James Lyons-Weiler is an odd duck. He started his career in bioinformatics conventionally enough, getting a PhD, following it up with post-docs, eventually getting a position at the University of Pittsburgh, and then…he succumbed to the lure of the crackpot circuit. He now wanders about the country, giving anti-vax lectures and giving his uninformed opinions about autism. He also launched a website called IPAK-EDU.org, where IPAK is short for “Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.” Yeah, he also invented an academic institute, which is his, and of which he is the sole member. He peddles online courses on various topics — you can, for instance, gain access to a series of lectures on evolutionary biology for the low, low price of $160.
He’s also notorious enough that he has a Wikipedia page. It’s short. Here’s the bulk of it.
Lyons-Weiler has made numerous false and misleading claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. United States Court of Federal Claims Special Master Christian J. Moran concluded in 2020 that Lyons-Weiler was “wholly unqualified to opine on the question of vaccine causation”; the decision related to a lawsuit in which Lyons-Weiler had testified claiming that a woman was injured as a result of the HPV vaccine.
His February 2020 claim that SARS-CoV-2 contains a genetic sequence proving that the virus was probably engineered in a laboratory was discredited by researchers and fact-checkers.
Now you know where he’s coming from: he’s a failed academic who ekes out a living by being a mouthpiece for quack ideas. He’s anti-vax, he’s got weird ideas about autism, and now, oh joy, he’s jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon. He has an essay that seems to be fairly typical for him, Evolutionary Analysis of the “Trans Agenda” as Mass Sterilization of Youth as Reproductive Spite, in which he lards a lot of nonsensical pretentious jargon around the thesis that gender-affirming care is a scheme to sterilize your children.
Please understand that this article was written to create awareness about the new reality involving the interplay between social dynamics and the way people control and influence others’ reproductive heritage. I have not seen this issue addressed by anyone because discussions about evolutionary principles and social dynamics are taboo because evil people in the past twisted Darwin’s understanding of evolution toward their own advantage in ways that led to mass forced sterilization. I am issuing this article as a warning of the hidden dangers of de facto state-sponsored sterilization programs being implemented by certain states within the United States embedded in the Trans Agenda.
The evolutionary principles and social dynamics
he’s talking around are the ideas of eugenics and the extermination of undesirable individuals. Yeah, it’s taboo
, and he is the brave truth-teller who is going to expose the Trans Agenda as the same thing. He’s going to explain Haldane and Hamilton and Maynard Smith to back up his argument that gender affirming care is a nefarious plot, and he’s going to cite animal examples as evidence (bonus points for mentioning spiders).
Some female spiders may consume their own offspring. This is known as “filial cannibalism”, is seen in many species of fish that brood their live young, and is a form of reproductive spite. This behavior can be driven by a lack of resources or as a strategy to gain additional nutrients for the female, thereby increasing her chances of surviving and reproducing again, thus maximizing the mother’s, but not necessarily the eaten young’s, lifetime reproductive success.
In some insects, males deposit substances in the female reproductive tract that harm or kill the spermatozoa of previous mates. This approach to sperm competition helps ensure that their own spermatozoa have a higher chance of fertilizing the eggs and increases their reproductive success. While spermatozoa are not live, this feature of competition via spite is thought to be the explanation for the shape of the human penis.
Hang on there. He defines his term, Reproductive spite refers to the phenomenon where an individual’s reproductive behavior negatively affects the survival or reproductive output of other individuals,
but the spider example is not relevant. The spider is optimizing its opportunities for reproduction by recycling its own progeny, not that of others. The insect example is just mundane, familiar sperm competition — it’s only affecting the reproduction of others in the sense that if a female is bearing the male’s children, she isn’t available to bear someone else’s. This is just weird. It’s like he doesn’t understand his own argument.
Then this is a surprise: spermatozoa are not live.
What biologist would make that claim? Of course they’re alive! Also, that claim about the shape of the human penis is weak, supported only by some crude modeling studies, and has not been demonstrated to be functional.
And did you know that some kinds of gender modification (but not all) lead to sterilization? No trans person ever thought of that, I guess.
