Alice Roberts - what the hell?

[GenderApostate19]

I can’t tell you how utterly disappointed I feel by her comments about Sex and reproduction not being binary. She knows the truth, what the hell is she doing? I’m even more upset by her than by Sarah Champion, she’s a Scientist ffs.

Yep, I’m really interested to see what she makes of those skeletons she digs up. Cos surprisingly your sex isn’t determined by your feelz.

Thing is, most gender critical people have no problem being kind and considerate to trans people (obviously there are the odd bigoted exceptions). My own concerns are with the dismantling of safeguarding and the possible disappearance in the future of women’s sports and prizes.

She was on Time Team Fekko. Sexing skeletons by their feelz apparently.

You only have to look at one of the twitter threads above:

twitter.com/theAliceRoberts/status/1141460396223733761

to understand why Roberts made those tweets. Tweet anti-science that appeals to "being nice to certain groups is the only virtue worth having" types, and if you get grief you can do a "you know who the real victim in all of this is? ME!" tweet, and then have hundreds of tweets to massage your ego. Which celeb would resist that?

I feel so exasperated at this pretence that people trying to engage you in rational discussion is really people being mean, or nasty, or "trolling" when those of us on the other side of the debate constantly get called bigots, or threatened with rape, torture or murder. Stop making yourself the victim, Alice, and actually engage in some debate. That's what your job is. Do it.

If she was prepared to engage in rational debate I'd question her about this statement:

"'How I feel in myself has no bearing on what someone feels. If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female - I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?"

She is a humanist so she should know the answer to that. I know lots of religious people who tell me they have a personal experience of God. Can I tell them they're wrong? Well, yes, I can. It might not be polite to, but only an idiot would assume that just because an individual claims to have a personal experience of God, therefore God must exist.

She was the time team woman? Silly donut.

"'How I feel in myself has no bearing on what someone feels.” Ok
“If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female” ok but I’d ask how do they now twist that feels like?
“I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?" I certainly wouldn’t say ‘she’ because a feeling isn’t actual reality. Unless my old physics teaches was talking crap.

I think Janice Turner summed it up well:

twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1141623948712562688

Humanists are expressly against most magical thinking, aren't they? Except the magical genderism.

I, too, saw no hate, bile or misogyny directed at her. I freely admit I may have missed it, but since I haven't seen it from gender-critical feminists elsewhere, I would be surprised to see it here.

It just feels like such a topsy-turvy world when we are told to have "compassion" for men who do not care about our boundaries, but us objecting is "hate".

I am so disappointed. I had a lot of regard for her. (And this does look very much like a "validate me!" flounce, too, which I would not have expected from her either.)

This is almost as disappointing as Prof Robert Winston's pro-lady-brain stance :(

She is a humanist so she should know the answer to that. I know lots of religious people who tell me they have a personal experience of God. Can I tell them they're wrong? Well, yes, I can. It might not be polite to, but only an idiot would assume that just because an individual claims to have a personal experience of God, therefore God must exist.
Exactly

There's a strange undercurrent to the tone of the many males defending her. I can't articulate it well but she clearly ticks the 'acceptable woman in science boxes' Attractive, smiley, amiable, non-threatening.
I wouldn't expect many males and females not to like her, that's why she has her job, but so many men jumping to her defence in a protective way.

The Buddhists have it right when they pair compassion with wisdom.

Wisdom without compassion can be inhumane.
Compassion without wisdom can be misguided and even harmful.

And of course, wisdom is needed not just in a scientist adhering to objective truth but also in balancing compassion where the wishes or needs of different groups conflict.

Compassion for males who 'feels female' is good, but not when it results, in practice even if unintentionally, to lack of compassion for people who are, inescapably, female.

I’d never heard of her until this thread.

She has an incredibly irritating way with words, I’ll say that much. All the peace and love and empathy guff. Give over, Alice! You’re a scientist. On Twitter. It’s not a bloody therapy group sharing circle.

She said: "I've argued for reason, compassion and empathy in discussions about sex and gender. That's opened me up to more hate, bile and even misogyny than I've experienced before."

I didn't see any hate, bile or misogyny on there. She is accusing women, who are standing up for sex-based rights, of misogyny. She should try supporting science instead of 'feelings' and then she'll see what misogyny really looks like. As well as hate and bile.

