Years of ignoring Jerry Coyne, a record ruined by the fact that I felt obligated to find out what he’s complaining about in order to address that recent bad article…and what do I find? His usual half-assed whining about people different from him.
When I gave a lecture in the Deep South some years ago, I went to dinner with several of the biology faculty, who told me of the occurrence of “furries” (actually, better known as “otherkins”) among the students. “Otherkins” are students who dress up and act like nonhuman animals in their day-to-day life. But the group the profs were really concerned with were students who identified as animals, claiming that they had the spirit of animals, insisting on being addressed as the animal they identified with, and wore animal costumes like ears or tails. These are the true “otherkins”. I saw several of these, including one girl who had a horse tail stuck in the back of her pants. The professors told me that they had been given special instruction by the university on how to treat and deal with the otherkins.
I haven’t seen any otherkins at my University, but this Torygraph article (click on the screenshot to go to the archived piece) notes that it is an issue in Britain, and schools don’t know how to deal with it. I was sent this article by a Brit who couldn’t believe that the phenomenon was real. I assured my correspondent that yes, this is a reality.
Oh god. No, it’s not real. Furries/otherkin do exist, but they are fully aware of their identities — they just enjoy role-playing. Seeing a girl with a horsetail stuck in her pants does not mean they’re running around, thinking they are a horse, and that the university needs to provide special instructions for how to deal with them. Just talk to them. You know, like they’re human beings. That works. I’ve even attended a furry convention, and honestly, it’s no more weird than attending a D&D con…or an atheist convention.
What next? Is he going to declare that American schools are putting out kitty litter for the kids who identify as cats?
Anyway, in this case he credulously goes on to tell the story of kids in England thinking they are cats and other animals.
Perhaps tellingly, the incident at Rye College – a Church of England school – happened at the end of a class on “life education” in which children were told by their teacher that there were lots of genders, including “agender – people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.
An argument ensued in which two pupils disagreed with the teacher, saying there was no such thing as agender, because “if you have a vagina, you’re a girl and if you have a penis, you’re a boy – that’s it”.
When the pupils told their classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” the teacher reprimanded them for “questioning [the child’s] identity”.
In this instance, the teacher in charge of the class appears to have bracketed a child’s desire to be treated as a cat with other children’s desire to be treated as another gender, or genderless.
To Coyne, this is evidence of his bigoted presumption that this is a case of social contagion promulgated by both peers and also by teachers who have been indoctrinated by gender activism to accept any child’s assumed identity.
Indoctrination! Gender activism! Social contagion!
Except…that’s not what happened at all. It’s all hyper-inflated hyperbole from the UK news media. The school has said it didn’t happen.
In a statement to Schools Week, the trust said it wanted to “clarify that no children at Rye College identifies as a cat or any other animal”.
Doesn’t matter. By then, GB News, the Daily Mail, and Tucker Carlson were promoting the kind of nonsense that finds favor with Coyne, all based on a brief Tik Tok excerpt of a longer discussion held in the classroom. One reporter, Otto English, dug deeper and interviewed one of the people involved.
We have taken the time both to establish this individual’s credibility and to safeguard their identity and as such the individual is anonymous and some critical details given to us have been deliberately omitted. I am very aware that the two children who made the recording are also just that – children – and so have taken care to omit details about them and some of the things they are alleged to have said on the day.
I shall refer to the ‘cat’ pupil as ‘Student A’ and the two individuals who made the tape as “B” and “C”.
Our correspondent – present in the room – tells us: I want to make (it) clear that ‘A’ does not identify as a cat.
What, by our source’s account, happened is that there was an ongoing conversation happening between several pupils about identity before B and C engaged with them and – according to our source – as the discussion became increasingly personal and ill-tempered, either B or C then said, apropos of gender: ‘if you identify as a cat or a carrot you are insane’.
In other words, nobody was talking about ‘cats’ until the subject of them was introduced into the conversation by one of the two pupils who later made the recording. This was a broad-ranging conversation about gender and identity between a group of kids in Year 8 which seems to have turned nasty before the teacher intervened.
Our source defends the teacher and says that having started out ‘extremely calm’ she only became ‘irritable’ when the two students became increasingly ‘disrespectful’.
That’s it. People can be grumpy when arguing about sex and gender — Coyne should know, he’s a good example. That’s all this was, young people expressing their opinions, and there were no cat-people involved.
