Among all scientific or medical journals, The Lancet is the most woke, and I’ve written about it several times before, once calling it the “medical Scientific American“. For a fuller account of its wokeness, which seems to be entirely the doing of editor Richard Horton, see this piece from the site The Daily Skeptic, which summarizes a lot of craziness in the journal. The latest mishigass is the long (11-page set of “author guidelines” that you can read by clicking on the link below:
And right near the beginning, on page 2, you read the guidelines for using the terms “sex and gender”. The bolding of the headers is theirs (I’ve put these in caps), but I’ve taken the liberty of putting in bold several select sections of the text.
REPORTING SEX-BASED AND GENDER-BASED ANALYSES
Reporting guidance
For research involving or pertaining to humans, animals, model organisms, or eukaryotic cells, investigators should integrate sex-based and gender-based analyses into their research design according to evolving funder/sponsor requirements and best practices within a field. Authors should address their research’s sex and/or gender dimensions in their manuscript. In cases where they cannot, they should discuss this as a limitation to their research’s generalisability. With research involving cells and model organisms, researchers should use the term “sex”. With research involving humans, researchers should consider which terms best describe their data (see Definitions section below). Authors can refer to the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) Guidelines and the SAGER guidelines checklist. They offer systematic approaches to the use and editorial review of sex and gender information in study design, data analysis, outcome reporting, and research interpretation. However, there is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex and gender or reporting sex-based and gender-based analyses.
DEFINITIONS
In human research, the term “sex” carries multiple definitions. It often refers to an umbrella term for a set of biological attributes associated with physical and physiological features (eg, chromosomal genotype, hormonal levels, internal and external anatomy). It can also signify a sex categorisation, most often designated at birth (“sex assigned at birth”) based on a newborn’s visible external anatomy. The term “gender” generally refers to socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities of women, men, and gender-diverse people that occur in a historical and cultural context, and might vary across societies and over time. Gender influences how people view themselves and each other, how they behave and interact, and how power is distributed in society. Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man), concordant, and static. However, these constructs exist along a spectrum that includes additional sex categorisations and gender identities, such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development (DSD), or identify as non-binary. In any given person, sex and gender might not align, and both can change. Sex and gender are not entirely discrete concepts and their definitions continue to evolve. Biology and society influence both, and many languages do not distinguish between them. Since the terms “sex” and “gender” can be ambiguous, authors should describe the methods they use to gather and report sex-related and/or gender-related data (eg, self-report or physician-report, specific biological attributes, current sex/gender, sex assigned at birth, etc) and discuss the potential limitations of those methods. This will enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility, and avoid ambiguity or conflation of terms and the constructs to which they refer. Authors should use the term “sex assigned at birth” rather than “biological sex”, “birth sex” or “natal sex” as it is more accurate and inclusive. When ascertaining gender and sex, researchers should use a two-step process: (1) ask for gender identity allowing for multiple options and (2) if relevant to the research question, ask for sex assigned at birth. In addition to this defining guidance and the SAGER guidelines, you can find further information about reporting sex and gender in research studies on Elsevier’s diversity, equity, and inclusion in the publishing author guide available here.
Note that everything referred to here deals with HUMANS, as this is a medical journal. Note that the editors specify that “sex” has multiple definitions, but in so doing mix up the way sex is determined in humans (chromosomes carrying sex-determining genes), the way it is observed at birth (usually via genitalia), and the way it is defined (whether an individual has the apparatus for producing big, immobile gametes (“females”) or small, mobile gametes (“males”).
Biologists agree about the gametic definition of sex, which produces the sex binary that I’ve discussed so often, and that definition is not ambiguous. (Note that there are no cases of hermaphrodites in humans that are functional as both males and females, so even if you considere hermaphrodites to be members of a “third sex”, and I don’t, they don’t exist in our species.)
The editors also state twice that sex is “not static” and can change, but biological sex cannot change. What can change is gender—unless you use a hormonally-based definition of sex, which is not tenable and was used only to determine which group someone could compete in athletically. (The Olympics has now abandoned that approach.)
Finally, note that The Lancet recommends the term “sex assigned at birth,” which is simply wrong. Sex is not ASSIGNED at birth, it is observed at birth, but observed using characters like genitalia that are almost always concordant with biological sex but may not be infallible indicators of biological sex. But regardless, sex is never “assigned” but exists. The exceptions to the sex binary—individuals who are truly intersex—comprise about 0.018% of people, or about 1 in 5600. As I always say, “that’s as close to binary as you can come.”
