Category: Health / Healthcare / Illness / Vaccines
Italy begins stripping lesbian mothers of their parental rights
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/07/italy-begins-stripping-lesbian-mothers-of-their-parental-rights/
Right wing governments working with Christian churches to deny rights to LGBTQ+ people. To stop equality, to stop same sex marriage. To deny family status at the same time as right governments and churches claim family units are best for children. We already know that children raised in same sex households do as well as or better than children in traditional opposite sex households. This is an attempt to make anything but the traditional male / female relationship status meaningless. Sure you can have civil partnerships but you get no rights with it, same with same sex marriage in the US if the republican fundamentalist religious right has its way. Because it is not good enough for those people to be able to do their things, do their beliefs, follow their own doctrines, their goal is to force everyone else to live by their church rules also. Hugs
Photo: ShutterstockIn conjunction with its crackdown on the rights of same-sex parents, the Italian government has begun retroactively stripping same-sex parents of their legal connection to their children.
Michela Leidi told the Daily Mail that she “cried for ten days” after receiving a letter informing her she would be removed from her daughter’s birth certificate. “It was as if I did not exist.”
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The couple doesn’t know why they were targeted as one of the first to have their legal status changed retroactively, as in most cities the policy has been focused on new babies born. They said their community, friends, and family have always supported them.
“I suspect the government is afraid that a family that looks different, like ours, can be as happy – maybe even happier sometimes – as a traditional family,” Liedi said. “On paper, they say Giulia has one mother but we know she has two. We will do everything possible to prove we are a good family.”
Her wife added, “No one from the government or the prosecutors came to see that we are a happy family with a happy baby.”
While same-sex civil unions have been legal in the country since 2016, same-sex couples do not have the right to adopt, thanks in part to opposition from the Catholic Church. Surrogacy remains illegal in Italy and there are restrictions that prevent the adoption of “stepchildren” by one parent. Medically assisted reproduction, like in vitro fertilization (IVF), is only available to heterosexual couples.
Viola became pregnant through artificial insemination, and the couple had to travel to Spain to receive the treatment.
Until March, there were several Italian cities where same-sex couples could be listed as “parents”—as opposed to “mother” and “father”—on birth registrations. But the Interior Ministry began sending letters ordering an end to the practice.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, made anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric a cornerstone of her campaign for office. She opposes allowing same-sex couples to adopt as well as marriage quality, calling civil union “good enough” for LGBTQ+ couples.
“Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies,” she declared last summer.
Under current Italian law, the member of a same-sex couple who is not legally recognized as a child’s parent could lose custody if the legally recognized parent dies or the relationship ends.
This is particularly horrific for another couple, Vanessa Finesso and Cristina Zambon. Finesso is the one who gave birth to their daughter after undergoing IVF in Spain. Even though she used Zambon’s egg, Zambon has been threatened with the loss of parental rights by the government. Finesso has cancer and is worried that if she dies, her wife will lose custody of their daughter.
The order also leaves the children of same-sex couples in jeopardy in other ways. “Children end up having limited access to key services and benefits, such as healthcare, inheritance, and child support,” Angelo Schillaci, a law professor at Sapienza University in Rome, told BBC when the policy was first announced. “At present, only one parent is recognized by law, the other one is a ghost. In real life, parents and children play together, cook together, play sports, and go on holiday together. But on paper, they are apart, the state does not see them. It’s a paradoxical situation.”
In the city of Padua, where Finesso and Zambon live, 27 families (33 children) have gotten warning letters that one parent may lose parental rights and be stripped of their place on their kids’ birth certificates. Some plan to leave the country for good.
But the mayor of Padua, Sergio Giordani, is defying the government’s orders and continuing to issue birth certificates recognizing two-mom families.
“My phone is full of pictures of happy families with shining eyes,” he said. “I’m really proud of what I’ve done.”
Queer Folks in the UK are Being Denied Sexual Healthcare Due to Budget Cuts
A new study has exposed the startling lack of access to sexual healthcare in the UK. After testing the healthcare resources across Great Britain, the researchers nearly half of all requests for doctor’s appointments concerning sexual health were denied.
The study was conducted by Terrence Higgins Trust, a nonprofit focused on HIV and sexual health services, with support from British Association of Sexual Health and HIV. In the UK, the National Health Service is funded by the government, and the researchers wanted to examine “the state of sexual health services after a decade of austerity.”
Under the persona of a ‘mystery shopper’ called ‘Gabriela,’ the researchers contacted 57 clinics in England, Scotland, and Wales to try to book a sexual health appointment. ‘Gabriela’ was described as being in her mid-20s, having recently had unprotected sex with both men and women, and as experiencing no symptoms. The researchers chose this persona in order to test whether clinics prioritized symptomatic patients, given that asymptomatic patients are common in STIs like chlamydia.
What they found was that 49% of appointment requests in all three countries were denied. The remaining 51% did offer face-to-face appointments, but with wait times averaging 13 days (19 in rural areas).
While these appointments were successfully made by telephone, online booking proved challenging. In England, only 10% of clinics offered online booking, none in Wales, 44% in Scotland.
Only 11% of clinics offered walk-in appointments without exceptions. Postal STI testing, meanwhile, varied wildly. All clinics in Wales offered mail-in testing, but only 56% in Scotland did.
In consequence, the researchers are calling on all three countries to provide free year-round postal testing, easy access to online appointment booking, and to reduce wait times to no more than 48 hours.
“The sexual health of the nation has consistently been ignored by Central Government,” said Richard Angell, Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust. “A wake-up call is needed. If more than 1,000 new STIs being diagnosed each and every day does not incentivize policy change and renewed investment, it is hard to see what will.
“Ultimately, you get what you pay for – the lowest real terms spending on sexual health is matched by the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections.
“The Government should guarantee long-term funding settlements for sexual health services at a rate of inflation plus 1 percent so as to address years of consistent under-funding.”
Germany’s naked truth: the 19th-century nudism movements co-opted by the Nazis
German socialists saw nudism as a weapon of class struggle. George Hull investigates how nudist movements grew out of the crowded, dirty cities of the late 19th century before being co-opted by the Nazis in their quest for racial purity
Published: October 20, 2021 at 7:05 am
There can’t be many sources of genuine culture shock left for a Brit travelling in western Europe. In Germany there is at least one: stumbling upon naked people in the most unlikely places.
On a hot summer day, it isn’t just at nudist beaches on the Baltic coast or in designated zones beside bathing lakes inland that naked sunbathers are to be found. Take a lunch-hour stroll in Frankfurt’s Grüneburgpark or Munich’s Englischer Garten and there they’ll be, a stone’s throw from the traffic and bustle of the city centre, nonchalantly applying their sun cream. Visit a German sauna in winter and, likely as not, you’ll be asked to remove your towel. Go for a dip in the Berlin municipal baths and you may discover it’s naked swimming day.
Beyond noting that the Germans are decidedly comfortable with nudity, the British tourist might be tempted to see in this phenomenon the legacy of an atavistic Romanticism or even the reactionary ‘folkish’ currents in German culture on which the kitsch paganism sponsored by the Nazis drew. This wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but it is only part of the truth. For one thing, far and away the most successful organised nudist movement in German history stemmed from the progressive left. For another, one of the first things the Nazis did upon being elected into office was to ban nudism.
