The bindweed
Science-Based Medicine has a venomous book-length post by AJ Eckert attacking Helen Joyce.
Who is AJ Eckert besides a contributor at SBM?
AJ Eckert, DO, is Connecticut’s first out nonbinary trans doctor and serves as the Medical Director of our Gender & Life-Affirming Medicine (GLAM) Program. Dr. Eckert has over 17 years’ experience in LGBTQ health care, with 9 years as a provider of primary care and gender-affirming services.
After Dr. Eckert completed their education at Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine and residency at NEOMEN/Maine Dartmouth Family Medicine Program, they specialized in LGBTQ health. Dr. Eckert is board certified in family medicine.
Outside of their clinical work with patients, Dr. Eckert is active in education and advocacy. He is an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University and has piloted a 4th-year medical student rotation at Anchor Health. Since 2021, Dr. Eckert has published nine articles in Science-Based Medicine, was a reviewer for the Journal of Medical Ethics, and had a quote in the 2nd edition of “The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.” They were on the 2021 Abstract Review Committee for the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, or USPATH.
Dr. Eckert is active in advocacy all right.
Joyce doesn’t understand why she’s seen as transphobic; in one interview, she claims,
No, Helen. That’s not why you’re transphobic. Asserting two sexes is just incorrect. You’re transphobic because you claim that individuals cannot ever change biological sex, and anyone who disagrees with that statement is just frightened of activists.
Cool; that’s fine then.
Finally we get the accusation of seeking genocide:
Helen Joyce’s goal is to reduce the number of trans people and keep down the number of those who transition. She opines,
Joyce is following the pattern of pundits in 2023 who have taken the anti-trans campaign from “just asking questions” to “protecting children” to “trans eradication.” People are scared, and with good reason.
Subtle enough? The good doctor is saying Helen wants trans people “eradicated” i.e. killed.
It’s almost funny, because the doc goes on to quote Helen saying she hopes to see kids who think they’re trans getting over it and being happy lesbians and gay men as if that were evidence of her hoping to see them “eradicated.” Like so:
Joyce is following the pattern of pundits in 2023 who have taken the anti-trans campaign from “just asking questions” to “protecting children” to “trans eradication.” People are scared, and with good reason. And for those who still don’t believe this is Joyce’s goal, here she says in an interview:
“There are two versions of the future, and one of them is just clearly better than the other, which is to let these kids just be themselves and grow up to be gay.”
That’s not eradication. Changing your mind is not eradication. Just being yourself is not eradication. (If it is, what about people who were gay but later decide they’re trans? Wouldn’t that be eradication too?)
Joyce does not want us to exist…is it clear now?
No. No, it isn’t. She wants you not to be deluded and confused, which is not the same thing as not existing.
She compares trans rights to bindweed. We are a weed that needs to be eradicated.
“I often analogize it with bindweed or Japanese knotweed, depending on which analogy, how pessimistic I’m feeling on that day, because bindweed is hard, but Japanese knotweed is really hard. So this has spread while nobody was doing the weeding, but you could conceivably pull it all back out. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Note the lurch from “trans rights” to “we” – but note also that Helen is talking about the bizarro beliefs of trans ideology, not trans people as people. Comparing an ideology to a weed is not all that unusual, let alone shocking, let alone genocidal.
There’s a whole lot more. It’s a staggeringly long article. The bindweed goes on for miles.
H/t Harald Hanche-Olsen
Teehee.
Now that WHOLE PIECE is transphobic!
No because Dr E is [whispers] Not a Real Boy.
I note that Dr Eckert lists pronouns of: “he/him/his & they/them/theirs”. The extra-helpful addition of the possessive leaves out “their”. Such a good example of how idiotic it is to specify a long list of bespoke pronouns that must be memorized for every single individual. She could have said “masculine” or “anything but feminine”, but no, let’s list all the cases, and let’s forget to list some while we’re at it.
“Dr. Eckert is bilingual in English and Czech. They are a classically trained pianist but mostly plays Elton John and Queen now.”
I didn’t know that English and Czech, when combined bilingually, are a classically trained pianist.
So what are the other sexes involved in reproduction, Dr. Eckert?
So, Joyce is not transphobic for saying there are two sexes, but rather for saying that people cannot change sex. The former is just incorrect, while the latter indicates hatred, is that it? I’m not following Eckert’s attempted reasoning here.
Eckert also takes this statement by Joyce, from the linked book review:
and turns it into:
Again not following.
Twiliter @ 4
“Behold the window, out of which I discard all the books of grammar.”
I read the essay, it’s a regular dog’s breakfast of non sequiturs, errors, contradictions, assertions, and misrepresentations, all put forth while frothing at the mouth.. It’s hard to pick out just one thing.
Like many of these hit pieces against the Gender Critical, the writer apparently assumes they’re writing to a highly sympathetic audience which either already agrees with them or finds everything they’re learning a matter of common sense. Thus they are heavy on quotations but light on analysis.
It goes (long reasonable passage) — “OMG did you SEE what she SAID!” — ( another fair statement) — “And will you LOOK at THIS!” — (excerpt stating issue and objection clearly) — “This is TRANSPHOBIC!” — ( GC legitimate point) — “TRANSPHOBIC AGAIN!” — ( scientific statement) — “”This is WRONG!” — (justified political extrapolation) — “Well, MY work here is DONE! Case closed!”
Very annoying.
SBM: “There are no “homeopathic healers.” We want to eliminate homeopathy.”
Homeopaths: “See, they deny our existence and advocate genocide!!”
Except homeopaths didn’t think of using this angle. Yet.
Reading anything with “nonbinary” pronouns is like having someone shoot spitwads at you while you’re trying to read. I guess I’m sensitive to clunky writing anyway (and guilty of it sometimes too), but that’s well beyond.
