Late-breaking FAIL: webcomic creator in cissupremacist quiz error

I decided recently that I should apply for membership of the British Psychological Society. I have a valid degree to apply for graduate membership, and the recent business at the APA  over the DSM-V categorisation of Gender Incongruence shows that psychology, as a science, needs people who can think beyond the binary. Ironically, one of my favourite webcomics has recently provided an indication of why this is the case.

XKCD is a webcomic produced by Randall Munroe. Munroe comes from a scientific background, having worked as a contractor for NASA, and often includes geeky, science-based humour in the strip. He's also currently conducting some kind of research into colour blindness, and has included a survey on colour-blindness on his site.

If you've been following this blog awhile, you'll have worked out what's annoyed me. It's this question:

Do you have a Y chromosome?
If unsure, select "Yes" if you are physically male and "No" if you are physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness.
 
What's particularly annoying about this is the fact that Munroe is clearly trying to be gender-inclusive, bless him. And I can sort of see why you might want to know the birth gender of people who are colour-blind, if you're studying the genetics of the condition. But...the fail. It burns.
 
It burns for a lot of reasons. Mainly because it's more complicated than that. Munroe doesn't allow for intersex people: by reducing 'physical maleness' to the matter of having a Y-chromosome, he excludes men with Klinefelter's syndrome (on which note check out Helen from Bird of Paradox's post about KS Awareness Week), who have a Y chromosome, it's true, but also have an extra X chromosome, and are less 'physically male' than the generic-model XY-guy. He excludes those people with tetragametic chimerism who can have XX and XY chromosome structures in different parts of their bodies. And he is of course tremendously hurtful to trans people by reducing the issue of their gender to what chromosomes they were born with.
 
I don't think that this was deliberate on Munroe's part. He's mentioned people who've had SRS, he's tried to frame the question not as 'are you male or female?' but 'do you have a Y-chromosome?' He's tried. This isn't the kind of Cisfail the Guardian, say, engage in when they run columns about trans people and queerness by folk like Julie Bindel or Bea Campbell. But he's got the whole thing bloody wrong. Not just ethically, in fact, but methodologically.
 
Because the thing is, doing a survey on the internet, in which anyone can take part, is a lousy way to carry out research. You'll get lots of responses, but how do you know those responses are the same people? How do you know which participants make up your sample? The data at the start of the survey are meaningless because - and I'm gonna rock you in your socks here, people - the internet lies. Anyone (i.e. me) could go on Munroe's survey, and claim to be, say, a colourblind Frenchwoman in possession of a genuine Y-chromosome, and then proceed to answer the survey by, say, giving the colours increasingly ridiculous names. This happens when you do research. One of my old psych lecturers said that psychology experiments are tainted, for the most part, because the samples they usually use are made up of psychology students, and usually most of those students will either (a) be nice students trying to 'help' you get the result you 'want' or (b) evil little feckers (i.e. me, again) deliberately trying to give answers which will give you the result you don't 'want.' So, y'know, doing a survey on the internet in which anyone can participate is methodologically unsound from the get-go. So why ask an offensive question in the first place?
 
It'll get lots more responses, that's certain. But a more tightly controlled research project carried out among a smaller participant population would yield better quality data from participants who could be much better described. As it is, Munroe's survey is basically an open invitation to people to lie about their gender, about whether or not they're colourblind, about what country they're from (and we've noticed the annoying 'Tell us your native language, but answer questions in English' question, haven't we?) and so on, and then to 'answer' the survey by calling the colours things like 'Jan Vermeer's Pannetone Cyclotron', 'Grrr-nommy-nomminy' and 'the mongspoddler'. Not that I would endorse such behaviour (which may or may not have been carried out by me).
 
