(This satire is inspired by a call for papers for a volume about treatments of sexuality in various cultures; in the CFP, the editors-to-be specified that they “are looking for authors who are themselves from the culture under discussion”. This got me thinking about a world where all research were limited thus….)
DATELINE: Washington, D.C.
In an unexpected move, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health jointly announced today that the only type of research that would be funded by their institutions would be that conducted by researchers who belong to the groups under study.
“We don’t think researchers are really capable of understanding cultures that are not their own,” said Bob Ackernacht, a middle-aged straight white man with Type 2 Diabetes, a latex fetish, and a lifelong affliction of liberal guilt. “We think it’s clear that the only good science emerges from people thoroughly embedded in the culture they are researching.”
Researchers around the country reacted with shock at this news, but many also accepted this as an inevitable step in the march of scientific progress.
“It’s true we’re unlikely to ever learn anything again about children,” said Molly Surenuf, M.D., Ph.D., until today a pediatric oncology specialist. “Children just don’t have the training to do good research on themselves. But I can see why I’m utterly unqualified to know much about them either,” she conceded.
“I’ve turned over the keys to my lab to the rats,” said Marcus Lovebreed, Ph.D., who has spent decades studying sex and stress hormones in rats. “To be honest, I never really did understand them anyway.”
The rats were not immediately available for comment.
“I think I’m OK,” concluded Paul/a Johannsen, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher whose work has focused on the bra sizes of women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, “because I’ve always wanted to be a woman, and I have testicles, so I think I count as a member of my subject group.”
Democrats hailed the news as a boon to marginalized groups who could now be assured of spending all their time on in-fighting instead of having to battle external oppressors. Republicans at first expressed outrage, but quickly changed their reactions once they realized how few projects would actually be fundable. Sources reported that Republicans are now considering insisting that the peer-review process for grants also be limited to members of the group being studied, further limiting what is fundable.
“In fact,” said John Bogusties IX, “we are thinking about applying the same approach retroactively in politics.” Bogusties went on to explain: “Civil rights legislation and pro-civil rights court decisions have almost all been made by white people, who can’t possibly understand what it is really like to be a person of color. So we’ll be working to rescind all of that culturally-insensitive work. We also note that men gave women the right to vote, an obviously sexist move borne of a failure to be able to understand what it is like to be a woman. Therefore, we’ll be repealing the 19th Amendment. As soon as women are in majority position in elected office, we will welcome their reflection on whether they should have the right to vote.”
In the meantime, Bogusties said, his party deeply regretted the profound paternalism of the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, too. He blamed Democrats for their passages. A Democratic spokesperson with the appropriate identity was not available for comment.