CNN op-ed attacks free speech

November 30, 2018 • 11:30 am

Free speech is under attack from all directions these days, including from a lot of colleges and now the media, or at least in an op-ed on CNN.

I didn’t know CNN did editorials or op-eds, which shows that I haven’t been paying attention. And of course they have a right to do that, so long as they make clear that it’s one person’s view and not the website’s. But I would have expected better from CNN than this Authoritarian Leftist call for censorship of “hate speech” and other “speech that incites immediate violence,” even when it doesn’t.

Here’s the editorial by Noah Berlatsky, self-identified as a “freelance writer and editor.” (Click on screenshot to see it.)

 

Berlatsky starts his “Nazi” screed by calling attention to this infamous “Nazi salute” picture taken by a photographer of a bunch of guys attending their high-school senior prom in Baraboo, Wisconsin:

Yes, it looks like the famous Nazi salute, and has been circulated as such by white-supremacist groups all over the place, but are the kids really thinking, “Sieg, heil!” It’s not at all clear. The Internet and the school (which decided not to punish anyone), is outraged, although the photographer says he simply asked people to wave goodbye to their parents (the senior prom, a dance, marks the end of high school). I’m not sure why the photographer would ask a bunch of people to give a Nazi salute, or raise their arms to mimic it, but his explanation is nevertheless somewhat credible, and until we learn that he’s a secret Nazi sympathizer, or that all those boys are being white supremacists, I think we should let this one go.

As CNN reports, the school did let it go:

In a recent letter to parents and the community, Baraboo School District Administrator Lori M. Mueller said the district made the decision after a 10-day review. She said district officials are unclear about some key details surrounding the photograph despite their efforts.

“As previously stated, we cannot know the intentions in the hearts of those who were involved. Moreover, because of students’ First Amendment rights, the district is not in a position to punish the students for their actions,” Mueller said in the letter, which Baraboo School Board of Education President Kevin Vodak shared with CNN.

CNN affiliate WISN previously identified the photographer as Pete Gust. He told the station critics took the photo out of context.

. . . . Gust said he asked the students to wave goodbye to their parents. “There was no Nazi salute,” he said.

Convinced that this was a Nazi salute mistakenly protected by the First Amendment, Berlatsky calls for punishment of all the students, and then issues his real beef: these guys got off because they are white, using the mantra of “it was free speech” (it doesn’t need to be defended that way if it was a wave), while black students wouldn’t get off:

Perhaps Gust was just confused, but the mix of explanations (“it’s free speech”; “they were just waving goodbye”; “who knows what’s in their hearts”) suggests that the issue is less any one principle, and more a general desire to exculpate students. Black students apparently need to be disciplined rigorously and constantly in schools across the US, but white students are good kids who deserve protection, even when (especially when?) they make the sign for white power.

The school could have mandated detention or banned students from school activities for a time. Gust should be reprimanded by the school. The school has said it’s going to put in place “restorative practices,” which is good. But if there’s no sanction of any kind, how seriously will students view those efforts?

And so we get the usual reason for attacking free speech: it disempowers minorities, who are said to be unable to answer it or incapable of their own counter-speech, and free speech can incite hatred and violence (he raises the issue of Heather Heying’s murder in Charlottesville, in which the car-driver is being tried for murder). We already have laws that ban speech if it incites immediate violence, and in Charlottesville that was not the case, as the white supremacist speakers didn’t urge their followers to go out and kill Lefties.

Berlatsky proceeds to make a number of misleading statements, which include the following (I haven’t the heart to repeat my refutations again, but you’ll know them). For example, this is wrong is a lot of different ways:

Speech by white people is often seen as unobjectionable, no matter what its content; who you are is more important than what you say. Defending the speech of white kids doesn’t necessarily protect the speech of marginalized people, just as All Lives Matter in a racist society does not in fact mean that Black Lives Matter. Racism is built on inequality and disproportion; you can’t confront it by pretending that we’re all in this together when we manifestly are not.

