On February 5, three prominent biologists and presidents of major biological associations wrote a letter to President Trump and Congress opposing his January 2025 Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The letter alleges that scientific evidence contradicts the binary view of sex by emphasizing the complexity of sex determination involving chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy, and highlighting variations that suggest sex and gender are not strictly binary traits.
What Does the Evidence Really Say?
The biologists’ perspective conflates biological sex with gender identity. Biological sex is determined by the type of gametes produced: males produce sperm, and females produce eggs. This dichotomy is consistent across sexually reproducing species, underscoring the binary basis of sex. This is noted in a response letter written by some eminent biologists, such as neo-atheists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja, and also backed by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins, which addresses the misconceptions about definitions about biological sex: “The universal biological definition of sex is gamete size.”
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The letter challenging Trump’s executive order asserts that “sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment,” conflating gender—a social construct—with biological sex. Even though the assertion that sex exists on a spectrum has been propagated in some academic and political spheres, it is an unscientific perspective. As Coyne and Maroja state,
However, we do not see sex as a “construct” and we do not see other mentioned human-specific characteristics, such as “lived experiences” or “[phenotypic] variation along the continuum of male to female”, as having anything to do with the biological definition of sex.
Some argue that intersex conditions challenge the binary nature of sex. However, conditions like Turner syndrome (XO), Klinefelter syndrome (XXY), and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome are rare anomalies, not distinct sexes. As biologist Jerry Coyne notes in a letter to Nature, “In animals, which of course include humans, sex is as close to binary as you can come, with only 0.018% of individuals being neither male nor female, but intersex.” These rare exceptions do not redefine the biological framework but instead reaffirm that sex is binary with occasional anomalies.
Biological Sex as a Construct: How Did We Get Here?
To understand the shift in discourse on biological sex, we must examine how contemporary ideological movements, like the Frankfurt School, extended Marxist critiques into culture and identity politics, which has infected the natural sciences.
How have we reached the point where prominent scientists (Neil deGrasse Tyson is an example of this phenomenon) feel compelled to deny fundamental biological realities? Part of the answer lies in emotional appeals and the common fallacy of appeal to pity, which often drives academics to reject truth in favor of ideological conformity. Couple this with the appeal to authority fallacy as exemplified in the presidents’ letter and you have a combination of fallacies that run rampant throughout our educational, medical, legal, and media establishments.
These logical fallacies have influenced policy decisions without taking actual evidence and logic into consideration. This trend has been no more evident than in the Covid debacle (something I discuss in my book COVID-19: A Dystopian Delusion), climatology, and in this particular case, the gender and sex debate. The rise of biological denialism—the rejection of sex as a binary reality—can be traced to several modern philosophical movements, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Hegelian Dialectics
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectics is a triadic process: 1) Thesis: a dominant view or existing reality; 2) Antithesis: an opposing idea that challenges the thesis (a contradiction or negation); and lastly, 3) Synthesis: integrating elements of the thesis and antithesis, formulating a new mode of thinking or paradigm. This triadic process fuels biological denialism in the following way: 1) Thesis: the traditional view that biological sex is either male or female and can’t change; 2) Antithesis: ideas that question biological essentialism in favor of non-binary views; and 3) Synthesis: The synthesis would transcend the opposition between binary and non-binary sex by proposing a gender spectrum or gender fluidity. This position argues that sex and gender exist along a continuum, acknowledging the diversity of human experiences.
Extending Marxism: The Frankfurt School
Unlike economic Marxism, which focuses on class struggle, the Frankfurt School expanded Marxist theory into cultural and ideological domains. The Frankfurt School, led by thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, critiqued Enlightenment rationality and bourgeois society, laying the foundation for critical theory. These thinkers expanded Marxism beyond economics, focusing on culture and ideology. They incorporated psychoanalysis, studied mass media’s influence, and examined mass culture’s role in shaping society. Their goal was to challenge perceived power structures and embed Marxist theory into modern social discourse.
Consequently, they have attempted to dismantle sex as a biological category by using critical theory. The Frankfurt School’s thought has led to the reformulation of Marxism into Neo-Marxism (commonly known as cultural Marxism). This ideological shift has allowed critical theorists to argue that biological sex is merely a social construct, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody is an excellent critique of critical theory in general and how it has heavily infiltrated the academy since the 1970s.
Postmodernism
Similarly, postmodern philosophy has also played a significant role, even though incoherent, in shaping the denial of objective truth and consequently many fundamental aspects of science. For instance, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionismchallenges Western binary distinctions, including the male-female dichotomy, arguing that all categories, even biological ones, are unstable and fluid. Michel Foucault’s work on power and sexuality contends that sex itself is a product of discourse, not an objective truth, as he argues in The History of Sexuality.
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Foucault disputes what is deemed to be “natural,” questioning the idea of the stability and uniformity of nature, while instead emphasizing the social and historical understanding of how humans relate to nature. In turn, he argues that sex is the result of historical and cultural conditioning, which in turn functions to challenge the truth of biological sex. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity introduces the concept of “gender performativity,” where she argues that sex, like gender, is also a social construction that is fashioned by cultural norms and repeated behaviors rather than in the universality of the binary nature of biological sex.
Standpoint epistemology, developed by feminist theorists Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding, argues that marginalized groups possess a unique epistemic advantage due to their lived experiences (the presidents of the biological societies make reference to “lived experience”). Hartsock’s Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialismcombines Marxist historical materialism with feminist theory, asserting that women’s experiences in a patriarchal society provide a unique epistemological standpoint.
In The Science Question in Feminism, Harding went even further with this idea by saying that in order for science to be objective, it should include the views of oppressed groups in order to counter the biases of dominant discourses. Applied to biology, this framework challenges scientific objectivity by prioritizing subjective identity claims over empirical evidence. This perspective has influenced contemporary gender debates by asserting that biological sex is a construct shaped by social and historical contexts rather than an objective category. For a deeper discussion on gender ideology and its many dangers, see my book Making Sense of Nonsense: Navigating through the West’s Current Quagmire.
