Two amendments

I’ve changed my mind on a couple of things since yesterday.

  1. Based on the impression I got from the play Copenhagen, I said that Heisenberg was head of the German nuclear program in WWII. I was wrong. A reader wrote in with the details:

    A lot of documents regarding the WWII German nuclear program have only been declassified and rediscovered in archives in recent years (much more recently than the well-known Farm Hall transcripts and the main Alsos reports). Based on these documents, Heisenberg was not the head of the program. The chief theoretical physicist in the program appears to have been Siegfried Flügge, who was brought to the United States after the war to help Edward Teller with a certain classified project. The chief administrative official for the program in its final years was SS General Hans Kammler, who was also taken in by the United States after the war, according to several declassified documents. However, the documents do show that Heisenberg was involved in more weapons-related wartime nuclear work than he was willing to publicly admit after the war.

    I certainly understand if this is too far beyond your range of interests, but if you are curious, please see:

    Revolutionary Innovation

    https://f5o.aea.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/GermanAtomicBomb2024-01-27.pdf

    I still don’t care for the character of Heisenberg in the play — just working with the Nazis makes him distasteful to me — but he wasn’t quite as bad as I thought.

  2. I was far too generous to the Cass Report. Reading the comments and digging deeper into the report, it’s clear that this was the neo-liberal version of trans care — that is, say just enough that you won’t be accused of hiding the obvious facts, but not enough to actually disturb the status quo. It’s appealing to the reactionary anti-trans crowd because they can pretend to be judicious, while not actually doing anything and allowing the bad people to continue their bad policies and bad behavior.

The only summary of the Cass Report that I need

I keep hearing from anti-trans activists that this major review of the literature on the efficacy of transgender treatments, the Cass Report, confirms their position, which I don’t understand. What I’ve read of the report isn’t very overwhelming at all. Rather than wading into almost 400 pages of text, though, I thought this succinct summary of the whole thing was very good.

A systematic review collects all the published research in an area and ranks the research based on how likely it is to be reliable. The weakest form of evidence are case reports, where a doctor formally writes up an anecdote about a patient. The strongest form of evidence are randomized controlled trials where patients are randomly assigned to some type of medication or intervention, or to no intervention, or to a placebo, and the groups are compared to see how an intervention compares to alternatives/no treatment/placebo. Systematic reviews of several interventions for trans youth were undertaken by the University of York including puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, social transition, and psychosocial support measures.

The results of each of the systematic reviews was to characterize the overall evidence as weak, which was the Report’s most significant finding and has been widely reported. When looking more granularly at the York papers, a pattern appears of some papers showing a psychological benefit of the intervention, a smaller number showing no change positive or negative, and no papers showing any psychological harm. For example, in the systematic review of the evidence on puberty blockers, several included studies suggested psychological benefits to treatment in a range of areas, while a smaller number of studies found no significant impact. This was summarized in both the papers and the Report as “weak evidence” but could also be accurately described as “weak evidence (in favor of treatment).”

That the evidence was weak is not an indictment of the report — by their nature, case reports are necessarily weak. The alternative is to do controlled experimentation on human children, which is going to be even more problematic! The weak evidence is what we have, and that evidence says that, for the sake of the children, we should be treating kids.

The report itself actively endorses the use of puberty blockers, as well as other treatments, in addition to further studies of their effects. However, it takes a very conservative position on when young people should be allowed to take them, and even discouraged social transitioning in young children.

A full programme of research should be established to look at the characteristics, interventions and outcomes of every young person presenting to the NHS gender services.
The puberty blocker trial previously announced by NHS England should be part of a programme of research which also evaluates outcomes of psychosocial interventions and masculinising/ feminising hormones.

So I don’t get it. Why are the trans haters treating this as a vindication of their position? What I’m seeing is a cautious, conservative review that is compelled by the evidence to give cautious, conservative recommendations in favor of some degree of treatment, and I don’t care how much Helen Lewis and The Atlantic strain to twist it into a condemnation of American policy.

As usual, expect the issue to continue to be unresolved as ideology is used to torment trans kids further.

Chris Rufo is eaten alive by the naturalistic fallacy

Oh, look. Another bogus claim by an extremist conservative.

The point of sex is to create children — this is natural, normal, and good.

