An ultimatum
Abigail Shrier on Gorski et al v Hall, via Bari Weiss:
Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer.
This is a colleague, remember, not a subordinate. It’s an itchy feeling when colleagues start giving you ultimatums (or ultimata if you prefer). The temptation to say “You’re not the boss of me” becomes very strong.
“What surprised me was that my fellow editors attacked me, too. Basically what they said was that my article was not up to my usual standards as far as medicine, science and critical thinking went. And I didn’t feel that I did anything but what I always do. That surprised me,” she told me. Considering the editors’ ultimatum, she elected to have the editors who disagreed add a disclaimer to the website. “I told them I did not want it retracted. And the next thing I knew, they had retracted it.”
So the ultimatum actually was: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer, and if you choose the last then we’ll retract it anyway.
It’s not only corporations facing this type of activist pressure. Public libraries now do, too.
Halifax Pride, the annual LGBTQ festival, announced late last month that it would cut ties with the city’s library system over its insistence on carrying Irreversible Damage, calling it “transphobic,” and claiming that it “jeopardizes the safety of trans youth” and “debates the existence of trans people.”
I wonder if it ever occurs to them that over the long haul this kind of coercion isn’t going to make their ideology more convincing but rather the opposite. “If they have to force it on us maybe it’s kind of a feeble set of ideas?”
There are more people who already think that than we’re allowed to know. Shrier hears from them.
Child and adult psychologists and psychiatrists write to say they have witnessed a surge in transgender identification among teen girls who seem to be acting under peer and social media influence. Teachers write to say they believe that the phenomenon is plainly an example of social contagion within their classrooms. Surgeons and pediatricians and endocrinologists write to wonder aloud at what has happened to their profession.
There are lawyers who posit that lawsuits are on the way — brought by others, presumably. Professors who have come to hate their jobs — you can’t discuss your own research without trampling on a young generation’s vast neural network of sensitivities. Journalists at our most storied newspapers, TV networks, and literary magazines, even at NPR, write to tell me they liked my book, they agree with it, and to tut-tut the abuse directed at me. They assure me that the horrible accusations — from child predation to white supremacy and transphobia — accusations that will forever live on the internet, blackening my name, are things no one really believes. They wish — wish! — they could say so publicly.
This is fine. Teenagers are ruining their futures, and people can’t say anything about it publicly, because the venomous pressure to shut up is so powerful.
For more than a year Shrier thanked people who wrote to her this way.
But then, a few months ago, a pediatrician reached out to say that she also thought it was insane that minors were self-prescribing testosterone and that she agreed that her profession was negligent in unquestioningly “affirming” the sudden trans-identification of teenagers.
The standard response didn’t cut it this time. I wrote back as politely as I could: That’s just not good enough. You are a doctor. We aren’t the same with regard to medical scandals. I can continue to seek and publish the truth. I can interview experts and report what they’ve said. But you can appeal to your own authority. You took a Hippocratic oath. If you see young patients in harm’s way, you have an obligation to do something.
The same is true for other professions. If you are a teacher, you entered the profession in order to expand young minds. If you are watching them being warped, it’s your responsibility to fight that. If you are a journalist witnessing lies being spread by your colleagues, it’s your responsibility to stand up for truth. If you are a professor, watching your colleagues being bullied — a med school professor watching hokum being peddled as fact, a scientist watching the corruption of research — there’s no one else to speak up but you.
And if enough people do it will swiftly become far less dangerous to join them.
They’re wasting a perfect teaching moment. They could use this as an opportunity to “educate” all of us poor, benighted gender critical types. Being all sciencey and everything, they should be able to go through the review and clearly point out exactly where it fell short, and how. Showing us things that are wrong, incorrect or mistaken would actually help the trans cause, shedding light on this contentious issue, correcting misconceptions and misinformation. If the review is so bad, it should be easy. But they aren’t doing that. They aren’t engaging in argument or discussion. It’s long past the point where one needs to bother about giving them any benefit of the doubt. One can only conclude conclude that they haven’t got any arguments, and that they dare not risk discussion. Pathetic.
