Is sex binary? The question is almost as philosophical as "What is a woman?"
Implied in a debate co-hosted by The MIT Free Speech Alliance and Adam Smith Society on April 27, 2024, is the necessity to delve into the deepest levels of understanding about these questions in our current era. While reproductive sex and women are undergoing rapid deconstruction in Western societies—in law, language, institutions, and materiality—resulting in young people experiencing intense dissociation from biological reality and their sexed bodies, and doctors are cavalierly assaulting their vital reproductive systems and sterilizing them, we in Western cultures find ourselves trapped in the cul-de-sac of gender ideology that we've been navigating for a decade.
The debate at MIT posited the following proposition: "Resolved, that sex is biological and binary, and gender identity is no substitute for sex in social policy."
Alex Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at MIT and author of "Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions," and Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne and author of "Gender-Critical Feminism," argued in favor of the proposition. Alice Dreger, historian and author of "Galileo's Middle Finger," and Aaron Kimberly, Executive Director of the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and co-host of the Transparency podcast, posing as a man, argued against the proposition. Nadine Strossen, professor emerita at New York Law School and former president of the ACLU, served as the moderator.
The co-hosts took no official position on the debate proposition. Their stated goal was to provide a model of vigorous yet civil discussion for both the MIT community and the wider public.
This discussion, which I urge my readers to watch (video below), exemplifies the narrow confines within which discussions about the gender industry are allowed to unfold. The debate remained within the framework of one group's rights versus another's, and whether an inclusive balance can be reached in society between them. Put another way, it was debated as to whether reality can coexist with anti-reality, which is constantly shifting. Furthermore, the getting-very-old question, "Is reality real?" was thoroughly exhausted.
Though overall, I found the discussion enraging, I must confess to having laughed at various intervals at the mental gymnastics we humans love to subject ourselves to. Watching those on the affirming side of the debate try to pin down Alice Dreger into a solid point of view was akin to watching two adults attempt to wrestle a 300-pound, wet tuna.
