Under pressure, a journal once notable for its courage retracts a major paper on the social roots of gender-related distress—all over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.
This is my favorite thing I have read all week--it reads almost like a true-crime piece, and I am all about those. Of course, the stakes are lower...or are they?
I move in some very leftie circles, and so I have gotten to know a number of activists. One thing I have learned about activists is that victory does not sate; it encourages. They won't say, "We got the Diaz/Bailey paper retracted, well done, all. Let's hit the pub." They will sharpen their daggers and go after the next paper whose conclusions do not match their ideological convictions, and the next one after that. Activists are also indefatigable, and will advocate long after normal people have throw up their hands because they want to, you know, sleep and eat and live a life. ASB may think it has dodged a bullet, but it has really just reloaded the gun that fired it. And that does not bode well for scientific publishing.
I'm not dumping on activists here, who often do good and necessary work. However, activists in a discussion should have a voice, not a veto.*
So glad you enjoyed it! I've had a few people tell me something similar about how it reads, and maybe I should do more of these types of pieces! It was fun to write.
Child genital mutilation is barbaric cruelty no matter what language is used to “justify” it. Everyone on every side knows this on some level,and no amount of screaming will change that reality.
That's right comrade. When the mind has been perfected, thoughtcrimes -- such as so called 'evidence' -- cannot take root anywhere and do not exist. 'Evidence' is merely a state of mind and perfected minds have perfected thoughts.
Reminds me of a famous quote of Arendt that seems, rather sadly, to characterize most of the woke, many on virtually all sides of the transgender clusterfuck, and even a few here in this otherwise enlightened neck of the woods:
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."
Thank you Colin for A superb article about an increasingly Important issue.. legitimate scientific debate and bona fide data regarding the Trans epidemic.. Jennifer Bilek has been researching the origins and various dimensions of this social contagion for about 4 years, well worth reading.. Not surprisingly Americas Big Pharma/Medical/ Industrial complex has been a key driver making over 11 Billion on Trans surgery/medicine last year alone.. truly ruthless Corporate predators feeding on our youth..
We have stacked up too many over-educated and unqualified (from a real life and real work experience perspective) from a too large and too well funded higher-learning industry. These new inserts into the high-status ranking pursuit game are finding a lot of competition for attention. And so they naturally drift to pathways that are less "science ethics" and more about likes, clicks and money.
This is the reason that most of our institutions run by the educated elite are no longer trusted. The people working and controlling those institutions are no longer calm public servants enjoying a good enough economic life and a feeling of smug elitism because they hold information nobody else has.
Then the Internet and masses of new college graduates that expect instant status and the gig is not longer calm. It is like a Rube Goldberg machine where there are too many marbles stacked in the hopper looking for path down to success, and the marbles are rebelling by building their own pathways that crash and wreck things on the way down.
The fix is to reform higher learning... the grants and student loans must go except for degrees that are connected with real job opportunities. Schools with lower tuition costs and better economic outcomes for their students should be subsidized to provide student aid to low income students. Those that teach victim studies and CRT should do it from their higher tuition and endowments.
We need to be sending more students to industrial arts schools, and even scientists should have a year or two working with their hands. Say building low income housing, or doing overseas work to help build clean water supplies etc. They can bank money/credits for their work that helps fund their education.
I have a friend married to a college president. They live in a mansion provided by the university and are waited on by servants at home. They are pleased to be "upper class" but it sounds to me much like the old plantation system. Poor black kids "borrowing" money from the government to support the people in the big house while the masters tell them they are oppressed and gender fluid. Higher education is a scandal all around, and the higher the education the more profound the scandal.
Yup. I live in a state university town with a staff parking lot full of new Tesla cars and other exotics. The Oak Ave loop next to campus with the older remodeled mansions on acre lots are all occupied by university administrators and professors. Some retired.
The student grants and loan programs have allowed these people to gorge themselves at the trough of soft government money. The kids are stuck with huge student loan bills and a useless undergraduate degree that the professors didn't even teach as their assistants did the lectures.
