We are sharing this detailed article for our readers interest. We reprint it from Left Horizons UK. It was originally published by James Robb on his blog here. Feel free to comment as readers here can learn more about this issue but it might be best to also publish it on his blog.
With law changes pending in the UK, New Zealand and other places
that will make it simpler for people to change the sex marker on their
birth certificates (and moves in the opposite direction apparently being
discussed in the US government circles), scientists have waded into the
debate on transgender ideology. They are not shy about waving about
their scientific credentials as they attempt to answer what is
fundamentally a political rather than a scientific question. And in
doing so, they are not only joining an assault on women’s rights, but
also doing a great disservice to scientific thinking. You don’t have to
be a scientific expert to see this.
 |
| Dr Siouxsie Wiles |
Siouxsie Wiles is an Associate Professor in Molecular Medicine and
Pathology at Auckland University, who popularises scientific ideas in
various media including Radio New Zealand and Stuff. She published an
article on Stuff 26 November is headed
Sex chromosomes more complicated than XY and XX.
After a brief discussion of the fact that there are people whose sex
chromosomes do not correspond to the typical XX or XY norm, Wiles says,
“In other words, the reality is that people don’t fit into two neat
categories [male and female – JR], and sometimes, they know they don’t
fit the sex they were assigned at birth.”
The word
‘assigned’ is a poor choice of word here, with its
implication that the person doing the ‘assigning’ has some influence
over the baby’s sex, or some choice in the matter. In fact, the baby’s
sex is
observed and recorded, based on the evidence available
to the doctor or midwife who makes the record (the evidence being,
usually, the outward appearance of the infant’s genitalia). This is how
scientific knowledge proceeds. The midwife might make a mistake or
misread the evidence, but such a mistake would not alter the child’s sex
in any way. The child’s sex is decided by
nature, not by any human act of ‘assigning.’
 |
Modern
science rests on materialist conception, that the material world
exists
independently of human perceptions. Dinosaurs lived and died long before there were any humans in existence to perceive them.
|
Modern science rests on the assumption that the material world exists
independently of human perception of it. For example, over a period of a
hundred million years, the dinosaurs lived, foraged, ate, fought,
reproduced sexually, then declined and vanished to extinction – and all
this happened many millions of years before there were any human beings
to perceive their existence, let alone assign a sex to any individual
dinosaur.
The task of science is to discover the facts of the material world and its laws of motion. This is consistent with the
materialist
conception of existence and the materialist theory of knowledge matter
precedes mind. The opposite of materialism is the idealist conception,
which places thought or spirit as primary, and sees the material world
as an imperfect reflection of the spirit. The idealist conception was
encapsulated by Rene Descartes in the aphorism “I think, therefore I
am.”
For a scientist to depart from the materialist conception today puts
them on dangerous ground scientifically. The materialist foundations of
science are under threat from the politics of gender interfering in the
science of sex, in particular, by the drive to find scientific
justification for including some biological males in the category of
‘women.’ The consequences for scientific thinking are dire. And
Professor Wiles is not alone in this, as we shall see. The
sex of a baby is observed, and on that basis, social roles – gender –
are assigned. Conflation of sex and gender are at the heart of the
debate, and these scientists are adding to the confusion.
But first, let us return to the new-born baby. At the instant the
baby’s sex is recognised, society also imposes on the baby – ‘assigns,’
if you like –
a social role pertaining to that sex. From birth,
male and female babies are treated differently, subjected to different
expectations and different social conditioning – this is sometimes
symbolised by wrapping the newborn in clothing that is pink for girls
and blue for boys. This
social role goes by the term ‘gender’
in current usage, although that is a fairly recent use of the word. The
second-wave feminist writers of the 1960s and 70s generally used the
term ‘sex roles’ to describe this phenomenon, and had that term been
adhered to, much confusion could have been avoided.
Confusion between sex and gender, between objective biological fact
and the social consequences of that fact, lies at the heart of this
discussion and makes the issues unusually difficult to disentangle.
Even
relatively careful journalists, such as those at the
New York Times,
when covering the debate on changing the sex designation on birth
certificates and related issues, frequently refer to this as changing
one’s
gender, or use the terms sex and gender interchangeably.
