Sacrificing Truth at the Altar of Gender Ideology
On February 5, three prominent biologists and presidents of major biological associations wrote a letter to President Trump and Congress opposing his January 2025 Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The letter alleges that scientific evidence contradicts the binary view of sex by emphasizing the complexity of sex determination involving chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy, and highlighting variations that suggest sex and gender are not strictly binary traits.
What Does the Evidence Really Say?
The biologists’ perspective conflates biological sex with gender identity. Biological sex is determined by the type of gametes produced: males produce sperm, and females produce eggs. This dichotomy is consistent across sexually reproducing species, underscoring the binary basis of sex. This is noted in a response letter written by some eminent biologists, such as neo-atheists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja, and also backed by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins, which addresses the misconceptions about definitions about biological sex: “The universal biological definition of sex is gamete size.”
The letter challenging Trump’s executive order asserts that “sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment,” conflating gender—a social construct—with biological sex. Even though the assertion that sex exists on a spectrum has been propagated in some academic and political spheres, it is an unscientific perspective. As Coyne and Maroja state,
However, we do not see sex as a “construct” and we do not see other mentioned human-specific characteristics, such as “lived experiences” or “[phenotypic] variation along the continuum of male to female”, as having anything to do with the biological definition of sex.
Some argue that intersex conditions challenge the binary nature of sex. However, conditions like Turner syndrome (XO), Klinefelter syndrome (XXY), and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome are rare anomalies, not distinct sexes. As biologist Jerry Coyne notes in a letter to Nature, “In animals, which of course include humans, sex is as close to binary as you can come, with only 0.018% of individuals being neither male nor female, but intersex.” These rare exceptions do not redefine the biological framework but instead reaffirm that sex is binary with occasional anomalies.
Biological Sex as a Construct: How Did We Get Here?
To understand the shift in discourse on biological sex, we must examine how contemporary ideological movements, like the Frankfurt School, extended Marxist critiques into culture and identity politics, which has infected the natural sciences.
How have we reached the point where prominent scientists (Neil deGrasse Tyson is an example of this phenomenon) feel compelled to deny fundamental biological realities? Part of the answer lies in emotional appeals and the common fal
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