Religion is a Mental Illness

Turn of the woke tide will leave many stranded

Students may be starting to reject pronouns and BLM, but ideology is embedded in organisations

thetimes.co.uk

It is a cliché that when the US sneezes, the world catches a cold. Thankfully, when it comes to the phenomenon of wokeness — loosely understood as a box set of holier-than-thou attitudes about race, gender identity and sexual minorities, with accompanying punishment beatings for dissenters — many now appear to be reaching for the antivirals.

A friend of mine who teaches in a famous North American liberal arts college, full of achingly cool rich kids, tells me her undergrads are “so over” pronoun rounds, eye-rolling whenever staff try to introduce them in the classroom. Taste-making East Coast broadsheets are dipping nervous toes in the water on subjects such as unfair male advantage in women’s sport and the experimental status of medicalised child transition, having avoided or spiked such stories for years. The once ubiquitous hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has fallen out of favour with many, after accusations that the founders of the namesake organisation misused donations and enriched themselves.

Meanwhile in Britain, football players taking the knee are an increasingly rare sight. Organisations such as Sports England and the Arts Council are quietly exiting Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, and the once-ebullient charity no longer feels confident enough to advertise the list of members on its own website. Free speech societies are forming with renewed vitality in British universities; and last week even saw those bellwethers of middle-class humour, the blokes on Have I Got News For You, pluck up courage to make a tentative joke about gender identity flags in NHS hospitals.

So can the rest of us — the ones who knew all along that wokeness was a pseudo-progressive hobby for guilty rich people, role-playing as meaningful political action — relax? Unfortunately not yet. For I’m afraid the demise of woke won’t be like the end of toothbrush moustaches, indie folk music or any other temporary behaviour supercharged by the whims of the young and the hip, then dropped without consequence. Wokeness, in contrast, is a bit like a hulking great boulder launched into the middle of a calm lake: waves will be crashing on the shoreline long after the epicentre bears no trace.

The most obvious difference between wokeness and other passing fashions is that nobody working in HR ever decreed that moustache-wearers or indie folk-listeners be considered uniquely oppressed minority groups. In contrast, thanks to wild and unevidenced claims made at the height of wokemania by lobbying groups, thousands of organisations have been left with unfair, illiberal and sometimes even illegal policies that blatantly cater to the special interests of a few: rules about how social spaces can be accessed and by whom; what data can and cannot be collected; what conversations are allowed and which are not. Policies tend to dictate organisational behaviour long after those who first championed them move on ideologically; and especially when propped up by a raft of specially created career positions, whose occupants have a financial interest in maintaining the momentum.

And alongside such policies, superficially moralised gestures have become embedded in many workplaces, embraced by senior figures for no better reason than they think everyone else is doing it too and by junior figures because the boss is doing it. Students at liberal arts colleges may no longer be listing their pronouns but the head of MI6 currently has his in his Twitter/X bio. Activist-sanctioned holy weeks and days are carefully observed by blue-chip managers. Hospitals, construction sites, police stations, council buildings, banks and hotels are festooned with the visual monstrosity that is the Progress flag. None of this happened with the craze for platform shoes or Agas.

In effect, the storm-surge of wokeness throughout British institutions from 2020 onwards was what the political scientist Cass Sunstein has called a “reputational cascade”: a relatively small number of people started acting in a certain way, each for roughly independent reasons; then at a certain point, a wider group of people started observing the behaviour of the smaller group and copying them, each privately assuming their reputations would be damaged if they did not. Before long, this pattern expanded exponentially, helped by the odd bit of public witch-burning.

Here again is a difference with more benign aesthetic crazes: if you don’t keep up with the moral version, you risk losing your social circle or even your job. But the reputational cascade that was wokeness didn’t just deter dissent from those frightened to swim against the perceived tide. It also incentivised opportunists, who actively used the surging tide to swim further ahead than their competitors. Many organisations latched on to it as a positive marketing strategy, thereby creating workplace structures and habits that, from the inside, now seem very difficult to unpick.

Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be too gloomy. For of course, the existence of a reputational cascade doesn’t require sincere belief in the rectitude or wisdom of whatever behaviours you are copying, only the sincere belief that nearly everybody else thinks such behaviours are good ones. And, while no doubt depressing as a fact about human nature, this also has an upside: it only takes widespread realisation that other people don’t actually believe what you thought they believed for a reputational cascade to collapse. As organisations start to cotton on properly to the fact the tides of fashion are turning, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Dis-empaneling Anthropologists

Bowing to political pressure, two leading anthropological associations cancel a conference discussion on the centrality of biological sex.

City Journal

We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.

Reckless and Irresponsible

The “affirm or suicide” narrative is politically potent, but also reckless and misleading.

City Journal

DON’T attribute a suicide death to a single factor (such as bullying or discrimination) or say that a specific anti-LGBT law or policy will “cause” suicide. Suicide deaths are almost always the result of multiple overlapping causes, including mental health issues that might not have been recognized or treated. Linking suicide directly to external factors like bullying, discrimination or anti-LGBT laws can normalize suicide by suggesting that it is a natural reaction to such experiences or laws. It can also increase suicide risk by leading at-risk individuals to identify with the experiences of those who have died by suicide.

“Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! This warrant’s vengeance! I’ll not give my wife to vengeance!”

-- Arthur Miller, “The Crucible”

By the time the trials came to an end, more than two hundred people had been accused, nineteen had been hanged, five others had perished in jail, and the farmer Giles Corey had been pressed to death with large boulders for refusing to enter a plea. In the throes of victimhood, these children had found the means to become the most powerful members of the community. They could see their fellow citizens executed on the basis of ‘spectral evidence’ alone, what we might today refer to as ‘lived experience’. Those who attempted to apply reason and logic to the events as they unfolded were liable to find themselves accused, and so for the sake of self-preservation most left their doubts unuttered. The fantasies of the few were propagated by the elites: judges and ministers who had lost sight of reality, or had no inclination to see it restored. [..]

