Cultural Nihilism, American Puritanism, and the Pursuit of Truthiness

A Socio-Cultural Journey Through the Relativisation of Academia and Science

The Trump administration’s attacks on science have intensified in recent months, with far-reaching and damaging policies across several crucial public health domains, from vaccines to dietary guidelines. The levels of insanity seemingly have no boundaries, including the recent “Tylenol causes autism” crock of quackery. So egregious are the Trump administration’s attacks on science, objectivity, and truth, that anyone who stands for the principles of open inquiry and empiricism must necessarily oppose this regressive, anti-intellectual crusade.

Yet within this opposition, the issue has, predictably, calcified along partisan lines, with Left/liberals suddenly decrying the politicisation of academia and science. This is gratuitous and opportunistic, because what the MAGA/MAHA Right are now doing to the sciences is precisely what Left-liberals did to the humanities, arts, and social studies over preceding decades—an assault on empiricism, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth. The primary distinction is that Trumpism is wielding the power of the state, while the Left/liberal attack on positivist empiricism came from within academic institutions themselves, using the “long march through institutions” approach.

While much of the Left/liberal assault on empiricism was historically localised to the humanities, arts, and social studies, the same pervasive relativist rot has been increasingly evident within science for the past five years, particularly regarding the interface of scientific research and liberal socio-cultural-political shibboleths. It might be comforting to think that until Trump 2.0, academic research and science were open intellectual systems of inquiry, pursuing truth without fear or favour. An overview of the nexus between academia and politics over the past half-century, however, reveals a different picture, one in which the politicised and anti-intellectual antecedents of the present moment become clear.

Open Inquiry and Its Enemies

A brief primer on the underpinning basis of integrity in our methods of intellectual inquiry is warranted. When people use the term “science”, this may have several meanings:

1. The body of knowledge derived from research and empirical testing;

2. Specific disciplines of study, research institutions and ancillary bodies, such as academic journals, that provide the infrastructure of research in those disciplines;

3. The specific method of inquiry, termed “the scientific method”, which is derived from a specific ontology and epistemology.

The method is what we are presently concerned with. What is referred to as “the scientific method” denotes the ontology and epistemology, respectively, of realism and empiricism (or positivism). Ontology is concerned with questions over the nature of reality; epistemology deals with questions of knowledge and how we acquire knowledge. Simply put, ontology asks, “What is there to be known?”, while epistemology asks, “How can we come to know it?” Realist ontology posits the existence of an objective reality which is observable and discoverable; positivist epistemology asserts that we can gain knowledge of this reality through empirical observation and experimental testing.

Referring to this combined ontologic and epistemic framework of inquiry as “the scientific method” provides a somewhat misleading sense that this method is unique to specific disciplines we, in today’s parlance, term “science”, like physics, chemistry, or medicine. In fact, the method denotes a much broader application, owing to the meaning of the Latin word, scientia: knowledge and learning. Thus, properly understood, the method of scientia describes the basis of rigorous intellectual inquiry across all academic disciplines, in which truth claims are subject to constant empirical testing, and where the robustness of any idea or theory reflects the rigour of the empirical testing it has survived. This applies to the humanities as to the sciences. Note that positivism also underpins our legal systems; what is the presumption of innocence if not a null hypothesis?

Other ontological and epistemic positions exist on the continuum; idealist/subjectivist ontology (i.e., reality is a construct) and rationalist (i.e., innate knowledge and a priori reason as a source of knowledge) epistemology have attempted to provide alternative approaches. They are, however, rendered incapable by their very own operational definitions of producing the same level of rigour in whatever discipline they are applied. Subjectivism may be useful for adding a human voice to positivist inquiry. However, when it provides the foundation of inquiry in and of itself, subjectivism inevitably produces moral and epistemic relativism and provides no mechanism for resolving competing truth claims. In the humanities, this is often evident in the absurd concepts of “epistemic justice” and “indigenous ways of knowing”, which conflate what may be other ways of understanding the world with the accuracy and precision of those beliefs. Subjectivist and rationalist approaches to knowledge conflate claims to truth with truth itself, confuse assertions of fact with fact, and mistake the pretence of knowledge for empirical knowledge.

It is often said that the scientific method is self-correcting. However, this is not an inherent characteristic, as it requires certain prevailing conditions for self-correction to function. The guiding principle for self-correction to function, articulated in the seminal book The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, is openness. Popper envisaged the key to social progress as a structure of institutions in society that facilitated open intellectual inquiry, but crucially, ensured that the fruits of that inquiry were open to critique, active deliberation, and falsification. In Popper’s concept of an open society, disparate views and perspectives were considered a prerequisite, as the constant testing of such divergent views and their modification based on empirical evidence provided the basis of progress. It is in such conditions of an open information ecosystem that the scientific method is self-correcting.

A useful illustration of the importance of an open system of inquiry may be found in Popper’s analogy of the black swan, which he used to highlight the concept of falsifiability. If we test a theory that “all swans are white”, the observation of thousands of white swans supports the theory. Yet the sighting of just one black swan is sufficient to falsify the theory, no matter how many white swans have been observed. In an open system of inquiry, the premise that “all swans are white” remains a theory open to falsification; it prevents the theory from morphing into a dogma, into a received truth of the nature of reality. The dangers of a closed information system are that those within the system come to assume that “all swans are white” is a self-evident truth, and all further inquiry proceeds from that assumption. In a closed system, when a black swan is discovered, the impetus is to protect the assumed truth that “all swans are white” and dismiss, deny, or suppress, the observation of the black swan.

Further, if a particular epistemic framework allows for the declaration that “all swans are white” to be accepted as a self-evident truth, or assumes that “all swans are white” is true based on conditional characteristics of the speaker, then it ceases to be falsifiable and thus, in the Popperian definition, is pseudoscientific. Closed information systems engender a hierarchical organisation of knowledge and truth claims, favouring a select elite—whether priests, professors, or politburo—who are bestowed with the power to determine truth as they see it. Open systems of intellectual inquiry provide the antidote to closed systems that favour dogma and resist challenges to elite arbiters of truth, by facilitating ongoing testing of truth claims in a system where knowledge is organised around empirically verifiable facts. This distinction is crucial for contemporary academia and science; if specific disciplines, or indeed entire institutions, shift from open to closed systems of inquiry, they become incapable of producing robust and reliable knowledge.

