Biology is not Bigotry

This piece from the biologist Jerry Coyne original appeared on the Freedom from Religion blog FreeThought now, but was later removed for dogmatic reasons. Critical Mass subscribers can read it here

(Gettyimages: Credit: SCIEPRO)

Two days ago, Jerry Coyne, the author of the well known Why Evolution is True blog discovered that the piece he had written for the anti-religion free thought organization, Freedom from Religion Foundation, entitled Biology is not Bigotry no longer appeared on its website Freethought Now. He figured that the post had merely been relocated, and asked the Co-President of FFRF what had happened to it. He got no reply, but shortly thereafter, saw a public notice posted by FFRF, stating that Coyne’s piece, about the biological basis of sex, violated the FFRF stance on LGBTQIA-plus rights.

That an organization ostensibly built around promoting free speech and decrying religious dogma could itself devolve into what can only be called secular religious dogma—in which diverging views are viewed as heretical, and therefore need to be expunged—was ironic at best, and tragic at worst. FFRF has a distinguished tradition, and I was honored eight years ago to receive its Emperor’s New Clothes Award (a fact which, I just discovered has for some reason also disappeared from the FFRF site). Therefore I was saddened to hear of the unfortunate trajectory the organization had now taken.

Others were as well, Coyne, Steve Pinker, and Richard Dawkins, all members of FFRF’s honorary advisory board (I group I had also been a member of some time ago), have resigned their positions. Like the American Humanist Association, the FFRF seems to have allowed social justice concerns to cause them to renounce the fundamental principles on which their organization has been based. It is sad to see another such humanist/free thought group fall by the wayside.

Critical Mass is based on the idea of promoting free speech and respectful discussion of ideas. So that Jerry’s piece is not lost for the world, I asked him for permission to reprint it here. Here it is. I hope it promotes thoughtful discussion

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In the Freethought Now article “What is a woman?”, author Kat Grant struggles at length to define the word, rejecting one definition after another as flawed or incomplete. Grant finally settles on a definition based on self-identity: “A woman is whoever she says she is.” This of course is a tautology, and still leaves open the question of what a woman really is. And the remarkable redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature. Because some nonbinary people — or men who identify as women (“transwomen”) — feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of “woman.”

Further, there are plenty of problems with the claim that self-identification maps directly onto empirical reality. You are not always fat if you feel fat (the problem with anorexia), not a horse if you feel you’re a horse (a class of people called “therians” psychologically identify as animals), and do not become Asian simply become you feel Asian (the issue of “transracialism”). But sex, Grant tells us, is different: It is the one biological feature of humans that can be changed solely by psychology.

But why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality. Instead, in biology “sex” is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (“gametes”). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (“hermaphrodites”), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.

It’s important to recognize that, although this gametic idea is called a “definition” of sex, it is really a generalization — and thus a concept — based on a vast number of observations of diverse organisms. We know that, except for a few algae and fungi, all multicellular organisms and vertebrates, including us, adhere to this generalization. It is, then, nearly universal.

Besides its universality, the gametic concept has utility, for it is the distinction between gamete types that explains evolutionary phenomena like sexual selection. Differential investment in reproduction accounts for the many differences, both physical and behavioral, between males and females. No other concept of sex has such universality and utility. Attempts to define sex by combining various traits associated with gamete type, like chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, body hair and so on, lead to messy and confusing multivariate models that lack both the universality and explanatory power of the gametic concept.

Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary. Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly — without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)

In biology, then, a woman can be simply defined in four words: “An adult human female.”

Dismissal of trait-based concepts of sex leads to serious errors and misconceptions. I mention only a few. The biological concept of a woman does not, as Grant argues, depend on whether she can actually produce eggs. Nobody is claiming that postmenopausal females, or those who are sterile or had hysterectomies, are not “women,” for they were born with the reproductive apparatus that evolved to produce eggs. As for chromosomes, having two X chromosomes gives you a very high probability of being a woman, but a rearrangement of genetic information can decouple chromosome constitution from the gametic apparatus.

But the biggest error Grant makes is the repeated conflation of sex, a biological feature, with gender, the sex role one assumes in society. To all intents and purposes, sex is binary, but gender is more spectrum-like, though it still has two camel’s-hump modes around “male” and “female.” While most people enact gender roles associated with their biological sex (those camel humps), an appreciable number of people mix both roles or even reject male and female roles altogether. Grant says that “I play with gender expression” in “ways that vary throughout the day.” Fine, but this does not mean that Grant changes sex from hour to hour.

Under the biological concept of sex, then, it is impossible for humans to change sex — to be truly “transsexual” — for mammals cannot change their means of producing gametes. A more appropriate term is “transgender,” or, for transwomen, “men who identify as women.”

But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Biological sex affects who and what we are. Let’s look at the contentious area of sports participation. Here’s a summary of the current regulatory situation (from a link that Grant gives):

“For the Paris 2024 Olympics, the new guidelines require transgender women to have completed their transition before the age of 12 to be eligible to compete in the women’s category. This rule is intended to prevent any perceived unfair advantages that might arise from undergoing male puberty.”

“In addition, at least 10 Olympic sports have restricted the participation of transgender athletes. These include sports like athletics, cycling, swimming, rugby, rowing, and boxing.”

Completing transition before 12 is virtually unknown (26 American states ban childhood transition), and the International Olympic Committee has now asked each sport to devise its own rules. Further, the presence of “regulation” does not make the problem go away, for many regulations are insufficient to protect female athletes from male athletic advantage. According to a United Nations report on violence against women, “By 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals [to transgender women] in 29 different sports.”

I close with two points. The first is to insist that it is not “transphobic” to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights. Transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else. But moral and legal rights do not extend to areas in which the “indelible stamp” of sex results in compromising the legal and moral rights of others. Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.

Finally, speaking as a member of the FFRF’s honorary board, I worry that the organization’s incursion into gender activism takes it far outside its historically twofold mission: educating the public about nontheism and keeping religion out of government and social policies. Tendentious arguments about the definition of sex are not part of either mission. Although some aspects of gender activism have assumed the worst aspects of religion (dogma, heresy, excommunication, etc.), sex and gender have little to do with theism or the First Amendment. I sincerely hope that the FFRF does not insist on adopting a “progressive” political stance, rationalizing it as part of its battle against “Christian Nationalism.” As a liberal atheist, I am about as far from Christian nationalism as one can get!

Issues of sex and gender cannot and should not be forced into that Procrustean bed. Mission creep has begun to erode other once-respected organizations like the ACLU and SPLC, and I would be distressed if this happened to the FFRF.

Jerry A. Coyne is emeritus professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.