Wikipedia's Lysenkoism

The politicization of science – by some very unusual suspects

“The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective.”

Elizabeth Finne, “The Tyranny of the Subjective,” Quillette, 19 Mar 2018

[This essay was first published on Medium about a year ago. Posting it here to make it more accessible to Substack readers, and to include a few corrections and some “late breaking developments”.]

We’re living in an era in which we have mastered the power of the atom, space travel, worldwide instant communication, and medicine so powerful it saves literally millions of lives a year. But recently we seem to have become less intelligent and perceptive than an infant – largely as a result of that “tyranny of the subjective” – for we no longer know the difference between a “man” and a “woman”, let alone the more fundamental difference between “male” and “female.”

Even newborn babies know mother gives milk and father doesn’t. That is a simple truth; an intuitive conclusion we all reach, and a necessary sense for the survival of the human race: What is a female? That knowledge is bred in the bone; it is reflected in the fossil and etymological record and goes back through all recorded time and underwrote what was until recently the standard definition:

“woman, female”, literally “she who suckles.”

Sadly, many Wikipedia editors — and even the esteemed New York Times, as well as many others — seem to have lost sight of such a basic truth. They genuflect to the view that transwomen can “transition to females.” This claim might have been justified given both that earlier definition and the predilection of many transwomen for, in effect, “growing their own” breasts enabling them to lactate, although the ethics of doing so, and the quality of the “milk” produced being somewhat suspect at best. However, medical science has yet to develop the ability to change the gonads to actually change sex — i.e., changing the ability to produce either sperm or ova — with “gender transition” surgery since no testicles or ovaries are ever transplanted.

The standard biological definition for “female” has changed greatly over the years, largely as a result of scientific advancements, notably the discovery of gametes — the sperm and ova that characterize and define the sexes — in the 1880s. As emphasized in a Quillette article by Helen Joyce — mathematician, journalist, and author of the recently published “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”, — the word “female” primarily means “of or denoting the sex class that produces large gametes”. Although she has managed to mangle the standard definition somewhat, even if it’s a common mistake, since classes (categories) are abstractions and can’t do anything themselves, only members can. But she usefully further emphasized that it’s a word with “an objective definition that holds right across all of biology, and hardly any of the things it refers to are capable of identifying as anything”. She rightly judged that “female” is a word which refers, first and foremost not to gender but to biology. This naturally excludes transwomen from ever qualifying as such — which of course has many of them up in arms (“How DARE you!” 🙄) and engaging in egregious thuggery.

But let’s turn now to the broader use of the words “woman” and “female”. While the primary denotation of woman is as a sex, it is increasingly common to see it used as a gender which leads to its own largely unaddressed controversy. Similarly and as Joyce underlined, the primary denotation of “female” is as a sex — “produces ova” — but transgender activists are trying to corrupt that by using it as a gender and, more recently, as an entirely subjective “gender identity”.

But for an example of the former, the Wikipedia article on transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard made the bold if politically motivated claim that Hubbard had “transitioned to female,” although that is, as the article had coyly suggested — “wink, wink, nudge, nudge”, a use of the word “female” as a gender. However, it is also a usage that is generally deprecated for many sound reasons, not the least of which is that it seriously conflicts with the far more common and useful biological definition and denotation. For instance, Merriam-Webster, in their own usage note on gender, emphasizes that:

“In this [sex-gender] dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender).

However, Merriam-Webster seriously undermines their own credibility with several definitions for “male” and “female” which have no underlying objective criteria for category membership or as points of reference. Which thereby have to qualify as their own top-rated entries in the “Circular Definitions R Us” contest — a popular pastime in these days of transgender looniness :

Although to be fair to Merriam-Webster, all they’re doing is reflecting the incoherent twaddle that transgenderism is bringing to the table. Which is looking more and more like the one at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

But underlining the first misuse or intentional obfuscation, Wikipedia’s own article on Gender quotes the late Justice Scalia who, in a sex-discrimination case in 1993, emphasized that dichotomy with a cogent analogy:

“The word ‘gender’ has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics … distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”

A reference work should never contradict itself  — or if there are contradictory viewpoints then it should clearly indicate the presence of a controversy, not insist any one is gospel truth as Wikipedia so often does, particularly on matters of sex and gender. The readers are depending on it to advise them on what the most recent and correct information is, on what are the mainstream views and definitions. Therefore this flagrant violation of consistency and standard English usage should be repudiated by any Wikipedia user or editor who values the resource.