Yet this shift is precisely what occurred in the humanities and social studies, a process which developed in earnest during the 1960s and accelerated over subsequent decades. And it is now evident in certain domains of science, a process which I’ve referred to as the “postmodernisation of science”. Following the previous essay on this topic, the present essay aims to explore some questions regarding the antecedent drivers of the postmodernisation of science. When and how did the culture of academic institutions and science shift away from their positivist underpinnings? Why did entire disciplines become closed systems seeking to defend their assertions of truthiness, rather than openly pursue truth itself? What factors drove the propagation of certain fashionable political dogmas and ideologies within academia? And how did the culture of academia and science evolve into one that polices consensus, however manufactured, and that prioritises notions of “justice” and “equity” over the pursuit of truth?

It is worth examining how such a Cultural Revolution could have occurred.

French Intellectual Nihilism and Marxist Theory Sans Social Class

The origins of this Cultural Revolution can be traced to the post-Second World War social, cultural, and political disillusionment with modernity, which precipitated the emergence of philosophical schools of thought characterised by the prefix “post”, implying the emergence of something new that goes beyond the defining characteristics of the preceding epoch. What historically is referred to as the Modern Era, the dominant paradigm of Western societies from the Reformation, was characterised by the values of the Enlightenment: progress, science, secularisation, and reason. In literature and the arts, however, the term Modernism describes a movement that emerged in the mid-19th Century as a reaction to the constraints of Victorian morality and to the rapid industrialisation and social change of the Industrial Revolution. Literary Modernism blended scathing socio-cultural and political critiques with expressions of hope and optimism, a sense of light at the end of the dark tunnel. In the aftermath of the First World War, which had eroded faith in the social and political order, literary Modernism flourished.

The Second World War further shattered faith in humanity and the aspirational ideals and values of the Modern Era. To many intellectuals, the Modernist values of progress, reason, and scientific-technological advancement violated their presuppositions in the scale of human slaughter and horrors of the war. The post-war pessimistic intellectual climate in Europe provided fertile soil for the emergence of reactionary literary, philosophical, and artistic schools of thought, characterised as “post-modernist”, “post-structuralist”, and “deconstructionist” rejections of the guiding assumptions of Modernism. Although each of these domains may be distinguished as intellectual disciplines, they share certain core characteristics that render the term “postmodernism” suitable as a nomenclature for the overarching epistemic framework. Specifically, the unifying epistemology of the strands of postmodernism assorted radical scepticism of reason and objectivity, rejected so-called “grand narratives” and the existence of universal truths, and embraced relativist and subjectivist interpretations of the social, cultural, and political world.

These schools of thought would find their most enthusiastic pioneers among disaffected post-war French intellectuals, a motley crew of socialists and paedophiles whose bitter cynicism and deep disillusionment found expression in a form of academic vandalism based on the epistemic presupposition that there is no objective reality, and that society is comprised of systems of power, where language provides the legitimising source of power. “Power” is thus maintained through linguistic constructions, which are deployed to establish the “hegemony” of one group or system over others. Hence, for example, the popular claim of French postmodernists that the “power” and perceived authority of science is based on a construction of language to provide “legitimation” to science, not on the value of its epistemology and characteristics of empiricism, falsifiability, and reproducibility. This epistemic shift to radical subjectivism has been described as the “linguistic turn” of 20th-century philosophy. The worm at the core of postmodernism, however, is that the interrogation of language never has to correspond with reality. To quote from a 3am Thoughts essay in 2023:

“Thus, for example, if we were to consider layers of meaning in a Shakespeare play, we would recognise the presence of metaphor and allegory, and meaning beyond simply the literal words on the page. Yet the interpretation of that text would attempt to correspond our understanding of that text to reality, i.e., what do we know of the history of that period, or the author’s personal views, etc. Accordingly, there would be limits to what we would, or would not, read into the text. For the postmodernist, the interrogation of language would have no such constraints, and because language only relates to other language rather than any material reality, the words of the text could be “deconstructed” repeatedly to produce whatever language soup of relational interpretation the inquisitor sought.”

The French intellectuals who provided the vanguard for this cynical subjectivism were highly political, drawn from the ranks of the French far-Left, and were animated by political activism. Yet the scepticism and linguistic deconstruction of the world in the works of the postmodernists reflected the comforts of the “armchair radical”, the very epitome of the problem with cloistered academics insulated from the need for their ideas to have contact with reality. Their ire at the West—at capitalism, democracy, science, universal values—translated into a cultural and intellectual nihilism, ensconced in the ivory tower and always safe from the maddening crowd. This dangerous combination of relativism and nihilism, while insulated from the consequences of their ideologies, would be articulated in various morally reprehensible ways, from delighting in the massacres of the Algerian FLN, to gushing over the Islamic Revolution in Iran, to defending sex with children. You can see the ripple effects of this today as American university students fawn over Hamas and Hezbollah, and Leftist academics work to “destigmatise” paedophilia by relativising it as “Minor Attracted Persons”.

It would be unfair to state that the postmodernists produced nothing of interest or value. If you can suffer through the tendentious reasoning and the deliberately obscurantist prose, there are some interesting insights in, for example, Baudrillard’s concept of “simulations”. However, there is a critical distinction between individual ideas which may have utility and are the products of insightful individual thought, and an overarching epistemic framework within which knowledge is produced. The problem is that as an epistemology within which knowledge is produced, postmodernism is unserious and lacks rigour, is fundamentally anti-intellectual, cloaks superficiality in obfuscation, and engenders the proliferation of what Sokal and Bricmont termed “fashionable nonsense” in academic trends. The kernels of insight are the exception that proves the rule, that the disciplines to which postmodern epistemology is applied produce an overwhelming mass of sloppy academic pseudo-scholarship. And as postmodernism seeped into society and culture in the ensuing decades, the relativisation of reality and truth forged the incoherent, disorientating information landscape of contemporary socio-cultural and political discourse. As argued in a previous 3am Thoughts essay, Trump is the first truly post-modern president, the logical political endpoint of postmodern anti-intellectualism, of destabilising language and embracing cynical relativism.

