I didn’t think my opinion of Riley Gaines could get any lower

Wait, what? There’s a Riley Gaines Center?

Meanwhile, the Leadership Institute, a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit that trains conservative activists, launched a project it called the Riley Gaines Center. In fundraising materials, it promised to send Gaines to speak on college campuses and recruit other student athletes who had been “harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.” The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation—one of the biggest funders of the conservative movement—donated $100,000 to the project in 2023. In the first five months of the center’s existence, the Leadership Institute paid Gaines more than $126,000, according to tax filings. As more student athletes began to forfeit matches with trans players, Gaines awarded them medals stamped with the Leadership Institute logo and emblazoned with the name of her center.

A 23-year old woman with no accomplishments, other than coming in 5th place at a swim meet, has an organization named after her, gets a cushy salary, and flits about the country making speeches (at $25,000 a pop) about how oppressed she is? I am impressed and disgusted. I should have lost more athletic competitions, I’d be rich now.

This story has more sleazy elements. Gaines is a loud supporter of her college swim coach, Lars Jorgensen, praising him as a wonderful person.

Gaines, who was seen as one of Jorgensen’s favorites, seemed to weather the pressure on the team better than most. “I never saw Riley cry because of something Lars said,” Ward recalls. “I never saw her have like a mental breakdown or show that any of this was getting to her.” In her book, Gaines writes that, despite his “utter savagery,” Jorgensen “became, and still is, one of my best friends.”

She’s also used her appearances on far right-wing media to strongly support him.

The Daily Wire article catapulted her into the feverish world of right-wing media. On March 28, 10 days after her race with Thomas, she appeared on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show; on April 1, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn hosted Gaines on her podcast; on April 6 she was a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson lauded her for “bravery.” “I’m just fortunate enough to where I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen,” she told him.

It seems he needs that support, because she’s turning a blind eye to his atrocious behavior.

While Gaines continues blasting her message, another lawsuit is making its way through the courts more quietly. In the spring of 2024, two former members of Gaines’ University of Kentucky swim team filed a lawsuit alleging that Lars Jorgensen, their coach, had sexually assaulted them.

Both swimmers are former students whom Jorgensen hired as assistant coaches. In their complaint, they allege he groomed them by pressuring them to lose severe amounts of weight, emotionally abusing them in front of team members, and making sexual comments to them. The assistant coaches, who believed their careers were dependent on Jorgensen, allege he invited them to his home and sexually assaulted them.

One swimmer alleges Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023, telling her he would “ruin her reputation” if she told anyone. The other says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her despite her protests. Their complaint also alleges that Jorgensen raped a third assistant coach at his home after a coaching staff Christmas party several years earlier. They claim that university employees were aware of some of Jorgensen’s abuse and discouraged them from reporting it when they came forward. (“UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process,” a university spokesperson says.)

That disregard of rapists in the locker room reminds me of Jim Jordan, who similarly ignored the sexual abuse going on in the locker room where he was a coach. Is this a thing now? Maybe we should prohibit coaches with a history of hysterical ranting at athletes from running for political office. It’s clear that Riley Gaines is a poor judge of character.

She also exaggerates and lies.

Soon the locker room became a central theme, as she accused the NCAA of having “forced” the swimmers to change with Thomas and allowing “any man” to walk in—though both the men’s and women’s locker rooms had been opened to the competitors at the women’s championship. “If you walked in and saw Lia and you didn’t want to be in there, you could walk next door to the other locker room, or go in the stall,” says one of Gaines’ teammates. Though a handful of swimmers at the meet also went public to say that Thomas’ presence in the locker room made them uncomfortable, Gaines’ version of the story was more lurid: “We turned around and there’s a 6-foot-4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” she told Fox News. “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.”

But other swimmers who saw Thomas in the locker room say she changed facing a corner, wrapped in a towel. “She was just in the corner, changing normally, keeping to herself,” says one competitor.

Lying. That’s how conservatives get paid the big bucks.

Guess who else is in the Epstein files?

Rebecca Watson.

The context: it’s because Lawrence Krauss was getting clobbered by Watson over his abuses, and he wrote to Epstein asking for advice, because who better to ask for assistance than a convicted pedophile?

The Epstein files also include lots of examples of Krauss sucking up to Epstein, begging for money, and minimizing the reports of sexual abuse that were separately affecting both of them. Watson isn’t going to be hurt by this, but jesus, Krauss’s reputation is going to take an even bigger hit than it already had.

Bonus: Epstein is revealed as a scientific ignoramus.

The long-term consequences of misogyny

It’s as if America wasn’t the paradise the Right tries to tell us. A Gallup poll shows that a lot of young people want to escape our dystopia.

For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women.

In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.

A lot of young women want out. It’s hard to blame them.

Young American men don’t feel the same degree of alienation. It also seems to be an American phenomenon — women in other countries aren’t as interested in fleeing their homeland for somewhere else.

The growing trend in younger women in the U.S. looking to leave their country is not evident in other advanced economies. Across 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the percentage of younger women who say they would like to migrate has held relatively steady for years, typically averaging between 20% and 30%.

For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, younger U.S. women were less likely than their peers abroad to want to move. That changed around 2016. Since then, they have been more likely than younger women in other wealthy countries to say they would leave their homeland for good. By contrast, U.S. men aged 15 to 44 continue to be less likely than average to want to migrate compared with their peers in the OECD.

It’s almost as if women have noticed that we’ve been denying them autonomy and rights.

OH NO! Larry Summers and Bill Clinton might be hurt by the Epstein files? Threaten me with a good time already.

The Democrats have been releasing damning emails from the Epstein files, which is a good start. There’s nothing too surprising in them, though. We already knew Trump and Epstein were pals, we’ve always known that Trump was a nasty little sleazebag with a thing for underaged girls, and the right-wing side of the electorate has been able to ignore that all along, so I expect nothing to change. Also, the Republicans are playing the victim card and howling about it was all innocent banter and Trump didn’t do nothin’, anyhow.

Except that conservatives are hypocritically complaining about emails that expose the president for what he is, and simultaneously fishing through the emails that make Democrats look bad. I’m all for it! Expose all the dirtbags, no matter what side of the aisle they sit on.

For example, Larry Summers, good buddy to Bill Clinton and ex-president of Harvard, was quite chummy with Epstein.

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers maintained a close personal relationship with convicted sex criminal Jeffrey E. Epstein until just months before his death in August 2019, according to emails released by Congress on Wednesday.

The cache, released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, details how Summers and Epstein regularly corresponded about women, politics, and Harvard-linked projects. They appear to have maintained a close correspondence as late as March 2019 — just months before Epstein’s arrest and death.

Some of the emails are casually venal, as when Summers tried to cajole huge financial gifts to specific projects at Harvard.

The correspondence reveals that Epstein had planned to donate $500,000 to Poetry in America — a television show and digital initiative spearheaded by Harvard English professor emerita Elisa F. New, who is married to Summers. In 2016, Epstein donated $110,000 to Verse Video Education, the non-profit organization which funds the initiative.

Cool. It’s quite the inbred tangle of scholars they’ve got there at Harvard.

We also get the slimy side of Summers, as he asks Epstein for dating advice.

In dozens of emails, Summers — corresponding from his personal account — also appears to have written to Epstein with ease about his personal life. At times, he confided in Epstein about his relationship with an unnamed woman, referring to the topic and his requests for advice as the “dear Abby issue.”

He recounted a conversation between himself and the woman to Epstein, telling him that at one point it had turned tense.

At one point, he told Epstein, the woman brushed him off with the phrase “I’m busy.” Summers told Epstein that he responded to the woman by telling her “awfully coy u are.” Summers then asked her, “Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming,” he wrote to Epstein.

“I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Summers recounted to Epstein, adding that “she must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”

Epstein supported Summers’ response, saying that the woman was making Summers “pay for past errors” but “no whining showed strength.”

Oh, ick. He was trying to arrange a weekend together with this woman (remember, he’s married), and she clearly wanted nothing to do with it. Epstein praises him for his strength. Come on, this was a homely, middle-aged man hitting on a woman, not a profile in courage.

And then there is the sexism, a trait that we’ve known Summers to have for many years.

In an October 2017 email to Epstein, Summers appeared to joke to Epstein that women were less intelligent than men — and suggested that having “hit on” women should not damage one’s career prospects.

“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population….” he wrote to Epstein, without elaborating further.

