A Harvard-sponsored organization is handing out fliers that make some shocking claims about gender and sex.
The pamphlet, created by Harvard’s Office of BGLTQ Student Life, explains, “There are more than two biological sexes.” Anyone with a basic understanding of X and Y chromosomes knows that this is simply false. The flier, for its part, does not name what other sexes (besides male and female) exist in the world.
In addition, the flier says that a person’s gender identity can change day by day.
The stakes are high, according to this flier: “Transphobic misinformation is a form of systemic violence.” It is not violent to say that the flier is very wrong, and that science refutes many of its claims.
Results of a study published in the journal Endocrine Practice demonstrate that a person’s gender identity (sense of the self as male or female) is biological. That means that gender is pre-installed in our bodies, even if it doesn’t match a person’s biological sex. In other words, a person could be cisgender or transgender, but since biology doesn’t change day-to-day, gender doesn’t change that way, either.
A later study in The New Atlantis found no evidence to support the idea that a person’s gender identity could be different from that person’s biological sex.
Since a total lack of evidence isn’t stopping Harvard’s liberals, let’s suppose that the flier is right – that gender does change on a day to day basis. That means that gender is flexible over time. There is nothing about the revolution of the Earth on its axis that makes everyone’s gender “re-set” at 12:01am. If gender can change day-to-day, then it can also change minute-to-minute.
This is going to severely complicate things for the Harvard College Women’s Center, which will now be virtually unable to identify who is a woman and who is not. A student could ostensibly walk in to the office on a “female” day to make an appointment with an advisor, and then, on the day of that appointment, wake up “male.”
Fast-paced gender fluidity also complicates roommate situations. To its credit, Harvard maintains a practical policy to accommodate transgender students while also respecting the rights of cisgendered students to live with someone of their own gender:
If bedroom occupants must be the same gender, what happens if a roommate pair starts out as two males but, one day in the middle of the semester, one roommate wakes up as female? Should the newly-female person notify her roommate? The male roommate could wait it out and hope that the other person becomes male again soon, but there is no guarantee that such transition will ever happen.
Of course, just because something is complicated does not make it inherently wrong. But to take ideas that have no basis in science, and then use them as grounds to disrupt the most basic functions of a university, is a tremendous disservice to American higher education.
