The GOP's Despicable Demonization Of Transgender People

[Introduction:  As I watch people posting charts and citing statistics to make various cases online, I also realize that only 37+ percent of adult USians* have four year college degrees.  That means that many, if not most, only have the sketchiest grasp of how to read graphs, or even to understand basic ideas like percentages.  The same is true of a lot of words - they are not in many people's vocabulary and they have a vague or even wrong understanding of many words.  Of course that's not true of my readers :), but sometimes I feel the need to get more basic in my explanations just in case someone wants to use something I write to expand a friend or relative's understanding about a topic.]

I've been thinking about a post like this for a while.  A post somewhere this morning saying it was Transgender Awareness Week, seems to have pushed me to write this today.  Though there's probably enough reminders today and I'd be better off putting this up another time.  But, here are my thoughts on this.  I'm trying to give people as many links as possible to expand their knowledge on this topic.  

The current administration makes a habit of demonizing groups of people its base has little or no actual contact with.  They made up stories about Haitian immigrants who were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.  (A subheading of that Psychology Today story says the immigrants were 'mistakenly' accused.  There was no 'mistakenly.'  The campaign saw an inflammatory story and ran with it, intentionally adding another log into their firestorm of hatred.)  

The campaign constantly talked about immigrants who were criminals, drug dealers, murderers, and rapists.  Those who didn't know it was all flagrant falsehoods to stir them up to vote for their criminal rapist candidate, are now shocked when ICE comes after the immigrants who look after their children, grow their food, clean their cars, build their houses, and even are their relatives, their spouses. 

They also attacked non-Christians, especially Muslims, even though their presidential candidate was chummy with the Middle Eastern prince who chopped up an American journalist.  Again, there was no danger to USians from non-Christians that was greater than the danger from Christians themselves.  It was just another fictional class of villains to scare voters.  And there are campaigns against "anti-Christian bias"  which seems to mean any criticism of Christian values enacted into law to govern the behavior of non-Christians in this predominantly Christian nation.

Among the relatively unknown minorities in the US are transgender folks.  By 'unknown' I mean few people actually know someone who is transgender.  And the campaign made transgender folks a major campaign target.  This is my focus today.

Targeting transgender folks gains traction for several reasons:

1.  The idea of a clear cut dichotomy between male and female just seems so natural.  We ask whether new babies are girls or boys.  The difference between a vagina and a penis is pretty convincing.  

The idea of the world being flat makes perfect sense for someone living on what appears to be and feels like flat ground.  But from different perspectives, with greater information, it eventually becomes clear that the earth - like the round moon in the sky - is a sphere.  

And with greater context and from different perspectives, it's also clear that the dichotomy of male or female is also a gross simplification.  

Some societies have long recognized there were people who didn't fit into that either/or category.  See:

PBS - A Map of Gender Diverse Cultures

Anthropology Review - Non-Binary Gender Identities in Different Cultures

2.  Most people have little or no personal contact with a transgender person.  A PewResearch study says 42% of US population say the know someone who is transgender, with the percent higher among the youngest.  But it doesn't clarify what exactly 'know' means.  Have they spoken to the person?  About transgender issues?  Have they had them over for dinner?  We don't know.  Our schools do little or nothing to help students understand anything about trans people, and Evangelical congregations do their best to demonize them.     

• About 10% of the population are left-handed. 
• About 2 million men per year beat their partners, according to the F.B.I.  (That's not a percentage, but that's more than all the transgender people in the US. according to the study below, though others offer a higher number.)  
• Approximately 1.5 million people attempted suicide in 2023.  49,000 successfully.
• 804,926 Americans were arrested for suspected DUI in 2024, representing 11% of all arrests nationwide.  12,429 people were killed by drunk drivers.
• New data on violence against transgender people in the U.S. shows there have been at least 399 cases of fatal violence against trans people since 2013, including 27 murders in the past year alone, with no indication the trend is slowing.
• 86% of people don't fact check news on social media  and here's a related study showing people are not that good at spotting fake news, and it differs for Democrats and Republicans
• 10% of US population believe the earth is flat. Another 9% aren't sure

I was just trying to find some numbers to put the number of transgender people into context.  Raw numbers without context, without other numbers, don't mean that much to most people.  You can look up other numbers that might be more relevant.  

Bur my basic point is that transgender people are simply not a major danger to anyone compared to other things we ought to be spending time and money on.  

3.   People don't know that much about the science of gender, even people who support transgender rights.  This is hard to prove, but this study by PewResearch seems to support it:

"When asked what has influenced their views on gender identity – specifically, whether they believe a person can be a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth – those who believe gender can be different from sex at birth and those who do not point to different factors. For the former group, the most influential factors shaping their views are what they’ve learned from science (40%) say this has influenced their views a great deal or a fair amount) and knowing someone who is transgender (38%). Some 46% of those who say gender is determined by sex at birth also point to what they’ve learned from science, but this group is far more likely than those who say a person’s gender can be different from their sex at birth to say their religious beliefs have had at least a fair amount of influence on their opinion (41% vs. 9%)."  .  

If 40% rely on science, that means 60% do not.   And exactly what science are the 'gender is determined by sex at birth' crowd reading?  

This map is interactive online

From World Population Data where this map is interactive.  While it gives percentages for each state, it doesn't give percentage for the United States as a whole.  It does give a US total of 1,337,200 transgender people in the US but no percentage.  Further, that number is probably low because it is hard to identify transgender people - particularly those who haven't publicly identified themselves as transgender.  Using a US population figure of 347,999,881 from Worldometer, I get a total percentage of .0038 for the United States. I'll use that as a rough estimate, given the total population is more recent than the study itself.  A further complication is that the number I used is of people 18 and older.  The site says that younger people identify as transgender at a higher percent of the population than older transgender folks.  In any case, the number of transgender people is quite small.  

What do we learn from this map?

