Big Science Waffles on Gender Confusion

The mouthpieces for science don’t seem to know whether to use common sense or go with the PC current.

There’s hardly anything more obvious about human beings (and all mammals) than that they come in male and female forms. Except in very rare medical disorders, such as those born with “ambiguous genitalia” or anomalous chromosomes like XXY forms, the dividing line is pretty clear. Women give birth to babies; men don’t. The primary sexual characteristics are obvious, and the secondary sexual characteristics are usually pretty obvious, too. Circuses may have the occasional bearded lady, but such cases are recognized as genetic anomalies, not the norm. Most of them did not “choose” their anomalous condition. Some men can’t grow a beard, and some develop “man boobs” with age or obesity, but again those are not “gender choices” that men make. Women have fallopian tubes; men don’t. Men have to worry about prostate cancer or testicular cancer; women, about cervical cancer or ovarian cancer. It’s not necessary to lengthen this list. Even if a man dresses like a woman, or a woman dresses like a man, it doesn’t require a specialist to find out who is for real. So-called “sex reassignment surgery” can only go so far; it cannot change the chromosomes in each cell. Don’t expect Bruce “Caitlin” Jenner to give birth any time soon.

A relatively small group of activists has gained enormous power over the media and academia— the LGBT movement (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, with other initials vouching for inclusion, like Q for queer). Flush with successes in the courts, adamant LGBT spokespersons claim that gender can be completely separated from biological sex, such that a biological male can not only just “feel” like a woman, but actually be one. Conversely, a biological female can actually be a man by simply choosing to “identify” as such. Look, for instance, at this article, “Can a woman have a penis?” by Katharine Jenkins, a good example of an LGBT talking head who insists that the answer is, “Yes!” – and she means it seriously. Must we quote her (it?) to prove this?

If this is right, what does it mean for the Liverpool ReSisters’s claim that “women don’t have penises”? Well, since gender identity is not determined by what kind of genitals someone has, a person with a female gender identity might well have a penis. In other words, yes, some women do have penises.

Notice that this article, though written at The Conversation (a presumed ‘science’ site where everything but conservativism is tolerated), but reprinted by Phys.org, a science news site!

So powerful has been the influence of LGBT activists in academia and media, they have convinced some legislators to criminalize addressing someone who identifies as the opposite sex by ‘its’ biological sex pronouns. This has been on the rise in commonwealth countries like the UK and Canada but is happening in America already, too. Such transgressions can cost persons their jobs, and shame them for believing in traditional sex roles and determinations. Tugged along by political correctness, science news sites are joining in the shaming of common-sense people, suggesting that believers in traditional sex roles are bigots and obstructionists, while science is on the LGBT side. Here are some example stories that appeared recently in Big Media (BM):

• Young people want sex education and religion shouldn’t get in the way (The Conversation). Gary Bouma wants schools to teach “gender diversity” and decrease parental and church influence in the teaching of sex roles and values.
• People who embrace traditional masculinity beliefs less likely to report rape (Medical Xpress). Those evil traditionalists; they cover up sex crimes more than the tolerant LGBT types. (But is rape only possible for men? How does that fit the gender-fluidity belief system? Can a man have an abortion? What happens to the philosophers’ tautology illustration that bachelors are unmarried men?)
• Gender stereotypes begin at age 10 (Medical Xpress). It’s traditional parents’ fault for teaching children that men and women are different. The subtext is that government needs to intervene. This article uses fear-mongering and extreme cases to show the danger of traditional values.

