Fairfax, VA, USA. Meet me at the crossroads where psychology engages neuroscience and biology. Join me at the sharp edge where cultural anthropology and sociology confronts the higher maths and scientific methodology.

There are no pristine university sanctuaries that will survive the growing standards of rigorous scientific research; no learned academic petitions that will survive outside of their ivory sanctuaries without baring themselves to vigorous peer review by neurobiologists, genetic researchers, physics, mathematics, and careful replication in the laboratory.

The age of well-doctored professors coming down from their mountains to spread their good word to the less educated masses is passed. Their ancient engines no longer drive the discussion. Every rack, every prize they have sought and promulgated has fallen to the realities of the physical universe and twenty-first century science.

Their voyage is closed and done. We have moved on to newer worlds than they can ever imagine.

All men, all women are born with an equal opportunity to fail. We are creatures of atoms made flesh and the laws of physics, a non-specialized, under-muscled, well brained ape who quickly learned to fill every available niche on its planet.

We survive by the quality of our gray matter, not the intensity of our emotions or the appealing promises of our wish fulfilling fantasies. Humanity exists at the fulcrum point of fanciful explanations and the unfurling physical realities of the universe.

We are starstuff in more ways than one.

The social sciences, especially sociology, undoubtedly doing a lot of good research but there is a sea change underway in how that research is conducted. As Sharon commented, however,

The gap is widening between the study areas with quantitative drivers and those dependent on unacknowledged and values-laden premises that are central to qualitative approaches. The latter are progressively hampered by an educational foundation that devalues biology and mathematics.

The old road is rapidly aging and the new one is beyond the command of professorial social philosophers and academic researchers who have spent their careers ignoring primate biology, the higher maths, physics, and now, neurobiology and the science of genetics.

But so far, although they can’t lend a hand, the ancient regime refuses to get out of the way, preferring to block the doorways and the halls in a last gasp attempt to retain control of the scientific discoveries and subsequent discourse that has developed outside their walls.

The old roads and career paths are gone, washed out by modern science and research. The old guard, whose words and wisdom once were revered, refuses to leave their now flooded land, denying that they are standing waist deep in a Big Muddy that will soon cover their heads and scrub the earth clean.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched; — at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Chapter cxxxvThe age when the speculative conclusions of a short, semi-formal observational study masquerades as rigorous scientific research is passed. God no longer speaks without the foundations of the higher maths and neurobiology. Academic prophecy and personal theology no longer hold sway in a universe grown weary of sesquipedalian papers filled with obscurely constructed sentences.

Five college students looking to please an interviewer do not the universe make. A handful of carefully chosen participants does not make a substantial data base that can withstand vigorous examination by science. Cherry-picking subjects that support your thesis while rejecting those who do not is antithetical to the nature of true science.

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer

J. Morrison
The Soft Parade
The Doors.

When you are in therapy – or when you are a child, or when the nun or priests asks you when the last time you went to mass or took confession, for that matter – you soon learn, if you have any survival instincts at all, what the “correct” answer is, the answer your therapist or parents or your boss or spouse expects.

You’re paying the therapist hundreds of dollars an hour after all and unexpected answers only lengthen the process.

Here are some correct answers. Feel free to use them wherever and whenever you may think them applicable.

Every Sunday.

Next Saturday.

Since I was two or three.

I’m transgendered actually.

My parents don’t understand me/respect me/love me.

The Man/Society/My Parental Units are out to get me/stop me/force me to conform.

No.

Too often the answers given by the subjects (aka, the data points) of an old school cultural study are those given by college students pleased with their selection as subject matter and looking to provide the “corrected” answers. Old school social “researchers” seldom question the validity of expected answers and results that support their study thesis.

They have been known to cull out subjects and responses that do not support the original thesis. This is known as cooking the books.

There have been a lot of cooks in gender theory, sociology, and psychology but the times are changing. The old cooks are slowly, noisily dying, refusing to accept the inevitable. Good science, at long last, is finally emerging victorious and in control.

Researchers with a rounded approach to nature v. nurture are marshaling observational strength and analytical rigor. The good guys are slowly taking control, the bad actors are finally being identified.

Science, after decades of academic opposition, is winning out.

Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson is a Co-Founder & Principal of TS-Si. She also serves as a Contributing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. She maintains another site, StarPoet.com, for her poetry and literary works.

Ms. Thompson's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. Lisa welcomes your comments. Use the form below or email via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.

The TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.


TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.

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