Dear Colin, thank you for such an insightful look into what fair-minded realistic scientists/researchers are running into. I am sitting here, astounded, realizing how far reaching the tentacles of censorship be. Being grateful for saving graces such as SEGM, and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licenses, for through them the important work of Bailey and Diaz will continue. I am so grateful for them, and all the others (such as yourself) who refuse to capitulate to nonsense.
Wow! What a betrayal of the very idea of empirical science. It's both horrifying and deeply depressing. Ditto for "Nature" regarding Transgenderism and Ukraine.
So it is taboo to investigate the origins on the trans social contagion? Freud wrote a book about taboos and their origin: "Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics." He thought taboos originated in early sexual development with the projection of the inner mental life on to the external world, and their persistence past childhood caused obsessive and delusional thinking. It is hilarious that a journal dedicated to sexual development would become a poster child for the mental lives of savages and neurotics. Our society has become littered with taboo topics about race and sexuality. The solution is to dissolve all those magical taboos and return to honest assessments of the world around us. Otherwise we will have to continue living in a world run by savages and neurotics.
We take for granted the permanence and universal value of our airports, power plants, and bridges… But our government has increasingly recognized how easily damaged, and how catastrophic damage would be to these points. Nobody imagined fully fueled 747s might be aimed at buildings, or a carload of fertilizer would be explode at a government office in Oklahoma. The right people are worrying about the same thing happening at Hoover Damn or Chicago O’Hare.
Similarly, nobody really grasps how important and fragile our intellectual infrastructure is. Knowledge flows through narrow valves, and stored in fragile institutions, which if damaged can take generations to recover. Even the Nobel prize was once awarded to a neurologist who convinced thousands of doctors that jamming an ice pick into eye sockets to scramble brains was a good thing. It took decades to understand that nightmare and stop.
The fragility of existing instituons has been exposed, they are attracting attack, and failing to maintain the process knowledge and truths. At least there are always ones to take their place, however long that takes.
It was Walter Freeman who innovated the ice pick transorbital lobotomy. Moniz's first lobotomies were done by pouring absolute alcohol to dissolve the frontal lobes before he started using a wire loop to cut the brain tissue.
According to Wikipedia Walter Freeman performed as many as 4000 lobotomies on patients as young as 12. He was only banned from surgery in 1967, following a fatality on a lobotomy he performed that year.
Lobotomies fell out of favour with the rise of new antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine but one wonders whether there would have been many more otherwise.
It is in the 12 Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Classic activist playbook tactic to attack the person, or exploit a technicality rather than debate the issue at hand.
Once again, I shall draw a distinction between the 'old-fashioned' gender dyphorics, who have complained about their sex/gender since early childhood, and those who constitute the 5,000% increase in referrals seen over the last few years: they are different populations. The old-fashioned kind may need to transition in some cases, but we know that most of them desist and become, usually, gay adults. The (mostly) female autistic teens who decide, out of the blue, in entire peer groups, to suddenly declare their dysphoria are sufficiently different that they require a different approach. I believe that most of them will not only desist, but regret hurried choices made during the maelstrom of puberty. They require more than watch and wait, they require therapy to understand what has suddenly happened to them. To immediately affirm and perform irreversible hormonal and surgical treatments will violate primum non nocere egregiously.
Activists are trying to prevent any study of this group, and even recognition of them as individuals with special requirements for treatment. The reasons for this are plain to everyone: it is to normalise a new paradigm of gender for political reasons. Whenever someone, and particularly someone with a political axe to grind, says something must not be studied or named, you know the issue is not a scientific one. This should be resisted.
This is my favorite thing I have read all week--it reads almost like a true-crime piece, and I am all about those. Of course, the stakes are lower...or are they?
I move in some very leftie circles, and so I have gotten to know a number of activists. One thing I have learned about activists is that victory does not sate; it encourages. They won't say, "We got the Diaz/Bailey paper retracted, well done, all. Let's hit the pub." They will sharpen their daggers and go after the next paper whose conclusions do not match their ideological convictions, and the next one after that. Activists are also indefatigable, and will advocate long after normal people have throw up their hands because they want to, you know, sleep and eat and live a life. ASB may think it has dodged a bullet, but it has really just reloaded the gun that fired it. And that does not bode well for scientific publishing.
