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] transphobe
s, 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.
Comments
16 responses to “Instant affirmation or else”
Isn’t it people like this FTB/SBM that are too weak to just tell you to leave and just make it unpleasant as possible so you show yourself the door?
KInd of like the kitchen manager who doesn’t want to fire a cook, but only schedules him or her 1 her per week so they quit?
No, that’s much too pedestrian.
I think what we’ve got here is a witch hunt.
Mike – I don’t think FTB was too weak to tell me to leave, exactly, because they did tell one or two other people to leave. They certainly would have told me to leave, and soon, but there wasn’t 100% consensus on it at the time.
It’s getting to be a hazy memory for me now, and I wasn’t involved directly in it other than I was a bit miffed that I wasn’t asked to be in it. I guess I was lucky to be a small fish in a small pond after all.
You should have whined about it! I too was miffed not to be asked and I whined about it on Facebook so Ed asked me.
I enjoy a side point that Jerry Coyne expressed his views with the word transsexual (7 times) more than he wrote the word transgender (4 times) to express or quote the views of others.
Coyne missed the memo that the Gender ID movement put the word transsexual down the Memory Hole (maybe 2012-2014) to make room for Trans Women Are Women (TWAW). In other words, transsexual is the “deadname” for transgender (identity) before it “transitioned”.
Coyne meant what he wrote at face value, so he wasn’t trolling, but that makes it even better.
I wonder if they’ll cancel him.
At this point if I hear that someone is an X-phobe, I think it means that someone probably holds the more reasonable position. See also Islamophobe.
The Milton character from Office Space came to mind. He was fired years ago, but no one has the heart to tell him. His salary has already been stopped, but he keeps coming to the office. His desk is moved to increasingly awful locations (such as next to the boiler) in the hope that he will eventually just stop coming in.
You were the big radio star, Mike! Maybe the people in print were just afraid of you. ;)
Seriously, now that you’ve brought it up, it is sort of surprising that nobody asked you to join FtB back in the day. You certainly were contributing a lot more relevant material to the overall discussion than, say, that guy who posted a fish taco recipe every six months but nevertheless had an FtB blog. Be all that as it may, you sure dodged a real bullet in the end, all things considered.
The scourge of the airwaves, I was.
#11 Physioproffe! With his infantile speaking foibles and no discussion of anything noteworthy whatsoever, what a value-add.
Well, you know:
Dr. Steven Novella
Posted without irony at Neurologica:
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/eu-report-on-glyphosate/
Oyyy.