Pun Salad

I had always felt at home in America. It was my home and my parents’ home and my grandparents’, and it never seemed like it could be any way else. But three weeks from now, I am leaving the place where I was born and making a new life in Israel. The story of why is the story of a growing cohort of Gen Z Jews who see what the older generations cannot yet see: That the future doesn’t feel like it’s here as much as there.

When people ask me what the origin point is—when I knew I would leave—it’s not one particular moment, but a collection. Among them:

• The drunk girl at my alma mater, George Washington, caught on video in November 2019, saying, “We’re going to bomb Israel, you Jewish pieces of shit.”

• The Hillel that was spray-painted with “Free Palestine” in July 2020, at the University of Wisconsin.

• The Chabad House set on fire in August 2020, at the University of Delaware.

In a somewhat rambling essay published Aug. 17, James H. Sweet, president of the American Historical Association, argued that his profession is succumbing to “presentism,” the temptation to read all of history through a contemporary lens — in particular, through an emphasis on modern social justice issues. His assertion seems to be backed up by a quick perusal of the program for the AHA’s most recent conference, which is heavy on topics such as “Queering the Presidency” and “Decolonizing and Recentering Indigenous Specialists.”

“The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past,” Sweet warned. The result, he said, is “ahistorical.”

Historian Twitter exploded — there were rants and calls for resignation and, eventually, a groveling apology. Some of the critiques were substantive responses. But others rather proved Sweet’s point, rolling eyes at the old White guy who hasn’t gotten with the times.

For the umpteenth time we find Scientific American distorting empirical data for the sake of buttressing a “progressive” ideology. In this case the magazine has produced a short article as well as a video on “the sex binary” (there’s also an earlier article and video on sex, but on a different topic: sex-specific variations in health).

Both the video and the article below are devoted to debunking the idea that sex is a binary trait in humans. And they both reach the same conclusions:

1. People with true intersex conditions are often subject to unnecessary and harmful genital and reproductive surgery when they are too young to consent.
2. People with true intersex conditions are so common that one cannot say that sex is binary in humans. Rather, biological sex is characterized as a “continuum.”

I agree with the first point, which is an ethical one. Of course children with ambiguous genitalia or other deviations from the strict “male” and “female” dichotomy should not be subject to drastic surgical intervention until they’re old enough to consent, particularly when those conditions won’t cause irreparable damage before the age of consent. What rational person could object to that? And who could argue that intersex individuals, or any individuals who can’t immediately be placed in the sex binary, should be treated as inferior to other people?

No, my problem is with #2: the claim that sex in humans is not a binary.  This would be true if we had more than two sexes, and the other sex (or sexes) was quite common. But this is not the case.  We do not have more than two sexes: the “intersex” individuals, apparently considered by Scientific American (but not science itself) as “members of other sexes” are not. They are usually sterile, and do not constitute a “sex” in any meaningful sense. Rather, they are deviations, due to genetic or developmental anomalies, from the normal binary, just as many aspects of the development of other traits (limbs, brains, etc.) can seriously deviate from the “normal” condition.

On August 18, the journal Nature Human Behavior published an editorial called “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.” The editorial is draped in reasonableness — who could be against dignity and rights for all humans? — and contains some unobjectionable arguments, like how it’s important to “[d]efine categories [of humans] in as much detail as the study protocol allows,” which, okay. But its primary goal, if you read it carefully, is to expand the number of reasons scientific articles can be rejected for publication or, most troublingly, edited or retracted post-publication.

Early on, the article contains the ominous sentence “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” Whenever someone feels the need to express opposition to a belief held by just about no one, it’s a sign of potentially choppy intellectual waters ahead. To be fair, I don’t know how seriously this policy will be taken or if researchers will really try to use it as a cudgel to force retractions. But boy, is it half-baked. It nicely demonstrates the extent to which the careless injection of political values (guised as reasonableness) into science can cause trouble.