Is the Male Female Divide a Social Construct or Scientific Reality?

In November 2024, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) published a silly article by one of their staffers, Kat Grant (“they, them”) called What is a Woman? The indefatigable Jerry Coyne took the trouble to write a reply, called Biology is not Bigotry, which the co-directors of FFRF reluctantly agreed to publish, albeit with a disclaimer, making clear that it did not represent their views. It also didn’t represent the views of some of their more emotional young employees, whose way of disagreeing with something was the now fashionable way of summary suppression rather than constructive debate. The leaders of FFRF caved in and took down Jerry’s article, almost as soon as they put it up, and without informing him that they were going to do so.

Fortunately, Dr Coyne’s article has now been published in several places (see here, here or here), so anyone can judge whether the censorship was justified. His own take on the affair can be seen on his Why Evolution is True website, e.g. here and here. He, Steven Pinker and I all resigned from FFRF’s Honorary Board. Our letters of resignation are here, here and here. FFRF responded by disbanding their Honorary Board altogether, whether to forestall further resignations or for some other reason I couldn’t say.  My public avowal of personal affection for Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, the leaders of FFRF, is totally sincere. It makes me particularly sad that they have chosen to stray so far from their stated mission of promoting freedom from religion and the separation of church and state. They seem to think that opposition to militant trans ideology is necessarily associate with the religious Right. That is false. If it were true, it would be an indictment of the rest of us for neglecting our duty to uphold scientific truth. In fact there is strong opposition from feminists concerned for the welfare of women and girls.¹ Also from within the gay and especially lesbian communities², giving the lie to the myth of  a monolithic “LGBT.” “LGB” represents a coherent constituency within which “T” is regarded by many as an interloper. Most relevant here, cogent opposition comes from biological science – and that, after all, was the whole point of Professor Coyne’s censored article.

FFRF does not lack support. Indeed, among the secular / atheist / agnostic / sceptical / humanist communities of America, the  Center for Inquiry (CFI), with which is incorporated the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), is now the only major organization still standing unequivocally for scientific truth.

This lamentable affair is what has provoked me into posting the following critique on my Substack. It is an abbreviated extract from my article called Scientific Truth Sands Above Human Feelings and Politics, commissioned by Lawrence Krauss for a multi-authored volume on The War on Science, to be published in 2025 by Posthill Press³.  The full article makes a comparison with the debauching of science by TD Lysenko in Soviet Russia in the 1940s..

A Social Construct?

“I accept the Universe”

Margaret Fuller (attrib.)

“Gad, she’d better”

Thomas Carlyle (attrib.)

Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay make a good case⁴ that so-called “postmodernism” is the philosophical underpinning of the view that an individual’s sex or “gender” is a matter of personal preference rather than objective reality. The physicist Alan Sokal, one of the most effective critics of the postmodernist attitude to science, has summarised it as the belief that

“So-called scientific knowledge does not in fact constitute objective knowledge of a reality external to ourselves, but is a mere social construction, on a par with myths and religions, which therefore have an equal claim to validity.”

He illustrates it with following remarkable quotation from the sociologist Harry Collins:

“The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge.”

And there’s this, equally astonishing, from another social scientist, Kenneth Gergen:

“The validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence.”

Science, according to these social scientists, is no more than a “social construct”.

What is a social construct? The perfect example is money. A rectangle of green paper with “100 dollars” written on it is seen by most people as a desirable object, and a hundred times more desirable than a piece of green paper with “One dollar” written on it. A rectangle of green paper is not useful in the same sense as a rectangle of chocolate, bread, or integrated circuit board is useful. A dollar is useful only because society deems it to be exchangeable into things like chocolate, bread, or electronics. “One hundred dollars” has no meaning outside the meaning that society chooses to accord it. Money, unlike science, really is a social construct.

The number of days in a year is real, determined by the rotation of Earth around the sun in relation to Earth’s rotation on its own axis.  But the calendar, with its arbitrary division of the year into twelve months is a social construct. When it became apparent that the Julian calendar had drifted out of phase with celestial reality, it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar, more in synch with Earth’s orbital cycle. In the British Empire September 3^rd 1752 jumped straight to 14^th. That’s the kind of thing you can decide to do to a social construct like a calendar. Human power extends that far. It may or may not be a myth that people protested in so-called “Calendar Riots” because they thought the government had deprived them of eleven days of their life. In any case it’s a good joke. The date of your death will be determined by implacable facts of nature, not by a mere social construct like the Gregorian versus the Julian calendar. 

Another of the quotations Alan Sokal used to illustrate postmodernism was from Stanley Aaronowitz: 

“Science legitimates itself by linking its discoveries with power, a connection which determines (not merely influences) what counts as reliable knowledge . . .” 

