Once again, the Witherspoon assumes their biases are laws

The Witherspoon Institute has once again decided to dictate to us all about the proper, conservative approach to everything. This time, they take aim at National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution”: Bad Argument and Biased Ideology. Of course they’re agin’ them transgenders.

The January 2017 issue of National Geographic is dedicated to exploring what it calls the “Gender Revolution”—a post-Sexual Revolution movement that seeks to deconstruct traditional understandings about human embodiment, male-female sexual dimorphism, and gender. In an article titled “Rethinking Gender,” Robin Marantz Henig cites evolving gender norms as a justification for the Gender Revolution. But Henig’s argument is not only unpersuasive, it’s also based on a radical proposal about human nature that is at odds with both natural law and biblical anthropology.

I started reading this essay enthused about seeing their “natural law” and “biblical anthropology” arguments, both subjects I find to be nonsensical trash, and therefore ripe for mocking. To my disappointment, there is no biblical anthropology anywhere in it, and what ‘natural law’ arguments there are are sadly implicit, and just assumed. It reduces the whole essay to weak whining.

They have only one point to make, and it’s laid out in this one paragraph.

Indeed, this is the crux of the matter that plagues the transgender movement. It is based not on evidence, but on the ideology of expressive individualism—the idea that one’s identity is self-determined, that one should live out that identity, and that everyone else must respect and affirm that identity, no matter what it is. Expressive individualism requires no moral argument or empirical justification for its claims, no matter how absurd or controverted they may be. Transgenderism is not a scientific discovery but a prior ideological commitment about the pliability of gender.

The Witherspoon Institute, that deeply ideological organization, wants to argue that transgender people are wrong because they are ideological. But of course they are! So am I! So are they! If they want to claim that an “absence of scientific discovery” invalidates a whole personal and cultural phenomenon, they’re going to have to burn down the entirety of their archives, because nowhere, including in this essay, do they build a case for their ideology with science. In fact, this is the whole of their defense.

Accepting the claims of transgender ideology requires papering over one’s conscience and making a mockery of the “law written on the heart” that our bodies bear witness to in our complementary design.

They want to claim that there is a “law written on the heart” that makes the gender binary natural and proper and righteous — but they make no scientific (or biblical anthropological, which is fine, because I’d dismiss it) argument for that claim.

Here’s my proudly ideological argument against the Witherspoon’s biases.

The gender binary is a social construct: it is a set of behaviors and expectations for how people should conform within a society. It is built around biological predispositions which are real but not absolute; all we have to do is look at different cultures around the world and see that there different expectations in different societies. Real men don’t cry? Not always. Women are the sheltered, weaker sex? Not always. Men should always “pay” at the “restaurant” when they take a woman out on a “date”? I can’t even begin to unpack all the artificial cultural constructs built into that sentence. They are really trying to impose the standards of Victorian England on all of humanity, which is the kind of thing Victorians did all the time, but isn’t it about time we kicked that bullshit to the curb?

They want to argue that humans aren’t plastic, but are fixed by their biological natures. But we know that isn’t true, because we can see that human beings have thrived in a variety of different cultures without a necessary genetic difference in their makeup. Look at the United States — we have people living here who within the last few generations have come from Vietnam, Ireland, Laos, Nigeria, Peru, Sweden, Somalia, Iran, etc., etc., etc., and they have adapted, and in fact, the conservative American ideology requires that they must conform.

This is what people do. They adapt, they conform, they absorb the expectations of their surrounding culture, especially as children, and they also bring their past experiences into communities and shape their environments. The Witherspoon wants to reify masculinity and femininity to fit their ideological preconceptions, deny the reality of people’s identity, and they reject arguments against that kind of cultural imperialism because, they say, you can’t fit a person’s perception of their identity under a microscope. Well, you can’t fit Christian conservativism under a microscope either, yet you’re sinking a lot of money, time, and effort into propping it up.

