All hell breaks loose at Columbia University

April 18, 2024 • 3:08 pm

I’ll write more about this tomorrow, perhaps, but here’s what I was going to put in tomorrow’s Nooz:

*One day after Columbia University’s President and some of its trustees testified before Congress on endemic antisemitism at the University, and after President Shafik promised to double down on antisemitism, the school has started arresting lots of pro-Palestinian demonstrators engaged in illegal protests.  I guess those nasty Republicans put the fear of God (literally) into Shafik, who doesn’t want to go the way of Liz Magill.

The authorities moved Thursday afternoon to quell a protest at Columbia University, arresting dozens of demonstrators who had constructed an encampment of about 50 tents on campus. The arrests, which drew a new crowd of students to support the protesters, came the day after university leaders pledged to Congress that they would crack down on unauthorized student protests tied to the war in Gaza.

Police officers, clad in riot gear and prepared with zip ties, began taking protesters into custody just before 1:30 p.m. as scores of demonstrators gathered in front of Butler Library. “Since you have refused to disperse, you will now be placed under arrest for trespassing,” a man repeatedly called through a loudspeaker. “If you resist arrest, you may face additional charges.”

The scene played out less than 24 hours after Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, and other top officials insisted to Congress that they would take a harder line in handling the protests that have embroiled campuses across the country since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Leaders at two other elite schools, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, lost their jobs after similar appearances last year.

Here’s what else to know:

  • Hundreds of students and others rallied with the protesters inside and outside of the school overnight and through the morning. “They can threaten us all they want with the police, but at the end of the day, it’s only going to lead to more mobilization,” said Maryam Alwan, a senior and pro-Palestinian organizer on campus, speaking from the tent encampment.

  • Police officers loaded at least three buses with demonstrators, who cooperated as they were taken into custody, though other protesters shouted “Shame! Shame!” Organizers had said they expected to be arrested.

  • Dr. Shafik angered some students and professors during her appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Wednesday, when she largely conceded that she felt some of the common chants at pro-Palestinian protests were antisemitic. In a letter sent on Thursday afternoon as the arrests began, Dr. Shafik said she “took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances.”

About time, I’d say.  Without punishment there is no deterrent, which is my own University’s problem with protestors like these. And foreign students are especially liable, as they could lose their visas if suspended (that’s why MIT didn’t arrest any of its protestors). Colleges are loath to suspend foreign students, or have them arrested, because foreign students pay pretty much the full fees at colleges, whereas Americans often get big breaks on tuition.

And, mirabile dictu, one of the students who has been both arrested and suspended (from Barnard), is Isra Hirsi, the daughter of none other than Congresswoman and notorious antisemite Ilhan “Follow the Benjamins” Omar. (Omar was in fact on the House committee that grilled the Columbia people.

Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is among several Barnard students who have been suspended for participating in a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.

The camp, which includes dozens of tents pitched on the campus’s South Lawn in protest against Israeli actions in Gaza, has created a standoff between administrators and students on the Ivy League campus. Dozens of students were arrested on Thursday, after the university notified them that they would be suspended if they refused to move and the students vowed to remain in place.

Ms. Hirsi posted on social media around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday that she was one of three students suspended so far for participating in the protest, which began on Wednesday, the day the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, appeared before Congress to discuss antisemitism on campus.

At the congressional hearing, Dr. Shafik told lawmakers that she would enforce rules about unauthorized protests and antisemitism. Ms. Omar, who is on the committee that held the hearing and who did not mention that her daughter was among the pro-Palestinian protesters, was one of several Democrats who questioned Ms. Shafik about her actions toward Palestinian and Muslim students.

Ms. Hirsi, 21, said on social media that she was an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the student coalition that has been pushing the university to cut ties with companies that support Israel. Such divestment is the key demand of protesters in the encampment. She is also involved with the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of two student groups that was suspended in November for holding unauthorized protests.

“I have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings,” she wrote. “I just received notice that I am 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide.”

Ms. Hirsi is a junior majoring in sociology. Two other Barnard students, Maryam Iqbal, 18, a freshman, and Soph Dinu, 21, a junior majoring in religion, were also suspended, protest organizers said.

Who would have thought that testifying before a hostile group of Republicans in Congress would make college presidents straighten up and fly right? I disagree with the hostile treatment of Presidents, but it’s time to start enforcing the “time, place, and manner” aspects of protests, speech, and demonstrations. It’s also time to enforce behavior codes (and speech codes, if schools have them, which they shouldn’t) uniformly, for it was the lack of uniformity that got Liz Magill fired from Penn and started the process that resulted in Harvard’s Claudine Gay being let go.  My preference is the Chicago Free Expression principles, but those don’t allow you to say anything, anywhere, and at any time on campus.

Pro-Palestinian protestors have been coddled too long (even at the University of Chicago), and unless they get serious discipline from their colleges, they’ll just keep disrupting everything.  This is a lesson that Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, learned, perhaps from being Provost here first.  What a pity that threats like those of Congress are what make colleges reform and apply their rules uniformly!

Now if only the University of Chicago would listen. . .

Indigenous mathematics: smoke and mirrors

April 18, 2024 • 11:30 am

I used to think that the “decolonization” of STEM was strongest in New Zealand and South Africa, which of course is a movement to dethrone so-called “Western” science in favor of indigenous science. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the “indigenization/decolonization of science” isn’t making its way deep into Australia as well.  I have followed developments in New Zealand far more closely than these other places, because I hear often from Kiwi scientists who beef about the dethroning of modern science (which hasn’t been “Western” in a while) in favor of Mātauranga Māori (MM), the “way of knowing” of the indigenous Māori people. Also, I have visited New Zealand, love the place, and would be devastated if science were watered down with superstition, myth, legend, and morality.

And that’s the first issue with “decolonizing” science. Usually those movements intend to either defenestrate modern science or at least teach “indigenous science” alongside it as an equally valid “way of knowing”. Yet indigenous science, like MM, is a grab-bag of empirical knowledge based on trial and error (the premier example is the navigation of Polynesians, the ancestors of Māori; another is how to catch eels), but is also imbued with superstitions, myths, legends, word-of-mouth tales, and “rules for living”, including morality. And rarely is indigenous science vetted with the same rigor as is modern science, because modern science has many features missing in indigenous “ways of knowing” (double-blind testing, deliberate replication, hypothesis testing, and so on).  One result is that “indigenous science” can be wrong more often. One example is the insistence of some New Zealand researchers that Polynesians discovered Antarctica in the early seventh century. This is based on oral legend combined with mistranslation; in fact, the Russians were the first to glimpse the continent—in 1820.

