A short while ago, I critiqued a New York Times op-ed by child psychiatrist Jack Turban explaining how he talks parents into transitioning their children (The Story the Industry Tells: Jack Turban’s Three Element Pitch). I noted that the argument fails right out of the gate. Today I share another example of an argument failing right out of the gate, Dhamala et al’s “Functional brain networks are associated with both sex and gender in children,” published this month in Science.
“Over the last two decades, the interactions between sex, neurobiology, and behavior have been extensively researched. However, these studies often report contradictory findings and fail to replicate. The growing literature on sex differences and the lack of reproducibility of many of those reported differences suggest a potential bias and/or misunderstanding in how we study, interpret, and report findings related to sex.”
That’s the first three sentences of the opening paragraph. So far, so good. But not for long. “More recently, researchers have begun to question whether these observed differences between males and females are driven by biology (e.g., sex) or whether they are a manifestation of social constructs (e.g., gender).” You see where this is going. “Here, we use the term ‘sex’ to indicate features of an individual’s physical anatomy, physiology, genetics, and/or hormones at birth, and we use the term ‘gender’ to indicate features of an individual’s attitude, feelings, and behaviors.”
The authors included in that long paragraph this observation: “The reality is more complicated in that sex and gender are both influenced by biological and social factors. Critically, associations between biological and social factors are intertwined and reciprocal in nature. As an example, personal experiences across the life span are shaped by an individual’s sex and gender as well as the sociocultural environment they are embedded within; complex relationships converge to influence brain organization and function.” To be sure, an obvious observation. Then the authors slip into queer theory mode and pursue a course of relentless nonsense.
Once you’ve begun attending to the corrupting force of queer theory, organized by postmodernist thought, the fundamental problem of scholarship on the question of gender raises a bigger question about the state of scientific inquiry. The premise of the article relies on the false distinction between gender and sex. The authors want to be slick, writing that “sex and gender are irreducible to one another not only in society but also in biology.” But sex and gender are the same thing, synonyms referring to gamete size, reproductive anatomy, and sex chromosome determinants. For example, plants have both phenotypic and genotypic gender. That’s right, gender is the word used in scientific studies of plant biology for centuries to present-day scholarship. The definitions provided by the authors, designed to manufacture the perception that gender and sex are different, reflect the ideological-political goals of queer theory. They have no basis in materialist science. This ensures that what follows is pretentious nonsense. (See Gender and the English Language).
Take this line from the abstract: “Here, we demonstrate that, in children, sex and gender are uniquely reflected in the intrinsic functional connectivity of the brain. Somatomotor, visual, control, and limbic networks are preferentially associated with sex, while network correlates of gender are more distributed throughout the cortex.” We can make this make sense by simply adding the word “role” to either the terms “sex” and “gender” and then differentiating between them. Let’s take gender as the preferred term and rework the sentence: “Somatomotor, visual, control, and limbic networks are preferentially associated with gender, while network correlates of the gender role are more distributed throughout the cortex.” You can do the same thing with the terms “sex” and “sex role.”
The piece becomes an exercise in irony because its stated goal is to sort through the muddle of contradictory findings and replication failure. Muddle and failure are actually the result of the pseudoscientific matrix generated by sexology. The trick to keeping the pseudoscience flowing is to remove from either sex or gender the necessary words “role” and “status.” Role refers to behaviors, duties, expectations associated with one’s gender. Status refers to the social position or rank that an individual holds in a group or society. You can use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably when discussing roles and statues. I recently published an essay on this and the matter of (see Gender and the Gender Role). This is an exercise in ideological obscurantism.
John P. A. Ioannidis’ 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” is a must read to understand why scientists fail so frequently. Of his six corollaries, these three ring true: (1) the greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, (2) the greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, and (3) the hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. Academic science fails also because most research is replication of bias given paradigm dressed in the clothing of neutrality (see The Science™ and its Devotees). It’s akin to the practice of hermeneutics in the monastery. This is why I don’t bother with peer-review academic publishing, either refereed journals or university press books. Editors and reviewers are gatekeepers whose function is to keep out challenges to the prevailing hegemony of thought. I refuse to allow my work to be held up by religious clerics.
Colleges and universities have become corrupted by woke progressive ideology. Not only is there the ongoing replicability crisis and daily multiple retractions of published studies, but what is accepted and remains in print is crackpot. This is especially true across the humanities but also in the social sciences, including anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
Recall the hoax papers scandal, often referred to as the “Grievance Studies Affair,” was a significant academic controversy that unfolded in 2017 and 2018. It involved three academics, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, who submitted intentionally absurd and fabricated research papers to academic journals in fields they collectively termed “grievance studies,” which includes areas like critical race theory, gender studies, and sociology. The goal of the exercise was to expose what they saw as a lack of academic rigor and ideological bias in the humanities and social sciences. Of the twenty hoax papers, seven were accepted for publication, with some even winning recognition for their contributions to the field. The papers included bizarre and deliberately ridiculous content, such as a paper that reimagined parts of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf using feminist language and another that suggested that dog parks were sites of rampant “rape culture” among canines. Despite the contribution the three made to popular understanding of the ideological capture of these fields, Boghossian faced an investigation by his employer, Portland State University for alleged research misconduct. Boghossian is no longer working there.
The “Grievance Studies Affair” was not the first of its kind. In 1996 there as the “Sokal Affair,” orchestrated by physicist Alan Sokal who submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the cultural studies journal Social Text. The paper was a pastiche of bizarre theoretical claims wrapped in postmodern jargon, entirely devoid of meaningful scientific content. Sokal’s paper was accepted and published in a special issue of Social Text. After the paper’s publication, Sokal revealed the hoax in another journal, Lingua Franca, explaining that his aim was to expose what he viewed as the lack of rigor and the susceptibility to fashionable intellectual trends in certain areas of the humanities. So the “Grievance Studies” hoax was confirmation of the Sokal’s intervention.
What is damaging the legitimacy of science today is not the critics of science but an industry that claims to be objective, rational, and scientific. Neutrality and peer-review are fig leaves for ideology. They are rhetorical props to false legitimize scientism and other ideologies. That queer theory is even a thing testifies to the woo-woo professional science has become. Postmodernism is a resilient political-ideological project taken up by corporate power. It isn’t going to be destroyed by Sokal or Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose. It will take all of the academy to vanquish the crackpot beast and as long as the educational system embraces progressivism, the beast will continue to wreak havoc on knowledge. If scientists want to save the profession, then they need to drive from the various disciplines the nonsense produced by woke ideologues—and this will be hard because the nonsense is ubiquitous. Meanwhile, I will be doing what scholars should be doing over here on Freedom and Reason.
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