In the current Trans Agenda, in which gender modification surgeries are advocated for minors as “affirming care”, a dark link exists: gender modification surgery often leads to sterilization of those individuals as a side effect.
Again, if I choose not to have children, voluntarily and of my own free will, that is not “reproductive spite.” If a man chooses to get a vasectomy, you cannot argue that that is an example of the taboo
subject of eugenics. Human beings are not obligated to bear children! Also, it is not your duty to have children for your parents’ sake.
The strongly negative reaction of parents to news that some state governments – and some in powerful positions in the US Federal Government – want to allow minors to choose gender reassignment surgery – even over the objections of their parents – is understandable from a rational, scientific point of view.
No, it is not. It is understandable from a narrow, utilitarian point of view that sees individuals as having one single task, the direct production of offspring. We are social animals, and the ability of individuals to specialize and fill other roles is advantageous to the population as a whole. Remember, please, that evolution is a property of populations, not individuals.
Evolution is also not a conspiracy theory, but Lyons-Weilers seems to see everything as a conspiracy theory.
…I am not saying I have evidence the connections are intentional, but I am saying: Screw the Taboo. We owe it to our children and our collective future to ask these questions and to use Science to find the answers.
There are other areas in which social pressure is used to try to coerce or force parents to put their children in harm’s way for the potential benefit of other children. Social psychologists who are deeply schooled in evolutionary principles should look into the potential role that the vestiges of reproductive spite may play in promoting tolerance of, or even the promotion of increased risk for harm to other peoples’ children in the area of vaccine mandates.
Right. Let’s abuse “evolutionary principles” to compel children to believe that having babies is their destiny. And oh, look, there’s the crackpot anti-vaccine nonsense! Getting vaccinated reduces harm, that’s the whole point of vaccines, so you don’t get to use that as an example of people trying to reduce the competition.
But then, this is a kook who sees trans people as an example of Mass murder, mass sterilization,
just like he sees vaccines as a strategy for poisoning the other members of the population.
That is a whole lot of wacko nonsense to unpack.
Just about all of it is wrong.
A lie here.
We don’t do “gender modification surgery” on minors in the USA or any where that I know of.
Another dead strawperson.
These state governments and Federal government officials aren’t advocating to “allow minors to choose gender reassignment surgery” and certainly not over the objections of their parents.
They don’t actually even exist.
Like all crackpot liars, he is devoid of details here.
Which state governments are these? Which Federal government agencies are these?
It should be trivial to list them and he doesn’t do that.
What is telling is, a search for the phrase “reproductive spite”. It’s truly sad when a scholar cannot have his works found on Google Scholar, it’s as though even a dumb search engine knows that they’re an off the wire crank.
But, this gem had me openly chuckling before I could finish my morning coffee – thank goodness I had swallowed that mouthful before reading this pearl of wisdom:
What a major discovery! Who’d have thought that being eaten would have deleterious effects upon one’s future reproductive success!
Indeed, if that is of such a great effect, would not a more successful “spite” be to simply eat all of the young about, thereby ensuring access to all resources and one’s own reproductive success?
And by extension, would not the success of the spiteful not be endangered by one James Lyons-Weiler, guaranteeing that he himself would also be consumed?
Oh wait, humans aren’t coprophages, leaving him quite safe.
Just to put some perspective on this, a huge number of Americans are and will end up childless for a lot of reaons.
It will end up being about 16.5% of the population.
So of the current 334 million Americans, about 55 million will end up childless at the end of their life. That is a lot.
The number of childless Trans people won’t be a significant part of that number.Trans people make up 0.6% of the population and a lot of them will…have children.
People end up childless for a lot of reasons.
.1. Choice.
.2. Biology. Some people are just infertile for a lot of reasons.
.3. Lack of opportunity.
They never found anyone who wanted to have children with them and/or lacked the economic and social circumstances to make children a good idea.
.4. And so on.
Mr. Cuckoo crackpot also ignores that…many Trans people have and/or will go on to have children, biological or not.
It all varies by the details of surgery and the timing.
This is a snapshot in time.
Right now 19% of Trans people are parents.
The lifetime percentage who are or will become parents is higher, but I don’t know what that number is.
