Mick Hartley

From evolutionary biologist Colin Wright (via):

The new @APApsychiatric textbook "Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care" is out and, as expected, it's pushing sex pseudoscience.

On page 32, the authors give their definition of the term "sex." They claim that the terms male and female "are used to describe characteristics of an… pic.twitter.com/eL7BOiM3ov

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 10, 2024

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Full text:

In other words, they claim that we cannot refer to people as belonging to a sex category, but can only describe their various traits as being sexed. For example, instead of statements like "Joey is a male" or "Jennifer is a female," we should break them down trait-by-trait and say "Joey has male chromosomes, male genitals, a male hormone profile, and a male gender identity, etc."

This is scientifically inaccurate and actually self-refuting when you prod it even a little. It is self-refuting because the only way we can code various traits like chromosomes, genitals, and hormones as male or female is by understanding that males and females exist independently of these individual traits. How do we come to associate an XY karyotype with males and an XX karyotype with females without knowing what males and females were beforehand? How do we associate testosterone with males and estradiol with females if males and females don't exist independently of hormone levels?

You see, we are only able to code these various traits as male or female because being male or female is totally independent of these traits, and is based on the type of gamete (sperm or ova) an individual has the function to produce.

So why do gender activists and doctors insist on viewing sex as applying to individual traits and not entire individuals? Because it is a necessary premise for the justification of "gender-affirming care." The entire practice requires sex to exist along various axes or "levels," such as chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, genital sex, behavioral sex, and even "brain sex" (which they call "gender identity"). That's because if sex exists along multiple independent axes or levels, then it's possible for some of these axes or levels to be incongruent and then made congruent through some medical intervention.

According to their ideology, a person is considered transgender if they have a "mismatch" between their brain sex (gender identity) and the sex they were "assigned at birth" based on their genitals. The goal of "gender-affirming care" is to use hormones and surgeries to alter a person's hormonal sex and other physical traits so that they "match" a person's brain sex.

The mutability of one's physical sex through the use of hormones and surgery is foundational to gender-affirming care. This is why gender activists insist that sex and the terms male and female apply only to characteristics of an individual and not individuals themselves. If sex were instead viewed correctly as applying to individuals independent of their secondary sex characteristics, then the entire premise of gender-affirming care crumbles because there would be no such thing as a mismatch between different levels of a person's sex and altering a person's sex by hormonally and/or surgically altering their secondary sex characteristics would be impossible.

Pointing out that the evidence for the efficacy of gender-affirming care is extremely poor is important, but it is perhaps even more important to expose the fact that the entire premise of gender-affirming care is unsound and pseudoscientific. We need to attack the premise.

This is what I have been trying to highlight for a long time, and I am happy to finally be working as an expert witness in court cases to drive this point home. This is also great optics, because lawyers look like fools sparring with biologists about basic biology.

This is how we are going to win.