Defining male and female in Missouri

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 25th of January, 2024.

This is WORLD Radio and we’re happy you’ve joined us today. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. First up on The World and Everything in It: defining biology in the law.

A quick word to parents, this story references material you may want to review before listening with kids nearby.

Last Thursday, legislators in Missouri heard testimony regarding a new bill. Here’s state representative, Adam Schnelting:

SCHELTING: Now, House Bill 2309 is the Defining SEX Act. This legislation is a needed attempt to ensure there's no ambiguity in our state law regarding sex…It's incumbent upon us to ensure that our laws reflect a stable legal category for something as, as basic as sex.

REICHARD: Ever since the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision in 2020, the legal definition of sex has been in question. Does the term refer only to a biological reality, or does it include subjective perceptions of it? What about sexual orientation? And should doctors be allowed to perform procedures on children to change their appearance and hormone levels?

BROWN: It’s a contentious debate, and joining us now to talk about it is a man who’s served as an expert witness for several states seeking to clarify the issue.

Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist who left academia in 2020 after standing up for the fact that sex is not a spectrum and there are only two biological sexes.

He’s Founding Editor of the Substack called Reality’s Last Stand, and serves as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

REICHARD: Colin, good morning.

COLIN WRIGHT: Good morning. And thank you for having me on.

REICHARD: So, Colin, how would you define sex in a way that clarifies biological reality?

WRIGHT: Yes, so it's important to define sex in a way that's very broad. You know, a lot of medical institutions are very myopic in the way that they define sex or where they treat it, because they're just, you know, treating humans, and they're trying to diagnose diseases. And so they tend to look at things like, “Oh, we're gonna look at chromosomes, we're gonna look at their hormones, we're gonna look at their, you know, their genital shape, and all these things that they have.” And they're certainly related. But broadly speaking, males and females are defined by a type of reproductive strategy that is producing either small gametes or sperm, or large gametes or ova, so sperm and eggs. So this is universally how animal’s individuals are defined as male and female across the plant and animal kingdoms. And it's important to maintain that that is also true for humans, because we are also animals that are no exception to this rule. So broadly speaking, I would classify human males and females as those having the primary reproductive anatomy that's organized around producing either sperm or ova, because it's all about reproduction.

REICHARD: What is the most worrisome argument you are responding to when it comes to biological sex?

WRIGHT: The most worrisome ones are those coming from the medical doctors, the ones who are doing gender medicine. And this is because they have this bizarre view of biological sex as not pertaining to entire bodies, but you can only describe sex as a trait-by-trait basis. So you would not say that David is a male or Susan is a female. They would say that David has male appearing genitals, has male chromosomes, has male hormone levels. Those types of things. This is used as a justification to say that you can have a child, or anyone for that matter who might have, you know, all of the traits, the secondary sex traits we associate with being male or female, but maybe that their brain sex is different from their body. And if that's the case, well, for one, brain sex is a completely pseudo-scientific concept. But if that's the case, if you can have this mismatch between your brain sex, and then all your other, you know, sex-related characteristics, then we can, by the use of hormones and surgeries, correct your body, change all of your secondary sex characteristics, your physical traits, to sort of be in alignment with your brain. This is the justification that's being used in order to do these types of innervations on children. But you cannot actually change your sex. What actually matters in medicine, if you can actually literally change your sex or if you're just making cosmetic changes. And so it really matters to get the actual natural biology right on this issue, because this forms the premise of performing these interventions on children.

REICHARD: In a further twist, folks on the far Left who oppose laws protecting children from these so-called sex-change procedures have embraced limited government. They say the politicians should stay out of decisions made between doctors and parents. Colin, why do you think it’s important for elected leaders to take the lead on laws like the Defining SEX Act in Missouri?

WRIGHT: It's important for leaders to step in because, frankly speaking, our medical institutions have been captured by this ideology where they're not actually using evidence to make their proclamations about these types of procedures. All of the other countries in the world who have performed systematic reviews of the evidence for the efficacy of these you know, hormonal gender affirming care, surgery interventions, Norway, Sweden, the UK, these are not, you know, super conservative areas. These are in many ways used as models for super liberal societies and very progressive. They've all done these systematic reviews, which is the highest amount of evidence you can possibly have, because it takes into account all of the evidence on all the studies and ranks them by how rigorous they are. They've all concluded that the evidence for the efficacy of these procedures, especially in children is very poor or nonexistent, and relies on very short term outcomes, that type of thing. So unfortunately, we do need to step in and sort of rescue it from that type of ideological capture.

REICHARD: Is there some part of this story that you think deserves more attention than what media are giving it?

WRIGHT: I think there needs to be a lot more attention put onto the actual biology side of things. You know, coming from a biologist, that might make sense. But a lot of the debates really focused on you know, is a trans woman a woman, what is a woman, all this type of stuff. And what I've been trying to really focus on for the last five years, is the fact that the foundation for all of this is this attempt to undermine the biological reality of male and female as discrete biological categories in nature. Once that goes, once you get rid of this separation, then anything goes from there. If we relinquish control of this aspect of reality, which is fundamental to who we are as a species, and as a fundamental concept in biology, there is just nothing left that they can't distort completely and turn on its head. So we need to get back to the basic principles, rather than talking about sort of, is gender affirming care, what's the evidence for that? Well, the entire premise for it is based on pseudoscience, and I think we need to really attack at the root of the problem, rather than the studies with whether the sex change procedures gives people short or long term benefits for kids.

REICHARD: Colin Wright is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand. Colin, thanks so much!

WRIGHT: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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