Thread by @FrancisAaronUK

There’s a certain type of person who invokes “experts” as if they were some sort of monolithic priesthood. This is generally someone without the cognitive capacity to question received dogma; someone who has been inculcated with a set of prescribed beliefs. Thread.
1.

The summoning of “experts” as a form of argumentation is a fallacy: an appeal to authority. In all live issues, there are a range of “experts” who have differing views. Where one expert can be appealed to, another can be conjured to negate the first.
2.

Unless all parties agree that a particular “expert” is infallible on a given issue, this line of argumentation is void. This is what Richard Feynman meant when he said that all scientific advance, and the scientific method itself, rests precisely on doubting the “experts.”
3.

Where all “the experts” agree – as they do for instance on human evolution and the consequent fact that human beings are an anisogamous species composed of only two sexes – then arguments along the lines of – “the experts say so” – are more valid.
4.

There will be some who disagree with even this. Some will go so far as to construct a metaphysical creed centred around a spirit-substitute called “gender identity.” They may even seek to overturn, or at least cast suspicion upon, the established fact of the sex binary.
5.

Sometimes the questioning of what we assume to be absolute is vital. Its interrogation can remind us that some things aren’t as absolute as first supposed. But other times it only serves to remind us that the knowledge that was established is as solid and certain as can be.
6.

If the transgender dream-world proves anything, I will bet that in the years or decades to come, it proves that the pursuit of sex change and the desire to modify the body to match an internal notion of “gender” – will end in remorse. Perhaps not for all. But for many.
7.

Do I agree with “the experts” that dosing children with triptorelin to suppress puberty, that summoning a simulation of the opposite sex via synthetic estrogen or testosterone, and that severing sex organs is the apt solution to a child’s neurosis?

No.

8.

In a field already flowing with cranks and crackpots, arguments that invoke “experts” or “international best practice” are folly. Lobotomy was once “best practice.” In 1949, Egas Moniz, the pioneer of the frontal lobotomy, even won a Nobel Prize.
9. End.