Some cis people really hate the word “cis”

I have never understood the aversion. Is it because I learned the term as part of Science Latin (all scientists get to learn a crude pidgin version of Latin that lacks all grammar rules and has a limited vocabulary, you know) where “cis” just means “on the same side”? It’s common parlance in structures in organic chemistry and regulatory logic in molecular biology. There’s nothing pejorative about it. When I learned it’s also used to describe someone whose gender identity is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth, yeah, sure, it made perfect sense. I’m a cis person. You can call me that and I won’t be offended at all. Some people are trans, they don’t identify as the sex on their birth certificate, and that’s fine, perfectly normal, “trans” is a nice short word to describe that.

Hmmm. Maybe that’s why some cis people are outraged at being accurately described, because the word also implies the normal categorical existence of trans people.

Anyway, how determined are these people to dodge the awfulness of being called “cis”? They’re trying to appropriate other words for their condition, to hilariously offensive results.

You’d think they’d figure out that abandoning the neutral, innocuous term “cis” to use a different word with an immense amount of baggage is a bad idea, but if they were smart they wouldn’t be TERFs.

Why did YouTube allow Steven Crowder back on?

Steven Crowder, the right-wing “comedian”, was previously banned from YouTube for hate speech. They’ve lifted his ban, though, and he’s back in action. He’s been mocking pride week in his inimitably repulsive way.

Now, if we just look at it — look, with kids, you’re going to say, “OK, you’re born gay. You’re born straight.” Fine, let’s just go with that. But you overwhelmingly celebrate gay. If it’s just something that’s a part of you, it either shouldn’t be celebrated or certainly you wouldn’t celebrate the one of the two versions that results in HIV, more likely; AIDS, more likely; promiscuity, more likely; mental health issues, more likely, but lower domestic abuse with gay people, higher with lesbians.

My point is if you’re just going to celebrate, hey, the preference of friction, why wouldn’t you celebrate the one that makes for the most productive environment for children and has worked for perpetuating the human species since ever. That’s all I’m saying. I just don’t think you need — you’re like — you’re just like telling kids, “Hey, hey, isn’t it great? They’re gay.” What does that mean? It means they have sex in a way that doesn’t work.

…

Honestly, let’s look at all major historical gay figures. You look at Milk.

…

You look at Harvey Milk. You look at people, you look at [UNINTELLIGIBLE] — these are people with AIDS.

How dare those gay people, who all have AIDS and don’t make babies when they have sex and are unproductive, celebrate their survival in a culture full of asses like Steven Crowder?

Also, though, I have to ask…how is that funny? Why are they wearing stupid costumes? Does Crowder need a sycophantic claque to laugh at his jokes, because no one with half a brain will?

Wise up, YouTube. Make this guy gone. He’s not a comedian at all, he’s just a mouthpiece for hate.

“A happy ending is ultimately had by all in this delightful if politically incorrect concoction”

Way back when I was a kid, the local television station would occasional broadcast a matinee showing of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I never watched it. I probably caught a few minutes of it here and there, but it was a musical singing about getting girlfriends at a time when one of the other four channels was probably showing a Gamera movie or something.

But other people paid attention, like Devorah Blachor at McSweeney’s. You mean to say the seven brothers were going to kidnap the seven women and rape them? The movie is based on the rape of the Sabine Women? You mean people in the 1950s just overlooked that it was all about mass rape and even nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar award?

I mean, this was pretty blatant.

I am forced to conclude that the America I grew up in was even more fucked up than I thought, and all that saved me from this kind of indoctrination was a fondness for cheesy sci-fi/horror movies. Did you know that the first Godzilla movie came out in the same year as this dreck, but did it get a best picture nomination? Noooo.

I’d join the misanthropy club, but I would probably detest the members

Early on, one of the things that led me to atheism was that so many Christians insisted on things that were patently wrong. Why did I leave the church at a young age? This would horrify Ken Ham, but they lost me precisely because of the anti-science and specifically anti-evolution slant.

Then the racists lost me because they insisted that black people were a parallel (and inferior!) evolutionary line that looked more like gorillas than white people do. I knew a fair bit about other primates, and no, that’s definitely false. It’s absurdly false. So nope, the racists will not persuade me, especially since now I have even deeper knowledge of the subject than I did as a child.

