Pulse
02 Feb 2026
Woke ‘Science’
One of the most disingenuous strategies of the authoritarian Left is to instrumentalise science by distorting its findings in order to achieve its political and social goals.
For many people, science is regarded as that human enterprise which has been kept outside the realm of the political, and whose findings are deemed to be objective and therefore universal. (Whether you are black or white, a Marxist or capitalist, gravity is real!)
Science is premised on a critical-realist epistemology which maintains that objective knowledge about the world in which we live can be had. Science is therefore the process by which knowledge is acquired through the collection and observation of data, controlled experimentation and testing, and falsification.
Woke ‘science’ is not concerned about the principles, discipline and safeguards of traditional science. Its focus is on advancing its ideology, and it would have no qualms about distorting scientific research, skewing its findings or pressuring scientists and scientific journals in order to do this.
When the advocates of work ‘science’ insist that we must ‘follow the science’, it is not traditional or mainstream science they are referring to, but a politicised interpretation of science, which affirms and supports their vision of reality, and promotes their solutions.
As Ben Shapiro puts it, woke ‘science’ (he calls it The Science™) is ‘never invoked in order to convince; it is invoked in order to cudgel. Woke ‘science’, in other words, is ‘politics dressed in white coat.’
But how does this pseudo-science manage to have such a sway? Wouldn’t its falsehoods be exposed by real science?
The proponents of woke ‘science’ have strategically targeted the general public instead of the specialists. This is done by releasing the findings of skewed science through blogs or vlogs, and using ordinary language stripped of scientific jargon.
There is also a deliberate move to change the focus from journal publications to an approach of explaining to the audience how their ‘findings’ can directly impact society and bring about change and social justice, especially for the marginalised.
A few examples of how the woke Left has instrumentalised ‘science’ to advance their ideology will show just how dangerous it can be – not just for the individual, but also for society.
TRANSGENDER ‘SCIENCE’
On May 1, 2023, Scientific American Magazine, a respectable science journal, published an article entitled, ‘Here’s Why Human Sex is Not Binary.’ The subtitle states provocatively and quite categorically that ‘Ova don’t make a woman, and sperm don’t make a man.’
‘There are those, politicians, pundits and even a few scientists, who maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex,’ writes Agustin Fuentes, the article’s author. ‘This is bad science,’ he asserts.
According to trans ideologues, the categories of male and female represent a spectrum and are not biologically determined. In fact, they are nothing more than a subjective feeling.
It would be a mistake to think that this is the view of a few scientifically uninformed members of the general public.
According to an article by Joan Smith published at the Unherd website, three out of 10 British scientists have said in a poll that they don’t believe sex is binary. ‘Almost two-thirds believe that “gender” is fluid, whatever that means,’ she writes. Among academics in British universities, only 58 percent agreed with the statement that ‘sex is binary,’ while 29 percent disagreed.
Dr Deanna Adkins, a professor at Duke University of Medicine and Director of the Duke Centre for Child and Adolescent Gender Care, states in an expert declaration to a federal district court in North Carolina that ‘From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.’
She insists that every other method of determining sex is bad science: ‘It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.’
In 2018, the American Medical Association (AMA) publicly states that it opposes any definition of sex based on ‘immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,’ and that it favours the language that doctors ‘assign’ sex at birth. In 2019, the AMA even outlined legislation that would prohibit therapists from suggesting to children that they should become more comfortable with their biological sex.
This is the ‘new orthodoxy’ advanced by trans ideologues, and anyone who has the audacity to challenge it will be demonized and silenced. For example, the Scientific American article mentioned above makes this outrageous claim that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is ‘trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society.’
On 3 October, 2023, Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in the U.K. sparked a controversy in a speech in which she warned that science is ‘under attack’ by woke ideology. She said that scientists are being ‘told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex.’
When the Conservative government pledged to ‘kick woke ideology out of science’, many scientists reacted strongly stating that they are ‘appalled, saddened, and angry’ by the move. An open letter, signed by more than 2,000 researchers, said that ‘Far from depoliticizing science, this policy appears to be driven by ideology’ and that it threatens academic freedom.
