Category: books

New tendentious and possibly dangerous APA book on “gender-affirming care”

February 19, 2024 • 12:30 pm

From the Washington Monthly we hear of a brand-new book published by the prestigious American Psychiatric Association (APA), a book dealing with (and all gung ho for) “gender-affirming” care. You know what that is: it’s the care that goes to a child with gender dysphoria, taking him or her directly to a therapist or doctor who affirms the child’s feelings of being born in the “wrong” body, then to prescribing puberty blockers and other hormones, and, then if the patient wants it, to excision of body parts: operations on genitalia and removal of breasts, along with hormone treatment that eliminates a patient’s ability to have an orgasm.

Click below see the book on Amazon. It’s $58 and, as you see below it, the 18 ratings on Amazon so far aren’t very laudatory. But according to Amazon it came out only on January 7, and the gender activists haven’t yet weighed in. But they will after they read psychiatrist Sally Satel‘s critical take.

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Why such poor reviews? Perhaps, as Sally notes in her description of the book in Washington Monthly, because it’s written by gender-affirming advocates and is woefully short on warnings about possible dangers of this kind of medical and psychiatric care. Nor does it appear to offer any alternative care that doesn’t wind up with hormone therapy.

Click to read:

Although the book is published by the APA, it doesn’t constitute “official APA guidance.” But here’s psychiatrist Sally Satel’s take (excerpts indented, bolding is mine):

Last fall, the APA’s publishing arm issued a textbook called Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care. Described in accompanying promotional material as an “indispensable” resource, the book is written for mental health and primary care clinicians. The publisher, American Psychiatric Association Publishing, APPI, hails it as “the first textbook in the field to provide an affirming, intersectional, and evidence-informed approach to caring for transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive (TNG) people.”

The “affirming, intersectional” textbook is not official APA guidance. Still, APA Publishing describes it as “rigorous” and “an expert view from fields that include psychiatry, psychology, social work, nursing, pharmacy, public health, law, business, community activism, and more. And because each of the 26 chapters features at least one TNG author, wisdom gleaned from lived experience bolsters the professional perspective provided throughout the book.” One would hope that “lived experience” might enhance the scholarship, but that is not the case here.

Affirming care for children with gender dysphoria, a condition that, according to the APA, refers to individuals who suffer from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender [at birth],” is a major subject of the book. Unfortunately, though billed as a compendium of “best practices,” Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, instead of providing even-handed analyses of the controversies within a still-evolving topic of great clinical and social importance regarding the science of treating gender dysphoric youth, the volume approaches it as a settled matter when it is not.

The textbook’s treatment philosophy is that if a child or teen desires transitional steps, then the physicians should proceed, taking the patient’s request on its face. According to the authors, “Clinicians should … always allow patients autonomy in their care.” The authors further advocate for puberty blockers (chemicals that suppress the natural hormonal development and the appearance of secondary sexual traits) and then cross-sex hormones (estrogen or testosterone) to produce the physical characteristics aligned with the patient’s gender identity.

When it comes to gender-affirming surgery (which, for natal girls, can entail the removal of breasts, uterus, and ovaries, as well as penile construction; and for natal boys, involves the genital removal and the creation of a vaginal canal), patients first require a psychiatric evaluation before surgical consultation. In this evaluation, the authors say that “the [mental health] clinician should never place barriers to surgery, only identify those that exist and assist with overcoming them.” (Emphasis added.) While the final decision to operate ultimately lies with the surgeon, who is tasked with obtaining informed consent from the patient and guardian, a psychiatric greenlight is also necessary. Surely, there are times when a yellow or red light is appropriate. It’s telling that a book of 420 pages only mentions guardians once and in the context of saying that guardians and parents (who get five mentions) should not be part of decisions concerning their transitioning kids’ medical data. Parents are referenced only in the context of being unsupportive to their children’s desire to transition.

Satel has other beef. The book doesn’t cover the fate of youths who aren’t given this kind of care, many of whom become gay or no longer gender-dysphoric without affirmative treatments; the book doesn’t cover those who de-transition or reverse the process when it’s going on before medical treatment (“desisters”); the book doesn’t describe alternative treatments in which therapists don’t automatically buy into the patient’s wishes and narratives; and, most important, and, most important, the book doesn’t warn of the potential dangers of some of the medical treatments—dangers recognized by other Western countries.

