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Netflix Edits 'Bill Nye' Episode to Remove Segment Saying Chromosomes Determine Gender

posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 05 2017, @09:53AM   
from the language-evolves-too dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

When uploaded to Netflix, an episode of the educational children's show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" cut out a segment saying that chromosomes determine one's gender.

[...] While noncontroversial at the time, the 1996 segment appears to contradict Netflix's new series "Bill Nye Saves the World."

The new show endorses a socially liberal understanding of gender, under which gender is defined by self-identification rather than genetics and there are more than just the two traditional genders.

People, people, people... Say it with me: The Internet Never Forgets.

Source: http://freebeacon.com/culture/netflix-edits-bill-nye-episode-remove-segment-chromosomes-determine-gender/

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Original Submission

• Re:Sigh. (Score: 2, Informative) by NSash on Friday May 05 2017, @02:46PM

  by NSash (4319) on Friday May 05 2017, @02:46PM (#504888)

  Sure you could let them air as-is but they are WRONG. Even through no fault of their own at the time of original creation / broadcast.

  Regarding Pluto specifically, people who are unfamiliar with the situation who believe they are championing science are in fact not. The IAU's reclassification does not reflect the consensus of subject matter experts — even within the IAU itself. See this relevant Slashdot post. [slashdot.org]

  That's just the issue: that's not what happened. The IAU discussion was a disaster. Here's the timeline:

  2005: The IAU appoints a committee to investigate the issue and generate a proposal. The committee investigated the issue for a year.

  The IAU meeting is scheduled from 14-25 August 2006.

  16 August: The committee recommends a definition based on hydrostatic equilibrium. No "cleared the neighborhood" nonsense. They publish their draft proposal.

  18 August: The IAU division of planetary sciences (aka, the people who actually deal with planets) endorses the proposal.

  Also 18 August: A subgroup of the IAU formed which opposed the proposal. An astronomer in the group (aka, someone who studies stars, not planets) - Julio Ángel Fernández - made up his own "cleared the neighborhood" definition. While most of the membership starts to trickle away over the next week, they remain determined to change the definition.

  22 August: The original, hydrostatic equilibrium draft continued to be the basis for discussion. There were some tweaks made (some name changes and adjusting the double-planet definition), but it remained largely the same.

  Late on 22 August: Fernández's group manages to get to just over half of the attendance at the (open) drafting meeting, leading to a very "heated" debate between the two sides.

  22 to 24 August: The drafting group begins to meet and negotiate in secret. The last that the general attendance of the conference knew, they'll either end up with a vote on a purely hydrostatic definition, or (more likely) no vote at all due to the chaos. Attendence continues to dwindle, particularly among those who are okay with either a hydrostatic definition or none at all.

  24 August: The current "cleared the neighborhood" definition is suddenly proposed and voted on on the same day. Only 10% of the conference attendance (4-5% of the IAU membership) is still present, mainly those who had been hanging on trying to get their definition through. They pass the new definition.

  It's not generally laypeople who are upset about how it went down, it's IAU members. Many have complained bitterly about it to the press. The IAU's own committee of experts was ignored, in favour of a definition written in secret meetings and voted on by a small, very much nonrandom fraction of people, the vast majority of whom do not study planets.

  If there's one thing I hate, it's people who pretend that anyone who opposes the IAU definition does so because they're ignorant morons overcome by some emotional attachment to Pluto, when in reality it's been planetary scientists themselves who have been the definition's harshest critics, because it's an internally self-inconsistent, linguistically flawed, false-premise-based definition that leads to all sorts of absurd results and contradicts terminology that was already in widespread use in the scientific literature.

  Parent

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