The message invoked one of the most controversial episodes of Summers’ career — his 2005 remarks at an economics conference suggesting that innate differences between men and women might help explain the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering at elite universities.

Yeah, fine, throw Summers under the bus. If you can hurl Bill Clinton under there at the same time, I’m not going to complain…I’m probably going to cheer. But please understand you can’t condemn Summers for being a sexist asshole without also condemning Trump.

Behold, the magnificent swoop of my slippery slope!

Various conservatives are celebrating the publication of a new issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, or Peter Singer’s slush pile of pseudoscientific justifications for bigotry. The ideas aren’t so much controversial as they are bad. For instance, here’s one charming example from 2024, Intelligence and Immigration, by Christopher Heath Wellman. You could tell from the title alone that this was a trash fire of burning bigotry, but here, taste the abstract.

The relative intelligence of prospective migrants likely does little to move the needle on the central issue in the ethics of immigration, namely, whether states are morally entitled to forcibly exclude outsiders. Even so, I argue that varying levels of intelligence may be relevant to a number of theoretically interesting and practically pressing issues. In particular, such variations may in some cases (1) affect the number of refugees a country is obligated to accept, (2) be relevant to the advisability of encouraging refugees to resettle rather than attempting to help them where they are, and (3) have implications for relational egalitarians who are especially concerned with inequalities among fellow citizens.

The body text is even worse; it’s a meandering opinion piece with no evidence presented, and I was shocked that it didn’t even bother to cite Rushton, the source of all of its biases. I mention this to prepare you — there is little quality control in this “journal” which is prepared to publish the most egregious nonsense. If you desperately want an article defending blackface, they’ve got it. To be fair, they sometimes also publish criticisms of the garbage they put on their pages. For instance, there is an article titled Deflating Byrne’s “Are Women Adult Human Females?” that logically skewers the whole definitional approach to excluding trans women from the category of “woman”.

But what caught my eye in this journal was an article titled On the Intellectual Freedom and Responsibility of Scientists in the Time of “Consequences Culture” by Lee Jussim and others, including Luana Maroja and Jerry Coyne…names of reactionary culture warriors I’ve seen many times before, usually in the context of yelling about racism and misogyny, which they practice ably. I read it, and dismissed it out of hand, because it’s nothing but a slippery slope argument, which most of us know is a fallacy.

It practically telegraphs its intent in the abstract.

The 20th century witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated in the name of ideologies that stifled dissent in favour of political narratives, with numerous examples of resulting long-term societal harm.

It’s not a good sign when it warns of past unimaginable atrocities as its premise. Don’t worry: it will fail to deliver any examples of similar atrocities in the contemporary world. In fact, it’s going to ignore actual atrocities to instead whine about small slights to scientists, blaming it all on those parts of contemporary society that are under genuine assault from the establishment.

Despite clear historical precedents, calls to deal with dissent through censorship have risen dramatically. Most alarmingly, politically motivated censorship has risen in the academic community, where pluralism is most needed to seek truth and generate knowledge. Recent calls for censorship have come under the name of “consequences culture”, a culture structured around the inclusion of those sharing a particular narrative while imposing adverse consequences on those who dissent. Here, we place “consequences culture” in the historical context of totalitarian societies, focusing on the fate suffered by academics in those societies. We support our arguments with extensive references, many of which are not widely known in the West. We invite the broader scientific community to consider yet again what are timeless subjects: the importance of freely exchanging views and ideas; the freedom to do so without fear of intimidation; the folly of undermining such exchanges with distortions; and the peril of attempting to eliminate exchanges by purging published documents from the official record. We conclude with suggestions on where to go from here.

I don’t know, I was looking forward with a little glee to the descriptions of the adverse consequences imposed on the kinds of assholes who compare their plight to the Holocaust, but it fails to deliver. The inciting incident for all this anxiety was one specific paper.

In 2020, Tomáš Hudlický submitted an essay to Angewandte Chemie (Hudlický, 2020) reviewing the evolution of organic synthesis since Seebach’s prior reflection on the field three decades before (Seebach, 1990). The essay, which included a discussion on the organic synthesis community, was peer-reviewed, accepted by the journal, and a pre-publication version was uploaded to the journal server. Among several topics Hudlický addressed, he argued that in some cases, institutional policies mandating “equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates” (Hudlický, 2020). Then, in an unprecedented action, the published article vanished from the journal’s server, with the DOI returning a 404 error (Howes, 2020). The withdrawal notice would appear some days later declaring that “the opinions expressed in this essay do not reflect our values of fairness, trustworthiness and social awareness” (Withdrawal, 2020).1 Unofficial copies can be found online, and further information can be found in Howes (2020) and Sydnes (2021).