Now trial and error methods can indeed produce empirical knowledge in the sense of “justified true belief”, but that is practical knowledge, designed to help people where to find things to eat, how to navigate, how to herd bison, when to plant food, and the like. Its ambit is far narrower than that of modern science, and examples of “indigenous science” that have made valuable contributions to modern science are thin on the ground.

Which brings us to the second issue with indigenous science. Although it’s touted loudly and passionately, examples of indigenous knowledge making substantial contributions to modern science are either scant or missing. Most of the written defenses of enthroning indigenous science I’ve seen are based on a need to pay attention to marginalized people as oppressed victims, whose knowledge must be elevated precisely because they were victims.  But that’s no way to judge science.

And that is precisely the content of this puff piec, coming from Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, touting the dethroning of “mainstream European-based mathematics” in favor of mathematics produced and used by “Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world.” The article highlights Professor Rowena Ball of ANU’s College of Science, who lists these as her research interests:

Mathematics Without Borders, Truth-Telling in Mathematics History, Decolonisation of STEM, Indigenous and Non-Western Mathematics, Emergence of life, Nonlinear and complex dynamical systems, Thermochemical instabilities and oscillators, Thermodynamic analysis, Railways and trains, Country pub lunches

What is mathematics? What is included in mathematics? Who gets to say? How and why did Western mathematics exclusively colonise minds and curriculums over the whole world? Should that situation continue unabated?

It will not escape your notice if you read the piece, heavy with quotes from Dr. Ball, that she neglects the contributions of anything other than “mainstream European-based mathematics” to modern mathematics, leaving out the contributions of the Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, Romans, and Babylonians to modern mathematics. Those people were apparently not “indigenous” and at any rate were not “colonized”. But Ball goes on and on, proffering only one tepid example of how a group of Australian aboriginals in Mithaka Country (an area of east-central Australia) had a form of mathematics that was useful. It turns out that it wasn’t mathematics at all, but practical knowledge that we wouldn’t recognize today as “math” at all.

Click the screenshot to read this short piece (h/t Peter Forsythe):

First I’ll give some of her quotes from the ANU piece (indented) and then her holotype specimen of indigenous math.

What constitutes mathematical knowledge? What is included in mathematics? Who gets to decide? These are some of the questions being asked in a growing decolonisation movement.

“Mathematics is a universal human phenomenon, and students of under-represented and minority groups and colonised peoples are starting to be more critical about accepting unquestioningly the cultural hegemony of mainstream European-based mathematics,” says Professor Rowena Ball from the ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute.

Professor Ball leads a research and teaching initiative called Mathematics Without Borders, aimed at broadening and diversifying the cultural base and content of mathematics.

“Mathematics has been gatekept by the West and defined to exclude entire cultures. Almost all mathematics that students have ever come across is European-based,” she explains. “We would like to enrich the discipline through the inclusion of cross-cultural mathematics.”

“Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world are standing up and saying: ‘Our knowledge is just as good as anybody else’s − why can’t we teach it to our children in our schools, and in our own way?’

“And this is happening in New Zealand, North and South America, and Africa, and also in a great movement in India to revive traditional Indian mathematics.”

But wait!  There’s more:

. . .“There is a lot of gatekeeping going on,” Professor Ball says of having to justify Indigenous maths. “One effect of colonisation of the curriculum is defensive protection of what is thought to be an exclusively European and British provenance of mathematics.”

“Like most mathematicians I was educated in European and British mathematics,” says Professor Ball, “and it’s fine stuff – I still love my original research field in dynamical systems.” But that mathematics did not develop in isolation, she says, and now there’s even more to learn about how non-Western societies have been seeing the world mathematically that many of us haven’t yet tuned into.

“What the general public think of as mathematics tends to be whatever they learned (or, more likely, did not learn) at school. But in many Indigenous societies, mathematics is lived from when you are born to when you rejoin your ancestors,” Professor Ball says.

Rejoin your ancestors? Does she mean as underground worm food? I don’t think so. But I digress.  Ball argues that indigenous math is largely non-numerical, though in her one unpublished paper that is mentioned in the article (see below), numbers and counting figure largely.

At any rate, here is the single example Ball gives of valuable indigenous mathematics. I am not making this up: it involves the direction of smoke signals.

“One interesting example that we are currently investigating is the use of chiral symmetry to engineer a long-distance smoke signalling technology in real time,” Professor Ball says. “If you light an incense stick you will see the twin counter-rotating vortices that emanate − these are a chiral pair, meaning they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other.”

A memoir by Alice Duncan Kemp, who grew up on a cattle station on Mithaka country in the early 1900s, vividly describes the signalling procedure, in which husband-and-wife expert team Bogie and Mary-Anne selected and pulsed the smoke waves with a left to right curl, to signal “white men”, instead of the more usual right to left spiral.

Mithaka country is southwest Queensland − Kurrawoolben and Kirrenderri (Diamantina) and Nooroondinna (Georgina) river channel country − and for thousands of years this region was a rich, well-populated cultural and trade crossroads of the Australian continent.

To create and understand these signals, you have to be a skilled practical mathematician, Professor Ball says.

“Theory and mathematics in Mithaka society were systematised and taught intergenerationally. You don’t just somehow pop up and suddenly start a chiral signalling technology. It has been taught and developed and practised by many people through the generations.”

At that time in the early twentieth century, British meteorologists were just beginning to understand the essential vortical nature of atmospheric flows.

“Imagine if the existing Indigenous Mithaka knowledge of vorticity had been recognised, nurtured and protected? In what ways may it have fed into the high performance, numerical weather forecasting capabilities that we all rely on now?” she asks.

