X-ray scans of game controllers and other household items

Scan of the Month features X-ray computed tomography of everyday items such as game controllers, plants, shavers, minifigs, a Gameboy, an instant camera, sneakers and so on.

How did Scan of the Month start?

How Colleges Admissions Might Diversify Without Affirmative Action

Three African American Women Who Have Been Appointed to Provost Positions

Pamela E. Scott-Johnson was named provost and vice president for academic affairs at Spelman College in Atlanta, effective August 1. She has been serving as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Before joining Monmouth, Dr. Scott-Johnson served as the dean of the College of Natural and Social Sciences at California State University, Los Angeles. She spent nearly 15 years on the psychology faculty at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Earlier, she held a tenured faculty post at Spelman College.

“I am thrilled to be returning to my alma mater as a member of the leadership team to help shape and enhance the academic landscape through which women of Spelman develop as change agents,” said Dr. Scott-Johnson. “Spelman has been and will continue to be a special place for women of African descent and how they impact the world. I look forward to guiding additional pathways for advancing faculty, at all levels, and delivering innovation in student success from retention to graduation.”

Dr. Scott-Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Spelman College. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Allyson L. Watson was appointed provost and vice president for academic affairs at Florida A&M University. Dr. Watson, who came to the university in 2019 as dean of the College of Education, has served as interim provost and vice president for academic affairs since December 2022. Before she arrived at Florida A&M University, Dr. Watson served as the interim chief academic officer and dean at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. Earlier, Dr. Watson spent nearly 14 years on the faculty at Northeastern  State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where she held the Eddings Endowed Chair for Urban Education, Outreach & Research.

“Florida A&M University is an institution of academic excellence. I am honored to represent the significance of our history and the academic contributions we have accomplished and be at the helm of such an important time for our future,” Dr. Watson said. “Our future is bright, and I look forward to leading with vision, tenacity, and innovation.”

Dr. Watson holds a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in educational administration, curriculum, and supervision from the University of Oklahoma.

Ana Hunt was named provost of the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College. She has been serving as interim provost and previously was interim chancellor of the college. She joined Pulaski Tech in 2019 as registrar. Earlier, she was registrar at National Park College in Hot Springs, Arkansas. From 2012 to 2016, Dr. Hunt was registrar and enrollment coordinator at Baptist Health College in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“I’m humbled and very grateful that the search committee chose me,” Dr. Hunt said. “I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues to offer the best educational experience in Arkansas.”

Dr. Hunt is a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Monticello. She holds a master’s degree in college student personnel from Arkansas Tech and a doctorate in educational leadership and management from Capella University.

Electric flying car gets FAA approval for test flights

Alef Aeronautics announced that its electric flying car, the "Model A," has received a Special Airworthiness Certification from the Federal Aviation Administration. The car is expected to cost $300,000, and with this approval will start limited testing in the air. From the Insider article:

It's the first such approval for a flight-capable car, according to the startup, which has been backed by the likes of SpaceX.

The World is a Shitting Bird: A Conversation with Emilie Moorhouse

During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.

I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.

***

The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?

Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.

Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?

Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.

Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?

Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.

Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.

Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.

Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.

Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.

Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?

Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today.  Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.

Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?

Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.

Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?

Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.

Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?

Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.

Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.

Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.

Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?

Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!

Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.

Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?

Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?

Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.

Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?

Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.

Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?

Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.

Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.

Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.

Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.

Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?

Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.

***

Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle

Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

The ‘Unseen’ Students in the Affirmative Action Debate

What Is the Higher Education Act? Biden to Try Canceling Student Loans Again.

Student Loan Borrowers React to Supreme Court Decision

The Supreme Court Just Blocked Student Loan Forgiveness. Now What?

In a conclusion to one of the most consequential Supreme Court sessions in many years, the Court released an opinion today on the Biden administration’s proposed plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. After dismissing one case due to lack of standing from the plaintiffs, the Court voted 6-3 to block forgiveness in the second case (giving standing based on the servicer MOHELA).

This decision will have major implications for higher education policy. Here are the things that I will be looking for in the coming months and years:

Restarting student loan repayment was already going to be a nightmare, and this creates additional challenges. The first challenge is the sheer number of borrowers re-entering repayment. Roughly 43 million Americans have federal student debt, and the Biden administration estimated that about 20 million would have their loans completely forgiven by their proposal. I have little confidence that the Department of Education, student loan servicers, and colleges can smoothly handle 23 million borrowers that would have remained, let alone 43 million. Federal Student Aid badly needed additional resources to manage a return to repayment, but Republicans were only willing to provide the funds if it came with a rider blocking its use on debt relief. Since both parties agreed on no riders in last year’s omnibus spending bill, no additional funding was provided.

In an overlooked item due to yesterday’s important decision on college admissions, the Department of Education released information about how they plan to manage the return to repayment. ED plans to give a 90-day grace period for missed payments and is considering future grace periods. Needless to say, Republicans are not happy and may go to court to stop grace periods based on the agreement in this summer’s debt ceiling legislation.

