Maya Forstater has challenged Adam Rutherford and Ben Goldacre to set Bragg straight about Cass and systematic reviews

[RethinkingLife]

Maya Forstater challenged Rutherford and Goldacre to set Billy Bragg straight on his misunderstanding of systematic reviews in re: Cass because FondofBeetles' explanation has seen her put on naughty step by TwiX.

There are a rash of people like Billy getting horribly confused about systematic reviews.

AdamRutherford bengoldacre you might want to step up now as neutral science communicators and explain how this works.

https://x.com/MForstater/status/1779422767781118224

No response from Goldacre but Rutherford responded to deny any relevant knowledge. And, yes, this is the Rutherford of Rutherford and Fry fame and the books and radio programmes ] Rutherford's TwiX bio: "I'm a scientist. President of Humanists_UK Lecturer in Genetics UCL Genetics, race, eugenics, history of science, movies, books, cricket"

It's not something I know much about.

https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1779478504930779315

To which somebody else responded with a clear Rutherford prior intervention about methodology etc.

https://twitter.com/JustMisogyny/status/1779580934448095682

And there's an interjection from Gurwinder Bhogal to Rutherford.

https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1779593609387421785

This is an important point, and one on which Douglas Murray has written fluently.

The fact is that we really don't know much about the science of sexuality: whether people are born gay, become gay, and why sexuality changes over time (as it often does).

The field of research into these topics lost funding and died in the 1980s as the gay rights movement took up steam. I think it's very understandable as to why this happened although I do think it's a shame to have lost out on scientific research into an important area of human behaviour.

On Rutherford - it must be really strange to have a career as a scientist and yet also try to support a belief in transness which is basically a mirage, a vision in which humans have 'souls'/'gender identities' which are somehow different from themselves ie their bodies. It must cause him a lot of cognitive dissonance. It'd make me uncomfortable too and in a way I'm not surprised that he's trying to take refuge in pretend ignorance. In his position I might do the same (although I hope I would have the courage to admit I was wrong - but then, if my entire career and reputation depended on it, I too might take the cowardly way out).

@Grumblevision as a former teenaged Kenickie fan, I'm so sad to see what Lauren Laverne has become. hanging out with Sali Hughes and India Knight, partaking in the online bullying of Dawn O'Porter, and deplatforming people who express reasonable GC views, is not a great look.

What did Dawn O'Porter do/say? Apologies if I missed part of the thread

"Big gender" isn't in the same class as "big pharma" when it comes to selling tabloids to tabloid readers.

I don’t think the thinking goes any further than ‘do I care about this enough to engage on Twitter publicly, taking into account the potential impact on my professional and personal life? No’

I think the true cowardice is not backing away saying "that's a toxic area and I'm going to focus on my areas of expertise", and then doing that and sticking to it, but to pretend to be above it all but snipe from the sideline in favour of one side from time to time in order to get clout points.

Rutherford seems to have been working on the book wrt his programme on Caster Semenya.

Billy Bragg is a busker who got lucky

Laverne's brother, also formerly of Kenickie, is rabidly pro-TWAW.

Nothing. Just that some years ago Lauren Laverne was part of a trio of celebs (Sali Hughes and India Knight were the other two) who spent a few months viciously bullying and bitching about Dawn O'Porter on Twitter

This was in the relatively early days of Twitter so a good decade ago and they were all grown women at the time, really made me think twice about the characters of all three of them

@popebishop that doesn't surprise me as many years ago I went to (as it turned out one of their last) Kenickie gigs and Johnny X was being a right prat, insulting the audience etc etc

India Knight is married to a convicted paedophile.

I'd love it if you were right and I was wrong... not holding my breath.

Mary Harrington has some comments about Rutherford (in addition to Allsopp) in Unherd.

On Sunday, for example, Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater (herself notoriously a victim of the “No Debate” consensus Kirstie Allsopp says never existed) called on science communicator and Humanists UK president Adam Rutherford to defend systematic scientific reviews, against the trans activists spreading misinformation about the Cass Review. Did he come out swinging for science and reason over gender ideology? Reader, he flunked it: “It’s not something I know much about.”
Last November, Humanists UK welcomed a Private Members’ Bill banning “conversion therapy” — in a formulation that would, in effect, ban anything but the “affirmation” approach to gender identity, recently decried by the Cass Review as unsupported by evidence and potentially harmful to children whose sense of self is still developing. Perhaps Rutherford is waiting…until it becomes obvious which Truth Universally Acknowledged was always obviously supported by the evidence.
We can hardly blame him. I don’t doubt his vaunted commitment to even uncomfortable scientific truth…scientific truth can be — with the best of intentions — somewhat ductile, especially weighed against the risk of ostracism by every desirable dinner-party hostess in medialand. But should those hostesses resume broadcasting their TUA, having agreed that they always believed puberty blockers were bad, perhaps the Rutherfords of our public discourse will feel able to hop back in the trenches on behalf of science, objectivity, and Dr Hilary Cass.

https://unherd.com/2024/04/why-the-centrists-changed-their-trans-tune/

I don't know much about Rutherford, but I remember Goldacre from his Guardian column heyday. It's shitty and cowardly from the lot of them! Alice Roberts and Hannah Fry too, if the cap fits. When you think what some women have risked to put themselves in the firing line, who don't have the media standing of R & G...