Wait…the problem is the removal of a paper on organic synthesis, which wandered into a discourse on why maybe we’ve got too many chemists in certain subgroups who are less meritorious? Yes, remove such papers; they shouldn’t have passed peer and editorial review. I think even the authors of this terrible article that it would be misleading to lard a technical paper in chemistry with advocacy for social engineering, except that they’ll only do it when they agree with the social engineering part. A scientific review should be to the point, and not scurry off into topics on which the author is not at all qualified.

Jussim’s paper dwells on this incident with several paragraphs of breast-beating, and references to the KGB, ostracizing Sakharov, Lysenkoism, and the authoritarian territory of collective denunciations. I kept waiting for the grisly adverse consequences to Hudlický that they promised me, but they didn’t describe any. He had a paper removed from a journal. That was it. He wasn’t banished to a concentration camp in the Everglades, his family wasn’t bombed, he wasn’t even tortured. He wrote a flawed paper, the editors removed it, done.

Surely, they must have many more examples of tormented scientists to discuss. They do, sorta.

Hudlický’s is not the only case of “consequences culture”. This phenomenon is becoming pervasive in modern Western societies. Numerous academics across various fields in the USA (Abbot, 2021; Hooven, 2023; Lyons, 2022), Canada (CBC News, 2022; Howard-Hassmann, 2022), Germany (Sibarium, 2022), the UK (Adams, 2021; Gibbons, 2021), and New Zealand (Clements et al., 2021; Coyne, 2021a; Leahy, 2021) have been subjected to mistreatment after running afoul of activism of one kind or another. Between 2014 and 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), logged more than 1,700 attempts to deplatform or discipline faculty for speech that should have been protected by academic freedom (FIRE, n.d.-a, n.d.-b), with incidents occurring at an increasing rate (Flaherty, 2021). Several other online databases have also been compiled (Acevedo, 2023; Cancel Culture Database, 2025). Looking into these cases, one finds that in many instances, the views expressed were neither extreme (Danagoulian, 2021; Howard-Hassmann, 2022), nor factually incorrect. In fact, some simply challenged questionable science or policy, or defended science from an assault by pseudoscience (Coyne, 2021a). For example, a medical student was expelled and forced to “seek psychological services” for challenging the validity of microaggressions (Cantu & Jussim, 2021; Hudson, 2021). Indeed, the problem is not limited to academia: those same regressive authoritarian tendencies are evident in other strata of Western society (Applebaum, 2021; Tabarovsky, 2020), as are attempts to deny their existence or minimise their dangers (Young, 2021).

Interesting that they cite FIRE, a far-right, Islamophobic organization that explicitly claims that far-right, Islamophobic professors must be defended, but doesn’t mention TPUSA, which maintains a Professor Watchlist and calls for the firing of liberal professors. Most of the sources mentioned are about aggrieved conservative professors claiming that they were denounced for declaiming their bigoted views, but there’s a notable lack of examples of mistreatment. The one specific example given is a medical student being advised to seek psychological services, which is not the public whipping and flaying I was hoping for. Darn.

They then declare that science hasn’t been as repressive as those liberals claim, so we get a bizarre section that they purport shows the dishonesty of the people who disagree with them.

Just as Herbert et al. selectively dismiss some lived experiences, they overlook historical facts that complicate their narrative. They claim, for instance, that the “gentlemen of the Royal Society” of London 150 years ago “could not imagine that Asians, African-Americans, Jews, Arabs, women, or LGBTQIA+ individuals would find a place among them” (Herbert et al., 2022), despite there being clear, albeit rare, examples that they did imagine such individuals. They elected Arab and Jewish members as far back as 1682 (Turkmani, 2011) and 1727 (Samuda, n.d.; Vieira, 2014), respectively, had at least one member who in 1781 admitted to being gay (Namier & Brooke, 1964; Onslow, n.d.), and elected Ardaseer Cursetjee, a marine engineer from Bombay, as a fellow in 1841 (Cursetjee, n.d.). The Royal Society counted pioneering women such as Margaret Cavendish among its speakers (1667; Wilkins, 2014) and Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) among the authors of its Philosophical Transactions (Herschel, 1787, 1794, 1796; Royal Society, 2017). A Jamaican mathematician, Francis Williams, was admitted to the meetings of the Royal Society, and, highlighting the importance of dissenting voices in attempting to overturn the status quo, he was proposed as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1721 – against a majority that rejected him on the basis of race (“on account of his complection [sic]”; Carretta, 2003; Williams, 1997).

