Teaching UBC Medical Scholars that Biological Sex is a ‘Colonial Imposition’How to identify a male research subject? At the University of British Columbia, it’s anyone who “resonates with masculinity.”
Amy Eileen Hamm
14 Feb 2023
You can study HIV in gay males—but your research sample must include females who have anal sex. You can study health outcomes in new fathers—but only if you agree that some fathers gestated and birthed their offspring. You also can study sexual violence inside of women’s prisons—but you must include those who currently, formerly, or occasionally “identify” as a woman.
Each of these examples reflects actual guidance for researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Medicine, one of Canada’s top medical schools. The document in which they’re contained, Gender & Sex in Methods & Measurement: Research Equity Toolkit, offers a case study in the process by which ideologically-driven pedagogical mandates associated with DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—are metastasizing throughout STEM.
https://twitter.com/ubcspph/status/1485744990298914818There are probably few regular Quillette readers who haven’t already read indictments of overreach in the DEI field—or, as one Harvard Business Review headline writer calls it, “the DEI-Industrial Complex.” At best, dubious DEI practices are merely ineffective. At worst, they’re an outright scam. We’ve been forced (or “voluntold”) to sit through so many DEI seminars and Zoom sessions that we can recite the often-religious-seeming mantras by heart. No, I will not ask a non-white person “where they are from”; yes, I will announce my pronouns every time I step into a room. Hail, Mary, full of grace, they/them is with thee.
Like other critics of DEI, I had long assumed that this ideological movement would stop at the gates of medical and engineering schools. After all, it’s one thing to affirm the existence of 37 genders when you’re writing an Intersectional Feminism midterm. It’s another thing when you’re training to become an obstetrician. It’s one thing to insist that “Indigenous ways of knowing” are just as scientifically valid as, well, science, when you’re composing a long-form land acknowledgement. It’s another thing to explicitly denounce the scientific method so that you can make sure no one gets their feelings hurt by the reality of human sexual biology.
But the ideologically constructed fables of progressive activist subcultures are now penetrating even the most important (and formerly) scientifically rigorous disciplines. At UBC, whose Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity (CGSHE) produced the above-described “Equity Toolkit,” researchers studying male populations are instructed to expand their outreach to anyone whose identity “resonates with masculinity.”
What does this even mean? Does watching the Super Bowl at Hooters now make you grow a prostate? According to the CGSHE, it’s all very complex, since a person’s masculinity may come and go like a summer breeze: “If your research is interested in men’s sexual risk taking, consider that a prospective participant may have identified as a man last year, but not today, or might identify as a man as well as non-binary.”
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/14/teaching-ubc-medical-students-that-biological-sex-is-a-colonial-imposition/
