The episode reminded me that while toddler art is probably not worth that much money, it was the original impetus for my accidental second career as a writer. When my daughter was in preschool, I used to swap photos of her latest finger-paintings and collages with an art-world friend, accompanied by titles, dates, and solemn thematic commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Then I posted a few of these online, and was surprised when the blog went modestly viral. Another friend saw it, encouraged me to write more, and now here we are.  

But what even is “art”? What is it for? How can anyone tell when something is “art”? The whole bit for that toddler-art blog was the fact that sometimes it’s genuinely hard to tell whether a painting was done by a graduate from Central St Martins or by a sticky preschooler in a bib. Nothing, that is, except where it’s displayed, and the price tag. Sometimes not even that: German child artist Laurent Schwarz, now four years old, regularly sells paintings for thousands and recently landed a marketing deal with paint manufacturer Relius. 

We might be forgiven for wondering whether the definition of “art” isn’t as elusive as the one given in 1946 by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, to define “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it”. But there is surely more to the question than just personal judgment, not least because not even “art” is immune to today’s omnivorous, omnipresent culture war. 

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the public art installed on plinths and in high-traffic areas, where new works routinely attract Right-wing complaints of “wokeness”, or of ideologically monolithic elites imposing weird, mutant iconography de haut en bas. The painter Alexander Adams, one of Britain’s more vocal conscientious objectors to this moral monoculture, writes furiously of an insular internationalist consensus that has sewn up government and philanthropy, and now operates as a closed shop. So what is this closed-shop promoting? 

If we’re to believe the Box venue in Plymouth, it’s art as a kind of therapeutic emollient for the soul. The venue recently published an independent report claiming it has made a £43-million contribution to local communities, including by reducing dementia and depression, and improving visitors’ health and productivity. In this view, an arts venue can be seen as contiguous to, and as a kind of extension of, other municipal “services” such as leisure centers and doctors’ offices. But this suggests nothing grander in aspiration than “art” understood just as a supplement one can take, like cod-liver oil, in order to function more effectively as a fungible work unit: as something barely distinguishable from any other kind of improving leisure activity, such as swimming or studying Spanish.

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By Bruce Clark

Is that all? Some might say the only thing that makes modern “art”, as per the joke of my old blog, is a context which signals to the viewer that they should perceive something as “art”. To take one famous example, a urinal is for men to pee in, until it’s signed and submitted to an art gallery, as by Marcel Duchamp in 1917. At that point it becomes “art”, or maybe a lightning-rod for debate about the nature of art, or indeed more recently a byword for the absurdity of recent efforts to “Westernize” Afghanistan at gunpoint. 

In this rarefied and highly intellectualized context, then, we might claim that it doesn’t matter if the toddler did the painting, or if the banana duct-taped to a gallery wall is the “original” banana or a replacement after another artist ate the first one. What matters is everyone playing along that this really is an “artwork”.

But if it’s all really that abstract, why the concerted efforts now afoot across the developed West to re-moralize art? No major gallery seems immune to curators hell-bent on “reimagining” and “decolonizing” the archives, or public-art consortia commissioning works on leadenly pious progressive themes. Taken together, it all suggests (implicitly at least) an intuition that there’s still more to “art” than just whatever I like or find intellectually stimulating, or else (as in Plymouth) therapeutic leisure for “communities”.

When “art” is so contested, it’s difficult to see why this would be the case. For a clue, though, take a walk round the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, which houses medieval and Renaissance paintings. Do that in the right frame of mind, and you can sometimes catch a glimpse of what “art” used to be, before it was “art”. But it’s tricky; for unlike modern “art”, which sometimes only reads as such because of the gallery context, premodern paintings have to be considered outside the gallery context before they become legible. 

Even though, today, the National Gallery hangs these works as though they are “art” in the modern sense, many were originally painted for churches or private chapels. In their original context, these were not “art” in the sense of something nice to look at on the living-room wall. They were for spiritual use: devotional objects that happen to take the form of pictures. 

Artistic works with a spiritual orientation, such as paintings of scenes from the Bible, rest upon a radically different set of assumptions about their own grounding. The older stream of Christian thought within which such works were created believed these should point beyond human experience, toward what classical philosophy called the “transcendentals”: a dimension that now survives only in classical Christian pedagogy, under the heading “the good, the true, and the beautiful”.