In fact, in practice free speech for Nazis is often itself a threat to free speech for everyone else, because Nazis use their freedom to violently suppress their opponents. Giving free speech to fascists to rally can reasonably be expected to curtail the free speech rights of other people, which means that organizations like the ACLU, and judges, need to balance interests, rather than just treating free speech for fascists as in itself increasing free speech.

Berlatsky is using his own free speech to attack the behavior of white people; allowing speech by one group doesn’t endanger the speech of another; and free speech for Nazis, so long as it doesn’t produce “clear and present danger,” doesn’t curtail anybody else’s free speech. We can see this this from the regular counter-demonstrations that occur when Nazis or white supremacists appear, something that happened in Charlottesville. Berlatsky’s objection is that “hate speech” causes physical danger to others and prevents them from speaking. This is not true with the exception of the kind of speech that’s already outlawed. Berlatsky adds that “Fields [Heyer’s killer] used his freedom to make sure that Heather Heyer would never speak again.” That’s bullshit, to put it bluntly. If Fields was free to kill, how come he’s on trial for murder?

Berlatsky then goes off on a tangent about disproportionate punishment of black students. I’m not sure whether that reflects real racism or a difference in school or student behavior, but at any rate it has nothing to do with free speech:

. . . school officials have broad latitude to suppress and punish student speech and expression, on campus and off.

Inevitably, schools use that disciplinary authority disproportionately against marginalized students. Black students in 2013-14 were 15.5% of the US student population, but accounted for almost 39% of suspensions, according to data from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released this year. Black students were also disproportionately subject to corporal punishment, expulsion, and school-related arrest.

In that context, the Wisconsin school board’s reference to the First Amendment sounds less like a principled stance and more like an excuse. Free-speech rights are important, and school officials are given far too much power to silence their students. But if you truly care about free speech, it’s important to acknowledge the ways in which free speech arguments can be leveraged to protect the powerful while others are silenced.

As usual, the problem is this: who gets to decide which speech to ban? Invariably it’s the person writing the editorial. But until Berlatsky can show me that allowing free speech for one group SILENCES the speech of other groups, I’m sticking with the courts’ construal of the First Amendment.

Feynman memorabilia for auction, including his Nobel Prize! (Also, Darwiniana and Einstein’s palm print)

November 30, 2018 • 10:00 am

This is sad, and I’m not sure why Richard Feynman’s papers and even his Nobel Prize medal are up for auction rather than going to a museum or an archive (does the family need money?). But if you want some Feynmania, Sotheby’s auction house can accommodate you. You have to have a lot of dosh, of course. The auction site is below, and I’ll put up some selected items with their estimates. (The sale, by the way, started at 10 a.m. eastern time in New York, and you can watch live by going to the site):

There’s a lot more, too.

A cool million for the Prize medal!

Some other cool stuff. You want an Enigma machine?

Anything about Einstein with his signature is worth a ton! Especially his BIBLE!

 

And over here, you can even get Einstein’s handprint! Why isn’t this worth more than his autograph?

Finally, maybe some rich reader would like to give me a Christmas present:

 

h/t: Amy

Black students at Williams College favor self-segregated housing

November 30, 2018 • 8:45 am

The more I look at Williams College, the locale for Luana Maroja’s report on free speech yesterday, the more I’m convinced it’s a candidate as the Evergreen State College of the East Coast. My opinion comes from Maroja’s report (especially the behavior of students), a perusal of the student newspaper, The Williams Record, Williams’s “yellow light” rating by FIRE, (among other things, Williams has a “bias reporting system” and the college “retains the right of refusal for any outside speaker/performer and/or their campus sponsor for any reason”), and the administration’s rejection of a student-invited speaker in 2015 because the college President said the speaker’s views were contemptible.