However, when I (as user TillermanJimW) challenged that use as a gender in the Hubbard article as being contrary to and a flagrant violation of Wikipedia’s own guiding and “non-negotiable” principle of a “neutral point of view” [NPOV], I was blocked for a week. The “reason” given by user Gadfium in my appeal — that “transitioned to female” is “the accepted way to express a gender transition” — is, as indicated above by both Merriam-Webster and Justice Scalia, so completely incorrect to the point that it seems made up — or politically motivated.

Then, after insisting that Wikipedia had an obligation to address this clear failing in their stated mission to “collect and develop educational content,” that egregious hypocrisy, that potentially fatal flaw, I was blocked indefinitely for my troubles.

While that, in itself, may be superficially of no interest or value to anyone outside of a small circle of friends, it betrays and manifests an increasingly common “left-wing bias” within Wikipedia — which even co-founder Larry Sanger has frequently drawn attention to. Not that Mr. Sanger’s complaint seems to have had much if any effect in Wikipedia’s inner workings. But while Sanger has emphasized the leftward bias in the context of “science, religion, and politics,” the even hairier issue of sex and gender — where I ran afoul of Wikipedia’s Star Chamber — is arguably the intersection of all three of those topics, making it far more rife with dogma and hysteria from leftist commentators on Wikipedia and in general.

However, while Wikipedia has clearly, and rather too often, strayed from the straight and narrow of its founding principles, that is not at all to say that Wikipedia is totally beyond the pale. Co-founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, the former in particular, are to be commended for their vision of “free knowledge”, as imperfect and impractical as that may ultimately be for a number of reasons. As T.E. Huxley put it:

“For those who look upon ignorance as one of the chief sources of evil; and hold veracity, not merely in act, but in thought, to be the one condition of true progress, whether moral or intellectual, it is clear that the biblical idol must go the way of all other idols. Of infallibility, in all shapes, lay or clerical, it is needful to iterate with more than Catonic pertinacity, Delenda est.”

In other words, just as T.E. Huxley argued that “ignorance is one of the chief sources of evil” and that accuracy, in both thought and act, is the “one condition of true progress”, Sanger and Wales commendably see “free knowledge” as their mission statement. This “hacker ethic” has also been one of the main principles that has changed the internet over time from a few nodes to be used in the event of a nuclear war to the most comprehensive compendium of human knowledge ever assembled in the history of the world.

A rather large percentage of Wikipedia’s 42 million editors seem commendably and selflessly dedicated to this ethic and to that vision of free knowledge. The problem is that far too many other contributors and editors have something of an axe to grind, are less interested in the pursuit of truth and its explication than, in particular, in the “deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable” — Lysenkoism, in a nutshell.

This “deliberate distortion” is no more evident than in virtually every Wikipedia article that has anything to do with gender. Consider, for example the specific article on “gender” that boldly (if rather vaguely) claims that gender is the

“range [AKA, spectrum] of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between femininity and masculinity.”

Yet, there’s little to no recognition or discussion or recommendation in either the article or in many scientific studies in the field of any heuristic or method in that process of “differentiating” that might determine which “characteristics” qualify for use and how they might be quantified. The most that is typically acknowledged as common ground is that the two broad “genders” of “masculine” and “feminine” — each of which is presumably comprised of spectra of their own — encompass various sets of “attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with” or are more typical of human males and females. For example, in the same way that we say that males are, on average, typically 4 inches taller than females, on average, we can also say that being tall is more commonly associated with being a male than with being a female.

