Biological Sex & The Gender Agenda

 

It's probably high time we had a chat about what's been going on in society in terms of individual identity, especially around sex and gender, because you are not going to hear it in many places in the UK right now, and very few people are telling the truth; the politicians aren't, most people in business and industry aren't, many in the education sectors aren't, and the people most aggressively pushing this agenda certainly aren't. The half-truths and outright distortions to which society has become subjected are creating a very messy, anxious landscape, where numerous onlookers are committing the great sin of omission in quietly not accepting this stuff, but finding themselves intimidated into silence. And it's that silence that is allowing the air waves to be filled with a highly dubious discourse that is likely to get a lot worse before it might start to get better. Despite what loud voices in society have been saying about sex and gender, I think a much-needed reality check would reveal the following things about sex and gender. We'll start with sex (if you give your consent), and then come on to gender.

Sex
Evolution is a long and complex story, and quite a few organisms don’t conform to the standard male or female categorisations. But for humans (and all mammals), biological sex is mostly bimodal, which means there are 2 peaks in the distribution, but that there are off-peak exhibitions too. Think of the traffic congestion in the city as an illustration. Traffic follows a bimodal distribution in that most cars are on the road and congested at 2 peak times of the day (the morning and evening rush hours). Sex is similarly bimodal (even more so, in fact) in that most people are either at the male or female peaks, but there are some rare, anomalous cases that depart from the standard categories. It is in those individual cases where we require further consideration when it comes to people’s claims about their sex.

For those who would find it useful, here's a simple biology recap: sex is largely determined by gametes and chromosomes. A gamete is a reproductive cell of an animal or plant (female gametes are called ova or egg cells, and male gametes are called sperm). Chromosomes are structures at the nucleus of cells that contain genes. Men and women both have 46 chromosomes (with 2 sex chromosomes). Women have 2 X chromosomes, and men have 1 X chromosome and 1 Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is dominant, and causes the formation of male biological apparatus. XX and XY differences also engender the variances in hormones (principally oestrogen and testosterone), and these bring out most of the physiological and biological differences between males and females.

In mammals, the male primary sexual traits (lack of womb, penis, testicles, etc) are adaptations of the female ground state – because although sex is determined at the point of fertilisation, the embryo begins with the female anatomy until the Y chromosome’s SRY gene (what they call the "male-determining gene,") initiates the transition to the formation of male genitalia. Given that in our early our pre-mammalian legacy, ancestors lacked the same male and female sexual differentiation, and had sexual reproduction but not differentiation between siblings by sexual reproduction, some of that evolutionary story remains in our genes – and that is why there are occasional genetic anomalies or developmental partial reversions in the development of the sexes, affecting some people in terms of a clearly differentiated male or female sex. That’s when we’re likely to see the untypical off-peak secondary sexual traits (pubic hair, facial hair, vocal development, muscle mass, hip size, etc) after a chain of genetic events, and in those occurrences, some sense in which males or females feel at odds with their sex of birth.

Consequently, despite the bimodal male/female peaks, there are still a significant number of people with XXY and other chromosomal mixes and people who are XX or XY, but with primary and/or secondary physical characteristics usually seen with the other chromosomal type, especially as many sexual traits are carried on both X and Y chromosomes. So if, for example, the double X fails to block Y traits, a person may have an XX karyotype (the set of chromosomes in the cells) but a more masculine expression too. The reality is, almost everyone is biologically male or female, but a small minority of people are born with untypical reproductive organs, what you might call intersex (but they are very very rare in human populations). Occasionally, people are born that don't fit the binary category, with what is called congenital chimerism. This condition occurs through the fertilisation of two separate ova by two sperm, followed by aggregation of the two at the blastocyst or zygote stages. This results in the development of an organism with intermingled cell lines.

