Aubrey de Grey has been on my crank radar for many years as an amorphous fuzzy electronic blob meandering about in the distance. He’s an immortality “researcher” who makes extravagant claims that newspapers love and promote. For instance, he says that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has already been born. Cool. Except that he has no evidence for this, it’s based entirely on unwarranted extrapolation of his exceedingly optimistic view of scientific progress.

For instance, his big idea is that aging is caused by free radical damage by the activity of mitochondria. His solution is to move mitochondrial genes from the organelle to the nucleus, which makes no sense — those reactions are essential to the metabolism of the cell, they have to occur no matter where in the cell that it happens, and we have mitochondria as distributed ‘power plants’ with increased surface area (most of these reactions occur on membranes), so how does centralizing everything limit the deleterious effects of essential energy-producing reactions? The virtue of this scheme seems to be entirely about enhancing his ability to babble sciencey sounding words to venture capitalists like Peter Thiel. I am all for bilking Thiel out of every penny he owns, but the rest of us should be smarter than that.

Furthermore, it’s one thing to make grand promises with technobabble, but has he done anything with the idea? He made a bet over 20 years ago that someone (not him, he wouldn’t know how) would translocate 13 mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, with all the imaginary benefits that would bestow, by 2005. Didn’t happen. Isn’t going to happen. Every cell and molecular biologist is going to look askance at such a silly idea. It’s just more empty, hypothetical promises.

Did you know he was going to cure cancer? This is from an old article in 2005 — I guess he was leaping from his mitochondrial hypothesis, which didn’t pan out, to a new hypothesis about telomeres. The telomere hypothesis has also not panned out; I wonder what new flaky idea he’s telling audiences of rich old people, but unfortunately I don’t care enough to try and find out, although I do know for sure that people are still getting cancer.

…he tells us of his plan to combat cancer, perhaps the most pernicious of the Seven Deadly Sins. The chink in cancer’s armor, de Grey believes, is the telomeres, strands of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes that must be maintained in order for a cell to continue to divide. When scientists started intensively investigating telomeres in the 1990s, the buzz went as follows: If we could turn on the enzyme telomerase, which maintains the telomeres, thereby keeping them, and cell division, going indefinitely, was this not the molecular fountain of youth? It was not. Researchers have since concluded that short, unrepaired telomeres don’t impose an absolute limit on human life. Our bodies have considerable cell reserves, and some of the most crucial types of cells, in the brain and heart, divide rarely or not at all. Cancer cells, however, do require well-
maintained telomeres if they are to keep lethally multiplying, which is why cancer is most commonly found in the oft-dividing cells of the gut, the reproductive system, the skin and the blood, cells that are actively producing telomerase. (It’s also why Mike West and others are pursuing anti-cancer drugs based on telomerase.)

De Grey, as is his wont, takes the strategy a few steps further, even if the end result bears little resemblance to medical reality as we know it. He has devised a plan to make people essentially immune to cancer. Stem cells from the cancer-prone organ systems would be removed and, in a process not yet developed, reproduced in the lab after they had been genetically modified to turn off their production of telomerase. The stem cells would then be reintroduced into the body, but not before they had been genetically modified a second time to make them more resistant to cancer-fighting chemotherapy drugs. So now people could be bombarded with ultrapowerful doses of chemo to kill any potential cancers, and their newly modified stem cells would shake off the insult. Over time, as people returned to the doctor for periodic stem cell “reseedings” (necessary because without telomerase, cells won’t divide normally), their cells would become progressively less capable of letting cancers grow.

Got that? Once upon a time, people speculated that the key to immortality was switching on telomerase, which is normally inactive in all somatic cells. Then it was pointed out that switching on telomerase is a common mutation in cancers, a prerequisite to indulging in wild, frantic reproduction unchecked (hmm, maybe there’s a reason telomerase genes are inactive in healthy cells). So de Grey proposes deleting telomerase genes altogether from somatic cells, which seems to me a counter-intuitive idea from a guy who wants to keep healthy cells reproducing forever, because cells would eventually lose telomeres and die, but he has a magic solution. We should 1) extract all the stem cells from cancer-prone tissues (basically, everything), a process we can’t do. Then we should 2) delete telomerase from all those cells, which is something we can sort of do, and then 3) load them up with shiny new genes that make them resistant to chemotherapy (it’s OK, these telomerase-deficient cells couldn’t possibly go cancerous, he thinks, while Ian Malcolm mutters “life finds a way” over in the corner), and 4) repopulate the patient’s organs with the stem cells (how? I don’t know), and 5) have the patients all come in periodically to repeat the process as their stem cells die off (dollar signs appear in the eyeballs of the venture capitalists).

