Scientists Pressured to Go PC on Gender

Secular scientists face a dilemma: say what is politically correct, or state the biological facts about human sexual differences.

Biology, genetics, experience and common sense concur that men and women are different. A certain segment of powerful special interests on the left, however, are pressuring everyone to deny common sense and ignore their own eyes. They teach that sex and gender are two different things; anyone can choose to switch between male and female on a whim, and make everyone bow down to your wishes. Some countries, like Canada, are making it a crime to refer to a ‘transgender’ person by the wrong pronoun. Since the special interests directing this cultural change control the media, academia, some courts and NGOs, this is no small challenge to those unwilling to sacrifice their common sense. LGBT advocates promote hate against anyone who considers human sexuality binary (male or female at birth; see commentary), especially those who have religious convictions that the binary types are the way God made us.

What’s a scientist to do in this political climate? Let’s look first at some recent findings that acknowledge that men and women are different:

Sexual dimorphism and fathers: Biologists routinely speak of sexual dimorphism in animals, such as silverback gorillas that tend to be larger and more aggressive than females, and male peacocks that look and act very different from peahens. Notice the “binary” nature of this common-sense, observational fact. In a recent paper in PLoS One, “Father absence and gendered traits in sons and daughters,” two female scientists speak freely of “sexually dimorphic” traits between boys and girls, considering the impact of father absence on these traits.

Men, not women, may be having fewer strokes (Medical Xpress): News items like this speak freely of bodily differences between men and women as actual realities, without considering PC terms of gender. Bodily differences are real.

Man flu is real, but women get more autoimmune diseases and allergies (Medical Xpress): This article from The Conversation briefly mentions looking through the “gender lens” but quickly acknowledges that the immune systems of men and women don’t respond the same way to diseases. Key point is “man flu is real”; it’s not a figment of cultural conditioning.

Women have more active brains than men (Medical Xpress). Here’s another study that shows bodily and mental differences between men and women. “This is a very important study to help understand gender-based brain differences,” the lead author says. “The quantifiable differences we identified between men and women are important for understanding gender-based risk for brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

Now, let’s see how some scientists are getting swept into the PC trend to deny sexual dimorphism. They will find sexual differences, but then deny that “gender” is binary.

Supreme Court rulings can signal a shift in societal norms (Medical Xpress). Leave it to Princeton psychologists to pretend objectivity about gay marriage while clearly celebrating it. They even extend the LGBT alphabet by three letters, LGBTQIA (“lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual/agender/aromantic”). How far will this insanity go in days ahead? Will we all have to memorize LGBTQIAXZVWDPFYC@#!&$? and be careful not to “discriminate” against any of them, whatever they turn out to be? Clearly, everyone is rushing to jump on the identity bandwagon, including ‘scientists’ who like to look trendy. The shrinks end by noting that a case is pending before the Supreme Court where a baker was facing the loss of his business for not willingly participating in a gay marriage by baking a cake for them; the outcome is sure to be important for religious liberty, but the article’s bias is palpable: “the appeal of a state decision to uphold discrimination charges levied by a gay couple against a bakery that refused to make a cake for the couple’s same-sex wedding.” What would they think of the case of bakers who refused to bake a Donald Trump birthday cake for a 9-year old boy? (Truth Revolt). What would they think of the man who wants to marry his laptop computer and demands state recognition and a wedding cake? (Washington Times).

Medicine’s gender revolution—how women stopped being treated as ‘small men’ (Medical Xpress). Deb Colville at The Conversation identifies a flaw in medical history, which tended to view the male body as the standard for anatomy and the female as a special case. “Until the turn of this century, there was little sense in Western medicine that gender mattered,” she says. “Outside the niche of female reproductive medicine, the male body was the universal model for anatomy studies.” This error could have been corrected by treating men and women as equally important and equally valuable. Instead, Colville leaps onto the PC gender bandwagon, saying, “Gender is not the same as sex, which is about biological and physical male-female differences. Gender relates to the social and cultural behaviours we attach to the biological aspects of sex; it is not binary and exists on a spectrum.” By the end, she is preaching against the sin of treating gender as binary.

Do men and women really find different words funny? Here’s what the research says (Phys.org). Judith Baxter at The Conversation acknowledges that men and women differ in what they consider humorous, but then leaps onto the PC gender bandwagon, preaching, “The danger of reducing the use of humour to simple comparisons between men and women is that it can lead to binary gender stereotyping, thus reinforcing the very folk myths about men and women’s language that recent research has dispelled.” Oh, you evil people who think men and women are binary! (like everyone in thousands of years of history before T was added to LGB a few years ago).