Among the things you’ll find in the social-justicey Williams Record are two articles about African-American students demanding that they be allowed to have their own residential space, where they’d live only with other African-American students (this is not a requirement for black students, but an optional ancestry-restricted dormitory). One article reports the discussion and the other (the op-ed below) reprises that discussion from the viewpoint of an African-American senior at Williams (click on screenshot):


“Affinity housing” is, of course, housing in which people of a given ethnicity can have a “safe space” to live, i.e., one housing others of similar genetic background (or social-construct background, depending on your views). In other words, it’s segregated housing, albeit voluntarily segregated.

Richardson, described as a “biology major and Africana studies concentrator, as well as co-chair of Williams’ Black Student Union”, calls for segregated housing not just for blacks, but for Hispanics and Asian-Americans (would “Asian-Americans” include Chinese, Japanese, and Indian students?). Apparently Amherst and Wesleyan also have “affinity housing”.

Richard’s justification rests on her claim that such housing provides minority students with “support”, “solidarity”, and so on. Here’s part of what she says:

Affinity housing would grant students who share an aspect of their identity the opportunity to live together in an intentional community with shared values and goals, allowing these students to feel supported and have their identities affirmed by those who live around them. This type of housing serves to enrich the campus life by providing educational, cultural and social programming for not just the residents of the house, but also the wider campus community, thereby promoting a stronger sense of solidarity among students of marginalized identities. It would also allow the DC to have closer ties to students’ residential lives, allowing them to better support students of underrepresented identities.

. . . The common argument against affinity housing at the College is the idea that one can learn from living around people of all different races, interests and cultural backgrounds. This is true, but is already an experience that every student has during their first year here through the entry system. Forcing students to live around people of other backgrounds for the full duration of their time at the College, based on the idea that they are to learn from one another, inherently tokenizes international students, students of color and students of underrepresented identities. Nevertheless, even with the existence of the neighborhood system, many students rarely interact with their neighbors outside of their pick group.

. . . By giving athletes their own unofficial spaces, without providing an analogous option for other identities, the College seems to expect us students to adhere to a “mythical norm” (a term coined by Audre Lorde that describes the characteristics idealized by society that hold power and bring about oppression) of straightness, whiteness and able-bodiedness. When we deviate from this norm, we are meant to educate others around us about our experiences as “ambassadors” of our identities.

Now I confess ignorance about what the “entry system” is, nor do I think that students should have to live around those with whom they’re not comfortable for the entire four years of college. But neither do I think a college should provide segregated living facilities for its students. My view is that if there is college-mandated housing for a period (at William and Mary, where I went, it was for two years, after which you could rent an apartment off campus), it should not be segregated by ethnicity. In other words, I object to college-supported “affinity housing”.

I can appreciate the positive aspects of affinity housing limned by Richardson, one of which is a greater sense of solidarity with her fellow black students. She, and apparently others, would be uncomfortable having to interact with those who “tokenize” them and commit microaggressions (such microaggressions are mentioned in the other article, though no examples are given).

But whatever advantages accrue to segregating college living, to me they’re outweighed by a college’s mission to expose people to other kinds of people and to other ideas. It seems to me that if you want people of different backgrounds to understand each other—and who can deny that with understanding comes empathy and appreciation?—then there’s no better way than to have them live together. Sure, by all means have “cultural centers” where students of different backgrounds can meet up and mix with similar folks, but “affinity housing” on top of that simply keeps groups apart during their entire college experience.

When I was thinking about this, I called up an old friend from William and Mary, one of two white students in our class (there was only one African-American!) who took advantage of the opportunity to spend a year at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black college in Hampton, Virginia. That exchange involved living with a black student. When I asked my friend about his experience, and whether he favored “affinity housing”, he said the experience, while sometimes uncomfortable, was immensely valuable, and that he wasn’t in favor of voluntarily segregated housing sponsored by colleges.

