by Ace North, The Critic
There are dangers to mixing ideology into our biology
Historically, queerness and science have been bitter enemies. Queerness has been Science’s BIGGEST cover-up operation.” Gosh – who knew?
I was at a seminar hosted by the LGBTQ+ journal club of Oxford University’s biology department, who had invited guest speaker Ross Brooks (he/him) from Oxford Brookes University (no relation) on the other side of town. Dr Brooks, a historian, was promoting his research into Darwin’s views on all things queer, to be revealed in a forthcoming book Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life. That the book is to be published by Yale University Press is itself evidence of Brooks’s claim that queerness (whatever this means) is now a part of science. That Brooks had been invited to talk at Oxford’s famous biology department, the birthplace of The Selfish Gene and plenty more besides, may be seen as further evidence.
But the fact that it is a part of science does not mean that it should be one.
For several years we have been showered with pronoun badges, rainbow lanyards, gender unicorn posters, and all manner of gender identity flags. And such heavy promotion of queer iconography seems to have taken effect: the lecture theatre, in the University’s sparkling new Life and Mind Building, was packed. Representatives from every corner of the department filed in: students, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty professors, and administrative staff. Students from other departments. I estimated 120-150 people in total. The anticipation was palpable.
From Brooks’s text-laden power-point slides, we learned: