Gloria Steinem died

September 3, 2026 • 6:11 am

I guess I’m at the time of life when all my heroes are dying off, because of course they were older than I and I’m no spring chicken. The latest to leave the planet is Gloria Steinem, who died yesterday at 92. Activist, feminist, one of the big figures of “second wave feminism” that promoted women’s equality in all spheres, and co-founder of Ms. Magazine which I read regularly, she was perhaps the first response you’d give when asked, “Name a famous feminist.” This is from her obituary in the New York Times: (archived here):

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who, in galvanizing the modern women’s movement, helped millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday in New York City. She was 92.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause. It said Ms. Steinem had died peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones.

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

She was a columnist for New York Magazine, and the article below, written in 1969, is touted as having pushed her into the limelight (click to read):

The piece is about the rise of third wave feminism, and this is how it ends:

But there is bound to be a time of, as social anthropologist Lionel Tiger puts it, “increased personal acrimony,” even if the revolution fails and women go right back to darning socks. (Masculinity doesn’t depend on the subservience of others, but it will take us a while to find that out.) It might be helpful to men—and good for women’s liberation—if they just keep repeating key phrases like, “No more guilt, No more alimony, Fewer boring women, Fewer bitchy women, No more tyrants with all human ambition confined to the home, No more ‘Jewish mothers’ transferring ambition to children, No more women trying to be masculine because it’s a Man’s World …” (and maybe one more round of “No more alimony”) until the acrimony has stopped.

Because the idea is, in the long run, that women’s liberation will be men’s liberation, too.

She was one of those figures that you implicitly think will live forever, and who you never imagine might be getting old, and so the announcement of her death was a shock.

Here’s a bit from Wikipedia about Steinem and ageing:

Commenting on aging, Steinem said that as she approached 60 she felt like she entered a new phase in life free of the “demands of gender” she had faced from adolescence onward. When asked about her desired legacy, she said she hoped her work “might help individual people… to become more the unique, valuable, loved and lovable person that they want to be.” In 2026, Steinem was interviewed as part of a New York Times essay asking about how it felt to reach 80. The article was released to coincide with the 80th birthday of sitting United States President Donald Trump; Steinem said the worst part of turning 80 was “losing people you love”. When asked if she had advice for Trump specifically, she replied: “Resign”.

Here’s Steinem in 1977, when she was 43:

Photo by Lynn Gilbert, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s rare interview with Steinem in her New York condo, conducted in her last year of life. It’s 80 minutes long, and be sure to listen to her claim that “we have an asshole in the White House” (1:03:06).

Intersectional feminism and chemistry: the fracas continues

October 8, 2024 • 11:00 am

Over a year ago I read this article in the Journal of Chemical Education and found it ideologically biased and deeply problematic.

Here’s the article’s abstract:

This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics. This article presents a pedagogical model for implementing a special topic class on science and feminism for chemistry students at East Carolina University, a rural serving university in North Carolina. We provide the context of developing this class, a curricular model that is presently used (including reading lists, assignments, and student learning outcomes), and qualitative data analysis from online student surveys. The student survey data analysis shows curiosity about the applicability of feminism in science and the development of critical race and gender consciousness and their interaction with science. We present this work as an example of a transformative pedagogical model to dismantle White supremacy in Chemistry.

I read the paper and then wrote the post below about it. I wasn’t keen on the paper, to say the least. You can read my critique for yourself—though you may be tired of the ideological camel sticking its nose into the tent of science. I’ll quote my review very briefly.

Click to read my post (there’s another post that mentions this paper critically, as one of many science-and-ideology tirades, in a WSJ op-ed by Lawrence Krauss).

Below, indented quotes from my piece. Quotes from the Reyes et al paper are doubly indented:

The abstract gives an idea of the purpose of the course: to indoctrinate students in the authors’ brand of feminism, CRT, and other aspects of woke ideology. It wants to rid chemistry of White Supremacy, for the unquestioned assumption is that chemistry education is riddled with white supremacy. If you read the authors seriously, you’d think that all chemistry teachers put on white robes and burned crosses after school. . .

. . . .At the outset they get off on the wrong foot: by asserting that sex is not binary (all bolding is mine):

When scientifically established facts, such as the nonbinary nature of both sex and gender are seen by students of science as a belief, one might ask: Are we being true to scientific knowledge? We use this student comment as a reflection of the subjectivity of how the pedagogical decisions are made in teaching “true science” vs what existing scientific knowledge tells us. This has resulted in the propagation of scientific miseducation for generations.

. . . .Besides the reading assignments, there are essays in which students are expected to parrot back the woke pabulum they’ve been fed:

The final assignment was a full paper with an intervention plan that might be implemented in their own institution/department which will enable students to create a STEM identity which acknowledges and respects their personal identity. For 2021 and 2022 classes, the intervention topics that students wrote about were as follows: the importance of all-gender bathrooms in STEM buildings, the importance of teaching how race, gender, sexuality, etc. are created and pathologized by STEM as a medical college course, how to increase accessibility of STEM as a discipline without erasing the lived experiences of URM students, and how the American STEM identity can incorporate the immigrant student/scholar experience.

At this point I wondered if this course had anything to do with science beyond using the “field” (excuse me) as an example of racism and white supremacy. I don’t think so. It’s ideological propaganda, pure and simple, and even worse than the forms dished out in “studies” courses. ‘

They also confused the Tuskegee airmen, a band of brave black pilots in WWII, with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a misguided and racist study of syphilis that’s an exemplar of how not to do medical studies on ethnic groups. This kind of confusion bespeaks a deep ignorance by Reyes et al, for nearly everyone knows the difference, and they could have looked it up. (There were NINE authors!)]

Here’s my conclusion:

The Upshot: This is without doubt the most annoying, misguided, and misplaced paper on science education I’ve read in the last five years. The American Chemical Society should be ashamed of itself.