How many borrowers are willing to start making payments? There is going to be a group of people who are livid about having to resume payments after not getting the loan forgiveness they were expecting. I am expecting a substantial group of borrowers to not make any payments until they get to the brink of default—which could take a while. These borrowers may still hold out hope for another forgiveness effort (more on that in the next section) and they may not proactively reach out to servicers to update their information if they have moved since March 2020. A particularly interesting group is the 20 million students who would have received complete forgiveness, as the frustration factor is likely higher among this group than among students who knew they would still have a balance remaining under this plan.

As a note, with income-driven repayment, students at least in theory should be able to start making some payments. But adding an expense back to the monthly budget is painful and income-driven repayment is still complicated to navigate. So there will be challenges even among people who are not as upset about this decision.

How will Democrats respond? The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been pressuring the Biden administration to forgive all student debt and immediately pivot to using the Higher Education Act instead of the HEROES Act. That is likely not happening given today’s court decision. But a few moderate Democrats voted in favor of a Republican-led resolution disapproving of debt forgiveness and ending the repayment pause. The Biden administration will point to its expanded income-driven repayment plan, which could also face legal challenges in light of this decision. Free college and debt forgiveness were key issues in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and they will continue to be key issues in contested Democratic primaries for the next several years.

How will Republicans respond? By the time you read this, there will be plenty of press releases from Republican politicians celebrating the discussion. But there are still concerns about a future administration trying another avenue to forgiveness, particularly through income-driven repayment. There are some thoughtful efforts among Republicans to maintain income-driven repayment while reversing most of the Biden administration’s proposed changes. But Republicans are also seeking to limit borrowing for graduate students, which is something that I have been expecting for years.  

This week’s Supreme Court decisions are likely to influence the direction of American higher education for years to come, and some of the influences are not going to be immediately obvious. But the items discussed above are going to play an outsized role in policy discussions for a good while.

The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’

NYC Pride – 6/25/2023
My name is K. Yang, I’m a former trans rights activist & LGBT non-profit whistleblower. I was just kicked, hit, pushed, mobbed by dozens of people in Washington Square Park. who identify as called me “bitch” & assaulted me. @KnownHeretic @bjportraits pic.twitter.com/4J9AaFXSEf

— Stop Female Erasure / K Yang (@StopXXErasure) June 25, 2023

“Two [men] followed me calling me a “bitch.” They began to explain misogyny to me. I was called a “cis bitch” by a [man] who claims to be a [woman]. Another begins the gang assault by hitting me, yet another kicks me from behind. #CisIsASlur“

Many of you have likely observed the endless stream of fear-mongering propaganda force-fed to us by mainstream media outlets, politicians, and NGOs, insisting “attacks” against the  “2SLGBTQ+ community” are on the rise. In the month leading up to Pride, these claims have been amplified in what has become an ongoing war against reality.

On June 6, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national “state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States… following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”

What they are referencing is not, in fact, any actual “assault” — legislative or otherwise — but a series of bills passed in various red states preventing youth from being given harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on account of a declared “trans” identity.

What has happened is that states like Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and Kentucky (among others) have passed laws preventing the medical transition of kids. This legislation protects minors from making adult-influenced decisions that cause irreparable damage, rendering youth sterile before they have even had a chance to explore intimate relationships and their sexualities. The long term effects of these drugs are both known and unknown, leading to bone loss, increased risk of cancer, and all sorts of other obvious and perhaps less obvious problems related to interference in the natural, healthy development of human bodies. We don’t have enough long term research on this kind of experimentation to know the extent of the damage, but we do know there is damage.

The tragic story of Jazz Jennings, whose mother thrust him into the spotlight as a “trans child,” and who has now undergone four “sex reassignment” surgeries, all of which have resulted in painful complications, should have acted as a warning. Today, the 22-year-old struggles with eating disorders and depression, and will likely never experience sexual pleasure or be able to have children.

You cannot simply stop puberty, feed a developing child or teen hormones that increase cancer risk and result in a host of other side-effects in adults, and assume no harmful repercussions for youth. Yet, that’s what these NGOs insist, claiming these treatments are “life-saving” and medically necessary, and that laws limiting these interventions constitute an “assault” on “LGBTQ+ people.”

The response to this legislation has been hyperbolic, to say the least, suggesting that kids feeling confused or troubled by their changing bodies and entry into adulthood flee their hometowns in search of states that will allow these interventions.

An HRC guidebook directs youth in their decision to leave their homes for “friendly states” that allow minors to alter their IDs and bodies, no questions asked, and encourage them to find their “chosen families,” described as “people who are in your life, not because of biological ties, but for love and support, to celebrate you and help you no matter what.”

