Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
There's an old quip that there are lies, damned lies, and then there's statistics.
I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, but the misuse of statistics is a significant problem. Even how numbers are presented can make a huge difference in how they're perceived -- something that is routinely done to shape public opinion. Considering the following:
There are three medicines -- A, B, and C -- that are being considered to treat an aggressive form of cancer. Upon large clinical trials, it is found that over five years following treatment, drug A reduces the risk of recurrence from 94% to 88%, B increases the chances of remaining cancer-free by six percent, and C doubles your chance of staying healthy during that time.
Which one do you choose to take?
It turns out, of course, that the statistics of all three are identical. Your chance of being cancer-free after taking A is 12%, as compared to 6% without the drug. That's the same as B -- an increase of 6% in the chance of remaining healthy. But it's also the same as C, because going from a 6% to a 12% remission rate represents an increase by a factor of two.
But to a lot of people, they all sound different. Don't fool yourself by thinking this kind of thing isn't being used, deliberately, to mislead. Especially, any time you see statistics such as, "Doing ____ doubles your risk!", the first thing you should ask is, "What is my risk of the same bad outcome if I don't do _____?"
After all, twice a very small number is still a very small number.
Things get even more muddled when you throw averages into the mix. Oh, they have their uses; looking at the average score on a well-constructed test, for example, can tell a teacher if, as a whole, (s)he is teaching the students effectively. The problem occurs when you start trying to apply averages in situations where they don't belong, such as the statement that the average human has slightly less than one testicle.
As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, significant > true.
In large part, we owe our incessant focus on turning everything into numbers to two men -- Adolphe Quetelet and Francis Galton. Quetelet, a Belgian polymath, at least started out with good intentions; he'd noticed how a lot of physical characteristics, from human heights to repeated position measurements of astronomical objects, followed a normal distribution (colloquially called a "bell curve"), where there are a few extreme outliers and a great many values in the middle. That the ubiquity of this pattern could be due to more than one thing -- in my two examples, that the first was because of the effects of genetics, diet, and body mechanics, and the second due to random measurement error -- he conveniently glossed over.
Adolphe Quetelet (ca. 1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Quetelet then took a dangerous leap. Because this pattern was common, he decided it must be good. He started measuring everything he could, and found the same pattern showing up in assessments of intelligence, body/mass index, individual wealth, size and position of facial features, and skull shape. He began an obsessive quest for l'homme moyen -- the "average man," whose characteristics showed the least possible deviation from the norm.
Which Quetelet decided also had to be the "best possible man."
Then Francis Galton took hold of this idea, and ran right off the cliff with it. Galton was an English statistician and psychologist (and, incidentally, Charles Darwin's cousin), and also a raging racist, who decided to use Quetelet's methods to prove his thesis that other races, especially Black Africans, were inherently inferior to White Europeans. He wasn't subtle about it. "The average intellectual standard of the Negro race is some two grades below our own," Galton wrote. "It is mere heredity.... [Black Africans] are lazy, palavering savages... It would be for the best if some means could be contrived for the coast of Africa be given to Chinese colonists so that they might supplant the inferior Negro race."
You would think that some thought might have been given to asking why Black Africans scored lower on Galton's intellectual assessments than White Europeans did, and that someone would suggest such obvious answers as opportunity for education, cultural biases in the assessment tool, and socioeconomic level. Surprisingly, few did. The outcome for the Western European elites -- "we're inherently better than the people we're colonizing" -- was so convenient to their goals that it was easier not even to ask the question.
Of course, it bears mention that Galton didn't just hate Black Africans. He kind of hated everyone who wasn't a member of the English aristocracy. One of his more astonishing "studies" was a "beauty map" of the United Kingdom, which purported to measure the average beauty of women across the UK, ranking places from the most beautiful to the ugliest. (The low point, if you're curious, was Aberdeen, Scotland. Being partly of Scottish descent, I'd like to send a personal memo to Galton to kiss my Celtic ass.)
In 1904, Galton founded the Eugenics Record Office, and along with another person of similar mindset -- his student Karl Pearson -- launched a journal called the Annals of Eugenics (which is still around, but has been rebranded as the Annals of Human Genetics). Pearson made a huge contribution to the statistical study of genetics, developing methods still in use today. But he was also responsible for scary stuff like this:
History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended... No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings. Such means may render the individual members of a stock passable if not strong members of society, but the same process will have to be gone through again and again with their offspring, and this in ever-widening circles, if the stock, owing to the conditions in which society has placed it, is able to increase its numbers.
