Universities: Complicit in the War Against Biological Sex?

Written by Gloria Moss on May 25, 2023. Posted in Current News

Students at the world’s top university turn their back on science

In the second week of May this year, the Junior Common Rooms at five Oxford Colleges voted to condemn the Oxford Union’s decision to host gender critical feminist, Kathleen Stock. The colleges where students passed these motions are Mansfield, St Anne’s, St Hilda’s, St Edmund’s and Christ Church. Professor Kathleen Stock’s heresy is to state that Trans people can never claim to have truly transitioned to their gender of choice.

Whilst we respect the rights for individuals who may for personal reasons choose to present and identify themselves in a unique way, the behaviour of individuals should not potentially cause harm to others, nor have any bearing on the legal or biological definitions of people that are based on well-established and evidenced-based science.  In terms of the science, this supports Professor Stock’s gender critical position regarding the impossibility of Trans people ever truly transitioning to their gender of choice, and those who deny this are turning their back on the medical and scientific evidence. The same applies to those universities that stand in opposition to gender critical feminism. This article asks what trust can be placed in a university system that follows ideology rather than science, the subject of a 2022 book The Dark Side of Academia: How Truth is Suppressed.

Our starting point is a historical one, tracing the developments that spawned the social constructionist notion of gender fluidity, one whose foundations were laid in the late 1940s and the several decades that followed.  There follows evidence from the fields of medicine, pharmacology, psychology and design, all challenging the social constructionist view as to the fluidity of gender. A good place to start is with the underpinning concept of social constructionism.

Social constructionism and subjective reality

A Critical Thinking approach to this concept reveals its concern with the subjective experience of everyday life rather than the objective perception of reality. It is also concerned with how a person’s subjective experience can morph into reality, so that the subjective becomes reality for a person. This leads a commentator Burr (1995) to suggest that our identity originates not from inside a person but from the social realm that is internalised by individuals. In this way, reality for many people can be nothing more than a set of subjective experiences, rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Indeed, a former Professor of Sociology, Ian Craib, likened social constructionism to a form of manic psychosis (1997).

The connection to the Transgender agenda? Well, a highly held view concerns the ability of men to become women and mothers and for women to become men and fathers, a view which runs counter to the evidence of biology and psychology. In terms of a snapshot of this view, here are some samples:

• Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Second Sex, wrote that ‘One is not born but becomes a woman’ (1949).
• Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature at California University, asserted that “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender” (1990). In 2021, she asserted in an interview that “The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way”.
• The University of California department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, in their marketing literature, invited approaches from women wishing to be men the opportunity of having ‘gender affirmative care’ and ‘gender affirmation’ involving the removal of their reproductive organs (do watch this breath-taking presentation)
• An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies the reality of sexual dimorphism.
• Martine Rothblatt author of The apartheid of sex: a manifesto on the freedom of gender (1995) has stated that ‘The genitals don’t determine your sex. You can choose whichever gender you want’. Martine Rothblatt has also stated on a TED talk that ‘Separate male and female genders is a constructed fiction”…there is a gender fluidity that crosses the entire continuum from male to female.”
• The author of the book Eve: the disobedient future of birth (2023) Claire Horn, writes there that “The real tyranny is our inability to relinquish archaic ideas of sex and gender”, stating also that “The idea that artificial wombs could be used to redress gendered inequity in reproductive labour is compelling”.

These are all socially constructed views since the facts of biology are such that biological sex can never be fully altered to that of the opposite gender. Despite this, centres of learning are not active in informing students of the background biology. Instead, some universities are recipients of funding that encourage pursuit of transitioning, even when complete transitioning is impossible because of the laws of biology. In the US and Canada for example, these institutions have received funding from Pritzker family monies that are supportive of people seeking a synthetic sexual identity (SSI):

• The University of California, Ronald Reagan Medical Centre, department of obstetrics and Gynaecology
• The University of Chicago: in 2022, the Biological Sciences Division of the University and its school of medicine received $30m
• The University of Arkansas: the Medical Sciences Foundation received monies for its work on gender
• The University of Minnesota: its Institute for Sexual and Gender Health received support for its objective to “Revolutionise the sexual and gender climate”
• The University of Toronto received funding for their Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
• The University of Victoria in British Columbia: the first chair in Transgender Studies was funded by the family

We will set down in the rest of this article how deeply rooted is biological sex and how only surface aspects of sex or gender can ever be changed. Our discussion will focus on three aspects namely: medical differences in symptoms, immunity, responses to infections, disease progression and how males and females respond to infections; behavioural differences, including differences in the brain; and finally physiological differences in the five senses. We will start with the medical and pharmacological differences.

Medical and pharmacological differences

The evidence for differences in medical differences appears to be unquestionable. According to Dr. Alyson McGregor MD, cofounder and Director of the Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, and also co-founder of the Sex and Gender Women’s Health Collaborative, “women are not just men with boobs and tubes.” Put differently, males and females do not merely differ from each other in virtue of their genitals and hormones, but also in anatomical and physiological differences that go beyond immediately observable sex-related properties. To deny this, according medical ethicist Dr Charlotte Bease (2023) is to harm patient populations.

