AltDooyeweerdian

(International) Law, Politics, Arts & Culture, Journalism, Herman Dooyeweerd

[steve bishop @stevebishopuk]

Roger Henderson’s excellent Illuminating Law: The Construction of Herman Dooyeweerd's Philosophy is now available as a pdf.

https://t.co/Y3iRx41jqL

[Leor Sapir @LeorSapir]

Another Major Transgender Suicide Study Crumbles

A widely cited study published in the prestigious @NatureHumBehav claimed that “anti-transgender laws” encouraged teen suicide attempts.

A new methodological review dismantles that finding.

New from me in @cityjournal

[steve bishop @stevebishopuk]

Monergism have translated Kuyper’s E Voto Dordaceno — his commentary on The Heidelberg Commentary. https://t.co/yXJrC1jD16 #Kuyper #Kuyperania #neocalvinism

[Peter James Steven @pjamessteven]

The @DetransAI chatbot is now live and fully automated on X - mention it in any thread to include it in the conversation, just like you would mention @grok. It's an expert on gender and detransition related topics.

Get the full experience at https://t.co/VBTI8v219J

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

A lot of people have struggled to believe me when I say that the Australian Human Rights Commission is giving pregnancy protections in law to men who claim to be woman, because it’s so stupid it’s hard to believe anyone would say it.

Enjoy:

[Committee for Academic Freedom @ComAcFreedom]

Today is International Academic Freedom Day.

One of the clearest accounts of why academic freedom matters, and why it is increasingly under pressure, was delivered at CAF’s recent Navigating Academic Freedom conference.

In this keynote, Professor argues that many universities are drifting away from the ideal of open inquiry and towards a more mission-driven model in which institutional “values” increasingly shape what can be said, taught, researched, or challenged.

He also sets out why academic freedom ultimately depends not just on regulation, but on academics themselves being willing to exercise it visibly and confidently.

Well worth watching in full:

https://t.co/qfDmNWZE6U

[Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT]

On the latest round of fertility discourse, friends don't let friends share chart 1 without the important context of chart 2, which is @lymanstoneky's child-survival adjustment:

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

On Hantavirus: a (non-technical) thread.

Disclaimer: I am a biology PhD, but not virology/epidemiology. Husbandman is a virology PhD. But I’m told I’m good at communicating science, so here’s my take.

#Hantavirus

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

https://t.co/kthaj84HDU

[Judge Stephen Dillard @JudgeDillard]

Every American should watch every second of this video.

Thank you, @BenSasse.

[Leor Sapir @LeorSapir]

"We're all just winging it."
-- Erica, gender clinician in Utah (2022)

Last year, a court in Alabama authorized the unsealing of videos from @wpath conferences.

This clip shows why WPATH had tried--unsuccessfully--to keep the videos under wraps.

Read my expose in @TheFP 👇

[TransgenderTrend @Transgendertrd]

Calling all parents!

Please read this and respond to the updated Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance for schools this weekend 👇

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

Another sign of the times:

Harvard is reportedly raising “several hundred million dollars” to “bring dozens of faculty members to campus and drastically shift Harvard’s academic makeup.”

This could be a serious and positive step toward reforming the university.

[AltDooyeweerdian @RRBagares]

Important!

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Since I started writing about sex pseudoscience, critics dismiss my arguments because I mainly published in popular news outlets instead of academic journals.

Well, my scholarly article "Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes" published last year is now the most-read academic article on the subject.

Only one scholar has written a formal critique of it, but from a "feminist epistemology" perspective. It was laughably nonsensical. I responded (link below).

I am still waiting for a biologist who thinks I'm wrong to expose and embarrass me with formal, detailed take-down of my arguments.

If I'm nothing more than an anti-trans bigot promoting "junk science," as the SPLC has claimed, publicly demolishing my supposedly crank views should be seen as a public service. And it should also be an easy way to add to your academic résumé.

LINKS (all open access):
-My paper "Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes":https://t.co/k6VEmRcgqM
-A critic's "feminist epistemology" response:https://t.co/EgT5o1q8k4
-My response to the critique:https://t.co/AyvtjDJq9t

[AltDooyeweerdian @RRBagares]

Its pointless to have suicide hotlines when you have something like this in your country. This culture of death is founded on a distorted view of personal autonomy. When you only have autonomy as a value, you have nothing.

[Dr Katie Musgrave @dr_musgrave]

Teenage boy with autism euthanised in the Netherlands.

