Direct link to apology:

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/an-apology-a-growing-threat-briefing-published-on-8-july-2026/

Response from Rowling:

https://xcancel.com/jk_rowling/status/2083280764934746228#m

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867424001223

The history of sex research demonstrates an ongoing coexistence of multiple, conflicting meanings of sex. This history raises questions for scientists about the deployment of a research variable that lacks precision. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between scientists and science and technology studies (STS) scholars offers a way to find solutions to this problem.

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/6/1582

A short critique of the paper:

https://xcancel.com/FondOfBeetles/status/2077389417291845705

I’ve requested the subject-level Brain Sex Index data behind Kurth et al., 2022. Brain sex in transgender women is shifted towards gender identity. JCM.

While I wait, some open questions on the published methods and conclusions.

(Using the paper language)

The key comparison (transgender women vs. cisgender men) was “one-tailed”(seeking a statistical difference in only one direction, which provides a more generous boundary to reach significance).

There is no stated correction for multiple pairwise comparisons across multiple groups.

Two-tailed, their own reported p=0.016 becomes 0.032. Why one-tailed, and why no correction across the 3 group comparisons?

The cisgender men’s group has one data point flagged as a statistical outlier (marked “+” on the plot, and apparently excluded from the box’s standard stats display).

But the reported comparison test shows 24 cisgender men were included.

If one cisgender man is such a clear outlier, does the headline finding hold with that point removed?

Effect sizes (d): briefly, how large a difference are we looking at?

Transgender women vs. cisgender men, d=0.64 (moderate).
Transgender women vs. cisgender women, d=1.87 (large).

That’s a big asymmetry: is that gap large enough to justify the authors’ conclusion of “hovering between”.

And since this calculation includes the outlying man, would removing it make “hovering between” a nonsensical conclusion?

As an analogy: the cisgender men are at the 100m finish line, the transgender women are about a 25m behind them, and the cisgender women are still at the start.

The authors report their transgender women cohort (n=24) as 6 androphilic (attracted to men) and 18 gynephilic (attracted to women).

Orientation has been linked to brain differences in other studies.

Why wasn’t orientation controlled for or stratified, especially since the authors recommend this for future studies? 😂

You have the data, my friends.

What does their dataset look like when disaggregated for orientation?

Anyway, I’ve made a formal request; I know other researchers have too. I’ll share what I get.

(And again, I’m repeating the language of the paper for ease of cross reference to it)

Frankly, to make the claim that sexuality might impact analysis in TIMs, look at the TIM plot that clearly shows two groups - as opposed to the smooth bubble of other males and the female cohort - and fail to disaggregate is bonkers.

There is a reason this is a different shape.

https://xcancel.com/SwipeWright/status/2081789091046182975

My scholarly article "Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes" has been accessed over 50K times, placing it in the top 8 of all articles in the journal's history.

Activists refuse to cite it or acknowledge it exists.

I'm still waiting for someone to publish a scholarly scientific takedown of it. You'd think this would be a top priority for those asserting "sex is a spectrum" who believe my work is bigoted, pseudoscientific, and actively harming a vulnerable community.

Until then, you can read it and arm yourself with a thorough understanding of the 5 major frameworks that activists and activist scientists use to undermine the binary nature of the sexes and why they all fail.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3

One reply to his paper, Response to Wright’s (2025) “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes”, is probably why he had to qualify takedown with "scholarly" and "scientific". Nicely put, it's neither. He published a response to that, Response to Mahr’s (2026) Response to Wright’s (2025) “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes”

https://xcancel.com/SwipeWright/status/2059728010253828274

ANNOUNCEMENT: WE’RE SAVING SCIENCE!

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.”

But that’s not really true.

Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear.

And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

This isn’t exactly new.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship.

Two decades later, @ConceptualJames, @HPluckrose , and @peterboghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and queer performativity. Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory.

The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing.

And today, the problem is even worse.

We now have serious SCIENCE journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.”

But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults.

That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children.

And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.”

That is untenable.

So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society (@Theory_Society), and I decided to do something about it.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.”

The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.

A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.

Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?

If yes, it gets published.

And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.

That’s how science is supposed to work.

Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.

That’s what we’ve done.

Now it’s time for academics to use it.

Read our announcement on the @WSJ below.

Background

Alcohol use disorders (AUD) associate with structural and functional brain differences, including impairments in neuropsychological function; however, reviews (mostly cross-sectional) are inconsistent with regards to recovery of such functions following abstinence. Recovery is important, as these impairments associate with treatment outcomes and quality of life.

Objective(s)

To assess neuropsychological function recovery following abstinence in individuals with a clinical AUD diagnosis. The secondary objective was to assess predictors of neuropsychological recovery in AUD.

