CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised | Hacker News Reader

CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised

insidemedicine.substack.com

844 pointsKittenInABox721 comments

I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

I could imagine people moving away from CDC into private sector, and considering it's long been a "model" US view that things progress best when done in a free market, it might actually be a boon to medical research.

But, a couple of quick searches tells me 1/3rd of healthcare costs per person comes from the federal government (data from 2023), and NIH puts majority of it's $48B budget towards external (83%) and internal (11%) research.

Obviously, only some research would have (or need to have) the forbidden terminology, so perhaps nothing really happens.

Edit: and lest it remains unsaid, let's also take this with a grain of salt until it comes out from multiple sources or officially.

According to TA, this also affects lots of other papers even if they are not central to the topic. The intention is to combat "woke" research, but it creates pure chaos and uncertainty across the whole field. There is no official policy, and every bureaucrat is trying to guess what is going to be permissible in the future and what not. To be on the safe side (i.e., to not get fired), the ban is interpreted broadly.

Hopefully not much. They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on. The issue with banning "woke ideology" in principle is that it isn't formally defined and doesn't mean anything. And to ban a thing first it has to exist in a detectable way.

My guess is there'll be a bit of flailing then everyone will default back to status quo. It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies and it isn't going to do anyone any favours in terms of image to pursue this. Might take 4 months, might take 4 years to blow over.

> Might take 4 months, might take 4 years to blow over.

That’s a lot more optimistic than I fear.

> issue with banning "woke ideology"

It’s the illiberal right shaking hands with the illiberal left. The problem is this time the purges aren’t just ideological, but also financial: there are winners and losers in our healthcare industry likely to be defined by their polarity to Trump.

What "illiberal left" benefits from this? Half of the reason we are at this point is the nonstop equivocation that goes on in our discourse.

Lay this at the feet of who caused it.

> What "illiberal left" benefits from this

Banning terms from general and academic use originated, in modern America, from the illiberal left’s cancel culture.

I’m not saying they caused this—it’s not novel that illiberalism leads to censorship. But the tactics both groups use when they get their hands on power are remarkably similar.

> the nonstop equivocation

You probably mean false equation. I don’t believe I am, because the illiberal left never came into power. At least not federally. Liberals on the left successfully checked our radicals in a way the right did not.

(If you want policy fusion between the illiberal left and right, it’s in RFK Jr. Marin County sees eye to eye with MAGA on e.g. vaccines.)

before cancel culture it was satanic panic from the right. This is not a new phenomenon, and I don't think it has much to do with the shift towards right wing extremism

cancel culture from the left came from grassroot movements - kids at uni get offended and they ban certain words and heckle certain speakers.

cancel culture from the right is coming from POTUS.

can you tell me if you think there's any difference at all between the two?

> cancel culture from the right is coming from POTUS

Not really. Trump is channeling something that probably came from the book-banning religious conservative crowd.

"the buck stops here". he controls the most powerful army in history. I don't care whose arm is reaching up his colon to move his lips - he's responsible. it's his signature on the orders.

He clearly has dementia on top of raging NPD and I'd honestly be surprised if he knows what day it is.

Nobody is arguing with you on that. You said cancel culture was grassroots while this is not. My point is they both started grassroots. This one just reached higher.

The origin is not the point, the power differential is. Hence why this is an equivocation.

Cancel culture was systematically supported and promoted by the most powerful people in our society.

give five examples?

If we’re talking about banned words or terms, one of our Supreme Court justices wouldn’t define the term “woman.”

The Biden administration directed ICE to use the term “undocumented noncitizen” instead of “illegal alien.” They also pressured social media sites to censor certain content.

There was also the whole Al Franken thing.

is any of this comparable to banning any acknowledgement of the existence of trans and intersex people in anything connected to the federal government?

in fact refusing to define a term doesn't sound like banning at all. to ban is to forbid somebody else from doing something. to refuse to do something personally isn't banning.

Being unable to describe a woman would be pretty similar to banning trans acknowledgement. They're basically 2 sides of the same coin; the mismatch between reality and the categories we use. There are different opinions about which part of the mental model has to give. Ie, the concept of man/woman is too imprecise for political discourse - do politicians abandon the word woman or do they abandon the parts of reality that don't fit into a man/woman model?

The obvious solution is the third option of letting a few more genders in, but that would still require being able to articulate what a woman is.

again, one of them is refusing to do something, but the other is forbidding the doing of something. there's a huge difference.

The gender one is more consequential; if we accept that they exist there are a lot of women who get involved in the legal system because of their gender. Eg, say there is a case that involves gender discrimination - a judge that can't identify what a woman is will struggle to come up with reasonable rulings.

In fairness we don't have the words the judge used in front of us so maybe there was some hedging involved. But they do have to be able to come up with a working definition.

if the ruling is unsatisfactory, you can appeal. you can bring in expert witnesses. she's a professional, and she'll make her decisions based on the facts of the case, and hopefully not based on prejudice. if it's the supreme court, she won't be alone.

> It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies

If you assume that the goal is to implement a policy, no, it's not possible. But that's never the goal with such chaos. The goal is to make it unclear what's allowed or not, so that the real answer becomes: whatever the current ruler favors is allowed, and whatever he dislikes is disallowed. "Woke ideology", like "globalism" or "cultural Marxism" before it, means nothing, which means it can mean anything.

I remember my dad having to travel to Moscow during the Soviet times to get the censor's approval for the movie he was planning to shoot (that is on top of budget-related issues etc.) I was still very little then, but from what little I remember, it seemed like it always was a guessing game: how much do you have to add of glory to the proletariat in order to make the cut. Naturally, artists were turning their noses when they saw too much of the Soviet propaganda in a movie, so, they tried to put as little of it as possible, at the same time using all sorts of tricks to disguise the criticism of the system that required the censorship.

And while this kind of little struggle had its fun moments... overall, I don't think it was fun. Also, indeed the rules of what's allowed or disallowed would change based on current political events, and just like in 1984, everyone was supposed to acknowledge that the rules had always been the way they currently are. Which, in terms of long-term planning, would sometimes result in problems. Like, when someone was trying to placate the censorship by overemphasizing some political aspect at the time of submission, but the events developed so fast, that the official party line at the assessment time was the exact opposite of what it was at the submission time.

----

Oh, and just to give some examples of when the "proto-woke" (in Soviet times it was called the "decadent capitalist influence") had some tragic consequences.

The only acceptable painting style was Soviet Realism. Anything that had signs of deliberate distortion of color / perspective / size / anatomy etc. would be labeled "decadent capitalist" and perpetrators would be prosecuted.

So, another student in my dad's class came in drunk to a model drawing session. And instead of using a graphite pencil, used what was called a "chemical pencil", which is a kind of Indian-ink based pencil (it's practically impossible to erase). And, in a study of a head of a model, that student made several strokes that extended beyond where the area of the nose would've been, and so it looked like the model had whiskers...

That student was later taken away to the dean, and in short time was expelled.

Another student was expelled for wiping his paintbrush on the canvas (which he later planned to cover with some neutral background color, but was too late...) because he forgot to bring a piece of rug that one usually uses to wipe a brush before using a different paint.

That sounds like a fun anecdote, but those two had their lives ruined.

> The only acceptable painting style was Soviet Realism

It was the "socialistic realism". Being interested in math this particular insanity did not affect me too much, but for someone interested in the arts living under this gun was a 24x7 reality. Not fun times...

Yeah, my bad. Funny how I managed to forget it. That was a big part of my life :) It was still a thing when I went to art college.

And then years later I'd go to see Kyiv Art Academy final year exhibition, and it was still socialistic realism, but now instead of workers and farmers they have saints. For some reason it became very religious... Or maybe I just fell on bad years.

The weirdest thing is to watch the American right wing implement a Russian playbook. The people who made loudest noises about "commies" are now fawning over the Eastern Bloc.

Should not be too surprising. Russia is mot communist anymore and advocate a more traditional society.

But the book was written as a guide to how to take down USA. Implementing the book for local politics = helping Russian goals.

Today's Russia is not communist in any way. It's a far-right-wing autocratic kleptocracy, where all power is held by a single individual and those who have personal favor with him, all wealth is managed through a cycle of corrupt state-sponsored ventures, and all cultural identity is wrapped up in tradition and faux-masculinity. There's not even a pretention of left-wing influence; it's a fully fascist state.

The USSR was obviously similar in practice for most of its history, especially under Stalin, but it still pretended to maintain the trappings of a communist structure. And at least the USSR made it clear what the rules were: it was an unabashed command economy, with property owned by the state, and economic decisions flowing through the party leadership. The Putin/Trump version where there's a de jure market economy but de facto control by the ruling party is a different kind of corruption incentive - it's much harder to challenge what theoretically isn't happening.

Having lived close enough to it to "pick up the vibes" I'm going to say the only thing that's really changed is the flavor of the propaganda. USSR might have started as a leftist thing (I wouldn't know), but it didn't behave like one toward the end. It was all about power & corruption.

Governments implement incoherent policies all the time.

I'd argue that it isn't possible to write thousands of pages in a single bill or budget proposal and have it actually be coherent.

It also might take four generations or four centuries to 'blow over'

Authoritarians do not stop until they are stopped by an external force.

The cost of stopping them only increases with every move they make to consolidate power (which of course is the intention).

From the article:

> This is leading to what Germans call “vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or “preemptive obedience,” as one non-CDC scientist commented.

And why is this term German? Do, perhaps, the Germans have unique experience and insight in this regard?

> After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. [1]

It’s become fashionable to accuse people who raise the spectre of fascism and authoritarianism of crying wolf. We are being told not to believe the evidence of our own eyes, like when Elon Musk performs the Nazi salute in front of the far right dignitaries assembled for the inauguration and we’re supposed to believe this is because he’s on the spectrum or some other nonsense. If you don’t want to go down the road that anticipatory obedience leads to, then you have to resist. It is that simple.

1: https://lithub.com/resist-authoritarianism-by-refusing-to-ob...

Late Soviets had term for it too - “aggressive-obedient majority”, although this applies more to Republicans in legislature and the Air Force people who took down Tuskegee stuff

> They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on.

The authors of this memo banning terms haven't realized this has already happened in part. Obstetrics avoids the use of gender with the term "parturient" instead of "mother." "Pregnant person" probably isn't showing up in many papers.

And maybe that's fine because it isn't a signal of ideology like "pregnant person" is. Don't forget that if scientists were using these terms, they were likely already doing so because of political pressure, so it is good to stop it in cases where it's nothing to do with their research (eg. transgender parturients). Of course it doesn't mean this order isn't ham-fisted, but research is often polluted by politics because it helps get funding as well as researchers are pretty politically biased in some fields.

What’s wrong referring to the relevant sex characteristics? Why change language for the exceptional and small population? A man who gives birth is still the mother even if they take a social role of a father later in the child’s development.

Because their sex characteristics aren't the relevant thing, the fact that they are pregnant is. The medical field prefers precise terminology. It's only when it comes to trans people that people get weird about it, because they're really using it as an excuse to argue about something else

It's a lot easier to destroy something than rebuild it.

I've always joked that Trump was basically the Manchurian candidate.

> Hopefully not much. They'll invent some jargon if necessary and move on.

"Winnie-the-Pooh"?

Healthcare costs don't neccessarily map to funding of research. It doesn't make sense to bring that up here.

noobermin is rihgt. I've been reading a book about gastroenterology and it is surprising how many decades occur between research, findings, medical acceptance, and then eventually application to the public.

What book? Sounds interesting.

Sure, but there must be some relation as they cover the cost of drugs and any novel procedures, which are at least somewhat priced according to how much research to develop them cost.

I was just looking for how much research is funded by federal government, and that number came up as somewhat unrelated — it was harder to come up with a total medical research cost number, so this was the best I could do in a couple of minutes.

If corporations are going to argue for the current regime of health care costs to stay as high as possible in the "free market" using research & development costs as an argument, then yes it makes sense to bring it up.

> I wonder how will this affect private institutions and private publications?

A government agency trying to enforce censorship in scientific publications outside its sphere of influence... I have to admit, that was not the first thing I wondered about.

I don't agree with how Trump and his administration are going about this, but it has been interesting to see how quickly it has pushed democrats back to a more federated approach.

After the election many started looked to state's rights type issues to make change locally before Trump took office.

Changes like this could very well push research back out of the centralized government back to more of a free market and federated or decentralized approach. That would at least be a silver lining in my opinion, though to a potentially very dark cloud.

The free market doesn't support most research. Research usually doesn't end in something that's marketable, and even if it does it's often on a too long time scale to do so for companies to justify. And even if there is, it might never get published lest competitors gain anything from it. This is bad for science. At best states might step in but I imagine many won't.

That's the conventional argument for government funded research, but is it true? The AI space is a good example of very long term research, funded almost entirely by the private sector without any clear idea of how the results would be marketed, they publish and - the key part - the work actually replicates. Nor is the AI space unique. XEROX Parc was another famous example, Big Data/Cloud has come entirely out of private sector research. Not unique to computer science either: the research work that led to Ozempic was being funded by Novo Nordisk as far back as 1998.

> Research usually doesn't end in something that's marketable

It usually does, even in academia. That's why they count citations. It's just that the thing that's marketed is either policy advocacy (marketed to governments) or the claims in and of themselves, marketed either to the general public in TED talk style advocacy or to other academics as work they can build on to get more grants. A lot of people don't recognize the existence of things like the profit motive, lobbying or marketing in government funded research, imagining that they don't exist, but they do. In some fields, it's common for lobbying to be like 50% or more of the word count.

There's a long tail of papers that research things that nearly nobody cares about, yet perhaps one day they might. These are the "we studied some obscure fish in the Amazon and found a cure for cancer" type stories that crop up from time to time. But such claims often don't quite work out, and the private sector is easily able to fund this sort of exploratory work too.

Yet at the same time we keep seeing startups bringing innovation, while the big enterprises do not bring that much original innovation. Instead, those big enterprises rather kill innovation by buying those startups. Not seldom to just cancel the whole product together.

This is almost a secret, but __most innovation come from the small players__. Those small players benefit from open access and academic progress. It is a very fruitful cooperation.

