More Transsexuals Winning Girls' Events, Martina Navratilova Hates It

• Transsexual sprinters placed first and second at a Connecticut high school indoors event.
• Martina Navratilova hit a fabulous return shot about transsexuals competing in womens' categories and took heat for it. I have asked her for the basis of her Times piece.
• The IOC is okay with transsexuals competing in womens' events, but their own guidelines permit "females" with penises — highly suggestive of their political aims.
• At bottom of a lot of the claims that trans women should be competitive with biological women is a 2004 study in the European Journal of Endocrinology by Louis J. G. Gooren and Mathijs C. M. Bunck studying muscle mass in n=19 transwomen, and concluding that after a year, muscle mass had diminished to the point where "it is justifiable that reassigned M-F compete with other women", while ignoring height, size, and bone differences.
• Update 2019-02-26: A pretty good article at Velo News on the post-Rachel McKinnon landscape on M2F transsexuals competing in women's events. Something I didn't know, and seems to have been missed in the fracas over McKinnon's victory: the reigning women's cycling champion, Sarah Fader (née Caravella), resigned in protest minutes before the races were to begin, despite the fact that she beat McKinnon in both the 200m and 500m preliminary time trials.

  Track racer Sarah Fader believes the IOC’s rules create an unfair situation for cis women (cisgender refers to individuals whose gender identity matches their birth gender).
  
  Known by some cycling fans for her maiden name, Caravella, Fader raced in the U.S. professional road scene from 2006-2015. Fader was set to race against Dr. McKinnon in the masters finals in Los Angeles. She was the defending masters world champion in the event, and she set the fastest time in the qualifying heats. She beat Dr. McKinnon in both a 200- and 500-meter time trial during the weekend.
  
  Fader, however, told me that she felt that racing against Dr. McKinnon was simply not fair. Dr. McKinnon stands six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds. Fader, by contrast, is  5-foot-5 and weighs 135 pounds. So minutes before the finals were set to start, she pulled out of the competition entirely.
  
  “I thought that doing it this way was my own form of protest,” Fader said. “I knew that I personally did not agree with the situation. I don’t want to compete in a sport where the rules are unfair.”

• Included in that Velo News piece is a good link to a Stuff (New Zealand) article interviewing Otego University physiology professor Alison Heather, who says "She is adamant international sporting regulation bodies such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have rushed a decision to include transgender athletes in male and female categories, as there has not been enough research."
• Update 2019-02-27: More linky goodness: the IOC's policy (PDF) has no mention of any studies of the situation, and neither USA Cycling's policy.
• The American Spectator has a fine essay on the subject:

  A transgender training expert says this later in the same article:
  

  “The gender identity doesn’t matter, it’s the testosterone levels,” said Harper, who studies transgender athletes. “Trans girls should have the right to compete in sports. But cisgender girls should have the right to compete and succeed, too. How do you balance that? That’s the question.”

  Harper is wrong. Biology matters. The DNA. The sex of the baby, child, teen, adult matters. The hormones make a difference but they are secondary.
  Think of it this way. Lance Armstrong and the rest of the doping cyclists (which is about all of them, at this point) have extraordinary biology before they doped. A woman with similar testosterone levels could not even come close to the last place male finisher in the Tour de France and cycling is a lower body-focused sport where men and women have more muscle strength/per size parity. The biology of the males before the doping is already an advantage. The extra hormones are a boost.

• Madeleine Kerns at National Review:
  

  In December, Navratilova tweeted: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”
  McKinnon was not pleased by this and began a tirade against Navratilova. In her Sunday Times essay, Navratilova describes this behavior as bullyish and argues that, while she feels able to take a stand, she worries that other women will be “cowed into silence or submission.”
  

  
  

  Likewise, when a spokesperson for the organization Fair Play for Women (FPFW) was invited by the BBC to discuss Navratilova’s comments about trans participation in female sport, McKinnon wrote on Twitter: “I will not participate in a discussion panel that takes them [FPFW] seriously and gives them a platform.”
  FPFW were then disinvited by the BBC, and McKinnon boasted about having the platform to himself.

  What an appalling state of affairs. 
• Speaking of Fair Play for Women, their website is chock-full of resources, including, especially, their science links. I highly recommend following their Twitter account, @fairplaywomen.
• Something FPFW tweeted recently, an excellent summary of the scientific landscape at Medium by Dr. Antonia Lee, including an incredible call for the retraction of a widely-cited paper purporting to justify M2F trans inclusion in sports on evidentiary quality grounds.
• Update 2019-03-02: This keeps trickling on: A M2F transsexual hit the automatic NCAA qualifying time in the 60m hurdles in New Hampshire.
• A M2F transgender woman won a 54 km Dutch beach cycling race (English Google Translate version).