This is ridiculous. Gene knock-outs are feasible and done fairly routinely on small sets of cells, but the rest is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy which almost certainly wouldn’t work, and which de Grey himself can’t do, and which isn’t being done by the institutes he is associated with, and which receive all that money from wealthy donors. It’s a spectacular con, pure high tech snake oil with an ever-shifting magic formula that he conjures up with the latest scientific buzzwords. He’s ready-made for TED talks.

Oh, yeah, he’s also a cryonics proponent.

I haven’t paid much attention to him, though, because he mainly seems to be bleeding rich vampires like Peter Thiel, who would be wasting their millions and billions anyway. He also has a seemingly harmless, idiosyncratic manner, again making him a perfect poster boy for TED talks, and who cares what those twits think? Except now he seems to have crossed the wrong entrepreneurs, who revealed some of the seediness of his personal attitudes, and he’s been put on indefinite leave for his behavior.

On Tuesday night, Laura Deming, the 27-year-old founder of the Longevity Fund, and Celine Halioua, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech startup developing drugs to help dogs live longer, posted accounts on their blogs and to Twitter of experiences they had with de Grey as young scientists trying to gain a foothold in the field.

Ugh. Sorry, I already dislike these two for their petty silicon-valley-style startups and for being young and rich. I only say that to remove any idea that I’m prejudiced in their favor, because I’m not, but they didn’t deserve the treatment they got.

Here are the stories that are demolishing de Grey’s reputation.

Halioua, who had been an intern at SENS Research Foundation in 2016 and whose research as an undergraduate and graduate student had been funded by the organization, alleged that SENS executives exploited her youth and attractiveness to solicit funds from donors. Halioua described a dinner in which de Grey allegedly told her that she had a responsibility to have sex with the SENS donors in attendance so they would give money to the organization.

“I left that dinner sobbing,” she wrote. “It has taken me years to shake the deep-seated belief that I only got to where I am due to older men wanting to have sex with me.”

Do I believe her? I sure do. The entirety of de Grey’s career has been about milking money from donors, so the idea that he’d think pimping out his employees was a good plan fits my impression of his character. That is a deeply demeaning way to regard students.

Aubrey de Grey is 58. Leave the young women alone.

In her own post, Deming described an encounter she had a decade ago with de Grey, in which he told her over email that he had an “adventurous love life,” and expressed a suppressed desire to talk about it with her. Deming was 17 at the time, and had known de Grey since she was 14 and a precocious freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deming said she dismissed the experience as a mistake on de Grey’s part. But in recent months, conversations with Halioua and others had convinced her the behavior was part of a serial pattern of predation on younger women. “I’m angry to realize that Aubrey inappropriately propositioned more than one woman over whom he was in a position of power, many in the community knew about it, and no one did anything,” she wrote.

Ick. Do not talk about your love life with 14-17 year old girls. Just don’t. Not ever.

But, the skeptical among you are saying, these are just two stories. De Grey denies them. Aren’t we just going on hearsay? I’d be more cautious about the allegations, but de Grey just had to open his big fat mouth and sound exactly like every other abuser.

Early Wednesday morning, de Grey addressed the allegations in a Facebook post. “Unsurprisingly, I deny these allegations,” he wrote. “What may be more surprising to you is this: my belief is that both Laura and Celine have been deceived into the view that I have done many things that I have in fact not done.”

In the post, De Grey said that the women’s descriptions of their personal experiences were “decidedly incomplete.” Deming “references an email I wrote — inadvisedly, for sure, and which I unreservedly regret — to her when she was 17, but she explicitly states that ‘I wrote it off as a mistake’ and that she only resurfaced it in the past few months at the instigation of others,” he wrote. “Celine references a dinner where she and I sat together, and accuses me of saying certain things that I utterly deny ever saying and that she implies I said when she was drunk. … It is instructive that the very next day she wrote to me without the faintest hint of ambivalence, asking for additional feedback on her presentation, and that every one of our exchanges, of which the most recent was less than a year ago, has been of similarly untarnished character.”