But the tragedy is that in the US the meaning of "the free market" is being loudly distorted. What they actually mean is a cozy climate for oligarchs, protected by the mountains of tariffs and deregulation. In the US society, the idea of competition has deformed into "killing competition", and they clarify it now with "by all means possible". Those extremists HATE competition. Nobody arrived likes being disturbed and having to work to keep competitive. Rent extraction is way simpler.

Especially HN should think a little longer about what that all means for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Well, in the AI space at least that's not really true. Google, NVIDIA and Meta have all made huge contributors. So has Microsoft, in their own way. It's a real mix of big old companies and smaller upstarts.

Even in this example it is a yes and no. Remove academic development in the AI, including the paths we left, and your examples would not have any AI at all.

The problem is a little bit more nuanced than that though. It is not that big companies do not make inventions. Often, these inventions do not survive politically in the behemoth. That is why some companies decide to create a spinoff, knowing that their own body would be trying to kill the growth of their offspring.

Even in the early days AI was heavily funded by the private sector. Symbolics machines were partly promoted as a way to do AI research, back in the logic era. And the AI winter was mostly a grant funding phenomenon. When it became unfashionable in universities the field rebranded as ML and became commercially driven by (mostly) different people. Companies like Google invested in advanced ML research from day one.

Nowadays it's been rebranded back to AI due to the switch to neural methods, but there's been funding for AI from the computer industry for as long as the field existed.

I'm pretty sure AI would exist as a field and be in a similar place to where it is now, even if governments had never funded it at all.

Even more, a significant portion of the researchers at industrial labs got their start as graduate students, largely funded by government grants. Even if somehow no actual fundamental research transferred from academia into industry, the people sure do.

That is not actually what happens with most acquisitions, especially not in the drug and biotech space. Big enterprises buy promising startups at the phase 1 or 2 stage fully intending to bring them to market. But still many fail to ever make it through phase 3 and gain FDA approval. That's not an innovation problem it's just the nature of the business.

I am not sure if this applies here, but Regulatory Capture is a certain way to block the small players from growing. I understand that drugs are a special case, so I do not know if that applies there.

Also, the fact that a product fails post-acquisition is precisely what happens a lot in regular business too. They can be seen as a threat to other fiefdoms in the behemoth, or they lose their autonomy. Doesn't always mean the product or idea was flawed beyond repair.

This is bad for science, if you mean the deletion of data. Moving away from centralized authorities may be net positive though, time will tell.

You're also touching on the problem of research as an industry. Papers should be published regardless of economic value, and research should be done for the sake of curiosity. Sometimes outcomes are useful or functional, but that shouldn't be the only, or even primary, driver.

States rights will be in the crosshairs soon enough. States that support public health, be that reproduction, vaccines, sex ed, weather, or simply just fact-based research, could see thier federal funds dry up. States still need to biuld infrastructure, something that almost always taps federal funds. Everyone who works in science or research is afraid at the moment, irrespective of where they think their funding comes from.

I know a guy measuring tree growth, with an eye to whether tree planting is effective post-fire. Much of the study is on federal lands. He has no idea whether the project will still exist come spring.

Once the Republicans start going after state's rights the parties really will have fully flipped.

Nothing wrong with that, it happens pretty often, but it is interesting to see play out in real time.

I don’t think states rights is defined by whether they receive money from the federal government.

There is a history of federal funding drying up when states don't follow federal guidelines.

Louisiana didn't have ant federal funding for roads for years because they were refusing to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21.

I don't see how this addresses my point. State rights is the ability of a state to act on their own - not have unfettered access to federal funds.

Sure, but the GP you were replying to was focused on the risk of states losing federal funding and how that leverage is making many act differently in response.

When the federal government takes somewhere between 50% and 100% of the income tax payed by a state's citizens simply to give it back to the state with strings attached, that is a straightforward undermining of the state being able to act on its own.

In general, it's amazing how reliably crypto-authoritarian points are prefixed with "I don't see how". It exploits our natural advantage to assume good faith and difficulty understanding, rather than a willful ignoring of coercion.

It has never been the case that one party was for centralization and one was for decentralization. Neither of these are goals. Both are instead methods of achieving goals. Both parties will use claims of federalism when they want to oppose federal policy they don't like and have done so for decades and decades.

Sure, that seems to be what drives the two parties flipping and it seems to be happening now. While your team is in charge you like federal powers, when the other team is in charge you like state powers.

It is generally true, though, that one of the two parties is for decentralization at any given point in time.

I don’t know about “parties” but political movements absolutely are divided by centralization (or not). Collectivism is literally the centralization of wealth.

I wonder how much of the success pseudo gender “science” had in undermining the scientific and medical communities was attributed to the centralization of science authority in the federal government. It makes me wonder if there shouldn’t be a separation of science and state.

> it might actually be a boon to medical research.

How? That seems like going out of your way to label this as not as bad as it actually is.

If you get really good researchers away from cash-strapped CDC into private sector — not sure if this will play out, and if private sector would be interested, or if their research even has earning potential — but it "might", right?

A lot of research NIH funds because there is low outcome of a market product at the end of that research. This is because investors won't spend the money or only fund research that has no money incentive in its outcome. The way I see is it is progress is about to stop because investors will only fund thing that can have a direct money outcome for them in the future...

I think that's the only option. We need the truth, we currently have a deranged President leading the blind who would rather believe in a sky daddy and the lies they tell themselves than reality. I could see an oligarch that actually might choose to do the right thing, along with a group of high end Universities to replace CDC and NIH at least for the next 2-4 years when we can reestablish some sanity. While I'm fine with rescending bad papers and false information, these blanket attempts to normalize thought crime from the new regime to destroy science and the truth and replace it with their own distorted world view needs to be met with resistance.

Whether they believe in God doesn't have to be part of the equation though. You can believe in God and also in trans rights and science and everything.

It's possible but somewhat rare. I've met religious research scientists before, but in general principles of faith and the scientific method are at odds with each other.

Interesting thought, but significant technologic “break throughs” almost never come from the private sector. A “break through” is just luck, and countless years working on a problem incrementally. That doesn’t typically return profits.

I'm assuming at this point refusing will be a badge of honour but one which is terminal for federal funding, in this 4 year term if not longer. You would need very high confidence in your future career trajectory to do that.

We had a mini storm over government censorship of CSIRO science in Australia and it got pretty ugly, but this is much uglier.

If they do the same for NSF, earth sciences, DoE and AGW it's going to be pretty nasty.

I don't even have to agree with the science. This kind of mass bad-topic-ban is really unhelpful. I wonder if the editorial boards are also going to put up a fight? I can imagine some kind of "retracted because of Trump policy, not because the peer review process asked for it" markers.

Genetics, and Lysenkoism comes to mind. A stain on soviet science which echoed down the years.

If they do give in though, they might face consequences after Trump’s term. The Supreme Court should definitely chime in quickly here, although the court is stacked way too heavily with conservatives who open to Trump’s new interpretation of the constitution.

Holding back science publication for national security is pretty well understood. I'd be amazed if the funding T&C doesn't have weasel words back to the sixties about requiring permission from the feds to publish, even if it was implicitly assumed most of the time.

Retraction of previous work for political reasons is a new thing.

Funder publishing requirements are actually one of the few contractual things my university usually refuses to accept.

I think this move by the administration is a bad idea but it's not necessarily illegal. Which federal law or Constitution article do you think is being broken here?

I, unfortunately, do not anticipate much if any opposition from those receiving funding. Hope I am wrong.

Anything related to climate science or vaccines is next. Disgusting.

It's hard to keep up I know, deleting climate science was 24 hours ago:

Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42896378

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-order-...

Thanks. I think. Maybe we can move the statue of Einstein in DC north for a bit.

Why hold back? They need to choreograph some Einsteinfall events.

I am not a lawyer but this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP”.

This Executive Order states in part: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

… Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to: (a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;

(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; …

Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech. (a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/rest...

Someone should tell him about it then...

Generally when it comes to Trump it is rhetoric indicating the opposite.

He complains about a bias government, to install his own loyalists.

Same goes for science.

Rule of law…

_biased_ is the adjective, bias is a noun.

We are losing this battle, every kid now talks about how they are “hype” rather than hyped for something, and talking about being “tan” rather than tanned is already commonplace in the USA

Maybe, but in an online forum where many people use input with autocorrect, it might simply be the autocorrect.

(Yes it happened to this message as well, but too egregious to leave as an example).

"biased government" = government that is biased

"bias government" = government that is about bias, in some way, e.g. obsessed about it

No, no, no. A bias government has layers in opposite directions at an angle of about 30 degrees to the way of travel, as opposed to a radial government where layers are parallel to each other.

Radial governments have better fuel economy, and suffer fewer blowouts.

+3 to -3. I will continue to shout at the tide. In the age of trump we must consistently and patiently push back against all the wrongness.

If only millions of American's knew he would do that when they voted for him and supported him. They still do I don’t think they care.

It seems like behavior matters.

They care very much. They think it's great.

In my experience, the more loudly someone shouts about being a crusader for free speech, the more likely they are to actively be attacking others' freedom of speech.

[flagged]

The more re-truths it gets, the truther it is..

2+2=5

Nitpick: it can be if you redefine numbers and/or operations. Math is not science (but is used as a basis for science) and you can yourself redefine what 2, 5, + and = mean, and use that new set accordingly. Just like you can make "Sky is green" true if your redefine what either "Sky", "is", or "green" mean - language is also not science so it can be redefined.

That is so not the point. The point of 2+2=5 is that white science is bad and needs to be dismantled because it’s structurally racist.

Retraction isn’t censorship, and bans on what you can publish at work as part of your job are not restraints on your individual right to free expression.

> In the order, CDC researchers were instructed to remove references to or mentions of a list of forbidden terms: “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,” according to an email sent to CDC employees (see below).”

So yep, censorship. Any article that even _mentions_ LGBT (e.g. for epidemiological reasons) is now prohibited to be even referenced.

This argument doesn't hold water when the left does it, and it doesn't hold water in this instance either. Censorship does not only mean government infringement upon freedom of individual expression.

lookup the word censorship

No one (inside the government) probably considers that EO to be valid. It's just for "the others".

> this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order

Freedom of speech and the First Amendment generally apply to the government imposing penalties on private citizens, e.g. through criminal law.

The CDC is the government. The government as an employer regularly imposes speech restrictions on government employees and always has, e.g. if you're a public school teacher and you want to teach students to believe that vaccines cause autism, they can tell you not to do that and fire you if you don't. You can imagine the trouble if that wasn't the case.

> You can imagine the trouble if that wasn't the case.

While you're absolutely right, just wanted to take this opportunity to point out that we may well not need to imagine this particular scenario, unfortunately, as it might happen very soon indeed.

Based on what? It sounds like you've got carried away imagining things.

Based on a man who has dedicated the last twenty years of his life to fighting vaccines (and who thinks that even the polio vaccine killed more people through cancer than it saved) becoming Health and Human Services secretary. What makes you so sure that antivaxx propaganda will continue being banned from education?

You think laws still count with an immune president who has packed the supreme court and DOJ?

Laws don't count with Don, conventions don't count, rules don't count. The only thing that counts is power.

And he has it now.

I believe this is called doublespeak due to George Orwell, and many fascist dictatorships do it.

If you understand the language wasn’t English bit Newspeak, then it makes perfect sense.

It does feel like some straight "war is peace" kind of, uh.. shenanigangs and things

Standard doublespeak.

This is an administration that is actively ignoring other EOs such as anti-DEI initiatives. An administration that has come out and said that either all humans are neither male or female, or both male and female at once. This is an administration that either tried to send $50M in condoms to Gaza, or thought their followers were too stupid to believe the lie. This is also the administration that hates the military, police, and Americans in general. None of this is debatable. It's backed up by action. So, not surprised why we'd think they'd be burdened by the law.

This is my thought exactly. If you are requiring re-working of papers to exclude certain words, that sounds like censorship to me.

It seems fairly clear that free speech does not apply to government employees acting in their official duty.

The order is concerned with government censoring private individuals.

When Trump (or Republicans, generally) say "free speech", they patently do not mean what the rest of us mean by free speech. They mean:

1. Everyone should be able to say horrible things about sexual and racial minorities.

2. Everyone should be able to deny scientific facts that are inconvenient to Republican ideology, the fossil fuel industry, or any of their friends.

3. There can be no consequences for (1) or (2), even when it obviously contradicts other laws (libel, incitement of violence, fraud, etc.) or oaths (to truth, to the constitution).

4. Stating a fact or opinion contrary to (1) or (2) is in fact trampling the free-speech rights of right-wingers, and is therefore forbidden.

They don't want free speech. They want free speech for themselves, and enforced consent, if not assent, from everyone else.

All right, then by this logic what does the left mean by "free speech". You talk about scientific facts, so does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology? Furthermore, I'm not aware of any censorship regarding fossil fuels. My understanding is that the Sierra Club and Thunberg are able to say whatever they want in this country if this is what you are talking about.

> what does the left mean by "free speech".

One difference is that the left doesn't generally advocate for absolute free speech, so it isn't hypocritical. I think the left is generally more open about the areas where free speech shouldn't be absolute - namely, where it causes manifest harm, especially to underprivileged groups - whereas the right will use it in a doublespeak way where they claim to be free-speech absolutists while actually favoring only their own ideology.

But also, the main difference is that the left wants to protect speech that is factually true and punish lies, whereas the right wants to protect lies and punish truths. So even if the strategies were very similar, I wouldn't actually care all that much - you can still differentiate and make a value judgment. Scientists should lose federal grants if they publish made-up or obviously biased research; they shouldn't lose federal grants if they publish results that are inconvenient to the current president's fragile masculinity.

> does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology?

No.

I'm guessing you're trying to not-so-subtly talk about gender identity/trans people. If you're trying to say that "there are only two biological sexes" is a true fact that the left suppresses, then (1) it isn't a true fact (according to literally the entire medical community), (2) even if it were, it's not relevant to gender identity (nobody questions that trans women are biologically male, it just isn't relevant), and (3) the left position isn't that you can't say such things, just that saying it makes you an idiot and likely a bigot, and it should be treated like any other hate speech: if it ends up causing harm (e.g., by inciting physical attacks on trans people, or getting them fired from their jobs) then there should be legal consequences (the harmed people should be able to sue you, it should be a violation of equal-employment laws, etc.).