The Historically Stupid Democratic Obsession With Destroying The Electoral College

Comes now the news that Colorado has joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a mechanism to defeat the Electoral College, handing a state's votes over to whoever wins the popular vote. The current list of such states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington — all are generally very reliable Democratic-voting states. Except when they aren't. Based on the Wikipedia state-by-state results of the US elections since 1980, these state totals would have switched a state vote for the Democratic candidate to a Republican twenty-three out of twenty-five times. That is to say, it amounts to a bet these states will henceforth and forever vote Democratic, and that the popular vote winner will likewise always be a Democrat. I'm not sure that's a bet I'd be willing to take.

NYT Discards The Right Cause For "The Insulin Wars"

The New York Times somehow recognized that patent protection is behind the whack-a-mole madness of insulin prescriptions, yet mostly elides that as causal:

There are several reasons that insulin is so expensive. It is a biologic drug, meaning that it’s produced in living cells, which is a difficult manufacturing process. The bigger issue, however, is that companies tweak their formulations so they can get new patents, instead of working to create cheaper generic versions. This keeps insulin firmly in brand-name territory, with prices to match.

But the real ignominy (and the meat of the lawsuit) is the dealings between the drug manufacturers and the insurance companies. Insurers use pharmacy benefit managers, called P.B.M.s, to negotiate prices with manufacturers. Insurance programs represent huge markets, so manufacturers compete to offer good deals. How to offer a good deal? Jack up the list price, and then offer the P.B.M.s a “discount.”

Minus spurious patents, this kind of tomfoolery wouldn't happen. Patent reform as it applies to medicine, is absolutely a precondition to fixing pharma pricing.

More Thoughts On Toxic Masculinity

Being mostly just bullet points:

• Gad Saad reminds us that the answer to rhetorical headline questions is always "no" with his essay in Psychology Today, "Is Toxic Masculinity A Valid Concept?" Excerpt:
  

  ... [M]ost of the traits and behaviors that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate! This is not a manifestation of “antiquated stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the existence of gravity, and no amount of campus brainwashing will ever alter these facts. Let us stop pathologizing masculinity. Instead, let us appreciate the endless ways by which men and women are similar to one another, as well as the important ways in which the two sexes differ.

• An unusual good piece in the NYT from Thomas Edsall on the new APA guidelines, quoting David French, Steven Pinker, Ryan A. McKelley, and a number of others.
• In case you wondered whether Harry's was an alternative, in 2017 they, too, ran with the idiotic "toxic masculinity" trope. (I saw the tweet as recently as a couple days ago, but it's been since deleted. The subsequent deletion of the tweet might just be read as corporate ass-covering, in which case at least they understood what it was they did.
• A closing point: "toxic masculinity" appears to require transmission by some cultural means, and is frequently asserted (as with the Gillette ad) to be either tacitly accepted or actively encouraged. Yet, if this is the case, why isn't there some culture where this is no longer active or has been stamped out? The whole affair looks, as described, to be a sort of conspiracy theory. 
• Update 2019-01-23: Ran into this City Journal piece by Kay S. Hymowitz via Christina Hoff Sommers yesterday but only today got around to reading it. This pulls in the dumb Covington High fracas and ties it back to "toxic masculinity". Money graf:
  

  Now you could argue—and I have—that contemporary American society has not done a great job of taming and channeling juvenile aggression or of developing young men and women into the best they can be, to use the words of the Gillette ad. But “toxic masculinity” goes much farther than that. It evokes a society dedicated to creating and stoking the raw male desire for dominance. I’m hardly the first to point out that males engage in more violence and dominance behavior than females in every known human society, as well as in every primate troop. When the authors of the APA guidelines get to the section on bullying, however, they locate its cause in “constricted notions of masculinity emphasizing aggression, homophobia, and misogyny,” that is, in social teaching.
  
  ... The ad’s writers miss the possibility that “boys will be boys” is not guidance or an excuse; it’s a warning. Far from encouraging boys’ aggression, the American “patriarchy” tries in its own crude way to squelch it, as any decent society must do. That’s why the country is awash with anti-bullying programs and public-service announcements.

• Drifting off to the Covington Catholic fracas: Ross Douthat in the NYT who steals a page from Scott Alexander. Neatly done almost to the end, where he writes himself an excuse note with "Cuck".

The Only Kind Of Masculinity Is "Toxic"

So now comes Gillette with a stupid ad decrying "toxic masculinity" and yammering at men, instead of, you know, selling razors. The video itself has just short of 500,000 dislikes, and 167,000 likes, suggesting the reaction is, among those who care to register an opinion, strongly negative. If this is a reaction to the increasingly unshaven millennial generation, it's hard to see how alienating your existing customer base is exactly going to help your sales.

