Protests erupted yesterday in response to a rumor that the Trump administration is considering defining gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” Under this groundbreaking policy, the legal definition of sex under Title IX would be limited to “male” and “female” and determined by biology and anatomy.
The anti-science Left will have none of it. They insist that the government must operate according to their faith-based belief in an ambiguous, undefined “gender spectrum.” And it’s not just a gender spectrum anymore, but a sex spectrum as well. The New York Times science section tweeted an article with this heading today: “The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades.” This is the forefront of the Left’s gender revolution: the idea that biological sex is a “misconception” and “not a reality.” Gender-confused men are biological women, they now tell us. Gender and sex are both fluid.
Well, I think this is all madness. But I could be convinced otherwise. It would be rather simple, and should be extremely easy, to prove that sex doesn’t exist and gender is a spectrum, or they’re both spectrums, or however the Left is phrasing it today. If gender is not a simple binary system, then all the Left would need to do in order to prove this point is locate one human being, anywhere in the world, who has the reproductive capacities of both sexes. They would just need to present one example of a person who has the natural ability to impregnate and be pregnant.
Indeed, if sex is not binary, if there really is a liquidy spectrum of hundreds or thousands of different genders, then there should be a Venn diagram with “Can get pregnant” in one circle and “Can get others pregnant” in the other, and millions upon millions of people in the intersecting circle in the middle. But there isn’t. There is no one in that middle circle. There is no middle circle at all. Every human belongs to the male circle or the female and nobody has ever crossed from one to the other. It looks like we have ourselves a binary system, by definition.
Now, obviously there are people who possess neither capability. Sterility and infertility certainly exist. But these are the result of illness, deformity, or old age. They do not disprove the principle. In principle, men can get women pregnant and women can get pregnant by men. A malfunctioning reproductive system does not undermine that rule or provide evidence for a spectrum. For a spectrum to be proven, we would need evidence of people who truly exist between these two categories. I know that color is a spectrum because of the existence of secondary colors. Mix red and yellow and you get orange. So, when it comes to sex, where is the orange? Where is the person who possesses the functioning characteristics of both ends, thereby creating the blend, or the link, that truly makes a spectrum?
I’ll tell you where that person exists: in the fevered imagination of liberals. Nowhere else. And, actually, even if this weird fairy tale character could be found in reality, it still wouldn’t legitimize transgenderism. Transgenders are biological men or biological women who identify as the opposite sex. The hypothetical existence of a biological male/female hybrid would do nothing to prove the validity of transgenderism among biological males and biological females. Yet it would at least prove that gender is not such a simple concept. It would give us evidence of a real spectrum.
But no such evidence exists. Because gender is binary. The science, on this issue, is settled.