Anti-science refers to a set of attitudes and beliefs that dismiss or reject scientific methods and principles. Individuals who hold anti-scientific views deny science as a reliable means of generating objective and universal knowledge. This perspective manifests in various ways, such as rejecting the theory of evolution, embracing pseudoscience—claims that present themselves as scientific but fail to adhere to established scientific standards—and falsely asserting that corporate medicine is grounded in genuine scientific practice.
My critique of gender ideology is the same as my critique of Islam or Scientology. To be sure, one can believe in gender identities, thetans, and souls. I don’t care what people believe per se. I don’t care how they appear—and long as appearances are not for deceptive purposes with the intent to harm others. Wear the stereotypical garb of the other gender. Whatever. But deny the rights of others, harm children, undermine the integrity of science, now I care. And so should you.
All ideologies are subject to criticism, the pernicious most necessarily, since the harms involved often elude a great many people. Scientology has been successfully withered by relentless criticism and ridicule, as it should be. Unfortunately, Islam has been rather resilient (some 1.8 billion believers and growing). The state of gender ideology is somewhere in between. People are more aware today of the harms this belief system and its associated practices causes others, especially to women and children. Unlike Scientology, gender ideology has the support of corporate state power. As for Islam, the West remains far too tolerant of its practices.
The central claims of gender ideology, Islam, and Scientology are unscientific, even antiscientific. One of the most settled question in science is that in gender is binary, and in mammals exclusive and immutable. A member of our species cannot change gender. It is an impossibility. Members of the gender cult, and the institutions they have coopted—the institutions that are exploiting them for profit—have substituted a quasi religious ideology for science. That the cult has the corporate state at their backs, and the ideology captured organs claiming to do science, makes the problem of gender ideology a difficult one to unwind.
I continue to confront the objection that gender and sex are different things. But that distinction, portrayed as definitive, is in fact recent and contrary to settled science. As I have shown on the pages of Freedom and Reason, gender and sex have been synonyms for eight centuries. I have provided proof that biologists use gender to refer to gamete size, sex-determining chromosomes, and genitalia in books and journals, and objective research that still work from the standpoint of scientific integrity. That others have substituted ideology for science does not make their ideology scientific. It only shows the power of ideology to corrupt scientific institutions.
To be charitable, perhaps the problem is being misspecified. Gender dysphoria, like all body dysmorphia may have roots in a brain disorder (it appears as a body mapping problem). But gender identity as anything other than an internal subjective experience is an entirely made up notion—and made up by a man who believed in dream telepathy. And the man before him was a pedophile. Is that unfair? Hitler had some good ideas, I’ve been told. The point is that it’s a crackpot notion invented by crackpots. In the end, gender identity is a nonfalsifiable proposition, which means, like the soul in Islam or the thetan in Scientology, it lies beyond the scope of science. The advocates of this idea are chasing gender angels. It’s a faith belief.
The claim that a man can have a gender identity that is incongruent from his actual gender is indistinguishable from a man who says he has a soul that exists independent of his body (Christianity, Islam) or that a thetan exists inside him that must be realized through auditing (Scientology). These are unscientific concepts. The conjecture that a female brain can exist in a man’s body would have to be definitively shown in every instance where an intervention is sought—and even then, it does not follow that modifying a person’s physiology or morphology is the appropriate intervention. It will take incontrovertible evidence to disprove the obvious, that a brain in a man’s body is by definition the brain of a man, however it appears in scans and scopes.
Identity is not what a sentient being thinks of itself. Such a standard is absurd on its face. That has never been a standard in science. Identity is what the being is, determinable by science. This fact has far reaching implications. Universal humans rights must rest on this standard, since science uncorrupted by ideology is the only universal method of explanation. What gender is a member of any given species of mammal? Look and see.
Unlike most mammals, our species have delusions. Either that or they are lying. They believe in things or claim to believe in things that cannot be demonstrated to be there in actuality, things that are not merely unproven, but at this point unprovable. People who insist that I am wrong are not working from the standpoint of reason and science. Those who want to punish or shame me for working from that standpoint are authoritarian in attitude.
The man is of course free to believe whatever he will, but this remains a faith belief. A free and open society allows for faith belief. Many of my family and friends are Christians and I do not seek an intervention to cause them to believe something else except in debate. People have to voluntarily leave the head space they are in. We may only reach them by persuasion. I have no power to deprogram those captured by cults and religions and I do not seek that power. At the same time, a free and open society cannot allow faith belief to determine the lives of anybody else or to guide government action. We live—or at least should live—in a secular society where decisions that affect everybody are based on rational adjudication of facts and situations. All deviations from that standard undermine reason and the foundation of human freedom. This is the problem.
What gender ideology seeks is to create simulations that stand in the place of reality—and they demand that everybody else agree or risk marginalization, punishment, or reputational harm. The gender affirmation movement is industrial scale delusion and deception. Indeed, it is not a social movement at all, but a reactionary countermovement against reason and science and human freedom (See The Authoritarian Presence).
freedom and reason 