Nature, one of the top-tier scientific journals in the world, published an editorial last week requiring future study authors to consider how their findings “might perpetuate gender stereotypes” as part of the submission process.
Researchers must also acknowledge how sex and gender were accounted for in their study design and analysis, and if they weren’t, they would have to explain why. This is with the goal of removing bias, and it applies to research involving humans, animals, and cell lines. But if you were curious about the journal’s stance on other social justice-related hot topics, it has also issued guidance on implementing intersectionality during COVID-19, geopolitics, and systemic racism.
I agree that it is important to take sex into account when conducting research, as using men as a scientific baseline, as has historically been done, means that many biomedical findings won’t be relevant to women. But because biological sex is verboten among transgender activists, an emphasis on gender identity must be even further prioritized.
Nature stated that studies should acknowledge both sex and gender, defining sex as a “biological attribute” and gender as “socially constructed.”
However, sex and gender are both biological. Transgender people, as well as some intersex people, identify more with the opposite sex than their birth sex, but this difference is attributable to biological influences, such as hormonal exposure in the prenatal environment. If gender was a social construct, why couldn’t transgender people be persuaded to be comfortable in their birth sex?
Being receptive to the concerns of minority communities is, of course, a worthwhile endeavor, but rewriting science to acknowledge 0.8% of the population frankly doesn’t make sense. As well, activists’Â ideological separation of gender from sex is precisely what is eating away at scientific discovery to begin with.
If gender is completely detached from sex, then anyone can be a woman. This freedom to self-identify however one pleases has led to a false amnesia about what a woman is. As we’ve seen, there is no end to the absurdity as women’s sports are being destroyed, a rise in violent and sexual crime is being attributed to women due to male offenders identifying as female, and dehumanizing language such as “chest-feeding” and “frontal birth” is being normalized.
I am saddened by the ways in which academia continues to be debased by a movement that champions threats and deceit over knowledge and understanding. Because once the public has lost trust in the scientific process, it cannot be repaired.
Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.