I don’t find this at all convincing. First, Bogie and Mary-Anne sound like white oppressors to me. But even if they weren’t, is the “reverse curl” something the locals actually used to signal “white people around”? It couldn’t have been going on for thousands of years because the first European people arrived in Australia in the early 17th century. So was there an elaborate system of smoke signals before that? Perhaps, but how are they based on mathematics? Patterns of smoke, like drumbeats, is a kind of language, and how to make the patterns and get them understood correctly is based on trial and error. Where does the math come in?

Further, the claim that the Mithaka knowledge of vorticity—I’m not sure what that knowledge is beyond empirical ways to make smoke signals—would have revolutionized “high performance numerical weather forecasting” long before now is simply risible.

Well, that’s enough. But I’d be remiss not to at least mention a paper by Xu and Ball that defends the thesis above. It’s called “Is the study of Indigenous mathematics ill-directed or beneficial?“, and appears at Arχiv.org, which means it hasn’t been published or peer-reviewed. There are a few examples of indigenous mathematics, which I put below. In some cases you’ll have to look up the references given to check on which people they’re referring to:

Much of ordinary day-to-day arithmetic and geometry performed by ‘illiterate’ women, artisans, carpenters and many other workers are unwritten and even unspoken (Wood, 2000). The apprentice learns by watching carefully then doing the mathematics themselves. The use of tools–an unwritten approach–to support arithmetic has a long history; there are different media for recording and computing with numbers, including stones, twigs, knots and notches (Hansson, 2018). People of many Indigenous Pacific and Australian nations can use parts of the body to count quickly and accurately (Goetzfridt, 2007; Owens & Lean, 2018; Wood, 2000), communicating methods, operations and results through speaking, listening and gesture. Weaving skills were taught unwritten to next generations to construct the numerical relationships that give rise to the desired complex geometrical designs with symmetries (Hansson, 2018). Knotted quipus were used by ‘illiterate’ Inca people of South American
Andes regions to allot land and levy taxes (Ascher & Ascher, 2013). The quipu (Figure 1), with its columns of base-10 numerical data encoded as knots, can be thought of as a spreadsheet, and it seems likely that the Inca knew and applied some array and matrix operations.

Dan, an Indigenous language of central Liberia, is non-written but Dan speakers can carry out arithmetic operations orally, including addition, subtraction and division, play games that require fast counting, tracking and calculating skills, and practice geometric principles in constructing buildings (Sternstein, 2008). Fractal geometry, developed to a high art in Western mathematics from the late 1960s and executed in silico, has non-Western antecedents that were implemented in the built environment in Africa (Eglash, 1998). Chaology and fractal geometry have also been a part of traditional Chinese architectural and garden design for thousands of years (Li & Liao, 1998).

Clearly some indigenous people could count and calculate, though the calculating seems to fall largely to the Chinese, not usually considered indigenous. At any rate, what’s above doesn’t jibe with the claim and quote in the article:

Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.

“In fact, as most mathematicians know, mathematics is primarily the science of patterns and periodicities and symmetries − and recognising and classifying those patterns.”

A lot of the above sounds like counting and accounting to me.  Regardless, it’s clear that some indigenous people could count and figure out patterns that involved counting.  I’m not so sure about the Inca “matrix” operations,  but one can hardly carry out some kind of commerce or taxation without being able to count. At any rate, yes, indigenous people had a form of “counting and pattern mathematics,” but to put them on a par even with what the ancient Egyptians and Greeks accomplished mathematically is to give indigenous people too much credit.

Guest post: The new Cass Review

April 18, 2024 • 9:15 am

The final version of the Cass Review (formally the “Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People”) was issued on April 10. Here’s a brief summary by the CBC, noting that doctors and others have griped about it:

A long-anticipated — and contentious — national review of gender-affirming care for youth in England was released last week, resulting in headlines across the U.K. saying that gender medicine is “built on shaky foundations.”

The Cass Review, chaired by pediatrician Hilary Cass, was commissioned by England’s National Health Service (NHS) in 2020.

Even before the final report was published, the review has led to significant changes for youth gender medicine in England, where the debate over transgender care has become increasingly heated, with complaints of both long waiting lists and medical treatments being too readily available to youth.

Last month, the Cass Review findings led to a ban on the prescription of puberty-suppressing hormones except for youth enrolled in clinical research.

That’s a move away from the standard of care supported by many international medical bodies, including the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS), the American Academy of Pediatrics and World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Though several European countries including Sweden have also restricted access to puberty blockers and other medical treatments for youth.

The report cites a systematic review of evidence, commissioned as part of the Cass Review, which found “a lack of high-quality research” that puberty blockers can help young people with gender dysphoria.

While experts in the field say more studies should be done, Canadian doctors who spoke to CBC News disagree with the finding that there isn’t enough evidence puberty blockers can help.

I had no time to read the long report, and didn’t think that just regurgitating a summary for the readers was sufficient. But reader Jez told me he was going through it, and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind writing his take for this site. He kindly agreed, and so, without further ado. . . .

First, though, Jez notes

“The Cass Review’s final report (and its other publications) are available here.

 

THE CASS REVIEW: A READER’S TAKE

by Jez Grove

Since around 2014, the number of children and young people presenting at gender clinics in the Western world has surged and the patient profile has switched dramatically from predominantly pre-pubertal males to teenage females. Both changes are unexplained. The treatment offered to these patients has also significantly shifted: a psychosocial and psychotherapeutic approach has given way to many being offered medical treatment with puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues, GnRH) and cross-sex hormones.

In September 2020, Dr Hilary Cass, a retired consultant paediatrician and former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was appointed to undertake a full review into how NHS England* “should most appropriately assess, diagnose and care for children and young people who present with gender incongruence and gender identity issues [and] to make recommendations on how to improve services […] and ensure that the best model/s for safe and effective services are commissioned”. [Cass Review Final Report, henceforeth “CRFR”, Appendix 1: Terms of Reference]

The Cass Review’s Interim Report (2022) highlighted that a lack of evidence on the medium- and long-term outcomes of the treatments that children and young people were receiving was limiting the advice that the Review could give. In response, it commissioned an independent research programme to provide “the best available collation of published evidence, as well as qualitative and quantitative research to fill knowledge gaps” and set up a Clinical Expert Group to help it interpret the findings. [CRFR, p. 25]

The Interim Review also warned that social transitioning (changing, name, appearance and pronouns, etc.):

. . . .“may not be thought of as an intervention or treatment, because it is not something that happens within health services. However, it is important to view it as an active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning. There are different views on the benefits versus the harms of early social transition. Whatever position one takes, it is important to acknowledge that it is not a neutral act, and better information is needed about outcomes”. [Cass Review Interim Report, henceforth”CRIR”; pp 62-63]

The findings of the Interim Report led to the closure of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) last month.

