Sorry, lady scientists, you don’t count

Vera Rubin was a famous astronomer who did research on dark matter, and has an observatory named after her. Sadly, though, she was obviously a DEI hire, what with her lady bits and all, and her observatory has been forced to edit their web page describing her contributions.

DELETED: “Science is still a male-dominated field, but Rubin Observatory is working to increase participation from women and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Rubin Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science, and takes steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with less privilege.”

Did I say “forced”? Not so…someone in the administrative chain of command at the observatory chose to willingly comply with Donald Trump’s crusade against non-white non-men and decided to curry favor by deleting a woman’s role from their web page.

It makes me sick. Do not comply. Resist. Fight back with, at the very least, non-action on these discriminatory rules. Anything else makes you a chickenshit.

Anti-DEI is another word for racism and sexism

You’re sitting there trying to argue that reality isn’t what you see right there in front of your face: nah, that wasn’t a Hitler salute, nah, Trump is not a fascist, nah, opposing DEI isn’t racist, but then eventually something is going to pop up that shows you’re totally wrong and are living in denial. On that last item, there are many people arguing that getting rid of DEI will simply open the door for a meritocracy, it will get rid of all those idle wastrels who are coasting on their victimhood and are demanding special privileges.

And then…whoops. The mask slips.

The Air Force has removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs — the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military — to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The videos were shown to Air Force troops as part of DEI courses they took during basic military training.

In a statement, the Air Force confirmed the courses with those videos had been removed and said it “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency and in alignment with national security objectives.”

Look at these pilots from WWII.

Apparently, they weren’t brave or skilled or self-sacrificing, and their history can be discarded. You can tell because they’re black, obviously DEI hires.

Same with those women who were ferrying bombers across the Atlantic to serve in Europe.

The Air Force was wrong to resist their willingness to serve their country 80+ years ago, and they continue their shame today.

Good biologists understand the complexity of sex determination & differentiation

I’ve been saying all along that good biology doesn’t categorize sex into two inflexible bins, but what does that matter — I’m just one weirdo liberal biologist at a liberal arts college, so I can be ignored. When our awful president puts out an executive order decreeing that there can be only two sexes, it’s only reasonable to ask other, bigger named biologists whether that reflects a scientific consensus.

HuffPost reached out to seasoned biologists around the country to help make sense of Trump’s definitions of sex, gender and “reproductive cells.”

They don’t know what he’s talking about, either.

Yeah, it doesn’t. They should have just asked me, or just about anyone teaching biology at the college level. Or look, they talked to experts in reproductive biology!

“Lots of folks are wondering the same thing!” Dr. Francisco Diaz, director of the Center for Reproductive Health and Biology at Pennsylvania State University, said of the Trump White House’s understanding of how biology works.

Embryos are “neither male nor female” by Trump’s definition, Diaz said, since there are no germ cells present at conception. Germ cells are reproductive cells that later become eggs and sperm, and that are set aside early in embryonic development.

“How about men after vasectomies? No germ cells there, are they still male?” asked Diaz, who is also an associate professor of reproductive biology at the university. ”Are postmenopausal women still female?”

“Not a super tight definition!” he concluded. “The ‘at conception’ wording seems forced to define personhood as beginning at conception and not really to define sex.”

They asked anthropologists!

Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.

“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”

Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.

Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”

The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”

They asked health experts!

Some health experts said the problems with Trump’s definitions of sex and gender go beyond his ill-informed understanding of embryonic cells. Put simply, neither sex nor gender is a simple binary.

This executive order “is highly problematic from a biological standpoint because it overly simplifies what we know to be an incredibly complicated developmental process,” said Dr. Josh Snodgrass, a professor of anthropology and global health at the University of Oregon. “It’s just not that simple from a genetic standpoint, and then becomes even more complicated with time under the influence of hormones, environmental exposures, and social experiences.”

They asked the president of the Human Biology Association!

Snodgrass, the past president of the Human Biology Association, noted that Trump’s order also doesn’t account for people who are intersex, which means they are born with genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit into the typical male/female sex binary.

“This reads to me as coming from people who desperately want the world to be simple — for sex to be a simple binary and for us to return to some imagined time when this was more broadly accepted,” he said. “The problem is that it’s not only science that shows us that human biological variation is more complicated, but other cultures do and have also appreciated this for thousands of years.”

Snodgrass added that there is one more thing missing from the executive order that belongs in all conversations about sex and gender: empathy.

“The authors of this executive order seem like they are trying to twist science to fit their worldview, but that this worldview is painfully out of step with reality,” he said.

