Conservative state legislatures continue to attack transgender rights: Texas has banned transgender care for youth; Kansas passed a law erroneously defining gender as sex assigned at birth; Montana’s House of Representatives banned Representative Zooey Zephyr, the first trans legislator in the state, from the legislative chamber.
These are only a few examples of a larger pattern in which states like Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Missouri have passed increasingly intrusive restrictions on gender expression. In response, some people are leaving these states to protect themselves and their families.
These laws are highly discriminatory. They also display a shocking lack of awareness of the complex science of gender and sex.
Such laws are harmful to the health of transgender individuals and ignore the facts of science.
As an associate professor of biology, I know that sex and gender are intertwined, complicated, fascinating and nonbinary. The more scientists study gender/sex, the more nuanced and myriad variation we find. For sex assigned at birth, there are at least three categories—female, male, intersex—and they still greatly simplify true variation in hormone levels, genetics, and anatomy.
But now, according to many Red state legislatures, sex and gender are the same, binary, and life-long. Scientists, on the other hand, have long accepted that biological sex is not the same as gender. The American Medical Women’s Association defines gender as “socially constructed and enacted roles and behaviors which occur in a historical and cultural context and vary across societies and over time.”
To treat gender and sex as synonyms is a grave error. In addition to sex assigned at birth, people have gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Each of these are different aspects of a person. Biological sex is also not binary due to the spectrum of outcomes that can be produced by biological processes.
As wide as the variation in biological sex is, so too is variation in gender. Scientific fields from neuroscience to psychology challenge a gender binary. For centuries and across cultures, people have expressed gender identities that differ from their assigned birth sex. Many Native American cultures recognize multiple gender identities. The Navajo (Nadleehi and Dilbass), Lakota (Winkte) and Mohave (Alyha and Hwame) celebrate members who would now be called transgender. Such people are, in fact, considered gifted and are widely called “Two-Spirit” people.
To be sure, science only takes us part of the way in understanding the true complexity of sex and gender. However, laws and policies, whether they address climate change or healthcare, should not be based in science denial. Such laws are harmful to the health of transgender individuals and ignore the facts of science. Rather than more anti-science legislation, we need better public education so that voters, and our politicians, understand the differences between sex, gender, and sexuality.
Science denial continues to play a strong role in American politics. But the world works the way the world works, and no amount of legislation can change that. Our educational system should teach the complexity of human bodies and identity.
I challenge fellow scientists: psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors and nurses to join me in raising their voices against these harmful laws. We need to embrace the true complexity of human identity, not deny it or attempt to limit it.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.