Now two authors from Florida International University have written a short but trenchant critique of the first article, replete with references. Click below to read it, or you can find the pdf here .

Here are the three errors that, the authors say, dominate the paper. I’ll put them in bold and also indent some Landrum and Lichter quotes that support their critique:

In this commentary, we provide criticism of this work based on the following three points:

(1) the authors claim this course can “dismantle White Supremacy in Chemistry” yet fail to provide valid evidence for “White Supremacy.”

Nowhere within the text is the phrase “White supremacy in Chemistry” again found, nor is the term White supremacy again mentioned. The authors cannot be unaware of how the term White supremacy is often received. (3,28,29) This term is historically pejorative having arisen etymologically from the 19th century racist screeds of John H. Van Evrie and subsequently becoming identified with Jim Crowism and the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan. (30) To suggest a connection exists between such historical racism and the contemporary nature of the discipline of chemistry and chemists is disingenuous. (28−30) The authors eschew discussion of “White supremacy” and instead fixate on the lesser known neologism “dysconscious racism”, apparently expecting readers to uncritically overlook this equivocation. It is our opinion that the choice in interchanging “dysconscious racism” and “white supremacy” within this paper, without demonstrable and valid evidence of either, is poor scholarship and delegitamizes the claimed course objective.

(2) the paucity of content directly related to chemistry and the evangelical presentation of a sociological and politically charged perspective producing a course more identifiable as political indoctrination than chemistry education.

Most of the topics of Reyes et al.’s course, 8 are listed in Table 2 of ref (1), have little to do with chemistry and more to do with medical or STEM-related historical events dealing with racial and gender inequality. Content appears to have been selected to advocate the authors’ sociopolitical preconceptions, and there is a noted absence of balance. We identified two topics as having connection to the history of (bio)chemistry: “HeLa cells” and “DNA and Rosalind Franklin”. The 6 other topics seem completely unrelated to chemistry: “Perfecting the C-section”? “Social Darwinism”? “Tuskegee Airmen”? It seems, referring to the latter, the authors have mistakenly written Tuskegee Airmen when referring to the Tuskegee Syphilis study. These are different historical events, and both are unrelated to chemistry or chemists. . . .

(3) the evaluation of the course which is both flawed and statistically meaningless.

The sample size is pathetically small, some evaluations were omitted without giving a reason, and there are no statistical tests (Reyes admit this in their rebuttal below)

Reyes et al. (1) evaluated their course using an online qualitative, four-question free response survey. A subset of 6 of 8 responses collected were included in the Supporting Information; no explanation is given to explain the exclusion of the 2 unreported responses. Of these 8 students, only four students had completed the course. A separate group of four students who had not taken the course also submitted responses.

The authors appear to suggest the latter group’s responses might represent a valid control group.

The authors report comparison of the responses of 3 students who had not taken the course to those of 3 students who had completed the course. It is unclear why the authors did not include and compare two responses, one from each group. The longer-length responses given by those who completed the course is claimed by the authors to be a measure of student mastery of the course objectives. This conclusion amounts to conjecture and speculation.

Finally, Reyes and one co-author (why not the rest?) wrote a response to the critique above; you can see it by clicking on the link below, or find the pdf here.

It’s tiring to have to deal with the two authors’ (non)reply, but I’ll summarize how they respond to the accusations. Their quotes are indented; mine are flush left.

White Supremacy

Scores of research articles published in peer-reviewed and well reputed journals have documented white supremacy in Chemistry and other STEM departments in US Universities and linked the above-mentioned negative outcomes to white supremacist practices. (19−30) As such, we are not the first one to claim white supremacy in STEM/Chemistry based on just one or two personal experiences, but we grounded the pedagogy for this class in well researched observations. (31) Given the presence of white supremacy in STEM, (19−30) it is wrong to not provide ALL students an opportunity to engage with these ideas in an honest conversation as it robs them from crucial professional development training on working with a diverse work force. Our class is one example of such an effort, and although one class does not ensure systemic changes, it does try to create a more unified society in Chemistry/STEM. In fact, like us, other scholars have also suggested teaching history and consequences of bias in STEM as a strategy to dismantle white supremacy and other forms of systemic discriminations in STEM. (30−32)

I suggest looking at references 19-30 to see if they really do document “white supremacy in STEM”. Of the first nine references I looked at, only two even mention “white supremacy”. That is, of course, different from racism. And a lack of opportunity for minority chemistry students is not necessarily due to white supremacy.

Paucity of chemistry content. The authors argue that this is irrelevant because this was a special topics course in chemistry that didn’t affect whether a student could or could not graduate with a chemistry major. Instead, they say, “with the changing demographic of STEM/Chemistry higher education disciplines and the continued observation that students of color feel alienated in STEM/Chemistry fields, this class intended to provide all students with training on how to engage with identity and its influence on one’s ability to learn. Students chose this class from the list of all available classes, further reinforcing the idea that there was student interest in learning about intersectional feminism and its connection to STEM/Chemistry.” In other words, this wasn’t really a chemistry course, but an ideology course (though they loudly decry that there was an ideology involved, yet cite bell hooks, who is not a chemist but an ideologue).

The vacuous nature of the claim that this course was successful. Here’s the response, though note that the class “is not offered at present”:

We agree that the survey data presented in the original article is not statistically significant (and because of that reason we did not make any overarching generalization or provide any statistical analysis). However, the open-response (qualitative data) nature of this survey allowed us to gather rich data which could be analyzed for thematic analysis using standard protocols (coding, thematic analysis) as described in the original article. (1) Due to institutional changes and restrictions nationally, (33−35) this class is not offered at present which makes it impossible to gather further data. We suggest any interested reader to consult a review that compiles the potential application of critical race theory (CRT) in physics which might be useful in designing similar classes in STEM.