It is not gender but sex that is recorded on a birth certificate. I
have looked at many examples of birth certificates from many different
countries, and every one I have seen lists ‘sex’ not ‘gender.’ It is
possible that in some jurisdictions there may have been recent changes
in this regard that I am not aware of – if anyone can show me a birth
certificate that records gender, I would be interested to see it. But
irrespective of what is written on the birth certificate – I repeat –
the
sex of a baby is not decided by any conscious human action, but by nature.
Having confused sex and gender, our scientists then proceed to lay
out the biological case for more than two sexes, and to slip in
non-biological criteria for determining sex.
Siouxsie Wiles tackles the first task, focusing on chromosomes.
“What
we learned in school science classes [is that] humans come as males or
females. Of our 46 chromosomes, two are the sex chromosomes: XY for
male, XX for female. Simple. As with most things in life, it turns out
to be a little more complicated than that. Some people are born with a
single sex chromosome (X or Y), and others with three or more (XXX, XYY,
XXY, and so on) … Because of this, the Government is proposing to make
it easier for people to change the sex recorded on their birth
certificate to reflect how they know they truly are [my emphasis – JR], whether that’s as the opposite sex, intersex, or an unspecified sex.”
There are many errors, and equally important omissions, in these
lines – to begin with, the proposed law changes don’t just apply to
people with atypical chromosomes. The
video that
accompanies the article, on which Wiles seems to be basing her
argument, only confuses matters further.
“A lot of biological,
sociological and psychological factors go into the definitions of man or
woman, or neither” says one of the smug talking heads in the video,
thereby explicitly conflating the biological category of sex with the
social category of gender, while leaving these
‘factors’ conveniently
vague and undefined.
They continue,
“So really, biological sex is not
black or white because there are so many different variables going into
it that are not necessarily correlated with one another. … Which is why
there is good evidence to say that there are more than two biological
sexes.”
Thus, having invoked the ‘sociological and psychological factors,’
they return to draw conclusions in the realm of biology. In other words,
sociology and psychology determine biology. It is honestly hard to
believe that this video comes from a website that claims to promote
science, and that a science professor like Wiles bases her arguments
upon it.
A similar argument is made in this article in
Time on
October 23 by Elizabeth Reis, a professor of gender and bioethics at
the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York.
“Sex is not so
binary as we have assumed. A small but substantial portion of the
population is born with intersex traits, including atypical sex
development and sometimes genital and chromosomal ambiguity….
chromosomes aren’t the perfect sex markers we might think. Only fairly
recently have we been able to see that chromosomes do not define a
person’s “true” sex, if we insist on seeing sex as a simple male-female
binary.”
This article by Alexandra Kralick, an anthropology Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, entitled
We Finally Understand That Gender Isn’t Binary. Sex Isn’t, Either was published in Sapiens, then reprinted in Slate and The Atlantic, and has circulated widely on social media
.
“An increasing recognition of this complexity by researchers and the
public has affirmed that gender sits on a spectrum…But underlying all of
this is the perception that no matter the gender a person identifies
as, they have an underlying sex they were born with. This represents a
fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of biological sex. Science
keeps showing us that sex also doesn’t fit in a binary, whether it be
determined by genitals, chromosomes, hormones, or bones (which are the
subject of my research).
Kralick continues:
“The perception of a hard-and-fast separation
between the sexes started to disintegrate during the second wave of
feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. In the decades that followed, we
learned that about 1.7 percent of babies are born with intersex traits;
that behavior, body shape, and size overlap significantly between the
sexes, and both men and women have the same circulating hormones; and
that there is nothing inherently female about the X chromosome.
Biological realities are complicated. People living their lives as women
can be found, even late in life, to be XXY or XY…
“For generations, the false perception that there are two distinct
biological sexes has had many negative indirect effects… The famous
cases of strong, athletic, and audacious female athletes who have had
their careers derailed by the Olympic “gender tests” exemplify how
misguided it is to classify sex or gender as binary. These women are,
like all of us, part of a sex spectrum, not a sex binary. The more we as
a society recognize that, the less we will humiliate and unnecessarily
scrutinize people—and the less discriminatory our world will be.”