First is the need for more objective care:

As a practicing psychiatrist, I would expect this volume to probe how to conduct productive interviews with all patients, especially children and young teens, who consider themselves candidates for a gender-affirming approach. After all, this is a book from the American Psychiatric Association’s publishing arm. As such, it should advise clinicians to examine, over many sessions, patients’ experiences and developmental struggles (such as emerging sexuality and identity formation), to learn about their home lives and social worlds, as well as to treat them for the frequent co-occurring issues, such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, which sometimes manifest as gender dysphoria in youth.

This would seem to be at the heart of any responsible psychiatric assessment of whether chemical intervention (which can be irreversible) and procedures as life-altering as “confirmation surgery” should be recommended. However, oddly, such foundational steps are ignored.

Here’s Satel on the lack of discussion of the dangers of affirmative therapy (again, we’re talking about young people who may not be mature enough to make such important decisions). To me, this almost verges on academic malpractice:

Finally, a reader gets no sense that gender-affirming care is the subject of vigorous international scientific debate. Remarkably, the textbook does not mention that in 2020, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service commissioned a comprehensive review of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and concluded that “the available evidence was not deemed strong enough to form the basis of a policy position” on their use.  Similarly, in 2022, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare suspended hormone therapy for minors except in very rare cases and limited mastectomies to research settings. Likewise, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board now defines all medical and surgical interventions for youth as “experimental treatment,” and the French National Academy of Medicine advises caution in pediatric gender transition.

Regardless of the authors’ personal views, a textbook that is advertised as “rigorous—and timely” as well as “informative” should, at the very least, acknowledge, and ideally explore, the tension between the European and American approaches and elucidate the concerns raised by European medical authorities.

Why the lacunae? As Satel notes, every chapter has at least one likely gender-activist author (“TNG”), and this has resulted in the sorry situation where the APA gives its imprimatur to treatment that might be dangerous or, at best, ineffective. Do note, however, that Satel also opposes state-imposed bans or limits on treatment for adults.

Gender activism is one thing, but when it comes with the imprimatur of the APA and without mention of either alternative therapies nor warnings about the dangers of medical care that have been recognized by other countries, that activism is irresponsible.

The worst thing one can say about this book is that it’s probably going to be highly recommended by ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.

Faith versus Fact audiobook for 75% off: only $4.25

February 15, 2024 • 1:17 pm

My audiobook publisher is running a special deal until March 15: my audio book Faith versus Fact: The Incompatibility Between Science and Religion, for a pittance: $4.25. It’s not available on Amazon, so I’d say this is a good deal.  To get it, click on the icon below, and, if you don’t want to buy into a continuing deal, click the blue “get discount” button and then check out.  If you click the orange button, you’ll buy into a continuing series and will keep getting other books.

The blurb:

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion-including faith, dogma, and revelation-leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Coyne is responding to a national climate in which over half of Americans don’t believe in evolution (and congressmen deny global warming), and warns that religious prejudices and strictures in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable ‘truth’ by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science.

Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm-to individuals and to our planet-in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in.

Look at it this way: it’s cheaper than a Starbuck’s latte. And, as with all my books, if you send them to me with a postpaid return envelope, I’ll autograph them and even draw a cat inside.

Abigail Shrier has a new book on where therapy for the young went wrong

December 21, 2023 • 9:20 am

We all remember Abigail Shrier from her controversial first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which pointed out the huge increase in the number of adolescent girls who wanted to transition to becoming trans males, attributing some of the rise by the egging-on of gender dysphoric adolescents by social media to go ahead with transitioning.  As Wikipedia describes it:

Shrier states that there was a “sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls” in the 2010s, referring to teenagers assigned female at birth.  She attributes this to a social contagion among “high-anxiety, depressive (mostly white) girls who, in previous decades, fell prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder”  Shrier also criticizes gender-affirming psychiatric support, hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery (together often referred to as “gender-affirming care”) as treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

The book was controversial, but it was also brave, and since its publication Shrier’s theses have largely been substantiated: the social-media contagion is present quite often, and the willingness of bad therapists to shunt children onto the medical track has led some countries to consider hormone therapy as “experimental.”  But soon after Shrier’s book came out, there was a maelstrom of controversy, as always happens when anybody goes against the tenets of gender activism.

First, ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio called for banning the book (yes, the ACLU!). Have a gander at his tweet (archived but, I think, taken down)

Other stuff happened.  Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine reviewed the book favorably, but her review was removed and had to be published elsewhere because editors Steve Novella and David Gorski,  didn’t like the book and wanted to ban a favorable review. Amazon suspended paid advertising for the book shortly before it came out, and Target did ban it from sale, albeit briefly.  Here’s more from Wikipedia:

In July 2021, the American Booksellers Association, a non-profit trade association that promotes independent bookstores, issued an apology for including the book in a monthly mailing, calling the decision to do so a “serious, violent incident” and characterizing the book as “anti-trans”.[20] This set off further controversy, with some arguing the association was now trying to censor the book, and others saying the apology was insufficient.

The book has been translated into multiple languages and foreign-language versions have been released in other countries such as Spain,[36] France, Hungary[37] and Israel where a speech by Shrier drew protesters.

Backlashes against the book have led to termination of its publication in Japan.

This is what happens when you advance a thesis—and Shrier advanced it with data and well as with civility—that runs contrary to the gender activist narrative that many people are born in the wrong bodies, realize it on their own without social contagion, and then, often after cursory “affirmative therapy”, undergo surgical and hormonal intervention whose results may be either unknown or harmful (note: many who transition are happy with what they did, and Shrier noted that).

But I think the backlash took Shrier by surprise, and she’s had to defend herself numerous times. She even started a Substack site called The Truth Fairy.  It was from that site that I got the announcement of her new book, which I can’t read in toto as I don’t subscribe. But I thought I’d call attention to it, first by reproducing what I can see:

BAD THERAPY arrives in ten weeks and – first of all – THANK YOU.  This book took me almost two years (and hundreds of interviews) to write.  I’m so excited for you to read it.  And I could not have done it without your support.

I started BAD THERAPY, as I always do, with a question: Why is the rising generation suffering so mightily? Why did a generation who had seen no world war, no great depression, no 9/11—plunge into a bottomless well of despair? They received far more parental attention than we – their Gen X parents – did. And we showered them with more mental health resources – preventive care, treatments and interventions – than the children of any generation prior. They ought to be the picture of mental health. Instead, they seem to be the essence of psychological frailty.

I hypothesized that the answer to this question had to do with the way kids were being raised. I even sold a book proposal with that central argument. But no hypothesis should remain entirely unscathed after a serious investigation. And after hundreds of interviews, I understood that I’d only been half right: the rising generation had been raised differently. But that difference was not the result of their parents’ flawed judgment so much as it was parents’ willingness to be guided by mental health experts and to serve up their children for the experts’ evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment.

The rising generation is awash in therapeutic intervention, and it isn’t helping. Still, I resisted the notion that those interventions could possibly be making things worse.

Bad Therapy is being published by my own publisher, Penguin Random House, and will be out on February 27 of next year (click on the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site). The book is already #1 in parenting over two months before the publication date!

The summary from Amazon:

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

  • Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
  • Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
  • “Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Clearly this book is not solely about “affirmative therapy”—the tendency of some psychologists to immediately accept a child’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and immediately putting them on puberty blockers or other hormones without a thorough and ardent discussion and analysis of the adolescent. Rather, it’s about the failure of child therapy in general, both directly and through what child psychologists say that has filtered down to parents.  I haven’t seen the book, but suspect it should be read by both parents and child psychologists. It seems to be a sort of supplement to Lukianoff and Haidt’s popular book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which dealt mostly with how parents and societal norms were screwing up kids. Shrier now adds therapists to the mix.

Oh, and we should be prepared for strong pushback by therapists, who, after all, think that they’re doing a terrific job. But they’re often not, as we can see from the persistence of psychoanalysis long after its been debunked.