This is word salad; and yes, they do make generalizations. Here’s one from the first paper:

Analysis of the survey from students who took this class appreciated that the historical situatedness of knowledge and knowledge production and could explain the benefits that those can provide to one’s professional success as well as the society at large. This being the overarching learning objective for this class, the authors argue that students gained the ability to analyze information presented to them and express those using both scientific and feminist language.

But please, read for yourself (take these articles, please!). It’s a paradigm of how authors can infuse science with ideology and then, when called out on it, wriggle and waffle in trying to deny the accusations.

Dawkins talks to Kathleen Stock

July 14, 2024 • 12:00 pm

Here we have a 55-minute on-on-one conversation between Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock conducted during the “Dissident Dialogues” conference in NYC last May. Here’s a précis of Stock’s background from Wikipedia:

Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.

Her views on transgender rights and gender identity have become a contentious issue. In December 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of services to higher education, a decision which was subsequently criticised by a group of over 600 academic philosophers who argued that Stock’s “harmful rhetoric” contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. In October 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex. This came after a student campaign took place calling for her dismissal and the university trade union accused the university of “institutional transphobia.” A group of over 200 academic philosophers from the UK signed an open letter in support of Stock’s academic freedom.

After tons of opprobrium and threats, Stock resigned from Sussex in 2021. The book that caused a lot of the trouble is Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. I haven’t read it, but it’s a work of gender-critical feminism, and the topic itself ensured that Stock would be ostracized and deplatformed. I suspect that it’s not a work of “transphobia,” but, like Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which I have read, a defense of preserving some spaces for biological women but a work that doesn’t demonize trans people themselves.

I won’t go into the details, but the discussion is largely about sex (she accepts the biological definition based on gametes, which produces a binary) as well as gender. (She also considers a “cluster definition”, in which one combinse secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes, gametes, and other traits to come up with a multivariate definition of “sex”, but properly concludes that it doesn’t work.)

They go on to discussing gender, and Stock dissects the many meanings of that elusive word. As far as “trans” people go, she says (referring to Jan Morris), Stock says that Morris’s account of what it’s like being a woman was unconvincing (I agree; as it’s based largely on stereotypes). Stock does agree that females transition because they’re unhappy as males, but doesn’t agree that a transwoman is “a woman inside.” She adds that “she has no ambition to stop adults who’ve been through a proper period of reflection” to transition from one gender identity to another; but doesn’t agree that someone who has not medically transitioned should be allowed to define themselves as a member of their non-natal sex.

Stock discusses the “suicide myth”: the idea that girls not allowed to transition have a higher risk of suicide than those who do transition. This is a “myth” because the cohort of adolescent females who want to transition do indeed have a higher rate of suicide, but it could be because of other mental issues and, in fact, there’s no evidence that actual transitioning reduces that risk.

I’ll let you listen to the rest, which includes puberty blockers, the Cass Review, transracialism and so on.

My one disagreement with Stock is that she seems to equate almost all trans women as those who have a “male fetish”: autogynephilia. I am not an expert, but I suspect that male-to-female transitioning can be caused by a variety of reasons, only one of which is autogynephilia.

In the end, Stock doesn’t seem to be a “transphobe”—someone who hates trans people—but, like others tarred with that slur, she seems pretty reasonable. She is opposed to the prevalence of affirmative care and to the premature dispensation of hormones and surgery to children or adolescents, as well as to social acceptance of someone who identifies as a member of their non-natal sex as identical to members of that non-natal sex. The latter allows trans females, for example, to compete against biological women in athletics, to occupy cells in women’s prisons, and to display their penises in locker rooms. In other words, I see her as not hateful, but reasonable and anxious to prevent harm to young people who don’t fully understand the consequences of premature decisions. And she largely blames adults for this harm.

Western feminists largely ignore gender-based violence (rape and mutilation) inflicted by Hamas on Israeli and foreign women

November 19, 2023 • 9:30 am

One of the great puzzles of activism among “progressive” American youth is the support from feminists and LGBTQ people for Muslim countries, including, in this moment, Palestine. Palestine will not tolerate gays (same sex-relations is a criminal act), and a common punishment is to heave gays to their deaths off of rooftops, behead them, or kill them in other ways.

As for women, even the United Nations has condemned the oppression of women in Palestine:

Women and girls in Palestine continue to experience various forms of violence due to the entrenched discriminatory social norms and traditions, and the prolonged Israeli occupation. The most common types of violence against women observed in Palestine include domestic violence, sexual harassment, early marriage and femicide, as well as public and private spheres including streets, workplaces, homes and high-density areas such as refugee camps, particularly in Gaza. The outdated and discriminatory laws in Palestine hinder survivors of violence from accessing gender-responsive services and obtaining justice. In addition, survivors of violence often face social stigma, and are blamed as responsible for the violence occurred to them.

Notice how they blame this partly on Israel, despite the fact that similar violence is seen in other Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, where it can’t be blamed on Israel. (Note that two of those links go to UN reports!) In general, women are second class citizens in Muslim society, and nobody with neurons doubts this.

Nevertheless, we see stuff like this, which can only be described as cognitive dissonance, or, less charitably, hypocrisy:

LGBTQ supporting Palestine/Hamas
is like chickens 🐔 supporting KFC pic.twitter.com/uCzNbiGnJ1

— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) October 8, 2023

. . . and this:

Of course women become fifth-class citizens if they’re Israeli, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The decision of LGBTQ people and feminists to support Muslim societies—societies where they’d never want to live, for many of them would be killed because of their sexual orientation—is an example of MacPherson’s Law, confected by one of our readers. According to Diana, if progressives must choose between conflicting causes to support, and one of them is women’s rights, the women’s rights lose. (By “causes”, I mean “supporting a group deemed to be oppressed.”) I’ll add a corollary: if progressives have to choose between two conflicting causes, and one of them is LGBTQ rights, those rights also lose.