Methods

Following the preregistered protocol (PROSPERO: CRD42022308686), APA PsycInfo, EBSCO MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Web of Science Core Collection were searched between 1999–2022. Study reporting follows the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Manual for Evidence Synthesis, study quality was assessed using the JBI Checklist for Cohort Studies. Eligible studies were those with a longitudinal design that assessed neuropsychological recovery following abstinence from alcohol in adults with a clinical diagnosis of AUD. Studies were excluded if participant group was defined by another or co-morbid condition/injury, or by relapse. Recovery was defined as function reaching ‘normal’ performance.

Results

Sixteen studies (AUD n = 783, controls n = 390) were selected for narrative synthesis. Most functions demonstrated recovery within 6–12 months, including sub-domains within attention, executive function, perception, and memory, though basic processing speed and working memory updating/tracking recovered earlier. Additionally, verbal fluency was not impaired at baseline (while verbal function was not assessed compared to normal levels), and concept formation and reasoning recovery was inconsistent.

Conclusions

These results provide evidence that recovery of most functions is possible. While overall robustness of results was good, methodological limitations included lack of control groups, additional methods to self-report to confirm abstinence, description/control for attrition, statistical control of confounds, and of long enough study durations to capture change.

During the past twenty years, the prevailing clinical approach to child and adolescent gender dysphoria changed dramatically. Before then, most clinicians considered youth gender dysphoria a mental health problem best addressed through psychological management. Typically, childhood gender dysphoria resolved prior to adulthood. Recently, however, the gender-affirming approach has prioritized facilitating social and medical gender transition of dysphoric youth. The ascendancy of gender-affirming care did not arise because of empirical advances. Rather, gender-affirming care triumphed because of the unquestioned ideological beliefs that treating gender dysphoria as a psychological problem is unenlightened, unethical, and akin to conversion therapy for sexual orientation. Clinical referrals for youth gender dysphoria skyrocketed. Adolescent-onset dysphoria among natal females, previously unknown, became the most common subtype, and there are indications it is socially transmitted. Concerns about these developments led to systematic research on the claims that gender affirmation is necessary for improvement and to prevent suicide. Comprehensive reviews failed to support these claims, and gender transition has serious social and medical complications. Thus, gender-affirming care is increasingly seen as a dubious approach. Psychotherapy, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, holds promise as a tool to manage gender dysphoria, ideally until it desists. Gender transition should be considered only after alternatives have been explored. Three distinct pathways are discussed: childhood-onset, autogynephilic, and rapid-onset gender dysphoria. Their optimal treatment may differ.

For twenty years a single therapeutic approach has predominated in the treatment of gender dysphoric children and adolescents: gender-affirming care [1,2]. This approach is based on several propositions, listed in Table 1, and the most important are as follows: Children and adolescents who feel they may be transgender should not be questioned or doubted. The goal of mental health professionals, doctors, and parents should be to facilitate social and medical gender transition as soon as possible. Delaying, or worse, opposing gender transition is courting suicide. Recently, systematic research has examined these propositions and found them either lacking evidence or false (see Table 1).

Abstract

Background

Identifying groups at increased risk for political violence can support prevention efforts. We determine whether “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans, as defined, are potentially such a group.

Methods

Nationwide survey conducted May 13-June 2, 2022 of adult members of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. MAGA Republicans are defined as Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and deny the results of that election. Principal outcomes are weighted proportions of respondents who endorse political violence, are willing to engage in it, and consider it likely to occur.

Findings

The analytic sample (n = 7,255) included 1,128 (15.0%) MAGA Republicans, 640 (8.3%) strong Republicans, 1,571 (21.3%) other Republicans, and 3,916 (55.3%) non-Republicans. MAGA Republicans were substantially more likely than others to agree strongly/very strongly that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States” (MAGA Republicans, 30.3%, 95% CI 27.2%, 33.4%; strong Republicans, 7.5%, 95% CI 5.1%, 9.9%; other Republicans, 10.8%, 95% CI 9.0%, 12.6%; non-Republicans, 11.2%, 95% CI 10.0%, 12.3%; p < 0.001) and to consider violence usually/always justified to advance at least 1 of 17 specific political objectives (MAGA Republicans, 58.2%, 95% CI 55.0%, 61.4%; strong Republicans, 38.3%, 95% CI 34.2%, 42.4%; other Republicans, 31.5%, 95% CI 28.9%, 34.0%; non-Republicans, 25.1%, 95% CI 23.6%, 26.7%; p < 0.001). They were not more willing to engage personally in political violence.

Interpretation

MAGA Republicans, as defined, are more likely than others to endorse political violence. They are not more willing to engage in such violence themselves; their endorsement may increase the risk that it will occur.

