The long-respected scientific journal Nature appears to be going woke, according to an editorial on its website titled, “Nature journals raise the bar on sex and gender reporting in research: Authors will be prompted to provide details on how sex and gender were considered in study design.”
The editorial notes that some journals have already “encouraged” reporting on sex and gender “for years” but cited insufficient reporting of data on both sex and gender — as if the two are different.
The editorial says, in part:
To remedy this, from now on, researchers who submit papers to a subset of Nature Portfolio journals will be prompted to state whether and how sex and gender were considered in their study design, or to indicate that no sex and gender analyses were carried out, and clarify why. They should note in the title and/or abstract if findings apply to only one sex or gender.
Under the subheading “Accounting for sex and gender makes for better science,” the editorial continues:
They will also be asked to provide data disaggregated by sex and gender where this information has been collected, and informed consent for reporting and sharing individual-level data has been obtained. The changes apply to studies with human participants, on other vertebrates or on cell lines, in which sex and gender is an appropriate consideration.
In addition, from 1 June, four journals — Nature Cancer, Nature Communications, Nature Medicine and Nature Metabolism — will be raising awareness of the updated recommendations in letters to authors and reviewers during peer review. The aim here is to improve understanding of the degree to which sex and gender reporting is already part of study design, data collection and analysis in the research these journals publish. The journals will also evaluate author and reviewer reception of the changes so that we can iterate on them as we learn through experience.
The editorial cites studies on drugs and even concedes to the gender identity activists’ narrative when saying those studies have different impacts on women and men — “we recognize that not everyone fits into these categories.”
But Debra Soh, a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society, wrote in an oped how ludicrous Nature’s stance really is:
Nature stated that studies should acknowledge both sex and gender, defining sex as a “biological attribute” and gender as “socially constructed.” However, sex and gender are both biological. Transgender people, as well as some intersex people, identify more with the opposite sex than their birth sex, but this difference is attributable to biological influences, such as hormonal exposure in the prenatal environment. If gender was a social construct, why couldn’t transgender people be persuaded to be comfortable in their birth sex?
Being receptive to the concerns of minority communities is, of course, a worthwhile endeavor, but rewriting science to acknowledge 0.8% of the population frankly doesn’t make sense. As well, activists’ ideological separation of gender from sex is precisely what is eating away at scientific discovery to begin with.
If gender is completely detached from sex, then anyone can be a woman. This freedom to self-identify however one pleases has led to a false amnesia about what a woman is. As we’ve seen, there is no end to the absurdity as women’s sports are being destroyed, a rise in violent and sexual crime is being attributed to women due to male offenders identifying as female, and dehumanizing language such as “chest-feeding” and “frontal birth” is being normalized.
Soh concluded by saying she was “saddened” by academia being “debased” by putting “threats and deceit” over “knowledge and understanding,” and that once the public trust in science is lost it cannot be gained again.
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