I tell you, it’s exhausting dealing with all these people who write to me to explain how biology works…and I’m cis. I don’t know how trans people deal with it, especially since stupidly flawed ideas about biology are being used to legally discriminate against them.

I’m going to have to blame the neo-liberal cabal of Dawkins-Pinker-Coyne for spreading the anti-trans propaganda and presenting their authority as superior to all of modern biology. Ignore them.

Our government has officially gone full TERF

Never go full TERF. Here’s another Trumpian declaration:

(a) “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity
(b) *Women” or “woman” and *girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively
(c) “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.
(d) ‘Female’ means a person belonging) at conception;to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception; to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

I disagree, though. He’s not declaring all Americans female; he’s instead declaring that we’re all trans, because we changed from an undifferentiated state to whatever sex we’re assigned at birth. Unfortunately, his argument is built on a falsehood, because obviously sex is not immutable, it changes during fetal development, and we get another major shift at puberty (why do all the TERFs ignore puberty? It’s right there in our faces, everyone goes through it, and we definitely change at the cellular and gross morphological level). We can also trigger profound changes with hormones, and more subtly, brains can have properties of either, both, or no sex. You cannot reduce complex human identities to a single cell type produced by a single organ, although these regressive dimwits will try desperately.

Do I need to mention that you are not producing any reproductive cell, small or large, at conception?

Why are fewer men going to college?

Every year in my genetics class we play a little game. The first lab is dedicated to learning some basic rules of probability and running through some simple statistical tests, and one of the exercises is to look around the room and count male-presenting vs. female-presenting students, and test whether the distribution is close enough to 50:50. It never is. then we test against a 40:60 male:female ratio, which used to be the ratio for my university as a whole, and it’s always significantly different than that. This year I have closer to a 30:70 ratio.

Another anecdotal observation: all the men in the class spontaneously segregated themselves to one lab bench. I told them it looked like a high school dance with all the boys nervous and shy about asking someone to dance. The women also looked comfortable with the separation. I’ve long wondered what’s going on, why men are avoiding college, and today I found an article that ponders the same question.

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

Yeah, why is that? Let’s hear some hypotheses.

Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”

I call bullshit on that one. Do you think women don’t get negative, discouraging messages in k-12? The whole damn culture is rife with a bias that girls are supposed to be homemakers and squirt out babies.

Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”

True, tuition is ridiculously high, but being a woman does not qualify you for a discount, so that’s a bad explanation.

Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.“

I can confirm that! I’ve looked at final grade distributions in my classes, and typically the top 10% in the class are all women. However, that doesn’t explain why we have this difference in performance. I don’t think women are intrinsically smarter than men (I confess to being biased by my experience), and I struggled to understand where this performance difference might come from. Once I thought it might be that the men are all distracted by sports, but no…our male students are often engaged with our sports teams, but I’m more often seeing that women are putting in long hours with the swim team, the volleyball team, the soccer team. When there’s an away game it produces bigger holes in the women student audience than the men’s group (partly, of course, because there are fewer men in the first place.)

There are other suggestions bounced around.

• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.

• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.

• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.

• Men join the military more than women.

• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.

OK, but those disparities were just as great, or greater, in the 1950s as they are now. They don’t explain the 𝚫♂ at all. But the author proposes an interesting, if rather circular, explanation.

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

Here’s a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost 40 years of teaching: vocational choices have been shifting.

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

That’s also true for med school. Every year I’m writing recommendations for vet school, med school, and grad school, mostly for women. It’s not for the usual annoying excuse I hear from some people, that those professional schools and those occupations have gotten easier, with reduced standards, to accommodate “the girls”* because, if anything, admissions have become even more competitive over the years. Probably the toughest school to get into is vet school, and that’s where the disparity between male and female applicants is highest, in my experience.

So one simple explanation is…cooties. Girls’ germs.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

Great. I’ll inform the administration that one way out of our enrollment and budget declines is to admit fewer women.

But seriously, there is something going on here: witness the spontaneous segregation of men and women in my genetics lab. I don’t understand why men are averse to working with women, but it’s a real phenomenon I’ve witnessed. There is no shortage of stupid explanations, at least!

Because the concept of school is feminine.
In Spanish, school is ‘escuela’, ending in -a, which is a feminine.
Think about what you do in school.
You sit down, you accept that you don’t know sh:t and you accept that your teacher is right and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
What is masculine is standing up in the classroom and saying “Fvck this sh:t, I’m going to do it my way, you’re wrong, I’m right, I’m not gonna listen to you”, that is a very masculine thing to do, and that’s why men, who are on average, more masculine, essentially do that.

