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The Imane Khelif controversy gets us right to the heart of the gender wars. For those living under a rock or coming to this article once this episode has become a distant memory, Khelif won the gold medal for women’s boxing in the 2024 Olympic Games. Thing is, Khelif did not look much like a woman, punched like a man, and had been previously disqualified from women’s sports owing to high testosterone. It’s not that Khelif was transgender; it’s that this person was declared a girl at birth and was raised as such.
Not long ago, it was 2022, you’ll recall, Matt Walsh made a documentary called What is a Woman? It was not an especially strong film because it lacked any real engagement with the fringe cases like Imane Khelif that actually disrupt mainstream understandings of sex and gender. Walsh confronted clearly unstable, social constructionist activists, and seemed unable to find those representing the more intelligent side of the problem. Furthermore, Walsh never presented the fairly well-adjusted transgender members of our society, thereby depriving viewers of critical perspectives. Like all social media successes, Walsh was stirring the pot to stoke outrage, and although one might have felt a certain glee in his strike back at the incessant attackers of gender-normative sexual culture, I felt it was an empty sort of victory that had unfortunately missed an opportunity to actually address the problem.
The biological fact argument has of course been the cornerstone of defenders of the status quo. Richard Dawkins piped up during the Imane Khelif scandal, claiming that since Khelif has a Y chromosome, he is a man and that’s that. As readers of analogy magazine know, Dawkins is a blowhard fraud. Since he is considered a specialist in the field of genetics, however, his utter ignorance of the subject is socially damaging, especially in the age of Twitter. His brand has social capital, and like a cult leader, his millions of disciples fall in line and rally to his side with pitchforks crying, “The Science! Biological Fact!”
As it turns out, however, the Khelif example is just the sort of thing that complicates the paradigm. I searched around and found this informative BBC article on the subject where I learned that a Y chromosome may be incomplete or lacking in certain vital coding. So someone like Khelif is born and declared a girl at birth because to all outward appearances. . . it’s a girl! Those born with this condition, do in fact have a vagina, but no reproductive organs. . . or some similar biological anomaly that upsets the male-female binary model.
In short, when we hear those crazies telling us that it’s a biological fact! that biology does NOT determine gender or sex, they’re not wrong. (Pardon the double negative.) The crazies I’m talking about are Walsh’s activists who go off the deep end by asserting that men menstruate or chest feed, for example; the crazies include those who whimsically and fashionably identify as an alternative gender—or whatever weirdo nonsense they get in their heads (cats come to mind)—and try to impose their idiosyncrasies on others by demanding special behavioural accommodations that genuflect to their inviolable uniqueness, including changes to your vocabulary, and your character, and other impositions that they themselves would not respect coming from other quarters, like, say, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Scientologists. The crazies won’t even accommodate you: it’s a one-way relationship. Be they as they may, their craziness is based on some measure of truth: it is indeed a biological fact that biology occasionally throws us a curve ball that breaks the glass of the simple binary paradigm.
What I’m after is that if we don’t examine the issue honestly, we miss an opportunity to address it with some brains and some heart. First thing, the gender controversy is a flashpoint for social constructionist arguments regarding everything we believe and take for granted. We’ve reached a point in the evolution of consciousness where it is difficult to ignore how much a culture colours not only gender expression, but all manner of custom and convention. As we’ve been discovering here at analogy magazine, our worldview (or paradigm), however productive it may be, never accounts for all the appearances and is therefore always incomplete.
The biological fact argument is no different. At best, it amounts to a statistical claim in which a minority is felt not to exist, when it most certainly does. Calling outliers “freaks” doesn’t make them go away. And hopefully our hearts are big enough to find a way of including these folk productively. At its best, the spirit of inclusiveness (which has unfortunately run amok) is all about overcoming our biases so as not to marginalise and abuse our fellow human beings. After all, the goal is to get to a point where we’re no longer behaving like a bunch of puritanical witch hunters, calling for the burning of those who upset our worldview.
So where does the failure of our model to account for all the phenomena leave us? It can be a frightening predicament. It feels like we’re losing our grip on reality. Indeed it is this fear that drives many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent members of our society to just go with the biological fact argument without doing their homework. As it happens, there are academics and medical professionals out there (who are not nutters) presenting scientific evidence that biology alone does not determine sex and gender. The claim that “it’s all a social construct” is a frightening prospect. But where do we go when we discover that biological fact and that’s that is a bad response? I propose that this moment of discovery is an opportunity to deal with the whole shebang, and our ongoing explorations here at analogy have paved the way for precisely this predicament.
Our fist step is to recognise the constructed quality of man and woman, and argue for its productivity and indispensable role in generating social stability. We ought to remind those who use the notion of the social construct as a pejorative or method of delegitimising folk ways that there are indispensable constructs. Sure we need to interrogate our conventions, but we need to do so intelligently. We need to remind our confused bothers and sisters that theft, incest, rape, and murder are also social constructs—ones that we invented out of a necessity to maintain a relatively safe and prosperous society. Moreover, those who would introduce new genders are themselves making social constructs rather than presenting some objective and finally final revelation.
Having stated it so simply, one wonders what the foofaraw is all about. Why so much confusion? It just seems so obvious, and yet I haven’t seen this solution proposed anywhere. My feeling is that once our metaphysics is cleared of politics, bad religion, and bad science, we have a decent shot at clarity.
So what is a woman? What is a man? Clearly, there are some biological differences. The proposition that there are no biological differences is as unfounded as the assertion that sex and gender are a biologically determined binary. Clearly, that easy binary doesn’t account for the phenomena. Clearly, normative gender and sexual expression are socially constructed and vary from culture to culture and era to era. And clearly, the constructs of man and woman are not only necessary to healthy communities, but something worth celebrating: none of us would be alive without them.
Meanwhile, in some rare cases, the ledger book that accounts for the biological differences reminds us that our models are merely heuristics, and not the phenomena themselves. We must resist the insistence that scientific laws determine our world since it is we ourselves inventing those laws rather than discovering them. And we must equally eschew analogically identical claims that God’s laws (or natural law) determine the static gender binary as we once had to give up the idea that the sun moves about a static Earth. In short, we must resist becoming slaves to the plan. We must quit being idol worshipers and serving the models that ought to be serving us. We need to start getting comfortable with this state affairs if we ever hope to get along and move forward.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
Suggested retitle:
Socially Constructed: "Deal with the whole shebang"
<sophmoric chortling>
But really, it was a great little side pun (albeit, i'm sure unintentional.)
A valuable post, a keeper. There was a lot here I did not know about that boxing episode. I should not be surprised to find that mainstream media kept certain things out of their accounts. Thanks for this information and for the larger perspective.