It’s difficult to imagine a mainstream contemporary artist today talking in these terms. Why? The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that, especially since the Renaissance, the West has by degrees turned away from this transcendental approach to aesthetics, replacing it with a more human-centric approach to the creative arts. In the process, the arts came adrift from the divine. Churches were cleansed of imagery by Puritan iconoclasts; in the wake of this rupture, across the ensuing centuries, “art” flowered in its familiar secular form. 

These are the kinds of works that would, in time, occupy the “gallery” setting: artifacts that hover awkwardly between decoration and their former link to the spiritual world. This association still persists, albeit in degraded trace form, in the instrumentalist view of an art venue as a kind of spiritual cod-liver oil. But beauty gradually came to be understood as “for” only itself, then as something entirely subjective — and finally as irrelevant to the real domain of “art”, which is pure idea. In this outlook, it doesn’t matter if the banana gets eaten and replaced; there is no banana, just the idea of one. Now, though, this economy of abstraction may be approaching a terminal state — and, out the other side, showing early signs of re-moralization. 

The most recent sale of the banana “artwork” was for a whopping $6.2 million, to a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who vowed to eat it (again) as his contribution to the “work”. And what makes this so intriguing a development is the parallel between this kind of “art” and the cryptocurrency that paid for it. Cryptocurrency’s purely abstract, un-grounded economy and its mimetic process of assigning value bear a strong resemblance to the one in which this kind of conceptual art acquires value and is traded. 

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Just as crypto has no material referent, and gains its value via the aggregate of purchasers’ belief in its value, so “art” in the banana or urinal (or toddler painting) sense floats largely free of any stable aesthetic, cultural, or even material referent. These meme-worlds in turn come together in the lively market for “artworks” in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as the “milady” and “bored ape” genres. 

But this isn’t the only way the internet is shaking up art’s state of terminal abstraction. As well as threatening mediocre creators with a tide of AI-generated “slop” imagery, those deft enough to use it, and clear enough in their vision to build a following, are finding ways to thrive outside the state-art cartel — whether by connecting like-minded dissidents, as Adams observes, or by enabling sales directly to customers. 

And here, notwithstanding the slop-tide, there’s still demand for real work, by real artists. But the kind of art that enables an artist to build a platform in this environment is very different. The self-taught British painter Ross Baines, for example, paints portraits for MMA fighters, along with themes from pop culture and (and not very progressive) politics. Recent works in this vein include a portrait of the murdered American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and a work based on a viral photo from the recent Unite The Kingdom rally in London, showing a man atop a stone lion on the South Bank, holding a cross and St George’s flag. There is no way on earth Baines would be able to sell prints of a painting from a Tommy Robinson rally if he relied on mainstream galleries to stock his work. 

The internet, then, is driving “art” out the other side of abstraction in search of engaged buyers. Is a painting of a Tommy Robinson rally “the good, the true, and the beautiful”? Debatable; but it’s a step in the direction of reconnecting painting with a moral vision. And the same trend is even discernible, albeit mostly negatively, in the kind of “woke” public sculpture conservatives love to hate. For unlike the kind of abstract public art that characterized the 20th century, the “woke” kind is progressive precisely in its attempt to “subvert” some variation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And this still means tacitly acknowledging the transcendentals themselves. 

Meanwhile, outside the progressive arts-industrial complex, creators are less self-conscious about re-moralizing their work. Baines isn’t my cup of tea, but he’s creating heroic iconography for an audience of (I’d guess) largely secular Right-wing men. His work seems to find buyers. Others, such as the podcaster and Greek Orthodox icon-artist Jonathan Pageau, are more frankly spiritual in their subjects — and likewise seem to find buyers. Notably, Pageau has done an end-run round the gallery ecology, selling his work exclusively via a digital portal he himself controls. But importantly, his work is not “art” in the modern gallery sense; it’s closer in intent and function to the paintings now, misleadingly, hung as “art” in the Sainsbury Wing. 

It would be a mistake to read any of this digitally enabled creativity as an “art movement”. It’s the opposite: a movement away from “art”, as such, in the anthropocentric sense we’ve grown accustomed to, toward a reunification of aesthetic and spiritual values. Whether in negative “woke” form or (however clumsy) dissident attempts at positive ones, the transcendentals are coming back. 

If there’s a struggle ahead, it won’t be over what “art” means, or which style of painting is desirable, or whether the banana is real. It’ll be over the fundamentals. What do we mean by “good”, “true”, and “beautiful”? The internet has freed a new generation of creators and visionaries to grapple with that question. We’d better hope they come up with something before the tide of AI imagery drowns us.