I'd like to be able to give you the comforting message that the racism, bigotry, and flawed use of statistics Galton and Pearson excelled at have disappeared, but it's still with us. The 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, was little more than a modern reworking of Galton and Pearson. Despite it receiving enormous amounts of criticism from researchers in cognitive psychology, it's widely credited with influencing our current generation of white supremacists, such as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk.
If you still don't believe me, consider a story that just broke last week, which is the reason the whole topic comes up -- that National Institute of Health genetic data on twenty thousand children have been given to a "group of fringe researchers" who turned around and used it to produce sixteen spurious papers claiming to show a genetic (and racial) basis for intelligence. It's a breach of both privacy and scientific ethics -- not that this is uncommon given the current regime here in the United States -- and shows that although Francis Galton died over a hundred years ago, his twisted spirit lives on.
Even Quetelet, though, should raise some eyebrows. What, exactly, does it mean to be average? I remember having that discussion with my principal during my teaching years. Suppose a particular kid gets a 75% on a test, and that's the average for the class. I've seen kids score like that when they were very good at regurgitation of facts (so they got all the questions requiring rote memory correct, but few of the deeper ones) and conversely, from kids who were great at understanding the bigger picture in depth, but had issues with recalling terminology. How can we justifiably throw those two, very different, groups of students into the same bin, stamped with the same all-important number?
As someone on the neurodivergent end of things, I can vouch for the fact that grades don't really mean much. I'm definitely not Quetelet's homme moyen, and kind of never have been. I've got a decent brain, but my grades -- especially in high school and the first two years of college -- weren't all that great. There were a lot of reasons for that -- perhaps a story for another time -- but my point here is the numbers supposedly characterizing me didn't, perhaps, say everything there was to be said about me intellectually.
Our desire to turn everything into numbers has a long and sketchy history, because so few people stop and ask why the numbers are what they are. Quetelet's legacy misleads us most, I think, in believing that reality can be captured in data alone. The world is a complex place, and converting it into a handful of statistics may make it seem simpler.
But at the same time, it also falls far short. As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anyone who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."
It's a weird time for queer representation in fiction.
There's some good news, for sure. The surprise breakout hit Heated Rivalry, a steamy series about two closeted hockey superstars (played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams), got stunningly high viewership and ratings, with episode five ("I'll Believe in Anything") becoming the second-highest IMDb-rated television episode ever. (Beaten only by the Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias.") The two leads, and costars François Arnaud and Robbie G. K., have been signed for two more seasons of the show.
Likewise, the extremely popular (and well-received by the critics) series Heartstopper, and the rom-com movie Red, White, and Royal Blue, have much-anticipated sequels coming out in 2026.
At the same time, though, the Stranger Things season five episode "The Bridge," where the character Will Byers came out to his friends as gay, got review-bombed, with 104,000 people weighing in (more than twice the average). While some reviewers cited poor writing and too many extraneous plot lines -- not new criticisms of the series -- a good many railed against the coming-out scene as "jarring," as well as (I can't even say this word without clenching my jaw) "woke." And of course, it wouldn't be complete without Elon Musk contributing some additional bigotry by tweeting, "It's completely unnecessary and forced on audiences who just want to watch some basic sci-fi."
Netflix also chose to cancel -- after one season, and high ratings -- the queer-inclusive shows Olympo and Boots, the latter after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called it "woke garbage."
Apparently us queer people simply existing is now "woke."
You hear from the homophobes that they're upset that "you can't turn the television on without seeing queer people." Well, y'know what? Given that recent surveys found that around ten percent of people in the United States self-identify as LGBTQ+, you kind of should expect that. (And keep in mind that's only the people who were willing to admit to it. Chances are, the number is significantly higher than that, considering the continuing stigma.)
But you know what else? If you don't want to watch queer-inclusive shows, there's a simple solution:
Don't. Watch. Them.
