Sex vs. Gender: Is A Truce Possible?

There should be a way to insist on the basics of biology, to safeguard rights for women based on their biology, and to accommodate people who are different, whether gender dysphoria, intersex, or non-binary. Yet these are the points of contention in sports, discrimination law, and even in the medical profession.

Alas, the strange, needless, and incendiary debate that pitches sex (a biological category) against gender (the social attempt to normalize relations between the sexes) continues unabated as an ideological civil war in the West.

In this civil war, there are two camps, first, biological realists i.e., those who think that there are objective and empirical facts about human nature such as humans are a sexual binary species; versus the gender theorists i.e., those who insist that there is no stable feature of human bodies or existence, only constructions of truth determined by lived experience, oppression, and will-to-power.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

To be clear, this “civil war” is not right-wing versus left-wing, more often than not, it is the liberal left (think of Bill Maher) versus the postmodern left (think of the New York Times).

Let me explain this civil war with two articles and a podcast from one of my favourite online magazines, Quillette, where they tackle the issue.

To begin with, William Wex writes on Sexual and Gender Identity: Four Competing Paradigms. He points out that there are different ways – traditional, social construction, internal essentialism, and choice – of conceiving of sex and gender. You can read the details for yourself, but in my view it ultimately it comes down to two things.

First, how do you account for the full array of human experiences in biology (dimorphic sexual organs, intersex conditions, chromosomal abnormalities, etc), psychology (predispositions, gender dysphoria, etc.), and sociology (heteronormativity, diverse expressions of gender, etc.)?

Second, should you preference empirical biology or an ephemeral gender ideology when it comes to ordering the self, identities, rights, social norms, and law?

It is debates spawned by those questions that lead to different professional pediatric organizations in the USA holding mutually exclusive views on sex and gender. For instance, the American Academy of Pediatricians embraces a gender-affirmative care model, defining sex as follows:

An assignment that is made at birth, usually male or female, typically on the basis of external genital anatomy but sometimes on the basis of internal gonads, chromosomes, or hormone levels. 

While the American College of Pediatricians expressly rejects the gender-affirmative model (putting it closer to the UK’s National Health Service and to the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists). They write:

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) affirms the medical fact that the sex of an individual is based upon biology and not upon thoughts or feelings.  The individual’s sex is encrypted in every diploid cell of the body.  Since an individual’s biological sex is immutable from the moment of fertilization, it cannot be changed, regardless of hormonal or surgical interventions.  Nothing in this paper should be construed to mean the College agrees with or accepts that individuals can change their given biological sex. 

Thus, even pediatric associations are at loggerheads over what is sex, gender, and how to treat gender dysphoria.

So what should take precedence for identity, law, and medicine: sex or gender? The problem with preferencing gender ideology, especially self-identification, is that it is crushed under the weight of its own incredulity. Note Vex’s explanation:

If gender identity is socially constructed, for example, it is neither inherent nor something that you can decide to change all on your own. But if it is inherent, then it cannot be socially constructed, and one is basically substituting a purportedly objectively extant quasi-religious “sexual soul” for the purportedly objectively extant biological reality of sex, which also means you cannot really explain identity change. And if these matters really hinge only on the potentially contingent ephemera of personal choice, you diminish your ability to fight off the objective reality of science (because you are no longer invoking, against the traditional view, what claims to be a countervailing objective reality). At the same time, you risk having your whole schema collapse into a formlessly whimsical free-for-all in which it’s hard to see why these matters are important enough to justify our time and attention in the first place, especially in a world so full of dramatic, concrete, and definable wrongs in need of righting.

At the end of the day, you have to deal with the naked facts of biological reality which cannot be bent to the will of anyone’s self-identification. Humans are sexually dimorphic: we are male and female. Yet we should concede that people should not have to live their lives in a gender straight jacket, so that boys cannot be dressmakers and girls cannot be mechanics, etc. People are different, have the right to be different, and without fear of reprisal.

Now, I like to think that an accommodation or mutual peace can be established if we concede that humans are sexually dimorphic species and work out the social differences from there. Respect all people, defend women’s rights, and don’t punish people who either by nature or nurture don’t fit into the gender norms around them.

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No, you should not let a trans-woman into a woman’s bathroom, but you can ensure that a trans-woman has the facilities that s/he needs.

No, you cannot punish lesbians because they said they don’t want to date transwomen, but you can require dating apps to list if the females on the app are biological or gendered.

No, you cannot discriminate against an employee for being gay, bi, non-binary, or trans, but you can make clear the expectations of behaviour for all people in your workplace.

The idea of a peace treaty between women and lesbians (on one side) and trans-activists and social constructionists (on the other side) is possible with a bit of common sense and compassion.

Easy … but it’s not, largely because the postmodern gender theorists don’t want accommodation, they demand a total capitulation.

You can’t make a truce with someone who insists that biological sex is a social construct, an “essentialist” heresy, a heteronormative horror, and just another tenet of patriarchy. You cannot enshrine women’s rights with people who deny the undeniable facts of biology.

Duke Law professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman, whose new book is excerpted in Quillette: The Campaign to Erase Biological Sex, argues for upholding biological sex and its priority in sports and law, but wants maximal accommodation for people who are intersex or transgender. Prof. Coleman also does a great interview with Jonathan Kay at the Quillette podcast.

Cole contends against the gender theorists who deny the reality of biological sex:

All of these arguments depend on significant erasures: the erasure of reproduction as part of the definition of sex; the erasure of the whole body in favour of a focus on the bits; and the erasure of norms, how people almost always are and how their traits almost always distribute. They also depend on the assumption that sex as we know it is absolute, that it doesn’t already contemplate genetic mutations, developmental differences and disorders, and diseases and conditions that affect our physical form and function. Finally, they depend on an ideological preference for characterizing sex as a social construct, a stereotype, and a myth—based on the view that sex isn’t good or shouldn’t matter.

However, she notes too, that if you can get the parties to agree on the basic facts of biology, and work on accommodations from there, then a truce is achievable. This is largely Coleman’s project. To safeguard rights, rights for women as a biological category, but to take a compassionate and inclusive accommodation towards trans and gender diverse people as an imperative.

I’d disagree with Coleman on a few things, but the main point holds: to disregard sex as a myth or a patriarchal evil is to diminish the rights of women and it is needless to protect the rights of people who are gender diverse.

A better way is possible!