Overlaying the emergence of postmodernism in the post-war period was a separate intellectual movement in Germany that emanated from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in the early 1920s. Often referred to as the “Frankfurt School” of philosophy, it originated as a Marxist-based social studies discipline that combined aspects of Marxist social theory and Freudian psychoanalysis with Hegelian philosophy, in particular the concept of alienation. This approach would become known as “Critical Theory”, derived from a 1937 essay by one of the Frankfurt School’s pioneers, Max Horkheimer. To Horkheimer, the essential ingredient of what made a theory “critical” was the ability to convert the theory into political action and affect change. He believed that the ultimate goal of any analytical framework should be to identify and understand ways in which oppression operates, to develop effective means of liberation from that system. Frankfurt School academics, including Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, were highly influential to the post-war New Left. Marcuse in particular shaped aspects of the New Left that remain recognisable today, such as the endorsement of intolerance and the “Year Zero” approach to a radical social and political reset in the image of Leftist ideals.

The Frankfurt School produced some important critiques of authoritarianism, mass consumer culture, and the psychological struggle for recognition, building on Hegel. However, the fundamental characteristic of critical theory-based analysis was that, despite its Marxist-inspired origins, it substituted class for culture. Replacing social class-based analysis with culture-based analysis as the core of political critiques fostered an emphasis on new classes of individuals, defined by social identity, with a heavy emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality. If postmodernism provided the linguistic turn in 20th-century philosophy, critical theory gave rise to the cultural turn in Leftist political analysis. Such political analysis was grounded in the experiences of specific social groups considered oppressed, historically and/or contemporaneously, and would eventually incorporate the concept of “intersectional” forms of oppression. Theory-based analysis would thus become applied to whole swathes of academic disciplines, from critical race theory, which initially emerged as the application of critical theory to racial issues in legal scholarship, to critical gender theory, to “critical fatness” (which is every bit as absurd as it sounds). And within the cultural turn of theory-based analysis lay the genesis for the moralisation of politics, and the atomisation of the Left into a zero-sum competition in the marketplace of oppression.

The cultural turn was not only confined to political analysis; it recentred Leftist action away from class-based organisations to the unique cultural confines of the universities. Divorced from the working class, the universities provided an incubator for the propagation of culture-based political analyses. This would have enormous ramifications for the subsequent development of New Left theory from the later 20th century onwards, and dominate the 21st-century Progressive Left, as Leftism was effectively reduced to an exercise in academic theorising with little practical nexus to political action or class-based politics. The revolutionaries of the New/Progressive Left would be middle-class guilty White kids with degrees in gender studies or post-colonial theory, making sweeping assumptions of “complicity” with “systems of oppression” while benefitting from the materialistic capitalist social structures their rhetoric appeared to decry. The moralisation of politics displaced collective action with an emphasis on the individual to “do the work”, and the atomisation of identity provided corporations with the opportunity to foreground support for “marginalised communities” while the structures of corporate power remained unchallenged and unchanged. What we came to term “identity politics” is, in effect, a form of pseudo-Leftist-radicalism entirely compatible with, and reliant on for its socio-cultural power, hyper-individualistic neoliberal capitalism.

It is important to note, as Andrew Doyle has highlighted, that there is no straight line between postmodernism and critical theory, nor necessarily between the ideas of the original generation of postmodernists and Frankfurt School social theorists, and the pseudo-scholarship associated with these fields produced by Anglophone academics over the past three or so decades. Nevertheless, it was the convergence of postmodern relativism with theory-based social analysis that would produce a proliferation of pseudo-scholarship, most notably in American universities, directed at the humanities, arts, and social studies. The resulting disciplines, whether related to race, gender, sexuality, colonialism or literature, often draw indirectly on critical theories or underlying postmodern epistemology, a contributory factor in why these disciplines tend to produce incoherent and contradictory ideologies. The question is, how did the mental masturbation of French paedophiles and the socio-cultural theorising of Marxist-inspired German philosophers become the lingua franca of the American academy, and the ideas of their bastardised academic offspring become catnip for college-educated Anglophone urban professionals?

European Cynical Nihilism Meets American Puritan Protestantism

The genesis for this development lies in the most influential social convulsion America experienced in the 20th Century: Vietnam. The United States emerged from the Second World War not only as the premier global economic and military superpower but also with a very particular narrative about the transcendent moral purpose of America in the world intact. America had tipped the balance of the war in the Pacific and in Western Europe, sacrificing men and materials to do so. Domestically, the war came during the New Deal era, and the war itself contributed to unprecedented social mobility through the GI Bill of Rights. Servicemen from dirt-poor rural towns or urban tenements were able to get a degree and move into previously inaccessible careers. For the post-war working class, the roaring industrial economy meant that an industrial worker could earn a decent wage, become a homeowner, and put kids through college. While not all American citizens shared equally in this social contract, the Warren Court of the period developed jurisprudence grounded in the advancement of civil rights. Importantly, this was also an era of generally competent public life, characterised by high levels of trust between the American people and their institutions of state, from the federal government to the Supreme Court.

The immediate postwar years in Europe, amid the ruins of war, crumbled empires, and devastated economies, provided fertile ground for disaffected intellectuals to produce cynical scholarship and anti-Western ideologies. Conversely, the immediate postwar years in America were years of unparalleled confidence in American liberal democracy, the American social contract, and, juxtaposed against the Soviet Union, in the concept of an American-led Western order. The Vietnam War would shatter this post-war narrative, creating the fault lines in American society and politics still palpable and influential in the “culture wars” of today. Unlike the full society-wide mobilisation of the Greatest Generation, the brunt of the Vietnam War was borne by America’s underclass, impoverished Black kids from Georgia thrown in with poor White kids from Oklahoma farms. Middle-class and well-off kids going to college were granted deferments or found ways around the draft, and it was this section of America’s privileged college-educated class who ultimately formed the vanguard of the anti-war and Counterculture movements. While initially sympathetic to the plight of draftees, in scenes prophetic of the moral narcissism of today’s American college-educated Progressive Left, dope-smoking entitled middle-class kids would hurl abusive cries of “baby killer” at traumatised working-class boys plunged into hell in foreign fields.

