A palpable hit from Andy Lewis

Highlight of an often frustrating exchange

I’m bringing you in several letters in to a fascinating exchange between sceptics Andy Lewis and Aaron Rabinowitz on Andy’s proposal that Sceptics Need to Be Gender Critical. Thanks to cowardice at the top, the sceptic movement has been disgracefully captured by gender identity ideology along with every other institution and communications platform, and this exchange goes right to the heart of the rot.

Eight letters in and Andy can’t seem to winkle a coherent definition of ‘gender’ out of his opponent. There is instead a Gish Gallop that begins in Letter 4 and shows no sign of slowing. Aaron deserves credit for entering into the exchange, but not for the way he speaks to abuse victims who take issue with his incoherent positions, which have massive stakes for the women whose rights he is so flippantly hand-waving away.

Anyway, here is Andy’s most recent response. Everyone should be following this one.

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Dear Aaron,

I do not want to get too weighed down in this exchange in the to-and-fro of points here, and instead I want to keep this on track with the main argument about the need for sceptical involvement in the sex and gender debate.  The fact that you raise so many points suggests that there is indeed much here for sceptics to pick apart.

But to quickly address a few of your issues: 

Point 2 is indeed in "tension" - but not for your reasons. These are not my words. I think the very term gender-affirming care suffers from the point 1 you ascribe to me (which is actually fair) - that gender is a muddled concept. My position is that people have a sex and not a gender. So, what you call gender-affirming care is perhaps more realistically called medical sex-denial. The child's sex is being denied by medical staff because the child has false beliefs about their body and sexuality - which are not being challenged - but affirmed. 

 "Gender care" is not about social gender (sex stereotypes), but medicalising the denial of the material and physical reality of a child's sexed body through puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, removing sex characteristics though surgery, and psychological affirmation of false beliefs. 

I am not going to pick apart your ideas on gender, but for the record, it looks as if you gave up on trying to define what a "gender" is and resorted to a "it's complicated" type non-argument. And that leaves me with not a clear target to address. Science requires precision. And your approach, to be honest, looks more like mysticism and hiding behind the supposedly ineffable. 

As for the 4000% figure, disputing any particular number here strikes me as a deflection. Would it make a difference to my argument if the "true" generalised figure was more like the overall 2000%? I think not.  The orders of magnitude increase needs to be addressed, not its specific value for any given clinic. 

But on to the main argument. 

Your position that all this is 'moral panic' fails if any concerns here can be justified as sincere and meaningful about potential harms. We have looked at the unexplained massive rise in paediatric referrals and I would suggest your attempts to hand-wave this away are far from satisfactory. 

Moral panic is everywhere in trans activist rhetoric. Look at this disgraceful tweet.

The Chris Mosier @TheChrisMosier

A NOTE FOR PARENTS: If your child tells you they are transgender, you have two choices: 1. have a trans child 2. have a dead child It really is that simple - for so many of us, the ability to live authentically is a matter of life & death.

To accuse gender critical feminists of "moral panic" over this blatantly irresponsible messaging being given to children and parents is to be blind to an outrage.

Children (especially girls) are being told their discomfort and distress at their emerging sex and sexuality through puberty is "gender dysphoria" and they might be "trans". This sort of ideation is then put in their head that their only choice to save their life is to "transition". This is manufactured moral panic at its absolute worst. 

But as you know there are other concerns that I also believe are not moral panic.

 The next one is about female sport and its erosion by allowing males into the category because they self-identify as women. 

This is the area where I would suggest we see the most dishonest, specious and disrespectful arguments being made.

Sports have separate categories for each sex as human males and females are distinctly dimorphic when it comes to physical strength, speed, size and weight.  At  the top end of the normal distributions for performance for each sex, we see huge disparities in winning times etc. 

This is starkly illustrated by this website that compares the best child males (boys) with the best adult females (women). Large numbers of male children can beat the greatest women athletes in almost all events. If you allow males to compete against females - the males will win. This is a denial of the right for women to have their own excellence in sport celebrated and conducted safely. 

We see women up in arms at their sports being ruined by males who want their false assertions affirmed by inclusion in women's sports teams. The women swimmers of UPenn wanted to boycott their own meetings because a male was included in their team. They are faced with terrible dilemmas - compete and stand no chance. Or complain and risk their future participation. Males are bigger. They have narrower hips, stronger musculature, bigger arms and hands, bigger lungs. All these things add to greater performance in swimming.

Here are the UPenn women swimmers with the inclusion of a male. We can easily spot the male in this photo because of their male build. Humans are very dimorphic and we are attuned to the differences. There are no prizes for this particular "Where's Wally?".

Sceptics should be right on this debunking the awful arguments put forward like "testosterone suppression reduces performance to female levels". Will the male swimmer above ever lose their male hip alignment? Will they have smaller hands and narrower shoulders? Nope. The evidence is pretty clear that male advantage is retained even after several years of hormone suppression.

There is absolutely no justification to segregate sport by "gender". It serves no purpose other than at best assuaging male feelings.

This has gone on a little longer than I expected and we have not tackled the core problem: the erosion of women's rights, language, recognition and protections by removing all meaning from the word "woman". Perhaps if you have the stamina you can tell me why this is not a problem.

What does the word "woman" mean, Aaron?

Andy