Extreme LGBT activists even multiply the number of possible genders, with associated pronouns that must be used so as not to offend a gender-confused person’s chosen gender du jour. It’s nearly impossible for people to keep up with the new gender vocabulary, even if they consider themselves tolerant and want to affirm the chosen gender identity of an acquaintance. It might be offensive, for instance, to address a bearded bodybuilder type wearing lipstick and a dress as “she” if it identifies as some other oddball gender. Campuses must let “it” enter the women’s bathrooms and showers, even with full male genitalia exposed. Anyone who dares to complain must be punished. Male athletes can identify as women and win all the female sports contests, even without hormones or sex reassignment surgery. Some feminists are beginning to get fed up with the unfairness, but so far there’s been little they can do about it. California almost passed a law criminalizing the counseling of a gender-confused person, before the bill’s author pulled the bill after talking to evangelical leaders. So certain was expected passage given the political makeup of California state government, traditional-values groups considered it nearly a miracle that the bill did not go through (see California Family Council).

Gender-Confused BS

Enter Big Science (BS). What’s a politically-astute secular scientist to do? He, she, or “it” can look at the chromosomes under a microscope, examine the genitalia, and note the secondary sexual characteristics of a lab rat or a human being. But is a scientist immune from the shaming tactics of the LGBT totalitarians? The situation is not yet clear. Biologists routinely denote the sex of non-human organisms (e.g., lion vs lioness), and often report on differences between men and women (e.g., “Binge Drinking Affects Male and Female Brains Differently,” posted on Science Daily). The European Society for Medical Oncology posted a risky article, “Men and women are different: medical oncology needs to restate the obvious” (Medical Xpress). Cancer doctors cannot risk the health of their patients by ignoring well-studied differences in treatment responses between the sexes. Whether the authors were hit with a backlash for saying this, we don’t know.

We have seen, however, that affirming male-female differences can be fraught with danger. After Brown University published a peer-reviewed scientific paper about “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (see 27 Aug 2018), so vehement was the outcry from transgenders who were offended, the university had to post an apology and censor itself (Breitbart News). Even the journal Science took note of this in a short news post:

A study describing “rapid onset gender dysphoria” in teens and young adults—a sudden unease with the gender they were assigned at birth—has infuriated transgender activists while sparking a debate about academic freedom. Critics of the paper, published last month in PLOS ONE by physician-scientist Lisa Littman of Brown University, call it a flawed study that reflects an antitransgender agenda, in part because it suggests some cases may be the result of “social contagion.” Brown and the journal have both distanced themselves from the paper, drawing charges that they surrendered to political pressure.

The editors appear very careful in this statement not to take sides. Perhaps they don’t want to become the next targets of LGBT wrath. If so, there goes the objectivity of science.

Update 09/17/18: WND reports that professor has angered LGBT leftists by insisting that men and women are biologically different. Germund Hesslow of the neurophysiology department at Lund University in Sweden is being accused of “transphobia” and “anti-feminism” but is standing his ground. “He said his comments were not based on a political agenda but scientific fact,” according to the article. It remains to be seen who will win the tug-of-war, but we can expect more situations like it, because leftists are not used to having professors refuse to buckle under. They have ways to destroy careers when crossed.

If the trend continues, BS (Big Science) will find itself too intimidated by the powerful leftists* with their identity politics to appeal to observation and common sense for anything. The mandarins of political correctness have them on a long leash, but they are starting to wind it in. If the totalitarians can do this to Big Science, what can churches and traditional families do?

Ironically, around the same time, Science Daily printed a post about “the universality of shame.” Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are at it again (3 Aug 2018), destroying civilization by explaining everything about human behavior as an evolutionary adaptation (23 July 2017). According to their latest just-so story, shame evolved as a defense mechanism. This means that Science was not engaged in an unbiased search for the truth when it reported the “debate” about rapid onset gender dysphoria. The editors were just puppets of their selfish genes, conditioned to use ancient evolved responses to perceived threats. Shame is universal in human nature, Tooby and Cosmides claim, except that they should be ashamed for posting this stupid story, but are not.

Screwtape and Wormwood are howling at the gullibility of humans who think the senior devil’s latest play, The Shaming of the True, is about reality.

*See the difference between liberalism and leftism in this short video on Prager University.