One common denominator in all of these events was the impulse to explain or “contextualize” them in ways that minimize their horror. After 9/11, for instance, I heard a Muslim student say that the hijackers just wanted to “start a conversation” with the West. After 10/7, an expert on sexual violence excused her public silence about the rape and torture of Israeli women because, she told me, such atrocities are “happening every day” around the globe. The Charlotte mayor responded to the murder of Zarutska, an utterly innocent victim, by calling for “compassion” for homeless criminals like the man who stabbed her. Some people even started crowdfunds for Zarutska’s murderer, which GoFundMe quickly shut down. As for Charlie Kirk, plenty of people, makeshift scales of justice in hand, would have us weigh his death against his supposedly hateful opinions.

Whatever else all this might mean, these responses serve to distract us from addressing the real issue: the problem of Evil. To be fair, people will go to great lengths to avoid peering into the dark abysses of the human soul. That includes contemporary philosophers and theologians, few of whom, even after the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, have had much to say about Evil. Perhaps this is because these atrocities directly challenged the presupposition that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures.

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Precisely this assumption is called into question by the behavior not only of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, but of its bystanders, among whom one finds few exceptions to the twin principles articulated in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah by Polish farmers who lived near Treblinka: “One can get used to anything”, and “If you cut your finger, it doesn’t hurt me”. Morally speaking, in other words, human beings are highly flexible, so much so that dwelling alongside a death camp need not register as anything more troubling than an inconvenience. Those who would dismiss such callousness as evidence of the stupidity and ignorance of peasants would do well to watch the numerous videos of educated progressives tearing down posters of Israeli hostages abducted on October 7.

I insist on capitalizing Evil for several reasons. First, because it is a metaphysically fundamental reality. It won’t do to describe it, as many thinkers have, as the mere absence of Good. Evil, the demonic willfulness and primal instinct of death and destruction that Freud called Thanatos, is a substantial force in its own right. As such, it resists all ordinary explanation. Can the Holocaust really be explained, as scholars have tried to do, as the result of social discontent in Germany caused by hyperinflation and other contingent factors? The very idea is obscene, not least because it implicitly relieves people of ultimate responsibility for their choices. Second, because Evil is as inexplicable as Good. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, surrounded by irate Russians, is approached by a bereaved mother who carries a brick to bash his head in. Seeing his frightened face, she instead gives him the gift of a breadcrust, a spontaneous choice for which she immediately berates herself. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was himself a prisoner of the Nazis, was greatly impressed by this passage. For him, the fact that nothing in the totality of the woman’s strong emotions and urgent needs can explain her deed is one indication that it is Good. It is a pure act of kindness, from which she derives no benefit, and that she later regards as senseless.

Evil is similarly unsupportable by ordinary reckoning. Like Good, of which it is a kind of photographic negative, it is no longer on the moral continuum of everyday existence. It is a quantum leap to another system of human interaction, where violence reigns supreme and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The murder of Charlie Kirk — a young husband and father, slain on a university campus where he came to model the give and take of respectful argument for which universities were designed, and on which they used to pride themselves — was Evil. So was the celebration with which this despicable deed was greeted by an alarming number of people.

But there is something peculiar about the latest iterations of Evil. Here again, the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis had an ambivalent relationship with their crimes. They recorded everything in ledgers, photographs, and films, making their war against the Jews one of the most extensively documented events in human history. Yet survivors of the camps report that their SS guards took solace in the idea that no inmates would live to see the day of liberation, and that even if they did, no one would believe their testimony. Osama bin Laden took a very different approach. 9/11 was mass murder as political theater, a tour-de-force performance for Islamists and radicalized Westerners. This tactic found its audience. At the university where I was teaching at the time, Saudi students cheered when the Twin Towers fell. A professor was happy to tell me that Americans would now understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples. And my public endorsement of what would later become the policy of the Obama administration — hunting down bin Laden and killing him — made me an outcast among the faculty.

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The Hamas terrorists intuitively understood the effectiveness of al-Qaeda’s political theater, and doubled down on it. On October 7, they equipped themselves with GoPros, so that their spree of murder and torture could be broadcast far and wide. They publicized their acts, correctly betting that some would relish their death porn, and that the world in general would respond by blaming their victims. For those who’ve watched the 22 minutes of footage released by the Israelis, that response is unfathomable. We see images of a dozen older women at a bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to the stores. After the attack, they lie in heaps, blood pooling around their corpses. We see couples burnt to a crisp like the petrified victims at Pompeii, their cries at the moment of death frozen for all time. We hear a rescue worker describing what he saw in one kibbutz: the corpses of a father with his eye gouged out, a mother with her breast cut off, a daughter with her foot cut off, a son with his fingers cut off. What was the message sent by their torturers? To the father: what you see us do to your loved ones will pain you more than having your eye ripped out. To the mother: you gave these children life, fed them and gathered them to your bosom. Here, in the warm, severed breast we hold in our scarlet hands, is what we think of that.