> I'm not aware of any censorship regarding fossil fuels.

Have you looked at any news reporting lately? The Trump administration just spent half of last week stripping every mention of climate change from every government website, and threatening any research organization that takes public money against looking into it.

> the Sierra Club and Thunberg are able to say whatever they want in this country

The Sierra Club is a mess and a neutered shell of what it used to be, so nobody really cares what it says.

Greta Thunberg has been personally mocked and threatened by Donald Trump, so I don't think it's fair to say that she can say whatever she wants - I think she'd be in very real danger if she came here.

> so does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology?

I'm dying to know what this fact is, and if you spent even 30 seconds looking up what the current state of science is with regards to it.

man, fuck this site, I forgot how many transphobes there are here with their heads up their asses.

I want to know if you downvoted with zero consideration, or if you looked it up and then downvoted me to assist in your delusional denial.

Having talked to a couple of people in the CDC I fear the worst. They’re not allowed to participate with the WHO outside of the agency (even on their own time). The employees are largely censored from expressing their opinion on any topic, anywhere.

They were talking about getting work outside of the States. These are smart, dedicated people who are boots-on-the-ground for crises like Ebola, and I wonder about the purpose of the agency and our ability to respond to the next event (with bird flu looming on the horizon).

So research aside, our incident response has already been compromised, and we’re just seeing the beginning.

This is literal political correctness. I guess when it's your censors in power, big government is fine and dandy.

So, a historical question - did these terms such as “pregnant person” get introduced by administrative diktat or by gradual evolution? I’m curious about the provenance of such terminology.

Administrators have elsewhere made changes like renaming manholes “maintenance holes”, is this mostly rolling back such decisions (in a characteristic bulldozer/chaotic style of course)?

Language changes. There's been lots of inclusive changes that people have adopted without even knowing.

Police officer and firefighter are pretty ingrained now, but those weren't the dominant terms just 30 years ago

The difference is that police officer and firefighter are roles that can be occupied by people of either sex, so the change of language from policeman and fireman made sense in that context.

By contrast, pregnancy is a state of being that is by its very nature female-only. Males cannot become pregnant, as by definition they lack a female reproductive system.

The "pregnant people" terminology implies that pregnancy is something that affects all people, male and female alike. But this is of course not true at all.

It's also not inclusive - consider that much of the sex-based oppression women experience goes back to the ability to conceive children. "Pregnant people" discards and downplays all of that.

Some people have unusual chromosomes, ie. Not women or men's, and they can still get pregnant. Other people transition but still have kids. Sex or gender; the language can apply just fine to anyone who gets pregnant and is appropriately vague. I am fairly certain the term isn't one of disrespect to women's rights or accomplishments.

Regardless of sex chromosome aneuploidies or a desire to be the opposite sex, everyone who is, who could be, or who has ever been pregnant is female.

Another point against using the phrase "pregnant people" instead of "pregnant women" is that it leaves no way to talk about women who aren't pregnant. "Non-pregnant people" includes every man and every prepubescent child.

Yes there is, it's "non-pregnant woman". You can still say pregnant woman if you want to or need to, it's not banned.

But my point was about situations where the term "pregnant people" is being mandated or strongly recommended instead of "pregnant women".

>Regardless of sex chromosome aneuploidies or a desire to be the opposite sex, everyone who is, who could be, or who has ever been pregnant is female.

Nature disagrees with you. There are many animals out there that can change sex. Sex, gender, etc etc don't have a perfect universal definition because nature doesn't work that way. The scientific literature is trying to capture the observed variety we see in humans and it will continue to evolve as our understanding evolves.

This whole line of argument reminds me of the history of pi and the governments that tried to legislate it to fixed values. Just because you want things to be simple doesn't mean that reality backs you up.

We're talking about humans. That some other animal species have a reproductive strategy of sequential hermaphroditism is not relevant to the conversation.

It's relevant to language, since we use the same terms for a lot of different thing.

Which non-human species do you believe are being referred to when the term "pregnant women" (or "pregnant people") is used?

> Regardless of sex chromosome aneuploidies or a desire to be the opposite sex, everyone who is, who could be, or who has ever been pregnant is female.

That is _your_ definition, and it is very debatable.

Do you have a counterexample to illustrate your point?

very wrong!

How so?

Language changes ... when you get to call anyone not going along with your desired changes a "bigot" or worse.

Both expressions "pregnant person" and "maintenance hole" came from DEI directives and have not organically evolved through time. To borrow your analogy, they bulldozed over existing expressions because of ideological reasons, hence generating great resistance from the population which didn't agree to such forced changes.

In my experience, it's never been an administrative push, but a desire to be more precise, more inclusive, or both, or to reflect the stated preferences of the populations we work with.

The only time I've had to fight with a scientific publisher about a term was when they errantly applied a ban on causal language to a study I was part of.

It's going to be NASA next isn't it, because of climate change and the need to remove any evidence of that and other environmental changes...

https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/

https://ntrs.nasa.gov. Get to downloading!

It'll be tough to silence the overwhelming consensus in essentially every single field of science.

I don’t disagree, although defunding them and threatening their jobs will go a long ways.

USDA was told to take down websites mentioning climate change days ago

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-order-...

https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/ is still up, for now.

I wonder for how long. I scroll down and read:

"How Do We Know Climate Change is Real?

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture ..."

I suppose there's a lot of both bright and brave people working there (extremely bright compared to the president)

Which ten regulations did they cut to introduce this anti-free speech one?

Judging by the last few days, I'd guess something to do with the aerospace industry.

Remember how a few days ago, headlines were exploding how DeepSeek wouldn't answer questions about Tiananmen Square and other "sensitive topics"?

Well, welcome to the inside part of a great wall in the making. Thoughts and prayers y'all.

If everyone at the CDC quit tomorrow, how hard would it be to create a non-profit and staff it entirely with CDC personnel and resume work? Assuming somehow funding could be acquired. What else would be a barrier? Research labs? Some kind of logistical, organizational, etc partnerships? Access to data? What else? I'm half serious.

Where do the funds come from? Zuckerberg? Bezos? They’re not coming from the NIH.

Do we crowd fund it? Maybe we create a system where everyone gives a percentage of their income. And we scale it progressively so as not to cause undo hardship to low earners.

Eh people won’t go for that. Let’s tax neighboring countries, say 25% of the cost of their traded goods. They won’t retaliate right? Ok go.

Tax ourselves on goods from neighboring countries*

Yeah, it does seem like a tax hike.

It's not like shoe manufacturing is moving to the US. Shoes will just be more expensive.

(Until a deal is negotiated, which is probably what he is after)

The annual budget is $ 11.5 billion.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/s0309-budget.html

They would be replaced by the incompetent who want to shine in the new limelight. That happened in Germany after the Machtergreifung. The new government got rid of the unwanted in science and mathematics and many others quit in protest. The gaps were quickly filled by science backbenchers and cranks who would get rid of all the theories they didn't understand (e.g. parts of number theory) and replaced them by what they called Aryan mathematics and Aryan this or that, towing the line of the people who got them into their new position.

You are assuming you are still living in a country where laws are upheld. You aren't anymore. So if you do a thing that your betters don't like, they will stop it, legal or not. You assume a democracy, but you are in an authoritarian society.

Your only chance is to have significant support by the population and good luck with that when all the popular social media platforms are on their side. The US is fucked if the population doesn't unite against that quickly.

And given the self-centered individualism that is so predominant nowadays I say that isn't going to happen.

This is darkness. State mandated lists of forbidden words.

Trump's cat's paw proposing Constitutional amendment for a third term for Trump (but not previous Presidents). We can be sure at the end of such a third term, another amendment would be tabled.

The recent election, won by deception; enough people believed the lies that the election was taken. This is not democracy - it is something only which looks like democracy, because there is an election. An actual election requires voters to be well-informed.

The FBI staff involved in the investigation, fired. This is vindictive; they were doing their job.

It's quite alarming. And it seems departments are complicit. Which is further alarming. We need Governors, AGs, and mayors to refuse to comply with unlawful federal directives. If everyone just falls in line, what levers can we pull? Feels like at that point, civil war might be upon us.

Government has accumulated enormous power over the centuries.

Now Government goes bad, this becomes very clear.

You're not wrong. We've lost the plot on what value government provides. It should be about community. People having agency and coming together because we see our selves in our neighbors.

Yes, we also lost the plot on what government should be. It should be a tool for positive some collaboration, on projects that most people can agree on. It should not be a club for beating each other over the head.

I can't get an Obamacare protest poster out of my mind that sums up how democracy fails. It raid "If you shove this down our throat, We will shove it up your asses".

This isn't to say democrats started it, but emblematic of the failure mode.

>Yes, we also lost the plot on what government should be. It should be a tool for positive some collaboration, on projects that most people can agree on. It should not be a club for beating each other over the head.

And how we get there is through empathy for one another. Like full on Mr Rodger's love your neighbor.

Sure. I just dont think the role of the government is to enforce that.

Absolutely! It requires all of us to have agency and reach this on our own time.

A direct quote from Fred Rogers "There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it."

Sadly, I think you're being optimistic.

The Democrats are not fighters, the states will fall in line, and the people are not willing nor able to wage civil war.

>Sadly, I think you're being optimistic.

I wish. I'm currently looking into where long range gun rifle ranges are. About to start purchasing armor penetrating rounds. Basically try to form local "municipal militia" style groups. I'm fully expecting violence within a decade.

Incredibly respectable. And get on it ASAP because imo its likely they'll be harder to get in the very short term. But the sad thing is I just don't see there being enough organization.

Nazi Germany didn't end because of internal militias.

> The Democrats are not fighters

because they don't represent the people, they represent big corporations.

Totally with ya.

One of the problems of outright refusal is that you'll end up being fired, and likely replaced by a Trumpdroid. Staying in your position and cooperating the "least amount" you can get away with is better. Very thin rope to walk though, and seems like a nigh-impossible position to be in.

>One of the problems of outright refusal is that you'll end up being fired, and likely replaced by a Trumpdroid

We need resistance at all levels. Fire me? We sit in and chain the doors? Call the police? Police stand down and need to support the people. Police need to recognize they will also be on the chopping block.

It's all about who can enforce what. We are literally in a power battle. And it'll take every single one of us to ACT. Otherwise, we are fucked. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

That's easy to say from the sidelines, but it's people's jobs we're talking about: they need to eat, and have mortgages and children in college and whatnot. There's a lot at stake for people in very direct and tangible ways. And at this point it's unclear if any of this will even be effective, or if any of Trump's action will stick. "Put your livelihood on the line to perhaps maybe prevent some form of authoritarianism of unclear severity".

I mean, I don't think we really disagree on matters as such, but I do think you're underestimating the extremely difficult position these workers are in.

It does sound like that, doesn't it. I think it speaks to how dire I see this situation. Because you're right, people are being put in a very difficult situations. And the government likely is aware of that too. They understand the power imbalance that exists.

We need to find a way to support these people. People that sacrifice for the whole of our community must be supported by said community.

Yep. Do not obey in advance.

Reminds me a lot of what’s happened in countries like Hungary. I never thought this would happen in the US but here we are.

Very much so. Same failure mode. Win by deceiving voters, keep the deceptions going (external enemies - Soros, the EU, etc, take your pick, "we're under threat") enough to keep winning. No need to rig vote counting - it's all rigged before the election. Mess up the economy through corruption, incompetence and favourism. Become more and more authoritarian, suppress dissent and checks and balances. Country goes to hell.

I'm hoping it doesn't happen, that the culture of the USA will be the basic mechanism to prevent this, but if enough people are living in fantasy land, they're going to cheering along for all this.

I agree that this is bad, but we've already had state mandated lists of forbidden words for years, and this is a reaction to those less explicitly defined rules.

The shift is just which layer of the establishment is making and enforcing the rules. For the past half century, that's been committees at various government agencies, academic counsels and quasi-governmental groups like the AMA, etc.

Those various entities collectively mandated forbidden words that would for instance, prevent a grant from being approved, prevent a person from getting a job or tenure or a promotion or a political appointment, or prevent a paper from being published.

There is a huge range of language policing and forbidden words, phrases and ideas. From the relatively uncontroversial things like using "person with X" as opposed to "an X person" for various conditions to the clearly controversial replacement of "mother" and "woman" with "birthgiving parent" and "assigned female at birth".

I suspect this will get challenged in court and overturned and not really matter in the long term, but maybe it's an opportunity to consider all the power structures we interface with and how they control what we write, say and think.

> I agree that this is bad, but we've already had state mandated lists of forbidden words for years, and this is a reaction to those less explicitly defined rules.

One issue is that this power exists.

Another then is what it is used for.

If you have a gun and you use it to and only to prevent, oh, bank robbery say, that's fine. If you use it to rob someone, not fine.

Government has enormous power, and now that power is being used for evil and for darkness, and that's the problem.

> Government has enormous power, and now that power is being used for evil and for darkness, and that's the problem.

This order is "power is being used for evil and for darkness"? Come on, cut it out with the hyperbole. It does no one any favors.

This is a good point. It's rather ludicrous to see the people who have been acting as thought police for years with a list of banned words and mandatory terms suddenly now caring about free speech just because someone else is making the list. I'd like to think they've learned their lesson, but I think they just want to be in control of the words again.

Yes, I think this also.

But at least we can think those people are passably decent and have some care for others.

While the intention behind “woke” research may have been to promote inclusivity and address historical injustices, its execution sometimes led to unintended consequences.

By prioritizing ideological alignment over rigorous methodology, some studies may have compromised objectivity, breadth, or practical applicability. The goal of creating space for marginalized voices was important, but in some cases, this approach limited open discourse, dismissed alternative perspectives, or failed to produce the most balanced conclusions.

That said, the push for inclusivity did bring valuable insights and necessary corrections to many fields. However, for research to serve everyone effectively, it must remain grounded in evidence, open debate, and methodological rigor—ensuring that progress is both fair and sustainable.

"woke" seriously broke the minds of the conservatives in America. Crazy to watch their reaction to this. They can't take their own advice and just mind their own business? Leave people alone?

The cdc is political and gets involved in cultural wars? This is already happening with this administration?

"Woke" is exactly the same thing as "politically correct" used to be, along with "social justice warrior" and "cultural Marxism" and a bunch of other euphemisms for "not us and therefore evil". It's been the same thing for decades. This is just the latest incarnation.

