• The rainbow-fascists, struggling to make the trans run on time:
World Aquatics’ plans to debut an open category for transgender athletes at the World Cup in Berlin this week have been cancelled after no entries were received.
Swimming’s governing body, which voted last year to ban transgender women from the elite female category, had promised to stage the “pioneering pilot project” to promote its “unwavering commitment to inclusivity, welcoming swimmers of all sex and gender identities”.
However, its intention to hold an “open” category, with 50m and 100m races across all strokes alongside its men’s and women’s competition, has been put on hold. “Following the close of registration for the open category competitions at the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup – Berlin 2023 meet scheduled for 6-8 October, World Aquatics can confirm that no entries have been received for the open category events,” it said.
World Aquatics’ decision to bar transgender women from elite female competitions if they had undergone male puberty came after research showing trans women retained a significant advantage over female swimmers even after reducing their testosterone levels through medication.
• But wait—there’s more:
Males took over a women in tech career conference by registering as non-binary. pic.twitter.com/CcGByMt4H1
— Ren (@rottengirl) October 3, 2023
To quote The Mandalorian, this is the way. Or as Marx said, heighten the contradictions.
• The rainbow crusade is not the only woke cause suddenly crumbling. Just a few days after Ibram X. Kendi’s grift at Boston University was exposed, the Daily Telegraph over in England reported similarly:
It’s time to admit it: “Black Lives Matter hysteria made fools of us all”
Remember the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol? The one where the mob tipped the statue into the harbour? In court this week, one of its organisers admitted fraud, after £30,000 in donations from Black Lives Matter supporters went missing.
Those donors will be shaking their heads. But I suspect they won’t be the only ones. Because, three years on, it feels like an appropriate time to reflect on what happened during that mad summer of 2020 – and to ask: what exactly came over us?
We all recall what happened. For almost a month, mass protests raged all over Britain. Outside Downing Street, a policeman took the knee while on duty. The Labour leader, and his deputy, posed for a photograph in which they solemnly took the knee inside Parliament.
Then the England football team started taking the knee, too. In fact, they continued to perform this American gesture long after American sportsmen had stopped. Hence the peculiar spectacle before the England vs USA match at last year’s World Cup. The England team took the knee – but the US team didn’t.
• We were early to the embarrassment that is the American Anthropological Association, which canceled an annual meeting panel on biological sex because of the “harm” it would cause to the biology-deniers in their midst, but both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education have caught up with the story.
The Times reports it “straight” (so to speak—and heh), but the wokerati that run the AAA don’t look very good:
The move was criticized by some academic freedom advocates who said that the two anthropology groups had caved to political pressure and proved the panel’s point: that the discipline was unfriendly to dissenting views on sex and gender.
But Ramona Pérez, the president of the American Anthropological Association, rejected the attacks. She said the decision had “no impact” on the panelists’ academic freedom, because the association was a professional group, not an educational institution.
The panel was nixed, she said, only after complaints that it did not have scientific merit and that it was harmful to some of the association’s 8,000 members. “This was an intention to marginalize, not engage scientifically,” Dr. Pérez said.
Agustin Fuentes, an anthropology professor at Princeton, was consulted by the American Anthropological Association about the panel and supported the group’s decision. He said current research in anthropology had shifted toward the term “gender/sex” instead of “sex.” Biological sex, he said, is itself fluid, citing those born with XXY chromosomes, for instance.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is not as equivocal:
At first glance, it seems as if the association’s institutional politics vis-à-vis science had turned by 180 degrees — from rejecting science to defending the scientificity of the discipline against a pseudo-science the AAA board compared to the race science of the late 19th and early 20th century. For, like race science, the claim that biological sex is binary and that only gender identities are fluid was not only scientifically erroneous but also morally wrong, an abuse of “‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already-marginalized groups of people.” In the association’s administrative diktat, the good and the true align against the bad and the false. . .
The second question is whether scientific knowledge of biological sex is indeed settled. In science studies, the paradigm case of settled science is textbook knowledge. I consulted half a dozen biological anthropology textbooks from the past 10 years. Sex differences are usually discussed under the rubric of “sexual dimorphism.” Analytically, they all distinguish between males and females. Some qualify the distinction with reference to Klinefelter syndrome (a genetic condition where a person has an additional copy of the X chromosome beyond the X and Y chromosomes characteristic of males) and Turner syndrome (in which a person has a single X chromosome but no second sex chromosome, and appears phenotypically female). . .
All of this shows that the AAA’s reference to “settled science” is misleading. There is a live controversy. One would expect a professional organization that claims to represent American anthropology not to arbitrate such a controversy by decree but provide a platform for it to play out. What else do we have conferences for, if not to learn about the latest scholarly debates?
• How much truth is there to the old saying that dogs reflect the personalities of their owners? I don’t know, but:
Bidens’ Dog Is No Longer at White House After Latest Biting Incident
President Biden’s dog Commander is no longer living in the White House after a series of biting incidents involving staff members and Secret Service personnel, according to a spokeswoman for Jill Biden, the first lady.
Elizabeth Alexander, Dr. Biden’s communications director, said the dog was no longer living with the first family.
“Commander is not presently on the White House campus while next steps are evaluated,” Ms. Alexander said in a statement.
The move came days after Commander, a 2-year-old German shepherd, bit a Secret Service officer. It was the 11th episode of “aggressive behavior” by the president’s pets, many of them involving Commander and the officers and agents who protect the president.
One of Mr. Biden’s other dogs, Major, was sent to live away from the White House soon after the president took office because of what was described at the time as a “biting incident” with a White House staff member.
It’s almost like there’s a pattern here.
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