Here’s a story that had me hopelessly confused: according to this one woman in the UK, she was denied essential surgery because the hospital wanted to pander to the transeses. It sounded unlikely to me, but hey, I don’t trust hospital administrators myself. Here, though, is an article that explains it all, using the woman’s own words.

It turns out she made a whole bunch of unreasonable demands, triggered by seeing someone she thought was a trans woman looking at her. So she insisted that no men be allowed anywhere near her, that she get a private room that allowed no men to enter, and that she would not agree to use pronouns or otherwise engage with such manifestations of gender ideology. She also accused men in general of having mobile phones that they use to look at sick, perverted pornography. The hospital told her that they could not meet her demands and told her to go elsewhere.

It’s all there at the link, but be warned: the complaining woman is a retired solicitor, and her complaints are lengthy and outrageous.

Here’s a novel definition of transgender people…although it’s not at all novel in the sense that it’s desperate flailing about trying to find an anatomical basis for discrimination. When all else fails, invent a criterion.

Pakistan’s progressive transgender laws are currently under attack. As legislators and clerics oppose the country’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act four years after it was passed, one senator wants to change how the measure defines transgender persons. Fawzia Arshad, a senator from Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) says transgender people should be defined as those who “keep one hole for urination.”

Arshad’s bill reflects a trend of escalating dissent and misinformation campaigns against the country’s transgender laws, in an effort to bring it in line with their understanding of Islamic teachings on gender and sex. While Arshad’s awkwardly-worded proposal has bemused many, making some wonder if she knows the difference between a vagina and a urethra, there’s also a larger concern over the direction this movement is taking.

Confusing. By this definition, I am transgender. So is my wife. So is everyone, including Fawzia Arshad, unless she has an unfortunate medical condition.

Isn’t it terrible that the most ignorant people are also the most confident about their mistaken beliefs?

I know, some people think having trans kids in school is a peril (it’s infectious, don’t you know) and states like Florida and Texas are freaking out with wild legislation “for the children”, but there’s a bigger worry you ought to have — much bigger, since the Trans Peril is nonexistent — and that is they’re coming for the cis women now. And after that, the cis men.

Florida now requires all student athletes to fill out a rather invasive questionnaire. Part of it is marked “optional”, but who knows how long that will last, and one wonders how much suspicion will be cast on those who refuse to answer.

Seizures. Fainting spells. Allergies.
Florida student athletes have to report all these medical conditions when they register to play for the season.
But all female athletes in the state also are asked to report their history of menstrual periods: When they got their first period, how many weeks pass between periods and when they had their last one, to name a few.
The information is reported on athletes’ annual physical form, which they are required to fill out with a physician and turn in to their school’s athletic director.

Yikes.

Let us ask the obvious question: why does the school need to know all that?

No, really. When I went to school, all that was kept quiet, nobody needed to know about it, let alone report it to the athletic director.

Why does the athletic director need to know how long your periods last, or how many periods you had in the last year? What will they do with that information?

Oh, I know. They’re going to upload it to a commercial database run by a for-profit company called Aktivate which will never ever sell that information or accidentally leak it or be hacked.

But I repeat: WHY? There are a few hints.

Abortion rights advocates who stress reproductive privacy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade worry that women’s menstrual history may be used to prosecute them if they terminate a pregnancy.
And a vocal contingent of parents want forms to stay offline in the name of their parental rights over their children’s data — which they worry about being leaked or sold.
“I think we’re all on edge right now,” Haller said. He added that he has “very little reason to have faith in our state leadership” to keep data provided to educational institutions private.

It might also be useful if you want to categorize the population into menstruators and non-menstruators. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that, but certain people have a weird obsession with that kind of reductionist division.

Isn’t this a fairly obvious strategy? To set transgender policy, look to the evidence. It’s what I would recommend. Unfortunately, that’s not how policy is established.

The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data.

