Disgraced loser Donald Trump held a “press conference” today to tell an indifferent world that he’s suing Social Media for not letting him use its platforms to incite a civil war.
The funniest part is the photo, titled Let’s Pretend This Is Still the White House.
He’s at his New Jersey golf club.
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Playing a skeptical maverick.
As I have said many times, I cut all ties to Movement Skepticism™ specifically because of the misogyny issue, but now I don’t even think the movement did very well on the science front. For example skeptics tended to let climate change denialists (some of whom were even considered “thought leaders” of the movement) off the hook far too easily, and enter false balance territory whenever the issue came up, while congratulating themselves on how clever they were for not believing in homeopathy or Bigfoot.
The Movement also includes some of the most staggering examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect ever seen. Even the smartest, best educated, most knowledgeable person who ever lived, is only personally familiar with <<1% of all the scientific knowledge that’s available, and of that very tiny fraction <<1% is first-hand knowledge, And yet it’s quite common to hear skeptics talk as if they had personally done all the science (or even derived all of science, mathematics, epistemology, logic etc. from first principles without ever taking anything on trust) when all they’re really doing is repeating back half digested, half understood layman’s explanations from books, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos etc. We see this whenever skeptics tell others (guilty as charged!) to just “follow the facts where they lead”, “let the evidence speak for itself” etc. which makes is sound like “following the facts where they lead” were a straightforward matter rather than something that requires vast amounts of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right. The truth of the matter is that the evidence never speaks for itself. As I have previously written, I could probably provide a decent layman’s explanation of the evidence for things like evolution or climate change based on books I have read, but I wouldn’t personally be able to derive any useful information about past climates from tree-rings or ice-cores.
I remember reading an article (I wish I could remember by whom) about skeptics debunking pseudoscience with bad science of their own. The author made the point that while self-identified “pro science” types may be more likely to reach a (somewhat) accurate conclusion than others, it doesn’t mean that their methods for arriving at those conclusions are that different from those of their opponents. It’s just that rooting for “Team Science” confirms their particular tribal identity. As much as movement skeptics like to think of themselves as Spock and elevated above all that touchy-feely “value” stuff, it seems to me that true critical thinking is at least as much about attitude as it is about skills. Without the proper self-questioning attitude acquiring the tools of critical thinking only gives you more excuses for rejecting any conclusion you happen to dislike for ideological, tribalistic or purely self-serving reasons.
Also, it now seems to me that skeptics have developed a few myths of their own. E.g. we’ve all heard how the system of (pre and post publication) peer review ensures that only those ideas that can withstand the most merciless criticism and attempts at falsification survive in the long run. My current understanding from reading about the replication crisis etc. is that the peer-review process often fails and in most cases no replication is ever even attempted. We have also heard how scientists like nothing more than having their pet theories disproved because it means there’s something new to learn, “it gives them something to do” etc. I think Max Planck was probably closer to the truth when he said that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.
Another commonly heard trope is the idea that freeze peach guarantees that the best supported ideas will rise to the top in the marketplace of ideas. The unstated – sometimes even stated – premise being that those who have science and logic on their side always enjoy a decisive advantage in the battle for public opinion. This never seemed right to me, even in my movement skeptic days. If critical thinking should have taught us anything at all, it’s that the strongest indicators of truth vs. falsehood – objectively speaking – rarely coincide with what seems most subjectively persuasive to laypeople. Playing by the rules of science is nothing if not limiting, while the purveyors of bullshit are free to say whatever will impress people. Without the necessary pre-knowledge and critical thinking skills all your average layperson can be expected to get out of the exchange is that one side comes across as far more assertive, aggressive and confident while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate” etc.), acknowledge uncertainty, and introduce caveats, conditions and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one.
Isaac Schorr at National Review:
Tracey Lambrechs is not quieting down.
Lambrechs — a female weightlifter from New Zealand who took bronze in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, silver at the 2015 Pacific Games, and competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — has retired from the sport. But that retirement appears to have lent her her voice back after several years of being cajoled into silence.
Those several years are the years when “Laurel” Hubbard was breaking records.
In 2017, Lambrechs was gearing up to compete in the 2018 Commonwealth Games when she was informed that if she wanted to participate, she would need do so in a different category than she was accustomed to.
