I have been contemplating this dilemma for some time. In 2023 Neil deGrasse Tyson had an interview with Konstantin Kisin on the Triggernometry Youtube Channel Podcast. Which you can watch here...
During this interview, Neil speaks about gender expression: "the xx/xy chromosomes are insufficient because when we wake up in the morning we exaggerate whatever feature we want to portray the gender of our choice... Suppose no matter what my chromosomes, today I feel 80% female. 20% male. I'm gunna put on makeup. I'm gunna do this- Tomorrow I might feel 80% male. I'll remove the makeup and I'll wear a muscle shirt. Why do you care?... My only point was that if who you decide is male and female in the street is a construct of style and trends and what the beauty industrial complex wants you to see. If's that's how you establish gender, then maybe some people want to be fluid within that gender. So they'll wear a skirt but have a beard. Or they'll mix and match that in whatever way they want... So if a person, using the tools of the beauty industrial complex, wants to mix and match this and that, they are expressing their freedom in a free country to do so, why is your job to tell them not to?"(Punctuation added)
To kind of distill down Mr. Tyson's argument: Why does sex or gender matter at all to society?
To address the two main arguments that have been made to him why we should care about biological sex, gender specific bathrooms/changing rooms and sports, he made some lengthy arguments that I will attempt to summarize. Neil's argument for unisex restrooms/changing rooms which I hope I am portraying accurately: The solution is a communal cleaning space, sinks, etc, but with individual private chambers or stalls.
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To break down a counter argument, simply having unisex stalls in the same bathroom or changing room doesn't fix the purpose of having separate sex bathrooms and changing rooms. The purpose is to protect women from the minority of men who have the criminal mindset to abuse women both physically and sexually. The reason why having individual stalls, like this, doesn't fix the problem is that the bathroom or changing room itself isolates those who enter from the rest of the structure. So, if a lone woman enters a vacant unisex bathroom followed by a man who seeks to deal her harm, there is already one noise canceling barrier to aid the man in his attack, decreasing the odds of someone hearing her plight for help. It even helps to muffle the sound of him breaking into her private stall to get to her, assuming she made it into the stall.
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Admittedly, the remedy to this is individual bathrooms visible for the rest of the structure. To make sure no one twists my words, I am not saying anything like bathrooms with glass walls. I am saying single individual bathrooms or changing rooms with the entrance that is visible to the public or employees of the structure, whether it is an office, restaurant, place of work, etc. Having rooms like this not only provides the woman with a barrier door between her and her attacker, privacy for what the room is used for, but also removes the barrier that can muffle the sound and block visual of his trying to barge into the room.
However, the reason we have bathrooms and changing rooms with several stalls in the same room is because of the high traffic that can occur. Having individual bathrooms and changing rooms congests the traffic and increases the amount of time the stall is being used. Thus the solution that most of us has found is having sex determined bathrooms with individual stalls with the entrance visible to the public. If a man with ill intent follows a woman into a women's bathroom, then he can be removed for her safety before he can enact his malicious goals. A counter argument is that then you are discriminating against potentially innocent men without them actually attacking the woman. However, since the "rule" is that only women can enter the space, the man is already displaying his disregard for rules and laws by entering. Accidents do happen, which is why I am not suggesting brutally attacking any man who enters a women's restroom, but asking them to leave and becoming upset when they do not is perfectly reasonable.
Does this fix all the problems? No. Women and girls are still attacked in bathrooms and changing rooms. But that doesn't mean that we should lower their safety further to accommodate men who are wanting to break social rules or norms.
Now, to summarize Neil's argument about sports competitions: When he wrestled, he was in a certain weight class because it would be unfair for him to compete against someone with reasonably or significantly less weight. Thus, it is reasonable to create different classes for competition besides just weight, like hormone levels, etc.
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The reason why sports leagues haven't already discriminated classes based on hormone levels or other factors is because outside of biological sex, those levels are almost always the result of doping, which they have remedied by banning it. Neil brought up the example of a biological woman who naturally produced more testosterone, which is an extremely rare occurrence and is not the norm. Outliers do not change the rule. I can see the reactive argument, "But transgenders are also a rare minority, so why change the rule?" The reason is because institutions are changing the rules to make it less fair by trying to redefine female and male biological terms in order to include these unfair exceptions.
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That being said, I do concede the notion of having a full separate transgender class system for competitions possibly divided even further with hormone levels. Particularly, I like the idea of a competition class where people are allowed to dope as much testosterone or even steroids as they want and compete against each other just to see how strong humans can actually become and are capable of. However, because transgenders are the minority, the problem occurs with lack of competition. It isn't much fun watching two or three people competing in a competition because there are only so many individuals in a particular subset of classes: weight, sex, hormone levels, etc, resulting in all three receiving medals or prizes.
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| Pam from The Office after receiving a Dundy Award |
It reminds me of The Dundies from The Office, where each nomination award is so narrow that only one or sometimes two people could even be selected to win. Thus removing all competition and just making it a feel good reward show.