People often seem to say that this is the ultimate form of it. It's not. It continues unabated, and in a few years they'll have yet another term for the same thing.

Same thing with DEI and Affirmative Action.

Everything has to be based on merit except for nepotism, legacy admission, donations for favours etc.

"It's all about merit until merit has tits." - Naomi Wu

No one is interested in eliminating strict gender roles. What people want to do is to exclusively be the one to define and enforce them according to their own believes and views.

Affirmative action has a long history of only being applied when the benefiting demographic is the intended benefiting demographic. The same rules apply to freedom of religion, in that only officially approved religious beliefs are allowed to benefit from freedom of religion. The definition of an approved religion get defined by those creating and enforcing the rule, which changes based on who is in power.

Can't hug children with nuclear arms level of cringe...

It's not "not us and therefore evil". That's too simple. Instead it's "they are saying we're the problem which is evil, and others perhaps including my children, are starting to believe them, therefore a threat".

Conservatives really care about an order in things, to keep out chaos. Anything that reduces structure in society is suspicious, especially if it comes at you expense. Note that this holds for plenty of people who are way down on the power ladder.

Republicans stopped being "conservative" in that sense a very long time ago. They see threats wherever they are told to see them, and ignore very real threats right in front of them. "The children" are an excuse, not a principle.

I would very much like to see the American conversation turn to a legitimate discussion of differences of values. I can't say if it ever really did, or if that's just the myth we tell ourselves. But for the moment we have "conservatives" consistently sowing chaos with no benefit to themselves, and even their own detriment, solely for the purpose of harming those they see as their domestic enemies.

Because this is a direct attack on their societal model? You enslave a gay guy as priest and social contract upholder, the others get smithered upholding social machinery in companies and the state. If you do the moses "let-my-people-go"-thing, everyone is out partying, but the overall structure of society falls apart. Its horrifying ,a evolutionary created, biological state building instinct. But reality wont budge.

>They can't take their own advice and just mind their own business?

Not all conservatives are "small-government" conservatives. Ron Paul was really the last libertarian in the Republican party. The latest crop has an authoritarian streak.

Traditional conservative values are pretty much dead in the current Republican party. It has become a cult of personality instead.

"Efficiency".

I'm surprised they haven't started saying phrases like 'useless eaters'

biologically male, biologically female

The trans stuff has definitely been controversial, but those phrases are definitely not "woke"?

The implication of the term is that there are other contexts for "male" or "female" other than "biologically". If "non-woke" contexts assume that male/female are inherently biological terms, then "biologically [male/female" is obviously "woke".

Your second sentence is tautological, and also begging the question.

I don't see the implication. How is it obviously woke?

It acknowledges trans people exist. And I put the word "woke" in quotes, because it's stupid and it's not my word.

Just using the term "cis" on Twitter under Musk gets you a suspension, chemistry be damned.

This isn't true. You can search Twitter for 'cis' and find endless unbanned accounts.

The "right" is basically trying to assert (without saying it out loud) that science is wrong. They're also basically either intentionally or unintentionally confusing gender and sex.

Science has shown that there is more than two combinations of X and Y chromosomes. So if you went by chromosomes alone, there's more than two sexes. And if you go by phenotypic categorization (secondary sex characteristics, like tits, balls, dick, vagina, voice, height, etc), there's a multitude of sexes and male and female are just categories. Again this is well-documented in scientific literature, it's biology 101.

But then "the right" also mix in references to gender as banned. Gender, as every half-educated person knows by now, is different than sex: gender is social expression, sex is biological expression. Gender is your clothes and hair and voice and name, sex is the junk in your pants.

But the "right" is basically saying: "Hey, science is wrong! And these weird leftists are wrong! Sex determination doesn't matter, gender determination doesn't matter. There's only two things in the world, ever, and we call them male and female. Science and society and logic and reason and everything else can get fucked."

It's political psychosis. Hate-filled zealots who are so hell-bent on imagining the world in a more simplistic way that they literally want to re-define reality to fit their wishes. It's the book Nineteen-Eighty-Four, being enacted in real life. This isn't a joke or hyperbole, this is literally what's happening. They're creating a government of insanity.

Since they can't literally stop people from having all kinds of combinations of chromosomes and primary/secondary sex characteristics, the next step will be what the Nazis did, which is to round up anyone who doesn't fit a "normal body" and incarcerate them or force them into medical procedures to "fix them". (we actually did this in the past, too, not just the Nazis)

But before we get there, the first step is to force the government to perpetuate the psychosis so they can say it's official, and then people will swallow it easier. They are betting that we won't do anything. And we won't.

Hmm, rather than waste my response to the two deadheaded comments below the above and now my zombie peers; I wrote:

  > an explanation for the recently-invented concept of "gender".

  Perhaps recent to certain Europeans in central north america .. but hardly a recently invented concept.

  When I was a kid in the 1960s in the Austral Asian equatorial region the missionaries were going hard trying to stamp out Sistergirls, the bugis gender roles, and every other abomination under God that caught their eye.

  As I heard tell, indigenous north and south americans had expanded concepts of gender that got the same treatment.

  If there's a fallacy it likely lies with repressed WASP types brainwashed into a rigid moral prison of a worldview.

I don't think it's really about science. I mean if anything the science agrees with them. Sex is extremely bimodal (intersex is on the order of 1 in 1000):

https://isna.org/faq/frequency/

Also the use of gender as "it's like, how you feel, man" is very recent. When I was growing up (80s, 90s) it was just a synonym of "sex". If you look in old dictionaries that's what it says.

I looked it up and apparently the more recent definition came from feminists in the 70s (I guess it didn't catch on until later).

I think this is a massive over-correction (banning words is dumb) but they're not completely wrong.

I think the sane path lies in the middle: people shouldn't be forced to avoid "pregnant women" or "pregnant people". That includes being forced by social ostracism, which is the far left's method of choice.

Taking it back to RealScience™ is fine.

Elemental distribution in the universe is also extremely bimodal .. moreso even than the exceptions to the reproductive male or reproductive female buckets.

Everything in the universe is either Hydrogen or Helium .. save for a tiny tiny cluster of exceptions known (to astronomers) as "metals" and as "every other damn element including carbon and oxygen" to the aquatic apes.

Science is quite happy to endlessly study things with a frequency of ppm (parts per million) and less.

> Everything in the universe is either Hydrogen or Helium

Not sure what point you're trying to make here but we don't live in a star.

We do all live in the same universe.

Give it some time, it may come to you eventually. Or not.

Well I guessed that you were trying to make a point about how our language is highly biased towards heavy elements even though they are a tiny proportion of the universe, and that means it also makes sense to bias our language towards intersex people even though they are a tiny proportion of the population.

But it can't be that because that is an obviously stupid point. So what was your point?

Remind me of your point, if you would:

> I think this is a massive over-correction (banning words is dumb) but they're not completely wrong.

Is it that "they're not completely wrong" to ban terms referring to events significantly more common than the occurrence of gold in the earths crust?

To quote another:

> it can't be that because that is an obviously stupid point. So what was your point?

----

For general interest:

* frequency of "true" (undecidable) intersex (1 in 5,500 births): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

* Mean global crustal ppm of gold: 0.004 (four thousandth of one in a million) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

* Report on Gold deposits in a high yeild region: Gold Deposits of the Pilbara Craton https://www.ga.gov.au/pdf/RR0065.pdf (74 page AGSO report, 'rich' veins have 0.4 ppm gold)

This is a fantastic analogy!

> (intersex is on the order of 1 in 1000)

Whoa, honestly, that is much more common than I expected in my mind.

Strict intersex, as in can't decide via genetic tests and physical examination is rarer.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex for why it's not straightforward and why the edges are pretty fuzzy.

The main take away would be that some people are born that are neither male nor female, others are born where assignment isn't clearcut or easy, and such births are more common than the frequency of gold in the earth's crust.

Everyone is born male or female, some just ambiguously so. Intersex is a colloquial misnomer, the correct and more accurate term is “disorder of sex development”.

I don't think that's true. Or at best it's a tautological argument. Some people have crazy genes like XXY. There's no clear gender that they are "supposed" to be.

It's very rare though.

I refer you to my comment[0] (flagged for some inexplicable reason), chromosomes are not the method of sex determination in humans (or most animals), and are not even the necessary condition in the process of fulfilling the sexual reproduction strategy in some others.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907868

I don't know how to read that comment, but your idea that everybody is exactly male or female is clearly wrong just by thinking about it.

Sex is clearly a continuum, just like everything in the world. If you smoothly vary someone's physiology and genetics from male to female there will be a region in the middle where it's kind of woolly and you can't really say they are definitely male or female.

Let me give another example. Is a spork a spoon or a fork? It's clearly somewhere in-between. You can't say "this spork is actually a spoon with some anomalous tines".

Now it just so happens that there are very few sporks in the world (due to the huge selection pressure). But they do exist and they aren't obviously "male with errors" or "female with errors".

You can't really argue against this, any more than you can argue that green is actually very blueish red. The English language dictates that it isn't.

You're free to go off and make your own not-English where green is "blueish red" but don't expect anyone to know what the hell you are talking about.

Sex is not colour. Colour does exist on a spectrum, sex does not (in humans or other mammals). Humans are also not cutlery. Both of your analogies are misplaced.

Humans, (along with 95%+ animals) are gonochoric, which means they are either male or female and cannot change that.

There is no spectrum because there are only two types of sex cell (gametes, sperm and ova) thus, only two reproductive strategies available.

We also know that the reproductive strategy coincides with gamete size (small and large, again, sperm and ova) and this is helpfully confirmed by non-gonochoric species that are hermaphrodatic, like clownfish. We know that a clownfish has changed from male to female when their reproductive strategy has changed to the point that they can produce the other type of gamete.

> You can’t really argue against this

It seems like your assumptions have been challenged, it would’ve been better if you’d do some of that yourself, and read some biology by actual biologists, not from activists.

> sex does not (in humans or other mammals)

Yes it does. It just has an extremely bimodal distribution.

> Humans, (along with 95%+ animals) are gonochoric, which means they are either male or female and cannot change that.

Sure, when the genetics all goes to plan. But it isn't perfect. Sometimes it doesn't.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about all of this but I can't quite figure out where it is. It's like you've only read a biology textbook and never really thought about it or something.

No, there cannot be a hermaphrodatic human because of the genetics, as only one reproductive strategy can be chosen even when there is a disorder.

Find me the third type of gamete and you’ll have a point.

Edit: I’ll add, traits are a bimodal distribution, sex is binary (because of all I’ve outlined here). If you believe that traits define sex then you are sorely mistaken (see 3rd gamete for why).

True hermaphroditism: Geographical distribution, clinical findings, chromosomes and gonadal histology

European Journal of Pediatrics, 1994

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02000779

Dealt with here[1] but I'm more than willing to post the quote again:

> In the past, ovotesticular syndrome was referred to as true hermaphroditism, which is considered outdated as of 2006. The term "true hermaphroditism" was considered very misleading by many medical organizations and by many advocacy groups, as hermaphroditism refers to a species that produces both sperm and ova, something that is impossible in humans.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42929198

Your opinion is readily falsifiable by empirical observation:

   "if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female" .. "the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018% (one in 5,500 births)"

In https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

What I wrote is not contrary to what Sax writes, in any way. In fact, I fully support what he wrote, and would urge people who are interested in the subject to read his much fuller explanation on his website[0].

As such, I really do not understand your objection, and that’s probably because you don’t understand your objection. Sex in humans determined by the strategy for gamete production, which can only result in a large gamete or small gamete - not by chromosomes. Hence, “intersex” people are still male or female regardless of their disorder. This is well understood, settled science, and is not my opinion. If you think sex is decided based on your chromosomes, then you’ve been misinformed.

[0] https://www.leonardsax.com/how-common-is-intersex-a-response...

> and that’s probably because you don’t understand your objection.

Maybe tone that down a notch or three.

Gametes (egg or sperm) can mix-and-match with other sex markers—commonly, chromosomes, genitals, sex hormones, and secondary sex characteristics—to create a mosaic of sex traits.

We can’t create a sex binary using the reproductive organs (gametes and gonads), because:

* People can have both ovarian and testicular tissue (an ovotestis or gradation of cells)

* People can have ambiguous gonadal tissue

* It is common for all types of gonads (female/male/intersex) to lack gamete production

I refer you to:

  > “In anisogamety, an individual's sex condition coincides with the type of gametes it produces; male if it produces male gametes exclusively, female if it only produces female gametes, and hermaphrodite if simultaneously or at different times” [1]

  [1] The Biology of Reproduction, Cambridge University Press, Giuseppe Fusco, Alessandro Minelli

which you might be familiar with [0].

Note: " male if ..", "female if ..", and "hermaphrodite if .."

which is ( counts slowly 'cause can't understand stuff real good ) one, two, three buckets.

Not two.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907868

An individual's sex condition *coincides* with the type of gametes it produces. Gametes are used to determine (in this sense, ascertain) sex because it shows the reproduction strategy.

> which is ( counts slowly 'cause can't understand stuff real good ) one, two, three buckets.

Humans are not hermaphroditic, no mammals are. Not sequentially, not simultaneously. (In fact, the way that sex development occurs it cannot happen, but that is going to be too high level for this discussion, clearly.)

> Gametes (egg or sperm) can mix-and-match with other sex markers—commonly, chromosomes, genitals, sex hormones, and secondary sex characteristics—to create a mosaic of sex traits.

Traits do not define sex, gamete size does (see above), adding them all up will not change that.

> People can have both ovarian and testicular tissue (an ovotestis or gradation of cells)

And only one reproduction strategy, which is why there are no human hermaphrodites, having both types of tissue does not mean there is possible gamete production, as evidenced by the total lack of any actual hermaphrodites in all of recorded human history, if not a knowledge of the process itself.

> People can have ambiguous gonadal tissue

Completely irrelevant.

> It is common for all types of gonads (female/male/intersex) to lack gamete production

Also irrelevant. Someone who has finished their fertile phase still has a reproduction strategy in place. Someone who has a disorder still has a reproduction strategy in place. Someone who is not disordered and still in their fertile phase yet not producing gametes right now still has a reproduction strategy in place.

