I’ve been covering the increasing number of liberals who are either becoming victims of political correctness or who fear they will be. Now, add another one to the list — Northwestern University’s Alice Domurat Dreger. In a blog post lamenting Nobel Prize-winner Tim Hunt’s purge from multiple prestigious positions over one sexist remark, Dreger expressed her own anxieties:
The mob that thinks this is a good idea seems to be composed largely of people I generally respect: feminist, pro-science, publicly-engaged. But I feel like they’re not thinking about this clearly.
Let me admit my biases here: The last couple of months have been rough for me. In just the last couple of weeks I published two articles that pissed off a whole lot of people on the science-y left, including one for WIRED on gender nonconforming children, and another for New Statesman on vaccine politics. These have each generated a number of calls for my head from people on the pro-science left.
In addition, as you may have heard, I live-tweeted my son’s sex ed class, and with no warning that went internationally viral. (If somehow you haven’t heard about that, you can read what happened through my articles in The Stranger and The Guardian.) That was not exactly a pleasant experience, and I quickly got the sense my medical school’s administration was none too happy to have their institutional name on the front page of the Washington Post in this raucous sex ed context.
I read her WIRED article, and it takes a very soft position against outlawing gender conversion therapies for “transgender” children. In other words, she’s not entirely supportive of the notion that adults have to affirm a eight-year-old girl’s idea that she’s really a boy. She says:
Gender is complicated. Gender identity development in children is even more so. Even with our ever-expanding understanding of gender’s fluidity and variance, we still err by reducing it to simple labels that do not apply to everyone. When children are developing their gender identities, over-simplifying gender can be especially harmful, as a nudge in one direction or another at this crucial phase might forever change a person’s life. Can we respect the expressions of gender-crossing children without being so “affirming” of their declarations that we accidentally steer them to a transgender path they might otherwise not want or need to take?
Voicing this opinion contributes to her fear that she might lose her job? The world has gone mad. I do, however, like Dreger’s phrase “the science-y left.” Whether she meant this comparison or not, it reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” where the world is divided between “those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.” Science-y is to science what “truthy” is to truth — it’s all feelings over facts.