Here’s one example. Anti-trans campaigners often argue that allowing trans women to use women’s toilets and changing rooms will increase sexual assaults. In fact, research has shown the opposite. One study tallied criminal incidents related to assault, sex crimes or voyeurism in public toilets, locker rooms and changing areas in parts of Massachusetts that had laws against trans discrimination, and compared them with those that hadn’t. It found no evidence that these laws put women at risk, and concluded that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded” (A. Hasenbush et al. Sex. Res. Soc. Pol. 16, 70–83; 2019). Furthermore, there is evidence that transgender children who cannot use toilets and locker rooms that match their gender identity are at increased risk of assault (G. R. Murchison et al. Pediatrics 143, e20182902; 2019).

Nevertheless, a false ‘protection’ argument has been used to justify anti-trans ‘bathroom bills’ in Alabama, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and to buttress trans discrimination in the United Kingdom.

Politicians’ claims also have little to do with empirical evidence when it comes to gender-affirming care. Alabama’s law banning provision of such care to minors described the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies as “experimental”. It did not mention that 22 US medical associations endorse these medications as well-established treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

Case in point: Graham Linehan. He says we literally don’t know who to believe.

Graham Linehan saying that he doesn't know who to trust on COVID vaccines, and "isn't 100% on climate change anymore."

Why? Because "gender criticism" is a conspiracy theory cult, and it encourages conspiratorial thinking in its adherents.

This is radicalisation in real-time. pic.twitter.com/3VCNnYmMxs

— Aidan Comerford (@AidanCTweets) September 30, 2022

He’s against trans rights, and now he’s doubting the existence of COVID (citing Bret Weinstein!) and climate change, all because he’d rather listen to hucksters lying about the evidence than accept something contrary to his biases. He is getting sucked right down into the conspiracy theory pipeline, and you can trust that he’s going to get worse and worse. He is actively demonstrating crank magnetism.

That Nature article has a good suggestion on where to start. There’s plenty of research and evidence on these matters…the problem is that it all says Linehan is WRONG, so he won’t look at it.

Much evidence-based research is already available. More is still needed, but it is either a lie or a cop-out to say that there’s not enough research to make informed policy decisions. Instead of whipping up arguments to churn culture wars, elected officials and those around them should look to the evidence.

You could also start by unsubscribing from Weinstein’s podcast.

I have proof by anecdote.

That wimpy child was feminized. Those men were wrecked by soy products and the mainstreaming of LGBTQ ideas.

It’s an ongoing tragedy.

The article was from 1893, when everyone knew the correct answer to the question, “what is a woman?”

They’re everywhere. The NSF has released a horrifying report on sexual harassment and assault at US Antarctic program — there are a large number of military personnel, contractors, and researchers who converge on Antarctic bases for long periods of time, with their ability to escape the place limited. It’s a The Thing situation, except instead of a shapeshifting alien, it’s horny drunk dudes groping anything without a beard. And you aren’t allowed to use a flamethrower on them!

Women are a significant proportion of the Antarctic population, with 140 out of 440 respondents to a survey (peak population total at all sites is about 1600). A huge fraction of the women think harassment and assault are serious problems in the Antarctic, which, whoa, speaks to courage of the women who go there to do science.

This is supposedly a professional environment, but working there is going to subject you to all kinds of degrading behavior. I am astounded that women still go there to work, and also surprised that an epidemic like that is allowed to continue. That persistence might be explained by another datum.

Only 23% of leadership (defined by older, higher salaries, and higher-status
positions) agree or strongly agree that sexual assault is a problem and 40% agree
that sexual harassment is a problem.

Leadership is grossly out of touch or in denial. Read the whole, long report to see multiple examples of the seriousness of the problem. Beautiful, isolated research stations seem to be a magnet for assholes.

Should, maybe, NSF provide all women working in these research stations a flamethrower?

I find conservatives’ obsession with gender affirmation therapy to be disturbing and bizarre. This Libs of TikTok fanatic, Chaya Raichik, has been haranguing hospital help lines in an effort to get incriminating sound bites for her sensationalist channel. And she succeeded!

Last Friday, Libs of TikTok’s founder Chaya Raichik posted an audio recording of her discussion with hospital telephone operators who said that “a 16-year-old trans boy would be eligible for a hysterectomy at the hospital’s gender development clinic,” The Washington Post reported.

One operator told Raichik that a 16-year-old child would be “in the clear” to receive the operation. A second operator told her that “all different type[s] of age groups” come in for the operation and that “kids” younger than 16 have come in for the procedure.