Not everyone will be accommodating of your particular views. I am not comfortable, to put it mildly, with Christian conservativism — you don’t get to tell me that I am wrong in my identity, and that I must learn to love faith and oppressive authoritarianism. However, I am personally comfortable with my expected gender role — I have never questioned my conformity to maleness — but I am also capable of recognizing that not everyone else is, and that they would be as unhappy with a world that dictates that they must be a straight heterosexual man’s man as I would with a world that told me I had to participate in gay sex, and like it (although if I’d been brought up through childhood in that world where gender fluidity was more common, maybe I would…which I suspect is one of the ideas that horrifies the Witherspoon).

That the majority of people fall into one of the two broad, culturally accepted definitions of gender is not scientific evidence that these divisions are natural and necessary because, as I said, people are plastic and tend to conform to cultural norms. There have always been individuals who refuse or are unable to meet social expectations, even in Victorian England. The question is whether we punish people by demanding that their identity meet a narrow set of criteria, or whether we accept people for who they are and who they want to be. The former is a formula for widespread misery. The latter leads to greater happiness, although it does tend to piss off the authoritarian prigs who enjoy crushing the joys of others.

I have to confess to sharing a little bit of that latter attitude, because I would greatly enjoy crushing the totalitarian hopes and dreams of the Witherspoon Institute members.

I wouldn’t normally be telling you this

I want you to watch the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, at 8pm ET tonight.

That ad in the NY Times protesting Trump has pissed Ol’ Bill off enough that he has invited a couple of the signatories on to be abused — unfortunately for him, it’ll be Carl Dix and Cornel West, so it might be an incendiary event, and a good time will be held by all.

I guess even I will watch Fox News tonight, much as it pains me.

Another example of why basic research matters

Scientists have been working on techniques to treat mitochondrial diseases, and one strategy is to create “3 parent” babies, where the mother’s defective mitochondria are replaced or supplemented in her gametes with mitochondria from another woman, and the gamete is then fertilized with sperm from the father. It works!

In September, reproductive endocrinologist John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City captured the world’s attention when they announced the birth of a child to a mother carrying a fatal genetic defect.

Using a technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy, the researchers combined DNA from two women and one man to bypass the defect and produce a healthy baby boy — one with, quite literally, three genetic parents.

There is, however, a significant possibility of failure.

Earlier this month, a study published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, head of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, suggested that in roughly 15 percent of cases, the mitochondrial replacement could fail and allow fatal defects to return, or even increase a child’s vulnerability to new ailments.

The findings confirmed the suspicions of many researchers, and the conclusions drawn by Mitalipov and his team were unequivocal: The potential for conflicts between transplanted and original mitochondrial genomes is real, and more sophisticated matching of donor and recipient eggs — pairing mothers whose mitochondria share genetic similarities, for example — is needed to avoid potential tragedies.

This is not at all surprising, and shouldn’t be used as a reason to stop the research. This was expected. Anyone who has studied mitochondrial genetics — and I’m sure this is the case for these researchers as well — knows about dominant negative effects. There are known alleles in mitochondria that are negative, that is they are deleterious to the organelle, and are also dominant, that is, one copy of the of the allele can suppress healthy mitochondria in the same cell. We also know that mitochondria replicate independently of the cell, and that in some cases the defective mitochondria can outcompete and replace the healthy mitochondria. This is the case in, for instance, poky mutants in Neurospora, and petite mutants in yeast.

So, old news. It seems to make the popular press only when it looks like it might affect human beings, though, which is too bad, because awareness of the problem arose from basic cell biology, and will be best solved by experimental work in non-human organisms. Let’s see more funding for yeast and Neurospora and fruit fly and zebrafish research!

Odious Christianity

I woke up to Ken Ham testifying to his faith…and demonstrating why I hate Christianity.

Hate is a strong word, but not strong enough for my feelings. Ken Ham might be a decent human being if he weren’t so thoroughly poisoned by this toxic faith he professes, and insists on infecting others. Christianity is the rot that corrupts minds.

I reject his notion of sin — the idea that there is some kind of divine law against which we can transgress — but humanists do not deny that we can do wrong and we can do harm. We think we should do better, not to appease some vengeful deity, but because it improves our lives and helps make those around us happier and better able to live up to their potential. We certainly do accept that death is inevitable, but not because we are wicked — the wicked often seem to flourish while the good may die young. Are we to measure the virtue of human beings by their longevity? Charles Manson is 82, and surely destined to join the saints in heaven, while every infant death must open a chute directly to hell for its wicked soul.

