Damming the River of Wisdom

Survival.

Since the first spark of life flickered tentatively on planet Earth, its history has been utterly of survival.

Some species adapted to changing conditions, evolving to suit new climates. Some species learned to make shelters and use tools to improve their chances at survival.

Those that couldn't adapt, died and - if fortunate - were left to the fossil record. The eternal struggle is either to adapt or die - there is no other choice in survival.

But only one species works actively against itself: thwarting some from developing the best tools, eradicating others best suited to survive.

That species is homo sapiens.

Learning about our Universe requires listening, not telling. Too often, science is held up as simply a collection of facts, not a process of asking questions.

Instead, we plug our ears, close our eyes, and pretend what we wish for is already real. Or worse, we elect officials who promise they have the power to direct science.

Unfortunately, science and the Universe don't work that way. Shutting our ears means never learning - never being able to learn.

And when humanity purposely prevents new knowledge from being acquired, we live not in an Age of Reason, but another Dark Age of rule by violence.

Even homo sapiens must adapt in order to survive.

Healthy skepticism

My work focuses on improving understanding of human identity. Who are we really? How do we know who we are? Are there limits to what we may claim as "our truth" within the social environment?

I expect my work to impart a direct benefit to my life: I am transgender, and I require gender-affirming care. However, Executive Orders and new legislation seek to limit access to my care.

Upon what evidence are these edicts founded?

In some cases, religion. In other cases, poorly done science. Neither is a sound foundation for governing a nation. Both depend on keeping the people from knowing or understanding why the edicts are enacted.

Today, skepticism is brandished as the only method of scientists. Internet pundits claim belief in "basic science" and attack "woke gender ideology" as nonfactual.

But at what point does skepticism become unhealthy?

Science is founded on the principle that more data is better. As scientists, we learn quickly that the more we know about the natural world, the more we realize there is more to know.

Coming to a conclusion is tricky for a scientist - have we acquired sufficient data to form a hypothesis? To develop a theory? Healthy skepticism is valid before publishing definitive statements that affect humanity.

Unhealthy skepticism is nothing more than a weapon against those who would benefit from fully-developed theories. And when unhealthy skepticism wins, every human loses.

Johns Hopkins Hospital

After World War II, plastic and reconstructive surgery centers flourished. Initially developed to deal with war injuries, the post-war economic boom led to major improvements in surgical techniques.

One of the procedures studied was gender-affirming surgery. When Christine Jorgensen returned home to flashbulbs and ticker-tape parades, hospitals quickly built centers to study those whose bodies failed to match their identities. More to the point, they developed new techniques they could sell to address the problem.

Hopeful in pioneering this new field of study, Johns Hopkins University funded and built a large center to study gender and its effect on society in the mid and late 1960s. Even with more rudimentary techniques, gender-affirming surgery clearly worked. Patients who received surgery reported greater satisfaction in life across all axes.

But Johns Hopkins Hospital discovered those people did not go on to be more productive members of society, and shut the entire clinic down.

Medicine is dedicated to improving lives, but Johns Hopkins measured "improvement" as the ability to find and hold a salaried position, to avoid run-ins with the law, and to be married as part of a heterosexual relationship. Happiness was of ancillary value.

As a result, all patients were discarded, the clinic was defunded, and no further surgeries were performed. The data collected ignored the experiences of patients, focusing instead on what benefited United States society in the 1970s.

The Cass Review and its obfuscations

Johns Hopkins Hospital established a pattern of dismissing a patient's personal experience as irrelevant in the face of politics.

A similar result occurred with the Cass Review, commissioned in 2020 and concluded in 2024. NHS England, the budget and planning branch of the National Health Service of England, charged Hillary Cass to determine the efficacy of gender-affirming care.

Read that again - the branch responsible for funding care in the National Health Service of England commissioned a nurse granted an honorary doctorate degree for service not at all in the field of gender dysphoria…to establish whether gender-affirming care should be funded.

The final report highlighted the number of patients requesting care, the overwhelm placed on the system by increased demand, the speed at which patients received care, the level of certainty doctors felt in referring patients for further care, and the shift away from inexpensive talk therapy toward expensive medical therapy.

Strikingly absent from the data reviewed were case studies - the kind of data that indicated whether patients felt better while receiving gender-affirming care. Cass considered the data low quality and not worthy of consideration.

Perhaps predictably, NHS's financial inefficiency in treating transgender youth transmogrified into recommendations to restrict gender-affirming care for youth. None of the data - at least, none of the data Cass included in her review - indicated gender-affirming care was effective.

The Cass Review spurred a nationwide ban on youth gender-affirming care, largely because it suited the financial and political goals of the people who commissioned it.

At odds with actual scientists, the Cass Review prevents further investigation. Instead of inspiring longer studies and more data acquisition, the entire machinery of the scientific process was dismantled.

Unobserving the Universe

Note the distinction between realizing a hypothesis must always be improved as we acquire and analyze more data, and the act of shutting down the ability to acquire data altogether.

The latter is not the mainstay of the scientist.

That is the action of a politician. That is the blunt-force compulsion of a person who must control science in order to control the people affected by it.

The act of shutting one's eyes to data, ignoring the full story, and developing conclusions to justify the payout received to develop them is most emphatically not science.

The motivation of a scientist is to understand. The motivation of a politician - and of those rabid followers who elect them - is not to understand, but to obscure.

A scientist is duty-bound to investigate and explain. A politician fostering ignorant opposition to science and humanity must close their ears and shut their eyes, deny data, and create a world in their social environment that doesn't match the operation of the real world.

I name this denial "unobserving the Universe." Its purpose is to calcify political desires as dogma and legislation. It is to insure domestic tranquility, as it were, by perverting the act of science as complete, a done deal, with no effect on the natural world it is purported to describe.

But observation, knowledge, and science are tributaries of the river of wisdom: they must flow in order to remain fresh, to maintain oxygen, to sustain life. If homo sapiens is to survive, it must adapt.

All of us bear responsibility to expose attempts to appropriate the methods of science. A scientist chooses not to know the answers without first investigating the question.

If we are to survive, we must hold politicians accountable for choosing not to know the truth the Universe presents us.