But a couple of evolutionary biologists have been aghast at their culture after suffering the wrath of today’s “Woke” mob—those anarchists who promote violence in support of “social justice” (SJ). Q: How can they say it is wrong? Their righteous indignation rings hollow when they rehearse the wrong that has been done to them, and then give advice on what should be done about it.
Colin Wright
Wright testifies that his scientific colleagues were comfortable writing about binary sexuality when it concerned flies or meadow voles, but they shielded off human beings in such a way that they were not allowed to speak of sex in the same realistic terms. When he tried to point out this inconsistency, he received responses that were “couched in social justice talk about these terms in vague ways” for fear of offending somebody.
In 99.98% of cases, he says, the outcome of development leading to maleness or femaleness is non-controversial: it is binary, measurable by whether the body produces sperm or ova.
For a time around 2010, he continues, he was willing to grant that
“gender identity” might differ from biological sex, but he maintained that sex itself remained a binary reality. In the last couple of years, he says, scientists have been asked to make “another concession” – to say that biological sex is the same thing as gender identity: that it is fluid and can change, too. The Woke mob began insisting that one’s identity choice determines what sex they are. “That’s when I got off that train,” he says. It was blurring the line completely.---As for the agenda, he sees the social justice (SJ) movement responsible for the new irrationality and insanity in cancel culture. “It’s kind of a bizarre place we’re currently in,” he muses, where “you can’t make the most introductory Biology 101 claims about sex differences without these things being considered hate speech.” On Instagram, he had only posted a graph from a peer-reviewed paper in Sports Medicine, a premiere health journal. Their judgment of it as “hate speech” prompted him to ask for a review. After two rounds of review, Instagram maintained its judgment that it was hate speech.
As a result of this incident, a leftist campaign was mounted against him — so public that he can probably never be hired in his PhD specialty at any university.
---Students at Penn State, where he did postgraduate work, complained of being triggered by seeing him on campus. Professors joined in the campaign of calling him a transphobe bigot. Even colleagues he had worked with and considered friends, whom he considered able to discuss anything, turned on him because of this issue. He noted that they didn’t read his writings, but made up their opinions based on rumors they had heard.
Wright is alarmed that these ideas are rampant now in science. So great is the pressure within academia, he says, that journals have to go outside academia to find people able to write about the reality of sex differences. To do so within most universities would be career suicide.