If you were caught off guard by Will Byers being gay, you weren't paying attention to the eight million clues that had been dropped along the way. And as for Olympo and Boots, those were advertised as dramas about queer athletes and military men, respectively. Judging by the ratings, neither of these shows was unpopular, or lacked viewers; they were axed simply because Netflix chose to kiss the asses of rich bigots who complained.
You homophobes honestly don't need to watch those shows and then whine, or (worse) brigade them. There are plenty of one hundred percent straight television, movies, and books out there for you to enjoy.
And always have been. One of the weirdest comments you hear about queer representation is that exposure to such content "turns people gay," as if some straight fourteen-year-old boy sees a single gay character on a television show and suddenly gets this dazed look and says, "I know! I shall run out and kiss a boy right now." Funny, though, that it doesn't seem to work the other way. I grew up in the 1970s, and damn near every television show and movie I watched featured only straight people in straight relationships, and I came out queer anyhow.
It's almost like it doesn't matter what you watch.
Nota bene: bear in mind that I'm not talking about age-appropriateness, here. That's an entirely different conversation. Heated Rivalry has some scenes that aren't appropriate for people under eighteen, whatever their sexual orientation. Too many people conflate these two entirely separate issues -- often deliberately, to muddy the waters.
But mere representation? Yeah, it should be there, in all kinds of media.
We exist, dammit. I spent four decades feeling invisible because society taught me that I should be ashamed of what I was and who I was. Don't expect me and others like me to vanish again.
So yeah, we've got a way to go. There's still way too much "When will there be a Straight Pride Month, hurr hurr hurr" bullshit whenever Pride rolls around. (My stock answer is "Be glad you don't need one.") And judging by the combination of accolades and condemnations we've seen just in the last month, our culture's attitudes toward queer people are still in a considerable state of ferment.
Let me end by saying what it means to queer people just to see themselves reflected in the fiction they read, watch, and hear. We live in a society where a significant portion of our neighbors would like very much to pretend we don't exist, and where a vocal minority want to see us dead. As for us, we just want to be who we are, openly and without shame or fear. A friend of mine posted the following a few weeks ago:
As someone who was a queer kid who almost did turn into a dead kid (twice), I can say with some assurance that this strikes at the heart of the entire issue. My suicide attempts, at ages 17 and 20, were not solely because I was closeted -- there's more to that story than I have the space or the inclination to go into right now -- but if I had honestly understood back then that I wasn't broken or in need of redemption, the effect on me would have been huge. Just having one trusted mentor say, "I know, and it's okay" could have made all the difference.
Or -- failing that -- seeing consistent, positive LGBTQ+ representation in films, television, and books, reassurance that queer people didn't have to be nothing more than the punchlines of jokes, or (worse) damaged, loveless, hopeless, or dead.
It's one reason I have LGBTQ+ representation in my own books. Maybe someone reading them will be like I was back then -- afraid, alone, and closeted. If my writing can console one of those folks, reassure them that they're just fine as they are, maybe even pry open the closet door a little and let some light in -- well, I don't know that I could ask for anything more as an author.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about wondering how the trajectory of my life would have been different had I made different choices -- amongst them, coming out when I was a teenager. Of course, you can't ever know the answer to that, so all the regrets I sometimes wrestle with are the very definition of fruitless. But I do know that we can demand a better world now. For everyone, including the marginalized and stigmatized.
The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them. Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.
It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.
Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there." The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system. The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.
Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps. Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.
What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural. The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate. (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)
Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution. Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book. And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:
Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous... The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount. Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent. Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly. Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two. On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world. Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.
Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world. The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.
Appearance confounds. We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese. (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)
Bigotry, of course, is based in fear. People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change. Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in. There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on. But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.
And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.
Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates. If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means. My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.
So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.
I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock. Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen. If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."
Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor: "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."
Today I'm asking a question not because I'm trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.
How should we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia?
I'm not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the Doctor Who episode "Rosa," for example, are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South. Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I really considering awful stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point. (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The White Ape," which is repellent from the get-go.)
I'm more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn't form an essential part of the story. The topic comes up because I've been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh and the other greats of classic mystery literature.
The bigotry in Sayers's work doesn't smack you over the head. The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there's no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time. And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes. Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman's Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.
The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place. There's one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.
So far, so good, I guess. But when one of their descendants returns to England, he's very much looked at as an aberration. The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in white English society isn't really portrayed negatively, but there's no doubt he's played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).
Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism. There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the "of course he's money-conscious, he's Jewish" stereotype. In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there's something about it that reeks of, "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."
It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were "people of their times," whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in. In Sayers's early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of white British superiority; the racism is almost by default. The characters don't set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, it's more that the message is, "Of course we're superior, but that doesn't mean we'll be nasty to you -- as long as you know your place."
Christie herself is not a lot better. One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written. But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot -- Ten Little Indians. Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme -- Ten Little Niggers.
At least she had the good sense to change it. But that doesn't alter the pervasive white wealthy British superiority that runs through all her work.
Even authors who you'd think would be more enlightened sometimes include stuff that is mighty sketchy. One of my earliest favorite books was Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time. The third book in the Murry family series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, has a neat theme -- riding through time and trying to prevent a catastrophe by altering timelines in selected places -- but the "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" trope that skims along right beneath the surface gets cringier the longer you look at it. (Especially since the "blue-eyed Indians" have blue eyes because they have European ancestry. Which makes them... better? Eek.)
I've found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I'm not honestly sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now. Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read works of theirs that have no racist aspects at all? More recently, what about Orson Scott Card's homophobia? His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don't recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender's Game. What about worse things still? Since reading about her alleged role in her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, I can't read Marion Zimmer Bradley -- but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her in the first place? Isn't it a bit hypocritical to give authors' bad behavior a pass solely because we don't want to give up reading them?
The allegations against Neil Gaiman -- whose work I love, Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane were immensely formative in the development of my own writing style -- have made it nearly impossible for me to read his books, something I dealt with in a post earlier this year. Is it honestly possible to separate the creator from the creation, the product from the toxic culture that produced it?
I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this. I'm certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as "The White Ape" ignores the fact that there's way more gray area here than you might think at first.
I'd love to hear how you approach this as a reader. I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that's how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how horrible they actually were. But what about reading solely for pleasure? I loathe the words "woke" and "politically correct" -- they all too often become synonyms for "stuff I don't like" -- but don't they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn't reflect our current cultural standards?
Even if those standards are laudable?
I honestly don't know the answer to that. I'm not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers and Christie. I can't deny that even Lovecraft -- at least his stories where race doesn't come into it, even subtly and implicitly ("At the Mountains of Madness" comes to mind) -- have been major positive influences on my own work. As for Gaiman and Card, well, I don't want my money supporting people with attitudes and actions I find repulsive, so I won't purchase their work. But it's a way more complex, and less clear-cut, topic than it appears.
What do you think? Is there merit to the "(s)he was a person of the times" argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old -- or because we like it otherwise?
Today I dodged a battle on social media, and I honestly don't know if it makes me a coward or just someone who tries to be prudent about which battles are even winnable.
The person in question, an acquaintance I only know through a mutual friend but who connected to me a couple of years ago for reasons unknown, has thrown out some questionable stuff before, but nothing as bad as this. " There aren't many genders," she posted. "There are TWO genders and many mental disorders."
After I stopped seeing red enough that I could tell what was on my computer screen, I pondered a variety of responses I could have made. Among the top contenders:
"Wow, that's some weapons-grade stupidity, right there."
"Do you realize what a narrow-minded bigot this makes you sound like?"
"Get off your fucking high horse and do some research."
Then I calmed down a little more, and considered other, marginally less obnoxious responses:
"Maybe before you post stuff like this, you should talk to someone who is trans and get actual information on what it's like."
"I believe the Bible you claim to be so fond of has a lot more to say about charity, kindness, and passing judgment than it does about the biology of gender. You should reread those verses."
"I hope like hell your grandchildren don't turn out to be LGBTQ. For their sake, not for yours."
But finally I said nothing, and unfriended her.
I know it's the duty of every responsible person to confront racism, homophobia, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and general idiocy. Not doing so, leaving this kind of thing unchallenged, gives it tacit permission to continue. I never would have let something like this go in my classroom; the few times I ever got really, truly angry at students during my 32 year career were over issues like this.
But lord have mercy, I am tired. I'm tired of seeing this kind of bullshit trumpeted as if it was a proclamation of an eternal truth. I'm tired of trying to convince the anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, the nitwits who claim the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump is the Second Coming of Jesus, the people who believe that the January 6 insurrectionists were Antifa and liberals in disguise.