The colourful history of nudism in Germany encompasses the best and worst aspects of this complex nation.
The final quarter of the 19th century was for Germany a time of swift industrialisation and mass internal migration. During the Second Empire (1871–1918) half of all Germans left their place of birth for the city. This vast influx to the new urban centres, mostly in west Germany, gave rise to a burgeoning civil society made up of diverse neighbourhood associations, social and political subcultures and organised movements, in which new arrivals sought to carve a niche for themselves. It also gave rise to crowded, damp and unhealthy living conditions for the majority.
Many of the associations and subcultures grew up precisely as a response to these substandard living conditions, which they saw as creating a public health crisis. The ‘life reform’ groups experimented with a variety of measures to confront the perceived crisis, ranging from vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and nicotine, natural healing and Buddhism to the building of rural communes and ‘garden cities’. Some of them embraced what the Swiss physician Arnold Rikli called ‘Lichtluftbäder’ (‘light and air baths’) – naked sunbathing – as an effective natural therapy.
Classical inspiration
Karl Diefenbach was the first life reformer to advocate nudity not just as a therapy but as a way of life. A strict vegetarian, he moved with his family to live in an abandoned quarry not far from Munich, naked, or wearing just a hair tunic in winter. In 1888 he was taken to court for being naked in public with his son. Undertaking his own defence, he persuaded the jury to acquit him. Diefenbach was an influential painter, for whom the summit of beauty was represented by the nude sculptures of ancient Greece. In his mind the benefits of nudity from a life-reform perspective coincided with an ideal he felt had been attained in ancient Greece, but which modern Europeans fell sadly short of: a perfect harmony between body and mind.
In urban artistic circles secret societies with a handful of members began growing up and strove to realise precisely this ideal. The members of Deutsch-Hellas, for example, went out into the woods and photographed one another naked in the poses of discus hurlers and Greek goddesses. Otherwise they held ‘beauty evenings’ in town, where they would pose nude as living statues or watch visiting celebrities such as Olga Desmond dance naked. They published their photos and musings in the magazine Die Schönheit (Beauty).
Diefenbach’s most famous pupil, Hugo Höppener, known as ‘Fidus’, took his inspiration from an idealised version of, not the Greek, but the German past. The Roman historian Tacitus had written of the German tribes that had fought the imperial legions fiercely – and often with success – in mixed ranks of men and women, all fully nude. It was these naked warrior ancestors of the German people whom Fidus depicted as an ideal Nordic type in his popular etchings, which blended the erotic with the esoteric and were published in nudist magazines.
As the years went on Fidus also wrote articles calling for a new disciplined German culture founded on pure racial descent from these Teutonic warriors. This resonated with people who had themselves concluded that the current public health crisis was a symptom of racial degeneration.
A lifestyle formula
While the living conditions of urban workers undoubtedly caused sickness and death, overall the second half of the 19th century had seen life expectancy and quality of life for most Germans increase to unprecedented heights. People who would once have been worried about survival were, by the turn of the century, more concerned with success. A new middle class was emerging, made up of those who had not received a classical education at a ‘gymnasium’ (selective, academically focused schools). Such people would probably not have read Tacitus and would spend little, if any, time thinking about ancient Greece. Die Schönheit would leave them cold.
They were impressed, however, by life reformers such as Richard Ungewitter, who had made a success of themselves against the odds and were offering a lifestyle formula that would give anyone who followed it an edge on the competition. Ungewitter’s bestselling autobiography told how a combination of veganism and nudism had allowed him to overcome his natural frailty and become a strong, successful man, able to “hike for 10 to 14 hours” and “perform daily the most strenuous mental work”.
Ungewitter performed nude gymnastics every day and worked naked at his desk, standing up, as proved by plentiful photographic illustrations in his numerous books.
On his epic hikes, Ungewitter became increasingly preoccupied with the health of the German race, which, he thought, had been “poisoned” by Jews, Africans and other “inferior racial riffraff”. Nudism was the answer to this problem, in his opinion, because in their naked state superior breeding partners would recognise one another straightaway and genetically inferior types would not be able to disguise themselves. The challenge, he thought, was to overcome the hypocritical prudery of Wilhelmine Germany of the late 19th and early 20th century.
He is at his most sympathetic when pointing out that the elaborate dress worn by bourgeois women, putatively out of natural modesty, was not just cumbersome and physically deforming but positively calculated to ratchet up sexual desire by exaggerating the bust and bottom. He suggested a law be passed prohibiting tight corsets on penalty of flogging.
Ungewitter’s nudist colleague, the former pastor and mystic Heinrich Pudor went one better. (His name, the Latin word for ‘a sense of modesty or shame’ was adopted to make a point.) For a start, he encouraged nudists to hiss at corset-wearers in the street and call them ‘whores’. What he thought was really needed, however, was a revival of the ancient German punishment for unchaste behaviour: being sunk alive in a bog. But then, for Pudor, more was at stake. As he explained in volume 3 of his book, Nacktkultur, if people started living naked this would ultimately allow humans to become immortal.
A lake in the March of Brandenburg, Motzener See, within easy reach of Berlin, became a centre for the naked scene after the First World War. On the east bank there gathered bourgeois nudist groups of the Ungewitter/Pudor persuasion. South of these were Freisonnland, founded by Fedor Fuchs as a dedicated area for naked sport, and Charly Strässer’s Birkenheide, a naked area exclusively for young people – measured, as he used to stress, “not in years, but in vitality”.
Strässer himself had been involved in the Wandervögel (literally ‘hiking birds’) before the war – a camping and hill walking youth group bearing some resemblance to the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, except that it was a rebellious movement with no adult supervision.
It was the spirit of the Wandervögel (who recognised themselves in Fidus’s etchings of youthful Nordic warriors) that Strässer tried to recreate in Birkenheide. The boys and girls who met there to swim naked and play ball had nothing but scorn for the prissy vegetarian moralism and ‘light and air baths’ of the bourgeois groups further along the lakeside.
They also had little to do with the rapidly growing League of Free Men, a nudist group founded by Adolf Koch that met on Motzener’s north-east bank. Whereas Charly Strässer’s group was formed largely of rich kids from west Berlin, the League of Free Men comprised workers from the squalid housing blocks in the city’s eastern half.
A fitter proletariat
Koch had started as an elementary school teacher in Berlin where he encountered first-hand the worst effects of industrialisation and urbanisation on the young. Like many life reformers before him, he thought that sunlight and gymnastics were needed to improve the health of the workers, but he realised these on their own would not be enough. What was needed, in his opinion, was for the growing proletarian class to take collective action, removing the societal causes of poverty and disadvantage. But for this to happen, he thought, individual proletarians would need to become fitter, better-informed and more rational – particularly in their approach to sex and reproduction.
So Koch began keeping his class behind after school for nude gymnastics, political discussion and sex education. One fateful day a Catholic cleaning woman told her priest she’d “happened to catch sight through a keyhole” of what Koch and his pupils were up to. The priest informed the press and a scandal erupted. This experience radicalised Koch, who thought it was just one example of how vested interests like the Catholic church were preventing the self-development of the working class.
In 1924 he set up his own private School for Healthy Pedagogy and Body Culture in Berlin. By the end of the 1920s, 13 Koch schools had been established in cities around Germany for working-class people of all ages.