1.  Less than one percent of USians* identify as transgender.  That means for a group of 100 randomly selected people, there maybe one or no people who identify as transgender.  The Alaska number was .7% of the Alaska population.  That means out of 100 people .7 identify as transgender.  But, of course, we know, we don't have any .7 people walking around.  If we double the sample size from 100 to 200, then we'd double the number of people from .7 to 1.4.  Again, there are no .4 people walking around.  So let's go up to 300.  That would yield 2.1 people.  So, essentially 2 people for every 300 people.

 

That means most people don't know, or aren't aware they know, a transgender person.  And if they do, most of the 300 people have never had a heart to heart talk with that person to gain an understanding of what being transgender means to that person, how the person figured out they were transgender, or anything else other than the fact that the person is transgender.  

One can also learn about transgender people through other sources:  books, movies, media.  There are a number of books written about transgender people - fiction, biography, science.  

OVERCOMING IGNORANCE

Mayo Clinic:  Transgender Facts - basically a list of definitions

American Psychological Society - Understanding transgender people, gender identity and gender expression

The above two are basically sciency definitions.  The next one is similar, but adds a bit of human experience into it.

Advocates for Trans Equality - Trans 101

The ones below  offer books by trans folks themselves.  

19thNews - 21 books bringing transgender visibility to book lovers

GLAAD - Eight Books from Trans Authors to Read for Trans Awareness Week

*USians is a term some people use instead of Americans as a way of recognizing that all people who live in the Western Hemisphere - from Canada to Argentina - are Americans, not just people in the United States.  

New Inspiration From A Long Time Hero

Just in the opening intro to Robert Caro’s Working, I was inspired to take on a project I’d put off for a couple of years now.  Caro reads his audio book and talks about how when writing the Power Broker he realized he needed to document the human cost of all the parkways and bridges and slum clearance Robert Moses built.  I have such a project to pursue in Anchorage.

I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.  My bookclub is reading Working this month, and while the time zones don’t work out for me to zoom in, Caro has been a hero of mine for just about 50 years.  Caro’s first big book - The Power Broker - is about Robert Moses who created  a mesh of overlapping ‘authorities’ - park authorities, transportation authorities, port authorities - that gave him a working income that he controlled and the power to create public works projects that transformed the landscape of New York City.  I should be clear - Caro never found any indication that Moses was in this business to make money, but rather to fulfill his visions of how to create infrastructure that would improve life for New Yorkers.  They money he made through tolls and bonds went to build his vision.  

Caro tells us in the intro that he wanted to understand how Caro had wielded so much power for close to 50 years, power over mayors, governors, and other elected  officials, though he had never been elected to any office.  He talks about advice he  (Caro) got early on about doing research on documents - read every page.  

Caro worked full time on The Power Broker for over five years.  It came out in Fall of 1974 about when I’d finished my Masters in Public Administration and was working on my doctorate.  And I would have read it right after it came out - maybe the Spring of 1975.  And as I started teaching as a doctoral student, The Power Broker, at least parts of it (it’s over 1100 pages) were part of the readings in my intro class until I retired.  One of the questions I had about the book - as did many others - was how did Caro find out all the stuff he had on Moses.  This book answers that question 

I’ve mentioned “Thick Description” several times lately, and as I listened to Caro talking about the need to get the stories of the people Moses displaced with his projects, I realized this was an example of thick description as well.  (I hadn’t thought about that before since I’d been using Caro’s book long before I’d heard about thick description.). https://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2015/07/who-am-i-who-are-you.

Why Truth Is So Illusive? Braun- Blanquet Scale

[I found this draft post from July 2012.  It appears never to have been posted.  But it's interesting to see how what I wrote 12 years ago is still relevant today.  Probably more so. And posting it today - August 3 - is fitting as you will see if you read it.]

Getting the facts right - whether it's in an old sexual abuse case or an attempt to see how ground vegetation has changed over a period of time - is the first step.  Once the facts are established, then models - whether scientific theories, religious beliefs, or the unarticulated models of how the world works we carry in our heads - are applied.

For example, did your son lie to his teacher about his homework?  If the answer is yes, then you must go through various models you have about topics such as lying, education, changing the behavior of young boys and apply them to this situation to get the desired result.  It's not as easy as you might initially think.  You may have a clear value that lying is never good.  Or you may think there are times it is ok.  Do you think his teacher is wonderful and working hard to teach your son to be a great human being with all the necessary skills?  Or is he part of a corrupt educational system that expects all students in the class to be at exactly the same level at all times and finds fault with your son because he's brighter than most and bored in class, or slower than most and having trouble keeping up? Or do you think he is picking on your son because he's a different race from the teacher?  And finally, will you talk this over with your son?  Restrict his internet access for a week?  Or whup him with a belt to help him learn this lesson?  Or maybe you'll go to the school and defend your son and attack the teacher. 

Things get much more complicated when we deal with the collective problems of a community.  If king salmon aren't returning to their rivers in the numbers expected, how should state fish and game authorities deal with this?  First, is their method of counting salmon working right?  Perhaps the salmon are getting through without being counted?  Then, do you restrict subsistence fishers?  Which models do you use to explain the shortage?  Is it climate change which is affecting the water temperatures?  Is it overfishing by commercial ocean fishing vessels?  Is it that these salmon are being caught as by-catch by bottom trawlers?  And when you think you know, what model do you use to decide whether subsistence fishers are allowed to catch any?

All this is introduction to Josias Braun-Blanquet who in 1927 devised the Braun-Blanquet scale.  The Botany Dictionary tells us about the Braun-Blanquet scale.

A method of describing an area of vegetation . . . It is used to survey large areas very rapidly. Two scales are used. One consists of a plus sign and a series of numbers from 1 to 5 denoting both the numbers of species and the proportion of the area covered by that species, ranging from + (sparse and covering a small area) to 5 (covering more than 75% of the area). The second scale indicates how the species are grouped and ranges from Soc. 1 (growing singly) to Soc. 5 (growing in pure populations). The information is obtained by laying down adjacent quadrats of increasing size. One of a number of variations of Braun-Blanquet's method is the Domin scale, which is more accurate as there are more subdivisions of the original scale. The Braun-Blanquet scale also included a five-point scale to express the degree of presence of a plant. For example, 5 = constantly present in 80-100% of the areas; 1 = rare in 1-20% of the areas.

