It’s almost as if transactivism was a specific test of whether fact and evidence really matter in science today:
In August, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was criticized for removing a news release about a peer-reviewed study published in PLoS One by one of its academics—Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher at Brown’s School of Public Health. Littman’s article, titled “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,“ discusses the phenomenon by which social media and peer pressure seem to have fuelled the recently observed trend by which young teenagers (typically girls) suddenly declare themselves transgender. The paper infuriated transgender activists, who claim that the entire notion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a transphobic invention. Both Brown and PLoS One also were attacked as Brown’s enablers.
While no one could offer any evidence that Littman’s results were wrong, PLoS One issued a statement acknowledging the complaints about the study, and promising “further expert assessment on the study’s content and methodology.” Meanwhile, the dean of the School of Public Health, Bess H. Marcus, claimed that concerns over methodology had incited the university to remove the news article from the university’s web site. She added that members of the university community members had “express[ed] concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” In other words, Marcus is worried that facts might be used to undermine ideologically hallowed “perspectives”—also known as “opinions.”
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All of this might have been anticipated by Jean-François Lyotard, a French postmodern philosopher who, in his Postmodern Condition (1979), analysed situations of justice in terms of what he called “language games”—which served to reject the claim of any discourse to be grounded in truth. The result of such an outlook is that superstition and blind dogma are elevated to the status of knowledge obtained through science and rationality. Transgender ideologues have adapted their approach to this postmodern age perfectly, since their narrative focuses mostly on “pain,” “hurt feelings” and (as Brown’s public health dean put it) “perspectives.” Even in the UK earlier this week, there was an open letter published in The Guardian which cited the concern of 54 academics who note the harassment, no-platforming, and attempts to invoke the dismissal of scholars who engage in academic research into the transgender phenomenon and ideologies. Where vaccination policy is concerned, science still has the edge on superstition and propaganda. But in the field of gender studies—and every field that gender studies touches, from philosophy to reproductive health—superstition is now firmly in the lead. Julian Vigo, “Trans Activists’ Campaign Against ‘TERFs’ has Become an Attack on Science Trans Activists’ Campaign Against ‘TERFs’ has Become an Attack on Science” at Quillette
One gets the feeling that so many adminbots in academia today, including science, would be happy to just forget the glorious history of science and all thate other DWM stuff and go full bore, headfirst, into a sort of identity politics that is actually a materialist version of traditional hysteria about witchcraft.
What right do facts and evidence have to stand in the way of whatever it is that people feel strongly about?
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See also: If thinking so makes a man a woman … not only is the mind real but it is so real that nature doesn’t even matter.
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Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.