While many might question how we can say that sex is separate from gender yet still be “associated” or connected with it somehow, that seems to be the result of some confusion and ambiguity over what is meant by “associated” and its qualification with “generally”. Although part of that confusion is apparently that that “connection” is less a physical or biological one and more a logical or statistical connection of correlation. But what that means is that any given trait is not always connected with a given sex, but only typically or usually. For example, consider this “joint probability distribution” which compares the degree of “agreeableness” in males and females by plotting the percentage of the male and female populations (on the vertical axis) versus or associated with the corresponding degree of agreeableness (on the horizontal scale):

What that graph is showing in the location of the peaks of the two curves is that on the gender dimension of “agreeableness”, for example, females usually or on average have a higher “agreeableness factor” [AF] of about 4.0 while males usually or on average have a lower agreeableness factor of about 3.6. We might then say that “agreeableness” is more of a feminine trait than a masculine one, is more associated with females than with males. But that graph also means that some males will have AFs greater than some females. While “agreeableness” is more associated with females, that is only typically or generally so but not always.

But while it may seem a bit odd that people who have various masculine and feminine traits wish to change them with various surgical or hormonal interventions into ones more typical of people of the other sex, that does not mean that they have actually changed their sexes. As much as many of the transgendered try to suggest or claim otherwise — something akin to the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, i.e., next to therefore because of: if it even marginally looks like a duck, it must be a duck, even it’s entirely plastic or looks more like a cuckoo in the wrong nest.

But without the use of some scientific techniques such as those joint probability distributions it is impossible to say which of those traits, “attributes, behaviors, and roles” are more feminine and which are more masculine. It is even less likely that we’ll be able to differentiate between, and make sense of the myriad of genders that are implicit in the concept of a spectrum — and that have been flung, willy-nilly, into the conversation. For instance, Facebook lists some 56 variations, and other sources — here and here — have equally “well-populated” but entirely different spectra which makes the whole concept an elaborately childish game if not a laughably absurd one. One might reasonably wonder whether those peddling such elaborate schemes and demanding we participate in them have any plans to create separate sports leagues and change rooms for each of those many “genders.” We might just as well create separate sports leagues for introverts and extroverts, for the agreeable and the obnoxious.

But apart from those scientific techniques, one might also ask, on what evidence are these new gender categories based? The classic concepts of man and woman being male and female are now solidly based on the stipulative definitions of biology and on brute facts about profoundly and crucially important differences in reproductive abilities which encompass literally millions of sexually reproducing species, while those of gender are so amorphous and incoherent as to be worse than useless.

The claim that gender is nonbinary has been shouted from the rooftops (and from pulpits) to the extent that even psychologists are afraid to question it. Confidentially, a friend of a friend who is a psychologist said that she didn’t want to lose her employment for asking the wrong questions, but she couldn’t help but question the status quo when the map and the territory simply don’t match. Though gender is supposedly “a spectrum” or “nonbinary,” every client who comes into her office to discuss gender dysphoria or confusion cross identifies: the males as women or girls and the females as men or boys.

But all of that “range of genders” is analogous to the colour spectrum where “reddish” and “bluish” aren’t too helpful in identifying an exact wavelength of visible light. There exist a large number of named colours within that “binary” between red and blue even before using scientific terminology. However, at least some researchers in the field are using “joint probability distributions” as above in some very tentative and preliminary steps towards a “taxonomy of gender”, even if some Wikipedians are less than enthusiastic about even recognizing that much.

We already have many different systems that try, some more successfully than others, to categorize various personality types — largely what gender boils down into — such as those of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and many others. Whether a potential “typology” and taxonomy of gender will be much of an improvement on those is a question to be answered over time, yet it doesn’t look hopeful, particularly since so much of gender is incoherent nonsense. Even personality tests are judged by whether they have strong test-retest reliability. But that is not what is occurring with the invention of these new gender categories. The process is carried out more like a hobby or a silly game than a form of research. True distinctions will stand the test of replication. We do not see anything like that happening with regard to the proliferation of gender categories.