That’s not all. The rescue worker explains that the murderers sat down for a meal in the presence of the slaughtered family. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that executed millions of Jews across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — would sometimes set up a table alongside the pit into which their victims had fallen, and enjoy a hearty meal. (Not for nothing did Life and Fate include a scene in which Adolf Eichmann dines on ham in a gas chamber whose construction he is inspecting.) The message could hardly be clearer: your unfathomable suffering and grisly death is our sustenance and pleasure. This is ghoulish vampirism, and it is Evil.

Evil is not banal, but many people are doing their best to make it so. To characterize the Hamas pogrom or Kirk’s murder as understandable reactions to Palestinian suffering or Right-wing provocation is to normalize Evil — to pretend that it is something we can control, a problem that reasonable people can solve over coffee and talk. More honest, though hardly less blameworthy, is to avert one’s eyes, like the passengers who walked away from Zarutska as she bled to death on the train. Neither of these responses dare to confront Evil directly, and to call it out, nor to look into the faces of its victims and to say their names. Yet this is what all decent people must do if we hope to arrest our descent into limitless violence.

It is a doctrine that has become highly influential. The American Medical Association in 2023 laid down “best practices for sex and gender diversity in medical education.” Medical students are to be taught that both sex and gender are “[socially] constructed.” And “it is appropriate to affirm each individual’s self-determination regarding both sex and gender labels.” But are “male” and “female” really social constructs like money or like our 12-month calendar? Is that really the considered view of the American Medical Association? Are we seriously training a generation of young doctors to think that the sex of a patient is a matter of individual choice, not objective anatomical and physiological reality?

There are welcome auguries that the fashion is finally on the wane, at least in Britain. It is to be hoped that, in America, it will soon go the way of McCarthyism. The otherwise loathsome President Trump made the upholding of biological maleness and femaleness the subject of an Executive Order, as one of his first actions after taking office (perhaps the only good thing he has ever done). I could imagine future lawsuits against surgeons who, in violation of the first clause of the Hippocratic oath, have cut off the breasts of girls below the age of consent for no better reason than a subsequently regretted claim to have been “assigned” the wrong sex. What, after all, does “below the age of consent” mean if not too young to make permanent, life-changing decisions?

Two and only two sexes

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes? Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, is of the opinion that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants, not our masters, and he might claim that it’s open to him to say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman; therefore, a woman can have a penis.” That is logically unassailable in the same way as “I define ‘flat’ to mean what you call ‘round’; therefore, the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand.

The question is whether a particular redefinition is helpful for any constructive purpose. The flat Earth example clearly is not. It’s simply perverse. How about the redefinition of woman (or man)? I shall make the case that the redefinition of a woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is worse than unhelpful. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the universal biological definition (UBD) based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD because it’s the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms and all the way through evolutionary history.

Gametes come in two radically different sizes, the phenomenon of anisogamy. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, and that is how biologists define female and male. A human egg contains at least ten thousand times as much matter as a human sperm. In ostriches, the discrepancy is obviously even greater, by a very large amount. The UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. All plants, too, unless you count algae as plants.

The UBD has the virtue that, in addition to being universally applicable, it explains a diverse load of facts. And it’s grounded in a body of powerful and widely illuminating theory. Here’s how. It’s an argument that should appeal to economists. In the words of R.A. Fisher (1930), “In organisms of all kinds, the young are launched upon their careers endowed with a certain amount of biological capital derived from their parents.” When two gametes unite to make a zygote, they must, between them, provide this requisite quantity of expensive nourishment. In a fair and equitable world, you might expect the two parents to contribute equally, each bearing half the necessary costs. Such a system is known as isogamy. It doesn’t exist in animals and plants but can be found in some microorganisms and algae. Clever mathematical modeling by various scientists, including Geoffrey Parker of the University of Liverpool, indicates that, under plausible conditions, isogamy is unstable. It tends to be replaced, in evolutionary time, by its opposite, anisogamy: two different kinds of gamete, radically different from one another.