Having addressed Neil's arguments I would like to add my own argument as to why sex/gender is important for society to recognize. That is the pursuit of finding a spouse. Whatever your sexual orientation, except for bi-sexual (where you are attracted to both men and women), sex is an important factor. Homosexual men are looking for men, lesbian women are looking for women, and heterosexual men and women are looking for women and men respectively. Before anyone chimes in, I excluded a-sexual orientations because by definition, they are not attracted to men or women and are thus not pursing a spouse at all beyond a potential lifelong roommate.
With these three reasons as to why sex is important for society to recognize and acknowledge, women's safety, physical competitions, and romance; lets keep them in mind as we dive further into what sex and gender is.
In Bill Nye's show "Bill Nye Saves the World" season 1 episode 9, he explains that gender is a spectrum. As Mr. Tyson pointed out, and I admit that I might be reading into his words here, that because of gender expression changing and fluctuating by how you "exaggerate" your femininity or masculinity with your appearance, defining gender as simply xx/xy chromosomes isn't sufficient. Thus straying from the binary into the spectral realm.
There is some precedent for this in the realms of science. Take as an example, Neil's field of study, astrophysics which is routed in astronomics. In ancient days, people would look up at the night sky and see all the stars and have a simple word for them equivalent to "stars". However, when they began to notice that some of the stars seemed to move, they began creating more precise words to describe the astral bodies making the stars in the night sky a spectrum of objects, ranging from stars/suns, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.
A while ago, around 2018, Steven Crowder began a series of segments on his youtube show, Louder with Crowder called Change My Mind. One of these was called "There Are Only 2 Genders". I remember watching it as a sort of thought experiment, hearing Steven's arguments, and quite bluntly agreeing with them, while also trying to not only have an open mind for the counter arguments people would have, but even pushing as far as to how I would intellectually and honestly argue that there are more than two genders. The biggest and most common argument by those apposed to Mr. Crowder was that "gender" and "sex" are two different things, thus they were acknowledging that there are only two sexes, but saying that gender is something else that has a spectrum. Basically, as far as I have been able to tell, they were arguing that "gender" is what Neil defined as "gender expression". While individuals have biological sex, how they express that biology in their appearance, physical bodies (hormones/surgeries), and behavior is "gender". Thus allowing for gender to be a spectrum.
Stepping along the train of thought that by certain definitions gender and sex could be separate, I still couldn't roll out Steven's argument that throughout modern society, sex and gender have been synonymous. For example, there are drivers licenses that list your gender as m or f, male or female, while others list those same options for sex. Clearly, at the governmental level, which reflects the understanding of the society it governs, gender and sex were synonymous and interchangeable. Wherefore, unwilling to give up the territory into forcing people and even legislature which used these terms as equals, to change their definition, I decided to devise my own argument.
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There is a difference between social/practical nomenclature and the specific definitions within a specialized field. For example, when someone casually talks about looking up at the night sky and seeing stars, they are talking about what they see. As Neil has repeatedly joked, wishing on the first star you see at night doesn't work because the first stars you see are actually planets. The social word for star is different from the specialized astrology definition of a burning ball of gas.
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Similarly, and closer to my own fields of knowledge, the word "throw" or "throwing" a pot means something completely different in the field of ceramics. If you tell someone you threw a pot, they imagine you tossing it, likely with it shattering against a wall or on the ground. However, in ceramics, when you throw a pot, you put the clay on the wheel and spin it, allowing you to shape the circular form of a pot, vase, bowl, or whatever vessel more symmetrically.
Wherefore, I was willing to concede the ground that possibly, within the fields of sociology or more applicably psychology, having a different definition for gender could be useful. Particularly, with individuals suffering with gender dimorphic or body dimorphic resulting in changings to their "gender expression". By allowing them to categorize themselves with all of the "tumblr" genders, I briefly imagined a world in which doctors would be able to use these nearly countless genders to help treat their patients. (Gender non-binary mental health study 2020). However, this was a naïve dream.
The real world's progression has proved three things to me. First, that by allowing individuals to continually categorize themselves, they create increasing more and more categories ad nauseam resulting in the over used but often accurate "slippery slope" effect. In this case, leading to the ultimate conclusion that all of these categories will devolve down to the level of the individual.
Second, it has become apparent that even if the professors at the colleges emphasized that the separate definition of gender was directed toward their specific field of study, whether sociology, psychology, or something else, the graduates would still try to take that definition and apply it to the rest of society because they incorporated that definition so deeply into their identity. Attempting to force, where possible, compliance and acceptance of this new definition of gender to conform to their personal sense of self.
Third and as a result of the second, by trying to force a change in the definition of gender separate from sex, which had been previously combined, the lines between the two become blurred and conflated until they have merged together once again.
