Will the real pseudoscience please stand up
Another campaign / protest / open letter / list of demands, this time aimed at the New York Times.
The New York Times has been accused by its own writers of fomenting “bigotry and pseudoscience” against trans people in the latest controversy to grip one of America’s biggest-selling newspapers.
Pseudoscience? Because what, trans ideology is based on such authentic genuine non-counterfeit not at all pseudo-type science?
More than 180 contributors, including Sex and The City actress Cynthia Dixon, writer Lena Dunham and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, have penned a letter raising “serious concerns” about the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.
Oh no, not Cynthia Dixon and Lena Dunham. How will the Times survive?
[The letter] said the newspaper had “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”.
Signatories said: “Some of us are trans, non-binary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record.
“Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.”
Is that supposed to be scientific? Their person is not good enough? Discovering and fighting for their true selves? That’s not science, it’s idenniny ideology.
It added that the New York Times had published more than 15,000 words of front-page coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children in the last eight months alone.
As they should. What if the trans fanatics are wrong? What if transing children is really bad for the children? What if trans activism is not like feminism or LGB rights but like lobotomies and symphysiotomies?
When I want to demolish pseudoscience I always head for the biggest guns in my arsenal; actors, writers and whistleblowers (of whatever sort).
They are ACtivists being ACtive.
Like bleeders, uterus-havers, clownfish, cis and TERF? Or is the problem the fact the NYT didn’t use their preferred terms like bleeders, uterus-havers, cis and TERF?
Or maybe the Times reported on the contoversy surrounding how best to treat dysphoric children, and discussed options other than just “gender affirming” care. And as far as the omission of “relevant information,” how about an admission that humans can’t change sex? Call me mad, but that seems somewhat relevant to me. And what about the testimonies of desisters and detransitioners? They’re villified and ostracized and accused of never having “really been trans.” As if anyone is. What about loss of sexual function and sterility? What about the documented harm caused by puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones, not to mention the horror shows that can arise from surgical “treatments” designed to carve the body into a crude, non-functional visual likeness of the target sex? That’s a lot of data supression right there, all of it relevant. Informed consent much? And trans activists have hidden it, lied about it, denied it and shot a multitude of messengers who’ve dared to bring these skeletons to light. Watchful waiting has nothing to hide. Genderists have long since run out of rugs under which they could sweep their dumpsters full of dirty, monstrous secrets. Does trans activism really want to go down the path of science, and studies, and sources, and follow-ups? Because it if it does, it will lose.
Are you going to protest reality, too? It is by far your biggest and most determined opponent. That’s a stream with a mighty powerful rate of flow, and you ain’t gonna get far against it. Where will you find the appropriate address to which you can forward a copy of this letter? The NYT could just write honestly about realities (which it did not itself create) and you would be complaining about “bigoted coverage.” And as for pseudoscience, you’re way ahead of everyone else with the Genderbread Person, not to mention your reintroduction of Cartesian dualism.
The only thing keeping these demographics together is forced teaming, and a shared incoherence when it comes to defing any of these “conditions” in a non-circular way that doesn’t rely on sexist steretypes, or wilfully misgender the rest of the population as “cis.”
I’m amazed that, in this quote at least, they didn’t use the standard LGBTQ formula, as that could rope in gays and lesbians to artificially inflate their numbers.
I’ve been studying social aspects of science as a layperson for at least 25 years, some college courses before that, and through discussions with working scientists on my podcast since, and just chatting with Greg Laden. I don’t claim to be an expert on science by any means, since I have limited practical experience designing and conducting experiments only when they are part of an undergraduate course and so that just gives basic context of how some science works. But it’s such a broad area of investigation, that even among working scientists there are concepts in the philosophy of science that they don’t accept or fail to understand. It’s likely that this is due to a lack of interest since they spend so much time mastering a specific field that the broader arguments hold no interest for them. So, when specialists speak out of their field, and I know that they are talking out of their ass but using their authority as say, a theoretical physicist, to expound on a subject that they don’t have experience in researching,. it’s maddening. I’m thinking of a couple of TV and multi-media physicists in particular.