Plus, there's the question of what good it would have done if I had confronted her on her nasty, sneering post. She barely knows me; I think we've maybe talked in person once. Since then I've had zero interactions with her, online or anywhere else. Why would she listen to me? More likely she'd write me off as another godless liberal, getting all bent out of shape because she dropped a Truth Bomb on me. What is the chance that anything I could have said, polite or rude, would have changed her attitude one iota?
Still, I can't help but feel that I took the coward's way out. If I'm not going to challenge stupidity and bigotry, it kind of gives lie to the entire raison d'être of this blog I've written so diligently on for the last fifteen years. Every time we let someone like her get away with something like this unchallenged, it does double damage -- it further convinces any LGBTQ people who read it that they don't have (or aren't deserving of) unequivocal support, and it gives any other bigots in the studio audience free license to perpetuate their own hateful views.
So I dodged my responsibility, and I'm still feeling a little sick about it. I'm not going to go back and re-friend her just to have an opportunity to say, "Oh, and about that post...!", and I guess there's an outside (probably minuscule) chance that when she sees she's lost friends over it, she might reconsider.
But I still think I made the wrong decision.
Right now, I'm taking a deep breath and recommitting myself to fight like hell against this sort of thing. I can't let bigotry slide, excuse it by saying "it's just their religion/politics/age," give it a pass because I'm afraid of what they might say in response or who else I might piss off. Okay, I'm tired, but it's still a battle worth fighting -- and one that can be won, but only if we refuse to accept prejudice and hatred every damn time we see it.
Shakespeare put it far more eloquently, in Henry V:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Two nights ago, I watched "The Star Beast," the first of three sixtieth anniversary specials of my favorite show, Doctor Who. As I might have expected, it was campy good fun, and featured the return of my favorite of the Doctor's companions, Donna Noble (played brilliantly by the inimitable Catherine Tate).
As I also might have expected, the howling from the right-wingers started almost immediately.
The problem this time is Donna's daughter, Rose (played by the wonderful Yasmin Finney), who is a trans woman. The script looks at her identity head on; our first introduction to Rose shows her being taunted by some transphobic classmates, and there was a scene where Donna's irascible mother Sylvia struggles with her own guilt about sometimes slipping up and misgendering her granddaughter. It was handled with sensitivity, and not with any sort of hit-you-over-the-head virtue signaling, but there's no doubt that Rose's being trans is an important part of the storyline.
Then later, one of the aliens in the episode, Beep the Meep (I shit you not, that's this alien's name), is talking with the Doctor, and the Doctor asks what pronouns the Meep uses, and gets the response, "My chosen pronoun is the definite article. The. Same as you, Doctor."
Which is a funny and poignant line -- especially considering that the Doctor's previous incarnation was female.
Well, you'd swear Doctor Who had declared war on everything good and holy in the world.
"Doctor Who has gone woke!" one ex-fan shrieked. "I'm done with it for good!" Another declared that Doctor Who "hates men." Yet another made a whole YouTube video dedicated to the statement that the show had "set its legacy on fire."
To which I respond: my dudes, have you ever even watched this show?
Doctor Who has been on the leading edge of social acceptance and representation ever since the reboot in 2005. Captain Jack Harkness gave new meaning to "pansexual" by flirting with damn near everyone he came into contact with, ultimately falling hard (and tragically) for a Welshman named Ianto Jones. Freema Agyeman and Pearl Mackie were the first two Black women to play companions; Mackie's character, Bill Potts, was lesbian as well, as was the Thirteenth Doctor's companion Yasmin Khan (played by Mandip Gill). Then there's the wonderfully badass Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh) and her wife Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart), who are in a same-sex relationship that is also an interspecies one.
Not only has this show steadfastly championed representation, its themes frequently press us to question societal issues. It's addressed racial prejudice (several episodes, most notably Rosa and Cold Blood), slavery (The Planet of the Ood), climate change (Orphan 55), whether it's ever possible to forgive your sworn enemies (Dalek), the terrifying evils of tribalism (Midnight), how power eventually corrupts anyone who wields too much of it (The Waters of Mars), how easy it is to dehumanize those whom we don't understand (The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People), if vengeance ever goes too far (Human Nature/The Family of Blood), and the devastating horrors of war (The Zygon Inversion).
So it's not like the people running this show shy away from looking hard at difficult issues. It's pushed the envelope pretty much from day one.
More to the point, though -- the most troubling part of all the backlash is the subtext of the whining about how "woke" Doctor Who is. What they're saying is they want to be able to pretend that those who are different -- in this case, trans people, but more generally, LGBTQ+ individuals -- don't exist. They don't want to be reminded that everyone isn't straight and White; even having queer folks or people of color appear on a show like this is "ramming wokeness down everyone's throats."
Well, let me say this loud and clear -- as a queer guy who was in the closet for four decades because of this kind of mindless, heartless bigotry: never again. We will never again be silent, never again be shamed into hiding, never again pretend we're invisible, never again quietly accept that we don't deserve exactly the same respect -- and representation -- as anyone else. I can only imagine how different the trajectory of my life would have been if there'd been these kinds of positive depictions of queer people on the shows I watched as a teenager; how dare you wish that fate upon yet another generation of young adults.
So if that makes you stop watching Doctor Who -- I think I can speak for the majority of fans by saying, "Oh well." *shoulder shrug* We don't need you. However, it does make me wonder how you don't see the irony of calling us snowflakes, when you are the ones who get your knickers in a twist because of someone asking what pronouns a furry alien prefers.
In other words, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. Because we LGBTQ+ people are here to stay, as are people of other races, ethnicities, cultures, and religions. If you don't like that, you might want to sit and think about why you believe the world has the obligation to reshape itself in order to conform to your narrow-mindedness and prejudice.
As for me, I'm going to continue to watch Doctor Who and continue to enjoy it, and -- to judge by the great ratings "The Star Beast" got -- so are millions of other "woke" fans.
Way back in 1952, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a mathematical model to account for pattern formation that results in (seemingly) random patches -- something observed in as disparate manifestations as leopard spots and the growth patterns of desert plants.
"In previous studies,” said study co-author Brendan D’Aquino, who presented the research at the March meeting of the American Physical Society, "people kind of retroactively fit models to observe Turing patterns that they found in the world. But here we were actually able to show that changing the relevant parameters in the model produces experimental results that we would expect."
Honestly, it shouldn't have been surprising. Turing's genius was unparalleled; the "Turing pattern" model is hardly the only brainchild of his that is still bearing fruit, almost seventy years after his death. His research on the halting problem -- figuring out if it is possible to determine ahead of time whether a computer program designed to prove the truth or falsity of mathematical theorems will reach a conclusion in a finite number of steps -- generated an answer of "no" and a paper that mathematician Avi Wigderson called "easily the most influential math paper in history." Turing's work in cryptography is nothing short of mind-blowing; he led the research that allowed the deciphering of the incredibly complex code produced by Nazi Germany's Enigma machine, a feat that was a major contribution to Germany's defeat in 1945.
Turing's colleague, mathematician and cryptographer Peter Hilton, wrote the following about him:
It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.
Hilton's words are all the more darkly ironic when you find out that two years after the research into pattern formation, Turing committed suicide at the age of 41.
His slide into depression started in January 1952, when his house was burgled. The police, while investigating the burglary, found evidence that Turing was in a relationship with another man, something that was illegal in the United Kingdom at the time. In short order Turing and his lover were both arrested and charged with gross indecency. After a short trial in which Turing refused to argue against the charges, he was found guilty, and avoided jail time if he agreed to a hormonal treatment nicknamed "chemical castration" designed to destroy his libido.
It worked. It also destroyed his spirit. The "authentic genius" who helped Britain win the Second World War, whose contributions to mathematics and computer science are still the subject of fruitful research today, poisoned himself to death in June of 1954 because of the actions taken against him by his own government.
How little we've progressed in seven decades.
Here in the United States, state after state are passing laws discriminating against queer people, denying gender-affirming care to trans people, legislating what is and is not allowable based not upon any real concrete harm done, but on thinly-veiled biblical moralism. The result is yet another generation growing up having to hide who they are lest they face the same kind of soul-killing consequences Alan Turing did back in the early 1950s.
People like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott, who have championed this sort of legislation, seem blind to the consequences. Or, more likely, they know the consequences and simply don't give a damn how many lives this will cost. Worse, some of their allies actually embrace the potential death toll. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said, "For the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. The whole preposterous ideology, at every level."
