Last week I published an essay exploring the catastrophic political state of the transgender agenda, in particular as it pertains to pediatric gender medicine, for Alex Berenson’s Substack, Unreported Truths. Today, Berenson and I had a Substack live to talk about the philosophy undergirding this ethically fraught field of medicine, as well as how it interrelates with other subjects I’ve covered, including HIV, monkeypox and gay sexual health. I also talked about my experience taking GLP-1 and addressed the question of whether the risks of a new treatment, both known and unknown, are outweighed, at least on an individual level, by the benefits.
During our conversation, I got a chance to reflect on the famous debate between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris in 2018 after Harris had Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, on his podcast. The podcast triggered an avalanche of debate and controversy over Murray’s belief in the association between race and IQ and what many thought was the egregious platforming by Harris of this controversial figure.
During the contentious debate between Harris and Klein, which I listened to for the first time the other day, Harris argued that we have to be able to dispassionately discuss difficult scientific research topics that might have findings that could cause harm to certain groups. Censoring science accordingly, he argued, could set a precedent that might have any number of harmful impacts in other contexts. (There is an obvious comparison to scientific inquiry about treating gender dysphoria in minors, as I see it. I related to a lot of Harris’ gripes over the illiberalism that had slapped him in the face for taking on a forbidden subject.)
An exasperated Klein insisted that it wasn’t possible to divorce this particular scientific debate from its larger, incendiary context, namely the use of race science to justify harmful racist policies and eugenics.
I personally wish each of these two very smart men had listened to the other more during the debate, as I think they both had a point! It raises the question of what responsibility journalists have when covering scientific findings that might be misused, so to speak, by people motivated by animus. Should a journalist selectively edit what they report accordingly and just never cover inconvenient truths? Or is their responsibility simply to report the truth, whatever it may be, and to do so with the least amount of inflammatory rhetoric and bias as possible?
I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
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