Transgender activists appear to have been successful in bullying politicians, the media, police and even the courts into affirming the lie that a person can change their sex.

When public figures are asked to define the term woman, very few dare to do so. Australian Health bureaucrats, the New Zealand Prime Minister, every Minister for Women in this country, media personalities and more all baulk at this very simple question. Not one seems to be able to confess a woman is in fact an adult human female.

In the USA a Supreme Court judge nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked the question and responded “I’m not a biologist.” 

One doesn’t need to be a biologist to understand there are differences between males and females that are observable and supported by science. Even children can tell the difference.

Thankfully, there are some biologists who have refused to give in to the bullying by the trans lobby. One outspoken evolutionary biologist is Colin Wright. He is extremely active on Twitter and is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Wright has written an article for the Wall Street Journal to try and clear up the confusion between social constructs, intersex and biological reality.

“I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don’t undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” arbitrary and meaningless.

In reality, the existence of borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else’s sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on day and night. For the vast majority of people, their sex is obvious. And our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female.

Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.

But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex”.

To conflate the two is disingenuous and harmful. One is a biological reality, the other an ideological position.

Males who claim to be women, are not. They are male. There is no diagnostic test to prove a male can be female. Not one. It is impossible to change sex because sex is written on every single cell in our bodies.

The terms male and female are scientific and have very specific meanings. We rely on language for understanding. The language of male and female is critical to our understanding when forming public policy, especially when it deeply impacts safeguarding for women and children:

“Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans women,” from female sports, prisons and other female-only spaces isn’t complicated. Trans women are unambiguously male, so the chances that a doctor incorrectly recorded their sex at birth is zero. Any “transgender policy” designed to protect female spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded (or “assigned,” in the current jargon) female at birth”.

Intersex conditions are another matter entirely that should not be lumped under the same umbrella. As Wright says regarding sport and other issues that affect policies regarding sex, should “be rooted in properties of bodies, not “identity.” Identity alone is irrelevant to issues of fairness and safety.”

Adults are free to ‘identify’ however they please, but they are not free to impose their ideological belief onto society as if it were fact. Women and children deserve safeguarding according to the reality of their bodies as determined by biological sex. Men’s feelings should not determine public policy that puts women or children in harm’s way.