Here, we have an actual historian/journalist christened* Wierd Duk, who I never could figure out. He’s a self-declared social-democrat, but I only saw him say anything other than lazy rightwing stuff.
*) Being a son of a Dominee (=reverend).
The crackpot also ignores that there is another vast and powerful conspiracy to…force Americans to have children they don’t want and can’t support
These Dark forces of evil are known as the Forced Birthers and Female Slavers.
They include the fundie xians, the GOP, the Red states, and the US Supreme Court.
They’ve outlawed abortion wherever they can and made it a death penalty offense to get an abortion in at least one state so far.
The reality in the USA is the exact opposite of what Lyons-Weiler claims.
There is no conspiracy to prevent people from reproducing but there is one to force them to have children.
And unlike his unnamed and nonexistent conspiracy members, the fundie xians, the GOP, the Red states, and the US Supreme court definitely exist.
I’m also trying, with precisely zero success, despite utilizing state of the art technologies, to trace any meetings of groups of significant size to document any kind of agenda.
One does not produce a mass doctrinal agenda without meetings, so there should be immense stadiums full of people meeting to produce such a global agenda! My spiders and crawlers come up blank. Search engines find nothing whatsoever. Searches of speeches, equally oddly blank. The only group meetings that meet the terms are all cranks and far right fearmongers, quite a few having terrorist affiliations. And such terrorists are decidedly against reproduction, otherwise they’d not murder physicians, blow up clinics and threaten to destroy hospitals, thereby ensuring greater numbers of people fail to survive to reproduce.
Strange that these right wing “scientists” always potray evolution almost like something that has certain “desires”. They deicde whats “right” or “wrong” in the light of evolution, whats “intended” or not. They are creationists with different verbiage.
Well, this is odd. I had some interaction with Lyons-Weiler way back when he was a graduate student. He had some strange ideas about phylogenetic methods, notably a method of testing phylogenies called RASA, which never made any sense but was harmless. I see he got out of that business and into something much stranger and much more problematic.
“Please understand that this article was written to create awareness about the new reality involving the interplay between social dynamics and the way people control and influence others’ reproductive heritage.”
I understand that James Lyons-Weiler is trying to control the reproductive heritage of others via gossip about trans people, and this is easily extended to other parts of the LGBT+ community.
“I have not seen this issue addressed by anyone because discussions about evolutionary principles and social dynamics are taboo because evil people in the past twisted Darwin’s understanding of evolution toward their own advantage in ways that led to mass forced sterilization.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
It’s not taboo. You and others can and are saying such things. You shouldn’t say such things because it’s gossip about people you don’t like and not a concrete response to anything that actually exists, but you can say it.
You and others are getting criticism and shunning which are based on personal choice and do hurt. I don’t deny it. It’s supposed to hurt and it’s natural human that doesn’t become bad because you don’t like it (that would be shaming and shunning, in addition to different genders).
So James Lyons-Weiler and the like are just going to have to respond to the specific shaming and shunning. I’m not going to play pretend that it’s just bad.
The “necessarily” in this sentence is killing me.
SC @ 10, I was immensely thankful that I had swallowed that mouthful of coffee before I read that sentence this morning. Otherwise, that man would owe me a laptop and keyboard.
I say someone needs to grab him and put him into the Boo Box.
Where’s The Pan when you need him?
The mutants are coming! The mutants are coming! The royal family are shape-changing lizards!
Raven @1:
Actually, “we” (=doctors) have done so for a long time. On newborns with what they see as ambiguous genitals. Sometimes without even consulting with the parents. (Not as though they consult with the baby either.) This is something the intersex community has been fighting for a while.
However, children old enough to have an opinion on the subject aren’t allowed to have it done to them. (At least, not until they are 18 or older.)
It’s a big part of the cis agenda — to enforce the doctrine that all humans are born in either the M class or the F class (no exceptions), and it is impossible — nay, inconceivable — that anyone could cross over. (Among other things, this doctrine is why, for a long time, trans women could only transition if they swore to go stealth.)