This kind of rhetoric is common to trans activists, who often recommend youth identifying as trans abandon their “non-supportive” families (labelled “abusive” for failing to encourage transition) for a “chosen family,” who support and validate their transition. “Come talk to me about your secrets — your parents don’t really love or understand you, but I do” should be treated as a red flag of epic proportions, but within trans activism is normalized.

Moreover, the irony of describing a “dizzying patchwork of discriminatory state laws that have created increasingly hostile and dangerous environments for LGBTQ+ people” becomes obviously rich when we look at how women are treated by these groups. In the past five odd years, women and girls have not only lost the right to women-only spaces — including change rooms, shelters, and prisons — and lost the right to compete on fair grounds, among females, in sport, but have lost the right to speak out about this. Women who have challenged gender identity legislation and policy have been fired, assaulted, censored, threatened, blackballed, ostracized, deplatformed, and banned from social media.

And all this has been perpetrated against women with impunity while being gaslit into oblivion by public officials, the media, institutions, corporations, progressives, activists, NGOs, and human rights organizations. We are told over and over again that it is not women, but the “LGBTQ community” who are under attack and in dire need of our support.

Nonetheless, yesterday, GLAAD, a non-profit originally founded to fight for gay rights (recently expanded to advocate the LGBTQ cultural revolution) published an open letter calling on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to “Stop the flow of anti-trans hate and malicious disinformation about trans healthcare.” Signed by a dizzying number of celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Haley Bieber, Elliot (nee Ellen) Page, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the letter claims “Dangerous posts (both content and ads) created and circulated by high-follower anti-LGBTQ hate accounts targeting transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people are thriving across your platforms, directly resulting in terrifying real-life harm.

The letter labels “misgendering and deadnaming” as “hate speech,” claiming that correctly sexing individuals or daring to acknowledge a name change is “utilized to bully and harass prominent public figures while simultaneously expressing hatred and contempt for trans people and non-binary people in general.”

By framing pushback against and discussion of the harms of transing kids as “disinformation and hate,” and claiming refusal to call men women as “dangerous,” GLAAD is able to demand censorship, insisting these social media companies “urgently take action to protect trans and LGBTQ users on your platforms (including protecting us from over-enforcement and censorship).”

It is all very urgent. An emergency. People are dying because of true statements and free speech. Not any real people, but certainly people in our imaginations. Either way, we are not used to being challenged and it is triggering.

On June 1, Marci Ien, minister for women and gender equality and youth, issued a statement to mark the start of what the Canadian government has rebranded as “Pride Season,” saying:

“While it is important that we take the opportunity to recognize the hard-earned victories of the Pride movement, we must continue pushing back on the sharp rise in anti-trans hate and anti-2SLGBTQI+ legislation, protests at drag events, the banning of educational books in schools, and calls against raising the Pride flag.”

She followed this statement with the announcement that the Liberal government would be “moving forward with the development of a new Action Plan to Combat Hate – that will address hate faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities and, specifically, hate faced by trans people.”

Where is the Canadian government’s action plan to address the silencing, marginalization, and harassment of women who speak up about their sex-based rights and about biological reality? Where is our “feminist” Prime Minister on women’s rights and the actual assaults perpetrated against female inmates by the violent male criminals he has allowed to be transferred to female prisons?

Nowhere.

Justin Trudeau’s government didn’t stop with an action plan. On June 5, Ien announced that the government would be pledging $1.5million in “emergency funding to ensure Pride festivals stay safe across Canada.”

Safe from what? Where is the emergency?

Half of the population are losing their rights without any genuine public consultation or debate, and the government leaps to action, pouring money into a trend that is already the most well-funded marketing campaign I have seen in my life.

Today, Pride is a corporate-sponsored event that is celebrated as though it is the national religion. Dissent is unacceptable, but even if it were allowed, who is attacking Pride-goers? Nothing of the sort has been reported, nor was anything of the sort even threatened. What I did see was a lone woman mobbed by deranged, violent Pride fanatics, enraged that anyone would dare challenge their faith.

I would, frankly, never attend one of these things out of fear of being assaulted or worse, so clearly Yang is braver than I. We should all be enraged at the lack of support for women and women’s voices from those in power, who dare lie to our faces while we suffer the consequences.

The post The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’ appeared first on Feminist Current.

Toward a Feminist View of Harm

The Correct Way to Argue with Richard Hanania

Attention conservation notice 1 – a long read about a simple idea. When reading trolls, focus on the anodyne-seeming starting assumptions rather than the obnoxious conclusions.

Attention conservation notice 2 – This is also available via my Substack newsletter, Programmable Mutter. I’ll still be writing on CT, but I have a book with Abe Newman coming out in a few months, so that there will be a lot of self-promotion and stuff that doesn’t fit as well with the CT ethos. And do pre-order the book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, if you think it sounds good! We’ve gotten some great blurbs from early readers including Kim Stanley Robinson, Francis Spufford, Margaret O’Mara, Steven Berlin Johnson, Helen Thompson, Chris Miller, and my mother (the last is particularly glowing, but sadly not likely to appear on the back). Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.