It’s simply a British example of the litter boxes in the classroom lie that was spread over here on this side of the Atlantic, and anyone who falls for it should not be taken seriously.
Fun fact: Furry fandom’s been around in it’s current form since the late 80s. I’ve been in it since 1990. The only way you can characterize it as a “social contagion” is if that phrase means “learning something exists”…
90+% of the freak-out around furry fandom boils down it the fact that it’s very LGBTQ+ friendly (in a 2020 survey, only about 20% of furries identified as straight).
There’s a fun collection of social science research into furry fandom at https://furscience.com/research-findings/
I had mostly been hate-reading Coyne for quite some time. Many of the memes he posts lately I’ve seen multiple times already so that usefulness has receded. He’s become, with some but not all his commentariat, a reflexive reactionary outrage machine about all things ctrl-left…regressive left…woke. Some commenters push back, risking the infamous Coyne banhammer (has Paul Topping ever been seen there again after he pissed Coyne off for pointing out what Rufo was about?). Free speech guy hates criticism from the untermenschen.
He wrote a speciation book and a pop primer on evolution so can thus opine on anything else at will. And he sometimes feigns being a leftist while pushing towards the center-right of the spectrum.
The recent facepalming furry-otherkin post on his BLOG has shifted the meter into the redline of full blown ridiculousness in this terminal phase of his kid-dissing dotage.
… the trust said it wanted to “clarify that no children at Rye College identifies as a cat or any other animal”.
So who will raise the alarm that the administration of a Church of England school fails at noun-verb agreement?!?
Coyne claims to be a liberal, mentioned Peter Thiel on his blog, then later claimed he’d never heard of Thiel, then participated in the Peter Thiel key-noted conference on “free speech” that was just an excuse for right-wingers and racists like Amy Wax to socialize and recite grievances. Thiel gave a crackpot mess of a keynote, referencing the Bible to make his point that our choice now is Armageddon vs. Apocalypse. As far as I’ve been able to find, Coyne has had nothing bad to say about the Trump-funding, anti-democracy, Bible-quoting, crackpot Peter Thiel.
Coyne is a reactionary IDW clown now.
https://www.pinkerite.com/search?q=coyne
I put this blogpost into the Coyne’s greatest hits collection: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/07/28/social-engineering-in-portlands-schools/
Especially given Coyne’s telling reaction to a long-standing commenter there:
“That’s enough. Your goal here is to vindicate yourself by dissing Rufo. Sorry, but you have to go after his argument, not go after the person. I bet you’re furiously Googling to find out bad stuff about him.”
The commenter got disappeared. Wonder why…
Hi Pinkerite!
Way OT tangent: I wish PZ would get around to Larry Moran’s excellent new book on the wonders of junk DNA. Coyne hasn’t either that I know of. Nudge, nudge.
I just finished it! I will be getting to it — it’s just that I’ve got this big meeting coming up next week.
Sweet.
I’m no expert and have no direct experience of furries, and therians (see article below), but judging from what I’ve seen of the waxing and waning of the hysteria around anything not mainstream (e. g., D&D, Satanic Temple, atheism — grew up in the Bible Belt — anything than 100% homophobic heterosexuality etc), a lot of this boils down to fear and fear of anything different from what Mommy & Daddy said.
https://unherd.com/2023/05/the-animals-trapped-in-human-bodies/
I’ve even attended a furry convention, and honestly, it’s no more weird than attending a D&D con…or an atheist convention.
Either of those would be way to weird for the likes of Coyne too.
The only way you can characterize [furry fandom] as a “social contagion” is if that phrase means “learning something exists”…
Yes, that’s exactly what that phrase means to the reactionaries.
So Coyne thinks the novel by Stephen King is based on reality? Should there not be a lot more dead bodies?
Two words: “skin walkers”!
It’s a good thing these people aren’t English majors instead. The crackpots would eventually notice Jonathan Swift’s writings. And the next thing we’d hear from them would be alarmist hysterics about how British explorers had encountered enormous and tiny humans. And they’d be claiming in all seriousness that the Irish potato famine was solved by cooking up a whole generation of Irish babies like so many hams.
I don’t believe this!!!
I’m sure furries exist but I don’t believe they spend all their waking hours pretending to be humanoid animals on campus.
My basis for saying this.
I was on one of several major university campuses for one reason or another here and there, sometimes teaching a class, and never saw this. Up until around the year 2000. I’ve also never heard about this.
