I predicted (or hoped) that with New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon of the centrist National Party, New Zealand’s educational system, which was circling the drain, would find its way out. After all, Luxon promised to reform the educational system by emphasizing “teaching the basics.” (New Zealand performs poorly in math and reading compared to countries of comparable well being.) Most of all, I hoped that Luxon would purge the wokeness of the Kiwi educational system, especially the teaching of indigenous superstitions and “ways of knowing” that seem to be insinuating themselves into science education.
Now I’m not so sure.
Reader Al sent me the tweet below, which was like a (mild) punch in the gut. It comes from the (now protected) account of New Zealand’s Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard. She was appointed for a three-year term on July 1, 2018, a term that was apparently renewed in 2021 by the woke and now ex-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Gerrard’s present term expires on June 30 of this year. I hope Luxon replaces her, as she’s clearly woke and misguided, and a fan of those who sacralize the indigenous people, a tendency that’s warped New Zealand academics.
At any rate, have a look at this tweet:
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UPDATE: The tweet appears to be from 2019, but recall that Gerrard is still the Chief Science Advisor for New Zealand. It’s not clear to me when Gerrard locked her account. The point remains that the present Science Adviser to the Prime Minister has a view of sex that is misguided, probably because of wokeness. In my view, she should not be the science advisor, but that may be solved in June.
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The PM of New Zealand's Chief Science Advisor @ChiefSciAdVisor has locked her account after tweeting this stupidity… pic.twitter.com/K0x66eTfnP
— Andy (@lecanardnoir) January 31, 2024
The first sentence is okay, the second is crazy, at least regarding “sex”. The third is mixed, for if you go to Wikipedia under Intersex, you see the declaration that sex is not binary, but also that indicators of sex, like genitalia, are pretty close to binary:
Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies”.
Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child’s anatomical sex and phenotype. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 1:4,500–1:2,000 (0.02%–0.05%).[3] Other conditions involve atypical chromosomes, gonads, or hormones.
The best source I know of for the frequency of intersex is that of Leonard Sax, which is also quoted ion the Wikipedia article:
A study published by Leonard Sax reports that this figure includes conditions such as late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia and XXY/Klinefelter syndrome which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex; Sax states, “if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” stating the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018%. This means that for every 5,500 babies born, one either has sex chromosomes that do not match their appearance, or the appearance is so ambiguous that it is not clear whether the baby is male or female.
In both cases, the number of people considered “intersex” is very low. But that’s pretty much irrelevant to the discussion of whether sex is a spectrum, for biologists, as we discussed yesterday, use a definition of sex involving gametes: if you have the reproductive apparatus to produce small mobile gametes (even if that apparatus is inactive), you’re a male who makes sperm. If you have the apparatus to produce large immobile gametes (even if you can’t, as if you’re postmenopausal or sterile), you’re a female who makes eggs. If you don’t fit either of these classes, you’re often (but not invariably) classified as intersex. The athlete Caster Semenya, for example, has internal undescended testes, designed for making sperm, but other female sex traits, like a vagina. Biologically I’d call her a male, but wouldn’t quarrel if others want to call her “intersex”.
But the point is that intersex individuals are not members of a third sex, so don’t really affect the sex binary: there remain only two types of gametes. We have males, females, and those unclassifiable, with the latter having frequency of one individual in 5600.
I keep repeating myself on the sex binary, along with others like Richard Dawkins, Carole Hooven, and Colin Wright, but I’ll add that the sex binary humans says nothing about the humanity of intersex individuals or transgender individuals (who usually can be classified as biological sex). With a few exceptions involving things like sports and jails, the legal and moral rights of transgender or intersex individuals are independent how “sex” is defined by biologists, and these individuals should never be denigrated for their desire to transition or for the fact that they have a biological condition that makes them intersex.
Finally, the Science Advisor cites Siouxie Wiles, who you can read about on this site (two posts here), a science communicator and microbiologist who’s done some good things, but also vigorously opposed the Listener letter that argued against teaching indigenous ways of knowing as science. As for @whaeapower on X, it’s another protected account, so I don’t know what it’s about. It may be a Māori site given that “whae” means “mother or aunt” in that language, and because Dame Gerrard has a Māori koru (fern front) tattoo on her back.