By power, he meant political power. This attitude exemplifies the hubristic aggrandisement of human power, arrogating to mere humans a quasi-divine dominion over nature itself. If reality is a mere social construct, society has the power to change reality. Like the joke about legally repealing the Laws of Thermodynamics so that we can have perpetual motion machines.

I would argue that legally declaring a man to be a woman, just because he wants to be a woman, or vice versa, has much in common with the perpetual motion joke, and the calendar riots joke. But unfortunately it is no joke. It’s the law in several countries. There are not just males and females, so the claim goes. They are but the extremes of a spectrum. Where you place yourself in the spectrum, man or woman or somewhere in between, it’s all a matter of personal choice. This entails a denial of genetic reality, and a Marxist-like faith in the malleability of nature. A bullying lobby today thinks your sex is not genetically determined but is malleable under your personal whim, sometimes backed up by law. If you feel you are a woman you are a woman. Never mind if you have a Y-chromosome, testes and a penis, no matter whether you have breasts and ovaries, your male or female identity is something you get to decide for yourself, as easily as you might choose your political party or favourite football team. 

It is a doctrine that has become highly influential. The American Medical Association in 2023 laid down some “Best practices for sex and gender diversity in medical education.” Medical students are to be taught that both sex and gender are “social constructed”. And, “It is appropriate to affirm each individual’s self-determination regarding both sex and gender labels.” Really? Are we seriously training a generation of young doctors to think that the sex of a patient is a matter of individual choice, not objective anatomical and physiological reality? If I ever encounter a doctor who gives me a full medical examination and then asks me what sex I am, I’d be inclined to ask for a more thorough examination, if not another doctor.

There are welcome auguries that the fashion is finally on the wane. One example is the closing in 2022 of the infamous Tavistock gender identity clinic for children. Also encouraging, again in Britain, is the Cass Report on gender identity services for children (2024)⁵.  In America, the otherwise loathsome President Trump made the upholding of biological maleness and femaleness the subject of an Executive Order, as one of his first actions (perhaps the only good thing he has ever done) after taking office. I happily anticipate successful lawsuits against surgeons who, in violation of the first clause of the Hippocratic oath, have cut off the breasts of girls below the age of consent, for no better reason than an assiduously encouraged childish belief that they were “assigned” the wrong sex at birth. What, after all, does “below the age of consent” mean, if not too young to make permanent, life-changing decisions.

Two and only two sexes

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes. Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, said that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants not our masters. One might say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.⁶” That is logically unassailable in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand. I shall make the case that redefinition of woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is close to that extreme. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.

Gametes come in two radically different sizes: the phenomenon of anisogamy. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, with no intermediates whatsoever, and that is how biologists define female and male. A human egg contains at least 10,000 times as much matter as a human sperm. The UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and  invertebrate. All plants, too, unless you count algae as plants. Admittedly, not all individuals produce gametes at all, or throughout their life. Worker bees are sterile females. We call them female because they have the potential to produce macrogametes. Every worker would have turned out as a queen if she had been fed differently as a larva. That’s “potential”. A human male baby or foetus has the potential to produce microgametes, for all that he doesn’t produce any yet. An old woman remains female, though she has ceased to produce ova.

The UBD has the virtue that, in addition to being universally applicable, it explains a diverse load of facts. And it’s grounded in a body of powerful and widely illuminating theory. It’s an argument that should appeal to economists. When two gametes unite to make a zygote they must, between them, provide the expensive nourishment it needs. In a fair and equitable world, you might expect the two parents to contribute equally, each bearing half the necessary costs. Such a system is known as isogamy. It doesn’t exist in animals and plants, but can be found in some microorganisms and algae. Clever mathematical modelling, by various scientists including Geoffrey Parker⁷ of the University of Liverpool, indicates that, under plausible conditions, isogamy is unstable. It tends to be replaced, in evolutionary time, by its opposite, anisogamy: two different kinds of gamete, one bearing all the economic costs, the other nothing more than DNA.

Here’s a verbal version of the Parker type of mathematical model of anisogamy. Imagine you are an individual in an isogamous system. If you produce slightly larger than average isogametes, each zygote will be better endowed for survival. On the other hand, since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can only afford to make fewer zygotes. Conversely, by stinting on gamete size, you could contribute to making a larger number of zygotes, but they’d be less likely to survive. Unless, that is, your smaller-than-average isogametes could somehow seek out larger than average isogametes to partner with. Parker and others developed plausible models whereby, over evolutionary time, half the individuals produce gametes in ever decreasing numbers but ever increasing size. These gametes eventually evolve into eggs. The other half go in the other direction. They evolve smaller and smaller gametes in larger and larger numbers, which eventually reach the tiny extreme of sperms⁸. You could, if you wish, say that the sperm producers exploit the egg producers. Or you could say that, being more economically valuable, eggs don’t have to go out of their way to seek sperms. They can just sit and wait to be approached. Sperms therefore evolved miniature outboard motors (waving tails) with which to actively seek out eggs. Both types, the macrogamete producers and the microgamete producers, flourish in the presence of the other.