So, essentially, this is a measuring device to calculate the percentage of an area that is covered by different plant species.  Measuring is just the first step.  Once you have the measures, then you can apply your models. (OK, I know some of you will point out that you can't measure anything unless you have models that tell you what to measure.  True enough.  But once you have the measures - in this case of percentage of species of vegetation in a certain location - you have to interpret what that means using a model or several.)

But one problem is that the measurements might not be accurate or might not be used right. 

A 1978 Study in  Environmental Management found the Braun-Blanquet scale to be adequate and more efficient than another method of measuring species in an area.  Here's the abstract:

To document environmental impact predictions for land development, as required by United States government regulatory agencies, vegetation studies are conducted using a variety of methods. Density measurement (stem counts) is one method that is frequently used. However, density measurement of shrub and herbaceous vegetation is time-consuming and costly. As an alternative, the Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance scale was used to analyze vegetation in several ecological studies. Results from one of these studies show that the Braun-Blanquet method requires only one third to one fifth the field time required for the density method. Furthermore, cover-abundance ratings are better suited than density values to elucidate graphically species-environment relationships. For extensive surveys this method provides sufficiently accurate baseline data to allow environmental impact assessment as required by regulatory agencies.

 So, fifty years after Braun-Blanquet's scale went public, it was still being used.  And apparently it is still in use today.  And people are writing about some of the limitations of the model.

In Monitoring Nature Conservation in Cultural Habitats:: A Practical Guide and Case Studies, (2007) by Clive Hurford and Michael Schneider, the Braun-Blanquet scale is compared to the Domin scale and both are found to have two sources of error.  First, is the observer bias that could affect the initial estimate of the percentage of species coverage that is then used to identify the appropriate cover class.  The second problem arises when the vegetation is at or near a vegetation boundary.  This is, apparently, more of a problem in the Domin scale. (p. 82)

And a February 2009 (online) article in Journal of Vegetation Science warns that the Braun-Blanquet abudance-dominance scale cannot be used with conventional multivariate analysis techniques because the Braun-Blanquet scores use ordinal numbers. 

I bring this up for a couple of reasons.  First, today, August 3, is Braun-Blanquet's birthday.  He was born in Switzerland in 1884 and died in France at 96 in 1980.  Second, and probably of more general importance, has to do with science and truth.

We are at a time when science is under severe attack by a combined force of right wing politicians and fundamentalist religious groups.   They pounce on what they call scientific errors and publicize them to 'prove' science isn't trustworthy.  The emails about global warming data is a good example. 

Now, there are scientists who for various reasons (fame, money, revenge, you know the usual human failings that lead to compromises) do cheat.  But the beauty of science is that one's work must be made public and when others try to duplicate your work and can't, then your work becomes suspect. 

But the pursuit of truth is and will always be imperfect.  Data collection and interpretation will always be dependent on the ability to observe and measure and interpret.  And the Braun-Blanquet scale shows, in a small way, that even a technique that's been around over 70 years, is not perfect.  But in science no one holds all the cards, no one proclaims truth for everyone else to accept. 

Scientific truth is always being tested and challenged.  That's its strength, but absolutists see it as a weakness. 

DePaul University Professor of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture, has an interesting story about a project  to rid the oak woodlands of Rhododendron ponticum, an invasive shrub that was encroaching in the understory of this habitat in Killarney National Park in Ireland.  It talks about the use of the Braun-Blanquet scale.  It's posted at his blog Ten Things Wrong with Environmental Thinking.

Evidential Languages Part III -

In evidential languages, as I understand it, there are verb tenses, which indicate whether the speaker personally witnessed the events they are relating.  

As I move along in my Duolingo Turkish lessons, I've come to the Turkish version of this.

In Turkish - you use a different past tense ending for things that you actually witnessed than for things you only heard second hand!   

"In Turkish, there are different ways to talk about the past. For example, you can put 

‑di/dı/du/dü   [in Turkish you use vowels in the suffixes that match those in the word]

 after the base word.

Yüzdüm.  [He swam]

Sen buraya geldin."  [You came here - word by word: You here came]

But forms of ‑di are only for things you actually witnessed. If you didn’t, you use 

‑mış/miş/müş/muş

 instead.

Yüzmüş.

(I heard that) he swam.

Biri benim ekmeğimi yemiş.

(Apparently) someone ate my bread."

As I tried to digest this, I realized that I had heard of this phenomenon before.  That such languages are called evidential languages. 

And that I've written about them before.  The first time was in 2010.  Evidential Languages.  It's short and pretty clear.  

The second time was in 2015.  "Alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse" - For Example: Arapaho Narrative Past

This 2015 post discusses how different languages cause us to see the world slightly (or significantly) differently by having words and grammar patterns that don't exist in another language.  It also raises questions about political implications if we had a tense like that in English.  Would it be harder for politicians to lie?  I'm guessing they've figured out work arounds.  

But another point I want to make is that with such different tenses, people are required to internalize the concept reflected in the vocabulary and in the grammar.  Having to distinguish between something you witnessed from something you hear second hand, and having to do that unconsciously as you speak seems pretty significant.  And as the translations of theTurkish examples above suggest, we have adverbs in English that allow us to add that notion to a sentence, such as "Apparently."  Or we could say, "He told me that. . .," or "I heard that . . ."  But we can leave such qualifiers out of the sentence.  But if you use a verb tense that means you witnessed it, it would seem it would be equivalent to saying, "I saw this happen."  

I don't know how this all actually works in these languages.  But it's interesting to think about.  

I also see that in a comment on the first post on this topic, KDS pointed out the Turkish example I just discovered for myself.  

