subramaniam

🧵1/4 A Harvard professor has just published a glowing review of Yale Professor Agustín Fuentes’ new book, Sex is a Spectrum, in The Lancet—one of the highest-ranked, most prestigious medical journals in the world. In it, she asserts that the “gametic definition” of sex—roughly, that there are two sexes, defined by whether the organism produces sperm (male) or eggs (female)—is not only “harmful,” but also “sophistry, not science.” (Lancet piece is below.) I hold the gametic view. To the best of my knowledge, this is the view held by most evolutionary biologists. The author of the review has different ideas, and quotes approvingly from Fuentes’ book on the nature of sex: “sex is a biocultural construct. Gamete size represents but one of multiple components and developmental processes—including gonads, hormones, genitals, fertility, mating, parenting behaviour, secondary sexual characteristics, and gender identity.” People disagree about the nature of male and female, and that’s OK. Respectful disagreement among scholars should be encouraged; it often sharpens thinking and research. But The Lancet review goes well beyond disagreement about the facts, and exemplifies one of the main reasons Harvard is being targeted by the government. Nobody wants to be called hateful or bigoted (especially by faculty with fancy endowed professorships), or even tainted by close proximity to views that could be construed that way. But not only has the Harvard professor disagreed with the gametic view, she apparently feels free to publicly impugn the ostensible motives and character of those who endorse it. Without providing any evidence, she asserts that our view is motivated (at least in part) by political aims, and harmful ones. As she wrote in The Lancet: “Although the gametic definition makes reference to biological systems, it is sophistry, not science. Those who promote this definition favour the assertion that sex inheres in gamete (sperm and egg) production because, in part, it facilitates their political aims by fuelling unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles.” She praises Fuentes for recognizing scientists’ “responsibility to respond to harmful deployments of inaccurate, overly simplistic, and reductionist science by those attempting to naturalise and depoliticise their hateful views.” And last, there’s the link between those who hold the gametic view and bigots: “Like scientific bigots of yore—such as the anthropologist J McGrigor Allan, who in 1869 pronounced in the Journal of Anthropological Science that, ‘Thousands of years have amply demonstrated the mental supremacy of man, and any attempt to revolutionize the education and status of women on the assumption of an imaginary sexual equality, would be at variance with the normal order of things’—the recent favour bestowed on the gametic definition of sex by anti-trans gender traditionalists appeals selectively to science to naturalise and rationalise inequality and exclusion.” The subtext is that in science, simply following the evidence is ill-advised if you (or others who have power over you) think it will lead to social harms. What kind of person would want to hold, let alone give voice to such harmful views as the gametic one?