The State of Pseudoscience and Skepticism

[ArranUpsideDown]

I think you might need to scroll up to where Andy Lewis (MN's @quackometer123 iirc) answers the original challenge:

crackedscience: Looking for recent pseudoscience trends! Will be on a year-end TV show, talking about 2019 trends in health woo & possible 2020 pseudomedical things to look for. What have you seen?

Andy Lewis: The denial of sex as a material and objective reality - mediated by the infiltration of postmodernist style anti intellectual thinking into academic, medical, legal and social discussions of what it means to be male or female

Worth looking at some of the intervening exchanges (involves Emma Hilton) where leading medics, scientists and skeptics refuse to engage with either Andy or Emma and trade jibes followed by blocking:

twitter.com/Bleedinheart2MD/status/1210938352222031872

And, yes - some of the names in that thread are leading skeptical voices who have been at the forefront of tackling denialism.

What is happening to science, medicine, and the shared understanding of the need to tackle denialism or at least to maintain civil discourse about important topics?

See apparently we are behind on what biology means. Which really fucking confuses me. Biology is biology it doesn’t change. I’d really like some actual scientists to come out and explain this to all the idiots out there.

Well, Emma Hilton was willing to engage but she was blocked the moment that she 'liked' Andy Lewis' tweet which tends to preclude discussion.

To be fair, David Gorski is a researcher as well as a breast cancer surgeon. And Mark Hoofnagle was a researcher before he was a trauma surgeon (I think). I can't believe Hoofnagle and Gorski are slinging around "bigot," "garbage," and "Terf" (tho' that was Hoofnagle).

The thing you have to remember about the sceptic community is that it's jam packed with misogynists. Unfortunately for them, they've removed from their lives that great ideological bulwark of misogyny, paternalistic religion.

So they need a new ideological prop to take its place. Enter genderist. The central tenets are "being a woman is a feeling in a man's head," "men are whatever men say they are and women are whatever men say they are," and "womanhood is a set of regressive stereotypes around appearance, femininity and (incredibly conveniently for a certain type of man - let's not forget the #metoo issues in the sceptic community) sexual submissiveness."

Basically, for all they role-play rationality, sceptics are just as drawn to a convenient post-hoc justification of their behaviour as the rest of humanity, and the behaviour they particularly want to justify is entrenched misogyny.

One of the few UK women who was at least on the fringes of scepticism is a Professor of Public Health with a special interest in sexual and reproductive health. She's nonetheless arguing that GC feminism is being funded by extremist right-wing groups and has RT'd mimmymum with approval (she had a few exchanges with Jane Clare Jones aka @LadyPrincesexual). I couldn't quite follow it but she's likewise RT'd 'sex is a spectrum' material and suchlike although I'm convinced that she'd know what form of prophylaxis any given patient sitting in front of her needs to use (to prevent disease or pregnancy).

I'm fairly certain she would deny any charge of internalised misogyny. I don't think she's a separate instance of Prof Alice Roberts advice that we should all be kind.

See apparently we are behind on what biology means. Which really fucking confuses me. Biology is biology it doesn’t change.

Our major problem is that large chunks of the medical establishment have swallowed WPATH’s political lobbying wholesale. I suspect these men are programmed to assume other medics will not have rushed on into drastic treatment protocols based on poor evidence...

I’m not sure what I’m about to say is relevant or not but I’m going to say it anyway. Given how apparently people can change their sex, I’m wondering if it would be acceptable to say, hold on, you can’t be pregnant you are a man, or no, prostate cancer doesn’t exist for women so no point checking for it. If these idiots want to really believe their sex has changed, then fine, let them think that. Remove all the medical care for the sex they were born as and see how far they get. I realise this is drastic but I’m so fucking sick of being told sex isn’t important when it really is and maybe they need shown how important it is by suffering the consequences of their own delusions.

I don't understand this. Skeptical unless it relates to genderism, in which case no evidence required.
Just waiting for Nemo at this point....

But if doctors and other medical health professionals are lying to patients that they CAN change sex, then it’s hardly fair that those people should be made to suffer. Different obviously for the self-identified person, but this is a medically induced problem and I think to sort it out, the medical profession are going to have to be dragged (kicking and screaming) back to reality. Which will only occur when the lawsuits begin.

this is where I'd be expecting Ben Goldacre to raise his head over the parapet

The question is like to ask these medics is: how many times in their career does the average GP come across a DSD such that the actual sex of the patient was not apparent at birth, versus how many patients do they have who unambiguously need to have their records marked to be called for regular cervical smears/ prostate tests if old enough.

Very true @BarbaraStrozzi

And to be fair, a lot of what used to pass for 'scepticism' during the Goldacre era would now be termed mansplaining

You just have to bear in mind that eugenics was swallowed hook line and sinker by rational progressives. People will believe anything if they think it's in their interests.

Slightly OT but there's a mansplaining flowchart:

pbs.twimg.com/media/EM3HynHU0AURRnE?format=jpg&name=large

[Source is:
twitter.com/c3convertase/status/1210843553322061824 ]

Fucking nuts.

I remember an article in the guardian all about "what trans people wish for" and there was a large part about how the medical world needed to recognise their sex and treat as needed as they were being routinely let down through ignorant and stupid systems that immediately popped them into the actual opposite sex.

Buck angel talks a lot about the impact of the lack of research of the hormones Buck takes on the female reproductive system and endocrine network,

I liked two tweets Dr Hornswaggle was mentioned in and he blocked me!! What the actual fuck??

I think the problem is that

1)They seem to get bogged down in different ways that sex can be defined without thinking about why we define sex.

2)They seem to be completely oblivious to the consequences of sex

3)They seem unaware that a majority can also be oppressed and marginalised.

You can argue over whether a man's brain can exist inside a woman's body or vice versa, but fundamentally only one type of body will grow a small human without contraception, and that has an unavoidable impact on human rights.

This is getting so much worse. Another female professor with an immense (and richly-deserved) reputation for academic rigour is commending someone for being absolved by Twitter Support. (I don't know the specific item for which he was reported but it might have been something akin to saying that the swarms of Terfs were like swarms of anti-vaxers in mentions.)

twitter.com/gorskon/status/1211011577962328064?s=20

Someone needs to ask them how this all fits in with evolution.

Fuck - she's a Uni of Oxford professor too.

This is madness

she's a Uni of Oxford professor too.

She's amazing. In so many ways and on so many fronts all at the same time. She is a role model for generations of doctors and researchers. She co-wrote an outstanding book with another doctor-academic when they both had breast cancer. She's active in patient-led, patient-centred research.

One of these days, surely, somebody is going to be willing to have a civil discussion of the medico-legal aspects of this vital matter.

It’s not madness, it’s hubris.

Interestingly a number of people I follow high up in the GC field follow her.

I'm really shocked at Trisha Greenhalgh. I'm familiar with her work and used to think she was very impressive. She is both a medical doctor and has a background in social sciences. Nuts.

We’re a “swarm”.

Dehumanising language. Whether madness or hubris, I find their position almost as astonishing as it is depressing.

I cannot wrap my head around any of this.

Actual scientists and doctors are not only participating in this charade but acting as though we're, at best, a bunch of activists (see comparisons to the anti-vaxxers on that thread) when what we are saying is about as controversial as saying 2+2 = 4.

I honestly feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.