Moreover, the demographics show that the vast majority of the population are born either male or female. As Bease states:

“Intersex individuals comprise around 0.018 percent of the population; even within these groups there is broad variety. But the fact that very rare human variations exist does not refute the reality of a binary sex norm.”

Bease goes on to inform us that the majority of trans people are not intersex since they possess a biological male or female anatomy. So, as she writes, “biological sex differences matter in medicine”. Examples? Acute coronary syndrome has a different disease presentation in females and males; the blood cells that surround the heart in women are smaller than in men. Where drug reactions are concerned, aspirin therapy works to lower the risk of myocardial infarction in male but not female patients (it’s actually harmful for female patients); women experience an almost twofold risk of adverse physiological drug reactions compared with men. The way that sex mediates drug reactions is also clear in the case of Zolpidem, a sedative sold under the brand name ‘Ambien’ in the US, was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1992. In 2013, however, it was discovered women experienced 25-30 percent higher levels of the drug in their system the morning after taking it.

Consequently, biology cannot be dismissed in the way conceived in the six social constructionist views presented earlier. As Dr Alyson McGregor stated in a TED talk, ‘The chromosomes in every cell of our bodies remain active for people’s entire lives’ and she quotes on this point Dr Page of the Whitehead Institute and Dr Yang of UCLA on this point.

So much for the evidence from medicine and pharmacology. What of that concerning the five senses?

The Five senses

Nature has organised things rather brilliantly to ensure that men and women were physiologically adapted to the tasks that they undertook for 99% of human history, and men and women shared the burden of life pretty evenly. Men were the hunters while the women were the managers, architects and designers of the day, building the dwellings and all that went inside them at base camp and gathering berries and nurturing the young. Anthropology and physiology make this species’ division of labour clear.

Where physiology is concerned, we can back-engineer men and women’s roles from the robust differences documented concerning their five senses. We will begin with hearing, and for those readers seduced by Simone de Beauvoir’s view that ‘One is not born but becomes a woman’ (1949), you may be somewhat surprised to read about the differences observed by psychologists and scientists.

Hearing

It has been found that women are more sensitive to loud noises than men are, with men tolerating sounds some eight decibels louder than women. Women also seem more sensitive to the sound of a crying infant at night, which suggests one possible beneficial effect for offspring. Further, research finds that women’s brains process auditory signals more rapidly than men’s do, based on the recording of the brain’s evoked potentials, and this may have resulted from women’s role as managers for infants and adults in the base camp while the men were absent on hunting expeditions.

We will move on now to sight, an area which after height shows the largest number of sex differences.                                                      

Sight

Given that just over 70 percent of viewers of the English Premier League in the United Kingdom in 2021 were male, it may not come as a surprise to learn that men are better at distinguishing moving objects in the distance than women. This aptitude will give men pride of place in the animal tracking business, one amplified by men’s targeting accuracy. The cause can be found in the fact that men’s eyes on average are set an average 5mm further apart than women’s, an adaptive mechanism that helped men in their specialised task of hunting.

What of women? Well, their visuo-spatial skills give them skills in other areas. Their ability in  object-location memory, for example, gives them the edge in the discernment of ripe fruits on a tree or bush. In fact, the differences do not end there. Where colour is concerned, up to fifty percent of women have a fourth colour pigment giving them access to hundreds of millions more colours than men with their three pigments. Given this, it is not surprising that women have a richer vocabulary of colour words, being more apt than men to use refined terms such as ivory, azure, and mauve that are used less frequently by men. Likewise, women are more accurate in matching colour strips to a colour chart.

This greater perception of colour on the part of females served, very probably, as an adaptive mechanism to women’s task of managing the community at base camp where they could discern subtle changes in the skin colour of others (perceiving potential flare-ups of tempers and fevers whether in adults or infants) and also, as mentioned, discern the ripe as against the unripe fruit.

So, we can rightly speak of ‘hunter’ and ‘gatherer’ activities with men’s eyes adapted to the first and women’s to the second. How then can a Trans woman be said to be a woman when their eyes are still those of a biological male? It is simply not possible except in the world imagined by the Social Constructionist. Indeed, in the research on gender and design that I conducted over more than twenty years, the findings showed the design creations and preferences of males and females to differ in consistent and statistically highly significant ways, both in early and late childhood and also adulthood.

Examples? Whilst males used straight lines, few colours and 3D forms, females would employ rounded shapes, a plethora of colours and 2D forms, creating two almost wholly distinct ‘hunter’ and ‘gatherer’ worlds manifested clearly in the shapes and forms of paintings, buildings, furniture, graphic and website design. The differences in design creations are mirrored in preferences, with men and women showing a strong preference for the designs created by those of their own sex. The persistence of these differences strongly suggest that they are hardwired into males and females. And, from an evolutionary psychological standpoint,  hardwired over numerous millennia, so sociology acting in the long-term!

