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Over the last decade, academic biology has been under full-scale ideological assault by activists pursuing the narrow political goal of convincing the public that the biology of sex has undergone a revolution. Whereas biologists traditionally viewed the reproductive categories of male and female as a strict binary, these activists and ideologically captured scientists now claim that modern biology has abandoned this overly “simplistic” view in favor of a more complex model involving myriad traits that fall on a continuum. According to this narrative, the traditional binary model was not merely wrong; it was a product of bigotry that actively oppressed intersex and transgender communities.
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At least, that’s the story they want you to believe.
But no scientific revolution ever occurred. No new data or discovery has overturned our universal understanding of males and females as evolved reproductive strategies rooted in the type of gamete, sperm or ova, an organism’s reproductive system has the biological function to produce. Instead, the assertion that sex is a “spectrum” gained traction because activists successfully attached moral valence to what should remain an amoral empirical matter. Scientists and the public were suddenly confronted with a false binary: Are you a good person who accepts the modern science of the sex spectrum, or are you a hateful transphobe clinging to outdated junk science?
This framing has done tremendous damage, both to the careers of biologists like myself who publicly object to this pseudoscientific ideological takeover on scientific grounds and to the public’s grasp of basic, universal biological concepts fundamental to our species.
When Trump took office earlier this year, a top priority was to purge this sex pseudoscience from the federal government. On Inauguration Day, he signed an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order affirmed that the terms ‘man’ and ‘boy,’ as well as ‘woman’ and ‘girl,’ refer to the adult and juvenile forms of human males and females, respectively. It further defined ‘male’ and ‘female’ in objective biological terms, specifically according to whether a person’s reproductive system has the function to produce either the small or large “reproductive cell” (i.e., sperm or ova).
The order also explicitly identified “gender ideology” as the force behind efforts to abolish sex-based legal protections by replacing “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” Under this redefinition, men and women can self-identify as the opposite sex, and institutions are expected to treat such declarations as authoritative in all contexts.
On February 19, one month after Trump’s order, the Department of Health and Human Services followed up on Trump’s order with a detailed set of technical definitions for sex-related terms to guide federal agencies, external partners, and the public in implementing the order correctly.
The Left’s response to Trump’s order and the HHS guidance has been to flood the zone with essays and peer-reviewed articles declaring these documents and the binary notion of sex itself unscientific, bigoted, and harmful. Many of these attempts are not worth responding to. But a new article published last week in the San Francisco Chronicle is worth highlighting because it marks a notable shift in the public and scientific debate over sex and gender.
The article, titled “We’re scientists who study sex and gender. Here’s what Trump gets wrong about trans people,” is written by renowned evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden and psychologist Jaimie Veale. They present their piece as an expert rebuttal to Trump’s EO.
As an evolutionary biologist myself and a member of the small team of biologists and philosophers tasked with formulating the HHS definitions of sex, male, and female, I want to respond to this latest attempt to shift the debate and redefine biological reality in service of an ideological agenda.
Roughgarden and Veale’s first move is to try and root transgenderism in biology by claiming that “transgender people are a natural part of the human species” who have existed “across cultures and through time.” This statement is misleading. It relies on yet another definitional sleight of hand in which activists expand the definition of transgender into “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” But no reasonable person, let alone any biologist, denies that masculine girls and women, or feminine boys and men, are natural parts of human variation. Of course they are. And it must be pointed out that gays and lesbians are considered transgender according to this expansive definition, as being attracted to the same sex is a behavior that “does not conform to that typically associated” with one’s sex.
Calling such individuals “transgender,” a label that implies a pathological misalignment between one’s brain and body, is both regressive and harmful. It is regressive because it effectively reclassifies masculine girls as boys and feminine boys as girls. And it’s harmful because activists have constructed a “gender-affirming” medical pathway — puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — designed to “correct” this perceived misalignment. This pathway permanently alters healthy bodies and can render individuals sterile and medically dependent for life.
Roughgarden and Veale defend this medical pathway and cite seven major medical associations that “support transgender people and their right to appropriate care.” But statements from medical associations are not a substitute for evidence. And the current evidence, as revealed in the highest-quality systematic reviews conducted to date by multiple countries, shows no clear evidence of benefit and a growing list of known harms and potential risks. It is therefore grossly irresponsible for the authors to characterize these interventions as “appropriate care” when the available evidence provides no basis for such a claim.
Roughgarden and Veale then pivot to the central aim of their essay, which is to set the record straight on the biology of sex and gender. Here, we witness an attempt to redefine the debate landscape in real-time.
They begin with an apparent concession to sex realists like myself. While medical practice might rely on “practical but inconsistent markers to define sex, such as genitals, chromosomes and hormones,” they argue that these traits only “statistically correlate with human sex, but do not define it.” They go on to accept the universal, binary definition of the sexes: “males make small gametes (sperm), females make large gametes (eggs).”
