Sexism Poisons Everything

That black hole image was something, wasn’t it? For a few days, we all managed to forget the train wreck that is modern politics and celebrate science in its purest form. Alas, for some people there was one problem with M87’s black hole.

Dr. Katie Bouman, in front of a stack of hard drives.

A woman was involved! Despite the evidence that Dr. Bouman played a crucial role or had the expertise, they instead decided Andrew Chael had done all the work and she was faking it.

So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library () to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop.

Our papers used three independent imaging software libraries (…). While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and

the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data. With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper ();

as a result, this is probably the most vetted image in the history of radio interferometry. I’m thrilled Katie is getting recognition for her work and that she’s inspiring people as an example of women’s leadership in STEM. I’m also thrilled she’s pointing

out that this was a team effort including contributions from many junior scientists, including many women junior scientists (). Together, we all make each other’s work better; the number of commits doesn’t tell the full story of who was indispensable.

Amusingly, their attempt to beat back social justice within the sciences kinda backfired.

As openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other gender/sexual minority (LGBTQIA+) members of the astronomical community, we strongly believe that there is no place for discrimination based on sexual orientation/preference or gender identity/expression. We want to actively maintain and promote a safe, accepting and supportive environment in all our work places. We invite other LGBTQIA+ members of the astronomical community to join us in being visible and to reach out to those who still feel that it is not yet safe for them to be public.

As experts, TAs, instructors, professors and technical staff, we serve as professional role models every day. Let us also become positive examples of members of the LGBTQIA+ community at large.

We also invite everyone in our community, regardless how you identify yourself, to become an ally and make visible your acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people. We urge you to make visible (and audible) your objections to derogatory comments and “jokes” about LGBTQIA+ people.

In the light of the above statements, we, your fellow students, alumni/ae, faculty, coworkers, and friends, sign this message.

[…]
Andrew Chael, Graduate Student, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
[…]

Yep, the poster boy for those anti-SJWs is an SJW himself!

So while I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life. Otherwise, stick around — I hope to start tweeting

more about black holes and other subjects I am passionate about — including space, being a gay astronomer, Ursula K. Le Guin, architecture, and musicals. Thanks for following me, and let me know if you have any questions about the EHT!

If you want a simple reason why I spend far more time talking about sexism than religion, this is it. What has done more harm to the world, religion or sexism? Which of the two depends most heavily on poor arguments and evidence? While religion can do good things once in a while, sexism is prevented from that by definition.

Nevermind religion, sexism poisons everything.

… Whoops, I should probably read Pharyngula more often. Ah well, my rant at the end was still worth the effort.

“You might think that’s OK”

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I treat US Republican politicians as if they were a hive mind. That’s obviously false, but when they act as a unit to continue family separation policies or put partisan hacks on the Supreme Court then their differences are small enough to safely ignore.

Today, we got another example of that. The Intelligence Committee within the US House of Representatives held a hearing on Russian interference. Rather than contribute towards that, however, every Republican on the committee used their time to demand the head of the committee step down. Why? According to a letter they released,

Despite these findings [of the Special Council report], you continue to proclaim in the media that there is “significant evidence of collusion.” You further have stated you “will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president or people around him compromised in any way to a hostile foreign power?” Your willingness to continue to promote a demonstrably false narrative is alarming.

Either Adam Schiff knew this was coming, or he’s damn quick on his feet, because he shot back with this. Forgive the length of this quote, but it’s worth absorbing in full. [Read more…]

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

Remember that old thing? No? OK, quick summary:

Parental reports (on social media) of friend clusters exhibiting signs of gender dysphoria and increased exposure to social media/internet preceding a child’s announcement of a transgender identity raise the possibility of social and peer influences.

Littman L (2018) Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLoS ONE 13(8): e0202330.

In short, maybe social media is making the kids transgender? This seems like something someone should study, and someone did!

Poorly. [Read more…]

I Think I Get It

We seem to be in a cycle. Every time PZ Myers posts something about transgender people, the comment thread floods with transphobes. Given the names involved, I suspect this is due to Ophelia Benson’s effect on the atheio/skeptic sphere.

Regardless, there may be another pattern in play. The go-to argument of these transphobes was transgender athletes, with the old bathroom line showing up late in the thread. I had a boo at GenderCritical on Reddit, to assess if this was just a local thing, and noticed there were more stories about athletics than bathrooms over there. Even one of the bigots thought this was new. Has there been a shift of rhetoric among transphobes?

If so, I think I understand why.

[Read more…]

Some Much-Needed Follow-up

You can almost watch my opinion flip in real time.

September 25, 2014 at 11:57 am

If Benson made a habit of linking to TERF materials, even though she knew where they came from and had plenty of alternatives, I wouldn’t be so quick to defend her. But this is a single cartoon that is only problematic because of its source, and even then you had to either know TERF lingo or read carefully to discover the source was problematic. It should be entirely forgivable, at minimum, especially if Benson made it clear she didn’t endorse trans exclusion once she knew of the source. Which she did.