The implications? The world of ‘gatherer’ aesthetics would be lost were Trans women to take over the domain of womanhood, just as the world of ‘hunter’ aesthetics would be lost were Trans men to dominate the world of men. Imagine a world where the sensitive use of colours in a Winifred Nicholson painting would be a thing of the past because the Trans woman’s tastes, influenced by the absence of a fourth colour pigment, would eschew it. Or where the simple linearity of a Mondrian painting was side-lined by a Trans man because ‘their’ original preference was for rounded shapes. This is to conjure into being an unmanageable degree of complexity.

We will move on swiftly to the remaining three senses before examining some statistics.

Touch

Those with smaller fingers (typically females!) have a finer sense of touch (or ‘tactile acuity’), according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience ((see https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215173017.htm).  Perhaps women were also healers in base camp, diagnosing problems with their hands?

Smell

Women tend to outperform men on tests for identifying scents, and one factor was identified in 2014 with the discovery that female brains had, on average, 43% more cells and almost 50% more neurons in their olfactory centres (the part dedicated to smelling and odours) than male brains. One reason advanced is that physically attractive men with symmetrical body builds emit an odour that is more attractive to women. Others might be to discern whether food and liquid is fresh and whether a fire is about to flare up at base camp!

Taste

Girls and women were known to have a better sense of taste than men with 35% of women and only 15% of men calling themselves ‘supertasters’, those able to identify flavours such as bitter, sweet, and sour more strongly than others. The underlying factors were identified in 1994 when Bartoshuk et al reported on the greater volume of taste areas (‘fungiform papillae’) and taste buds on female than male tongues. It is suspected that this protected offspring both during and after pregnancy as women of childbearing age taste flavours more intensely than younger or older females, as also do pregnant women.

As if these differences are not dramatic enough, there is also the brain to consider, with major differences in male and female brains.  As early as 26 weeks, female brains start developing a thicker corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the left and right hemisphere. This could be the subject for a completely separate article!

Size of the Trans population

It is a fact that the vast majority of the population are unambiguously male or female with a chromosomal pattern and phenotype that are in agreement, producing primary and secondary sex characteristics. The statistics show that the proportion of the populations with these characteristics are small but spiking during young and young adulthood. So, in the UK, one per cent of those aged 16-24 self-avow a gender different from that registered at birth while only 0.36% of those aged 35-44 do this. The same tendency is found in the US where, according to a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA showing that just half a per cent of adults but 1.4 per cent of youth between 13 and 17 years in the US identify as transgender. The spike amongst young people could well be the result of moves to deny the importance of biology and push the notion that a person can select their gender.

As we have seen, biological sex produces primary characteristics (i.e. genitalia) and also secondary characteristics (height, tone of voice, manifestation of the five senses, brain characteristics) with the scientific evidence presented here showing how pervasive are secondary sex characteristics. In the face of this, we have to question whether the creation of ‘synthetic sex identities’ (SSIs) can legitimately be viewed, legally or socially, as equivalent to men and women. We will consider this in the next section.

Synthetic sex identities: equal with biological males and females?

A spokesperson for the SSI phenomenon is Martine Rothblatt, author of the book The apartheid of sex. Rothblatt states that “The genitals don’t determine your sex. You can choose whichever gender you want” and that “Separate male and female genders is a constructed fiction” with “a gender fluidity that crosses the entire continuum from male to female”. Considering the biological evidence for primary and secondary sex characteristics, this is straightforwardly incorrect, and a social constructionist rather than scientific view.

In a similar way, the book Eve: the disobedient future of birth by Claire Horn, describes the view that there are only two sexes as “so entrenched”, and that the “real tyranny is our inability to relinquish archaic ideas of sex and gender”. Again, there is absolutely no basis for this in science. Despite this, the book was published by the Wellcome Collection, part of the Wellcome Trust, a body with £16 billion of funding to spend by 2032 “to advance scientific discovery and take on the world’s most urgent health issues”. Much of this money will go to universities, adding to our concerns about universities’ ability to shore up the well-established science concerning biological sex.

Concluding remarks

When Professor Kathleen Stock speaks at the Oxford Union on 30 May, it is vital that people are aware of the strength of the science supporting biological sex differences. Any attempt to undermine this science takes us into the realms of social constructionism and the subjective experiences that flourish under this. As we saw, Ian Craib, Professor of Sociology, likened this to a form of manic psychosis (1997) and it is time perhaps to proclaim that the Emperor has no clothes.

References/ sources

Bartoshuk, L.M. Duffy, V.B. and Miller, I.J. (1994). PTC/PROP tasting:  Anatomy, psychophysics, and sex effects, Physiology and Behavior, 56, 1165-1171

Moss, G. (2014), Why men like straight lines and women like polka dots, Psyche Press

Moss, G. (2017), Gender, Design and Marketing, Routledge, London

Gloria Moss is a Professor of Management and Marketing and the author of over 80 peer reviewed journal and conference papers and eight books. She runs two conferences a year, Questioning Science (next on 16-20 August 2023) and Questioning History (next on 15-17 December 2023) and can be reached via [email protected].

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