Never go full TERF. Here’s another Trumpian declaration:

I disagree, though. He’s not declaring all Americans female; he’s instead declaring that we’re all trans, because we changed from an undifferentiated state to whatever sex we’re assigned at birth. Unfortunately, his argument is built on a falsehood, because obviously sex is not immutable, it changes during fetal development, and we get another major shift at puberty (why do all the TERFs ignore puberty? It’s right there in our faces, everyone goes through it, and we definitely change at the cellular and gross morphological level). We can also trigger profound changes with hormones, and more subtly, brains can have properties of either, both, or no sex. You cannot reduce complex human identities to a single cell type produced by a single organ, although these regressive dimwits will try desperately.

Do I need to mention that you are not producing any reproductive cell, small or large, at conception?

Every year in my genetics class we play a little game. The first lab is dedicated to learning some basic rules of probability and running through some simple statistical tests, and one of the exercises is to look around the room and count male-presenting vs. female-presenting students, and test whether the distribution is close enough to 50:50. It never is. then we test against a 40:60 male:female ratio, which used to be the ratio for my university as a whole, and it’s always significantly different than that. This year I have closer to a 30:70 ratio.

Another anecdotal observation: all the men in the class spontaneously segregated themselves to one lab bench. I told them it looked like a high school dance with all the boys nervous and shy about asking someone to dance. The women also looked comfortable with the separation. I’ve long wondered what’s going on, why men are avoiding college, and today I found an article that ponders the same question.

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

Yeah, why is that? Let’s hear some hypotheses.

Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”

I call bullshit on that one. Do you think women don’t get negative, discouraging messages in k-12? The whole damn culture is rife with a bias that girls are supposed to be homemakers and squirt out babies.

Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”

True, tuition is ridiculously high, but being a woman does not qualify you for a discount, so that’s a bad explanation.

Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.“

I can confirm that! I’ve looked at final grade distributions in my classes, and typically the top 10% in the class are all women. However, that doesn’t explain why we have this difference in performance. I don’t think women are intrinsically smarter than men (I confess to being biased by my experience), and I struggled to understand where this performance difference might come from. Once I thought it might be that the men are all distracted by sports, but no…our male students are often engaged with our sports teams, but I’m more often seeing that women are putting in long hours with the swim team, the volleyball team, the soccer team. When there’s an away game it produces bigger holes in the women student audience than the men’s group (partly, of course, because there are fewer men in the first place.)

There are other suggestions bounced around.

• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.

• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.

• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.

• Men join the military more than women.

• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.

OK, but those disparities were just as great, or greater, in the 1950s as they are now. They don’t explain the 𝚫♂ at all. But the author proposes an interesting, if rather circular, explanation.

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

Here’s a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost 40 years of teaching: vocational choices have been shifting.

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

That’s also true for med school. Every year I’m writing recommendations for vet school, med school, and grad school, mostly for women. It’s not for the usual annoying excuse I hear from some people, that those professional schools and those occupations have gotten easier, with reduced standards, to accommodate “the girls”* because, if anything, admissions have become even more competitive over the years. Probably the toughest school to get into is vet school, and that’s where the disparity between male and female applicants is highest, in my experience.

So one simple explanation is…cooties. Girls’ germs.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

Great. I’ll inform the administration that one way out of our enrollment and budget declines is to admit fewer women.

But seriously, there is something going on here: witness the spontaneous segregation of men and women in my genetics lab. I don’t understand why men are averse to working with women, but it’s a real phenomenon I’ve witnessed. There is no shortage of stupid explanations, at least!

The concept of school is feminine…but never mind that women were often forbidden from attending college, until relatively recent decades.

In Spanish, ‘escuela’ has a feminine gender…damn, this is an argument from a man who has never studied languages, because the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.

Since when is good teaching and good learning a matter of rote memorization? My best students ask questions. I encourage them to ask me to clarify or explain why something I say is true. To assume that obedience is a feminine trait is straight up wrong and bigoted, and to think that the manly way to learn is to announce aggressively that you’re not going to listen, is antithetical to learning anything. That guy gets everything wrong.

It’s a useful example of the problem, though. It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.

That’s my perspective from the world of education. I can’t think of any examples from the world of politics, for example, can you?

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* One thing that bugged me about the article is that it uses men/women, boys/girls, male/female interchangeably. I’m working with college-aged students, and I can’t think of them as boys/girls — they’re adults, or nearly so — and as a biologist male/female has connotations of sex, which I avoid with students. They’re men and women in my classes, that’s it.