Yeah, no. Transgender groups are on tenterhooks right now, aware that the mob is ready to rampage and kill, and are scrupulous about avoiding doing anything irreversible to a minor, no matter how much the child may desire it. I don’t believe that they got a revelation from an informed expert at the hospital — they badgered a person who probably primarily handles appointment scheduling to say something wrong. You might want to instead base your opinions on what pediatricians and ethicists say:

One of the most complicated ethical issues that arises in children’s hospitals today is the issue of whether it is ever permissible to perform a procedure for a minor that will result in permanent sterilization. In most cases, the answer is no. The availability of good, safe, long-acting contraception allows surgical options to be postponed when the primary goal of such surgical options is to prevent pregnancy. But what if a minor has congenital urogenital anomalies or other medical conditions for which the best treatment is a hysterectomy? In those cases, the primary goal of therapy is not to prevent pregnancy. Instead, sterility is an unfortunate side effect of a medically indicated treatment. Should that side effect preclude the provision of a therapy that is otherwise medically appropriate? We present a case that raises these issues, and asked experts in law, bioethics, community advocacy, and gynecology to respond. They discuss whether the best option is to proceed with the surgery or to cautiously delay making a decision to give the teenager more time to carefully consider all of the options.

It’s just not done. You can find people who claim it is done — Raichik and her collection of freaks included — but the hospital has denied it and they have nothing but an uninformed claim by someone who is not a medical expert.

The recording, made by Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik, features two telephone operators at the renowned D.C. medical facility stating — in response to Raichik’s questions — that a 16-year-old trans boy would be eligible for a hysterectomy at the hospital’s gender development clinic. Children’s has not disputed the authenticity of the recording but said the employees provided inaccurate information.

“None of the people who were secretly recorded by this activist group deliver care to our patients,” hospital spokeswoman Ariana Ahmadi Perez said. “We do not and have never performed gender-affirming hysterectomies for anyone under the age of 18.”

Now the hospital is flooded with threats. Some human beings seem to favor an opportunity, even a false opportunity, to exercise some self-righteous violence. I think it’s less about protecting children and more about venting some aggression and believing they are heroic…by screaming at a children’s hospital.

Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said. The torrent of harassment was accompanied by social media posts suggesting that Children’s be bombed and its doctors placed in a woodchipper.

Chaya Raichik has been suspended from Twitter temporarily for spreading misinformation. Not banned, mind you, despite her long history of vicious rumor-mongering. We’re going to have to wait for one of her followers to throw a doctor in a woodchipper before that happens.

Oh, Twitter. Forever pretending to be ethical, forever failing before the siren call of profitable traffic.

Here we go again: Jerry Coyne is flogging another dead dichotomous horse. All it takes is for anyone to say that sex isn’t binary, and he charges in over all those people who demonstrate that it really isn’t so simple to say it is too! Now it’s the NY Times, which published an op-ed titled, The Maternal Instinct is a Myth that Men Created. Dr Coyne is not alone — it set the racist and misogynist internet on fire (Go ahead! Google it! I sure see a lot of links I wouldn’t post anywhere.) How dare the NY Times question the purity of women?

Let’s take a look at that article first. I didn’t find it at all objectionable, but then, I am an SJW soy-boy. It points out that simplistic notions of a maternal instinct are invalid — some women are uninterested in, or even repelled, by the idea of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a child (and some men, obviously, are thrilled with the joys of parenthood). It can’t be a simple matter of inheriting a chromosome that makes you want babies — there’s a complex continuum of maternal behavior, and it’s not only exhibited by people with two X chromosomes, or a vagina, or certain hormones, or whatever excuse conservatives have been making for an intrinsic female nature for the last century. There’s a peculiar impulse that makes some human beings want to cast everything in a black/white light, though.

The myth of maternal instinct places a primacy on biological mothers, suggesting the routes to parenthood fall into two categories: “natural” and “other.” It sustains outdated ideas about masculinity that teaches fathers that they are secondary — assistants, babysitters — and encourages mothers to see them that way, too. It undermines the rights and recognition of same-sex couples and transgender and nonbinary parents, whose ability to care for their children is often questioned.