I'm not dumping on activists here, who often do good and necessary work. However, activists in a discussion should have a voice, not a veto.*
*Stolen from some source I can't now recall.
So glad you enjoyed it! I've had a few people tell me something similar about how it reads, and maybe I should do more of these types of pieces! It was fun to write.
I like to think of “activists” as “lobbyists”, because that is what they actually are.
I think of these as "gender jihadis" or "Genderites" or "Gender Scientologists." Jihadis is probably the most accurate.
"ASB may think it has dodged a bullet, but it has really just reloaded the gun that fired it." Beautifully put.
Suppressing the evidence won't make it go away.
Child genital mutilation is barbaric cruelty no matter what language is used to “justify” it. Everyone on every side knows this on some level,and no amount of screaming will change that reality.
No job for you at the Ministry of Truth. Such defeatism, folks like you just aren't trying hard enough.
Room 101 for the lot of you ... 😉🙂
That's right comrade. When the mind has been perfected, thoughtcrimes -- such as so called 'evidence' -- cannot take root anywhere and do not exist. 'Evidence' is merely a state of mind and perfected minds have perfected thoughts.
👍 In Lenin and Big Brother we trust ...
Reminds me of a famous quote of Arendt that seems, rather sadly, to characterize most of the woke, many on virtually all sides of the transgender clusterfuck, and even a few here in this otherwise enlightened neck of the woods:
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8110811-the-ideal-subject-of-totalitarian-rule-is-not-the-convinced
Thank you Colin for A superb article about an increasingly Important issue.. legitimate scientific debate and bona fide data regarding the Trans epidemic.. Jennifer Bilek has been researching the origins and various dimensions of this social contagion for about 4 years, well worth reading.. Not surprisingly Americas Big Pharma/Medical/ Industrial complex has been a key driver making over 11 Billion on Trans surgery/medicine last year alone.. truly ruthless Corporate predators feeding on our youth..
So glad you enjoyed it!
Scientific/medical/other professional journals should not succumb to any bullying. Period.
So let's take a page from the activist playbook. How do we organize the retraction of a few thousand scientific papers?
"Make the enemy play by his own set of rules" -- Saul Alinsky
👍 Tit for tat is often the optimal strategy in game theory ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
I think the recent article from N.S. Lyons "The Change Merchants" https://substack.com/inbox/post/130539159 nails what is going on.
We have stacked up too many over-educated and unqualified (from a real life and real work experience perspective) from a too large and too well funded higher-learning industry. These new inserts into the high-status ranking pursuit game are finding a lot of competition for attention. And so they naturally drift to pathways that are less "science ethics" and more about likes, clicks and money.
This is the reason that most of our institutions run by the educated elite are no longer trusted. The people working and controlling those institutions are no longer calm public servants enjoying a good enough economic life and a feeling of smug elitism because they hold information nobody else has.
Then the Internet and masses of new college graduates that expect instant status and the gig is not longer calm. It is like a Rube Goldberg machine where there are too many marbles stacked in the hopper looking for path down to success, and the marbles are rebelling by building their own pathways that crash and wreck things on the way down.
The fix is to reform higher learning... the grants and student loans must go except for degrees that are connected with real job opportunities. Schools with lower tuition costs and better economic outcomes for their students should be subsidized to provide student aid to low income students. Those that teach victim studies and CRT should do it from their higher tuition and endowments.
We need to be sending more students to industrial arts schools, and even scientists should have a year or two working with their hands. Say building low income housing, or doing overseas work to help build clean water supplies etc. They can bank money/credits for their work that helps fund their education.
I have a friend married to a college president. They live in a mansion provided by the university and are waited on by servants at home. They are pleased to be "upper class" but it sounds to me much like the old plantation system. Poor black kids "borrowing" money from the government to support the people in the big house while the masters tell them they are oppressed and gender fluid. Higher education is a scandal all around, and the higher the education the more profound the scandal.
Yup. I live in a state university town with a staff parking lot full of new Tesla cars and other exotics. The Oak Ave loop next to campus with the older remodeled mansions on acre lots are all occupied by university administrators and professors. Some retired.