Transgender Military Ban: 5 Facts That Rebut Trump’s Claims (Live Science). This ‘science’ site, always ready to take the far-left side on any issue, rears its politically-biased head again. Sara G. Miller rushes to denounce President Trump in a knee-jerk reaction, selectively citing alleged ‘scientific’ statistics to show that since he is Donald Trump, a Republican, he must be wrong again. The main thrust of her argument is that it’s not disruptive and not expensive. She fails to point out that the order to let transgenders serve openly in the military was an executive order made by Obama in the last days of his administration, leaving this can of worms on the new president’s oval-office desk. Indeed, Ash Carter had directed the military to actively recruit transgenders in 2017 (after Obama was out of office), and to pay for their expensive sex change operations. Critics point out that the mission of the military is to win the nation’s wars, not to become a lab for social experimentation. The order would favor those with a psychological dysphoria – a ridiculous double standard considering that people who wish to serve can be denied military service for peanut allergy or nearsightedness. Should taxpayer dollars support the fantasies of transgenders who would be unable to perform their duties for up to a year or more? What about morale to normal servicemen in the trenches? In addition, precious time was set aside to train all military personnel in how to be nice to these confused individuals. Live Science mentions none of this.

How marriage may protect transgender couples (Phys.org). A smiling woman’s face accompanies this headline. “Transgender people who are married are less likely to experience discrimination than their unmarried counterparts, indicates a national study led by a Michigan State University sociologist.” What does ‘science’ have to do with this? Does she care about the discrimination against people with sincerely held religious beliefs that have been common understanding for thousands of years, relying on unchanging principles from God, who cannot embrace the confusion that transgender marriage injects into society? Where is her article with this headline: “Common-sense people with sincerely-held beliefs in traditional values are less likely to experience discrimination when the Supreme Court protects religious liberty”? Crickets.

Fired Google engineer files complaint, weighs legal options (Phys.org). Talk about discrimination; here is a case to watch. A Google employee was reprimanded and fired for daring to question the PC denial that men and women are different. When he suggested that men and women have different aptitudes in the tech industry (a common belief going way back that is probably still common among people too scared to say so), Google fired him for the crime of “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” Predictably, it was the recently-hired “diversity director” who offered the canned explanation that Google remains “unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success.” Conservatives need not apply for said “inclusion”.

Update 8/12/17: On WND, Michael Brown provides some much-needed logical analysis of the double-talk in the transgender movement. For example, transgender advocates claim that gender is not what is between your legs, but what is between your ears. “But if that’s the case,” Brown asks, “when a biological boy is convinced he’s really a girl, why is he put on hormone blockers to stop the onset of puberty so he won’t develop as a boy. And why, when he’s old enough, does he get sex-change surgery to change his genitals? I thought genitals didn’t determine gender?” It gets better; read on.

Commentary: In very rare cases, gene abnormalities can sometimes give rise to ambiguous sexual conditions, such as the XXY genotype. Parents of children born with such physical abnormalities are often counseled to raise the child in one or the other gender orientation, or perhaps wait till the child is old enough to decide. The Transgender movement is not about these rare cases. It portrays gender as a personal taste independent of sex that any person can have regardless of their XX or XY chromosomes and physical parts. While there have always been tomboy girls and effeminate boys, it used to be called “sexual dysphoria” and often, children grew out of it by their teens. The Transgender movement is different. It pushes those with dysphoria to parade and celebrate their confusion, and requires everyone else to celebrate their choice under penalty of law. It expects society to pay for expensive hormonal treatments and surgeries, which do nothing to change their chromosomes, but only turns XY males into freakish women or XX women into freakish men, often permanently damaging their bodies. A transgender male is never going to get a prostate gland, and a transgender female is never going to give birth. Extreme proponents of Transgender lunacy consider gender a spectrum of dozens of forms, each with its own newly-concocted sets of pronouns by which everyone must refer to them. All of this is harmful to support a fantasy that is anti-science. How much better to counsel them lovingly to accept the way God created them, and to learn to enjoy being who they are?

Leftists have opened Pandora’s Box with their identity politics. Now everybody with a grievance is going to jump onto the discrimination/diversity/inclusion bandwagon, seeking redress of their grievances for people who don’t kowtow to their feelings. It’s a tool they used against me at JPL, treating my sharing scientific evidences for intelligent design as making co-workers “uncomfortable” and not being sensitive to their feelings (as if I was not discriminated against, nor included in the diversity of views, nor had my feelings taken into account hearing Darwin preaching every week).

I love the two cases mentioned above: the 9-year-old boy wanting a Trump birthday cake, and the guy marrying his laptop. They show the way out of the leftist insanity back to common sense. Give the leftists a taste of their own medicine by using their own Alinsky tactics against them. Yes, demand that the bakery make a Donald Trump cake, and run them out of town if they refuse! Take it to the Supreme Court! Demand that the state honor the wedding for the man and his laptop spouse! Demand that bakeries honor his wish for a cake! Enough of these role reversals, and the leftists may get the message, “Uh, this isn’t working as planned.” But then again, you never know. Never underestimate the illogic of a far-leftist cultural wacko. For evidence, watch the documentary “Indoctrinate U” and enjoy the look on the faces of the university diversity staff when film-maker Evan Coyne Maloney, posing as a campus visitor, innocently asks where the Men’s Resource Center is. The film is hilarious because it is (tragically) real.