These are the people who want to control your reproductive tract, ladies

I guess you don’t need a medical degree to run for office, and heck, you don’t even need grade school anatomy.

An Idaho lawmaker received a brief lesson on female anatomy after asking if a woman can swallow a small camera for doctors to conduct a remote gynecological exam.

The question Monday from Republican Rep. Vito Barbieri came as the House State Affairs Committee heard nearly three hours of testimony on a bill that would ban doctors from prescribing abortion-inducing medication through telemedicine.

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“The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

That quote is from a good article in Nature on how sex is non-binary — my only quibble would be with that “now”. You’d have to define “now” as a window of time that encompasses the entirety of my training and work in developmental biology, and I’m getting to be kind of an old guy. Differences in sex development (DSDs) are common knowledge, and rather routine — and coincidentally, I’m giving an exam on sex chromosome anomalies today.


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These are not serious or intelligent people

Several years ago, when that awful Expelled movie came out, I did a radio interview with Mark Mathis, one of the producers. It was hilarious. I was talking about their dishonesty in getting interviews and how the movie was misleading propaganda, and by the end, Mathis was reduced to shouting in answer to every question, “HE’S AN ATHEIST!” That’s all had to do, he thought, to rebut me: expose the openly known fact that I also proudly mentioned on the header of my website, and he’d crush me (and with some members of the audience, it was probably true.)

For some reason, I remembered that when I was reading Milo Yiannopoulos’s attempted rebuttal of Brianna Wu.

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If you’re this stupid, could you please stop pestering me?

As is customary, I got up to a cacophony of demands and insults and questions on my computer. Among them was this odd thing:



I’m curious, why do you automatically defend people with ideas so obviously poorly thought out that they turn off YouTube comments?

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They’re made of PEOPLE!

I can’t really recommend this long article about MRAs. It’s not awful, but it seems determined to demonstrate something no one had questioned: “golly, not all MRAs are neckbearded trolls. They’re humans too!” OK, I know and agree; there are circumstances in which anyone could have a civilized conversation with them…which the author proceeds to do, talking to a random MRA named Max in Chicago, and also calling up Paul Elam and Roosh, and in every case doing his very best to put them in a good light, while not easing up on their awful opinions.

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