Oh god, what a crappy alibi. He’s accusing unnamed malignant individuals of brainwashing these women into saying things to do him harm. That sounds like projection to me. Of course he’s the center of the conspiracy against him, it’s not possible that these women could have independently decided to ruin him.

Then he dismisses his sexual email to an underage girl because she “wrote it off as a mistake”. Right. That’s what people do when they learn of things that make them uncomfortable, they try to rationalize it. This is mundane human behavior, it is not exculpatory at all — a 17 year old girl tried to make excuses for a man she admired doing a bad thing. It does not mean he didn’t do that bad thing. Calling Harvey Weinstein!

Most tone-deaf of all and so common there must be a psychological phenomenon named after it, he dismisses the other accusation because the woman was friendly afterwards. Sound familiar? Powerful influencer simply can’t believe that he could possibly have so much clout in his field that the people he oppresses might continue to ingratiate themselves with him. He can’t believe that the women he harasses would pull themselves together and try to cope with their harasser because he’s essential to their careers, therefore he thinks he must not have really harassed them.

Before, I would have said we should believe the women and investigate further, and in particular, we should see if there are other similar incidents in his history. After reading his rather arrogant reply, though, I’m just saying “fuck it, he’s guilty.” I don’t care what happens to another pseudo-scientific parasite and quack.

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Uh-oh. I just read some of the comments by his defenders on Facebook.

I’ve known Aubrey for over a decade now and during all those times that we met I’ve never seen him behave inappropriately, says a man named Sven. That’s convincing: so an old man who hits on young women has never, ever been improper in the presence of his bros? Calling Lawrence Krauss to the witness stand.

This is just a couple of SJW’s trying to cancel a mid-aged well educated well earning white male, says Rudy, who goes on to say Contemporary feminazi’s nowadays reduce any unsuccessful approach attempt or even a simple compliment, simply if unwanted, to sexual harrassment, or at least sexism. Wokistry judges quickly, on the spot, without process,goes public in stead of to court, and makes intention processes. I guess I’ll have to judge de Grey by the company he keeps, as well.

Says Stefano, How comes 17 years old are not entitled to be solicited, but should instead be discriminated as a matter of principle?! This sounds pretty ageist to my ears. By the way, age of consent is civilised countries is 14. I could almost hear the phrase It’s not pedophilia, it’s ephebophilia! quivering on his lips.

Looks like a witch hunt to me, says Kurt. Yeah, “witch hunt” gets thrown around a lot over there.

I once groped a girl in a nightclub without permission around 45 years ago, says Dirk. Two wrongs do make a right!

Does it really matter what one said or wrote many years ago? complains Valerija, one of the few women defending him. This was ten years ago, not that long, when the girl was 17 and de Grey was 48. I guess the rule is you can pursue under-age girls until you are 50, then you have to slow down.

This is a more typical response from one of the few women commenting:

I have never in my life read more automatic misogynistic responses to a post. You all are upchucking a huge, untapped (until now) volcano of hatred towards women in the worlds of science and finance. It doesn’t even matter now whether the women are telling the truth or not. The tone of the original post and the comments are revealing enough. I know this is not the popular response but that has not stopped me from being the voice of truth ever, so here I am. Pile it on, men (and a few women). That’s what you do best. #deplorable

The general consensus is that how dare these women hinder Aubrey de Grey’s progress towards eliminating aging. One problem with that perspective is that no, Aubrey de Grey has never and will never make a significant contribution in gerontology. He’s a hype train that has finally been derailed.

Do I need to state the obvious again? Biologists keep telling everyone that sex and gender are a lot more complex and diverse than the binary bill of goods the ideologues try to sell you. Now let’s add another scientific discipline shouting the truth at the public, with Archaeologists for Trans Liberation.

