A new peer-reviewed paper is making normie, which is to say not fully woke, academics to say “Yikes!”. The existence of this paper, as you’ll see, adds another shovelful of evidence on the steaming pile of proof that peer review is deader that a congresscreature’s reasoning power.
We’re interested in two things: the paper itself, and the response of the normie academics.
The paper is “Deconstructing sex: Strategies for undoing binary thinking in neuroendocrinology and behavior” by Megan G. Massa, Krisha Aghi and M.J. Hill in Hormones and Behavior.
I looked up the authors, which I hadn’t seen anybody else do. Megan G Massa might be a female, though the visual evidence is unclear; Massa uses the pronoun “they”, and is therefore at least a very confused person. Massa says the paper is part of the “struggle for liberation” (from Reality). Krisha Aghi is a man pretending to be a woman. MJ Hill might also be a woman, but again you can’t tell with certainty from the pictures; Hill’s research “explores [the] formation of categories and related systems, connecting mundane interactional practices to wide-reaching social systems of power and oppression.”
Clearly, something, or rather many things, has gone wrong with the thinking of this trio. Which if you aren’t convinced already, then I ask you to slowly read the paper title again. The paper announces its raw political advocacy. It is not science. So not only are the mental machinations of this trio suspect, so are those of the reviewers and journal editor.
The opening sentence of the paper begins with a lie: “Neuroendocrinologists have long known that ‘sex’ is a specious category.” No, neuroendocrinologists have never “known” this; indeed, they know the opposite. But now they are asked to lie, being bullied into the lie by a form of academic gaslighting.
The authors themselves acknowledge the lie in the opening sentence of the second paragraph: “While its shortcomings are well-established, ‘sex’ remains deeply entrenched in our field.” Which is it? Sex is a real entrenched category or a “known” specious one? Whichever, because they argue “how reliance on gross ‘sex’ categories damages scientific knowledge and leads to harm of marginalized communities”.
The phrase, or really word, marginalized communities, is one of those academic abortions that routinely ooze out of the ivory tower and infect the populace. There are no such things as “marginalized communities”. There are, though, people with perverse hobbies who grow weary of being told their behavior is gross. They would make all admonitions illegal.
The word itself, and this is the important point, is the natural deduction from the egalitarian premise. That is, the false premise that all people, and therefore all behaviors, are equal. Almost everybody in the West believes in the egalitarian premise.
There is little point in fisking the paper, because it based on a lie, and an obvious lie. With sections beginning with titles like “Questioning ‘sex’ as a biological variable”, it’s clear that nothing in it is of any scientific value.
It is, instead, a political document. Reflecting, as regular readers know, the transition of science into The Science: i.e., yet another branch of politics and advocacy. Centuries of science are being jettisoned and transformed into The Science. I could not state it better than the authors themselves in their Conclusion:
To be clear: this is a call-to-arms. This is not a how-to or a roadmap.
They go on: “we believe that the behavioral neuroendocrinology community is well-positioned to implement this deconstructionist approach in lieu of binary sex framework”.
For the woke, all false groupings are “communities.” Deconstruct, too, is a beautiful word, saying exactly what it means, a dismantling devastating destruction of truth.
Now let’s look at some shocked academics. We, my friends, are not shocked, are we? We have seen this coming, you and I, for at least the last decade. But normie academics pretend—and they are pretending, or at least being dishonest with themselves—that this paper is some shocking new foray. But have not their universities, with great gusto, being DIEing, and DIEing has hard as possible these last many years? Every large, and most small, institution has sacrificed Truth in the mania for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. Further, all academics at these institutions know this, and if they saw anything wrong with it, as they damned well should have, they kept their mouths shut.
They are not paying the price for their silence.
One lady, boasting a Harvard PhD, calls this paper “Alarming.” Many of those answering her are fellow academics, also pretending to be shocked.
Others see what this paper means for the academy. One fellow says “The universities have fallen. The gov’t funding sources have fallen. The popular science magazines have fallen”.
All true. But it happened a long while ago. It won’t be fixed, either. Let me prove to you why. Suggest to any of these academics that they stand up in their next departmental meeting and say that the authors of today’s paper are crazy, that sex is indeed binary, that “gender” is a woke construction, that gender dysphoria is a form of madness.
Maybe a few will be so brave. But don’t you bet on it. Academics won’t say these things, or anything like them. Not out loud. They value their own skins too highly.
And that is why the terrible trip’s calls to arms will clear the battlefield.
Academia is lost. Science is broken.
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As you've written, cowardice allows this poison to spread.
In 2020, during the height of the Floyd Excitement, I read Rod Dreher's blog religiously (forgive me). One of the commenters proudly announced that he was a very famous academic ("you've all heard of me...") and was appalled at the lies. But, his plan was not to fight for truth but to keep his head down, attend DIE-mandated sessions, and grind it out until retirement a few years over the horizon. A man for all seasons, this guy ain't.
My theory:
When a child receives a trophy as a reward for nothing, when a child is protected (well into adulthood) from every single sharp edge life has to offer, when a child's behavior in all private and public environments is never bound to any acceptable social standard, when a child's decisions, no matter how egregious, are praised and rewarded, when the parents primary childrearing strategy is to become their child's best friend, when a child's parents prevent anybody from saying anything about their child except that which is presented in the most fawning terms, that child learns never learns what reality is.
"Woke" is the result of a generation of children who were raised like this and they live life inside a bubble of narcissism. They believe that throwing a tantrum is the only path to solving a problem because that is all they know. This child believes that if they think it, then it is so. This child is now the "Karen", the "HR Dept", the inventor of "Hate Speech", the "Fact Checker" on PravdaBook, the HOA member, and they author papers like this.
I really feel sorry for them. They never had a chance as their parents doomed them to this life. No matter how many birthdays they tick off, they will always be 5 years old and playing dress-up and make-believe and absolutely baffled when it isn't so. They will always demand that society provide them with the parental affirmation that is the keystone of their ego, and react with anger and violence when they don't get it. They have constructed a fantasy world to live in and they demand we affirm, validate, support, and respect it. They are absolutely incapable of even considering, much less understanding, any viewpoint that deviates from their constructed fantasy.
Woke is a fad (like 1980's hairstyles) and it will pass. However, the wreckage left in it's wake will be large as these poor kids won't be able to just go a barber. They will be totally lost.
Having said that, they really are a bunch of idiots!!!