And a final example: the
statement signed by more than 2,600 scientists in the United States protesting a proposal apparently being circulated by the US Department of Health and Human Services and
presumed to indicate US President Trump’s policy intentions in respect to transgender rights. A leaked memo outlining these proposals was
described in the New York Times. (It should be noted that the Trump administration has not made any official statement on the matter).
The scientists say,
“…The proposed policy seeks to erase the
identities of millions of Americans who identify as transgender
(individuals whose gender identification differs from their assigned sex
at birth) or have intersex bodies (individuals with biologically
atypical patterns of male and female traits). In transgender
individuals, the existence and validity of a distinct gender identity is
supported by a number of neuroanatomical studies. Though scientists are
just beginning to understand the biological basis of gender identity,
it is clear that many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex
links between identity, genes, and anatomy.”
Let us critically examine these arguments.
At face value, the statement by Reis (and echoed by Kralick and
Wiles) that
“chromosomes aren’t the perfect sex markers we might think”
is true enough. However, they draw false conclusions from this because
of a failure to distinguish between genotype and phenotype, between the
genetic ‘information’ influencing sex and the actual physical form of
sex. Chromosome arrangement is one of the primary mechanisms determining
sex in an individual, but not the only one. Hormones also play a major
role, and these are
not all governed by genes on the X or Y chromosomes. The
outcome of sex determination, the sex of a human being, is the
form of the reproductive tract. There are only male and female forms. Intersex conditions commonly result in incompletely developed sex organs, but
even among the small percentage of the population who have atypical chromosome arrangements and intersex conditions,
ambiguity of the reproductive organs is rare.
Maria
José MartínezPatiño,Olympic hurdler unfairly disqualified and humiliated by sex verification policies at the time. Her own account can
be read
here.
The existence of atypical chromosomes among people who are unaware of
it proves only that chromosomes are an imperfect predictor of sex, not
that a multiplicity of sexes exists. The case cited at the beginning of
Kralick’s article, of a female athlete, Maria José Martínez-Patiño, who
was unfairly disqualified and humiliated because she turned out to have
XY chromosomes, proves the folly of relying too rigidly on chromosome
configuration as a marker for sex. It does not at all prove Kralick’s
claim that “[it is] misguided to classify sex … as binary.”
Distinct sexes arose in natural history as a condition of sexual
reproduction. Everywhere in nature that sexual reproduction occurs, in
both plants and animals, the process of sexual reproduction involves
recombining
matching pairs of chromosomes, one element of the
pair from the male, the other from the female. A pair can only be
created from two elements. There is no form of sexual reproduction known
which involves more or less than two sexes. Sexual reproduction is
universally binary.
The process of splitting, replicating and pairing chromosomes is a
physical one, and consequently, an imperfect process, not without
occasional ‘errors’ that result in missing or extra copies of
chromosomes or parts of chromosomes, including the sex chromosomes. Some
of these atypical chromosome conditions have little effect, others
cause developmental disabilities, endocrine disorders, and in the case
of extra or missing sex chromosomes, sterility. The fact that all three
scientists quoted here, Wiles, Kralick and Reis, neglect to mention that
many people born with sex chromosomes other than the typical XX or XY
pattern have some kind of developmental and/or reproductive disability,
and often lifelong health problems, is disingenuous to say the least.
The point here is that people with intersex conditions or atypical
chromosomes do not constitute additional sexes. They are the exceptions
that prove the rule of two sexes.
Nor is it a new discovery that the line separating the two sexes is indistinct.
Stephen Jay Gould 1941-2002. photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that
of all the many questions his readers wrote to him to ask about, one
little oddity of nature stood out as the most frequently asked question:
male nipples. Why is it that male humans (and the males of other mammal
species) have nipples? What function do they serve, when only the
female lactates?
1
The puzzle of the male nipples is an old one. Gould quotes a
discussion of the subject in the eighteenth century by Erasmus Darwin,
grandfather of the father of evolution, as well as speculations by the
ancient philosopher Plato that
“mankind with all the other animals were
originally hermaphrodites during the infancy of the world, and were in
process of time separated into male and female.”