There are only two reproduction strategies in humans, and only one in any individual, and only one is possible in any individual, and it cannot change.

> Maybe tone that down a notch or three.

It was an accurate observation, which you have only gone on to prove further.

> Humans are not hermaphroditic, no mammals are.

Most humans are not, sure. Some are: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02000779

Your claim is falsified.

> And only one reproduction strategy, which is why there are no human hermaphrodites,

Not all humans reproduce. Yes, there are only two reproductive genders, these do not cover all humans.

There are several strategies to identify gender, as we both (I hope) know, each has its edge cases, none is sufficient.

A laser like focus on sex-as-gamete-production (SAG) is completely adrift from social reality.

> It was an accurate observation, which you have only gone on to prove further.

Your attitude says more about you, the lack of self reflection most of all.

> Your claim is falsified

No, as we have both quoted, and you miscounted, there are four states:

- Male (gonochoric) - Female (gonochoric) - Sequential hermaphrodite - Non-sequential hermaphrodite

True hermaphrodite is a misnomer, a term for an intersex disorder known as ovotesticular syndrome[0]. To quote the great Wikipedia:

To check, we can apply "our" quote - a hermaphrodite would either be sequential, which we know humans are not (I hope we know that much), or able to produce both types of gametes at the same time.

True hermaphrodites cannot do that, and the paper you shared makes no claim that they can or that they have. None of the examples show that either.

Your claim is false.

> Not all humans reproduce.

I'm sorry, but you're bringing the conversation down to a level too silly to bother with there. Every human has a reproductive strategy, and from conception to boot. Whether any individual actual reproduces is irrelevant to that.

Really, that kind of argument is beneath the level of this forum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovotesticular_syndrome

> Also the use of gender as "it's like, how you feel, man" is very recent.

That's because we got to some level of acceptance in some regions where we got to agree on some English term. It's not like the non-binary people appeared only very recently. We just got to honestly talk about it now. But there's many known figures from the past who pretty much lived that way, including the Universal Friend.

Outside of the usual western countries, it existed for ages, like the non-binary "mahu" in Hawaiian culture.

0.001 > 0, especially multiplied by the population of the US, continent, or world.

If that's your standard you'll quickly find you can't say much about anything.

For example, you can't say humans have 5 fingers on each hand, polydactyly (had to google that one) has a higher prevalence than 0.001

And yet politicians don't spend their time demonizing people with an extra fingers spreading lies, fear, and hatred. Revoking protections to expose them to harassment. "The cruelty is the point" and all.

The context of the discussion matters. My friends are scared, I don't really think your desire to be able to easily generalize the human race is something I can care too much about.

>And yet politicians don't spend their time demonizing people with an extra fingers spreading lies, fear, and hatred.

People with extra fingers don't demand society bends backwards for them, branding anyone who presents any opposition whatsoever as bigots. They don't have a history of, funny enough, "spreading lies, fear and hatred" like trans advocacy does either.

Trans people deserve sympathy and care and I have little expectation the current US administration treats them as they should, but the amount of willful ignorance required to look at this as something that "just happened" rather than the result of abuses of power by advocates is such that anyone partaking in it is better off ignored.

> don't demand society bends backwards for them

clown comment from the start. utterly delusional bullshit. go on, what demands are trans people making of "society" other than "leave us the hell alone".

>. They don't have a history of, funny enough, "spreading lies, fear and hatred" like trans advocacy does either.

just outright making shit up, cool.

Pronounces is one.

>what demands are trans people making of "society" other than "leave us the hell alone".

To be referred and treated to as a gender they are not perceived to belong to (often under legal penalties), often reaching into biological sex (see: sports, women spaces). To dismiss gender definitions altogether in order to blur the lines to accommodate for them (you yourself were doing this a moment ago).

>just outright making shit up, cool.

No. You are, again, doing this yourself, right now, by saying stuff like "The cruelty is the point" which is very evidently spreading hatred. Advocacy did A LOT of "spreading lies and fear" by spreading narratives like the "female brain in a male body" or "would you rather have a trans son or a dead daughter?". And again, the vast majority of trans people are innocent for these, they deserve no blowback, their situation is bad as it is to begin with, but this did not by any stretch of imagination begin with politicians and pretending that's the case only worsens the problem.

> Also the use of gender as "it's like, how you feel, man" is very recent. When I was growing up (80s, 90s) it was just a synonym of "sex". If you look in old dictionaries that's what it says.

The changes in society are recent, the ideas are extremely old.

In our society, being gay used to be illegal, black people were property, and women had no rights. Then somebody would suggest that be changed, and the majority of people would freak out, for exactly the same reason: "that's not how it was when I was growing up!".

Yet multiple genders [not sexes] have existed for millennia, we didn't have the concept of two sexes [not genders] until the Enlightenment, and these words have changed their meanings and been used in different ways throughout time.

Society changes. Our understanding of the world changes. Sometimes we regress, like right now, like we did in the Victorian era, like we did after the fall of Rome, etc. But we need to push back, so that regression doesn't harm people, the way it has harmed people so many times in the past.

> Science has shown that there is more than two combinations of X and Y chromosomes. So if you went by chromosomes alone, there's more than two sexes

This undermines the point most "gender positive" people want to make. Yes, there are non XX or XY people, but they're rare compared to XX/XY transgender people. They also tend to have issues like learning disabilities and problems with speech. By conflating transgender people with people with chromosomal irregularities you're establishing a link suggesting XX/XY transgenderism is also a "disorder".

But those xyz combinations are not deceases, right? Why should we spend public money on that?

Indeed, the terms "biologically male" and "biologically female" have been described by activists who are not at all aligned with Trump as "trans-phobic" and a "TERF dogwhistle" so it's strange to see these two groups suddenly agreeing with each other over something.

It's a rhetorical wrestling match, not an agreement. Moreover, the reality of the majority of the larger movement doesn't always align with the loudest voices in the room, especially when it comes down to semantics. Meanwhile any search for truth in the form of science suffers.

They got you all riled up about words and definitions while they ignore your constitution and turn the US into their own authoritarian regime.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn't a little bit deserved, since people are so removed from what really counts, they might need a reminder how unlikely having democracy actually is.

Divide et impera (or divide and conquer) is one of the old machiavellian imperatives. And language is enough to divide. Letting them divide you is a good way of making sure your own interest loses and theirs win.

This is part of the administration as defining all humans are neither male nor female — or, due to the presence of both Müllerian ducts and Wolffian ducts in early embryos, that all humans are both sexes at once.

More importantly, they've made it clear you shouldn't trust the government, so they are going out of their way to prove that is the case.

So the US government is cancelling federal research that uses terminology it doesn't like?

Isn't this sending an Unamerican view of freedom of thought and expression? And a very dictatorial view of the American government and institutions?

All future research must abide by whatever histrionic whim the president has? I could imagine this being news from Belarus

Welcome to the party pal.

The entire “freedom” thing in the US has some pretty funky “terms and conditions apply”. I am not sure if anyone actually thinks they are more “free” than other first world countries.

I live in the Deep South. People here absolutely and unironocally believe they live in the freest country on earth. This view is widespread for a thousand miles.

That's by design and not new. The whole nationalist brainwash since early age thing. I always thought the primary benefit is to have enough soldiers to mess stuff up abroad. But of course it helps to ged rid of enemies within, including the existing government structure, rules, and paradoxically constitution.

Ahem. It's only "canceling" when Democrats do it. When Republicans do it, it's free speech (somehow).

Can be spun as a "freedom from". Might sound the same superficially, but it's not a capital-F "freedom to".

Enthusiasm for censorship has had a broad popular support from both sides of the political spectrum. Censorship is never free speech, regardless if Democrats or Republicans do it.

Do anyone feel like arguments like "No one has a right to a platform" making this kind of censorship better? Should we view platforms as a megaphones, one that should be denied or given based on the whims of the owner?

No, it not only canceling when Democrats do it. Both sides enjoy censorship and it should always be viewed with suspicious.

You're being disingenuous and trying to create a false equivalence with your use of the term "platform." The CDC is not a platform, and this kind of censorship is not equivalent to social media being allowed to "censor" content through moderation.

I humbly disagree with both your accusations that it is disingenuous, or that CDC is not used as a platform for publishing papers. CDC call the CDC library as a publishing environment where parties submitt papers and documents for publication.

The CDC is not a platform in the sense that "platform" is commonly understood when discussing social media, meaning a privately controlled entity.

The simple fact that the CDC publishes papers does not make the two equivalent, because the rights that private citizens have relative to the First Amendment differ versus the government. What Trump and his administration are doing is a violation of the First Amendment. What social media platforms do when they ban or moderate content is an expression of the First Amendment.

As the counter argument goes, the first amendment does not grant the right of amplified speech. If the government act as a publisher, with discretion to choose which information they choose to publish, then there is no conflict. Feel free to provide examples of first amendment being used to compell the government to publish someone else book or study.

I would like to reassert that censorship is harmful regardless which side does it, especially when the purpose is to silence opposing political views. The filtering should occur at the end points and in control of the user, not governments or companies.

I think CDC needs to be given funding to research the contagious mental sickness known as TDS!

It wasn’t but a few months ago when certain words and topics not in favor with the ruling administration wouldn’t be published. Now the pendulum has swung, and it’s suddenly a freedom of speech concern. Maybe even the end of democracy.

The Democrats did nothing like this move when in power. There is a difference between agreement and enforcement.

Edit: to be clear, when Twitter recognizes hate speech, it's not "the Democrats". It's not dictated by the monarch.

If not funding something counts as Unamerican then there is no escape from it, there are a huge number of thoughts and perspectives that the US government doesn't support financially.

The US has always been hypocritical about freedom of thought and expression. We literally have an Office of Anti-Boycott compliance to ensure American companies (even privately held ones) don't boycott Israel.

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oac

The world is complicated. This policy was established in response to a secondary boycott policy from the Arab League, where any company that agreed to do business in Israel would not be allowed to do business in a member country. Congress judged, I think correctly, that prohibiting companies from cooperating with this boycott was the only way to preserve their broader freedom to choose which countries they do or don’t want to do business in.

There's (still) a way to call this office and snitch on your company if you think they aren't offering services or contracts to Israel that they are offering to other countries. I know the history here. It's still blatantly against the idea of the free market and free expression

If the US chooses to opt out of science research, China and others will not.

That doesn’t bode well for the US.

Wait, do you think China is more accepting of LGBT ideology than the USA, even after this directive?

The trans stuff doesn’t matter much to scientific progress but these regressives are going to kill research in EV, renewable energy, vaccines, public health, climate etc.

I think the idea is that this keyword list will be expanded to include climate change etc over time, or some similar uncontroversial topic scientifically, but controversial socially/religiously that will reduce USA's scientific output in areas that are a genuine competition globally. E.g. climate change research to plan locations for future farming enterprises etc.

We shall see if true.

China doesn't care about climate change either.

They are building vast amounts of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power, and for fossil fuels they can't yet get rid of they are replacing old equipment with newer more efficient equipment.

New car sales there are over 50% EV or PHEV, up from 7% a few years ago. They currently have the 4th highest percent of EVs in use at 7.6% in 2023, behind Netherlands at 8.3%, Sweden at 11.0%, and Norway at 29.0%. The US is at 2.1%.

I'd be surprised if they weren't using climate change data in their modellin/planning.

Whether you are trying to reduce emissions or ignoring it is a separate concern than finding appropriate projected climates for agriculture etc.

They care about building solar panels, etc…

> LGBT ideology

You sound like you like this digital book burning.

Nothing I’ve seen happen in the last few weeks bodes well for the USA. It really looks like planned destruction to me.

If you’re reason for being is “owning the libs” it must be a glorious time, but outside of that…

This is a rather well planned set of moves to gut the federal administration. There are smokescreens in the form of nonsense, distractions in the form of blatantly overreaching orders that exhaust opposition and then there are the rather well aimed, more subtle and actually destructive moves that get almost drowned out in the chaos. They stick because of all the other shit that is hurled around.

It's not a perfect plan by any means but it works well enough to scare me.

I grew up watching ultra patriotic American first macho movies, interesting to see how all of this actually plays out in reality. Let's see where it goes from here.

And it can take a long time to reverse. For example, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

Would the US be in the same situation wrt to guns if that amendment had never gotten into the bill in the 90s? Hard to know.

I think this is appalling, but I’m not sure what practical effect defunding trans and gender research would have on the US’s prospects in competition with China. The scary thing is a fascist, compliant US might still perform ok economically. Similarly there are UK politicians who hold up Singapore as a model for us. This is going to be a nasty few decades.

It's a shame most of that research is digital, I'm sure they would have preferred a public book burning like in die gut old days.

Maybe we'll get lucky https://xkcd.com/750/

Elon Musk burning down an X Datacenter would have a real Roman Emperor Nero vibe to it.

The search and replace they want researchers to do:

gender -> personality

transgender -> trans-identifying

pregnant person -> pregnant woman

pregnant people -> pregnant women

LGBT -> LGB (or LGB and T separately)

transsexual -> ??? presumably trans-identifying

non-binary -> ??? presumably something to do with personality

assigned male/female at birth -> male/female

biologically male/female -> male/female

That seems less extreme than this thread makes it out to be

Because as far as I can tell, he's pulled it straight out of his ass.

You know what? These changes make good sense in my head. And I'm still a bit afraid to admit it.

So...

1. If true, yes maybe not as bad as it seems at first, but...

2. Some of those terms are not equivalent at all, like the first. The last two are very different, and don't necessarily have anything to do with trans anything in the way this administration is concerned about.

3. This could have all been approached differently and more efficiently.

On 2: For you. Not for me. I'm not gender-coded, i don't have the masculinity/femininity thing in my head. Gender is personality for me, comparable to favorite color or music preference. Its like an fictional boundary in the space of what a human can do.

A boundary that is not fictional is whether i can bear offspring or not. I can't. And this is, in my eyes, one of the few remaining places where the "male"/"female" label is useful. Because aside from bearing offspring (and breastfeeding and urinating in certain positions), anyone can do anything.

On 3: Yes, it could. But i see the fault in the societal climate that made people like me suppress saying what they think.

Personality is much broader than gender IMHO, the latter is one small part of the former. Gender as a term is unique in meaning in that way.