The willingness of the villagers to believe the girls’ visions serves as a reminder of the human susceptibility to false narratives, particularly if they are more readily comprehensible than complicated truths. When bad ideas are allowed to spread unchecked they take on an illusion of incontrovertibility, and when figures of authority are captured by dangerous ideologies, resistance becomes a feat of courage that few will dare to attempt. But perhaps the aspect of Salem most redolent to today’s cultural skirmishes is the development of an intense climate of fear and mistrust. This episode in history offers a stark example of the conflicting loyalties and tribal instincts that can manifest in any society if the conditions are right.

-- Andrew Doyle, “The New Puritans”

"We are living through a frenzy of conformity, in which the opinions of a minority of activists are falsely presented by the media, political and corporate classes as though they reflect an established consensus."

-- Andrew Doyle, "The New Puritans"

Britain has many major problems - racism isn't one of them

It has less prejudice than the countries where I’ve lived before – and more people taking offence

www.spectator.co.uk|Clarissa Tan

I am a banana. In Singapore, where I used to live, this needs no explanation — it means I’m yellow on the outside but white on the inside, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose way of thinking is ‘western’. There are bananas all over Asia, and I daresay the world. We are better versed in Shakespeare than Confucius, our Mandarin is appalling, and we often have pretentious Anglo or American accents.

Then there are people who are ‘ching-chong’, a reference to anyone who enjoys the kitschy bling of stereotypically Chinese things, sans irony — they like paving their entire garden with cement, for example, or driving a huge Mercedes, or placing two garish stone lions on either side of a wrought-iron gate.

In Asia, there are lots of labels like these, based along racial lines. Most trenchant of all, an entire kaleidoscope of words exist to refer to foreigners, more often than not whites: farang in Thailand, gaijin in Japan, mat salleh in Malaysia, gweilo in Hong Kong. In the latter, ‘gwei’ means ‘ghost’ — taken literally, it means a white person is not fully human. Indeed, in many Chinese dialects, the idiomatic term for any foreigner, be they Indian or Ivorian or Irish, contains the ghostly ‘gwei’; only ethnic Chinese are constantly referred to as ‘rén’, which means ‘person’. In other words, only the Chinese really exist as full-blooded people.

Now, these terms have been used for so long and so broadly that often they’re not employed as racial epithets — though sometimes they are. But I wish they weren’t in circulation at all, because they make us view people through the narrow lens of ethnicity.

And where’s the outrage? No high-level, activist campaign exists in any Asian country to eradicate such racially charged language. Nobody feels strongly enough to object, least of all white people.

In Britain though, where I now live, the opposite seems to be true. I can’t help noticing that certain sections of the population are now so acutely tuned into the issue of race that they spot racism where none is intended. I was stunned for instance, when a few years ago police in the Isle of Wight arrested a beach-bar singer for belting out the pop song ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ because someone had complained it was racial aggravation. (I try to picture the Singapore police taking action over a claim that ‘Play that Funky Music’ is offensive to white boys, and can’t.)

Recently there was an online petition against a Knorr advert featuring Marco Pierre White making a dish of rice, peas and chicken and describing it as Jamaican — the chef’s creation was not authentic enough, apparently. A writer in the Guardian called this ‘disrespectful cultural appropriation’.

Racism is such a charged subject in Britain that even outside observers feel they have a right to offer hyperbolic comments about the state of the nation: the Iranian commentator Ismail Salami recently said that ‘racism is eating away at the fabric of Britain’ and that the nation is ‘plunging into the depths of moral deterioration’. It’s true that he made the remarks after the horrific murder of a disabled Iranian by extremists in this country — but then Iran is hardly the poster nation of a rainbow society. It’s also unclear whether he was also talking about the equally horrific murder in Woolwich of a white soldier by black Islamists.

Britain is not a racist country. I have not, as a member of a minority ethnic group here, encountered racist comments or treatment from anyone, neither in London nor in the countryside, when I go there. I’m sure racism still has a hold in places — even the Home Secretary suggests that blacks are disproportionately likely to be stopped by the police, for example. The British National Party may have imploded in the last five years but it still exists — albeit relying on the votes of angry old men. But it’s hard to say, even by the widest stretch of the imagination, that racism is one of this country’s big problems.

Take the Woolwich murder. The killing might have roiled prejudice — this was the hope of the so-called English Defence League who tried to organise scores of rallies. They picked the wrong country. In Exeter and Devon, no one turned up at all. In Leeds, 20 of its members were met by 30 opponents shouting ‘You’re not welcome here.’ It was a similar story in Manchester, Oxford and Edinburgh.

Surveys show racism is dying on its feet in Britain. In the 1990s, the British Social Attitudes survey found that 44 per cent of people said they would be uncomfortable if their children married across ethnic lines. But that is changing dramatically: according to a recent British Future report, only 5 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 would mind their children marrying someone of a different ethnic background. The World Values Survey found British people among those most likely to befriend a neighbour from a different ethnic background. (The nations that were least tolerant included Jordan, Egypt, South Korea and Iran.)

To the British young, racism is not repugnant — it’s incomprehensible. The young of Britain, says the British Future report, belong to the ‘Jessica Ennis generation’ and are ‘ever more likely to form mixed race relationships themselves; and much less likely to think there is any big deal about that anyway’.

You only have to look at other nations across the globe to see how far Britain has come. Countries everywhere impose laws and policies along racial lines, in a manner that would be inconceivable here. Malaysia, where I was born, has a constitution which safeguards the ‘special position’ of ethnic Malays, such as by establishing quotas for entry into the civil service, public scholarships and public education. Thus many Malaysians — and I am deemed an ethnic-Chinese Malaysian — come to be extremely aware of their racial background.

As for China, racism appears to be ingrained, especially against blacks: large numbers of young Africans studying there complain of this. (The early 20th-century Chinese reformer Kang Youwei once advocated ‘Improver of the Race’ medals for whites or yellows willing to marry blacks in order to ‘purify mankind’.) And across Africa, where in several countries slavery still exists, inter-ethnic tension is rife.