Imagine you are an individual in an isogamous system. If you produce slightly larger than average isogametes, each zygote will be better endowed and therefore more likely to survive. On the other hand, since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can only afford to make fewer zygotes. Conversely, by stinting on gamete size, you could contribute to making a larger number of zygotes, but they’d be poorly endowed and less likely to survive. Unless, that is, your smaller-than-average isogametes could somehow seek out larger-than-average isogametes to partner with.

Parker and others developed plausible models whereby, over evolutionary time, half the individuals produce gametes in ever-decreasing numbers but ever-increasing size. These gametes eventually evolve into eggs. The other half goes in the other direction. They evolve smaller and smaller gametes in larger and larger numbers, which eventually become sperms. You could, if you wish, say that the sperm producers exploit the egg producers. Or you could say that, being more valuable, eggs don’t have to go out of their way to seek sperms. They can just sit and wait to be approached. Sperms, therefore, evolved miniature outboard motors (waving tails) with which to actively seek out eggs. Both types, the macrogamete producers and the microgamete producers, flourish in the presence of the other.

The fundamental economic inequality of anisogamy illuminates a large number of biological phenomena, thereby justifying my claim that the UBD does lots of explanatory work. If you define females as macrogamete producers and males as microgamete producers, you can immediately account for the following facts:

1. In mammals, it’s the females that gestate the young and secrete milk.
2. In those bird species where only one sex incubates the eggs, or only one sex feeds the young, it is nearly always the females.
3. In those fish that bear live young, it is nearly always the females that bear them.
4. In those animals where one sex advertises to the other with bright colors, it is nearly always the males.
5. In those bird species where one sex sings elaborate or beautiful songs, it is always the male who does so.
6. In those animals where one sex fights over possession of the other, it is nearly always the males who fight.
7. In those animals where one sex has more promiscuous tendencies than the other, it is nearly always the males.
8. In those animals where one sex is fussier about avoiding miscegenation, it is usually the females.
9. In those animals where one sex tries to force the other into copulation, it is nearly always the males who do the forcing.
10. When one sex guards the other against copulation with others, it is nearly always the males that guard females.
11. In those animals where one sex is gathered into a harem, it is nearly always the females.
12. Polygyny is far more common than polyandry.
13. When one sex tends to die younger than the other, it is usually the males.
14. Where one sex is larger than the other, it is usually the males.

In all cases, the key is economics: large gametes cost more than small ones. In various ways, this inequality plays out. Large gametes are more precious, more worth guarding, more worth fighting for, more worth protecting against wastage through mating with the wrong species or wrong individual.

It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, and social systems for probably two billion years.

Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

Here are some apparently anomalous examples that test (the true meaning of “prove” in the proverb) the rule. Unlike most mammals, spotted hyena females are larger than males and socially dominant over them. They have a hugely enlarged clitoris, scarcely distinguishable from a penis. They can get erections. They have false testes made of fatty tissue. The sight of apparently male hyenas giving birth has given rise to numerous myths of hermaphroditism. Given that so many roles and signals are reversed or ambiguous, how can we even know what we’re talking about when we use the words “male” and “female” in describing the anomalies of hyenas? By the UBD, of course.

Many species of fish are livebearers. As listed above, it is usually the female who gets pregnant. But in seahorses, it’s the male, in the sense that he has a pouch for holding the fertilized eggs, and he gives birth from his pouch. How do we know it’s the male? Couldn’t we define the female as the one that gets pregnant? We could, but then, “In seahorses, it’s the female who gets pregnant” becomes a tautology that leads nowhere.

Some worms and snails, and many plants, are simultaneous hermaphrodites. They are capable of producing both micro- and macro-gametes. Not a problem: the UBD is easily applied, and sex remains binary. The earthworm has organs appropriate to both sexes defined by gamete size. Enthusiasts for fluidity of “gender” love anemone fishes, also known as clown fishes. They, along with many other creatures, are sequential hermaphrodites. The largest, most dominant fish in a group of clownfish is female. If she dies, the dominant male becomes female. But what does that even mean? By what definition of male and female? On the UBD, it’s very simple. When the dominant egg-producer dies, the largest sperm producer starts to produce eggs instead.

Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male/female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedeviled by numerous exceptions. Especially with respect to the sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we, in practice, recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

Gender

A watered-down version of the ideology concedes that sex may be binary, but “gender” is not. The word gender enters the discourse trailing clouds of confusion. To grammarians, gender is clear. It is a classification of nouns by how adjectives and pronouns agree with them. French nouns fall into two genders, English and German nouns into three. Kivunjo, according to Steven Pinker, has fifteen genders. French genders could have been named A and B (la table, le tapis), English and German genders A, B, and C. As it happens, all males belong in gender B, all females in gender A, and that same neat separation occurs in most languages. It is, therefore, convenient to use “feminine” and “masculine” as names for two of the genders, rather than A and B. This perfect correlation permits the use of “gender” as a coy euphemism for sex. Alex Byrne, in Trouble with Gender, and Kathleen Stock, in Material Girls, both make valiant attempts to sort out the confusion. In the mind of this reader, accustomed to scientific standards of rigor, the confusion remains. Stock herself sensibly tries to avoid the term, replacing it with “concrete, clearer terms that do whatever jobs I want them to at the time.” For the same reason, gender is not a word I normally use except in the grammarian’s sense. If you want to speak French properly, you really do need to respect every noun’s preferred pronoun.

The current fashion for transsexualism belongs in a cluster of inter-related vogues, sometimes called “woke,” partly stemming from a sincere concern for social justice, largely well-meaning but misguided and scientifically ill-informed. The cluster includes “identitarianism” and the view that alternative “ways of knowing” (women’s ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, personal lived experience) are just as valid as objective science in understanding nature.

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Transsexualism has strictly no necessary connection to whether sex is “binary” or a continuously varying spectrum, although, in practice, the same people are often partisan with respect to both. Those of us who argue that there is no spectrum of intermediates between male and female — that sex is “binary” — should not be seen as threatening to transsexualism. Whether or not there are “intersexes” with ambiguous genitalia, or abnormal sex chromosomes, is irrelevant to transsexualism because no trans person claims to be intersex. A trans woman insists that she actually is a woman; a trans man, that he actually is a man. Neither claims to be hermaphrodite. Rather, the claim is a psychological one. There’s a disjunct, or so it is claimed, between a person’s biological sex and the gender that they feel themselves to be.

There are many dimensions along which human personality can be measured. They might include assertiveness, ambition, empathy, aggressiveness, selfishness, methodicalness, volatility, perseverance, affection, bossiness. A mathematician might see each person as situated in a multidimensional space defined by these dimensions. We are all amateur psychologists who gossip about each other. Without being mathematicians, we implicitly classify each other along dimensions such as those I have listed. Perhaps there is a psychological dimension of masculinity/femininity, which is more or less correlated with some of the other dimensions listed. In defiance of much hard-won feminist progress, you might invoke sexual stereotypes in an implicit invocation of such a dimension. “Cecil is effeminate. Ros is butch. Lizzy is a tomboy; she doesn’t like dolls, loves climbing trees, and plays with wheeled toys.”

We can situate ourselves along such personality dimensions, including the perceived dimension of masculinity/femininity. We may even go so far as to wish we had been born the opposite sex. We might phrase it as being trapped inside the wrong body. It’s a version of dualism, a belief in a kind of disembodied soul, the real you, who is of a different sex or gender from the body in which the “real” you lurks. If that is how you are inclined, it might take little encouragement from the surrounding culture to push you over the edge into full-fledged belief. And today’s surrounding culture — doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, political leaders, lawyers, and perhaps above all school friends — gives more than a little push. Sex “assigned at birth” is arbitrary, we are told, and you only discover whether the real you is male or female by introspection.

An early account of what it is like to feel you are trapped in the wrong body is Jan Morris’s Conundrum. As what she called a “true transsexual,” she had little time for “the poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves.”

A feeling of being in a body of the wrong sex seems to be a real psychological condition. Such “dysphorics” can feel genuine distress. When anorexics look in the mirror, they see an emaciated body that they think is too fat. “Gender” dysphorics look in the mirror and see the wrong genitals. Both deserve sympathy and understanding. Nobody is phobic about anorexics. Why should anyone be phobic about gender dysphorics? “Trans- phobia” is a pernicious fiction.

Partly influenced by Jan Morris and partly out of normal politeness, it is my custom to refer to people by their preferred pronouns. But I draw the line at the belligerent slogan, “Trans women are women,” because it is scientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women. It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons, and so on. So powerful has this “postmodern” counterfactualism become that newspapers refer to “her penis” as a matter of unremarked routine. Even the Times, Britain’s traditional newspaper of record, could begin an article (Jan. 18, 2023) with these words: “A transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis as she went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow.”

