Alice Sullivan’s important new book Sex, Lies and Statistics is published this week:
Sex, Lies and Statistics investigates one of the most contentious and puzzling social phenomena of our time: the removal of sex from data, social policy and public discourse.
Sociologist Alice Sullivan traces the origins of the conflation of sex and gender in sexology, postmodern queer theory, and transgender rights activism. She analyses the way these ideas moved beyond academia and permeated our institutions, tracing the consequences everywhere from statistics bureaux to sports bodies to prisons to the effects on children and young people. Along the way, she exposes the pressures―political, institutional, and social―that have discouraged open debate and sidelined evidence in favour of orthodoxy.
It’s reviewed by Victoria Smith at the Critic:
Perhaps my favourite crazy anecdote involves King’s College London’s ethics committee rejecting a 2023 research proposal seeking to “find the views of athletes and volunteers on the question of when males should be allowed to compete in the female category in athletics”. The proposal was rejected on the basis that its use of the terms “male” and “female” “constituted ‘misgendering’”. Ha! Imagine that! Hilarious until you remember this actually happened. It’s a prime example of the way in which, as Sullivan puts it, “talking about women’s rights becomes impossible if we can’t talk about women at all”. Without data on sex, she notes, “we cannot tackle sexism and discrimination, nor understand differences in experiences and outcomes between women and men, girls and boys”. Everybody knows this, or at least they used to until five minutes ago….
Publishing is awash with books “explaining” why noticing sex is binary is biological essentialism, puberty is assigned at birth, no one had sex categories before colonialism and any male advantage in sport simply isn’t proven yet. It can be harder to against this kind of thing than against something which isn’t total bollocks. You can’t just say “that’s total bollocks” (believe me, I have tried). When something sounds completely mad and counter-intuitive — and especially when challenging it might lead to ostracism — people have a tendency to decide they must have missed something. With gender identity ideology, too many people in positions of power have been persuaded not to worry about the detail (or about human females, that passé, wrong-side-of history category). As Sullivan recounts, they were warned that “losing data on sex would affect the ability of scientists and policymakers to analyse and tackle questions such as life expectancy, fertility, childcare, pay and pensions”, but went along with it anyways, accepting “an analogy between gay rights and trans rights in place of evidence regarding the likely effects of removing sex as a dimension of policy in different domains”. How does one get through to such people, now that things have gone so far?
If a good-faith reading of Sex, Lies and Statistics doesn’t work, I’m not sure what will (send it to every politician swearing to tackle sex discrimination and violence against women without being “tricked” into stating what a woman is). It is packed with pithy statements which cut straight through all the waffle: “rather than gender roles, it would be more accurate to say that it is sex categories and sex-based vocabulary that queer theory has attacked”; “‘Trans women are women’ was not an empirical claim. It was a demand”; “the existence of real differences between males and females does not imply the inferiority of females”. The opening paragraph of the final chapter offers a powerful, four-sentence dismissal of acres of Butlerian nonsense on how sex, when you really think about it, is, like, totally the same as gender:
People who have been bamboozled by the claim that sex is not binary have simply failed to understand what sex is. They have mistaken the correlates of sex or the signifiers and cultural associations of sex with sex itself. There is enormous human diversity within each sex category, and expressions of masculinity and femininity are fluid and diverse. This does not negate the sex binary.
So there. That should be it. We all know it won’t be, but writing like this should surely help us take a few more steps back to reality.
Richard Dawkins: “A terrific book, strongly recommended”>
Carole Hooven: “A gripping, essential work”.
OK then….
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