Awesome. Some non-white, non-male people got into the Royal Society despite a majority rejecting them on the basis of race. That is not the win that Jussim thinks it is. It’s saying that it was easier for a mediocre white man to get into the Society than for an exceptional black man to do so. Maybe we should reject all barriers to entry that privilege white men, as DEI principles propose? How many great women and non-European people were deprived of opportunities historically?

The article concludes with a bit of pablum, rather than workable suggestions on where to go from here.

We have two choices. For scientists, those choices are simple. The first is whether to do honest science to the best of our abilities and help others to do the same, or to make science subservient to ideological goals which permit falsehoods as long as they serve the agenda. The second choice is whether to speak up when one sees a falsehood, because, as the epigraph to this article states, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid”. The idea, that voicing one’s views merits punishment is untenable, and needs to be scrapped. Similarly, the politicisation of science needs to stop.

Yes! Do honest science and help others! I can agree with that, although they go on to suggest that everyone else is pursuing ideological goals, unlike them, and are lying to serve the agenda. The problem is that Jussim et al. do have ideological goals that oppose our ability to serve others — they want science to support a conservative agenda. To that end, they are complaining about liberals, women, gay and trans people, Muslims, and anyone to the left of Charlie Kirk, and ignoring the active politicization and repression of science in America today.

It’s kind of a weird choice to get irate at gay women protesting about the discrimination they face at the hands of established conservative professors at a time when Trump is shutting down science funding and appointing looney tunes kooks to run our scientific institutions. But you do you, Lee Jussim, Mikhail Shifman, Luana Maroja, Jerry Coyne, David Bertioli, Arieh Warshel, Gernot Frenking, and Barry L. Bentley. Since you’re so committed to free speech, I’m sure you won’t mind if I say you’re all entitled, privileged, whiny-ass-titty-babies who are simply aligning yourselves with a dominant repressive and authoritarian culture. Assholes.

I should mention that Tomáš Hudlický died in 2022. It was not at the hands of fanatical liberal mob; he died of natural causes while holding the position of Professor and Canada Research Chair in Organic Synthesis and Biocatalysis at Brock University, shortly after giving a lecture at a conference.

Good news from Minnesota

Donald Trump has another reason to invade us: this state stands for trans rights.

Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting, affirming that transgender athletes have the right to compete in sports without discrimination under the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA). The decision also clarified the harmful precedent set in Goins v. West Group only applies in the employment context, and the court did not consider whether to overturn Goins because Cooper’s case is not an employment case.

“This ruling sends a clear and powerful message: transgender people have a right to enjoy public spaces in Minnesota like sporting events, restaurants, and movie theaters, free from targeted discrimination,” said Jess Braverman, Legal Director at Gender Justice. “This decision is a historic victory for fairness, equity, and the fundamental rights of all Minnesotans.”

This ruling clarifies that all public accommodations in Minnesota, including sports organizations, must ensure their policies comply with Minnesota’s anti-discrimination laws. The implications of this decision extend well beyond sports to other facets of public life. This ruling reinforces the principle that every person deserves equal access to opportunities and spaces where they can thrive and belong.

Cool. Can we just replace the federal supreme court with the Minnesota supreme court?

That’s some persecution complex you’ve got, Anna Krylov

I wish people would stop running to Richard Dawkins for quotes defending regressive policies in science. He has nothing worthy to add, and it just damages his reputation more. Leave him in peace, to fade away gracefully.

His latest contretemps is to accuse the journal Nature of abandoning science for social justice. He provided no evidence that Nature was compromising science.

A leading scientific journal has defended its efforts to boost the diversity of researchers cited in its pages after an academic accused it of abandoning science to pursue a “social justice agenda”.