No, that is one of the purposes of sex. One of many. Do he and his wife only have sex when they intend to have children?

Masturbation is perfectly natural. So is every sex act I can imagine. I’d like to know which ones are unnatural or supernatural…list them for us, Chris. I’m sure it would be educational.

I don’t have procreative sex. Am I not normal? Is everyone who has sex after menopause or after sterilization abnormal? What about people who are naturally sterile?

If Rufo’s attitude is “good,” how do we account for all the oppressive, puritanical harm done to people in its name?

His whole schtick isn’t about natural, normal, or good. It’s all about control and punishing people who don’t follow his sick, sad ideology.

Alabama doesn’t hate all science

The Alabama Supreme Court has decreed that human life begins at conception and that terminating a blastocyst is a crime. This decision came about because three people, rightfully upset at the accidental loss of some frozen embryos (a property crime) decided to escalate the loss into an immoral act of murder in order to get retribution…and now look what they’ve done. They took advantage of a technology that involves excess production of embryos, making those embryos themselves, and then turned around and took legal action to make sure no one else could use those reproductive technologies themselves. Thanks, guys.

Then, of course, one of the most backward states in the union has ignorant religious zealots on their court (whoa, can’t hold that against Alabama, since the federal court has the same problem) who then decided that a small collection of undifferentiated cells is a “child”. Alabama ranks 47th in the nation on overall child well-being, but now they can claim to be first in the nation for overall “child”/tissue/zygote well-being.

The Alabama ruling is the first to attribute human rights to a developing organism at such an early stage following conception. The ruling states that “unborn children are ‘children,’” and that frozen embryos should be afforded the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action, a national antiabortion organization, heralded the court for showing “moral clarity” in ruling that the unborn deserve the same rights as children.

“You have children being created in petri dishes at will and then destroyed at will and used for experimentation,” Rose said. “It’s not acceptable to leave human beings on ice. It’s not acceptable to destroy them. These are not commodities.”

You know who creates these “children” in petri dishes? Hopeful parents who can’t conceive otherwise. I guess people who want children under those circumstances are going to have to flee Alabama, if they can afford it. IVF is a fairly expensive procedure so it’s mostly well-off people who can afford it, so this is another of those laws that will selectively hurt the poor and middle class — the rich will be unaffected. That’s why it’s safe for the sanctimonious Christians to applaud this decision, since it won’t hurt their priesthood, yet.

Jennifer Lincoln, a board certified OB/GYN who practices in Portland, Ore., said she doesn’t think people understand how “scary” the Alabama ruling is. She raised a common scenario: A patient undergoing IVF has an egg retrieval that leads to the creation of multiple embryos, with the hope that at least one turns into a live birth. If successful, the remaining embryos remain frozen for possible future use — but not all may be used.

“If someone has five embryos left and they decide not to have any more kids and want those embryos destroyed — and someone in that physician’s office hears that, could [the doctor] be criminalized for being an accomplice in a crime?” Lincoln asked.

I said “yet” because every Xian fanatic is cheering this decision as another avenue to attack women’s reproductive rights. The anti-choicers are gearing up to use that precedent as a tool to oppose abortion rights in Florida. Declaring that a “child” exists the instant sperm meets egg is a nice bit of sophistry to justifying outlawing abortion…and also, eventually, contraception. Oh, look, a nice example of a “slippery slope”!

Now that Alabama’s supreme court on Friday took the remarkable step of declaring that frozen embryos are “children,” a conservative group is trying to derail an expected 2024 ballot initiative in Florida that would enshrine abortion rights in that Sunshine State’s constitution.

On Monday, a religious civil rights law firm alerted the Florida Supreme Court to the neighboring state’s recent ruling in an attempt to have the high court block the amendment from reaching voters as it currently stands.

Earlier this month, the conservative-leaning Florida court heard arguments on the proposed constitutional amendment. It will decide by April 1 whether to approve the language in the measure, which states, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Please note that these same black-robed dingbats who are wallowing in their self-righteous, superficial pretense of respect for human life are the same people who approve of the state experimenting with novel methods for executing prisoners. It did not go well.

Kenneth Smith, who survived an attempt by the state to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, was put to death Thursday evening in Atmore, the rural home to Alabama’s execution chamber near the Florida state line, Governor Kay Ivey’s office confirmed.