> the "male"/"female" label is useful

Unfortunately, these are overloaded terms, and we need to dereference them. Otherwise we end up with weird expectations that contradict your egalitarianism. See: "Feminine Mystique," "Second Sex", and "Revolution at Point Zero".

Re: "sex", even this is not easy. Genetics aren't a binary, they are a complex multidimensional field. Sure, there are attractors in this field, but more than two.

> Otherwise we end up with weird expectations

These are the problem, not the labels. People having preconceptions on how a man/woman should behave and be like.

If you free yourself from these preconceptions, you don't need the mental gymnastics around "but biological sex is non-binary" anymore because regardless of your physical condition, you don't owe anyone conformity to their preconceptions.

> free yourself from these preconceptions

I have, but patriarchal societies have a tendency to accommodate--even encourage--violence against those who don't exhibit "conformity to their preconceptions". It is those categories subject to violence from which we exclude ourselves when we abandon gender labels. We are not "men" and "women" just as we are not "n***," or "k*."

It has absolutely nothing to do with biological fact, which we fully support. True, we "don't owe anyone conformity," but this is a practical matter of evading violence, and words are cheaper than bodies*. So we abandon words to preserve our bodies.

I figure that the western world is not patriarchal. What you are describing sounds like something that happens in the middle east.

Bro, I have sat in a room in the wealthiest city in the US and interviewed dozens of men who repeatedly violate their partners—verbally, physically, emotionally, and sexually—and justify it all in terms of what men deserve, and what women deserve.

And I see too much of them in every man I've met crossing this country back and forth over the years. Oh sure, it's bad in Dar Al-Islam, but I have standards that aren't met in the States.

I'm sure you'd agree if you had the data I've collected. Men violate women in the US.

Being an asshat is not gender-specific. I disowned my mom for the same things. And the horrible mental gymnastics to justify her behavior are part of the abuse.

Also, as she was my mom and raised me, i subconsciously interpolated from her onto society and ended up thinking there are general issues with society. And i recognize that aspect of myself in your writing.

I'm not talking about "asshats," I am talking about violent abusers—95% of whom are men! It's nowhere near close!

I'm sorry about your Adverse Childhood Experience, but you're way out of touch with the statistical reality here: the "Western world" is overwhelmingly patriarchal.

>A boundary that is not fictional is whether i can bear offspring or not. I can't

Lots of people who you would consider a woman cannot produce offspring either. In fact, most women cannot after a certain age.

Some of them do, some of them don't.

WTF is "trans-identifying"? They are not literally identifying as "trans". They are identifying as men/women (although the opposite of their biology), not as "trans". "Trans" is a description for people who identify as other than their biological sex; it is not an identity, per se.

You can doubt whether a trans woman is "really" a woman. But you cannot doubt that a trans woman is "really" trans. Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans" literally means.

It makes as much sense as replacing "tall people" with "tall-identifying people".

They do. "I thought you knew I'm trans".

> Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans"

They are not trying to be of another biological sex. "opposite" is a rather bad term here. They are living out their idea of what a person from the other sex would do. "their idea" emphasized.

> It makes as much sense as replacing "tall people" with "tall-identifying people".

"tall" is an measurable thing. Distance is a metric unit, even.

> But you cannot doubt that a trans woman is "really" trans. Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans" literally means.

Breaking it down, trans has two parts to it. The smaller part is simply describing those who are going through transition. There's no identity requirement here, though most people would consider themselves trans if they're going through transition.

But on the other hand, you can also be trans if you...simply identify as such, even if you make no effort to socially or medically transition, with or without a formal diagnosis.

The flip side is, you also can suffer from dysphoria and wish you were born as the opposite sex and still be cisgender, as long as you don't actively want to identify as transgender for whatever reason.

So I'd say a large part of it is identity based. If (say in a survey) we let people classify themselves into short/medium/tall and it was self-reported like gender was, we'd probably use "survey respondents who identify as being tall" or "tall-identifying people" too.

What is your source for this? As far as I can tell there is absolutely no guidance whatsoever on what is and is not acceptable language now. The executive orders use terms like "gender ideology" but make no effort to define those terms. So everything that could even remotely be construed as being "gender ideology" is being removed.

The right: "free speech for me but not for thee."

Who controls the present controls the past

Luckily not always the future though.

Overtures of fascism. I expect we’ll see thinly-veiled euphemisms and rephrasings that just evade the banned list, if not outright refusal. Ultimately this falls short for the same reason that simple filters of all kinds fail in their (apparent) objective, to the extent that it doesn’t even feel like the point is to actually stop the discussion, but rather to send a message.

There's a big difference between word filters and this: this one has a chilling effect. The intent is to send a message, but that message is a threat.

If you are a spammer and get past the filters you win, if you get past the word filter here the thought police can still decide to punish you.

The more successful you are the more likely you are to be punished instead of being rewarded. It will require self-sacrifice to actually work on "dangerous" topics.

This is a weird way to look at it. There's a shifting of incentives towards less "dangerous" topics. But "dangerous" just means citizens have decided research involving these terms is generally not the highest ROI for taxpayer funding. No one's going to face the wall over private research.

Why is this flagged? this is important news

how does its importance compare to all the other similar garbage they are generating? the volume is designed to wear you down

Why is this submission flagged?

something something “overly political”

[flagged]

There's a contact email in the footer for queries like that and requests to restore.

Users with high enough karma can also vouch for flagged posts, though anything involving politics will usually get mass flagged as soon as anyone does that.

Not in this case. The post was marked as flagged, but likely by staff, with no vouch option.

[flagged]

I mean I sort of get it. HN isn't really the place for discussing this (ref. HN Guidelines[1]), and judging by the past two weeks, the Trump administration will do something as discussion-worthy as this at least every day for the next 4 years.

If each such instance gets a thread here, it will be pretty bad for Hacker News, an Eternal September-like event.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I don't find this kind of article interesting or novel (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), specially as someone outside the US.

What a terrible blow to US Constitutional rights.

Which one?

According to Musk, the First Amendment.

Is he a lawyer?

Xi Jinping and his colleagues must be opening a champagne bottle over the US being this stupid. They could have never imagined an enemy so retarded

It’s like watching a combined plot of succession and space force.

Everything people keep telling me about how bad China is keeps happening here.

This was bin laden’s goal. Making Americans afraid was very successful because it turns out that stoking fear is very profitable and useful for gaining power. Now everyone is taking advantage of it.

This isn't just this person's opion. bin Laden wrote about and spoke about it quite often, even before 9/11.

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

Note that that was published in 2014. Those days seem positively halcyon now.

If you sent all the headlines from the last week back in time to the editor of The Onion they would be summarily ignored as too dumb.

Talk about winning a war without firing one shot at the enemy. The admiration, envy and emulation of totalitarian Chinese despotism in the U.S. must feel like a victory.

Make the US too busy fighting itself to focus on external threats.

Divide and conquer has always been the most effective strategy.

Dividing is much easier with portable propaganda devices, selling citizens' psychological profiles to anyone with cash.

We know Russia invested a lot in this outcome. Hence, at some point, this government will be seen as treasonous. Didn't China as well, wouldn't they know it's a net win for them and their interests, despite the few hurdles ("tariffs") that were announced?

I never understood why there hasn't been more investigation into Russian influence during the last four years. But maybe the ones to make a call about that didn't care.

I think the hope was that the US electorate would be better than this and see through the bullshit. They weren't.

It seems to me that it was extensively investigated and the strongest claims about Russian influence didn’t end up being true.

I think the most dangerous claims about Russian interference could not be proven true, they weren't proven false. I'm talking here about Trump being a full on Russian asset.

As a side note, I'm not sure that he is _explicitely_ in contact with Russia, but since he got oRussian assistance, an implicit quit-pro-quo is obvious to me.

The fact Russia meddled in US elections is pretty clear cut by this point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...

This is spelled out by the Republican Comitee as well.

Most of the claims of Russian influence were directly proven, the only thing not proven was direct coordination with the presidents campaign. Notably, there were several ‘dangled pardons’ to prevent people from testifying (pardons that were eventually granted) so who knows what actually happened.

By all accounts, Russia invested next to nothing in this outcome compared to how much Musk alone invested, never mind the whole of Trump's campaign.

Definitely. At this point rest of the world might as well become friends with China. At least Xi Jinping the CCP aren't idiots, which makes them more predictable to deal with than Trump's regime.

The only proof I see in the article is a picture of part of an email taken by a cellphone camera. Can anyone link to the official policy/order?

You can just go to the CDC website. The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is the most prominent US public health publication, hasn't been published since the inauguration. That has not happened in over 60 years. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html

Sorry, I mean the order described in the article requiring a list of words to be removed.

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Yea, this is what Ezra Klein seems to think as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

"Of the 4,700 newspapers published in Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, no more that 1,100 remained. Approximately half were still in the hands of private or institutional owners, but these newspapers operated in strict compliance with government press laws and published material only in accordance with directives issued by the Ministry of Propaganda."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-...

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We are now at the digital equivalent of book burning in the 1930's. The parallels are pretty clear. This is the moment in history class that someone raises their hand and asks 'but why didn't anyone stop them?'.

There is truth to what you wrote but a major difference is that this is mainly about scientific results now and no matter how it plays out it will mean major damage to science and evidence based research that will take decades to fix. We will lose all the people on the brink of distrusting science.

This isn't mainly about scientific results. This is about hate and power. It didn't start here and it won't stop here. History is very clear that this will get even uglier very fast. We have a very small window left to do something to stop it, if we are lucky.

Given the costs involved in all the back and forth that a typical retraction involves, I can't see the journals wanting to deal with it.

I see the forbidden terms include "gender" and google scholar returns 5.3 million results with that. It's all a bit silly. Next they'll ban European languages for being gendered.

They actually like male/female enforced gender. Maybe what they’ll do is add gender to English grammar!

  La primera pregunta es: Que es mas macho, pineapple o knife?

  Well, let's see
  My guess is that a pineapple is more macho than a knife

  Si! Correcto! Pineapple es mas macho que knife

  La segunda pregunta es: Que es mas macho, lightbulb o schoolbus?
  Uh, lightbulb?

  No! Lo siento, Schoolbus es mas macho que lightbulb

  Gracias. And we'll be back in un momento

~ https://youtu.be/6mRq1xgKykM?t=95

I wonder how that'd go. Like in French "the book is on the table" is "le livre est sur la table" so I guess it'd become something like "he book is on she table"? We might need some new words. Or just steal the French ones "le book is on la table"? Vive la franglais!

Old English had gender, and the feminine definite article to match masculine the would be theo. (The whole concept of "the" was a late addition, mind you, and Middle English followed soon after and got rid of grammatical gender, apparently because an influx of Nordics had trouble with pronunciation.)

Half the point of the order is Trump’s admin wants gendered language. That is:

Pregnant person -> pregnant woman

Pregnant people -> pregnant women

Does this mean that they also have unconstrained control over the weaponized diseases created and stored in laboratories?

Should I be concerned that they may break all treaties and engage in biological warfare with the EU?

Unlikely, France and the UK have nukes (yes, the UK is not in the EU). They will just attempt the same playbook in Europe. In fact, Elon is already at it in Germany and the UK.

If you can be concerned without it affecting your daily mood, I would answer yes. If your disposition doesn't allow for that kind of detachment, I'd say there's still plenty of time for concern later.

Freedom of Speech.

Democracy.

Equality.

Equity.

I used to know what these words meant, but it seems the old definitions are no longer fit for purpose.

I am truly utterly dismayed that any fool could attack the very foundations of science like this.

The only interesting thing is how a Supreme Court might react to a scientist challenging this blocks his right to free speech. The test would be which is greater - the ideology or the law …

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Having seen the word list change, all it is doing is rolling back terms that were introduced and forced into use by the left.

You're just complaining that the newspeak is being undone.

Yes exactly the same they are doing with global warming and climate change. words invented by the left.

I'm looking forward to the first ChatGPT response saying it can't talk about certain topics.

This is true, but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science. There is no ambiguity about it.

It's only "offensive" to people who don't like how reality works.

Which is clearly the real problem here.

Pretending otherwise is gaslighting, because they're doing the same thing to climate change research and pandemic research.

And there's a good chance vaccines and other public health measures will be next.

This is not a rational government for rational people planning a rational future. This is a government of angry anti-rational cranks with mental health issues working out those issues in public, to the detriment of everyone except a small cadre of multi-billionaires who share the same psychology, but whose wealth will (somewhat) protect them from consequences the rest of us will have to live with.

> but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science

Maybe my education is just getting out of date, but isn't the biological side of that topic sex while gender is generally referring to more of the social constructs like expected social roles and behaviors?

I though body or gender dysmorphia would in fact be tied to gender rather than sex because it is more of a psychology question than a biological one.

fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia. So while we may treat it as a psychological condition, it, like many other psychological conditions, also has an underlying biological basis.

Correlation still doesn't tell us too much though. In general its nearly impossible to find likely causation for psychological conditions. That doesn't mean the links aren't there, its seems likely to me that there is a biological factor, its just really hard or impossible to design proper studies for causation.

Sure but the point of research is to improve understanding. Today there is correlation, tomorrow we find causation.

Are you suggesting we should stop looking for a physical cause of depression? Many neurologists believe that psychological conditions map onto physical structural or chemical differences. Maybe that is the case, maybe that’s not the case but we use the tools we have to do that research so that we can better understand, and if necessary treat, these conditions.

I'd be very curious to see how causation may be found for most psychological conditions. I'm sure there are ways I haven't seen or considered, but it seems really difficult to structure a study that would lead towards potential causation.

Traumatic brain injuries are one standout, though even then I think its just correlative as no one is going to attempt a study that intentionally causes TBIs in the test group.

> fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia

No they haven't, that study was debunked. There is currently no physically detectable way to identify gender dysmorphia or trans identity, there is only self-report.

If someone started grinding up those pill things and putting them in your salt shaker, you wouldn't be able to prove that you didn't like the results - unless we can believe self-reports.

Believing swlf-report for an n of 1 question of personal preference is very different from trusting a self-report survey meant to extrapolate the results of one cohort to a larger audience.

Unfortunately in this debate, two sides of any given argument from a study cannot even agree on what criteria counts as "debunked".

