same land in Michigan but it is trans friendly and features sanctuary spaces for women of colour.
Sources: Wikipedia and a Google search of the name of the transsexual person mentioned in Wiki.
For years, several trans-identified males were fighting over taking credit for coining the term terf. Once it became strongly associated with threats of sexual and physical violence against women – a woman came out of no where claiming that she coined it. No in gender critical or radical feminist circles had ever even heard of this of woman. She’s a trans activist doing damage control.
“It is evident throughout the painstaking reading of her online footprint and book that she labors under confusion, ignorance, and lack of scientific knowledge.”
A “Just So” statement if there ever was one. Something must be true if someone SAYS so.
This guy claims to be a skeptic, but it looks like he has drunk a lot of the Kool-Aid:
https://x.com/Daniel_Loxton/status/1743427139566006314?s=20
Oh my goodness! Gorski calls gender critical facts ‘pseudoscience’. He’s become a bad as the woowooo homeopaths and ear candlers he used to criticise. So sad.
https://x.com/gorskon/status/1743364752145858795?s=20
Not just Gorski, but Loxton, who quoted him. He claims that gender-critical stuff must be right wing. How stupid can one get? Do I need to remind people that Hitler was a vegetarian? If they (correctly) don’t claim all vegetarians are Nazis, then why do they claim that all gender-critical people are right-wing just because some right-wing people are gender critical? It is the old logical fallacy: there are only two sides: not just for a given question (bad enough), but in general, and based on SOME of one’s beliefs, such self-appointed social-justice warriers witll decide which side one is on, and stir up the hate to match.
Yes. Another instance of Haidt & Lukianoff’s three great untruths in action. In this case, “Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
I think don’t any right-wing people are gender-critical if by ‘right-wing’ one means religious conservatives who believe people should be coerced into conforming to gender roles that don’t suit them. That is the direct opposite of gender-critical. Gender-critical means being critical of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ being defined by conformity to sex stereotypes as opposed to simply being terms for adult human males and females, which means that both males and females can express any traits and choose any roles that suit them as individuals without ‘changing gender’. What I think has happened is that trans activists have repeatedly lied and tried to smear all opposition as right-wing. Some on the right who do believe in enforced gender conformity have then latched onto this and started wrongly calling themselves ‘gender-critical’, especially in the US. This doesn’t make any sense at all if they believe for religious reasons that people should conform to gender roles. In the UK, most people who identify as gender-critical are centre or left politically and not religious.
Gorski I think has been ‘educated’ by people like Eckert and Andrea James and swallowed their nonsense uncritically. I remember he posted something a while back about having just been finding out about how awful these gender-critical people are and what they are really up to.
Helen Joyce also pointed out that the Pope criticises ‘gender ideology’ which actually means something completely different from gender identity theory and does espouse a religious conservative attitude to gender, and to avoid confusion one should add the word ‘identity’ when criticising this ideology from a scientific standpoint. It makes no difference to activists however, as they aren’t interested in truth.
I agree. The problem is the woke lumping people like Jerry, Steven Pinker, and myself into the same heap as the MAGA Bible-thumpin redneck crowd only because none of us buy into wokeness.
I just saw the defensive tweet which refers to “gender critical”.
The time has come to ask for references for this word “gender”.
What, precisely, is “gender” – as it refers to H. sapiens? with references to literature. Where did this idea originate – in the literature – that is all over signs of “spaces” (Foucault) everyone walks into and out of, that is ubiquitous in discourse, and personal/institutional documents post ~1960 (see Google Ngrams), to suggest everyone consents to “gender”?
Where is it? How is it measured? When was it discovered? What was the animal model – rat, mouse, chimp, … or (fungi) yeast? Why or why not, and why does it matter so much?
Here’s a clue, from 1908 – the full text of The Kybalion:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Kybalion
Sad developments. Thank you for this post, and for generally standing for both science and women.
Somebody was triggered LOL
https://x.com/gorskon/status/1743364752145858795?s=20