Gender and the Scope of Science
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Posted in Essays • August 19, 2022

Author's Note: I am currently uploading some of my old writing while I get the site set up. This post is a transcript of a speech I gave at my city's March for Science in 2019

Hello [name of city]!

My name is Annie, and I am a transgender woman. I'm also a lifelong science nerd, and have been actively involved in the sciences — first as a student and researcher, and later in industry — for about a decade at this point. This means I have a front row seat to the cultural conversation around science and gender, and let me tell you, it's one heck of a show.

If you're transgender, or have any loved ones who are transgender, or really if you just spend any time talking about gender politics at all, then you've probably run across a particularly annoying variety of transphobe: the ones who claim that science is on their side. They'll often say something along the lines of "Sure, Annie might call herself a woman. She might wear a dress and take estrogen supplements and testosterone blockers. But she's still got a Y chromosome, so scientifically speaking, she's still a man. That's basic biology, and if you call her a woman than you're just rejecting science."

I'm sure you lovely folks don't need me to tell you that this argument is total baloney. But there are people out there who find it surprisingly convincing.

There's a few ways we can argue against this. We can point to the scientific community's defense of trans people's rights last fall¹, after You-Know-Who proposed legally redefining gender to refer exclusively to assigned sex at birth. Over 1,600 scientists — including nine Nobel Prize winners! — signed a letter² rejecting the proposal, and saying that it was "in no way 'grounded in science' as the administration claims". As far as expert consensus goes, it would be hard to get more clear than that.

Or we could point out that, biologically speaking, a Y chromosome just doesn't do that much! There's only one gene on the Y chromosome that does anything sex-related, and it's only active for about three days during fetal development. It kicks off the genetic signalling cascade that determines what kind of gonads develop, and then it gets switched off and kinda just hangs there doing nothing.

But none of these arguments are attacking the problem at the root, because the problem isn't just that these people don't understand the details of gonadal differentiation, or the state of expert consensus among biologists, or any of that. The problem is much deeper: they don't understand what science actually is, and what it actually does. Science can tell us facts about the world. It can point out patterns, and provide explanations of how those patterns got there, and teach us which causes lead to which effects. It's probably the most powerful tool that we as a species have come up with for understanding the world around us. But it can't tell us what things mean. Science is about observing and learning about the world, not about defining it. To explain what I mean by that, let's take a detour into one of my favorite scientific controversies of all time: the species problem.

The problem is simple: what is a species?

It sounds pretty straightforward, but biologists have been arguing about this for decades, and don't show any signs of stopping soon. One common definition is the so-called biological species concept — a species is a population of organisms that are capable of interbreeding with each other, but not with organisms outside of the population. But what about populations of organisms that never interbreed in the wild because they are geographically isolated from each other, but put them together in captivity, and hey presto, you've got babies? Or what about ring species — situations where population A can interbreed with population B, and population B can interbreed with population C, but populations A and C can't interbreed with each other? Would you say these populations represent one species, or two, or three — or even more? And how would this even apply at all to organisms like bacteria that reproduce asexually?

Clearly the biological species concept breaks down in certain edge cases. So biologists have come up with other competing species concepts. For instance, the cladistic species concept — the smallest group of populations that can be distinguished by a unique set of morphological or genetic traits. Or the ecological species concept — a population of organisms adapted to a particular ecological niche.

So which of these definitions is correct? I'll give you a moment to think about it... You ready? It's a trick question! None of them can be "correct" because that's not how definitions work. Definitions aren't floating out there in space for humans to find — they're created by humans, for humans, in a specific context and for a specific purpose. If two definitions of a concept conflict, it doesn't mean that one is "right" and the other is "wrong"; it just means they were developed for different purposes.

Reproductively isolated populations of organisms exist; genetically and morphologically distinct populations of organisms exist; populations of organisms adapted to a specific ecological niche exist. These are all things that exist out there in the world. It's not like one of these is objectively more species-y than the others, and we have to figure out which it is. Rather, the species problem isn't a question of which species concept is "true"; it's a question of which of these things it makes most sense to attach the label "species" to. Or, to put it a bit differently, it's a question of how we choose to socially construct the category "species".

That's right, I went there. I invoked the Dread Name of Social Construction. Come on, you knew I would get there sooner or later. It's not as scary as everyone thinks, I promise. All that "social construction" means is, well, exactly what I've been saying this whole time: that a concept is created by humans, and gets its meaning from its particular human context. This is true of the concept "species", and it’s true of just about any other concept you could name, too. This isn't to say that there's no reality out there external to humans, of course — just that anything we might want to say about that reality, any models we use to make sense of it or meanings we might assign to it, is something we as humans have to create together.

This is as true of gender as it is of anything else. Gender can't be reduced to a set of facts about the body, or even about the brain for that matter, because gender exists not in the realm of facts but in the realm of meaning. Gender is a means of communicating about our bodies, our minds, our relationships, and our way of existing in the world.

This means that science can't tell you what gender someone is, because there is no objective answer there. Science can tell you what sort of reproductive anatomy someone has; it can tell you what sort of hormone balance they have; it can even tell you at least some things about how their brain works. But it can't tell you what these things mean — to the person or to the society around them. That's something we have to decide for ourselves. So this is the choice we have before us: are we going to construct gender in a way that respects and honors people's understanding of themselves and their right to self-determination, or are we going to construct it in a way that tramples that right in order to fit the world into a box?

I know what I would choose, and I hope you do too.