The article below from Unherd, by Nicole Lampert. shows how Western feminists have largely ignored not only the oppression of women in Muslim countries, but the sexual violence inflicted on women by Hamas on October 7. Click the headline to read.

I’ll give an excerpt:

After Hamas terrorists set about murdering, raping and abducting as many women as they could, one might have expected widespread condemnation from the West’s feminist groups. After all, Hamas had provided enough evidence of its crimes — within hours, they were posting footage of abducted young women in bloodied trousers being paraded around Gaza. Even beforehand, its feminist credentials were hardly glowing: it mandates the hijab, has made it illegal to travel without a male guardian, and refused to ban physical or sexual abuse within the family.

The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) was threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate. In the words of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars”, to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to “colonial feminism”.

Here in the UK, this approach is perhaps best embodied in the work of Sisters Uncut, a charity that boasts its own “Feministo” committed to “taking direct action for domestic violence services”. Until this month, the activists’ work has generally taken the form of media-savvy stunts: dyeing the water of Trafalgar Square’s fountains red, setting off rape alarms outside police stations, occupying the roofs of council buildings. Yet all paled in comparison to the demonstration it organised earlier this month: a call for Israel to put down its weapons that ultimately shut down London’s Liverpool Street Station.

Afterwards, the charity issued a 600-word statement, filled with references to “apartheid”, “genocide” and disproved reports that the IDF had bombed Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital. There was no mention, however, of the 239 abducted Israelis, roughly 100 of whom are believed to be women, or the sexual assaults that took place on October 7. When journalist Hadley Freeman pointed out this wasn’t terribly feminist of them, the group responded by claiming reports of Hamas’s sex attacks amounted to “the Islamophobic and racist weaponisation of sexual violence”. Towards the end of their rambling statement, they concluded: “no people would ever accept being murdered, humiliated, dispossessed, racially targeted, oppressed, cleansed, exiled and colonised without resisting.”

That’s reminiscent of how antisemites blame the Holocaust on the submission of Jews. “Why didn’t they resist?”, they ask. “Had they fought back when the Nazis came to take them, there would have been no Holocaust.”

The article continues:

Other feminist groups fell into a similar victim-blaming step. Southall Black Sisters, another charity committed to ending violence against women, did at least mourn the loss of life on both sides, but blamed it on “the Israeli government’s declaration of war on Gaza”. Elsewhere, Women for Women UK, which specialises in helping “women survivors of war” and calls itself a “non-partisan organisation”, has decided to raise money only for Palestinian women. Even Women’s Place UK, once viewed as an outlier for its brave campaigning for women-only spaces, decided to call for an “immediate ceasefire” without mentioning sexual violence.

In a similar vein, Claire Waxman, London’s first Victims’ Commissioner, wrote to Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, to ask why the organisation has stayed silent. In response, Waxman tells me, Alsalem claimed the evidence was “not solid” enough to warrant a statement. An incredulous Waxman points out that November 25 is the UN’s International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls: “How can we talk about eliminating violence against women and girls if we are tacitly saying it’s acceptable to rape Jewish ones?”

Alsalem, of course, is willfully blind: the rapes and sexual violence against the victims of Hamas has been amply documented, even on film! The fight against Hamas’s violence directed against women, then, has been largely led by Israeli groups:

To remedy this, Israeli feminists this week launched #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew, a campaign calling for the UN Women group to focus on the gender-based violence against Israeli women. “The UN Women is turning a blind eye to Hamas’s vicious war crimes by remaining silent,” they said.

But all this is nothing new, except that turning a blind eye to women who are raped and mutilated by Islamists now involves ignoring Israeli as well as Muslim women. And even the UN imputes some violence against women in Palestine to Israel. As you see above, “Women and girls in Palestine continue to experience various forms of violence due to the entrenched discriminatory social norms and traditions, and the prolonged Israeli occupation.” There are control countries, you know. . . .

I’ve always thought that there’s no substitute for actually seeing violence if you want to absorb its horrors, and that’s why the IDF showed to journalists extended videos filmed by terrorists themselves on October 7. The reaction was universal: it sickened the viewers.

The next closest thing is hearing graphic descriptions of the violence, as in the video below. I suggest that the video, a panel discussion on “The unspeakable terror: gender-based violence on October 7”, sponsored by the Maimonedes Society, the Harvard Jewish Law Students Association, and the Harvard Business School Jewish Students Association, should be required viewing for feminists who support Muslim societies.

Here is the constitution of the group (I apologize for the low quality of the print, as this is taken from a screenshot):

And here is the panel discussion (95 minutes total), which describes the sexual brutality inflicted by Hamas, its legal ramifications (including war crimes), the trauma inflicted on survivors of sexual violence, the treatment of survivors, and how to draw global attention to the situation.

But today I want to call attention to just one 13-minute segment of the panel, that from 14:06 to 26:55. It’s presented by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, Chair of the Civil Commission on Oct 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women & Children. She is at Penn, where she’s described as “an expert on international law, human rights law, constitutional and administrative law, global governance, religion & state matters, global sustainable development and feminist theories.”

Here Elkayam-Levy simply describes what Hamas did to Israeli women—and some foreign women—on October 7. This is very strong stuff, and she can barely keep herself together as she describes it. So it’s mandatory for me to issue a TRIGGER WARNING here: if you can’t bear to hear graphic descriptions of sexual violence to women (those descriptions begin at 17:05), violence so strong that acts of rape broke women’s pelvises, then skip it.

This is nothing other than brutality enacted on women because they were women, not just Israelis. And that comes from the tenets of Islam that have been incorporated in many Muslim societies. Remember too that both the live and dead women paraded around Gaza after the attack were cheered not just by Hamas, but by Palestinian citizens. Then ask yourself if the Israeli military has enacted things like this, and calibrate your moral compass.

h/t: Jez

Oxfam demonizes J. K. Rowling, branding her as a “terf”

June 7, 2023 • 12:00 pm

I got an email from reader Jez Grove pointing out how Oxfam has (literally) demonized J. K. Rowling in a recent video discussed by the Sunday Times of London. The original Times article is here, but it’s paywalled for most of us. However, you can access an archived copy here or by clicking the screenshot below.