It always seemed like a most excellent liberal arts college, and in particular I enjoyed visiting with the late Jane Oppenheimer, a developmental biologist and historian of science. I was doing a quick refresher on Nettie Stevens, the cytologist working on chromosomes at the dawning of the age of genetics, while preparing my introductory talk on chromosomes and learned something new. I knew that Nettie Stevens studied there and was offered a position on their faculty, and I knew that Bryn Mawr was and is an all-women school, but I just learned an interesting fact about Bryn Mawr:

On February 9, 2015, the college’s board of trustees announced approval of a working group recommendation to expand the undergraduate applicant pool allowing transgender women and intersex individuals identifying as women to apply for admission. This decision made Bryn Mawr the fourth women’s college in the United States to accept trans women. Bryn Mawr “recognizes that gender is fluid and that traditional notions of gender identity and expression can be limiting”, and has the official policy of accepting nonbinary students who were assigned female at birth as well. All current, past, and future students are fully recognized as members of the Bryn Mawr community, regardless of current gender identity.

Well, now I respect that college even more.

He’s denying the worst of the claims, while admitting that he did have sexual relationships with his accusers. They were all consensual, he says.

As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.

I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.

This is the “bitchez be lyin'” defense written in the gentle romantic style of Neil Gaiman. It doesn’t add up. So he was in a happy, positive, respectful, consensual relationship with women who have all mysteriously changed their minds and started misrepresenting his sensitive style of making love as brutal sadomasochistic assaults? Why? What changed “positive and happy” to tears and trauma? There’s a massive plot hole in his fantasy.

His real sin was not being open and feminist enough.

And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.

I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel.

Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.

This is a dim acknowledgment that gosh, he did something wrong in his past relationships. He’s not sure what, but maybe he wasn’t as emotionally available as he ought to have been. Yeah, demanding that he be called “Master” is a sign of his clumsiness in relationships. But he’s learning! He’s a better person now!

At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.

Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.

Something sordid went on. We don’t know all the details, fortunately (the Vulture story had more than I could stomach as it is), but “Yes, I had sex with the babysitter, but it wasn’t as rough as she claims, and besides, she wanted it” isn’t the strong defense he thinks it is.

Sexism in gaming isn’t a new thing at all — good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons was full of it. Here’s Gary Gygax, one of the creators of the game, opining on women in gaming sometime in the early 2000s:

One thing that jumped out at me was his flat statement that he was a “biological determinist”. Gygax had no training in biology, no college degree at all — he was an insurance agent before he became famous as a gamer. You can dismiss anything he says about “brain function” as a product of ignorance.

He mentions that few women were interested in his game in 1974-75, when they “tested” the idea. Women were not interested, according to him, because their brains were different. I have an alternative explanation: here’s Gygax writing about the subject in 1975.

Wow. Just wow. What an asshole.

Were you shocked by gamergate in the 2010s? I was. I shouldn’t have been, if I’d been paying attention in the 1970s. I don’t think Gygax was a cause, but a symptom of an attitude common at the time.

Let’s not forget the weird racism in old school D&D, either. I suspect he was a “race realist” in addition to being a “sex realist”, and now it’s coloring my impressions of the game.

Sometimes I miss Twitter. It’s the place where you can find the dumbest arguments and most stupid people on the internet, and the idiocy has gotten even more concentrated as the smart people bail out. Look what I missed!

For dog’s sake, man, that is hyperbole so extreme it makes you look even more ridiculous than your bluster would lead me to expect. You’re a 57 year old man who has never done any military service who was born long after the Somme, and a realistic answer would have been “Swollen prostate, erectile dysfunction, and a bloated sense of entitlement.”

Although I’ve long abandoned Twitter, I haven’t yet deleted my account, and I still get occasional notifications by text. Lately it’s mostly been Graham Linehan raging, so it’s amusing, but isn’t at all tempting me to re-engage.

Nancy Mace poses with a crappy paper label added to a restroom sign as if it’s something she’s selling on the home shopping network, and I cringe. I’ve said this before: this makes no sense. There is no such thing as a non-biological woman, making the phrase redundant. Mace is just appropriating a complex term to assign it to some narrower, more ideological interpretation that she leaves unstated — it’s reducing biology to a meaningless term which bigots can abuse, expecting you to read more into it than is appropriate.

Be honest, Nancy. Spell it out. You really just want to exclude Sarah McBride from using the restroom. Don’t cloak your meaning in bad biology.

Alternatively, I’m going to have to protest this baseless anti-synthetic humanoid bigotry.