Finally, why do the editorial guidelines imply that sex is not “static”? There is only one reason I can think of, and that’s trying to push on the journal’s readers a gender-activist ideology. If you truly believe that a transwoman is a woman in terms of biological sex, or a transman is a man in terms of biological sex, then yes, you can say that sex is malleable. But this is not accurate, for using the biological definitions of sex, a transwoman remains a biological man and a transman remains a biological women. (This of course is not to demean them or say that they’re somehow morally unequal to the rest of us; it’s just biology.) In the end, biological sex is not malleable but static.
As the Daily Skeptic notes at the end of its piece:
The Lancet’s guidelines on sex conclude by explicitly telling authors to use the term “sex assigned at birth” because it is “more accurate and inclusive”. I’m imagining a future Lancet article on Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: “She was the first person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and she went on to found the first medical school to train people who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth. All in all, she was a truly remarkable person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth.”
If this were some obscure Gender Studies periodical, it wouldn’t really matter. But we’re talking about the world’s second most cited medical journal. It’s read by doctors, surgeons, researchers and all the people to whom we’ve entrusted our health. How can they maintain our trust when they can’t seem to tell the difference between a man and a woman?
Indeed!
h/t: Luana
Shameful and scary – The Lancet’s “reporting guidance” on sex in humans!
As if I weren’t depressed enough already.
When I entered academia, I was very disappointed to discover how thoughtless and cowardly most academics are. And that most seem to jump on every bandwagon headed their way. Most academics are also overly trusting of “experts”, because the academics themselves are “experts” and want to be listened to. If you tell them that the American Academy of Pediatrics has a consensus on something, that settles the issue for many academics.
It makes sense, considering many of us were mild-mannered nerds in high school and university. And that modern academia leaves people little time to think. And that academia rewards bandwagon-jumpers.
They will continue to promote this gender ideology nonsense until they start being widely ridiculed and the bandwagon starts heading in the other direction. Throw in a few more scandals like David Reimer, and that will seal the deal.
“Some critics admire only one another.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonfirstorderizability
lol
Thank you for your honesty. Why do you think you recognize this when others seemingly do not?
Part of it is having always enjoyed reading contrarian takes even when I disagree, and part of it is having read “The Vision of the Anointed” by Thomas Sowell.
I will look Sowell up. Thank you.
1) The one woman every Englishman admires is the Queen.
2) The one woman every Englishman admires is his (own) mother.
Probably (2) is too indexical to be represented in FOPL.
Yes. The first-order paradigm does not really address indexicals. Nor does it really address the intended individuation of definite descriptions (“The one”) except by first stipulating that constants are zero-place functions (graph paper anyone?).
I just find the example of nonfirstorderizability particularly telling with respect to ivory tower infighting.
Jesse Singal on the suicidal death of expertise and why it’s such a huge loss for everyone.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/experts-have-many-reasons-to-stop
And Critical Medical Theory is born.
When will these articles cite some literature on “gender”? It’s like they use coded language to grant access to … secret knowledge…
#gnosticism
#dialectic
“However, there is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex…”
That is true because of woke entities like The Lancet mucking up the issue with ideology. The “moon landings” are controversial, too, and so is anthropomorphic climate change… Everything, come to think of it, is up for grabs (the last election too).
“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche (no source, sorry)
#mystification
like it!
Now I am hastened to find the quote.
Best so far, in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
“Many a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy, that no one might see therethrough and thereunder.”
A bit obscure, though. I’ll try to report back if I find the exact source.
Follow-up :
It appears to be a false quotation.
However, 🙂 , the 2nd next stanza in Thus Sprach Zarathustra is :
“But the clear, the honest, the transparent—these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so PROFOUND is the depth that even the clearest water doth not—betray it.—”
… so I think someone reduced those two stanzas into the more easily remembered quote I gave above.
Anyway, glad to sort that out at last – for now. Cheers.
Oh my gosh. When will this end? When editors like Richard Horton and Laura Helmuth move on? I mean, it has to end — we cannot permanently set aside fundamental (and important!) facts about ourselves and almost all other animals and how we and they function. Right? Right?
“When will this end? When editors like Richard Horton and Laura Helmuth move on?”
The zealots may be many things, but shy of using power has never been one of them. They will not move on of their own accord. They must be moved.