At any rate, I guess Dame Gerrard did protect her tweets, as this is what you find when you look for them:
My point, however, is this: the official Science Advisor to the Prime Minister should not be making erroneous statements about sex, even if those statements are made to give succor to people that are not of conventional gender. That she misunderstands sex does not bode well for science education in New Zealand if Dame Gerrard continues in her position after June 30.
As for whether what looks like a quasi-official “X” account should be protected, well, you can be the judge.
I find it quite odd that the Chief Science Advisor to any government would “protect” their Twitter account. If science is about enquiry and testing hypotheses, then I would have thought when s/he posts something on a topic s/he would welcome engagement.
Absolutely! Any public official protecting their X/Twitter account is outrageous.
Well, she is a chemist.
From which one can deduce (predict even) the following numbers of intersex people :
Country . . Population . . Predicted Number of “intersex” people.
UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 M . . ..12060
US . . . . . . . . . . . . 336 M . . ..60480
Canada . . . . . . . . . .41 M . . . .7380
NZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 M . . . .936
Australia . . . . . . . . . 26 M . . . .4680
Clearly, someone feels the need to beef those numbers up, to get a sufficiently large constituency for [whatever they want a constituency for].
Of course, every one of those people deserves appropriate medical treatment for any problems arising from their condition. If there are significant, treatable issues. And otherwise, it is precisely nobody else’s business.
Damn, WP needs to handle tables.
Well, she’s not got the “blue tick of shame”, indicating that she (or her office expenses – obviously this is a reclaimable expense) pays His Melonness $8/month (or whatever it is). Which might free up other more granular ways of managing the likely “dog pile” of response to a tweet like this.
Damn – that means that Elon clearing his Twitter-debt is as far in the future as the Cambrian Explosion is in the past. [sob] So sad.
That tweet of Dame Juliet’s was sent under the last government – the tweet is at least two years old. So its existence is not new evidence of NZ science circling the drain, nor can we draw any inferences about new Prime Minister Christopher Luxon from it.
Juliet is British, so it is a bit cringe-inducing for her to have a Māori koru design on her back. I (a Māori) don’t care about cultural appropriation (fill yer boots!) but it does provide evidence of your statement that NZ academics sacralize indigenous people.
Ironically, the account @whaeapower belongs to Jackie Clark, the head of a NZ based charity set up to support domestic violence victims. You can read their site here: https://aunties.co.nz/. A noble cause but the way that Jackie Clark conducts herself on social media makes you wonder whether chief among her motivations are self aggrandisement, attention seeking, white saviour complex and charity-porn.
Jackie herself is from a notable and affluent NZ family which made its fortune in the crockery business (think NZ’s answer to Royal Doulton). You can read about her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Clark_(philanthropist).
Jackie’s social media output is abusive, vindictive, sanctimonious and bullying. She supports all the progressive left causes – transwomen-are-women, decolonisation, critical race theory, the myth of the noble savage, socialism good, capitalism bad, etc. She’s another Labour party luvvie like Dame Juliet.
Further irony for someone who claims to abhor cultural appropriation of indigenous cultures, and even went on a Twitter rant a couple of years ago about people misappropriating te reo Māori (the Māori language), Jackie, descended from British immigrants with zero whakapapa Māori (Māori lineage) adopts a twitter handle with “whaea” in it. Her audacity and lack of self awareness are out of this world.
You may be right though I had no way of knowing that since there’s no date. At any rate, she’s still the chief science advisor to Luxon, isn’t she?
If you can give me a verified date for the tweet, I’ll add it above, but note that she remains the government’s chief science advisor. Why didn’t Luxon replace her?
I doubt that she made her account private years ago, so the fact that it is so now would indicate that if the tweet is old, it was retweeted recently. And it’s still a wrongheaded tweet.
I think she protected her tweets over a year ago but in relation to some other blunder; my vague recollection was that it was something in the “don’t you know who I am” line.
Also in case it wasn’t clear, I share your concern about her batty tweet. She should feel embarrassed.
“ Why didn’t Luxon replace her?”
