A new push to mainstream radical conceptions of sex and gender is ushering average Americans into a debate once contained to the dusty corners of academia.
“Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female” by Ashley McGuire is a powerful resource for anyone seeking to arrive at reasonable answers to new questions raised about “gender identity” and biological sex. In the book, McGuire walks readers through society’s rapid march towards a world with no concrete definitions of biological sex, drawing on stories from popular culture, college campuses and more. “Sex Scandal” provides incisive and well-researched analyses of the questions about sex and gender we’re confronted more and more in today’s world.
The book also outlines the serious, surprising, and underreported consequences of policies that seek to diminish the importance of biological sex.
In the face of this ascension of radical gender theory, “Sex Scandal” helps readers understand the origins of these ideas, the breadth of the challenges ahead and the stakes of abolishing our long standing definitions. McGuire is compelling and concise, providing her audience with a page-turning exploration of the issues that also manages to offer clear answers to complicated questions.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, McGuire dug into some of those very questions, touching on everything from Chrissy Teigen to “neo-Gnosticism” in an engaging survey of her book’s central themes.
What are some of the ramifications of replacing the fact of biological sex with the idea of gender?
The language of the debate is critical, and we are ceding important territory when we use the word “gender” instead of “sex.” The reality is that “sex” means something and “gender” means nothing. The definition of sex has an agreed-upon and clear-cut medical definition – whether one is male or female as determined by a couple of obvious biological markers. “Gender” used to be a way to talk about the more superficial ways sex manifested in various cultures – i.e. here men do not wear skirts or dresses, in other cultures they do. Now gender has been rendered completely meaningless. I quote a legal scholar in my book who argues that one can actually claim one’s gender can be pizza.
Pizza.
Facebook got a taste of how undefined “gender” is when they moved away from the options of “male” and “female” and offered some seventy plus choices like “pangender” and “two-spirit.” They thought they were being so progressive, but instead they wound up getting major blowback for not being inclusive enough. Now it’s just “male,” “female,” or “other.” As one writer I quote in the book puts it, “Just how many possible gender identities are there? The only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take.” In other words, one for every person.
The problem is that when we replace “sex” with “gender,” as the Obama administration tried to do through its Title IX mandate, women no longer have grounds to make claims on the basis of their sex. Our laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, but what happens to women when sex is not a recognized or valid category?
Furthermore, science and medicine are just hitting the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the importance of sex. I document in the book the way that top medical professionals are realizing that a deeper understanding of the science of sex is more essential than they ever thought when it comes to good care and medicine, especially for women. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has learned drug trials have to be done on both men and women, because their bodies can react so differently to the same drug. The fields of psychology and psychiatry are realizing how differently conditions like depression and anxiety manifest in women versus men.
What should we make of how people reacted to Chrissy Teigen and Kate Middleton’s baby announcements? Is there a deep-seated human impulse to acknowledge sexual differences despite increased cultural pressures to do otherwise?
Absolutely. I am eight months pregnant and without fail, I get two questions every time anyone, even strangers, bring up my pregnancy. 1. How far along are you? 2. Are you having a boy or a girl?
I talk in the book about the fact that even as society on the one hand is pressing on towards androgenaity, it’s now almost expected for a couple to find a creative way to make their “gender reveal” in which they tell the world, typically through a social media post but sometimes even with an actual party, the sex of their baby. The announcement is always made in a celebratory way, which I think gets at parents’ natural and deep desire to celebrate something so essential about the identity of their unborn child.
That’s what Chrissy Teigen thought she was doing when she opened up about using sex-selective in vitro fertilization to pick a girl. She didn’t realize that she was walking into a landmine, as the practice is still highly controversial, which is interesting in and of itself. Even in today’s world, where everyone wants to argue that one’s gender is a “choice,” people still squirm at the idea of picking a baby out of a lab dish based on his or her sex. It suggests that people deep down know there is something mysterious and Divine about our sex, and it’s not for humans to mess with.
Is the philosophy that gender exists separate from biological sex inherently contradictory?
I point out in the book that even when dictionaries or medical books try to define “gender,” they are often forced to tether those definitions to sex. That’s because without sex, we really are thrown into pure anarchy.
Exhibit A: Facebook. And we see this all the time, people have to get workplace training on “gender sensitivity,” which winds up just reinforcing the reality that there are differences between the sexes, or people try to argue that rather than two categories, there is a spectrum, which still has two stubborn poles. I actually think that in an ironic twist, all the focus on “gender” in lieu of “sex” has only served to enhance stereotypes, because people wind up defaulting to the caricatures of a male and female in their desperation for some benchmarks in the debate. We wind up with the super macho alpha male and the hyper-sexualized female as the paradigms of the male and female ideals.
Why do you think the notion of gender fluidity is proliferating?
I think there are two forces behind the push to abolish sex differences. I think there are well-meaning people who genuinely believe that the way to establish that ever-evasive equality between the sexes is to make men and women the same. Androgynous clothing, androgynous bodies, androgynous marriages. To them, the differences between the sexes are the source of the perceived inequity in society. My book is an attempt to show how that approach actually worsens inequity, especially for women.
But I think there is a second strain behind all of this, one that is about radical denial of nature, a sort of neo-Gnosticism and the denial of the reality of the body. I find this gnostic component sort of humorous given how obsessed we are with our bodies these days and all the fitness and food fads as well as the hyper-materialistic emphasis on clothes and anti-aging products, etcetera. But actually, that is the sad irony of Gnosticism. We can’t deny the body’s role in the self, and when we do, we wind up actually reducing ourselves to our bodies all the more. I think my book shows this as well, and how especially devastating it is for women to be both reduced to their bodies in some aspects and have other essential aspects of their bodies denied by our culture.
Purchase your copy of “Sex Scandal” to read more from McGuire here.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
