Skeptic

Bitching about trying not to do racism?

Ah, no: bitching about trying not to do transphobia. Starting off by fucking up sex and gender. No politics anywhere are stifling your ability to talk about does versus bucks. We are talking about people. You have a moral duty to minimize harm, even when describing true things. If you feel constrained by guidelines to avoid fueling bigots then imagine how their targets feel about bigots given fuel.

Teachers have been hounded out of their jobs and deprived of their classes simply for declaring that human sex is binary.

I appeared on “Fox and Friends,” a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological.

Yeah simply for agreeing with fascists, on national television, to promote their anti-trans bigotry. Using the full weight of your institution's gravitas. Posterior bootprint deserved.

To a biologist, this kind of blank-slateism—which may stem partly from the Marxist faith in the infinite malleability of humans—is profoundly wrong.

Aaand the author blames communism. Fuck off with this garbage. People avoiding bell-curve scientific-sexism prejudice are not picking a fight with numbers or biology, they are trying to protect real living persons, from politics, using politics.

Your discipline interacts with reality. Your actions affect people, in the here and now. You want it to just be the medical stuff! You want it to just be the breakthroughs from unrestrained curiosity. But pop-science that emerges organically has excused, bolstered, or outright caused immense human suffering. People are getting on top of that shit, to help you avoid providing cover for monsters.

Oh hey, and they do get around to bitching about trying not to do racism! Look: to some extent race and ethnicity need to be cleaved apart like sex and gender, so when someone says one of them is kinda bullshit, their meaning is clear. Outside of bad-faith misrepresentation like this article started off with for sex and gender. Whoopsie doodle. But the larger picture is that oh my god your own fucking example is a guy saying some ethnic groups might be dumber. That's your defense? That's the argument! Nooo shit people get in trouble "for merely suggesting the possibility" that we could rank the races. To scoff and sputter like you can't see the harm in that is either being so far up the ivory tower you need an oxygen tank... or just being a bigot, yourself.

Underlined a thousand times by the next paragraph beginning 'well everyone knows IQ tests already prove some groups are automatically dumber.'

To the author's undue credit, closing out with woo-woo nonsense suggests the former. But just fucking barely. They still dropped a link to a guy who was invited on Fox News to effectively say trans people are faking it, as if that guy facing consequences was incomprehensible. Motherfucker you namedropped creationism. You know debate doesn't work on frauds! You know that showing up to call bullshit, can often promote bullshit! That's why they want to debate you! Showing up to agree, but then split hairs, isn't even partial credit. You fail. You actively made the world a little bit worse, just because you couldn't imagine an audience outside tightly-puckered academia.

You want to keep this shit amongst yourselves until you figure assholes won't abuse it? Go back to writing it in Latin.

Hmmmm what are your thoughts on this? I thought it was interesting and very opinionated. The authors are definitely clear on their stance. I'll admit, I skimmed bits and read others, but it felt more like this essay was comprised of things they just wanted to get off their chest and not a means to try and sway any detractors. Which maybe was the point, but it left me wanting.

This article leans more toward Denialism than Skepticism, and you need look no further than the very first point they make to see that.

1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum. This statement, one of the most common political distortions of biology (e.g., Ainsworth 2018), is wrong because nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories.

They contradict themselves in the very same sentence. "nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories" is just another way of saying "sex is a spectrum because some people DO fall between two distinct groups". There are many millions of people out there like this and deserve to be considered in scientific research.

Then their 2nd point is just a blatant straw man:

2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

I very much doubt this is a common statement made by any legitimate scientist. Nature and Nurture is at the very core of human psychology. That's psychology 101.

Given that they opened their article with these two intentionally fallacious statements, I see no reason to read any further. The authors need to examine themselves for ideological biases, not accuse everyone else of it.