Science Under the Knife

In the United States, the religious right is often criticized for "not believing in science", usually over disagreements relating to evolution or global warming (just for the record, I firmly believe in evolution, seeing it as part of God's plan, and I am open to the current theories of global warming).

But the truth is, the leftist thought police doesn't like science either, when it's not on their side.

I have seen a lot of legitimate research into race, IQ, and gender generally dismissed or censored from the University because it didn't toe the politically correct party line. It will even cause liberals to turn on their own; Harvard ran Larry Summers out of his job for merely suggesting that inborn differences between men and women might be one reason why women are unrepresented in the sciences.

Yesterday, the NYT ran an article about another strong case in point. In 2003, Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University (and hardly a religious conservative), wrote a book titled The Man Who Would Be Queen that dared to suggest that "gender identity disorder" was a myth. It went directly against conventional liberal thought, and for that, he was savagely attacked, wrongly accused of misconduct, and forced out of his job.

(To help illustrate how controversial the book is, look at it's Amazon ratings. 55 "5-star" ratings, 35 "1-star" ratings, and virtually none in between!)
From the article:

In his book, he argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies.

If you're like most of us, and aren't really into transgender issues, you might be thinking: "Why would they care so much about that? What real difference does it make?"

Here's why: If this "dangerous idea" caught on, the practical result is that it could force many folks to end up paying for sex-change operations themselves, instead of forcing the government or insurance companies to, since it might not be considered a legitimate medical need anymore.

For years, "gender identity disorder" is the justification that many have used to force others to pay for what amounts to a very expensive, unnecessary, and destructive procedure. With current technology, it's also ultimately pointless, since it doesn't actually change a person's biological gender; the changes are fully cosmetic (DNA would still identify the person as their original gender, they need hormone treatments all their lives, and they can never reproduce as a member of their new gender).

Lynn Conway, himself a "transgendered" person and a computer scientist, set up a web site devoted solely to attacking Dr. Bailey as if he was the Devil incarnate.

Attacks from elsewhere were downright disturbing:

Ms. James [a transgender advocate] downloaded images from Dr. Bailey’s Web site of his children, taken when they were in middle and elementary school, and posted them on her own site, with sexually explicit captions that she provided. (Dr. Bailey is a divorced father of two.) Ms. James said in an e-mail message that Dr. Bailey’s work exploited vulnerable people, especially children, and that her response echoed his disrespect.

If they really disagreed with him, then I think further research into the subject would be a better counterweight to his book than ad hominem attacks. The fact that the backlash was so severe shows how much his detractors were genuinely afraid of his research.

I don't really lean one way or the other on this issue, except that I have always been skeptical of "gender identity disorder" as a real diagnosis. It's also contradictory, since feminists have been trying to tell us for years that gender is learned, not inborn to us.

As further evidence that many liberal extremists aren't interested in science, they have pushed hard for changes in many states to allow people to even alter their sex on their birth certificates. In New York, a measure was recently adopted that allowed people to do this even if they never had sex reassignment surgery! As the article put it:

But some psychiatrists and doctors are skeptical of the move, saying sexual self-definition should stop at rewriting medical history.

“They should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record,” said Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a Midtown psychiatrist who was on the panel of transgender experts convened by the city. “If they wanted to change the gender for all the compelling reasons that they’ve given, it should be done perhaps with an asterisk.”

Another interesting quote:

“I’ve already heard of a ‘transgendered’ man who claimed at work to be ‘a woman in a man’s body but a lesbian’ and who had to be expelled from the ladies’ restroom because he was propositioning women there,” Dr. Paul McHugh, a member of the President’s Council of Bioethics and chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an e-mail message on the subject. “He saw this as a great injustice in that his behavior was justified in his mind by the idea that the categories he claimed for himself were all ‘official’ and had legal rights attached to them.”

Incidentally, Brazil recently joined the ranks of nations that now require taxpayers to pay for people's sex change operations, declaring it a "constitutional right". That's very generous for a nation that has 31% of its population living below the poverty line... The USA is heading that same direction: earlier this month in Idaho, taxpayers were forced by court order to pay for a prisoner's hormones treatments. I wrote earlier on similar nuttiness here.






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