Oxfam is a consortium of charitable organizations devoted to alleviating poverty throughout the world. At least it was that way when I lived in England and Scotland, but it’s now taking on social justice at home as well. Unfortunately, they’re being a bit hamhanded about it, as the article notes:

An excerpt:

Oxfam has been branded “utterly shocking” for releasing an anti-trans cartoon character apparently based on JK Rowling.

The charity’s animated #ProtectThePride video was issued to mark Pride month. It said it could not “ignore the cruel backdrop” against which LGBT people marked the celebration.

The strip included a woman resembling Rowling, who was wearing a badge saying “Terf” — which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” and is used as a slur to describe those, like the Harry Potter writer, who believe people cannot change sex.

The woman, with blood-red eyes and face contorted in hate, was wearing a green dress – similar to one worn by Rowling at a film premiere – and was looking at the Pride flag. As she appeared on screen, a caption said that LGBT people were “preyed on by hate groups online and offline”.

Gender-critical campaigners attacked Oxfam, which later removed a link to the video.

Milli Hill, a feminist author, told The Times: “Oxfam’s caricature of an ‘ugly hag’ wearing a Terf badge is so typical of the attitudes displayed to feminists who stand up for women’s rights. We are evil old witches basically, and this is the same old misogyny we’ve been fighting for decades, repackaged as ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’.

Here’s the scene from the video, which, as Jez notes below, has now been eliminated. If that’s not supposed to be J. K. Rowling, complete with red hair and a TERF patch where her poppy is, I’ll eat my hat. This removed screenshot, found by Jez, is in The Daily Mail:

Apparently Oxfam has an animus against Rowling:

The charity has also been accused of hounding out a volunteer who defended Rowling. A former worker, calling herself Maria, said she was accused of transphobia after a colleague asked on an internal message board if Oxfam shops should ban the sale of Rowling’s books.

Maria “had come to the defence of Britain’s most popular living author, asking for evidence of Rowling’s supposed transphobia”, the website UnHerd said. It prompted a “gruelling internal investigation”, with Maria struggling to clear her name, having a nervous breakdown and leaving her job and the country, the website claimed.

She claimed constructive dismissal and belief discrimination and in July last year.

Following the claim, both parties agreed to settle, with Oxfam issuing a public apology for its handling of the process.

Maria told UnHerd: “My life has been torn apart. It drove me to a breakdown, I lost my confidence and, worst of all, I began to doubt myself.”

Ideology stomps all over chemistry in a new paper

January 15, 2023 • 12:45 pm

There are two ways I can criticize the uber-woke paper below that was published in from The Journal of Chemical Education (an organ of the American Chemical Society). I could go through it in detail and point out the fallacies and undocumented claims, and note where “progressive” ideology simply overwhelms the science. I could highlight why it’s a bit of hyper-Left propaganda, designed to force students in a Chemistry, Feminism and STEM course to think in a certain way.

Or I could simply mock it as an example of politicized science that is so over the top that it could appear without change in The Onion.

Way #1 would waste a lot of my time, and I’ve gone through this kind of exegesis many times before. Way #2 would bring out the splenetic readers who say that I shouldn’t make fun of dumb papers like this but instead take them apart line by line—that mockery is not an effective weapon. But it is. Why else would Stanford have remove its list if disapproved words and phrases had not the Wall Street Journal mocked the list? “Mockery makes you look bad,” these jokers would say, “and it’s unintellectual.”

I’m rejecting both ways today in favor of The Third Way: let the paper reveal its own ideology, postmodern craziness, and authoritarianism by just giving quotes. In other words, I’ll let it mock itself.

You can access the the pdf here. or click on the screenshot

The abstract gives an idea of the purpose of the course: to indoctrinate students in the authors’ brand of feminism, CRT, and other aspects of woke ideology. It wants to rid chemistry of White Supremacy, for the unquestioned assumption is that chemistry education is riddled with white supremacy. If you read the authors seriously, you’d think that all chemistry teachers put on white robes and burned crosses after school:

ABSTRACT: This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics. This article presents a pedagogical model for implementing a special topic class on science and feminism for chemistry students at East Carolina University, a rural serving university in North Carolina. We provide the context of developing this class, a curricular model that is presently used (including reading lists, assignments, and student learning outcomes), and qualitative data analysis from online student surveys. The student survey data analysis shows curiosity about the applicability of feminism in science and the development of critical race and gender consciousness and their interaction with science. We present this work as an example of a transformative pedagogical model to dismantle White supremacy in Chemistry.

At the outset they get off on the wrong foot: by asserting that sex is not binary (all bolding is mine):

When scientifically established facts, such as the nonbinary nature of both sex and gender are seen by students of science as a belief, one might ask: Are we being true to scientific knowledge? We use this student comment as a reflection of the subjectivity of how the pedagogical decisions are made in teaching “true science” vs what existing scientific knowledge tells us. This has resulted in the propagation of scientific miseducation for generations.

Sadly, it’s the authors who are miseducated here. Whatever they think, biological sex in vertebrates is binary, and to teach otherwise is the real distortion of education.

They have a new term, too, though I don’t see how it differs from either systemic racism, unconscious bias, or deliberate racism. (The “King’ mentioned, by the way, is not Martin Luther King, Jr.):

King introduced a new term, dysconscious racism, defined as an acceptance of dominant White norms and privileges arising from the uncritical habit of the mind leading to the maintenance of the status quo. In contrast to unconscious bias which has been quoted as involuntary and used in the academy often, King’s idea of dysconcious racism demands a critical analysis of the history of systemic discrimination in the institutions and coming up with effective interventions.