The letter slams the U.K. government’s decision by asserting that it is based on ‘over-simplistic or scientifically illiterate arguments’ about sex and gender. It accuses the government of attempting to ‘stoke so-called culture wars and make the UK increasingly hostile towards people identifying as inter-sex, non-binary and/or trans.’
In 2018, Brown university assistant professor Lisa Littman released a study on ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria,’ in which she documented the fact that teenage girls were becoming transgender due to pressure from their peer group.
Brown University pulled the study. The dean of the Brown School of Public Health, Bess Marcus, issued a letter denouncing Littman’s research and alleging that she had failed to ‘listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of [her] work.’
Woke ‘science’ is the politicization of science. It forces science into the procrustean bed of woke ideology – whether it is gender theory, social justice, race, etc. Woke ‘science’ signals the death of genuine scientific inquiry.
Work ‘science’ is pseudo-science. And pseudo-science is dangerous because it destroys lives and it is detrimental to the flourishing of society.
IDEOLOGY TRUMPS SCIENCE
Not only do the authoritarian Left manipulate science to advance their agenda, they also have no qualms about ignoring science altogether, if it suits their purposes. Nor will they hesitate to harass reputable organisations and institutions into aligning themselves to their ideology.
A classic example of this, drawn from the early 1970s, is the way in which gay activists pressurized the prestigious American Association of Psychiatry (APA) to ignore scientific evidence and change its position on homosexuality by stating that it is not a mental disorder.
The APA did not make this dramatic move because of some significant breakthrough in research on homosexuality that made its previous assessment untenable, but because it cowed to the aggressive badgering and coercion of the activists.
Another example of how the Left, who are devotees of wokeism, have ignored the science is to privilege ideology over it. This became glaringly obvious during the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020 when lockdowns were imposed by the U.S. government for reasons of public health.
On 25 May that year, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, died in the custody of Minneapolis police. Massive protests and riots ensued across the country as a result, led by the radical Black Lives Matter movement. According to some estimates, somewhere between 15 and 26 million people in the United States participated in the protests.
As to be expected, these protests and riots clearly flouted the social-distancing and mask-wearing rules imposed by the government. But what is disturbing is that the same politicians and public health officials who decried anti-lockdown sentiments and who advocated social distancing, have now enthusiastically endorsed and participated in these mass protests.
For example, just days after explaining why lockdowns are important for saving lives, Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer participated in the civil rights march in Highland Park with hundreds of others. In a similar vein, Mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti, who took part in the Black Lives Matter protest march, explained that only BLM marches are allowed in the city because they must be distinguished from other types of gathering:
This is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we’re used to, the parades, the fairs – we just can’t have that while we’re focused on health right now.
More than one thousand ‘public health specialists’ signed an open letter supporting the protests. Writing to The New York Times, infectious disease expert Ranu S. Dhillon of Harvard Medical School asserts that:
Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential. The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason … that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.
Echoing this sentiment, Julia Marcus, epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, and Gregg Gonsalves, epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, wrote in an article in The Atlantic claiming that:
Public-health experts are weighing these same risks at a population level, and many have come to the conclusion that the health implications of maintaining the status quo of white supremacy are too great to ignore, even with the potential for an increase in coronavirus transmission from the protests.
Science maintains that in the middle of a raging pandemic, mass gatherings like protests are irresponsible because it is detrimental to public health. Work ‘science’ says that health concerns are secondary, political concerns are primary.
For the woke Left, ideology always trumps science.
In his captivating book, The Authoritarian Moment, Ben Shapiro, stating the obvious which is now strangely no longer obvious, writes:
… science is neither liberal nor conservative. But The Science™ – the radicalised version of science in which scientists speak their politics, and in which political actors set the limits of science – is certainly a tool of authoritarian leftists. And it predominates across the scientific world.
He hopes that scientists (and surely also politicians and the general public) would sober up before it’s too late:
We can only hope that scientists realise that scientific credibility relies not on membership in the New Ruling Class but in the pure legitimacy of the scientific process in the entire field – a field that has transformed the world in extraordinary ways – collapses.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.