It brings to mind this Ifonlyus:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom_syndrome

Tweet from James Wong supporting Alice.
twitter.com/Botanygeek/status/1141501170151841792

"The trolls are sat in their mums’ basements seething at strangers."

He doesn't seem to realise these are the people who are supporting her.

I'm the woman who hiked up into the caldera of a volcano (several actually) and dived to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible for science, James and I think Alice Roberts is wrong here and that lady brain is bollocks.

Not finished reading the thread yet, but just saw her flounce on twitter and came here.

She can fuck off with that victimy "the women are so mean" schtick. She knew exactly what she was doing when she started tweeting about this - this isn't a debate that will have passed her by, she knows there are two "sides" and that one of those sides is women & reality, and the other is males, their dominance and feelings. Even if, IF!, she genuinely didn't know about the debate before, she's have fairly quickly realised when the first few replies started coming in from women and intersex women explain how wrong and offensive what she'd just said was, but rather than engage, she ignored and continued pushing her male-agenda.

She knowingly chose her side, and used her platform to wade in to side with men and feelings over reality and women, and then expected that women should either remain silent, or give her a pass on it because she's a women, or maybe because we are women.

No.

Own your decision, Alice. You knew exactly what you were doing.

And you're using the oldest trick in the book going crying "mean bullies" now. It won't work.

It's interesting that a narrative is being established in which the "hate, bile and even misogyny", in order words people disagreeing with Roberts and pointing out she was making incorrect statements, was supposedly coming from men on twitter.

"Informed women take issue with anti-science" becomes "nasty inadequate men launch vicious "hate, bile and even misogyny" at a lovely person who wants everyone to be lovely to each other".

Aquatic Ape hypothesis is one of my favourite hypotheses in human evolution hypothesising. It might not be true but it's still fun to discuss it. When has science become so restricted?

A few years ago (actually, maybe 10 now!!!) I listened to a great radio documentary series about how science works, and there were a number of episodes on scientists who had ideas that were considered bad because they didn't toe the line. James Lovelock was one, and a woman who suggested that the reason that women in some cultures didn't report menopausal symptoms might actually be physiologically differences in different ethnic groups. They also talked to Rupert Sheldrake, and it was quite fascinating because he really had some pretty crazy ideas, but he was very careful about his process, following the scientific method, hypotheses that were really based on the data. But his career was completely destroyed because the editor of Nature blasted him as a quack.

There isn't really as much openness in science as people think.

I have a lot of compassion and empathy for girls and women in refuges, women in prison, ill girls and women on hospital wards, girls and women using communal changing rooms, women who want to get into politics and have their place taken by a man, girls and women who have to undergo police and customs searches and girls and women who are athletically talented and ambitious but can't win against male bodies. And I'll probably get deleted for mentioning male bodies.
If this woman is genuine, well I can only say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Lynn Margulis had a hard time pushing endosymbiont hypothesis. It's completely accepted now and suported by shedloads of evidence. Or Carl Woese and his three domains of life proposal. It's completely accepted now. Most students don't even realize there was a controversy once that "would end his career" as his supervisor predicted at the time.

"Acquatic Ape Hypothesis" has, appropriately, evolved. It is now the waterside ape hypothesis not least because so many people misrepresented it as suggesting humans evolved from dolphins.

A few years ago, David Attenborough did a radio show with Elaine Morgan called "Scars of Evolution." When she died, he revisited the territory and found a lot of research supporting her general direction if not her full premise.

Cue furious reaction from the scientific establishment, including Roberts, who wrote an article in one paper insisting that Savannah Hypothesis was nailed on and beyond question, and anything that said otherwise was akin to Lamarckianism and giving respectable Science a bad name.

(Savannah and Waterside are not mutually exclusive. It is quite possible to see them as parallel branches on Darwin's tree.)

The "tone" of the many males jumping to her defence is paternalistic and frankly creepy

"I'm there for you". Really ? I suggest that Ms Roberts is blocking the wrong people.

Science is recognising what sex somebody really is; compassion is breaking the news gently.

I followed it all on Twitter yesterday and was fuming to see that from a scientist in her position.

She's making out it's about being nice to people. She's ill-informed on what's happening.

Her flounce was so similar to everyone else in this debate who can't back up their statements and then cries pile-on.