Until this week, the debate over gender fluidity left me completely cold. It was possible, I felt, to treat transgender people with respect while at the same time holding the view that only women could have babies.
I know two transgender people, and they are about as different from each other as you could get. One is 80 years old and identifies as a woman, the other 20 and identifies as a man. But one thing they have in common is that neither is remotely interested in who qualifies as a female athlete. Those furious arguments over bathrooms and pronouns struck me as, if not exactly concocted, certainly niche.
Then it suddenly struck me that the row is not really about transgender people at all — who account, after all, for only a quarter of 1% of the population. No, what we are seeing is an attempt to deny biological sex completely: to assert, in other words, that boys and girls are born identical and that any differences in their interests, abilities, and choices are the just result of social conditioning.
I only grasped the audacity of the claim when I read an article in The Atlantic, which argued that girls played volleyball instead of football purely because the patriarchy had invented a bogus distinction between the sexes. “Maintaining this binary in youth sports,” the piece rather boldly alleged, “reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.”
Wait, what?
We only imagine that boys are bigger?
The column cites a sociology professor from the University of British Columbia, Michela Musto, who claims that physical differences between the sexes are a product of, not a reason for, the segregation of sports. “Part of the reason why we have this belief that boys are inherently stronger than girls, and even the fact that we believe that gender is a binary, is because of sport itself, not the other way around,” she said.
Ten years ago, even the most extreme blank-slaters (those who believed that personality differences between the sexes were a product of conditioning) at least allowed for the observable reality that men tend to have greater upper body strength than women. When even that observation is considered controversial, it becomes much harder to acknowledge the existence of aggregate differences of any kind.
For example, the New York Times recently ran a column arguing that the maternal instinct was “a myth that men created.” Again, this claim flies in the face of all observed evidence. It would be odd if ours were almost the only mammalian species in which females did not have a heightened attachment to babies. But, no, apparently “the notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.”
As a matter of fact, the science is pretty settled on this one. We observe the same differences across cultures. We see them developing in early infancy (including a form of maternal instinct in small girls). We can increasingly identify the genetic sequences that account for them.
The sex differences are, in themselves, unsurprising. Men tend, on average, to be better at systems and things, women at relationships and people. But, though few psychologists or neuroscientists dispute that claim, we now find that even a publication like Scientific American is running the following outlandish fable.
Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body. (6/7) pic.twitter.com/x8KZ5rEaeW
— Scientific American (@sciam) August 24, 2022
“Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it,” the publication’s tweet read. “The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
You might dismiss this stuff as campus craziness. But almost all public policy is now based on blank-slatery — the denial of inherited differences of any kind.
What began as a reaction against the study of biological differences between ethnic groups, a field that saw some dangerous junk science in the early 20th century, has now become a generalized suspicion of genetics period. And that has malign consequences.
The West’s success has rested on our elevation of reason, empiricism, and the scientific method. These things distinguished us not just from backward theocracies, but also from anti-Enlightenment polities such as the Soviet Union, where Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s favorite biologist, denounced genetics as a bourgeois aberration. Yet we, too, are now lifting certain ideas beyond the realm of inquiry and telling people to deny the evidence of their own experience. That never ends well.
