Pseudoscience

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

The project’s star success story was a young man named Kirk Andrew Murphy, who had been caught by his father posing in the kitchen in a long T-shirt saying, “Isn’t my dress pretty?” In a 1974 paper research assistant George Rekers and Lovaas described Kirk at age five as “‘swishing’ around the home and clinic, fully dressed as a woman with a long dress, wig, nail polish, high screechy voice, [and] slovenly seductive eyes.” At home, Kirk’s father exchanged his son’s red tokens for beatings with a belt, with Rekers’s approval. Eventually, Kirk’s brother Mark started hiding the red tokens to save Kirk from the abuse.

After 60 sessions in the lab, Kirk was declared cured of sissy-boy syndrome. The psychologists noted that after the treatment, the little boy was no longer upset when his hair was mussed and was eager to go on camping trips with his father. Rekers eventually published nearly 20 papers on his client’s alleged metamorphosis, becoming one of the world’s leading proponents of conversion therapy in the process.

Then in 2003, at age 38, after a series of unsuccessful relationships with women, Kirk died by suicide. His sister Maris told Anderson Cooper on CNN that his treatment at U.C.L.A. “left Kirk just totally stricken with the belief that he was broken, that he was different from everybody else.”

Their starting premise (and desired conclusion) is: There must be a strict binary because that would define trans people out of existence. When we discuss how gender identity and gender expression vary in the population, they claim that “gender” is somehow completely divorced from “biological sex” (it isn’t, see video). When they insist that genitals are the primary determinant of sex, we point to trans and intersex people who fall outside of those expectations. When they shift from genitals to sex chromosomes, or the SRY gene, we point to even more exceptions there. So now they’re championing gametes, but once again, there are always exceptions. Because human beings, like all animals, display some degree of sexual variation.

Speaking of all animals, the second reason why gender-critical activists have embraced gametes is that they believe they have stumbled upon a universal definition of sex that overrides all other conceptualizations (and we know how much they love their definitions). Their argument goes something like this: “In organisms that sexually reproduce, scientists categorize the sex that makes the larger gametes as ‘female’ and the sex that makes the smaller gametes as ‘male.’ Therefore, we must use this same standard when [checks notes] deciding which human beings can use which restrooms or play in which chess tournaments. Because science!”