Weekly Recap

PZ Myers on sex, 'affirming' 5th graders, an adult male competes against girls in cricket, why not using 'Latinx' is transphobic, Notre Dame commits to freedom of expression, and more...

Gender Ideology Melted PZ Myers’ Brain

It’s been a while since I’ve spoken of or even thought PZ Myers. For those unaware, he’s a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota in Morris perhaps best known for his participation in the movement known as New Atheism that peaked in the late 2000s and early 2010s. He writes the blog Pharyngula, which I used to regularly read back in the day.

In 2010 I was a student at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, CA, and was the vice president of the school’s Freethinkers club. We were fortunate enough to book PZ for a talk on our campus as part of his California speaking tour. I picked him up from the Amtrak station and had a great conversation with him about evolution as I drove him to campus. After we arrived, there was still some time before his talk, and so I gave him a tour of the campus and of the school’s amazing natural history museum.

PZ’s talk was great, and he engaged the audience’s questions with positivity and nuance. After the talk, I took PZ with a very large group to a local brewery for food and drinks. It was truly a great and memorable time!

I bring up this story because this version of PZ Myers as a calm and rational thinker has not been the case for quite some time now. In the early 2010s, PZ began courting wokeness, which drove him become increasingly agitated and spiteful. In 2020, when Emma Hilton and I had our an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal about the reality and importance of recognizing biological sex, PZ became rabid and blocked me on Twitter after joining the cancel mob that was trying to oust me from academia.

Funnily enough, he was right! I currently support myself via this substack in addition to my employment at the Manhattan Institute, a Right-wing think tank.

Since my last interaction with PZ, he has gone on to say some truly bizarre things about biological sex, such as horses having seven sexes!

This is like saying there are four sexes in humans: boys, men, girls, and women. It’s just totally insane and disconnected from a fundamental understanding of what sexes are, which has to do with having the function of producing sperm or ova.

Last week PZ made some new comments about biological sex, as he became entangled with Pepperdine philosopher Tomas Bogardus, who wrote a thread on Twitter about why “the sexes—male and female—cannot be social constructs.”

PZ did not seem able to grasp the simple logic of Bogardus’ tweet, and kept trying to inject “human social behavior” and “culture” into the mix, as though this had bearing on whether sex is a social construct.

Following this exchange, PZ blocked Bogardus, and then wrote an equally confused blog post about the exchange where he seemed to be confusing the phenomenon of sexual reproduction with the sexes—male and female. He also played ignorant by quibbling with the definition of “societies,” and bizarrely attempted to equate the sexes in humans with societal expectations of the sexes.

The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.

This is all very confused and rambling. Nobody is saying that the existence of two sexes requires that “everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.” That’s nuts. All we are saying as biologists, or as philosophers in the case of Bogardus, is that there are only two sexes, and that they are not social constructs because they predate humans and our societies.

This is just obviously, uncontroversially true, and anyone, especially a biologist, should be able to say this with maximal certainty. But while PZ claims to have sworn off God or gods, he has adopted a zealous faith in the tenets of wokeness and gender ideology.

Doctors Told Teachers to ‘Affirm’ 5th Graders

On the heels of whistleblower Jamie Reed speaking about the harms being done at the St. Louis Childrens Hospital gender clinic, the hospital has come under fire again. This week an email exchange was released between a teacher who messaged the hospital for advice on how to proceed when multiple children in a friend group suddenly identify as trans.