Sex Assigned at Birth - According to anti-trans activists at the New York Times
Another week, another transphobic piece at NYT
Today, the New York Times published an opinion piece by anti-trans activists Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven. They use their platform on the opinion page of NYT to argue that “sex assigned at birth” is misleading since sex is ultimately immutable. (Spoiler: this is wrong). Bryne is a professor of philosophy at MIT and author of the 2023 book Trouble with Gender. (After presenting a draft of the book to editors at Oxford University Press, the publishing house declined because “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.”) Hooven is a nonresident fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and frequent guest on anti-trans media outlets such as The Joe Rogan Experience.
Byrne and Hooven’s main argument is that distinct and immutable sexes are a common feature of all animals, and that the sex of an animal imbues it with a distinct and gendered biology. Every part of this argument is wrong.
First, not every animal has distinct sexes with fully singular reproductive capacities. For example, the animal that I study in lab C. elegans, a small worm-like nematode that lives in the soil, does not have a dedicated “female” sex. Instead, it has a male sex and a hermaphroditic1 sex. The latter animals produce both eggs and sperm and can self-fertilize. So, Byrne and Hooven’s thesis is off to a bad start.
Byrne and Hooven also argue that sex (or at least the one assigned at birth) is immutable. While they don’t explicitly say it, Byrne and Hooven seem to be referring to sex as the presence of external genitalia associated with “maleness” or “femaleness.” Of course, the external genitalia present on an individual can be changed surgically. This includes gender-affirming phalloplasty and vaginoplasty. But importantly, it also includes medically unnecessary surgeries performed on intersex folks shortly after birth and without their consent. (The “medical goal” being to alter the person’s external genitalia to fit within the sexual binary. This is, in fact, not a medical goal but a social goal.)
The last bit of their argument posits that there are distinct biologies associated with maleness and femaleness. Again, this statement falls short of reality. Queer Science Lab has already begun to break down why by looking at the sex hormones: estrogens and androgens. In short, sex hormones exist in a constant state of fluidity in the body, and estrogens and androgens can be directly interconverted by the action of a single enzyme. The sex hormones are by no means the only example of Byrne and Hooven’s argument falling short.
However, we must also consider that our understanding of sex is influenced by social settings. If “sex” is purely defined by reproductive capacity, it doesn’t quite matter the “sex” of an individual living on a deserted island because there are no opportunities to reproduce. But what does matter to that individual is their sense of themselves regardless of their reproductive capacity. Bryne and Hooven’s ideas around sex are therefore a way of describing and subdividing people into distinct categories of their own making. The transgender historian Susan Stryker lays out well in the revised 2017 edition of Transgender History:
The messiness of sex has to do with our cultural beliefs about what those biological differences of reproductive capacity mean. It’s a cultural belief, not a biological fact, that having a certain kind of reproductive capacity necessarily determines what the rest of your body is like or what kind of person you are, or that some of these biological differences can’t change over time, or that biological differences should be used as a principle of sorting people into social categories, or that these categories should be ordered in a hierarchical way.
Byrne and Hooven envision a world where gender is collapsed into the overriding category of sex which would effectively erase gender non-conforming folks. The call to action in their piece is for journalists, academics, and medical professionals to abandon the phrase “sex assigned at birth” because they think the words “assigned at birth” are superfluous. (They do not reckon with the possibility that someone could surgically change their external genitalia.) The cruelty of their solution is underscored by their consideration that “sex assigned at birth” could be used to denote “politeness or expressions of solidarity.” Apparently, they prefer having control to being nice.
Unfortunately, this is another case of the New York Times (the newspaper in the United States with the largest subscriber base) platforming anti-trans activists and misinformation. In April 2023, almost 1,000 NYT contributors signed an open letter dragging the publication for its coverage of gender non-conforming folks. The publication scoffed in response. Since then, they have continued to platform anti-trans views such as those of Pamela Paul. In February, Paul published a deeply misleading opinion piece about gender affirming care. Trans journalists Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart responded by calling out Paul’s transphobia. Just last month, Media Matters published an investigation into the journalistic coverage at NYT on trans topics. This report showed that the publication failed to quote a trans person in two-thirds(!) of its stories covering anti-trans legislation around the country. This includes 18% of their articles which propagated anti-trans misinformation without rebuttal. And it is not just the NYT. As trans writer Parker Molloy noted recently, there is only one trans person who is a paid contributor on TV: Caitlin Jenner who regularly goes on Fox News to argue that the recent wave of anti-trans legislation is actually a good thing.
Until more trans and gender non-conforming folks have access to the same platforms as anti-trans activists Byrne and Hooven, these non-sensical arguments will continue to spread. Here at Queer Science Lab, we will do our best and revisit these topics in the future with greater detail. In the meantime, stay strong out there folks.
Yes, scientists still use the word “hermaphrodite” when describing non-human animals with both male and female reproductive capacities. When used to describe an intersex person, the word “hermaphrodite” is a slur. Science should collectively reexamine its use of that word when describing animals too.