Anyone, can you confirm Coyne’s claim or not?
I’m a Boomer and after a while fashions and fads just sort of pass one by.
I hope there are people on this blog who weren’t born in the Dark Ages.
FWIW, I’ve seen people at rock concerts wearing tails with their tie dyed T shirts.
They weren’t out of place.
@13 raven
I saw Student A at a grocery store in East Sussex yesterday. I told them how cool it was to meet them in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother them and ask them for photos or anything.
They said, “Oh, like you’re doing meow?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but they kept cutting me off and going “meow? meow? meow?” and retracting their claws shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard them chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw them trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Meow Mixes in their hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Kitty, you need to pay for those first.” At first they kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, they stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical interfurrence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, they kept interrupting her by hissing really loudly.
Sometimes furries go out in their fursuits just randomly. There is more than one video of people having amused positive reactions to that. Others may see their presence in public as negative without reason. I’m sure those videos are there too. And I’m sure there are some who try to make more of a lifestyle out of it.
But mostly it’s a pastime, and they gossip conflating furries with otherkin and their imaginations.
Well, OK.
I put the question, Are Furries and Otherkins found on university campuses into Google. Here is the third result.
It’s an urban myth.
Or something like the periodic satanic panics that we see.
Coyne is making things up now.
He’s lost to reality and lost in his own mind.
Meanwhile this hot mess that’s been going downhill fast (wonder where Coyne throws in as he provided well informed links from a physician he knows during the height of the pandemic…I found them very valuable…just sayin’):
https://skepchick.org/2023/06/no-one-should-debate-anti-vaxx-kook-rfk-jr-on-joe-rogan/
And Rebecca’s on point: “To which Joe Rogan responded with a pathetic, open-mouthed gape. Because he’s what would happen if you gave a podcast to one of the monkeys who had his neurons melted by Elon Musk supergluing a computer chip to his brain.”
Priceless slam! I would watch old episodes of NewsRadio starring my comic hero Phil Hartman, but they are polluted by knuckledragging Rogan so no. Fuck that!
This part concerned me: “Rogan began harassing Hotez, joined by Kennedy, Elon Musk, Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer, and a thousand morons who paid Elon Musk $8 a month for their harassment to appear at the top of these threads.”
I get that he’s persona non grata here but has he gone down the epistemic shithole that far? His tweet read charitably seems to encourage Hotez to demolish worthless POS RFK Jr (embarrassment to Kennedy clan…Ahlnuld got his shot!): https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/1670261792621359104
“Dear @PeterHotez I encourage you to debate @RobertKennedyJr on @joerogan
on vaccines, autism, Covid, cell phones & cancer & all the rest. I did a 3.5 hour debate on Joe’s show—he’s a stand-up guy & will absolutely be fair & give you the time you need. Podcasts are the new media center. Why would you pass up $100,000 & tens of millions of viewers? Do it.”
I mean the hyperbole about Rogan being a standup guy is total BS but I cannot fathom, regardless what a POS he is himself, Shermer being OK with antivaxxers per autism and COVID conspiracies, the cell phone nonsense (5G) etc. If I’m wrong about that, Shermer has really tripped himself face first into the shitter.
I would err on the side of not appearing on scumbag Rogan’s show and giving RFK Jr the time of day. Arnold Schwarzenegger would be a better saner venue and he’s allegedly a right-winger:
The question I always have for the litter box urban legend spreaders is “Why is it only a claim of a litter box in school?” Furries dress as all kinds of animals. Bears poop in the woods, why no stories of students being allowed to wander among the trees for a bathroom break? Why no stories of a student who identifies as a dog being accommodated at the end of a leash?
@dbinmn #18: Oh, I think I know this one! They don’t want to accidentally trip over the real fetishes their conservative peers are hiding. That would just be embarrassing. I mean, you make this whole big to-do about how “kids these days” + some random crazy nonsense you made up = apocalypse. And then next thing you know some rando is asking you to point them towards the apocalypse because it sounds kind of interesting.
Where does this leave the people pretending to be robots? Can I be a person pretending to be a robot pretending to be a furry?
@18, apparently the litter box story was triggered by schools stocking kitty litter for kids who puked at school and sadly also to accommodate kids under lock-downs in class rooms during active shooter events.
hemidactylus:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
Shermer is on the circuit.
hemidactylus @ 17, I will grant one partial truth to the hype against cell phones.
They can cause headaches.
