- It is the latest fight over transgender rights.
- Arkansas passing a bill blocking gender affirming care
for trans youth.
- Transgender kids in Texas are facing new barriers
to accessing health care.
- Right now you're probably seeing the fight
for gender affirming care for trans kids play out
across the country in your news feeds
and all over the Internet.
- In 2022 the power of science and literature crumble
in the face of the trans lobby.
- We're seeing just sustained kind of moral panic
and attack on the very idea of trans people,
and so obviously science is being weaponized.
- One point biologists were allowed to determine
what biology was, and there were two: male and female.
- But there's one thing that keeps popping up over and over
and over again in an attempt to discredit the rights
of trans people: junk science.
But first, what makes junk science, well, junk?
First, you have to understand the role that science
has historically played in understanding sex and gender
and how that's being weaponized today.
- You can't respond, "Oh, so men can become women"
just by wishing it so.
Tell us how that works.
- I talked to Jules Gill-Peterson, a science historian
and professor at Johns Hopkins, who studied the history
of trans children, about the actual history of research
that's attempted to define sex and gender.
- For a long time, the kind of research on, you know,
gender, sex and trans people
was incredibly poorly executed. And it was often done
with outright prejudice.
It was often done with very poor methodology.
And it was often done in order
to kind of increase social control of people, to force them
to conform to a gender binary.
- Let's rewind back to the 1940s and 1950s
and specifically to the history of the word "gender."
- The crisis for both physicians and psychologists
in the 1950s was that they had no idea
what made people male or female. It wasn't chromosomes.
It wasn't gonads, right?
It wasn't hormonal composition.
It wasn't genetics.
They couldn't find any one facet of biology
that predicted reliably, right, who would be male or female.
And then they were encountering all these people
whose bodies didn't match how they felt on the inside.
As I had found when I was reading the medical records,
they would assign intersex children a sex, right,
and they would enforce surgeries and hormones on them
to achieve that sex.
But then the child wouldn't identify with that sex.
And it would cause so much hardship.
And so gender was sort of created just
to make a conceptual distinction.
- Peterson says the war against trans people actually
has a basis in the same tenants
that enforce scientific racism historically.
- We can talk about a kind of history of scientific racism
that lots of people are familiar with
that was basically sort of projecting social hierarchies,
right, out into the world.
White, northern European scientists just kept discovering
that they were apparently the superior race, right?
And you see this sort of shift, after World War II,
away from kinds of biological explanations around race
towards sort of cultural explanations that still come
to the same conclusions.
Interestingly enough, the history of gender in medicine
and psychology is actually a really key part of that.
- And the thing is: a lot of outdated misinformation
about sex, gender and trans people is still cited today.
- But I think sometimes that a line between junk science
and legitimate science changes over time.
So it's really easy for people to kind of cherry-pick ideas
that they might want to use sort of out of context.
And that's a lot of pressure to put on, you know,
someone reading a newspaper article or scrolling Twitter.
- And if you wanna talk about cherry-picking data,
the very same psychologist who tried
to enforce biological definitions of sex on kids
were the same psychologists who accidentally discovered
something else.
- Just that the idea that gender is separate from sex,
as in separate from the body,
that they don't always go together.
That's a concept that we often take for granted
as being either associated with
or invented by trans people somehow.
Was an invention of behavioral psychologists
who were working very closely with researchers
in endocrinology in the 1940s and 1950s.
But they couldn't force children to then identify
as boys or girls.
That was their big problem.
Team talk about this in a series of papers in 1955,
published at Hopkins. They say gender is basically
just your sense of being a boy or a girl.
- And science has come a long way.
It's increasingly understood now that gender
isn't a binary.
Peterson says there's still a lot of misconceptions
masquerading as scientific consensus.
- The biggest, right, is that there is scientific consensus
on what makes people male or female
or what makes people trans.
The anti-trans side invokes
really outdated scientific concepts.
The idea that "Oh, we know what makes people male or female.
It's either genitals or our idea of chromosomes."
Anyone worth their salt will tell you XX and XY
are not the only chromosomal combinations for humans.
- So how and why should we debunk junk science?
- Before I even decide if I would want to debunk something,
I first just wanna contextualize
"Where did this data come from?"
Their work may have been
passed peer review 20 or 30 years ago,
but it wouldn't today.
- And we don't need to go far to see moral panic.
A 2018 study by a Brown University researcher suggesting
that peer pressure could make kids trans
led a journal to republish a corrected version.
But that same study is being used
against trans kids right now.
- So I think actually the tools that we would bring, right,
say to debunking race science or other kinds
of just extremely unscientific
but also extremely objectionable weaponizations
of scientific discourse,
I think we can use those same principles.
So if we start from a point of view where we're unafraid
to say, like, "Look, I don't like junk science directed
at trans people, because it harms trans people,
and it's bad science," right?