Gould explains the puzzle in this way:
“Males and females are not
separate entities, shaped independently by natural selection. Both sexes
are variants upon a single ground plan, elaborated in later embryology.
Male mammals have nipples because females need them – and the embryonic
pathway to their development builds precursors in all mammalian
foetuses, enlarging the breasts later in females but leaving them small
(and without evident function) in males.”
In the very young embryo, he explains, it is very difficult to
distinguish the sexes at all by outward appearance, even after the sex
organs develop. The reason is because the sex organs develop as
homologous pairs: the male penis and the female clitoris are
indistinguishable, until later in the male embryo’s development the
penis is enlarged by the action of testosterone. Similarly, the tissues
that form the labia majora in females are also present in the male
embryo; in the male they later enlarge, fold over and fuse in the
centre, forming the scrotal sac.
Similarly with the hormones that are central to sexual development:
males have not only the ‘male’ hormone testosterone, but also the
‘female’ hormone oestrogen, which performs some essential functions in
the male body. Likewise, females have oestrogen, but also testosterone.
The complex interactions of these hormones and others in both men and
women result in wide variations in the secondary sex characteristics,
including body shape, facial and body hair, and so on, that give the
appearance of a continuum of variation in secondary sex characteristics
between the sexes. (Kralick’s statement that
“both men and women have
the same circulating hormones” is an over-simplification of this
situation. Both sexes have both hormones, but in different proportions.)
2
But none of this ‘blurriness’ between males and females contradicts
the division into two and only two distinct sexes. In dialectical terms,
this blurriness is known as the interpenetration of opposites, and it
is the
norm for complex entities in nature and human society. The interpenetration of opposites does not annihilate distinct categories.
This can perhaps be seen more easily by looking at some analogies
from biology, sociology, and medical science that are less politically
and emotionally charged than the present discussion.
Within
the single species of tigers, there are distinct sub-species,
geographically separated, which could in time evolve into separate
species. Graphic: WWF
The concept of species is central to biology. Yet the boundaries of a
species are often blurry – not only are no two individual organisms
within the species identical, but in many species more or less
clearly-defined sub-species exist, which might over time separate to
become distinct species. Up until the recent extinction of most of them,
distinct subspecies of tigers existed on each of the main islands of
the Indonesian archipelago, as well as on the Asian mainland. Tigers and
lions can mate to produce infertile, and sometimes even fertile,
hybrid offspring.
Were it not for such variation within the species and ‘blurriness’ of
species boundaries, the process of evolution would grind to a halt.
The
Darwinian theory of evolution takes as its starting point such random
variations within a species. We recognise that the boundaries of a
species are not ‘hard-and-fast.’
Yet we do not dispense with the concept of species on that account. There is not a continuum of felines. There are lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, lynx, and so on.
The binary distinction between adult and child is important in human
society. Yet every adult human being alive has gone through a phase
where they were not quite child, not quite adult. Growing to maturity is
a complex and contradictory process. It is impossible to determine the
exact moment when any child becomes adult; there are many transitional
states. Does it follow, then, that the distinction between adult and
child is a ‘
false binary,’ and therefore we should, say, abolish
age-of-consent laws, children’s courts, and other protections for
children?
3
In medical practice, it is important to be able to distinguish
between a living patient and a dead one. But this is not necessarily
‘black and white,’ to borrow an expression from Wiles’s video. On the
one hand, in patients that are most definitely alive, some cells in
their bodies – the outermost layer of skin cells, for example, are
constantly in a state of dying and decay. On the other hand, it is not
uncommon for a dying patient to become suspended, sometimes for an
extended period, between life and death, with some of their organs
effectively dead, others still functioning, still others functioning but
dependent on life support machines. Does this interpenetration of life
and death mean that the distinction between life and death should be
discarded as a ‘false binary’? Does it prove a “fundamental
misunderstanding about the nature of biological death?” (to adapt a
phrase from the Kralick article above).
Would it clarify thinking about
this situation to postulate some third state of being, for an organism
that is neither living nor dead, or a spectrum of states? Obviously not.