Britain, perhaps ironically through her Empire, has become a multi-ethnic state — and continues to mix it up. One reason why there are cases of racism and discrimination constantly being reported in the UK is because there are so many different ethnic communities here: there is far more chance for the odd episode of racial friction than in a vastly more homogeneous country such as, say, China. In Beijing, just 4 per cent of the population are non-Han Chinese. In London, 40 per cent are non-white.

The danger with crying racism at every turn is that it conceals real problems. Immigration cannot be discussed properly here, because anyone who wants to raise the subject is labelled bigoted or racist — even if they’re talking about white Poles. The concerns of the poor, who live in areas where immigrants flock, are about oversubscribed GP surgeries or about schools that suddenly go multilingual. Yet their concerns are dismissed by the governing elite as racist, such as when a voter once voiced her concerns over crime and immigration to Gordon Brown, and he was caught on microphone calling her a ‘bigoted woman’. It risks alienating a class from British politics and driving people to support genuinely racist parties.

And while Britain is looking out for the old bigotry, new ones creep in. ‘Culturalism’ — favouring someone because they share the same mindset as you, is not so bad because it’s not ‘racist’. Appearing before the Commons education committee, an Ofsted inspector recently raised the issue of working-class white schoolchildren being overlooked and without representation versus ethnic groups: too much race awareness tends to cause division, rather than inclusion.

Just a few weeks ago I discovered that I fall under a group known as BAME — Black and Minority Ethnic. Such categorisation, used mainly by the political left, is meant to protect my rights against discrimination. But I feel mildly repulsed by it (and no, I don’t understand why the acronym segregates blacks from other minorities, either). Ironically, this well-meant labelling might be the most racist thing that I have ever encountered in the UK.

The truth is, I didn’t come all the way to Britain to hide myself under an umbrella acronym. I refuse to be the ‘ME’ in BAME. I don’t want to feel safe and secure by cordoning myself off from the larger community. I can’t bear to feel perpetually aggrieved, offended, slighted, victimised. Most of all, I don’t want to be viewed purely according to my race — I’ve had enough of that back where I come from, thank you very much.

I have been welcomed and accepted in this country, and — uncool as this may sound — I feel grateful for this. Perhaps there are thousands of other ‘minority’ people in this country who feel the same way. We are here to throw ourselves pell-mell into the national life, whatever that may bring. Because of course Britain faces many challenges today. It’s just that racism isn’t one of them.

The Woke Paradox: Any society racist enough to warrant woke policies is too racist to implement them. And any society woke enough to implement them is not racist enough to warrant them. A society that implements them is systemically woke, not systemically racist, and is deluded.

Stephen: I used to spend a lot of my time, most of my time in fact, going for fundamentalist religion. And then when this new ideology reared its head, I picked up on the themes pretty quick. And a lot of people who'd been following my work for a while sort of thought it was a deviation. And it was very difficult to explain to some of them that it's basically a continuation. Going for dogmas, tribe mentality, blasphemy codes, things like that. Bbut a few people would say, how can you call it a religion? It's been referred to as far left, progressive, woke, etc. And then how can we possibly label it a religion, when there's no god in the sense that a monotheism would have?

Andrew: Well, there have been lots of people who have argued that social justice, or what we call social justice, maybe the woke or critical social justice, is a form of religion in an authentic sense rather than merely as an analogy. People like Vivek Ramaswamy, John McWhorter, James Lindsay.

I'm using it more in terms of an analogy by which we might fully comprehend it. Because I think it has all the hallmarks of a religious movement. People can see that there's all these very powerful ideologues in positions of clout in society, and that they are doing all this kind of damage, and that they they brook no dissent, and they have a very specific sense of what you must believe, and they will police that through what we now call cancel culture, and they can see all of these things, and they ex-communicate those who who step slightly out of line, and they they brand people as heretics effectively. You even had that case with the protest outside of Netflix around Dave Chappelle where someone was shouting at one of the protesters to repent saying repent, saying "repent, motherfucker." So even using the language of religion themselves. And by framing it in those terms, it makes it accessible, and I think that's why I wrote the book.

Because above all, I think the reason why the new puritans are winning is because people don't understand them. It's because they use progressive sounding language to describe themselves. Things like "progressive" when they're not, they're regressive. They talk about "social justice" which sounds brilliant. They talk about "anti-racism" which sounds brilliant because we're all opposed to racism. They talk about equity, which is a bit of a fudge, because most people think they're talking about equality and they're not, they're talking about something different. But they use all these ideas, these phrases. They call themselves "left-wing" even though I don't think they are. And so people go along with it. Decent people think, oh well, I'm for all those things, I'm for equality, I'm against racism, so I'll go along with it.

But then they've also started to notice that actually, it's weird because the outcomes of this movement aren't that. The outcomes are creating more racial division, even outcomes such as the mutilation of children because of the extremities of gender identity ideology.

So all of this sort of stuff is now starting to make people nervous, but they still don't understand it. If they see it as a religion, then it makes sense because, as Stephen Weinberg, the physicist said, in a world where you had good and bad, you have good people doing good things and bad people having bad things but for good people to do bad things that takes religion. And that's the same with any ideology isn't it. But once you see it in those terms, once you see the chief proponents of this movement as high priests setting down their edicts and their decrees, once you see it in those terms, it really does start to make sense and clarify. And I think that's why I've done it that way. But I'm not saying it's a religion in a literal sense.

Stephen: Perfect answer. Might be worth a quick digression on Titania McGrath now. You're the brains behind that excellent piece of satire, in book form, Twitter form, and for a while you were doing remarkably well predicting the future with that account. You'd think of some absurd excessively woke claim about culture or society and put it out there, and life truly does imitate art in that sense. And I suppose my question would be, is this ideology, in regards to satire, does it make it easy to satirize or is it harder to satirize because it is so absurd?

Andrew: Well that's a good question. A lot of people think that things have gone beyond satire now because when you read these stories, they do seem so self-satirising. When they're talking about how fire engines are racist, or you know, cheese is homophobic, or whatever it might be. And you just think it's so silly, so stupid. But actually they believe it.

