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This weekend, The Lancet dehumanised the bodies of half the population.
The single quote on the front cover was stark, “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.”
Our new issue is here! On the cover—'Periods on display' and the cultural movement against menstrual shame and #PeriodPoverty.
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— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 24, 2021
Not even, “people with vaginas”, though that would have been bad enough. The Lancet has now gone beyond the appalling language — “people who menstruate” — that so upset JK Rowling last year.
The excerpt came from a review of an exhibition on the history of menstruation by Sophia Davis, but my complaint is not with her — she used the words woman and women five times in her piece. My concern is that this specific quote was chosen to be used so provocatively on the cover.
The Lancet — one of the world’s oldest and best-known medical journals — is on a mission. The publication might claim that “improving lives is the only end goal,” but editor Richard Horton has grand plans. His vision, which he laid out in 2016 is political revolution.
“The idea of the Lancet was born at an extraordinary moment in the history of the world in the early 19th century which was a moment of political revolution and social revolt. We have to capture that idea every single day in what we do… What I think we’re trying to achieve now is to capture that original idea – the essence of who we are, our identity, in these campaigns that we are developing.”
This journal is of course no stranger to controversy. In 1998, it published Andrew Wakefield’s now notorious article that linked the MMR vaccine with chronic enterocolitis and autism. By the time that paper was retracted — 12 years later — children had been harmed. According to Public Health England, “It had an important impact on MMR coverage which dropped to about 80% nationally in the late nineties and early 2000s and took many years to recover. … Measles cases continued to rise and in 2006 endemic transmission became re-established in the UK.”
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SubscribeRichard Horton is simply one of the numerous class of intellectuals that wish to epater le bourgeois ( shock the conventional middle class) by using language in a way that he hopes will startle. It is an essentially adolescent move where you want to wind up your stuffy parents and grandparents. While it pretends to have some intellectual heft behind it it is merely a trivial emotional spasm and ultimately unworthy of serious analysis despite the excellent and very sensible nature of this article.
Yes, I immediately thought it was like a little boy shouting, “KNICKERS!” in church.
Except. Shouting “KNICKERS!” in church is precisely the sort of thing small bodies with p~nises do. It is endearing and funny and they should of course be disciplined for it. This fellow however is the editor of a once respected scientific journal and absolutely should know better.
Quite right.
I agree with your point, but letting emotionally and intellectually immature lightweights like Horton get away with things will cause real-world harm; they can’t be ignored until they calm down.
Yes, it is not easy to know how to respond to something which was obviously designed to get a rise out of normal women and men and expand the “celebrity” of Horton rather like the early Kim Kardashian. I compared him to an adolescent in my earlier post but in some senses he can be compared to a flasher wishing to both upset and show his contempt for women. Do you treat his display with equal contempt and pass by without deigning to notice it or make a song and dance about it – which is just what he wants.
It would be good if his front page generated a Twitter storm and a grovelling apology and resignation but that doesn’t usually happen to the Horton’s of the world.
A flasher is an individual sad case, society has never lauded flashers! Very different from the high priests of woke ideology.
But he is the bourgeois! Times have changed.
The guy is editor of The Lancet, a supposedly prestigious and influential ‘scientific’ journal. Much as we might want to dismiss it, woke biology denying ideology is powerful and making inroads everywhere (including my Tfl Pensioner magazine!). So it is a pretty serious state of affairs, as almost anyone currently working in the public sector could tell you.
Not just ‘supposedly’, it is a prestigious and influential journal. Which makes this latest nonsense all the more dangerous. And sad. It was to the Lancet that Crick and Watson submitted their seminal paper on the structure of DNA.
Another institution captured.
I wish people would stop referring to them as intellectuals. Naughty little boys/girls would be far more appropriate.
This, of course, isn’t the first foray of the Lancet into disputed territory that’s outside of scientific evidence. Their partnership with the EAT Foundation a few years ago is another prime example.