The fact is that, frankly, trans people, as much as we might wish it otherwise,  are such a statistically small section of the population (yes, even on the internet) that, unless you're actually doing research on the trans community (and research in such a sensitive area should come with very specialised ethical requirements), it isn't worth controlling for the possibility of trans men and women answering your survey. Munroe could easily get away with asking the question 'Are you male or female?' safe in the knowledge that most of his results will come from cis people, and that any statistical patterns relating to biological gender will be easily apparent in the data. To get into discussion of chromosomes, to talk of being 'physically male' or 'physically female' and to ask trans people to give their birth gender (therefore reminding them of their status in some bigots' eyes as not real women or men, with all the traumatic memories that will trigger) is both unnecessary and irresponsible. It's bad science, in both senses of the word. And, coming from the creator of a strip who's so often found humour in mocking other peoples' scientific errors, it's a depressing thing to see.
 
As any scientist will tell you, the biggest part of the job is asking the right questions. Munroe has tried to ask the right question in his survey, but he's tried too hard: and when he finds himself toiling through page after page of deliberately buggered-up results, he'll only have himself to blame.
 

Who's Afraid of Beatrix Campbell?

Here's an interesting idea from sci-fi author Justine Larbalestier: mansplaining. Mansplaining is when men explain things to women which women actually understand better than men. Very often this is men explaining to women why sexist comments aren't actually sexist. Larbalestier points out there are other variants of this, such as whitesplaining, where white people explain to black people why something isn't racist.

It struck me - and this can't be an original thought, I'm sure others have had it before me - that you could also have cisplaining, wherein cis people explain to trans people how something isn't really transphobic. Hmm, I thought, I wonder where I could find a good example of cisplaining to illustrate the point?

Why, in the Guardian, of course! For it would seem that Bea Campbell has decided to bravely leap to Julie Bindel's defense and protect her from those mean people who protested against her on Friday.

Weirdly, I'm actually okay with this. The reason for this is, from perusing her wikipedia entry, I've found that Campbell has  a pretty interesting record when it comes to defending people.

She endorsed the Newcastle City Council report into allegations of child abuse at Shieldfield Nursery in 1993. The two alleged perpetrators of this abuse had already been found innocent in a criminal trial, but Campbell believed the Council report was 'stringent' and had uncovered 'persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse'.

The two nursery workers accused of this abuse successfully sued the 'independent review team' who produced the report, and were awarded the maximum possible damages, with the judge admitting that the report 'included...claims...which they must have known to be untrue' and that the only likely explanation for this was 'malice.'

Campbell also defended the prosecution of Sally Clark, who was imprisoned for the alleged murder of two of her sons. Campbell based her belief in Clark's guilt on the most stringent of scientific grounds, arguing that 'motherhood...can make some women lose their minds.'

Sally Clark was found not guilty on appeal, and released, after the 'scientific' evidence against her was found to be faulty. (This is not a happy ending, though. Clark emerged from prison a broken woman, by all accounts, and died of acute alcohol intoxication at the tragically young age of forty-two. I would like to think Campbell loses sleep over the thought that her words contributed to the demonisation and eventual suicide of an innocent woman. I would like to think that, but I would like to think I will be awarded the TS Eliot prize on the same weekend I win the lottery and find out Katee Sackhoff really, really likes me.)

They say God loves a tryer though, in which case ze must be quite fond of Campbell. Unchastened by these past experiences of failure, she went to the mat for paediatrician David Southall, who had testified against Clark and had also been involved in some ethically and scientfically dodgy medical research on Munchausen's by Proxy. With the same level of high-minded scientific reasoning she had displayed in her examination of the Clark case and the Newcastle Council report, Campbell declared that Southall 'established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse.'

In 2007, Southall was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council for 'professional misconduct.' The judgement specifically referred to his role in the Clark case and other legal proceedings involving child abuse, with Justice Blake saying that Southall 'had speculated on non-medical matters in an offensive manner entirely inconsistent with the status of an independent expert.'

So you'll excuse me if I don't quake in my New Rocks at the thought that Beatrix Campbell has decided to go into battle for Julie Bindel, armed with the sword of wonky science and the shield of blinkered ideology. Based on Campbell's past record at championing other peoples' causes, if I was Bindel I'd get the next plane to Tuscany - and not bother booking a return flight.