Last week, the Cass Review published its Final Report. Dr Cass begins it with an apparent effort to placate her critics; her opening sentences read:

“This Review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare. It is about what the healthcare approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the NHS in relation to their gender identity”. [CRFR, Foreword from the Chair, p. 12]

However, she is not blind to the problems that have developed in this area of healthcare:

“It often takes many years before strongly positive research findings are incorporated into practice. There are many reasons for this. One is that doctors can be cautious in implementing new findings, particularly when their own clinical experience is telling them the current approach they have used over many years is the right one for their patients. Quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children. Based on a single Dutch study, which suggested that puberty blockers may improve psychological wellbeing for a narrowly defined group of children with gender incongruence, the practice spread at pace to other countries. This was closely followed by a greater readiness to start masculinising/feminising hormones in mid-teens, and the extension of this approach to a wider group of adolescents who would not have met the inclusion criteria for the original Dutch study. Some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches to holistic assessment, which has meant that this group of young people have been exceptionalised compared to other young people with similarly complex presentations. They deserve very much better”. [CRFR, Foreword from the Chair, pp. 13-14]

The problems with the evidence base that sparked the Review persist, with Cass writing that the independent research programme she had commissioned

. . . .“has shown that there continues to be a lack of high-quality evidence in this area and disappointingly […], attempts to improve the evidence base have been thwarted by a lack of cooperation from the adult gender services.  The Review has therefore had to base its recommendations on the currently available evidence, supplemented by its own extensive programme of engagement”. [CRFR, p. 20]

The failure of the UK’s adult gender services to cooperate is perhaps the most shocking revelation in the report. As Cass notes,

“When clinicians talk to patients about what interventions may be best for them, they usually refer to the longer-term benefits and risks of different options, based on outcome data from other people who have been through a similar care pathway. This information is not currently available for interventions in children and young people with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, so young people and their families have to make decisions without an adequate picture of the potential impacts and outcomes”. [CRFR, p. 33]

A quantitative data linkage study was intended to

. . . “use existing data held by the NHS, including data from GIDS, hospital wards, outpatient clinics, emergency departments and NHS adult GDCs, to track the journeys of all young people (approximately 9,000) referred to the GIDS service through the system to provide a population-level evidence base of the different pathways people take and the outcomes. This type of research is usual practice in the NHS when looking to improve health services and care received.  However, this has not been the case for gender-questioning children and young people and the hope was that this data linkage would go some way to redress this imbalance”. [Cass Review Final Report, p. 190]

Despite its “not particularly unusual” methodology, it took more than a year for the study to receive ethics approval from the Health Research Authority (HRA); Cass considers the “robust scrutiny and consideration [to be] entirely appropriate given the sensitivity of the subject matter”. [Ibid.] The independent research team “undertook stakeholder engagement and developed the patient notifications and communications resources to explain the research and provide information about how to opt-out of the study should an individual choose to do so. […] In January 2024, the Review received a letter from NHS England stating that, despite efforts to encourage the participation of the NHS gender clinics, the necessary co-operation had not been forthcoming”. [Ibid.] Appendix 4 of the Review sets out the details and history of the “thwarted” study.

The proposed linkage study had been complicated by the fact that, uniquely, GIDS patients are issued new National Health Service (NHS) numbers when registering their new gender identity. Cass notes:

“From a research perspective, the issuing of new NHS numbers makes it more difficult to identify the long-term outcomes for a patient population for whom the evidence base is weak”. [CRFR, p. 229]

The UK government had to bring forward a special legislative instrument to facilitate linking the patients’ new and old NHS records; NHS England had vowed to pursue the thwarted research before the special instrument’s powers expire in 2027.

There are other serious unintended consequences of allowing young patients to change their NHS numbers. Cass writes,

“Safeguarding professionals have described a range of situations where this has put children/young people at risk. These include young people attending hospital after self-harm not being identifiable as a child already on a child protection order; records of previous trauma and/or physical ill health being lost; people who do not have parental responsibility changing a child’s name and gender; children being re-registered as the opposite gender in infancy; children on the child protection register being untraceable after moving to a new area”. [CRFR, p. 229]

While Cass has been unable to use a stronger evidence base, she has provided a valuable service in bringing together an independent and thorough assessment of the existing research in areas related to the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of gender-confused children and young people and suggested a way forward.

The Review gives:

  • An overview of the patient profile, including mental health and neurodiversity, adverse childhood experiences, theories about the rise in referrals and the change in case mix, and the weak evidence with regard to suicidality.
  • An important appraisal and synthesis of the available international guidelines. Cass notes,

“For many of the guidelines it was difficult to detect what evidence had been reviewed and how this informed development of the recommendations. For example, most of the guidelines described insufficient evidence about the risks and benefits of medical treatment in adolescents, particularly in relation to long-term outcomes. Despite this, many then went on to cite this same evidence to recommend medical treatments.

Alternatively, they referred to other guidelines that recommend medical treatments as their basis for making the same recommendations. Early versions of two international guidelines, the Endocrine Society 2009 and World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare (WPATH) 7 guidelines influenced nearly all the other guidelines. These two guidelines are also closely interlinked, with WPATH adopting Endocrine Society recommendations, and acting as a co-sponsor and providing input to drafts of the Endocrine Society guideline. WPATH 8 cited many of the other national and regional guidelines to support some of its recommendations, despite these guidelines having been considerably influenced by WPATH 7. The links between the various guidelines are demonstrated in the graphics in the guideline appraisal paper (Hewitt et al., Guidelines 1: Appraisal).