Yet Vietnam was not merely a betrayal of America’s underclass; the war itself, for the first time in the post-Second World War period, revealed the cynicism of political power and political leaders, the triumph of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned about, and the prioritising of corporate interests over the interests of ordinary citizens. Nixon would add outright corruption to this demoralising picture. And antecedent fractures in the American social contract, such as the disenfranchisement of Black Americans, papered over by the gloss of the Greatest Generation, were thrust into the fore as young Black soldiers were disproportionately represented in combat units for a country that went out of its way to segregate and discriminate against them at home. Precipitated by the Vietnam War, the disaffection of post-war European intellectuals finally found a vehicle for expression in America. Yet the class-based divisions of labour for Vietnam concentrated the intellectual disaffection in American universities, which became the most visible American institutions to vehemently oppose the war. Radicalism was the order of the day, at a time when Left-wing ideologies and activism, following the lead of Marxist-inspired “anti-colonialism” and revolutionary movements in Europe, were fetishising violence and rejecting values deemed “Western”. This included, as in post-war Europe, a rejection of Modernist and Enlightenment ideals.

But in the Counterculture Revolution, The Man ultimately won. The hippies graduated, put on ties, and went on to have the proverbial 2.4 children and white picket fence. And the other middle-class Leftist kids, who during those heady years became more addicted to ideology than to LSD, retreated into the dusty corridors of humanities, arts, and social studies departments in the universities. They found consolation in the nihilism of Foucault, romanticised violence in Sartre, indulged the self-loathing of their whiteness in Fanon, and enshrined Said as the oracle of the Orient. The postmodern turn in the American academy constituted a reflexive reaction to disillusioned Leftists faced with the reality that a counter-culture was never strong enough to counter power. Thus, the power-based linguistic critiques of postmodernism, hidden safely behind the cloistered walls of academia, provided the basis for a new political movement, masked behind an external facade of academic inquiry. In this movement, the failed radicals of the Counterculture metamorphosed into the armchair academic pseudo-radical; if they couldn’t be radicals, they would think like radicals, and apply their relativist ideology to any disciplines they could. The humanities and social studies were easy initial targets given their inherent subjectivity, but even humanities disciplines with more rigorous standards, like history, would eventually fall prey to the pseudo-academic sermonising of America’s new class of high priests.

The impacts on the culture of academia were evident early. In his 1972 book, Social Science as Sorcery, the late Polish sociologist Stanisław Andrzejewski incisively described the nascent academic culture in American universities:

“Although some of the protesting students have potentially good minds, which enable them to see through the sham of conventional jargon, it would be a miracle if they could put their subjects on a correct footing without suitable preparation, particularly as exposure to a sloppy pseudo-science could hardly fail to have stultified their powers of logical reasoning. Moreover, once you jettison the canons of logic and clarity, you can believe any nonsense and you are perfectly free to choose your beliefs according to their emotional appeal... Liberated by their teachers from the constraints of logic, the young rebels have no difficulty in reconciling the ascetic and disciplinarian collectivism of Mao with a compulsive eroticism inspired by a misreading of Freud, and a lipservice to the greatness of the ‘workers’ with a byronesque self-indulgent wilfulness, heedless of the feelings or the welfare of the common herd.”

The political turn within these academic trends was distinct. To be “heedless of the feelings or the welfare of the common herd” could describe the Democratic Party from 2016. As the NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber has pointed out, with class removed as the fulcrum of political analysis and action, the Left’s Cultural Revolution became obsessively focused on a particular concept: representation. This concept was applied specifically to groups deemed to be marginalised, emphasising race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. But with class stripped from the analysis, the theories formulated around such marginalised groups represented the theorising of the tenured middle class. With the ever-expanding theorising of the bored pseudo-radical bourgeois, another important academic trend occurred. Where previously consideration of race, sexuality, gender, etc., had occurred within a given academic discipline, identity-based theories evolved into entirely distinct academic fields, with entire departments dedicated to their study. The specific identity characteristic was no longer a part of the study of, for example, history, but history itself now revolved—and could only be understood—through the lens of race, gender, etc. The result was what Chibber has termed “the balkanisation of academia”.

The epistemic consequences were also distinct, characterised by an extreme form of epistemic relativism, i.e., relativism in relation to knowledge and truth. By centring identity as the fulcrum around which history, politics, society, science, etc., all revolved, this positioned the particular niche identity in question as possessing exclusive knowledge of, e.g., sexuality in history, race in politics, etc., and therefore privileged claims to truth on that subject. The truth of history, for example, was not what could be verified empirically or on the balance of evidence, but what was “true” relative to the perspective of the niche-focused marginalised group. The essential ingredient for privileging knowledge and truth claims within a group was the experience of, or perception of, oppression. This is the epistemic environment that produced the 1619 Project and the litany of recent revisionist histories of imperialism. As the physicist Alan Sokal wrote in 1997, this epistemic relativism “confuses truth with claims of truth, fact with assertions of fact, and knowledge with pretensions of knowledge.” The political consequence was that the academic Left was no longer associated with the pursuit of truth, but was associated instead with specific identity groups where knowledge and claims to truth were deemed to be within the special provenance of a particular identity.

Yet this epistemic shift among the academic Left in American institutions also developed with distinct American characteristics. Andrzejewski had identified within the American cultural climate a “proneness to uncritical enthusiasms”, remarking:

“No wonder then that in the social sciences the Americans have tended to throw themselves with a tremendous energy into one silly craze after another, hailing every pretentious gimmick as an epoch-making ‘break-through’, and then employing their power and wealth to foist their manias upon the rest of the world. Even the new mood of disillusion with the status quo constitutes no exception to this rule, as it amounts to a swing from a gullible admiration to an equally uncritical denigration.”

Underpinning the “manias” that Andrzejewski described is a unique American characteristic, namely the cultural legacy of American Puritanism and the fire-and-brimstone Presbyterianism of the nation’s founding. These foundational strands of American Protestantism are baked into the national psyche, infusing the nominally secular liberal America with a cultural framework obsessed with piety, moral purity, and the strict imposition of social rules and norms. When Andrzejewski spoke of a “proneness to uncritical enthusiasms”, this was a rather polite way of stating that America is a hysterical nation, prone to intermittent explosions of mass social hysteria, a national trait reflective of Reformist religious zeal; the Salem Witch Trials, the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s, the anti-Cathololicism of the 1880s, the nationalist jingoism of the 1890s, the “100% Americanism” of the 1920s, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the hippy counterculture of the 1960s. American hysteria, at least, is bipartisan. The identity politics of the 1990s through to the contemporary American Progressive Left, and now its dialectical opposition in the MAGA Right, are merely the most recent manifestations of this cultural hysteria. No other country in the Western world exhibits this cultural tendency to moral frenzy more than America.