A dearth of science books on the “Year’s Best” list

December 19, 2023 • 12:30 pm

I’m not going after the NYT here, as this observation may simply reflect a dearth of science books published in 2023. However, the paper’s list of 100 best books of the year (click below), divided into 50 fiction books and 50 nonfiction books, has only a single book that I’d classify as “a science book”: that is, one that isn’t about the interaction of science with humanity, as in global warming (there’s one of those). Click below to see the list:


And here’s the sole, lonely science book on the list:

I’m sure that there are some new science books out, but perhaps they weren’t very good. Whatever the situation, it’s sad that the public doesn’t get a chance to read some good science.  If you know of a good science book that appeared this year, please put it in the comments.

I haven’t read the owl book, but I have read two on the list, both nonfiction. They were both recommended by friends, and were both very good:

This one, the story of a ship voyage, was unexpectedly good—a page turner. It’s about the grimmest voyage you can imagine, and it’s true.

And here are two I want to read, for I remain fascinated and inspired by the civil rights era of the Fifties and Sixties:

On the Times page itself, each title links to the NYT review of the book (I haven’t put those links here).  I won’t list any more books save one, for recently we had a lively discussion of recommended books, and that, combined with recommendations from friends, has led to me having a pile of six or seven books to read on my headboard.  Right now I’m reading the one below, and will finish it tonight.

Because I love the works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, it was only natural for me to want to read about the legendary editor who discovered these men and helped them craft their fiction: Maxwell Perkins of Scribners.  He was perhaps the most important figure in shaping the twentieth-century novel, though he never wrote a book himself. He was a laconic man of immense talent, who also jump-starterd the careers of Ring Lardner and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (read The Yearling!).  Max Perkins: Editor of Genius won the National Book Award.

Click to go to the Amazon link:

I need a book

December 4, 2023 • 10:15 am

I have finished the collected short stories of Saul Bellow, which I read as a way of deciding whether I wanted to tackle his longer novels. And I decided that his prose style, which has been much lauded, doesn’t appeal to me, so it’s into the bin with Saul. That’s sad, as he wrote a lot of highly-rated and fat novels that would have kept me busy for a while.

Therefore I’m appealing to readers for suggestions of good books to read.  They can be either fiction or nonfiction, though I think I’m in a nonfiction mood. As I’m old and on the downhill slide to oblivion, the books should be world class, as I have little no time for less than brilliant works.

Let us know what you’re reading, but particularly put your recommendations in the comments. For example, you could tell us what you think is the best book you ever read. For me it’s Anna Karenina for long fiction and Joyce’s The Dead for short fiction. Non-fiction is harder, but Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson come to mind (I’ll probably think of another choice soon).  “Best books,” then, are what I’m looking for, and I realize that such choices are subjective.

Please comment below.

Jon Haidt on a new book, the silence of university leaders, self-censorship, and America’s loss of confidence in higher education

October 19, 2023 • 9:30 am

UPDATE: See a positive review of this new book (as well as a related one by Yacha Mounk) at The Economist.

This week, Jon Haidt’s short Substack piece (click on title screenshot below to read it), does four things: he introduces a new book, explains why University leaders remained largely silent (or waited a few days) before giving public reactions to the Hamas attacks on Israel,  gives some of Jon’s thoughts about why self-censorship has spread beyond the campuses, and shows data indicating that Americans are losing confidence in higher education. I’ll give a brief bit on each of these, with Jon’s words indented.

a. The new book.  The Canceling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, came out just two days ago, is selling well on Amazon, and has gotten good preliminary reviews. The title is a mirror of Lukianoff’s previous book with Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, which was quite influential (see my summary here and be sure to read the authors’ Three Great Untruths that have infused modern college students).  This new book is largely about “cancel culture.” Haidt wrote the foreword.

Lukianoff is of course the president of FIRE, and Rikki Schlott is an author, journalist, and podcaster (one of her podcasts on cancel culture is here).