There are good reasons why medical personnel who switch off
life-support equipment are not charged with murder.
Georg
Wilhelm Hegel in 1831. Hegel developed the logic of evolution and
revolution known as dialectics. Portrait by Jacob Schlesinger
The false reasoning which assumes that hard-and-fast, black-and-white
categories are the only valid ones, and that therefore the existence of
transitional and intermediate forms constitutes evidence that the
categories don’t exist, is called formal logic. The limitations of
formal logic are illustrated by these analogies, as well as by the false
arguments against the binary nature of sex put forward by the
scientists in this discussion. Dialectical logic looks at things in
motion, their origins, development, and eventual negation. Dialectics is
the logic of evolution and revolution. It brings human thought into
closer correspondence with the constant motion and transformations of
things in the real world.
All these scientists accept that transgender people “know [what] they
truly are, whether that’s … the opposite sex, intersex, or an
unspecified sex” (quoting Wiles). One might ask, how can a scientist be
sure that transgender people know what sex they truly are? What
verifiable evidence is there to support this knowledge, if this
knowledge contradicts the evidence of their physical bodies?
The only such evidence offered by any of these articles and statements is
a few studies
of those parts of the human brain that vary in size between males and
females. Size of these parts, an overview study claims, correlates more
closely to ‘gender identity’ than to biological sex. One need only read
the abstract of this study to see that it is highly tentative, indirect
evidence, and there is also contrary evidence in the study itself. This
is inconclusive, to say the least, and the video attached to the Wiles
article concedes that.
Clearly, the acceptance of such ‘knowledge of the sex they truly are’
by these scientists rests not on such tentative studies, but rather on
the expressions of feeling by the transgender people making the claims
and on
the stated desire of the scientists to affirm them.
Confronted with the lack of reliable scientific evidence, the scientists
fall back on the argument that since the biology of sex is so very,
very complicated, we have to rely on the evidence of the feelings
expressed by transgender people themselves. As the letter of the 2,600
scientists phrases it,
“Though scientists are just beginning to
understand the biological basis of gender identity, it is clear that
many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex links between
identity, genes, and anatomy…[therefore] affirmation of gender identity
is paramount to the survival, health, and livelihood of transgender and
intersex people.” But affirmation of something for which the scientists
themselves admit there is little scientific evidence is a dangerous leap
of faith.
Feelings of being born in the
‘wrong body’ are unverifiable, no
matter how strongly felt and expressed. They do not constitute
scientific evidence of objective material reality. Thus, with
affirmations like this, scientific method flies out the window, and the
scientists depart from the world of materialist science altogether. By
accepting such ‘knowledge of the truth,’ these scientists are, perhaps
unwittingly, passing from materialist science over into the realm of
mind-over-matter idealism. “
I think I am a woman, therefore I am a
woman” is the purest kind of idealist thought. On such grounds one could
make equally valid scientific arguments that sincere religious
believers know the true nature of God.
I dispute neither the sincerity, nor the strength of feeling, nor the
degree of mental and emotional distress suffered by people who claim to
have been born in the ‘wrong body.’ These are things that I am not in a
position to judge. It is not my wish to prolong anyone’s distress.
However, I don’t accept that overthrowing the established facts of
biological science can provide anything other than illusory relief from
this suffering, and for scientists to ‘affirm’ this course can only do
more harm than good.
In affirming ‘transgender identity,’ these scientists bind themselves
to affirm the central idea that the category ‘women’ is a term that
describes a gender rather than a sex, and therefore that it can include
biological males,
4 overturning a central fact of biological
science in the process. Many proponents of transgender ideology insist
on using a special term for adult human females, cis-women (a term which
also excludes women who transition to male gender), or even a separate
word that does not include the word ‘women’ at all, such as
‘menstruators’ and ‘uterus-havers.’ Contemptible and offensive as this
may be, it is the logical corollary of adopting the gender-definition of
the word ‘women.’ The de-humanising of biological women is its
necessary consequence.