No, Michael, there is no "ism" here. It's not an "ideology;" it's not a political belief or a religion. What you are saying is "eradicate transgender people." You are advocating genocide, pure and simple.
And so, tacitly, are the other people who are pushing anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Not as blatantly, perhaps, but that's the underlying message. They don't want queer people to be quiet; they want us erased.
I can speak first-hand to how devastating it is to be terrified to have anyone discover who you are. I was in the closet for four decades out of shame, not to mention fear of the consequences of being out. When I was 54 I finally said "fuck it" and came out to friends and family; I came out publicly -- here at Skeptophilia, in fact -- five years after that.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I had nearly uniform positive responses.
But if I lived in Florida or Texas? Or in my home state of Louisiana? I doubt very much whether I'd have had the courage to speak my truth. The possibility of dire consequences would have very likely kept me silent. In Florida, especially -- I honestly don't know how any queer people or allies are still willing to live there. I get that upping stakes and moving simply isn't possible for a lot of people, and that even if they could all relocate, that's tantamount to surrender. But still. Given the direction things are going, it's a monumental act of courage simply to stay there and continue to fight.
It's sickening that we are still facing these same battles. Haven't we learned anything from the example of a country that discarded the very genius who helped them to defeat the Nazis, in the name of some warped puritanical moralism?
This is no time to give up out of exhaustion, however, tempting though it is. Remember Turing, and others like him who suffered (and are still suffering) simply because of who they are. Keep speaking up, keep voting, and keep fighting. And remember the quote -- of uncertain origin, though often misattributed to Edmund Burke -- "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing."
This comes up because of a couple of unrelated social media interactions that got me thinking about the fact that many people use words and then want to avoid the implications and consequences of how they're perceived. The first was a post from the Reverend Doctor Jacqui Lewis that (hearteningly) got a lot of responses of the high-five and applause variety, which said, "You don't 'hate pronouns.' You hate the people who are using them. If that makes you feel uncomfortable, then good. It should. You either respect how people are asking you to know and name them, or you don't. But stop pretending it's about language."
The other was in response to a TikTok video I made for my popular #AskLinguisticsGuy series, in which I made the statement that prescriptivism -- the idea that one dialect of a language is to be preferred over another -- is inherently classist, and that we have to be extremely careful how we characterize differing pronunciations and word usages because they are often used as markers of class and become the basis for discrimination. Most people were positive, but there was That One Guy who responded only with, "Great. Another arrogant preachy prick."
Now, let me say up front that there are perhaps times when people are hypersensitive, and infer malice from the words we use when there was none intended. On the other hand, it's critical that we as speakers and writers understand the power of words, and undertake educating ourselves about how they're perceived (especially by minorities and other groups who have experienced bigotry). If someone in one of those groups says to me, "Please don't use that word, it's offensive," I am not going to respond by arguing with them about why it was completely appropriate. I would far rather err on the side of being a little overcautious than unwittingly use a word or a phrase that carries ugly overtones.
Let me give you an example from my own personal experience. I grew up in the Deep South -- as my dad put it, if we'd been any Deeper South, we'd'a been floating. And I can say that it really pisses me off when I see a southern accent used as a marker of ignorance, bigotry, or outright stupidity. I was appalled when a local middle school here in upstate New York put on a performance of Li'l Abner, a play written by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama (both northerners native to Chicago). The entire play, in my opinion, can be summed up as "Oh, those goofy southerners, how comically dim-witted they are." If you've never seen it, you'll get the flavor when you hear that it features characters named Mammy Yokum, General Bullmoose, and Jubilation T. Cornpone. I don't blame the kids; they were doing their best with it. I blame the adults who chose the play, and then chortled along at sixth and seventh graders hee-hawing their way through the lines of dialogue with fake southern accents, and acted as if it was all okay.
People who know me would readily tell you that I'm very comfortable with laughing at myself. My reaction to Li'l Abner wasn't that I "can't take a joke" at my own expense. The problem is that the show is based on a single premise: characterizing an entire group, rural southerners, using a ridiculous stereotype, and then holding that stereotype up for a bunch of smug northerners to laugh at.