“I was told if I wanted to go to the next Commonwealth Games I needed to lose 18 kilograms [the equivalent of almost 40 pounds] in three months or retire” Lambrechs told National Review. “Losing that much weight quickly was not ideal for my health and I suffered some severe migraines and started passing out a lot.”
When she raised her concerns over both Hubbard’s participation and its very visible consequences on her body and career, Lambrechs was instructed to be “resilient.”
Schorr forgot to explain what Hubbard has to do with telling Lambrechs to lose weight though.
Instead of at minimum providing support for athletes whose physical and psychological well-being was being adversely affected by Hubbard’s participation, higher-ups responsible for managing the national team told athletes “to be quiet,” with the threat of reprisals hanging over their heads, according to Lambrechs.
I’ve been wondering about that all along.
“We were told not to talk to the media and were warned that if we did we could bring the sport into disrepute and then could miss out on being selected or could be dropped from national teams. The sports national body did not know how to handle the situation, so they had a knee-jerk reaction and thought silence would be best for them.”
When in doubt, just shrug and leave it to the women to deal with.
For female athletes with the opinions on the matter of transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports that Lambrechs has — and the willingness to express them so publicly — the waters are choppy. Consider, for example, the reaction to a USA Today guest column authored by a high-school track and field athlete who had been robbed of four state titles in Connecticut.
Not only did the newspaper that agreed to publish the piece edit it without the consent of its author, it added an editor’s note apologizing for not “reflect[ing] USA TODAY’s standards” and the use of “hurtful language.”
Remember: when women do it it’s “hurtful language.” When men do it it’s stunning and brave.
Moreover, some transgender advocates are eager to paint those with Lambrechs’s views as not only mistaken, but violent and hateful. On a May New York Times podcast, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer accused American legislators seeking to protect the integrity of women’s sports of being motivated “on some level” by the “impulse” to “kill” transgender youth.
Chase Strangio? Is that you?
David Gorski asks in 2006 why not just castrate them?
Ever since I found myself critically examining the claim that autism and autistic spectrum disorders are caused by mercury found in the preservative(thimerosal) used until recently in childhood vaccines, I thought that I’d heard of every dubious or quack autism therapy there is out there. Indeed, it is from that concept (that “autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning,”, which is not supported by epidemiological or preclinical evidence) that flows all sorts of dubious therapies to “remove” the mercury. Foremost among these questionable therapies is chelation therapy, using a chelating agent like EDTA or DMSA to bind to and remove this supposed mercury excess. This therapy is touted as being extremely effective in improving the behavioral abnormalities in autism, but, contrary to what its proponents say, it is neither efficacious nor safe. Indeed, six months ago it resulted in the death of an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama at the hands of a quack named Dr. Roy Kerry in a clinic near Pittsburgh.
…
Yes, I thought I’d seen it all. I thought that no proposed treatment for autism could be so bizarre, so unbased in science, so risky, that it would shock me anymore.
Or so I thought until I read a rather lengthy account by Kathleen Seidel, who runs the Neurodiversity website about how the concept of “testosterone regulation” has risen from the underbelly of the fringe of the “mercury equals autism” community and started to make appearances in the mainstream press.
What caught my attention and shocked me so much? What therapy could once again make me wonder what these people are smoking or whether they’re on crack?
They’re talking about adding chemical castration with Lupron to chelation therapy as a “treatment” for autism.
Yes, chemical castration. Mark and David Geier, the father-son tag-team of VAERS database dumpster-divers who don’t seem to be too concerned about following Institutional Review Board guidelines while diving in, have latched on to the idea that lowering testosterone will “increase the efficacy” of chelation therapy. That’s why they want to give Lupron to children.
2006 that was.
Fifteen years is a long time, it seems.
He explains the few limited medical uses for Lupron – metastatic prostate cancer, endometriosis and uterine fibroids, and in vitro fertilization.
But we’re not talking about adults here. We’re talking about children. Are there any medically accepted uses of Lupron in children? Yes, but only one: Precocious puberty. Precocious puberty is defined as the onset of secondary sexual characteristics before 8 years old in girls and 9 years old in boys. It can be the result of tumors, central nervous system injury, or congenital anomalies.
The criteria for use of Lupron were strict – the idea was not to just start popping them for flimsy reasons.
