It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such a big deal and fuss, that it works. I think a perfect example is the young man who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the "white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media. And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is cancel culture.

It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly ambiguous.

And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.

[0]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

>And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies.

If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?

>If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in?

Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture.

>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?

Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.

I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.

And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's behalf?

By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...

> And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's behalf?

Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own policies required it.

And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that investigation other than its outcome.

>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...

Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to care.

Yep. And whilst the balance of who holds the social capital in which circles and which views they consider beyond the pale changes, it's not a new phenomenon and seldom a one-sided one.

The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.

Presumably, the author has some kind of scientific studies or evidence to back up his position though (as his claims rely on that)? In which case, he would be using his "social capital" to try and have the debate be more focused on science and research, and less about belief.

Both sides argue that based on interpretations of the scientific studies they have selected, carrying out the others' suggestions with regard to treating gender dysphoria or even saying the wrong things about gender in a manner which might form impressions upon young people is tantamount to child abuse. The author didn't write his original article arguing that medical professionals shouldn't affirm gender in order to encourage them to test their hypotheses.

And needless to say there are many others who take things further than the author.

You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different, and the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender. As the article states, that understanding is common sense to anyone who isn't an activist or professional academic.

> You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different

You do if you're a scientist and you're appealing to scientific authority.

You'd need to address why there have been cultures across time and geography that don't have these binary norms, and you'd need to take into account British colonialism that stamped out anything that didn't fit their binary norms.

> the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender

There are about as many people with intersex conditions as there are transpeople. The world is weirder than you think. https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-vill...

This is one of the most serious problems with the gender critical crowd: They assume that the truth is so obvious all they need to do is to state it and then insult anyone who disagrees with them. Their arguments collapse as soon as you look at the real world.

Male and female being a binary difference is an artifact of British colonialism?

Is that what critical theorists really think? That's as mad as a box of frogs. The world is full of languages that actually label every single noun as either male or female. They date back far further than the British empire. You have gods that are clearly male or female dating from thousands of years ago in any ancient culture. The concept of male and female being clearly distinct and without a third category has nothing to do with colonialism.

I mean, I get that my "crowd", such that it is, may seem offensive when confronted with these beliefs. And yeah, sure, not ideal. But this stuff sounds like what flat earthers believe. They have all kinds of weird arguments about why the world isn't really spherical that can sort of pass muster if you don't think about it much and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, but most people just say, eh, that's really mad and ignore it. I mean what you're arguing here contradicts a lifetime of 'lived experience', to use their terms.

The article you're pointing to - and let's generously assume the story is 100% factually accurate - says pretty specifically that this is a very, very rare medical disorder. It's not some sort of thing that needs to be taken into account in daily life.

But the notion of binary gender being the default state is supported by vast amounts of other evidence, so much that people don't even see the need to spell it out because that's kind of like how you end up trying to prove that NASA images of the Earth from space aren't Photoshops.

I understand "cancel culture" to simply be a form of mob-enforced group-think. It's "intolerance of intolerance" taken to an extreme. If you say or do something (or said or did something in the past!) that runs afoul of the mob, the mob "cancels" you (tries to get you fired from your job, kicked out of github projects you contribute to, membership revoked from organizations you participate in, your business boycotted/destroyed, etc. - essentially ruin your life as much as possible without causing bodily harm). The end goal of cancel culture is to "send a message" to other people that do similar things and get them to conform to the prevailing group-think of the mob.

Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"

It would be convenient if there was a database of cancelled people so those people could go on with their lives and operate outside cancel culture.

For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example).

I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.

What we'd really need is a public database of cancellers. Apart from the few deeply ideologically motivated ones, most of the cancellers are simply individuals who either perceive, consciously or unconsciously, the advantage of aligning themselves with the dominant ideology, or who are trying to minimise the risk of being misaligned with it. What we lack is something to counterbalance the advantages of signalling conformity- some longer perspective in which to frame our actions.

Unfortunately, this type of record keeping is typical exactly of the cancel culture I'm so opposed to.

tbh I suspect the applicants who were cancelled would come up with a lot of theories of sex, race, religion and politics and relatively little novelty.

