Arty Morty

Lysenkoism all over again?

In the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Stalin’s ideological revolution turned its
attention to biology. By then, it was well-understood that species evolve
through genetics: two sets of genes get shuffled together via sexual
reproduction, with a little random mutation thrown in, and out comes a brand
new being with its own unique genetic identity. This fact, however, came to
be deemed incompatible with communist principles, because it says that
we’re powerless to change our genes through learned behaviour or acquired
experiences. If you spend your whole life working hard on the farm, it won’t
make your offspring innately stronger; and no matter how dedicated to the
collective good you are, your children’s spirits won’t be hard-wired for civic
duty. A biologist named Trofim Lysenko, who had grown up a peasant and
as a result became deeply committed to the communist cause, proposed an
ideological alternative to natural selection, and he set out to prove that we are
the masters of our heredity by experimenting with exposing wheat crops to
extreme climates to make their offspring hardier.

The result was catastrophic. Lysenko’s pseudoscientific principles were

applied nationwide to agricultural crops, prolonging the effects of the
famines that had already killed millions of Russians and Ukrainians.
Biologists who defended genetics were rounded up by the thousands and
executed, committed to prisons, gulags, and mental hospitals, or fired.

The ideological denial of genetics spread throughout the communist world

and lasted for decades, from the Eastern Bloc to Mao’s China (where it
played a role in another famine which killed 30 million Chinese). Propaganda
across the Left portrayed natural selection as, varyingly, “fascist science,”
capitalist imperialism, or outright Nazism.

As an example of ideology trying to bend biology to its demands, this is

almost perfectly analogous to what’s happening on university campuses
across the West today: the fact that humans come in two sexes — male and
female — has come to be deemed incompatible with the principles of gender
identity ideology — that every individual is the master of his/her/their/xir/its
“gender,” free of the “fascist science,” “colonialism,” and (so they say)
outright “Nazism” that says we each are born one of two biological sexes that
we are powerless to change.

And the result is already catastrophic. Pediatric “gender clinics” are sprouting
up across Europe, North America, and elsewhere, channeling tens if not by
now hundreds of thousands of children, adolescents and young adults onto
experimental drugs, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries, based on
the pseudoscientific and logically self-contradictory premise that body
modifications to mimic the appearance of the opposite sex are somehow
medically crucial to protect people’s inner sense of a sacred “gender
identity,” and also to prove that biological sex, defined as an immutable fact
of the human species, is nothing but a fascist fiction. China, too, just opened
its first children’s sex-change clinic, adapting Western gender woo to the
Chinese Communist’s Party’s doctrine that gender nonconformity is
“unhealthy” and goes against the greater socialist good.

The facts of biological sex are being wiped from textbooks and school
curricula, even in Ivy League university medical schools. This week, it
was reported that all but one student walked out of the class after an
education professor at the University of Southern Maine simply declared that
there are two sexes, and that labels such as “non-binary” do not literally
change or negate anyone’s biological sex. Students and faculty are claiming
the teacher is “transphobic,” “ignorant,” and demanding she be re-educated
or retired. Once-respected academic journals such as Nature now
publish flaky editorials saying that there are more than two sexes. Even the
atheist and skeptic communities, supposed bastions of the scientific method,
are now rife with biology deniers, like the biology professor PZ Myers,
and this flaming jackass. Everywhere in the media, there are stories that
demonize the basic facts of biology and sing the praises of the new dogma,
which is the same as the old one, that says social progress can let us
transcend the hard, heartless realities of biological life on earth, if we just
believe it in our hearts strongly enough, and ruthlessly persecute anyone who
dares to disagree.

Of course, logic and reason tell us that biological sex, like natural selection,
is a fact of life that isn’t going anywhere, and also that that’s perfectly OK.
We don’t need to rail against genetics or sex in order to grow better crops,
teach future generations to be good citizens, or express our feminine and
masculine sides freely. Lysenkoism and the denial of biological reality did
not lead to prosperity, bounty, and social cohesion; just the opposite: it ripped
societies apart, and Lysenko is probably responsible for the deaths of more
people than any other scientist in the twentieth century. In fact, it is
the acceptance of genetics that has taught us how to make hardier crops, feed
more people, and cure countless diseases, advancing society by leaps and
bounds. Likewise, gender ideology and the denial of biological reality is not
leading to an era of free and healthy gender expression; it’s creating a vast
population of disillusioned, distressed and severely harmed detransitioners;
it’s creating so much hostility to gays and lesbians that our heroes can’t even
attend Pride parades without being violently assaulted by ideological mobs;
and it’s gutting the legal rights and protections for women and girls that
feminists have built up over more than a century of struggle.

Just like with genetic denialism, every single one of the ideals that gender
identity ideologues aspire to is harmed, not helped, by the denial of
biological sex. The acceptance and understanding of same-sex attracted
people is entirely dependent on the acknowledgement of the facts of
biological sex. Understanding and accepting the variety of gender expression
in humans, and how it relates to our sexuality and our attraction to each
other, is entirely dependent on acknowledging the facts of biological sex.
Ensuring that women and girls can live their lives with as much freedom and
dignity as men and boys do is entirely dependent on the acknowledgement of
the differences between male and female bodies.

Everyone’s got to start paying attention. This is all just history repeating