Smith, 58, was executed at 8:25 p.m. local time, according to a press release issued by the state Department of Corrections.

The execution took roughly 22 minutes, the Associated Press reported. He appeared to stay conscious for “several minutes” after the gas began to flow, shaking and writhing and sometimes pulling against the restraints of his gurney for more than two minutes, the wire service added.

See? Alabama does not oppose all technological advances. They just have to be technologies that kill the right people.

A death in a high school restroom

I did not know that Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind Libs of TikTok, had an official position in Oklahoma schools. But she did. She was on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, placed there by the far-right extremist, Ryan Walters, who runs things in that state, unfortunately.

Raichik specifically targeted one school district for her hate campaign.

One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats.

She deleted a bunch of those posts? Why? Has she learned some shame?

No, that’s not it.

This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that “one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not a murder mystery, even though the MSN headline is “16-year-old Owasso student who died unexpectedly was laid to rest”. Died unexpectedly? They were brutally beaten to the point they couldn’t walk, and died in the hospital the next day. They were killed by those three students, who had been incited to the act by Chaya Raichik. That’s 4 people, at least, who need to be arrested for manslaughter, for a start.

Maybe Ryan Walters should be fired, too.

CripDyke has a thoughtful post on this crime. Go read that.

Empirical data that shows people finding happiness is good news

We can make all kinds of arguments about what defines or doesn’t define a sex, but it really doesn’t matter — especially when it’s from a stock vanilla cishet person like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or me. What we should be discussing is the lived experience of trans people who are better acquainted with the actual life in a trans body.

So they did.

The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.

Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.

The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.

I don’t think the report will convince the opposition to shut the fuck up, unfortunately. I predict two responses. One, they’ll focus on the 6% (although it’s actually less than 1% who were unhappy after hormone treatments or surgery) and shriek about their ruined lives while ignoring the majority of successful outcomes, and not bothering to ask what went wrong in that minority. Two, they’ll point to the study as proof that they were right all along, see how seductive the trans lifestyle is? I remember how the anti-gay people moaned about how appealing the self-indulgent, self-gratifying, sybaritic gay life was, and how we must ban all gay references to keep our children from falling into the trap. This is the same thing. They’re going to call this study trans propaganda and ignore the actual data.

The one thing I can say as a stock vanilla cishet person is that no, I’m not going to suddenly shed all my sexual preferences and change my interests because I see somebody else having a good time. I’m going to be happy for them. What’s the matter with those people who’d rather others were unhappy?

Someone’s got the old geezer cranked up again

It looks like it’s Jerry Coyne. Those two need to be separated — every time they get together they start hooting and jumping on the furniture and throwing unmentionables out the window.

The New Zealand Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor is so ignorant of science that she thinks sex isn’t binary. She may be right about “gender” (whatever that might be) but sex is binary, defined by gamete size. A government’s Chief Scientific Advisor should advise on science, not on the latest fashionable opinion of Generation TikTok.

In case you’re curious to know what outrageous insanity the science advisor, Juliet Gerrard, said, it’s this: “Sex and gender are different but related things. Neither is binary. For an accessible introduction to why sex isn’t binary, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start.”

Are you reeling in shock? No? Neither am I. That’s actually an eminently sensible statement, since sex and gender are different but related, and neither is binary. This is the kind of thing biology professors all around the world, at least those who aren’t poisoned by an ideological freak-out, are saying all the time. That’s a mundane, normal, healthy expression of our current understanding of the science of sex. Calm down, guys.

I have a couple of other objections to Dawkins’ statement.

  1. Pretending to not know what gender is is childish and stupid, well beneath him. Yeah, Richard, you can look up “gender”. It’s what we’d expect of a serious scholar.

  2. Biologists do not define sex by gamete size. Gamete size is one of the many consequences of sexual development, and not the only one.

  3. Come on, complaining about “Generation TikTok”? Do you also shake your cane at those kids on your lawn? Face it, we’re older than most people, the young’uns will be taking over the world soon enough. Get used to it.

You know, those two olds are making the rest of us look foolish. If you can’t keep up, Grandpa, go back to gumming your pablum while watching Wheel of Fortune. Some of us still have brains that are relatively uncalcified and can enjoy watching the world progress around us.