Many people will try to have you believe that because gene mutations result in chromosomal irregularities (departing from the standard XX and XY) and anomalous hormonal signalling, that sex has a highly dubious categorical status in biology - but that is pushing things a little too far. Even in the rare cases when an individual's anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal sex, that usually doesn't mean one is intersex - people generally identify with how they primarily express anatomically and feel perfectly comfortable doing so. The fact that there are a wide range of variations in genes that have mild effects on individuals does not, in my view, equate to the person's sex needing to be re-categorised. It’s not possible to have fully functional and complete male and female genitalia, because male organs are expressed a few weeks after the initial formation of crude female genitalia, and there are no mammals with two complete sets of genes for fully formed versions of both male and female reproductive organs.

It's true that very occasionally too little or too much of the male or female sex hormone can affect the development of reproductive organs, making sex a fuzzier category of definition. I don't doubt that this is a difficult condition into which one can be born, where too much oestrogen or testosterone has been exposed to a foetus in-utero, or when mutations trigger the wrong amount of a sex hormone being produced. But in the vast majority of cases concerning everyone who has ever lived, the sex of a person is clearly and comprehensively demarcated, and most people haven't the slightest trouble living as a biological man or as a biological woman.

Of course, we should be highly sympathetic and tolerant and loving towards people who don't express biologically in the expected way. But most individuals are XX (male) or XY (female) with a categorically determined sex, and the attendant primary and secondary physical traits - and as I will elaborate on in a minute, I think there are important aspects to being male or female that we discard or trivialise at our peril. In other words, in the vast majority of cases, I think there is profound truth and utility in owning one's male and female state - and in the exceptional instances where anomalies and malformations occur, we need a carefully thought out case by case consideration with regard to the identity and well-being of the individual in question.

Gender
At this point, we should move on to what I believe the primary issue is about - the human construct we call 'gender'. Gender is a term we've conceived to define masculinity and femininity and the associative socio-personal phenomena in partnership with biological sex. And it is a very problematic concept. We've all observed that some women are more masculine than some men, and some men are more feminine than some women - and that is often heightened when individuals identify as homosexual. We also see that when it comes to secondary sexual traits - hair, vocal development, muscle mass, hip size, etc - that some men are more feminine than masculine, and some women are more masculine than feminine. This happens because evolution is a long and complex story that frequently throws up irregularities that do not conform to the standard categorisations and demarcations we like to attribute. Given the complex genetic influences acting on our phenotype and on our neurological wiring (not to mention complex factors associated with personal identity and psychological manifestations), it is probably expected that in some cases individuals will sense a different internal experience of maleness and femaleness to what they outwardly appear. But I do not think this should mean, as it's currently so often taken to mean, that these individuals need to 'change sex'. As we’ve said, fundamentally, these individuals are still male or female - it's just that the complex spectra associated with individual traits is being disregarded or trivialised in favour of something more societally detrimental, like claims of 'being born in the wrong body', gender fluidity and countless invented pronouns.

To that end, I've never been much of a fan of the word 'gender' - it's a word with too much ambiguity for a civilised definition. When people are not saying the word gender when they really mean sex, they use it to mean something like "the state of being either male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones". But it's not difficult to talk about social or cultural distinctions between males and females, the differences in secondary traits, and indeed concomitant personality differences, without having to use the term gender. Masculine and feminine traits can be categorised individually, and physical differences can be easily delineated, with no real need for the concept of gender as an umbrella term for these aforementioned individual descriptions. I believe the term 'gender' is being grossly abused in modern society. If people are going to be so irresponsible with it, it may be better if we bring about its gradual diminution. Sex is perfectly adequate to describe the biological differences between males and females, and apart from those very rare exceptions I mentioned above, the other distinctions we can make about the differences between sexes are also adequately defined without the need of all this extraneousness of a gender identity that's proclaimed to be different from their sex.

In the minority of cases, it's clear that, from a neuroscientific perspective (and a psychological one), something is happening in the brains of people who seem convinced that they are non-binary, gender-neutral or born in the wrong body. But I suspect the specific male/female traits in the neural architecture are, in fact, simply descriptive properties of humans on or near both peaks of the bimodal distribution, and that we would be wiser to simply accept them as being diverse properties of being either male or female. In other words, we recognise the masculine and feminine traits in the neural architecture as being varied across the spectra of biological male and female sexes (homosexuality, feminine males, masculine females, bigger and stronger females, smaller and weaker males, and so forth) rather than trying to promote a narrative whereby males and females are getting ever more confused about their sex (and confusing the term sex with gender).