When I asked him what the value of “mixing” was, he said that only by living with a black person, and constantly associating with them socially and in class, could he truly appreciate the damages of segregation and bigotry against blacks. (They even experienced a minority status themselves, with one W&M student being shunned in the cafeteria, and finally gaining acceptance by writing a blues poem that went, “It isn’t right to be alone when you eat. . . even if you’re white as a sheet.”)

And that lesson stayed with my friend; he spent the rest of his working life as a teacher and principal of largely black schools. When I asked him, “Well, did the black students get any benefit from your presence?”, he said yes, that for once they were able to teach white people about their culture and to have their teaching appreciated. All in all, he saw that semester as one of the most valuable experiences he had in his life.

So I would not only oppose affinity housing, but perhaps have colleges deliberately put different types of people together for a year or more. (In my freshman dorm, we were put with others of the same religion, so lived with the only other Jewish student in my program!) Imagine the kind of learning that would occur! Even if it would occasionally be uncomfortable, well, college should sometimes be uncomfortable. Besides, if the period of college-mandated housing was limited, you could thereafter choose to live with whomever you want.

As for the athletes, the article implies that athletes aren’t forced to live together off-campus, but do so voluntarily. If Williams itself supports athlete-restricted housing, I’d find that insupportable as well, unless—and I doubt this is true for Williams—the athletes dine together in a common area because they have a special diet.

At any rate, while I appreciate Richardson’s desire to feel safe, empowered, and not tokenized, it’s not the College’s job to coddle students and keep the different ethnicities together as groups and segregated from other groups—no matter what the students’ wishes and their justifications for self-segregation. There is plenty of time in the real world to live with people of your own ethnicity if you wish. I see the experiment of mixing different people for a year or two as a valuable way to promote mutual understanding.

 

I had another dream. . . and some biology

November 30, 2018 • 7:30 am

For some reason I’ve remembered my dreams recently, though I usually forget them by morning. This is a short one from last night.

For some reason I was confined in a cold jail cell, and the cell’s heater was simply a series of heated squiggly tubes, like a television antenna, resting on a stand. The heater didn’t work well, and when I asked the jailer why it wasn’t working, he provided me with—and explained—a diagram of how a duck’s legs remain warm in cold water through the anatomical and physical process of countercurrent distribution.

That’s all, except the diagram and the amazing way a duck keeps its legs warm has absolutely nothing to do with the poor heat radiation of a thin, heated tube in a cell. But of course it was just a dream.

But here’s a chance to learn how ducks keep their naked legs and feet from freezing in chilly water. The explanation of countercurrent distribution comes from here.

Ducks, as well as many other birds, have a counter-current heat exchange system between the arteries and veins in their legs. Warm arterial blood flowing to the feet passes close to cold venous blood returning from the feet. The arterial blood warms up the venous blood, dropping in temperature as it does so. This means that the blood that flows through the feet is relatively cool. This keeps the feet supplied with just enough blood to provide tissues with food and oxygen, and just warm enough to avoid frostbite. But by limiting the temperature difference between the feet and the ice, heat loss is greatly reduced. Scientists who measured it calculated that Mallards lost only about 5% of their body heat through their feet at 0o C (32o F). To put this in perspective, the rest of the duck is covered with feathers and in contact only with air, not ice, but because the body is relatively hot, 95% of the heat loss is from the head and body. Meanwhile, the cool feet sit on ice and give up very little heat.

More Info: In the diagram [below], without counter-current heat exchange, warm blood makes it all the way to the foot. This keeps the feet considerably warmer than the ice the duck is standing on. Remember that heat flow is roughly proportional to the temperature difference. With a large temperature difference, there is a large flow of heat from the foot to the ice.

In the second diagram [below], you’ll see that multiple branches of the artery are in close contact with branches of the vein. This intertwining of arteries and veins is called retia (singular – rete tibiotarsale). Because heat flows from the arterial blood to the venous blood, the arterial blood becomes colder and the venous blood becomes warmer. Less warm blood gets to the foot, keeping the foot cold and reducing the temperature difference between the foot and the ice. This reduces the flow of heat from the duck to the ice.

