Top all-time · #13392
Colin Wright
Personal blog · realityslaststand.comsciencepolitics
Colin Wright writes Reality’s Last Stand, a personal blog at realityslaststand.com about science and politics. Since 2022, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Colin Wright's posts on sex as a biological binary and the 'sex realist' viewpoint, usually as a reference point in debates about sex and gender. Linked posts are also cited as support for commenters' own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Holding the line on free speech, science, and reality.
Most-linked posts?
- /p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-04
What Hacker News says?
The RCTs that validate your assertion (or mine) when comparing reparative therapy and affirmation do not exist. All that we have to rely on now is the overwhelming consensus among medical and mental health professionals, and that consensus appears to exist among major reputable bodies worldwide, and is based on their many decades of collective clinical experience and research. If medical bodies are changing guidelin…
Comment linking /p/gender-medicines-citation-cartel
on “I Met Paul Graham Once”The claim that 1-2% of the population is intersex is a common myth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/ "Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia." "...the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterlin…
Comment linking /p/intersex-is-not-as-common-as-red
on “I Met Paul Graham Once”You might disagree with this point of view, but that doesn't make it unreasonable. As Wright notes in https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum , this view of sex as a binary system is based on the concept of male and female being the two discrete halves of the reproductive system in humans (and other anisogamous species): " Biological sex [...] is connected to the distinct type of gametes (sex cells…
Comment linking /p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
on “I fought the PayPal and I won”This article, by Colin Wright, is a good introduction to the 'sex realist' viewpoint, and the arguments it addresses: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum A good example of an opposing point of view to 'sex realism' is this article (and one that's most often cited in online discussions of this particular topic): https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony...
Comment linking /p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
on “I fought the PayPal and I won”>In my definition that only happens when you start making decision that affect other people. Not a hard line. Scientific papers often comment on the best public policies. It matters a lot to taxpayers if institutional characteristics mean that these papers will inevitably recommend left-wing policies. Why would right-wingers want their tax dollars going to institutes that will just recommend left-wing policies and c…
Comment linking /p/woke-academics-are-rigging-their
on “NSF plans end to lone U.S. Antarctic research icebreaker”All biological categories are fuzzy around the edges. The existence of small numbers of people on those edges with truly physical intersex conditions in no way invalidates the usefulness of the categories for science, medicine, and our ability to protect the physically weaker of the two. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/why-there-are-exactly-tw... Wear whatever kind of clothes you like, and sleep with whoever wil…
Comment linking /p/why-there-are-exactly-two-sexes
on “US Criminally Charges Southern Poverty Law Center, Blanche Says”They might aim to do this, but it's not actually possible: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
Comment linking /p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
on “I made a transformer by hand (no training)”