That report that was widely rubbished by serious scientists for being devoid of any real evidence, but driven instead by an ideology.
I think it’s more a kind of signalling to let other members of the tribe know you are one of them. This use of “bodies” is very common in low grade say-nothing academic pieces – as in “the violence done against black bodies”. I doubt most of the writers could tell us why they use “bodies” instead of “people” except that other tribal members do it too.
To think that they have consciously and thoughtfully adopted some form of dualism is to give them far too much credit.
Incisive comment.
I think you are correct in suggesting the primary motivation in this case is signalling to other members of the woke tribe. However, there is another motivation that affects the publishers of scientific journals and the various scientific Institutes more generally – they are often financially reliant on Government bodies and third sector organisations for funding, and getting that funding relies on adhering to the woke ideology. You can look up the Lancet’s sponsors for its open access journals online, and it includes UK Govt departments and many well-known health charities and foundations. If you have ever had to prepare a tender for a Govt / third sector client, you will be aware of the various requirements to demonstrate your own organisation’s commitments to all the hot topic diversity / inclusivity / environmental issues – even having to write a mini essay to explain how committed your organisation is. And points are awarded in the tender ‘scoring’ process – it’s no excuse to say that as a scientific organisation you are politically neutral and don’t get involved – you will lose points for that. For organisations depending on Govt funding or Govt contracts, it’s a case of “if you don’t go woke, you go broke”. The core problem isn’t just the wokery of editors of scientific journals, it’s the wokery that infuses the civil service / Govt departments, the NGOs and the third sector more generally. We may have a conservative Govt, but the woke are in control.
Agree completely, and without knowing Horton at all, or their biology of choice, I would hazard a guess that they are rarely spotted in public without an equally virtue signalling muzzle covering their face.
Apologies, but had to return to edit my pronouns.
Incidentally, can anyone explain why it isn’t possible to accept that gender (behavioural) is entirely a matter for personal choice, to some extent driven by one’s biology and environment. However, one’s sex (biological) is intrinsic, and even surgery and hormones does not change a persons DNA.
My nephew (who was once my niece, before surgery and hormone therapy, and who now performs the same surgery on others) explains this much better than I can. He is regarded by these morons as transphobic because he believes that ‘transition’ involves a lot more than merely saying that you wish to change sex.
I have absolutely no issue with anyone being whatever they wish to be, but their have to be some hurdles which one must clear to change a person’s sex.
There are ‘hurdles’ in place. Changing one’s sex only occurs within the domain of law – that is, by going through the preconditions for a GRC as outlined by the GRA. When those preconditions are met a legal Fiction is created for a GRC to be issued. The Legal Fiction states they have changed sex only in the domain of law – they will be treated only in the domain of law, as something they are not in reality, in other words having not done so in fact.
As Prof Rosa Freedman stated The law clearly sets out in that case that sex is biological, and that transsexualism (what we would now term transgender) is psychological.
This position of the law almost sounds like a gnostic position as Debbie has laid out. What it doesn’t state is the statistical data on the proportion of people whose gender matches their sex observed and recorded at birth.
Horton is one of the most dangerous people in this country.
The Lancet has so much to answer for. The Wakefield Scandal should have finished it, but the response to Covid and defence of China is in some ways worse.
If there is a wrong tack to take, the lancet will take it. A great shame.
The Lancet has a long history. It may yet recover.
Thank you Debbie Hayton for a voice of sanity on trans issues. “Nobody, not even transgender people, can discern what it feels like to be someone else” needs to be properly understood by the medical profession to stop them encouraging children to make choices based on beliefs, that can change, rather than facts, that cannot change.
