Transcript for The New Eugenics

Whilst researching this episode, I looked at a map of the world from the Victorian era, and saw large areas where coloured pink, wow I thought, queer people ruled a lot of the world then, no, it was just the reach of the so called, “British Empire”, when Britain unwarrantedly ruled a lot of the world!

In this episode, I will look at the discovery of the mechanism of inheritance, a theory unaware and unincumbered by this discovery, which with other beliefs and a misrepresentation of a philosophy, led in part to one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, and how today, similarly unincumbered by an understanding of psychology, is a belief that is having a real world impact on trans and non-binary people.

Welcome to “Trans Wise Trans Strong”, I am Carolyne O’Reilly.

Episode three, “The New Eugenics”

If I were to say “racial superiority” and “concentration camps”, what one word comes to mind?

Might I suggest, “Nazi”, and yet the belief in “racial superiority” and the existence of “concentration camps”, preceded the Nazis.

It was the latter half of the 19th Century, that a theory originated, that believed in “racial superiority” and which, misunderstood how inheritance functioned, by Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), that theory was called, “eugenics”.

The use of concentration camps was also employed towards the end of the 19th Century, not by Germany, but by Spain, the United States and Britain.

But who was the discoverer of the principles of inheritance, for that answer we need to look again to the 19th century, and an Augustinian friar, Gregor Johann Mendel (1822 to 1884), who laid the foundation for our modern understanding of genetic inheritance.

Mendel’s understanding of inheritance was as a result of experiments conducted with tens of thousands of pea plants, by first cultivating by self-fertilisation, pure strains of pea plants, the modern terminology for such a plant is homozygous.

Mendel created seven strains with distinct characteristics, such as height, tall and short, flower colour, violet and white, pea colour, yellow and green etc., over a period of about eight years, and as a result of his research he formulated three principles.

Mendel published his research in 1866 in a paper titled, “Experiments on Plant Hybrids”, in the journal, “Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn”, which was unfortunately ignored by the majority of the scientific community, unlike another work that preceded it by seven years in 1859, Charles Darwin’s, “On the Origin of Species”.

Mendel’s eventual understanding of inheritance was at odds with the accepted orthodoxy of biology, which believed that inheritance results in the offspring having a blend of characteristics from both parents.

It was believed that if a plant with red flowers was crossed with one with white, the resulting plants from this cross fertilisation would have pink flowers, but Mendel found this was not the case.

Let’s examine one of Mendel’s early experiments, that involved flower colour, he crossed pure strains of violet flowered, with pure strains of white flowered pea plants, and found the resulting first generation of hybrid plants, the modern term is heterozygous, had the same flower colour as one of the parent plants, violet.

He referred to this dominance of one of the parent plant’s flower colour as a “dominant trait”.

Mendel deduced his first principle from this result, which is the “principle of uniformity”, which states that a cross between parent plants that differ only by one trait, will result in offspring that appear to be identical to one of the parent plants.

Observing this result caused Mendel to wonder, was the trait for white flower colour still conceal within these hybrids.

As a test for this idea, Mendel crossed this first generation of plants with each other, and found with a sufficiently large enough sample size, that the second generation resulted in only 75% with violet flowers, the remaining 25% being white flowered, a ratio of 3 to 1.

These findings implied that, even though all the first generation of plants could not be distinguished from one of the, dominate parent plants, they still possessed the potential to look like the recessive parent plant.

From these findings Mendel proposed his second principle, the “principle of segregation”, which states that during “meiosis”, “particles”, which we now call alleles, that determine traits, separate into “gametes”, and equal numbers of ova and pollen contain each allele.

An allele is a variation of a gene, genes and DNA of course were unknown to Mendel.

Meiosis is the process of sexual reproduction, and a gamete is a sex cell, so for animals they would be eggs and sperm, and for plants ova and pollen.

But why 3 in 1?

The hybrid first generation would have inherited a dominate allele and a recessive allele, which means there can be 4 permutations of alleles.

Two dominate alleles or one dominate and one recessive or one recessive and one dominate, all three of these permutations have at least one dominate allele, and therefore all the flowers will be violet.

The last permutation will have two recessive alleles, resulting in white flowers, hence the ratio 3 to 1.

Mendel wondered would the ratio of 3 to 1 in favour of a dominate trait still hold true if a plant had two traits, and to test this hypothesis, he cultivated pure strains that differed by two traits.

Mendel predicted that based on the concept of segregation, the four traits would separate into different gametes, and from his earlier experiments, he further predicted that the inheritance of one trait would not affect the inheritance of a different trait.

