The anti-trans agenda is creating scientific garbage. If you can't speak rigorously and precisely about people and their bodies and their lives then lots of data become nonsense.

Making it harder to keep your kids alive makes it harder to combine childbearing (something people love and value) with any other goals in women's lives. That's what it does.

Making pregnancy more dangerous and more painful makes it harder to combine childbearing (something people love and want) with any other goals in life. They're betting this will contribute to women renouncing non-childbearing goals like education, careers, civic participation, etc.

Hook ‘em means too many things

Abortion bans making pregnancy more dangerous, shaming women for using tylenol, making the world more dangerous for babies: this is all pronatalist because pronatalism is about recreating mandatory childbearing, not making childbearing easier.

I start to lose hope in the usefulness of producing rigorous quantitative estimates in a nation where the government ignores them, and then I see how lies about about levels and trends in statistics fuel escalation and I’m recommitted. ✊

In my heart I know we all share the fault when babies die.

I keep thinking about how utterly consumed I was by earlier moments of crisis that were so much ((less)) than all this.

When a cartoon summarizes your last two years of research...

Trans Pleasure coming early 2026 Preorder today: www.ucpress.edu/books/trans-...

I literally did this (a series of church-based “listening sessions” on abortion) and it wasn’t safe 15 years ago. I can’t imagine how terrifying it would be now. I was naive and fearless and I wish someone had told me not to do it.

"Fundamentally, having a child is making a decision about the future." Great piece by @karenguzzo.bsky.social #demography #birthrates www.newsweek.com/low-birth-ra...

In like 1990 I learned the “winter gap” explanation of cultural and economic variation. In a hippy-dippy liberal west coast college town.

Pausing from my abortion/politics posting to say: if you, your daughter, your niece, or a bestie’s kid are looking for a homecoming dress, I’m selling a Y2K column dress that dreams are made of ✨ www.depop.com/products/big...

Great day to join your campus union (mine is @ucwcolorado.bsky.social ✊) or AAUP.

I have let the cocktail of credulity and selfishness justify making common cause with people whose actual aims I should have seen more clearly. So I can imagine how it works. But damn, this is next level.

Just a reminder that I wrote a whole PhD dissertation on the social and economic roots of Gamergate and the alt-right, in case you’re interested in understanding fascism and its connection to the games industry + academia from a materialist POV. spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/98...

Such a creepy confluence of the lie that better information would cure patriarchy and racism and the lie that LLMs give good information.

It’s weird to miss the shared belief that war and McCarthyism were bad things.

and I think the part it really, really, really, really crystallized - like a thing we all new, but they straight punched us in the face with it - is that Elites vs Rabble is so much more important to them as a line of demarcation than any vector of ideology or belief or politics

This subheading makes no sense since most journalists I talk to about this stuff falsely believe that population is already shrinking.

The Economist tries to both sides fertility decline and ends up just putting out a moral panic starter pack. What on earth this picture?!

"The problem does not start with the individuals buying and eugenically curating pregnancies from working-class women, but with the “soft” eugenics, competitiveness, and individualism that permeates our culture’s entire approach to baby-making to begin with." www.thenation.com/article/soci...

If they 100x the Title X program it wouldn't pay for this. What on earth.

The idea that you're promoting something by learning about it.

Student, to professor: "I'm not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president there's only two genders... and I don't want to promote something that is against our president's laws as well as against my religious beliefs" www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

Being worried about who's annoying is something bullies do.

Hey other academics: What's your take on back channeling arguments? My experience in contested spaces is mostly in spaces where opponents aren't good faith so I learned long ago not to do this. This pronatalism debacle is maybe different? But I've already had/seen some ugly bad faith there, too.

The thing about technocratic arguments for/against pronatalism is that they won't work because it's it's more about more about shaming the "Female, voted for Trump" column than it is about bullying the "Female, voted for Harris" column.

My department is hiring an assistant professor of environmental behavioral sciences. The research area is open but we are particularly interested in people with research on collective action or computational social sciences. Happy to answer questions about the Doerr School or the department.

Look at this beautiful plot from Taylor (1961)

This whole thing is such a bleak three-for-one: They get to stigmatize autistic people AND blame and shame women AND they get to specifically blame and shame women trying to mitigate their physical suffering in the only way they're allowed to during pregnancy!

“What if everyone knew Austin was the sum of two normal distributions?”

Truly wish they would stop making up ridiculous movement names (Abundance! Techno-optimism! Effective altruism!) and just admit that being rich doesn’t soothe the pain of being gigantic dorks in high school

This is just not a terribly skewed population age structure and pronatalists are bananas. www.census.gov/library/stor...

I'm a fan of the Michael Bolton maxim, myself.

I know entitlement to others' reproductive labor is stark dehumanization. But somehow the quotes from the person who hired the surrogate in this story broke my heart in a new way. I wish I hadn't read this.

Forever fuck you to the people making the world even less safe for immunocompromised people, many of whom I love.

Demographers: "But you can't raise birthrates with policies like those!" Gender scholars: "The cruelty was never the (only) point - the impossibility of ever achieving the goal was load bearing all along."

If anyone wants to pre-bunk the garbage this will generate, I am FULL of ideas.

Don't sleep on the marriage promotion parts of these efforts. The power of property rights (coverture!) to narrow women's lives and the power of familial obligation to absolve us of any responsibility each other.

when you think about, it's actually kind of impressive to make a computer innumerate. like that's its one job. it's in the name.

The birth rate discourse makes me snark in Black Gen X… they criminalized Black parents (teen & single) back when we were growing up. Reagan literally made our reproduction a campaign issue! (Read Professor Dorothy E. Roberts’ work!) Many of us Black late 1970s babies had kids late or not at all… 🤷🏾‍♀️

Are there abeyance structures for American science other than ((the rest of the world)))?

If you want to ovulate because you're into that or for whatever reason at all, cool. But saying you're only a real women or your real self if you ovulate is creepy propaganda.

Happy Labor Day 🙂

My Hard Opinion is you cannot call yourself a patriot if you don’t go to your local fair and nod approvingly at everyone’s beautiful quilts, lovely pies and amazing gourds

RFK's idea that disease is good, actually, is not just eugenicist - it's literally on the extreme bad edge of eugenics. Many original eugenicists understood that preventable disease killed "fit" and "unfit" alike. They wanted to prevent disease and practice public health. /1

Using pronatalism to address the parenting crisis is kind of like outlawing camping to address the housing crisis. Targeting specific visible signs of a problem doesn't address the problem.