From a type of radiation well known to most, sound. They make a noise demanding attention when you’re busy and with enough of such stimulus, one grows tense and gets a headache.
I tend to put mine on silent and to any who complain to me about it, I gently remind them that that’s a half-measure, as I really would prefer to simply turn the damned thing off until I’m good and ready to get some nonsensical message.
Well, off or in the river across the street… Alas, none of the fish was interested in being my secretary.
I have no doubt that Furries and Otherkins exist but so what?
It’s a free country and people have all sorts of hobbies.
A few related ones.
.1. Civil war reenacters who recreate the Civil War.
.2. Drag Queens.
.3. Pioneer and Mountain men re-enacters who recreate the old west.
.4. Cosplayers are everywhere, recreating comic book and movie characters such as Wonder Woman/Princess Diana of Themyscira, Thor, Batman, Robin, etc..
.5. A lot of religious groups dress in various costumes. Some Orthodox Jews dress in 19th century suits because of course, that is in the 500 BCE Torah. Some of the local Menonites where I used to live also dress in archaic clothing style.
6. I almost forgot this one.
The Society for Creative Anachronisms.
The Middle Ages.
They’ve been around for a long time and are still popular.
7. The Renaissance Fair people.
8. The Boy Scouts with their sort of military looking uniforms and badges.
9. I’m sure there are more that I can’t think of right now.
So what is the difference here between all these groups and the Furries and Otherkins?
Not much.
It’s a free country and people can dress however they want for whatever reasons they want.
If it is harmless, it is none of your business or concern.
The brony version involves all those public aspects. And you had people declaring characters literal girlfriends… this is fandom. It has occasional embodied sensory aspects. Similar things exist in other fandoms.
Gestures towards animal mythology, mascots, creature hybrid stuff…
I think the point PZ is making is much simpler.
“When I gave a lecture in the Deep South some years ago, I went to dinner with several of the biology faculty, who told me of the occurrence of “furries” (actually, better known as “otherkins”) among the students. “Otherkins” are students who dress up and act like nonhuman animals in their day-to-day life. But the group the profs were really concerned with were students who identified as animals, claiming that they had the spirit of animals, insisting on being addressed as the animal they identified with, and wore animal costumes like ears or tails. These are the true “otherkins”. I saw several of these, including one girl who had a horse tail stuck in the back of her pants. The professors told me that they had been given special instruction by the university on how to treat and deal with the otherkins.”
Credibility-wise, this is on a par with Trump’s weeping manly men who come to him to gush at his magnificence.
Furries exist. I have met some. It’s not all role-playing, but even those who do identify as an animal don’t want to use kitty litter to toilet or any of the other fevered imagings of malicious gossips turned into ‘news’ by the mendacracy. this is nothing more than the right-wing need to drum up a constant supply of ideological enemies.
And as John says, it is all highly sus. ‘The professors told me that they had been given special instruction by the university on how to treat and deal with the otherkins.’ So they can provide a copy of the memo, then.
First off, furries and otherkin are two different things, Coyne appears to treat them as the same but prefers the term otherkin, probably because it sounds weirder. But about Otherkin, they do exist. They’re distinct from furries in that they actually do identify as something other than human. I am a furry, but I’ve never really talked to any otherkin (that I know of) so I’m not a great person to be explaining their nature, but whenever this subject comes up I usually try to point out that they are real, they’re not just a right wing fabrication. Needless to say I think they deserve the same basic level of decency and respect that we all do. And I don’t think they go out of the way to paint a giant target on themselves in school.
I didn’t see the Coyne post before this, but I think I did see the article that he referenced. It was the most blatant attempt yet to take the same story that’s been spreading around Facebook in the USA (and apparently the rest of the world, I’m told it spread around Australia too) and dress it up as if it’s a real thing that’s happening locally, and the thing is, you can tell it’s the same specific story that’s been spreading over social media. It’s always got several of the same distinctive elements. This time there was apparently no mention of litter boxes in bathrooms, but something else was present. It included students meowing. Whenever this story is repeated, it always includes students meowing (and sometimes barking). The full version that’s been spreading around Facebook includes a story about the rest of the students being made to fear the furries (it’s usually about furries, making it about otherkin instead was an interesting modification), and that barks and meows are often heard in the school hallways.
Let me tell you why that tells me this was made up. I’ve attended many furry conventions. I’ve spent a lot of time in crowded furry filled hallways. How many times have I heard meowing? Zero. Cat furries just don’t meow all that often, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to hear it above the noise of a hallway filled with people having countless conversations.