They were enabled by their mellow-mannered peers who either rolled their eyes, gently ridiculed them (almost never to their faces), or simply remained ignorant of the ideological ramblings in various academic ghettos. As the zealots started forcing themselves into more respectable and rigorous settings, then the mellow people allowed them space, whether out of academic principle, kindness, or fear—fear of being deemed a racist, sexist, conservative, or right-winger. Certainly, there were lonely voices who resisted; they foresaw where this “advocacy as analysis” movement could lead, and each did what he or she could to preserve our intellectual heritage. But one thing the intellectually respectable crowds rarely did was to exercise the power that they had to stop the madness. They, instead, enabled it at every step—voluntarily or otherwise. Now that the sane have lost more ground to dogma, have seen many of their most stalwart and level-headed retire, have ceded more organizations and institutions to the new clerics, have experienced their power diminish substantially, why would we expect them to do what is necessary to make this end? They still cling to hopes that the movement will simply burn itself out. It might, but let’s ask the Soviets how long that could take and at what cost.
Your analysis reads as depressingly accurate. I was fine, at one time, referring to a transwoman as a “she,” so to that extent I myself was an enabler. But I never envisioned that it would be taken LITERALLY.
Interesting in The Lancet’s convoluted attempts to define sex in all its obfuscatory ways, they didn’t even get it right in any of them: no mention of gamete size at all. I think the reason for this omission is that gamete difference (and the associated body plan that makes each type) is the one unambiguous way to define sex. Can’t have anything straightforward, can we? Then the long homily about changing sex — yes, they really said that: they want us to believe that men and women transubstantiate into each other, literally — would be pointless.
(As an aside, the Government of Canada is planning to modernize the Employment Equity Act that mandates affirmative action for equity-seeking groups in federally regulated businesses—banks, airlines, telecommunications, railways—and the enormous federal public service. It is deliberating whether to remove “women” as an equity-deserving group or, alternatively, to redefine “woman” in light of changing social views of what women are, thus giving “transwomen” a second equity box to tick, a third if they claim to be lesbian. This would follow from The Lancet’s view that sex really is mutable….or at least can be discovered to be different from what was carelessly “assigned” at birth or by obstetrical ultrasonographers.)
And the government will say they are doing it because experts at such noted publications as SciAm and The Lancet have proclaimed it as The Science.
I really cannot understand how normally sane people can believe that men can become women and vice versa. A man adopting the clothing and mannerisms of what they consider to be stereotypical female attributes is still male. Even if they “know” they are women, it doesn’t change basic biology. I cannot fathom any sort of mental bridge in my brain that would allow me to get there. That said, people who seem to be highly intelligent honestly believe in transubstantiation so I’m missing something.
What is the best steel man argument that convinces skeptical people like me that a man who puts on makeup and says “I’m a girl” is actually a female?
And many blue-collar voters in the State of Michigan had agreed with your sentiment.
Regardless of political affiliations, the transexual bathroom issue had been introduced into the mainstream consciousness by the judicial interpretation of Title IX. However, the issue begins with religious leaders in Houston TX,
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2015/02/09/55784/houston-equal-rights-ordinance-how-did-it-wind-up-in-court/
And, whatever President is in office — Obama, at the time — has responsibility to enforce the law. So, Democrats bear the brunt for a small part of their coalition because of bad timing.
I watched the exit polling for Michigan in the 2016 election. Again and again I saw blue-collar fathers explaining how their girls should not be in bathrooms with boys dressed as girls.
The election had been so close, I often wonder if this made the difference (setting aside the non-participation of Sanders supporters who now have exactly the laws the chose to have).
What is weird also is that it seems the guidelines are perfectly traditional with non-humans, but for our species allofthesudden it’s very hand-wringing and squishy-wishy.
Helllloooo? The biology is the same? Riiiight?
Yes, PZ Myers for example, talks about “male” and “female” spiders. How does he know how they identify?
Yes, PZ Myers for example, talks about male and female spiders. How does he know how they identify?
Hmmm . . .I tried to delete the first comment using the edit function, but it didn’t work.
For all creatures other than humans, “males make sperm; females make eggs”. But humans are magic, you see.
Science!
Yes, as we all know, at some mysterious point in the evolution of humans, all heritable traits and talents and behaviors and sex differences were suddenly erased and replaced by infinitely malleable social constructs and systems of oppression that miraculously manifest exactly as if we still were a bunch of jazzed-up primates.
And yet people who adopt a different race than the ‘race assigned at birth’ get into all sorts of trouble if they are caught out.
