The ?IFLScience? crowd seem to imagine that science is a discipline of rigorous intellectual purity, somehow immune to such follies of human nature as fraud, bigotry and faddism. This is complete nonsense of course. Walter Gratzer?s excellent The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty is an often startling expose of the nonsensical manias which have gripped science from its inception and right up to the present.
But perhaps the most destructive pseudoscientific mania du jour is the transgenderist ideology, with its nonsensical doctrines of ?gender fluidity? and ?non-binary?. The core conceit, that ?gender is a social construct?, is almost entirely based on the work of Judith Butler, and later, Cordelia Fine. Neither are scientists in any imaginable degree: Butler is a professor of comparative literature and Fine of historical and philosophical studies. Yet they are showered with awards and their nonsensical witterings are allowed to ride roughshod over all scientific evidence and dictate what actual scientists are allowed to say (to dissent is to invite swift denunciation and career suicide).
Thankfully, at least some academics who do know what they are talking about are still prepared to risk speaking up. Quote:
I have debated this topic with followers of Butler and Fine in various settings. When I share with them research showing, for example, robust female/male differences in the trajectories of brain development, the most common response is sheer ignorance of the finding in question?[they] claim that the research must be meaningless because it involved children or adults. Children and adults have spent years being subject to the heteronormative patriarchy. End of quote.
It?s my own experience, too, that trying to debate biology with transgender activists is like trying to debate geology with Young Earth Creationists. At best, they are able to parrot some ?sciencey? sounding stuff, or woefully misrepresent actual scientific terms that they appear not to understand at all. They likewise love to employ arguments that seem impossible to disprove.
Or perhaps not. Quote:
So let?s study humans before birth. In recent years, there have been fascinating studies in which neuroscientists have studied the brains of babies in their mothers? wombs?These investigators looked at how individual genes are transcribed in the human brain from the prenatal period through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and throughout adulthood. They found that the biggest female/male difference in gene transcription in the human brain, for many genes, is in the prenatal period.
?If the Butler/Fine theory was correct ? if gendered differences in brain and behavior are primarily a social construct, and not hardwired ? then we ought to see zero differences between the female brain and the male brain in the prenatal period, but large differences between adults, who after all have had the misfortune of living all their lives in a heteronormative patriarchy. But the reality is just the opposite: Female/male differences are generally largest in the prenatal period, and those differences diminish with age, often dwindling to zero among adults.
?Now we have another, even more, striking study of the human brain prior to birth?They found dramatic differences between female and male fetuses?Some of the sex differences in the new study are truly amazing. End of quote.
psychologytoday.com
In other words, the Butler/Fine hypothesis is blown out of the water. When there are demonstrable differences between male and female brains before birth, then the ?social conditioning? claim is completely debunked.
These studies join the litany of evidence from other disciplines, from sociology to anthropology, which demonstrate sex/gender differences. Societies which have done the most to dismantle ?patriarchal? structures show profound differences in the career and lifestyle choices of men and women ? which correspond strongly to despised ?traditional, heteronormative gender roles?. The young of our close biological cousins, the apes, demonstrate preferences in toys which strongly correspond to the traditionally ?gendered? preferences of human children.
The upshot of all this is that gender is not a social construct. Sex and gender are, as was accepted for millennia until the late 1960s, synonyms.
The proponents of ?gender theory? are ignorant frauds. That they are lauded by the academy is just another example of how hopelessly corrupt western academia has become; in a way not seen since Lysenko in the Soviet Union and to the detriment of us all.