Haidt on the book:

An important book comes out today: The Canceling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff (my co-author for The Coddling of the American Mind) and Rikki Schlott. Greg and Rikki explain the long history of efforts to silence people by threatening them with social death, unemployment, or physical harm for questioning orthodox beliefs or proposing heterodox theories. They show how today’s version of cancel culture, which first arose on American college campuses around 2014, spread out from universities to many other fields including journalism, medicine, psychotherapy, and even the hard sciences. Greg and Rikki show the devastating effects of cancel culture on institutions that require viewpoint diversity to function, with universities being the pre-eminent example. (Cancel culture causes the condition I called “structural stupidity” in a 2022 Atlantic article.) They show how cancel culture takes a different form on the right, running through legislatures that try to dictate what can’t or must be taught in K-12 schools and even at universities.

It’s definitely a book I’ll be reading. A cute gif from Schlott’s site:

b. The curious silence of university leaders. 

The Canceling was a darn good book when I read a draft last spring, in order to write the Foreword for it. It’s an even better book now that the world has been treated to the shocking spectacle of so many university presidents remaining silent, or issuing only vague and cautious comments, in days after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Their collective reticence stood in stark contrast to the speed with which so many had offered expressions of solidarity or shared grief whenever an election or court case went the “wrong” way in the years since 2014. (In general I think universities should embrace the “Chicago Principles” and commit to institutional neutrality. See Jeff Flier’s recent application of these principles to the current situation. But if university leaders made so many pronouncements on “controversial” issues before October 7, then they should have made a strong one on October 8.)

Why did so many leaders take so long to say anything strong or (seemingly) heartfelt about the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the holocaust? Why did so many wait a few days to see which way the wind was blowing before augmenting their initially tepid statements?

I see nothing to suggest antisemitism; I see everything to suggest fear. The kind of fear that Greg and Rikki explore and explain in The Canceling of the American Mind.

. . .  have spoken with many university presidents since 2015. Most of them have good academic values. They are trying hard to lead institutions that are becoming “ungovernable,” as one president said to me. I have also spoken with the leaders of museums, professional associations, and non-profit organizations. They face the same challenges from their politically active employees who use social media like a “dart gun” to intimidate leaders into making rapid pronouncements on the issues the activists care about, and to intimidate leaders into silence about issues and events that contradict their preferred narrative about victim groups and oppressor groups.

Of course my own position is that universities should be officially institutionally neutral, making no pronouncements on politics, ideology, and morality unless they’re on issues that directly affect the working of the school. The University of Chicago statement, which basically says “There’s a war on; people are concerned; here’s the resources where you can get help,” can be seen here.

If it were official policy for universities to avoid taking stands on stuff that didn’t concern them directly, there would be no need for suspicious administrative silences, balled-up statements that get walked back, and donors stopping their contributions.

We need a country-wide push for institutitional neutrality of the Chicago type, yet so far only three universities have implemented it. For some reason they can’t adopt this reasonable position, designed to avoid free speech being impeded by fear of hurting your prospects at school. This leads to self-censorship  Do universities really NEED to weigh in on politics and ideology, especially if it chills speech? I see no reason why, and this week’s parade of college presidents repeatedly “clarifying” their positions is a strong argument for institutional neutrality.

Of course if a school has a history of making such pronouncements, they are obliged to condemn Hamas for what it did to Israel, and to speak out about terrorism. But it’s best to avoid accumulating such a history, as then you have to weigh in on nearly every significant event.

c. The spread of self-censorship beyond campuses. 

In the five years since The Coddling was published, the disease has metastasized and spread far beyond universities. It now infects journalism, the arts, non-profits, K-12 education, and even medicine. Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially, and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission. In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg and Rikki follow the story far beyond universities to show how deep the structural stupidity now runs. If we want to make our minds and our institutions work well again, we’re going to have to end the “crisis of self-censorship” that Rikki wrote about. This book [Lukianoff and Schlott] will tell you how we do that.

Can you think of “an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially” that has not become “structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission”?  I think this is a rigged question, actually, because if people are afraid to challenge dominant ideas, the organization has already become those things!

d. The waning respect for American universities. This is something that may hurt the Democrats in the next Presidential election.

The fact that higher ed lost the trust of most of the country before October 7 should have inspired soul searching and reform long ago. We can only guess how much lower the numbers have fallen since October 8, the day when so many university leaders failed to say or do anything.

