A lot of scientists and science educators absolutely hate the way the media reports on new scientific "discoveries".
You'll see some headline like "Could Eating Broccoli Be the Answer to Cancer?" and the article will be a fluff piece about some scientists in Bulgaria who made a shocking discovery™️ that will change medicine forever but if you actually click through to the article (and this assumes they even provide the link) you find out that it's an unreviewed preprint of a paper showing that a small sample of a certain strain of rat, when fed an absurd amount of broccoli, showed a 5% lower incidence of a very specific type of colon cancer, in such a way that suggests the authors might have engaged in a little bit of recreational P-value-hacking.
Put this kind of headline through a game of social media telephone and by the time it shows up in your feed/on your dash, there's a 50-50 chance that whatever is being said is diametrically opposed to what's actually happened, leading to an all-out food fight between carnivores and vegans in the comment section.
It's not just science, though. The same problem pops up in a lot of highly-technical, deeply nuanced fields. One of these areas is administrative law (the most subtle and violent of law).
Take for instance, the following two headlines:
- "Biden Administration Okays Bans on Trans Girls in School Sports"
- "New DoE Guidance to End Trans Student Athlete Bans"
These are descriptions of the same proposed rule, announced today. Both of them are even technically true. But obviously, one of these will horrify trans people and the other will infuriate anti-trans bigots. (Either way, people are gonna be real angy on the internet, and more importantly, they'll click through and see the ads.)
Now, as someone who likes to see herself as media savvy, I saw the smoke and immediately went searching for a good article about the actual fire. And the thing that struck me was that, hey, you know who got quoted in the article? A bunch of big-brain transgender legal experts and activists. And they were ecstatic about the rule. But I also saw my friends panicking online and sharing breathless coverage from sites that cover LGBTQ news.
So I did what any small-legal-brain person would do in this situation. I asked the nearest lawyer (who fortunately happened to be sitting next to me on the couch). And after listening to her break it down, here's my best attempt at a take:
- It's hard to know anything without seeing the specific wording (and understanding how that wording will be applied).
- The rule would definitely nix all of the blanket bans that red states are passing.
- The rule would probably nix all restrictions on trans athletes in club sports, and in all sports in grades up through at least middle school.
- The rule would defer to groups like the NCAA for reasonable guidelines on participation in elite competitive sports.
#4 is what is giving people in the trans community fits, but to be clear: this is already how things work; many NCAA sports require trans people to maintain certain hormone levels for a certain period of time before they can compete. But, because some restrictions are allowed, you can write a headline like "Biden Okays Bans on Trans Athletes".
Now, that said, #4 also provides a lot of wiggle room, but this specifically depends on how the rule is written! Like, for example, if the rule says "do whatever, we defer to you", that's probably bad. But if it says, "if you ban without specific scientific evidence that this population can never compete fairly you're in violation of Title IX", that's probably the best we can hope for. The fact that trans legal activists seem to be in favor of the rule suggests it's probably closer to the latter than the former.
Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than to try to potentially talk some folks down from the wall, and to remind everyone that it's really important to seek out knowledgeable sources where areas of deep nuance are concerned, no matter how stark the headlines might seem.
