Debunking Myths about the Biology of Sex - ICONS Conference

okay um i'm here to uh introduce dr colin wright and he's going to speak to us about what is a woman debunking myths about the biology of sex so dr wright has a phd in evolutionary biology he is the founder of reality's last stand which explores the debate around sex and gender without further ado thank you dr wright awesome well thanks for the invite this is an amazing event i'm having a great time i've met so many amazing people um i think a lot of what the previous speakers did that was really great is look at how uh i guess i would just best describe him as a lot of activists that are trying to just diminish sex differences between males and female but i think there's you know there's actually a more insidious thing going on because once we've actually presented all the evidence that i would consider what you guys just saw was pretty irrefutable about these sex differences the narrative sort of shifts and the data doesn't matter it's still inclusion so there's something else going on that's not so much that they just are waiting for the data because as ross has said that the data is clearly in there's not so much this attempt to i guess blur the lines between performance between males and females or sex differences but there's actually like a more fundamental attempt to just blur the lines between what males and female are completely you know there's a lot of people that will say things um you know that sex is a spectrum or there's multiple sexes or something like this or you know more than two um or that sex is just a complete social construct and uh you know we can't even talk about males we can just talk about sort of degrees of maleness and femaleness so that's kind of what i want to talk about more i'll get to like the what is the woman thing at the end and i understand that's kind of weird as a guy standing up here for a room full of mostly women explaining what you are so that'll be a very brief thing at the very end but mostly i'm going to just go through a couple arguments that people are a lot of motivated activists are using to really try to just undermine the concept of biological sex all together not just saying that the differences aren't that big but that these aren't even real things and that's sort of what's i think underlying a lot of the uh the arguments that we're seeing it's why when you give them the data that there's big sex differences that doesn't seem to matter all of a sudden okay so we'll start out first with just like an overview of sexual reproduction okay so sexual reproduction it's a type of reproduction that involves a complex life cycle in which in which a gamete such as sperm or an egg cell within a with a single set of chromosomes combines with another to produce a zygote that develops into an organism composed of cells with two sets of chromosomes so that's just a long way of saying that you have males and females and some plants this can be in the same organisms some animals too but there's a lot of you know if we're talking about humans these are two separate organisms from the male testy of the female ovaries they'll produce either egg or sperm these then become the through fertilization they come these two you know half of a component of chromosomes come together to form a complete one in a zygote this then turns into an embryo continues to develop into a fetus and then eventually you get a new organism that this then grows up and continues this life cycle contributing either sperm or ova into the next generation so this is what we mean by sexual reproduction you can't talk about what sex is without understanding sort of this is what it's it's it's doing this is an ancient process been around for many hundreds of millions of years so what are males and females we've talked a lot about that today i'll just go over it again kind of briefly so it does involve something to do with eggs and sperm or gametes as you've learned so broadly speaking if we just sort of back up and take a take a distance look at it males are the sex that produce small gametes or sperm and females produce large gametes or ova now i can already hear like the activists yelling you know but not all humans produce sperm or ova you know this is what you'll commonly encounter you know and yeah so while this is how sex is defined in a broad sense it's it's crucial to note that the sex of you know individuals within a species isn't necessarily based on if an individual can actually produce uh certain gametes at any given moment we have you know pre-pubertum pre-pubertal males for instance they're not actively producing sperm um and you know people with a variety of sexual development issues might not ever be fertile okay but we can still you know we can say a male is still a male even before puberty they're not actively producing sperm um so if we want to actually like sex the an individual like a flesh and blood individual what we're really looking at is um well sex of an individual is based on their reproductive anatomy and it's defined by the type of the gamete this anatomy is organized around through development to produce whether that ever becomes the case whether they ever actually can ever make it or they used to be able to make gametes and didn't before it's just really sort of the the ground plan the organizational plan of their reproductive anatomy okay so because there is no third or intermediate gamete you know people talk about the elusive sperger speg sometimes um people are still looking for those