I subscribed for a while to an email service called “The Big Think”: and they used to blast out emails with videos of famous scientists answering questions. Sometimes the questions were lame, sometimes they sparked my interest. But one video in particular was really frustrating. The question that was assigned to physicist Michio Kaku was lame, but I hear it all the time from Creationists, or people new to the evolution v creationism mess: “Has human evolution stopped?” Kako, having the physicists usual arrogance that they are the Top Scientists, decided to wing it with an answer. And, I, with my bachelor’s in business, but with extensive reading in talk.origins, knew the answer. Michio did not. Rather than pass along the question to a biologist, he answered that due to medicine and the advances that we are making, evolution by natural selection is basically over.
I canceled my subscription. The video should not have been sent out, and they should have gotten their money back from Kaku.
The point is, that when it comes to claims of pseudoscience, the reader still needs to apply critical thought, even if a scientist makes the claim. More to the topic at hand, Sean M. Carroll, another physicist, shared an image about DSDs with some verbiage about what “The Science” says about trans issues. So, as a physicist he doesn’t even know what the transgender claim is, and as a physicist, he has the god-like brain to make a declaration that is irrefutable. He didn’t respond to any of the replies that pointed out his error.
So, GLAAD, which is another organization that once existed to promote the well-being and social acceptance of lesbians and gays, wrote about how the science was settled and that the Times were promoting pseudoscience to dispute it.
Anyone with a basic understanding of science knows that the “science is never settled.” All answers are provisional, subject to further exploration.
It sticks in my craw, and grinds my gears because the proponents of transgenderism are using a propaganda technique of sounding sciency and using the language of science to promote their own pseudoscience, and all those people who have those signs on their lawns about “in this house we believe” that “Science is Real” are fooled into thinking that it’s settled. The Dutch and the Danes figured it all out years ago, and any objection is denialism. Well, no one wants to be called a denialist! Especially if they don’t fully understand how the science is supposed to work.
Along with all of the other weaknesses in our educational system, teaching the process of science is one of the weakest. Teaching critical thinking and the acceptance that even the best science can be overturned by new facts and new techniques is lacking. We are taught that science is a body of knowledge, not that it is an imperfect process of gaining understanding. We’ve lost the spirit of the IGY, and just take in as accepted fact what we hear from experts who tell us what we already agree with. It’s easier to let other people do our thinking for us, and we can then get back to doomscrolling and “liking.”
– footnote about Neil DeGrasse Tyson –
I really like him, but whenever I see that clip of him saying to Bill Maher that “Science is true, whether you believe it or not,” it pierces me. Deeply. I may be a pedant, but that is such an imprecise statement that he shouldn’t say it. It gives a completely wrong impression of what science is.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Will the real pseudoscience please stand […]
Physicists have usually come to the opinion that they are the experts on all things scientific, to the extent that Tyson, when called out by evolutionary biologists about a misstatement he made about evolution doubled down by claiming his critics did not understand evolution.
I see a lot of this. Physicists dismiss Biology as “stamp collecting”. Evolution is anything but.
Of course human evolution is not over. We need only to ask if there are any traits that are most common among people with high fertility rates and less common among people with low fertility rates, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what we think would be useful, or what we wish would happen. Who is having more kids survive to themselves reproduce?
That knocks most people in industrialized countries out, because industrialized countries are where high fertility rates go to die.
The most obvious observation we can make about the future evolution of humanity is that humanity will be much darker, because the only place in the world maintaining fertility rates above replacement level is sub-Saharan Africa. Almost all of the growth in world population that will occur between now and our expected peak around 2080 will be in sub-Saharan Africa.
[…] Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up. […]
Iknklast, I imagine how that must stuck in your craw.