And if you'd have said, if you'd have made a joke, say 10 years ago, about there's a major invasion, Russia invades Ukraine, and on that morning the Ministry of Defense puts out a tweet saying, we're having a really great LGBTQ coffee morning where we're talking about pansexuality, and then on the same day you also have a front cover of the Daily Mail talking about how MI5 and MI6 are urging their spies to reconcile with their white privilege.

Stephen: Putin must be shitting himself.

Andrew: But it sounds so, it sounds like the stuff of fiction doesn't it? And if you'd have made that kind of joke about 10, 15 years ago, you would have thought, well it's funny but it's obviously never going to happen. We're in that world now, and I think we've kind of not noticed that seismic shift in a way. We've just been kind of carried along on this tide. All of the stuff that we now take for granted.

The fact that the police are routinely investigating non-crime. The fact that there are NHS clinics who are effectively fixing gay children through sterilization and medicalization. The fact that we have a broad movement calling for censorship. The fact that you now watch comedy shows on TV and scenes have been taken out because people at the BBC think you shouldn't watch certain scenes. The fact that there was a school board in charge of 30 schools in Canada that has removed thousands of books from school library shelves, and burnt some of them, and called it a "flame purification ceremony," in the name of progress.

All of this stuff, if you'd have said that to us 10 years ago, this is going to happen in 10 years time, you'd have said, don't be ridiculous, that cannot happen in a sane society, in a liberal society, none of those things can happen. People can't be arrested for quoting rap lyrics, people aren't going to be arrested for posting memes online, people aren't going to be teaching children that there are a hundred different genders. You'd never have believed it.

And what worries me now is that we're so in it now, we just sort of accept it. There was that TV show on BBC where a young child is being told about how there's hundreds of genders, and we just sort of now think, oh, we shrug don't we, and we say well that's the world we're in, let's just ignore that.

My point that i'm making in the book, hopefully quite clearly, is we can't ignore that. Because for every flippant, stupid story about Mr. Potato Head becoming gender-neutral, which sure we can make fun of and you know, it's probably best ignored, it is symptomatic of a much broader problem. Huge problem. You can't ignore it.

When the Ministry of Defense, when the police, when the NHS, when the government, when the civil service are all enthralled to this kind of stuff, you can't ignore that because those are the wheels of power. So, it's funny while it's a few students on university campus who are a bit overzealous. It's funny when it's just a few things like that, a few activists online screaming their nonsense into the ether. It's not funny when the leader of the Opposition is asked to define a woman and cannot do so because he's too terrified to say what we all know to be true. That's no longer funny. Well, I mean, it is funny, but there's a really dark element to that.

Pediatric Gender Medicine and the Moral Panic Over Suicide

Hyperbolic rhetoric about suicide rates may do more to increase suicide than prevent it.

www.realityslaststand.com|Leor Sapir

In a recent exchange between Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Berkeley Law professor Khiara Bridges on the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Hawley wanted to know whether the Court’s decision affected women as a class. After initially informing Hawley that not all “cis women” have the “capacity for pregnancy” while some “trans men” and “non-binary” people do, Bridges appeared caught between her loyalties to gender identity ideology and to the long-held idea that abortion is a women’s issue. And so rather than clarify her position, Bridges berated Hawley for his “transphobic” line of questioning, insisting that he and those like him are the reason why “one in five” transgender people attempt suicide.

The affirm-or-suicide mantra has become the central strategy of contemporary transgender activism, and at times it would seem that activists have little else in their rhetorical arsenal. Federal courts have used it to impose new policies on schools under Title IX. When Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education Act—a law that limits classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation to “age appropriate” circumstances and that requires schools to notify parents when their children are being “socially transitioned” to the opposite gender—Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg agreed with his husband Chasten that it would “kill kids.” Florida’s law was in response to, among other things, books like Gender Queer: A Memoir, which contains graphic depictions of oral sex, appearing on school library shelves. The book’s “non-binary” author, Maia Kobabe, countered that her book’s presence in libraries was “life-saving.”

A few weeks later, transgender Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services Rachel Levine used the same word to justify the federal government’s support for “gender affirming” interventions. Neither Levine nor President Biden, who has given his own imprimatur to the controversial practice, seemed to care much that Europe’s most progressive welfare states have been moving in the opposite direction, placing strict limitations on the use of puberty blockers to treat adolescents in distress presumably because of their “gender.” Scandinavians are not indifferent to teen suicide. Rather, they have examined the evidence behind the affirm-or-suicide claim and have found it wanting.

Despite the unwaveringly confident manner in which these claims are often asserted, there is no good evidence that failing to “affirm” minors in their “gender identity” will increase the likelihood of them committing suicide. As I discuss below, that claim is based on a small handful of deeply flawed studies that, at most, find loose correlations between “affirming” interventions and improved mental health. Some find no reduction of suicide at all, and a new study claims to find that puberty blockers actually increase the risk of suicide.

Not only is the empirical basis for the affirm-or-suicide mantra shoddy at best, but its dissemination is also profoundly irresponsible. Such extreme rhetoric limits our ability to better understand and respond to mental health problems in vulnerable youth, and may itself contribute to the real and documented phenomenon of “suicide contagion.”

*  *  *

Part of the problem is the vagueness of the term “suicidality.” There is a difference between thinking about suicide, attempting it, and actually doing it. And even within the first two categories, shades of grey prevail. A “suicidal attempt,” for instance, can mean climbing to a roof of a building without actually stepping onto the ledge, but it can also mean surviving a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Women are far more likely to think about and attempt suicide, but men are more likely to die by suicide. Actual suicide is obviously more serious than suicidal attempts, and attempts more than ideation. Human beings may go through periods of depression in which they contemplate suicide, even seriously, but this does not mean that they are at permanent risk for suicide. It’s a messy, dark, and multifaceted topic ill-served by the moral panic-mongering of activists.

Gender activists commonly argue that roughly four in ten transgender-identified youth (TIY) attempt suicide when not socially and medically “affirmed.” Does the research bear this out? The simple answer is: no.