Any bet as to whether the Geiers will adhere to these guidelines? (That is, of course, a sucker’s bet.) In my book, if you’re going to give a potent drug like Lupron to children, a drug that can almost completely shut down the synthesis of both male and female steroid hormones, you’d better have damned good evidence that it’s likely to help to make it worth the risk.
So……………………what makes it worth the risk now?
It’s not just “viewpoint.” At all.
Eric Kaufmann at National Review thinks willingness to fuck a Trump fan is an index of political open-mindedness. Come on. The vast unexplored foulness of Trump goes way beyond the political, and anybody who can’t see that is, to put it delicately, not desirable.
When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him [huh?]). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude bleeds into problematic spheres such as hiring and social toleration.
So if people discriminate in dating in the sense of preferring to date people who are not flamboyantly rude, stupid, sadistic, ignorant, boring, conceited, loud, empty, vulgar, corrupt, dishonest, greedy, exploitative, selfish, and more, they are somehow working against social toleration?
It’s the other way around, chum. Social toleration doesn’t exist in Trumpworld, and we can’t get any more of it by encouraging him to continue being what he is on a public stage. That would be true if he had the most left-wing opinions on the market. It’s not primarily the politics, it’s the person. Nobody should tolerate that person.
Updating to add: see Screechy Monkey’s comment @ 18 for how deceptive that “only 6 percent” is.
I didn’t know until today that Bret Weinstein is an anti-vaxxer. When worlds collide, yeah? He’s one of those Intellectual Dark Web people, which surely ought to be enough to keep anyone busy, but no, he finds the time to tell people not to get vaccinated against Covid too.
Bret Weinstein is, simply, a right-wing media grifter in the vein of conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro and Canadian professor of psychology Dr. Jordan Peterson. Part of the “intellectual dark web,” (a term his brother Eric coined), Weinstein has risen in prominence over the last year as other members of the IDW have lost relevance.
Weinstein made his reactionary right wing guru bones after he left his evolutionary biologist teaching gig at Evergreen State College in Washington State.
Because of political correctness. (I’ve never really decided what I thought about that whole fuss. That’s ok, I don’t have to have an opinion on every single thing.)
After a confrontation with protestors, Weinstein and Heather Heying, a fellow biology professor and Weinstein’s wife, sued the college.
The couple resigned, and Weinstein began his career playing a skeptical maverick who was cast out by political correctness. His DarkHorse podcast is wildly popular, reaching Number 51 on the Podcast Insights chart. Weinstein, like a lot of IDW personalities, positions himself as a centrist intellectual just searching for answers, but it’s a thin veneer that is destroyed by even a cursory listen or look at his Twitter feed.
His job is [to] gussy up white nationalism and other alt-right talking points to make them palatable for the mainstream. You can see that in his thoughts on #BlackLivesMatter or the use of non-gendered pronouns.
I don’t think Special Pronouns are comparable to BLM though.
Weinstein is also a fervent believer in ivermectin (that horse dewormer I mentioned above) as a cure for COVID, which is one of the reason he keeps having social media posts taken down for spreading misinformation.
Has he considered the injecting bleach cure?
Posts are sharing the false statement that the spike protein in COVID-19 vaccines is cytotoxic, suggesting that it kills or damages cells. There is no evidence to support this.
…
One post (here) links to a YouTube video (here) with the caption: “Spike protein is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic (Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Bret Weinstein).”
The 15-minute video shows three individuals discussing the COVID-19 vaccine and the spike protein is repeatedly described as “very dangerous” and “cytotoxic.”
What kind of damn fool puts out videos telling people a vaccine is very dangerous during a pandemic? What the hell is wrong with people?
I don’t find it particularly shocking or alarming that an Edinburgh school doesn’t want to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. There are a lot of better books, and schools can’t teach all of them, so…so what?
A Scottish secondary school will no longer teach the classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird after teachers claimed the book promotes a “white saviour” narrative.
Well, it does. I like the book, but more for its picture of childhood than for the Atticus Finch part. I don’t hate that part, I wouldn’t urge anyone not to read the novel because of that part, but it is there.
Now if it were Huck Finn it would be a different story, because that is a great work, despite “problematic” aspects. But Mockingbird, nah. It can take care of itself.