The fundamental economic inequality of anisogamy illuminates a large number of biological phenomena, thereby justifying my claim that the UBD does lots of explanatory work. If you define females as macrogamete producers and males as microgamete producers, you can immediately account for the following facts (see any recent textbook of Ethology, Sociobiology, Behavioural Ecology or Evolutionary Psychology):

1. In mammals it’s the females that gestate the young and secrete milk.

2. In those bird species where only one sex incubates the eggs, or only one sex feeds the young, it is nearly always the females.

3. In those fish that bear live young, it is nearly always the females that bear them.

4. In those animals where one sex advertises to the other with bright colours, it is nearly always the males.

5. In those bird species where one sex sings elaborate or beautiful songs it is always the male who does so.

6. In those animals where one sex fights over possession of the other, it is nearly always the males who fight. 

7. In those animals where one sex has more promiscuous tendencies than the other, it is nearly always the males. 

8. In those animals where one sex is fussier about avoiding miscegenation, it is usually the females.

9. In those animals where one sex tries to force the other into copulation, it is nearly always the males who do the forcing. 

10. When one sex guards the other against copulation with others, it is nearly always the males that guard females.

11.  In those animals where one sex is gathered into a harem, it is nearly always the females. 

12.  Polygyny is far more common than polyandry. 

13.  When one sex tends to die younger than the other, it is usually the males.

14. Where one sex is larger than the other it is usually the males.

That’s quite a lot of explanatory heavy-lifting⁹ although, admittedly not all the 14 are independent of each other. In all cases the key is economics: large gametes cost more than small ones. In various ways this inequality plays out. Large gametes are more precious, more worth guarding, more worth fighting for, more worth protecting against wastage through mating with the wrong species or wrong individual.

It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, social systems, for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

Here are some apparently anomalous examples that test (the true meaning of “prove” in the proverb) the rule. Unlike most mammals, spotted hyaena females are larger than males and socially dominant over them. They have a hugely enlarged, erectile clitoris, scarcely distinguishable from a penis. They have false testes made of fatty issue. The sight of apparently male hyaenas giving birth has spawned numerous myths of hermaphroditism. Given that so many roles and signals are reversed or ambiguous, how can we even know what we’re talking about when we use the words “male” and “female” in describing the anomalies of hyaenas? By the UBD, of course.

Many species of fish are livebearers. As listed above, it is usually the female who gets pregnant. But in seahorses it’s the male. He has a belly pouch for holding the fertilised eggs, and he gives birth from his pouch. How do we know it’s the male? Couldn’t we define the female as the one that gets pregnant? We could, but then, “In seahorses it’s the female who gets pregnant” becomes a tautology that leads nowhere. The UBD fruitfully leads on to further questions. It is the male, as defined by gamete size, who gets pregnant. Now that’s interesting. It’s unusual. It generates questions for further research. What is it about seahorses that leads to the microgametic sex getting pregnant, in departure from the usual pattern? I won’t discuss possible answers here, but the question is obviously worth asking. It would make for a PhD thesis.

Some worms and snails, and many plants, are simultaneous hermaphrodites. They are capable of producing both micro- and macro-gametes. Not a problem, the UBD is easily applied, and sex remains binary. The earthworm has separate organs appropriate to both sexes defined by gamete size. Enthusiasts for fluidity of “gender” love anemone fishes, also known as clown fishes. They, along with many other creatures, are sequential hermaphrodites. The largest, most dominant fish in a group of clownfish is female. If she dies, the dominant male becomes female. But what does that even mean? By what definition of male and female? On the UBD, it’s very simple. When the dominant egg-producer dies, the largest sperm producer starts to produce eggs instead.

“Non-binary” advocates are very fond of “intersexes”, and they often quote a figure of 1.7 percent as the frequency of intersexes in the human population. Even if that figure were true, it is still a derisorily low percentage on which to build an ideology. And it isn’t true. It’s wrong by a huge margin. This false figure originated with Anne Fausto-Sterling, an expert in “gender studies” –whatever that might be. As pointed out by Leonard Sax¹⁰, Fausto-Sterling inflated her figure by including such conditions as Klinefelter syndrome (XXY, with male genitalia), Turner syndrome (one X chromosome and no Y, with female genitalia) and late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia. These are not intersexes by any sensible definition. Sax estimated the true percentage of intersexes based on genital anatomy as 0.018, two powers of ten smaller than Fausto-Sterling’s bogus figure.

