How Sex Became Gender

[Kamaji]

How Sex Became Gender

The modern denial of biology undermines an essential part of the human story.

JUNE 16, 2022
ROBERT LYNCH

Jim Gaffigan has this joke about a scientist who mistakes the male seahorse for the female and then stubbornly refuses to admit his mistake after learning that the one he’d called the male is pregnant. It’s a funny bit, but it hinges on a common misunderstanding that sex designations are arbitrary.

The biological definition of males and females is entirely based on the size of the sex cells, called gametes, that they produce. Males produce the smaller gametes and females produce the larger ones. When scientists discover a new sexually reproducing species, gamete size is how they determine the sexes. In humans, males release between 200 and 500 million tiny sperm in each ejaculation while females have a lifetime supply of around 400, much larger, eggs.

This initial asymmetry in gamete size may not seem like a big deal, but it leads to a whole cascade of evolutionary effects that result in diverging paths for each sex, which we call sexual selection. If male and female bothers you, call them little and big, but regardless of what you call them, this foundational cell-sized difference in gamete size has profound effects on both evolution and behavior.

*  *  *

By replacing “female” with “the sex that invests more in its offspring,” however, we can extract Trivers’s general argument, and one of the most falsifiable predictions in all of biology—the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate, and the sex that invests less will compete over access to mates. Find a single species where the sex that invests less in offspring is choosier, and the entire theory is disproved. The brilliance of this insight is that it explains both the general rule and all of the exceptions. Because of the initial disparity in investment, females will usually be more selective in choosing mates. Trivers explained something that had puzzled evolutionary biologists ever since Darwin and also explained why the male seahorse, which really does get pregnant, is choosier, and the female seahorse is bigger.

The assertion that male and female is an arbitrary classification is false on every level. Not only does it confuse primary sexual characteristics (i.e., the reproductive organs) which are unambiguously male or female at birth 99.8 percent of the time with secondary sexual characteristics (e.g., more hair on the faces of men or larger breasts in women), it ignores the very definition of biological sex. Although much has been made of the fact that sex differences in body size, ornamental features, hormonal profiles, behavior, and lots of other traits vary widely across species, that these differences are minimal or non-existent in some species, or that a small percentage of individuals, due to disorders of development, possess an anomalous mix of female and male traits, none of it undermines or challenges this basic distinction. Sex is binary. There is no third sex.

*  *  *

This major change is part of a larger movement to deny the effects of biology in humans altogether and the dominant view in the social sciences has now become that human sex differences are almost entirely socially constructed. In this interpretation, all differences in outcomes between men and women are the result of bigotry, and all we need to do to eliminate them is change children’s beliefs by encouraging gender neutral play.

Despite these assertions, human sex differences are among the most robust and replicable findings in the social sciences. The strongest effects are in physical abilities, such as throwing distance or speed, spatial relations tasks, and some social behaviors, like assertiveness, where men have the advantage. Women, meanwhile, tend to have an edge in being more extraverted, trusting, and nurturing. The largest sex differences, however, involve mate choice and are in behaviors that emerge out of Trivers’ theory of parental investment, with women giving more weight to traits that signal a potential partners ability to acquire resources (e.g., socioeconomic status and ambition), while men give more weight to traits that signal fertility (e.g., youth and attractiveness).

*  *  *

The assertion that children are born unisex and are molded into gender roles by their parents delegitimizes other scientific claims. If you can’t be honest about something every parent knows, what else might you be lying about? It leads to inane propositions, like the assertion that transgender men can give birth by a pro-choice doctor testifying to Congress, and endangers the most vulnerable parts of our population.

When people are shamed into silence about obvious male advantages in sports, or children are taught that sex is grounded in identity rather than biology, masculine girls and feminine boys may become confused about their sex or sexual orientation, and harmful stereotypes take over where none existed. Boys are told that if they like dolls, they are really girls, while girls who display interests in sports or math are told they are boys, born in the wrong body. This restrictive thinking shames people for feeling misaligned with their birth sex and pushes them to change their bodies to reflect this new identity. How is this progress?The rapid rise in the number of young girls with gender dysphoria is a warning sign of how dangerously disoriented our culture has become. Feminine boys, who might have ended up being homosexual, are encouraged to start down the road towards irreversible medical interventions, hormone blockers and infertility.

*  *  *

Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-sex-became-gender/