But immediately after this concession, Roughgarden and Veale unveil a new framework entirely. They claim that although an individual’s sex is defined in terms of gamete production, “gender” refers to “all the anatomical and behavioral traits that correlate with sex taken together.” “Beyond gamete size,” they write, “everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender.”
Everything beyond gametes is now gender?
It is difficult to overstate how radical a departure this is from the activists’ prior rhetoric. Until recently, activists insisted that sex encompassed a wide array of biological traits, such as chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics, while gender referred to a deeply rooted internal sense of identity that related to culturally defined social roles, behaviors, and forms of expression. But now, suddenly, we are told that “gender” includes sex chromosomes, height, body size, shape, and behavior?
In biology, all of these traits fall under the well-established concept of sexual dimorphism, which refers to physical, physiological, and behavioral differences between males and females that often evolve due to divergent selection pressures. Think of the elaborate plumage of male peacocks and birds of paradise, the antlers and combat behavior of male deer competing for mates, or the characteristic hormone profiles of male and female mammals. According to Roughgarden and Veale, all of this is now “gender.”
This reclassification is both incoherent and unnecessary. We already have precise biological terms to describe these differences. Which raises the question: Why are they doing this? I believe there are two main reasons.
First, I believe they are moving in this direction because activists are losing the debate over the biology of sex. The gamete-based definition of sex is a fundamental, universal, and powerfully predictive concept in biology, so well established and so indispensable that denying it is futile. Entire fields of evolutionary biology collapse into incoherence once the gamete-based definition is abandoned. Sexual selection, parental investment theory, and the very evolution of the sexes become totally nonsensical without it. The prior activist framework for “sex” as a socially constructed, multivariate spectrum of traits simply cannot support modern biology. The centrality of gametes in the biology of sex can perhaps be suppressed temporarily during the peak of a moral panic, but it cannot be ignored forever.
Second, and more ideologically, this strategic concession on sex, paired with a sweeping redefinition of gender, allows activists to appear reasonable on the biology while preserving their justification for medically transitioning minors and adults. That justification depends on the claim that a fundamental misalignment between a person’s brain and body can occur during development. To get there, Roughgarden and Veale invoke the developmental biology of sexual differentiation to argue that “trans and other gender diverse people” arise from the following process:
“From conception to birth, the human body and brain develop in a shifting hormonal environment. In mammals, genital structures develop early in fetal life, whereas the brain and many other anatomical structures, as well as behavioral traits, develop later. If hormone levels vary during these stages, the brain and the rest of the body can develop along different developmental paths, which can result in trans and gender diverse people. This is a natural and expected variation in how human development unfolds.”
Once again, presenting this as the developmental mechanism underpinning transgender identity lacks a scientific justification. It is purely ideological. Yes, the hormonal environment during fetal development can influence sex-typical behavior. For instance, female fetuses exposed to elevated levels of testosterone and other androgens are more likely to be same-sex attracted and show behavioral profiles more commonly associated with males. This is well established and widely accepted among biologists. But framing these effects as the proximate cause of “transgenderism,” rather than as contributors to natural variations in sex nonconformity or sexual orientation, is scientifically baseless.
Studies purporting to show that the brains of trans-identified individuals resemble those of the sex they identify with rather than their biological sex are plagued by the failure to control for sexual orientation. This matters because the majority of trans-identified individuals are same-sex attracted. When sexual orientation is properly controlled for, the alleged “cross-sex shift” in brain structure disappears. In other words, these “transgender brain” studies are simply rediscovering well-known cross-sex patterns in certain brain regions associated with same-sex attraction. They are not demonstrating a distinct neurobiological basis or mechanism for transgender identity.
When viewed without an ideological filter, the enterprise of “gender-affirming care” is best understood as an inverted form of gay conversion therapy, one in which the healthy bodies of ordinary gender-nonconforming people are altered to “match” their minds, rather than the traditional and rightly condemned approach of attempting to alter people’s minds to “match” their bodies.
Because of this, we must resist this attempted reframing of the entire debate. Yes, sex is binary and rooted in whether an individual’s reproductive anatomy has the biological function to produce either sperm or ova. But no, everything else is not “gender.” And no, sex nonconformity or homosexuality does not make a person “transgender.” These are ordinary, natural variations within each sex, and such people are best left alone to grow up healthy and whole.
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Roughgarden and Veale end their essay with an appeal to Christians, invoking the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But countless happy, well-adjusted gay and lesbian adults recognize that, had they grown up today, they would have been prime targets for activists like Roughgarden and Veale, who would have placed them under the transgender umbrella and medicalized their adolescent distress. They are grateful this didn’t happen to them, and they wish the same protection for the sex-nonconforming children of today.
And certainly the growing number of detransitioners, young people who were permanently harmed by “gender-affirming care,” wish that modern gender ideologues had not done unto them what was done to them.
Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