Human biology extends beyond and between “Male” and “Female”

The erasure of the complexity of sex and gender beyond simple binaries is a function of contemporary transphobic ideologies within archaeological analyses and not a reflection of past peoples’ lives. Moreover, this erasure risks providing fodder for accounts of the past that are used to further marginalize trans and gender fluid people.

Identifying and understanding past people’s conceptions and experiences of gender is not straightforward. The further back one goes, the fewer and more fragmented the traces of people’s lives become and the more complicated it is to interpret and understand them. We work from scraps to construct narratives that are messy, ragged and rarely twine together.

It’s a very thorough article, and well referenced. I especially appreciate the bits we mere biologists don’t know as much about.

Our current social organization, based around strict lines delineating gender, primary sex characteristics, and sexuality, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged as part of European hegemonic colonialism and serves to enforce and maintain capitalist norms in the home and wider society (Monaghan 2015). An imposed and rigid gender binary regulates reproduction (a concern of nationalist states), breaks down Indigenous and non-European kin connections and families (perpetuating genocide), and positions the household as a site of capitalist surplus accumulation (through regulated social roles and relations of (re)production) (Morgensen 2010, 2012).

Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies critics such as Deborah Miranda (2010) and Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) have documented the ways in which colonial governments engaged in violent projects of gender normalization targeting Indigenous individuals and communities. Daniel Justice (2010) draws on archaeological materials as resources for inspiring queer Cherokee worldviews, politics, and modes of belonging. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear, in her academic writing (2018) and public scholarship (Wilber, Small-Rodriguez and Keene 2019), explores the way binary structures colonised bodies and beds, breaking and distorting traditional kin relations.

Such practices seem to have been a regular or even necessary force in sustaining European colonial violence across the globe. Religious strictures against ‘sodomy’ (which often glossed a range of non-heteronormative sex practices) were frequently used by European colonial and religious authorities to punish gender nonconforming individuals in Africa and South America. Epprecht notes that the British South African Company was particularly enthusiastic in prosecuting “homosexual crimes” during its first year of occupation of Zimbabwe, suggesting the commonplace nature of non-heteronormative relationships prior to Colonization, and “[indicating] a reflexive defense of patriarchal, heterosexual masculinity by the homophobic representatives of the colonial state” (Epprecht 1998: 217). British colonial sodomy laws, despite no longer being in place in the U.K., remain on the books in many colonised countries, and continue to drive state violence and acts of bigotry against queer and gender diverse people (Sanders 2009; Semugoma 2012).

That does explain why so many of the status quo warriors are vehement in their denial of the science.

According to Lifesite News (as we all know, a highly reliable site), Outer space to be solely the dominion of gays and trans. Now it sounds spectacularly fun, but I guess I’m excluded, not being either. They really are discriminating against us cis-het folk! I’m also curious about the sexual orientation of Branson and Bezos.

The story goes on:

According to a growing number of astronomers, physicists, and major scientific journals, anyone who is not sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ should be denied a presence in the cosmos. 

There is a movement afoot within NASA to rename the much anticipated, $8.8 billion yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Why? As a State Department official in the 1950s, James Webb opposed employing gays and lesbians, viewing them as security risks susceptible to blackmail.     

Webb went on to become in 1961 the head of NASA, where he oversaw the Apollo program.   

Because the race to beat the USSR to the moon was viewed as integral to winning the Cold War, the Apollo program had to be protected against vulnerabilities to Soviet interference.  Webb was responsible for implementing federal policy that included purging gays and lesbians from the NASA workforce.    

That’s rather thin gruel of evidence for the extraordinary claim that all the straight people will be denied a presence in the cosmos. It’s a bit of a grand leap from suggesting that large space projects shouldn’t be named after bigots to whining that the straights have been banned from outer space.

You do know that the reason gay people were considered vulnerable to Soviet interference is because good ol’ American bigots would use information about people’s sexuality to find common cause with the nefarious Russkies and wreck our own programs, right? All they had to do was recognize that gay people could also be patriotic Americans to negate the threat, but Webb willingly went along with a plan to discriminate against gay folk, which suggests he shared that bigotry. It’s the presence of homophobes, like everyone at Lifesite news, that is the problem.

They also make the claim that LGBT corruption: Making the hard sciences soft, squishy, citing the fact (which is a fact) that statements about, for instance, the biology of men and women are more complicated to interpret than a simplistic, dishonest TERF can comprehend.