Yes, yes, yes!!! I have been so puzzled by the claims of non-women to know that fundamentally they are women, since I myself (XX chromosomes) have no idea at all what being a woman feels like. I know only what it feels like to be me! And another thing – please can we get rid of that ghastly ‘Big Brother’-ish statement “.. such and such a gender was assigned at birth”. I am a midwife, and I can promise you that no-one has ever ‘assigned a gender’ to any infant at birth. What happens is that the infant’s biological sex is inferred from the appearance of the external genitalia (and, sadly, this can in a very few cases prove to have been inaccurate) and announced to the family. How that little personality develops and expresses itself and chooses to live is no business of the birth attendants and we would not wish for that power or responsibility.
It wasn’t printed with the objective of achieving factual correctness, that’s what’s wrong.
Indeed but when is it ever where the subject matter is politically contentious.
Reactionary feminism started biological denialism in the 60s, what goes around comes around.
That’s a reasonable point. What’s interesting now is that mangling the English language under a cloak of scientific respectability is creating common cause between radical feminists from previous generations and people who hold views based on classical liberal or conservative principles.
Indeed. My view is that us classical liberals should stand well back and let the protagonists with most skin in the game fight it out.
Really? Please provide evidence of this “fact”? I have read extensively on so called “reactionary” feminism and have not found any “biological denialism”. Could the reason for this be that I am a woman?
The analogy with feminism just doesn’t work, unless you are truly a very deep reactionary opposed to almost all social change since the 19th century. Feminism is broadly about furthering women’s rights in modern societies, such as at work, in property, marriage etc. Some of it is too extreme, the idea of ‘patriarchy’ made sense over a century ago but not now, but there is reason and fairness at its core. Many feminists, probably most, do accept that there are biological differences between men and women. We can argue about how great those sex based differences are, but also acknowledge that there was a lazy assumption that women could not do x, y or z, and should stay at home. In almost all traditional societies women’s work was extremely important to survival.
Arguing simplistically that ‘trans women are women’ goes on the other hand into the realm of biological and scientific nonsense.
David McDowell – a body is a thing – dehumanised and reduced. I’m not a body, I’m a women, with a vagina and a cervix, and to reduce my sex class to a thing is at best misogynist at worst deliberately othering. If the latter, we are moving towards a world where women only exist as objects with particular biological functions. Why is it so hard to use my noun? Woman. The Lancet has no problem using yours.
That’s fair enough and I can sympathise with how this is making you feel. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that some trans people feel victimised for how others view and speak about their body parts.
Why does a whole sex class- 51% of the population have to be erased to mollify the feelings of a tiny few. Surely the solution is to say women and trans women?
Correction trans men
That would work for me.
Well said ..Good for you
What a Silly-Billy this Horton chap is.
His is a sort of graphic, cheap shot way to get an immediate reaction. But after you have quickly, almost instantly, seen through it you realise it has no substance. The man only wants to tease a reaction and it is just typical condescending tripe that he and his ilk think it is so clever to stoop to..never let them grind you down.
Mr. Horton is obviously an arsehole with a body.
Aside from reducing women to bodies with holes, and making communication about those bodies dangerously opaque, if they’re choosing that take then they need to refer to male bodies in the same way. Which they are not. Ergo: this is sexism.
I suspect if transmen objected loudly to the use of the term “men”in the pages of the Guardian, then we would of course see other tribal members shouting loudly to silence use of that term. Curiously perhaps, they are not.
Gender ideology is a Trojan horse for men to legitimize male access to female spaces. By deconstructing the concept of womanhood to mere sexual organs, they seek to remove the social inhibitions surrounding male behavior toward women. If ideas like this become written into law, in theory there will be no reason to separate men and women in spaces like bathrooms, changing rooms, sports clubs or prisons. In short when a man physically assaults a woman it will not be viewed as particularly heinous. We already see this happening in wrestling events where a man is permitted to smash a woman up with crowds cheering him on.
Strange as society itself becomes feminised it begins to hate women.
The man was not “permitted to smash a woman up” as you put it.