Shaped by this cultural context, the unique contribution of American academics in the humanities and social studies departments of their overwhelmingly Left-liberal institutions was to infuse the nihilistic, cynical relativism of European postmodernism and niche identity focus of critical theories with American Puritanical piety. In this construct, oppression is elevated to the status of Christ’s suffering, the cross carried by marginalised groups for the sins of “Whiteness”, the West, and the Enlightenment. Thus bestowed with the omniscience of the Sacred, possessed of special knowledge and insight into truths, any challenge to the veracity of such claims becomes tantamount to heresy. The tenets of the subject become enshrined as articles of faith, Sacred Values treated as transcendental, and thus beyond the pale for critique. As a transgression against the Sacred Values, heresy is punishable by excommunication (in the form of “cancellation”, “no-platforming”, or firing) and social (media) ostracisation of the offender by the True Believers. To reaffirm their belief in the Sacred Values, the True Believers engage in public displays of moral outrage and moral cleansing; the former, an expression of righteous indignation and fury, excoriating the perceived sinner for their transgression; the latter, a performance to other Believers of one’s unwavering, uncompromising belief in the Sacred Values.

This quasi-religious epistemology, reinforced across multiple domains of academic disciplines, produced an ideological monoculture in the humanities and social studies, militantly policed and enforced. In the hyper-subjectivist and anti-intellectual epistemology of this bastardised postmodern secular American Puritanism, the “something studies” departments created a closed system academic environment in which ideas and theories could be taken to an extreme, blind to the consequences of distorting reality, truth, and empiricism. Propagating an anti-empiricist ideological monoculture fostered an atmosphere of intolerance, with disconfirming evidence or refutation met with irrational, hysterical denunciation. Positivist epistemic values such as humility, open inquiry, and falsifiability were supplanted by epistemic arrogance, moral certitude, and unfalsifiability. These epistemic traits, combined in a closed system resistant to external scrutiny, have produced socio-cultural and political ideologies of profound intellectual and moral incoherence. And as these characteristics filtered out into the wider culture through successive generations of graduates, so the Progressive Left came to be defined by these pathological intellectual traits. We have witnessed the incoherence, moral certitude, and irrationality of Progressivism lurch from one hysterical outbreak to another over the past five years, from Floyd to Falasteen.

It is important to note that this is not simply a recent temporal flashpoint in the interminable “culture wars”; there is a long history of principled objections against the metastasis of this intellectual cancer in universities. Jonathan Rauch’s ‘Kindly Inquisitors’ was published in 1993, distinguishing the “liberal science method”, in which knowledge is created and continually tested empirically, from “intellectual egalitarianism” that judged the outcomes of knowledge creation according to its relationship with perceived oppressed groups. Rauch argued that in the epistemic framework of liberal science, if knowledge produced from the method is robust to empirical scrutiny, then the outcomes must not be suppressed or doctored, even if they may be considered offensive or unpalatable. In effect, Rauch was arguing for the preservation of a distinction between knowledge, acquired through a system of empirical inquiry, and beliefs, which may be held in the face of contrary evidence. By the early 1990s, academia was a place of speech codes and “intellectual egalitarianism”, which was Rauch’s polite term for suppressive academic safetyism.

The historian Richard Evans published In Defence of History in 1997, responding to the new postmodern orthodoxy “infecting a disturbing number of young historians, above all in the United States…”, and its epistemic relativism, “by allowing any body to claim that their view of history, their reading of a document, is as valid as anybody else’s, and by making it impossible to refute their arguments on anything but political grounds.” In this 2008 book, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, the historian Michael Burleigh lamented:

“Within my lifetime, academics studied such subjects as the comparative history of parliaments or war finance; they are now more likely to be experts on gay and lesbian body art, serial killers, or the persecution of witches, rivalling television in their popu-list [sic] pursuit of the lurid or trivial. A glance through any catalogue of academic books—that is, those written in incomprehensible jargon and with pages of footnotes to prove earnestness—shows how unserious academics have become as a group.”

Yet perhaps the seminal moment which revealed the new academic orthodoxy as a naked emperor was a 1996 paper submitted to the journal Social Text, with the obscurantist title, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, submitted by two French physicists. The authors applied postmodern, obfuscating language to physics to produce a paper that was deliberately incomprehensible to any reader, “brimming with absurdities dressed up in fancy scientific and pseudo-scientific jargon.” For example:

“…the π of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.”

The paper was accepted and published, drawing ire from the relativist humanities and social studies disciplines after the hoax was revealed, predictably attacking the authors’ intentions and character. What Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont had highlighted, however, was the prevalence of academic obscurity in social studies, the seemingly deliberate approach of deploying incomprehensible jargon. They stripped the emperor of his clothes, revealing that the postmodernists had “become international stars primarily for sociological rather than intellectual reasons, and in part because they are masters of language and can impress their audience with a clever abuse of sophisticated terminology…” The naked emperor was exposed for presiding over an academic realm in the humanities and social studies where ideas were accepted based on intellectual fashions and dogma, rather than based on empirical rigour and persuasive power.

Camille Paglia once remarked that “the elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs in the history of cults.” Yet up until recently, those same academics were largely confined to the humanities, arts, and social studies. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the epistemic and moral relativism of the postmodernists was transmitted from the humanities departments into the sciences.

Postmodern Science and TheScience™ as a Sacred Value

It seems possible to pinpoint 2020 as the year when the postmodernisation of science, and the political co-opting by liberals of TheScience™ as a Sacred Value, became publicly visible. While there was likely a longer latency period preceding 2020, the seismic shock of the pandemic and the death of George Floyd triggered the manifestation of overt symptoms. The most visible symptom was the shift from judging scientific research by its empirical rigour and the integrity of the methods to instead judging the socio-cultural-political utility of the outcome. This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it is an inversion of a principle fundamental to the scientific method that knowledge produced by empirically valid means should stand, warts and all. To determine the validity of an outcome relative to the particular social cause to which it relates is a distinctly postmodern epistemic standard.

