his week, according to
news
reports, an entire class of graduate students at the University of
Southern Maine walked out of their class and demanded that their education
professor be fired for stating that there were only two sexes.
It sounds like science fiction, but I've met people who really believe there are some large number of sexes. One person told me they learned this from National Public Radio, a left-wing radio network in the USA. The idea seems to be that persons suffering from genetic aneuploidy, such as men with Klinefelter syndrome, are a different sex, as is anyone who claims to be “gender fluid”, “non-binary,” and so on.
If the story is true, I feel sorry for those students. They've been cheated out of the wondrous knowledge that science has provided. Their heads have been stuffed with ideology designed to confuse them.
It's ridiculously easy to disprove: sex can be defined as a physiological distinction in an organism that is essential in mating. If there were, say, fourteen sexes, it would mean that fourteen people, one of each sex, would have to mate in order to produce a baby. This would be challenging, for sure, though they might not all have to be present at the same time.
On the other hand, ‘gender’ is intrinsically ambiguous, as it refers mainly to psychological and emotional feelings. As often happens when a term is subjective and vaguely defined, ‘gender’ is rapidly losing its usefulness as a word. By contrast, sex is already codified into the law. This is undoubtedly why the activists want to use ‘sex’ instead.
Unfortunately, there is an ocean of knowledge proving beyond any possible doubt that not only is sex real but that humans really, truly have only two of them.
Science teaches that anchoring one's results in empirical observation is the only way to be sure that something is true. It's a way of listening to what the world is telling you instead of inventing your own reality out of fantasies.
Now, you might say this is the golden age of false beliefs: we have economists who think government spending doesn't cause inflation and people who have to be told that cooking a chicken in Nyquil is a bad idea. So why worry about this one? Why bother defending the truth?
After all, evolution will win in the end. The flood of scientific illiteracy will be self-limiting, as those who deny empirical reality are destined to be eliminated by evolution as their planes crash, their economy implodes, and their diseases remain uncured. If they deny the existence of sex, their reproduction rate will fall to zero and they will be eliminated from the gene pool. If people want those things, what right do we have to deny them?
The reason is that when people can force you to say things that are obviously false, it's a form of oppression of the mind. Science is the last pillar of civilization still standing. There's no faster way to destroy it than to make it dangerous to speak a scientific fact.
Back in 2005, religious activists on the Kansas Board of Education approved changes allowing creationism in the form of intelligent design (ID) to be taught alongside science in the schools. Prominent science organizations spoke out forcefully against this, rejecting ID as non-scientific. Famous scientists like Richard Dawkins even began fiercely criticizing religion itself. Finally the people of Kansas voted the activists out of office and the changes were rescinded in 2007.
The ID movement was dismissed as part of a fringe movement of crazy fanatics. They were not: they were committed ideologues who sincerely believed what they were saying. Using the arguments of fairness and equal time, they came close to forcing religion to be taught as an alternative to science in the schools. Now science organizations and major journals must once again speak up to defend biological science from a new generation of ideologues.
This time it might not be so easy: the ideologues are inside the walls, and we can all hear them pounding.
oct 08 2022, 6:00 am.
