> Gender identity issues can be genuinely uncomfortable. Gender identity issues in sports can be extra uncomfortable. Maybe one side of the political spectrum is over the top in disliking trans rights, but perhaps the other side should acknowledge that having people with penises in women’s locker rooms would make a lot of people extremely uncomfortable.
The concern in sports was never about "penises in women's locker rooms". It was always about the participation of athletes who had gone through a male puberty in women's sports categories. That's why for example athletes like Caster Semenya and Imane khelif were caught in that, to name two recent and famous cases, who are intersex and not transgendered. I find it extremely distasteful to speculate about strangers' genitals (unless it's absolutely necessary) but nobody ever accused those two athletes of introducing "penises in the women's locker rooms".
The outrage on social media absolutely was all about "penises in women's locker rooms" or in female toilets etc, but that's not where informed debate normally takes place. Unfortunately it seems that social media are increasingly the space where decisions are taken collectively.
Read here about intersex athletes at the Olympics, as an introduction to the informed debate I mentioned above.
> This explains why my coauthor, “Suzanna Diaz,” doesn’t go by her real name. I don’t even know it, despite having met her in person once and spoken with her many times. She uses a pseudonym to protect her family, especially her daughter, whom Suzanna believes has ROGD. Suzanna isn’t an academic. She is a mother who has become an activist to raise awareness about this phenomenon, including by creating an online survey for parents who believed their children had ROGD. The survey was hosted by the website ParentsOfROGDKids.com. I was impressed with her findings and we decided to collaborate.
The coauthor of the retracted paper and the source of the data that caused the retraction is a pseudonymous activist. This alone is enough to explain why the editors of the journal would want to take a second look at the paper they had just published.
I do not misremember the chapter. He asked his 10-year old son what he thought about his study and his son replied that dancing is feminine, which the author took as confirmation of the validity of his study.
> My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth.
The author is J. Michael Baily, a psychologist known for the controversy surrounding his book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism", promoting his -now discredited- theory of autogynephilia, that transsexual women are either feminine gay men, or straight men with a fetish for seeing themselves transformed into women.
I read "The Man who Would Be Queen" when it first appeared, being curious to find out what the controversy was all about. At some point, the author is carrying out some research to identify feminine traits in gay male dancers and asks his son what he thinks of the research:
> My son was 10 years old when we began our dance study. One day I explained what we were studying, and I asked him why I might expect to find a high rate of gay male dancers. He immediately answered, “Because dancing is feminine, and gay men tend to be feminine.” I was pleased by his answer, which was also mine. It seemed to me that if a 10-year-old boy could come up with the hypothesis, then scientific reviewers of our study would not find it far- fetched. (Indeed, some of my friends made fun of me for studying something they already considered to be an obvious fact.)
And the comment is on page 69, in the chapter titled "Gay femininity".
That passage is a good example of the level at which the whole book is written, clearly aimed square at causing controversy of some kind, and completely lacking any kind of integrity or respect for its research subjects.
If he's getting his work denounced "by people of all political stripes" that is most likely not because he has "prioritized the truth" but because he is constantly trying to kick up a shitstorm, and getting on everybody's tits, to keep his career going.
The concern in sports was never about "penises in women's locker rooms". It was always about the participation of athletes who had gone through a male puberty in women's sports categories. That's why for example athletes like Caster Semenya and Imane khelif were caught in that, to name two recent and famous cases, who are intersex and not transgendered. I find it extremely distasteful to speculate about strangers' genitals (unless it's absolutely necessary) but nobody ever accused those two athletes of introducing "penises in the women's locker rooms".
The outrage on social media absolutely was all about "penises in women's locker rooms" or in female toilets etc, but that's not where informed debate normally takes place. Unfortunately it seems that social media are increasingly the space where decisions are taken collectively.
Read here about intersex athletes at the Olympics, as an introduction to the informed debate I mentioned above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_and_intersex_...