Scientific American regularly publishes articles that are political, not scientific, where LGBT ideology trumps intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research. Recent editorial headlines include Why Anti-Trans Laws Are Anti-Science, A Nationwide Ban Is Needed for “Anti-Gay Therapy,” and Gender-Affirming Health Care Should Be a Right, Not a Crime — all of which belong in the opinion sections of The Advocate or LGBTQ Nation, not a science journal. 

Nature has appended notices to articles and social media postings, declaring, “Nature recognizes that sex and gender are neither binary nor fixed,” or some variation on that theme.  

Science and policy are intertwined, so of course a science journal is going to take a stand on the intersection of science with politics. It is true that “intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research” support the idea that anti-trans laws are anti-science, because they are, and that “anti-gay therapy” doesn’t work and does more harm than good, and fucking of course gender-affirming health care should be provided to everyone who needs it. What is wrong with these people that think respecting the diversity of human identities should be a crime? It is anti-science to think it’s bad that scientific evidence repudiates their narrow-minded views.

As for Nature…it is entirely reasonable that they would qualify statements about the nature of men’s and women’s sexual and gender nature with a reminder that those properties are more fluid and complex. They are rightly concerned that, for instance, actuarial statistics that classify people into male and female categories will be misinterpreted as evidence that sex is rigidly binary by, for instance, bigoted readers like Lifesite News.

Case in point: they try to discredit the petition to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope by implying that the people behind it are a bunch of weirdos.

The name-change petition was launched by the four astronomers, including one who identifies as ‘non-binary,’ an astrophysicist who uses the pronouns ‘she/they,’ and a professor of physics and astronomy who is also a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies who identifies as “queer and agender.”  The petition now has amassed 1,250 signatories, according to Nature.  

But that makes the point for those scientists! These non-binary astronomers exist, and are speaking out and demanding respect as human beings; they are saying that you don’t get to pretend they can only be pure, ideologically conservative men and pure, ideologically conservative women. They are different, and don’t fit into the traditional pair of bins, and they are protesting the fact that people like them were discriminated against! Meanwhile, Lifesite News is not contesting the fact of discrimination, implicitly acknowledging that Webb was biased against them, instead just trying to justify it because we were in a space race against the Soviet Union.

It was a stupid race, anyway. Think what we could have accomplished with less competition and more cooperation, and with the assistance of more brilliant minds that just happened to have sexual preferences James Webb, and other hidebound administrators, didn’t like.

She was an attractive pop-singer in the 1970s who became the face of intolerant homophobia. I don’t remember any of her songs, but I sure remember how much she was a running joke among the kinds of liberal hippies I hung out with.

(Oh, right, the “your watch is on backwards” thing. You see, back in the Old Days, we wore timepieces called “watches” on our wrist, and most normal people wore them with the face on the dorsal side, so you’d hold your arm straight out to see the time; some people wore them with the face on the ventral side, so you’d bend your wrist back when you wanted to know what time it is. This is a difficult difference to grasp for people who may not know what a watch is.)

But really, I did not know anyone who didn’t think Anita Bryant was a creepy fanatic. She had her fans, obviously, but she was equivalent of a TERF nowadays — yeah, she has her following, she was promoting awful laws, but we were sure she was on the wrong side of history. It’s nice to see that confirmed.

She’s an old lady of 81 now, still just as rigid in her thinking (definitely not a cool grandma), and still a committed homophobe. It’s satisfying to know that she lived long enough to see her granddaughter, Sarah Green, come out to her face.

Toward the end, Green talks about her relationship with Bryant, who was a doting grandmother; Green says she once thought Bryant didn’t really hate LGBTQ+ people, but she started to look at her grandmother differently when Green realized as a teen that she herself was gay.

She had no intention of coming out to Bryant, but she was spurred to do so on her 21st birthday. Bryant sang “Happy Birthday” to her granddaughter on the phone and told her that if she had faith, the right man would come along. “And I just snapped and was like, ‘I hope that he doesn’t come along, because I’m gay, and I don’t want a man to come along,’” Green recalls.