I’ve often had occasion to turn to Daniel Davies’ classic advice on “the correct way to argue with Milton Friedman” over the two decades since I’ve read it. The best white hat hacker is a reformed black hat hacker, and Dan (dsquared) knows both the offense and defense sides of trolling.

Dan (back in 2004!):

I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept. A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.

In the same friendly spirit, I’ll note that Jonathan Katz flounders a bit in his rebuttal of Richard Hanania. None of this is to blame Katz – Hanania is not only building on his knowledge of social science (he has a Ph.D.), but some truly formidable trolling techniques. Years ago, I upset Jonathan Chait by suggesting he was a highly talented troll of the second magnitude, if a bit crude in technique. Hanania is at an altogether different level. He’s not blessed with Friedman’s benign avuncularity, but he is as close to masterclass level as we are likely to get in this fallen world.

Hanania wants people to buy into a notion of “enlightened centrism,” where the space of reasoned debate would stretch from the left (Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Noah Smith, Jonathan Chait) through Andrew Sullivan and company to people on the right like Steven Sailer. Now, you might ask what an outright racist like Steve Sailer is doing on this list. You might even suspect that one of the rationales for constructing the list in the first place was to somehow shoehorn him into the space of legitimate debate. But to figure out how Hanania is trying to do this, you need to poke hard at the anodyne seeming assumptions, rather than be distracted by the explicitly galling conclusions.

That is where Katz stumbles. He gets upset at what Hanania says about the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action as the origin of wokeness, saying that Hanania “seems to think that the Civil Rights Act caused the civil rights movement, as opposed to the other way around,” tracing it all back to Barry Goldwater. Katz then remarks on Hanania’s claim in a podcast that “Government literally created race in America. Like not blacks and whites, but like basically everyone else — and Native Americans — basically everyone else was basically grouped according to the ways, you know, the federal bureaucracy was doing things.” Katz has some ripe prognostications about what Hanania hopes will happen if government got out of the way.

But Hanania isn’t relying on the authority of Barry Goldwater. He’s standing on the shoulders of academic research. In some cases – including much of the stuff that Katz focuses his fire on – left-leaning academic research. Even before I did a Google search, I surmised that Hanania’s civil rights arguments riffed on Frank Dobbins’ eminently respectable work of social science, Inventing Equal Opportunity. I don’t know which academics he’s invoking on the U.S. Census and the construction of categories such as Hispanic: there are just so many to choose from, ranging from moderates through liberals to fervently lefty.

You could go after the details of Hanania’s social science claims if you really wanted – I would be startled if there weren’t selective misreadings. It is hard to claim on the one hand that the state creates the structures of race, and on the other that structural racism is a gussied up conspiracy theory, without some fancy rhetorical footwork to work around the gaping logical crevasses. Getting involved in that kind of debate seems to me to be a waste of time. But disputing the broadest version of the case – that key aspects of equal opportunity, civil rights and ethnic categories emerged from modern politics and battles in the administrative state – seems even worse. The bull of Left Critique thunders towards the matador, who twitches his cape to one side, so that the poor beast careens into the side of the ring, and then staggers back with crossed eyes and mild concussion, raring for another go that will have the same unfortunate result, or worse.

More succinctly, you don’t want to be the bull in a fight that is rigged in favor of the bullfighter. Instead, as per dsquared, you want to figure out what is wrong with the terms of the fight and press back hard against them.

As best as I can make it out, Hanania’s “let us assume” moment comes in the middle of a series of apparently non-controversial claims about what “Enlightened Centrists” believe. In context, they initially appear to be things that any reasonable person would agree to, or not think unreasonable. I think most readers won’t even notice them, let alone the nasty stuff that is hiding beneath. Here’s what Hanania says:

Enlightened Centrists take what Bryan Caplan calls “Big Facts” seriously. They are kept in mind as new information about the world is brought to light. Some examples of Big Facts that ECs rely on are: the heritability of traits; the paradox of voting; the information problem inherent in central planning; the broken windows fallacy; Trivers’ theory of self-deception; the existence of cognitive biases; comparative advantage; the explanatory power of IQ; the efficient market hypothesis; and the elephant in the brain. New theories or ideas should be met with more skepticism if they contradict or are in tension with Big Facts that have been well established. ECs of different Level 3 ideologies will place more emphasis on certain Big Facts over others, though some, like the idea of historical progress, they all share.

Now, any sentence that non-ironically connects “Bryan Caplan” to “Big Facts” is a big fat warning sign. Hanania links to a Caplan essay that starts explaining what “Big Facts” are by citing Caplan’s own book attacking democracy. Many key claims in this book are less facts than factitious (my co-authors and I have written about this at some length). They suggest pervasive cognitive bias (in particular, bias against free market economists) undermines the case for regular democracy, so that we should go for markets instead, or perhaps give more votes to well educated people (who are, after all more likely to recognize that economists are right).