Trippy - A Well Written And Fascinating Look At Psychedelic Treatments

[You'll figure out pretty quickly, I think, that I enjoyed reading this book.  I wanted to read the next chapter as soon as I finished the previous one.  Aside from introducing people and situations outside my normal realm, Ernesto Londoño raises lots of interesting legal and ethical issues.] 

TRIPPY took me on a fascinating journey through Latin American ayahuasca [the pronunciation is pretty easy if you think of the h as a w] retreats and US psychedelic
retreats/treatment centers.  The focus is on psychedelics and their effect on people, mainly on people with serious hard-to-treat issues like depression, suicidal thoughts, trauma.  But this gets more complex as the author, Ernesto Londoño, pulls in a number of related issues such as the conflict between running a spiritual retreat and a for profit enterprise, the psychological impacts of war, the conflict (in the US) between religious freedom and drug laws, how black market (my term, not his) psychedelic treatments serve patients who find standard medical approaches to their problems ineffective, which raises serious questions about why the established field of medicine took so long to find better ways to treat PTSD and other mental problems.  

Before I go further, let's give a bit of background. 

"Ayahuasca is prepared by boiling crushed chunks of an Amazonian vine called Banisgeriopsis caapi -which wraps around trees in the rainforest in serpent like formations - with the leaves of a shrubby plant called Psychotria viridis, or chacruna.  The leaves contain the psychoactive compound, but when taken alone, an enzyme in the stomach neutralizes it.  The vine, however, inhibits that metabolic process, inducing dramatic alterations in perception and sensations." (page 66)

The author previously worked at the Washington Post reporting on local DC police and court issues and as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as an editorial writer for the New York Times.  The book  begins when he was the New York Times Brazil bureau chief.  So he's a serious reporter.  

In the book, he also tells us a lot about his own life issues.  His coverage of the ayahuasca retreats in the Amazon jungle to a ketamine clinic in San Diego includes his own drug experiences at the places he writes about.  I think that gives him deeper insights than had he merely played the objective observer.  He also is often the skeptic and raises issues with some of the places he visited and offers others' critical as well as positive reports.  He interviewed a lot of people, both practitioners and academics studying psychedelics.  (I know, 'a lot' is vague, but he's always stepping back to find out what others think as well as the what the owners, the employees, and participants have to say.)  He tells us that he always identifies himself as both a participant and a journalist.  

The book called out to me from the new books section at Loussac library.   And while I came of age in the 60s, I didn't experiment beyond pot.  Being a student in Germany for a year and after graduation a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand was trippy enough for me.  I haven't read Michael Pollan's book that reviews say strongly advocates for psychedelic experiences.  So maybe this book would tell me what I need to know.  

The book was a wild and informative ride.  While the main vehicle was psychedelic experiences, those experiences lead us into lots of unexpected adventures with interesting people and interesting religious, legal, ethical issues not only of drugs, but also war and sexuality and trauma and medicine.  

 Most of the people Londoño describes come to these retreats to deal with depression, trauma, addiction and other mental disorders.  This includes the author who, as the NYT bureau chief in Brazil finds himself lonely and depressed and decides to report on an Amazonian retreat and to test the curing powers of ayahuasca.  In the posh Costa Rican retreat, much later in the book, a lot of the clientele are more well-to-do, but there's an emptiness in their lives.  [As I wrote that, I thought that 'but' might not be the right word.  Simple pursuit of wealth as Trump and Musk demonstrate, doesn't lead to happiness.  But (again) Musk is reported to be addicted to MDMA (which is looked at later in the book) and that clearly hasn't had a therapeutic, enlightening effect on him.]  We also get to USian retreats that incorporate as churches in hopes of avoiding the Drug Enforcement Administration and have focused on US veterans with PTSD and other war related traumas and who haven't found relief from nightmares and suicidal thoughts through VA psychiatrists or alcohol.  

Londoño also consults regularly with scholars - through their written works and through personal interview - and gives us threads throughout the book about the twists and turns of the legal landscape of medical psychedelic experimentation and research - most notably with Nixon's 1971 War on Drugs prohibition, which shut down a lot of promising research.   

There are also the discussions of how far back ayahuasca was used by Amazonian people - with claims ranging from thousands of years to hundreds.  

We learn about the people who run the retreats and clinics, the people who own them, and the clients.  It's not always pretty.  There are stories of sexual impropriety, of death, but mostly of profoundly changed clients.  Or is that positive response brought on by the group and organizer pressure to let go of one's doubts and embrace the ayahuasca so that one can get the full benefits?  Londoño always raises these questions.  

Are these really healing retreats or are these cults?  This question bothers him, but he seems to conclude that since people leave, they aren't cults, even though the requirements to trust the facilitators and the drugs seem to overlap with cult like instructions.  A question I had was about the people, the author included, who go to many retreats and keep imbibing the ayahuasca.  In the author's case, he tells us there are other buried issues to be explored.  (He also mentions that the concoction is foul to taste and usually induces vomiting, buckets provided.)

He talks about going to a gay only retreat and how that differed from the others.  And as he writes about the problems other retreaters hope to heal, Londoño writes about his own demons.  How he learned about mental health issues in his family growing up in Bogota, Columbia.  After writing about the war traumas of veterans, he begins to think about the traumas he brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan as a correspondent.  

The discussion of the veterans, fed up with the VA's inability to cure their PTSD, mentions at one point that it costs $230 billion a year for the Veterans Administration  to treat PTSD!  The vets he connected with did find a profound relief that the VA couldn't provide.  But in the MDMA experiment we only hear about Chris and not the others in the experiment.

That cost of PTSD treatment doesn't tend to be mentioned in defense budget debates or to recruits.  And that doesn't take into account the individual and cumulative costs to the individual veterans, and their families, whose lives are destroyed, even though their bodies work.  At some point he mentioned that more military die of suicide than they do in battle.  

Another telling comment came when interviewing Dr. Matthew Pava, who was in charge of research funding at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Defense Department.  And who approved a $27 million experiment that was searching for new compounds that change the brain without the hallucinogenic effects.  What he really needs is a drug that will allow him to get soldiers back into battle quickly, and that doesn't seem to be likely with psychedelics.  