Members of the Koch schools performed two hours of nude gymnastics weekly, regularly took part in political discussions and received a full medical check-up every three months. American observers Frances and Mason Merrill reported as many girls as boys at Koch schools, respect between the genders and hygiene standards equal to those of “the most up-to-date hospital clinic”. Unlike any of the bourgeois nudist associations, Koch schools never barred entry to anyone because they were fat, ugly or disabled. The membership fee was also much lower than that of the bourgeois associations. Koch set it at five per cent of an adult’s yearly income, but his schools were free to children, the unemployed, pregnant women and mothers of infants.
Though the various bourgeois nudist associations published more literature and have consequently left a larger documentary trace, membership numbers at the Koch schools were far higher: so much so that his socialist nudism was by far the most popular nudist movement in German history. By 1933, 3,947 people had gone through the Berlin Koch school alone. In the early 1930s there were around 80,000 practising nudists in Germany; 20,000 belonged to the bourgeois nudist groups and the remaining 60,000 or so belonged either to Koch schools or to affiliated socialist nudist groups.
Nazi appropriation
On 3 March 1933 Hermann Göring passed a decree abolishing the “naked culture movement”, which, he said “deadens women’s natural feelings of shame and kills men’s respect for women”. The Hitler Youth was despatched to wreck the grounds of nudist clubs. Koch tried a variety of strategies to keep his schools open, including renaming them and himself joining the ill-fated SA, but in the end he was forced underground. It is rumoured that, like a Catholic priest in Elizabethan England, he travelled secretly from town to town, gathering adherents in a safe house for a session of nude gymnastics where he could.
A few nudist associations under the umbrella title, League for Body Discipline, were ultimately tolerated by the Nazi regime after an SS major, Hans Surén, won them over to it. Surén had been in charge of physical training in the German army, where he’d introduced such innovations as caber tossing and naked cross-country running. In 1924 he published a book, Man and the Sun, in which he outlined the benefits of his trademark gymnastic regimen, the mystical rewards of nudity and the advantages of oiling oneself all over when naked. The official justification for the oil was that it enabled one to withstand low temperatures when nude, but the illustrations in his book suggest it was at least partly a pretext for Surén to be photographed naked holding a spear or discus, doing an impression of a gleaming bronze statue.
Man and the Sun was reissued in 1936 – with racist additions – as Man and Sun: Aryan-Olympian Spirit, and was something of a hit in Nazi circles. By the end of the 1930s Richard Darré, Reinhard Heydrich and Rudolf Hess had all concluded that the nudism advocated by Surén was in line with Nazi thinking. In 1942 Heinrich Himmler introduced an ordinance officially permitting nude bathing. Surén’s own fortunes took a turn for the worse in the same year, however, as he was expelled from the Nazi Party for masturbating in public.
After the war Adolf Koch re-emerged and was instrumental in revitalising a liberal, denazified nudism in the new Federal Republic. But even in this changed political climate his ideas did not fit into the mainstream. His socialist emphasis on preparing the working class to claim what was theirs became an embarrassment to German nudist associations, as did his insistence that sex education should have a central place in nudism. Despite his decades of inspiring dedication to working-class nudism, he was expelled from the German Association for Free Body Culture in the early 1960s.
In any case, the era of organised German nudism was coming to an end. Himmler’s 1942 ordinance remained in force in both East and West Germany, meaning that people no longer had to join a club or enter a special enclosure to be nude outdoors. It is ironic, given the Nazis’ initial attitude towards nudism, that this law accounts in no small part for the widespread informal nudity in Germany today.
George Hull is currently completing a PhD in the history of philosophy at UCL. He has written for The Economist, The Spectator, Left Foot Forward, Time Out and The London Magazine among others
NYT: DeSantis Worsened Florida’s COVID Death Toll
If you remember Der DeathSantis attacked hard anyone who disagreed with his covid denial. When the vaccines were first made available the governor made sure his wealthy friends got first chance to get them, making sure distribution sites were next to or in wealthy enclaves. Then he held a sort of lottery where the pharmacy / company that gave him the largest donation would have exclusive rights to give out the vaccine. That was the Publix chain of grocery stores, which are found by and run on “Christian” principles. When state officials challenged his views of forcing companies to violate federal guidelines, he fired them and used the state legal authorities to attack and harm the whistleblowers. When the state medical community would go along with him he fired them, and hired one of the Frontline doctors that were scamming the maga by charging $90 or more for a short video medical consultation and then charged them for an Ivermectin prescription. This was led by the “semen doctor” who claimed demons were having sex with people leaving demon semen seed in them causing all sorts of illnesses. His new quack head of the Florida health department is a complete anti-vaccine covid denying fraud who is now raking in almost $600,000 when he first took the position because Der DeathSantis forced a state university to make him their president. Not a bad gig, going from scamming random maga people to making over half a million a year just to parrot and provide pseudo-science reasons for what ever the governor proclaims. Hugs
The New York Times reports:
In Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before. As the governor’s political positions began to shift, so did his state’s death rate, for the worse.
Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.
Tapping into the Republican revolt against scientific authority made him a political star. But that revolt came with costs. “These were preventable deaths,” Dr. Rivkees, who resigned as Florida’s surgeon general in September 2021, said in a recent interview.
Read the full article. It’s quite the deep dive. Gift link.
The Science of Being Transgender
Wow. 2015 MRI study of 2,600 people showed that trans men and cis men have similar brain scans. Same for trans women and cis women. Yet cis men and cis women have different brain scans. Hugs
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/05/t… https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases… https://health.clevelandclinic.org/re… https://news.usc.edu/158899/transgend… https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158… https://journals.aace.com/doi/abs/10…. https://www.publicmedievalist.com/tra… https://www.ese-hormones.org/events-d… https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-proc… https://www.acog.org/patient-resource… https://www.plannedparenthood.org/lea…
How Junk Science is Being Used Against Trans Kids
From a medical journal
Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism In Anti-Trans Crusade
Very informative as Ethel does deep serious research into the subjects she posts on, and it is well broken down into sections if you are interested in just certain information. For example those who claim that gamates are the entire decider of sex will want to watch at 15:42 – Sex Is More Complicated Than Gametes section. For those that claim intersex is an anomality and rare should watch 20:28 – Science Is… Ignoring Contradicting Data where she points out that there are more intersex people than red heads. Something I have read before. For those that want to read and not watch they provide a written script and resouce list after the video. There is one section where her verbage is confusing and that is on gender. I understand what she is saying and she is correct that gender is an immudable part of ones person, which is why we know if we are assigned the wrong gender. And she cites the well known example of failed experiments of John Money. However what is steriotypical of each gender in a society is a social concept. What is feminine and what is masculine is dependant on culture and tradition. And it changes with time, jsut look at what was thought of as men only jobs or treaits and what women were thought incapable of doing. At some point in western culture it got to the point where men thought of women as almost a different species. Any way great video / read. If you enjoy their work please go to their chanel and watch more of their videos. Hugs
[Chapters]
00:00 – Intro & Content Warning
01:14 – Richard Dawkins’ Fall From Grace
07:12 – Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationist Rhetoric
15:42 – Sex Is More Complicated Than Gametes
20:28 – Science Is… Ignoring Contradicting Data?
