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.

From Reduxx:

The World Health Organization is under fire for choosing a group of trans activists to develop its first global guide to “gender-affirming care,” with particular concern surrounding an appointee who advocates for halting children’s puberty. 

Why is the WHO doing that at all? Why is the WHO promoting a stupid fad that urges people to ruin their own bodies? Why do people in Nigeria and Laos and Afghanistan need to adopt this brainless destructive fad?

On December 18 of 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally announced the individuals who had been selected to make up its guideline development group (GDG). According to the global health body’s website, the GDG will create “implementation guidance on health sector interventions” for “trans and gender diverse people.” Among them are academics, trans activists, and former leaders and financial backers of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The WHO said the 21 appointees will meet at its headquarters in Geneva next month to collaborate on the guide.

So millions more people all over the planet will ruin their own lives. Brilliant.

[T]he appointee who has sparked perhaps the most controversy for his continued focus on advocating for childhood ‘transition’ is Florence Ashley, currently an assistant professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Canada. Since 2018, Ashley has repeatedly written and spoken about “transgender youth” and has called for pubertal suppression to be mandated as a “default option” for “gender creative youth.”

Ya see that’s where they go wrong, this idea that it’s “creative” or some other rah-rah word to try to live a delusion, wreck your own body, and demolish women’s rights, all on the basis of a fiction that people can swap their sex.

There’s a lot more about this Ashley fella, all of it sick-making.

Kath Murray, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Lisa Mackenzie write:

This week the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee will consider the Scottish Prison Service revised policy for transgender prisoners, finally published after a five-year hiatus…

As before, the revised policy is based on self-declaration principles. Prisoners seeking to be accommodated and/or searched based on their gender identity are required to “demonstrate” their identity, but this is not essential. As the SPS explain, the “policy is also explicit that decisions should not be made based on an individual’s ability to provide a wealth of evidence and there may be many reasons why an individual cannot provide this evidence and should not be penalised for this”.

Because the people of gender identity must never be penalized for anything. There is no such rule about women of course.

Whilst the revised policy starts from a default position of excluding men with a history of violence against women from the female estate, it also provides for access if the risk is not considered ‘unacceptable’ – or in plainer language, SPS thinks there is an “acceptable” level of risk it can create here.

An “acceptable” level of risk to other people, that is. Those other people just happen to be women.

Despite consulting more widely, compared to the preceding 2014 policy, the SPS has nonetheless arrived in the same place. To reach this position, it has ignored a swathe of evidence relating to the vulnerability and trauma of women prisoners, male offending risks, and relevant human rights instruments.

It’s interesting how the goal is doing what men who claim to be women want, and everything must be arranged to accommodate that goal, as opposed to the goal’s being to do what women need for safety. Why is that? Why are men who claim to be women so massively more important than women? Why does men’s fun outweigh women’s basic safety?

Despite the clear relevance of the policy to female prisoners, the Equality and Human Rights Impact Assessment (EHRIA) only sought to understand the policy impact on transgender prisoners in any depth. It ignored the 2007 Corston Review of Vulnerable Women in Prison and 2012 Commission on Women Offenders chaired by Dame Elish Angiolini, as well as its own policies that foreground the prevalence of trauma in the female prison population. It did not consider human rights instruments relevant to women but instead cites the controversial Yogyakarta principles at length. It relegates women to the status of “non-transgender women” and describes risks to their safety as “perceived” and a “perspective”. 

How do people get this way?

The lack of balance demonstrated here is not an isolated case. The same failures are evident in the analyses underpinning the two Scottish Government consultations on gender recognition reform. In each case, it appears the policy was decided at the outset, and the evidence retrofitted to that aim. Like the SPS, the Scottish Government ignored relevant evidence, including cases demonstrating the adverse impacts of policies and laws based on self-identification. 

Mass hypnosis. That’s all I can suggest.

Pathetic NPR:

“I think just a few years ago, before Roe was overturned, it was unimaginable for people to tell their stories about traumatic pregnancy loss and about abortions without the fear of public stigma,” Molly Duane of the Center for Reproductive Rights told NPR.

For people to tell their stories? Avoiding something?

Now, it’s different. “Women and pregnant people in this country are so angry and so shocked at the treatment that they are receiving at the hands of the state that they have been compelled to tell their stories,” she says.

Go to hell, NPR. There are no pregnant men in this or any other country; we don’t need you erasing us in the very act of reporting on a drastic curtailment of women’s rights.

Across the country, dozens of women use their full names in high-profile court cases, not just in Texas but also in Idaho and Tennessee, detailing extremely intimate experiences in legal filings, writing op-eds, doing interviews, and having their photographs in the news.

