Historian Who Popularized Gender As A Social Construct for Power, Retracts

A Canadian historian who popularized the notion that gender was a social construct is regretting he ever said that.

LifeSiteNews reports:

Christopher Dummitt is an associate professor at Trent University’s School for the Study of Canada. On September 17, Quillette published an essay in which he explains his past conviction that “sex was wholly a social construct” “all about power,” admits that his “big idea” has run roughshod over biological common sense and freedom of speech, and offers a “mea culpa for my own role in all of this....”

By his own admission, he could “cherry pick” details because “history is a big place. And so there was always something to find....”

Dummitt maintains he was on “safe ground” to the extent that he “stuck to the documents, and reconstructed how people talked in the past,” but the conclusions he drew from them were “intellectually bankrupt” because they “came from my ideological beliefs — even if, at the time, I wouldn’t have described this as ideology....”

“And that’s why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic level, I didn’t have proof for part of what I was saying. So I stuck to the arguments with fervor, and denounced alternative points of view. Intellectually, it wasn’t pretty. And that’s what makes it so disappointing to see that the viewpoints I used to argue for so fervently — and so baselessly — have now been accepted by so many in the wider society.”

~End quote. LifeSiteNews

Cherry picking from history to fit one's presuppositions and ideology, or suppressing study findings, happens all the time  in "science". It happens with the global warming "scientists" too. They throw numbers at you, but you have to ask some critical questions and do some digging to find out the context and truth. For example:

In 2015 the mythical "97% of the world's scientists agree global warming is real, man-made, and dangerous", except that's not true. According to Ian Tuttle:

The “97 percent” statistic first appeared prominently in a 2009 study by University of Illinois master’s student Kendall Zimmerman and her adviser, Peter Doran. Based on a two-question online survey, Zimmerman and Doran concluded that “the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific bases of long-term climate processes” — even though only 5 percent of respondents, or about 160 scientists, were climate scientists. In fact, the “97 percent” statistic was drawn from an even smaller subset: the 79 respondents who were both self-reported climate scientists and had “published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.” 

Surely the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook — author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand and creator of the blog Skeptical Science (subtitle: “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.”). In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier: Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent! When David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who formerly headed the university’s Center for Climatic Research, recreated Cook’s study, he found that “only 41 papers — 0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent,” endorsed what Cook claimed. Several scientists whose papers were included in Cook’s initial sample also protested that they had been misinterpreted. “Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain,” Legates concluded.

~End quote.  National Review

Or how about global warming's emailgate as I reported:

"Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data."

~Forbes

SCIENTISTS AT TWO OF THE WORLD’S LEADING CLIMATE CENTRES - NASA AND NOAA - HAVE BEEN CAUGHT OUT MANIPULATING TEMPERATURE DATA TO OVERSTATE THE EXTENT OF THE 20TH CENTURY "GLOBAL WARMING".

The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.

When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models -  20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic.

This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the US was the 1930s.

End quote.

Bold, red are my emphasis.