Activists Continue to Murder Left-Wing Thought
A case study involving my old boss
My former boss went viral for all the wrong reasons this week. Here’s the clip:
What makes this clip high art is the air of “I can’t believe I have to explain these obvious facts to you, you half-sentient monkey person.” And it’s done in service of a flat Earth-quality argument. It’s like saying “For the last time: Babies happen when the daddy pees into the mommy’s belly button, that’s just science, crack a fucking book, you troglodyte.”
Then, on Sunday, Jen Psaki said almost the exact same thing:
What’s probably happening here is that the phrase “no evidence that trans women in sports threaten safety or fairness” is on some list of activist talking points somewhere, and activists have succeeded in getting that talking point on TV at least twice. I can say for sure that the flow of information on Last Week Tonight often goes activist > “researcher” > John > television. And in fact, Mike Pesca may have found the mountain spring upstream of this mighty river of bullshit — this is from a document called “Transgender Athletes: A Research-Informed Fact Sheet” from the University of Kansas’ Center for LGBTQ+ Research & Advocacy.
Three things about this bullet are remarkable:
It claims that an academic paper successfully proved a negative (if true, give those researchers several Nobel Prizes!);
That paper is from 2017, as if no new evidence on this fast-evolving issue could have occurred in the past seven years;
That paper’s authors explicitly said that their paper does not find that transgender athletes have no competitive advantage — their finding was much more narrow. Here’s what they wrote in response to a comment on their work (Mike Pesca found this, too):
The University of Kansas’ “Research-Informed Fact Sheet” is quite a piece of work. Almost all of its links are dead. One of the academic resources it cites is this “fact sheet” from the ACLU, which was the subject of a rim-rattling social media dunk fest a while back, because it included obvious non-facts like “FACT: Trans girls are girls.” and “FACT: Trans people belong on the same teams as other students.” The Kansas document also prominently features a pull quote from a professor who — whoa, coincidence alert! — teaches at the University of Kansas! That professor, Kyle Velte, specializes in research on transgender issues, and I would put the odds that Kyle Velte wrote this fact sheet and cited herself1 as an expert without acknowledging that she is the author of the fact sheet at around 99.999999999999999%.
In short: This is joke scholarship designed to trick people. This is like when the religious right used to dig up some crackpot professor who would argue that evolution can’t be true because kangaroos are too rad, and that Jesus buried all those fossils as a prank. The contention that there is “no evidence” that physiology confers an advantage in sports — despite the fact that there is extensive research2 measuring differences in sports performance between men and women and that this obvious reality underlies the very existence of women’s sports — isn’t an argument so much as a dare. Activists are spouting bullshit and daring you to admit that you know what they’re saying isn’t true.
Which, in a way, is kind of an activist’s job. But it’s not the job of politicians to beclown themselves by pandering to zealots. Nor is it the job of media figures to light their credibility on fire by staring into the camera and claiming that down is up. America’s institutions are suffering a credibility crisis — government, media, and academia are less popular than pubic dandruff. And, not coincidentally, the nation has handed power back to a populist who uses rage against “elites” as his lifeforce. People don’t believe that experts, journalists, and other pointy-headed dweebs deserve their trust, and when said dweebs make arguments that would get you excommunicated from high school debate club, it’s hard to say that they’re wrong.
Consider Covid. The vaccines were a godsend — they prevented an estimated 14.4 million deaths globally in their first year. But vaccination rates stalled due to anti-vaxx sentiment that had an obvious rightward tilt. Responsibility for that lies first, second, and third with people who fear mongered about the vaccine, but the story of Covid isn’t complete without talking about institutions that treated their credibility like Keith Moon treated hotel rooms. It was a problem that the CDC said “masks don’t help” and then “they’re vital” and then “actually it’s more like ‘couldn’t hurt’”. It was a problem that some intern deep in the bowels of the New York Times decided that the idea that a virus that started in Wuhan might have something to do with the Amalgamated Wuhan Virus Corporation is racist, and the bulk of prestige media just said: “Okay.” At a crucial moment, when we needed to trust our institutions, the best a fair-minded person could say was “We can sometimes trust some of our institutions — context dependent, of course, with many exceptions and qualifiers.”
Trump’s resurgence also demonstrated institutional weakness. He hasn’t reformed, he didn’t pay a price for what he did, and if anything, he’s got the focus and zeal of a much younger tyrant. Many in media screamed themselves hoarse trying to warn people about him, but they’ve been tuned out. As I’ve written before, that’s largely because much of what was said about Trump was hyperbole — he’s not Hitler times ten, he’s Hitler times, like, 0.15. Which is still really bad! And the blame for Trump lies with those who enabled him, but it’s also the case that the Rachel Maddows and Alvin Braggs of the world overplayed their hand, which made the “whataboutism” deployed by Trump’s defenders more persuasive than it should have been.
Many activists have falsely asserted that a robust scientific consensus supports their views on trans women in sports and youth gender medicine, and they’re clearly hoping that that lie is repeated by the credulous and/or obsequious. They’ve had some success. But when people with influence repeat those lies to an American public who clearly aren’t buying, they do further damage to our already-degraded institutions. Which plays into the hands of people who are determined to burn our institutions down.
I’m not misgendering anyone — Kyle Velte lists her pronouns as “she/her”.
I choose that Times article to be the link beneath the words “extensive research” because it’s a good starting point. Beginning in the section titled “The Debate Over the Science”, it summarizes the debate and links to several of the most important studies. The TL;DR summary is also contained in the article: “Most scientists, however, view performance differences between elite male and female athletes as near immutable.”
I am a liberal Democrat, but I am increasingly frustrated by the “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” vibe of so many invocations of “the science” in the liberal media, especially as regards trans women in sports.
Everyone has observed that men are almost always significantly stronger, larger, and faster than women. As just one example, last summer my college-age niece stayed with us for a week. She is a college gymnast who also runs track, and so she is very fit. She had a giant suitcase that she could barely lift. But her cab driver, a small man in his sixties, could pick up the suitcase with one hand and sling it into the trunk with no effort at all.
So when the NYTimes et al. tell us we are wrong about phenomena we observe every day all around us, it is maddening.
I mean, it's true that "telling obvious lies about transgender issues and other topics is wrong, because it provides Trump and other populists with ammunition with which they can credibly attack mainstream institutions".
But sometimes I wish more progressives were willing to finish the sentence above before the "because".
Telling lies isn't just PRAGMATICALLY wrong, in that when you get caught telling lies, it compromises your credibility and makes it harder for your preferred candidates to win elections and in turn makes it harder to get your preferred policies in place. It's also just flat out morally wrong. You shouldn't deceive people. You shouldn't tell people things you know to be untrue. You shouldn't tell people things which are TECHNICALLY true, but phrased in such a knowingly misleading way that any reasonable person would come away from them with a misapprehension of how the world works.
Jeff, I understand that you, personally, recognise that telling lies is morally wrong, but you're playing up the pragmatic angle in hopes of persuading your fellow-travellers that telling lies isn't in their best interests.
But I worry that focusing too much on the pragmatic angle might in itself be counterproductive - that some people might come away with the message: "so you're saying we shouldn't tell lies if they'll come back to bite us in the ass, but telling lies that WON'T come back to bite us in the ass is A-OK? Sweet!"