Women. Yes. Hold that thought.

But then NPR skips up to pretend it’s a men’s issue too.

The geography of abortion access is dramatically different [from] before Dobbs. The data show that abortions zeroed out in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri, while the number shot up in other states, including Illinois, North Carolina and New Mexico. In states with bans, people WOMEN who are seeking abortions and have the means, travel to states where it’s legal.

But why did the overall number increase? Upadhyay suggests there may be an increased demand for abortion because of the economy, or because of reduced stigma as more people WOMEN talk about their experiences with miscarriage and abortion.

They do it four more times before the story ends.

Awww look at that adorable cutesie-wootsie kittycat and look how stabby it is and how threat-makey it is. I always love that combination of violent threat and cuddly diddums.

I didn’t know about this guy:

A beluga whale that turned up in Norway wearing a harness in 2019, prompting speculation it was a spy trained by the Russian navy, has reappeared off Sweden’s coast.

First discovered in Norway’s far northern region of Finnmark, the whale spent more than three years slowly moving down the top half of the Norwegian coastline, before suddenly speeding up in recent months to cover the second half and move on to Sweden.

On Sunday [May 22, 2023], he was observed in Hunnebostrand, off Sweden’s south-western coast.

…

Norwegians nicknamed him Hvaldimir – a pun on whale in Norwegian, hval, and a nod to its alleged association with Russia.

When the whale first appeared in the Norwegian Arctic, marine biologists from the Norwegian directorate of fisheries removed a human-made harness from him.

And the reason I learned of his existence is a reunion with one of those marine biologists:

A tender moment between “Spy Beluga” “Hvaldimir” and fisherman Joar Hesten, is shared in this photograph, which was given finalist status in the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards.

Hesten was the one who freed Hvaldimir from the military camera harness he had been wearing when he suddenly showed up in northern Norway in April 2019. During that summer and autumn, Hensten visited the whale, looked after it, and discussed with local fisherman how they could best protect it.

5 weeks ago, Hvaldimir, who comes and goes as he pleases, was in Sórfold Norway appearing fit and active. He has been there since November, according to locals who keep an eye on him.

The chronology is confusing, but anyway, I like the affectionate reunion. I’m a sucker for affectionate reunions of this kind.

Man tells world he can’t understand why women don’t want men strip-searching them.

Originally a comment by Papito on Relating to coercive behavior.

Since “changing gender” doesn’t really mean anything, how can one prevent it? If you are “assigned sex at birth,” but you are born with an inherent, inalienable gender, then it never changes, so you can’t prevent it changing. For example, once upon a time, in a deleted universe, there was an actress named Ellen Page, but in our more valid universe you can see that a fellow named Elliot Page has credits for Juno, where he played a pregnant girl, and Hard Candy, where he played a 14-year old female vigilante. Because he was always Elliot, he never changed gender. He played those roles as a remarkably talented young lad.

In the case of a young girl who was assigned male at birth, a similar rule holds: she is already a girl, and she doesn’t need to do anything in particular to prove that. We are informed by many transwomen that having a penis does not mean they’re not a woman – it’s a “ladydick.” So preventing a child from having genital surgery isn’t preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Many transwomen are balding and bearded, but they’re still women, so preventing a child from taking puberty blockers or female hormones is not preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Some women, trans or otherwise, even wear clothes typical of men on a daily basis, so preventing a child from wearing women’s clothes isn’t preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Some women go by names that are more typical of men, like Freddy or Jack, so preventing a child from taking on a typically female name is not preventing her from changing or expressing gender.

As long as a woman can look like anything, have any body, and be called anything, no restriction in dress, address, or medical treatment can prevent, define, or change a child’s gender. Parents should feel free to uphold whatever rules they prefer, with no worries that they can be misinterpreted as attempts to suppress or change a child’s gender.

Yes, yes they would. Next question?

Parents are allowed to talk about gender identity, but they are of course not allowed to say it’s not a real thing. It’s like the church. Parents are allowed to talk about the religion, but they’re not allowed to say it’s bullshit.

Furthermore parents will be jailed for seven years only in the case of coercive behavior, like telling their sons they’re boys and can’t change themselves into girls.

How very liberal.

Dave Hewitt is brilliant.

There is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in political discourse many times in recent years, which goes like this:

• An existing term is colonised and its meaning subverted to new political ends
• Previous users of the term are forced to try to come up with a new term to replace the old one
• The new occupants demonise the old, and deny political legitimacy to any new terminology

The best description I can think of for this process is semantic gentrification, in which users of a word’s original meaning are forced out by newcomers who consider themselves morally enlightened in comparison to the older population, who completely change the character of the term in service of their own, narrow interests, and who regard the now-homeless former inhabitants with contempt.