Below is the authoritarianism, breathless in its arrogance. I used to think that it was an exaggeration to compare the radicalization of science with the Lysenko movement in Stalin’s Russia. Now I’m not so sure! We’ve put our feet on that path. Is there any ideological buzzworda missing in the following paragraph?:

In this article we describe the development, implementation, and student experience from a special topic course in chemistry, Science and Feminism, as a disruptive tool to challenge the status quo in Chemistry. Using Critical Race Theory and intersectional feminism as the framework, this course aimed at creating an intellectual as well as physical space for STEM students at East Carolina University (ECU) where they could explore their identities and how these intersect with the knowledge base and the pedagogy of science by looking at these from historical, political, and feminist lens. The other aim was to shine light, through this process, how scientific epistemology and culture have strong links with capitalism, enslavement, colonization, and exploitation of female-bodied folks. We provide the historical context of teaching this class in our institution, development of the course syllabus, assignments, and evaluations adopted for this course over the past two years as a template for future course development. In the Discussion and Conclusion section, we also provide a short description from qualitative analysis of online student surveys to understand what students thought about the importance of such a STEM course. Finally, this course is intended to produce an affirming space that will allow minoritized students to enter a chemistry class without having to leave their identities at the metaphorical and physical door of STEM classes.

But you’re supposed to leave your identities at the door. Science is science and the pursuit of the truth, and what truths are apprehended, should be independent of the characteristics of the person who does science.

Below is the “all must have prizes” bit. Sadly, given that there are more candidates for academic jobs than there are jobs, some people aren’t going to make it. Here’s a statement that East Carolina University, where most of the authors come from, put on their website after George Floyd was murdered:

That same year, the Chemistry Department posted an antiracism statement on its Web site, which stated: “…That means we, as a department, must continually self-reflect and ask hard questions of ourselves. Do our pedagogy, assignments, exams, and grading practices help everyone to succeed?”

This means, of course, that if some students don’t succeed, it’s the fault of the teachers. Ergo a new course in which everyone succeeds, and, I suppose, in which there is no ranking of merit.

Here are the four parts of the course, each accompanied by readings from the appropriate propaganda (note: there is NO dissent in the readings, which you can see in the article):

Unit 1 readings (Table 2) focused on introducing students to the history of American feminism and its contribution/effect as felt in STEM epistemology. This unit also comprised of readings that critically looked at the DEI work in the Academy and its connection complicatedness dysconcious racism. As experiential learning, this unit also invited students to think and talk about their individual relationship with the word feminism, STEM culture, and their own identities. The end of the unit assignments was writing a reflection from all the readings and participation in a debate with the topic: Science done by a feminist and feminist practice in science are the same thing.

Unit 2 included readings (Table 2) that exposed students to the historical context of pathologizing the pregnant womb and the construction of gynecology as a White male discipline while utilizing Black and Indigenous bodies as experimental subjects. We further explored the development of (Black, Indigenous, and Brown) races as inferior and pathological throughout the development of modern science. As experiential learning, students participated in discussions on their interaction with the medical system as immigrants, women, women of color, and LGBTQIA2S+ individuals. The end of the unit assignments was writing a reflection from all the readings and participation in a debate with the topic: Health care providers (doctors, dentists, nurses, PA, PT, and administrators) should be required to learn the history of medical racism, sexism, and homo/transphobia and their legacy as part of their licensing process, and it should be an ongoing training than a onetime one. Students were also suggested to watch the 2017 movie, The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.

Unit 3 explored the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized. The end of the unit assignments was writing a reflection from all the readings and participation in a debate with the topic: past is never dead, it is not even past. The students also had the option of watching the 2020 movie, Antebellum. However, the instructor was flexible on this assignment as some of the African American students did not want to watch it and be triggered. They wrote a reflection on a book on race and gender that they had read.

Unit 4 consisted of reading articles in STEM that used identity (racial/gender/sexuality) as empirical parameters and how that can further propagate the absoluteness of these categories rather than dismantling these constructed realities. The end of the unit assignments was writing a reflection from all the readings and participation. There was no debate for this unit as this was close to the semester end.

Besides the reading assignments, there are essays in which students are expected to parrot back the woke pabulum they’ve been fed:

The final assignment was a full paper with an intervention plan that might be implemented in their own institution/department which will enable students to create a STEM identity which acknowledges and respects their personal identity. For 2021 and 2022 classes, the intervention topics that students wrote about were as follows: the importance of all-gender bathrooms in STEM buildings, the importance of teaching how race, gender, sexuality, etc. are created and pathologized by STEM as a medical college course, how to increase accessibility of STEM as a discipline without erasing the lived experiences of URM students, and how the American STEM identity can incorporate the immigrant student/scholar experience.

At this point I wondered if this course had anything to do with science beyond using the “field” (excuse me) as an example of racism and white supremacy. I don’t think so. It’s ideological propaganda, pure and simple, and even worse than the forms dished out in “studies” courses. ‘

There’s a section on “Social Location of the Authors and Their Relation to This Course.” Here’s just a bit:

M.A.R. participated in the special topic chemistry class in Spring 2021 as a biology graduate student. She is a young adult Filipino cis woman who was raised in a middle-class rural town in North Carolina for most of her childhood by immigrant parents.D.M. consulted on the design and delivery of the course as well as the preparation of this manuscript. He is a middle-aged White cis-gendered man who was raised in a suburban Philadelphia family with a diverse set of adopted and foster siblings. He approaches this work largely trained in a Jesuit social ethics tradition and currently serves as a student affairs educator responsible for community engagement, leadership, and DEI experiential programming.