The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.” [Cass Review Final Report, p. 130]

  • An overview of the existing clinical approach and clinical management and recommendations to improve them.
  • Recommendations for a new service model for NHS England, including follow-through services for 17-25 years-olds to ensure continuity at “a potentially vulnerable stage in their journey” and “allow clinical and research follow-up data to be collected”. [CRFR, p. 225] She also stresses the needs for detransitioners to be supported and warns of the dangers of private healthcare providers outside the NHS not following its policies.
  • Finally, she cautions that, while innovation in healthcare is important, there must be a “proportionate level of monitoring, oversight, and regulation that does not stifle progress, but prevents creep of unproven approaches into clinical practice. Innovation must draw from and contribute to the evidence base”. [Cass Review Final Report, p. 231]

To critics who say the Cass Review tells us nothing new, surely the onus is on them to justify continuing to provide children and young people with “gender-affirming care”, care for which we already knew there is no reliable evidence on the medium-and long-term outcomes.

______________________

* Health is devolved in the UK; Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (and indeed all other  healthcare services) are free to ignore the Cass Review’s findings, but may be unwise to do so.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 18, 2024 • 8:15 am

We are back with photos, but I beseech readers to keep sending in their good wildlife pictures.

Today Uwe Mueller is back with some new bird photos from Bergisches Land, Germany. Uwe’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos to enlarge them.

A Carrion crow (Corvus corone) looking curiously at the guy kneeing in front of it:

A female Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) in its typical pose, showing her beautiful wings with the characteristical blue-white pattern:

A Common blackbird (Turdus merula) singing its song. And they do it really loudly:

Eurasian chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs):

The Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) with its raspy voice can often be heard in our local forest. Seeing it is a lot more difficult:

Common chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita), a small bird that can easily be confused with the √ (Phylloscopus trochilus):

Eurasian nuthatch (Sitta europaea), for once not in its typical pose sitting head down in the bark of a tree:

A Great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) landing in our local pond:

This Grey heron (Ardea cinerea) was photographed by me just yesterday [JAC: Last Saturday] …

… as well as these two juvenile Grey herons in its nest, together with one of its parents. The juveniles look a bit disheveled and have what I call the “Jurassic Park stare” much more than the adult birds. Well, they can’t deny that they are dinosaurs.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 18, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, April 18, 2024, and National Animal Cracker Day. I ate many boxes of these as a child, all the famous “Barnum’s Animals” variety, about which Wikipedia says this:

The number and variety contained in each box has varied over the years. In total, 53 different animals have been represented by animal crackers since 1902. In its current incarnation, each package contains 22 cookies consisting of a variety of animals. The most recent addition, the koala, was added in September 2002 after being chosen by consumer votes, beating out the penguin, walrus and cobra.[4]

In August 2018, Mondelez International (the parent company of Nabisco) released a new design for its Barnum’s Animals Crackers boxes in the United States, showing the animals freed from their traditional circus boxcar cages. This design change was made in consultation with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), one year after the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus ceased operations. The new design shows a zebra, lion, elephant, giraffe and gorilla together in an African landscape.

Here is the new cageless version:

“Nabisco Barnum’s Animal Crackers” by Pest15 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

And here are some of the animals. Is that a bear? Regardless, they tasted good.

From Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Velociraptor Awareness Day (see meme below), National High Five Day, Newspaper Columnists’ Day, National Ask An Atheist Day (the answer is “42”), Coma Patients’ Day in Poland, International Day For Monuments and Sites, and World Amateur Radio Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*There’s not much new in the Trump trial, but the big gossipy news is that NPR editor Uri Berliner resigned from the organization, something nearly inevitable after he blew the lid off it with his seamy tales of biased reporting and endemic wokeness. His punishment for going public was a five-day suspension, but now he’s quit for good.

National Public Radio prohibits staff from publishing work for other media outlets without permission. Senior editor Uri Berliner broke that rule when he published a searing, 3,000-word critique of his own storied news organization in the Free Press, a media upstart.

His actions led to a five-day suspension without pay. Then on Wednesday, he posted his resignation letter on X, in which he accused the public radio network’s new chief executive of having divisive views that “confirm the very problems” he cited in his Free Press piece.

A spokeswoman for NPR declined to comment on personnel matters.

Berliner’s essay, which said NPR had lost its way by letting liberal bias skew its coverage, is the latest sign of a management challenge several major newsrooms are dealing with: how to handle staffers who are willing to go public with concerns about their own employer.

Weeks earlier at MSNBC, a coterie of high-profile anchors used their respective shows to publicly call out a controversial hiring decision by the network’s parent. And the New York Times’s newsroom has been divided over its Gaza war coverage, culminating with a recent investigation into whether staffers leaked confidential information to another outlet.

. . . In his essay in the Free Press, a media company founded by Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor, Berliner wrote that NPR’s newsroom had lost its culture of open-mindedness and no longer offered a diversity of viewpoints. The piece, titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” also said the network had erred in its coverage of high-profile events, from the origins of Covid to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Here’s his letter of resignation on Twitter, short and sweet:

*A phalanx of Western diplomats has been visiting Israel, pleading with it not to respond to the missile-and-drone attack by Iran last Saturday. As usual, Israel is not allowed to deter attacks by its enemies (if you think that Saturday deterred Iran from taking more action, even though proxies, you’re wrong.  But the country has vowed retaliation, without specifying how or where.

For days, Israel’s closest Western allies have pleaded with the country’s wartime government not to risk igniting a wider war by responding too strongly to Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones last weekend. And on Wednesday, the top diplomats from Germany and Britain delivered that message in person to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

But Mr. Netanyahu emerged from those talks resolute that his country would not bow to any outside pressure when choosing its response. He declared before a cabinet meeting that Israel would “do everything necessary to defend itself” and warned the allies that “we will make our own decisions,” according to his office.

The British foreign secretary, David Cameron, acknowledged just before meeting with the prime minister that Israel was unlikely to heed pleas to turn the other cheek.

“It is clear that the Israelis are making a decision to act,” Mr. Cameron told the BBC. “We hope that they do so in a way that does as little to escalate this as possible.”

The United States, Britain and Germany have been urging Israel to avoid making moves that could increase tension with Iran, which launched around 300 missiles and drones on Saturday night in what was believed to be its first direct attack on Israel. Most of the missiles and drones were shot down before they reached their targets — thanks in part to the assistance of the United States, Britain, France and Jordan — and the ones that got through did minimal damage.