I have seen people use many states of being for a study being in a "debunked" state:

Peer pointed out methodological issues

Retracted

Another study found something in conflict with first one

Somebody with a PhD just said it was wrong (regardless of field)

Somebody without a PhD said it was wrong, but has domain experience

Author of the paper proven to be biased in some way

Author of the paper proven to be a cheat (but nothing specific about the paper)

And so on...

Sure, so to clarify, the study that claimed to find differences in trans brains:

* Did not control for sexual orientation (same-sex attracted people exhibit preferences and behaviours of both sexes, and many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay)

* Did not control for whether the person was on HRT or puberty blockers (people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex)

* Did not control for body perception disorders (body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body)

> many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay

Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%), and that lack of social acceptance is a huge factor in deciding if someone desists or not — the less social acceptance, the less likely someone is to be able to comfortably transition socially, the more likely they're going to "desist".

In other words — not only is the "desistance rate" for treatment vanishingly small, there isn't a straight line between "desisting" and "not being transgender", and one of the most recurring explanations for "desistance" in the study groups basically boiled down to "society has bullied them into hiding themselves".

> people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex

Citation needed. In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.

> body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body

Correct! And given that you know this, you should also know that treatments for body dysphoria do not work for gender dysphoria, and that for almost 100 years now, the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria has been transitioning.

> Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%)

No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition. The poor quality of the evidence in this field is why virtually all Western nations are taking progressively stricter approaches to trans care to improve the quality of the long-term data.

Furthermore, this 1% regret rate number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test. The regret rate for literal live-saving surgeries, like artery bypass, are upwards of 25%. A 1% regret rate is just completely implausible and I honestly can't believe anybody swallowed it.

The desistance I was referring to are cohorts that experience gender dysphoria for various reasons and then ultimately desist. A large subset of this cohort are gay, sexually confused or uncomfortable with puberty for various reasons, and throw in a bunch of other comorbidities and the affirmative model is a recipe for disaster. The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.

> In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.

This causation for their suicide is conjecture (trans people have many mental health comorbidities), but I don't see how this is even relevant to the point I was making. Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated? Just because it does so, doesn't mean it would solve whatever ailed the trans or intersex people, and I never claimed it would.

The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.

> No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition.

There are multiple longitudinal studies of trans people many years after transition, and their numbers fit the already-existing numbers known by GICs — but I'm sure given your predisposition for research on this topic, you've already seen them and disagree with them. I'd agree that more research is fine, but the fact that the vast majority of trans people report feeling way more comfortable after 5 years of transitioning, to me makes it very clear. Who follows up with knee surgery patients after 10 or 20 years? Do we have long term data that 30 years after a bypass surgery someone isn't regretting having it? The existing data we have for trans people is comparative in length and scope to the followups performed on said people with life-saving surgeries. I'd agree that more data = better, sure. But I really doubt that you're actually going to find the smoking gun here that you're so blatantly looking for.

Also, it should be said that, again, the main reason we don't have very, very long term data on trans people is because most of the trans people that transitioned in the 1920s - 1980s kept it very, very close to their chests and later went stealth. It is literally only the last 10 or so years that acceptance of trans people has hit a point that many don't feel an impetus to go stealth in the first place. Wanting very, very long term data is like asking "Where are all the studies on old gay people, if being gay is natural" and ignoring that the AIDS pandemic happened — it's ignorance of social factors precluding data gathering.

> The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.

To be honest, I'd wait another 30 years for the anti-gender cult[1][2][3][4] to run it's course first, before we start getting actual data :)

> Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated?

Yes, I'll take the citation please.

What you said was "people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex". Which is dubious in terms of the evidence available for that position in relation to humans, as the majority of evidence for that in terms of sex hormones were done on rats — which, notably have a very different psychology to humans. There is a phenomenon where some trans women realise that they are straight and attracted to men, after transitioning, but it's very unclear whether or not that's simply the case that they feel able to be attracted to men — occam's razor kicks in here, I think. Regardless, it would be difficult to get figures on this because speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of trans women I have met and been in contact with (probably a couple of hundred or so) are dating (cis and trans) women.

> The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.

But you should already know, Sandro, that for the last ten years multiple authors doing fmri studies on trans people have been performing them on non-hormone treated, and hormone treated trans people. The data is already there and collected.

--------

[1]: https://freedium.cfd/https://beaudyess.medium.com/prodigal-b...

[2]: http://idavox.com/index.php/2020/02/08/christian-fundamental...

[3]: https://fxtwitter.com/mimmymum/status/1321009862537551876

[4]: https://fxtwitter.com/RationalWiki/status/157974164781415628...

If by "sex" you mean physical characteristics, it's not what we learn in school books but not all people have only two XX or XY chromosomes. There are other (rare) combinations.

XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), X (Turner syndrome), XXX (Triple X syndrome), XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),

If we think in terms of genes, the situation is further complicated, and hormones also influence the sexual phenotype during fetal development.

There’s also chimeras who can have some XY cells and some XX cells due to the fusion of a male and female fertilized zygotes in the early stages of prenatal development.

Resulting in genetic tests of gender to result in different outcomes depending on which cells are sampled.

There’s a women in the medical literature (I have read the original paper, but can’t lay my hands on it right now) who had multiple children & was discovered to be a 99% XY / 1% XX chimera IIRC.

(edit) This is probably the case paper I was thinking of: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/ It was her ovaries that were 99/1% proportions. Other parts of her body had varying levels of mosaicism.

Dr. House treated a patient like this on television over a decade ago.

Oh for sure, I didn't mean to employ that sex is itself binary.

> XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), X (Turner syndrome), XXX (Triple X syndrome), XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),

While this is true, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion. These conditions are extremely rare - certainly much rarer than gender dysmorphia - and most transgender people are either XX or XY.

I think the point is the bad-faith effort to erase trans people by asserting that chromosomes are all that matter falls down because obviously there are people running around with unusual chromosomes, so if it was an actual good faith effort they would be defining new (rare) genders to map to these chromosome patterns.

But it’s not good faith, and nobody really believes that chromosomes are the most important definition of gender. It’s just a convenient way to erase trans people.

Nobody serious is claiming that chromosomes are "all that matter", but while you complain about bad-faith efforts to dismiss trans people, you seemingly ignore all of their bad faith efforts to dismiss the importance and reality of sex.

> nobody really believes that chromosomes are the most important definition of gender

I don't understand how you reach this conclusion given the fact that for >99% of the world's people, their gender matches their sex. Who is this "nobody" you speak of?

> Who is this “nobody” you speak of?

That seemed clear? Meaning: there is a population of people who believe gender is abstracted from chromosomes by factors including psychology, and there isn’t a population who claim the believe that gender is 1:1 with chromosomes, but who handwave away the inconvenient < 1% who have a chromosome pattern not mapped to a gender.

Thus, nobody actually believes this. It’s just rhetoric to support an ideological position. There are 8B people on earth; no serious scientific or political position can be built on “if you ignore millions of people who don’t fit”

> Meaning: there is a population of people who believe gender is abstracted from chromosomes by factors including psychology, and there isn’t a population who claim the believe that gender is 1:1 with chromosomes, but who handwave away the inconvenient < 1% who have a chromosome pattern not mapped to a gender. Thus, nobody actually believes this.

I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.

Edit: >There are 8B people on earth; no serious scientific or political position can be built on “if you ignore millions of people who don’t fit”

To clarify, nobody ignores people who "don't fit". Prior to the spread of transgender awareness, feminism spent a lot of time and effort breaking down stereotypes of what it means to be one sex or the other, in order to allow anyone to express any kind of behaviour or presentation. Taking the position that you have a definite sex regardless of your behaviour or presentation is not "ignoring people who don't fit", it's just recognizing the reality of sex and letting people do what they want, while avoiding a commitment to some completely undefined, fluid notion of "gender".

> I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.

My understanding is that it is not entirely Western nations and not even all that modern of an idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history

The opening paragraph literally says, "The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities."

Applying these labels to historical peoples is projection at best. The whole problem with "gender" is that it is either undefined or it has no universal definition, therefore it's meaningless to apply it historically.

To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture, because there was no notion of gender as we know it, nor is there even a universal definition of gender that we can apply retroactively.

> To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture[...]

You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason. Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?

I’ve lost interest in the “obv gender equals sex, because sex defines gender” nonsense, but your question is interesting.

Murder comes to mind, but lots of asterisks there (it’s not murder if it’s an honor killing). I’m hard pressed to think of universal mores. Respect for elderly maybe? Or unacceptability of theft?

> You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason.

I don't think I did. I said historians noted that cultures often had roles and duties divided along sex lines, but that some people did not strictly conform to those divisions of labour. In what way does that entail that they had some notion of gender that was abstracted from sex?

> Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?

Law. Government. Trade. Religion. Gods. These all have a definition by which we can look at a system and say, "that was a religious belief", or "that was not a law but a local custom", "this was a deity they worshipped". They're not "universal" in the sense that they are identical in all cultures, they are universal in the sense that you can look at the definition and use that definition to classify cultural characteristics in a meaningful way.

I don't think this is possible with "gender".

> I don't understand how you reach this conclusion given the fact that for >99% of the world's people, their gender matches their sex.

What is the significance of this in this context? 100% of the world's people are not lions, does that mean lions don't exist? Some people don't fit neatly into one of the two gender/sex categories. This is scientifically very clear. Why is it important to have hard categories, and why should we legislate that only two categories exist?

> 100% of the world's people are not lions, does that mean lions don't exist

No, 100% of the world's people are not lions, therefore people are not lions.

> people don't fit neatly into one of the two gender/sex categories

Don't conflate gender and sex. All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex, and sex allows for a range of development, even malformed ones.

As for "gender", if it's defined separately from sex, then I don't know what it means because it hasn't been defined. My response was that the vast majority of people don't distinguish between gender/sex, because not only have they never encountered a person where these are distinct, they don't even have any inclination that this is even a thing. That's why I'm confused by the original claim that "nobody" thinks gender comes down to sex. It's just a bizarre claim. If you go to remote tribes in the Amazon, even they think gender and sex are the same.

If you go to remote tribes in the Amazon, you'll find a lot of things modern day society tries to distance itself from, like kidnapping women and beating them until they're docile. You have literally no idea what those people were to think of themselves, given the freedom to do so. Ancient is not the same as good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami_women

Here's some other "ancient" stuff, that can be used to say the opposite of your point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit#Traditional_Indigen...

> Ancient is not the same as good.

Who said otherwise?

> Here's some other "ancient" stuff, that can be used to say the opposite of your point

Yes, native Americans had gay people too, and slightly varying ideas of division of labour. I'm not sure how you think this proves the notion that distinguishing gender and sex is or was some dominant mode of thought.

Just look up transgender history on Wikipedia, literally the opening paragraph says these concepts were invented in the 1950s.

> All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex

I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex, and even then, there are lots of people who appear to have a definite sex but their body is varied massively from the "baseline". Such people are actually more numerous than red-headed people or albinism, within society. All of this is pretty trivial in terms of talking points and very well supported within the encompassing scientific literature, which is why I don't actually feel the need to cite myself here — any introduction to biological psychology, or the general subject of sex/gender, from a biological or sociological view, will very easily get you up to speed on this.

> I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex

Phenotypical sex characteristics do not define sex, and developmental disorders tied to one's sex do not somehow refute one's sex. This talk of "appearances" is exactly the kind of confusion I've been trying to argue against. Biology has a more rigourous definition for sex to avoid exactly these confusions. I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.

> Biology has a more rigourous definition for sex to avoid exactly these confusions.

You're right — here's a semi-old crash course on the whole topic from someone who is actually studied and practiced in the fields of biology and endocrinology: https://imgur.com/a/sciencevet2-on-science-of-gender-qmIiULb

The tl;dr of it is "the bimodal sex distribution model is really bad at a lot of the things we use it for, including predicting results to prescribed medication, or questions about who can give birth". There's some links to actual papers included in the gallery, if you want to follow this up further.

> I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.

From 'knowing people in the field of biology', I can say rather clearly that it's less "some biologists are mistaken/foolish" and more "the majority of biologists who are up to date have decided to revise their beliefs about sex in line with current research".

The people passing laws and executive orders trying to define "male" and "female" by chromosomes, and thus deny people human rights and/including medical care, are pretty serious.

> the importance and reality of sex.

The what and what? Just because it's "important" to a bunch of extremist religious fundamentalist bigots doesn't mean what's in someone's pants or genes is important to anyone but said someone.

"Reality"? FFS.

Stay in your lane and stop fixating on how other people lead their lives or their self identity. The only degree it affects you is that you're bothering yourself about it.

Klinefelter syndrome: one to two per 1,000 live birth

Turner syndrome: 1 in 2,000 to 5,000 female births

Triple X syndrome: approximately 1 in 1,000 (female)

Jacob’s syndrome: 1 in 1,000 males

Mosaicism affecting sex determination: 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 50,000

Swyer syndrome: ~1 in 80,000–100,000 births

SRY translocation to X or autosome: ~1 in 25,000–30,000

Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: 1 in 10,000–50,000

So there are ~0.3% of people who have an unusual sex determination because of genetics. As another poster said that means there are 900,000 people with these conditions in the USA. That's half of the transgender population in the USA.

Yet I agree that does not prove that a significant portion of the transgender population has some genetic variation affecting their sex determination, but definitely it proves that the situation is more complex than many think.

Those account for a number half the size of trans populations. Are you saying trans is also exceedingly rare and irrelevant, yet they are under attack?

> XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), X (Turner syndrome), XXX (Triple X syndrome), XYY (Jacob’s syndrome)

Yes, but all of these conditions are sex-specific, so you're still only one sex or the other.

I am sorry but I am specifically speaking of cases where the phenotype contradicts the genotype. For example, there are cases where an individual has an XY karyotype but develops female traits due to a mutation in the SRY gene.

The word "sex" is ambiguous, do we speak of phenotype (sexual traits/appearance) or genetic characteristics? And if you categorize people by their appearance, how do you categorize people with atypical genitalia (~1/5000)?

Yep. And there's XX people that naturally appear male and XY people that naturally appear female.