"In recent years, he said, 28 percent of service members medically evacuated from frontline positions are sent home after being diagnosed with a mental health condition.  According to a 2021 study, roughy 23 percent of active-duty service members had been diagnosed with depressive disorder, a rate far higher than that of the civilian population."[page 264]

Yes, there are depressing issues (but there's a cure for that now) but also very heartwarming stories of people who have overcome debilitating mental problems.  The subtitle of the book - The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics - is accurate.  

So maybe I do need to go back to Pollan's book to find out why someone without depression and suicidal thoughts should use psychedelics.  And I'd note, Londoño mentions a lot of other books on various aspects of psychedelic medicines.  

NOTE:  In the course of the book, we learn a lot about the author.  He feels almost like a friend.  And toward the end we learn that quit his job with the New York Times and he's moved in with his veterinarian boy friend in Minnesota to write the book and is unsure of what will happen next.  And I wanted to know how that turned out.  After I wrote this post, I googled Ernesto Londoño and found this New York Times article on today's LA  ICE raids and citizen protests.  The bio link says:  

"I’m a reporter for The New York Times based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and keeping a close eye on drug use and counternarcotics policy."

Civil Service - Who Are These People ET Are Firing? - Part II

INTRO:  Part I is here.  

If you find this topic dry and hard to get your head around, then you are half way there.  Because some of the most important things to know about government are dry and hard to get one's head around.  And that makes it easy for politicians to bamboozle voters with falsehoods and misinformation.  

So if you want to understand why ET's firing of civil servants (most of government employees) is a violation of law and various regulations, you'll have to buck up and read carefully.  Even take notes.  

This content is based on testimony I gave in a local discrimination case.  So I had to pare it down to as simple an explanation as possible so that I didn't lose the jury.  The attorney was nervous that his expert would talk over their heads, but when I was done he was relieved that I'd made it very easy to understand.  And the jury said the local government was guilty.

So good luck.   [I explained ET in the Intro to Part I, but it's not critical.]

From a February 19, 2018 post: 

Graham v MOA #9: Exams 2 - Can You Explain These Terms: Merit Principles, Validity, And Reliability?

The Municipality of Anchorage (MOA) Charter [the city's constitution] at Section 5.06(c) mandates the Anchorage Assembly to adopt

“Personnel policy and rules preserving the merit principle of employment.”   AMC 3.30.041 and 3.30.044 explain examination types, content, and procedures consistent with these merit principles.  

Âs defined in the Anchorage Municipal Code Personnel Policies and Rules,

“Examination means objective evaluation of skills, experience, education and other characteristics demonstrating the ability of a person to perform the duties required of a class or position.” (AMC 3.30.005)

[OK, before I lose most of my readers, let me just say, this is important stuff to know to understand why the next posts will look so closely at the engineer test that Jeff Graham did not pass.  But it's also important to understand one of the fundamental principles underlying government in the United States (and other nations.)  And I'd add that the concepts behind merit principles are applied in most large private organizations to some extent, though they may have different names. 

Jeff Graham's attorney made me boil this down to the most basic points to increase the likelihood I wouldn't put the jury to sleep.  So bear with me and keep reading. 

And, you can see an annotated index of all the posts at the Graham v MOA tab above or just link here.]  

Basic Parts of Government In The United States

Governments can be broken down into several parts.

• The elected politicians who pass the laws and set the broad policy directions (legislature)
• The elected executive who carries out the laws.
• The administration is led by the elected executive - the president, the governor at the state level, and the mayor at the city level.
• Civil Service refers to the career government workers who actually carry out the policies.  There are also appointed officials at the highest levels who are exempt from some or all of the civil service rules.

Merit principles are the guidelines for how the career civil servants are governed.  

So What Are Merit Principles?

Probably the most basic, as related to this case, are:

• Employees are chosen solely based on their skills, knowledge, and abilities (SKAs) that are directly related to their performance of the job. 
• The purpose of this is to make government as as effective and efficient as possible by hiring people based on their job related qualities and nothing else.  
• That also means other factors - political affiliation, race, color, nationality, marital status, age, and disability should not be considered in hiring or promotion.  It also means that arbitrary actions and personal favoritism should not be involved. 
• Selection and promotion criteria should be as objective as possible.   

So Steve, what you're saying, this sounds obvious.  What else could there be?

Before the merit system was the Spoils System.  Before merit principles were imposed on government organizations, jobs (the spoils) were given to the victors (winning politicians and their supporters)   The intent of the Merit System is to hire the most qualified candidates.

In 1881, President Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job seeker, which spurred Congress to set up the first version of the federal civil service system - The Pendleton Act.

Only a small number of federal positions were covered by this new civil service act, but over the years more and more positions were covered and the procedures improved with improvements in the technology of testing.  The merit system, like any system can be abused, but it's far better than the spoils system.  Objective testing is a big part of applying merit principles.

What does 'objective criteria' mean? 

Objectivity has a couple common and overlapping meanings:

• Grounded on facts.  Grounding your understanding or belief on something concrete, tangible.  Something measurable that different people could 'see' and agree on.
• Unbiased.  A second, implied meaning from the first, is that you make decisions neutrally, as free as you can be from bias, preconceived ideas.  That’s not easy for most people to do, but there are ways to do it better. 

What Ways Can Make  Tests More Objective And Free Of Bias?

I think of objectivity as being on one end of a continuum and subjectivity being on the other end.  No decision is completely objective or subjective, nor should it be.  But generally, the more towards the objective side, the harder it is to introduce personal biases.* 

objective ...............................................................................................subjective

First Let's Define "Test"

In selection and promotion, we have tests. Test is defined as any thing used to weed out candidates, or rank candidates from poor to good.  So even an application form can be a test if it would lead to someone being cut out of the candidate pool.  Say candidates are required to have a college degree and someone doesn’t list one on an application.  They would be eliminated already.  

Again,  how do you make tests more objective?