It’s not so much a description as a metaphor, and it’s a brilliant metaphor. Let’s use it a lot.

Inherent in this is a sense in which the new meaning is superior to the old, representing a progressive, moral inevitability, and that attempts to reassert old meanings are denied legitimacy as regressive, backwards, and “on the wrong side of history”. Why would you want to hold on to a run down, backwards old semantic neighbourhood, when the shiny new hipster takeover is such a clear improvement?

It has huge windows! Wifi for cats! Luxury lightbulbs! Espresso machines in the showers!

…the female-centric analysis of feminism was colonised and redefined into a gender-centric one promising “equality for everyone”, women’s studies supplanted by gender studies, and so on. Rather than a movement to redress historic in[e]quity for women, and bring women’s needs to the fore, this shift reinforces women’s stereotypical role as primary caregiver, sacrificing their own needs – their own words – to right all of the world’s wrongs.

It reinforces it and it abuses all women who resist. Win-win.

Of course, in this inverted analysis, the most wrongs are perpetrated against the most “marginalised genders”, and the most marginalised of all are the men who wish to be seen as women, whose concerns have become so central that any women’s issues that exclude them are deemed hateful.

Deemed hateful and punished accordingly. Cops arrest us, friends berate us in public, judges tell us to call our male assailants “she” in court. It’s 1960 all over again.

Shared understanding cannot be assumed because the entitled new occupants have appropriated the old semantic structures, and supplanted them with their new, fashionable concerns. Every attempt to speak with precision about the pre-gentrification meaning of these words, to talk only about women’s rights and needs, to talk specifically about LGB issues, to make a feminist stand on a newsworthy event or a matter of policy – all becomes a trans issue. The conflict is inescapable, and a huge amount of time is expended trying to restate entirely reasonable feminist points from first principles. All the while the new inhabitants of these well-respected old semantic neighbourhoods have free rein to use their stolen goodwill to reshape society in the way they see fit.

The neighborhoods now have no grocery stores or parks or libraries but there’s a Starbucks on every corner. Enjoy.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Too many organisations have let them get away with it.

Our generation had Punk. They practised what we’d probably now call “trolling” and got the desired response. That was their passport to seeing themselves as lonely misunderstood romantic heroes. Then came Goths and most people were a just little wiser and pretty much let them get on with mooching about in cemeteries at midnight and writing bad poetry. We’d been there. Then came what? We’d reached a point when nothing anyone could do in terms of presentation or “lifestyle” could shock or even slightly perturb the older generations. We, who had become those older generations, were all too busy desperately denying the reality of our ageing bodies.

So what do you do when dying your hair an unnatural colour and weighing down your body with a jeweller’s case of heavy metal isn’t getting a response? You make demands – inherently unreasonable demands. Except the generation which is still young enough to be successfully denying the reality of their bodies but has gotten their hands on the mid-level reigns of power, is way ahead of you. They’re actually happy to accede to unreasonable demands – indeed it’s a badge of pride(!), because postmodernism, or something, though mostly just to deny that they’re no longer young romantic heroes and have gotten hold of the power they profess to despise. And if it’s just the rights of women in prison (or women in general) that need to be sacrificed well that’s not a sexy issue, and won’t look good on social media, and almost certainly will never affect them or anybody they know (until one day they look in the mirror and realise they’re old and everyone else sees them as old and are plotting to push them out of the way, and no they can’t identify out of being old but that won’t happen, surely not?).

So the reasonably well-off twenty-somethings get to play the romantic hero and be a dick to women on the internet and everyone else gets to be a dick to women on the internet. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. Well, it could be if they could just get their head around where all the shouting is coming from.

Is that really true though?

Is Thomas Willett’s ability to be himself at work really vital? Is it true that he shouldn’t have to hide who he is?

I don’t mean specifically the azza gay man part, I mean the generalization. Is it vital for people to “be themselves” at work?

I’ve always taken the truth of this claim for granted, but today I paused to interrogate it.

I don’t think it is, at least not always, not necessarily, not regardless of what the work is or who the other workers are or what is expected of employees.

Work is not primarily a social opportunity. It’s work. Some kinds of work may go much better if the workers know each other well and get along, but lots or most kinds of work don’t depend on that. Skills matter, effort matters, attention matters…a lot of things matter more than whether or not every employee is her or his beloved self. It may be preferable for people to feel they don’t have to hide things about themselves at work but I doubt it’s always vital.

And sometimes the need goes the other way. Some people don’t want to spill much about themselves at work, especially if they’re pushed to do so.