They are also harming their cause. Once people spot they are willing to ignore the science in this specific subject, they will loose all authority when pointing out science doesn’t support some alternative therapy.
Well, for the large part, people really don’t understand the philosophy of science behind the issue well enough to see how the science is being ignored. People seem to be assuming that their is neuroscience to prove that transgender people have an actual brain shape that matches their gender identity, but don’t stop to ask how the actual brains shape was established. People are not up in how science works, unfortunately, thinking that a single study is proof of concepet. They don’t know to stop and asked if the study has been replcated, if it meets the consensus, if the hypothesis was constructed well enough to reach the conclusions stated, and finally whether or not the study was based on valid science.
I have not even seen a theoretical framework for how transgender identification is supposed to work scientifically. Most of the papers I have read simply beg the question of how it works and go on to study the effects (suicide, correlations of reductions of suicide following transition, etc.) The science is a mess, but the fact that knowledgeable science communicators such as Gorski and Novella are not willing to point this out, leaves the impression that non-believers are akin to creationists and flat earthers, justifying their bigotry.
I would like to think that soon people will start to wonder what a Gender ID is, and see that it is merely the equivalent of a soul, that it is the result of socialization rather than biology. I don’t think that most people centering the TQ+ part of Pride realize that this is not to do with intersex conditions or DSD, nor do mostpeople realize that AGP is a driver of many of the males who want to believe that they are women (or want lesbians to validate their lady-male private parts.)
Scientific understanding on many issues in the modern world is reaching a nadir, and most people don’t understand how their own biases affect the way that they accept science. It’s not only a problem with gender identity, it’s a problem with vaccination, nutrition, climate, hydrology, and a whole host of issues where ideology drives the scientific belief rather than the other way around.
It doesn’t help that the skeptics are either out to lunch on this. Either they are promoting, going along, or being silent beyond dipping their toes in occasionally (I see you, RD,) or like Shermer are just saying it’s all Leftist. This is why a prominent skeptic like Hall reviewing the book was important, and, I think, why SBM had to retract it. We just can’t let the pseudoscience be exposed, because the opposition might be proved to be the true skeptics on this.
The longer I have been active in atheist and skeptic circles, in meatspace as well as cyberspace, the more I have seen the arrogace of skeptics and atheists. It’s easier to examine the folly of others than it is to examine your own, and most atheists and skeptics avoid the practice when it can hurt. Here, let’s throw the “TERFs” to the wolves while we make fun of the anti-vaxxers again.
And then there is this. This one hits me where I live. I was keeping my comments on the issue, and trying to avoid it on other social media outlets. I have no professional damage to worry about, really, and as a male, less likely to face physical threats than the women who are making a public position visible on this.
There’s something wrong going on, and women’s rights and gay rights are at stake. Children’s health is at stake, and the silence is danaging. We’ll have to accept that we will be seen as bigots. This is far more risky than the Out Campaign was for atheists, but it has to be done publicly, doesn’t it?
I once made the mistake of indicating disagreement on a trans topic on a friend’s post. Demands were made that I substantiate my simple statement of “I don’t see it this way”. I complied, indicating some disputed assertions. Then came the articles that disagreed with what I had said. My friend asked me if I’d changed my mind now that my position was “debunked”. Apparently that’s the way things work: a single article that disagrees constitutes “debunking”, the goal of science is to “debunk”, there’s no further discussion needed or indeed wanted.
FWIW, I left that discussion and stopped following that “friend”. It’s maddening.
And this also accepts the bad science behind the idea of separate male brains and female brains; the best that can be said about that concept is that we don’t know. In fact, a lot of studies show little to no differences that can be attributed to anything other than socialization. Unfortunately, most people don’t notice this, because the “male brain/female brain”, “Mars/Venus” dichotomies get all the attention.
AND how many of those who were not long ago making fun of the very idea of “ladybrains” are now saying It’s Science!
The initials P.Z. come to mind.