The science of gender idenniny
Oh no oh no, says Philip Ball: government is messing with science!
The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.
I wish we could skip the stale “political correctness” bit along with the stale “woke” bit, but denial of biology is not something to laugh off as if it were imaginary.
What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.
Such a review should not be necessary, but we don’t live in that world.
You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity.
That’s just a bit of obfuscation. The issue is scientists – and we know there are some – who insist that trans women are literally women in every sense. Adherents of trans ideology consider it blasphemy to distinguish between “the socially constructed aspects of gender identity” and the physical ones. “Trans women are women” is the slogan. No exceptions allowed, not even for biologists.
But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed.
They’re not all that difficult and subtle. Dressing up as Darth Vader isn’t all that difficult and subtle, and neither is dressing up as a woman.
More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime.
Yes but this time the role of Stalin and the Nazis is being played not by governments but by narcissists on social media. This time it would be the government stepping in to shove the ideologues out of the science. (That is, if the government does it right. That is a big if.)
So far, the focus is on allowing scientists to express multiple views, so the comparison with totalitarian regimes inserting a view doesn’t work. Of course, the implication is that the scientists who fail to go along with the sex-is-a-spectrum nonsense are equivalent to flat earthers and No True Scientist.
Alice Sullivan is excellent, should be a very useful review.
This is the amusingly frustrating part of the arguments, since so many come back with “You’re mistaking gender for sex.” And when asked for elaboration, they are not able to do so. Thus the problem with mantra as argument. Mantras are not meant to make sense, they are to take one’s thought patterns off of one’s self for meditation. (What is the sound of one hand clapping? has no answer and that’s the point.)
“Transwomen are women. Om mane padme om.”
Exactly. See Helen Webberly just now, assuring us she knows in her “heart of hearts” that she’s right. Oh well that’s fine then.
It’s unfortunate that the term “politically correct” has been diluted so.
Trofim Lysenko was a scientist. A politically correct scientist.
Just like the scientists who today let political correctness determine scientific correctness.
The more I look back at the political correctness wave (which has now morphed into woke,) it was mostly a bugaboo term that eventually was used to taint any cause that liberals were associated with such as recycling and environmental causes, racial justice, feminist causes, etc. If you listen to the right, they play the word association game pretty well. While there are genuinely damaging aspects to people’s demand that we be Woke on some issues, not everything from the left side is posturing for cookies as implied by the modern term “woke.” Same with the term it replaced, “politically correct.”