The End of Transgender Care for Minors? | Jesse Singal 

Really interesting interview. Now Jonah needs to go on Blocked and Reported to go head to head with Katie Herzog.

I say this as a neuroscientist-turned-lawyer that has also worked in scientific/medical publishing more broadly. Regarding “true science,” people in general have too homogenous/narrow a view of what is scientific, and what scientists are/do. An experimental physicist's 'science' is very different to a theoretical physicist's, and very different to an ecologist. Then there are differences in fields/approaches, in my field of cellular/systems neuroscience, many would say that ‘cognitive’ neuroscience and psychology aren’t really sciences at all, let alone the ‘social sciences’. Generally as you move more towards more complex systems/human elements, the more cautious we should be. A big problem in the American academy has been the “social science-ification” of psychology, sociology, economics… which tries too hard to fit/treat human spheres of knowledge as a “pure” science, and thinks that taking on a facsimile of scientific method will necessarily be more fruitful/valid, which can be misleading or just plain wrong when applied to non-scientific questions. Then particularly with medicine, people really shouldn’t consider it primarily as a science first. There’s a world of difference between being a practitioner/vocation and capital S-science. That’s not a denigration of the professions, I’m just saying we should value them without having to treat them like a pure science. It’s like saying an engineer is a physicist, a miner is a geologist, or a lawyer is a philosopher (though the US has a problem with that too). Also from my time in publishing, the quality of doctors/medical studies are usually an order of magnitude worse/variable, and the incentives for doctors in their research/publications are especially vulnerable to not being aligned with scientific rigor, and other biases are much more prevalent. There is a general problem in the public thinking that 'studies' = science. Studies are just step one to entering the conversation, and the majority of studies are wrong. Ultimately medicine is a profession/vocation that requires phronesis/practical wisdom/judgment/experience to be able to interpret data and make decisions, taking into human/professional/social/ethical considerations. Setting aside the terrible quality (and fundamental limit) on the quality of human studies, studies can only provide the basic information for you as a professional to then weigh/interpret to make a good decision. Which is why it is evidence-*based* medicine,.EBM is just as much about a general disposition to avoid ideological thinking. Evidence-based thinking is a skill and extremely important, but it’s a fallacy to think by having enough data in vacuum, we will know how doctors should act and health systems should be run. “Following the science” in a professional/political sense can be misleading in that way, and an abdication of political/social/professional/moral judgment. This all just a long way of saying, we need to respect disciplines and professions for what they are and on their own terms. And trying to tie everything back to science does a disservice to both the scientific method and medical practice, and leads to a lot of shoddy research/pseudoscience.

We need to demand a class 45:33 responsibility lawsuit for the pharmaceutical and agricultural companies that have denied the evidence that endocrine disrupting petrochemicals affects childhood hormonal development.