25:06 – Gender Identity Is Not A Social Construct
28:56 – The Problem With ‘Evolutionary Psychology’
Watch Here
Intro & Content Warning
As bad as he is, I still didn’t expect Richard Dawkins to abandon every principle he has ever had, embracing creationism just to ‘stick it to the trans community’, yet here we are. He is living proof that nothing degrades cognitive faculties quite like unbridled bigotry; that ignorant people don’t become bigots because of their ignorance, bigots choose to become ignorant because of their bigotry. That bigotry is, as I’ve been saying for years, a willful and ideologically driven ignorance.
And we’ll discuss that further in a second, but first, a quick content warning for the following: Transmisia, Intermisia, Islamisia, Ableism, Misogyny, Sexual Harassment & Medical Violence. If you like our work and appreciate the research put into each video, please consider supporting the channel via Patreon. You can also support us by liking, commenting, and sharing this video on social media.
Hi there, my name’s Ethel Thurston (She/Her They/Them), and today we’re taking a look into Richard Dawkins’ crusade against trans people and how, in his desperation to deny the complexity of human nature, he has resorted to openly promoting creationist rhetoric.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. /s
Richard Dawkins’ Fall From Grace
Now, to be fair, I, as with many others, was someone who once respected Richard Dawkins and his work. During the late 00’s and early 10’s, Dawkins was a much celebrated evolutionary biologist, best selling author, and science communicator. For me it was his work debunking creationism, the belief that animals, people, and the natural world at large was ‘designed’ by a creator entity, that drew me to him. His work, like that seen in Channel 4’s ‘Inside Nature’s Giants’ in which Richard Dawkins displays the incompetence of the recurrent laryngeal nerve using the extreme example of the giraffe, helped me and many others go out there and combat what we saw at the time to be a very real problem. [1] Indeed, Dawkins even made an appearance in the Essence of Thought banner, alongside fellow secular icon Christopher Hitchens.
It didn’t last, however, as Dawkins’ began to act out, leading people, myself included, to question his apparent rationality. For me the cracks began with the whole honey incident in which he openly declared that: “Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. Stupid waste.” [2] What’s a dundrige? Why, I’m glad you asked, as that allows me to show you this tweet in which Dawkins tells us that: ““Dundridge” is a coining I am trying to introduce into English. It means a petty, bossy, bureaucratic little rule-hound.” [3] So a bureaucrat… We already have a word for that.
Now, at first I’d assumed a flaw here was the fact that honey is a highly regulated substance in certain areas due to the dangers it poses native bees. I distinctly remember Dawkins having travelled to Australia around the time, so I assumed that was where the incident took place. Yet it turned out that was not the case, that it had, in fact, been a flight between Edinburgh and London Heathrow, meaning it was almost certainly seized at security. And it was whilst I went looking for more information on what happened that I came across other incidents, like this now infamous anecdote he’d written in 2011 about a mother going through security, declaring that:
“No sane person, witnessing that scene at the airport, seriously feared this woman was planning to blow herself up on a plane. The fact that she was accompanied by children gave us the first clue. Supporting evidence trickled in from the brazen visibility of her face and hair, from her lack of a Koran, prayer mat or big black beard and, finally, from the absurdity of the notion that her tub of ointment could, in a million years, be magicked into a high explosive—certainly not in the cramped facilities afforded by an aircraft loo.”
Which, yikes. What is there to say about that other than the fact that it is gross on account of being incredibly racist. Terrorism is a method used by many groups and is not limited to a specific appearance or culture. This is nothing more than racial profiling. [4]
And that’s what got me side-eying the man, leading me down a rabbit hole regarding many of his other views, including those on consent; from his comments regarding ‘mild pedophilia’ to his earlier mocking of Rebecca Watson for her crime of… Spending a minute and twenty seconds on a side note politely asking strange men not to follow her into elevators late at night and ask her back to their room for sex. [5] No, seriously, that’s all she did. That is what ‘instigated’ (and I’m doing heavy air quotes here), elevatorgate, these 80 seconds:
WATSON: “You were all fantastic and I love talking to you guys. Erm- all of you except for the one man who erm- didn’t really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel because, erm- at the bar later that night- actually at 4:00 in the morning, erm- we were at the hotel bar. 4:00 A.M. I said ‘you know I’ve had enough guys, I’m exhausted going to bed’ err- so I walked to the elevator and a man got on the elevator with me and said ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?’ Um- just a word to the wise here, guys, don’t do that. Um- you know. Uh- I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable. But I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country at 4 A.M., in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I- don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualized me in that manner. So yeah, err- but everybody else seemed to really get it and- and thank you for getting it.” [6]
Richard Dawkins responded to this simple request by writing a reply to a fictional woman, “Muslina,” in which he clearly framed Watson’s advice as her speaking over ‘real’ victims of gender based violence and discrimination. This of course ignored how it’s not an either or situation, how a person can take issue with female genital mutilation, driving bans on women, and sexual harrasment at secular conferences. [7]
And I’m taking time to highlight all this because I don’t want people to pretend like today’s incident was a once off. Richard Dawkins has chosen to embody much of what is wrong with the secular community; the racism, the misogyny, and yes, the transmisia.
Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationist Rhetoric
Therefore it came as little surprise when, on the 20th of June 2023, Richard Dawkins tweeted out the following:
“Superb article by Jerry Coyne & Luana Maroja. Scientists, publishers & editors should grow a spine & call the bluff of dogmatic adolescent bullies. Skeptical Inquirer bravely stood up when other publishers wouldn’t touch it.” [8]
Said tweet linked an article titled ‘The Ideological Subversion of Biology’ which opens with:
“Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.” [9]
Wow, that sounds pretty bad. So what ‘political dogma’ is ‘poisoning’ biology? Well thankfully the authors list six examples, six claims that they assert have impeded or misrepresented biology. Those claims are:
- “Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.
- All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.
- Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.
- We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.
- “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”
- Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.”
Now, there’s a lot here meaning I can’t touch on all of them, so I’ll leave that to other people who I imagine might have something to say. And if you’re one such person watching this, hit me up and I’ll be more than happy to link your work down below.
What I want to focus on today is the first supposed ‘misrepresentation’, the claim that: “Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum,” because, in a surprise twist that absolutely nobody saw coming, it’s about trans people, specifically non-binary folk like myself. That’s why the section ends with the authors asserting that:
“And why do people distort the truth? We suspect that some of those whose gender doesn’t correspond to one of the two biological sexes, and their allies, want to redefine sex so that, like gender, it forms more of a continuum. While jettisoning the sex binary is meant well, it also severely distorts scientific fact—and all the evolutionary consequences that flow from that fact.”
So let’s go through through the section, starting with the opening that led to the creation of this video, and that is the assertion that:
“This statement, one of the most common political distortions of biology, is wrong because nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories. Your biological sex is determined simply by whether your body is designed to make large, immobile gametes (eggs, characterizing females) or very small and mobile gametes (sperm, characterizing males). Even in plants we see the same dichotomy, with pollen producing the tiny sperm and ovules carrying the large eggs. The size difference can be huge: a human egg, for instance, has ten million times the volume of a single sperm. And each gamete is associated with a complex reproductive apparatus that produces it. It is the bearers of these two reproductive systems that biologists recognize as ‘the sexes.’”
Emphasis added by me.
