Mick Hartley

Carole Hooven was bullied out of Harvard for stating that in biology there are only two sexes. Jerry Coyne quotes from an article she's written in today's Boston Globe – Don't let anyone confuse you: There really are only two sexes. Yes Trump is right about sex, she says, however much you may dislike his politics.

Ideally, political beliefs would not bias views of scientific reality. But take a look at how the media covered the Trump administration’s new executive order. The Globe: “Trump executive order misstates facts about sex and gender, scientists say.” Time: “Trump’s ‘Biological Truth’ Executive Order Is Not Based in Biology or Truth.” The Guardian: “Most scientists now reject the idea that sex is strictly binary” and “sex is a hell of a lot more complicated than Trump’s executive order would have you believe.” NBC: “The executive order questions [transgender people’s] existence by saying the government would recognize only two unchangeable sexes: female and male.”

As for Fox News: “Trump is returning sanity to the gender conversation.”

Many journalists — and the experts they consult — seem unable to disentangle their politics from analysis of the relevant science. I’m a Democrat, and I have never voted for a Republican. Yet while I might have worded things in Trump’s executive order a little differently, I agree with the way this administration has defined sex.

There are two and only two sexes. Sex is immutable in humans and other mammals, and it is defined by gamete size.

When you see it laid out like this, with all the resources of the liberal US media, plus all the scientific institutions that've bowed their heads to the gender gods and gone with the ideology rather than the science, the comparison with Lysenko is clear. 

[If you don't know about Lysenko, here's Wiki. Basically he rejected genetics in favour of a Marxist-friendly kind of Lamarckism – the belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited by offspring, in opposition to Darwin's proven theories:

For starters, he believed that plants and seeds could be trained to follow socialist organizational principles. His theory, which would eventually be dubbed Lysenkoism, stated that crops could be trained to conform and produce vast yields almost from out of thin air. According to what he called “the law of the life of species,” seeds wouldn’t compete with one another, but rather they would cooperate with each other in a near-sentient fashion — like humans.

Applying the Marxist principle of materialism, in which the conditions surrounding an individual dictate its behaviors and responses, Lysenko believed that plants and animals, too, could be reshaped as needed.

In 1927, Lysenko’s theories appeared to be proven when a crop of peas he’d planted in the winter before burst forth into green life. He thought this proved that he had taught the peas to grow even in their off-season simply by exposing them to the cold.

Stalin backed him, Lysenkoism became officially approved Marxist-Leninist biology, opponents were jailed or sent to the gulags – and millions starved to death.

It's the classic case of ideology trumping science – cited, often enough, as proof of the idiocy of Soviet Communism under Stalin, and the willingness of regime apparatchiks to go along with the latest approved fad for the sake of their careers.

Well….]