DiscussionHow many lives has Judith Butler ruined?

submitted by JulienMayfair from self.LGBDropTheT

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[–]Neo_Shadow_LurkerPronouns: I/Don't/Care 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

She had major academic celebrity status, and it's clear now as it was then that she wanted to replace biological sex with gender.

In Butler's theory gender and sex are different things, which makes sense considering her framing.

The thing is: does she and her groupies were the ones directly responsible in changing the DSM V and baking transgenderism into law? I don't think so: she and her fellow gender theorists arrived late to this party.

There were a lot of postmodern theorists questioning science as a discipline back then, with a lot of it actually coming from branches of feminism.

One thing you're not getting is that 'science' is also responsible for our current situation.

Many psychologists and surgeons were in the forefront to this mess, as transgender surgeries mean a very lucrative market, full of healthy people who will be hooked on medical treatment for life, all with very little accountability and risk on their part.

The only countries pushing back on this have public funded health systems, which translates to government accountability, as happened in the Keira Bell case.

[–]JulienMayfair[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think I would separate science from medicine here as they are not always the same thing. Medicine is supposed to be based in science, but since medicine has to straddle science and social policy, it's never been immune to social pressures. Take, for example, the disaster of the "fat makes you fat" approach to nutrition, which we now know was hardly based in science at all and ended up just making people fatter by replacing fat with sugar.

Johns Hopkins stopped doing gender surgeries because they followed the science and found that the outcomes were not improved. But then people demanded these surgeries, and there were always places where someone would provide a service for the money, like the transwoman who's going to Brazil to get a womb transplant, probably because no doctor in the U.S. or Europe would do it.

[–]Neo_Shadow_LurkerPronouns: I/Don't/Care 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think I would separate science from medicine here as they are not always the same thing.

But medicine is a part of science.

The difference between biology and medicine is that the former is an applied science and the latter isn't.

Medicine is supposed to be based in science, but since medicine has to straddle science and social policy, it's never been immune to social pressures.

Did you know that funding is a fundamental part of science, specially in the US?

If a certain company nudges your reaseach team to manufacture certain results by threatening to cut your funding, what would you do? That's the dillema several scientists are faced with everyday.

Take, for example, the disaster of the "fat makes you fat" approach to nutrition, which we now know was hardly based in science at all and ended up just making people fatter by replacing fat with sugar.

Which was based entirety on manufactured studies by labs and research teams with ties to certain corporations.

The vision that the only things between science and it's conclusions are scientists and the evidence is very naive.