Except that’s not how biology defines sex in humans at all. That is a fundamentalist Christian approach adopted in the US and elsewhere as a means to, among other things, justify the ongoing attempts to eradicate trans people and strip those capable of getting pregnant of their reproductive rights on grounds that everything is a part of god’s design. Hell, the very notion of binary sex is largely a Christian invention, with god supposedly having created all animals ‘male and female’.
The authors even tap into this in their assertion that biological sex is determined by “whether your body is designed to make” eggs or sperm. This is something known as teleology, that is the presupposition that aspects of the natural world were ‘created’ or ‘designed’ with a specific purpose in mind rather than, as in the case of evolution, the result of environmental pressure acting upon natural and random variation. Teleology is, for all intents and purposes, the exact antithesis of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology cannot be true under teleology, meaning a declaration of teleology is a denouncement of evolutionary biology. This reveals said assertion to be less about defending biology and more the authors forcing their beliefs, their ideology of ‘how I think nature is meant to be’ upon the natural world.
Which is why I was shocked to discover Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, promoting this argument. He spent literal decades debunking the teleological argument for god, the idea that since ‘everything is so clearly designed for a specific purpose there must be a designer’. He was at the forefront of pointing out how so much of what we observe in nature is, to put it frankly, asinine from a ‘design’ perspective.
Returning to the recurrent laryngeal nerve mentioned at the start, it’s a nerve that has its start and end point mere inches from one another, going from the brain to the larynx. Yet rather than go directly, due to said nerve having evolved early in our ancestry, before the evolution of the neck, said nerve goes down from the brain into the chest cavity and loops around the right subclavian artery before going back up to the larynx. For a human that adds about a 10cm detour, which doesn’t sound like much. But consider the fact that the same nerve is present in all vertebrates, meaning that the same detour in giraffes is around 5m long, and in the case of some sauropod dinosaurs would have been closer to 28m long. And this is merely a single example of the ‘incompetence’ behind the natural body, at least when looked at from a hypothetical design perspective.
So to see Richard Dawkins go back on that very standard, to promote arguments flagrantly reliant on framing sex as a ‘designed’ feature, is him selling out his secularism for bigotry. Which, I’ve gotta say, is a hell of a lot more dangerous to the field of evolutionary biology than any imagined ‘problem’ posed by the existence of trans people.
Sex Is More Complicated Than Gametes
Yet all this still leaves the question, how does biology define sex in humans? It does so through a collection of sexual traits including chromosomes, hormones, genitals, secondary sexual characteristics, internal sexual organs, and yes, gametes. No one trait is the ‘defining’ trait, and furthermore, these can be expanded upon or even subdivided. For example, hormones can be broken into hormone production and utilisation since someone with androgen insensitivity produces testosterone on levels equivalent to those observed in most cis endosex men yet can’t utilise it at a cellular level. [10]
This is not a controversial position, by the way, this has been the scientific standard for decades going on centuries, a fact you’ll realise the moment you consider how, at birth, doctors assign a person their gender based on their genitalia and not their gametes. Furthermore, we wouldn’t say people incapable of producing gametes were genderless or sexless. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the relation between sex and gender in a bit.
Yet the shitshow continues, with the authors asserting that:
“Beginning with an ancestral species having gametes of equal size (“isogamy”), natural selection often promotes the splitting of the population into two groups of individuals having very different gametes (“anisogamy”)—either small and mobile ones or large and immobile ones. Two sexes have thus evolved, and henceforth the species will resist the invasion of individuals having other types of gametes—that is, other new sexes. … Natural selection has independently produced diverse pathways to generate the sexes, but at the end there are just two destinations: males and females. And so we have an evolved and objectively recognized dichotomy—not an arbitrary spectrum of sexes.”
I see the phrase “natural selection often promotes the splitting of the population into two groups of individuals having very different gametes” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Probability isn’t an ‘objective’ rule, it isn’t prescriptive, and the fact that the authors can’t state ‘always’ means they are fully aware that the assumptions they’re making about sex in humans are just flat out baseless. Nature can and does produce multiple redundancies, with diversity quite literally being a necessary component of evolution. If there is no diversity there can be no selection.
Now there are many examples of just how peculiar nature can be. One great example is the clownfish, which has recently drawn a lot of ire from anti-trans bigots who attacked the CBBC over a scientific segment on the fish. Which, if we weren’t facing literal trans genocide, would be fucking funny. Okay, it’s still a little funny. But if you’d like to know more about the science on clownfish and how changing sex is a natural part of their lifecycle, I’d suggest checking out the wonderful video put out on the topic by The Octopus Lady.
Yet to give my own example of just how strange natural selection can be when it comes to sex, look no further than side-blotched lizards, a species of small lizards that produce three distinct populations capable of carrying sperm, namely the orange, blue, and yellow populations. Oranges are the brutes of the three and secure the best breeding grounds capable of holding a group of females, blues are the calmer ones who secure smaller territories with only one female, and yellows are the sneakers who don’t secure any territory and instead sneak in to mate with the females of other lizards. This has led to the formation of a rock-paper-scissors situation in which oranges dominate the blues because of their size and aggression, the yellows prey on the oranges because the oranges can’t watch all their females, and blues chase away the yellows because of their monogamous nature. So this mere idea that nature is limited in sexual variance is patently ridiculous.
Though to be clear, I’m not saying that these lizards have a concept of gender, that takes cognitive ability they lack. All I’m doing is demonstrating how the authors of this article have a very limiting and prescriptive view of evolution. Evolution doesn’t care how something is done, hell it doesn’t even care if something is done. It just is, like gravity, and any value claims brought to discussion are brought by us, human beings.
Science Is… Ignoring Contradicting Data?
Speaking of value claims, that brings us rather nicely to the next section on the existence of intersex people, with the authors asserting that:
“Further, developmental issues can sometimes produce people who are intersex, including [redacted slur]. Developmental variants are very rare, constituting only about one in 5,600 people (0.018 percent), and also don’t represent “other sexes.” (We know of only two cases of true human [redacted slur] who were fertile, but one individual was fertile only as a male and the other only as a female.)”
First of all, this is just flat out wrong. 2% of all live births have medically recognised differences in sexual development, that is a distinct mix of those six sexual characteristics listed earlier, making them intersex. That’s one in every fifty people, which is about two secondary school classes or the same rate as ginger hair. [13] And the vast majority of them are perfectly capable of reproducing and go on to live healthy lives with zero complications. Hell, many of them never discover the fact that they’re intersex, that’s how benign being intersex can be in the evolutionary sense. So to present them as rare and their differences as ‘developmental issues’ is again, entirely baseless, forwarding the authors’ personal beliefs as something scientifically grounded.
And the reason they’re doing this is because those who acknowledge the fact that sex is more than a strict binary often reference the existence of intersex people as evidence of this. Hell, the example the authors referenced at the start for the claim they seek to debunk was an article written by Claire Ainsworth and subsequently published in the Scientific American in 2018, which did just that. So they know all this hence their desire to bury it. [14]
Because lets’ take their argument and apply it to another field of science. In the same way that 2% of all live births are intersex, being physiologically distinct from what was traditionally considered either male or female, just 2% of all matter in the known universe is something other than hydrogen or helium. [15] So to deny the relevance of intersex people in biology is akin to a chemist denying the relevance of every element on the periodic table that isn’t hydrogen or helium.