And then there are the anti-feminists.

It is incomprehensible to me how anyone committed to an evidence-based perspective can be opposed to feminism. You hang out with a few anti-feminists and they’re just oozing with bullshit, which was one of the features leading me to part ways with the atheist movement. This stuff is damaging to any social organization, and if you let it thrive, I want no part of you.

Like this:

At that link, there’s a whole series of dumbass assertions by ignorant idiots about biology. Ick. They’re all from those hives of villainy, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. And I realized that my problem isn’t just with Christianity, or atheism, or racism, or misogyny — it’s with all of humanity. Or, at least, that part of humanity that gravitates towards social media. And with that, my heart shrank two sizes that day.

The bigots who want to know what’s in children’s pants are on the wrong side of history

“What about the children?” they cry. We all know they don’t give a good god damn about the children. It’s all about controlling the children and forcing them to think one way and one way only.

Cody is rather more eloquent than I am on this issue.

These assholes have managed to poison the language — I see someone touting “family!” or “save the children!” I pretty much know they’re actually against those things and are screaming coded versions of “patriarchy!” and “abuse the children!”

Fundraising, stories, and a new video

It’s true, we’re still digging out from under our legal debt and begging for donations. Check out our Fundraising page! There’s new stuff there!

Also, very importantly, Kris Wager is matching donations, up to a thousand dollars total. This is the perfect time to kick in a little bit to our our paypal account.

My contribution this time is a video about a science paper — a case study of an XY woman who gave birth to a child.

You can read the original paper right here, or a transcript of my remarks below the fold.

[Read more…]

It’s all old neckless white guys with buzzcuts harassing kids, in my mind

Ken the Hen is exactly right: LEAVE THEM ALONE.

I remember genital inspections — only we called that junior high PE class. I hated it. Being an insecure and introverted adolescent and being told to strip and take a public shower was bad enough, but it was made worse by the swaggering asshole, Mr Earl, who ‘taught’ PE and would stroll through the locker room making comments about everyone’s bodies. He was definitely in the category of “really mean people”, and was probably also a white supremacist — he certainly raved on and on about the Vietnam War — and I’m sure he’d be a TERF, since, although there were very few openly trans folk in my community then, he was dazzlingly homophobic.

OK, maybe that’s my conspiracy theory. The worst people in the world are brutal PE coaches from the 1970s, and now they’re all running the country and sitting in the Missouri legislature passing hate crimes as laws.

They crossed the streams!

Sorry in advance, everyone, I got sucked into a dark hole and I’ve got to purge myself onto you. Somehow, I stumbled onto this unsavory character, Edward Dutton, who calls himself the “Jolly Heretic” — he’s not very jolly, and he seems to have embraced good ol’ mainstream 19th century pseudoscientific racism, so he’s not very heretical, either. Here’s a brief bio:

Edward Dutton is a prolific vlogger and author whose books have been published by Arktos Media, a Budapest-based white nationalist publishing house, and Richard Spencer’s Washington Summit Publishers. Dutton is listed as part of the “Editorial Circle” for Spencer’s online publication Radix Journal. He also sits on the advisory board of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudo-academic journal that traffics in scientific racism.

Unsurprisingly Dutton was denounced as a “white supremacist” in an op-ed for The Gaudie, the student newspaper of Dutton’s alma mater Aberdeen University, over his racist rants and associations with antisemites and white nationalists. Indeed, Dutton has made appearances on multiple white nationalist shows where he’s claimed white people have higher IQs than nonwhites and fretted over declining white birthrates.

In a jovial discussion of racial differences during a Dec. 2020 livestream with Richard Spencer, Dutton claimed that “white-Black” marriages are the “least likely.” He explained that “Black females are penalized because they are not particularly feminine looking,” but that “it’s Asian women that of course everyone wants” because they “have these child-like features” which are a “sign of good genes.”

Of course he’s on YouTube. He has over 50,000 subscribers.

