What Fear Sounds Like

DIAGdemocrats and Michelle Brooks

Breaking news: Founder of Skeptic Magazine and Executive Director of The Skeptics Society, author of the new book TRUTH: What it is, How to Find it, and Why it Still Matters, Dr. Michael Shermer, stuns WNYC podcast host Brian Lehrer by expressing skepticism and telling the truth.

Last month, Michael Shermer was invited on Brian Lehrer’s show to discuss his new book and his work as Executive Director of the Skeptics society, which went exactly as you would expect, at least for the first 15 minutes. Shermer, known for his decades long commitment to rigorous scientific thinking (and his Ph.D. in the history of science), adeptly ran through the basics of rational thought, and then, with no fanfare and no apology, flatly stated that men cannot become women.

No one could have been more pearl-clutchingly shocked at such heresy than podcast host and longtime NYC radio personality, journalist Brian Lehrer, who, despite years of covering local and national politics, was unable to maintain his composure when faced with some unpopular facts. In response to Shermer’s hate-filled rhetoric that “men cannot get pregnant,” and “men cannot become women,” the normally measured Lehrer was reduced to anxiously stammering anti-intellectualist disavowals and blurting out unfounded accusations. It was a painful performance that points to something much more sinister than simply disagreeing with his guest.

Let’s review:

Shermer spent the first part of the interview laying the groundwork for how a person interested in frivolous things like truth and science might proceed: thoughtful analysis, evaluating evidence, and applying reason. Shermer carefully explained—with examples from current and historical events—that this requires having doubt about commonly accepted beliefs, and making sure your facts are demonstrably and replicatively true. Most importantly: you must accept that truth can have no relation to the inconvenience or convenience of others.

Shermer also explained typical blindspots and their remedies: Bayesian Reasoning (thou shalt update thy beliefs as new evidence emerges!); Fallibilism (thou shalt understand you may be mistaken!); Pluralistic Ignorance (thou shalt remember thy opinion is probably shared by many who are equally afraid to speak); Subjective vs Objective truths (Thou shalt understand the difference between subjective internal states and objective shared truths that apply to everyone). Lehrer can claim no ignorance—he’d just had a 15 minute crash course in basic logic. Plus, he had supposedly just read Shermer’s book, right? So far, so good.

Enter call-in listener, Mabel from Trenton.

Setting aside her amusing non sequiturs about being a fertile woman during a time when people had a lot of sex, Mabel had a truth of her own to share about her frustration with the Democrats in particular. They’re “…trying to make us believe that you can turn a male into a female.”

Lehrer listened with genuine curiosity to Shermer for those first 15 minutes, but once Mabel spoke, you could almost hear Lehrer’s rational brain centers going offline. Curiosity evaporated and a veil of fear seemed to descend. Have a listen.

If you ever find yourself trapped between truth and allegiance to an irrational belief you don’t actually understand, but understand enough to know you’re not supposed to question it, it will sound something like Lehrer in this interview. Picture a rabbit frantically trying to dash down various holes to escape a hawk, and finding them all too shallow.

This is not a case of simple intellectual disagreement here, it’s more like panic. Lehrer is probably unaware that his apparatus for critical thinking has shut down and he’s now just a frightened man making rapid unconscious adjustments—goodbye, prefrontal cortex, hello amygdala. This reflex has been conditioned into many on the left who have not just forgotten their critical thinking skills, but eagerly relinquished them. He doesn’t seem to know what’s happening, he just knows he’s not supposed to be talking about this. In any functioning democracy, that’s alarming.

Feigning interest in concepts like “truth” and “reasoning” but then expressing scorn and outrage when they are employed, demonstrates something far worse than an actual disdain for critical thought; Lehrer would likely claim he embraces it. But his actions don’t line up with his ideals. Hijacked by fear, hamstrung by tribe loyalty, his ability to think simply sputters and dies; all he knows at this point is his guest is committing thought-crimes and is guilty of wrong-think, and must be denounced. He sounds embarrassingly similar to the now infamous Dr. Nisha Verma, someone Shermer had already referenced in this interview, giving Lehrer fair warning about who not to emulate. We hear panicky efforts to distance himself from Mabel and Shermer, we hear zero counterevidence. We hear him attempt to discredit their characters rather than their ideas.