Stephen Kelly, headteacher at Liberton High, in Edinburgh, said that there is a need to diversify the curriculum and develop an “anti-racist culture that recognises notions of stereotyping, notions of white-centric attitudes, notions of white people being more important, notions of representation.”
Meanwhile are they doing any teaching of literature as literature at all? I’m all for anti-racism but that’s not the same thing as literature, and what makes it good and how brilliant writers go about it and what is the point of it are important for understanding (and getting joy from) literature.
Ken Zucker on that “science-based” review:
Sheer silliness is chronic in this ideology.
Facts are transphobic.
Jesse Singal notes some rather large mistakes in That Review at SBM.
Jeez. That’s quite a howler, and it’s a howler that is damaging to Zucker, i.e. a perceived Enemy of the Cause. That’s not how one is supposed to do these things.
“Science-based.”
Maryam rejects Naz Shah’s attempt to invent a crime of “emotional harm.”
Notice that Shah says the bill is to “protect emotional harm.” She says it throughout her speech, too. She means protect from emotional harm…by sentencing people to 10 years in prison for damaging statues (and, apparently, for “blasphemous” cartoons).
What a revolting plan.
Well, you know…”they” is only doing what so many others do. Why can’t Oli do that?
They says they feels like “someone that feels like they’re born in the wrong body so for the last nine years I’ve felt like I’ve been trapped – since I lived in Korea I feel like I identify as Korean”…and so on.
Of course nationality isn’t in the body, but it doesn’t do to point out what makes sense and what doesn’t, because that gets you into the towering weeds instantly.
Anyway I’m sure actual Koreans find this person very flattering.
Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley and Thomas Chatterton Williams in the NY Times on laws banning Critical Race Theory:
In recent weeks, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho and Texas have all passed legislation that places significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms, and in some cases, public universities, too.
Tennessee House Bill SB 0623, for example, bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” In addition to this vague proscription, it restricts teaching that leads to “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.”
In other words you can’t teach anything at all about race, sex, religion, politics, or class. Anything you did teach could lead to division or resentment of some sort, so you just can’t teach it. Good luck teaching history.
Texas House Bill 3979 goes further, forbidding teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.” It also bars any classroom from requiring “an understanding of the 1619 Project” — The New York Times Magazine’s special issue devoted to a reframing of the nation’s founding — and hence prohibits assigning any part of it as required reading.
What exactly makes the “founding principles” the authentic, and slavery and racism the aberration?
These initiatives have been marketed as “anti-critical race theory” laws. We, the authors of this essay, have wide ideological divergences on the explicit targets of this legislation. Some of us are deeply influenced by the academic discipline of critical race theory and its critique of racist structures and admire the 1619 Project. Some of us are skeptical of structural racist explanations and racial identity itself, and disagree with the mission and methodology of the 1619 Project. We span the ideological spectrum: a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian and a conservative.
And they all think these laws are a threat to liberal education.
The laws differ in some respects but generally agree on blocking any teaching that would lead students to feel “discomfort, guilt or anguish” because of one’s race or ancestry, as well as restricting teaching that subsequent generations have any kind of historical responsibility for actions of previous generations. They attempt various carve outs for the “impartial teaching” of the history of oppression of groups. But it’s hard to see how these attempts are at all consistent with demands to avoid discomfort. These measures would, by way of comparison, make Germany’s uncompromising and successful approach to teaching about the Holocaust illegal, as part of its goal is to infuse them with some sense of the weight of the past, and (famously) lead many German students to feel “anguish” about their ancestry.
Indeed, the very act of learning history in a free and multiethnic society is inescapably fraught. Any accurate teaching of any country’s history could make some of its citizens feel uncomfortable (or even guilty) about the past.
Humans are humans. We don’t reliably behave well in all circumstances. It’s better to try to know more about that than to hide from it. Chronic self-flattery gets you nowhere.
What’s more, these laws even make it difficult to teach U.S. history in a way that would reveal well-documented ways in which past policy decisions, like redlining, have contributed to present-day racial wealth gaps.
That’s exactly the example I cited the other day to make the same point. This stuff is real, and should not be hidden.
Let’s not mince words about these laws. They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas.
Which is, ironically, another example of the way we don’t live up to our putative ideals. Land of the free, where public schools are subject to speech codes.
Well…
…yes freedom is very important, but so is not spreading a lethal pandemic. Lots of things are important, and some of them are incompatible with each other, so we have to choose among them.