That’s the message: human behavior isn’t binary. The idea of everything about people being the product of simple either/or switches has failed. And if you want to know how such a notion has taken over, we ask, “Cui bono?” It’s men who benefit from enforcing this arrangement.

Coyne doesn’t like that, and he has a rather silly argument against it. It first relies on typological thinking — the average defines the individual.

But to claim that women don’t have a greater desire than men to care for offspring, or have a greater emotional affinity towards offspring, is to deny biology, and evolution in particular. (I freely admit that many men love their kids deeply, and that some men care for them as much or more as do mothers, but I’m talking about averages here, not anecdotes.)

Women (aggregate noun) have greater desire (uniformly, it appears) to care for offspring. OK, what about people who don’t? Are they not women? We’ve seen this flavor of argument before from people who want to claim that some universal characteristic is an unambiguous and unmistakeable marker for sexual identity. Yeah, some AFAB women have wombs. So? Why should that one character define the totality of the person, and why should its absence likewise define other people?

I’m not impressed by his argument — it’s basically the idea that animal females can have babies, therefore we get to associate a whole lot of culturally determined other attributes on them — but I was amused by one thing. He sorta half-assedly cites Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to support his ideas.

UPDATE: In a comment below, Randolph Nesse, one of the founders of “Darwinian medicine,” cites a book I’d forgotten:

If only everyone interested in this topic could read “Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species”, Sarah Hrdy’s 2020 book on the topic. And if only the NY Times would review such excellent science books so people would know about them! I am tempted to send Conaboy a copy.

Hrdy is a highly respected anthropologist, and you can order her book by clicking on this screenshot:

I highly doubt that Hrdy sees maternal instincts as pure social constructs designed to hold women down. I’m going to read it, and I hope Conaboy does, too. Then we can expect her to retract her article (LOL).

He hasn’t read it? I’ve read it. It’s a very good book. It doesn’t support his binary reductionism, though, and nobody sees human behavior as pure social constructs — that’s a Pinkerish straw man. She asks hard questions and comes up with complex answers that are entirely compatible with evolutionary theory, but don’t support the kind of binary reductionism Coyne is peddling. She writes, for instance:

Is a mother born instinctively nurturing? (“She is a motherly type,” I’ve sometimes heard it said.) Does something inside her change during pregnancy that makes her maternal? (“Before the baby was born, her nesting instinct really got going.”) Is the increased responsiveness due to stimulation from the infant? (“She just fell in love with her new baby.”) Is a female gradually primed to be a mother by experiences?

For mice at least, the answer to these questions is: all of the above. “Instinctive” is a reasonable way to describe her maternal behavior, as long as it is understood that mother mammals do not necessarily exhibit automatic, full-blown commitment to infants immediately after birth. Rather, her “maternal instinct” unfolds gradually, in “baby steps” in which infants, too, are implicated.

Nature cannot be compartmentalized from nurture, yet something about human imaginations predisposes us to dichotomize the world that way. Nature versus Nurture, innate or acquired. The persistence, decade after decade, of a nonexistent dichotomy puzzles me.

Me, too.

Here’s one of her conclusions.

Rather than some magical “essence of mother,” what makes a mother is that she is (invariably) at the scene, hormonally primed, sensitive to infant signals, and related to the baby. These factors lower her threshold for giving of herself to satisfy the infant’s needs. Once her milk comes in, the mother’s urge to nurture grows stronger still. Furthermore, compared to the father (who also shares at least half of his genes with this infant by common descent), there is a good chance that this infant represents a higher proportion of her reproductive prospects than of his (though not necessarily, if she has several, and this is the only child he ever sires). These factors make the mother the likeliest candidate to become the primary caretaker. But they do not constitute an unyielding prescription.

Well, that neatly answers what Coyne considers to be his definitive point: How do we explain the fact that, across the animal kingdom, when members of only one sex do most of the childrearing, it’s almost invariably the females? Consider it explained without resorting to a universal maternal instinct driving all women’s behavior. Your idea of what a woman is supposed to be and do is not an “unyielding prescription,” it’s neither a “should” nor a “must,” yet that’s how most of these authoritarian thinkers use the concept.

Maybe it would help to treat women as individuals and people first, rather than as avatars of a sex?