“What do you mean there are more than two elements?! This is nothing more than egalitarian ideology run amok! It is our duty to reject the notion of chemical plurality!” /s
Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? This entire section is nothing more than the authors’ desperate bid to justify cherry picking the data because they don’t like the conclusions said data leads to when taken as a whole.
Furthermore, 2% of all live births being intersex is true after accounting for eugenics. For centuries and even millenia, intersex people were either sterilised or even murdered. And whilst the latter practice is no longer as common, many intersex children are still sterilised as they go through puberty, often being lied to by parents and doctors who will tell them that they have some ailment such as cancer, hence the need to operate. This has been, and in many places still is, the standard practice. That is why the intersex community is openly fighting to ensure that intersex bodies are left alone, that their bodily autonomy and integrity is respected. And we have no idea what impact this will have on the prevalence of physiological diversity, how those numbers might rise as more intersex people are allowed to go on to become biological parents, a fact that’s worth keeping in mind when people argue that it is ‘just 2%!’ No, it’s 2% after you fucks spent millenia trying to exterminate them as a perceived abomination. It’s 2% in spite of your best attempts to eradicate sexual diversity among humans. It’s almost like what fundamentalist Christians want and what nature actually allows for are two completely different things.
But clearly we’re the ideologically driven ones for acknowledging the full range of human diversity and not cherry picking our data. /s
Gender Identity Is Not A Social Construct
Moving on we come to the authors’ claims about gender being a social construct, with them asserting that:
“But despite the facts, the dichotomy of sex—especially in humans—has recently come under ideologically based attacks. Even in apparently objective discussions of sex and gender, individuals are often said to have been assigned their sex at birth (e.g., “AFAB”: assigned female at birth), as if this were an arbitrary decision by doctors—a “social construct”—rather than an observation of biological reality. Even the Society for the Study of Evolution, which should know better, was swayed by ideology to publicly declare that biological sex should be viewed as a continuum. Teachers have been hounded out of their jobs and deprived of their classes simply for declaring that human sex is binary. As we’ll see, this controversy comes from a deliberate conflation of a biological reality, the sexes, with a social construct, genders.”
Except gender identity is not a social construct, instead being an intrinsic and immutable part of a person’s psychology. That’s why I personally include gender on the list of sexual traits as the psychological component of sex, meaning gender is sex in the same way that humans are apes, with it being a single example of a larger group.
And we can actually observe this in what happens when you deny a person their gender, with such attempts targetted at trans youth increasing attempted suicide from a baseline of 5% to a whopping 57%. [16] With cis endosex people it’s a little more difficult as said torture is not typically seen as socially acceptable on them, however, we do have the failed experiments of John Money, a psychologist who set out to prove that gender was socially taught rather than innate and immutable, that children could be convinced to live and identify as a different gender.
To do this he reassigned a male infant, David Reimer, whose phallus was destroyed during a circumcision, convincing the boy’s parents to raise him as a girl whilst using David’s twin brother as a control. Yet far from proving that gender could be socially taught, all Money managed to do was give David, a cis boy reassigned as a girl, gender dysphoria as he grew up to identify as a man. This was in spite of the fact that David was a naive participant: He had no idea he was reassigned as an infant. His father only told him when he turned 15, years after he had already begun to show signs of suicidal ideation, just like trans youth pressured into denying their gender. Sadly, the damage Money had done to David and his family was so significant that it prevented him from forming familial bonds. David died by suicide on the 4th of May, 2004. [17] All of which goes to show that, just like trans people, cis people have some inherent sense of gender and that any attempt to force them to adhere to a different gender results in the same deep psychological scarring that it does trans people, which I consider to be strong evidence for gender being the psychological component of sex.
It is also why I view gender to be the most important component of sex when dealing with social interaction, because those social interactions have very real weight. That’s why I take issue with the notion that teachers, like Jordan Peterson, harassing students regarding their gender is okay or even noble. Said abuse causes measurable harm. If you don’t want to be fired, don’t harass your students, simple.
The Problem With ‘Evolutionary Psychology’
That said, one thing I need to be clear on is the fact that I’m not asserting the existence of pink brain and blue brain; that is the idea that people’s behaviour, interests, and preferences are largely dictated by their gender. A person’s gender identity can be dictated by their brain without it having an impact on anything else, same as their sexuality. In much the same way that we’ve come to accept that a person’s sexuality is something innate and immutable whilst having abandoned the idea of a ‘rainbow brain’, the notion that sexuality dictates behaviour meaning all lesbians are butch and all gay men are effeminate, I am merely positing the same here regarding trans people and gender identity. For the core identity itself to be biological, you do not need additional baggage, just gender identity itself. Gender expression, gender norms, and gender stereotypes are all socially constructed yet are separate and distinct to gender identity.
And the reason I’m being clear on this is to avoid the very problem that plagues ‘evolutionary psychology’, which is not, as the authors assert, simply the belief that psychology is impacted by evolution. It’s a very broad set of claims about human psychology, most of which are completely untestable and seemingly forwarded as an attempt to force the proponent’s personal ideology onto the natural world, usually in an attempt to justify discrimination. ‘Evolutionary psychology’ is to psychology what ‘social Darwinism’ is to politics in that it uses the legitimacy of evolutionary biology to promote ideological views as something objective. That’s why I’m being very careful to qualify what we can demonstrate, and that’s the immutable portion of gender identity.
Speaking of ‘evolutionary psychology’, sadly the bullshit continues, with the authors asserting that:
“Denying the dichotomy of sex prevents us from understanding one of biology’s most fascinating generalizations: the difference between males and females in behavior and appearance. The color, ornamentation, large size, and weapons of males compared to their absence in females, a difference seen in species such as deer, birds, fish, and seals, result from sexual selection: the process, first suggested by Darwin, in which males compete with each other for access to females. This involves either direct antagonism between males, as in the jousting of deer, or by males appealing to female preferences through their color, ornaments, and behavior. And this near-universal observation in nature ultimately comes from females investing more in reproduction than males, starting with those big and metabolically expensive eggs.
Ultimately, this puts the burden of parental care largely on females. Tied up in offspring production and rearing, females thus become the sex less available for mating, even when the ratio of males to females is 1:1. Sexual selection also explains behavior: why, in most species—including our own—males are more promiscuous than females, who are picky about their mates. For a male, fertilization involves merely expending a teaspoon or so of sperm, while for females eggs are few and expensive, pregnancy is long, and then there are those pesky offspring to tend and feed—for years in humans. Antlers, plumes, peacock’s tails, elaborate male mating dances, bird songs: these and a host of other traits make sense only as the evolutionary results of having different-size gametes.”
So here’s some of those unverifiable assertions made by evolutionary psychology that I was talking about. The authors start by listing a number of distant species known for strong sexual dimorphism before going on to assert that the ‘generalisations’ for them must also be true for human beings, a species known for relatively weak sexual dimorphism. Deers, peacocks, and other animals are not human beings, they’re not species which have evolved complex cognitive faculties like we have. Therefore to directly compare us to them is inherently flawed. It’s like comparing the creation of something inside a universe to the formation of said universe itself. We have no other examples of lifeforms with our cognitive abilities, just like we have no other examples of universes coming into existence. To draw conclusions from unrelated occurrences is spurious by definition.