There are two key terms we need to know:  validity and reliability.

What’s Validity?

Validity means that if a person scores higher on a test, we can expect that person to perform better on the specific job.  

Or saying it another way, the test has to truly test for what is necessary for the job.  So, if candidates without a college degree can do the job as well as candidates with a degree, then using college degree to screen out candidates is NOT valid.  

And what is reliability?

Reliability means that if  a person takes the same test at different times or different places, or with different graders, the person should get a very similar result.  Each test situation needs to have the same conditions, whether you take the test on Monday or on Wednesday, in LA or Anchorage, with Mr. X or Miss Y administering and/or grading the test.  

How Validity and Reliability Relate To Each Other

To be valid, the selection or promotion test must be a good predictor of success on the job. People who score high on the exam, should perform the job better than those who score low.  And people who score low should perform worse on the job than people who score high. 

BUT, even if the test is intrinsically valid, the way it is administered could invalidate it.  If the test is not also reliable (testing and grading is consistent enough that different test takers will get a very similar score regardless of when or where they take the test and regardless of who scores the test) the test will no longer be valid.  This is because the scores will no longer be good predictors of who will do well on the job. 

How do you go about testing for validity and reliability?

This can get complicated, especially for  factors that are not easy to measure.  I didn't go into this during the trial.  I wanted to point out some pages in a national Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual used by the Municipality of Anchorage, but I was not allowed to mention it.  It talks about different levels of validity and how to test for them.  It also says that for 'high stakes' tests, like promotion tests, experts should be hired to validate the test.  The jury didn't get to hear about this. But it's relevant because as I wrote in an earlier post, the people in charge of testing, and specifically in charge of the engineer exam, only had Level I certification, which allows them to administer training and testing designed by someone with Level II certification.  It's at Level II that validity and reliability are covered.  

There really wasn't need to get detailed in the trial, because the oral exam was so egregiously invalid and unreliable that you could just look at it and see the problems.  And we'll do that in the next posts. 

That should be enough but for people who want to know more about this, I'll give a bit more below.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Extra Credit

*"the harder it is to introduce bias"  There are always ways that bias can be introduced, from unconscious bias to intentionally thwarting the system.   When civil service was introduced in the United States, there was 'common understanding' that women were not qualified for most jobs.  That was a form of bias.  Blacks were also assumed to be unqualified for most jobs.  Over the years many of these sorts of cultural barriers have been taken down.  But people have found other ways to surreptitiously obstruct barriers.  

Merit Principles

If you want to know more about merit principles I'd refer you to the Merit System Protection Board that was set up as part of the Merit System Reform Act of 1978.  

A little more about reliability problems (because these are important to understand about the engineer promotion exam)

In the main part of this post I wrote that all the important (could affect the score) conditions of the test need to be the same no matter where or when or with whom a candidate takes the test.  Here are some more details

• Location - If one location is less comfortable - temperature, noise, furniture, lighting, whatever - it could skew the scores of test takers there.
• Time -  could be a problem in different ways.  
• All candidates must have the same amount of time to take the test.  
• Instructions - all instructions have to be identical
• Security of the test questions - if some applicants know the questions in advance and others do not, the test is not reliable.

The scoring, too, has to be consistent from grader to grader for each applicant. 

And there are numerous ways that scoring a test can go wrong.

• Grader bias  - conscious and unconscious.   Raters who know the candidates may rate them differently than people who don’t know them at all. 
• The Halo effect means if you have a positive view of the candidate, you’re likely to give him or her more slack.  You think, 'I know they know this.' 
• The Horn or Devil Effect is the opposite - If you already have a negative opinion about a candidate, you consciously or unconsciously give that a candidate less credit.  These are well documented biases.
• Testing order bias affects graders and candidates.  
• After three poor candidates, a mediocre candidate may look good to graders.  

• Grading Standards - Is the grading scale clear and of a kind that the graders are familiar with?
• Are the expected answers and how to score them clear to the graders?
• Do the graders have enough time to calculate the scores consistently?
• Grader Training -
•  If they aren't well trained, it could take a while to figure out how to use their scoring techniques, so they score different at the end from the beginning. 

How Do You Overcome the Biases In More Subjective Tests Like Essays, Interviews, and Oral Exams?

Despite the popularity of job interviews, experts agree that they are among the most biased and result in the least accurate predictions of candidate job performane.  Or see this link.

You have to construct standardized, objective rubrics and grading scales - this is critical, particularly for essay and oral exams.

On November 9, 2016 when the electoral college vote totals were tallied, everyone saw the same facts, the same results.  But half the country thought the numbers were good and half thought they were bad. When evaluating the facts of a job or promotion candidate, the organization has to agree, before hand, what ‘good’ facts look like and what ‘bad’ facts look like. Good ones are valid ones - they are accurate predictors of who is more likely to be successful in the position.   Good and bad are determined by the test maker, not by the graders.  The graders merely test whether the performance matches the pre-determined standard of a good performance.

What’s a rubric?

It’s where you describe in as much detail as possible what a good answer looks like.  If you’re looking at content, you identify the key ideas in the answer, and possibly how many points a candidate should get if they mention each of those ideas.  It has to be as objective as possible. The Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual has some examples, but even those aren't as strong as they could be. 

Good rubrics take a lot of thought - but it's thought that helps you clarify and communicate what a good answer means so that different graders give the same answer the same score.

Here are some examples: 
UC Berkeley Graduate Student Instructors Training
Society For Human Resource Management - This example doesn't explicitly tell graders what the scores (1,2, 3, 4, 5) look like, as the previous one does.
BARS - Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales - This is an article on using BARS to grade Structured Interviews.  Look particularly at Appendices A & B. 
How Olympic Ice Skating is Scored - I couldn't find an actual scoring sheet, but this gives an overall explanation of the process.

