The full EOAA report, and the police report, of the University of Minnesota football team scandal, have been released. It’s 80 horrible pages.

I can see now why the police aren’t pressing charges — the victim would be crucified in court, because she went along with some of the activities that went on in that apartment, out of fear or drunkenness. I can also see why the university is taking action against them, because the football players who participated were awful, ghastly, horrible, rotten young men. I am even less sympathetic with the other team members who are supporting them.

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One bit of good news: the other players have ended their threatened boycott. It’s not clear whether it’s because they read the EOAA report, or because UM just got awarded a bowl game.

They’re all amused that I don’t understand biology, as evidence by my criticisms of Boghossian’s blatant biases. Would you believe Jordan Peterson chimed in, too? Oh, how I tremble in terror and shame. I have roused a loud army of dumbasses (get used to it, Trump generation).

Except…I’m reasonably confident in my knowledge, and my opponents seem to be grossly ignorant and pandering to the twin trickster gods of prejudice and common sense. Never trust those guys. So I’ll keep it simple. They don’t understand that distinction between brute fact and social knowledge.

Here’s a brute fact: John produces sperm. Jennifer produces ova, sometimes. There’s no denying these simple, measurable observations. Further, we’ll stipulate that these are healthy eggs and sperm, and that I can extract these cell types in the lab and combine them in a dish and create a healthy, growing diploid zygote, that I could then implant in an individual who has a uterus and grow to adulthood. In fact, if I wanted to engineer a master race, I could go through the population and segregate out the individuals who make sperm and those who make ova and begin doing all kinds of interesting biological experiments.

Now, here are some social facts: John is a man. Jennifer is a woman. And Racist Twitter is saying, “Of course!” Except that that has taken a simple brute fact, the presence of organs that produce gametes, and extrapolated it into the socially loaded gender terms that carry huge amounts of baggage and imply lots of details in our heads that aren’t necessarily true. For example, you might then imagine John is a bit larger and physically stronger than Jennifer, which, on average, is probably true, but not necessarily so.

Or you might assume John would be a better scientist than Jennifer, which is not at all true.

In their study, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues created a fictitious resume of an applicant for a lab manager position. Two versions of the resume were produced that varied in only one, very significant, detail: the name at the top. One applicant was named Jennifer and the other John. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues then asked STEM professors from across the country to assess the resume. Over one hundred biologists, chemists, and physicists at academic institutions agreed to do so. Each scientist was randomly assigned to review either Jennifer or John’s resume.

The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits. Despite having the exact same qualifications and experience as John, Jennifer was perceived as significantly less competent. As a result, Jenifer experienced a number of disadvantages that would have hindered her career advancement if she were a real applicant. Because they perceived the female candidate as less competent, the scientists in the study were less willing to mentor Jennifer or to hire her as a lab manager. They also recommended paying her a lower salary. Jennifer was offered, on average, $4,000 per year (13%) less than John.

Having functional testes is not a requirement for a lab manager, yet our society as a whole has this mental shortcut that categorizes the suitability of individuals to particular jobs on the basis of a raft of irrelevant, but usually easily detectable, characters. This is a reality that those who want to reduce people to a definition based on sex are ignoring. Even when a social fact is turned into a brute fact by social scientists like Moss-Racusin, they deny. It’s kind of depressing.

Furthermore, I snuck in another social fact in that paragraph introducing John and Jennifer. Did you notice?

Why is the sperm-producing person named “John”, and the ovum-producing person named “Jennifer”? These are arbitrary signifiers that we associate with a gender, and then to their roles in culture, and to traits like their qualities as lab managers. Imagine if I’d started that paragraph “Jennifer produces sperm. John produces ova, sometimes.” Many people would be confused. They’d think I’d made a mistake. I’d created a conflict between their social assumptions and the brute fact of biology. But there are people named John who have ovaries.

Hmm. I wonder how good they are at lab management?

By the way, allow me to introduce Jessie^*. Jessie doesn’t produce sperm or ova, or maybe they do, but their behavior intentionally prevents reproduction. They do not dress in a socially conventional way for either gender. They do not engage in any of the standard courtship and mating customs of their culture. They ask you to use the non-gendered plural pronouns when addressing them.

But…but…there are only two sexes! We will struggle internally to fit Jessie into one of the two gender boxes convention allows. We must. We need to find some indication to help us accommodate our stereotypes.

Then we learn that Jessie is employed as a lab manager, and we are relieved. Jessie must be a “man”, then. We’ll be polite and continue to use the non-gendered pronouns, though. Or perhaps we’re an asshole like Jordan Peterson, and we’ll insist on forcing them into our biased pigeonholes.

And thus do we close the loop in our stereotypes and maintain the fiction of a binary reality, despite all the complicating evidence otherwise.

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^*Note that I snuck in yet another social fact for you to deal with: I chose what we consider a gender-neutral or ambiguous name for this person. But it can also be that someone named Jane or Joe chooses to defy those gender stereotypes, and then what happens? Everyone assumes Jane is female, of course. Even if Jane has testes hidden away under their school uniform. Because the gender binary must be served.