For a certain interpretation of “lifetime reproductive success”, it’s possible that being eaten by your mother increases it. “Lifetime reproductive success” could be defined as the number of copies of your genes that are present, because you existed, in subsequent generations. So if you are going to starve because times are bad, but your mother might survive and reproduce in better times if she eats you, being eaten could increase your lifetime reproductive success, odd as it may seem.
Apparently there have been a very few such surgeries performed. I have seen little documentation of them, but to the extent that this exists at all, it is TERRIBLY rare and appears to operate as a response to serious, ongoing threats of suicide made by a child in mid to late teens but who isn’t able for whatever reason to wait until 18 years of age without severe psychological consequences.
I say “appears to operate” because, again, this is something that is very, very rare, and medical histories aren’t something that doctors can talk about openly. Certainly the standards of care indicate waiting for the age of majority, so it’s dead wrong to say that the “Trans Agenda” actually advocates for teen surgeries. It actually advocates against it.
Nonetheless, apparently a very few doctors have performed a very few such procedures. Information about them is scant and probably only marginally accurate by the time it filters into popular reports, but the last time I searched the medical literature for a write up I couldn’t find a single paper actually describing such a case. The only thing that makes me believe that it has ever happened is that one trans person was accused of having surgery before turning 18 and didn’t deny it.
Whether that was breast augmentation or bottom surgery or whatever, I don’t know, but that case may actually have been real (or perhaps the trans person may have had other reasons not to engage, though IIRC the evidence that they received early gender affirming care is not in dispute).
Anyway, I have something else to say, but I’ll say it in a separate comment.
Well sterilizing their children’s grandparents is too late to fix the problem!
News flash: the Moms for Liability raised 1.3 million dollars for a plane to drop a bomb and destroy that evil ‘trans agenda’ city in Oregon – Eugene. Because everybody knows that’s where eugenics was invented.
I don’t know if the distortions of mainstream media are just amplifying this or if it is true. But, there seems to be an increase in the number of, and irrationality of, all the rtwingnut xtian terrorists and their destructive crackpot ideas. It is getting more and more difficult to get accurate, complete journalistic news.
I have to admit, up until now I’ve only not been having children for rational reasons, but after hearing from that guy I definitely will continue to not have children, but do it out of spite.
@ #15 Crip Dyke
“We don’t do “gender modification surgery” on minors in the USA or any where that I know of.”
Kim Petras is the only one that I know of for certain. She got a special dispensation to transition at 16.
Joe Biden has been in office for over two years now. He hasn’t turned all our children gay and forced them to have gender reassignment surgery yet?
There is another form of genital modifying surgery done on babies. Some call it genital mutilation surgery.
It is circumcision of males.
It is around 1 million male babies a year in the USA.
I’m not going to go that far.
And also going to drop the subject before it turns into a thread derail.
Suffice it to say that the only people routinely doing genital modifying surgery on minors are the cis gender majority.
I didn’t mention that but it is a good point.
The trend has been to not do that surgery on babies any more.
At least some in the intersex community think they are fixing something that isn’t broken.
Or that the surgical results are worse than what they are supposed to fix.
@15, not rare at all. Well documented, to the point of having a chapter or two in Benson’s handbook of OB/GYN back in the 1976 edition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_medical_interventions
I’m aware of a case of reassignment after a botched circumcision resulted in the loss of an infant’s penis back in the 1950’s and the child was only informed as an adult.
I suggest you consult Google scholar using the terminology Allison @ 13 used, specifically “ambiguous genitals”.
And consider if such a surgery being denied would potentially be lethal in the case of an infant being born with a cloaca, especially if the anus is imperforate. One radiology “case of the week” up on the lightboard when I was at TUH was of a neonate, when speaking with the radiology chief, I inquired if the infant survived beyond 12 hours. Doctor was shocked that his favorite PC tech predicted the outcome so well and asked me to justify the prognosis. Gassy abdomen, obliteration of the large intestine, all quadrants were gassy, implying sepsis was either immanent or ongoing, giving the dire prognosis and imperforate anus being the most probable cause at that age.
It was and the neonate died approximately 12 hours after the x-ray was captured. The rapid discharge from hospital thing missing the birth defect.