That’s today’s biology lesson.

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

November 30, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s the last day of the month: November 30, 2018, and I can eat again! Right now I’m nomming two pieces of toast with butter and the world’s best jam: Wilkin & Sons Tiptree “Little Scarlet” Strawberry Preserves. After that I’ll tuck into a huge latte.  It’s National Mousse Day, which is National Mouse day for cats. It’s also Regina Mundi Day, celebrating a South African church that was important in the anti-apartheid movement.

Another scanty day in history. On November 30, 1803, the Spanish officially gave the Louisiana Territory to the French who, just 20 days later, sold the same land to the U.S. as the “Louisiana Territory”. The French price to America was a pittance: 828,000 square miles for just sixty-eight million francs ($15 million at the time)—just $18 per square mile.

On this day in 1872, the world’s first international soccer game took place between Scotland and England. It was played at Hamilton Crescent in Glasgow and ended in a 0-0 draw.  On November 30, 1936, the famous Crystal Palace in London was destroyed by a fire that started in the women’s cloakroom.  On this day in 1947, according to Wikipedia, “Civil War in Mandatory Palestine begins, leading up to the creation of the state of Israel.”  Who knows how things would have turned out if the territory had been Optional Palestine?

Here’s a strange tale of a human struck by an extraterrestrial object. Again from Wikipedia, on November 30, 1954, “In Sylacauga, Alabama, United States, the Hodges meteorite crashes through a roof and hits a woman taking an afternoon nap; this is the only documented case in the Western Hemisphere of a human being hit by a rock from space. The 34-year-old woman was badly bruised on one side of her body, but was able to walk.”

Here’s the meteorite, the hole and the victim, Ann Hodges (all from National Geographic‘s story):

Mrs. Hodges, mayor, police chief examine hole caused by a meteorite that struck mrs. Hodges in Sylacauga. University of Alabama Museum of Natural History

From story: Moody Jacobs shows a giant bruise on the side and hip of his patient, Ann Hodges, in 1954, after she was struck by a meteorite. PHOTOGRAPH BY JAY LEVITON, TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

Finally, on this day in 1982, Michael Jackson released the album Thriller, which remains the best-selling album in history. My favorite song on that album is “Human Nature.” Here’s Jackson performing it “live” (not sure if there’s any lip-synching) at Wembley in 1988:

Notables born on this day include Andrea Palladio (1508), Philip Sidney (1554), Jonathan Swift (1667), Mark Twain (1835), Winston Churchill (1874), Gordon Parks (1912), Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (1918), Dick Clark (1929), Abbie Hoffman (1936), and David Mamet (1947). Mamet is the only one still alive.

Those who died on November 30 include Oscar Wilde (1900), Zeppo Marx (1979; real name Herbert Manfred Marx), Tiny Tim (1996), and Jim Nabors (last year).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a portrait of herself:

Hili: Print it out, please.
A: What?
Hili: What do you mean “what”? Me, when I’m washing myself while sitting on the printer.
In Polish:
Hili: Proszę to wydrukować.
Ja: Co?
Hili: Jak to co? Mnie jak myję się na drukarce.

Reader Nilou reports that the Central Park Mandarin duck is taking breaks in, of all places, New Jersey! He’s slumming!

Three tweets found by reader Tom from this collection. The first one is way creepy:

Rat + slice of bread = Kangaroo rat:

Remember the roadrunner?

https://twitter.com/OkigboXL/status/1065354215097335808

Tweets from Grania. This one she calls “Grim but amazing footage”:

Cat vs. ostriches (cat loses):

Look at that shock wave! Mt. Tavurvur is in Papua New Guinea.

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is amazing:

I believe this adorable creature is a sugar glider:

https://twitter.com/xxlfunny1/status/1067483234798321664

Why do these obese cavies do this?

