It’s presidents day. Here’s my protest.
"Biological sex" and “the biological reality of sex” are terms reacting to what the same people call “woke” “gender ideology”. They look at what’s happening to gender and sexuality and think it’s unnatural. But, lucky for them, they don’t have to impolitely call their fellow human beings “unnatural”, because they think science, facts, and reason are on their side. They’re wrong.
Sex is already
biology. Everyone gets that. We don’t need to be redundant and call sex “biological
sex” or “the biological reality of sex.” That anyone does is a dead giveaway
that we’re dealing with a political perspective and not raw, objective science,
here. The political goal of POTUS’s “biological truth” executive order seems to be to demarcate cis and transwomen, but it’s really
to uphold their definition of men. To keep amassing power and enacting that
power, they really need men to be what they believe men to be. How do they do that?
They must exclude males (Y chromosomes, certain gonads, certain genitals, certain circulating T levels, etc) from "woman" so that their idea of what a man is can reign and their
idea is this: a man is not, and cannot be, a woman. (If you read this and hear “ew”
as their punctuation, then we’re the same.)
The distinction between
the sexes is fundamental to their belief system. The separateness. (And the reduction of human beings to meat puppets.) This is how evangelical
Christianity and Darwinian evolution can sound like slightly mad-libbed versions
of each other. This is how Americans who believe that gender roles, gender expression, and sexuality are 100% innate (and any deviations have been led astray by the devil) can believe that science is on their side.
But Man and Woman are
not concepts that science can objectively, unilaterally define because “man”
and "woman" are concepts that people have constructed over time, have
done so differently in different cultures, and are continuing to construct. Like
right now. Historians, cultural anthropologists, and countless other scholars, and,
also, people simply living their lives and communicating their experiences
teach us all this and more.
So of course when people believe that there are natural categories for humans that distinguish man from woman and that they are written in our human biology, there is going to be a problem. And that’s really a problem, now, as we’ve ceded so much authority to STEM. All one has to do is appeal to the STEM gods and suddenly, no matter how Biblical your beliefs, you’re way more rational than anyone else can possibly be. Tradwives? They’re just enacting the science. It’s all in Darwin.
Sure, people are
typically born with either XY or XX chromosomes, and that’s one way to define
sex, but all people are born into a world of gender, and into a specific gendered
context. XX typically grow up into women, but they are not born women. XY
typically grow up into men, but they are not born men. And if you don’t believe
anyone is born a woman or a man, then you understand why defining “woman” or “man”
is a challenge.
Beyond describing a woman
as “someone who becomes who they are in this world (where there are
strong feelings about what a woman is) since being born with the typical
genitalia that correlates with XX chromosomes”, defining "woman" is pretty tough to do without a lot of exceptions and including a lot of
variation. Who decides where that variation ends? Apparently POTUS. And when
does a girl become a woman? Is it when she gets her period? When she has sex?
When she gets her first paycheck? When she gets married? When? And to whom does
it matter most: to herself or to others? That is, who gets to say when she’s a
woman? Does she get to say it about herself, or is it up to someone else? Funnily
enough, the people who emphasize biology to the point of excluding the power of
culture (or “gender ideology”) prefer to make it up to someone else.
One way to control the
definition of "woman" is to swing the hammer of science as if your
view of “ woman” is the correct, natural one. But that's politics, not facts. And
it’s no more obviously political than when Dawkins wrote in the New Statesman that, "A woman is an adult human female,
free of Y chromosomes."[1] It sounds like basic obvious common-sense science.
But here’s where the politics/culture
tells on itself: a woman is “free” of Y chromosomes? Wow. Dawkins explains the
material existence of a fully formed person by what has never been present,
materially, in that person.[2] It’s a bit Freudian, wouldn’t you say? A good
rational default scientific explanation describes what you observe. If you observe
a woman and describe what is lacking, then that’s saying more about you than
about the woman.
To describe a woman as
“free of Y chromosomes”[3] is to say that to be a woman is to be NOT a man. That
definition is absolutely key to defining men as definitely NOT women. “Biological
sex” adherents are doing gender harder than the “gender ideology” folks they
abhor and over whom they claim intellectual superiority.
"Biological
sex" and “the biological reality of sex” are not about biological facts;
they’re about staking a claim on gender norms by excluding the Y chromosomes
from "woman" to exclude transwomen, and thereby reifying what is Man,
as is necessary for them to hold onto power.
It’s almost like these
unscientific authoritarian Old Testament-compatible beliefs about nature that
are wielded to control our private personal livelihoods have shaped us into rebels…
Notes
1. I heard this from PZ Myers but can't find the blog post so I'm linking to the whole site: https://freethoughtblogs.com/
2. People, including myself, love to point out that many women
have Y chromosomes all through their bodies since gestating XY fetuses.
3. Choosing to say “free” rather than “lacking” is no doubt intentional. It’s kindly avoiding any whiff of calling women deficient, but it’s consciously stigmatizing the Y chromosome, denigrating toxic maleness, in defense of women! It’s the same bullshit either way.
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