It’s especially disappointing because he chose to remove real science in favor of his own political bias.

That was not why I removed it. I removed it because I thought that many users reported it as racist/transphobic. If that many people report it as racist/transphobic, that is usually enough for me. The problem is that it was a comment to the post what was being reported, not the post itself, but I was processing the reports quickly and I made that mistake.

That said, since you brought up my political bias, I don’t mind stating my actual views openly.

Here are some biases that come to mind:

• I weigh a local community’s interests much more heavily than a business interest
• anti-nationalism bias
• biased towards policies that aim to reduce global inequality and minimize environmental damage, even when they come at the expense of the local population
• biased towards immigration policies that provide mobility
• anti war, anti violence
• pro privacy
• pro drug legalization

When it comes to gender identity: To me, it is common sense that everyone deserves respect, medical professionals should be the ones deciding, based on the best available evidence, what care is appropriate for their patients, and people should be able to make their own informed choices. I want everyone to live their best possible life and if someone identifies in some way, then accepting that and treating them how they want to be treated takes minimal effort and is basic respect. So, I can appreciate that it is an important political issue, but it is just so frustrating that it is an issue at all. Political discussions around gender identity often start from assumptions that I reject, and so I don’t see the point of engaging the discussion at that level. If you want to know my bias on that, it is: don’t use politics to regulate how medical professionals can help people, and respect everyone. I’m sorry to people who care deeply about sports, world records, and gendered bathrooms, but to me those are secondary issues. Basic human dignity comes first. The edge cases, legal loopholes, medical malpractice or abuse, and sports regulations can be dealt with after that. What I often notice is that science gets pulled into debates that already rest on assumptions I reject.

An example that comes to mind is reading, many years ago, that gay penguins show that being gay is natural, and that this somehow supports the argument for gay marriage. I never liked that reasoning, and I find that having a back-and-forth about whether being gay is natural or not is counter-productive. This type of argument implicitly accepts an appeal to nature, which I reject.

So, the way I see it, what looks like a purely scientific disagreement is often not resolvable by science alone, because the actual disagreement lives underneath that, in different values and basic philosophical assumptions. It is extremely difficult to moderate a polarized discussion when science is used as if it could settle arguments that actually go much deeper, into values and what people think is right or wrong.

This is how I see it.