No, no, you misunderstand. If a teenage girl receives gender affirming care, it will interfere with my ability to impregnate her, thus denying my divinely inspired right to sire generations to come. See also abortion and anti-rape legislation.
I suspect Lyons-Weiler engages in reproductive spite every day by wasting his sperm on unreproductive activities.
Or worse, Lyons-Weiler bothers others by knocking on their door and demanding to know if they are committing reproductive spite.
Crip Dyke @15, I personally know the mother of a transgender boy (now adult) who had top surgery at about 16, due to circumstances that made chest binding impractical. The mother’s only regret was that she did not listen to her son earlier, when she could have gotten him puberty blockers and avoided the entire situation.
In the following article, He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak., one point that is made is that there is a lot of gender affirming care that is done to cisgender people. Cisgender women getting breast enhancements, or just any cosmetic treatment that makes them more conforming to standards of femininity, cisgender men who use hormones and supplements to bulk up more – are all receiving gender affirming care.
He’s just another forced birther. Fuck him and his shitty institute.
Good point.
Young women also occasionally get breast reduction surgery, for aesthetic and health reasons and this can and is done on those under age 18.
Where does male circumcision fit in here? It’s done for reasons but I’m not sure what they are any more.
What some refer to as male genital mutilation.
i too have committed reproductive spite and if i could get a uteroovarian transplant and get pregnant i’d also get an abortion just to do it again
@26, he’d love doing that, I’m sure.
I’d answer and allow him in to explain reproductive spite to me, as I get my cleaver out.
Then, introduce it as my SpiteMaster 3000.
One of my hobbies is measuring how quickly assholes can actually run.
Yes, I do own a nice heavy cleaver. I use it to prepare long bones for stock.
he’s a failed academic who ekes out a living by being a mouthpiece for quack ideas.
I would not be too sure about the “ekes out a living” thing. There seem to be a lot of these alt-health grifters who do very well for themselves. It’s a bit like fundie preachers, once you make a name for yourself as the brave maverick the dollars can really start rolling in. IIRC James Lyons-Weiler is a big enough name that he does not have to worry about where the next Mercedes is coming from.
Actually, I just found out from Google that there is indeed a movement to sterilize Trans people.
It is being run by the Red states, the fundie xians, and the GOP.
No surprise.
So, OK guess which states are those 17 states (that) “require sex reassignment surgery to update birth certificate gender markers?”
It’s places like Texas and South Carolina.
I looked on the map and it was..all Red states.
If there is a way to be sick and evil, the fundie xians and the GOP will find it.
They make you get sterilized by surgery to be legally recognized as who you are.
FWIW, these laws are common around the world.
And, the more enlightened and progressive countries such as Sweden have abolished them.
@raven #34
Well, now that many of the fasci.. red states have banned the vast majority of gender affiming care solutions, they dont have to enforce that anymore. How convenient.
@ raven #34
“If there is a way to be sick and evil, the fundie xians and the GOP will find it.
They make you get sterilized by surgery to be legally recognized as who you are.”
I can’t speak for all trans people of course, only myself, but it is this that depresses me more than anything else. They simply hate us so much and they never stop looking for ways to let us know. Like that **** hairdresser in Michigan who said that she wouldn’t have anything to with trans people. We could go to pet groomers. She’s so pleased because she believes the Supreme Court has given her license to treat us any way she wants.
A few weeks ago, after the President of Uganda announced the draconian measures his government was going to enforce against gay people, I came upon a blog site where the American haters were openly celebrating and wishing that they could do the same in the US.
These types are bottom-of-the-barrel human beings, and when it comes to trans issues, that’s where they display all their ignorance and stupidity. They don’t have a clue about trans issues. And it makes you sick when idiots give idiots the right to do as they please. And so those idiots get the idea that they’re actually superior to us. Imagine: an evangelical who believes that he/she is superior to others.
Though apparently the hairdresser is getting a lot of backlash.
queerphobe haidressers probably give dogshit haircuts anyway. i wouldn’t even let her shear a sheep
@Ada Christine #3
They give the same shit they give about sports, da childreeen, websites ,or anything else. They give a shit about xtian hegemony, though. A very big shit.