Even if a cat did write this, it’s right!

 

 

Alex Honnold free-climbs El Capitan

November 29, 2018 • 2:00 pm

I haven’t yet seen the movie Free Solo about Alex Honnold, arguably the greatest rock climber in history. For Honnold is a “free soloist”, climbing without ropes or any gear beyond his shoes and chalk bag. That means if he falls, he’s dead.

This New York Times video recounts the making of that movie, which premiered in August of this year. I had no idea that the cinematographers were rock climbers (though they surely had to be!), nor how difficult it would be to film Honnold’s daring climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan, which he accomplished in just three hours and 56 minutes on June 3 of last year. It’s a stunning achievement, and I can’t even begin to fathom the mind-set of someone who can attempt that.

Here’s a nice 10-minute mini-documentary about that climb.

I actually had a chance to see this movie and didn’t get around to it, which I much regret. But I’m sure I’ll get another chance, and this time I won’t pass it up. Wikipedia summarizes the positive reviews:

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10 [JAC: the critics’ rating is now 97% and the average score 95%] . The website’s critical consensus reads, “Free Solo depicts athletic feats that many viewers will find beyond reason – and grounds the attempts in passions that are all but universal.” On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating “universal acclaim”.

Writing for Variety, Peter Debrudge said, “Apart from a slow stretch around the hour mark, the filmmakers keep things lively (with a big assist from Marco Beltrami’s pulse-quickening score, the nail-biting opposite of Tim McGraw’s soaring end-credits single, “Gravity”), featuring test runs at Zion National Park’s Moonlight Buttress and the nearly sheer limestone cliffs in Taghia, Morocco.” Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair called the film “bracingly made” and wrote, “I left the theater invigorated and rattled, in awe of this charismatic man’s accomplishment but scared that it will inspire others to attempt the same…But maybe Free Solo‘s detailed, transfixing portrait of their hero will at least show some sort of barrier to entry, communicating to those eager wannabes that very few people indeed are built quite like Alex Honnold. And thank goodness, in a way, for that.”

If anyone’s seen this movie, weigh in below.

The journal Nature conflates sex and gender, decries “pigeonholing” people even though we do—and must

November 29, 2018 • 11:30 am

Lots of sites, including three scientific societies, have rejected the new Health and Human Services guidelines that provide a classification of a person’s sex into two categories. But these sites, and now an article in the prestigious journal Nature (click on screenshot below), conflate “sex”—which I take as biological sex recognized in humans by chromosomal constitution, which gametes you produce, and secondary sex characteristics—with “gender”, which I take as “the sex that an individual identifies with, whether or not it corresponds to their biological sex”. In this construal, which seems to make biological sense, a transgender woman would be a biological male but their gender would be female. There are also genders that aren’t “male” or “female”, as I note below.

Now the editorials that have appeared in scientific journals are well-meaning: their intent is to prevent intersexes and transgender individuals (the former much rarer than the latter) from discrimination. But that can be done without conflating sex and gender. For some purposes, like sports, recognizing an individual as either “male” or “female” (or “intersex”) is not only useful, but necessary.

As far as I can see, the Trump administration’s proposal, which may indeed be motivated by a desire to discriminate against intersexes or “non-binary” genders, is a definition not of gender but sex, at least as reported by the New York Times:

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

But sex and gender are not equivalent, and if the Trump administration wants to equate them, it’s making a serious mistake and hurting people as well. Still, scientific societies do themselves (or progressivism) no favor by the constant conflation of sex and gender. Sex is a useful concept whose binary nature has served biology well for centuries.