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. How exactly is Hanania using Big Factiness and for what purpose? He wants to define Enlightened Centrism so that it favors anti-democratic libertarianism, and brings “racial realists” like Steve Sailer into the conversation.

The apparently anodyne factual claims listed by Hanania systematically shift the terms of debate to undermine democracy and an economic role for the state, and instead promote markets and the belief that persistent inequalities result from some racial groups being systematically more stupid than others. To see this, it’s likely helpful to return to the passage in question, this time with the ideological translation function turned on. These translations are ideologically blunt, and perhaps tendentious, but I think they are pretty well on the mark.

Facts that ECs rely on are: the heritability of traits intelligence is racially inherited; the paradox of voting democracy doesn’t work; the information problem inherent in central planning socialism doesn’t work either; the broken windows fallacy Keynesianism – guess what?– it just doesn’t work; Trivers’ theory of self-deception citizens fool themselves with flattering just-so stories; the existence of cognitive biases let me tell you how citizens are biased; comparative advantage markets are teh awesome; the explanatory power of IQ have I mentioned race and intelligence already? Let me mention it again; the efficient market hypothesis markets are even awesomer than I just said a moment ago; and the elephant in the brain can I haz even more citizen cognitive bias?

As per the dsquared rule, if you stipulate to these beliefs, you’ve given the game away before it’s even begun. You have accepted that it is reasonable to believe that most people are biased fools, that democracy is inherently inferior to markets, and that differences in life outcomes for black people can largely be attributed to distribution of the genes for intelligence. Charge at the matador, if you want, but good luck to you! You’ll need it.

Or instead, as per dsquared’s advice, when you are dealing with a genuinely exceptional troll like Hanania, do not give away the underlying assumptions. Don’t be distracted by the red cape. Wedge your horns beneath the seemingly reasonable claims that are intended to tilt debate, lift those claims up, toss ‘em in the air and then gore.

This is getting too long already, and I have a life, so I am not going to do the full bullfighter-toss. Instead, at the bottom of this post, I re-order Hanania’s claims so that the underlying assumptions come out more clearly, linking to resources that provide counter-evidence at length. Read if you want, but I’m providing this mostly as a source I can come back to later, or cite as needs be in desultory spats on social media. Notably, the various prebuttals come from co-authors, co-authors plus me, or, in one case, someone who I was interviewing. You can take this commonality (very plausibly) as evidence of my own biases, and enthusiasm to work with people who share them. But even if you think this, they still provide evidence that Hanania’s purported Big Facts are drenched with their own ideology, and in many cases have been bitterly debated for decades. Which is another way of saying that they aren’t established facts at all.

And some of the facts are really not like the others. It might seem weird – if you aren’t read into debates among particular kinds of libertarians – to see that stuff about IQ and heritability in there. What work exactly is this rather jarring set of claims doing for the concept of Enlightened Centrism,? Do identified left-leaning Enlightened Centrists like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias “rely on” these facts, as Hanania seems to suggest they do?

Readers – they do not. Hanania seemingly wants to reconstruct policy and intellectual debate around a center in which questions of race and IQ are once more legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion. Back in the 1990s (a time that Hanania is nostalgic for), soi-disant centrists such as Andrew Sullivan could devote entire special issues of the New Republic to the urgent debate over whether black people were, in fact, stupider than white people. Big Scientific Facts Said That It Was So! Now, that brand of intellectual inquiry has fallen into disrepute. Hanania, apparently yearns for it to come back. That, presumably, is why those claims about heritability and IQ are in there, and why Steve Sailer makes the cut.

As it happens, Matt was one of the “CT mates” cited in the 2004 dsquared post that was excerpted right at the beginning of this post. I’ve had disagreements with Matt since, on other stuff, but I am quite sure that both he and Ezra are bitterly opposed to the whole race and IQ project that Hanania wants to relegitimize. I can’t imagine that they welcome being placed on a spectrum of reasonable thought that lumps them together with racist creeps like Steven Sailer. But I can imagine why Hanania wants so to lump them – it provides a patina of legitimacy for opinions that have rightly been delegitimated, but that Hanania wants to bring back into debate.

So to see what Hanania is up to, it’s more useful not to be distracted by the provocative and outrageous. Instead, you want to look very closely at what seems superficially reasonable, seems to be the starting point for debate and ask: is there something wrong with these premises? In this case, the answer, quite emphatically, is yes.