Below is one graph showing this. (There’s another asking Americans whether colleges have a negative effect on the U.S.  In that one, Democrats haven’t changed much since 2012 but Republicans “yes” answers have gone up quite a bit. Independents weren’t surveyed).

The caption for this plot is “ Percent of U.S. adults with “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Source: Gallup (2023).“


 

Note that there’s a substantial drop in all three categories, but it’s very large (from 56% to 19% for Republicans, a drop of 66%!).  This is more or less a repudiation of “elitism” in that college create the “elite”, and the drop could play a role in buttressing Republicans next year.  Gallup doesn’t analyze why this has happened, but surely burgeoning left-wing authoritarianism (“wokeness”) plays a role, for universities are largely left-wing institutions. And the public, by and large, sees universities as absorbed with in this brand of crazy performative activity.

University of Edinburgh academics demand cancellation of book on sex and gender

October 12, 2023 • 11:45 am

One thing that seems clear, at least to me, is that Scotland is woker than England, for you see more stuff like this happening to the North of Blighty than from its south. But even if you disagree with my assessment, it’s hard to approve of the bad behavior of academics from the University of Edinburgh who are calling for the banning of a book on sex and gender. The article below comes is from the Times of London; click below to read, and if it’s paywalled you can find it archived here.


It’s a simple matter of ignorance and censoriousness, with the excuse that the book promotes “transphobia”—which means it has an honest discussion of trans issues.   An excerpt from the Times:

Academics at the University of Edinburgh have been accused of an “horrific” and “nonsensical attack” on free speech after calling for the launch of a book about gender politics to be cancelled.

Members of the University and College Union have written to an estimated 2,000 staff and research students calling for a protest at the event on Wednesday and told Sir Peter Mathieson, the university principal, it should be scrapped.

The union branch said essays in the book, Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader, reduce “trans people to an abstract anomaly or sinister cabal” and breached the Equality Act.

It told union members in a mass mailing of its “concerns about the launch of a transphobic book on campus” and said it would be holding a protest at the event. The claims were rejected out of hand by contributors to the book and by other academics.

UCU Edinburgh was previously criticised for preventing free speech after it twice supported demonstrations and stopped the screening of the documentary Adult Human Female, billed as a critique of “transgender ideology”.

Shereen Benjamin, a senior lecturer in primary education, and a contributor to the book, said the UCU’s claims were “outrageous”, adding that she was horrified by the email to academic colleagues.

Benjamin said: “The individuals in charge of the branch have used their position to try to suppress legitimate academic discussion where it challenges views they personally hold, by exploiting policies intended to make the university a decent, fair environment, and smearing anyone who disagrees with them.”

. . .In its letter to Mathieson, the UCU accused Benjamin, a founder of the Edinburgh branch of Academics for Academic Freedom, of “debunking” the rights of trans people.

I haven’t found the email from the Union, which is a student group, but the UCU Edinburgh is clearly deeply Pecksniffian, having stopped the screening of a movie that, while you may disagree with it, makes some good points and certainly doesn’t deserve banning. (You can see the whole movie free on Youtube.)

Of course if you say anything that’s not 100% in agreement with the assertions of trans activists, you’re going to get labeled a “transphobe”, even if you  simply disagree with the right of trans women to compete in women’s athletics. The way the ideologues control discourse is to make their opponents so fearful of being called names that the opponents shut up (it’s worked with critics of “indigenous ways of knowing” in New Zealand). If that fails, try to ban their books.

A form of this banning is the refusal of scientific journals to publish criticism of weak papers.  One example occurred when Colin Wright wrote to the editors of  Integrative and Comparative Biology asking if several of us could submit a critique of a dreadful paper they published, “Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution” (see here and here for some criticisms).  Colin never got a response after writing the editors several times. This is reprehensible behavior on their part, and, worse, it’s their attempt to promulgate dubious science by simply censoring its opponents.  They want to avoid social media criticism: what a great excuse for suppressing scientific discourse!

But I digress. Edinburgh Uni has issued a statement saying what’s below, which is a bit self-contradictory:

Edinburgh University said it attached great importance to freedom of expression and academic freedom and “would not seek to influence any lawful events held on our campus”.