This is both shown with Neil's use of "gender expression" and with the medical and politically correct terminology the so called "woke" or "progressive" communities continues to spout. If gender and sex are separate things, Neil's "gender expression" should have been called sexual expression or simply gender. While "transgenders" shouldn't or wouldn't even be a term at all since the tumbler genders included both gender queer and gender fluid. Transgenders, if gender and sex are separate, should be called transsexuals, as they claiming to be, not a different gender, but a different sex, male or female. This is echoed with "gender affirming" care/surgery. If gender is separate from sex, then why would you need to alter your sexual organs to "affirm" it? Transgenders are transsexuals who are trying to "reaffirm" the sex they believe they are. Otherwise, if it was merely gender or sexual expression, then changing their appearance according to the "beauty industrial complex", as Neil repeatedly emphasized, should be enough to express their sex.
I am afraid this will be taken out of context, but Neil deGrasse Tyson is right, gender and sex are the same thing. However, as he so appropriately pointed out, "if a person, using the tools of the beauty industrial complex, wants to mix and match this and that, they are expressing their freedom in a free country to do so, why is your job to tell them not to?" EXACTLY Neil. No one cares about their cosmetic expression of their gender or sex. If a guy wants to have a beard and wear a dress, let him. If a woman wants to wear jeans and a baggy shirt, let her. The argument isn't against critiquing their fashion statements. The argument is that their gender expression or sexual expression isn't a compelling enough argument to completely redefine sex and gender from males having a Y chromosome and females only have X's. Speaking as a heterosexual man, I am attracted to women, aka females. Those females can exist on a broad gender expression/fashion range. I would imagine the same could be said of heterosexual women being attracted to men with all kinds of fashion senses; and likely extends to those who have same sex attraction as well.
Briefly, I would like to address one last argument I have heard for sex/gender being on a spectrum, and that is the inclusion of intersex/androgenous/hermaphroditic individuals. As far as science determines, a male has the presence of a Y chromosome. It doesn't matter if it is xy/xxy/xxxy/xxyy, they are all male. Thus making female, xx/xxx/xxxx. By this strict definition, even though there are some out layers in the expression of both the genes and their fashion, sex and gender are still binary.
However, despite this simple binary definition of male and female, I am not convinced that this definition is the correct one. I saw an interview on a talk show in 2011 where a woman (at least what I consider to be a woman) was on Dr. Drew's Lifechangers.(Season 1 episodes 21-22 Eric/Erica). She was a "true mosaic hermaphrodite" or as close to one as has ever been recorded by modern history, or so I recall from the episode.(It is obscure, not even listed on IMDB as of April 2024, so I have not been able to rewatch it to confirm my memory.) It is difficult to verify such things both on public tv and it being so many years ago with any degree of certainty. I don't remember if she stated her chromosome configuration, but she had a penis, a vagina, a womb, and had an internal testicle and an ovary. Despite having as much of a combination between male and female, her sperm would not swim, leaving her sterile when it comes to impregnating another female. However, her eggs were fertile, allowing her to become pregnant. Thus, even with the presence of a Y chromosome which resulted in her testicle and penis, making her a male by science standards, she was able to become pregnant, making her female by my standards.
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| Eric/Erica from Dr. Drew's Lifechangers |
Why do I consider her female?
The prophet and apostles of Jesus Christ's restored church sent out a proclamation to the world in 1995 stating: "All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." With this knowledge in mind, in my own spiritual contemplation and prayer, I have come to the conclusion that if being a male human is an essential characteristic of an individual's mortal and eternal destiny and purpose, then God wouldn't allow, even through the fallen state of the world which results in genetic mutations and mishaps, for a man to become pregnant. Nevertheless, I acknowledge my own limited perspective and understanding. The same God that made human beings in His image also made the seahorse, where even though the male releases sperm to fertilize the eggs, the eggs attach inside of a pouch on his body to be birthed later. (Searhorse Giving Birth) However, at the cellular level, the male seahorse giving birth still contributed sperm to the mating process. Wherefore, I have my stance and opinion on this matter, believing for now that I am correct, and await further revelation to clarify how intersex individuals exist in God's plan for the salvation of the human family.
To summarize my conclusions whether you believe intersex individual are males or females according to science or religion, they are still binary within the human genome. As far as gender expression is concerned:
When picking a spouse, the only effect gender expression/fashion has is to exclude some individuals, and emphasize others, all according to the individual's preference. When it comes to physical sports, whether or not the individuals competing are in the correct biological gender categories and proper weight classes FAR outweighs whether or not they are performing with or without makeup on. And when it comes to women's safety, whether or not the man is wearing a dress doesn't change the fact that a man is putting himself into a women's only space. Even if they have no ill intentions themselves, it sets the precedence that allows vile men to abuse that opportunity and in turn makes women and girls less safe.
Wherefore, if gender expression isn't an important factor in the few realms where sex is indeed important to society then why would we need to redefine sex to include it? Simple answer: We Don't. We don't need to change it. If anyone reading this feels the need to, for some reason, correspond an individual's fashion statement with their biological sex, I urge you to create a new term for it instead of appropriating an existing term to be used for your own political needs and only causes mass confusion and strife. If it is really so important to you, do it right and create a new term. And if anyone has counter arguments to what I have said, I welcome them; please comment them below.
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