The criticism of Springer Nature group, which publishes the journal, was made by Anna Krylov, an American professor who has been a supporter of President Trump’s drive to stop American universities from promoting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) in their admissions policies.

Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, backed Krylov and said that too many journals were “favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science”.

Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.

Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.

In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.

Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint.

And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!

Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.

Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished.

Unless…

Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.

Nah, near as I can tell, Krylov is an extremely well qualified chemist who is just afflicted with a petty and unjustified need to find offense in everything.

Once upon a time, Anna Krylov would have been unable to get a job in academia, and would have been discouraged from getting a college degree, let alone a Ph.D., and things have changed to the point where universities are doing their best to not discriminate against women or minorities (but not always succeeding). Now she wants to block progress in dismantling barriers, for some unfathomable reason, to the point she’s inventing slights against her career. It’s pretty bad when recognition that you’re a good scientist is used as evidence that scientific skills are being deprecated.

You didn’t know you’d wake up this morning to hear an old man raving about teenaged boys’ sperm counts

RFK jr went on a rant about sperm. It’s a national security threat, you know!

Today, the average teenager in this country has 50 percent of the sperm count, 50 percent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man. Our girls are hitting puberty six years early, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children.

Parents who want to have children do not have access. I have seven children. I feel that God has blessed me with that and I can’t imagine how different my life would be if I did not have that blessing.

Sperm counts are known to decline with age, meaning a teenage boy is likely to have a much higher count than a man in his late sixties, according to experts.

our parents aren’t having children… think about that one for a moment.

Then consider Parents who want to have children do not have access. Access to what, you may ask, and also what makes them parents if they don’t have children? My head hurts reading whatever that ratfucker has to say about health.

It’s true that sperm counts have been reported to be declining, although very poor sampling of a variable parameter adds some doubt to the conclusion. We tend not to get sperm counts from teenagers! But I’d agree with him that environmental hazards, especially the ones that big capitalist corporations tend to spew everywhere, are almost certainly damaging the quantity and quality of gametes humans are producing. We should probably do something about that, but Republicans aren’t going to change anything that might affect the bottom line of Dow or Monsanto, so seeing a lackey of corporate interests piously expressing concern about forever chemicals contaminating the environment leaves me unmoved.

Also, making babies is a more complex process than just having a man making sperm (that’s probably the smallest part of the problem). Conception requires a consenting woman, and also requires that the parents have the time and money and interest to invest in raising a child. If you want more healthy babies in America, provide better medical care with low cost first — pumping up male sperm counts accomplishes nothing if no one wants or can afford children.

As for RFK jr himself — he has six children by two mothers (I think he’s counting his current girlfriend’s child as his own, which is fair). All of his marriages ended in divorce, and one was exceptionally acrimonious, and one of his former wives died of suicide. I don’t think he should be talking about “blessings”. He’s an old rich fuck and is not a role model for successful parenting. One of the causes of his divorce was the discovery of a book where he listed all of his extramarital affairs!

Wait…I thought conservatives blamed feminism for declining birth rates, but now it’s all due to those tainted, poisoned men shooting blanks? Cool.

People have been policing masculinity for a good long while

I suspect most of my readers are not manly, masculine “he-men,” according to this declaration by Edward K. Strong.

Men Are Becoming Less Manly, Scientist Thinks
Men today are not as roughly masculine as they used to be, according to Dr. Edward K. Strong, of Palo Alto, California, noted psychology professor at Stanford University. He set forth this conclusion in an article in the current issue of the Journal of Social Psychology.
The only he-men are engineers and farmers, he stated in an account of a survey of divisions of interest among the sexes. But if you are a minister, a lawyer, a doctor, a writer or a newspaperman, you have feminine interests, which have become stronger with each generation.

Although…how can you trust Dr Strong? He was neither an engineer or farmer, but was a psychologist, a mere academic who wrote books like The Psychology of Selling and Advertisement and The Psychology of Selling Life Insurance. He reeks of “feminine interests.”

Also, he’s dead. The article is from 1936.

So that’s what Jey McCreight has been up to…

They’ve founded a new organization, Beyond X and Y.

As the copy on their web page says:

We’re a trans-led volunteer team of biomedical experts defending trans rights by educating the general public and political leaders about the real science behind trans identity and gender-affirming care.

Sign up for their newsletter and find out more!