What enrages me most is the implicit condemnation of every human being who had the effrontery to die, which by the Christian doctrine so clearly stated by Ham is every goddamned human being ever.

So my father, a good man, died quietly in his sleep on Christmas years ago — of heart disease. But in Ken Ham’s filthy mind, his death was the bite of an angry god against whom he’d transgressed.

My sister, a good woman, died suffering in a hospital bed of a massive systemic infection, leaving behind two young children. To Ken Ham, she deserved her death because she’d transgressed in some unknowing way against his mighty, vengeful god.

We all have people we’ve loved and lost to accident, to disease, to old age. To a Christian, their god willed this loss, and to Christians like Ken Ham, those deaths were a punishment for “sin”.

Some day, Ken Ham will die, and remember — it will be because he is struck down by his capricious god for his wickedness, and every moment of his dying, if it be long and agonizing, will be deserved. At least, that’s what he should believe.

Seriously? You’re going to blame the second law of thermodynamics for poverty?

Arguments from Natural Law are among my pet peeves — there’s nothing quite like reducing a complex sociological issue to a simplistic, naive causal relationship based on, of all things, physics. Steven Pinker commits this sin in discussing thermodynamics, which he seems to have a rather cartoonish perspective on, to the point where he decides that poverty is explained by entropy. Or rather, that poverty needs no explanation.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it.

Yeah, rather than talking about exploiters and capitalism and historical inequities and all that messy stuff, let’s instead have a caricature of a physics explanation from a psychologist who apparently gets all of his understanding of thermodynamics from creationist web sites and pop psychology magazines.

I’m just going to wash my hands of this slime and let Blake Stacey explain it all.

University of Minnesota football coach fired

Good news, for a change. After Coach Tracy Claeys proudly supported his gang-banging football team, he got his just reward: he has been fired. That’s the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, the article ends on the really important tragedy: what about the football team?

Minnesota now faces an uphill battle as National Signing Day for high school senior recruits is less than two months away. The football program is in danger of losing several recruits and having to rebuild both the performance side and the reputation destroyed as a result of the alleged incident. But in the bigger picture, administration has delivered the message that whatever happened in the alleged September incident will not be tolerated now or ever again.

With Claeys, the Gophers won nine games in 2016 for the first time since 2003, when they finished 10-3. They also won a bowl game for the second straight year.

Rebuild your reputation by suspending all football games for at least a year. That also solves the problem of rebuilding the performance of the team — maybe they can focus on their studies for a while.

It’s nice to know one lawsuit is going to go down in flames

Oh jebus. Lucas Werner is gloating about winning millions of dollars in a lawsuit against Starbucks, because they wrongfully banned him when all he’d done is pass a “nice note” to a young barista he found attractive.

Unfortunately for him, a “nice note” of the kind he passes to people has been revealed.

There's this chemical in my body Telomerase. All men past 35 automatically become ideal fathers and husbands. It lends offspring strong DNA. It's been a year. It's been 5 years since I've had sex. Why do I feel this need to be inside you?

There’s this chemical in my body Telomerase. All men past 35 automatically become ideal fathers and husbands. It lends offspring strong DNA. It’s been a year. It’s been 5 years since I’ve had sex. Why do I feel this need to be inside you?

“Nice” is not the adjective I’d apply to that: “creepy” is more accurate. As a biologist, I’d say “WRONG” would also be good, although I think the barista is more reasonably going to feel that the former is the right word to use.

There is a disease eating the brains of Americans

It ain’t kuru.

It’s the disease of ignorance, Christianity, conspiracy-theorizing, and the kind of raging right-wing poison that inspires garbage like this.

kuru

Those are the symptoms of kuru — they just copied them off a med site on the internet. They do not apply. Hillary and Bill Clinton do not have kuru. I have a special contempt for assholes who try to assign specific medical diagnoses on the basis of simple prejudice and stupidity.

In case you’re wondering where the hell this lunacy came from, it’s Facebook, obviously, and a group called “Pizzagate”. You don’t want to go there. These are the worst human beings.