Bryant responded by telling Green that homosexuality is a delusion invented by the devil and that her granddaughter should focus on loving God, because that would make her realize she’s straight.

“It’s very hard to argue with someone who thinks that an integral part of your identity is just an evil delusion,” Green says.

And now Sarah Green has had the joy of announcing her engagement to another young woman!

Bryant knows Sarah is engaged to a woman, said Robert Green Jr., Sarah Green’s father and Bryant’s son, says on the podcast. When he told his mother, he notes, “All at once, her eyes widened, her smile opened, and out came the oddest sound: ‘Oh.’ Instead of taking Sarah as she is, my mom has chosen to pray that Sarah will eventually conform to my mom’s idea of what God wants Sarah to be.”

Sarah Green says she doesn’t hate Bryant but feels sorry for her. “I just kind of feel bad for her,” she says. “And I think as much as she hopes that I will figure things out and come back to God, I kind of hope that she’ll figure things out.”

That’s even better than a pie in the face.

(Also cool: “four young homosexuals from Minneapolis” were responsible.)

As long as there have been Nazis. It’s a natural enmity. Today I learned about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two non-binary people who battled the Germans in occupied Jersey.

Lucy Schwob is better known by their pseudonym, Claude Cahun, and Suzanne Malherbe by her pseudonym, Marcel Moore. Theirs was a creative partnership, as well as romantic. Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, writer, and sculptor, while Moore was an illustrator and designer.

Cahun is the more renowned of the pair. She used her work to challenge notions of identity and gender with androgynous self-portraits that bring to life an array of characters. In one, she’s a bodybuilder holding barbells and hearts drawn on their cheeks; in another, she’s a lady of the manor swathed in velvet. Her work is a playful clash of the masculine and feminine, but also a critique of the societal norms she spent her life refusing to adhere to.

Cahun believed that gender was transmutable. Assuming different identities was her forte, and she regularly performed in avant-garde theatre in 1920s Paris (experts still refer to her using feminine pronouns, but it is likely she would have identified as non-binary today). Moore would create the costumes that Cahun would wear to tread the boards. A forerunner of the modern artist, Cindy Sherman, she was ahead of her time in more ways than one.

They were also uncommonly brave.

Three years after her arrival, on June 30, 1940, the Germans invaded. The islanders knew early on that Jersey was likely to be occupied – 6,600 fled on evacuation ships – but Cahun and Moore chose to stay. “They’d spent their entire lives resisting authority, so this was an opportunity to be part of the resistance on the island,” says Downie.

Together, the pair created a two-person resistance campaign, with the main focus being what they called their “traps”. Cahun would draft notes addressed to the German troops, which Moore would translate into German, signing them ‘Der Soldat Ohne Namen’ (‘The Soldier Without a Name’).

Their aim was to inspire dissension amongst the troops by pointing out the idiocy of war. Professor Shaw says they would do it in a cryptic way, using poetry, reminiscent of the surrealist sensibility: “It wasn’t like propaganda telling you ‘Here’s what you need to do’, it spurred the soldiers to think their own thoughts about it.” They would catch the bus into St Helier, disguised as old ladies to deliver the messages, placing them on parked cars and inside cigarette packets. They kept as quiet as they could about their resistance – not even their housekeeper suspected them.

Subversive poetry is a perfectly legitimate means of resistance. It bothered the Nazis enough that when they were captured after four years of making nuisances of themselves, they were sentenced to death — they were only spared because the Allies were timely in their liberation of island ports and the French mainland.

Hooray for courageous weirdos!

I haven’t watched it in years — decades, even — and that’s my excuse for not knowing about its sexist culture.

Shark Week, a celebration of sharks on the Discovery Channel that attracts millions of viewers, is marine science’s premiere annual television event—and it rarely features women scientists or scientists of color in leading roles. Many women I’ve spoken to were passionate viewers as children, but when they became scientists, found “it wasn’t what it used to be, or what I remembered it to be,” said Carlee Jackson, a co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS). Another scientist told me that Shark Week stopped feeling “pure,” to her, because she increasingly “saw it through a lens tainted by sexism … and I wonder what would be different if I’d had a positive, inclusive experience in science from the start.”