uh there's therefore no third type of anatomy that can develop to produce it and therefore there's only two sexes in humans and this means that sex is a binary system okay this this should be the end of my talk really but unfortunately a lot of people seem to have a problem with this and the next part of my talk is going to talk about all the various issues that people seem to have with this very straightforwardly laid out thing i just i told you about what males and females are i can't believe i'm actually having to give a talk like this um but here we go so i'm gonna debunk a few myths about the biology of sex um so what myths are there well uh there were some that were brought up earlier so one is this idea that sex is a spectrum sometimes they'll even say it's a social construct we'll get into about what that means and then there's other people that argue that there are more than two sexes okay so i'd actually be really interested in seeing these two different crowds talk to each other because these are not really compatible with each other to a large degree the multiple sexes people it's it's really weird because i'm of the i would say opinion but i'm of the knowledge that there's only two sexes people who say that there's three sexes you know make they get a huge applause for sex is great 10 sex is even better sex is a spectrum there's an infinite number oh my god this is amazing maybe there's two sexes you're a bigot this is sort of how it how it ends up playing out so there's something about the number two that there seems to be a lot of disdain for which is a little interesting um so let's get into the sex spectrum so what are people saying here usually they just talk about they don't really talk about males i have male and female on here but they would like to more talk about maleness and femaleness just we're all degrees of male and female no one is really a male or a female we're all intersex to some degree you know we can take maybe some measurements of different features and we can find out where along the sex spectrum where you reside in the middle this is sort of the intersex area but you know as i said we're all kind of intersex to some degree according to this ideology sometimes they'll try to give it like the patina of being scientific and they'll say it's a bimodal spectrum it'll look something like this uh where you have sort of these two maxima these two areas where you know there's there's sort of clumping there's people who are mostly male and mostly female but there's then this valley in the middle this is like the intersex valley and this this kind of appeals to our intuition i guess in our every day of how we're looking at people so it's it's really enticing and it kind of looks scientific because if people look at that if you don't know much about biology or for you're just looking at people every day this is kind of you know it makes it makes kind of sense um but uh i'm gonna argue that these are both bad i think actually the second one the bimodal one is actually worse has more worse implications so is this just something that's in you know fringe you know departments in the university or activist communities it's just on tumblr well you know that used to be the case and a lot of people ignored it for a while but this has kind of gone really mainstream there's a highly sympathetic media environment that's really just allowing these things to just spread like wildfire these ideas so you know we have big i guess magazines scientific american a lot of people have seen this sex spectrum diagram discover magazine they say that you can tell from skeletal remains that sex is a spectrum that's interesting then there's you know popular youtube videos that say biological sex is a spectrum um hundreds of thousands if not millions of views on a lot of these videos uh said very authoritatively there's popular books that talk about the sex spectrum that claim to you know they're just really giving you the facts about how biology has completely changed over the last five years uh despite despite the fact that i've no nobel prizes have been have been sent out for this discovery of the sex spectrum or the third sex or anything like that um there's activist organizations you know they'll have their gender identity expression spectrum they'll have uh you know all these different spectrums they have and then they'll include biological sexist right there on the top right there just again that whole sex spectrum between male female and intersex there's new york times ann foster sterling has written articles why sex is not binary so you know it's a spectrum argument but you know is this really in major scientific journals now like these aren't really big journals scientific american is a popular magazine well unfortunately it's all the way at the very top you know this is nature this is the most prestigious scientific journal in the world by by quite a large margin and here they say that sex has been redefined they say that the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic and biologists now think that there is a larger spectrum than just male or female so this was news to me when i saw it come out so this isn't just a sort of academic music people say well what are the consequences of this you know there there's actually a lot of problems that are arising from this denial of biological sex a lot of them we talked about now you know this is an ideology that's not just saying that sex differences are small but you know sex is is a spectrum who's really to say that