To test this hypothesis of trait independence, Mendel cultivated pure strains with different seed shape and seed colour.

One strain had wrinkled and yellow seeds, and the other had round and green seeds, and from his previous experiments, he knew that round seeds and yellow coloured seeds were the dominate traits.

Mendel expected that all the first generation plants would have round yellow seeds, and that is exactly what he found.

Then he cross fertilised this first generation we each other and totalled the respective four traits of the second generation of plants, and found that round seeds outnumber wrinkled by a fraction just over 3 to 1, and yellow coloured seeds outnumber by a fraction just below 3 to 1, so the ratio of 3 to 1 still held true.

From these results Mendel formulated his third and final principle, the “principle of independent assortment”, which states that gametes with alleles for one trait, do not determined the gametes with alleles for another trait.

I would like to acknowledge an article from Nature, Gregor Mendel and the Principles of Inheritance and an article from BBC Bitesize, Genetic inheritance, in preparing this section.

Mendel published, as mentioned, his research in 1866, unfortunately his genius was not recognised in his lifetime, and therefore it is extremely unlikely that Francis Galton had any knowledge of the true nature of inheritance.

Francis Galton, a year before Mendel’s publication, had written an article where he proposed his theory that; intellect, artistic ability and physical prowess could be inherited, and further expanded his theory in paper in 1869, “Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into its Laws and Consequences”.

Galton also considered the notion that criminality could be determined by facial features, so called “criminal features”, this was also theorised by Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909).

Lombroso propose that criminals have distinct features that he called, “atavistic”, in other words “primitive”, and that there is a distinct class of people prone to criminality, which implies such behaviour is inherited, and published his theory in a work titled, “The Criminal Man”.

This repellent racist theory has been total repudiated and what Lombroso proposed in “The Criminal Man”, was nothing but pseudoscience.

Back to Galton, it was not until 1883 that he gave his theory a name, when he coined the word “eugenics”, from two Greeks words, and it appeared in a publication titled, “Inquiries into human faculties and its development”.

Galton was no doubt influenced by Darwin’s work, “On the Origin of Species”, in his belief of heritability, that so called desired characteristics could be achieved by selective breeding, in his words, “to improve the human race”, although all those considered for this selected breeding were; white, well educated, and of athletic prowess, funny that.

The fact that Francis Galton was knighted, and Charles Darwin wasn’t, perhaps suggests how their respective ideas were thought of and by extension that Galton’s racist theory was widely accepted.

Others who had adherence to eugenics were; John Maynard Keynes, economist, Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and George Bernard Shaw.

Others were; economist William Beveridge, Liberal politician, Winston Churchill, Liberal then Conservative politician and Ramsay MacDonald, Labour politician.

In Germany there was a eugenicist, Alfred Ploetz, who coined the phrase, “racial hygiene”, in his work, “Racial Hygiene Basics”, which was embraced in nineteen-thirties Germany.

Somewhat later in the United States, eugenics was championed by Charles Benedict Davenport (1866-1944), with his definition of eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding”.

This belief in eugenics continued into the 20th century, with in Britain the creation of two organisations, the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics and the Eugenics Society.

Dalton, Ploetz and Davenport’s beliefs were incorrect in what can actually be inherited, eugenics was also nothing but pseudoscience.

There is one last example of pseudoscience I would like to mention and that is phrenology, which was based on thirty-seven so called “faculties” of the skull, that were deemed to provide insight into a person’s character.

Phrenology was developed by the Austrian physiologist Franz Josef Gall and

popularised by the German physician Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, who developed it into a theory of racial categorisation.

For the moment I just can’t think who would have been interested in this development.

There is one other person I would like to mention, whose writings were misrepresented in the early nineteen-thirties, and a word. The person is, Friedrich Nietzsche and the word is “Übermensch”.

That word of Nietzsche’s, (1844 to 1900), “Übermensch”, is often translated as Superman, and we are not talking abouts the leaper of tall buildings in a single bound.

“Übermensch” was a goal for humanity proposed by the character of Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, in English, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, which explores Nietzsche philosophical concepts, and a distorted understanding of Nietzsche would later find favour with a failed painter of buildings and landscapes.

It was following Nietzsche’s death, that his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became the curator of his works as the Nietzsche Archive, and it is how she presented his writings, now considered a distortion of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and the financial support from the German government, whose Chancellor, later Führer, one Adolf Hitler, led to her association with the National Socialists, AKA Nazis.

The Nazis belief in eugenics, phrenology, and other pseudoscientific beliefs and a misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, culminated in concentration camps for mass murder.