To call shark science a “boy’s club” is an understatement—although more than 60 percent of graduate students in my field are women, the vast majority of senior scientists are white men. During my research talk at my first shark science conference, a senior male scientist was so rude and aggressive during the question period that another male scientist apologized for him afterward, telling me “he does that to a female graduate student every year or two”. I have seen it happen to others since; at least one woman he targeted left the podium in tears.

For years, the annual conference “officially” ended at the beginning of the closing banquet so organizers wouldn’t be responsible for what came next. “Next” included a fundraiser in which scantily clad female graduate students were expected to parade auction items around the room, a dinner at which one senior scientist demanded to sit with only the “prettiest” students, and an alcohol-fueled mixer where women needed to be on constant guard against roaming hands. The first male Ph.D. student who volunteered to display auction items to help his female colleagues had his rear laughingly slapped by a male senior scientist “for old time’s sake.” A photograph from a past meeting shows a senior scientist with his hands between the legs of two women graduate students, lifting them off the ground—one of them smiling, the other appearing on the verge of tears.

Uh, what?

I’ve been to post-conference shindigs in my fields of study, and they’ve been relatively benign (given that as a man, there may have been undercurrents to which I was stupidly oblivious), but they’ve never this ridiculously sexist. It helps that most of those fields, developmental biology and now spider biology, have been filled with a woman majority, but then marine biology is similarly popular with women. I guess one difference is that we’ve never had a wealthy influencer, like a whole cable TV channel, tilting the playing field and fueling bias with unwarranted favoritism for male presenters.

Read the whole article and be appalled. One disappointment, though, is that none of the assholes (the best term for the men described in that quote) get named, and that’s a shame, but understandable. They’ve still got the power. Nothing has changed to make the power differential shift, so a woman calling them out is going to get an absurd amount of shit showered down on her. But jesus, shark researchers of any gender: next time you see a senior man browbeating a woman graduate student, or fondling her, or asking her to parade around in skimpy clothing, say something. Make it unacceptable to behave that way. If you want to be an ally, don’t acquiesce.

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And yet another reason!

“He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Daniels told In Touch Weekly, again recounting Trump watching “Shark Week.” “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities, and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was, like, riveted. He was, like, obsessed.”

Last night, I was listening to Katy Montgomerie’s latest TERF Wars video while I was supposedly puttering away at a lecture — it’s a nice entertaining mix of laughter and righteous anger — when she mentioned a name I hadn’t heard in a while, Andy Lewis. I banned him for his obnoxious TERFy bullshit way, way back in 2018, and I got a lot of cluck-clucking and tut-tutting from the British sceptic community for it. He’s such a rational fellow, don’t you know. Such an important figure in UK scepticism. He is still ranting away about Adult Human Females now in 2021, I guess, so I took a peek at his blog. He wrote about me just last year! Not just me, though, the main target of his ire was Rebecca Watson, who is still punching all the right buttons.

He was mad because she was using slurs and pointing out that the XX/XY dichotomy is “middle school science” and largely irrelevant in any discussion about human rights. He wants to discuss the True Science, which reveals that there are only males and females, and chortles dismissively at the idea that he and his fellow TERFs would use the XX/XY distinction.

The claim is that this is ‘middle school science’ and that if ‘the fervent believers’ are challenged they ‘will throw their hands in the air, claim it’s too complicated or the data is lying or whatever other excuse they can think of, and continue believing what they believe. And in a statement that we shall come back to, “They came to their belief first, for other reasons, and then attempted to build up science and reason in a way that makes it look like it supports their belief.”

This is a straw man argument because biologists do not define your sex by the chromosomes XX and XY. These chromosome combinations are part of a *sex determining mechanism* in organisms like humans. This mechanism is not universal in life. Birds, for example, have a different chromosomal sex determining mechanism – ZZ/ZW. Birds still have quite distinct males and females though.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9354761

In the XX/XY system found in humans, the actual determination mechanism is the SRY gene that is usually, but not always found on the Y chromosome. This gene switches between one of two evolved developmental pathways.

Almost, but not quite. He’s trying to reduce it even further, from a whole chromosome to just a single region on that one chromosome. If only he thought a little deeper about that phrase, “developmental pathways”, because that’s what really matters from a biological perspective — there’s a whole long chain of events that are usually, but not always, in concordance, and there’s a fair bit of wobble in the outcome. It’s not binary at all — as soon as you start dealing with multigenic processes, you open the door to a whole lot of variation.

