Only 29% of female undergrads opposed allowing a speaker arguing “White people are collectively responsible for racism & use it to protect their privilege” & 47% opposed allowing a speaker arguing “The police should be abolished b/c they are racist." Men expressed similar views. pic.twitter.com/yCPHA3e7Zi
— The Missing Data Depot (@data_depot) January 13, 2023
You can sort through the responses here.
A reader writes:
Steve,
We’ll that was depressing! When I saw the tweet on gender, I thought well we know how many rednecks there are. Looking at the data, that’s maybe not that off.First, being conservative, then religious affiliation, were the most important factors in being open to hearing that view. For example, being Mormon was better than being Catholic, but attending Notre Dame was better than Brigham Young. Explicitly conservative Christian Hillsdale was the only college to have a majority comfortable and somewhat comfortable.
Race was more interesting to me: The Aspirational vs The Secure (less anxiety, not about actually doing well or not). I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap with political party, but the Asians!
As far as women… Appealing to women is a waste of time. We’re submissive and value stability. Unfortunately, the strong horse steering our secular society is psychotic…but it’s still the strong horse.
These graphs follow up in more detail on allowing a speaker to come on campus who says “Transgender people have mental disorders.”
On the question of allowing free speech on World War T, the most liberal college (strongly support plus somewhat support) is explicitly conservative Hillsdale:
Conversely, the most strongly opposed student bodies to free speech regarding transgender claims tend to be women’s and rich kids’ schools in the Northeast:
By the way, psychiatrist Scott Alexander recently wrote about how the DSM-V manual has to classify “gender dysphoria” as more or less of a mental disorder in order from patients to qualify for insurance subsidization of their “gender-affirming care.” But then everybody in the profession has to act like it’s the greatest thing ever or not get canceled.
In contrast, homosexuality is NOT an official disorder because, while “transition therapy” is GOOD and must be paid for by insurance, “conversion therapy” is BAD and must never ever occur.
Got that?
Scott writes:
Consider: does the DSM classify transgender as a mental disorder? Hard to say. It includes 302.85: Gender Dysphoria, defined as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender”. It also includes approximately one million caveats saying that transgender definitely isn’t a mental disorder. Why the contradiction? Because regardless of the philosophical definition of mental disorder, the practical definition is:
If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good.
But if you call something a mental disorder, people will accuse you of trying to stigmatize them, which is bad.
The DSM writers are trans-friendly and want to make sure trans people can get the care they need (for example, in most states, people need a psych evaluation before they can get gender affirmation surgery), so they want to force insurance companies to cover transgender, so they have to include it. But they also don’t want to stigmatize trans people, so they also include a lot of paragraphs about how even though they just listed it as a mental disorder, it definitely isn’t a mental disorder.
(a common claim is that the DSM says transgender itself is not a mental disorder, but the distress it produces is. This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me – you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it? Also, I can’t find support for this distinction in a literal reading of the DSM criteria themselves)
When the DSM is political, it’s not (just) because the authors are ideologues and want to go around stigmatizing people they don’t like. It’s because “is X a mental disorder or not?” is scientifically meaningless but politically very important.