I suspect that Israel itself doesn’t to strike Iran directly, but lately their actions have been unpredictable. One thing that Israel knows is that it cannot handle a war with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah all at once (for one thing, there would be too many drones and missiles coming in. Further, they could expect no help from Western allies.

*Does anybody remember that Hezbollah is committing war crimes daily by firing missiles at Israel, for there is no state of war between Lebanon and Israel? Further, a UN resolution forbids Hezbollah not only to do this kind of fighting, but from even occupying the areas form which it fires. Today Hezbollah fired into a Bedouin village, injuring four civilians and 14 troops.  Does anybody care? Israel has retaliated, but they only go after the Iranian-backed Hezbollah when they’re fired on. Many residents of northern Israel have had to be evacuated because of this firing. A video is below.

Fourteen soldiers and four civilians were wounded as an explosive drone fired from Lebanon struck a community center in the northern border town of Arab al-Aramshe on Wednesday, medics and the military said.

The victims were taken to Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, which said that one was listed in critical condition and four others were seriously wounded. The remaining victims were moderately and lightly hurt, the hospital added.

According to the Israel Defense Forces, 14 of the victims were soldiers, including the five listed in critical and serious condition. The four civilian victims were all lightly hurt.

Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it targeted a building being used by the Israeli military with guided missiles and explosive-laden drones.

Though the town has been largely evacuated, soldiers are stationed there and may have used the building as a gathering space.

. . . . . Since October 8, Hezbollah has attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a daily basis with rockets, drones, anti-tank missiles and other means, saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.

Translation of the tweet below:

The attack in Arab El Aramsha: 6 were injured, including one seriously, one moderately and the rest in a minor condition | Documenting the moments of impact (Michal Wasserman)

*Yesterday I put up a live feed of testimony of officials from Columbia University, facing fire from House Republicans over accusations of endemic antisemitism at the institution (the nearly four-hour-long feed is still at the site. The Republicans were out for blood, and at least one of them went off on an unhinged tangent about God and the Bible. The WSJ reports on the proceedings:

Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik told a congressional committee Wednesday that the school wasn’t prepared for the firestorm stemming from Hamas’s attack on Israel last fall, which has led to numerous protests, instances of antisemitism, and claims by Jewish students that they feel unsafe on campus.

“When I first started at Columbia, our policies, our systems, and our enforcement mechanisms were not up to the scale of this challenge,” Shafik said. “They were designed for a very different world.”

Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, faced scores of pointed questions from committee members critical of the school’s response to instances of antisemitism on campus since the outbreak of war in the Middle East last October.

The questions were part of a 3 ½-hour hearing held by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The same committee in December elicited responses from two Ivy league presidents that led to their eventual resignations.

. . . Jewish students at Columbia have alleged incidents of assault, antisemitic graffiti such as swastikas, calls for the destruction of Israel at rallies, and speaking invitations from student groups to members of foreign terrorist groups.

. . . At the outset of the hearing, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the committee’s chairwoman, called Columbia one of the nation’s hotbeds of antisemitism. “Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence, at best, and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” Foxx said.

Committee members repeatedly probed decades of faculty attacks on Israel which they said had set the stage for the antisemitism that burst forth on campus after Oct. 7. Shafik responded that the school continues to ramp up processes to address antisemitism on campus and that professors who have expressed antisemitic viewpoints wouldn’t be hired under her watch.

All the Columbia officials said that any calls for genocide of the Jews was against the campus speech code, but that just convinced me that Columbia’s speech code doesn’t adhere to the First Amendment, for calls for genocide don’t violate that Amendment under many circumstances.  Shafik and the rest clearly learned from the disastrous testimony of the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn a while back, but, truth be told, Shafik was a little to glib, and Columbia needs to adopt a better speech code (the University of Chicago’s would do).

*Some savvy amateurs discovered the bones of what may be the largest known ichthyosaur (and hence the largest known marine reptile) off the west coast of England, and just published the results in PLoS ONE. It could be as much as 80 feet long.

On a nice spring day at the end of May 2020, 11-year-old Ruby Reynolds and her dad, Justin, were fossil-hunting on Blue Anchor Beach in Somerset, England, when they discovered a fragment of a titanic sea beast.

As Justin studied the four-inch-long, oval-shaped fossil, Ruby started to scout the slope above them. She found a second piece of fossilized bone, this one about twice as big.

Joining forces with a team of paleontologists, Justin and Ruby have now identified their find as a new species of giant ichthyosaur, a marine reptile from the Late Triassic thought to have been shaped like a modern-day dolphin. The father-daughter duo help describe the prehistoric predator in a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.

The team recovered only pieces of the animal’s lower jawbone, but they estimate that the entire creature could have stretched 80 feet — making it perhaps the biggest marine reptile yet discovered.

Justin, a postal worker who lives in the village of Braunton in Devon, didn’t know at first what he and Ruby had discovered, but after studying the fossils and doing research at home, they reached the conclusion that it was an ichthyosaur. They emailed Dean Lomax, a paleontologist and expert on the marine reptiles at the University of Manchester, for a consult.

. . . .Together, Lomax and his colleagues worked with Justin and Ruby to recover more parts of the intriguing fossil from Blue Anchor. They pieced together sections of the massive lower jawbone — enough to estimate that if complete, the lower jawbone, called the surangular, would measure more than six feet long.

What was most thrilling about the find was that it added to a very similar discovery made by Lomax and colleagues in nearby Lilstock, Somerset, that they reported in 2018. They found fragments of the lower jawbone of a different giant ichthyosaur, also from a period called the Rhaetian — the end of the Triassic, about 202 million years ago.

That’s a critical time period, when ichthyosaur evolution remains something of a mystery because of a dearth of specimens, according to Neil Kelley, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study.

Although it is only part of the jawbone, the find at Blue Anchor was more complete and better-preserved than the one from Lilstock, and finding two specimens from a similar geography and time period gave the researchers the confidence to say it is a newly identified species, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis.