Still, you (for values of ‘you’ that really mean ‘I’) don’t want to get dragged in further unless you absolutely have to. As Noah Smith, another of Hanania’s involuntary inductees into the Enlightened Centrist Hall of Fame said, “”Race and IQ” racism is a DDOS attack” on the time and attention of anti-racists. This naturally provoked Hanania to pop up in replies with a sarcastic rejoinder. When I wrote that Vox article I had to spend weeks dealing with Jordan Peterson acolytes popping up to inform me of the Established Scientific Facts about race and IQ. I really don’t want to be back there again. So take this post as an attack on premises, and a statement of principles, rather than the slightest hint at a desire to get stuck back into discussion on race-IQ and similar. Very possibly (he says after 3,000+ words) the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all.

MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION OF PURPORTED “BIG FACTS” BELOW

Markets are Awesome I: the information problem inherent in central planning (socialism doesn’t work). Indeed, central planning doesn’t work. This does not provide, however, a warrant for unleashing free market wildness. Instead, it suggests that we need social democracy, with all its messiness. Why so? Read on.

Markets are Awesome II: the efficient market hypothesis Well, up to a point Lord Copper. The unfortunate fact is that the computational critique of state planners’ information problems also bollocks up the standard efficient market claims. At greater length: “allowing non-convexity messes up the markets-are-always-optimal theorems of neo-classical/bourgeois economics, too. (This illustrates Stiglitz’s contention that if the neo-classicals were right about how capitalism works, Kantorovich-style socialism would have been perfectly viable.)” At greater length again: “Bowles and Gintis: “The basic problem with the Walrasian model in this respect is that it is essentially about allocations and only tangentially about markets — as one of us (Bowles) learned when he noticed that the graduate microeconomics course that he taught at Harvard was easily repackaged as ‘The Theory of Economic Planning’ at the University of Havana in 1969.” And if markets are imperfect, and so too the state and democracy, then we sometimes need to set them against each other, as recommended by social democracy. For elaboration of how this applies to machine learning too, see this week’s Economist.

Markets are Awesome III: The “broken windows” fallacy (Keynesianism doesn’t work). Under other reasonable assumptions, the “broken windows fallacy” is itself fallacious and misleading.

Markets are Awesome IV: Comparative Advantage. This is indeed a very important idea, but as per Dani Rodrik, “Our theories — such as the theory of value or the theory of comparative advantage — are just scaffoldings, which need a lot of context-specific detail to become usable. Too often economists debate a policy question as if one or the other theory has to be universally correct. Is the Keynesian or the Classical model right? In fact, which model works better depends on setting and context. Only empirical diagnostics can help us know which works better at any given time — and that is more of a craft than a science, certainly when it is done in real time. If we economists understood this, it would make us more humble, less dogmatic, and more syncretic.” I don’t imagine that this flavor of humility is what is being called for in Hanania’s piece

Democracy is Unworkable I: Trivers’ theory of self-deception (citizens tell themselves flattering just-so-stories). This is only half of the cognitive psychology story. People bullshit themselves all the time, but they also have an evolved capacity to detect bullshit in others. The implication is that group reasoning (under the right circumstances) can consistently produce better results than individual ratiocination, with results for democracy described below.

Democracy is Unworkable II and III: The existence of cognitive biases/the elephant in the brain (have I mentioned cognitive bias yet). Really, these are both slight restatements of Democracy is Unworkable I (the “elephant in the brain” refers to Simler and Hanson’s book of the same name). Both Caplan and Jason Brennan have written books claiming that the pervasiveness of cognitive bias undermines the case for democracy. I’ve already mentioned the pop version of the counterargument. Here’s the academic statement of what this plausibly means for democratic theory. The Simler and Hanson book is clearly aware of the key sources for these counterarguments (one of them is mentioned in a footnote) but doesn’t deign to engage with them.

Democracy is Unworkable IV: The Paradox of Voting (democracy doesn’t work). The problem with this paradox is that it relies on the assumption that voters are rational agents. This entire genre of argument is based in rational choice, which means that it does not sit well with Democracy Is Unworkable claims I, II and III. This incompatibility of ideologically attractive critiques leads a variety of anti-democrats to hop furiously from one foot to another, all the while making special claims to stave off any mean-spirited suggestion that there is lots of irrational behavior in markets too. The resulting intellectual acrobatics are quite impressive in one sense; not at all in another.

Race and IQ I: The heritability of traits (intelligence is racially inherited). Actually, heritability does not mean what most people thinks it means. Moreover, technical meaning blows up many of the standard ‘science proves my racism’ arguments that are unfortunately so common on the Internets.

Race and IQ II: the explanatory power of IQ (IQ differences across race are real). There is excellent reason to believe that IQ has little explanatory power – it is a statistical cluster rather than a single and causally consequential underlying trait. Put more succinctly, the notion that we are able to measure general intelligence is based on a “statistical myth.” Again, this has painful implications for the Internet Libertarian Race-IQ Science Complex.

There’s lots more that could be said, but I think that’s enough to drive the point home, and it’s anyway as much as I’m willing to write on this topic. Finis.