Fausto-Sterling had an agenda. Her idea of a “Sexual Continuum” had “profound implications . . . our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits”. But “continuum” implies that the frequency distribution, even if bimodal, should at least have non-negligible intermediates between the two peaks. In a true continuum, it should be possible to show this with a frequency bar chart on a normal sheet of paper. You can’t do it. It wouldn’t fit. If we represent the frequency of unambiguous male newborns by one of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, and the frequency of unambiguous female newborns by the other tower, the frequency of intersexes would be represented by a medium-sized molehill between them. Some continuum! It gets worse. My molehill was based on Sax’s estimate of 0.018. If we take the UBD seriously, even that is an overestimate. The true figure is zero, not even a molehill, for nobody produces middle-sized gametes, intermediate between egg and sperm.

Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male / female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedevilled by numerous exceptions. Especially those based on sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it. In mammals, sex is determined by the XX XY chromosome system, the male sex having unequal sex chromosomes. Birds and Lepidoptera have the same system, but in the opposite direction and therefore presumably evolved independently. It’s the females who have unequal chromosomes. How do we know? Couldn’t you define males as the sex with unequal chromosomes? Well you could, but then you’d to have to say it’s the male bird that lays the eggs, the females that fight over males, etc. You’d lose every one of the 14 explanations I discussed earlier. Far better to stick with the UBD and say birds use sex chromosomes to determine sex, but it evolved independently of the mammal system. Birds are descended from dinosaur reptiles, and most modern reptiles don’t have sex chromosomes at all. Reptiles often determine sex by incubation temperature. In some cases higher temperatures favour males, in other cases, females. In yet other reptiles, extremes of temperature, high or low, favour females, males developing at intermediate temperatures. Many snakes, some lizards and a few terrapins use sex chromosomes, but they vary which sex has unequal sex chromosomes. Amidst all this variation, the only reliable discriminator is gamete size.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is, therefore, separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we in practice recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

Gender

A watered down version of the ideology concedes that sex may be binary but “gender” is not. The word gender enters the discourse trailing clouds of confusion. To grammarians, gender is clear. It is a classification of nouns by how adjectives and pronouns agree with them.  French nouns fall into two genders, English and German nouns into three. Kivonjo, according to Steven Pinker, has 15 genders.  French genders could have been named A and B, English and German genders A, B, and C.  As it happens, all males belong in gender B, all females in gender A¹¹, and that same neat separation occurs in most languages. It is therefore convenient to use “feminine” and “masculine” as names for two of the genders, rather than A and B. This correlation encourages the use of  “gender” as a coy euphemism for sex. Alex Byrne in Trouble with Gender,  and Kathleen Stock in Material Girls, both make valiant attempts to sort out the confusion surrounding the definition of “gender”. Stock herself sensibly tries to avoid the term, replacing it with “concrete, clearer terms that do whatever jobs I want them to at the time.” My response to the confusion surrounding attempts to define gender is “Why bother? Who cares?” Gender is a word I never need to use, except in the grammarian’s sense. If you want to speak French properly, you really do need to respect every noun’s preferred pronouns.

The current fashion for transsexualism belongs in a cluster of inter-related “woke” vogues, facilitated by the philosophy of postmodernism, partly stemming from a sincere concern for social justice, but misguided and scientifically ill-informed. The cluster includes “identitarianism”¹² and the view that alternative “ways of knowing” (women’s ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, personal lived experience) are just as valid as objective science in understanding nature. The various strands have been helpfully listed and persuasively criticised by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja, originally published in Skeptical Inquirer, and republished in the same volume as the full version of this paper, edited by Lawrence Krauss,.

Transsexualism has strictly no necessary connection to whether sex is “binary” or a continuously varying spectrum. Those of us who argue that there is no spectrum of intermediates between male and female – that sex is “binary” – should not be seen as threatening to transsexualism. Whether or not there are “intersexes” with ambiguous genitalia, or abnormal sex chromosomes, is irrelevant to transsexualism because no trans person claims to be intersex. A trans woman insists that she actually is a woman, a trans man that he actually is a man. Neither claims to be hermaphrodite. Rather, the claim is a psychological one. There’s a disjunct, or so it is claimed, between a person’s biological sex and the gender that they feel themselves to be.

There are many dimensions along which human personality can be measured. These might include assertiveness, ambition, empathy, aggressiveness, selfishness, methodicalness, volatility, perseverance, affection, bossiness. A mathematician might see each person as situated in a multidimensional space defined by these dimensions. Perhaps there is a psychological dimension of masculinity/femininity, which is more or less correlated with some of the other dimensions listed. In defiance of much hard-won feminist progress, you might invoke sexual stereotypes in an implicit invocation of such a dimension. “Cecil is effeminate. Ros is butch. Lizzy is a tomboy, she doesn’t like dolls, loves climbing trees and plays with wheeled toys”.