As for “showing our faces is part of being human” – other things being equal, yes, but when showing our faces=risking the spread of a lethal pandemic, not so much.
Freedom is a good, no question, but so is respecting the needs of everyone else. Freedom that’s all for the self and to hell with everyone else is not a good.
Ok back to that polemic at Science-Based Medicine.
Early on there is a one-sentence paragraph that is arresting under the circumstances:
Bad science, however, remains bad science, and personal opinions based in confirmation bias and politicized beliefs are bad science.
Dr. Eckert “their”self isn’t being parsimonious with the personal opinions based in politicized beliefs in this review.
More accurately, Shrier’s subjects are “AFAB”, or “assigned female at birth“, because no one gets to choose what sex they’re assigned at birth. When discussing transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, this terminology is generally preferred over “biological male/female”, “male/female bodied”, “natal male/female”, and “born male/female”, which are considered defamatory and inaccurate.
Oh look, another agentless passive again. Generally preferred by whom, pal? Sure as hell not everyone. Not by most people. It’s preferred by gender idenniny zealots and their “allies” and no one else. Most people are unaware of the term “assigned at birth,” and a hefty percentage of people who are aware of it think it’s idiotic or insulting or both.
Moreover, disturbingly, most of the individuals covered in Shrier’s book were not personally interviewed. Their stories are told exclusively by their parents, all of whom use she/her pronouns for their trans children.
That’s just childish. Why did SBM publish this piece? If Shrier’s book is about the parents and gender ideology then Shrier needs to talk to them. It’s one aspect of the subject; there’s no requirement to talk only to “trans children” when writing about trans ideology.
Shrier’s use of she/her pronouns for her subjects, “for the sake of clarity and honesty”, is also problematic. She defends her referring to these subjects using pronouns that do not correctly reflect the gender with which they identify, commonly referred to as “misgendering,” by appealing to the First Amendment, a common strategy employed to attack the rights of LGBTQ people.
Again, childish. It’s not a “right” to be referred to by a reality-contradicting pronoun. The idea that it is is a silly innovation based on a grotesque ideology, and nobody is required to obey its mandates.
Throughout her book, Shrier characterizes those who ask that their accurate names and pronouns are respected as demanding, volatile teenagers who “fly into rage” when their request is denied. She scoffs at pronouns in email signatures, referring to them as “gender Ideology”.
omigod does she really?! That’s awwwful. What did she say next? Let’s not sit at her table tomorrow. Let’s put salt in her Coke.
I think that’s all I can stand to read. This person isn’t even bright. Why would Novella and Gorski post such an amateurish embarrassing exercise?
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Maybe science.
because no one gets to choose what sex they’re assigned at birth.
I object on behalf of the English language.
There is no general rule that says that the statement “Person A is Category X” implies that Person A chose to be X. I didn’t choose to be white, or blue-eyed, or even human, but if I went around declaring that I was “assigned human at birth,” people would back away slowly and look for an escape route.
There are, of course, some types of X where there arguably is (or should be) an implication of choice. I’m thinking of Richard Dawkins’s complaint about referring to “Christian children” or “Muslim children” as being as ridiculous as a “monetarist child.”
But then, that’s just it, isn’t it? The underlying belief is that there is no biological sex at all, only gender, which is a choice. Except when it isn’t, of course. It’s a choice when protesting that “you can’t say I’m female, because I didn’t choose to be female.” but it’s not a choice when complaining that “I can’t just choose to be female, that’s not who I am.”
Wo, this is a big step.
This at a blog called “Science-based Medicine.”
So let’s take a look.
Very science-based title.
Editor’s note: This is the second guest post discussing Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters solicited from experts in transgender medical care. In this post, Dr. A.J. Eckert describes the many errors, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings of science in Shrier’s book, doing so in more detail than was done in our recent guest post by Dr. Rose Lovell, who provided an excellent overview of the problems with the book. Dr. Eckert plans a second part to this discussion, which they are currently working on. We look forward to its completion.
Dr. Eckert is “non-binary.”
Does that make Dr. Eckert part of “the trans community”? Or no?
Clearly the mandated answer is yes, but the reality is that that’s absurd, because the very idea of being “trans” relies on the binary, so claiming to be some of each and to be “part of the trans community” is having it both ways, i.e. ignoring a contradiction.