The student grants and loan programs have allowed these people to gorge themselves at the trough of soft government money. The kids are stuck with huge student loan bills and a useless undergraduate degree that the professors didn't even teach as their assistants did the lectures.
Dear Colin, thank you for such an insightful look into what fair-minded realistic scientists/researchers are running into. I am sitting here, astounded, realizing how far reaching the tentacles of censorship be. Being grateful for saving graces such as SEGM, and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licenses, for through them the important work of Bailey and Diaz will continue. I am so grateful for them, and all the others (such as yourself) who refuse to capitulate to nonsense.
Love, Indio.
Wow! What a betrayal of the very idea of empirical science. It's both horrifying and deeply depressing. Ditto for "Nature" regarding Transgenderism and Ukraine.
"ASB is a primary target for activist researchers who will not tolerate dissent from their views"
A minor point, but do the activists deserve to be called researchers? One wants to be charitable but ...
Publication of the names of the individuals and entities pushing censorship is necessary to counter their efforts. Please list
So it is taboo to investigate the origins on the trans social contagion? Freud wrote a book about taboos and their origin: "Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics." He thought taboos originated in early sexual development with the projection of the inner mental life on to the external world, and their persistence past childhood caused obsessive and delusional thinking. It is hilarious that a journal dedicated to sexual development would become a poster child for the mental lives of savages and neurotics. Our society has become littered with taboo topics about race and sexuality. The solution is to dissolve all those magical taboos and return to honest assessments of the world around us. Otherwise we will have to continue living in a world run by savages and neurotics.
Excellent article, consider reading this alongside:
https://unherd.com/2023/06/is-liberal-society-making-us-ill/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=7c57172f68&mc_eid=9eb891c731
Here is an interesting and insightful article. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
We take for granted the permanence and universal value of our airports, power plants, and bridges… But our government has increasingly recognized how easily damaged, and how catastrophic damage would be to these points. Nobody imagined fully fueled 747s might be aimed at buildings, or a carload of fertilizer would be explode at a government office in Oklahoma. The right people are worrying about the same thing happening at Hoover Damn or Chicago O’Hare.
Similarly, nobody really grasps how important and fragile our intellectual infrastructure is. Knowledge flows through narrow valves, and stored in fragile institutions, which if damaged can take generations to recover. Even the Nobel prize was once awarded to a neurologist who convinced thousands of doctors that jamming an ice pick into eye sockets to scramble brains was a good thing. It took decades to understand that nightmare and stop.
The fragility of existing instituons has been exposed, they are attracting attack, and failing to maintain the process knowledge and truths. At least there are always ones to take their place, however long that takes.
It was Walter Freeman who innovated the ice pick transorbital lobotomy. Moniz's first lobotomies were done by pouring absolute alcohol to dissolve the frontal lobes before he started using a wire loop to cut the brain tissue.
According to Wikipedia Walter Freeman performed as many as 4000 lobotomies on patients as young as 12. He was only banned from surgery in 1967, following a fatality on a lobotomy he performed that year.
Lobotomies fell out of favour with the rise of new antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine but one wonders whether there would have been many more otherwise.
It is in the 12 Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Classic activist playbook tactic to attack the person, or exploit a technicality rather than debate the issue at hand.
Once again, I shall draw a distinction between the 'old-fashioned' gender dyphorics, who have complained about their sex/gender since early childhood, and those who constitute the 5,000% increase in referrals seen over the last few years: they are different populations. The old-fashioned kind may need to transition in some cases, but we know that most of them desist and become, usually, gay adults. The (mostly) female autistic teens who decide, out of the blue, in entire peer groups, to suddenly declare their dysphoria are sufficiently different that they require a different approach. I believe that most of them will not only desist, but regret hurried choices made during the maelstrom of puberty. They require more than watch and wait, they require therapy to understand what has suddenly happened to them. To immediately affirm and perform irreversible hormonal and surgical treatments will violate primum non nocere egregiously.
Activists are trying to prevent any study of this group, and even recognition of them as individuals with special requirements for treatment. The reasons for this are plain to everyone: it is to normalise a new paradigm of gender for political reasons. Whenever someone, and particularly someone with a political axe to grind, says something must not be studied or named, you know the issue is not a scientific one. This should be resisted.