Mudskipper
getting a breath of air and a taste for the terrestrial life –
recognisably a fish, but already in transition to non-fish. Photo:
James Robb
One of the laws of dialectics is the law of negation: Everything that
exists eventually turns into its opposite – even when, for a time, the
outward appearance may have changed little. Thus the seed is negated by
the bud, the bud by the flower, the flower by the seed. The aquatic,
gill-breathing fish is transformed by evolution into a non-fish, a
lung-breathing terrestrial quadruped – though in the first stages of
this transformation, it is still recognisably a fish. Dead
revolutionaries are resurrected by their enemies as harmless reformists.
The greatest working class revolution of the twentieth century, the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia, transformed into the most monstrous
counter-revolution against the working class of the twentieth century –
though the regime which carried out the counter-revolution still flew
the same banner of communism as the revolution it overthrew.
Transgender ideology also supplies an interesting example of the law of negation.
In a discussion with a friend about the fallacy of using the
gender-definition of ‘women’, my friend
 |
| Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986 |
responded that this was the
definition used by the pioneer feminist of the second wave, Simone de
Beauvoir, and referred me to the famous quote from the beginning of the
first chapter, where she writes
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman.”
This quote is used by the academic Judith Butler in a
1986 essay entitled Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex,
and it is Butler who initiates the negation. It is interesting to
follow her reasoning. Butler writes,
“Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation
distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of
identity gradually acquired. The distinction between sex and gender has
been crucial to the long-standing feminist effort to debunk the claim
that anatomy is destiny… With the distinction intact, it is no longer
possible to attribute the values or social functions of women to
biological necessity, and neither can we refer meaningfully to natural
or unnatural gendered behaviour: all gender is, by definition,
unnatural.
Moreover, if the distinction is consistently applied, it
becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any consequence for
becoming a given gender… the female body is the arbitrary locus of the
gender ‘woman’ and there is no reason to preclude the possibility of
that body becoming the locus of other constructions of gender… with the
consequence that ‘being’ female and ‘being’ a woman are two very
different sorts of being. This last insight, I would suggest, is the
distinguished contribution of Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation, “one is
not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Behind the wall of impenetrable academic language a crude
sleight-of-hand has been performed: Butler has turned de Beauvoir into
an apostle of the gender-definition of ‘woman.’ The very thing that de
Beauvoir fought to destroy has become the definition of ‘being a woman.’
This is a frame-up!
De Beauvoir’s own definition of women is indicated clearly enough in the title of her book – the book is called The Second
Sex,
not the second gender. No one who has even the shallowest acquaintance
with the book could misunderstand the intention behind de Beauvoir’s
formulation: the entire book is an impassioned protest against the
oppressive gender roles
imposed on women by men:
“her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
For Butler to claim that
“it becomes unclear whether being a given
sex has any consequence for becoming a given gender” rips women out of
the historical context – the ‘great historical defeat of the female sex’
that de Beauvoir laboured to bring to light. To transform de
Beauvoir’s protest against the gender roles imposed on the female sex
into the idea that “‘being’ female and ‘being’ a woman are two very
different sorts of being” is not just a misinterpretation, it is … a
negation. The dead feminist fighter has been resurrected as a liberal
academic professor of ‘gender studies.’
 |
| Gender
ideology banner in the sex-stereotyping colours of link and blue. Trans
rights demonstration, University of Minnesota, 8 November 2018. Photo:
Courtney Deutz, Minnesota Daily |
The final step of the transformation is to raise the gender roles
themselves from a form of oppression to a political identity in the
pantheon of identity politics. Is this any different from other
political identities that are formed out of dispossession and
oppression, such as Black nationalism in the US, or Gay pride? Yes it
is: Black nationalist and Gay pride identities championed the humanity
of the oppressed groups in the fight against their particular forms of
oppression. Gender-identity, on the other hand, champions the oppression
itself. It is not by accident that on its banner are emblazoned the
twin colours of sex-stereotyping, pink and blue.
With transgender ideology, the same fate of negation befalls the
ideology of two great (and connected) social liberation movements of
forty years ago, the women’s liberation and gay rights movements. The
liberating ideas which taught us to celebrate our physical bodies and
sexuality
as they are, and to fight to break down the
oppressive feminine and masculine gender roles imposed on the sexes (and
most heavily on women) are transformed into their opposite: In
transgender ideology,
gender is taken as fixed and unchangeable, the very definition of womanhood. This ideology teaches that
physical bodies must be altered to fit the perceived gender, through the use of hormones and surgery.