S.B. designed and taught this class as a special topic in chemistry class in Spring 2021 and then in Spring 2022. They are a middle-aged Indian immigrant working in the US higher education. They identify as gender nonconfirming and a brown-immigrant-queer. They were raised in an upper caste and middle-class, college educated family in an urban environment in India and experiences and understands this world from these complex vantage points. These social locations of S.B. also influenced the texts and topics discussed in this course which centered around the historical relationship of Black and Brown and colonized people with modern STEM discipline.

I’m not sure whether this is relevant for teaching propaganda, though it tells us why it’s being taught. It also help establish the authors’ “identity credibility”.

Finally, there’s the obligatory land acknowledgment at the end. It’s a long one!

The authors acknowledge that this article was conceived, researched, and written on Indigenous land and “We acknowledge the Tuscarora people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and live, and recognize their continuing connection to the land, water, and air that Greenville consumes. We pay respect to the eight state-recognized tribes of North Carolina; Coharie, Eastern Band of Cherokee, Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi Band of Saponi, Sappony, and Waccamaw-Siouan, all Nations, and their elders past, present, and emerging”.

Does this help the indigenous Americans? I don’t see how. I’m sure the Native Americans would prefer getting the land back than this faux form of “respect.”

To end, I point out what I think is an error. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there was a “Tuskegee airmen” case that falls under the “history of medical racism”. I believe the authors are referring here to the four-decade “Tuskegee syphilis study” ending in 1972. It truly was a dark episode in the history of medical ethics: an experiment in which black men infected with syphilis were left untreated so that the US Public Health Service could observe the effects of untreated disease. These men could have been treated, but weren’t; they weren’t told what they had; and they were promised medical treatment but lied to. This could not happen today, but it was a horrible, horrible thing to do to these people, and was certainly motivated in part by racism. Below is the conflation of this study with another group associated with Tuskegee:

The syphilis study had nothing to do, as far as I know, with the Tuskegee airmen, a group of black pilots who fought gallantly during WWII, despite the military having been segregated. They were the first black military aviators, and received many plaudits and decorations for their bravery and work. But the group had, as far as I know, nothing to do with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, except that both groups of men were associated in some way with the historically black Tuskegee Institute, which later became Tuskegee University. So much for checking the facts!

The Upshot: This is without doubt the most annoying, misguided, and misplaced paper on science education I’ve read in the last five years. The American Chemical Society should be ashamed of itself.

h/t: Anna

The rancor of the gender wars

September 27, 2022 • 11:15 am

The one ideological area in which I get the most pushback is that comprising transgender and transsexual issues. My concern with the topic has been twofold. First, I have been critical of the assertion of activists’ (and their adherents’) claim that sex is not bimodal in humans (or indeed, in anything), as well as the claim that there aren’t really any evolved differences in male and female behavior (again, not just in humans). To me, this flies in the face of all we know about biology. But I’ve given reasons for my views and won’t reprise them here.

Second—and again I’ve discussed this at length, adducing evidence, I’ve been worried about and critical of activists’ claims—now echoed by the Biden administration—that transsexual females (born as biological males) should be allowed to compete in most sports against biological women. This is especially worrisome if there’s been no medical intervention (hormone therapy) and if the transitioning occurred after puberty. Others feel differently, and this is a discussable issue that involves biology as well as philosophy.

That’s about it. I’m happy to treat all transsexual people with respect, including accepting that they’re members of the sex they want to be, using the pronouns they want us to use, and, in almost every case, afford them exactly the same rights as non-transsexuals. I certainly don’t want to “erase” them. And yet transsexual activism is so vociferous that even questioning issues of sports, sex differences, or sex bimodality brands one as a “transphobe.” I deny that accusation, as I deny the accusation that J. K. Rowling is a transphobe. And I am appalled at the self-righteousness of those who make flat assertions and are deaf to criticism.

In a recent article in Times Higher Education, Laura Favoro, identified as “a researcher at City, University of London’s Gender & Sexualities Research Centre”, surveyed 50 gender studies academics (all self-identified as “feminists”), trying to suss out the source of the acrimony around gender and transsexuality. Her conclusion, which those of us who have followed the “gender wars” already know, is that discussion on the issue has been severely and deliberately chilled, to the extent that most feminists who disagree with “progressive” ideology keep their mouths shut out of fear. And that fear comes from the rancor heaped on dissenters by “progressives”, who no longer want to debate—or even see the point of debate. This assuredness and willingness to silence dissidents is a recurring theme in the woke playbook.

The original is here but paywalled (you can read three articles for free), but I also found it archived here. Click below to see if you can access it; if not, go to the archive.

Of the 50 feminists interviewed by Favoro, 14 were “gender critical feminists”, comprising those who see a difference (as do I) between “sex” and “gender”. Favoro adduces a fact I didn’t know:

For them, there is a clear difference between “sex”, which refers to biological categories that are binary and immutable, and “gender”, which describes the roles, behaviours and attributes that a given culture deems appropriate for people by virtue of their sex. Recognising this difference is important because, as well as constraining both sexes, gender serves to justify the subordination of females. This group of academics also noted that their perspective was, until recently, largely shared across feminism, as well as within many academic disciplines.

I admit that I’ve been clueless enough not to know that emphasizing “gender” might lead to pressure on biological women to adopt classical female “gender roles”—something that modern feminists have opposed, or rather favor the right to reject traditional gender roles.

These “gender critical feminists” report significant harassment that has led to self-censorship:

It was clear that the “gender-critical” feminist academics I interviewed had faced negative repercussions for years for expressing their view (now protected in the UK under the Equality Act 2010 following last year’s tribunal ruling that a thinktank researcher, Maya Forstater, had been unlawfully dismissed for tweeting that women could not change their biological sex). Among other experiences, my interviewees described complaints to and by management, attempts to shut down events, no platforming, disinvitations, intimidation, smears and losing career progression opportunities, including being blocked from jobs.