Yet it’s from this poor foundation that authors go on to further assert that the differences in energy spent on reproduction preprograms men to sow their oats far and wide whilst women are more careful, and that these things being largely true historically has absolutely nothing to do with inequality in society, specifically misogyny. Their source to back up this claim? It doesn’t exist. Like, they literally stop referencing during these paragraphs aside from Dawin’s theory of sexual selection among animals.
And in case you’re wondering whether they supply said evidence in the section specifically on ‘evolutionary psychology’, they don’t. Aside from people critiquing ‘evolutionary psychology’ or commenting on its lack of status in academia, the author’s cite a non-peer reviewed book, two articles in Areo magazine, and a single opinion piece in ‘Current Directions in Psychological Science’, titled ‘Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean’, which was published all the way back in the year 2000. And I just want to read you a section of said opinion piece to give you an idea of its academic rigour.
After declaring that the nature-nurture debate is over and that everything is heritable, the author, Eric Turkheimer, goes on to list the titular three ‘laws’ of behavioural genetics, only to then double back in stating that:
“It is not my purpose in this brief article to defend these three laws against the many exceptions that might be claimed. The point is that now that the empirical facts are in and no longer a matter of serious controversy, it is time to turn attention to what the three laws mean to the implications of the genetics of behavior for an understanding of complex human behavior and its development.” [18]
That first line, that it is “not my purpose in this brief article to defend these three laws against the many exceptions that might be claimed,” is a pretty major problem considering that laws in science are quite literally universal constants, things which remain true no matter what. So to openly admit that there are exceptions that said laws need to be ‘defended from’ before going on to assert that the science is settled seems to be a way for ‘evolutionary psychologists’ to have their cake and eat it too.
Drawing this back to the claims about differences in sexual behaviour, this is why people have such an issue with so-called ‘evolutionary psychology’. It’s never about proving anything specific, which Darwin himself did all the time; it’s about failing to account for extraneous variables — things other than what we seek to measure having an impact on what we observe, in this instance misogyny and society in general — thus drawing spurious generalisations.
I mean, just stop and think about it; if cis women truly were ‘biologically programmed’ to be sexually reserved, why then would society need to invent slutshaming, an entire social institution, centred on forcing cis women to remain, as they see it, ‘sexually pure’? It wouldn’t. Just like theists who claim belief in God is an intrinsic part of humanity, ‘evolutionary psychologists’ ignore all of the systems and the vast amounts of wealth pumped into keeping these ideological tenets dominant in our society.
So like, it’s an interesting hypothesis, but without supporting evidence that accounts for extraneous variables, it’s just that, a hypothesis.
This is why the authors’ closing line, the assertion that: “While jettisoning the sex binary is meant well, it also severely distorts scientific fact—and all the evolutionary consequences that flow from that fact,” is so hollow. They haven’t shown any ‘evolutionary consequences’ using evidence. They haven’t demonstrated how trans people are at odds with evolutionary biology, they’ve just asserted it. And as Christopher Hitchens once said: “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
So if this is anything to go by, which, considering how it’s the first point presented and how the authors go out of their way to assert that said statement is: “one of the most common political distortions of biology,” I think that’s highly likely, it doesn’t exactly bode well for the remaining sections. Part of me wants to go through each of them, but this video would become too unwieldy and I’m not looking for a series. This video started out as just a short piece on the teleology point, but as I read the entire article I realised that… I was gonna have to cover at least the first point as it was just that bad.
Though what do you think? Do trans people pose a risk to evolutionary biology? Were you at all surprised with Richard Dawkins’ embrace of creationism, specifically teleology? Did you learn something interesting in today’s video? Did you notice something I missed? If so, be sure to let me know down below.
And if you appreciate what we do here and want to help out, please consider becoming one of our wonderful Patrons who make our work possible. On that note, we’d just like to thank the following people: Matthew Kovach, Gerrit Van Voorst, Hannah Banghart, MarbleWings, Sosh Daniels, Flynn, Darn it Dante & Higgins the Seagull. And from myself, Udita, and Levi, take care now.
References
[1] Channel 4 (2009) “Inside Nature’s Giants – Richard Dawkins Demonstrates Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe”, YouTube.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[2] Richard Dawkins (2013) “Bin Laden Has Won”, Twitter.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[3] Richard Dawkins (2013) “Dundridge”, Twitter.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[4] Richard Dawkins (2023) “If I Ruled The World: Richard Dawkins”, ProspectMagazine.co.uk
Accessed 25th June 2023:
[5] Abby Ohlheiser (2013) “Richard Dawkins Defends ‘Mild’ Pedophilia, Again and Again”, TheAtlantic.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[6] Rebecca Watson (2011) “About Mythbusters, Robot Eyes, Feminism, and Jokes”, YouTube.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[7] Rebecca Watson (2012) “It Stands to Reason, Skeptics Can Be Sexist Too”, Slate.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[8] Richard Dawkins (2023) “Superb Article By Jerry Coyne & Luana Maroja”, Twitter.com
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[9] Jerry A. Coyne & Luana S. Maroja (2023) “The Ideological Subversion of Biology”, SkepticalInquirer.org
Accessed 24th June 2023:
[10] Emily Quinn (2019) “The Way We Think About Biological Sex Is Wrong”, YouTube.com
Accessed 18th April 2019;
[11] Chantelle Billson (2023) “Bigots Rage Over Cbeebies Sharing Biological Facts About Fish Changing Gender”, PinkNews.com
Accessed 30th June 2023:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/06/06/cbeebies-fish-pride-month-gender-change-backlash/
[12] The Octopus Lady (2023) “Are Clownfish Part of the Trans Agenda?!?! | Alien Ocean”, YouTube.com
Accessed 30th June 2023:
[13] Melanie Blackless, Anthony Charuvastra, Amanda Derryck, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Karl Lauzanne andEllen Lee (2000) “How Sexually Dimorphic Are We? Review And Synthesis”, American Journal of Human Biology, 12(2), pp.151-166
[14] Claire Ainsworth (2018) “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic”, ScientificAmerican.com
Accessed 25th June 2023:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
[15] Gorgia State University (2011) “Hydrogen-Helium Abundance”, HyperPhysics.phy-gsu.edu
Accessed 15th July 2023:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Astro/hydhel.html
[16] The Trevor Project (2019) “Trevor National Survey On LGBTQ Youth Mental Health”, The Trevor Project
Accessed 28th June 2019:
[17] EssenceOfThought (2019) “The Tragic Case Of David Reimer & How It Relates To Trans/Intersex Children”, YouTube.com
Accessed 26th September 2020;
[18] Eric Turkheimer (2000) “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(5), pp.160–164.
Meta
NEW VIDEO: As bad as he is, I still didn’t expect Richard Dawkins to abandon every principle he has ever had, embracing creationism just to ‘stick it to the trans community’, yet here we are.
There really is no price too steep that bigots won’t pay.
The thumbnail for the Essence of Thought video “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism In Anti-Trans Crusade” which shows a crusader with the face of Richard Dawkins raising their sword to attack. Next to them bold text reads “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationist Arguments”, with “Richard Dawkins” and “Creationist” highlighted in red for emphasis.