The woman in question wanted to fight a man and did so of her own accord for money. Feminism is about allowing women choice. The choice to dress and make a living however they please.
stop trying to restrict the freedom of others.
“Why has the science journal waded into the gender ideology debate?”It is because the purpose of the publication has been subverted so as to pursue a political ideology.
We thought that once the National Socialists had been defeated, and communism unilaterally proved that it doesn’t work, we might live in a more peaceful, rational and constructive world, but no, the dream of revolution hasn’t only survived, it’s making steady progress, by infiltrating and dominating opinion-forming media, education and institutions overlooked as being vulnerable and useful.
Some years ago the New Scientist had a cover headline of “Darwin Was Wrong”. This was clarified somewhat in the actual article but it reinforced my belief that the New Scientist was becoming a shock/horror gossip magazine so I cancelled my subscription.
Perhaps if enough people cancel their subscription to the Lancet that might have an effect – if it doesn’t inspire them to greater excess?
I too cancelled my NS sub. But after gender adverts began appearing in the centre pages.
Indeed, I did the same!
I see my comment from yesterday has been deleted. Did it trigger someone when I pointed out that female does not require the prefix ‘biological’ since there is no such thing as a non-biological female? Male and female are categories of biological sex, and are observed facts, they are not gender identities.
If we lose science is there any hope?
“If we lose science is there any hope?”
No. Which makes me wonder why there is so little discussion anywhere, even in the few publications not dominated by the hard left, of what we can do to slow/stop/reverse this trend? Even Unherd seems to have an editorial policy of not commissioning articles that consider practical measures for pushing back on wokedom.
Institutions are what carry ideas. We need to either retake our institutions or destroy them and create new ones.
I agree with your point. I was catching up on the news this morning and noted the M25 disruption is still going on and that sparked one of those fleeting insights that tend to disappear as soon as they are formed – in this case I remembered it. I thought immediately of the furore over the Lancet and Davey and Starmer’s political posturings regarding a biological reality.
It seemed to me that the M25 ‘politimoral performance art’ and the ‘politimoral performance art’ of the Lancet, Davey and Starmer involved similar contexts – the basic infrastructures that allow our society to function. Hence the attack on major highways and the attack on common meanings within language.
This need not be intentional but just an outcome of disparate groups going for the most impactful position – the jugular of society.
When the dogma of your politics outweighs the value you put on truth, then the slope down which you slide is slippery indeed.
The Lancet stopped being a serious publication some years back and the fool that now edits this once great publication is a true science denier. I guess these rather childish tweets is all he has left to offer, as the Lancet slips further and further into irrelevance.
I don’t really undestand how this kind of lingo is inclusive (or meant to be, by the author?), like, if the idea is to make language that would be nice and inclusive for trans persons, I can’t possibly see this going down well at a doctor’s appointment
-doctor, I think, I was assigned the wrong gender at birth
-ah, I see, Jeremy, so you identify as a body with a vagina, huh
like, what
This is objectification at its worse. Imagine if an inebriated man in a bar referred to a comely woman as the “body with breasts” at the end of the bar. Women, be they born female or be they transsexual, are more than a list of body parts.
… pointless squabbles over pronouns. Words matter, because if we change the words we use we change the way we think.
The squabbles aren’t pointless because words do matter and Debbie’s observation regarding language illustrates the mechanism by which that Gnostic belief is forced upon us.
That mechanism derives from postmodernism and its analysis of the way we speak about things, that the social justice left have taken and applied to identity politics. Hence applied postmodernism. Thus, if the way we speak about things is controlled – through pursuasion, to convincing to compelling to forcing – then everyone will speak the right mantras and doctrines and everyone will therefore think the right way and not the wrong way.
And so an ideal state will materialise – the liberation from oppression for transgender people, liberation from the persecution and suffering by the confirmation of their privilege wishes – the Gnostic belief – because everyone will be thinking the right way because the way we speak about things will be constructed the right way.
