Thursday, October 14, 2021
Instagram censors evolutionary biologist for posting a chart from transgender study by prominent science journal that showed biological men are stronger than biological women in a range of Olympic sports
An evolutionary biologist was censored by Instagram after the woke social media giant removed his post about a transgender study by a prominent medical journal that said biological men were superior to biological women in a wide range of sports.
The study - titled Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage - was published in Medicine & Sports in Sports & Exercise, a peer-reviewed science journal founded in 1969.
Colin Wright, who has been published in the Wall Street Journal and was in academia for 12 years, posted a chart from the study - conducted by researchers at University of Manchester and Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm - showing that biological males have a performance advantage over biological females across many Olympics-contested sports.
Similar scientific conclusions were reached in a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine called 'How does hormone transition in transgender women change body composition, muscle strength and haemoglobin? Systematic review with a focus on the implications for sport participation' - conducted by researchers at Loughborough University and Karolinska Institute, Stockholm.
Both studies were published ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which saw many historic milestones for the transgender community, including the most transgender athletes competing and the first openly transgender athlete to ever take part in an individual event.
They each concluded that even after three years of hormone therapy transgender women on average still retain strength advantages over biological women, which may not allow for an even playing field in sports competitions.
The studies were conducted to test if the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) criteria for athletes to be eligible to compete in the women's category removes the performance advantage linked to male bodies.
The IOC has established that an athlete's total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months prior to and during competition.
Both studies found that the reductions to strength, lean body mass, muscle size and bone density through the use of typical testosterone suppression regimes shows a minimal difference compared to the average difference between biological men and women, leaving them with a performance advantage.
The chart that Wright shared displayed the male performance advantage that cisgendered men's bodies allowed them when compared to cisgendered women.
The illustration shows that while men have a performance advantage it varies over different sporting events depending on the level and type of physical or physiological skill or measure of success each sport requires.
The Sports Medicine study suggest that instead of a guideline for all transgender athletes, the individual sports federations should determine their own conditions for their events.
Wright posted the image of the chart as part of his defense of 'the reality of the two sexes' and that children should 'compete in sports with their own sex.'
Many of his posts comment on bills that are being introduced by more than 20 states across the country prohibiting transgender girls from competing on girls' sports teams - despite most sponsors' inability to cite an instance that has caused problems in their community.
Wright avidly rejects ideas of gender and sex fluidity and often posts his stance on his social media accounts.
He told DailyMail.com that he is 'extremely careful' not to post anything 'mean-spirited' or target any individuals but said his views are criticized as being transphobic.
He took to Twitter to show that the post of the scientific chart was removed from Facebook-owned Instagram for violating Community Guidelines on hate speech or symbols.
Wright tweeted that he was unable to appeal the social media company's decision claiming that they 'lied' when they wrote 'You can ask us to review our decision if you think we made a mistake.' Instagram also warned that he risks 'losing access' to his account if he is violated their Community Guidelines again.
Although his social media accounts are filled with his controversial commentary on sex and gender, he says he has never been told that he violated the platform's policy before and was given no warning.
The evolutionary biologist is a managing editor for Quillette, an online magazine associated with the intellectual dark web - an informal group of renegade thinkers who oppose identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture in academia and the media.
Last year, he left academia after struggling to get hired, which he claims was due to 'ideological policing' and his position 'that biological sex is binary and not a spectrum,' according to the Daily Caller.
According to the Instagram Community Guidelines, the platform will 'remove content that contains credible threats or hate speech' but notes that it may be allowed 'when hate speech is being shared to challenge it or raise awareness.'
As Instagram and its parent company Facebook have come under fire for it's lack of censorship and unsafe practices, they recently announced their commitment to 'sharing more information about the nuts and bolts of Instagram.'
One of the new features, Account Status, will 'give people more information' about post that they reported and to inform people if their post went against the Community Guidelines.
The Request a Review feature, which Wright tried to use, allows users whose content has been deemed in violation to dispute the claim against them.
Instagram did not respond to requests from DailyMail.com about why they took down Wright's post.
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Australian government minister flags further free speech measures as sacked climate sceptic loses High Court case
Universities face the prospect of further rules to protect academics’ free speech after Education Minister Alan Tudge raised concerns about a High Court decision upholding the sacking of marine physicist and climate change sceptic Peter Ridd by James Cook University.
