>>102121714Let's not be too hasty. Scientists certainly aren't, usually, the screeching myopic harpies the people who latch on to them to prop up their dumb internet fights are, but academia can be infected by social and moral trends as much as any other place. On the larger scale, research into things like brain size and similar biological variation in humanity can draw unwarranted PC bothering, even as scientists are more open and accepting of that variation than most liberal bloggers would dare to voice.
On the smaller scale, university faculty can get into petty fights over differences in theory and teaching philosophy. It's frankly quite ridiculous, especially in very controversy prone fields like anthropology.
Things like gender dysphoria move out from under the insanity label the same way being gay has: it became accepted as a legitimate biological variation and not simply people being difficult. Insanity ends up not being an object quality but the standard to which you can be a participant member in society despite you mental distinctions. People used to lobotomize and lock people for certain problems because it was believed they'd be too disruptive otherwise. Or for their own good. When society decided it wasn't going to cause as many problems as they'd previously figured, those options became less attractive. I'm sure a lot of legitimately delusional and hallucinating people in history had a great time simply because their behavior matched certain older social positions like "seer" and "witch doctor."
That it was scientific development that spurred this has more to do with the weight such things hold in our modern society more than their objective truth. Science is the new magic for most people. If we put more stock in tea leaves and witchery, and those things said the truscum (please google this word for a fun time) were actually alright, the same thing would've happened.
