Talk of the Town: Defund the Gender Police?

MIT Gets Sex-y

On a recent blustery Wednesday evening in Cambridge, Mass, two philosophers, a historian of science, and a psychiatric nurse assembled on an auditorium stage at MIT. They were debating a question whose answer would have seemed obvious to the vast majority of Americans until a few years ago: Is sex binary? And should it supersede “gender identity” in social policy?

Nadine Strossen, free speech advocate and former president of the ACLU, presided over the proceedings. Gavel in hand, she wore a red cap with white writing that read, “Make John Stuart Mill Great Again.”

The event was coordinated by MIT’s Free Speech Alliance, formed by MIT alumni in 2021, after the cancellation of Professor Dorian Abbot’s lecture about habitability of planets beyond the Milky Way—not because his stance on space travel was controversial, but because his stance on DEI programs was. Abbot had published an op-ed in Newsweek earlier that year, advocating to evaluate people based on merit and fairness, not identity—equality rather than equity. Per a Twitter mob and its real-life compatriots, such ideas were beyond the pale and thus: he was disinvited.

In swooped the Free Speech Alliance to “turn back the tide of cancel culture at MIT that has resulted [in widespread] self-censorship on campus.” DEI, Israel and Hamas—all the untouchable subjects are touchable with the Free Speech Alliance. Which brings us to the debate at hand. On the one side: Yes, sex is binary and should be the basis of social policy, over gender identity. On the other: No, sex is not binary, and we should base policy on gender identity over sex.  

The only problem was that the organizers couldn’t find anyone in the “No” category who denied the reality or relevance of biological sex completely, and believed that gender identity should always be paramount; those who hold such hardline views also tend toward the slogan and worldview of “No debate.” (Exception: last night’s debate with “puberty-blockers-for-all Dr. Jack Turban, which I haven’t watched yet.) So at one table sat Alice Dreger, author of Galileo’s Middle Finger and one-time activist on behalf of people with intersex conditions, and Aaron Kimberly, co-founder of the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the LGBT Courage Coalition—butch lesbian with an intersex condition, turned trans man, now back to butch lesbian, but with a beard and low voice because there is no reversing the effects of testosterone.

At the “Yes” table sat philosophy professor Holly Lawford-Smith, author of Gender Critical Feminism, in a hand-stitched (by HLS herself) t-shirt that read “Large Gamete Producer” ((HLS also stands for Hot Lesbian Scholar). With her was Alex Byrne, author of Trouble with Gender, and philosophy professor at MIT, who has done great work on the history of gender identity.

I was in the audience, thinking of myself as an XX-chromosomed, large-gamete producing, vagina-having person without a uterus (XXCLGPVHPWU). I’ll admit I had a little trouble following the arguments. Byrne brought out two gray boxes, one affixed with pink ribbons, the other with blue, and attempted to explain how we can divide up most human beings into one or the other based on our reproductive systems—in particular the size and mobility of our gametes. Males and females: You put one with the other and that’s how you get more! Sex is not culturally established, he urged; it’s biological. Byrne dismantled the myth that intersex people are as common as redheads. Most people with differences of sex development are easily male or female, but with a medical condition that affected secondary sex characteristics.

Gender identity, on the other hand, was actually gender self-identification. It’s whatever sex you say you are. Even if it turned out that sex wasn’t binary, he asserted, gender identity would be no substitute for it in law and policy.

Dreger discussed the protean fuzziness of said boxes, possibly offended by the hard contours of the cubes. Sex development is a lifelong process, she offered. Our chromosomes don’t change, but our hormones sure do. Proof: the estradiol capsules she inserted twice-weekly into her vagina. We can believe in biology without resorting to outdated definitions, she suggested. She spoke of the medical definition of the “five sexes:” the two ones in the boxes; “true hermaphrodites” with one ovary and one testis; and male and female “pseudohermaphrodites,” with the gonads of one and some genitalia of the other. Sex may be binary for most people, but there were exceptions.

Talk gametes all you want, but there were people with disorders of sex development like Aaron Kimberly’s. Her ovotestes had not only virilized her, but she’d additionally taken testosterone and had bottom surgery to further masculinize her, so she could walk through the world looking like a man—before recently deciding to return to identifying as her natal sex. Two boxes could not contain such multitudes! Dreger went through the list of DSDs: CAIS and CAH and 5α-R2D—all the exceptions to the rules.

But does that mean there aren’t rules, I wondered?

Dreger called binary sex “hostile sex definitions” and worried about, if social policy was based on sex, who would police those boundaries, and how? Would we be checking genitals at the bathroom doors? Swabbing cheeks for DNA before girls’ soccer games? Do we really want to return to Victorian definitions of womanhood, in a political sense, she asked? Do we want the government to police our bodies sexually? Can’t we police behavior, rather than biology or identity?

Well, I thought, we can’t police behavior if we can’t use biology as a factor, as any woman raped in prison by a man identifying as a woman will tell you. (Often when I bring this up, a skeptic will reply, “How often has that happened, though?” I wonder how many times it needs to happen for such people to care?)