Firstly, surveys of TIY suicidality rely on self-report and do very little to vet respondents when they say they “attempted” suicide. Secondly, studies purporting to show that TIY are at elevated risk of suicide tend to compare suicide rates in TIY with rates in non-TIY—a deeply misleading comparison. This is because TIY, especially among the new clinical cohort of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) teenagers, exhibit extraordinarily high rates of mental health problems (psychological co-morbidities) quite apart from their gender-related distress.

To the extent proponents of the “gender affirming” approach recognize these co-morbidities, they regard them as the product of social hostility and lack of acceptance (though, oddly, they also claim that rapidly rising rates of transgender identification are the result of a society increasingly accepting of transgender identity). Yet no evidence supports this hypothesis and mounting evidence vitiates it. ROGD teens are known to have very high rates of anxiety, depression, history of sexual trauma, anorexia, and eating disorders, all of which typically precede their gender-related distress. And as we’ve learned from detransitioners, many continue to experience these problems long after they have gone under the knife. According to a review of the U.K.’s Gender Identity Development Service, roughly one out of three girls seeking gender transition has autism—a significant finding, considering that “being in the wrong body” might provide these teenagers with a convenient explanation for their social isolation. Regardless, each of these mental health conditions is a known predictor of suicidal behavior.

Thus, while it is true that suicidal behavior is much more likely among TIY, rates of actual suicide are extremely low within the population and there is no basis for believing that “affirming” them with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries will reduce those rates even further. Importantly, when researchers compared TIY with non-TIY with similar mental health profiles, the disparities in suicidal behavior reduced considerably, suggesting that it is not the lack of gender affirmation that seems to be driving suicidal behavior.

The dubious claims about mental health benefits from “gender affirming” medicine, alongside the obvious risks, is why Sweden and Finland have recently moved to restrict the practice, with the U.K. likely to follow suit. It is also why medical authorities in France, Australia and New Zealand have issued strong statements highlighting the uncertainties and experimental nature of “affirming” interventions.

The gold standard for finding a causal relationship between “affirming” medicine and suicide would be the randomized controlled trial (RCT). To date, no RCT has ever been conducted to study the effects of puberty blockers on mental health (including suicidality) of gender-distressed youth. For this reason, the FDA has never approved the use of Lupron or other puberty suppressants for gender dysphoria. Claims about the reversibility of puberty blockers, which are essential to “gender affirming” advocates’ ethical case for allowing children to use them, rely entirely on referencing the drug’s original purpose, which is treating precocious puberty.

As for their safety, the risks of puberty blockers are not fully known but are thought to include cognitive impairment and bone malformation. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that another major risk is iatrogenesis, meaning that the use of puberty blockers to “treat” gender dysphoria virtually guarantees the persistence of the condition and continuation of the patient to more extreme and risky types of intervention.

At nearly $40,000 per implant, which lasts for one year, these drugs are extraordinarily expensive and a potentially lucrative source of revenue for drug manufacturers. So why not expand the market by getting FDA approval for a new type of use? Considering how ROGD could be a goldmine for drug companies, why not conduct RCTs? One reason is that activists and professional medical organizations already insist puberty blockers are safe and medically necessary interventions. If this is true, then withholding such interventions from minors with gender dysphoria (something required in a controlled experiment) would be unethical and even life-endangering. Another reason is the common (but misguided) belief about reversibility of puberty blockers: once the “pause” button is lifted, the thinking goes, adolescent development can seamlessly pick right back up as if nothing happened.

Authorizing RCTs for puberty blockers would require that activists allow their basic assumptions to be put to the test, but the intrusion of identity politics into medicine makes that unlikely. “Gender affirming” care is premised on the conviction that medical professionals should never steer a patient toward a non-transgender over a transgender outcome, as doing so assumes that transgender identity is abnormal or, at any rate, less preferable than “cisgender” identity. In the United States, identity politics has been framed as “civil rights,” so it is in the name of this venerable tradition and its robust judicial supervisory mechanisms that activists have waged holy war against alternatives to “gender affirming” care such as “watchful waiting” or therapy-only.

In countries without a strong civil rights state, medical rationales for “affirming” interventions can be more easily interrogated and, if necessary, challenged. Sweden, Finland, France and the U.K. have either recognized or are on the verge of recognizing the experimental nature and inherent risks of puberty blockers. Medical authorities in these countries have come under pressure from activists, but due in part to the absence of potent analogies to Jim Crow they have been able to weigh the pros and cons and consider the trade-offs of “affirming” interventions—precisely the kind of considerations that American “rights talk” is designed to make verboten.  These countries have “pressed pause,” but on the use of puberty blockers rather than puberty itself.

A 2011 Swedish study found that, even after medical transition, “transsexual” patients were nineteen times more likely to die by suicide than non-transexuals, but the study’s lack of adequate controls makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions. It does, however, cast serious doubt on the belief that “gender affirming” interventions are medically necessary measures for preventing suicide. Meanwhile, suicide remains an extremely rare event for TIY, even among the ROGD cohort. Between 2010 and 2020, the U.K.’s Tavistock Clinic recorded four deaths by suicide out of a total of 15,000 patients—and this notwithstanding the two-year waiting period for the clinic’s services.

*  *  *

At present, the studies purporting to find that puberty suppression in minors leads to reduced suicidality come nowhere near the level of causal determination normally required before approving new drugs or old drugs for new uses. I recommend anyone who hasn’t already done so to read Jesse Singal’s long Substack post on the flaws in these studies and how media tend to overlook them.

Among the serious deficiencies of studies such as those published by psychiatrist and “gender affirming” advocate Jack Turban are reliance on biased samples (the subjects in Turban’s studies were recruited through transgender advocacy and support groups) and non-random assignments of treatment. The latter is especially important: Turban and colleagues compared subjects who wanted hormonal interventions but didn’t receive them to those who wanted and received them. One of the reasons the former but not the latter received these interventions, however, might be because they were already more psychologically stable to begin with. The subjects of Turban’s studies would have been exposed to treatment protocols implemented before the surge in “affirming” therapy, meaning under the more rigorous “Dutch protocol,” which emphasized prescreening for mental health co-morbidities as a precondition for receiving hormones. In short, nothing in Turban’s studies can refute the possibility that improved mental health was the result of something other than medical suppression of puberty.