leah thomas isn't actually a female if sex is a spectrum where do you really draw the line maybe we should just go based on how they identify okay so the two main arguments for the sex spectrum one is this argument from intersex conditions so because some individuals might have ambiguous genitalia to some degree therefore males and females you can't really draw a line between them we're all just varying degrees of maleness and femaleness and then there's this argument from secondary sex characteristics and these are all the features that you gain through puberty so if you're a male you're going to have a big major growth spurt you get facial hair your voice deepens females they have they develop breasts they're you know the fat on their body distributes in certain ways that are different than males um all that all the effects that happens to your body after puberty that sort of contribute to our our uh sexual dimorphism basically this is what we mean by secondary sex characteristics so we'll first start with the intersex conditions and how this argument goes so the intersex argument they say that sex cannot be binary if some individuals have sexual anatomy that appears to fall somewhere in between males and females this is most popularized by the scientific american article that said you know viewing sex as a spectrum and this is actually a needlessly complex image here like emma has shown before that there's arrows that are drawn all over it that really don't need to be they don't need to span the entire page it's really it's meant there this this is meant to stun you it's meant to just make you feel like a deer in the headlights and then just throw your hands up and just say tell me what to believe basically so this is um this is kind of what it's done and this is how it's used i mean if you're ever on the internet talking with people about it this is something they're going to throw in your face so if we want to get a more accurate look of what this sex spectrum would look like for intersex conditions this is this is actually sort of a more accurate depiction of intersex conditions okay intersex conditions apply to maybe one in five thousand individuals and intersex is really an umbrella term for uh people who are born with ambiguous uh genitalia sort of they look sexually ambiguous at birth or they're sort of a mismatch between their external sexual phenotype how they appear in their internal uh sexual anatomy um but even if we zoom in on this little white square in the middle that represents these intersex individuals almost the vast majority of these can be just on you know a little bit more investigation can be placed into the male or female side as well so yeah this is this this argument really conflates two statements so the the idea that you know there's only two sexes or something hold on here so there's this idea so a claim that i would make and i think a lot of people would make is there only two sexes this is really taken by a lot of activists to mean that we're saying that every single human being who ever existed never will exist can be unambiguously categorized as to either male or female so actually leave the door open to this i don't think we need to assert that every single individual necessarily has to be categorized maybe there's some individual through some developmental process could be super sexually ambiguous that doesn't even matter for the argument that there's only two sexes to survive okay like just because someone might be sexually ambiguous doesn't call in uh everyone else's sex or mean that we're all sexually ambiguous to some degree okay so a lot of people even people i agree with on a lot of things will tend to say that like you know everyone can be categorized as male and female maybe they can but that's actually not necessary for us to say that sex is still binary um an individual with an ambiguous sex there's still not a third sex okay because male and female they refer to this different things there's no like third type of reproductive anatomy to be organized around a third type of gamete uh so as i said just because sex may be ambiguous for some does not mean it's somewhat ambiguous and as some activists might extrapolate arbitrary for all so i like to sort of highlight this using an analogy of like a coin flip so we use a coin flip to randomize a binary decision because a coin has only two faces but a coin also has an edge okay and about one in six thousand uh throws this is done with a nickel will land on this edge this is actually roughly the same likelihood of being born with an intersex condition which is one in five thousand almost every coin flip will be either heads or tails and those heads or tails don't come in degrees or mixtures that's because heads and tails these are you know qualitatively different and mutually exclusive outcomes the existence of edge cases does not change the fact okay heads and tails despite the existence of this edge you know they're they're these discrete outcomes okay uh likewise the outcomes of sexual development are almost always completely unambiguously 100 male and female just because there might be some edge cases out there doesn't mean that we come in degrees okay almost everyone is still 100 male and female and i think the coin flip helps sort of highlight that a little bit and so this really comes into play when you have a lot of people who are arguing for say like inclusion of someone like leah thomas and into sports a lot of times you'll get people making like these activists making the