As I’ve written before, while sex is not completely binary, in general it’s effectively so, for the vast majority of individuals can be classified as either “male” or “female”. And this dichotomy is the result of evolution, in which two sexes are the result of natural selection, while those rare individuals who are intersex result from genetic or developmental anomalies. A paper by Dr. Leonard Sax in Journal of Sex Research gives this clinical definition of “intersex”, that is, of individuals who fit in the nonbinary valley between the big frequency modes of “male” and “female”:

A more comprehensive, yet still clinically useful definition of intersex would include those conditions in which (a) the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female, or (b) chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex.

Using this definition, Sax estimates that 0.018%, or 18 individuals out of 100,000, are intersex. This is much lower than Anne Fausto-Sterling’s estimate of 1.7%, which includes many individuals who don’t fit the definition above. But it doesn’t matter. Under either construal sex is binary, or nearly so. Saying that sex is a “continuum” is palpably misleading (if technically correct), for the “continuum” includes at most 1.7% of all individuals between the two well-defined “binary” modes. As a biologist colleague of mine said, “Of course sex is binary.  No biologist in their right mind would question that.” 

The same might be largely true, though less true, for transgender individuals, estimated at about 0.6% of the U.S. population. But that figure doesn’t include individuals who identify as bisexual, polysexual, and so on, so the bimodality for gender may be a bit less pronounced than for sex.

At any rate, Nature shoots itself in the foot with this well-intentioned editorial that maintains that sex is not a binary concept (they don’t mention sex in the title but it’s in the text):

First, Nature estimates, without giving a source, that the frequency of people with “differences or disorders of sex development” can be as many as 1%, though these aren’t intersexes, nor blur the strong bimodality of sex. Most of these aren’t people who would be the subject of oppression or discrimination.

Worse, Nature conflates gender and sex several times, to wit:

The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour.

We do understand sex, and it’s for all practical purposes binary in most animal species, and certainly ours. Here’s another of Nature‘s conflations:

Political attempts to pigeonhole people have nothing to do with science and everything to do with stripping away rights and recognition from those whose identity does not correspond with outdated ideas of sex and gender.

Outdated ideas of sex? What are the updated ideas of sex? Is Nature rejecting the ideas of male and female based on the existence of biological anomalies or intersexes? If so, are they rejecting, for similar reasons, the ideas of male and females in deer, fruit flies, and most other animals?

Yes, ideas of gender may be outdated—we now know well that someone’s self-identity may not correspond to their biological sex—but not of sex. Please, Nature, stop distorting biology in the service of ideology. It’s neither seemly nor necessary, as we can protect transgender and intersexual individuals without deep-sixing the sexual binary that has served biology so well.

As for the practice of pigeonholing people being useless and having nothing to do with science and everything to do with oppression, surely Nature doesn’t really mean that. For one thing, pigeonholing by sex is necessary in two important cases: Title IX regulations, in which it’s illegal to discriminate against programs funding college education (including sports) on the basis of sex. To enforce that regulation, which is a good one based on civil rights, you have to recognize women’s opportunities and sports teams versus men’s. Individuals have to be pigeonholed, and there must be some guidelines. 

Pigeonholing is also important for sports, as in professional sports teams or the Olympics, where competitions involve either male teams or female teams, usually playing against same-sex teams. Without “pigeonholing” you simply have a mess. Does Nature advocate doing away with “men’s” and “women’s” teams? If not, then they recognize the usefulness of pigeonholing, and clearly must go along with some standard, even if it’s a somewhat arbitrary one. (How to define “male” and “female” in sports is a sticky issue, one that is above my pay grade.)

Second, does Nature oppose pigeonholing by ethnicity? Surely they don’t: they recognize the value of classifying individuals by ethnic backgrounds for the purpose of achieving either equal opportunity or equal outcome. In such cases “pigeonholing” on political grounds is generally salubrious, and certainly does not strip away people’s rights in the way the journal suggests above.

In the end, we progressives don’t need to distort biology to achieve our aims of treating people fairly. We don’t need to pretend that the idea of two distinct sexes in our species is “outdated.” It isn’t, and when Nature tries to pretend it is, they simply look silly.