For example, a 2020 paper published in Nature Communications found that junior female scientists benefited more from male mentors than from female mentors. Verboten! The authors elected to retract the paper following the apoplexy that followed its publication, citing a specious methodological reason regarding their definition of “mentorship” in the paper. This is specious because researchers have certain degrees of freedom, and a detail such as this, which is neither fraudulent nor necessarily an error, would ordinarily not warrant a retraction. In fact, the statement by the journal gave the game away:

“Readers are alerted that this paper is subject to criticisms that are being considered by the editors. Those criticisms were targeted to the authors’ interpretation of their data that gender plays a role in the success of mentoring relationships between junior and senior researchers, in a way that undermines the role of female mentors and mentees.” [Emphasis added].

Translation: the findings were not sufficiently Truthy for a liberal view of gender roles, and the journal caved to the “criticisms” of the paper based on the perceived CorrectThink of the findings. And we know it was a specious retraction because the authors stated in their retraction letter:

“Although we believe that all the key findings of the paper with regards to co-authorship between junior and senior researchers are still valid, given the issues identified by reviewers about the validation of key measures, we have concluded that the most appropriate course of action is to retract the Article. We are an interdisciplinary team of scientists with an unwavering commitment to gender equity, and a dedication to scientific integrity.” [Emphasis added].

The order of the final sentence is particularly revealing for the postmodernisation of science. Scientific integrity was placed second to “gender equity”, betraying the real reason for the paper’s retraction; the validity of the outcomes, which the authors stood over, were judged not on their merits, but relative to the social issue, as perceived from a particular world view, to which the findings related. More damning still to Nature caving because the outcomes failed to fit whatever social interpretation of the world they considered appropriate for publication was the fact that, using similar methodology, the authors had published a previous paper which found that ethnically diverse research collaborations enhanced the impact of scientific papers (and which also included data on sex, indicating greater participation of females in science). Bravo! That was allowed to stand because, no doubt, DiversityIsOurStrength™. Two papers from the same group using broadly similar methods were subject to entirely different standards based on the perceived socio-political utility of the outcomes. That is politicised bias.

Nowhere has this policing of outcomes according to politicised socio-cultural worldviews been more virulent, however, than in relation to the affirmative care model for gender dysphoric youth. In the UK, philosophy professor Kathleen Stock produced several academic critiques of common claims made within gender studies, particularly emphasising how sex and gender were defined in those disciplines. Stock was forced into early retirement due to the scale of abuse hurled in her direction, death threats included, while police advised her to stay away from campus and teach online to avoid the mobs of students baying for her firing (and death). In 2018, a then-assistant professor at Brown University, Lisa Littman, published a paper in the journal PloS One, an observational analysis which suggested that social contagion may explain the sudden increase in prevalence of adolescent girls declaring a trans identity despite no history of gender dysphoria, which the author termed “rapid onset gender dysphoria”. Verboten! Witch! A Witch! You can guess what happened next. In a lengthy handwashing of academic censorship, Brown also gave the true game away: “Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”

Disguising censorship with compassion, Brown was essentially stating that any evidence that might “discredit”—read: raise questions about—an unethical and pseudoscientific model of care by questioning its guiding assumptions should be censored; and that if the findings failed to accord with the social cause to which they relate in ways deemed acceptable to Left/liberals, they must not stand. And as a litany of research after Littman’s case confirmed, academic freedom was subjugated and manipulated to invent justifications for an unethical model of care (see this previous essay for more on his issue). To quote from one paper critical of the climate of ideological censoriousness:

“An ideological Iron Curtain is dropping across university campuses throughout North America. In this new Cancel Culture, anyone potentially offended by course content, viewpoints taken by faculty and/or research findings that are contrary to popular opinion or sensibility, can spread their righteous indignation on social media and embellish it into ad hominem attacks, to the point that it can damage—or even cancel—the careers of productive sexual scientists… The end result is an almost foregone conclusion: The faculty member is found guilty and removed from teaching or positions of responsibility in the university, suspended or even fired.”

No issue in science and medicine has revealed the postmodern supplanting of positivist epistemology in medicine and science more than this. To quote from the previous 3am Thoughts essay:

“The model was distinctly postmodern in that paediatric gender activist-clinicians deployed language (“kids know who they are” ... “innate identity” ... “science is settled”) to supplant research and invent a model of medical care based on non-existent evidence. Evidence for the use of puberty blockade drugs was replaced with a claim that such interventions were “pressing the pause button”. The treatments were “life-saving”, weaponising the threat of suicide which was simply absent from the available published research specifically addressing that outcome. Postmodern paediatric gender medicine moved to language-based modes of “constructing” its own evidential reality while “deconstructing”, usually by kicking and screaming, any disconfirming evidence. This is a field that operated, as the Cass Review makes clear, with little to no transparency, and no regard for standards of proof and evidence, no regard for consequences.”

One of the characteristics of the work of the postmodernists was co-opting scientific language and blending it into non-scientific writing, a feature that Sokal and Bricmont identified as part of the background research for their academic hoax. To quote:

“…we discovered Lacan lucubrating on topology, Deleuze and Guattari on calculus, Irigaray on logic and fluid mechanics, Latour and Virilio on relativity, Baudrillard on chaos theory and non-Euclidean geometry, Debray and Serres on Gödel’s theorem. These texts are confused at best, meaningless at worst. But, above all, the authors give no indication that they are trying honestly to communicate ideas to their readers.”

An interesting feature of the postmodernisation of science is that the reverse is now the case; the Truthy-sounding language soup of postmodern relativism and faith-based premises about the nature of reality is now evident in science. One striking example of this can be found in the journal policies section of Cell, a biological sciences journal. The journal offers guidance on reporting sex- and gender-based analyses, which includes a “Definitions” section with the following:

“Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female or male; woman or man), concordant, and static. However, these constructs exist along a spectrum that includes additional sex categorizations and gender identities, such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development (DSD) or identify as non-binary. In any given person, sex and gender might not align, and both can change… Authors should use the term "sex assigned at birth" rather than "biological sex," "birth sex," or "natal sex," as it is more accurate and inclusive.”