arguments um from intersex conditions they'll say you know i'll say liatama shouldn't compete in in female sports because leah thomas is biologically male they'll say well sex is a spectrum i'll say well what makes you say that well intersex conditions are real okay as leah thomas intersex no okay well then that doesn't really work you know um what what leah thomas is essentially is heads identifying as a tails this is not an edge case you know this is this is an ambiguous case that um i think really can be dismissed on on the grounds of the intersex argument they're sort of grasping at straws when they're using this one to to assert that the sex spectrum somehow means that you can identify anywhere else on the spectrum you'd like to so now let's look at the secondary sex characteristics argument okay so as i mentioned secondary sex characteristics these are anatomies that differentiate during puberty so enlarged breasts sweater hips and females facial hair deeper voices more musculature broader shoulders and males um because the distribu so the argument sort of goes because the distribution of these secondary sex characteristics can overlap between males and females it is argued that we should therefore view biological sex itself on a continuum so there's a lot of organizations that will make this claim um one that i like to really highlight because it just spells it out so clearly is the gender bred person this is something that's used in a lot of grade schools and across the u.s in canada i've even had people who are going to college send this to me this is what they're using to get their i guess anatomy education as well as learning about gender identity and stuff i particularly want to zoom in on what it says about biological sex here because i think it really just shows what we're up against in the confusion about what biological sex is so so with biological sex we have this really interesting thing here we have uh two two sort of lines that are going from from nothing to femaleness and from nothing to maleness and we're told that you know you can exist somewhere on here then when we look at the traits that they're using to describe whether you know to someone's degree of maleness or femaleness we see things like body shape voice pitch body hair and hormones so presumably if you're a female but you have a really deep voice you know you're kind of getting a little man-ish you know literally in a sense they would say that you're more male because you have a deeper voice or you're hairier or something like that and a male who has a high-pitched voice relatively small amounts of body hair they would be literally more female this is this is what this is what they claim this is a really popular educational tool um i would say you know conspicuously absent from this chart is any mention of gametes or sexual anatomy um this this isn't science when kids are getting taught this you know this is this is just a complete pseudoscience it's not education this is really indoctrination and like the highest degree it's it's pretty pretty important um so to understand why secondary sex characteristics don't define the sex i'll sort of use an analogy that i've developed with bikers and cyclists so bear with me on this one here so so on the left here we have bikers and then we have cyclists on the right so bikers ride motorcycles and cyclists ride bicycles okay while these two vehicles may share many similarities they differ in at least one fundamental way motorcycles are powered by the engines by engines and fuel while bicycles are powered uh by pedaling legs okay whether someone is a biker or a cyclist depends entirely on the binary criterion of whether they are riding a motorcycle or a bicycle this is we can call this the primary characteristic that defines bikers and cyclists but there are also many secondary characteristics associated with bikers and cyclists you know bikers for instance uh might be more likely to wear leather jackets and jeans and wear bandanas maybe even tattoos and things like that while cyclists are more likely to wear these skin tight spandex suits to be more streamlined bikers wear heavy helmets that contain the entire head and include the face shield whereas cyclists typically wear lighter weight helmets that cover only the tops of their heads so many of these secondary sex characteristics of bikers and cyclists you know these aren't arbitrary or coincidental like the male and female secondary sex characteristics we can we can really just map the utility of biker and cyclist secondary characteristics to their primary characteristics but importantly a person who's riding a motorcycle who's wearing a spandex suit and lighter helmet you know they don't become a cyclist or less of a biker because they share some of these secondary characteristics uh that are commonly associated with cyclists so we might look at this person here and say this person looks like they ride a bicycle but if they're on a motorcycle you know they're a biker okay the primary characteristic is whether they're riding a motorcycle or a bike and likewise you know a person riding a bicycle wearing jeans and a leather jacket doesn't become a biker or less of a cyclist by sharing these secondary traits that are more typical of bikers just as these secondary traits don't define bikers and cyclists secondary sex characteristics don't define males and females what defines males and females is their primary sex organs or their ovaries or their testes so this is sort of a way to distinguish between primary and