In Brave New World, all the Alpha citizens were sent to an island. Within six years they had a full scale civil war. I suspect something similar would happen if you put those cancelled for voicing their second wave feminism in a way which offended people as a threat in a faculty with those cancelled for voicing arguments considered sexist, those cancelled for making arguments considered Islamophobic with those cancelled for interpretations of the Quran considered extreme etc.

> Which is definitely not a claim he can make authoritatively

Did you also get your PhD in evolutionary biology?

This is the wrong question, and an appeal the authority. It doesn't matter what my credentials are. (And, I'd even go so far as to argue that an evolutionary biology doctorate is only one lens with which to observe the relationship between identity, society, and genetics.)

The correct question is, "Is there evidence in the scientific community that male/female are a spectrum? That male/female are social constructs? That sex is a sociological construct beyond just reproductive anatomy?"

I'm happy to provide examples where, in fact, the scientific community disagrees with him.

Edit: Some off the top of my head resources:

* I assume the author is explicitly talking about humans, and not the wider animal community where sex is obviously not defined by sex organs or chromosomes. (E.g. some animals are hermaphroditic, some transition from sex to sex based on environmental factors like wrasses that develop from female to male as they grow. Interestingly, the development of human fetuses has some parallels in that we all start from the same more female template.)

* Chromosomes do not neatly land in XY and XX categories. A significant portion of people have other chromosomal configurations.

* Androgen insensitivity can result in an XY chromosomed person who appears outwardly or developmentally female. Similarly there are conditions where XX chromosomed people develop male organs.

* There are significant hormonal differences between individuals that can result in dramatically different biological characteristics, blurring the lines between what is male or female (or otherwise) quite considerably. Testosterone production, for example, is not a reliable indicator of maleness.

* Approximately 2% of humans are born with genitalia that are ambiguous. Culturally, we deal with these people very differently. (E.g. in Saudi Arabia it is handled differently than the US.) This implies there is sociological input into someone's sex -- the same conditions may be altered to be male or female in different parts of the world.

I'll be happy to see those examples.

But anyway, that's besides the poin. Why should a university professor be cancelled because after his research he says he has evidence that sex is a biological construct and not a social one?

Because we have biological evidence for a sexuality which is richer than his socially-constructed binary sexuality. Specifically, we know about intersex [0] chromosomal arrangements, and we know that they don't just neatly fall into male and female arrangements.

We might expect of university professors that they grok the basis of their field, and what they're actually studying. When somebody insists that they ought to be tenured, we ought to double-check that they understand science. The Nature memo that he complains about [1] merely says that the Trump administration is incorrect to think that genitals determine chromosomal layout, and a brief sanity check shows that indeed it should be entirely the other way around, and even then, chromosomes don't guarantee that genitals will develop a certain way.

The author groks this critique and doubles down; in [2] he insists that intersex people are less than 0.02% of the population, and thus don't matter. That should show you exactly how unscientific he is; he points to his degree over and over as evidence of his quality, but fails at hard numbers. Meanwhile we estimate XXY chromosomes [3] and XXX chromosomes [4] to occur in around 0.1% to 0.2% of the population, and that's just one of dozens of possible chromosomal arrangements. (Or two, I guess, depending on how one counts.) He is at least an order of magnitude off, possibly more, and doesn't care because it would require him to back down from the hill he's chosen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8

[2] https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome

> Why should a university professor be cancelled because after his research he says he has evidence that sex is a biological construct and not a social one?

This isn't what happened. It's one thing to author papers and submit them for peer review, it's another to do this:

> I also eventually co-authored another Quillette essay, with endocrinologist Dr. William Malone and author Julia Robertson, titled No One Is Born in ‘The Wrong Body’.

Viewpoints like this are dismissive of trans and gender noncomforming people, and they put minority people in the position of having to constantly advocate for the fact that they do, in fact, exist. He goes on to describe several other instances where he calls, for example, gender dysphoria in Sweden "social contagion".

This person is widely, and publicly outspoken about their beliefs in op eds, and people are disagreeing with his op eds . This isn't a case of "I published some academic papers and people didn't like that", it's "I entered the arena of public opinion with my own editorials that specifically targeted trans and gender nonconforming people and people didn't like that."

I wasn't talking about any particular case, it was just an example...and it happens. Not only with teachers but with anyone who might have an opinion that the mob doesn't agree with.