Here we must note a perennial problem for science in a democratic society, which is that science can neither explain itself to the non-scientific public, nor can it present a self-explanatory plan of political action. Science requires mediators to interpret its findings and make them relevant to contemporary concerns, which are invariably value-laden and often political. Despite acknowledging—if not as forcefully as he should have—within his own study the limitations of his findings, Turban sold his work to an eager media environment as having found strong evidence that puberty blockers are life-saving and medically necessary. And they gobbled it up uncritically.

What makes an RCT reliable as a source of knowledge about causality is the “R.” Before the FDA can approve a new drug, it must have confidence that the reason why some subjects got the drug and benefitted from it while others did not is not some factor related to the positive outcome itself. For example, if an experimental drug for schizophrenia is given only to subjects who are hospitalized and the recipients experience improved mental health, researchers may falsely conclude that it was the drug that caused the improvement when in fact it was the hospital setting where patients were exposed to other therapeutic supports. Ideally, chance (i.e. randomness) alone should determine who gets the drug and who doesn’t.

In the absence of RCTs, and to avoid the pitfalls of studies like those of Turban and colleagues, researchers might try to approximate causality by introducing unrelated criteria for assigning treatments to some subjects but not others. Random chance is the ideal unrelated criterion because, almost by definition, it is the most unrelated to any measurable outcome. Short of that, researchers can seize on second-best proxies for randomness.

That is what Jay Greene, a former university professor who recently joined the Heritage Foundation, did in a new study investigating the causal relationship between puberty blockers and suicide. Greene’s “natural experiment” uses state minor consent rules—that is, laws that permit minors to consent to medical treatment without parental approval—adopted well before and for reasons unrelated to gender dysphoria. For that reason, they are exogenous to the outcome. “Whether adolescents live in a state that imposes fewer or no restrictions on accessing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones,” Greene explains, “is effectively random and should have nothing to do with later outcomes other than through the mechanism of receiving those interventions or not.” The fact that a blue state like Connecticut lacks a minor access provision and is thus coded as more restrictive for puberty blockers, while red states like Texas and Missouri have such provisions and are coded as more permissive, is not a problem for Greene’s research design, but an advantage. It suggests that Greene has not introduced a confounding criterion for treatment assignment.

Using this admittedly counterintuitive—but in the social sciences, well recognized—research design, Greene finds that puberty blockers actually increase the risk of suicide by 14 percent. It must be emphasized, however, that the causal link here is weak. It comes nowhere close to proving conclusively that puberty blockers increase suicide. Greene’s study is simply less bad than competing studies, including those by Turban and colleagues, which purport to find that blockers reduce suicide.

Now, there is a danger, as the saying goes, in making the perfect the enemy of the good. A political scientist by training, Greene knows that policymakers must often make choices on the basis of imperfect information; policymaking is rarely a choice between good and bad options, but more frequently between bad and worse ones. Faced with weak evidence for the dangers of blockers and even weaker evidence for their therapeutic benefits, a reasonable policymaker would prefer to halt their use pending further research.

When I posted a shortened version of this comparison of Turban and Greene on Twitter, Turban responded that his work, unlike Greene’s, was peer-reviewed and published in a “high-impact” journal (Pediatrics). As Turban surely knows, peer-review may increase the likelihood of a claim being true, but hardly guarantees it. And peer-review is only as good as one’s peers and the degree to which a field hasn’t been captured by fashionable political ideologies. While peer-review remains the most reliable mechanism for sorting science from pseudoscience, it has taken several serious and deserved blows to its reputation over the past few decades.

I’m not even referring to the hoaxing of the so-called “Grievance Studies,” where peer review is often little more than gatekeeping by postmodernist identitarians who cannot distinguish their own research from pure gibberish, or even to the low standards of the law reviews, where reviewers are law school students with little expertise in law (let alone in more substantive areas of scientific inquiry). A recent survey found a spike in the number of peer-reviewed article retractions, most of them “highly cited articles published in high-impact journals.” And of course, the academy has spent the past decades purifying itself of heretics (such as Colin Wright and myself) who might otherwise challenge approved research narratives. In short, even under these ideological conditions peer-review is nothing to scoff at, but to invoke it as proof of concept is either naïve or disingenuous.

Take Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that published Turban’s 2020 paper on puberty blockers and suicide. In 2018, Pediatrics published a paper entitled “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents,” by Dr. Jason Rafferty and others. The article contains a shocking number of errors, omissions, and blatant mischaracterizations of the available research on pediatric gender transition, some of them so fundamental and egregious as to suggest bad faith in the authors. The article’s central conclusion—that “gender affirming” medicine is the only ethical and scientifically-grounded approach to treating gender-related distress in youth—is negated by its very own citations, to say nothing of its flawed logic. I recommend Dr. James Cantor’s fact-checking of the AAP paper; it is one of the most thorough and devastating refutations of an academic “study” I have ever read.

Unfortunately, policymakers—including, most recently, a Trump-appointed federal judge—regularly cite the AAP statement and other unsubstantiated statements by American medical organizations as conclusive evidence that the gender-affirming approach is “settled science” and that it saves lives. A faulty peer-review process, it would seem, can be more dangerous than no peer-review process when it bestows false confidence or complacency.

The problem is worse than the mere mistaking of correlation for causation. The obsessive emphasis on “gender” as being both the source of and solution to suffering ultimately distracts parents, clinicians, teachers, and patients themselves from pursuing more effective strategies of mental health improvement. A teenage girl with a history of sexual abuse or eating disorders is ill-served by medical professionals who mistake the symptom of her distress (gender distress) for its underlying cause. A common complaint from a rising number of detransitioners is that no one was there to help them explore the true sources of their suffering. They have a point.