He calls himself “Professor” Dutton, which was hard to believe — what legitimate university would hire someone this disreputable? Apparently, though, he actually is an adjunct professor of the Anthropology of Religion and Finnish Culture at Oulu University in Finland, and is also a professor of evolutionary psychology at Asbiro University in Łódź, Poland. How he got these appointments is a mystery, but I’ll just guess that there are racists lurking in all the odd corners of academia, and he got these presumably nominal appointments through friends in very low places.

What also got my interest is that this screamingly vile racist pig not only has a successful YouTube channel, and some peculiar academic appointments, but has also cultivated associations with transphobes. It’s so amazingly repellent that I couldn’t look away. Would you believe Ray Blanchard appeared on Dutton’s channel? I’d never heard of Dutton before, but Blanchard…there’s a guy beloved by transphobes, and also possessing genuine credentials as a professor at the University of Toronto. Why would he agree to appear with a known white supremacist and all-around repugnant racist? What’s the connection?

During the Feb. 25, 2021 livestream Blanchard promoted his claim that trans women — whom he repeatedly referred to as “biological males” — can be divided into two basic categories.

The first category, Blanchard said, consists of trans women who “could be thought of as just extremely effeminate homosexual males who went the extra step to conclude that they actually are women, and that they want to be living as women.” He further described them as “drag queens who take their work seriously.”

The second category, according to Blanchard, is made up of people who begin as “fetishistic crossdressers” who, at a young age, engage in “masturbatory activities around women’s clothes,” a practice which “gradually gives rise to a more generalized sense of being … women.”

Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia” to describe this latter category, though it is not widely accepted as a reason for why trans women experience gender dysphoria or choose to transition.

So that’s why Blanchard was willing to hang out with a flaming racist: it was an opportunity to peddle his bogus, discredited ‘theory’ of autogynephilia to a a gullible, biased host who’d happily let him babble, and would nod in agreement. I’d say “ugh”, but I guess it’s good that slime attracts slime and make each other even more disgusting.

Also bizarre was this little interlude:

Later in the livestream Blanchard defended asking transgender people invasive questions about their genitals.

“As far as them being touchy about people asking questions about their genitals, all I can say is there are many shibboleths around that transsexuals impose because they have a fragile story that they want maintained,” Blanchard said. “And if people ask too many pointed questions it becomes threatening.”

Blanchard told Dutton that he had seen “many, many times the outrage you’re describing when people wonder what genitals a transsexual has,” and that “their rant is always ‘How dare you wonder what my genitals are.’”

He added, “In reality, 99.99% of normal, straight normies who meet a transsexual are wondering ‘Gee, what’s between their legs?’ That’s what’s going on in the head of most people. But transsexuals don’t want this question raised, and so they act as if it’s some gross breach of etiquette that only you and your stupidity were ignorant of.”

I, a straight normie, must be in the elite 0.01% because no, that’s not going on in my head. I also don’t ponder the genitals of cis people I meet. I particularly don’t quiz anyone, cis or trans, about the appearance of their genitals, and would consider it a gross breach of etiquette if you were to start asking about mine. That’s not mere prudishness: my interactions with almost every other person on the planet simply don’t involve genitals, so it’s an irrelevant concern, and obsessing over them is an alarming social signal. So why is Ray Blanchard focusing on them?

Is it because he’s a perverse creep?

He also can’t be all that bright. He apparently didn’t even consider the optics of so blatantly merging his transphobic cause with far-right racism. I do wonder if all the JK Rowling fans out there are at all perturbed by this association, or if they’re just all going to coalesce into a whirlwind of indiscriminate hate?

Marinated in wokeness!

In my previous post on the now-cancelled Coyne (the catapult is probably on the way to his office even now), I neglected to mention the other ludicrous part of his comment defending Ronald Fisher, and since transphobia has been brought up in the comments, is particularly appropriate.

Of course the spread of wokeness means that balanced assessments like this one are rare; usually just the idea that someone espoused eugenics is enough to get them canceled and their honors removed. It saddens me, having already known about Fisher and his views, that what I considered my “own” professional society—the Society for the Study of Evolution—and a society of which I was President, is now marinated in wokeness, cancelling Fisher, hiring “diversity” experts to police the annual meeting at great cost, and making the ludicrous assertion—especially ludicrous for an evolution society—that sex in humans is not binary (read my post on this at the link).

