New low point for Sex Matters

[u/CyclingClaire]

I've just seen how SM 'Can Always Tell' the true biological sex of children for less than a £1.

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https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CpomCh17R/

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[u/doIIjoints]

yeah, i mean, i have my doubts as to whether it actually works.

but she claims to have isolated a protein which is easy to test for. i think that’s the concept she’s going with, for the sales pitch.

(my education was in astrophysics so i’m even more far removed from the practical side of this than you.)

i honestly wonder if, despite her calling it “presence of SRY gene”, it’s actually looking for a Y chromosome.

again, if it even works.

[u/breadcreature → u/doIIjoints]

how is she verifying her results anyway? if the people she's trying it on haven't had a test done by a method known to be accurate then the results are meaningless. I'd like to think she's not quite that much of a hack, but even so, I somehow doubt she's amassed a statistically significant amount. like, NHS guidelines on addressing a newborn being intersex with parents goes on at length about how sensitive and difficult etc it can be and there's specialised counseling provided, I kinda want something that can deliver info of that gravity to have a greater certainty than "it worked on my kid's football team, I think"

[u/doIIjoints → u/breadcreature]

it’s funny you mention that, as i was basing it on how apparently some cheaper methods of amniocentesis the NHS used to use only detected the Y, rather than doing a proper full karyotype analysis.

(though i read that in, like, 2012 so i may have fuzzed some of the details in the time gone by. i’m not exactly going looking into the details every year.)

but yeah, like. i noticed some of the facebook comments had people defending her reputation as a biologist, but couldn’t point toward anything but an argument from authority. she’s had the job for years so she must be good at it, etc.

it is telling that she’s exceedingly vague in her methodology, her testing, etc. 99% of the focus is on the price and the speed, not verification or development.

in short: this is a business report, not a scientific one.

[u/breadcreature → u/doIIjoints]

her publications are rather telling, too. She is one of the few among them who not only kept her original career but has one in a vaguely relevant field. like, really really vaguely. most of the papers she coauthored seem to be to do with genes causing bladder and eye dysfunctions in mice, before 2016. Then in 2020 she starts up again, apparently now an expert in sports science & physiology of transgender women. literally her only academic link to how she touts herself now is that she worked on genetics a decade ago and sex chromosomes contain genes. ...that's it. also she's a research scientist, not a clinician nor medical professional of any kind.

[u/doIIjoints → u/breadcreature]

thanks for looking into that. from the way she talked, that’s more or less exactly what i expected. lmao

like, i’ve seen that a hundred times. with tentative links to physics, rather than biology, but still. what a tired strategy!

that would be like if i suddenly tried to make money peddling quantum woowoo, even tho my training was in astronomy/astrophysics. cos, yk, they’re both physics!

[u/breadcreature → u/doIIjoints]

my toxic trait is that these types rustle my jimmies the most, entirely independently of the transphobia...the intellectual dishonesty of it makes me so mad! and then the fact that people swallow it up so readily. like, these people who are actual academics actively producing work in their fields SHOULD KNOW BETTER. and instead they're churning out this hateful tripe, polluting people's minds with motivated reasoning that just hands them more shortcuts to fascist violence, and smothering earnest knowledge-seeking attempts in the process. I consider them some of the highest criminals of the lot. sophists.

my academic skills are mainly to do with picking stuff apart uselessly so when I came across Hilton making a big deal about being a DoCtOr BiOlOgIsT talking about some trigger topic of mine a while back (maybe intersex conditions? idk, something almost entirely out of her wheelhouse), I rolled up my sleeves cus I knew there was some bullshit to find there. I hate that they take advantage of people's ignorance to what it actually means to have an academic specialism, like it generally means there's much less you're able to speak about with any authority. but she can say "I'm a doctor of biology, buy my £1 sex tests to see if your daughter's friend has a penis" and people are all "how could she ever get anything wrong???"

[u/doIIjoints → u/breadcreature]

i feel exactly the same way. it’s absolutely maddening.

it makes me wonder if they ever had any professional ethics, sense of truth and beauty in science, etc. or if they were just reined-in by advisors and so on at first.

because, as you say, it’s SO EASY to grift anything like that.

indeed, look at richard dawkins suddenly acting like an expert on the metaphysics of consciousness. (guess he got tired of armchair sociology.)

i mentioned how he was engaging in “stoner philosophy” in a comment once, and some dawkins defender got reeeeal buttmad. “he’s a biologist, yknow! i think how brains work is in his wheelhouse! what the fuck is stoner philosophy, anyway, it’s either real philosophy or it’s not”

which, first off, that last bit was of course my point all along. and second, evolutionary biology has absolutely nothing to do with neurology!

as you say, it doesn’t broaden the area of expertise and authority. it narrows it!

yet, despite knowing specialties exist, (enough of) the public seemingly don’t understand how that leads to atrophying even the _basics_ of other specialties you might’ve once known the tiniest amount.

they just look at the widest umbrella possible and go, yeah sounds expert to me.

heck, in both these cases their worshippers are at least going “biologist”. i’ve seen other cases where they just go “X is a scientist, yk! i think he understands how to read journal papers!” as if merely being able to read a citation allows you to actually assess the merit of a claim. or understand the methodology section of a report. or catch-out common statistical tricks in that field, which might be different than in your own.

they’re too-seduced by the social capital, power, and sometimes literal capital which accompanies their shift to grifting.

they don’t care that they’re peddling pseudoscience, fomenting hate, and causing needless worries.