So for the applied postmodernists – perhaps Horton for example? – it has nothing to do with material reality because of the notion that everything is socially constructed (it goes deeper than that of course).[see sovereign nations podcast ‘Seeds of Collectivism’]
Mr. Horton is obviously an rsole with a body.
Why was my previous comment censored?
How do you know that I complain loudly and seek censorship, David McDowell?
Just a guess
Hmm. The context is a statement, not a guess.
Don’t you mean, “the same people who complain loudest when others seek censorship that they dislike”?
Are you new to the comments section?
Nothing if you are happy to be referred to as a body with a p***s
“Could of ” should be could have.
I disagree with everything he has said, but in this case he missed a comma.
Surley men should be bodies with prostates & epididymis in his lexicon.
The Gnosticism idea is fairly interesting, but the rise of the ‘bodies’ language recently has a more prosaic origin – Michael Foucault and Postmodernism.
Of course Foucault had his own reasons for preferring such a de-humanising word…
Yes. More precisely, certain ideas were taken from PM by the critical theorists at the end of the last century and distorted not what we can call Applied PM.[see Cynical Theories by Lindsay and Pluckrose]
One of the down sides of the internet! There are too many people (either unintelligent, nasty or attention seeking) spouting off rubbish to lots of easily influenced people who believe anything and spread it to others as the truth. They need to be either ignored or others need to challenge.
I’d expect little better from “th Lancet”, Far better to read the BMJ
You don’t need to trash Gnosticism to make your point.
Dr Rudolf Steiner once observed that the only surviving records we have of Gnosticism were written by their enemies. Would you believe accounts of a person written only by their enemies?
You are making a physical-world point, and need to consider it within that framework.
If you want to wander into the world of metaphysics, then please learn something about the subject first.
In fact, the claims you cite against the Gnostics are entirely without substance. They are untrue. Gnostics did not reject the physical body in favour of spirit. By basing your argument on such biased sources, you undercut the otherwise worthwhile points you wish to bring forward.
Is the author of this article a Catholic?
Whether consciously as a Catholic, unconsciously as an ex-Catholic, or mistakenly presuming to come from a secular-based “knowledge” about the historical Gnostics, this article does itself a disservice by uncritically quoting Catholic dogma in supposed support of its case.
These sex and gender issues have precisely nothing to do with genuine spirituality, gnostic or otherwise. They concern the relation between the external physical body and the inner etheric or life body, which directs formation of the physical. (The etheric body is also known as the vital, or formative body. In the east, the terms prana or chi have similar meaning, referring to the life forces.)
The key piece of missing knowledge here is that the two sexes have an inverse relationship to each other, insofar as in the man, the physical body is positive/masculine, the inner life body negative/feminine, whereas in the woman the physical body is negative/feminine, the inner life body is positive/masculine. So traditionally, the man’s soul is regarded as feminine—note all the references in literature to the “divine feminine”. Conversely, woman’s soul is masculine—but women weren’t allowed to talk about that.
The entire sex/gender debate can be understood from this knowledge base. The human being is constantly evolving. This includes physical sex and etheric gender. We are in a state of transition. For this reason, it is a good thing that those who find themselves numerically in the minority attain to the courage to bring their experiences forward into the public sphere, so others might come to know about the real broad parameters of current human sexual and gender experience. But balancing this, it is not desirable that anyone should set themselves up as the final word on this subject, since there is no final word, only a constant state of becoming. Charity, tolerance and ethical open-mindedness are, as always, the guidelines here.
I’m not sure I agree. They may have an underlying nefarious motive but they are essentially avoiding confusion in the era of trans-people.
If the Lancet had referred to “women” it would be accused by some of including trans-women in a medical group for which they are essentially irrelevant.
Similarly, saying that “men” should get a prostrate exam would be meaningless for trans-men. I assume they would refer to bodies, or people if you prefer, with prostates.