Sex is Binary – An evolutionary biologist explains – The Real KBrett's Stack of Stuff

Are sex categories—male and female—real, immutable, and binary? Or are they “social constructs”? Colin Wright, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has the answer.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2022, Judge Ketanji Jackson famously demurred, saying “I’m not a biologist.”

Well, I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.

To that end, let me rephrase the question to Judge Jackson: are sex categories in humans—male and female—real, immutable, and binary, or are they merely “social constructs”?

Answer: real (that’s just the way it is and we all know it), immutable (it can’t be changed), and binary (there are only two sexes, not three or four or fifty-seven).

This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it can or would produce. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; and females, ova, or large ones. There is no third gamete type. There are only two.

Therefore, sex is binary. This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just basic biology.

Every one of us is the result of a male and female (our biological mom and dad) successfully reproducing. Sorry to make you think about that. Without the existence of males and females, I wouldn’t be here right now, and neither would you. Our species would have gone extinct long ago.

Many “gender” activists, however, falsely assert that sex cannot be binary and must be viewed as a “spectrum” because a very small number of people have genitalia that appear ambiguous or mixed, phenomena known as intersex conditions. These idealogues claim the existence of such conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” meaningless.

But intersex conditions don’t undermine the sex binary at all because sex ambiguity is not a third sex. The existence of very rare borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else’s sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on the existence of day and night.

Our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a dramatic surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female altogether.

Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.”

This new system holds that males shouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons, or any other space previously segregated as long as they “identify” as female.

But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have an extremely rare condition that results in apparent sex ambiguity. Transgender people, however, aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely claim to identify as something other than their biological sex.

Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice that gender activists attempt to steer discussions away from—for example—whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports and toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya.

Why?

Because as long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on individuals with medically complicated intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from making easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I “women’s” swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas.

They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.

But the existence of a tiny handful of intersex cases is completely irrelevant to the issue of allowing males in female sports, prisons, and restrooms.

Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans women,” from female-only spaces isn’t complicated. That’s because trans women are unambiguously male, and so the chances that a doctor incorrectly recorded their sex at birth are essentially zero.

Therefore, any “transgender policy” designed to protect female spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded female at birth on their original birth certificates. Or, if no birth certificate listing sex is available, biology, not an individual’s feelings, will determine whether the participant would be allowed to compete as a male or a female.

Crafting effective intersex policies is more complicated, but a much less pressing issue for protecting the integrity of women’s sports.

Individual organizations can decide for themselves which criteria should be used to keep female spaces safe and, in the context of sports, safe and fair. It is imperative, however, that such policies be rooted in properties of the body and not of one’s “identity” because identity is not germane to issues of fairness and safety.

You can identify as anything you like, but your identity does not determine biological reality. And the reality is that sex in humans is immutable and binary.

No amount of activist hysteria is ever going to change that.

I’m Colin Wright, PhD in evolutionary biology, and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for Prager University.

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Last Updated on May 13, 2024 by Real KBrett