Well, there ya go, I guess. Pseudoscience calls to pseudoscience.
@Nullius: I have been told that “osteopathic” medical schools have abandoned the old pseudoscientific notions of classical osteopathy long ago, that they teach perfectly normal medicine nowadays, and only the name remains.
I don’t know if that is true or not (or only partly), but I have briefly come across an “osteopath” who appeared to practice perfectly normal medicine.
From The Little Prince
https://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter5.html
The book was published in 1943.
Baobab can be read as a metaphor for fascism.
Professor Google tells me osteopaths in the US get actual (non-pseudoscience) medical training at actual institutions for medical training, and add the osteopathic bit on top of the real training. I still have to wonder why SBM is incloosive of osteopathy.
What Harald said while I was typing, basically.
@Nullis #9, Harold #10, yes, an O.D. is a real doctor. Same training and certifications as an M.D. The O.D. designation is left-over from the early 20th century when the modern medical system was getting organized.
And to me, that makes it worse. She’s a real doctor practicing pseudo-science.
Please, make up your fucking mind: choose one or the other and stick with it. You can’t be both.
It’s one thing to have activists believing the impossible, but here we have a doctor. But in order to fool others convincingly, you need to fool yourself first. Looks like it took.
This is a doctor who, from this quote alone, quite literally does not know what she’s doing. If she can prove that humans have more than one sex, or that they can change sexes*, there’s a Nobel with her name on it. Proving either (without resorting to word games, or equivocating about gender “presentation”) would be revolutionary. Until she’s made the trip to Stockholm to pick up her medal, she needs to be kept away from patients, particularly children.
It’s like she’s high on her own supply, smoking the product she’s selling. Such ignorant confidence is rather scary to witness, even at the distance of reading a quote online. There’s no way that her counsel is going to be honest or complete if she insists that the impossible is possible. It’s like a mechanic telling you with a straight face that by removing a couple of parts, filling the tank with aviation fuel, and painting some wings on the side, your car can be turned into fully functioning Cesna, ready to fly anywhere. I wouldn’t let someone like that clean my windshield, let alone tinker with the engine. And yet here’s Dr. Nonbinary-Trans working under the hood on humans, telling her
victimsclients that she can change their sex by lopping off a few organs, pumping them full of wrong-sex hormones, and grafting pretend organs onto them, sculpting their own flesh in a futile effort to give it a vague, aspirational resemblance to the target genitals it can never be.*Two separate claims often joined in the same breath, neither of which is true. Even if one of them was true, it would not render the other any more true, possible, or likely.
Re DO versus MD
My doctor is a DO, in a practice with several others, a mix of MDs and DOs. She is an excellent doctor, I think very highly of her. My understanding is that some people go the DO path because of the style of patient interaction it emphasizes; the pseudoscience stuff is ignored or minimized. My MD daughter also finds DOs to be legitimate.
MDs are taught some amount of pseudoscience in support of gender ideology these days.
Re nonbinary trans
It is a surprisingly common designation. I can’t recall seeing it claimed by a man, only by women. I suspect the “trans” part rationalizes hormones and surgeries.
They have reached the nadir over at SBM, It is an illustration that skeptics with an agenda are the most dangerous kind of skeptics, because once they have established their bona fides as skeptics, people tend to trust their pronouncements of what is and what is not science. This particular agendum is to beat back any questioners of the trans ideology, by ridicule, by hyperbole, by calling out “pseudoscience,” and to make certain that the label transphobe is sufficient to poison the wells of any sort of doubt expressed that transgender people can change sex or that gender identity is a biologically-based facet of a person’s personality. i hate to sound like I have a Javer-like obsession with this turn by Novella and Gorsky, but I followed them for a long time and admired the way that they stood up for skepticism, and especially in medical matters. And Novella wrote a book on how to recognize fallacies, yet here he is with this article.
I hope one day when the bottom has fallen out of the trans movement we can have a proper belly laugh at all the people who should’ve known better but still somehow fell for it and subsequently pissed away their reputations as a result, but right now this just feels sad. Sad that the website where I first learned about Lupron and its use in crank medicine as a treatment for autism is now promoting an ideology that uses that exact same drug to stall the natural development path for adolescent humans because it thinks it’ll help children change sex.
There’s a dark beauty to this level of stupidity that just can’t really be appreciated in the present. To me stunting the process that turns a child into an adult seems so obviously like the prologue to a dystopian Sci-fi classic like Brave New World that it should be easy to dismiss out of hand, and yet here we are, doing it to thousands of kids every year.
[…] a comment by VanitysFiend on The […]
Ah, escalation via increasingly shaky equivocation, their old standby.
Mike H —
For sure. However, I bailed out on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe years ago, after one too many instances of hearing them talking about something I happen to know about, like high-end audio (people who spend thousands of dollars on a speaker cable…) and the historical Jesus (don’t get me started — or do, if you like!). They just made shit up with the same air of total confidence and authority that they brought to UFOs and Bigfoot. So I could no longer trust anything they said that I didn’t already know for a fact.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The […]
I presume you have already seen these OB, but for people who have not these are a good precis for the problems with the SBM site, and how far they have fallen since gender ideology took them out the back and coshed them over the head.
https://www.quackometer.net/blog/2022/07/the-muddling-of-the-american-mind-part-i.html
https://www.quackometer.net/blog/2023/03/the-muddling-of-the-american-mind-part-ii.html
I’ll add these comment pieces as well
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/26/steve-novella-gets-sex-wrong-gets-corrected-twice/
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/an-emeritus-editor-at-science-based
It should be easy to kill homeopaths, though – you just need a bit of their bathwater.