Also furries take more fursonas than just domestic cats and dogs. But the story usually assumes that that’s all they do. Whoever constructed this tale out of whole cloth had very little imagination. This version, if Coyne and I read the same thing, expanded out a bit to include some other kinds of animals, but it still includes a student who never speaks and supposedly only meows. And look, I’m not going to say that never happens ever. People can be weird, kids doubly so, I won’t say that no kid ever would do such a thing. But to see people all over the US and now other places as well all claiming to have seen it, no, I simply do not believe them.
I’ll add on one more thing, because furries are now unfortunately fully a part of the right wing culture wars. A furry convention in Florida called Megaplex made the decision to go adult only this year. Not because they decided to go with adult only activities, but because they’re worried about some of the Florida laws that targeted LGBT people, especially the anti-drag stuff. The laws are written vaguely enough as to be applicable to a wide variety of situations, they’re meant to make the LGBT community live in fear. And DeSantis is known to have used undercover “agents” to infiltrate events and try to find a pretense to punish them. If they did that at a furry convention, I guarantee you they could find something that that law applied to. One of the details specifies “simulated sex acts” as one of the things that triggers the law. Well that’s easy. Go to the dance at night and find two people grinding against each other.
I saw Fox News covering this, they used the headline of “furries declare war on DeSantis”. So.. yup. It’s not that big of a difference, given how LGBT the fandom is and how young it is we were always going to trend to the left. But it still felt different seeing Fox News trying to position us as an enemy to their anti-woke hero. It feels dangerous.
I bowled with an otherkin back when I was an undergrad. They were pretty adamant about feeling a tail.
So what is the difference here between all these groups and the Furries and Otherkins?
Not much.
Are furries as bad as MAGA or proud boys?
I know it’s just perfectionism on my part but the whole “litter box” meme makes me seethe. Using a litter box is a learned behavior in “house broken” felix domesticus. Not all cats. The bobcat who lives on my property proudly poops on a big rock at an intersection in my driveway. The pooping behaviors of animals are much more complex, and I want to know if furries are correctly species roleplaying before anyone gets all bent out of shape about it.
Someone who wants to cosplay as a dog bothers me much less than someone who wants to cosplay as a navy SEAL or a catholic priest or a lawyer. Especially if they are not “house broken”
Isn’t this exactly the same whining he had about how universities were installing safe spaces for queer and ethnic minority students?
As I recall, pointing out that his blog was a safe space since he tightly controlled what could and could not be discussed in the comments was just like how safe spaces in colleges worked was what got me banned. Not sure if it was for pointing out the hypocrisy or just calling it a blog that did it. But he’s one easily triggered snowflake.
@29 — ‘Bowling with the Otherkin’ is a great book title.
See, this part would concern me. A teenager who doesn’t understand the difference between outward appearance and internal feeling?
At best, they failed to understand what “gender” means. At worst, they’ve failed to develop a theory of mind.
The Daily Telegraph used to be a newspaper. I read it regularly as an adolescent, because my father subscribed to it. It was always right-wing, but I find it hard to believe its editors at that time would have even considered publishing the sort of crap it now peddles on a regular basis.
@ #33
“A teenager who doesn’t understand the difference between outward appearance and internal feeling?”
Excuse me. I don’t know if I truly need to reply to this, and I don’t want to come across as scolding somebody like a child. I’m just mentioning this because I think it is a point that needs to be emphasized.
To wit, gender identity is not a FEELING. I generally think of it as a “function of the brain”, and in a conversation of this sort I sometimes compare it to an aptitude for math. Is being good at math a feeling, or is it simply something that your brain knows how to do?
Or similarly I might ask, is being straight a feeling, or is it an objective fact about you? To be sure, being straight can produce feelings, but it is not itself a feeling. It’s just a part of who you are (if you’re straight).
The reason I bring this up is because one of the chief strategies adopted by the anti-trans crowd is to trivialize gender identity as if it’s not a real thing so as to make it (along with us) go away. It’s just a feeling, e.g., and sure we have all sorts of feelings and trans people shouldn’t get special consideration because they have a certain feeling just like everybody else.
Or just yesterday somebody gave a quote from good-old JK Rowling in which she asserted that transgender people believe in an “essence” which, they claim, makes them different internally from outwardly, and of course sensible people are perfectly free to disagree with that sort of nonsense. I thought I knew what an essence was, but I checked a dictionary just to make sure, and no, it isn’t an essence.