The decision ends Dr Ridd’s four-year legal battle with JCU after he was censured and ultimately sacked for challenging his colleagues’ views on climate change and the Great Barrier Reef, along with the university’s attempts to discipline him.
Mr Tudge said on Wednesday he was “concerned that, in some places, there is a culture of closing down perceived ‘unwelcome thoughts’ rather than debating them” and was seeking advice on the case’s implications.
“While I respect the decision of the High Court, I am concerned that employment conditions should never be allowed to have a chilling effect on free speech or academic freedom at our universities,” he said. “University staff and students must have the freedom to challenge and question orthodoxies without fear of losing their job or offending others.”
Dr Ridd, a long-serving professor at the university, was fired in 2018 after forming the view that the scientific consensus on climate change overstated the risk it posed to the reef and vigorously arguing that position.
In a unanimous decision on Wednesday, five justices of the High Court dismissed Dr Ridd’s appeal, finding his early criticism of climate research and the reef was protected by academic freedom but that he later went much further, justifying his termination.
The university welcomed the outcome as confirmation “that the termination of Dr Ridd’s employment had nothing to do with academic freedom”, saying in a statement it strongly supported the freedom of staff to engage in academic and intellectual freedom.
Dr Ridd took a parting shot at the university as he informed his supporters of the outcome on Facebook. The university’s actions, he said, “were technically legal” but it was “never right, proper, decent, moral or in line with public expectations of how a university should behave”.
Dr Ridd said one of the worst consequences of the decision was it allowed universities to demand disciplinary processes stay confidential, undermining government legislation designed to support intellectual freedom.
“I know a couple of really egregious cases happening right now where freedom of speech has been curtailed, and the university is sitting on confidentiality,” Dr Ridd told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “I can’t even tell you who they are because they would lose their job.”
Dr Ridd, who says he is only sceptical about “cataclysmic climate change”, wants the government to legislate to provide further protections to free speech directly in academics’ employment contracts.
Mr Tudge has previously used the threat of legislation to force universities to adopt free speech protections, warning earlier this year he would act if they did not fully implement a model code on free speech. All 41 Australian universities now have policies aligned with the code, proposed by former High Court chief justice Robert French, and will report against it annually.
Dr Ridd, the Institute of Public Affairs and the National Tertiary Education Union had argued that whatever the merits of Dr Ridd’s views, he was protected by a right to academic freedom in the university’s collective pay agreement with staff.
The university argued Dr Ridd was not sacked for his views but instead breached its code of conduct, which required staff to act in a courteous and respectful way, and confidentiality requirements about the disciplinary process.
The High Court found intellectual, or academic, freedom as contained in the university’s pay deal “is not qualified by a requirement to afford respect and courtesy in the manner of its exercise” and as a result, an initial censure in 2016 against Dr Ridd was not justified.
The justices quoted 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill in their reasoning.
“Whilst a prohibition upon disrespectful and discourteous conduct in intellectual expression might be a ‘convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world’,” the justices held, “the ‘price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind’.”
The union hailed that aspect of the judgment as a win. But that did not result in a win because the court found Dr Ridd’s conduct extended well beyond the expression of opinion within his area of academic expertise.
Had his conduct related only to his area of expertise or criticism of the JCU decisions through prescribed processes, it would have been protected by intellectual freedom. Because his case was run on an all-or-nothing basis, that meant Dr Ridd lost.
“This litigation concerned conduct by Dr Ridd far beyond that of the 2016 censure, almost none of which was protected by the intellectual freedom. That conduct culminated in the termination decision, a decision which itself was justified by 18 grounds of serious misconduct, none of which involved the exercise of intellectual freedom,” the judges found.
The Institute of Public Affairs, which had helped Dr Ridd run his case via crowdfunding and public relations support, said the decision showed Australia’s universities were mired in a crisis of censorship.
“Our institutions increasingly want to control what Australians are allowed to say and what they can read and hear,” executive director John Roskam said in a statement that also announced Dr Ridd would be joining the institute as an unpaid research fellow to work on “real science”.
The federal government in March legislated a definition of academic freedom into university funding laws – a push led by former education minister Dan Tehan, who said last year he’d received legal advice that Dr Ridd would not have been sacked had the definition been in place at the time.
The definition, which was also based on wording recommended by Mr French in his government-commissioned review of free speech at Australian universities, includes “the freedom of academic staff to teach, discuss, and research and to disseminate and publish the results of their research” and “to contribute to public debate, in relation to their subjects of study and research”.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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