We can situate ourselves along such personality dimensions, including the perceived dimension of masculinity/femininity. We may even go so far as to wish we had been born the opposite sex. We might phrase it as being trapped inside the wrong body. That’s a version of dualism, a belief in a kind of disembodied soul, the real you, who is of a different sex or gender from the body in which the real you lurks.  If you are so inclined, it might need little encouragement from the surrounding culture to push you over the edge into full-fledged belief.  And today’s surrounding culture –  doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, political leaders, lawyers, perhaps above all schoolfriends¹³ – gives more than a little push.  Sex “assigned at birth” is arbitrary, we are told, and you only really discover whether the real you is male or female by introspection.

An especially intelligent, sensitive and moving account of what it is like to feel you are trapped in the wrong body is Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974). As what she called a “true transsexual”, she had little time for “the poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals¹⁴, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves.”

A feeling of being in a body of the wrong sex seems to be a real psychological condition, even if much rarer than the current vogue would suggest. Such “dysphorics” can feel genuine distress. When anorexics look in the mirror, they see an emaciated body that they think is too fat.  “Gender” dysphorics look in the mirror and see what they perceive as the wrong genitals. Both deserve sympathy and understanding. Nobody is phobic about anorexics. Why should anyone be phobic about gender dysphorics? “Transphobia” is a pernicious fiction. I have seen “Be kind” advanced as a reason to accept propositions such as “Trans women are women”. “Be kind” may be an admirable maxim for civilised living, but it cannot be regarded as scientific evidence for anything. You could as well adduce “Be kind to creationists” as evidence for the proposition that the world is young.

Partly influenced by Jan Morris and partly out of normal politeness, it is my custom to refer to people by their preferred pronouns. But I draw the line at the belligerent slogan, “Trans women are women”, because it is scientifically false, a downright debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women. It logically entails the right of men enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons, etc. So powerful has this “postmodern” counterfactualism become that newspapers refer to “her penis” as a matter of unremarked routine.

“She is accused of four counts of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child and two counts of exposure where she ‘intentionally exposed her penis intending someone would see it and cause alarm or distress’.

Bournemouth Daily Echo, 23rd Jan, 2023

Even The Times, Britain’s traditional newspaper of record, could begin an article (Jan 18^th 2023) with these words:

“A transgender woman has denied raping two woman with her penis as she went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow”.

If the journalist had said “with his penis” The Times could have been in trouble with the police for “misgendering”. In 2020, Humberside police descended on the workplace of Harry Miller to warn him that one of his tweets “was being recorded as a hate incident.” What did the offending tweet say? “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” A neat joke in my opinion, and pretty gentle when compared with the satire of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Lehrer, Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, Monty Python, WS Gilbert, George Orwell, or Jonathan Swift. Evincing an almost superhuman inability to take a joke, the police recorded it as a “hate incident” and threatened the satirist. Have the British Police become George Orwell’s Thought Police?¹⁵ Will it come to that? The resemblance occurred to Mr Justice Knowles, before whom the Harry Miller case came up. “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. Well said, M’Lud! I hope the Humberside police officers have learned their lesson. Perhaps somebody might take them aside and patiently explain about this thing called satire.

On the day that I originally wrote this paragraph, JK Rowling¹⁶ called attention to a remarkable feat of doubletalk by another of Britain’s leading newspapers, the left-wing Guardian. The report said that a “woman” called Scarlet Blake had been convicted of murdering a man called Jorge Carreno as he walked home by the peaceful River Cherwell in Oxford. Blake had earlier filmed and livestreamed “herself” killing a neighbour’s cat and putting it through a blender. She explained to the court that she identified as a cat, and she miaowed to them in support of this claim.  The Guardian reported all this, using the pronouns “she” and “her” throughout, never once mentioning that this murderer of an innocent stranger was actually a man, referring to him throughout as a woman, including in the headline. When Louise Tickle, a former Guardian writer, complained, the paper belatedly changed the website version of the story. She pointed out that Blake had not even legally transitioned. This murderer and cat-homogeniser is a man through and through, legally a man as well as biologically. The Guardian reported the murder as the work of a woman for no better reason than that Alan Blake chose to call himself a woman, as easily as one might choose to call oneself a socialist or a Manchester United supporter. I suppose they were terrified of being accused of  transphobic misgendering. Or maybe they sincerely bought into the superstition that uttering the magic incantation, “I am a woman” turns you into one, like a pumpkin turning into Cinderella’s coach.

What is especially galling is that the violent deeds of the Scarlet Blakes of this world will swell the official statistics of crimes by women. The journalist Josephine Bartosch forcefully made this point¹⁷ quoting Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice studies. More than 90% of convicted murderers are male. This means that if a murder by a trans woman is added to the female side of the ledger, the percentage effect on female/male murder statistics is much more dramatic than if the murder is clocked up to a male. I plugged in the actual figures, and it turned out that the change in the ratio is 15 times as great, if a trans murderer is counted as female than if the same murderer is counted as male. This huge and misleading statistical effect is a direct consequence of taking “Trans women are women” seriously. That slogan doesn’t just harmlessly satisfy an individual’s private emotional needs. If taken seriously, it dramatically distorts official statistics that might be used to guide public policy.