A clearer example of dialectical negation would be hard to find. The
teachings of the movement which brought women to centre stage,
proclaimed their humanity, and insisted that biology was not women’s
destiny, is transformed into a set of ideas which marginalise and
de-humanise them, rob them of the title ‘women’ and reduce them to their
sexual organs and biological functions as ‘menstruators’ and
‘uterus-havers.’
This will not be the end of the matter. The negation is also negated
in its turn. And while the negation of second-wave feminism has taken
place in the realm of ideas, the stage is being set for a renewed
political
struggle of women fighting in the streets for their emancipation, and
this is most likely where the negation of the negation will be fought
out. For women do still exist, and as the true character and scope of
the ideological assault on them becomes clear, they will assert their
humanity in ways that will surpass the earlier waves of struggle for
women’s equality in their breadth, depth and force.
Capitalist society, meanwhile, is entering a phase in which it
devours its own children, destroying not just the institutions of
bourgeois democracy that formed the bedrock of its rule in an earlier
period, but also its own cultural conquests, including the forms of
thought on which bourgeois science has depended throughout the
capitalist epoch. For about the last four hundred years, science has
rested on a materialist outlook, albeit a kind of pragmatic,
semi-conscious materialism. Who would have guessed a decade ago that
there would be 2600 scientists in the United States willing to sign a
petition declaring that the category of ‘women’ includes men? That it
would be necessary in the third millennium of the Common Era to defend
the idea that women are adult female human beings, and that they do
indeed exist?
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Engels argued
that science could make great advances if it could integrate into
scientific thinking a conscious materialism in place of the largely
unconscious and muddled materialism that prevailed, and dialectical
thinking in place of the fixed categories of formal logic
5.
With a few exceptions (which included the founders of quantum physics in
the early twentieth century, and some evolutionary biologists of the
1930s in the UK and USSR) little progress was made along those lines.
Now it seems that without such tools of thought as conscious materialism
and dialectics, science is driven abruptly into reverse.
Footnotes
- See the essay ‘Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples,’ in Gould’s Bully for Brontosaurus.
Stephen Jay Gould was one of the few bourgeois scientists who did
understand the dialectic of nature– albeit that his understanding was
still mostly an unconscious one, developed out of a deep understanding
of Darwinian evolution rather than a study of logic. His essays on
Alfred Kinsey’s taxonomy of wasps, Of Wasps and WASPs (which
endorses Kinsey’s rejection of the essentialist view of species, while
suggesting that Kinsey went too far in seeing only a continuum of
variation), on the Portuguese Man-o-war, A Most Ingenious Paradox
(describing the nineteenth-century controversy over whether this
organism is an individual or a colony), his essays on the politics of
science, and many others, are outstanding examples of dialectical and
materialist thinking. They are a great place to study and learn the
dialectic today. In my opinion, the best introduction to dialectics in
general is An introduction to the Logic of Marxism, by George Novack.
- Some scientists reject the idea that the hormones testosterone and
estrogen are inherently ‘male’ and ‘female’ hormones respectively, and
argue instead that it is their respective proportions in the body that
create the conditions of maleness and femaleness. I have some sympathy
for this proposition, but don’t know enough about the science to have an
opinion of my own on it.
- Let me make a prediction: the advance guard of the advocates of
‘transgender rights’ will make such an argument in relation to
age-of-consent laws, if it has not already happened.
- Even if one is inclined to accept this ‘gender definition’ of
‘women,’ it would still be necessary to answer the question: On whom is
this gender role imposed? Circular definitions such as ‘a woman is
anyone who thinks they are a woman’ don’t address this at all. The
biological basis of womanhood cannot be evaded. The only possible
scientific definition of ‘woman’ is ‘an adult human female,’ as it
always has been.
- Engels’ Dialectic of Nature comes down to us as an unedited
collection of notes, some of which refer to now-obscure questions of
science, but large parts of it are brilliant.
