Inconvenient truths and the falsehoods that better serve the cause

Working backwards from a desired conclusion, subordinating truth-seeking processes to predetermined outcomes

What comes first? An attempt to seek the truth or the desired conclusion to which the ‘facts’ must cleave? Ideally, this should be a two-step process:

1) What's going on here? Be honest.

2) What should we do about it?

To free science from politics, these need to be separate steps.

But I’m seeing a lot of activists and researchers working backwards from a desired conclusion, subordinating truth-seeking processes to predetermined outcomes.

This comes up in the debate over gender identity again and again. If the desired outcome is males competing in women's sports, then those males can't have a competitive advantage or pose a risk to women's safety. Regrettably, the facts don't agree with that conclusion—so they've gotta go.

If activists want to remove gatekeeping around medical transition, then detransitioners' experiences are terribly inconvenient. Therefore, the finding must be that nobody or almost nobody detransitions.

If activists want male people to be treated as female people for any or all purposes, then we can't acknowledge there are any possibly relevant differences between male and female people—even if we sound totally bonkers.

If someone is fired, hounded or assaulted for her speech, she must have said something horrible. The crime and the punishment must match, working backwards from the severity of the punishment. (Familiar logic: If she got raped, she must have deserved it. Either she drank too much or put her trust in the wrong person or dressed like a tramp. Given the outcome, no matter what she did, she must have been asking for it.)

Let’s try it again:

Conclusion: TERFs must be pushed out of public sphere & trans claims/demands must be exempt from public inquiry.

Therefore: TERFs must be hateful bigots whose concerns are pathological and can’t be rationally engaged. Would you befriend, employ, or converse with a Nazi?

Because activists want kids to be able to transition at earlier and earlier ages, puberty blockers must be safe and reversible—no matter the evidence that puberty blockers may permanently stunt cognitive development and harm mental and physical health.

I’ve been re-reading Galileo’s Middle Finger—Alice Dreger’s excavation of academic controversies—and I’m struck that the researchers who get monstered are often much more accepting than the activists calling for their heads. Put it that way and it’s not surprising, I suppose.

Take Mike Bailey, whose research into autogynephilic transsexuals rubbed prominent trans activists the wrong way. Some of those activists set out to destroy Bailey’s career and ransack his personal life.

The thing is, Bailey didn’t think there was anything wrong with being AGP and never judged his research subjects. He didn’t think being AGP should stop someone from transitioning or changing their legal documents or being accepted as a woman. But Bailey's research didn’t fit the activist narrative that required ‘desexualizing’ trans identity as a route to social acceptance. Evidence that trans identification—for some males—was a fetish threatened this narrative. So Bailey had to go.

Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist who lived alongside the Yąnomamö people for many years, ran afoul of activists because his research didn’t support the narrative that paints Indigenous peoples as peace-loving environmental stewards. Chagnon believed that even though the Yąnomamö people could be violent and ecologically destructive, they nonetheless deserved rights and protections. But the truth was a story many activists couldn’t abide, so Chagnon had to pay.

What’s underneath this? A belief that the public will only support perfect victims and simple storylines? Or a discomfort with the facts on the part of the activists themselves?

There’s a black-and-white thinking at work here that finds a world cast in shades of gray hard to live with. Ideology can tidy up these messy realities.

Some activists come to believe that fictions can better serve the cause—perhaps even conceptualized as a 'greater truth'—than inconvenient facts. But this approach won't serve these causes well. The truth will out.

When it comes to preventing murders of trans people, understanding the factors that led to their deaths matters. The evidence suggests that that nebulous boogeyman ‘transphobia’ is less of a factor than poverty, male violence, and prostitution, which is deadly way to eke out a living for women and trans people alike. So saving the lives of these trans people has little to do with policing women’s speech and erasing sex distinctions in the law and a lot to do with extending social supports to help trans people escape abusive relationships and exit prostitution. But while this assessment better fits the facts, it doesn't cleave to the chosen narrative. (Let the witch burnings continue!)

Our liberal truth-seeking processes and institutions are suffering, too. If a narrative cannot accommodate inconvenient facts, it will be tempting to shut (or shout) down research designed to seek the truth and silence the people who speak it.

Activists on the left are playing with fire when they say there’s no way to get closer to any shared set of facts that can serve as a shared basis for political dialogue and action, or when they subordinate truth-seeking processes to a preset agenda. The way back—it seems to me—is to seek understanding first, and then deliberate and decide what to do.

[From November 2020 Twitter thread]