A known complaint among American medical providers is that systemic pressures discourage them from conducting careful and drawn-out diagnoses. Two friends of mine, both doctors, have raised this complaint to me several times in the past year alone; both wish they could spend more time with their patients in order to better understand their problems. One recently started his own practice in order to give his patients the quality of care they need and deserve.

One aspect of the gender affirming approach that makes it so attractive to therapists is its simplicity: it provides a single, easy, indeed all-too-convenient explanation for what is wrong with a teenager in distress. And it has the additional advantage of deferring to that teenager’s self-diagnosis, leaving her temporarily satisfied that she is finally being listened to. The affirm-or-suicide mantra lubricates this process by injecting it with a sense of urgency. Is this “gender ideology”? Perhaps, but it is no less the combination of a misguided belief about suicide, the pressures of a healthcare system that incentivizes swift diagnoses and expensive treatments, and an unchecked ethos of medical consumerism.

Another perverse outcome of the affirm-or-suicide narrative is that it may itself contribute to suicide. Social scientists and health officials have warned of a “contagion” effect following public discussions of suicide. A 2020 study found that teen suicide “increased significantly” in the month following the release of the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why,” which deals with—and some critics argue glamorizes—that subject. As one group of experts recently emphasized, “any conversations about suicide should be handled with great care, due to its socially contagious nature.”

Many countries, including the United States, have media guidelines on how to report on suicide so as not to inadvertently encourage people to engage in the behavior. Among the things that the CDC has warned not to do is “[p]resenting simplistic explanations for suicide.” As the agency explains, “Suicide is never the result of a single factor or event, but rather results from a complex interaction of many factors and usually involves a history of psychosocial problems.” It's difficult to imagine a more “simplistic explanation” than “kids will kill themselves if their gender identity is not affirmed.”

If there is scant evidence for the affirm-or-suicide narrative, and if using that narrative as a strategy for “transgender rights” might have negative repercussions for the very people activists and policymakers claim to want to protect, why do they continue to tout it? Some, perhaps, might simply not have given the matter much thought. Or perhaps they are uniquely vulnerable to emotional extortion due to some pathological excess of empathy or unexamined ideological assumptions. But I suspect that there are at least three additional motives at work, whether conscious or not.

First, as Colin Wright, myself, and other commentators on the trans phenomenon have argued, the trans movement is mired in confusion and self-contradiction. Activists tell us that the body has no relevance for being male or female, but also people with a male (or female) “gender identity” need a male (or female) body in order to live “authentic” lives; that women deserve their own category of sports but that access to that category should have nothing to do with physical sex distinctions; and that gender identity is an innate, immutable, even biologically derived, and socially valuable property of persons, but also that it is a system of social subordination to be resisted through “non-binary” and “queer” performances. When skeptics want to get beyond the contradictory statements to the truth of the matter, they are told that “getting at the truth is deeply transphobic.” The suicide panic enables activists to change the subject, diverting attention away from their contradictions.

Unlike other critics of gender ideology, I tend to think that what we have seen unfold in Western societies is equal parts “gender ideology” and a therapeutic attitude underwritten by half-baked relativism (or is it relativism underwritten by a therapeutic attitude?).

Second, from a more practical point of view, hyperbole surrounding the suicide threat is designed to get us to overlook the fundamentally experimental nature of pediatric gender medicine, suspend everything we know about adolescent psychology, and create an exception in our normal application of principles regarding patient autonomy and consent. The famed trans activist and child therapist Diane Ehrensaft argues, for instance, that just as we would allow a child to sever a limb to save his life, so too we must allow children to sacrifice their future reproductive and health prospects on the grounds that “gender affirming” care is life-saving. Any medical treatment, but especially one targeted at minors, requires a careful weighing of pros and cons, benefits and risks. The point of suicide alarmism, it seems to me, is to get us to not do this careful balancing act.

Third, transgender interest groups, which are now for the most part ideologically captured gay rights interest groups, face strong incentives to exaggerate threats and present themselves as standing in between transgender youth and impending doom. Obviously, alarmism is not unique to the world of LGBT advocacy organizations; pretty much all “public interest” groups who face collective action problems rely on what the late political scientist James Q. Wilson called “purposive incentives.” For an entity like the Trevor Project, an organization founded over two decades ago for the purpose of preventing suicide by (mainly gay) youth, public belief in a suicide epidemic is vital for soliciting donations, securing grants, recruiting talent, and exercising influence over the policy process. Especially under Democratic administrations, bureaucrats in federal and state education departments will cite Trevor Project statistics on LGBT suicide as justifications for more aggressive regulation of schools. None of this is to suggest that the people who work at Trevor are being dishonest, but only that they face strong institutional incentives to exaggerate the suicide threat.

Teen suicide is one of the most horrific and tragic events that can befall any parents. To exploit this primordial fear for political gains is cynical. If activists wanted to get serious about addressing the supposed “epidemic” of suicide among transgender youth, they would do three things. First, they would read the studies on suicide more carefully. Second, and as a result, they would take the therapeutic focus off of gender and, without completely excluding gender from the picture, place it on the more plausible causes of teen distress. And third, they would resist the temptation for suicide fearmongering and lay off the simplistic narrative that suicide results from not being “affirmed” in one’s “gender identity.”

We should not hold out hope that activists will do any of this, however, given how invaluable the suicide threat has been toward achieving their goals in the political arena.

“Far more dangerous than crimes of passion are the crimes of idealism, the crimes which are instigated, fostered and moralized by hallowed words.”

-- Aldous Huxley

[ Image: The title page of the Malleus Maleficarum, a.k.a. "The Hammer of Witches". This 15th century book contains detailed instructions for the capture, interrogation, torture, and execution of alleged "witches". ]

12 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Common Claims About Implicit Bias

Limitations in implicit bias research aren't always communicated to the public.

www.psychologytoday.com

KEY POINTS

• There is no consensually-agreed upon definition of implicit bias. This makes communicating about implicit bias quite difficult.
• The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common method for measuring implicit bias. Yet it has several flaws and limitations.
• Those limitations, which are well-known among psychological scientists, are rarely acknowledged to the wider public, including students.