What is gender identity exactly? The fact is that’s something I can hesitate over. We might await the verdict of neuroscientists, assuming that some great day in the future they will be able to explain in detail why exactly trans people are trans. My own working (and somewhat tautological) definition of gender identity is “a function of the brain that gives the ‘self’ a gender quality”.
But I don’t see why I’m required to explain all my inner workings in detail when nobody else on earth can explain all of theirs. Is gender identity a real, objective phenomenon? It is of course. It’s been with me for 69 years now and it’s obvious that it’s not going away. Trivialize it, dismiss it as you like, but it’s not going to go away and neither are transgender people.
Sorry if I’m ruffling anybody’s feathers here. That wasn’t my intention, but I think you can understand that this is an important point for me.
No worries, moonslicer. Worthwhile.
From the horse’s mouth, so to speak. :)
@ 35 moonslicer
You are quite right that they’re being ridiculous. The gender identity clinic – that was it’s actual name – at Johns Hopkins University opened in 1966.
Gender identity has been formally studied for well over half a century and the consensus is that it forms around the age of three, is extremely resistant if not impervious to external manipulation, and study after study has shown cross-gender identity is as deeply held as cisgender identity.
After decades of study and peer reviewed research, any psychologist who didn’t “believe” in gender identity would be dismissed as an utter crank.
The idea gender identity is an “unfalsifiable essence” (when that’s no less true of sexual orientation) is transphobic propaganda.
Transgender Kids Show Consistent Gender Identity Across Measures – Association for Psychological Science – APS
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/transgender-kids-show-consistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html
Transgender children sense true gender at young age, study finds
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5408732
Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children—Here’s What They Found
https://www.newsweek.com/transgender-kids-living-identity-develop-cis-children-1471729
@moonslicer:
That’s fine. The word “feeling” wasn’t really my point. I was simply pointing out that when discussing “a function of the brain” (or whatever other term we might use), then referring to the physical arrangement of genitalia is obviously missing the point.
Oddly enough, such people are clearly incredibly invested in their own gender identity, even as they refuse to admit they have one. I guess that’s where concepts like “normativity” comes in.
It’s all a furball in a cat bowl if you ask me. Trekkiedom is much more serious. Especially when you can’t get into your uniform any more because it’s shrunk (That’s my excuse anyway) I don’t ever remember anyone dressing up as Tribble, though, but it’s not a bad idea..
Signal boost: click the pinkerite.com link at Nancy McClernan’s # 4 to see a clear and detailed takedown of multiple, ahem, political lapses by J. Coyne and (as the URL suggests) some guy named Steven Pinker. The sidebar suggests the parallel dissection of numerous other “Intellectual Dark Web” luminaries – a real resource for IDW opponents.
I remember years ago, he used to spend time debunking creationism online. I remember visiting his site where he published articles debunking creationism which helped me to deal with my struggle with creationism years ago. That was then. Now he’s into anti-trans bigotry? I swear the pandemic and that Stupid Idiot Trump presidency has gotten to his head badly.
I find it odd (and somewhat funny) how people who call themselves “rationalists” have little to no self-awareness. I’m not even old, but whenever I see younger people doing things I don’t understand or find odd, I know I’m generally being grumpy.
To my credit, I don’t go around saying there’s some kind of “social contagion”. What’s next? Calling people “degenerate”?
The first time that I ever heard of furries was when I was teaching in a high school.
I complemented a student on her cute black headband with black cat ears attached.
She turned and showed my the little black tail that she had attached to her jeans, and explained that
it was a continuation of the fun that she had had at the furry convention downtown that weekend.
She showed me a picture on her phone of herself wearing her full costume at the convention.
That was one that I had to look up!
When my husband and I worked at a Comic Con in the same city, we saw a few furries wandering around that convention.
Like those of us who dressed as our favorite characters for Comic Con, they seemed to welcome any opportunity to dress as their favorite characters and socialize with understanding people.
BTW, I dressed as a fairly passable 13th Doctor Who, and my husband dressed as the hitchhiker from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, complete with a beach towel thrown over his shoulder. It was all done to have some fun!
The current issue of Skeptical Inquirer has an article by Coyne titled the Ideological Subversion of Science. Yes, it’s exactly what expect. P.Z gets a mention as one of the guilty parties! Congratulations!
