Speaking of medical quackery and dubious medical claims
Jerry Coyne on the decline of Science Based Medicine:
Lordy, how many of us used to love the Science-Based Medicine (SBM) site? I did! It was the go-to place for enjoying the debunking of medical quackery and the scrutiny of dubious medical claims. Started in 2008 by Steve Novella and David Gorski (“Orac”), SBM is affiliated with the Society for Science-Based Medicine.
Sadly, it’s now going down the tubes, having bought heavily, like the ACLU and FFRF, into gender activism. It started with an incident I reported here, involving Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage and a positive review by SBM editor, skeptic, and physician Harriet Hall.
Let’s let Wikipedia sum it up:
On June 15, 2021, Science-Based Medicine published a book review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage written by founding editor Harriet Hall. In her review, Hall wrote that Shrier’s book had raised legitimate concerns about the science surrounding drug treatments for gender dysphoria in children and that there was a lack of quality scientific studies on the subject. Several days after the review was published, Novella and Gorski replaced the review with a retraction notice and responded with a review of their own, the first of six SBM posts rejecting Shrier’s claims and addressing the retraction.
Six. It was that kind of dogpiling that prompted me to get the hell out of Freethought blogs. I had thought Novella and Gorski were more adult than “the horde”; live and learn.
That SIX articles were needed to defend the retraction of Hall’s review and criticize Shrier’s book was not only a sign of trouble at SBM, but an almost obsessive act.
Obsessive and worse. Sadistic. Pointless. Overkill. Backstabby. Unreasonable. Mean.
And all for what? Not for advocating bad or cruel treatment of trans people, or for talking supernatural nonsense, but for not accepting a new and eccentric claim about human sexes. That’s it, that’s the crime that merits all this over the top rebuking and “correcting” and badmouthing.
Maybe this was a case of the Left not being able to ally with the Right on anything.
I wanted to read the book, but I had to hold my nose when giving any money at all to the publisher. And I am sure the publisher took on this book for ideological reasons, not scientific ones. They are, after all, a leading light in the confected culture wars.
I decided that it was not Shrier’s fault that the book was rejected by “sensitivity readers” and ended up with a last resort publisher, nor do I make any other book buying decisions based on the publisher, but rather the author or the content. So, I held my nose, parted with my cash, read the book, and became better informed for it.
This is the only major policy debate in my lifetime where I have lost friends on the Left and found myself in the company of many from the Right, people whose views on other matters I reject.
I’d read SBM for years, and I can’t tell you how shocked I was by how . . . monstrous they’ve become. I haven’t been back there since the kerfuffle over Hall’s article. It was so weird seeing those professed skeptics in the comments acting like religious fanatics.
I know. Same.
True to form, PZ has a balanced….OK, unhinged ‘rebuttal’ to that post, and a follow-up post about an email he received calling him out on his bullshit. The second one has some hilarious comments from the usual suspects. This is how one of them interprets the claim “As the definition of a phobia is ‘an irrational fear’ this means that I too am not transphobic.”
Quite the leap, no?
Or how about
Invents the phrase ‘go all Trans on Cis people’, immediately claims not to know what it means, but clearly insinuates that it’s a real ‘thing’ that trans phones fear. There are more than a hundred comments in that thread, most of them nuttier than a mountain of nut roasts with a side ocean of nut gravy.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/07/jerry-coyne-as-dumb-as-a-creationist/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/09/i-get-email-100/
Even after all this time I’m baffled and dismayed by how people whose intelligence, sanity and clearheadedness I would have accepted and maybe even respected on any other issue become aggressively stupid on this one particular topic – so stupid I can’t believe they don’t realise what they’re saying, how they’re arguing, and how they come across. It dismays me for several reasons; one of them is that I can’t help but wonder, if all of these people are otherwise thoughtful and intelligent, what topic(s) I may be being aggressively stupid about and not realising it.
#1 (Rev David Brindley): “This is the only major policy debate in my lifetime where I have lost friends on the Left and found myself in the company of many from the Right, people whose views on other matters I reject.”
Unhappily (or at least uncomfortably), there is more than one policy debate that has moved me Rightward.
I don’t think of it as me moving Rightward on these issues, but as me standing still, and parts of the Left jumping off a cliff.
I’m with YNnB. I don’t think being a radical feminist is any further right than it was when I was a kid; I just think the fringe has moved further out…on both sides.
I don’t think that the previously left-wing parties have moved further left* at all. Rather, a new generation of career politicians abandoned left-wing principles and started chasing power for themselves, and for it’s own sake. That made them move to the right, in order to court centrist votes; and then another generation of frankly sociopathic narcissists seems to have leap-frogged the old right and gone straight for totalitarianism, where the class with inherited wealth is replaced by a class of young people who get to rule because they assume that they know best and want everyone to act and think the same way.
______________
I’m defining right-wing as in traditionally preferring that power is concentrated in the hands of the privileged few, and they rule everyone; whereas left-wing is supposed to remove power from the hands of the few and spread it amongst everyone. I might be wrong, there.
I agree that politics around trans demands don’t neatly map on the traditional left/right axis. The Right is for rugged individualism (choosing one’s own gender/legal sex fits here), the Left is for the masses and what’s best for people as a class (dudes opting into women’s change rooms doesn’t fit here); the Left supports women’s rights (so granting women’s rights to men makes no sense here) and the Right seeks to restrict women (but will actually let us speak on this issue in some cases, unlike the Left). And so on. Some conservative christians really love the whole trans idea because it “solves” the issue of how to “lovingly” deal with the kids that seem like they’ll grow up gay (eg Kai Shapley), while other members of the progressive Left (like me) think what happened to young Kai is a travesty that never should have been allowed.
Put simply, almost any organisation is split on this (the Left is split, as is the Right, the church, feminists, liberals, conservatives, Tories etc) in at least one acknowledged way, although the radical feminist, old Left perspective is the one most likely to not get mentioned or discussed.
Arcadia
Here’s the thing: genderism is a for-real non-binary issue. There are three positions here:
1) Genderism, or the “pro-trans” position. This hoolds that there’s a thing called “gender identity,” which everybody has (unless they don’t, but not having a gender identity is itself a gender identity, so they do,) this gender identity is distinct from one’s sex (which isn’t actually one’s sex but a matter of having certain body parts) but also not, no NOT a matter of sex stereotypes, and individuals’ gender identity must be prioritized over what was previously known as their sex in law and social policy.
2) Gender traditionalism, which holds that people come in two different sexes, and each sex has its proper role in life (broadly, women belong at home and men belong in the world outside the home,) and these roles should be encouraged for the good of society.
3) Gender criticism. Gender critics agree with #1 that people should be free to defy traditional gender norms and that doing so isn’t harmful; we agree with #2 that there are two distinct, dimorphic sexes and that this fact has real-world consequences. Gender critics question the notion of “gender identity” as posited by #1.
Or, as one meme has it:
Traditionalists: Women should do the dishes
Genderists: Whoever does the dishes is a woman
Gender critical: Anyone can do the dishes
Funnily enough, genderists really want this to be perceived as a binary argument. Even those who know better will mischaracterize gender critics as gender traditionalists. Doing so is effective propaganda: it appeals to tribal instincts (Left vs Right) and forestalls any pesky curiosity that could lead a person to think seriously about the muddle that is position #1.