Another problem is the great many other controversies associated with the whole concept of gender, not least of which is the question, noted above, on whether “female” can reasonably be used as a gender or as a gender-identity. Yet none of these controversies are being addressed adequately and as required by Wikipedia’s own policy guidelines. What’s particularly myopic and ignorant is the insistence that those “characteristics” can include (as in the Hubbard article) ones that are entirely subjective, the “self-identification” of Wikipedia’s sanctions relating to gender identity which further corrupts and distorts the public discourse. For example, transwoman Chelsea Manning attempted to get “her” military record changed to “reflect” her brand-spanking new gender. “She” might have had a point if the US military was engaged in the business of recording all of the myriads of genders on tap instead of either of two sexes, nominally speaking in any case.

But this reliance on emotions and “lived experience” as a way of judging what was formerly a fact of biology is profoundly unscientific if not actually anti-scientific which can, and will, and does have some sticky consequences for us all. Once again, we see how the tyranny of the subjective damages communication and the quest for knowledge and truth. Something of a classic if damning case of damage to that quest is afforded by skeptic Michael Shermer’s review of Matt Walsh’s documentary, What Is A Woman?, where Shermer referred to part of an interview of a University of Tennessee “professor”:

But Grzanka’s dodge is not uncommon in academia today, and in exasperation with Walsh’s persistent questioning in search of the truth, Grzanka pronounces on camera, ”Getting to the truth is deeply transphobic.”

🤯 If that is what now qualifies as “higher learning” then Academia might just as well close the doors and turn off the lights so we can all go back to swinging in the trees.

But more to the point, the talkpage on the Hubbard article emphasizes a standard procedure, the abrogation of which will get an editor “excommunicated.” It’s something of a fatwa that can be issued by any administrator on Wikipedia who has the power to ban or discipline others for “deadnaming” or otherwise offending transgender activists. The worst ban issued on Wikipedia is the INDEF — an indefinite block, possibly for life. It’s a rather ridiculously draconian punishment — “Off with their heads!” — merely for putting words on a webpage which take literally seconds to change, but listen to the requirements that must be met to avoid it:

“Precedence should be given to self-designation as reported in the most up-to-date reliable sources, anywhere in article space, even when it doesn’t match what’s most common in reliable sources. Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns … that reflect that person’s latest expressed gender self-identification.”

Bold and italics in the original. Let’s pick this apart. Some people claim to be “gender fluid.” On its own Non-Binary Gender page, Wikipedia says genderfluid people “may fluctuate among differing gender expressions over their lifetime, or express multiple aspects of various gender markers at the same time.” Furthermore, nonbinary people are being encouraged to create their own pronouns or use pronouns that are very arcane and known to few.

For example, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Plus (LGBTQ+) Resource Center of University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee lists more than 75 usable optional pronouns for nonbinary students to try. 75 pronouns. Constantly fluctuating gender. Are we to understand that unless every Wikipedia editor stays abreast of these constantly changing new words, they face permanent banning from the site? Keeping Wikipedia constantly updated with the whims of every person it mentions is not just an unreasonable expectation. It’s an impossible expectation! Clearly, the Red Queen with her ability to “believe 6 impossible things” - even before breakfast - has been outdone by the transloonie tribe and their “useful idiots” like Wikipedia.

But the insane requirement to constantly change our words and writings about “gender self-identification” or to face Wikipedia’s fatwa is seen by many others outside of Wikipedia’s Ivory Towers as a serious problem that motivates much of the controversy over the whole concept. In particular, Joyce argues elsewhere, with some justification, that “it’s wrong — and profoundly damaging — to make us all agree that someone is whatever gender they say they are”, that “the gender self-identification lobby is harming children, women — and trans people themselves.” Although there’s maybe some justification to think that she — along with too many others — is conflating sex, gender, and gender identity — entirely different kettles of fish; see my Welcome for some elaborations on that theme.