Lawford-Smith said she was quite a fan of the essentialism Dreger disdained. After all, we have historically used sex to organize our prisons, sports, domestic violence refuges and counseling services, changing and fitting rooms, hospital wards, schools, short lists for prizes—all these places where trans activists prefer to use gender identity and which have had a negative effect on many large gamete producers. She spoke of a law case in her native Australia, which happens to have the greatest name of all time: Tickle versus Giggle. A transgender woman is suing because she—or rather, he—was denied membership based on sex, not gender identity, and Giggle is for females. Many social apps don’t exclude based on sex, but, HLS asked, can women just have one social media app? Not all of them, but just one?

Well, not if the law privileges gender identity over sex, we can’t.

What happens when we erase sex? For instance, in HLS’s home state of Victoria, the government monitored the effects of covid-19 vaccines based on gender identity rather than sex. But your gender identity is unlikely to factor in how you respond to a vaccine. Sex, on the other hand, does matter, as any female who bled for weeks after getting a vaccine (even some women deep in perimenopause and who were on the pill!) will tell you.

Why might we want to use sex as a factor in how we organize ourselves? Privacy, safety, fairness, shared experience, HLS offered. She spoke of a DEI program intended to increase the representation of women in STEM, but which was open to anyone who identified as a woman or non-binary. How would such a policy accomplish its goal?

On the other hand, HLS accepted that passing trans women were likely to experience similar forms of discrimination as natal women. She may accept the two boxes, but she allowed for quite a bit of nuance between them.

Kimberly spoke of two ways to define gender identity, one political, the other evidence-based. Kimberly referred to the political definition as the “disembodied” model: an “invisible, internal feeling.” The “embodied model,” Kimberly said, is a self-perception of sex based on your body. She’d be a fool, she said, to say the invisible feeling should replace sex in law and policy, but as someone to whom both models apply, there may be a case that the embodied model has a role, too.

Kimberly’s example: She was extremely masculine as a girl, in part thanks to what she later found out were ovotestes. She suffered from gender dysphoria, which she later learned was common for people who end up same sex-attracted. She realized that all these aspects were intertwined: her biology, her behavior, her sexuality—all sloshed together in a big sex and gender stew. Most kids who have some conflict in their self-perception of sex, Kimberly said, grow up to be gay.

But sex and gender, bodies and behaviors, occur within a culture. And as a clinician working with gender-distressed kids, Kimberly saw many young lesbians longing to change their sex characteristics because they felt they couldn’t change the culture. If they gained a deeper understanding of the interplay between culture and biology, sometimes they’d decide not to change their bodies. Sometimes their embodied gender identity would shift.

Kimberly spoke of Caster Semenya—technically a male, but reared with a DSD and the belief that he or she was a woman: She’s a woman with a medical condition that gives her an unfair advantage in sport, Kimberly suggested. (I would say that 5α-R2D is a condition that affects only males, and that Semenya is male and thus shouldn’t compete against women, regardless of self-perception.)

In other words, there was a lot of overlap between the sides. The audience seemed to be disproportionately made up of those who believed that sex was binary and that gender identity shouldn’t be the basis of policy, but many felt they could embrace the idea that sex was binary but also a spectrum.  

Dreger often returned to some iteration of the phrase “You live where you live”—the last words of the debate, in fact. She meant, I think, that whatever rules there are—about sex, about behavior—in everyday life, it’s not always easy to get people to abide by them. Sure, of course, “you live where you live,” but what if you live in a women’s prison, which small, mobile-gamete producers with penises are identifying into, then raping the large, immobile gamete-producers? What if you live in a blazing blue bubble where people have absolutely no idea that the vast majority of what they’ve been told is true is in fact not particularly true, and what has been labeled misinformation is actually pretty damned close to the truth? What if it was two days before the Biden Administration released new Title IX guidelines that ignore the tens of thousands of comments expressing concern, for the very reasons HLS outlined, about replacing the diaphanous idea of gender identity with the concrete reality of sex?

More important than how we answer the question of what sex is or whether or not it’s binary is how we’re going to reckon with the way our policies and practices have changed to accommodate gender identity, as Byrne defined it: self-selected sex or gender category. What happens when we just let everybody decide for themselves? So far, the answer is endless culture war and government overreach from both Democrats and Republicans. If only our political system wasn’t so binary!

After the debate, the speakers, their friends and fans, and a couple of MIT free speech fellas gathered at the Locke Bar—named for John Locke, alas, not John Stuart Mill. There, they discovered the contents of the two boxes. Ova and sperm in candied representations: yogurt-covered pretzels as large gametes, and gummy bears as the small ones. I vociferously complained about the lack of chocolate, but Lawford-Smith gobbled gametes both large and small by the handful, to make up for her petite pre-debate meal. “I just had a salad!” she exclaimed, sipping on a cocktail made of pear juice and gin. I stuffed my face with fried zucchini and pondered the evening.

I felt that that Kimberly and HLS won the debate, despite being on different teams, in part because they seemed the most focused on how to be flexible but realistic, and create sex-based policy that worked with where you lived. But I suppose, as with sex and gender themselves, there was no clarity around who won. Nuance won. Free speech won.

These are ideas worth talking about. Indeed, in light of the Cass Review, Title IX, lawsuits from detransitioners, these are ideas we must talk about.

Two days later, the Biden team incorporated gender identity into Title IX, essentially subjugating biological sex. I polled some local ladies in my neighborhood, eager to find out what they thought. None of them knew it had happened, or what it would mean.