You can see reconstructed drawings at the Daily Fail, which describes the animal as “twice the size of a London bus”. Below is a smaller one from Wikipedia, labeled “A Holzmaden ichthyosaur in which the preparator found organic remains in the position of the dorsal fin, but failed to locate any for the flippers.” Note too that the backbone of this ichthyosaur (and others) extends down into the ventral fluke of the tail, while in sharks it’s the opposite. The convergence between these reptiles, which entered the water from the land, on sharks and fish, with both having dorsal fins and similar tails, is a remarkable example of convergent evolution. 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Ichthyosaur_-_Naturmuseum_Senckenberg_-_DSC02173.JPG

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and the cats are reveling in springtime, when they can roam outside and lie in the sun:

Hili: I passed a unanimous resolution.
A: What resolution?
Hili: Spring is to last the whole year.
In Polish:
Hili: Podjęłam jednogłośną rezolucję.
Ja: Jaką?
Hili: Wiosna ma trwać przez cały rok.

*******************

From reddit (see above):

From Divy:

Passover is almost here! (It begins on sundown Monday and lasts a week.) From Barry:

From Masih; a rare look at the inside of an Iranian “morality police” van.  The Islamic Republic is definitely intensifying its war against women after it went after Israel:

Have a listen to the new CEO or NPR denigrating “the truth”:

A tweet from my feed. Look at that lava go!

Congress votes against the First Amendment. Dylan Williams is right:

From Malcolm; a wonderful rescue of a young elephant (I couldn’t put up that second tweet without the first. . .)

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a link to Auschwitz art that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a puffin checking things out:

One of Leonardo’s rare studies of a cat:

Live Congressional hearings on antisemitism at Columbia University

April 17, 2024 • 10:40 am

I forgot that Columbia University officials are being grilled in Congress about anti-semitism on its campus. You can watch it live below, and things are getting heated, as they did in the House hearings involving the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn. The Republicans are loaded for bear, but I think I’ll have to watch most of this later. CNN has an article, with a live feed, about what’s going on. Here is some of their news:

All four Columbia officials testifying before Congress unequivocally stated that calls for the genocide of Jews violate the university’s code of conduct.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici asked Columbia President Minouche Shafik, board co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman and David Schizer, co-chair of a task force on antisemitism, for a simple yes or no response. All four said “yes,” calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Columbia’s code of conduct.

The response offered a stark contrast to the lawyerly answers that university presidents provided during the December hearing before the same committee. That moment went viral, sparking an uproar that eventually contributed to the ousters of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

Of course, the Columbia officials had the advantage of having months to prepare for that question.

Days after the December hearing, Columbia issued a statement saying: “Calls for genocide against the Jewish community or any other group are abhorrent, inconsistent with our values and against our rules.”

Columbia certainly has learned from what happened in the last hearings! But apparently Columbia doesn’t adhere to the First Amendment, under which calls for genocide are, under many circumstances, legal. This means that their code of conduct does not completely comport with the First Amendment.

Here, quickly, are the YouTube notes:

The Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC), will hold a hearing to call on the leadership at Columbia University to answer for the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses and threatening their Jewish students.

 

Here’s FIRE’s free-speech ranking for Columbia University. It’s below average: #214 out of #248 schools (Harvard was the lowest). Click to look it up:

Another refuted example of the reverse appeal to nature

April 17, 2024 • 10:30 am

As Luana Maroja and I wrote in our paper on the ideological subversion of biology, some of that subversion involves a fallacy that we called the “reverse appeal to nature”, an inversion of the naturalistic fallacy:

All the biological misconceptions we’ve discussed involve forcing preconceived beliefs onto nature. This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.” It demands that you must see the natural world through lenses prescribed by your ideology. If you are a gender activist, you must see more than two biological sexes. . . . .

In other words, people tend to justify something they consider morally desirable by seeing the phenomenon (or something like it) in nature. As we noted, the claim that sex is a spectrum in nature is a conclusion meant to buttress the value of people who consider themselves neither female nor male—those who are “nonbinary”. The problem here is twofold. Most important, biological sex is indeed binary in nature: all animals and vascular plants have just two sexes: males, making small motile sperm, and females, making large immotile eggs. I won’t defend this binary-ness now, as I’ve done it many times before, as have others. For a quick refresher, see this piece by Colin Wright.

The second problem is that the existence of something in animals or plants doesn’t buttress human morality.  Trans-identifying people should have all the same rights as other people, except that in some sensitive settings like sports, prisons, etc., segregation should be based on biological sex rather than gender. And that is regardless of what we see in nature. After all, we don’t think that theft, murder, and cheating are justifiable because we can point to these phenomena in various animals. (See my quote at the bottom.)

And yet there are still those, like gender activist Peter Tatchell, who fall victim to this fallacy.  In his tweet below, Tatchell claims to point out 18 animals that are transsexual (i.e., can change biological sex) and also show that “gender is not a simplistic binary, male & female”. This is a doubly incorrect instance of the reverse appeal to nature.

First, most of the animals in Tatchell’s litany of example do not change sex, and none of them are “transsexual” in the human sense (i.e., transgender humans who change their gender identity, not their biological sex, because they suffer from gender dysphoria).  And none of the animals that do change sex are mammals, since we know of no example of a mammal that can change from producing eggs to producing sperm or vice versa. (There are no examples, either, of human hermaphrodites that are fertile as both sexes.)

Second, not a single of Tatchell’s 18 examples shows that sex is “not a simplistic binary.” Every one of the animals shown instantiates that there are two sexes: males and females (or both combined in one body as simultaneous hermaphrodites). There are no third, fourth, or fifth sexes shown by Tatchell, for none exist.

His tweet:

In an earlier post I showed how Emma Hilton attacked Tatchell’s claims in jer twitter feed, with one tweet for each of Tatchell’s examples. Now she and Jonathan Kay have teamed up for a complete demolition job at Quilette, which you can read by clicking the headline below.

 

First the authors show the prevalence of using nature to justify nonbinary and transgender people:

Anyone who’s followed the debate about transgender rights will immediately understand why this type of fish now has a starring role in advocacy materials designed to convince the broad public that sex-switching is a common feature in the natural kingdom, including among humans [JAC: The preceding link goes to a Vice article by Diana Tourjée called “Yes, there are trans animals.”] In Canada, for instance, the publicly funded CBC is airing a documentary titled Fluid: Life Beyond the Binary, in which the self-described “non-binary” host, Mae Martin, invokes the existence of clownfish, and various other creatures, to argue that “each of us are on the gender spectrum.” Not surprisingly, Martin is explicitly promoting the documentary as a paean to social justice, and as a rebuke to anyone seeking to put limits on “gender-affirming health care” (such as the double mastectomy that Martin publicly announced in 2021).