What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

We are now a year removed from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In the flurry of protests that followed the late June 2022 decision, LGBTQ-identified persons and organizations paid a surprising amount of attention to the Court’s decision. The rainbow flag was a mainstay at Dobbs protests. Even a shallow dive into written backlash against the Court’s decision revealed that LGBT people were concerned about Dobbs at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships were, despite the latter’s lopsided contribution to actual abortion numbers. The most obvious reason for the former’s concern was Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference, in his concurring opinion, to reconsidering other “substantive due process precedents,” like those in the Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.

But some share of the political angst no doubt comes from the fact that there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).

Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.

This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.

The prospect of motherhood can no doubt undermine one’s sense of self-rule over one’s own body. This is particularly the case if you understand your body as “belonging” to you, and that you rule over it by making choices for it. You can permanently alter it, be harmed by it, or be at odds with it. It’s not surprising that a pregnancy can scare people, because—in the progressive worldview—you have the right not to be pregnant, just like you have the right to self-identify as you wish. It’s a cousin to asserting you have the right to body modification in service to your own self-definition. (And why should being a minor prevent such rights?) Dobbs appears to undermine all this; its three dissenting justices claim that “‘there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter’—especially relating to ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘family life.’”

As previous legally effective arguments about fixed, stable sexual orientations give way to malleable sexual and gender self-identities, it’s tempting to wonder whether we’re not simply speaking about different worldviews—as Hunter’s terminology maintained—but alternative religious systems. LGBTQ, after all, is a big-tent system that contains its own rituals, creedal commitments, forms of worship, sacred items and places, a liturgy, a calendar with holy days, appropriate confessions, salvation accounts, martyrs, moral codes, and magisterial representatives. Religious belonging commonly begins with self-identification. Just as not all Christians practice their faith, so too not all self-identified LGBTQ persons demonstrate behaviors long associated with the movement. And just as there are many moral questions that divide Christians, so too is this the case in the LGBTQ world. But the emotional depth of disagreement here suggests core religious belief systems are clashing.

Language and authority structures are no less pivotal in the LGBTQ world than they are in our own faith. British social theorist Anthony Giddens—a leading public intellectual in England and one of the more famous sociologists alive today—articulated the importance of sealing new ideas with new words in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy: “Once there is a new terminology for understanding sexuality, ideas, concepts, and theories couched in these terms seep into social life itself, and help reorder it.” This is why Hunter described culture (in his book To Change the World) as the power of legitimate naming. With regularity we now find ourselves wrestling with our opponents over basic terms. But sometimes even new religious movements get ahead of themselves, bungling their systematic ontology. As one Wall Street Journal columnist noted recently,

Those protesting the (Dobbs) ruling have a particular challenge in that there is now some disagreement among themselves about what exactly they are advocating and for whom. The left has been engaged in a confusing internal debate about what a woman is.

Indeed, this may prove to be a bridge too far. The recent flare-up involving Bud Light and Target Corporation, and the mystifying battle over whether drag queens should read stories to other people’s children, suggest that many people of any and no faith are fed up with the proselytizing. There’s plenty of religious tolerance in libertarian America—including among Christians—but little interest in revolutionary ideas about “queering” the gender binary. Sexual difference is not a problem requiring a solution. The Human Rights Campaign, as close to “headquarters” as it gets, should have seen this coming. Instead, it declared an LGBTQ “state of emergency” in the United States, akin to a plea for religious tolerance. But when parents’ rights are openly undermined by their efforts, the HRC should not be surprised when people of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.

Christians have a distinctive anthropology of the human person and a better, happier long-term vision for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to articulate it. But the time for making explicit what we believe—the true, the good, and the beautiful—is now. While it remains to be seen how our post-Roe society will look and how the present cultural conflict will play out in courts, legislatures, and around kitchen tables, a few things are certain. Subtlety won’t cut it. Gradualism won’t do. Charity—courtesy, kindness, and love—is always in good form. But don’t think that being deferential or nice will evangelize effectively or preserve our longstanding vision of the human person and its design, purposes, and ends from its ideological challengers. To paraphrase one old saint’s remarks about laws concerning marriage and education, it is in these two areas that Christians must stand firm and fight with toughness and fairness, and—if I may add a category—good judgment. A world, and not simply one country, is at stake.

Video Interview: Introducing Academic Visitor Prof Antonio Diéguez Lucena

An interview with Prof Antonio Diéguez Lucena, professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Málaga, Spain. Here he speaks of his research into the philosophy of biology and technology.

Guest Post — Why Are UK Libraries Signing a Springer-Nature Deal They Don’t Seem to Like?

Libraries continue to sign Transformative Agreements while becoming increasingly convinced that they do not represent the desired transformation. Peter Barr explains why this happens.