I don’t want to go too far with this. I’m certainly not saying people should be closeted, or that nonconforming people should conform. I’m just saying don’t overstate it. No homophobia in the workplace: definitely. Being yourself at work: frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Here we are, ready and eager to mutilate you!

Rebecca Mead wrote a rather interesting piece for The New Yorker about the Bloomsbury people and their clothes and what it all meant, but sadly it does end up at the too familiar trendy place.

At the exhibition, Morrell’s garments have been lined up like runway models at the end of a contemporary designer’s show. “Morrell spoke in her journal of how her preferred look was long and plain—she thinks her look is very simple,” Porter said. “But it seems to me that she is responding to her own features and exaggerating things because of the way she looked herself, rather than trying to hide anything.” Given Morrell’s height, hair, and hauteur, she was well aware that she looked striking and odd. Indeed, her appearance qualified as what she and her contemporaries would have called “queer”—that is, peculiar. In “Women in Love,” Hermione Roddice is described as “waving her head up and down, and waving her hand slowly in dismissal, smiling a strange affected smile, making a tall queer, frightening figure.”

Oh dear. Once the q-word enters the conversation the rest must follow.

Alongside the “Bring No Clothes” exhibition, Porter has published a book that shares the title. In both, he aims to demonstrate how people in the Bloomsbury circle used clothing, fashion, and the rejection of fashion to liberate themselves in a way that presages the modern usage of “queer” as an umbrella term for “not straight.” “I describe myself as ‘queer’ rather than ‘gay,’ even though I am a gay male,” Porter writes. “The word is specific enough to have meaning, broad enough to give all queer humans the space to be themselves.”

And, bonus, it infuriates a lot of “not straight” people because of its long history as a pejorative and sometimes a prelude to violence.

Porter is not alone in the world of the arts and fashion in finding that the Bloomsbury group speaks to contemporary notions of queerness: the actor Emma Corrin, who is nonbinary, recently starred in a West End adaptation of “Orlando,” which the lesbian writer Jeanette Winterson has categorized as “the first English language trans novel.” The British designer and artist Luke Edward Hall—whose interior schemes for homes, restaurants, and retail venues, with their clashing patterns and vibrant colors, are informed by the aesthetic of Charleston—has recently launched a line of home goods and gender-neutral clothing, called Chateau Orlando, that includes baggy floral shorts and the kind of boxy sweater-vests that are perfect for a weekend in an inadequately heated country pile. Porter writes that, if Woolf were alive today, “we might imagine her identifying as non-binary or trans.” 

I think not. She was a great deal too fastidious to find the gender police attractive or persuasive.

Elsewhere, Porter writes with subtlety about Carrington’s efforts to find language for an identity that today might be categorized as nonbinary. In a 1925 letter rejecting a former lover, Gerald Brenan, Carrington tells him, “You know I have always hated being a woman. . . . I am continually depressed by my effeminacy.” Writing elsewhere of an affair with the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, Carrington confesses to having “a day-dream” of “not being female.” 

But nothing is gained by calling it “nonbinary.” Literature is full of girls and women hating being a woman, at least in the sense of hating the automatic assumption of inferiority and not-mattering that comes along with it.

Porter also advances a theory that Morrell and Virginia Woolf may have fleetingly been lovers. He cites, among other suggestive evidence, a remark in a letter to Vanessa Bell from Roger Fry, an art critic in the Bloomsbury group, that Morrell and Woolf “have fallen into each other’s arms.” At the very least, Porter argues, it makes sense to consider Woolf and Morrell as “queer comrades.”

It makes even more sense to say they were both non-conformists in various ways and leave it at that. This business of trying to stuff them into a contemporary category just betrays the silly assumption that we’re vastly cleverer than they were because we came up with these contemporary categories.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Google confirms: she does say that.

I want to tread carefully here, but wouldn’t you think a personality disorder would be a hindrance to being a good representative of the people? It’s not called a personality variation but a disorder. I’ve gathered that the borderline type is…difficult. I know “ableism” is a no-no but all the same, people in government really do need some basic abilities.

I suppose the reality is that some people now think of such things as matters of “identity” and thus sacred. Thus BPD is not an obstacle to dealing with people reasonably, but a brave and stunning identity that makes the owner a miracle of empathy and supportivity.

Is that the thinking?

Joan Smith at UnHerd yesterday:

A social worker has won her claim for harassment after she was suspended for expressing gender-critical beliefs — and the judgment has far-reaching implications for freedom of speech. For years now, activists have claimed an exclusive right to decide what constitutes “transphobia” and too many organisations — employers, regulators and political parties — have let them get away with it.