The concept of school is feminine…but never mind that women were often forbidden from attending college, until relatively recent decades.

In Spanish, ‘escuela’ has a feminine gender…damn, this is an argument from a man who has never studied languages, because the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.

Since when is good teaching and good learning a matter of rote memorization? My best students ask questions. I encourage them to ask me to clarify or explain why something I say is true. To assume that obedience is a feminine trait is straight up wrong and bigoted, and to think that the manly way to learn is to announce aggressively that you’re not going to listen, is antithetical to learning anything. That guy gets everything wrong.

It’s a useful example of the problem, though. It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.

That’s my perspective from the world of education. I can’t think of any examples from the world of politics, for example, can you?

* One thing that bugged me about the article is that it uses men/women, boys/girls, male/female interchangeably. I’m working with college-aged students, and I can’t think of them as boys/girls — they’re adults, or nearly so — and as a biologist male/female has connotations of sex, which I avoid with students. They’re men and women in my classes, that’s it.

Surprise! We have a 28th amendment?

As Joe Biden was getting his coat and leaving the White House, he has announced that he has ratified the equal rights amendment! Just like that! He can do that? What took him so long?

But legal experts contend it isn’t that simple: Ratification deadlines lapsed and five states have rescinded their approval, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, prompting questions about the president’s authority to ratify the amendment more than 50 years after it first passed.

Biden is leaning on the American Bar Association’s opinion, the senior official said, which “stresses that no time limit was included in the text of the Equal Rights Amendment” and “stresses that the Constitution’s framers wisely avoided the chaos that would have resulted if states were able to take back the ratifying votes at any time.”

This is an interesting bomb to throw back over his shoulder. Will Trump fight it? Is this another issue that will tear the Republican party apart? Will Zombie Phyllis Schlafly rise from her grave to haunt the halls of Congress?

I approve of the core principles of the amendment, but I also approve of any effort to sow chaos in the Trump administration.

If we say the obvious often enough, will people figure it out?

I know the community here doesn’t need to hear this, but…


TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN

My one reservation about the video is that he focuses on intersex conditions with known biological markers. Most trans people do not have those markers; instead, the determination and differentiation of sex are so complicated and tangled that even in typical patterns of expression you get non-binary outcomes.

But yes, those ‘scientists’ who are now actively promoting bad science to benefit conservative, religious positions need to be called out more, and shamed.

I knew a few people at Bryn Mawr

It always seemed like a most excellent liberal arts college, and in particular I enjoyed visiting with the late Jane Oppenheimer, a developmental biologist and historian of science. I was doing a quick refresher on Nettie Stevens, the cytologist working on chromosomes at the dawning of the age of genetics, while preparing my introductory talk on chromosomes and learned something new. I knew that Nettie Stevens studied there and was offered a position on their faculty, and I knew that Bryn Mawr was and is an all-women school, but I just learned an interesting fact about Bryn Mawr:

On February 9, 2015, the college’s board of trustees announced approval of a working group recommendation to expand the undergraduate applicant pool allowing transgender women and intersex individuals identifying as women to apply for admission. This decision made Bryn Mawr the fourth women’s college in the United States to accept trans women. Bryn Mawr “recognizes that gender is fluid and that traditional notions of gender identity and expression can be limiting”, and has the official policy of accepting nonbinary students who were assigned female at birth as well. All current, past, and future students are fully recognized as members of the Bryn Mawr community, regardless of current gender identity.

Well, now I respect that college even more.

Neil Gaiman responds

He’s denying the worst of the claims, while admitting that he did have sexual relationships with his accusers. They were all consensual, he says.

As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.

I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.

This is the “bitchez be lyin'” defense written in the gentle romantic style of Neil Gaiman. It doesn’t add up. So he was in a happy, positive, respectful, consensual relationship with women who have all mysteriously changed their minds and started misrepresenting his sensitive style of making love as brutal sadomasochistic assaults? Why? What changed “positive and happy” to tears and trauma? There’s a massive plot hole in his fantasy.

His real sin was not being open and feminist enough.

And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.

I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel.

Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.

This is a dim acknowledgment that gosh, he did something wrong in his past relationships. He’s not sure what, but maybe he wasn’t as emotionally available as he ought to have been. Yeah, demanding that he be called “Master” is a sign of his clumsiness in relationships. But he’s learning! He’s a better person now!

At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.

Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.

Something sordid went on. We don’t know all the details, fortunately (the Vulture story had more than I could stomach as it is), but “Yes, I had sex with the babysitter, but it wasn’t as rough as she claims, and besides, she wanted it” isn’t the strong defense he thinks it is.