I quoted Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the British Liberal Democrat Party, as saying said that a woman can “quite clearly” have a penis (Daily Telegraph, 23^rd May 2023. I am sorry to say it looks as though otherwise sensible, and certainly well-meaning political leaders are pandering to an intimidating lobby, militant activists, bullies ever ready to pounce. Such vigilantism is especially zealous among young people. Several senior publishers have confided to me that they are under relentless pressure from young employees to censor, or even suppress, books that they perceive as “transphobic”. I hereby place on record my whispered, regretful suspicion that some otherwise respected scientists, too, are betraying science in a desperate attempt to curry favour with “the kids”, perhaps especially their own.

 Sex and Race: a Double Standard

An African American standing with an African

If you think about it, it’s rather surprising that the current craze for a spectrum of non-binary self-identifications should have hit sexual identity rather than racial identity. American culture is morbidly obsessed with race, at the same time as being obsessed with pronouns and sexual identity. But whereas sex is clearly binary, race is manifestly non-binary. When a male mates with a female, each offspring is either male or female, not intermediate¹⁸. Like Mendel’s wrinkled versus smooth peas. When a black-skinned person mates with a white-skinned person, the offspring are usually of an intermediate colour. Unlike Mendel’s peas. This is because skin colour, unlike sex, is polygenically inherited. But when Americans speak of a person with one white parent and one black parent they call them “Black”.

Because skin colour is polygenically inherited, you get a range of intermediates among the population of African Americans (see picture of Colin Powell together with President Daniel Arap Moi). But the cultural label “Black” is inherited as if it were a Mendelian dominant. If either of your parents is Black, society identifies you as Black. If any one of your four grandparents is Black, society identifies you as Black. If any one of your eight great grandparents is Black, society identifies you as Black. This gives rise to the confusing impression that race is binary rather than a continuum. In the case of sex, you know that exactly 50 percent of your great grandparents, exactly 50 percent of your ancestors in any previous generation, were male, exactly 50 percent female. In the case of race, there’s a continuous gradation in the American population.  You’d think it would therefore be relatively easy to indulge individuals who self-identify as whatever “race” they choose – who feel “born into the wrong race”. Yet the craze for non-biological self-identification hit sex and emphatically not race.  Why? An individual who chooses to identify with the sex opposite to their biology is treated with sympathy and respect. But if they try the analogous self-identification where race is concerned, what happens? They are ostracized, placed in the modern equivalent of the mediaeval stocks and pelted with metaphorical tomatoes. Why the double standard?

The philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published an article “In Defense of Transracialism” in the 2017 volume of the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. She compared the case of Rachel Dolezal, who identified as a member of a different race, with Caitlin Jenner, an American athlete (formerly William Bruce Jenner) who identified as a member of a different sex. The response to her article was nothing short of hysterical. A majority of the journal’s associate editors issued an apology. The editor resigned. Tuvel herself was publicly accused of “epistemic violence”, was described as crazy, racist, transphobic, and stupid, and threatened with loss of her career.  Others may attempt an explanation for the hysteria. I shan’t even try.  The double standard itself is quite beyond me, for the reasons given in the previous paragraph. Admittedly, there is the additional fact that Dolezal concealed her true parentage, but that’s just her as an individual and nothing to do with the principle. The principle is that American culture encourages you to choose your sex at will, but not your race. You’d think the freedom offered in the one case should extend to the other. The more so since race really is a continuum. The double standard, ruthlessly enforced, may have provided an understandable motive for Dolezal’s deception. Perhaps she lied in realistic anticipation of the kind of treatment meted out to Rebecca Tuvel. “Transsexual women are women” is all the rage. But “Transracial Blacks are Black” will see you ostracised as a pariah.

Rachel Dolezal, who felt she was born into the wrong body and self-identified as Black

In 2021, I invited Twitter readers to discuss the weird double standard:

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

As a lifelong Oxford teacher I have become accustomed to inviting my tutorial pupils to discuss controversial issues, counterfactual hypotheses, thought-experiments, interesting paradoxes. When I wrote “Discuss” at the end of my tweet, I was obviously signalling my hope for a reasoned response. What I got was the exact opposite. The details aren’t worth spelling out. If you’re curious, just Google my name together with “American Humanist Association”.

