Only stupid hurtful memes about trans people are allowed

I recommended that short story by Isabel Fell, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” to you all because I liked it. I liked it a lot, actually; it made me think. I didn’t see it as an attack on transgender people at all, but instead as a pointed repurposing of a right-wing meme to create a better perspective on the complexity of sex and gender, and it was effective at that, and that was also the intent of the author.

You can’t read it now, because the story was pulled by the editor to protect the author.

Yesterday, I removed the story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” by Isabel Fall from the current issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. The recent barrage of attacks on Isabel have taken a toll and I ask that even if you disagree with the decision, that you respect it. This is not censorship. She needed this to be done for her own personal safety and health. It does not rule out the possibility that the story will be restored (changed or unchanged) at some future point, but that’s not our priority right now.

There’s a lot of explanation at that link, but this one jumped out at me.

Isabel’s bio is intentionally short and internet presence negligible. I understand that to be a common practice for trans people who are wary of attacks from anti-trans campaigners. Unfortunately, the same shield used against them opened her up to an unexpected attack from others. Furthermore, Isabel was not out as trans when this story was published. Various claims being made against her pressured Isabel into publicly outing herself as a defense against the attacks. That should never be the case and is very disturbing to me.

Yeah, disturbing to me, too. Apparently there was a lot of foofaraw in comments there that were accusing the author of being anti-trans or some such nonsense (the comments are gone now, too) by, I presume, people who didn’t actually read the story and leapt to conclusions from the title. This is ghastly and unforgivable.

The retraction of the story has also been written up in The Guardian.

Have you noticed how some shitty male comedian can make unfunny, superficial jokes about trans people, and they get rewarded with a Netflix special or an HBO series, while a trans woman can make a serious exploration of the real issues behind the joke, and they get outed and their story erased? That’s the real cliche here.

These are scientists?

Tell me if this sounds familiar. MIT students confronted Seth Lloyd about his affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein, and he made this gobsmackingly stupid remark: I never saw him with underage women. He traveled around with two assistants, who were women in their 20s, who were typically very beautiful, and they were presumably previous Victoria’s Secret models.

Did he card them? Check their CVs for their employment history? Does he think that association with women above the age of consent means you could never have ever associated with underage women? Remember, this was after Epstein had been convicted.

It reminds me of something else: Lawrence Krauss’s feeble rationalizations.

“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

I’m embarrassed for them. Scientists should have a better appreciation of how evidence works, and that personal eyewitness evidence isn’t the only kind there is…that’s more of a Ken Ham attitude than I’d expect from these two.

Tactical gender

Isabel Fell has taken that feeble joke about identifying as an attack helicopter and weaponized it as a short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”. It’s good and slightly terrifying.

I sexually identify as an attack helicopter.

I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not a biological sex. My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope somatic female.

But, really, I didn’t lie. My body is a component in my mission, subordinate to what I truly am. If I say I am an attack helicopter, then my body, my sex, is too. I’ll prove it to you.

When I joined the Army I consented to tactical-role gender reassignment. It was mandatory for the MOS I’d tested into. I was nervous. I’d never been anything but a woman before.

But I decided that I was done with womanhood, over what womanhood could do for me; I wanted to be something furiously new.

To the people who say a woman would’ve refused to do what I do, I say—

Isn’t that the point?

If transhumanism leads to increasing integration with machines, sure, why not have identity at all levels associated with the whole?

How to make science more inclusive

We can be better, and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology shows how it’s done. Their journal published an article describing the steps they were taking to make SICB more inclusive and representative, and show the state of affairs in their membership.

The ethnic (top panel) and gender (middle panel) composition of SICB membership and the ICB editorial board (data from 2019) compared with the US and NSF census (data from 2015 US census and 2017 NSF survey). Bottom panel: Gender composition of the ICB editorial board since the journal’s foundation (median per decade).

The top graph is the ethnic distribution, and while the percentage of people of color in the society is somewhat lower than it is in the population of Ph.D.s, and significantly lower than the overall population, the key thing is that the population in leadership roles, that is the editorial board of their journal, is proportional to the population in the general membership. That sets the direction they’ll be taking.

The second graph is the gender distribution, and it’s roughly a healthy 50:50; maybe women are a little over-represented on the editorial board, but that’s also a smaller population with more variation. It’s worth noting, too, that over half the population of Ph.D.s in the country are women, so you’d better start paying more attention. Before the usual neandertals start whining about how women are in more ‘soft’ disciplines, note that over half the population of SICB, a highly technical field, are women. I should also point out that it doesn’t matter what discipline you’re talking about, all those non-STEM fields also require rigor and discipline and hard work.