1) Possibly, because it’s an independent role and thus might not be constitutionally possible for the PM to replace her until her contract expires.*
2) Possibly because the new PM’s attention is on a number of other quite urgent and more important issues.
3) Possibly because the PM is spineless.
4) Possibly because he wants to be Mr Nice Guy.
Etc.
* Relative to US constitutional arrangements, as I understand them, NZ governments on gaining power have limited powers to immediately dismiss and replace senior public servants.
Fram one extreme to another one can say? When something fair and legit tries to gain simple respect and is pushed down by a toxic force it becomes no less toxic.
Like it or not, domestic violence is a thing, back in the 50s it was just brushed under the rug as were those who were LGBTQ+, keep forcing a legit issue to be quiet for too long and it becomes a reflection of the very force.
Wokism is just toxic Left as Alt-Right is toxic Right (I’m a cynical centrist). In my book socialism/capitalism are both capable of being good or bad depending of how it’s managed, we Kiwis have done both good and bad with them and plenty of friends of mine who are Māori have no issue saying their ancestors could be real shockers at times against their own people or the Morori of the Chatom Islands (may not be “Nobel”, but the way I use the term “Savage”, as a means of describing a violent thug fits!).
It’s just the seesaw swings from one side to another. Sorry for rambling, well written!
Isn’t that tweet from like 2019? And someone just retweeted recently? That’s my vague memory at least.
That’s what one commenter said. I’ll correct if true.
It was March 2019. I’ve found a time stamped screenshot on the Facebook page of Broadsheet, a NZ feminist organisation. Not sure how to attach a photo to this post sorry, but hopefully that’s enough info for you to find it.
-Wahine Toa (accidentally used an old nom de plume).
A longer sample of Dame Juliet’s writing may be found in the foreword she co-wrote a few years back for a special issue of “New Zealand Science Review” on “Mātauranga and Science”.
https://scientists.org.nz/Special-Issue
“This issue also shows how much science has to learn from mätauranga and kaupapa Mäori approaches.”
It will be interesting to see what Luxon does when her term expires. He himself is an evangelical Christian with no apparent interest in science, but there are some encouraging signs from his education minister Erica Stanford.
I think how sex is defined by biologists sets up the moral question. It means the difference between how a society decides to deal with males who consider themselves to be women — and how a society decides to deal with women who are being excluded from the rights given to other women. And same for trans-identified females.
Heck, I’ll always be the first to stand up for LGBTQ+ and Intersex, honest there, always will be. But I also have no issue that so many of the issues came from mixing scientific terminology and phrases, which to be fair isn’t unique to this subject.
Also, in the far past we must remember the legit discrimination they often faced, Alen Turing for example.
That sort of thing can leave its scars on a community and cause overreactions all over the place.
My dad was a kid in the 50s and is what you’d expect (atheist though) as a boomer of the times in many ways. But he has no issue saying the shocking way people could be treated then and how the idealized views of the times are BS.
Alan Turing didn’t claim to be trans. The problems with “rights for trans people” as they demand them are completely orthogonal to rights for homosexuals, on whose coat-tails they now ride. Trans rights are not human rights. Rather they clash with human rights for other people. Once you carve out the “sensible” restrictions on the entry of men to women’s spaces and protecting minors from medical mutilation, they aren’t satisfied with what’s left, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. They want it all. That is the point of conflict.
Exactly. Gay rights do not impinge on the rights of others, since they were largely seeking the same rights that other people have – to be free from illegal discrimination, and to marry who they like. These rights require nothing more from society than that we leave them to it. They are in a sense negative rights since they require no effort be expended by the rest of us.
Trans rights activists on the other hand demand more rights than ordinary people; specifically the right to access spaces reserved for the opposite sex. They also usually demand that we pledge allegiance to their belief system and speak something we know to be untrue; viz that a man can become a woman because he says so.
I just loathe that phrase “sex assigned at birth”. We do not assign anything! We report sex accurately when the baby is born.
This from Dame Juliet’s Twitter feed:
“Having signalled before the election that I wouldn’t seek a third term in this role, I’m looking forward to passing the baton to my successor in July. Obviously, I’m not involved in this process but happy to chat to any interested candidates who want to learn more about the job.”
Applications close on February 11.