“But Mabel, if you’re going to go there, transwomen would say they had their experience of being a woman before they had any HRT or surgery, or anything like that so, I dunno, you know, but maybe you’re just biased against a segment of society who you don’t like.”

This is a textbook example of the Ad Hominum/Strawman combo, logical fallacies that attack the person rather than the idea, and misrepresent their position to undermine their argument. Lehrer is reacting much as he would if he heard a high pitched whistling sound from above that got louder and louder: he’s metaphorically ducking and running, but trying to get in a good punch before he does. His sense of safety relies on establishing himself in opposition to Mabel’s dissident statement that men can’t become women, and establishing her as a “biased” person. Everyone who hears this should ask themselves: What is Lehrer so afraid of?

Trigger Warning: science, facts

Shermer proceeds to calmly explain basic science with the following hateful and bigoted statements:

Can you actually change sex? No.

Can you actually pause puberty? No (not without lifelong consequences).

You are your body; there’s no you and then your body—you’re just your body.

Biological sex is binary.

Men cannot become women

Men cannot become pregnant

Critical thinking is for everybody, not just the things you want to be true.

Subjective truths are internal states. The transgender issue is very much in that realm.

In contrast to Lehrer, Shermer remains calm, sincere, and clear. He models the right way to “be kind:” firmly state the truth, and attack the idea, not the person. He doesn’t mince words or fall into any of the very traps he had just described. Not so for Lehrer. Despite hosting multiple episodes on the topic of free speech over the years, he seems fairly unfamiliar with the concept, and works very hard to make open dialogue, well… impossible. Instead, he scampers in panic to the next logical fallacy: Circular Reasoning, also known as Begging the Question.

Lehrer: “…people’s experience proves… you want evidence? People’s experience proves that transgenderism is real.”

The flaw in this reasoning is obvious.

Especially cringeworthy are Lehrer’s efforts to prove to his ideological overlords that he HAD NO PART IN THIS AND IF HE HAD KNOWN THIS TOPIC WOULD HAVE COME UP HE NEVER WOULD HAVE HOSTED THIS SHOW AND HE IS VERY VERY SORRY AND ALSO INNOCENT.

Lehrer:

“This is not at all where I thought this segment was gonna go.”

“I will just say as we wrap this up, yeah, that’s not at all what I expected this conversation to turn into, but… ”

“You’re here supposedly representing science… ”

“Well, again I think there are doctors who do this for a living who would disagree with you that you can’t pause something and turn it back on again. But I don’t want to go round and round on that with you.”

Even after Shermer has finished his segment and is no longer on air, Lehrer makes one last irrational effort to discredit his guest:

“The book was supposed to be in support of science, and my understanding is from my own looking at it, the topic wasn’t even in the book, but that’s where he went.”

He sounds like a 4th grader making excuses for not doing his homework. I’m surprised he didn’t say, “The dog ate my notes that Shermer is a transphobe.”

It wasn’t just Lehrer who had trouble coping with reality. Due to Shermer’s frank statements about biological reality, listeners were denied their steady public-radio diet of “gender” propaganda and boy were they pissed.

One caller (who isn’t a scientist) wants a platform to accuse the actual scientist of practicing pseudoscience:

“I don’t think we should be giving a platform to pseudoscientists.”

There was also this passionate list of angry, foundationless accusations:

“I’m sure you had a deluge of calls about the … list of falsehoods and ridiculous statements that this guy, who’s supposedly talking about being a logical skeptic, and then just to say a bunch of false nonsense!”

When all else fails, invent statistics:

“We have been performing transgendered medical care and surgical care for something like 90 years now. We’re very, very good at it. It has almost zero morbidity (false, see testosterone and estrogen side effects). It has something like zero mortality (false) … as for treating … gender dysphoria therapeutically, which the guest suggested, that has very often resulted in disaster, including the death of the patient.”

0% morbidity? Please review the testimony from thousands of detransitioners or this plastic surgeon who would disagree. And to claim that “treating gender dysphoria therapeutically” results in disaster and death, well, unless pre-2014 therapists secretly buried all those bodies in their backyards, this one doesn’t hold water either.

