ACLU attorney claims that ‘biological sex’ is white supremacist—it isn’t

Strangio shared an article by University of Massachusetts Amherst Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, Kevin Henderson titled, J.K. Rowling and the White Supremacist History of "Biological Sex."

July 28, 2020

In the last year or so transgender activists and thus LGBT and other assorted progressive activists have been indignantly mocking the idea that science demonstrates binary sex differences, male and female, in humans and even go so far as to demand saying something as simple as "sex is real" is harmful to transgender people.

In June of 2019, Scientific American, published, "Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia," subtitled: Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary. And this year, Forbes published an article confidently titled, "The Myth Of Biological Sex," arguing, "But, biological sex isn’t as straightforward as they likely think, and there is no one parameter that makes a person biologically male or female. In fact, many conditions make assigning a biological sex quite difficult."

But Henderson's argument that biological sex is the result of white supremacy relies on a different interpretation than the above arguments which conflate rare genetic and developmental disorders in reproductive organs and chromosomes with proof of multiple human sex categories. His argument is based on the mythology that white supremacy was the single most powerful driving force of human colonialism across the planet, during which period the culture and autonomy of non-white people were suppressed by white settlers.

Henderson writes, "As many people are engaging in conversations about how white supremacy has shaped so many of our political and social institutions, there is no better time than the present to talk about how 'biological sex' and 'sexual difference' were created over time to protect, promote, and police the boundaries of whiteness." His argument is based on the curious idea that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he correctly states inspired and justified racism and eugenics during the 19th century, was responsible for creating the notion of biological differences between men and women.

He argues that 19th century physicians began to study and classify groups of humans and break them down into "races" with gradually higher and lower rankings of evolution, measuring physical characteristics that were interpreted into standards of intelligence, health and beauty. He argues, "Undeniably, the present coherence of 'biological sex' is an effect of 19th century scientific racism and discourses of white supremacy." He goes on, "White Europeans assumed that they were the most "highly evolved" with the highest levels of sexual dimorphism (that is, European men and women were different but complimentary in every way: body and mind) and that sexual dimorphism decreased as one went down the civilizational rungs of the evolutionary ladder."

Essentially, because of ethnocentric prejudices in European understandings of physical differences in groups of people, to which they assigned moral and social values, black women, in his argument, were viewed as more masculine in appearance than white women. He states, "Black people supposedly had the lowest levels of sexual dimorphism. 'Biological sex' thus was never simply binary but was, from its inception, categorized along racialized degrees of difference."

This is the basis of the entire idea that white supremacy created the distinction between men and women based on these racist Darwinian ideals of human development. He strangely asserts that prior to the 18th century Europeans viewed women as simply underdeveloped men.

But what Henderson is actually demonstrating is how the idea of races placed arbitrary value on what people of the time felt were ideal aspects of human beauty. The biological aspect is entirely superficial as the argument was not that "less evolved" females were, in reality, not female. The standards did not apply to males at all which were apparently physically uncontroversial across all arbitrary racial groups. Biological sexual differences between men and women remained static regardless of how one isolated culture arbitrarily valued and moralized the particular size, shape and expression of secondary sexual characteristics exclusively in women.

Of course every culture across all of human history understood the differences between men and woman. What is being argued today is that these differences only mattered to "white" cultures in prior eras. What is ironic, of course, is that in this effort to deny the notion of biological sex, leftwing activists are effectively arguing against transgender medical transition and certainly social and medical transition in children and minors. Without two distinct sexes, what exactly is a transgender person transitioning to or from? Why would children need to halt their physical development, begin hormone treatment and adopt the superficial secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex if sex does not exist?

As assertions of what transgenderism exactly is rapidly evolve to meet whatever justification activists feel is necessary at any given moment, their reliance on authority to support and affirm them is transparent. Without a majority agreement to participate in their remarkably incoherent social theories, said theories easily dissolve into nonsense. The current obsession with white supremacy appears to be yet another attempt to shame people into denying what we know to be simple truth about human biology. But like all the other theories we see from the left on human sexuality, gender and race, it only serves to divide humanity and exploit hatred and bigotry for politics.

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