Not any more. An employment tribunal has found that Rachel Meade suffered harassment by her employer, Westminster Council, and her regulator, Social Work England (SWE). It’s a stunning vindication for Meade and a warning to other organisations that take accusations of transphobia at face value. 

Meade’s ordeal began when the regulator received a single complaint about her sharing gender-critical posts on social media. 

That single complaint, I’ve been learning, came from one Aedon Wolton, a trans man and busy “activist.”

SWE responded by launching a lengthy “fitness to practise” investigation and issuing a formal sanction. It was later withdrawn but Westminster Council suspended her for a year. A finding of gross misconduct was eventually withdrawn, but by then the damage had been done. 

Now the tribunal has stated what the council and the regulator should have acknowledged from the start: Meade had not broken any law or said anything that compromised her ability to do her job. “All of the claimant’s Facebook posts and other communications fell within her protected rights for freedom of thought and freedom to manifest her beliefs,” the panel held. 

And how did we get to the point where people are being suspended from their useful jobs for knowing and saying that people are not the opposite sex? We need to be free to know and say who is which sex, for a million reasons, some of them to do with the most basic safety.

The ruling goes further, calling out organisations which passively accept allegations of transphobia without considering that they might be malicious. The judgment explicitly criticises the regulator for “an apparent willingness to accept a complaint from one side” of the debate without any attempt at objectivity or balance — and for failing to look at the complainant’s own tendentious social media posts before initiating action against Meade.

It’s a body blow to all those gender warriors who claim that anodyne statements about biology constitute “hate speech”. Trans activists lurk on social media, like teenage boys looking for someone to throw stones at, and supposedly decent people are too cowardly to call them out. 

It’s almost as if the whole point of being trans is the power to stick it to people who don’t adhere to the absurd ideology.

What I don’t get is, why do people feel so happy to talk about themselves endlessly like this? It makes me cringe with embarrassment just to watch it – I can’t begin to imagine actually doing it.

Mind like a steel trap:

…the miracle of magnets still appears to stump some people, including Donald Trump.

At a recent rally in Mason City, Iowa, the former president went on a rant about the [fragility] of magnets while complaining about the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.

Simply put: The ship has an electromagnetic aircraft launch system that relies on very large magnets.

“They had a $900 million cost over on these stupid electric catapults that didn’t work. They had almost a billion dollar cost over on the magnetic elevators,” he said. “Think of it, magnets. Now all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”

That is, of course, not how magnets work. They work just fine underwater.

He didn’t say underwater. He said “a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets.” It has to be a glass of water, it has to be dropped, the person doing the dropping has to be Trump.

The former president has repeatedly brought up his fixation with the carrier, its electromagnetic catapult system, and the bizarre claim that magnets don’t function with water.

“They want to use magnets to lift up the elevators,” Trump said in a July 2021 interview with a Princeton professor. “I said magnets will not work. Give me a cup of water, throw it on the magnets, you totally short out the system. They said, ‘How did you know that?’ I said, ‘Because I know that.'”

There’s that thing he does again. “They said” – who said? They. Yes but who? They. Also, no they didn’t. Just like the people who, according to Trump, said “How did you do that???” when he said “woman man person camera tv” they didn’t say what Trump said they said. Nobody rushed up to say how brilliant he was, for the simple reason that no one thought he was brilliant and no one felt like saying he was. So when he talked about throwing a cup of water on the magnets no one hastened to congratulate him on his mind-bending genius. No one. And he doesn’t know that. He made it up, which is not the same as knowing it.

The SNP doesn’t mess around:

Parents who refuse to allow their children to change gender would face up to seven years in jail under SNP plans to ban “conversion therapy”.

Proposals published on Tuesday state that actions designed to “change or suppress” another individual’s gender identity, causing them physical or psychological harm, would become illegal under the radical law.

SNP ministers acknowledged that so-called conversion practices often took place in a “family setting”, raising the prospect that parents could be criminalised if they refuse to go along with their child’s declaration that they are transgender.

You mean if they refuse to agree that their son is a daughter or their daughter is a son.

The fact that parents are likely to have a better grasp on reality here is apparently beside the point.

“We have grave concerns that these plans will criminalise loving parents, who could face years in jail simply for refusing to sign up to the gender ideology cult,” Marion Calder, a director at the campaign group For Women Scotland, said.

And who would foster the kids while the parents are in jail? Susie Green? Jeffrey Marsh?

A few weeks ago:

But that’s not inclusive and fair. That’s the whole point. It’s not fair to women. Women are people too. Please make a note of it.

Also how the fuck does that “reduce administrative complexities for all athletes”?