Dr. Eckert starts with some poison.
Over the last couple of weeks, Abigail Shrier’s controversial 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters has enjoyed a renewed surge of interest and controversy on the Internet. On June 15, Dr. Harriet Hall, retired family physician and longtime contributor to the Science-Based Medicine blog, posted a favorable review of Shrier’s book on SBM.
The physicians behind SBM characterize their blog as one “dedicated to evaluating medical treatments and products of interest to the public in a scientific light and promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in health care”. SBM is widely regarded in its dedication to evidence-based medicine. Hall’s review was pulled from the SBM blog less than two days later for review, having been found not to meet the standards of SBM. Shrier sees this move as bullying.
So do I, and you know what else I see as bullying? This intro. This spiteful nasty intro.
Ms. Shrier, Lisa Littman, whose 2018 study proposed the diagnosis of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), and now apparently Dr. Hall see themselves as victims of a “woke” activist movement trying to censor science.
Gee, why would they think that.
In contrast to claims of Shrier having been “silenced,” her book has garnered praise and support, with several sites taking up her cause in the past week alone. Before Dr. Hall’s review, Shrier had previously appeared at a high-profile Senate hearing. She still has a platform as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and has expressed her views on several podcasts, including Joe Rogan’s massively popular one. Meanwhile, in part due to Shrier’s enthusiastic promotion, Littman’s made-up diagnosis of ROGD has enjoyed a renewed interest, spread widely, and is accepted by many as a real medical diagnosis.
Bad science, however, remains bad science, and personal opinions based in confirmation bias and politicized beliefs are bad science.
Says non-binary Dr. Eckert who is clearly not at all influenced by personal opinions or politicized beliefs.
Throughout her book, Shrier refers to her subjects as “biological girls,” a term that conflates sex with gender and mischaracterizes Shrier’s subjects. The reason is that a person’s sex refers to the identity assigned by doctors, parents, and medical professionals at birth, most often based on external anatomy (genitals).
That’s not right.
More accurately, Shrier’s subjects are “AFAB”, or “assigned female at birth“, because no one gets to choose what sex they’re assigned at birth.
That’s not more accurate. At all.
It’s breathtaking that they’re doing this.
More later, maybe, or maybe I’ll just leave it to fester.
National Weather Service Seattle is on Lake Washington, so they take nice snaps.
You can just barely see Mount Rainier. On a sharply clear day it stands out like a giant upside-down scoop of ice cream.
The non-binary comedian’s hit TV show draws heavily on an often troubled life. They talk about addiction at 14, the loving parents who kicked them out, the older men who abused their trust – and the happiness they eventually found.
How do they know those older “men” were actually “men”? Is they the only person who gets to be special in this story?
Feel Good is a disarmingly autobiographical love story. It tells the story of a character called Mae struggling with relationships, addiction, identity and life on the comedy circuit. Mae is attracted to men and women, but to women more, particularly women who identify as straight. The first series focuses on Mae’s relationship with Georgina, a teacher who had previously only slept with men and is reluctant to admit to her super-straight, super-posh friends that she and Mae are living together. Mae is a mix of streetwise and naive – reckless, precocious, promiscuous, self-absorbed and a bag of nerves.
I’m not clear on what “disarmingly autobiographical” is supposed to mean. What’s disarming about autobiography? Self-obsession is all too common and I can’t say I ever find it disarming. Tiresome and irritating is more like it.
By the end of series two both characters have evolved. George is happy with her bisexuality, while Mae changes from she to they, announcing: “I think I’m transgender or non-binary or whatever the term is these days.”
The term is “more interesting than everyone else.” You think you’re special and more interesting, and these days that translates to something under the “trans umbrella.”
It’s not surprising people react like this when you write and star in a TV series using your real name and telling a version of your life story. But this is where things start to get complicated. As Martin reminds me, it is a fictionalised version. So whereas in Feel Good, Mae talks about being trans or non-binary, Martin is non-binary but not trans.
Ohhhhhhhh. Thank god we cleared that up. How creative of they to make their character so different from theirself.
The Canadian standup thinks of Feel Good as a dramatised version of life 10 to 15 years ago. But while the addiction at the heart of the story goes back that far, the decision to identify as they rather than she is recent.
Better advertising, innit.
