The Infectious Myth

The Infectious Myth - Intersex and Transgender with Claire Graham

Claire Graham is a British intersex advocate, and an intersex woman herself. David discusses the new attention given to intersex issues, as they are often used to bolster the claim that sex and gender are not binary. But ‘intersex’ is a misleading term, because almost all cases are quite easily determined to be men and women, and in many cases, such as Claire’s, there are no characteristics of the opposite sex at all, just an abnormal development of the sexual anatomy. Claire has experienced significant hostility from some transgender rights activists, and has been banned on Twitter. Yet other transgender people have supported her, and don’t want the idea of distinct sexes banned.

 

Claire maintains a blog at: https://mrkhvoice.com

The Infectious Myth - Walkable City Rules with Jeff Speck

Jeff Speck is a well known urban designer who has a passion for making cities more walkable, as shown by his book, “Walkable City” and the recent follow-on, “Walkable City Rules”. David and Jeff discuss why it is important to make cities more walkable, what’s wrong with many current North American cities, what should be done, and how this can be accomplished politically. Optimistically, change is coming, one step at a time.

 

For more, see Jeff’s website: https://www.jeffspeck.com

The Infectious Myth - CO2 and Temperature: Friends, Enemies or Ships crossing in the night?

W. Jackson Davis is a Berkely, Oregon and Stanford educated climate science who has studied historical estimates of temperature and CO2. He first explains how these are estimated historically using so-called proxies, and then how there is little correlation between the two phenomena and, when there is, it is generally temperature changes that precede changes in CO2 levels. This was document in a 2017 paper entitled, “The Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years”. Davis does not believe CO2 is harmless, however, he does believe that it contributes to the acidification of the oceans.

 

For more information on this week’s guest see: http://EnvironmentalStudiesInstitute.org

The Infectious Myth - Psychological Dangers of Gender Affirmation with Oren Amitay

Oren Amitay is a Canadian psychologist, practitioner and university teacher, who has been outspoken about the dangers of gender affirmation, unquestioningly accepting someone’s claim that they are not their biological sex without dealing with the other conditions and life factors that they are almost certainly dealing with.. The vast majority of teenagers with gender dysphoria will normally ‘grow out’ of this by the time they are 20, but gender affirmation will encourage more of them to proceed to hormones and surgery, with lifelong health problems, and no possibility of returning to their original biological state. Amitay also talks about censorship, being kicked off twitter and out of the Ontario Psychological Association, and describes how many colleagues support him but are afraid to speak out. Despite this Amitay continues to advocate for an open discussion of the best psychological approaches to children and teens who in genuine distress due to their inability to accept their biological sex.