And if taking offense at that makes me a "woke snowflake," then I guess that's just the way it has to be.
If, in your humor or your critical commentary, you're engaging in what a friend of mine calls "punching downward," you might want to think twice about it.
The bottom line, here, is that what I'm asking people to do (1) can make a world of difference to the way they come across, and (2) just isn't that hard. When a trans kid in my class came up to me on the first day of class and said, "I go by the name ____, and my pronouns are ____," it literally took me seconds to jot that down, and next to zero effort afterward to honor that request. To that student, however, it was deeply important, in a way I as a cis male can only vaguely comprehend. Considering the impact of what you say or what you write, especially on marginalized groups, requires only that you educate yourself a little bit about the history of those groups and how they perceive language.
Refusing to do that isn't "being anti-woke." It's "being an asshole."
Words can be edged tools, and we need to treat them that way. Not be afraid of them; simply understand the damage they can do in the wrong hands or used in the wrong way. If you're not sure how a word will be perceived, ask someone with the relevant experience whether they find it offensive, and then accept what they say as the truth.
And always, always, in everything: err on the side of kindness and acceptance.
Undoubtedly you are aware of the outrage from people on the anti-woke end of the spectrum about Disney's choice of Black actress Halle Bailey to play Ariel in their upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.
This is just the latest in a very long line of people getting their panties in a twist over what fictional characters "really" are, all of which conveniently ignores the meaning of the words "fictional" and "really." Authors, screenwriters, and casters are free to reimagine a fictional character any way they want to -- take, for example, the revision of The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West into the tortured heroine in Gregory Maguire's novel (and later Broadway hit) Wicked. This one didn't cause much of a stir amongst the I Hate Diversity crowd, though, undoubtedly because the character of the Witch stayed green the whole time.
The current uproar, of course, is worse; not only is it blatantly racist, it's aimed at a real person, the actress who will play Ariel. But these lunatics show every day that they care more about fictional characters than they do about actual people; note that the same folks screeching about Black mermaids seem to have zero problem with using public funds to transport actual living, breathing human beings to another state, where they were dropped on a street corner like so much refuse, in order to own the libs.
Oh, but you can't mess about with the skin color of mermaids. In fact, the outrage over this was so intense that it has triggered some of them to invoke something they never otherwise give a second thought to:
Science.
Yes, if you thought this story couldn't get any more idiotic, think again. Now we have members of the Mermaid Racial Purity Squad claiming that mermaids can't be Black, because they live underwater, and if you're underwater you can't produce melanin.
I wish I was making this up. Here's a direct quote:
Mermaids live in ocean. Underwater = limited sunlight. Limited sunlight = less melanin. Less melanin = lighter skin color. Because they live underwater, which has no access to light beyond a certain depth, Ariel and every other mermaid in existence would be albino.
And another:
Correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't it physically impossible for Ariel to be black? She lives underwater, how would the sun get to her for her to produce melanin?! Nobody thought this through..?
Okay, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but applying science to a movie in which there's a singing, dancing crab, a sea witch with octopus legs, and a character named Flounder who clearly isn't a flounder is kind of a losing proposition from the get-go.
Fig. 1. Flounder from The Little Mermaid.
Fig. 2. An actual flounder.
Plus, there are plenty of underwater animals that aren't white, which you'd think would occur to these people when they recall the last science book they read, which was One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss.
Oh, and another thing. It's an ironic fact that the squawking knuckle-draggers who complain about "wokeness" every time some fictional character they like isn't played by a White American and are the same ones who pitch a fit at any kind of representation of diversity, be it in books, movies, music, or whatever, conveniently overlook the fact that (1) Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Little Mermaid, was bisexual, and (2) there's a credible argument that the original story itself was inspired by his grief at having his romantic advances rejected by his friend Edvard Collin. (In fact, in the original story, the mermaid doesn't marry the prince -- he goes off and marries a human girl, just as Collin himself did, and the mermaid weeps herself to death. Not a fan of happy endings, Andersen.)
Anyhow, anti-woke people, do go on and tell me more about "reality" and "what science says." Hell, have at it, apply science anywhere you want. Start with climate change and environmental policy if you like. Or... does it only matter to you when the subject is people who aren't the right color, gender, ethnic origin, nationality, or sexual orientation?