But in addition to Joyce’s entirely justified criticisms of gender identity, philosopher Michael Robillard in his essay (“The Incoherence of Gender Ideology”) at Quillette similarly argued that:

“… the notions of both “gender” and “transgender” are either incoherent or vacuous and therefore cannot be the conceptual grounds by which persons derive actual positive or negative rights claims. On the contrary, such false ‘rights’ claims actually amount to severe rights violations of the vast majority of everyday language-users and citizens and cause irreparable damage to the set of shared social and linguistic practices necessary for coordinating the basic public goods of a free, flourishing, and truth-preserving society.”

Clearly, this quote perfectly describes the rather fraudulent claims of transwomen such as Hubbard in particular that they should qualify as “females.” This fraudulent claim underwrites their imperious demands to compete against biological women in various sports leagues, and to be treated as females when it comes to accessing sex-segregated toilets, change-rooms, and prison facilities. Oddly, when it comes to gender-bending discussions, even the people who care most about getting their words right somehow seem to get confused themselves and say the wrong thing. I suppose Hubbard or those pandering to “her” “delusions” have forgotten about the years of rhetoric spent to draw a line between gender and sex. Transgender people are called that for a reason. They do not transition to biological males or females. They make a gender transition.

It is virtually impossible not to see the demand to believe that transgendered people are whatever gender they claim today as a fascist and privileged imposition of personal delusions: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” It’s a riding roughshod over the “social and linguistic practices” — those common definitions about what it takes to qualify as members of objective categories — that are essential to the smooth operation of society.

One is reminded of Orwell’s 1984 with Insoc’s destruction of language and the control of belief even to the extent of forced belief in lies. Winston must not merely say he sees the wrong number of fingers, he must believe it. This is the spirit in which our minds are being violated by these unreasonable and ridiculous requests to call a person with large muscles and a beard “Ma’am” or to ignore how a male bodied athlete destroys and injures their female bodied sports opponents. Now Wikipedia has joined this absurd chorus of harpies by being willing to ban us for using the wrong pronoun or even for questioning the language they use because it’s inconsistent with their other claims, policy guidelines, and even with their very foundational principles.

Another particularly egregious illustration of the problems associated with the concept of “self-identification” is afforded by an essay at the Journal of Cultural Anthropology by Sahar Sadjadi. Of particular note are these particularly cogent observations of hers:

“Moreover, the magico-spiritual undertone of the conversations I witnessed was striking, perhaps lending testimony to how mysterious these children who transgressed one of the most entrenched rules of their culture appeared. Statements about a child “born with the brain of the opposite gender” were articulated as self-evident facts by many clinicians, as well as by the media and some advocates. As a physician and anthropologist of medicine, I had begun this project as a critical study of a cutting-edge clinical field; I was perplexed by this merging of science, magic, and religion in explaining children’s gender transition. As another example, I encountered the word soul in an article published by a team from a pediatric gender clinic at Harvard, who are pioneers of new developments in the field ….

This use of soul as interchangeable with the brain in the clinical literature is remarkable. It raises important questions about the contemporary scientific understanding of the brain, as well as the relation between the body and personhood that underpins the clinical practices surrounding gender-nonconforming and transgender children.”

“Questions”, indeed, although “intentionally unscientific misunderstandings” may be more accurate in the second paragraph. If this trend of including metaphysics and quasi-religious conjecture and emotional reactions in a scientific and clinical context continue, what will stop concepts like animal magnetism or bad blood from being reintroduced into medical or psychiatric training? Since there’s no epistemological difference between a belief in the soul — or gendered souls — and a belief in animal magnetism, the creep of these concepts is corrupting and possibly irreparably damaging our ability to perform good research and to continue to invent better technology and medicines for a better future of the human race.

Frankly, it’s impossible to imagine a more risible concept than “self-identification”. If someone of 35 were to seriously say that they “self-identify as a teenager”, that they should thereby be allowed to attend high school and compete on the swim team, not only would that person be deemed mentally ill, they might be arrested for attempts to corrupt the youth as well. In fact, this madness of allowing everyone to self-identify has gone so far that there have been actual cases of grown men claiming to be little girls to justify their pedophilic pornography use. One such example is Joseph Gobrick of Grand Rapids Michigan.

