A famous transphobe was a postdoc where I was doing my PhD
I remember my friend coming to me one day. She talked about a new postdoc in the department that attends her lab meeting. "I think he's transphobic," she whispered. We looked at his twitter feed together.
"Oh yeah, definitely is," I answered.
Would I have known then that this was the infamous Colin Wright when he was a postdoc at Penn State?
Perhaps this is super naive, but I never understood why some people with life-science doctorates have an obsession of using their science to govern people (That "Population Bomb" or "Nonwhite people are having more children and that's bad" guy is a professor in entomology). Colin Wright, and many others, uses his doctorate like a justification for why their opinions matter. Doesn't his biology doctorate give him a scientific insight on sex? But why does it matter? Whether someone has rights or not should not be scientifically backed! By using the veneer of scientific technicality, one can make stripping rights away from the most vulnerable a more swallowable act, I suppose.
I thought about him when he came across my Twitter feed. I'm always been fascinated with the academics to alt-right grifters (including James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson). Academia didn't give them their stupid ideas, don't get me wrong, but I think academic training gives you an overblown ego. It convinces you that yeah your words matter more because you have a fancy paper.
I mean look at me writing a blog.