A spokeswoman added: “Given the size of our community, it is inevitable that there will be differing views and opinions. We always encourage respectful debate and discussion, and we remain steadfast in our determination to facilitate a safe environment where challenging topics can be explored. We also firmly uphold the right of people to take part in peaceful and lawful protest.

But an environment that explores challenging topics will be perforce deemed UNSAFE, so how do they deal with that? But I do trust that Edinburgh Uni will take no steps to censor or ban this book. It’s always the students who make all the noise.

But is the book “transphobic”? Have a look at the description of the book and title page here:

The title page:

I don’t see anything obviously transphobic here, but of course the Pecksniffs can find something in this lineup of sex and gender criminals to foster banning the book. Where is ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio when we need him?  Sadly, he can’t stop the circulation of this book, because the kerfuffle is in the U.K.

Robert Sapolsky’s new book on determinism

September 25, 2023 • 1:20 pm

Robert Sapolsky, a biological polymath who’s written several best-selling books, pointed out in earlier ones (like Behave) that he was a hard determinist, a view he reinforced on a Sci. Am. podcast—one of their rare positive contributions. Now, as I mentioned in February, his new book, totally about determinism, is about to come out—on October 17. You can order it by clicking on the screenshot below. It ain’t cheap at $31.50 for the hardcover, but I may have to dig down deep to get it–or order it from the library.

Here’s the Amazon summary, which implies that Sapolsky isn’t buying any of the compatibilism bullpucky:

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.

Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody’s “fault”; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together.By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.

As I wrote in February based on this summary:

It’s clear from the summary that the “free will” Sapolsky’s attacking is dualistic or libertarian free will (“some separate self telling our biology what to do”). And although some readers think that kind of free will is passé, that everyone already rejects it, that’s wrong. I suspect those who say such things are compatibilists who don’t get out much.  According to surveys in four countries, most people accept libertarian free will, i.e., if you repeated an episode with everything exactly the same, a person could have decided or behaved differently. They also think that a naturalistic universe (or “deterministic” one, if you will) robs people of their moral responsibility. As I’ve long argued, yes, the concept of “moral” responsibility loses meaning in a naturalistic universe, but the concept of responsibility  (i.e., X did action Y) still makes a lot of sense, and that alone gives us justification for punishment—although non-retributive punishment.

If you doubt the pervasiveness of belief in dualistic free will, just look at religion: the Abrahamic religions and many other faiths are absolutely grounded in free will. They are, after all, predicated on you choosing the right religion and/or savior. This means that you do have a free choice, and woe be unto you if you choose wrong. (Calvinists or any religion that believes in “the elect” are exceptions.)

. . . So it goes. Back to Sapolksky. He espoused his determinism in Behave, but this is a full-length treatment, and a book I would like to have written. My main fear about the book was that Sapolsky would take the Dennett-ian stand towards free will, saying that we really have the only kind worth wanting, and downplaying the naturalism that, Dan believes (with other compatibilists), leaves us only one course of thought and action open at any one time. As I’ve argued, while hard determinism leads immediately to a discussion of the consequences for our world, how we judge others, and the justice system, compatibilism seems to me the “cheap way out,” reassuring us that we have free will and not going far beyond that—certainly not into the consequences of naturalism, which are many. It is the hard determinists, not the compatibilists, who follow the naturalistic conclusion to its philosophical conclusions.

The good news is that now when someone wants to understand determinism, I can just shut up and say, “Read Sapolsky’s book,” for I see no divergence between his views and mine (I’d also add Free Will by Sam Harris.) In the end—and I’ll get in trouble for this—I think compatibilists are semantic grifters. They’re really all determinists who want to find some way to convince people that they have a form of free will, even though they couldn’t have behaved other than how they did. This is the “little people’s” argument, not for religion but for philosophy. But in the end it’s the same: “People need religion/the notion of free will because without it, society could not flourish.” That, of course, is bogus. As long as we feel we make choices, even if intellectually we know we couldn’t have chosen otherwise, society will go on.  After all, I’m a hard determinist and yet I’m still alive, getting out of bed each morning. I don’t know what I’ll pick when I go to a restaurant, even though I know it’s determined right before I look at the menu.