(By the way, birds aren’t quite so binary, either. Gynandromorphs, anyone? Avian homosexuality? Birds don’t play by your rules, man.)

If not chromosomes, then what is the binary defining character? He plops down in favor of gametes.

Sex is not defined by these chromosomes. Sex arises from the fact that we are evolved sexually reproducing organisms. Sex evolved deep in life’s history and has remained remarkably conserved – although there are many *sex determination mechanisms* in organisms. [Yes? He keeps almost getting it — sex determination in different species is fluid!]

Sex is near universal in eukaryotes and is the ‘the mixing of genomes via meiosis and fusion of gametes’. In multicellular organisms it is almost always done through the joining of unequal size gametes (anisogamy).

It is this fundamental and ancient asymmetry in gametes and the joining together of one of each type that gives rise to the sexes. The small, mobile gamete we class as male and the larger, and immobile one we class as female.

In multicellular organisms like us where anisogamy rules, the *sex determining mechanism* (the SRY gene) is used to switch between two sets of genes that develop different phenotypes to support each gamete type – males and females.

To suggest that there are more than two sexes, or even more extreme, that somehow sex forms a continuum, a distribution or a spectrum is completely incompatible with this view of life and sexual reproduction. (The idea that ‘sex is a spectrum’ is a core part of the credo of gender ideology.)

As usual, he misses the point. He is correct that there are two functional classes of gametes in humans. Generally speaking, an individual can only form one or the other, or none at all. But so what? Am I going to have to provide a semen sample before I’m allowed to use a public restroom? From a policy and social interaction perspective, this is a non-starter.

But most importantly, people are not gametes. Every person is the product of a fusion of two haploid gametes, one large immobile one and one small mobile one, so we start as a mixture of both. We then go through a complex developmental process with many steps that produce the messy diverse multicellular organism that may try to practice mating behavior of one sort or another, or contribute to the upbringing of more messy diploid multicellular organisms, or tries to shape the culture that we use to propagate ourselves. I, for one, do not consider myself a lumbering sperm delivery system, nor do I consider my wife an ambulatory incubator/ovum generator. I am also rather offended that a dilettante with only a superficial knowledge of evolution would think that evolutionary biology can be used to justify such an absurdly reductionist view of humanity.

Yes, I have gonads that produce sperm. It is categorically wrong to think that somehow tells you anything more about my nature, my sexual preferences, or whether I should be allowed to wear a skirt or not.

We see defenders of evolution such as @pzmyers reacting like the worst frothing mouth evangelical preacher when asked to defend the idea that women can have penises.

https://thoughtfreeblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/13/why-i-banned-andy-lewis-maria-maclachlan-and-alan-henness/ …

One would have thought that Myers would have taken the opportunity to use this as a quirky way to explain how evolution works and ends up with counterintuitive results. But no. Shouting and screaming instead.

I can only assume that Mr Lewis trusts that none of his readers will ever follow a link he gives, because there is no frothing mouth evangelical preacher or Shouting and screaming at that link. Go ahead, check.

There does seem to be a lot of shouting from TERFs over pragmatically useless distinctions between human individuals. I just don’t need to know about chromosomes or reproductive apparatuses in the people I interact with. As I said back then,

The presence or absence of a penis is possibly the worst gender signal ever, because we keep those hidden in almost all of our social interactions. I’d have to be really close, very intimate friends with a woman before she’d show me her penis.

I’d have to be even more intimate with her before I’d ask her to ejaculate for me.

Lewis also snipes at David Gorski.

And @oracknows screaming ‘TERF’ because I suggested the biggest sceptical issue that should be covered right now is the denial of the material reality of sex among gender ideologists. (now appears to be deleted.)

Tell me, has it ever been accurate to say David Gorski was screaming? It’d be fair to say I sometimes get worked up and rage loudly at the universe, but David is always careful and objective. I also can’t quite imagine him (or me, for that matter), denying the material reality of sex. Sex is most definitely real. It’s just not the simple phenomenon that Lewis thinks it is.