The Theology of Woke

Those twin American obsessions, with race and with sexual self-identification, have something else in common. Each has its own specific and detailed analogy with Christian theology. First race – and white guilt over slavery and colonialism.  Original Sin is one of the central tenets of Christian theology. Christianity is obsessed with sin, sin as a kind of abstract entity which accounts for all that’s negative, including even disease. In a biology class at my school, the teacher asked us about the causes of disease. Before any of us could suggest viruses or bacteria, auto-immunity or cancer, one boy put his hand up and volunteered, “sin”. His contribution received predictably short shrift from the biology teacher. It’s easy to see where it came from. But the Christian obsession with sin goes beyond individual misdemeanours. It’s not enough to feel guilt at our own transgressions. That would be understandable in any religion or none. But Christians are held responsible for the sin of an alleged ancestor (who never existed, as even theologians now admit, but let that pass), going much further back than Exodus’s “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation”. We are all born in sin. Straight out of the womb, we are already guilty of the sin of Adam. Augustine, the chief architect of this rather nasty idea, even thought that Adam’s sin passes down the generations in semen. Jesus, conceived without semen, was therefore without sin. It was theologically necessary that his mother Mary, too, should be without sin, so she too had to have been “immaculately conceived”, and this was conveniently revealed to Pope Pius IX in 1854.

The theology of atavistic guilt is directly carried over into the fashionable idea that all white people are automatically racist; all white people should feel guilty because they are white, guilty because of the appalling behaviour of slave-owning white people of past centuries. And it really was unspeakably appalling. A picture of the economically-driven packing of a slave ship conveys the horror. The scale of the suffering is beyond imagining. Our forebears who perpetrated such massive and hideous wrongs should have felt guilt on a massive scale. Today we cast around in desperation for someone to blame for such depraved cruelty. But they are all dead and unavailable. As are the African chieftains who sold the slaves in the first place. As are the Arab slave traders in East Africa. Whether your ancestors happen to be among the guilty ones (statistically they probably are), if your skin is the same colour as theirs, you are expected to share their guilt. But we are not our ancestors. Their genes have come down to us via sperm and eggs, but their sins have not. We should feel appalled at their monstrous evil, and this should drive us to a determination not to perpetrate whatever might be its modern equivalent. But there’s no reason to feel collective guilt specifically because we are the same colour as those old slavers, just as no German under the age of 90 should feel guilt for Hitler, any more than the rest of us who belong to the same species as that monster. Treating people as members of a race, whether for blame or credit, rather than as individuals, was precisely what Martin Luther King hoped we’d grow out of.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

Not only is Dr King’s noble hope unfulfilled. Even the aspiration itself, if without mentioning his name, is coming under ideological attack.

So to my second theological comparison. “Transubstantiation” and “transgender” have more in common than just their first five letters.  Protestants see the eucharist bread and wine as merely symbolic of the body and blood of Christ. But the Roman Catholic (and, less clearly, the Eastern Orthodox) church teaches that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood. The sense in which they mean this comes, like so much else in Mediaeval Christendom, from Aristotle, albeit he antedated Jesus by centuries. Aristotle made a distinction between true “substance” and “accidentals”. In the theology of Thomas Aquinas and others, the bread and wine retain the accidental properties of starchy food and alcoholic liquid respectively, but on being blessed by a priest their Aristotelian substance becomes body and blood. Hence the word transubstantiation. If that makes no sense to you, never mind. Theology is not noted for making sense¹⁹. My point is that the same style of mystery pervades extreme transgenderism. A person may be biologically male, but his penis, testes, Y-chromosome, masculine physique and assignment by inspection at birth are mere Aristotelian accidentals. Her true Aristotelian substance is her female gender, revealed by introspection. It is not a mere symbolic change of “gender” (Aristotelian accidental) but an actual revelation of true sex (Aristotelian substance) that the magic achieves.

Concluding Remarks

If your science is so weak that the best you can do is yell that your opponent is a “Transphobic bigot”, a “TERF”, or a “full-on MAGA alt-right Trump-supporter”, you’ve already lost the argument²⁰. Sometimes the name-calling goes further and becomes overtly threatening. At a London Pride demonstration in 2023, “Sarah Jane” Baker (previously Alan Baker) told a cheering crowd, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say that such language is more typical of the sex that “Sarah Jane” claims to have left than the one she aspires to join.

Sky News (23^rd January 2023) had a picture of a two Scottish Nationalist Party politicians, Members of the British Parliament and the Scottish Parliament respectively, at a transgender demonstration in Glasgow, grinning inanely in front of a large colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “Decapitate TERFS”. They afterwards claimed to be unaware of the sign behind them, for all I know truthfully. 