secondary characteristics okay so when any activist tries to tell you that you know there's overlap in some of these secondary characteristics and this determines whether you're male or female that's just sort of a major misunderstanding of what what it means to be male and female at a you know primarily at a fundamental level so there's this idea that sex is bimodal this is another it's still within the family of sex spectrum arguments um that secondary sex characteristics uh give rise to this you know the so sorry the argument that secondary sex characteristics define sex kind of gives rise to the bimodal spectrum argument um this was made i think popular first by this person on twitter named science vet where they claim that sex is is a spectrum or it's bimodal and they kind of presented a graph like this uh i kind of made it look a little better because it looked pretty bad um so you can see why this sort of would prove popular because it accords with our intuitive sense that most of us cluster around males and females presumably you could take various measurements to find out where you line on this on this graphic you know it sounds really progressive in theory but the consequences are really regressive and harmful in practice so i'll highlight why this should make it pretty clear so is male a more male than male b is female d more female than females see in this for decades we've properly taught our children that this kind of logic is you know both insulting and toxic you know that a girl with more typically masculine features we tell them that they're just as much of a girl as you know their friend with maybe more stereotypically feminine physique so we don't really know what a lot of the activists are even asserting is on the x-axis in these graphs um but whether it's you know quantifying genital morphology or a combination of secondary sex traits and behaviors the implication is that you know a tall aggressive males with thick beards deep voices larger penises and higher testosterone are somehow more male than short males with meeker personalities who answer to the opposite description and likewise according to this you know sex spectrum chart females with larger breasts and more stereotypically feminine waist to hip ratios less body hair would be considered more female than small breasted less curvy and hairier females this is literally sort of what pops out of a graph like this if you just take it completely literally um it is shockingly similar to what i think is what we maybe would would classify as playground bully logic you know there's a lot of kids if they're not maximally masculine you know little boys they get they get teased if you have a little boy who doesn't maybe they don't they don't have their beard growing in they're very effeminate they have a high voice you know they're going to get bullied they're going to be called you know that people might say what are you a girl now if they were to then go to a the counselor or something or someone on their campus to try to resolve this this bullying and they say oh the all the all the kids are bullying me they're calling me a little girl well then the teacher might go to their sex spectrum diagram look at it and just be like maybe you are a girl like they're onto something here so i think this is just a toxic way to look at it this is it's a really bad implication of it even if we just like give them the argument that sex is a bimodal spectrum which we shouldn't uh the implications are just really regressive in practice you know when we see a bimodal spectrum because a lot of traits secondary sex characteristics as humans do follow like a bimodal distribution but it's just because there's two different sexes uh and you know if we take one of the women here that's furthest to the right on the the height they can be taller than most men they're still 100 female they're not suddenly more of a male because they're just maybe male typical in height or something like that so that's just a really important point i think we need to take away here so then there's the other sort of argument the other myth that there's more than two sexes um this was you know um ann foster sterling in the new york times before you know she said biologically speaking there's there are many gradations running from male to female along that spectrum lie at least five sexes perhaps even more she wrote other papers and i think a book as well arguing these this is also you can see argued on youtube um you know this one says biological sex is a spectrum and that there are more than two sexes uh in the in the description um and then this person on twitter this they got like four thousand retweets this is dr shay alikum akil mclean b-a-b-a-m-a-m-a-p-h-d um they said that there's they're responding to my friend zach elliott who is saying that you know there's only two sexes in humans and this person uh mama phd person said that um oh actually humans there's six common uh sex karyotypes and there's four rarer ones so presumably they're saying there's ten sexes out there um there's actually they missed one so if we if we put all the ones at least that i know about there's about 11. and so the claim that they're making here is that all of these different ways to have your sex chromosomes arranged you know we see xx and xy that's maybe what we would consider you know normal male and female sex chromosomes what they're saying is that every other variation outside this isn't variation within a sex this is this is these are brand new sexes okay these are