Marked as culture wars even though it's within academia. It's a critique of the guy that discovered SRY, in the context of the controversy around Caster Semenya.

https://xcancel.com/FondOfBeetles/status/2079910911603511412#m

On Sinclair, SRY and the destruction of a legacy.

In 1990, Andrew Sinclair was the first author on a paper that reported the discovery of SRY as the gene that drives male development in mammals.

He was the first author on a paper led by Peter Goodfellow, and they published side-by-side with a paper led by Robin Lovell-Badge.

This pair of papers showed that the “mysterious make male mammals molecule” was the product of the SRY gene.

Unequivocally.

Their joint discovery was hailed, including by Sinclair himself, as the answer to one of the most fundamental questions about human life: what makes us male or female?

This is, IMO, an entirely reasonable lauding of the impact.

SRY is, unequivocally, the molecule that makes male mice and men.

Any researcher who wishes to identify the sex of a (mammalian) animal or tissue (or cell line, whatever) they are working with looks for SRY.

Any researcher in the intersection between developmental biology and clinical genetics (👀) uses SRY to understand how a genetic disorder has caused fetal death.

Any geneticist detecting the sex of a pregnant woman’s baby uses SRY as their marker.

Any embryologist trying to prevent the most appalling sex-linked genetic disorders in Petri-dish embryos uses SRY.

Any forensic scientist trying to profile a murderer uses SRY.

Any archaeologist trying to sex a skeleton will try SRY as a first pass.

Thousands upon thousands of SRY assays run daily for various reasons.

But all to flag “male”.

That SRY is the “make male” gene (at least in mammals) is uncontroversial, GCSE-level (maybe lower), textbook knowledge.

It is so thoroughly assimilated into - and crucial to, for good reason - our knowledge regarding sex development, it’s hard to over-exaggerate.

I don’t think the researchers will get Nobels, although developmental biologists have an outsized impact here.

We do good stuff. Like answering some of life’s most fundamental questions. 😉

And more, in developmental biology, there are few genuine “master switches”.

These are genes that control entire developmental processes, overwriting everything else that could have or should have emerged.

SRY is a master switch. Concept.

So maybe they’ll get a Nobel. I would fully support, TBH. Their impact is impossible to estimate.

So then, to the opening premise: the destruction of a legacy.

Sinclair, back in 1990, has this “switch” nailed down. The answer to a fundamental question. The single gene that is necessary and sufficient to determine (dev bio, not lay, meaning) male development.

And in the 2020s, he chucks this away.

He doesn’t chuck it away in the dev bio literature.

He has a thriving research programme in clinical dev genetics, all good.

He’s not saying in that literature “that discovery no longer holds”. Why would he?

But he’s saying “this gene doesn’t determine sex” in the sports/philosophy literature.

And that needs examining.

Because thousands upon thousands of people have been, for nearly 40 years, been routinely, with good reason, using SRY to “find male”.

He evokes uncertainty.

Of course, technology moves. Of course, we are more alert to exceptions.

He “hedges”. “SRY doesn’t always lead to testes development”.

I mean, OK 🤷‍♀️ It almost always does, but genetic disorders exist. This is not news.

“It’s a complex network and we can’t predict outcomes.”

That something is not guaranteed (because genetic disorders and environment insults) does not mean we can’t predict that almost all people with SRY have testes.

My friend, have you ever heard of a master switch? I feel you have experience here.

“You can’t tell sex by SRY status.”

Ok, if you prefer, you can think of these individuals as SRY+ with testes and all the stuff downstream of that, but don’t call them male/men.

Have you written to the textbook editors to change this record?

“It’s not a good way to call sex.”

I can’t even 🤦‍♀️ enough.

He is a clever guy (with SRY, I’d bet my house on it).

He knows - he knows - the difference between markers, screens, SOPs for medical workflows.

I don’t care if he doesn’t want to say Caster Semenya is male.

He certainly knows Semenya’s DSD, Semenya’s biology and what having SRY triggered for Semenya’s development.

And this is where I will stop. For the time being, at least.

This thread has been therapeutic 😆

I have been struggling with the collision of a scientific legacy, rightfully owned, then cast aside so easily.

He is the person I’d most love to sit down with and get to the bottom of “what’s happening here?”

Footnote: People in the labs that were historically and currently involved with this research, who have seen the various “names” prostrate themselves, have emailed me at various points.

None of you are alone.

The post image comes from a response to that thread:

https://xcancel.com/runthinkwrite/status/2079939020767850835

The paper from that image:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378759740_World_Athletics_regulations_unfairly_affect_female_athletes_with_differences_in_sex_development

And the response paper:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00948705.2025.2522809

Any other good posts/links?