On January 20 the Trump administration issued an executive order that claimed to be “restoring biological truth to the federal government” – by defining sex. “It is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female”, the order says. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
What, according to the document, is that reality? “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell [gamete]… “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” If your body makes ova (big), you will be declared female in the US; if it makes sperm (little), you are male. End of story.
But not really. This appears to be a startlingly cackhanded attempt to employ the gamete-size definition of sex insisted on by some evolutionary biologists. The trouble is that, as a universal criterion applied to individuals, it is hopeless.
It’s trivially obvious why that’s so: some people, because of either medical treatment or inherent physiology, don’t produce gametes – and embryos at conception certainly don’t. Then the definition can only work by saying that it’s a matter of which gametes those people or embryos would/will produce if or when they could. But how do we determine that? From their anatomy? Chromosomes? Hormone levels?
For the embryos at conception specified by the directive, chromosomes are the only possibility. This then must imply that the real criterion is that if you have an X and Y chromosome you’re male, while two Xs make you female.
Some have responded to the executive order with amusement by pointing out that, given that all embryos begin developing as female by default – the sex-determining gene of the Y chromosome in males only kicking in to channel development towards a male reproductive system around the seven-week mark – the insistence on assigning sex at conception means all US citizens are female. That’s funny but perhaps a little disingenuous. An embryo with a Y chromosome at conception will, after all, inevitably develop male genitalia eventually, right?
Wrong. There are all kinds of intersex conditions – many of them rare, but every one of them manifested in a real person – that can complicate the link between chromosomes and anatomy (Because of disrupted gonad formation, some intersex conditions suppress gamete generation altogether). People with androgen insensitivity syndrome or Swyer syndrome, for example, might be anatomically female (with underdeveloped gonads) despite having XY chromosomes, and people who are XX can have gene mutations that produce a male anatomy. Such people are sometimes assigned a sex at birth according to anatomy, so far as that is possible, and may be given surgery to emphasise that assignation. They would then typically be raised with that identity.
None of this has anything to do with people choosing to identify with a particular sex (whether binary or not) that matches neither anatomy, chromosomes, nor gametes. That’s another matter again, but even then it may be biologically nuanced: there is some evidence that the human brain is dimorphic, having neurotypically “male” and “female” settings fixed during development and therefore potentially contingent on other factors. How society responds to people who are anatomically and chromosomally of one sex but feel like the other is far from obvious, and understandably contentious – but there can be a biological component to it.
All of this reflects the “biological truth” that human development is complex and influenced by many factors. It is hard to know whether the executive order was drawn up in ignorance or in defiance of that fact; the result is the same. “The scientist in me is in disbelief at how stupid it is,” the biological anthropologist Kathryn Clancy has said. “How can you so fully misunderstand basic human biology and then legislate about it?”
What’s more, the executive order is a blatant attempt to smuggle in the concept of “personhood at conception” that, by serving an extreme anti-abortion agenda, makes its claim to be “defending women” (not, note, women’s rights) positively obscene.
There have been bitter arguments between those who see biological sex as binary and those who, on the contrary, see it as graduated and multiple. But hopefully both sides will be united in deploring the car-crash definition in Trump’s executive order – not just because it is scientifically incoherent but because of its ominous insistence on imposing a scientific “truth”, transparently driven by ideology, that the scientific and medical community will be compelled to obey.