these are beyond males and females um so 11 sexes this is quite a claim you know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but if we actually understand what a male and female are based on their reproductive anatomy you know we can actually reclassify these quite easily as just female male female male male male male female female male male uh this there's this idea that sex chromosomes define one sex you'll say that you'll read articles that say something like you know we've all been taught in school that that sex chromosomes you know whether you have a xx or xy defines whether you're a male or female but this is this is actually not what we're taught there's this there's this distinguish between sex being determined by chromosomes and then sex being defined by chromosomes so when when a biologist says something like uh your sex is determined by your sex chromosomes what they're really saying is that the genes on your these certain chromosomes uh you know put tissues down this pathway that will eventually inevitably result in the development of being a male or female but they're still your sex is still defined by your primary reproductive anatomy that you have um to make this point even clearer we knew what males and females were before we knew what sex chromosomes were that has to be true otherwise we couldn't say under the microscope and we discovered a y chromosome we couldn't have made the claim that oh this this is associated with being male like if if we didn't know what sex was before we would have just defined the y chromosome as it so we have to make in order to make the correlation itself we have to know that sex is something that exists apart from what chromosomes you happen to have okay and so i put this in there because um you know there's plenty of species that don't even have chromosomal sex determination so a lot of alligators a lot of reptiles for instance their sex is you know determined by the temperature at which they're incubated at okay but that doesn't mean that an alligator who has developed at a certain temperature is the sex they are because they developed at that temperature we still identify the fact that an alligator is male or female by the reproductive anatomy we just notice we make an observation that those who incubated above this certain temperature tend to develop into males those below tend to develop into females again we know we know what sex was before all this so what is a woman uh so for one a woman is an adult or if we're speaking biologically this is an organism that has reached sexual maturity so in humans you know we we have laws and so we uh we would sort of define them illegally as you know the united states someone who's 18 years old so at least in the u.s an adult is going to be someone who's at least 18. uh they need to be a human they're a member of the species homo sapiens i think we're all fit that description and then they need to be a female they need to be an individual whose reproductive anatomy is organized around through development the production of large gametes and again whether or not they they currently produce gametes they did in the past maybe they never will in the future but it just depends on that sort of that that design that they have the the design plan and why does this matter so this is what i get a lot from people you know why do you care if everyone saw the what is a woman documentary why do you care so much um well one you know truth matters i think is really important but i was always interested in sort of being a communicator of science so and public trust in science is really important if we want institutions we can believe in and trust in we need to understand that the information they're giving us is free of bias free of political affiliation whatsoever and if we're if we're getting if scientists are out there getting like this low-hanging fruit of what a male and female is just completely wrong that's obvious to anyone who's watching it even young children they understand that what males and females are how can you possibly trust someone who's also talking about more complex models like we just came through a pandemic how you can trust people about virology or epidemiology or climate science which is using you know huge data sets and chaos models and stuff that is much more like so many orders of magnitude more complex than just identifying someone's sex based on their reproductive anatomy um if we can't just get this right i mean this is why i named my website reality's last stand because if we just if we can't make this basic observation about what's true this is like the easiest thing we should this is like the underhanded pitch it's on a t for scientists to knock out of the park um if we're not hitting it then i don't know who we can trust in science anymore to be honest um and you know also it matters because sex matters in certain contexts certainly not all contexts certainly not even most contexts if you're going to get a raise that shouldn't your sex shouldn't matter it shouldn't matter if you decide someone to be your friend like this there's so many contexts where sex really doesn't matter at all it's only a very minority of context where it does and it's usually just when sexual dimorphism happens to matter and those contexts are you know things like women's sports or women's protected spaces like prisons and bathrooms like that and this this really just emerges because of the sexual dimorphism and you know one sex has much more uh you know a threat of violence from the other