My experience is that good rubrics force graders to ground their scores on something concrete, but they can also miss interesting and unexpected things.  It's useful for graders to score each candidate independently, and then discuss why they gave the scores they did - particularly those whose scores vary from most of the scores.  Individual graders may know more about the topic which gives their scores more value.  Or may not have paid close attention.   Ultimately, it comes down to an individual making a judgment.  Otherwise we could just let machines grade.  But the more precise the scoring rubric, the easier it is to detect bias in the graders. 


Accountability

Q:  What if a candidate thinks she got the answer right on a question, but it was scored wrong?

Everything in the test has to be documented.  Candidates should be able to see what questions they missed and how they were scored.  If the test key had an error, they should be able to challenge it. 

Q:  Are you saying everything needs to be documented?

If there is going to be any accountability each candidate’s test and each grader’s score sheets must be maintained so that if there are questions about whether a test was graded correctly and consistently from candidate to candidate, it can be checked. 

In the case of an oral exam or interview, at least an audio (if not video) record should be kept so that reviewers can see what was actually said at the time by the candidate and the graders. 

Q:  Have you strayed a bit from the Merit Principles?

Not at all. This all goes back to the key Merit Principle - selecting and promoting the most qualified candidates for the job.  There won’t be 100% accuracy. But in general, if the test is valid,  a high score will correlate with a high job performance.  But unless the test is also reliable, it won’t be valid. The more reliable the test, the more consistent the scores will be under different conditions and graders.  The best way to make tests more reliable is to make them as objective as possible.

Farrago Follow Up - What Will Trump Do?

The previous post, Farrago, meandered into the power struggles in the US and the assault on science in favor of fantastic explanations of things.  [I prefer 'fantastic explanations' to 'conspiracy theories' because there are in fact conspiracies and people who pursue real conspiracies - like the Federalist Societies 40 year plan to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would rule their way - aren't always 'crackpots.'] 

Reader Jacob left a lengthy comment which you can see there.    Rather than answer it there, I've decided to answer it in a new post.  

Well, since I know many of you won't go back to see what he wrote, I've decided to put it here again.

"Jakob in IrelandSunday, October 6, 2024 at 5:07:00 AM AKDT

Hi Steve. Just a thought from across the pond...

When you started your enquiry last year asking HOW we got to this point (of finding more & more people believing the unproven in so many things around us) you more often than not explained the difference boiling down to university education levels. 

I felt, and still do, that you do have the view of someone from the world of questions, of successfully negotiating the discipline of the academic reasoning & rewards. I also acknowledge that you (graciously) agreed that talent isn't limited to intellectual gifts, but also those of the 'multiple intelligences' view of human ability & talents.

So with all that, we plunged (as so many did then) into just HOW we could be at this political junction of PRO and CON re what we thought to be ‘dictator-in-waiting’ Donald Trump. We didn't succeed in pinning the tail-on-that-donkey, did we?

So today, I’m wiping my slate clean: I’m with many, if not most here, asking this question: Does Mr Trump plan to win regardless his methods to achieve it?

Given these past years of many quick checks and deep dives with so-many streams of thought & analysis, I have honed my own little thought for this presidential election in America, if anyone wishes to consider it. Mr Trump’s preparation is laid, his goal easy to know. He only awaits the day in which his blow will be struck.

Mr. Trump’s seizure of the presidency (at precious cost to a Republic) can be affirmed by his Supreme Court and a Congress with too-narrow mandate to intervene in a politically effective way. But most importantly, far too many Americans have ‘drunk the Kool-Aid’.

I am nearly 18 years from living in the USA now; I am also a person born to its promise & culture, to its history & dreams. I moved countries to know other histories, other ways of seeing law, culture & dreams. I can admit my shock to see so many Americans willing to surrender rule-of-law to a man of autocratic instincts, hoping his constitutional betrayal will deliver their aspirations. I have told European friends (here) that Americans have bedrock faith in their Constitution and its rule-of-law standards. It will win out.

Now I suspect I held a child’s faith: Too many Americans are faith-weary. So many flock to a ‘strong man’ promising his so-sweet nothing, “I’ll take back control for you.”

I am sorry to say that I am relieved to live where I do, where so very many here are asking, “What is happening to the USA?”"

Here's my response.  

Jacob,  

Lots of questions rolled up into the reply.  And lots of answers too.  

First, your comment “you more often than not explained the difference boiling down to university education levels.”  I suspect that reflects more what you hear than what I’ve said over the years.  I have indeed argued that good education does train students to think logically and critically (among other things.)  That could start happening in elementary school and be honed further in middle and high school in a good school with good teachers.  At good schools the attentive students graduate with varying levels of those skills.  And I've acknowledged that a rigorous logical, left brain, education is the best way to start all kids.  But I would add that all kids should be given the space to work on something that interests them, and a good school would then use their areas of interest, to cultivate logical reasoning in a context that makes sense to each kid.  

As students go deeper into those topics at the university level, they can improve on those skills.  Statistics that show college educated voters tend (note ‘tend’) to lean more Democratic than people with fewer years of education.  

“The last few election cycles have been marked by an increasing divergence in outcomes based on education levels, with Democrats making serious gains with college-educated voters while Republicans win far greater shares of non-college educated white voters.” from Politico  

But you don’t have to get those skills only in school.  People who are different in some significant way from the ‘average’ - different religion, ethnicity, sexual identity, etc. - often grow up in at least two different worlds: 1) their family and group world and 2) the larger white world that has traditionally ruled the US.  And for those with non-conforming gender identity, they can be in a different reality from their family.  

The dissonance between how these citizens who experience one reality at home and a different reality at school often gives them a leg up on seeing the big picture, on seeing there isn't just one reality.  

And there are lots of others who get the dissonance even if they don’t go to college.  And there are many college graduates who got by without learning how to think critically.  Or who can, but have blind spots where they can’t apply those skills.  Or they apply them in a twisted way.  Like logically justifying white nationalism or misogyny based on odd facts and premises.    

Getting back on track

Hoping people would come to their political senses when they were given the facts was not something I held out much hope for, though it’s my natural flex.  I used to tell students writing reports for actual administrators that emotions always trump reason if there’s a conflict between the two.  So they needed to know their clients’ values so they could write their reports not so it made sense only to the student, but also to the client.  