This week, British human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell tried to advance similar arguments in a widely read tweet referencing—as the linked Gay Times article put it—“18 animals you didn’t know were biologically trans.”

“These animals show that gender is not a simplistic binary, male and female,” Tatchell gushed. “Trans and intersex are real. Get used to it!”]

Indeed, the article that Tatchell cited goes further, denouncing the very idea of “biology” as a “pseudo-intellectual” fixation of “lesbian separatists” and “right-wing lobbyists.” The author, one Fran Tirado, warns that even mentioning terms such as “biological sex,” “biological male,” and “biological female” is a problematic affront to the supposedly non-binary, gender-bending nature of life—which, the author claims, has been in evidence since “the earliest recorded histories of the earth.”

Then comes the promised 18-point catalogue of “animals you didn’t know were biologically trans”—starting with the above-pictured clownfish (often described by scientists as anemonefish).

Hilton and Kay then run through the list, which I won’t repeat here. I’ll just say that none of the examples show that there are more than two sexes, though individuals of some species can embody both sexes in a single individual, like slugs (a ” simultaneous hermaphrodite”), or, like clownfish, can switch over time from one biological sex to another (“sequential hermaphrodites”). But that is a switch from one biological sex to another, something not seen in mammals, and of course not seen in humans (transgender people do not change biological sex, but switch from one gender identity to another).

That leaves us with the so-called “trans” animals, most of which don’t really change sex. Tatchell needs to bone up on his biology.  Here I list some of the biological phenomena cited by Tatchell

  • Real changes of sex (sequential hermaphrodites like clownfish, jellyfish, oysters, sea bass, sea snails).  That constitutes five species in his list.
  • Simultaneous hermaphrodites (banana slug): individuals can produce both sperm and eggs. There are a fair number of animals that do this, but no mammals and only a few fish (e.g., some gobies and serranid sea bass) There are no simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites known in mammals or birds.
  • Rare cases in which a single individual is known to have swapped testes for ovaries or vice versa (Boyd’s forest dragon, mandarin duck). These are rare exceptions to species in which there are two biological sexes that do not change.) They are developmental anomalies.
  • Parthenogenesis: species in which females can produce offspring without her eggs being fertilized (e.g., some Komodo dragons). Some animal species in which females can do this also have males (sometimes copulation is required to produce eggs, but there’s no fertilization). But all of these species are either completely female or have both males and females. They do not violate the sex binary
  • Species in which males look different from females (“sexual dimorphism”). The example Tatchell gives is a swallowtail butterfly. It doesn’t switch sex and there are only two sexes. Sexual dimorphism is widespread but doesn’t exemplify either changing sex or nonbinary sexes.
  • Species in which males can behave like females to get copulations (the ruff, a bird) or avoid predation (e.g., marsh harriers, a bird).  Again, it’s just a sneaky behavior; there is no sex-switching and all individuals are either male or female
  • Species in which males can get “pregnant”, like seahorses. Females stick their eggs into a the pouch of a male who fertilizes them and releases the newly-hatched seahorses. This is a reversal of sex roles, but not of sex: males still produce sperm and females eggs, and there is no changing of biological sex.
  • Hyenas (yawn). Females have long penis-like clitorises through which they give birth. There is no change of sex and individuals are either male or female. It baffles me why these animals are considered either “trans” or “nonbinary”
  • Gynandromorphs: individuals that, through a developmental accident, are part male and part female. Often the animal is split right down the middle with one half being one sex and the other being the other. I’ve seen them in fruit flies, and they are not all that rare in birds (see a gynandromorph cardinal here). These animals are developmental anomalies, not part of the regular constitution of a species, and most are sterile though some can be fertile.

So yes, some animals can switch sex, though none of those are birds are mammals. Those might be considered “trans” animals, but hardly (and shouldn’t) justify the existence of trans humans, which don’t change biological sex but gender identity.  And none of the species proffered by Tatchell show that there is a spectrum of sex.  As Hilton and Kay conclude:

Do some creatures change sex? Absolutely. But this isn’t new information. It’s a fact that biologists have known about for a long time.

What is also well-known is that none of these sex-changing creatures are mammals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine invertebrates whose biology is different from our own in countless (fascinating) ways.

What’s more, in every single case described above, there are always (at most) just two distinct sexes at play—no matter how those two sexes may switch or combine. One of those sexes is male, a sex associated with gonads that produce sperm (testes); and the other is female, with gonads that produce eggs (ovaries). There’s nothing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.

Yes, there’s a “spectrum.” But it’s not the imaginary sex spectrum that activists such as Martin, Tatchell, and Tirado are trying to conjure. Rather, it’s the extraordinary spectrum of traits, behaviors, and evolutionary adaptations that all of these creatures exhibit as part of nature’s grand pageant.

I swear that people like Tatchell need to learn some biology. If I hear about sexual dimorphism, gynandromorphs, or hyena citorises again, I’m going to lose it.  And people really need to learn not to scan through species in nature to buttress what they see as moral or “right”. That way lies considerable danger, as I wrote in my Times Literary Supplement review of Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow several decades ago:

But regardless of the truth of Darwin’s theory, should we consult nature to determine which of our behaviours are to be considered normal or moral? Homosexuality may indeed occur in species other than our own, but so do infanticide, robbery and extra-pair copulation.  If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers. And given the cultural milieu in which human sexuality and gender are expressed, how closely can we compare ourselves to other species? In what sense does a fish who changes sex resemble a transgendered person? The fish presumably experiences neither distressing feelings about inhabiting the wrong body, nor ostracism by other fish. In some baboons, the only males who show homosexual behaviour are those denied access to females by more dominant males. How can this possibly be equated to human homosexuality?

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Whoa

April 17, 2024 • 8:15 am

In the new Jesus and Mo strip, called “Whoa,” the barmaid compares modern-day versions of Christianity and Islam, and judges Islam as palpably worse for humanity. In that she agrees with Richard Dawkins, though not with those sophists who simply cannot admit that one religion can have more pernicious effects on the modern world than another.

The artists’s comment in the post: “It is worse.”

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