Commentary
An exercise physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Michael Joyner, has been admonished by the Clinic in part for having suggested in public that testosterone gives transgender women a lasting and unfair advantage when they compete in sports against ordinary women. He has been threatened with dismissal if he doesn’t desist from making such remarks in public: He’s henceforth only to say what the “Communications” department of the Clinic permits him to say.
A few years ago, Joyner’s suggestion would have been regarded as so banal that it would have been regarded as not worth making. It would have been as if an astrophysicist had suggested that the world went round the sun. But we live in strange times: Obvious truths have become dangerous to those who utter them. If the truth doesn’t accord with “our values,” as the Mayo Clinic puts it, so much the worse for truth….