WSJ: No Sex ‘Spectrum’ Beyond Male and Female
by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.The Wall Street Journal has issued a throwdown to the gender lobby, insisting in an op-ed Thursday that sex is binary and there is no “spectrum.”
“In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time,” note biologists Colin M. Wright and Emma N. Hilton. “The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova.”
“No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex ‘spectrum’ or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary,” they assert.
As the American College of Pediatricians concurred in 2016, the exceedingly rare disorders of sex development “are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design. Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.”
The WSJ writers are responding to what they call a “dangerous and anti-scientific trend toward the outright denial of biological sex,” which sees male and female as “arbitrary groupings.”
While sexual ambiguity does occasionally occur, the authors note, “intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a ‘spectrum’ or a ‘social construct.’”
The WSJ essay echoes concerns increasingly being voiced that modern society has rushed into a dangerous social experiment based on less than flimsy scientific foundations.
“The concept of changing one’s biological sex is, of course, nonsense, as sex is determined by unalterable chromosomes,” wrote researcher Jane Robbins for Public Discourse last October. “An individual can change his hormone levels and undergo surgery to better imitate the opposite sex, but a male on the day of his conception will remain a male on the day of his death.”
The problem with this ideologically driven approach to human sexuality is more than academic, because it often results in real-life damage to the most vulnerable members of society, Thursday’s op-ed argues.
This includes opening female-only spaces and women’s sports to biological males and trampling laws that safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace.
“The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce,” the writers note.
Those most likely to be seriously hurt by such “sex denialism” are children, the op-ed contends, since secondary sexual characteristics such as voice, mannerisms, and personality type can be seen as more gender-defining than the person’s biological phenotype.
The American College of Pediatricians has pulled no punches in condemning this behavior, calling hormone treatment and surgical operations on children with gender dysphoria “child abuse.”
“The time for politeness on this issue has passed,” the authors conclude. “Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex.”
When certain scientific institutions betray their mandate by abandoning empirical fact in favor of ideology, it is time for real science to take a stand.