Implicit bias is in the air. Hillary Clinton famously declared that "implicit bias is a problem for everyone." When she was California Attorney General, now-Vice President Kamala Harris expanded implicit bias trainings for police and has attributed many things to implicit biases on her Twitter feed.

Given widespread distress over unconscious racism, many consulting firms now provide implicit bias trainings and assure you that they deliver. A simple Google search for "consultant, implicit bias training" yields pages and pages of hits. Is this kind of corporate response to the problem of implicit bias justified?

In a 2018 essay, West Virginia University sociologist Jason Manning argued that "unconscious racism" bears a resemblance to older superstitions about the evil eye and sympathetic magic—but rather than mysterious unseen supernatural forces, we have mysterious unseen unconscious forces. There are, of course, some differences between beliefs in the evil eye and unconscious racism. There is no evidence that people can harm you by looking at you, whereas there is a wealth of studies on implicit social cognition. But I argue that the comparison may still be justified because the evidence for unconscious racism is so weak.

A moral panic occurs when some substantial portion of a society creates a "folk devil"—members of the community considered deviant and dangerous—and exaggerates the dangers they pose. In one research report, for example, people massively overestimated the number of unarmed Black people killed by police in 2019, with more than half of all liberals surveyed estimating the number at 1,000 or more (when data indicated it was more likely to be around 27). And many people have been denounced or socially ostracized for opposing things like affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, even though the majority of Americans, including majorities of Black and Hispanic respondents, oppose basing college admissions or hiring on ethnicity or race.

Others have been denounced or publicly shamed for a maladroit compliment of a supermodel or for sharing a peer reviewed sociology article, if doing so is viewed as deviant behavior or contrary to widely-held views. I personally have witnessed a talk in which a Jewish professor was publicly called a "grotesque Nazi" by physics professors for having described Obama as "half-black" (he has a Kenyan father and a White American mother). Such responses can be seen as evidence of a moral panic and the creation of "folk devils" surrounding the topic of racism.

Returning, however, to the implicit bias consulting firms—it's possible to find powerful testaments to the effectiveness of their trainings. But what does the science actually say—not just about the trainings, but about implicit bias more generally?

The workhorse method for assessing implicit bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can take several of these here to see what they are like for yourself. But before you do, you should consider these reasons to be skeptical about any claims about implicit bias.

1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.

Several researchers in this domain have put together this repository of over 40 articles (and growing) identifying flaws, artifacts, limitations, and threats to the validity of the IAT. Here are the titles of just a few of those articles:

• "More Error than Attitude in Implicit Association Tests"
• "Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure"
• "Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research"

In fairness, there are still plenty of research articles that take implicit bias seriously, such as this one. The point is not that the notion has been completely debunked or the IAT shown to be completely worthless; I even do research using the IAT! Instead, the point is that most of the most dramatic claims about it have been debunked or, at least, shown to be dubious and scientifically controversial. These are not firm grounds on which to sell the public on the power and prevalence of unconscious racism or trainings to mitigate it.

2. There is no consensually-accepted scientific definition of implicit bias.

Across five articles, there might be three with different definitions and two that do not even provide a definition. No one knows what "implicit bias" even is—at least if "know" is taken to mean "a clear understanding shared by most scientists."

3. The IAT measures reaction times, not things that most people think of as bias.

Whether reaction times might be considered bias in some technical sense is beyond the scope of this essay. Reaction times are not what most people think of when they think about bias; the IAT does not directly measure racism, oppression, or unfairness. (Whether it does so indirectly with any reasonable success is controversial, as described next.) To claim reaction times constitute any sort of bias in the common understanding of the meaning of "bias" is to import a conclusion by fiat rather than evidence.

4. At best, the IAT measures the strength of association of concepts in memory.

When reaction times are faster for some pairs of concepts than others, it is possible that the two concepts for which reaction times are faster are more closely associated in memory. That's the only thing the IAT can directly show: the closeness of association of concepts in memory—not "bias," not "racism." But it goes downhill from there; a slew of statistical issues and methodological artifacts suggest that the IAT is not even a clean measure of strength of association.

5. The IAT may capture prejudice, stereotypes, or attitudes to some degree, but, if so, it is not a clean measure.

Critiques of the IAT have concluded that it contains more error than attitude or reflects actual knowledge about actual group differences and conditions; and that IAT scores reflect four separate phenomena, of which attitude is just one.

6. The IAT, as used and reported, has a potpourri of additional methodological and statistical oddities.

Although a deep dive into them is beyond the scope of this blog, the interested reader can find them laid out in gory and technical details here and in the online repository of articles.

7. Many of the studies that use IAT scores to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.

If "unconscious racism" was as powerful and pervasive as its advocates claim, one would expect some, and probably a great deal, of anti-Black discrimination in these studies. Its absence in many studies justifies significant skepticism about claims about the power or prevalence of implicit bias.

8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.

Racial prejudice is real and is readily measured by self-report scales assessing attitudes towards various racial and ethnic groups. It is not clear that the IAT captures much beyond these self-report scales, though.

9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.

One might ask, then, the point of such procedures and why is there such enthusiasm for these trainings.

10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.

It's not that there is "no evidence." This is not a case of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It is a case of "there is tons of evidence, but most of it shows little or no effect."

11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are "unconscious."

Research finds that people are quite good at predicting their IAT scores.

12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students. Gambrill & Reiman, 2011, defined propaganda as “encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible” (p. e19516). Does extolling research on the IAT without presenting its limitations and weaknesses constitute "encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible"? I leave that to you to decide. Regardless, this omission is contrary to the aims of science.

What This All Means

Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.

WIGGUM: OK, here's how the process works. You sit on the broom and we shove you off the cliff. MARGE: What?! WIGGUM: Well, hear me out, if you're innocent, you will fall to an honorable Christian death. If you are, however, the bride of Satan, you will surely fly your broom to safety. At that point you will report back here for torture and beheading. SKINNER: Tough, but fair.

"Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged. [..] Someone like that will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish. Spreading fear in the name of righteousness"

-- Captain Jean-Luc Picard, “The Drumhead”