I have never seen an anti-trans demonstration but, for all I know they may exist, and it is possible that an equally violent incitement could be found on display there. If so, it would be equally deplorable. Threats of violence have no place in decent society. But I would make two points here. The first is that we need to be clear what we mean by violence. The “postmodern” fondness for redefining existing words, giving them new politically loaded meanings in terms of “oppressors” and  “oppressed”, doesn’t apply only to sex. It has been extended to redefining “hate” (“hate speech” can mean “anything I disagree with”) and the very word “violence” itself. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “violence” as “The deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”. “Physical force” is the key phrase. At very least, “violence” should include the threat of physical force. Yet you will find claims on the Internet that “Misgendering is an act of violence”. If you think it’s an act of violence to call somebody “he” rather than “they”, you are entitled to your private redefinition. But you may get short shrift from somebody who has suffered real physical violence and knows, at first hand, what violence means. If  the word “violence” is so devalued as to include the mere uttering of a pronoun, what word is left for brutal wife-beating and rape, for murder with knife, machete or baseball bat.

The second thing I’d say is that “Decapitate trans people” would not only be horrible. It would be pathetic.  As pathetic as an exhortation to punch a TERF “in the fucking face”. A position should be supported, or refuted, by rational discussion informed by evidence.  People who terminate an argument by resorting to threats, or name-calling, are signalling that they’ve lost the argument. Ignominiously.

1.  For example Kathleen Stock (2021) Material Girls: why reality matters for feminism;  Abigail Shrier (2020) Irreversible Damage: the transgender craze seducing our daughters; Kara Dansky (2021) The Abolition of Sex: how the “transgender” agenda harms women and girls; Helen Joyce (2021) Trans :when ideology meets reality; Debra Soh (2020) The End of Gender: a feminist analysis of the politics of transgenderism.

2.  See for example Gareth Roberts’s book Gay Shame (Forum, Cork (2024).

3.  The 39 contributors to the book include Nicholas Christakis, Maarten Boudry, Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja, Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Alan Sokal, Gad Saad, Carole Hooven, Frances Widdowson and Peter Boghossian.

4.  Cynical Theories. Independent Publishers’ Group, Chicago, 2020..

5.  https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

6. https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/lib-dem-ed-davey-penis-woman-b2344960.html

7. GA Parker, RR Baker & VGF Smith (1972) The origin and evolution of gametic dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon. Journal of Theoretical Biology 86, 529-553.

8.  Some aver that “sperm”, like “sheep”, takes no “s” in the plural: one sperm, many sperm. I dissent, at least in those sentences where “many” is explicitly or implicitly central to the sentence’s meaning, as in “How many sperms are crowding round that egg”. The Oxford English Dictionary allows both plurals.

9. And academic explanation is not the only consideration. There are important medical aspects, as Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja explain fully (2023, Skeptical Inquirer 47, July / August). Doctors really need to know whether a patient is male or female. Not how they “identify”, which is exactly useless. They need to know what sex the patient actually is – in the real world, not some postmodern cloudcuckooland.

10. Leonard Sax (2002) How common is Intersex? A response to Anne Fausto-Sterling. Journal of Sex Research, 3, 174-178

11. In German, not quite all: Das Mädchen.

12. See Robyn Blumner’s (2022) excellent critique, “Identitarianism is Incompatible with Humanism” in Free Inquiry 42,  4. By identitarianism she means the belief that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group, rather than individual, identity.

13.  I was moved to read the following, in a letter from a highly intelligent American schoolgirl: “I went to a very liberal school from 4th - 7th grades. There was so much peer pressure to either be gay our trans at this school. Basically, it felt like you weren’t cool if you were heterosexual. This made me even question myself quite a few times, even though I am heterosexual. I know that this pressure can be real for so many children. Some of them may actually be gay or trans and I will definitely support that and fight for them in the end, but that’s pretty young to be labeling yourself in any permanent way in my opinion.”

14.  There’s a strong case for the view that many alleged transsexuals are actually homosexuals who have been wrongly advised. See, for example Gareth Roberts’s powerful book Gay Shame. Forum, Cork (2024).

15. For other examples, see https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/13/the-police-are-still-witch-hunting-gender-critical-women/

16. https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1762194541539430678

17.  https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/29/why-are-the-police-lying-about-scarlet-blakes-sex/

18. This fact brought Darwin tantalisingly close to discovering Mendel’s Laws when he wrote, in a letter to AR Wallace, “I crossed the Painted Lady and Purpose sweetpeas, which ae very differently colour varieties, and got, even out of the same pod, both varieties perfect but none intermediate. . . . tho’ these cases are in appearance so wonderful, I do not know that they are really more so than every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring.” Darwin noted the fact that a cross between a male and a female yields either a son or a daughter, not an intermediate (hermaphrodite), and he came close to seeing this binary quality as the model for inheritance generally.

19. As Robert Ingersoll (“The Great Agnostic”) said, in his essay praising Spinoza,”Theology is not intended to be understood – it is only to be believed”.

20. TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. “MAGA”: Make America Great Again. Slogan of Donald Trump. “Alt-right”: A far-right white nationalist movement.

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