Why A Denial of Biological Sex is a Threat to Women
Today in the news, the world international swimming body FINA voted to restrict the participation of transgender athletes, making that decision with a specific aim to balance inclusion and fairness in women’s swimming. This is indicative of debates we are having in sports, pediatrics, and sociology about whether biological sex is an empirical category or whether, just like gender, it is a social construct.
I am highly concerned that defining “woman” as a kind of will-to-power self-definition rather than as a biological category is going to be incredibly detrimental to women, women’s rights, and perhaps even give sanction to certain forms of homophobia.
Two things I saw this week perfectly illustrate some of the concerning trends at work.
PCOS and Intersex
First, on Twitter, that wonderful metric of public rage and insanity, I saw that there was a movement to get PCOS classified as an intersex condition.
For those who don’t know PCOS stands for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome which according to one definition is “a condition that affects a woman's hormone levels. Women with PCOS produce higher-than-normal amounts of male hormones [i.e.., testosterone]. This hormone imbalance causes their body to skip menstrual periods and makes it harder for them to get pregnant.” I know about PCOS because my wife has it and so do many female friends. In fact, about 5-20% of women around the globe. Trust me, you know someone who has it!
What’s that got to do with intersex, well check these out:
Let me be clear, hormone fluctuations do not make a person intersex, because intersex includes a range of thirteen different developmental sex disorders. Plus, all of us experience hormone fluctuations over the course of our lives. In addition, PCOS is a condition that is only experienced by biological women, someone with ovaries, it is not experienced by men.
But what is both weird and dangerous is the way that PCOS is being falsely badged as intersex and then weaponized as proof that sex is not a binary. That reduces women with PCOS to nothing more than pawns to be redefined into something they are not as part of a futile attempt to deny the reality of biological sex. Women with PCOS are the losers in that campaign.
What is a Woman?
I saw last week that a new documentary is out called What is a Woman? put out by conservative talk show The Daily Wire and podcast host Matt Walsh.
Judging from the You.Tube clips I’ve seen, the premise of the documentary is to expose precisely how crazy and kooky the stuff churned out by gender studies academics and gender activists is. On that, I’m sympathetic, I have written a bit about the whole “biological sex is just a white heteronormative social construct” thing in a few previous blog posts like Women and Biology: Reality’s Last Stand and Should I Put Pronouns in My Bio? I am allergic to the weird stuff advocated by the so-called “busting up the biological sex binary” crew. I mean, humans are a sexually dimorphic species, I can’t unlearn that, and I can’t deny that even if a rainbow-colored gun is stuck in my face.
That said, I am a little worried about this documentary, I haven’t seen it, but it is from a right-wing media outlet, and it seems to be written for the, “I like Putin because he’s against trans-rights” kind of people.
Be that as it may, you have to admit that the question “What is a woman?” has become politically divisive and shows that we are now divided into two different political anthropologies, those who believe that biological sex is real versus those who believe it is not. Again, I think erasing biological sex is going to be to the detriment of women and women’s rights.
To end, let me recommend to you a great podcast episode. Economist editor Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, spoke to Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay about why biology must trump politics when it comes to defining who is a woman and who is a man. A terrific listen, don’t miss it, you won’t be disappointed!
Hi Mike, try watching the docu if you have time and tell us what you think about it.
Well said! I am enjoying Helen Joyce! Very instructive!