Yes, these woke people have it literally all backwards.
Race and gender are socially constructed. They’re unimportant and shouldn’t be the basis of anything.
Sex is real. It’s biologically meaningful. Yet that’s the one they’re trying to eliminate.
They are living in the upside-down world.
I just finished teaching a summer term course Human Genetics for Non Science Majors and all 16 in the class easily understood the fact that sex is binary.
Bill Nye had some sketch a few years ago where he explained how “sex is a spectrum”, and conveniently, he omitted gametes completely from his definition of sex. Because the second that you acknowledge “males make sperm; females make eggs”, the jig is up.
So, even the authors of this dreck from The Lancet understand that sex is binary when it comes down to it. (That’s why they limited their definition of sex to “human biology”.) They are merely reciting their catechism.
The more absurd the claim you are willing to make in defense of the ideology, the deeper you have demonstrated your commitment to the cause to be. Fail to do that if you are in a position of power, and you will be ostracized.
So, the dimwitted cowards in academia just keep reciting this crap.
Biological sex sounds a bit like quantum superposition. The atomic particle doesn’t have a distinct location until you look at it; and likewise the male / female designation. I wonder whether, since ultrasound technicians have been looking at fetuses for such a long time, it wouldn’t make more sense to say “the sex assigned the first time someone noticed”? For my taste, however, I prefer “the sex assigned at conception”.
There’s only one Observer who can collapse the wave function in sex; it isn’t God, but the almighty individual. As soon as someone says to themselves “hey, I am a boy/girl or both/neither!” the spinning cloud of variables crystallize into a solid truth.
The Lancet here is trying to explain that science is compatible with a philosophy grounded in the idea of Personal Autonomy as a high, if not the highest, value.
I just found this snippet in an article by Richard Horton, commenting on the limits of science:
“The take home message is that readers must exercise caution in interpreting the published literature, regardless of the reputation of the journal in which an article is found.”
Agreed.
Lost in this nonsense is the harm it does to women (if we must, humans assigned female at birth). Obviously they lose opportunities in sports, but if we eliminate the concept of sex, or anyone can be what they want, then all of the hard-fought protections for women in the workforce and elsewhere will be lost as well. No more complaining about sex discrimination since sex isn’t real but a social construct.
Sex predates sociology 101 by about 1.08 billion yrs. No social constructs needed, no genderly feelze needed. No self-declarations needed.
Are they going to do height and weight assigned at birth now too?
How exciting to learn that “In any given person, sex and gender might not align, and both can change”. Soon we can expect respected medical journals to advise us that in any given, uhh, being, their species and the kind of thing they (it?) identify with might not align and both can change.
Ultimately, the universities are culpable for foisting this malarkey on the rest of the world—by anointing it with academic status. If 40 years ago, academia had bestowed the same gift on Astrology, Butlerish fakers would have rushed into that scam and concocted “critical horoscope theory”; and by now medical journals would be advising us about birth charts and moon signs.
Birth Charts and Moon Signs
That’s the name of my new prog rock/pagan folk band. There are 2 tracks on our new album. One of them is an hour long mandolin solo.
One line of this puzzled me “investigators should integrate sex-based and gender-based analyses into their research design according to evolving funder/sponsor requirements”.
According to evolving funder/sponsor requirements?
Interesting, I glossed right over that. I take it to mean that large foundations which fund much of the research are requiring adoption of the woke philosophy into all that they fund. Foundation boards and reviewers are moving further to the left, so the comment you identify is acknowledgment that if you want your research funded you need to include statements that meet the leftward-moving philosophy. If you want the money, you have to do the dance.
This particular article from “The Daily Skeptic” seems to be okay (pouring snark on wokies is an easy exercise, after all), but in general the site triggers my bullshit detectors in a major way. Uh-huh, right, COVID vaccines caused the excess mortality, sure… discretion seems advisable when using that site as a source of information.
“Seems to be OK.”
The passage, “Both [sex and gender] can change”, is a direct quote from The Lancet’s Information for Authors, the original of which Jerry supplied to compare. If you want to instruct us about what sources we should trust, fine, but I think trying to undercut a correct quotation and a valid commentary by impugning the site’s other articles is reaching just a bit.
Articles such as this are useful in catching the attention of readers who don’t normally read medical journals to scrutinize things those journals say. Since the Skeptic provided a link, the reader can check the original without having to engage his bull-shit detectors in trying to decide to trust the article unverified, which isn’t a good idea generally.