The real eye-opener is that third graph, which shows the history of SICB. Sixty years ago, it was a very ‘masculine’ organization, with only about 10% of the SICB editorial board women; it rose to about one quarter women in the 80s, surging abruptly to 60% this year. That is a big deal. Changing the gate-keepers opens up new opportunities.

Researchers from non-prestigious institutions or minority groups face hurdles in publishing and in obtaining funding; for example, female scientists publish relatively less and get fewer citations than their male counterparts due to bias, such as gender differences in self-citation. Just as female and non-white authors remain underrepresented in the USA, so do authors from low-income and Global-South countries. In many scientific areas male, majority ethnic, and US scientists remain over-represented as gatekeepers (peer reviewers, editors) and lead authors. Although editorial boards have become more inclusive, most journals in the life sciences are still led by editors from US institutions and by men: in 2018, of the top 100 journals in life sciences as ranked in a 2009 study, 78 had a male editor in chief and 68 had an editor in chief affiliated with a US-based institution. Of the 22 female editors in chief, 17 were affiliated with US-based institutions. In contrast, women made up more than half of all PhDs granted in the USA in 2017 (Fig. 1), and the USA granted fewer than a quarter of doctoral degrees worldwide in 2018.

I’ve been to SICB a few times (not as much as I’d like, but their January annual meeting time doesn’t fit my schedule well), and there’s always been a lot of interesting work presented there. The directions they’re taking only make me want to go more often.

Do not put Gwyneth Paltrow in your vagina

I am not going to watch a single moment of Paltrow’s new show on Netflix, and you shouldn’t either. Boycott it. Cancel it. It’s a disgrace and it hasn’t even aired yet. It’s called The Goop Lab, and there is no science behind it at all, no lab, no research, just a bunch of rich people jumping on tired old bandwagons like energy healing or psychic mediums and using them as vehicles to sell crap to the gullible.

You can get a sufficient feel for the garbage being peddled from the trailer.

The last line there from Paltrow is We’re going to milk the shit out of it. Finally, some truth.

But another interpretation offers a clear description of Paltrow’s business model, which feeds into the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry. (That’s a lot of milk.) With the ever-elusive possibility of a better life, backed by her celebrity status and good genetics, Paltrow’s Goop hawks uber-expensive aspirational wellness products. That includes a $350 crazy straw, an $84 water bottle with a “positive energy” rock in it, and an $85 “Shaman Medicine Bag” with “magically charged stones.”

The business model is depressingly successful. Goop’s valuations in recent years have soared to $250 million, and the company has expanded into brick-and-mortar stores on multiple continents. The Netflix series is just the latest sign of Goop’s achievements.

I guess I won’t be seeing the next MCU movie if she’s in it, either. Thanks for the excuse!

Contrapoints and the test of endurance

A one hour and forty minute video! As always, Contrapoints is engaging, intelligent, and dynamic, but whoa, this one will take you while to sit through, and probably would have been more effective at half the length. She has a lot to say about “cancel culture” and the reign of terror.

I liked it and thought she made some good points, which I think means I now have another target painted on my back.

The Mansplaining Conference

I’m not making this up, that’s what they call it: “DESTINED TO BE THE MANSPLAINING EVENT OF THE CENTURY”, as if that’s a great selling point. Only women (but only biological women, they say) will be allowed to attend, all of the speakers are men, and the cost is $1,999. Did I mention that the speakers are people like Mike Cernovich and Stevan Molyneux and Andrew Dream Johnson, who I’ve never heard of before, but who calls himself the president of the Manosphere?

If that isn’t persuasive enough for you yet, the conference also promises to raise your femininity 500%, become the Ultimate Wife, and help you get pregnant and have unlimited babies!

Our speakers will teach you how to have as many babies as your heart desires with the time you have left and bounce back to amazing health and wellness without extreme diets or stress. The clock is ticking and your babies are soon to be kicking!

A sample of the kind of deep, poetic wisdom you will receive at this conference: “If you’re not strong, you’re weak.” Mind blown.

Well, ladies, have you signed up yet? If not, don’t worry, this is the kind of event designed to have your man sign you up to whip you into shape. Just sit back and let him make the decisions.

If you’re wondering what he’ll do during this woman-only event, don’t worry, there’s a parallel conference, The 21 Convention, 2nd Patriarch Edition, happening at the same time in the same hotel, with pretty much the same speaker list, for only $999 more. So yeah, $3000 for a weekend in which bloviating asses tell you what to do to live up to your man’s expectations, and then duck into the adjacent conference room to tell your man what to expect from you. It’s perfect.