But the Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, there were three preceding occasions when people were corralled together resulting in large scale death.

The first was on the island of Cuba, which was fighting for its independence from Spain, when the new governor-general of the island, Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher”, who in 1896 corralled noncombatants in appalling living conditions, and with little food, which resulted in excess of 100,000 deaths.

Then there was the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States acquired Spain’s longstanding colony of the Philippines and again there was a fight for independence that led again to the established of concentration camps, with the result over a 4 year period of the war, of at least 200,000 civilians deaths.

The last example occurred during the second Boer war, now referred to as the South African War, 1899 to 1902, where the Boers, which is a Dutch Afrikaans word for farmer, were lured by British promises of peace and protection into camps.

But due to the poor quality of the food, unhygienic conditions and inadequate medical arrangements, some 28,000 Boer women and children and at least 20,000 black South Africans died.

Whether deliberate or through incompetence, concentration camps can result in a huge death toll, but it was the Nazis who industrialised the murder of millions, with 6 million Jewish people and another 5 million non-Jewish people.

But who were the 5 million that were also exterminated, they were:

Roma and Sinti people

So called Asocials, who were; beggars, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and pacifists.

Black people.

Mentally and physically disabled people.

Freemasons.

Lesbian, gay and trans people.

Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Polish and Slavic people and POWS.

Communists, trade unionists and social democrats.

So why The New Eugenics, there is a quote by Hiram Johnson, “The first casualty when war comes is truth”, and in this respect for the so called cultural wars, this has never been more true.

Even though in its original form, eugenics has been debunked, a form of eugenics with science based racism, for added flourish, still exists, impacting on people of colour, people with disability and the LGBTQIA+ community.

For the last two to three years the concept of who is a woman is being policed by those who have a belief based on questionable factual rigour and knowledge.

I first became aware of this nearly three years ago, when the international body for swimming, FINA now called World Aquatics, announced in June 2022 that there would be a ban on transgender swimmers competing unless they had transitioned before the age of 12, so realistically it was a total ban.

World Athletics had a similar ban from March 2023, their president, Lord Coe said, “no transgender athlete who had gone through male puberty would be permitted to compete in female world ranking competitions from the 31 of March 2023”. Note the use of transgender here, and also by World Aquatics, not trans women, it’s as if they have no idea that there are trans men!

Other sporting bodies, have also instigated a ban on trans women; Rugby, Cycling, Cricket, Netball.

All these bodies, sight physical advantage, although I am not aware of any empirical evidence being provided, however Loughborough University is conducting research into transwomen and elite sport, the research is ongoing but when published there should be empirical data, so perhaps decisions can be, in the future, made, that are not based on prejudice.

Trans and non-binary people are also being targeted outside of sport, specifically by president Donald Trump’s various executive orders, which included on his first day in office, that the United States will only recognize “two sexes, male and female”.

This has resulted in the State Department, removing the gender option “X” on passports, which was available to non-binary applicants, and the word “gender”, is replaced with “sex”, and the sex has to be the same as applicants original birth certificate.

I feel that these policy changes, represent a real danger for trans and non-binary US citizens traveling abroad.

Although non-binary applicants in the UK have never had the option of “X” as a gender marker, I was so happy when I opened my new passport and saw F against Sex.

Also various federal organisations have been removing mention of trans, non-binary and queer people, such as the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, commonly known as the CDC, and the National Parks Service whom I mention in the previous episode, removing mention of trans and queer people from the citation for the Stonewall uprising.

I would like to acknowledge two articles from the United States National Public Radio (NPR) website, titled Here are all the ways people are disappearing from government websites and Health info wiped from federal websites following Trump order, targeting transgender rights.

Whilst in Britain during the closing speech at the 2024 Conservative Party Conference by the then Prime minister Rishi Sunak was the comment, “a man is a man and a woman is a woman, it is just common sense”, and that sentiment, “it’s just common sense”, is one that has been echoed by Donald Trump.

I am pretty sure if I had used, “it’s just common sense”, as a conclusion to a paper submitted whilst at university, I would have received short shrift.

All this writing out of history, and removing mention of trans and non-binary people, flies in the face of what is understood by psychologists, that there isn’t just simply two sexes, male and female, that gender identity is more complex.

I feel this targeting is not just appealing to the prejudices of various groups, but could also be as a distraction from a countries woes, and I find this chilling.

I would like to end by reading an English translation by the British charity, the “Holocaust Memorial Day Trust”, of First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

This episode was written and presented by me, Carolyne O’Reilly, thank you for listening.

Next time in three weeks, “There’s A Woman On The Stage”