Britain’s Oldest Medical Journal Goes Full Woke

Written by Noah Carl on June 6, 2024. Posted in Current News

The Lancet, Britain’s oldest medical journal and the second most important one globally, has been edited by Richard Horton for the past 29 years.

During that time, the 62-year-old has become embroiled in nuermous controversies – several of which involved him using the journal to promote political viewpoints that aligned with his own.

In a particularly egregious example last year, Horton penned an editorial denouncing then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman for saying that migrants crossing the Channel “possess values which are at odds with our country”.

Exactly what business a medical journal had criticising the Home Secretary’s views on immigration was not explained. In fact, Horton went so far as to praise Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, and wrote that “we” must not be afraid to engage in a “war of position” against “populists”. It was embarrassing stuff.

NowThe Lancet appears to have gone one better, with its latest author guidelines throwing science completely out the window. Under the heading “Reporting sex-based and gender-based analyses”, the guidelines state:

In human research, the term “sex” carries multiple definitions. It often refers to an umbrella term for a set of biological attributes associated with physical and physiological features (eg, chromosomal genotype, hormonal levels, internal and external anatomy).

It can also signify a sex categorisation, most often designated at birth (“sex assigned at birth”) based on a newborn’s visible external anatomy. The term “gender” generally refers to socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities of women, men, and gender-diverse people that occur in a historical and cultural context, and might vary across societies and over time.

So a supposedly serious medical journal is peddling the rather dubious distinction between “sex” on the one hand and “gender” on the other.

(There are “socially constructed roles, behaviours and identities” associated with different ages, but we don’t have a whole other word to refer to them.) Not only that, but it is claiming sex is something “assigned at birth,” rather than being an inherent property of an individual.

The Lancet’s new definition of ‘sex’ follows similar pronouncements from the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Expert opinion on matters of sex is now firmly on the side of left-wing woo-woo. And it gets worse. The guidelines continue:

Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man), concordant, and static. However, these constructs exist along a spectrum that includes additional sex categorisations 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. Sex and gender are not entirely discrete concepts and their definitions continue to evolve.

So sex is a “spectrum” that can change “in any given person”. If you’re female today, who’s to say you won’t be male tomorrow – or perhaps somewhere in between? This is complete piffle, of course.

As Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins note, “sex in all mammals is determined by sex chromosomes; and there are two and only two sexes: male and female”.

The Lancet’s guidelines on sex conclude by explicitly telling authors to use the term “sex assigned at birth” because it is “more accurate and inclusive”. I’m imagining a future Lancet article on Elizabeth Garrett Anderson:

“She was the first person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and she went on to found the first medical school to train people who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth. All in all, she was a truly remarkable person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth.”

If this were some obscure Gender Studies periodical, it wouldn’t really matter. But we’re talking about the world’s second most cited medical journal. It’s read by doctors, surgeons, researchers and all the people to whom we’ve entrusted our health. How can they maintain our trust when they can’t seem to tell the difference between a man and a woman?

See more here Daily Sceptic 

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