than the other way around so um this is why this matters and then something we didn't even really get into here that i'm not even going to dive into but i do elsewhere is you know this things like the gender bred person these confuse children very much about what it means to be a male or female or a boy and a girl it confuses them their relationship between their minds and their bodies it teaches them to identify themselves with stereotypes that we should be telling them to just reject completely and just you know you can be masculine and you can be a girl you can be feminine you can be a boy and in worst case scenarios you know we have things like puberty blockers being introduced putting kids down these paths of you know as abigail schreier would say or reversible damage so i think this is there are so many so many consequences from denying a fundamental aspect of of our biology you know you can't just ignore something so fundamental and not expect there to be a lot of crazy things happening up a lot of glitches in the matrix i would argue that things like leah thomas males competing in female sports these are the things you would expect to show up when you're denying really large fundamental aspects of human biology so truth matters i think if you care about justice social justice or whatever you really need to care first and foremost you know about what is true this is i think a point that carol made made earlier um so i'll just leave with a a quote this is by thomas soul in his book the quest for cosmic justice he said there's only so much divergence between prevailing theories and intractable reality that society can survive yet theories of equality are unlikely to be re-examined or examined the first time when they provide a foundation for the heady feeling of being morally superior to a benighted society so thank you so much [Applause] oh okay thank you so um the experts that are putting forth the idea of sex as a spectrum and whatnot have you ever encountered some of these um experts actually trying to debunk the um the fact that there are two gametes do they even address that do they did they just just you know do they provide arguments against that or they just ignore it completely in my experience they they really ignore it completely i mean we saw on the the gender bread chart right there it doesn't even mention anything about reproduction whatsoever like it just ignores the fundamental defining criteria of what it means to be male and female in favor of just sort of like these secondary sex characteristics for instance um you know i've had people sort of mention you know those that gametes are certainly a an aspect of one's sex but they would insist that those are just sort of one part of many that kind of create this mosaic of what it means to be a male or female they would just put gametes alongside of like hormone levels or you know voice pitch apparently um yeah it's it's nuts so one of the things that i noticed right off is that you used the term sex exclusively and never used the term gender yes and one of the things that's interesting and you know because one of the things we've noticed is that they're co-opting terminology to to their benefit is is your use of sex here a reflection of the fact that gender identity or gender that the that the side of activism is really trying to co-opt the truth about what sex is and redefine sex into this category and get away from the use of the term gender or gender identity yeah i mean i would say they're trying to just blur them all together in a slurry i mean it used to be the case i remember maybe around 2010 i had some friends some progressive friends and i was very much in that mindset too we were asked to you know distinguish between somebody's sex which was biological and their gender identity and they said that we're going to use the words male and female to refer to someone's sex and we're going to use man and woman to refer to someone's gender identity and i think a lot of people went along with that because we're like okay we have these two separate sets of terms why not just have that be a thing and it was okay with me because as someone who was into biology i said well as long as there's that wall between your identity and your biology then okay i can make a i'll concede some ground right there um but promise you won't go any further uh that took about you know just a minute for that to happen um and you know i pointed out the book you know the the spectrum of sex when you're reading these things they really just use sex and gender interchangeably although they might say one refers to one thing here and you know the gender refers to this other thing then they'll just use them interchangeably throughout so they're they're really i mean i would i think it's really intentional at this point where they're just trying to sort of really confuse people about what sex is they're trying to define it in terms of stereotypes from a biological point of view i don't really have my like my own definition of what gender is i just listen to what people are saying about what they think it is and then i i try to understand if if that's conflicting with what i understand males and females to be i'll try to meet people where they're at if they have a certain definition i'm usually willing to use you know for the the sake of conversation whatever definition they like just so i can make sure we're arguing concepts rather than just throwing different sounding words at each other um but they're really yeah they're trying to blur