See, Jerry Coyne knows better than most of the members of the Society for the Study of Evolution…and in fact, more than almost all the other national and international biological societies. I’d be impressed if he wasn’t insisting on something that is flatly wrong. The simplest and most obvious refutation — has he never heard of intersex individuals? (He has, but his argument is that sex is strongly bimodal, a fact that doesn’t refute anything in the statement below, and suggests that he doesn’t understand the difference between uncommon and nonexistent.) The differentiation of sex is complex with multiple opportunities for variation.

If you were curious, here’s the ludicrous assertion by the SSE:

We, the Council of the Society for the Study of Evolution, strongly oppose attempts by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to claim that there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait (male/female) determined by genitalia at birth. Variation in biological sex and in gendered expression has been well documented in many species, including humans, through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as “male” and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum.* Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits. Beyond the false claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex or gender, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genitalia one is born with do not define one’s identity. Diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans. As a Society, we welcome this diversity and commit to serving and protecting members regardless of their biological sex, gender identity or expression, or sexual orientation.

I can’t disagree with any of that.

Dawkham? Hamkins? What shall we call this unholy team-up?

It’s a portent of the end times. Ken Ham has found common cause with Richard Dawkins.

Of course their common cause is built entirely on Dawkins’ regressive, fallacious views on sex and gender. They can be wrong together, how sweet.

What happened is that a) Dawkins is old, white, and British, and there’s currently an epidemic of TERFishness sweeping through that population, and b) he read a book by hack named Debra Soh and thinks it’s definitive, and c) has been regularly endorsing bad takes in genetics, which is a bit embarrassing. So now he’s jumped on the “chromosomes are destiny” bandwagon.

If you’ve never heard of Debra Soh, it’s because she’s a darling of the right, and you don’t get out enough (good for you). I first heard of her through the posturing clowns of Mythicist Milwaukee, and then…well, read her own bio.

Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Globe and Mail, Scientific American, New York Magazine, Men’s Health, CBC News, Real Clear Politics, and many other publications. Prior to writing The End of Gender, she was a weekly columnist and resident sex scientist for Playboy.com.

As a journalist, Dr. Soh writes about the science of human sexuality, politics, and censorship in academia. She was profiled in the New York Times as one of “The Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” and in Penthouse Magazine as the December 2018 cover story and “Penthouse Crush.” In 2021, Dr. Soh delivered an invited address and Q&A about The End of Gender at the Oxford Union.

She recently appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, the Joe Rogan Experience twice, Dose of Dr. Drew, The Femsplainers, The Ben Shapiro Show, Fox News Primetime with Mark Steyn and Katie Pavlich, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast.

You’d know all about her if you were tuned in to Fox News, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro, as I would assume, Dawkins must be. As for her book, I haven’t read it, nor do I intend to, so I sought out the most favorable review of it I could find. It’s by Barbara Kay. You Canadians might know of her; she’s a fanatical conservative anti-communist xenophobe and anti-semite. So you can trust her summary of the book, right?

According to Soh, then…

Fact: There are only two biological sexes, and they are not “assigned” at birth. Male and female gametes (eggs, sperm) determine our sex, and sex is binary, “not a spectrum.” Fact: Gender, too, “both with regard to identity and expression,” is biology-based and therefore binary. “It is not a social construct, nor is it divided from anatomy or sexual orientation.”

Classic feminists gave us the concept of “social construction.” Feminists believe gendered differences in interests, presentation and behaviours are due to patriarchy and learned behaviour. Science tells us otherwise, Soh says. Male and female brains are demonstrably different. Now, Soh says, feminist chickens are coming home to roost, because—this is a trenchant insight—“If gender is thought to be learned, masculinity will remain the gold standard and femininity will be reduced to aberrations of it.”

None of that is true. That trenchant insight doesn’t even make any sense. This is what impressed Richard Dawkins? It’s the same thing that impressed Ken Ham!

If you read that and think, like I did, that “Gosh, that claim that the Bible endorses a chromosomally-based determination of sex sure sounds stupid,” then you ought to feel the same way when you read that Richard Dawkins thinks that sex is a binary determined by XX/XY chromosomes.

I am going to be so entertained when the two of them go on tour together.