That some people aren’t willing to forgive this no matter what Benson does outs them as demanding perfection from imperfect beings. Only the most fanatic religious fundamentalists agree to that.

=====

September 25, 2014 at 9:38 pm

Not only does coded language allow you to get away with saying racist/sexist/classist things, you might trick non-racist/sexist/classist people into supporting you. I myself was thinking of sharing an image elsewhere, until I saw octopod raise the TERF flag and went “hmmm, I might be missing something here.” On and off over several hours, I scratched my head trying to work out what that was. “I suppose that one comic ‘reinderdijkhuis’ linked to made it explicit, but I didn’t spot anything else as bad. Though, now that I think of it, that rainbow comic looked like a coded message. And it was weird the masthead used the word ‘cotton’ but I’m HOLY SHIT HOW COULD I BE THAT BLIND….” […]

In that moment, a page I originally thought contained a mix of funny but heavily obscure comics was revealed to be a vicious cacophony of sexist dog whistles. EVERY comic was dripping with hate, but in some of them it was so carefully hidden that it looked like feminist commentary. Those could easily float around Facebook, with only a select few snickering over the true message being passed around. Imagine sharing an image that mocked Obama for being a warmonger, following the link to the source, and stumbling across a white supremacist website. If you were black, that would be horrific.

Hopefully that should explain why the image had to go, and why I was wrong to edge towards the “devil’s advocate” chair. My apologies for taking so long to clue in.

I was a latecomer to Ophelia Benson’s transphobia, other people had been aware of it for at least a year before my flip began. The whisper network had started talking, and I decided to listen. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who helped me move from clueless to slightly-less-so, people like abbeycadabra, Janine, Xanthë, and Jason Thibeault. That also means I should take critiques from them seriously, as my understanding isn’t as far along as theirs.

Frankly, for a trans person, there’s something surreal and erasing in seeing cis people feuding with cis people over whether we exist. I mean, I am grateful that there are cis people being allies for us and pushing back against the transphobes (and homophobes and every other kind of -phobe.) But the fact that people have to come up with logical arguments and “evidence” that our transness is “real,” thus keeping the question alive of whether we do, in fact, exist, keeps giving me the creepy feeling that maybe I’m just a figment of my own imagination. I think the technical term is “depersonalization.”

It’s like when people run around “proving” that 1 = 0 — nobody sees any real need to “disprove” it, because it’s obvious that such a proof is BS. (It’s a reductio ad absurdum on the face of it.) But it seems like even those who believe in our existence feel the need to prove it. I was just reading HJ Hornbeck’s post about trans athletes, which has all kinds of “scientific,” “objective” evidence that gender dysphoria, gender identity, etc. are real. The problem with going down that path is not only that it concedes the possibility that it could be “disproven,” but also that trans people who don’t fit into the definitions and criteria in those “proofs” are then implicitly left out of the category “real trans.”

I was originally going to type up something in response, but after re-reading this comment that instinct feels mistaken. I agree with all of it, anything I add would just be restating something they said, and that would promote the idea that trans people’s opinions only have weight if cis people agree with them. So I’ll give Allison the final word.

This is BTW why I don’t like the idea of medical tests for transness, or proofs that trans people’s brains are observably different from cis people’s. Ultimately, being trans lies in one’s own understanding of oneself, gained through hard and painful experience. If I know based on my own experience of myself that “trans” best describes me, and some brain scan “proves” that I’m not, which am I to believe? (“Who are you gonna believe? Me? Or your own eyes?”) I spent most of my life ignoring my experience of myself and trying to live the way society told me I should, and it damned near killed me, and I think most trans people (at least we older trans people) have had the same experience.

… and Ophelia Benson

That small thing? I saw a referer pop up from Butterflies and Wheels, when one of Ophelia Benson’s commenters linked to me as an example of outrageous behaviour. Whenever that happens, I refer back to the rule I established three years ago.

For my part, I wrote myself into a corner with that last post. “Ophelia Benson is transphobic” became a “dog bites man” story, there wasn’t anything new or notable about it. The best evidence was on the table, people had entrenched in their opinions, and there seemed little point in flogging that horse further. So I hate-read Benson for a few weeks or so, then got bored and stopped caring. Maybe twice in that time she’s been mentioned in my circles, I checked back in, asked myself and others “does this qualify as noteworthy?,” then after some deliberation decided it wasn’t.

This time, it was. So I did my homework, typed up the first of a two-part post, and promptly got distracted. I promised to return to it during Trans Awareness Week, then broke that promise as academics and life caught up to me. PZ’s post landed just as I was clawing back towards a more stable spot, so I dusted off those old drafts.

[Read more…]