It gets worse. Not only are we allowing men to identify as children, we also allow children to consent to puberty blockers, which is also a very bad precedent to set. Children have never been allowed to consent to or deny medical treatments in our society, and for good reason. If children have the right to consent, our ability to protect them from various harms has ended. It’s like we have all decided to play a game where we simply believe our children’s make-believe claims. Yet, what would we do if a small child came to us many times a week saying “Meow, meow! I’m a kitty cat!” Would we give them hormones and surgery to look more like a cat? This is what we have become. Far too many so-called parents have abandoned their rights and obligations to say “no”, particularly in the face of transgender dogma:

How far we’ve come; how far we’ve fallen …

But no just society can exist if we do not know who is an adult and who is a child. We must know who has committed crimes, who owns houses, who is currently employed at each job and so on to have any semblance of order in society. We cannot simply allow everyone to say they are a little teapot, short and stout, or the Queen of Portugal or even that they are the Emperor with invisible clothes of the finest workmanship. We must not believe them if they do say that. We should not be sucked into their confusion and their delusions.

Either there must be objective criteria that qualify individuals as members of categories — actually being 13 to 19 years old (inclusive) in the case of teenagers — or those categories are manifestly worthless. Worthless categories do not divide things. Things that are not divided look the same to us. That means we treat them the same. But it would never be right to treat adults as children or vice versa. But somehow, when it comes to gender, far too many of us fall all over ourselves in “virtue-signaling” our agreement with those claims and all of their often odious consequences.

Given all of those problems with that concept of “self-identification”, one might ask exactly why Wikipedia would want to totally commit to a policy that is so profoundly illogical and egregiously anti-scientific. Some hints are provided by its “sister project”, Wiktionary, which provides this illuminating “usage note” on “trans woman”:

“The unspaced spelling transwoman [a compound word] … is often associated with the view that transgender women are not women, for which reason many transgender people find it offensive”.

Ah-ha! The plot thickens! We now see the naked “reason” for the illogical and anti-scientific policy!

It says it right there, “transgender people find it offensive” when we say various things such as that they’re still the same sex they were nominally born as. So the motivation for the policy is not to create educational material (Wikipedia’s entirely commendable vision), not to be fair to all editors, not even to do what’s best for everyone including transgender people. It’s all based on not saying whichever words some transgender people find offensive each day, and as shown gender can be fluid and people can change their pronouns to even unpronounceable words. Yet even Wikipedia apparently if incongruously accepts the common definition of “woman” as an “adult human female (sex)”, a state that no transwoman will ever attain no matter how much surgery or hormones they may have access to.

The answer to that previous question is that Wikipedia, and far too many others, would prefer to “distort scientific facts and theories for purposes that are deemed … socially desirable” — in particular and in this case, so as to not offend the transgendered. Wikipedia clearly needs to reflect on the words of Jonathan Rauch:

“Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.”

They should also reflect upon the somewhat more pithy words of Stephen Fry:

“It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so f_cking what.”

[I saw hate in a graveyard — Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]”

But while “self-identification” may be the more visible and fractious controversy, it is not the largest or most problematic of those that bedevil the whole concept of gender. One of the thornier issues is the question of the extent to which gender can be seen as entirely “socially constructed.” This concerns whether “gender” is only a matter of nurture with no contributions from nature, or is, at least in part, inherent to the person as they were born (“nature.”) The nature-nurture dichotomy and controversy is crucial to many social policies and far too many at Wikipedia are rather too quick to dismiss it as not at all relevant.

Even some feminist philosophers question the utility and applicability of gender:

“… which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues.”