If the journalist had said “with his penis,” the Times could have been in trouble with the police for “misgendering.” In 2020, Humberside police descended on the workplace of Harry Miller to warn him that one of his tweets “was being recorded as a hate incident.” What did the offending tweet say? “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” A neat joke, in my opinion, and pretty gentle when compared with the satire of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Lehrer, Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, Monty Python, W.S. Gilbert, or Jonathan Swift. Evincing an almost superhuman inability to take a joke, the police recorded it as a “hate incident” and threatened the satirist. Have the British police become George Orwell’s Thought Police? Will it come to that? The resemblance occurred to Mr. Justice Knowles, before whom the Harry Miller case came up. “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Well said, M’Lud! I hope the Humberside police officers have learned their lesson. Perhaps somebody might take them aside and patiently explain about this thing called satire.

I am sorry to say it looks horribly as though otherwise sensible and certainly well-meaning political leaders are pandering to an intimidating lobby, militant activists ever ready to pounce on what they see as heresy. Such activism is especially dominant among young people. Several senior publishers have confided to me that they are under strong pressure from young employees to censor, or even suppress, books that they perceive as “transphobic.” I hereby place on record my regretful suspicion that some otherwise respected scientists, too, are betraying science in a desperate attempt to curry favor with “the kids,” perhaps especially their own.

If your science is so weak that the best you can do is yell that your opponent is a “Transphobic bigot,” a “TERF,” or a “full-on MAGA alt-right Trump-supporter,” you’ve already lost the argument. Sometimes the name-calling goes further and becomes overtly threatening. At a London Pride demonstration in 2023, “Sarah Jane” Baker (previously Alan Baker) told a cheering crowd, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say that such language is more typical of the sex that “Sarah Jane” claims to have left than the one she aspires to join.

Sky News (January 23, 2023) had a picture of two Scottish Nationalist Party politicians, members of the British Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, respectively, at a transgender demonstration in Glasgow, grinning inanely in front of a large, colorful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “Decapitate TERFS.”

Threats of violence have no place in decent society. “Decapitate TERFS” is not only horrible. It’s pathetic. So is an exhortation to punch a TERF “in the fucking face.” A position should be supported, or refuted, by rational discussion informed by evidence. People who terminate an argument by resorting to threats or name-calling are ignominiously signalling that they’ve lost the argument.

The human conceit that personal feelings can change reality signals an extraordinary elevation of humanity in a kind of species-level solipsism; a vain hubris in the face of the eternal and universal verities of science. And yet science is the jewel in humanity’s crown. We have every right to take pride in it. But pride as we uncover nature’s truths should be tempered by humility. Let us hope we don’t take too long to come to our senses.

This essay is extracted from ‘The War on Science’, edited by Lawrence M. Krauss (Post Hill Press).

Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling, some parts of the UK seem more stuck in transactivist delusions than ever. But this week, tantalizingly, I discerned signs of imminent collapse. The Scottish media appears gripped by the Sandy Peggie tribunal, with daily revelations of unsympathetic NHS managers defending the presence of a male doctor in the nurses’ female-only changing room. One newspaper even referred to the man at the heart of the case as “he”. Down south, the NHS has announced the terms of reference for a rapid investigation into a Brighton GP practice that prescribed puberty blockers to minors, and it sounds like it is not messing about. And in academia, Oxford philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier just published an excoriating takedown of the Yale philosophy department’s own attempt to prop up child transition.

I am obviously particularly fascinated about what is happening in my former discipline. For years, I watched as a small number of philosophers, on both sides of the Atlantic, took a barely comprehensible proposition from the internet — “trans women are women and trans men are men” — and tried to build a system around it. The central proposition was treated as non-negotiable; any datum that didn’t fit would have to be jettisoned. Those who objected were either insufficiently well-read, too stupid to understand complexity, or simply bad actors. Quiet lifers across the Anglosphere quickly read the seminar room and went along with things.

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When therapy culture meets benefits street

By Kathleen Stock

The logician W.V.O. Quine argued that beliefs exist in holistic webs: each belief is interconnected and mutually supported by lots of others. If you reject one, you normally have to make adjustments elsewhere. Faced with a new, apparently confounding piece of evidence — say, the sight of a friend in London, who you believe to be in Dundee — you are more likely to update beliefs near the periphery of your web (“she is not in Dundee”; or “I mistook someone else for her”) than its center (“people can be in two places at once”).