This is the style of pseudo-profound bullshit that typifies the postmodern humanities and social studies, yet here it is in a supposedly prestigious biological sciences journal. Stylistically, it reads like a bad essay from the proverbial blue-haired Berkeley Becky under the spell of Judith Butler; it mirrors the postmodern strategy of obfuscation by blending falsifiable statements (i.e., that sex is not binary)¹, ideologically-motivated linguistic constructions (i.e., “assigned sex at birth”), and deliberately disingenuous arguments (i.e., that exceptionally rare developmental disorders constitute “additional sex categories”). For Cell to say that such relativist, ideological language soup is “more accurate” is hard to fathom for a biological sciences journal, openly revealing politicised, ideological capture. This language is not derived from biological sciences; it is lifted straight from the Progressive Left corners of the humanities. And yet now, under Trump, liberal academics are rushing to decry the politicisation of science and sound the alarm over ideology supplanting evidence. This is not a principled position. The reality is that when the politicised, ideological rot came from Leftfield, the supposed principles of Left/liberal academics were nowhere in sight.

One of the characteristics of the postmodernisation of science is the manner in which scientific language, and the language of evidence and rigour, is deployed in the service of anti-intellectual or pseudo-scientific worldviews. You’ll hear people confidently state that the sex binary has “been debunked”, that there is “The New Science of Sex and Gender”, that the term biological sex is “meaningless pseudoscience”. Deploying such language reduces public discourse on science to linguistic constructions of “science”, rather than science as a product of a specific ontological and epistemic framework. The scientific method is thus supplanted by language-based modes of constructing a new “scientific” reality, where obscurantist language games mask ideology while seeking to convey authority. In this way, science was reduced from an endeavour for acquiring knowledge and getting to the truth, to a project for politically Left/liberals to leverage the perceived authority of science to manufacture “truth” claims for contested socio-cultural-political ideologies. This metamorphosis may be pejoratively referred to as “TheScience™”. When MAHA public health gurus simply declare that Tylenol causes autism, or that national dietary guidelines are based on “flawed science” and new guidelines will be based on “the latest science”, they are borrowing plays from the postmodern playbook of TheScience™, conjuring linguistic constructions of a new “scientific” reality.

In its origins, TheScience™ has primarily been evident at the interface between scientific research and social, cultural, and political issues and worldviews, leveraged to a Left/liberal-leaning bias. As the defining characteristic of Left/liberal relativist epistemology is the sacralisation of the oppressed, TheScience™ was thus elevated to the status of a Sacred Value. Science as a Sacred Value underpins the American liberal rallying cry of “We Believe Science is Real”, declared alongside statements like “sex is a spectrum”, with no hint of irony in sight. The logical and scientific incoherence of these fellow traveller statements goes unrecognised, because “We Believe Science is Real” does not in fact mean a commitment to realist ontology and positivist epistemology; the word “science” in this statement only has meaning insofar as it can be leveraged to claim that their socio-cultural worldveiw is “real”, no matter how untethered from reality and science it is.

One cannot understand the MAHA Right and the current assault on academia and science, in any intellectually serious and honest way, without understanding how science came to be viewed by many people to the right of the Progressive Left as a biased instrument of enforcing a very particular worldview on society. Much of that case, as the foregoing illustrates, has merit. If Left/liberals in science genuinely believe in empiricism and truth, why did they say and do nothing to object to the postmodernisation of science?

Every Why Needs a Wherefore

We are still left with the question of why such a shift occurred. I appreciate that this essay is now a tome, and I think we could speculate on myriad factors that may have influenced this shift, but there are several that appear to stand out:

1. Overwhelming Left-leaning political representation in academic institutions.

2. Prioritising the consideration of whether research has arrived at the “correct” outcomes by reference to an American social justice and “harm” perspective, and prioritising cultures of safety and fairness (or “equity” in the vernacular) in institutions over merit-based hierarchies and the pursuit of truth.

3. A culture of politicised and ideological homogeneity, where Left/liberal academics, even if they see the bullshit, never “call out” nonsense that comes from within their ranks.

The first point is clear in any analysis of the political leanings of faculty in American universities and is supported by empirical evidence. Notably, the trend has shown a sharp divergence since the early 2000s, as illustrated in the figure below.

Source: The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty (1969-1984) and the HERI Faculty Survey (1989-2016).

However, beyond the crude “liberal” vs. “conservative” categorisation, the sharp rise in the proportions of liberal faculty is not simply an increase in milquetoast Ezra Klein-esque liberals, but rather appears to have been driven in part by substantial increases in faculty who identify as Far Left politically, evident in the figure below from the same data.

The timing of this dramatic Leftward political shift, set against an already liberal-dominated academy, must also be considered in the context of increasingly bloated university bureaucracies in which university administrators are overwhelmingly (~71%) Left/liberals. To quote political scientist Samuel J. Abrams, it appears that “a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.” The collective biases of the professoriate and administrators may thus explain the ideological proliferation and intolerance to divergent viewpoints, the identitarian hysteria, speech codes, the bourgeois ennui and neurosis related to race, gender, and sexuality, that have dominated the past decade or so on university campuses, and spilt over into the wider culture. Of particular note is that, while political monoculture is far more pronounced in the humanities and social studies disciplines, this Leftward shift has also been evident in the sciences and technical disciplines, illustrated in the figure below, biological sciences in particular.

Source.

Of course, political affiliation or inclination is not necessarily an issue itself nor proof per se of bias, so long as the commitment to realist and positivist values and a Popperian open system of free inquiry and empirical testing of truth claims prevails. However, the issue that arises is where a closed system develops, the consequences of which were articulated in a 2015 paper on ideological homogeneity and political bias in psychology research:

“If left unchecked, an academic field can become a cohesive moral community, creating a shared reality that subsequently blinds its members to morally or ideologically undesirable hypotheses and unanswered but important scientific questions.”

The presumption that political affiliation is not proof per se of bias is a rebuttable presumption, one that rebuts itself given the past decade, and particularly the past five years, of accumulating evidence of ideologically-motivated politicisation of academia and research. Perhaps the most gratuitous use of the word “science” is in relation to social studies disciplines, which, as you can see in the figure above, are overwhelmingly politically skewed. The term “social sciences” misrepresents these disciplines as truth-seeking fields committed to open inquiry, falsification, etc, rather than the pseudo-scientific hotbeds of Leftist ideological evangelism that they are.

It’s not an accident that “glory to our martyrs” ended up plastered on university walls or students chant “we will liberate the land by any means necessary…” in glorification of Hamas. It’s not an accident that unfalsifiable theories of gender supplanted established scientific understanding of sex within medicine. It’s not an accident that Hippocratic Oath ceremonies added a “pledge to honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine”. It’s not an accident that a return to race-based segregation on campuses happened. Only under conditions of a closed system environment, resistant to scrutiny and to intellectual challenge, could the conditions be created for such ideologies from politicised pseudo-academic fields to proliferate. And those ideas and ideologies have consequences.