Yes, the litter box thing is actually true, but it’s happening for a different reason:
https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-schools-issuing-buckets-kitty-litter-students-go-bathroom-during-lockdowns-school-1455261
So kids don’t get their faces shot off trying to pee during an active shooter. Seriously. That’s why this was a thing but it had nothing to do with furries. Nothing.
Good lord, I quit reading Coyne years ago, but he’s really lost his grip on reality if he’s raging against furries. Guy would probably crap himself seeing the Autobot insignia that I wear around my neck.
@ # 41
“The word “feeling” wasn’t really my point.”
Hi, LykeX!
Yes, I understood that that wasn’t really your point–which is why I hesitated to reply to your post at all. The only reason I did was that this word “feeling” (often coupled with “subjective”, as in “subjective feeling”) is used quite often, usually by our enemies, as a means of trivializing and attacking us. That was the point I was trying to explain.
Neither am I wedded to this expression “a function of the brain”. I would like to find something more succinct, but the point I’m making by using it is that gender identity is a real, objective phenomenon, something our enemies are always trying to deny.
” . . . referring to the physical arrangement of genitalia is obviously missing the point.”
Exactly, and this is what our enemies do over and over and over. They’ll talk about genitalia or DNA or (in the case of a doctor whose article I once saw) the difference between male and female internal organs. I.e., they’ll talk about anything but gender identity, which is the whole point of the exercise. They’re not just barking up the wrong tree. They’re barking in the wrong flippin’ forest. They will do anything they can to avoid making a genuine effort to understand what it is to be transgender.
@ #37 silentbob
“The idea gender identity is an “unfalsifiable essence” . . .”
Rowling seems to have absolutely no self-awareness. At times she makes herself look like the most awful bird-brain without realizing it. As I pointed out elsewhere, gender identity is not an “essence”, but, as Rowling further complains, it isn’t falsifiable. That’s because it isn’t false.
Like all TERFs, Rowling is trying to pretend that we’re all engaged in a huge, society-wide debate on various points such as gender identity. They have their point of view and we have our point of view, and both points of view should be respected, blah, blah, blah, and so she’s complaining because we’re not giving her a sporting chance to refute something that she knows nothing about.
We aren’t actually engaged in a debate. (Why in the world would we get into a debate with a lot of TERFs?) What we’re doing is trying to explain to people what we are, and they’ll decide for themselves whether or not they want to listen to us. We’re not going to put TERFs on an equal footing with us and go along with the view that they know as much about these things as we do.
There’s something wrong with Rowling (obviously). She actually believes that she knows more about us than we do (see her remarks about ROGD in her long ago published anti-trans manifesto), and she actually gets quite angry and indignant when we dare to contradict her. Some of us (like me, e.g.) know when we’re out of our depth, and so we refrain from arguing with people who clearly know more on a given topic than we do. You’ll never see me, e.g., arguing with PZ about biology. But Rowling just jumps right in, and then she’s astonished to see that we don’t particularly like her. Well, obviously, we’re just bad people.
yeonkimu @ 45, whenever I see younger people doing something I don’t understand or find odd, I simply look and think:
Don’t you try to out-weird me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
And then, Well, I’ve done worse and probably will do worse again later.
Like perhaps, going to a Trek convention dressed as a tribble, hanging out with the Klingons and carrying a bat’leth. Or worse, dress up as Sully from Monsters, Inc and do the same, telling attendees that I’m an adult tribble.
One has to have a sense of humor. That’s pretty much why I keep a mirror around.
I self-identify as the character in “Murderbot”.
(I strongly recommend that book)
They’ll run into “fursona” at some point.
Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children…
Well, they’d better follow it up with the Biggest Ever Printing Run, just to make sure there’s too many copies of their work out there for any party or faction to burn, like they did almost a century ago now.
Raging Bee, they can burn away until the oxygen’s gone from the atmosphere, they’ll still continue to fail, as one cannot burn electrons.
@moonslicer #49
For the record, I think that’s totally legitimate. It’s important to keep an eye on the language that the assholes are using. I imagine you’re more aware of that than I am, so I appreciate the input.
On an extended note, I find it weird that “subjective” have somehow come to mean “not real”. It’s an objective fact that people have subjective evaluations, so when discussing personal identity – a subject which is inherently subjective – pointing out that it is subjective is hardly the knock-out punch they seem to think it is.
Thanks Pierce R. Butler!