On top of all that I’ve said above, there is another ever-proliferating group of people for whom this is having the most detrimental effect – the confused folk on the bimodal male or female peaks on whom a reservoir of social contagion has washed over, making them think that they can hastily choose their sex or gender to reflect their subjective personal feelings about their unique identity. For several years now, people have been taught that their gender is merely a subjective preference that can be chosen at will, and that an essential part of growing up involves making their own decisions about where they fit on the sex-gender spectrum. Ironically, this is an invitation to a freedom that mostly only really ends up creating a more stultified and repressed perspective of reality.

Alas, this is a trend that is all too familiar to us. Just the other day I was with a couple who, without batting an eyelid, casually announced that one of the kids in their daughter's primary school had declared he was born a boy but now wants to be a girl. The way that much of the development of sex and the associative gender identity has gone on to produce the trends we are seeing at the moment is, I think, quite startling, and I believe we should try to put the brakes on this vehicle, especially in the pre-adult stages of life. This tendency is part of a phenomenon in society for which we perhaps need a catchy name. It's one we all recognise; the one where we take a subset of very extreme cases that occur infrequently in society and make it into a mainstream issue that grossly exaggerates its utility and its reality.

Of course, we should listen to our children and try to help them manage the feelings they believe they might be having in what must be a wildly confusing society for them. We should remind them that identity is complex - and all of us who have grown up from childhood through our teenage years to adulthood can testify that there is a lot to unpack and discover regarding a number of knotty areas of puberty, hormones, sexual development, bodily changes and growing pains, as we try to determine who we are, what we believe and what kind of person we are turning into.

But we should help them make sense of the world by teaching them about truths and facts, so that they can develop a proper balanced conception of the world. Because I can assure you that many people are using this issue interchangeably and mischievously for their convenience. Teachers are being instructed to unquestioningly affirm the trans identities of young children, even withholding the information from the child's family if they see fit to do so. And we’ve all seen how fraught society is becoming with men identifying as women to go in women's prisons, men in women's sports, men going in to women's toilets, presenters apologising on TV for refusing to believe false information about the fluidity of sex, professionals getting cancelled or in some cases fired for sticking to their beliefs that there are only 2 biological sexes, children utterly confused about their own sexual identity, hoards of people using sex and gender interchangeably and misunderstanding quite what they mean, and the list goes on. When you have scores of young children saying they have been born in the wrong body or that they are non-binary, it's a sign that society has gone too far in one direction.

Moreover, there is also the very well-established paradox at the heart of this conflict: that if gender is a social construct and we allow people to pick and choose their gender (gender-fluidity), that smacks in the face of the idea of immutable gender, which many are claiming as an inalienable privilege. Most people caught up in this perceived social cause are trying to have it both ways. The facts do not allow for this paradox. The reality is, integration of the sex developmental processes with environmental development gives rise to an individual's unique personality and preferences. And sex-related differences occur largely independently of socio-cultural influences. In fact, when socio-cultural influences diminish in occurrence with greater expression of males and females, the differences between males and females in terms of preferences become more pronounced, not less.

Furthermore, as we've seen above, there are many traits that overlap between the sexes, which means females can show up as extreme in more masculine categories, and males can show up as extreme in more feminine categories. In other words, in some traits, females can appear more male than males, and males can appear more female than females. It is folly to mechanically confuse these masculine and feminine outliers with gender dysphoria or intersexuality. The vast majority of people who have atypical personality profiles are still within the natural distribution of male and female identities - they are not 'born in the wrong body'. In most cases, what is perceived as "gender identity" is part of their personality profile from within a sex category, usually related to masculinity and femininity, but is then confused with one's sex. This is especially relevant in these perceived issues in younger people. What begins as perceived lack of congruity between a person's biological sex and their gender presentation usually gets washed out in maturity, where one becomes clear about one's sex and identity.