The politicisation of academia leads us to the second, crucial factor: the move away from an emphasis on positivist knowledge creation and ongoing empirical testing of truth claims. In its place, a relativist epistemic standard emerged where truth claims and the veracity of research findings are considered relative to the social cause to which the findings relate, and the utility of the outcomes from an egalitarian “equity”-based perspective. This is evident in the example of the retracted mentorship paper, but not the retracted diversity impact paper, and explains how evidence was swept under the rug in support of the gender-affirming care model. The catch-all buzzword permitting the subjugation of the positivist pursuit of knowledge is that amorphous term, “harm”. An editorial in Nature in 2022 captured this Zeitgeist: “Although the pursuit of knowledge is a fundamental public good, considerations of harm can occasionally supersede the goal of seeking or sharing new knowledge, and a decision not to undertake or not to publish a project may be warranted.” [Emphasis added].

The wording “considerations of harm” is sufficiently opaque to be wielded broadly with ever-expanding application, providing a veneer of compassionate, benevolent concern to justify academic censorship. If determining the Truthiness of research findings relative to the social cause to which the research relates is the Progressive aim, nominally egalitarian concerns provide the means. A mandate to police the pursuit of knowledge and truth, cloaked in the language of moral righteousness. In a 2021 report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), among 64 cases of academics targeting peers for their scholarship, nearly all invoked “harm” as a concern justifying censorship. A 2023 paper highlighted the issue with morally-motivated vetting of scientific research in the context of opaque definitions of “harm”:

“Moral motives likely have long influenced scientific decision-making and contributed to systematic censorship of particular ideas, but journals are now explicitly endorsing moral concerns as legitimate reasons to suppress science… These policies differ from ethical concerns regarding measurable harms to participants in the process of conducting research (the purview of university ethics boards) and instead concern possible, unspecified harms that could result from dissemination of findings. In effect, editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities.”

The foregoing reflects a distinct trajectory towards an egalitarian outcome-focused research culture oriented around safety/harm. And it appears likely that the liberal bias in academic institutions explains certain academic trends, including censorship, “cancel culture”, and the heightened and ever-expanding perception of “harm”. In a survey of U.S. psychology professors, younger, Left-leaning professors were more likely to prioritise social equity over the pursuit of truth. The analysis found that Left-leaning academics were more likely to endorse academic censorship, discourage research of controversial ideas and support punitive measures against colleagues deemed to be researching controversial ideas. An institutional shift to a new generation of younger, Left-leaning academics may thus underpin a shift to prioritising emotional and intellectual safety over academic freedom, and to the incorporation of postmodern gibberish into scientific and medical domains.

The final factor is the perils of a culture of ideological homogeneity resulting in politicised relativism, where Left/liberal academics, even if they see bullshit, never “call out” nonsense that comes from within their ranks. This in-group bias has resulted in incredible damage to the reputation of academic institutions. As one particularly egregious example, consider the case of a humanities PhD student at the University of Manchester who conducted an “autoethnography study” in which he spent three months masturbating to some weird Japanese cartoon porn that depicts pre-pubescent boys, and recorded his masturbation experiences in a diary. The “study” was published in the journal Qualitative Research, which has a not-shabby impact factor of 3.1. And when a Conservative Party politician rightly criticised this sordid excuse for “research”, Leftist academics leapt like Pavlovian dogs to defend masturbating to child cartoon porn as legitimate academic inquiry. Here is just a selection from Stuart Ritchie’s article on this affair.

The academic Left covers itself in glory once again.

Of course, that is an extreme example, but if something this shameful rouses Leftist academics to its defence, then something truly is rotten in the state of academia. It speaks to a wider culture in which an action or issue is not judged by reference to any discernible principles, but relative to who the actors are. Left/liberal academics are only interested in “calling out” nonsense or violations of the principles upon which academic rigour is built when it is the political Right that is seen to breach these principles. Left/liberal academics should have called out the biggest medical scandal of the last half-century. They chose silence or active aiding and abetting. Left/liberal academics should have acknowledged that non-scientific moral value judgments went into COVID-19 restrictions; instead, they insisted their moral value judgments were supported by TheScience™. Left/liberal academics should have steadfastly resisted the postmodernisation of language in science. They chose acquiescence. Left/liberal academics should have objected to censorship and intolerance, to academics being persecuted out of institutions for perceived transgressions against the Sacred Values of Progressivism; they chose to turn and blind eye and deny, justify, equivocate, and excuse.

So after decades of politicised bias within academia, of the “postmodernisation of science”, the policing of language and the academic arrogance of the overwhelming Left-leaning academy, or the catabolism of the humanities by postmodern relativism, the Trump administration has provided Left/liberals with an expedient excuse to sweep their assault on academic freedom, integrity, and the pursuit of truth, under the rug. And yet it was the academic Left that made this bed; did they really think there would never be any political consequences?

1. I am operating under the presumption that I do not have to plead a basic scientific fact. However, for what it is worth, sex is defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells, i.e., the type of gamete a person has the biological function to produce, of which there are two. Biological function to produce is important terminology here; a man who has both testicles removed for cancer treatment may not be able to produce sperm anymore, but he is still male, just as a postmenopausal woman remains female. This is a universal fact in the animal kingdom, including vertebrate mammals like our good selves. Secondary sex characteristics are traits associated with gamete type, and sex dimorphism characterises morphological and behavioural presentations associated with male and female sex categories. We associate secondary sex characteristics as “male” or “female” because we know which of the species is male and female based on reproductive potential (i.e., gamete-producing capacity). And no one can be “assigned sex at birth”, because sex is observed, not assigned. Neither intersex nor disorders of sexual development (DSD) conditions, with such a rarity in prevalence, undermine the definition of sex; a DSD is a specific diagnosis and condition, not a “spectrum” of sexes. Importantly, accepting scientific facts is not mutually exclusive to the existence of trans individuals or their entitlement to a life of safety and dignity. Medical transition exists to facilitate this, and trans people deserve a model of care grounded in science and evidence, not ideological language soup.