For the past five years, many have held out hope that gender ideology has a high-water mark: it could not invade the sciences. It was one thing for arts departments and sociologists to cram the world and all that is it into the framework of queer theory; it is quite another for the actual scientists to do so. Science, of course, has always been politicized to one extent or another, but the scientific method does provide something of a safety valve.
That hope appears to be a false one—at least for the time being. In addition to the near-total cooperation of the medical community in facilitating sex changes (a scandal on a scale not seen since the eugenics craze), the multidisciplinary peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Human Behavior has released an editorial titled “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans” which states, point blank, that: “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.”
So what, exactly, is academic freedom “bounded” by? You likely already guessed. The authors note that academic freedom should be restrained by “well-established ethics framework” to ensure that “humans who do not participate in the research” cannot be “harmed indirectly” by scientific research that “inadvertently…stigmatizes individuals or human groups.” Research that does this—even inadvertently—could be “discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist, or homophobic” and is dangerous because it “may provide justification for undermining the rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.”
This is, in short, the solution of ideologues to the lack of a scientific basis for gender ideology and the mounting evidence that it is nonsense—not to mention the horrifying testimonies of those who have undergone the “transition” experiment. Thus, research that the LGBT community does not like can now be dismissed not because it is wrong, but because it might “undermine” the LGBT agenda. Plenty of institutions and academics have been operating this way for quite some time—but this puts it out into the open. The editorial isn’t just staking a position for Nature Human Behavior—it urges the entire research community to “address these potential harms” and to apply this framework to “any academic publication.”