Every one of these callers, along with Lehrer, is a walking advertisement for why people desperately need the information in Shermer’s book. But don’t hold your breath, they aren’t interested in the truth.

Fortunately, Shermer is. So, does he get everything right?

Not quite.

Healthy skepticism leaves room for new discovery, but pushing back against unscientific claims requires absolute inflexibility. Objective truths like human biology aren’t up for debate. If ever there was a place to stand our ground, it’s here, and those of us who understand what’s at stake in the reality vs. fantasy war have to get this right every time. Michael Shermer, truth expert, makes abundantly clear that “there is no you and then your body, there’s just your body.” Similarly, you won’t find Shermer wondering if maybe the world actually IS flat. Our job is to frame transgenderism as a claim on par with the claims made by flat-earthers, but with added urgency, because in this scenario, the flat-earther stand-ins have captured all civil society such that non-believers lose their kids, lose their jobs, lose their social standing, and lose their hard-won civil rights; and young believers are encouraged to surgically alter themselves in ways that disable them for life, including removing their ability to procreate.

Is it logical to placate people who feel sad when they hear the earth is round, by telling them it’s flat? This would unreasonably prioritize avoiding sad feelings over facing obvious facts. It would undermine reality. It would lead to some really dangerous, confusing outcomes. Why then, do we struggle with this when it comes to trans? Bad science—unprovable, unevidenced, without merit—is bad for everyone and everything.

Shermer: Can you actually change sex? No.

An admirable, plain indisputable fact by Shermer. We should embrace statements like this and repeat them endlessly. But he undermines this vital message by trying, for instance, to differentiate between adults and children. Men who “transitioned” and their “difficult lives” are fundamentally part of the same cultural, ideological problem that creates and misleads the classic ROGD kid, and there Shermer missed a chance to continue to apply his own irrefutable logic:

You are your body. There’s no you and then your body—you’re just your body.

This applies to everyone. Adults, minors, seniors, babies, flat-earthers, vegetarians, religious zealots, and skeptics alike. It’s a perfect example of those objective truths described earlier in the interview: they universally apply.

Shermer muddies the waters further with another comment suggesting that there’s a hierarchy; that facts that apply to adults matter less. Referring to minors: “…That’s where it crosses the line, and facts actually matter.”

This isn’t defensible. Facts ALWAYS matter. We can’t claim something is more or less of a fact depending on the situation, and still call it a fact. It’s the nature of facts that they aren’t conditional.

We can learn from Shermer’s brief gaps in reasoning. We can recognize and avoid common pitfalls, like the idea that diluting the message might make it more palatable to the pitchfork and torches mob (it won’t), or the mistaken notion that once someone is 18, it’s magically okay to remove their healthy body parts, weaken their bones, destroy their sex lives, render them infertile, and increase their risk of disease on demand. We can’t afford inconsistency, incoherence, or equivocation—the stakes are too high. Bodies are on the line. Health is on the line. Families are on the line. Women’s rights are on the line. Reality is on the line.

We need to tighten up our messaging, get it right every time, and sing that reality refrain over and over, and probably with double the persistence, dedication, and inflexibility that was used to undermine reality in the first place. All of us working to oust this ideology need one focused message based on the Wolf Thought Experiment, which I just invented:

A pack of vicious wolves is circling your house. Your doors and windows are closed. What is the best strategy for protecting yourself from the wolves?

a) Leave the doors and windows closed

b) Open one door as a peace offering and hope the wolves reciprocate

c) Open one window and offer a bowl of porridge to the wolves in the hopes that they’ll be so full they won’t devour you next

d) Open one door and one window and tell the wolves you’re trying to be fair so if just the nice wolves would come in, that would be great

e) Open all the doors and windows because you don’t want to discriminate against the wolves

Are options b, c, and d less dangerous than option e?

NO.

Cultures ruled by fear of repercussions for thought crimes are headed for disaster. The same goes for societies that think being kind means never saying no to the wolves. And while podcast hosts who act like biology and reality are optional might seem harmless or amusing, they’re not. Truth and reality do matter. Do not cede ground. Leave no doors or windows open. Refuse the wolves of unreality entry regardless of what they’re saying (or what they’re wearing). We have to get this right.

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