Reader Tom Clark wrote a positive review of Sapolsky’s book on the Naturalism site. Click below to read it.

I’ll give just two of Clark’s quotes:

If free will is widely conceived as being opposed to determinism[1], it isn’t surprising that the latter is seen as a threat to responsibility, meaning, creativity, rationality, and other desiderata tied to our core notion of agency. If we’re fully caused to be who we are and do what we do, then it seems we’re merely biological robots, acting out a pre-ordained script; we don’t make real choices for which we might be praised or blamed.

Could you have done otherwise?

This is why Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will(link is external), is likely to ruffle more than a few feathers (although it will do so very entertainingly, see below). Following up on his earlier work Behave(link is external), Sapolsky, a behavioral biologist, is intent on making it clear to anyone who will listen that there is no escaping determinism if we’re serious about understanding ourselves: understanding how we got to be the exact persons we are and why our intentions and choices arise as they do. Moreover, as he takes pains to point out, indeterminism or randomness doesn’t help the cause of agency. After all, as deciders we want to determine our choices, not have them be subject to factors we don’t control. Strangely enough, therefore, determinism, construed commonsensically as the existence of reliable causal, and more broadly, explanatory connections between our desires, decisions, actions, and their effects on the world, seems a necessary condition of genuine agenthood. We really make choices, just not undetermined or arbitrary ones.

Well, the last sentence is a bit grifty given that “make choices” means, to most people, “we could have made other choices.” But I won’t quibble too much. The best part is that, according to Clark, Sapolsky has no truck with compatibilism:

The fight with compatibilists isn’t about determinism; compatibilists agree that we and our choices are in principle explicable by various determinants, not the causa sui. It’s rather about the relative importance assigned to determinism and its implications for moral responsibility and other beliefs, attitudes, and social practices informed by our conception of agency. Sapolsky argues that compatibilists tend to ignore the causal story behind an individual in order to fix our attention on agents and their capacities for rationality and reasons-responsiveness, capacities that compatibilists argue justify holding each other morally responsible.[8] Most of us are capable in these respects to varying degrees, but by downplaying determinism and the causal story, what Sapolsky calls taking the ahistorical stance, compatibilists in effect block access to the psychological and practical benefits of putting determinism front and center: increased compassion and more attention paid to the conditions that thwart human flourishing. Due to factors beyond our control too many of us end up with the short end of the stick when it comes to health, education, social skills, and employability. Sapolsky is especially critical of compatibilist Daniel Dennett, who has claimed that “luck averages out in the long run”. He responds in characteristically plain-spoken style:

No it doesn’t. Suppose you’re born a crack baby. In order to counterbalance this bad luck, does society rush in to ensure that you’ll be raised in relative affluence and with various therapies to overcome your neurodevelopmental problems? No, you are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there. Well then, says society, at least let’s make sure your mother is loving, is stable, has lots of free time to nurture you with books and museum visits. Yeah, right; as we know your mother is likely to be drowning in the pathological consequences of her own miserable luck in life, with a good chance of leaving you neglected, abused, shuttled through foster homes. Well, does society at least mobilize then to counterbalance that additional bad luck, ensuring you live in a safe neighborhood with excellent schools? Nope, your neighborhood is likely to be gang-riddled and your school underfunded.

In arguing against compatibilists, Sapolsky engages with the philosophical literature, citing skeptics about free will and moral responsibility such as Neil Levy, Gregg Caruso, Derk Pereboom, and Sam Harris (see references below). Such backup suggests he is not completely crazy to think that a robust appreciation of determinism, and therefore the sheer contingency of our formative circumstances, should force reconsideration of our conceptions of credit, blame, reward, and punishment.

Clark’s final sentence:

[Sapolsky’s] persistence in seeing Determined to completion – a prodigious undertaking – is much to be congratulated, although he would disavow deserving any such praise. Even if he’s right about that, we’re still lucky to have him.

YES!  But read the rest for yourself. This is a book we can all benefit from (even those miscreants who accept libertarian free will or compatibilism), and I’m glad I can point to a respected polymath who makes an argument I agree with, but written much better than I’d be able to.

What I’d love to see: a debate about compatibilism between Dennett and Sapolsky.