Well? Let me know how many of you are going.

(By the way, that “men prefer debt free virgins without tattoos” is one of the slogans they use, and it’s more horrifying than it even sounds. “Debt free” refers specifically to college debt — so their kind of man prefers women who are uneducated and inexperienced and young and trainable.)

Man, I hope some newspaper somewhere ponies up the cash to send a secret journalist to this thing to report on the nonsense they’re going to peddle.

Love doesn’t always win in the end, as it turns out

I’m not at all involved in this ongoing meltdown of another organization, but wow, does this account of the chaos at Romance Writers of America sound familiar.

It’s interesting to watch a major organization collapse in real time. I’m not involved, thankfully, but seeing the fall of the Romance Writers of America has been something. Whether it truly does cease to be still remains to be seen—a lot of its members are not on social media, and probably have no idea what’s going on—but for the online writing community, it seems the RWA will come to an end, going the way of all dinosaurs.

But to those authors on Twitter who are aghast—AGHAST, I tell you—that there could racism and bigotry in the RWA, I have to ask: why is this news to you? Courtney Milan has been fighting for marginalized romance authors in the RWA for quite some time. What exactly do you think she’s been fighting against?

Yikes. That link has a comprehensive summary of the events, but in short: the woman who was chair of the ethics committee, Courtney Milan, complains about racism in some of the authors’ works, leading several people to file ethics complaints against her, and then everything blew up with a flurry of resignations, firings, retractions, total chaos. Even now further revelations about bias in the management of RWA are trickling out.

It’s rather obvious that bigotry was rife in the organization (as it is everywhere), and what’s driving much of the meltdown is that some peoples method for dealing with racism is to deny that it exists. Problem solved! I’ve seen the same thing happen with various atheist/skeptic groups, and I rarely see them outright ending, they’re more likely to reconstitute themselves. Unfortunately, it’s 50:50 whether they improve vs. ending up under the sway of the assholes.

A science writer who doesn’t understand the difference between binary and bimodal

Tom Chivers has dipped a tentative, timid toe into the arguments about trans issues to declare that of course biological sex exists, a statement I find utterly baffling. “Biological” sex? Is there some other kind? I look forward to hearing stories about abiological sex, or artificial sex, or machine sex. It’s very silly — next thing you know, the TERFs are going to start ranting about an equally silly term like “biological woman”, as if the non-biological women are running around made of plastic and aluminum. Uh-oh, I guess they already are. That’s another one I don’t get. Are they just sticking “biological” onto terms that they want to dignify with a sciencey label, contrary to what actual biologists say?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around “biological sex”. Is non-biological sex what you get when you stuff a Hitachi magic wand into a Fleshlight? Biology doesn’t have much to do with that.

Anyway, what triggered Timid Tom was a comment by a British politician, Jo Swinson (sorry, I’m American, I know nothing about politicians in the UK):

Swinson, on Radio 4’s Today programme, was asked by Justin Webb whether she believes that “biological sex exists”. She replied: “Not on a binary, from what I’ve read. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in the subject but I don’t think that things are as binary as are often presented.”

That’s about as coherent and sensible a response as you can make to a silly question. She’s not going to pretend to be an expert, but she translates an absurdity into something as close to reality as she can, and answers that. She is correct. Sex is not binary. It’s a complicated mess of a subject with all kinds of variations.

Tentative Tom disagrees. He waffles about with a comparison to Pluto? Which used to be a planet? But “planet” was redefined so it isn’t anymore? Which he uses to somehow make an argument that objects in space are either planets or not-planets, a true binary, as long as you use the Correct Definition™, and that the fact that some objects are ambiguous does not affect the fact that Jupiter really is a planet.

OK.

I don’t see how arguing that there are artificial definitions that partition a continuum of object sizes supports his claim of unambiguous definitive binary states, but this is apparently Tom being Tom.

Then he launches into a discuss of intersex individuals, conceding that there are human intermediates in sexual differentiation.

With sex, just as with the concepts of “planet” or “species”, there do exist ambiguous cases. The intermediate cases in human sex are usually known as “intersex” people. There are various ways in which one can be intersex: the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA)’s FAQ site mentions genital ambiguity, such as girls with very large clitorises or boys with very small penises, or scrotums that have divided to form labia-like structures; external genitals that appear female, but with male-typical anatomy inside; chromosomal abnormalities, such as mosaicism, when some cells are XX and others XY, or having three sex chromosomes such as XXY; or having standard male XY chromosomes but a body that is insensitive to the androgenic hormones such as testosterone, which tell the embryo to start becoming male.