The post Guest Post — Why Are UK Libraries Signing a Springer-Nature Deal They Don’t Seem to Like? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

John the Baptist Was a Witness for Life and a Martyr for Marriage

It is June, and Pride has flooded the world. Pride is on display in the streets, in stores, in schools, and even at the White House. All of the great and the good (or at least the wealthy, famous, and powerful) are affirming the triumph of the sexual revolution, and some even applaud transgender toddlers and sadomasochism on parade. Affirmation is increasingly mandatory; the devotees of Pride are literally taking away lunch money from low-income children because their Christian school dissents from some aspects of the rainbow creed.

Christians should not be surprised when many of the rich and powerful mock God and scorn His people, and boast of indulging their every material desire and sexual whim. We have been warned about the world and its rulers. But this month also offers us encouragement to resist the depredations of the sexual revolution. June 24th is this weekend, and it is not only the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, but also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.

Before he was even born, John testified to the sanctity of all unborn human life. The sexual revolution requires abortion as a backstop against the consequences of the promiscuity it promotes, but John shows why the personhood of humans in utero cannot be denied without embracing grave heresy about Christ’s nature.

John’s ministry testifying to Jesus began before either was born. According to Luke’s account:

when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

The unborn John’s recognition of the unborn Jesus was a miracle that demonstrates the value of human life in the womb in several ways. First, the passage shows that the fetal John the Baptist and the embryonic Jesus were human persons congruous with their adult selves, and that both were already participating in their divine missions.

Second, the recognition of Jesus as Lord early in Mary’s pregnancy testifies to His divinity even as He grew within Mary’s womb. This divinity at conception is why Christians honor Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. This title is affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformed Protestant teaching, and is attested to by many ancient sources, such as Ambrose of Milan’s great Advent hymn, “Veni Redemptor Gentium” (“Savior of the Nations, Come”), which in verses 3 and 4 declares both Jesus’ full divinity and full humanity in the womb.

Third, this episode demonstrates the full humanity of all unborn persons. To claim that the unborn are not fully human is necessarily to claim that Jesus was not fully human while in Mary’s womb. But the Bible insists that His humanity was like ours in every way but sin. Denying the full humanity of the unborn therefore requires either also denying the full divinity of the unborn Jesus (thereby rejecting the reason for the unborn John’s joy and the teaching of the ancient church) or asserting that Jesus’ full divinity was present without His full humanity. Either is an enormous heresy.

Just as the beginning of John’s life shows us the value of unborn human life, the end of John’s life shows us the importance of marriage. At the end of his life John sacrificed himself to bear witness to the inviolability of marriage. As recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, “Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife,” because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” John was then executed at the request of Herodias, after Herod promised a favor to her daughter.

John could have kept quiet on this matter, contenting himself with calls to repentance that did not single out the powerful by name. He could have said that Herod’s sexual conduct was not actually a serious sin worth worrying about, that God doesn’t really care about what people do in the bedroom. He could have chosen to recant in the hope of saving himself after he was imprisoned. But there is no indication that John wavered or doubted his declaration that Herod was wrong to take his brother’s wife for himself.

John took his stand for marriage and fidelity, and he held to this position to his death. And Jesus allowed this martyrdom. Jesus could have told John to ease up in condemning Herod’s sexual sin—that it was not that bad, or even not sinful at all. But Jesus did not do this. Rather, His teachings contain many hard words for us, including condemnations of the sins celebrated by Pride. Jesus calls us in the condition he finds us, but He also calls us to repent of our sins, including sexual ones.

The lurid details of John’s death highlight how sin grows when indulged. Herod did not really want to execute John, but he found himself so entangled by his sins of lust and pride that he felt compelled to add evil to evil by ordering John’s death. And so John the Baptist, the wilderness ascetic whom Jesus declared to be the greatest man born of woman, died as a martyr for marriage.

This is a reminder of how seriously Christianity takes marriage and sexuality. The union of husband and wife is both a symbol of Christ and the church, and the vocation that most of us are called to. Marriage is the basis of civilization and culture in this world, and a sign of our union with God in the world to come.

This should encourage us as we are beset by the celebrants of Pride. The Christian path is the way of Christ, which is almost always contrary to the habits and desires that prevail in our culture. This often means worldly suffering, rather than worldly celebration. But we know that the defense of life, marriage, and chastity is a service to God, and He will ensure that our labor is not in vain.

Affirmative Action Shaped Their Lives. Now, They Reckon With Its Legacy.

Authors of ‘And Tango Makes Three’ Sue Over Florida Law Driving Book Bans

A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.

Realists Unite! New Documentary on Gender-Affirming Care Presents “Pro-Reality” Position in Response to Trans Ideology

The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.

The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.

Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.

Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.

How has the response been to the film thus far?

Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.

JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.

How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?

VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.

JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?

VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.

JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.

What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?

VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”

Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.

The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.

I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.

JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?

VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).

JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.

Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.

But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.

Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?

As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.

How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?

VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.

But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.

This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.

JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.

You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?

VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!

And ask commonsense humanistic questions:

– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?

JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!