Pathfinders – Without distinction of race or sex
In the USA, Trump’s MAGA gang is ruthlessly savaging everything they don’t like, including climate science, Ivy League universities which they see as being hotbeds of radical leftism, and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). Their DEI bête noire is what’s called ‘affirmative action’, which they take to mean promoting ethnic candidates over more talented white ones, in defiance of the principle of meritocracy.
This presupposes that a white-dominated ‘meritocracy’ is ever genuinely capable of being ‘colour blind’, in the sense that it doesn’t notice whether a person is white or black. Critical race theory, which the MAGA gang also loath, mocks this self-serving pretension and argues that disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced into the mix. As things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates.
Logically speaking, discrimination is not in the interests of employers, if through their own prejudice they are reducing the pool of talent they can draw from. But prejudice is not logical. Moreover, economically disadvantaged whites may not see or admit that there is a racism problem in the first place. To them, any positive discrimination in favour of other disadvantaged groups, together with talk of ‘white privilege’, will seem like a wholesale liberal attack on their ‘rights’. Populists like Trump are experts in exploiting such concerns.
During the USA’s infamous Jim Crow era, segregation required race-defining laws to determine who was black and who was white. The concept of ‘race’ has no scientific basis, so the laws were inevitably arbitrary, leaving some white-appearing people designated black, and vice versa. This legal nonsense imposed an artificial binary categorisation on what in reality is a spectrum, in order to enforce an iniquitous social oppression.
Constitutional lawyers teach that ‘parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman’. In its judgement last month the UK Supreme Court seemed to agree but they were making a purely legal ruling. They were not seeking to reflect the scientific view which is much more nuanced.
‘Most traits ascribed to males and females fall along a spectrum that has two peaks. One is the average for females. The other is the average for males […] But almost nobody fits in the peak for their sex on all of those measures.’.
As molecular evolutionary biologist Nathan Lents puts it, ‘How we define sex really depends on what we’re talking about. We want this to be a nice, neat, two-bucket category system where there’s no grey area, but unfortunately biology doesn’t traffic in binaries very often’. He describes a huge range of sex-related cardiovascular functions, hormone levels, blood, liver and brain conditions and disease dispositions, which don’t necessarily correspond to the external visible anatomy, or what’s called the phenotype. ‘While it’s very understandable to want to collapse all of this diversity into very simple categories, it really misses a lot of important biology. Life is complicated, life is messy, life is multi-dimensional’ .
He goes on: ‘We have anatomy all throughout our body that shows sex differences, but those differences are overlapping, and the variation within the sexes is larger than the difference between them’.
He concludes: ‘We’ve invented categories such as male and female, we invented these words, we invented these labels and we created the definitions, which means that they’re not necessarily a biological reality’.
For instance, women typically have two X chromosomes, and men have an X and a Y chromosome. But this is far from being universal. Around 1.7 percent of babies are born as ‘intersex’ or as having ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSDs), meaning they have traits of both sexes. This is about the same proportion as those who have red hair, or globally, around 110 million people. 1 in 650 newborns assigned male at birth have two or more X chromosomes and one Y (Klinefelter syndrome). 1 in 1000 newborns assigned female have just one X chromosome (Trisomy). In some cases, the SRY gene, important for male sex development, jumps out of the Y chromosome and bonds to an X instead. In others, X and Y have genes which prevent bodies from responding to testosterone and other male sex hormones (androgens), so that their bodies develop as female while having testes inside their abdomens.
Stigma surrounding such conditions often led to surgery at birth that was kept secret by the child’s parents, leading to severe mental health problems for the child later in life, in particular gender dysphoria, in which the person’s perceived gender does not align with their assigned sex.
Some of us may have mismatched sexual traits and not even know about it. In 2014, a 70-year-old father of four seeking treatment for a ‘hernia’ turned out to have a uterus with fallopian tubes (youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4).
The Supreme Court ruling is likely to have heartrending repercussions for transgender women, and will no doubt be contested. It’s a political ruling that will allow one large oppressed group to feel a measure of protection at the cost of another, far smaller one. But it is not based on science, which has nothing to say on wider questions about sports or hospital beds or prisons. And it allows politicians to ‘dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age’.
In socialism, ‘legal’ definitions will be irrelevant. Equality doesn’t mean we all have to look or be the same. What it does mean is that we will cooperate, practically, ethically, and creatively, to build a post-capitalist society of common ownership for the emancipation of the whole of humanity, in the words of clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles, ‘without distinction of race or sex’.
PJS