{"id":83798,"date":"2015-12-30T08:47:39","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T16:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83798"},"modified":"2015-12-30T08:47:39","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T16:47:39","slug":"why-some-of-the-worst-attacks-on-social-science-have-come-from-liberals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83798","title":{"rendered":"Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesse Singal writes<\/a>: I first read Galileo\u2019s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I often left it lying around the house when I was doing other stuff. At one point, my dad picked it up off a table and started reading the back-jacket copy. \u201cThat\u2019s an amazing book so far,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s about the politicization of science.\u201d \u201cOh,\u201d my dad responded. \u201cYou mean like Republicans and climate change?\u201d<\/p>\n

That exchange perfectly sums up why anyone who is interested in how tricky a construct \u201ctruth\u201d has become in 2015 should read Alice Dreger\u2019s book. No, it isn\u2019t about climate change, but my dad could be excused for thinking any book about the politicization of science must be about conservatives. Many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that it\u2019s conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo\u2019s Middle Finger corrects this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that\u2019s why it\u2019s one of the most important social-science books of 2015.<\/p>\n

At its core, Galileo\u2019s Middle Finger is about what happens when science and dogma collide \u2014 specifically, what happens when science makes a claim that doesn\u2019t fit into an activist community\u2019s accepted worldview. And many of Dreger\u2019s most interesting, explosive examples of this phenomenon involve liberals, not conservatives, fighting tooth and nail against open scientific inquiry.<\/p>\n

When Dreger criticizes liberal politicization of science, she isn\u2019t doing so from the seat of a trolling conservative. Well before she dove into some of the biggest controversies in science and activism, she earned her progressive bona fides. A historian of science by training, she spent about a decade early in her career advocating on behalf of intersex people \u2014 those born with neither \u201ctraditional\u201d male nor female genitalia. For a long time, established medical practice was for the doctor or doctors present at childbirth to make the call one way or another and effectively carve a newborn\u2019s genitals into the \u201cproper\u201d configuration, and in some cases to eventually prescribe courses of potentially harmful or unnecessary hormones. Sometimes the child in question was never even informed that they hadn\u2019t been born a boy or a girl in the classical sense \u2014 indeed, sometimes even their parents weren\u2019t. To the medical Establishment, all that mattered \u2014 even above patients\u2019 physical and psychological health \u2014 was that young bodies fit neatly into one established gender category or the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Singal writes: I first read Galileo\u2019s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I often left it lying around the house when I was doing other stuff. At … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83799,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83798\/revisions\/83799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}