The business of labeling all masculinity "toxic" is one that the American Psychological Association lately has taken on. Andrew Sullivan is on it:

At the very start of the document, for example, this “traditional masculinity ideology” (TMI) is deemed the reason why men commit 90 percent of murders (and always have in every culture and every moment in history). That’s an extraordinary claim, and presumably requires urgent intervention. If a terrorist group, defined as adhering to an ideology, were to kill more than 15,000 Americans a year (the total number of murders committed by men in the U.S. in 2017), we would surely respond with a deep sense of urgency.

What is TMI? The definition varies throughout the document, as it flings various slurs at half the human race. Here’s one such definition: “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” Just weigh that list for a minute — and how expansive it is. Men are exhibiting a dangerous ideology when they seek to “achieve” things, when they risk their lives or fortunes, when they explore unfamiliar territory — and these character traits are interchangeable with violence. As you read the guidelines, you realize that the APA believes that psychologists should be informing men that what they might think is their nature is actually just a set of social constructs that hurt them, murders thousands, and deeply wounds the society as a whole.

The APA's sordid diatribe-posing-as-therapeutic "reminded me of the way psychologists used to treat gay men: as pathological, dangerous, and in need of reparative and conversion therapy". He's not the only one to make that leap:

All of this, from the new @APA guidelines, is of course ideological codswallop. Pure grievance studies pseudoscience. It would be hilarious if they weren't serious about it.

But the last sentence is particularly disturbing. It's the progressive equivalent of conversion therapy. pic.twitter.com/PvLnpv26NU

— Yeyo (@RealYeyoZa) January 13, 2019

It would be nice if we didn't have this institutionalized misandry. We'll be fighting it a good long while, it appears.

A Conspirator In The James Damore Firing Comes Forward (Anonymously)

One hell of a story.

We needed to make an example of Damore. Looking for some excuse to fire him, we spied on his phone and computer. We didn't find anything, although our spying probably made his devices unusably slow, preventing him from organizing support within the company. When we did fire him, our reputation and integrity took a hit, but at least other employees were now afraid to speak up.

...

To control the narrative, we planted stories with journalists and flexed Google's muscles where necessary. In exchange for insider access and preferential treatment, all we ask for is their loyalty. For online media, Google's ads pay their paycheck and our search brings their customers, so our influence shouldn't be underestimated.

Damore himself apparently finds it credible, because it hits on things only an insider could know:

Wow, a Google insider lays out how they conspired to quell dissent by making an example of me, manipulating the media, and lobbying the NLRB.

It can't be fully verified, but they have intimate knowledge of the situation.https://t.co/UaSVHgS5vI pic.twitter.com/VsoR6RDI3x

— James Damore (@JamesADamore) January 8, 2019

More Obvious Stuff On Sexual Attraction And Marriage

• "Why Aren't More Wives Outearning Their Husbands?" asks Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. The distribution of the wife's share of income has a hard break around 50%, as shown here, with a significant disparity on the right side. This is not a normal distribution (emboldening mine):
  
  
  
  
  

  This drop-off is simply too steep to be explained by randomness or classical economics. If men and women were forming marriages without concern for relative incomes, we'd expect a smoother distribution curve...
  
  In a cool new paper, Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica pose a theory that some people might find controversial but others might find intuitive: What if there's a deficit of marriages where the wife is the top earner because -- to put things bluntly -- husbands hate being out-earned by their wives, and wives hate living with husbands who resent them?
  
  If this were true, we would expect to see at least three four other things to be true. First, we'd expect marriages with female breadwinners to be surprisingly rare. Second, we'd expect them to produce unhappier marriages. Third, we might expect these women to cut back on hours, do more household [chores], or make other gestures to make their husbands feel better. Fourth, we'd expect these marriages to end more in divorce. Lo and behold (as you no doubt guessed), the economists found all of those assumptions borne out by the evidence.

  The assumption that women have nothing to do with these choices is a peculiar one, especially considering the next item...
• "Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females", Guanlin Wang, et al., Evolution and Human Behavior, March, 2018, pp. 220-225. Abstract:

  Parental investment hypotheses regarding mate selection suggest that human males should seek partners featured by youth and high fertility. However, females should be more sensitive to resources that can be invested on themselves and their offspring. Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females. These results indicate that higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women. Neither raters' BMI nor age influenced this effect for females rating male attractiveness. This difference explains many features of human mating behavior and may pose a barrier for male engagement in low-consumption lifestyles.