Instant affirmation or else

Jerry Coyne on the sleazy behavior of the bros at Science-Based Medicine:

… the site removed a book review written by another respected physician, Harriet Hall, known for being one of the Air Forces’s first women flight surgeons as well as a notable advocate for science based medicine and a vociferous debunker of quackery.  And—get this—Hall is one of the journal’s five editors.

If only she’d been three of the five.

Neither Shrier nor her reviewer Hall [is a] transphobes, but now they are irrevocably typed as that. The ACLU staff attorney for transgender issues, Chase Strangio, has called for the banning of Shrier’s book from bookstores (odd for the ACLU, no?), and an uproar has arisen—all because Shrier is urging caution about a social phenomenon whose sudden increase demands scrutiny and investigation. To even deny the need for instant affirmation of a wish to be a boy if you’re a girl is to label yourself someone dedicated to eliminating transsexual rights or even advocating the genocide of transsexuals. That is hogwash, of course, and Shrier’s book and Hall’s careful review implicitly show that. She was instantly labeled a transphobe for not damning the book, and Science-Based Medicine got hundreds of outraged comments (see below).

Why is the denial of the need for instant affirmation equated to “transphobia”? Because the ideology, the movement, the activism, are all about how awesome it is to be trans and how dazzlingly fabulous trans people are.

And why is that? I don’t really know. Maybe because in reality it’s rather grim? Stripped of all the hoopla and celebration you’re left with people who have at the very least made their romantic and sex lives quite difficult. I suppose the more trans people there are the less difficult their sex lives are…or are they? Because the activism, after all, is all about insisting that trans X are X, so they don’t want to limit their dating pool just to other trans people, do they. That would imply that trans X are not X. It’s quite a trap they’ve caught themselves in.

But at least the more trans people there are the more trans friends are available, and maybe that’s reason enough.

The reason Hall’s review was archived is because Science-Based Medicine retracted it—a review by one of its own editors! (I don’t expect Hall will be an editor much longer.)

I expect the same thing. I found I couldn’t stand FTB any longer, and I expect Hall will find likewise.

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