P.S. I forgot to mention the other criticism they’re shouting at me: “Myers is all ideological!” They’re completely oblivious to the fact that their position is blatantly ideological, too.

I admit to it. My ideology is to consider all of the evidence, even the stuff that makes my understanding of a situation more complicated.

Their ideology is to always make the evidence conform to their prior assumptions.

Case in point: Kasich has signed a law outlawing abortion in Ohio after 20 weeks.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is not a moderate or a doctor, today vetoed Ohio’s proposed “heartbeat bill,” which would have effectively banned abortion altogether by outlawing it at six weeks of pregnancy, when many women don’t know they’re pregnant. This isn’t good news, by the way, just a distraction from Kasich’s decision to sign off on another ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And because we live in the Republic of Gilead now, the ban includes only one limited exception for the health of the patient—but not for cases of rape or incest, or for fetal abnormalities.

The 6 week bill was insane — not only are most women unlikely to know they’re pregnant, but even if they are, they’re unlikely to have any indications of potential problems, and some of the tests that can detect subtle problems take weeks to process…and you’re not going to have them done if you think it’s a routine pregnancy.

The 20 week bill isn’t much better. The standard recommendation for prenatal care is a check up once a month, and that check up is typically a simple pelvic exam and a measurement of external growth — it will detect gross problems in development but not the sneaky ones that will become apparent later. You might get one ultrasound examination, but it depends on your goddamn insurance. If you’re poor or have lousy insurance, you’re going to get nothing but the routine checkup, and we already know what Republicans think of health care.

The first fetal movements the mother can detect are at 13-16 weeks. Say there’s a problem; Mom and her doctor are going to be unconcerned if there is no quickening at the 12 week visit, but the doctor is going to get worried at 16 weeks and might give the pregnancy extra scrutiny, and might ask for extra tests (if the insurance will let you), but the alarm bells might not start ringing loudly until that 20 week visit. I kind of expect Ohio doctors will be putting a lot of extra effort into the 16 week visit from now on, but even then, it’s hard to justify extra tests if there are no apparent negative indications. Maybe Kasich is also investing much, much more money into prenatal care and screening for all Ohioans to catch problems earlier? (Hah. We know that’s not going to happen.)

There are going to be a lot of poor Ohio women — and well-off women whose pregnancies develop late problems — who are going to be told their pregnancy is life-threatening or non-viable, and who are simultaneously told that it can’t be terminated because it’s past the arbitrary deadline John Kasich decided would be the time he could get away with legally forcing them to host a dead or dying fetus. This is extreme ratfuckery. It is heartless and arbitrary. It is the act of an ignorant dumbass and a Republican…but I repeat myself.

I can guess at the political calculus going on right now. Women are less likely to vote for Republicans anyway. Pregnant women are only a small fraction of all women. Pregnant women with serious fetal problems are even rarer, so this is a negligible fraction of the electorate. Meanwhile, white male evangelicals who reflexively reject any expectation of bodily autonomy among their feeemales are the major electoral force that must be appeased. So, balancing intense, acute suffering of a few women vs. fostering the smug piety of Christian men, we know which one wins in Kasich’s mind.

As if that mind can empathize at all with women, that is.

I am simultaneously surprised and not surprised. Michael Shermer tweeted this:

Inez Milholland was a prominent suffragist, so it’s good to acknowledge her. But…

• He’s using her to promote an article by Christina Hoff Sommers, who is about as much of a feminist as I am a Republican.

• This article is about how it is inappropriate and weak for feminists to be dismayed about the election of Donald Trump. Don’t worry, girls, the patriarchy doesn’t exist!

• The article ends by accusing modern feminists of being hyperbolic and harping.

• You know what’s just not right? To use one feminist to berate a different feminist. We can see right through you guys: your beef is with feminism, period.

• Insulting modern feminists with slurs like fainting couchers is directly analogous to the insults given to the suffragettes of Milholland’s time.

• Somehow the only good feminists in some people’s minds are the feminists who died a hundred years ago.

• It’s telling that the “good feminist” is the beautiful white woman on a white horse wearing white robes. Dead symbols are so much easier to deal with than fractious, real, complicated people.

• The 1913 march is also known for it’s blatant segregation of black women who wanted to join in — they were sent to the back of the line. Unlike the old feminists he likes, “fainting couchers” now are intersectional.

• Over 100 women in that march were hospitalized for injuries they received from harassing men. But Shermer accepts Sommers’ claim that there is no patriarchy, women aren’t in any way oppressed?

Just to add arsenic icing to his poison cupcake, his next tweet praises Ben Shapiro. He later declares that he disagrees with Shapiro that transgender men and women are mentally ill, but never walks back the fact that this Shapiro fellow he’s praising is also homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-abortion, and doesn’t accept global climate change. But he’s sharp! Just the kind of guy a skeptic would like!

I put up a sign saying that I didn’t want their racist rag delivered to my door any more, and that I’d bill them $5 for each copy they trashed my office with. This morning: three copies delivered. Ka-ching!