Others spoke about being physically removed from events, alongside receiving torrents of abuse online that even included incitements to murder. One criminology scholar said her experience was “a continuum of hell”, while a law scholar claimed “the impact has been huge [and] is going to last a long time”. Aware of these potential consequences, and citing feelings of fear, isolation and despair, others had decided to “hide in the shadows”.

Those in the earlier stages of their careers said that “it would just be too terrifying” to make their views public due to the threat of being “ostracised…because so much within academia depends on personal connections”, while more experienced colleagues alluded to “self-preservation”. Feared by all was the “horrible backlash” online; one sociologist worried about death and rape threats seen elsewhere stated: “I have children – I’m frightened.”

Favaro also spoke to 20 “trans-inclusive feminists”, who differ from each other in their opinions, but as a group see no sharp line between sex and gender:

For some, “sex” is a construct of oppressive systems, notably Western colonialism. Others argue it is a biological spectrum that can – at least in part – change. For others still, it is both a social fiction and a biological reality. “Gender” is likewise understood in different ways: as socially or discursively constructed (performative model); as an inseparable combination of biological, psychological and social elements (biopsychosocial model); or, to a much lesser extent, as innate subjectivity, evoking notions of sexed brains (psychobiologist model). At times, “gender” is used as a synonym for “gender identity”, usually understood as an internal sense of self as a woman, a man, both, neither or something else, such as “non-binary” – which, among other possibilities, can be “plural” (“like having two or more alter egos or personas”) or “fluid” (changing “over years, months, or the course of the day”), as explained in the 2019 book Gender: A Graphic Guide.

Despite its conceptual diversity, genderism coheres around the push for gender (identity) to replace sex in most – if not all – contexts. Unlike feminism, its political subject is not female people but rather all those subjected to gender oppression – a concept that is redefined to emphasise lack of choice and affirmation relating to gender identity.

This is the viewpoint that I characterize as “progressive”, not because I think it’s connected with any real scientific or moral progress, but because its adherents see themselves as progressive, as being on the side of the angels. And, according to Favor (who’s going to get herself in trouble, even though she’s right), it’s this group that is the most censorious, the most eager to demonize their opponents as “TERFs” and transphobes. Some even reject the idea of debating:

On the issue of “no platforming”, some interviewees ridiculed the idea that gender-critical feminists were victims of it. . .

Others, however, openly embraced the “no debate” position on the basis that gender-critical feminism is “hate speech” or even “rhetorical violence [that] actually does have real-world aims”, equivalent to movements such as fascism and eugenics. One interviewee who identified as a trans woman described the current situation in academia as “a political battle over an institutional space”, clarifying that: “My political bottom line is – I don’t concede to people who are interested in the eradication of me and everyone like me in the world because I consider that a genocidal project.”

This view, together with the belief that “cis women have more power than trans people”, led genderist academics to refrain from forthrightly denouncing some transgender activists’ aggressive tactics towards feminists. These include threats and ideations of extreme violence, which, as well as being pervasive on social media, appear to be increasingly condoned at universities. For example, last year, a London School of Economics postgraduate student conference paper described a scene in which feminists critical of genderism “scream for mercy”. The paper then described the potential threat: “I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear”, concluding: “Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

Oy vey is mir! Yet some of these can’t even articulate their own beliefs:

When asked to describe their arguments, however, she responded: “I don’t know if what I understand or what I think are the issues are the issues, I’ll be honest with you – I stay out of their way.” This remarkable coupling of condemnation and ignorance regarding gender-critical feminism was fairly common among genderist academics. Many readily admitted that they limit their academic engagements, including their reading, to their “echo chambers and bubbles” where, as one journal editor noted, “we all share basically the same perspectives”.

Many genderist academics struggled, or were discomfited, when asked to provide their own definitions of sex, gender and (particularly) gender identity, despite their research and teaching revolving around these very topics. Some acknowledged lack of sufficient reflection, while others explained this peculiar situation by citing concerns over “perpetuating harms” with their words to people who identify as transgender. For others still, the concern related to “sounding Terfy”, or was a reaction to the fact that “there is very little openness to debating certain subjects which are difficult other than being framed as transphobic”.

If you can’t define your terms, you can’t have a debate. Among this group, Favoro interviewed 12 “genderist” feminists who were also editors of feminist, gender, and sexuality journals. Of course these journals all had the genderist perspective, but, further, all the editors they wouldn’t publish any gender-critical articles.

Finally, Favoro interviewed 16 feminist academics whose views she didn’t know. Many of them mentioned self-censorship because “we are all so afraid”. Others were in the “I’m not gender-critical, but. . . ” class, still raising issues that concern gender-critical feminists—issues like “affirmative care” for gender-dysphoric youth and the elimination of the term “sex.” Here’s a statement from one:

Are there things that I could write? Yes. Do I think that they could make a difference, that they could offer something? Yes. Will I write about it? No. Which tells you all you need to know about the current situation,” said a sociologist. “If I am scared to write about this…then I have no doubt that people who might be more easily classified as Terfs would feel afraid to speak, censored,” she added.

As you see, at least for the time being among this group—and, I think, much more widely—the trans-inclusive feminists have won, shutting down debate and chilling speech because people are afraid of being called TERFs or transphobes. (This resembles the debate about affirmative action and race-related matters, where the silencing adjective is “racist”.)

Favoro claims that she was objective in her approach, and I have no reason to doubt her, for if she had a history of being in one of the two main camps, people would know it and impugn her for producing biased journalism. Yet in the end, she herself becomes afraid for having conducted these interviews. Still, kudos toher for putting down her conclusions, as well as noting that almost all the heavy fire comes from the “progressive” side. But more than that. This side has achieved the dream of many progressives—silencing the other side:

Of course, I fear harms to my career and more for instigating, as interviewees repeatedly put it, “difficult conversations” – not least as an immigrant early career scholar with a family to support. But, at the same time, why would I want to work in academia if I cannot do academic work? Much more terrifying than being hated is being gagged.

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