Calling it “established science” seems like an attempt to shut down scientific discourse and normalize gender dysphoria even though it is a complex topic that causes distress to many people and has ongoing ethical concerns. It becomes even more complex when considering the decades of funding of gender studies which has attempted to normalize and promote it rather than research solutions. Further complicating the issue are financial incentives that encourage treatments. And, there are social and legal incentives that encourage expanding the number of people with that diagnosis. For example, there currently seems to be a push to immediately affirm adolescents with histories of mental health conditions when a more cautious approach may be more helpful.

Edit: Anecdotally, I have a transgender nephew, and three of my good friends have transgender children. Both of my best friend's two children are transgender. My friend went through a bitter divorce a few years ago and was estranged from his 17 year old son for over a year. When he next saw him, his son had already started irreversable treatment even though he hadn’t had any symptoms a year prior. To me, someone who experimented with what they call 'gender fluidity' as a teenager in the 90s, this all seems unusual and should be handled more cautiously.

One aspect that I find alarming about gender dysmorphia as a diagnosis is that it seems to pathologize gender non-conformity. For example, in some circles it's more acceptable to be a trans man than a "butch" woman. And the diagnostic criteria for gender dysmorphia might put a butch woman in the "trans" bucket if she were to talk to a doctor.

To me this is a betrayal of what feminism was after in the early 2000 - namely moving away from rigid gender stereotypes.

You mean gender dysphoria. Body dysmorphia is also something trans people experience. You’re basically making the “they’re killing the twinks!” argument with absolutely no evidence for diagnosticians leading patients towards transition. My experience as a trans woman is that I had to fight my doctors to believe me, and this is a common experience in my circles. I know dozens of trans people, and not a single one was told by a doctor that they were trans. We call it the prime directive, and we even apply it between friends.

You do not speak with authority on this topic.

What we're witnessing is active malice against two populations: people who are dysphoric and would like help to be comfortable in their own bodies, and people who are perfectly comfortable as they are and would like the rest of us to accept that they will not take measures to change their trans-gender physical characteristics.

What we need is a campaign with a firm message of "hands off, all of them."

>>What we’re witnessing is active malice>>

What do you think brought on this malice? What would cause 99.5% of the population to suddenly have malice against 0.5%? Was it spontaneous?

Wealth inequality and the resurgence of fascism pressing it's monied thumb on the Overton window.

Ok, then how does that work, exactly?

In 2021 a survey by the Pew Research Center found that about 4.5% of U.S. adults identify as gay, but when asked what percentage of the population they believe is gay, Americans on average estimated around 20%. Similarly, a study from Britain's NHS found that British youths were 50 times more likely to suffer from gender distress since 2011. To back that up, Reuters worked with Komodo Health recently and found a 3 times increase the diagnosis of gender dysphoria from 2017 - 2021.

So with this context as a backdrop, and knowing that fascists and their money were behind it, did they manipulate narratives to create an impression amongst Americans that there are 5 times as many gay people as there actually are? And did they also create a sudden surge in demand for gender affirming care?

Tactically, how did they go about that? Did they takeover Hollywood? The media? Was their plan to create a narrative that normalizes the fringe so as to ignite hatred towards that fringe? Sounds like a pretty clever chess game.

Billionaires experiencing midlife crisis and andropause started receiving gender affirming care, the same enjoyed by the military and law enforcement for decades, were courted by the fringe to amplify their ideas to disaffected people failed by the institutions that created those billionaires. The fruit of your individual merit is threatened by these chemically altered silver-spoon fed man-children threatened by mortality filling the greedy black hole in their psyche with your unexamined acceptance. But feel free to instead focus your ire on the current analog for "the Rootless Cosmopolitan" that is the source of all of your perceived discomforts. Make no mistake, I understand that there is a greedy black hole in the minds of many, and for some, it is filled by adopting ideas considered secret unacceptable truths contrary to the unwell mainstream that finds them despicable. You're not sick, they are, and there is only one cure-all solution. But at last, your brave difficult truths are told openly and you are emancipated from the shadows! Congratulations and good luck trampling the few to build monuments for the even fewer.

If that means a man can enter the women’s bathrooms, then I’m against it.

All this malice over bathroom use? How about we make bathrooms single stall and end this stupid hate

As a gay man, I will begrudgingly volunteer as a sacrificial genital checker. I will sit at the entrance to the men's restroom, like a bouncer of a club, and the men that are concerned about who is in which bathroom can show me their penis prior to gaining entry to the restroom. That way, we can make sure restrooms are safe for all.

You're against doors. Save your hate energy for actual problems.

I don’t understand this point of view at all.

Gravity is established science and billions of dollars a year are spent studying it, including efforts to refute parts of our understanding.

How does acknowledging the reality of current scientific understanding in any way “shut down” further exploration? It sounds like the opposite — that peoples’ discomfort with the current state of understanding should be a reason to revert science to a much older state and never mention the subject again.

Typically, though not always, the people who complain about established science shutting down new research are the ones pushing crank and conspiracy theories.

I don't mind if you call me a 'crank'. At least I'm not being shouted down - and I appreciate that.

It's important to understand that I believe that gender dysphoria is a real condition. I mainly question the scale, social dynamics, and the rapid cultural shift. I'm also concerned about the strife and (ironically) dysphoria that it causes.

I am open to the idea that 10% of my adult friends actually have gender dysphoria and just aren't able to talk about it. However, given I knew zero people with gender dysphoria 25 years ago but now 10% of the adolescents (and two 4th graders!) that I know have gender dysphoria, it is a surprising change.

Also, I feel like science should be open to scrutiny, and shutting down discussion only increases distrust. And, over the past 10 years, many people have been shut out from the conversation.

I'll just leave this graph here for you to reflect upon: https://archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...

Thanks - very eye-opening. My rough calculations show that four million US lives could have been saved over the past 100 years if only we had adopted handedness-sensitivity and modified schools and workplaces to account for left-handedness. I'm now thinking of pushing for a right-to-left version of written English.

I’m genuinely curious why you care if other people, with their own loving families, are too quick to diagnose dysmorphia.

Sure, there can be bad outcomes from overdiagnosis. But also from under diagnosis and from stigma. It seems like a very difficult and challenging thing to get right, so why put energy into second-guessing experts and people directly affected? What good can come from a semi-knowledgeable person with no personal stake forming strong opinions that they’re doing it wrong?

I’m old enough to remember when liberalized attitudes towards homosexuality were blamed for a huge increase in incidence. And it’s been long enough now that it’s pretty obvious that no, there really were that many closeted people suffering in ways small to large.

Not being gay or suffering from body dysmorphia, it’s hard for me to imagine wanting to tell people they’re wrong about their (or their children’s) gender identity.

Sorry if that came across as lecture-y, I honestly meant it as background for curiosity about why you feel the need to have strong opinions.

It's a reasonable question. Looking back, I can see how it seems that way. On the contrary, I believe people should do what they want. I've always supported my sister, my nephew, my friends and their kids, and their kids' friends. I've voted 'yes' to transgender policy for as long as it's been an issue.

It's only after struggling to motivate my lifelong liberal friends to vote that I started to re-think my opinion and research more. And, now my opinion is more mixed. I've read a few of the landmark papers on suicide rates for instance. And, there are big problems with the methodologies. However, you can't question or you will get labelled a bigot.

Maybe I'm too utilitarian, but I've been working toward liberal / progressive goals for the last 30 years. And, I just saw most get set back 30 years largely because of this wedge issue.

And, I don't not support them now. But, I feel like the approach that's being taken is unrealistic and way too heavy-handed and top down. It's not a strategy that will succeed, but it's taking a lot down with it.

I hope transgender activists will take a more pragmatic approach in the future. I hope they understand that lots of people over 40 can't relate to what they're talking about. This is different from other social justice activism in which most people could at least kind of relate to. Activists should also work on better outreach and good-will activities so that the average person recognizes them as nice, kind, and helpful people. You're not going to win support by shouting at people online. And, be happy with incremental wins. Changing culture takes time.

There are two problems at play here. One is that the science involved pertains to mental health care, which means psychiatrists. Meaning the same specialty that tried psychotherapy and blaming "cold" mothers for autism, and then had a lobotomies for everyone fad, and then got too enamored with electroconvulsive therapy.

I'm too young to have witnessed those, but I did personally see the effects when they launched the Drug of the Month Club in the 1990s. It's hard to look at how they treat gender dysphoria and not suspect it's yet another episode.

BUT....

At the same time what's going on with the Republicans is sheer malice. And it must be fought on those grounds.

> This is true, but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science. There is no ambiguity about it.

There is no biology of gender, biology is concerned only with sex. If you'd ever seen a mention of "gender" in biology prior to 10 years ago, it was a reference to sex because at the time they were not distinct.

So if you meant "sex" in your sentence then I agree with you, it is settled science, but if you really did mean to say "gender" then I have no idea what you're talking about because "gender" has no definition in biology.

Gender does have biological causes.

Define gender first and we'll see.

Gender diversity encompasses the range of differences between an individual's internal, subjective experience of their gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth. In gender diverse individuals, shifts in neurobiology are frequently observed, shifts that are frequently towards patterns typical of the other binary assigned sex.

and towards that of their gender identity.

> Gender diversity encompasses the range of differences between an individual's internal, subjective experience of their gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth.

That's a) not a biological definition, and b) circular because now you still need to define "gender identity".

> In gender diverse individuals, shifts in neurobiology are frequently observed, shifts that are frequently towards patterns typical of the other binary assigned sex.

No, this is a misconception based on flawed fMRI studies that did not control for sexual orientation, did not control for HRT, and did not control for body perceptual disorders. There is no known physical test that can assign or distinguish gender as there is for sex.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907007.

If your thesis is that Trump is awful and will be ousted, and the general public, even the MAGA crowd, will recoil at the devastation he unleashed, I suppose at least it's all mercifully quick. At this rate the US might be in a major recession this year already, with healthcare in disarray and everything else too.

Not something to relish, but I suppose better than slogging it out for years. At least he's accelerating the timeline.

Of course the alternative is that he's here to stay, in which case the accelerated timeline means more damage.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They will just blame Biden (and Obama).

It works for a little bit. But it stops working very quickly once people is wallets get hit.

Russia, China, and North Korea are counter examples.

These revolutions were literally won and maintained at gunpoint. Places like HN would be shut and people running them imprisoned.

Might still happen to the US but still far away.

Being ousted is unlikely. It’s very hard to remove a sitting POTUS. Assuming there are midterms, that’s the first opportunity to see what the general public thinks.

Most people in the US don't travel and have no clue that they're living in a pretty bizarre environment. E.g. healthcare has been a s.show for decades but people just shake their heads and spin up another gofundme for their medical bills. So expecting the population to rise up may be over optimistic.

This is what happens when people decide for dictorship, hard times ahead, unfortunately saying we have told you so isn't going to sort out things now.

interesting link but too bad that Hacker News can't stay clean of politics. I always come here to chill out and read about peaceful computers

Maybe it’s time to implement content notes.

CN: Politics

CN: Rust reimplentation

I’m sure CDC researchers are thinking the same thing about their work.

Unfortunately, totalitarianism is defined by its effects on science, education, and our private life. I expect apolitical topics to become rarer here simply because there will be no escaping it.

Politics now affects everything and you can no longer afford to ignore it IMO. Dangerous times.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HM4JXK/planet-earth-with-only-unit...

Not sure what you're trying to communicate there, friend.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen a politician make an absurd campaign promise and then follow through on it successfully. I’d find it terrifying if it weren’t about the most first-world of all first-world problems.

First they came for the trade-unionists, but you said nothing because you are not a trade unionist.

If by first world problems you mean that this destruction of our society is going to give us the traditional living standards of the third world, that seems like something worth worrying about.

> While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump’s executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that.

This seemed key to me. The managerial/editorial layer is acting in a way that any manager would when there is unclear interpretation: risk-adversity.

It's much easier to do than undo, so you stop until things are cleared up.

However, it seems the organizational layer whose work is being affected is assuming this risk-adverse interpretation is the new policy coming from the top. No doubt, legacy media will take the same interpretation.

If I were to approach this rationally, I would probably want to see clarification before running with the Hitlerian comparisons.

with all due respect, some of these journals got themselves into untenable positions that require twisting one’s self into a pretzel to defend their practices and decisions. for example, i had to cancel my acm subscription because the communications deteriorated in quality, shifting focus from publishing more on the science and practice of computing to sociopolitical issues. there was more articles on social intervention, blacks/minorities in tech, etc that reduced the useful content to about 40% of the journal, imo. not what i signed up for even though the identity police will help me know that i’m a minority in computing—a fact i wasn’t aware of until recently.

i guess at some point in these last 8 years or so, one accrued extra points for publishing articles along those lines. who knows, it probably earned acm more subscriptions, donations, pats on the back, sensitivity points, etc. and so it reinforced itself and resulted in even more sociopolitical articles. but it was a letdown for someone who wanted to passively follow developments in computing. so i left.

Publishing no science at all, or only once it's been thoroughly scrubbed of all mentions of certain topics and the researchers threatened or punished is much, much worse than publishing too much on topics that you don't care about.

Take the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is the most prominent public health publication in the US (the first reports of AIDS were published there for instance). It's not being published at all now. If/when they start publishing it again, it will be highly censored, particularly on topics that are extremely relevant to public health (if these rules were in place in the 80s, how would they have reported on AIDS?)

That's so much worse than having too high a percentage of content discussing gender or whatever.

> Publishing no science at all, or only once it's been thoroughly scrubbed of all mentions of certain topics and the researchers threatened or punished is much, much worse

You know that much social science research, especially on hot button topics, has already been dealing with censorship and academic shunning for years.

I'm not equivocating with EO, etc but that is bad too.

Yes, I agree with that. I would even say that self-censorship and shunning of out-of-favor ideas is inherent in academia, because funding and senior positions are always limited and controlled by older, more established people. The solution has always been more openness. What's happening here is an escalation beyond anything we've seen in the culture wars and it's using the power of the state to suppress anything that could even remotely be construed as dissenting.

I don't disagree, however my point was that if this research was already biased/filtered/self-censored as above it really diminishes their ability to complain about openness. True or not laymen will view it as a double standard.

That point would be more reasonable if this decision was limited to research about controversial topics. It's not. It includes, at the very least, ALL the science that CDC is involved with. That includes, among other things, a paper about bird flu infections among bovine veterinarians. It's a massive escalation. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/cdc-trump-mmwr-bird-f...

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