I took that as her speaking from her own personal experience. She's a doctor of psychology who specialized in sex research — her PhD thesis was titled "Functional and Structural Neuroimaging of Paraphilic Hypersexuality in Men". She worked in academia for about ten years until she became dissatisfied with the influence that political correctness had on her ability to fund her research. So you could say that she achieved a career in science, until she no longer wanted to.
You could argue that she failed to account for the fact that readers of this article don't necessarily know who she is or what her own experience has been.
To those who are put off by the article, it might help to understand that, while Dr. Soh has a PhD in psychology, she is also a political commentator, writes science articles, and is a podcast host.
Like a lot of Intellectual Dark Web folks, it's best to check out a long-form discussion — like a lecture[0] or a podcast[1] — to get a better sense of the ideas they're trying to communicate.
Well first of all, she misquotes the memo, which the New York Times reported as coming from the Department of Health and Human Services — they say 'sex', not 'gender':
> “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
I'm not saying I agree with the memo. But there's a reason to use the word 'sex' instead of 'gender' — the former refers to ones biological sex, which in humans is essentially determined by whether the person has a Y chromosome.
There is NO strong body of evidence indicating that people who are trans are that way because of biological factors. There are a few small studies, but nothing that, quantitatively speaking, justifies her claim that "[...] false ideas about gender have been thoroughly debunked by science".
There is actually a great amount of contention in academia about gender. You really needn't look further than the debate over whether gender is a social construct — a notion popular with some feminists and in the social sciences. The fact that it's so strongly asserted by as many people in the social sciences as it is, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A specific example: there's the "Social Role Hypothesis" which basically postulates a evening out of the distribution of men and women as a society becomes more industrialized and egalitarian [0]
However, a study [1] conducted by Armin Falk, an economics professor at the University of Bonn, and Johannes Hermle, a doctoral student in economics at the University of California, Berkeley of 80,000 people in 76 countries strongly disfavors that hypothesis.
The study supports quite the opposite — as life becomes less hard in a society, and as it makes progress in terms of gender equality, men and women tend to manifest MORE gender preferences.
What we have at the moment are deep divisions in academia, where certain topics are not being approached in an rational, intellectually honest, evidence-based way. Frankly, it approaches dogmatism.
When so much evidence suggests that biological sex and gender are very much _tightly_ interwoven — they are absolutely causally linked, and you still have people in academia claiming that they're not — even to the point of saying that gender has no biological basis — that's not "thoroughly debunked" by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't blame the author. She probably has sources that one would take as authoritative at first glance. The problem is that it's not backed by a thorough, honest, cross-disciplinary discourse. And sadly, for people like her and I, it won't be resolved until everyone puts their feelings aside and resolve to actually get to the bottom of it, regardless of whether the truth resembles what we wish were so.
> These false ideas about gender have been thoroughly debunked by science.
As much as I wish that were true, it's not. And not only does claiming it to be solid science not change anything, but also it weakens the standing of the person saying it. And by extension, the rest of us who live as we feel we need to live, but not at the expense of truth and intellectual honesty.
When I read a story like this, I'm not faulting a Uniqlo for choosing progress. It's logical and extremely profitable. I think the alarm is precisely because of how much sense it makes.
Enough incremental progress has been made for us to arrive at this threshold, after which a company like Uniqlo can lay off 90% of their workforce by investing an amount which is, if I'm not mistaken[0], considerably less than what they profit in one year.
Years ago when I was a remote employee, I definitely did become marginalized. Projects I took on and completed were often assumed to have been done by an on site employee. People on calls sometimes spoke of me as if there was no chance I was on the call. The CEO even talked about getting me to train my replacement, apparently assuming I wasn't part of the call concerning the department of which I was the lead.
I've found that the issue with being a remote employee is the employee part. My experience has been that trusting your job security to an employer is just not as safe as it used to be. Nowadays as a freelancer who works on mostly long-term contracts, it's possible that some of my clients wouldn't think much of replacing me, but if they do decide to stop using me, I can grab another contract. My office doesn't change. My machine is still my machine, i.e. they're often the more replaceable one.
However, and as others point out here, this only works if you have lots of experience in something highly in demand.
It is feasible for a small group like that. There was a project done by three people, presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2013, called "Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures". Their paper is not hard that hard to follow and it's really cool how it makes it possible to make any shape of biped figure out how to walk on its own. There's a video too: http://www.goatstream.com/research/papers/SA2013/index.html
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