the lines that's that's where the whole like queer theory comes in to just try to blur any sort of distinction that we can make and it's increasingly difficult to even write on this topic because when you try to just write something you write a word and then you admit you immediately realize that there's seven different ways that people are going to read that word from depending on where on the ideological spectrum they're coming at so it's uh they seize the language first and i think that's i think it's a part of the broad tactic is if you don't have the words to even talk about males and females anymore then they can sort of just kind of create their own own reality so colin as a scientist you know an evolutionary biologist um are you seeing kind of the blurring of lines coming from other scientists or is it like social scientists kind of infringing into your territory i mean when i'm not reading these articles but you know uh media and whatnot where they who who whose ear who has their ear yeah well in my experience it's coming from a lot of the younger scientists so it is i mean it definitely started within like the humanities departments but it's it's everywhere in my field evolution and ecology um anyone who's my age or younger is completely taken over by that ideology um my advisors they were always on my side they totally agreed with everything i said but they they don't think they can speak about it because they're even though they have tenure you know they don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole because they have a lot of collaborators who who um who believe these things um yeah i mean it's the students i'm not sure where they're getting it i think it's just sort of broadly in the in the culture and so they're they're getting it from somewhere but they're bringing it into the labs with them for sure it's it's a really big issue i mean i had a someone that i went to grad school with we shared a lab we overlapped for four years we were best friends for a while um really reasonable person last person i would ever expect to be like taken over by an ideology like this you know they got a job at a major university university of florida a week later pronouns went up in the bio and then they're literally texting me saying that people are looking at the fact that we had co-authored papers together on spiders and wasps that's what i studied when i was in academia and their colleagues are questioning like you're co-authored with this this super transphobic person and they were just basically this this policing of other scientists and he said that it was getting so bad that he had to publicly sort of denounce me on twitter and i was just like okay you do that if you want i thought it was going to be like making arguments but it was really just this complete distancing as they went through this like struggle session with people basically and then he didn't get everything completely right so then he was taking flack for not being maximally woke and saying all the right words um yeah it's this mutual policing that's going on in in these departments it's it's it's really shocking to behold okay one more question and then we need to move on i was just curious if you could answer the question of how much of this do you think is potentially cynicism and how much of it is true ideological commitment because i'm coming from academia too and obviously you're aware of how difficult going on the academic job market is so it seems like it would give you an advantage to put pro pronouns in your bio even if you don't believe that at all and i know people who've done that precisely for that reason to give them an edge in you know die and that it might also give you an edge to undermine competitors by pointing out their transphobia so could you just talk about do you see any of this as pure cynical self-interest yeah i mean my my old phd advisor he's he's very much uh how do i say this the best way he likes to climb ladders socially and he very much he was a he was a flamboyant gay man and he very much just sort of rode the transwave i think when he applied to his university he just put they them pronouns in there because no one's going to question this you know sort of flamboyant gay guy about their pronouns and stuff and um he put pronouns it up all the stuff i he even told me that he was doing this for that reason and he ended up getting like this really big job in at a canadian university so it works uh for sure i think a lot of people they might just do it just to stay under the radar you know they just put put the pronouns up just keep your head down and they can just sort of weather the storm um but there are a lot of true believers i mean i think my my old colleagues a lot of them anyway um i think they truly believe it now or at least it's just easier to convince yourself that it's there's a nugget of truth there and that it's not as bad as you think it is just because they have no choice when they're when they're in this environment they just they have to sort of double down on this it's the way you get grants it's the way you uh publish papers and get collaborations so it's hard to operate outside that that system okay yes thank you for your courage and i think we understand where the name reality's last stand comes from thank you so much dr wright

Channel: ICONS - Independent Council on Women's Sports

Views: 220,448

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Id: 5-rhLH5lYi4

Length: 43min 4sec (2584 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022