But there is virtually no recognition of those controversies in the Gender article, although their articles on femininity and masculinity at least genuflect to the possibility that “some behaviors considered feminine/masculine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors”. However, that general absence is particularly problematic in light of the fact that much of the orthodox view of gender, as promulgated in the Wikipedia article thereon, is largely based on and driven by “the distinction between sex and gender in feminist theory.” Don’t we think it’s a problem that organizations such as WHO endorse this social constructionist viewpoint and, presumably, develop policies based on their supposed correspondence to “the truth?” Are we basing our policies on confusion and error? Perhaps we should build our skyscrapers on foundations of clay as well?

Considering the massive and pervasive problems within the whole concept of gender, many of which derive from those in feminism itself and which I only touch on here below, Wikipedia would do well to answer these questions and to make an honest assessment and clear description of those controversies and their social consequences.

One of the more cogent elucidations of the breadth and depth of that problem is provided by philosopher Amia Srinivasan who argued that:

“The objection I have in mind is that feminist philosophy rests on a mistake: namely, a conflation of epistemology and politics. Philosophy, at least on the conventional understanding, is an epistemic project, a project oriented toward truth or knowledge, and thus committed to the kind of unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge. Feminism meanwhile is a political project, a project oriented toward the emancipation of women and the dissolution of patriarchy.”

While there is, as many have argued, some merit in that “distinction between sex and gender” and in that project itself, it often conflicts with basic biological facts. For example, many argue that personality, which even some feminists accept as roughly equivalent to gender, is also based on many sexually dimorphic but biologically influenced or determined psychological traits which aren’t as amenable to “social engineering” as many feminists might like or desperately insist is the case.

How interesting it is that the insistence that gender is essentially a “blank slate,” is something that a lot of feminism shares with Communism. Arguably Communism foundered on the rocks of brute facts showing it simply couldn’t work, that human nature isn’t simply something that can be hammered into any arbitrary shape. As famous biologist E.O. Wilson once said about Marxism, in suggesting it was more suitable to ants, a species he is an expert in:

“Wonderful theory; wrong species”.

But that is why many argue that there’s a substantial degree of “ideological bias in the psychology of sex and gender.” It’s also why a review of Koertge’s and Patai’s “Professing Feminism” referred to the “virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students” in many Women Studies programs. Given those biases, it’s not surprising then that so much of gender has so little scientific justification and credibility, that it’s rife with so many controversies, that Wikipedia, with its clear if not unseemly bias towards the feminist viewpoint, is so unwilling to describe those controversies in an unbiased manner. Although Wikipedia’s feminist bias is maybe not surprising given how it gushes over Judith Butler.

Just think of what we’ve learned here: transgender ideology is now controlling part of our scientific academy and much of our media. Is this what we want for science? Is this what we want from an encyclopedia? Would we want other ideologies such as capitalism to control science? Wouldn’t that lead to dishonest corporations misreporting the testing of their products resulting in unsafe goods being bought and sold? That is only the beginning of this line of thought. When truth goes out the window, when feelings control science, nothing good can come of it, and we may soon see this self-identify ideology — this tyranny of the subjective — destroy court procedures, economic study, engineering, biology, and much of the entire edifice of Academia.

As Carl Sagan put it in his The Demon-Haunted World, when we are “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true” then we will inevitably “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness”.

But all of the foregoing gives some justification to those who argue that “the spectre of Lysenkoism lurks in current scientific discourse on gender.” It’s no idle accusation, this idea. Lysenkoism brought repression, persecution, famine, and other suffering to its adherents and the societies which endorsed it. Is that what we want?

Undeniably, this is where Wikipedia is headed now. NeoLysenkoism is more or less exactly what Wikipedia’s articles on Gender, Laurel Hubbard, and many other related ones are engaged in: “the deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable.”

But encyclopedias can’t afford that kind of quite egregiously biased subjectivity. The neutral point of view policy of Wikipedia was an excellent idea which the editors never should have departed from. If Wikipedia never returns to a more balanced, empirical, and factual editing policy it will either become irrelevant when something better is invented, or it will become unpopular and degraded over time. In other words, the fate of the Communist countries that embraced Lysenkoism will be Wikipedia’s future.