I think this is wrong. 😥

Takeaway point: “Assisted suicide and euthanasia regimes quickly become dangerous for the most vulnerable people in society: the sick, the disabled, and the elderly.”

https://t.co/L1et4Ouq1U

[AltDooyeweerdian @RRBagares]

@Eldukebagulaya Uy baka naman me soft copy yan may Chimni. Perfect yan for my paper on Rizal's failed Singapore Habeas Corpus petition as Transnational Forum-Shopping for Liberty under the Shadow of Empire

[AltDooyeweerdian @RRBagares]

Is the NYT finally realizing that ideological commitment without truth harms journalism?

[Leor Sapir @LeorSapir]

BREAKING: The New York Times (@nytimes) has just called out the Chair of the Board of the American Medical Association (@AmerMedicalAssn), Dr. David Aizuss (@lasereyedoc), for misrepresenting his organization's recent media statements on pediatric gender medicine.

Here's what happened🧵

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.

Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.

They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.

The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.

Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.

Then it got worse.

The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.

It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.

One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.

Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.

Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.

That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.

Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.

This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

[Robert P. George @McCormickProf]

Reminder for friends in the DC area: On April 9th I'll be giving the 2026 Kellogg Lecture in Jurisprudence at the Library of Congress. You can register to attend in person or online at links provided in the announcement below. My Lecture is entitled "Why Liberal Secularism Fails." I'll be engaging the thought of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, as well as my esteemed teachers Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz.
https://t.co/7qk9Ne0qRu

[AltDooyeweerdian @RRBagares]

Not care but abuse, thanks to an unquestioning commitment to an unscientific ideology

[Our Duty Canada @OurDutyCanada]

Many still believe that immediate "gender affirmation" is the only compassionate path for a child in distress.

However, a massive longitudinal study from Germany (Bachmann et al., 2024) proves that this "care" model is built on a foundation of shifting sand.
https://t.co/FOu3GU6T5s

By tracking nearly 14 million young people over a decade, the researchers found that the "affirmation-only" route ignores a critical biological reality: adolescence is fluid, not fixed.

The Evidence the "Affirmers" Ignore:

• The 72% Desistance Rate: In the largest group of concern—females aged 15–19—72.7% of those diagnosed in 2017 no longer had a gender diagnosis five years later. If we "affirm" a child with permanent medical interventions, we are interfering with a condition that, for the vast majority, resolves on its own within five years.

• Explosive, Unexplained Growth: Diagnoses skyrocketed by 800% in just ten years. This isn't a natural biological shift; it's a social and clinical phenomenon that demands skepticism, not immediate medicalization.

• The Complexity of the Child: Over 70% of these minors were already struggling with documented issues like depression, anxiety, ADHD, or autism. When we "affirm" a gender identity first, we risk masking and neglecting the underlying mental health struggles that require real help.

The Call to Action:
Stop the Medicalization of Minors

This study is a wake-up call. The truth is that "affirming care" is often a fast track to life-altering medical consequences for a condition that the data shows is temporary for most teenagers.

We must stop treating temporary adolescent distress with permanent medical solutions. It is time to return to a model of careful, paced assessment that prioritizes the long-term physical and mental health of the child over the immediate demands of an ideological "affirmation" model. Our children deserve a childhood free from irreversible medical experiments.

Follow the data. Protect the children. Speak the truth.

Don’t just take one study’s word for it. The evidence for adolescent desistance and the need for caution is backed by major health reviews worldwide:

• The Cass Review (UK, 2024): A comprehensive independent review concluding that the evidence for pediatric medical transition is "remarkably weak" and calling for a holistic, therapy-first approach.
Read the Final Report: [ARCHIVED CONTENT] Final Report Cass Review https://t.co/nIoaW5VeXC

• The Dutch "Life-Span" Study (Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2024): Researchers followed over 2,700 children for 15 years and found that "gender non-contentedness" is common in early adolescence but decreases significantly with age.
View the Study Details: https://t.co/s6ZJYOr4dI

• Swedish National Board of Health (2022/2024): Sweden, a pioneer in this field, has officially pivoted away from hormones for minors, citing a lack of evidence and the high rate of desistance and comorbidities.
Read the Swedish Policy Shift: https://t.co/LCGUTclBdD

• The Finnish Medical Guidelines (PALKO/COHERE): Finland now prioritizes psychosocial support as the first-line treatment, noting that identity development is a natural part of adolescence that should not be medicalized.
Read the Finnish Guidelines: https://t.co/3l2oLbAJdU