Richard Dawkins Sides With Creationists In Anti-Trans Crusade
Trans,Transgender,Transexual,Richard Dawkins,Creationism,Anti-Trans,Evolutionary Biology,Teleology,Atheism,Secularism,Theism,Apologetics,Argument for God,Bible,Christian,Muslim,Gender,Sex,Biology,Biological Truth,Jordan Peterson,Matt Walsh,What Is A Woman?,Queer,Essence of Thought,Ethel Thurston,Trans YouTube,Trans Rights,Women’s Rights,Feminism,News,EssenceOfThought,Debate,Bathroom Debate,Sports Debate,Trans Activist,Evolution,Evolutionary Psychology
Soome Sam Seder clips I thought were important.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMajorityReport/videos
Later Tuberville was asked by reporters on Capitol Hill About why he continued to double down on his stance on White Nationalists. Tuberville attempted to amend his response: “I’m totally against racism. If the Democrats want to say that White Nationalists are racists, i’m totally against that, too.”
Exclusive: Texas troopers told to push children into Rio Grande, deny water to migrants, records say
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/border-trooper-migrants-wire-18205076.php
July 17, 2023Updated: July 18, 2023 12:16 p.m.
WASHINGTON — Officers working for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have been told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat, according to an email from a Department of Public Safety trooper who described the actions as “inhumane.”
The July 3 account, reviewed by Hearst Newspapers, discloses several previously unreported incidents the trooper witnessed in Eagle Pass, where the state of Texas has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.
According to the email, a pregnant woman having a miscarriage was found late last month caught in the wire, doubled over in pain. A four-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through it and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers. A teenager broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father.
The email, which the trooper sent to a superior, suggests that Texas has set “traps” of razor wire-wrapped barrels in parts of the river with high water and low visibility. And it says the wire has increased the risk of drownings by forcing migrants into deeper stretches of the river.
The trooper called for a series of rigorous policy changes to improve safety for migrants, including removing the barrels and revoking the directive on withholding water.
“Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well,” the trooper wrote, later adding: “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”
Department of Public Safety spokesman Travis Considine did not comment on all the contents of the trooper’s email, but said there is no policy against giving water to migrants.
Considine also provided an email from DPS Director Steven McCraw on Saturday calling for an audit to determine if more can be done to minimize the risk to migrants. McCraw wrote troopers should warn migrants not to cross the wire, redirect them to ports of entry and to closely watch for anyone who needs medical attention.
In another email, McCraw acknowledged that there has been an increase in injuries from the wire, including seven incidents reported by Border Patrol where migrants needed “elevated medical attention” from July 4 to July 13. Those were in addition to the incidents detailed by the trooper.
“The purpose of the wire is to deter smuggling between the ports of entry and not to injure migrants,” McCraw wrote. “The smugglers care not if the migrants are injured, but we do, and we must take all necessary measures to mitigate the risk to them including injuries from trying to cross over the concertina wire, drownings and dehydration.”
The incidents detailed in the email come as Abbott has stepped up efforts in recent weeks to physically bar migrants from entering the country through his Operation Lone Star initiative, escalating tensions between state and federal officials and drawing increased scrutiny from humanitarian groups who say the state is endangering asylum seekers. The most aggressive initiatives have been targeted at Eagle Pass.
The state has also now deployed a wall of floating buoys in the Rio Grande, which triggered complaints over the weekend from Mexico.
Federal Border Patrol officials have issued internal warnings that the razor wire is preventing their agents from reaching at-risk migrants and increasing the risk of drownings in the Rio Grande, Hearst Newspapers reported last week.
The DPS trooper expressed similar concerns, writing that the placement of the wire along the river “forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper and not as safe for people carrying kids and bags.”
The trooper’s email sheds new light on a series of previously reported drownings in the river during a one-week stretch earlier this month, including a mother and at least one of her two children, who federal Border Patrol agents spotted struggling to cross the Rio Grande on July 1.
According to the email, a DPS boat found the mother and one of the children, who went under the water for a minute. They were pulled from the river and given medical care before being transferred to EMS, but were later declared deceased at the hospital. The second child was never found, the email said.
The governor has said he is taking necessary steps to secure the border and accused federal officials of refusing to do so.
“Texas is deploying every tool and strategy to deter and repel illegal crossings between ports of entry as President Biden’s dangerous open border policies entice migrants from over 150 countries to risk their lives entering the country illegally,” said Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary. “President Biden has unleashed a chaos on the border that’s unsustainable, and we have a constitutional duty to respond to this unprecedented crisis.”
The DPS trooper’s email details four incidents in just one day in which migrants were caught in the wire or injured trying to get around it.
On June 30, troopers found a group of people along the wire, including a 4-year-old girl who tried to cross the wire and was pressed back by Texas Guard soldiers “due to the orders given to them,” the email says. The DPS trooper wrote that the temperature was “well over 100 degrees” and the girl passed out from exhaustion.
“We provided treatment to the unresponsive patient and transferred care to EMS,” the trooper wrote. A spokesperson for the Texas National Guard did not respond to a request for comment.
In another instance, troopers found a 19-year-old woman “in obvious pain” stuck in the wire. She was cut free and given a medical assessment, which determined she was pregnant and having a miscarriage. She was then transferred to EMS.
The trooper also treated a man with a “significant laceration” in his left leg, who said he had cut it while trying to free his child who was “stuck on a trap in the water,” describing a barrel with razor wire “all over it.” And the trooper treated a 15-year-old boy who broke his right leg walking in the river because the razor wire was “laid out in a manner that it forced him into the river where it is unsafe to travel.”
In another instance, on June 25, troopers came across a group of 120 people camped out along a fence set up along the river. The group included several small children and babies who were nursing, the trooper wrote. The entire group was exhausted, hungry and tired, the trooper wrote. The shift officer in command ordered the troopers to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico,” the email says.
The trooper wrote that the troopers decided it was not the right thing to do “with the very real potential of exhausted people drowning.” They called command again and expressed their concerns and were given the order to “tell them to go to Mexico and get into our vehicle and leave,” the trooper wrote. After they left, other troopers worked with Border Patrol to provide care to the migrants, the email said.
The trooper did not respond to a request for comment Monday. His email was shared by a confidential source with knowledge of border operations. It was unclear whether the trooper received a response from the sergeant he’d messaged.
Considine acknowledged that DPS was aware of the email and provided the additional agency emails in response. Those emails detail seven other incidents reported by federal border agents in which migrants were injured on the wires, including a child who was taken to the hospital on Thursday with cuts on his left arm, a mother and child who were taken to the hospital on Wednesday with “minor lacerations” on their “lower extremities,” and another migrant taken to San Antonio on July 4 to receive treatment for “several lacerations” that required staples.
Victor Escalon, a DPS director who oversees South Texas, wrote in an email Friday to other agency officials that troopers “may need to open the wire to aid individuals in medical distress, maintain the peace, and/or to make an arrest for criminal trespass, criminal mischief, acts of violence, or other State crimes.
“Our DPS medical unit is assigned to this operation to address medical concerns for everyone involved,” Escalon wrote. “As we enforce State law, we may need to aid those in medical distress and provide water as necessary.”
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Benjamin Wermund is the Washington correspondent for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. He covers the Texas delegation and the many ways the state and its leaders shape national politics and policy. He’s a Texas native and a diehard Spurs fan.VIEW COMMENTS
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