“Scientific” Transphobia: The Third Branch of the Gender Critical Movement
Richard Dawkins has usually been identified with the liberal left, having supported the British Labour Party in the 1970s and now become a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats. Yet he’s also taken positions which seem to lean rightwards, and none more so than his steady shift in 2021 towards anti-trans advocacy, starting with a just-asking-questions tweet in April of that year, to his call seven months later for people to join him in signing a “Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights” which lists the gamut of anti-trans policy proposals. The difference is that he turns to his background as a biologist to justify such a position, insisting that “sex is pretty damn binary” to rationalize that he supposedly supports the rights of trans people while echoing right-wing “concerns” about gender-affirming care, trans women in sports, and the use of pronouns.
And he’s not alone. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist associated with the conservative Manhattan Institute and the anti-trans think tank Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, has made similar arguments on media ranging from Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Joe Rogan Experience to The Times of London and Queer Majority. The Paradox Institute, founded and headed by Zach Elliott (an architect by training) also pushes the same “sex-is-binary” line in its YouTube videos and pamphlets, accusing those who see any evidence of a more nuanced view of sex and gender of “science denialism”.
The problem with this “gender critical” approach to biology and biological sex is that it goes against the growing scientific consensus. Instead, it provides a closed system of faulty logic and oversimplification that is more akin to the shoddy efforts by racists, creationists and flat-earthers. And the woeful way in which the general public is educated about science is certainly no help.
“Sex = gametes”
These arguments rest more on ambiguities of language than actual empirical evidence or scientific analysis. The first example is how they insist on defining biological sex, according to whether you produce sperm cells (male) or egg cells (female), also known as gametes. Since there is no “intermediate” or third form of gamete, they argue, then you can’t argue for any kind of sex other than the binary of male and female. That’s it, case closed.
Not so fast!
In the first place, when a human is born, we don’t determine their sex by which gametes they produce, especially since humans don’t produce them until they reach adolescence. We commonly identify sex by phenotype — physical anatomy, more specifically the genitals. And while that’s clear for most humans, there are those intersex people who have ambiguous genitalia, leading doctors to look for other indicators of sex, such as the person’s chromosomes and genes or genotype. Yet even there, we can have ambiguities and variations, such as when a person has XY (male) chromosomes, but they are unable to process testosterone and develop a female phenotype. Such variations in phenotype and/or genotype, as well as other determiners such as hormone levels, are typically categorized as intersex, and have led scientists to embrace a more complex and nuanced view of sex as a spectrum with bimodal distribution, with most people falling in one of two “peaks” while others fall into a “valley” of variation between them. The last nail in the coffin for the gametes-only position is that a significant percentage of people do not produce any gametes, for a number of reasons ranging from disease or injury to atypical genetics. So is a phenotypical male who can’t produce sperm “not really” a man? Does a woman cease being a woman when her ovaries stop producing eggs? This is the most egregious form of essentialism — reducing maleness and femaleness to fertility — with an understandable appeal to religious fundamentalists and other right-wingers.
Erasing exceptions
These essentialists have responded by dismissing the reality of intersex people by saying that intersex “disorders” are too small in number to be significant — moving the goalposts from an absolute binary to: “Well, yeah, there are a tiny group of exceptions, but their disorders actually prove the rule.”
Huh?!?
First of all, just about every intersex person I’ve encountered would take exception to the various forms of intersexuality as “disorders”, not to mention their being dismissed because they make up less than two percent of the population. That’s about the same percentage as people with red hair, or who are ambidextrous, and far more than the number of people with perfect pitch; yet we don’t consider those traits to be disorders, nor do scientists discount individuals with those traits when studying pigmentation, handedness, or musical ability.
This labeling of intersex as a “disorder” not only reflects the fallacious thinking of those making these specific arguments, but how the anti-trans movement not only insists on upholding the gender binary, but seeks to impose it on all of us. While deriding the mythical mutilation of transgender children, this movement is hypocritically silent about the very real mutilation of intersex kids. Indeed, the laws that have pushed to outlaw gender affirming care, against the actual medical consensus, allows exceptions to “fix” ambiguous genitalia, even though intersex people have repeatedly warned about the negative physical and emotional outcomes of such surgeries.
Blatant bias
Still another weakness in this branch of the gender critical movement is their outright cherry-picking and misinterpretation of scientific studies and data. One of the worst is the endorsement by many of them of the debunked idea of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”, despite the original paper which described it being criticized for serious methodological flaws. Neither the original author, nor the supporters of this hypothesis, ever considered greater awareness of gender dysphoria as a reason for increased diagnosis, such as previously observed with a number of conditions such as being on the autism spectrum and certain food allergies.
Such bias isn’t confined to embracing questionable studies, but of rejecting an increasing body of reliable research around the transgender experience. When they can’t debunk such studies, or twist the results to “confirm” their belief that gender dysphoria is some sort of delusion, they just choose to ignore it. After all, they’re not actually trying to understand the basis of gender identity. A friend of mine once remarked: “Whenever I read one of these folks repeating the term ‘delusion’, I expect Inigo Montoya to come out and say: ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’” It seems as if they are projecting their conflation of gender with sex onto transgender people themselves, rather than trying to understand how their sense of self is “out of sync” with both their physiology and how they relate to others. Nor do they pay attention to — or even show awareness of — the century of clinical and research experience around gender dysphoria and gender identity. Lastly, their response to how the scientific consensus has increasingly confirmed the realities of transgender experience is that the scientific community is somehow being “hijacked” by politics, despite how thoroughly such research has been and continues to be reviewed and replicated. If anything, their claims of political bias only serve to reveal their own biases and closed system of thought. Their minds are made up, so they can’t be bothered with the facts.
Countering the trend
The problem with responding directly to this branch of the gender critical movement is that they will always have ready-made answers to anything that may contradict their views — and they audience is already primed to believe them over trans people and their allies. The best way, then, to counter this trend is to educate those who are genuinely seeking answers in good faith. By doing so, we build a firm majority which can displace the entire gender critical movement, reverse the losses made, and assure a better future for all gender-diverse people and those who love them.