There is widespread confusion about the distribution of sex-related personality and behavioural distinctions, and this is creating a crisis of irresponsible teaching. Young children shouldn't be telling us they have been born in the wrong body - but when this happens they should be carefully nurtured towards more facts and greater wisdom, and given time to grow and develop. The trend towards alarmism, pandering to their whims, and worse, irreversible and harmful medical and surgical interventions are a damaging development that needs urgently addressing. The vast majority of men who say they want to identity as women, and women who say they want to identify as men, are making a claim that has no basis in biological or empirical reality. The surge in the attention seeking action of choosing your sex/gender and having preferred pronouns is hugely damaging to our young people, especially young children, and there'll be a huge price paid for this lazy-mindedness.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there is a whole category of experiential elements to the state of being what we loosely call 'intersex' that defy easy categorisation in terms of psychology and emotions. And I'm sure we'll go on to learn even more about those states as we progress in knowledge. But we need to seriously re-think this trajectory we are on, because maleness and femaleness are so inherent in our biology, our physiology, our psychology, our theology and our family structure that I think we start to undermine it at our peril. Maleness and femaleness conform to a Gestalt identity that is far greater than the parts that make up the sum. Whatever the decorative trappings that surround this issue - sexuality, masculinity, femininity, surgery, clothes, looks, attitudes - I do not think there are many people who've ever been born who fall outside of the category of being either a male or a female, with a classification that could not be identified thus with examination and exposure.

The upshot is, gender is a term that has now become so ambiguous, and so far divorced from rigorous empirical evaluations, that folk are proclaiming greater and greater freedom to invent things about themselves that elude scientific or pragmatic scrutiny, and that are too numerous and indefinite to be meaningful. If gender is now proclaimed to be a personal identity that matches your feelings about yourself, then taken to its logical conclusion, there is a gender for every single person alive, rendering the concept defunct. The people who wantonly try to have their way in a gender frenzy of countless quantities have effectively begun to destroy any utility it had left. It's becoming increasingly evident that a society that cannot use a word responsibly, or in a way that has clear unambiguous meaning, is a society that would probably be wise to stop using it altogether, and will likely be compelled to do so anyway by virtue of disabusing it of any real efficacy or service.

Edit to add:

Although we've talked so far about biological sex in terms of a bimodal distribution, there is no issue for me in categorising biological sex as binary. I think it's more helpful to consider it binary but with the odd anomaly, because even those odd anomalies do not depart from the rule that a person is either born male or female. This morning I cycled past a man dressed in women's clothing, and this idea popped in my head about framing the sex and gender issue with a coin tossing illustration. I don't mean in relation to it being a 50/50 chance whether you have a boy or a girl, because the odds are not precisely 50/50 (although they are very close). I mean in relation to whether sex is binary or bimodal. I've explained above why sex technically follows a bimodal distribution, but even a bimodal distribution can be so binary looking that it can, for all intents and purposes, be categorised as binary. This is where the coin tossing illustration may help.

Biological sex is based primarily on gamete production, and the coin either shows heads (male) or tails (female). Very occasionally, a coin lands unevenly, where it's still heads or tails, but it's resting unevenly on another object or leaning slightly up against something. This represents the occasional departure from the standard presentation of gametes, and represents a disability in formation, but it's still always clear whether the coin is showing heads or tails. In this analogy to biology, no coin has ever landed on its rim, whereby you can't tell whether it's a heads (male) or tails (female).

Society is awash with people trying to claim that, even though the coin has clearly landed on heads (or tails), you are compelled to believe them when they say they 'feel' like it really landed on tails (or heads).

Gender incongruence is defined as the term used to describe when your gender is different to when you were born. But that still assumes a definition of gender through which such measurements can be made. To know something is incongruent, you have to have an idea of what congruent is in this context - and I don't when it comes to gender. I'm certainly not trying to gainsay people's individual feelings or internal senses of experiences - I just don't know of a rigorous scientific definition that encapsulates what gender actually means