Except…I don’t seriously believe they’ll pay up. Just like I don’t think their declaration on the cover, First Copy: FREE. All subsequent copies are $5 is realistic or valid. Therefore I’ll consider their trash to be fair game for trashing. Since they don’t take my demand seriously, I won’t take theirs seriously, and obviously they don’t even take it seriously. It’s SATIRE, don’t you know.

I did glance inside as I was hauling them off to recycling, and I see they’re still maintaining high journalistic standards. Their recent thrill was a visit by Little Ben Shapiro, which they described in an article titled Ben Shapiro Visits UMM, Discusses Trannies and Freedom. Charming. We learn exactly what Shapiro thinks of the topic.

Transgenderism is a tragic, horrible mental illness that people suffer from. It should be treated with nothing but sympathy. The idea that you can magically change a man into a woman or a woman into a man is anti-biology and anti-fact and foolish.

What I consider anti-biology is this prejudice that every human being must conform to one of only two types with regards to phenomena as complex and psychologically and socially fraught as sexual behavior and gender roles. But what do I know? I’m just a biologist, while Shapiro is a professional right-wing bozo and utterer of simplistic bigotry.

The article unfortunately says next to nothing about free speech, except to say that Shapiro is annoyed by the exercise of it: he doesn’t like being labeled a “racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe”. The whole thing is almost entirely about those awful “trannies”.

But he doesn’t want to be called a bigot or homophobe. Go figure.

I look forward to disposing all of the future copies of this vile thing that cross my path. Don’t worry. I’ll do it satirically.

I had no idea how hard it would be on my masculine self-esteem.

These videos are very nicely done, but entirely NSFW — they are intended for children in Norway, though, which is impressive. The narrator is simultaneously enthusiastic and not at all salacious, a tough line to draw.

I’d have shown these to my kids, if I’d had them available back in the middle ages.

Here, learn about the vagina:

And for balance, here’s the penis:

This is a story about sex dolls — specifically, male sex dolls. By the way, totally NSFW.

I was horrified and offended. Not by the sex dolls, though, or the fact that some people really want these things — that’s fine, whatever floats your boat — but by a comment the owner makes. She’s asked by the reporter where these dolls are most popular, and she says “Texas, Minnesota, and Michigan…Republican states“.

I will have you know that Minnesota is not a Republican state.

I may have to sue for the damage to our reputation.

Wow. You’ve probably heard about the Harvard men’s soccer team scandal — they’ve been compiling a yearly “scouting report” of the women’s soccer team, rating each team member’s appearance and speculating about their sexual preferences and other such juvenile shit. They ought to be deeply embarrassed. Their team has been suspended, which is an appropriate step, although if it keeps up it ought to be just completely shut down, but I doubt that the boys who thought such nonsense was funny are at all ashamed.

But then you need to read the response by Kelsey Clayman, Brooke Dickens, Alika Keene, Emily Mosbacher, Lauren Varela, and Haley Washburn, members of the women’s soccer team. The boys write like a puerile gang of inflamed testicles, the women write like thoughtful and intelligent human beings.

The sad reality is that we have come to expect this kind of behavior from so many men, that it is so “normal” to us we often decide it is not worth our time or effort to dwell on. Yet as the media has taken advantage of the Harvard name once more, it has become increasingly difficult to evade the pervasiveness of this story, harder still to elude the abhorrent judgment of our peers and the outrageous Internet commentary of the public, and hardest to subdue the embarrassment, disgust, and pain we feel as a result.

In all, we do not pity ourselves, nor do we ache most because of the personal nature of this attack. More than anything, we are frustrated that this is a reality that all women have faced in the past and will continue to face throughout their lives. We feel hopeless because men who are supposed to be our brothers degrade us like this. We are appalled that female athletes who are told to feel empowered and proud of their abilities are so regularly reduced to a physical appearance. We are distraught that mothers having daughters almost a half century after getting equal rights have to worry about men’s entitlement to bodies that aren’t theirs. We are concerned for the future, because we know that the only way we can truly move past this culture is for the very men who perpetrate it to stop it in its tracks.

Having considered members of this team our close friends for the past four years, we are beyond hurt to realize these individuals could encourage, silently observe, or participate in this kind of behavior, and for more than four years have neglected to apologize until this week.

I know who impresses me and who disappoints me, and it’s a shame the difference falls along such strong gender lines.

What also worries me is that I read this satirical (?) article on McSweeney’s right after that, and you know, it sounded less like satire and more like a really good idea.

The Constitution? Yeah, we’re done with that. We’ve enlisted a group of multi-racial women, The Founding Mothers, to draft a new document, The Socialist Mixtape, which will become the law of the land. We’re only going to let non-white, low-income women vote for the first 150 years or so — just until things settle down enough to let white men have a say.

Right now, if it were announced that the US was going to disenfranchise all white men (which includes me) until they learn a little intellectual maturity as a group, I wouldn’t be too horrified. I’d at least regard it as an idea that might have some merit. I’d worry more that it was a proposal that was going to anger the largest bloc of armed assholes in America.