You Can’t Pseudoscience (Or Even Science) Your Way Out Of A Genuine Trans Rights Debate

Someone tell The Guardian and STAT News

The headline of Arwa Mahdawi’s latest column in The Guardian reads, “After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?” Here’s what she writes:

There was a flurry of commentary this week suggesting that, by the Trump administration’s own definition, this could very well be the case. On Monday, you see, Trump kicked off his second term by signing a barrage of executive orders, including one stating that sex starts at the moment of conception — at which point, Trumpian science decrees, you are female or male and that’s it.

“ ‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” reads the order. “ ‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

While Mahdawi allows that it’s not quite true that Trump has just turned himself (and all of us) into women, she’s quick to point out that (as all good Guardian readers know) this is an exceptionally outdated, ignorant, boorish, caveman-like way of understanding sex. Immediately, An Expert Appears (™) to reinforce this point:

Most scientists now reject the idea that sex is strictly binary. The likes of Nature, possibly one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, has noted that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” And there’s a huge amount of disagreement as to how these categories should be described. “Scientists ourselves cannot agree on how to define the two sexes,” Rachel Levin, a Pomona College neuroscientist who studies the development of sex, told me over the phone. “To say that sex is simple and easily defined — and defined at conception — is factually incorrect.”

There are lots of factors that contribute to how we think about sex, including physical characteristics, hormone levels, gamete size (larger gametes are eggs while smaller gametes are sperm), sex chromosomes, etc. Trump’s executive order seems to tie sex to just gamete size at conception. This is despite the fact that a lot of academics have moved away from a sex-classification system based primarily on gametes because some people will never produce a gamete. And, while it’s true that most people inherit either XX (typically female) or XY (typically male) chromosomes at conception, declaring that sex is determined so early is overly simplistic. “Most of us develop along a certain fairly common pathway, but a lot of us do not,” Levin notes. “One really important thing for the public to realize is that the president declaring something to be the case doesn’t make it true.”

This is very confused — it’s just a hodgepodge of appeals to authority and inconsistent logic. How does the (very silly) Nature editorial meaningfully debunk the Trump administration’s definitions?

Mahdawi also misinterprets the executive order itself. If the EO did “tie sex to just gamete size at conception,” that wouldn’t make sense. Rather, the language “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the [large/small] reproductive cell” points to the fact that yes, at conception, you already contain the genetic material to set your body down a male or female developmental pathway, even if sex differentiation doesn’t occur until later on (gonad development in utero and full sexual maturity after puberty). You can, in fact, karyotype an embryo and determine which category it fits in, as Trump defines them, because an individual’s genes are set at the moment of conception.

To be clear, I am not an expert on disorders of sex development. I am sure one could come up with one-in-100,000 exceptions that would trouble this definition, but it’s actually rather airtight, and it even encompasses disorders of sex development in which someone doesn’t have “vanilla” XX or XY chromosomes but is nonetheless female or male by this traditional biological definition. Plus, the existence of these exceptions just doesn’t really matter to what the EO is trying to do, even if you vehemently disagree with it. The EO serves as guidance for how agencies should interpret the law — it isn’t some Biblical tablet that immediately, like, zaps genuinely intersex people into nonexistence.

The Guardian is one thing — an increasingly unreadable lefty tabloid, to be specific — but STAT News is supposedly a top-tier health news site. And STAT ran a similarly oriented article by Megan Molteni headlined “Trump executive order declaring only ‘two sexes’ gets the biology wrong, scientists say.”

Molteni, too, has an Expert (™) at her disposal:

Within hours, he had signed an executive order to that effect, asserting a new legal definition of sex that strips federal recognition of the gender identity of some 1.6 million trans and nonbinary Americans.

The order directly contradicts a number of existing laws and recent court rulings and is likely to face legal challenges. It also defies decades of research into how human bodies grow and develop.

The document represents “a dramatic failure to understand biology,” said Rachel Levin, a Pomona College neuroscientist who studies the development of sex.

Oh wait — it’s the same one!

First, though: The EO does not “strip[ ] federal recognition of the gender identity of some 1.6 million trans and nonbinary Americans.” I know it sounds like I’m nitpicking here, but these details matter, especially because a lot of people are going to read about this EO and perhaps become more scared than they need to be. The 1.6 million figure reflects one survey’s estimate of the number of trans people in the U.S. The individuals in this group include every permutation imaginable when it comes to how they publicly present, if they’ve changed their documentation, and so on. In the case of individuals who have changed the marker on their state license, for example, the EO doesn’t appear to change anything. They will continue to have a driver’s license reflecting their gender identity. The EO refers only to federal identification, including passports, and the passport guidelines, the administration has since clarified, will apply only to new and renewed passports. Current passports remain valid for everyone, meaning that in the cases of many trans people who changed their markers after the Biden administration instituted self-ID and X markers for passports, there might be a new, Democratic presidential administration that undoes this change before it has any impact on them altogether.

To be clear, I see obvious potential problems both with back-dooring full-blown self-ID the way the Biden administration did and with the rigid approach the Trump administration is saying, which would force even fully physically transitioned Americans to carry passports that will make them stand out at points of entry in a way that could cause them undue scrutiny or even harm. I’m just trying to separate reasonable speculation from exaggeration with regard to the EO’s likely effects. (Also, for basically every claim I make in this piece about what the EO does or doesn’t do, imagine a giant asterisk noting that a huge amount has yet to shake out with regard to federal rulemaking, lawsuits, and everything else. This is all highly provisional, which is all the more reason to write about it in a careful manner.)

Molteni then writes:

Scientists who study gender define it as someone’s sense of self, reflected in their attitudes, feelings, and behaviors, which is different from sex, which is generally defined based on an individual’s anatomy, physiology, genetics, and hormones. Researchers told STAT that both are best understood as multi-dimensional concepts influenced by both biological and social factors.

This is a noteworthy paragraph. You have one concept, “sex,” which, with the help of technology, can be predicted with near-100% accuracy at the moment of conception (back to this shortly). You have another, “gender,” which doesn’t even have a consensus definition, as evidenced by the meaningless one Molteni provides — whatever “gender” is, it is surely not your “sense of self” (My “sense of self” includes being a professional writer. Is that part of my gender?) And one of the leading health outlets wants us to know that “researchers” (™) think that “both are best understood as multi-dimensional concepts influenced by both biological and social factors.”

Both articles represent dead-end attempts to defend what has become a sacred goal of progressive science discourse — claiming that biological sex is too complicated for us to divide the vast majority of humans into “male” and “female” — against the scientific and political beliefs reflected in Trump’s executive order.

I’m finishing up a freelance piece on that EO that gets at the interesting and dysfunctional game of executive-order ping-pong that has played out since the Obama administration. But the fact of the matter is that it offers a perfectly fine, workable definition of sex. Both these authors should have known that — in Mahdawi’s case, especially, because she reached out to Carole Hooven for comment and Hooven explained to her that, as she put it in an email she later posted to Twitter, “There are two reproductive categories, and Trump is correct that they are based on the kinds of gametes individuals are designed to produce.” Hooven’s comments didn’t make it into Mahdawi’s piece. This isn’t inherently damning, because reporters reach out to people all the time and then don’t use what they get back, but in this case Mahdawi should have leaned on Hooven, because what she ended up writing was very confused and silly.

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.