I did hold out hope that enough US voters would choose the Democratic candidate over Trump.  That isn’t unreasonable since that happened in 2016 and 2020.  Though the way the electoral college works, that’s not enough.  Harris has to win big so the GOP can’t fight with any credibility over crumbs in swing states.  And can’t plausibly argue that Trump won.  Of course there will always be those who deny reality as the 2020 election has shown.

Now to your first question, which you essentially answered yourself affirmatively.  

"Does Mr Trump plan to win regardless his methods to achieve it?"

I agree that he does plan to challenge the election no matter what.  All the talk of rigging elections is meant to get people ready for such a challenge. The bigger the margin of victory the harder that will be.  The many lawyers and others who have been fighting Trump’s original challenges in 2020 are well versed in his strategy and paying close attention to new ones.  

And this time round, Biden is in charge of the military and national guard and other levers of power that will be much better prepared than in 2021 post election.  

And the people he has working for him are skilled administrators - as we can see in the preparations for Helene and the coordinated efforts after the storm hit, getting inflation down, implementing the Infrastructure bill, etc.  

Will Trump supporters, those who believe all his lies, come out with weapons and raise hell?  Possible.  Even likely in some places.  

One other point I’d like to make concerning reason and non-reason.  It’s clearer and clearer that Putin and Iran and North Korea have all been using the internet to stir up conflict in the US (not to mention in UK and France and other parts of the world.).  We know about it explicitly in 2016.  It's been noted in every election since.  It’s likely they were at it earlier during the time they were grooming Trump as an asset.  They played a role in Brexit.   They’re at it over Gaza and Israel.  Taking down democracies strengthens their message to their own people that democracy is inherently unstable and bad.  It also makes their aggression much easier.  

Playing on people’s fears - of immigrants, of crime, of economic disaster - is always going to capture a certain number of people.  Trump’s non-stop lies, amplified by Fox, and main stream media,  is a well planned strategy to make it impossible to tell truth from fiction.  Everything Trump says is projection of his own actions onto his opponents.  With AI and hard to spot fake video, the ability to tell truth from lies gets harder.  All traditional authorities are challenged - scientists, universities, doctors, teachers, anyone who ‘can prove’ something with more than sweeping declarations of how things are, are targets.  The Right’s attack on public education is part of that package.  They want to get public money funneled to private schools that they can control.  

It’s ironic that until Reagan began attacking government, it was usually the Left that challenged government and the Right that defended it.  

Trump has good reason to fight for power, even after he loses.  If there is a Harris administration he will be on trial still and very likely sentenced to prison. At which point I wouldn’t be surprised if he fled to Cuba or another Russian ally.  Or Saudi Arabia.  

When he’s gone this isn’t over.  Our authoritarian enemies will continue to do what they can to weaken the West.  The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society will continue to fight for the power of the rich white elite to control the country.  

Fortunately their perfect candidate is also a huge liability.  Republicans’ eagerness to exercise their post Roe power at the state level has alerted and alarmed sensible voters.  And their demands for abject loyalty has resulted in less than stellar candidates in down ballot races - like North Carolina’s Mark Robinson, candidate for Governor.  

We’ll know in a month how the election goes, and then we’ll have to wait and see how the post election goes.  

You may well have made a good decision when you established yourselves in Northern Ireland.  But if the US goes down, no one is safe.   

Farrago

[This was written Sept. 22, but I wrote it under Pages instead of Posts.  Pages are the tabs up above (and below the banner.  So I'm adding it in today.]

I've heard of Fargo, but farrago is a word that wasn't in my vocabulary until I saw this LA Times article on Sean M. Kirkpatrick, who is

"the first director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO"

or the government's lead investigator of UFOs.

Here's where I encountered the word - I'm giving you more so you can see the context.

"From the start, Kirkpatrick says, he was determined to conduct a rigorously empirical inquiry: “We were looking for any data to substantiate any claims that were being made to Congress or in the social media arena.”

That applied not only to pilots’ reports of objects that seemed to have displayed unusual aeronautical behavior, but a farrago of reports in the press, online and among committed UFO believers about purportedly secret government programs to collect, examine and even attempt to reverse-engineer technology supposedly retrieved from crashed extraterrestrial UAPs."

My initial reaction was that the word was thrown in to sound erudite, as often is the case with such words.  But this is a perfect use of the word as I understand it after reading the definition.  

farrago /fə-rä′gō, -rā′-/

noun

An assortment or a medley; a conglomeration. A mass composed of various materials confusedly mixed; a medley; a mixture.Similar: medley/mixture

A collection containing a confused variety of miscellaneous things.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

Also noteworthy in the article is the assault of the ignorant against science.

“In my case,” Kirkpatrick told me a few days ago, “I’ve been accused of lying to the American people.”

He further revealed to the Guardian that he had experienced efforts of UFO true believers to “threaten my wife and daughter, and try to break into our online accounts — far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence [of U.S. Strategic Command]. I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.” 

The article compares the folks who refuse to believe the findings that there was no evidence of extra terrestrial visitors to the folks who refuse to believe in the COVID origin stories or that vaccines work.  

That points to “a larger problem with public opinion about scientific inquiry — science by social media versus science by scientific method,” he says. “You’re seeing the degradation of critical thinking skills and rational thought when it comes to analyzing what’s out in the world.”

"When scientific data confound received beliefs, he says, 'people cry ‘conspiracy,’ or ‘the data is wrong,’ or ‘scientists are making it up.’... Well, some of these scientists have been around for 30 or 40 years. If you don’t believe they know what they’re doing, then what are you going to base your decisions on in the future? Just pure belief and speculation?'

Kirkpatrick is working on another article on the topic of misinformation. 'I see what I was doing on UAP and misinformation as a microcosm of many other issues that challenge the U.S. today. That is, the division across belief lines where evidence suggests a contrary opinion that conflicts with one’s own belief system or political system.'”