I am prepared to forgive women for not wanting to put themselves and their families in the firing line and lose their entire career, but Alice Roberts was worse than that, she enthusiastically joined in.

There have been some rather creaky segments in "Digging for Britain" of late.

Archaeology is tricky for the TWAW crew because, however supposedly 'crossgendered' the grave goods may be, skeletal sex is exposed in all its glory.

"It must be galling for Rutherford, as the foremost communicator for science and a critic of bad research and quackery, to have – somehow – missed the big medical/scientific scandal story of the age."

Glorious shade thrown by the Speccie today 😀

I work with academics like this and they are not, and never have been, about the data,p. They are all about being Right, and ideally taking down the perceived establishment du jour. There was a time when their schtick coincided with socially acceptable viewpoints and genuinely good things (uncovering dodgy pharma practice, for example), but that was a success because their work was entirely fitting with the prevailing liberal world view, and they were therefore the Good Guys.

People like this are the absolute poster children for why many liberal viewpoints are no different from those espoused by GB news and the like, despite their smug sense of superiority and should be rigorously scrutinised. Goldacre and Rutherford are the modern union leaders, braying about equality for all (except women who are taking jobs from Hard Working Men, and should get back to making the tea).

Oxford should be embarrassed and ashamed to have Goldacre as a Professor of Evidence Based Medicine.

😒

There's always a tweet...

Link to tweet with screenshot

@GrumpyMenopausalScathingWombWielder
Congratulations on the length of your username.

So is that a genuine picture of Adam Rutherford?

I didn't think the name would fit tbh. Who knew? 🤷🏻‍♀️

It's a Halloween outfit apparently.

Link to additional image

For anyone who hasn't seen it. NB: there are so many that I admit I'd forgotten about what had happened to Christian Henson with Spitfire Audio.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-cant-stonewalls-ex-boss-come-clean-about-its-trans-obsession/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11188531/Top-Gear-Poirot-music-composer-cancelled-company-JK-Rowling-support.html

Re: the Halloween photos - I'd no idea Stranger Things has been running since 2016. I've not seen it. Is the outfit the character Eleven?

I can't agree hard enough with this. People tend to assume that academics these days all adhere to the fine Enlightenment traditions of empiricism and objectivity. Unfortunately, it's such a crabs-in-a-barrel milieu (especially in the social sciences but increasingly in the hard sciences too) that getting funding and jobs is now more about having the 'correct' views and being invited to the right bien pensant dinner parties. And for a certain type of straight male academic, using 'science to own the silly little women' is practically a life's calling.

Maths and physics are the last two holdouts and long may that continue.

But we GC reality-seers have never been able to rely on mainstream academia in this fight. Given that fact, the successes of our movement are all the more extraordinary.

While I relished reading Mary Harrington's and Julie Burchill's take-downs of the reverse ferreting by former TRA 'allies', in each case there was a 'whaat?' moment: JB took a sideswipe at climate change, and MH at Covid lockdowns, as if they put these into the same basket as trans ideology.

Covid lockdowns may or may not have been necessary/the right idea/motivated by groupthink, but for heaven's sake, bodies were literally-literally piling up around the world because of the highly infectious nature of Covid, and keeping people away from each other as much as possible seemed at the time to be a plausible, and indeed the only way, to stop thousands of us from dying, until a vaccination could be found - uh-oh, vaccinations..🙄

It's interesting that 'public opinion' now seems to be split between blaming politicians for rushing irrationally to lockdowns because of 'a chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism'. [MH in UnHerd], and blaming politicians for not locking down soon enough for fear of political fallout, (also caused arguably by a different 'chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism') thereby causing the avoidable deaths of thousands of people.

Covid, climate change, trans ideology - forced teaming?

Similar thoughts have been occurring to me, @MarieDeGournay . It's almost like, having, rightly, criticised the TRSOH attitude, whereby people signed up to a 'parcel of good beliefs', for some it seems the gender issue is an opportunity to insist that all the other liberal nostrums must go by the board now. The left-leaning NS, for example, is full of articles telling us that the EU is a bit shit really, and facing trouble down the line (but who isn't). Likewise complaints about vaccines and lockdowns don't go away, and in fact seems to be espoused more widely. I suppose the conservative feminism of Mary Harrington could be said to be another example, but that's not my area of knowledge! 😀Another would be the notion that insistence on electric vehicles and other policies is imposing enormous costs on Californians, who are leaving the State in droves, it seems.