One of the things that I love most about science is its ability to turn inward and improve itself.

As we learn more about the natural world, we constantly check on our models and see how they hold up,

always being ready to change our minds about the most fundamentally important parts of our understanding of reality,

when new information compels us to do so.

We once thought that life was stagnant and hierarchical. Then we discovered things like

fossils and accepted evolution. It completely changed everything we thought we knew about life

on Earth, but the truth was worth it. We once thought that the universe was eternal.

Then we discovered things like the recession rate of galaxies and accepted the Big Bang.

It completely changed everything we thought we knew about the entire universe, but the truth was worth it.

And now, as we learn more about the multidimensional nature of sex and gender, how these constructs are dynamic and spectral, not immutable, and binary, some of the most powerful people in our country have abandoned this cause.

Blinded by ignorance, they push the idea that the simplisms taught in the sixth grade biology class are all anyone ever

needs to know about these deeply complex topics. When we talk about trans and intersex

people, they complain that we're simply throwing out exceptions to the rules, ignoring the fact

that in science, finding exceptions to the rules is often what lets us know that it's time to

reevaluate what we thought we knew about the rules in the first place.

And worse, the new president has passed an executive order declaring sex and gender to be synonymous, binary, and established at conception,

flying in the face of science, completely eradicating the legal existence of

transgender and intersex people, and paving the way for aggressive anti-abortion legislation,

which can now claim that personhood begins at conception as well. Going even further, scientists

at the CDC have reported just this weekend that they have been ordered to attract

and revise any research from any scientific journal that mentions terms like gender,

LGBT, non-binary, or assigned sex at birth, destroying data and erasing evidence that goes against

...