You’re losing me, Tom. These are all people exhibiting variation in sex-related traits. Are you trying to argue that these do not demonstrate that sex is nonbinary? They seem to me to show a clear range in the phenomena.

But then he says something that makes all clear. He doesn’t understand the difference between bimodal and binary distributions! Something can exhibit a bimodal distribution yet not be binary, so telling me that a phenomenon is bimodal does not imply that it’s binary.

…that doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t exist “on a binary”. If you did a graph, plotting human beings by height, you will see two clear peaks on that graph — average male height and average female height. If you plot weight, it would be even clearer. Foot size, hip-to-waist ratio. There would be significant overlap between men and women, but there would be very clear differences.

That’s a really good example. You’ve probably seen that kind of curves plotted to illustrate the differences in height of the different sexes. The trick is that they usually segregate the data into two categories first, and then plot two curves. Oh, look: two peaks!

Except for one little problem. He says if you “plot human beings by height”, then you will see “two clear peaks.” Let’s try that, without first biasing the interpretation.

Ooops, without the color coding, that looks like a bit of a smear; maybe with the right statistical analysis, you could extract a bimodal distribution out of that, but it would be pretty much impossible to turn that into a binary distribution.

Other small problems with these data is that height varies in history and geographic location. The average height of men 150 years ago was equivalent to the average height of women today; South Asian men tend to be shorter than American women. Were all those workers in the industrial revolution women, as are the majority of people in South Asia? Belgians are significantly taller than the French…are they more manly?

This is not to claim that biological differences are non-existent — individual traits do vary significantly between sexes. Even height! This kind of growth curve is really interesting.

It’s almost as if exposure to differing hormone concentrations at puberty elicits a differing pattern of growth, an observation that isn’t at all surprising to all those biologists who will tell you that there is a spectrum of variation that tends to be biased by sex, but still insist that sex is not binary.

But you still wouldn’t argue that a solution to the terrible transgender bathroom problem is that all you have to do is put a stick across the restroom door 170cm from the floor with a sign that says “You must be shorter than this to enter”. That wouldn’t work at all. My wife would have to use the men’s room, and Tom Cruise would have to use the ladies’. So why is Tom Chivers using this argument?

I think Timorous Tom is well aware that this won’t work, so he unslings a fresh battery of “facts.”

And those are not really sexual characteristics. If you were to plot, say, volume of mammary tissue, or number of ovaries, or number of sperm cells produced, you would see a far, far clearer picture of two enormous spikes with almost no overlap at all. Sex is about as binary as any biological or natural classification gets. It’s certainly a lot more binary than planetary status, and we’re happy to teach kids that Mercury is a planet but Pluto isn’t. There is a twilight, but it’s tiny compared to the size of day and night.

Whoa. I think if you plotted the volume of mammary tissue it most definitely produce a non-binary distribution within women and within men, and there would be overlap. You wouldn’t see two enormous spikes, you’d see two rounded mounds, which would remind me of something, I can’t quite think what. Similarly, if you plotted sperm counts, there’d be a broad distribution, admittedly floored at near zero for many women and some men, so there’d be a strong, tall rod at 0 and a rounded hemisphere subsequently. But again, it’s a poor way to distinguish men and women. I can’t quite see the bathroom police cupping breasts or getting a sperm sample before allowing you to enter.

It also brings up another problem: there are so darned many traits with differential expression. Trembling Tom brings them up one at a time to try to make the case that everything is binary, and he’s failing at even that, but what about the combos? A person is short, has large breasts, a Y chromosome, and a sperm count of 0; man or woman? Another person is tall, is flat-chested, had a hysterectomy, and identifies as a woman; will you tell her no? We don’t just have a graded distribution, we have combinatorial variation.

Oh, and he also trots out that familiar excuse, that it’s a tiny minority. So what? You don’t get to ignore their existence, and they still wreck your imaginary binary distribution.

But wait, one more absurdity from poor Torn Tom.

Male suspects in domestic homicides outnumbered female ones by more than seven to one in England and Wales from 2016 to 2018. Men — male-bodied people — are simply much more violent than women, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

No one is pretending otherwise, it’s a disgraceful statistic. But why? That’s a real concern — is it something about masculine nature, or is it something about masculine roles in our society? Also, is it binary? Are all males violent, and all women passive victims? Tom — honest question here, I’m just trying to discern your sex — how often do you beat your wife? If the majority of men are not violent, doesn’t this make violence a poor criterion? We’re only going to allow you to use this public restroom if you present a copy of your arrest record for domestic violence.

It should also go without saying that transgender women are by far the victims of violence. I guess that makes them Biological Women™ by definition, then.