Ny vägledning från USA:s hälso- och socialdepartement definierar kön | NTD NYHETER

On day one of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order recognizing two sexes only, male and female. The Department of Health and Human Services yesterday followed up with further guidance, and joining us to discuss is evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright, who also helped to write the HHS guidance. Colin, good to have you with us. As a biologist, could you briefly explain the debate between the gender and sex? Yeah, so I mean, it's a debate that's been raging on for a little while. You know, there's no real scientific debate about it. When it comes to the biology, our sex is rooted in the type of gamete, sperm or ova that we have the biological function to produce. A lot of activists have been trying to just undermine this type of basic science and suggesting that we should use a person's totally subjective gender identity instead of objective things like our biology or reproductive systems to classify individuals. So this has led to terrible things happening like men playing in women's sports, men being admitted to women's prisons and all sorts of things like that. So Trump's executive order just gets rid of all that sort of pseudoscientific ideological nonsense and just bring science back to the White House, rooting it in objective biology as the way it should be. In terms of all those outcomes that you've mentioned, how does defining sex impact those? It impacts them, I mean, across the board. So we've seen in almost every area of the government under the Biden administration, they had wanted to use gender identity. And when you're using something totally subjective like gender identity, this basically means that anything goes. Anyone can just identify minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day into whatever sex category that they want to, that they happen to feel that day. This is kind of just a Wild West situation. We can't have that. You know, we have sex as a protected class in government. And so for it to be a protected class, it actually has to reflect something real and immutable about people. And so this roots it in an objective biology now. And so it'll have waves that will ripple out throughout all policy related to this issue. Yeah, on that point earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, you wrote that further executive action is needed to protect women's rights. What would that be? So that article specifically was arguing for Trump to sign an executive order to ensure that states aren't able to obscure a person's sex on their birth certificates. So I argue that it's one thing for Trump to issue an executive order that is defining sex and stating that our laws need to reflect biological reality. But it's hard to enforce those laws if we're allowing states not only to just amend birth certificates, but to issue brand new ones that don't have any indication that a change has been made. So if we are able to alter primary documents, identifying documents of individuals, then any executive order that's trying to establish the reality of sex kind of loses its teeth. So that's what was being argued in that piece. Now, going further, HHS's guidance says restoring biological truth to the federal government is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale and trust in itself. Could you expand on that? Yeah, I mean, I think as American citizens, we want to have trust in our institutions. And for a long time, our institutions were making objectively false claims, objectively pseudoscientific claims such that biological sex is either a spectrum, is perhaps a social construct, is in a sense a figment of our imagination. We should just be able to kind of willy nilly choose whatever sex we're in. These are objectively false things that almost every American just can see on its face that is patently absurd. And that undermines trust in the institutions. You know, we have other questions such as epidemiology and other health issues that are much more complex than defining sex. And if we can see that our supposed experts are getting the sort of low-hanging fruit about what a male and a female is wrong, then this kind of undermines trust that they might have in other really important topics that are actually much more complex that we need to rely on real expertise for. You have a lot of passion for this subject, understandably, and you helped to write the HHS guidance, as I mentioned earlier. Tell us about that. So I worked with a small team of biologists and philosophers, as well as people at the HHS to sort of craft the wording in the statement so that it won't be easily exploitable by activists seeking to undermine this biological reality. It was really kind of a big, big team effort. There was a lot of back and forth. But the HHS, really, they took a good lead on this in reaching out to the people that really understand this topic. So they need to be given all that credit for this. Well, it's great to hear from you on this topic. Thank you so much, Colin Wright, evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow. Good to speak with you today. Thank you.