Still, it is always possible to work from the center outward. Genderists in philosophy parachuted “transwomen are women” into the middle of their webs, defined a “woman” as anyone who said they were, and renamed the ensuing epistemological anarchy “progress”. And they were perfectly open about it. In 2020, for instance, Sally Haslanger, the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, told an interviewer: “if we wanted to include trans women among women, the body wasn’t sufficient… the pressure was to find a conception of woman that would enable us to accommodate all these differences”.

Once in the semantic upside down, there was a lot of profitable work for these web-spinners to do: not just to re-theorize every human idea and practice formerly conceived of as sex-based; but also to build up a satisfyingly dark story about the women and men who would not comply. Haslanger became a fan of authoring open letters, and other heroines in philosophy rose to the occasion too. “I hesitate to attach the label feminist to any view that is committed to worsening the situation of some of the most marginalized women,” wrote Jennifer Saul, a senior philosopher of language at the University of Waterloo, putting a typically charitable gloss on dissenters’ attitudes to trans-identified males. “No one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe,” wrote the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, Isaiah Berlin… only joking, I mean Amia Srinivasan, reframing erotic attraction toward a single sex as ethically problematic, whether hetero or homo.

Even during my most depressed phases in academia, I knew that these people were taking a big risk — albeit one they apparently didn’t notice. The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.

The risk for them, to be clear, was not merely that they would be proved wrong, a common enough occurrence in philosophy; but that they would be revealed as quite thick. If trans women are women, then not only are there surprisingly high numbers of children in the wrong bodies, women rapists, and mediocre female athletes etc, but those far-sighted philosophers making the case are bravely speaking truth to power. If trans women are in fact men, and have been all along, then the only major revelation is just how many gullible idiots have got into prestigious positions in academic philosophy.

Circa 2019-2022, these women — and they were mostly women — were trying in their own way to be what Cass Sunstein has called “norm entrepreneurs”. Their preferred norms quickly cascaded through a mostly male discipline, one made timid by several high-profile scandals, and with a general air of scary feminine malevolence floating about post-MeToo. Acolytes flocked, grants flowed, invitations proliferated, and their critics were silenced or exiled.

But the thing about norm cascades is how rapidly they can collapse. In a situation of pluralistic ignorance, each member of a particular group believes that every other member of that same group endorses some particular norm, even if very few still actually do. Still, private skeptical thoughts remain hidden as long as most people pay lip service to the norm for fear of reputational cost. If you don’t know what everyone else really thinks, chances are you will continue to keep quiet, especially if an example has previously been made of dissenters.

This situation can go on for a long time, yet should a tipping point of public dissent be reached, things can change fast. (The news that Gen Z are now reportedly abandoning sunscreen en masse looks like a good example.) Overnight miracles can occur: the most marginalized women can suddenly become men again, and formerly insightful thinkers revealed as deeply unserious people.

Of course, this possibility is not confined to academia. In every hospital, school, or civil service department, local transactivist gurus and witchfinders currently being treated like emperors by colleagues may eventually turn out to have no clothes. But apart from fanatics posting on the internet, most will be able to deny they ever really believed any of it.

The wonderful thing about philosophy, however, is that genderists wrote it all down. For this reason, perhaps, attempts to suppress discussion in philosophy seem to be ramping up, even as the rest of the world starts to come to its senses. Haslanger’s colleague in the MIT department, Alex Byrne, has recently disclosed in the Washington Post that he is the author of a report highly critical of pediatric transition, written for the Department of Human and Health Services. A hostile open letter has duly followed by an unnamed “concerned colleague”. One wonders who that might be. Meanwhile Justin Weinberg, the academic webmaster of one of the profession’s two main websites — the Daily Nous — is point blank refusing to host an open discussion of the Kodsi and Maier piece, reportedly responding to queries with the claim that the piece does not “merit attention”. As someone who has hosted hundreds of transactivist pieces masquerading as philosophy over the years, one can certainly see why he is nervous.

Perhaps the reign of genderism will truly be over when philosophers of sex and gender start acting like philosophers again: no foot-stamping about incontrovertible axioms, no smearing opponents, no anonymous open letters, no refusal to platform uncontrolled discussion. In an alternative scenario, it will end when the general public gets thoroughly fed up with universities altogether, no longer seeing the point of supporting supposed intellectuals who can get things so obviously wrong. Unfortunately, this possible world seems to me an increasingly close one. There are many philosophers who have so far kept quiet about genderism to save their jobs, but for the very same reason they should probably start talking.