A Perfect Example of Disinformation

There is a lot that has been written and will be written on disinformation. Granted, it is used by both political and ideological extremes. Accusations of disinformation are often disinformation in and of themselves.  Everything is racist, Russian collusion and claims of election fraud from both the left and the right abound. A little stroll down memory lane will show that before 2020 it was prominent Democrats calling elections rigged, fraudulent, and stolen.

The video below was put out last year by the GOP to show the hypocrisy. I’m sure if we went back further in history we would find more of this kind of thing. However, I bet if you asked the average person “Who made claims of election fraud?” you would likely hear the name Trump when in fact he is only the most recent. Here is a link to 150 examples of Democrats denying election results.

Here is another example of disinformation that is likely less talked about. I was scrolling through some YouTube Short videos when I came across this one related to the number of people born who are intersex. Intersex is a natural biological variation that occurs when a person is born with physical, hormonal, or genetic features that do not fit the typical expectations for male or female bodies. I had heard the number 1.7% but never thought it was correct and I never found the time to investigate until this video gave me a lead. The key comes at the end of the video with the name Sterling. So, I tried the search on Google “Sterling estimates intersex 100 times less” because that is all I could make out at the end of the clip.

Try the search yourself. First How many people are born intersex? You get the 1.7% prominently at the top of the search including the new AI results. Next try Sterling estimates intersex 100 times less. At the top, you get both the 1.7% and the reason it is 100 times less than that. The source for 100 times less is none other than the National Institutes of Health. Below is the abstract:

Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.

This is a huge difference. Either there are 5.6 million intersex Americans or there are around 59 thousand! That is out of 330 million people. Think about that. What is the motivation for the disinformation? How hard is it to find the truth?  How much of what you believe is true? Dozens of questions abound.

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