Lysenkoism all over again
With gender ideology, the left is once again destroying society by demonizing the "fascist science" of biology. Is anyone paying attention?
In the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Stalin’s ideological revolution turned its attention to biology. By then, it was well-understood that species evolve through genetics: two sets of genes get shuffled together via sexual reproduction, with a little random mutation thrown in, and out comes a brand new being with its own unique genetic identity. This fact, however, came to be deemed incompatible with communist principles, because it says that we’re powerless to change our genes through learned behaviour or acquired experiences. If you spend your whole life working hard on the farm, it won’t make your offspring innately stronger; and no matter how dedicated to the collective good you are, your children’s spirits won’t be hard-wired for civic duty. A biologist named Trofim Lysenko, who had grown up a peasant and as a result became deeply committed to the communist cause, proposed an ideological alternative to natural selection, and he set out to prove that we are the masters of our heredity by experimenting with exposing wheat crops to extreme climates to make their offspring hardier.
The result was catastrophic. Lysenko’s pseudoscientific principles were applied nationwide to agricultural crops, prolonging the effects of the famines that had already killed millions of Russians and Ukrainians. Biologists who defended genetics were rounded up by the thousands and executed, committed to prisons, gulags, and mental hospitals, or fired.
The ideological denial of genetics spread throughout the communist world and lasted for decades, from the Eastern Bloc to Mao’s China (where it played a role in another famine which killed 30 million Chinese). Propaganda across the Left portrayed natural selection as, varyingly, “fascist science,” capitalist imperialism, or outright Nazism.
As an example of ideology trying to bend biology to its demands, this is almost perfectly analogous to what’s happening on university campuses across the West today: the fact that humans come in two sexes — male and female — has come to be deemed incompatible with the principles of gender identity ideology — that every individual is the master of his/her/their/xir/its “gender,” free of the “fascist science,” “colonialism,” and (so they say) outright “Nazism” that says we are each born one of two biological sexes that we are powerless to change.
And the result is already catastrophic. Pediatric “gender clinics” are sprouting up across Europe, North America, and elsewhere, channeling tens if not by now hundreds of thousands of children, adolescents and young adults onto experimental drugs, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries, based on the pseudoscientific and logically self-contradictory premise that body modifications to mimic the appearance of the opposite sex are somehow medically crucial to protect people’s inner sense of a sacred “gender identity,” and also to prove that biological sex, defined as an immutable fact of the human species, is nothing but a fascist fiction. China, too, just opened its first children’s sex-change clinic, adapting Western gender woo to the Chinese Communist’s Party’s doctrine that gender nonconformity is “unhealthy” and goes against the greater socialist good.
The facts of biological sex are being wiped from textbooks and school curricula, even in Ivy League university medical schools. This week, it was reported that all but one student walked out of the class after an education professor at the University of Southern Maine simply declared that there are two sexes, and that labels such as “non-binary” do not literally change or negate anyone’s biological sex. Students and faculty are claiming the teacher is “transphobic,” “ignorant,” and demanding she be re-educated or retired. Once-respected academic journals such as Nature now publish flaky editorials saying that there are more than two sexes. Even the atheist and skeptic communities, supposed bastions of the scientific method, are now rife with biology deniers, like the biology professor PZ Myers, and this flaming jackass. Everywhere in the media, there are stories that demonize the basic facts of biology and sing the praises of the new dogma, which is the same as the old one, that says social progress can let us transcend the hard, heartless realities of biological life on earth, if we just believe it in our hearts strongly enough, and ruthlessly persecute anyone who dares to disagree.
Of course, logic and reason tell us that biological sex, like natural selection, is a fact of life that isn’t going anywhere, and also that that’s perfectly OK. We don’t need to rail against genetics or sex in order to grow better crops, teach future generations to be good citizens, or express our feminine and masculine sides freely. Lysenkoism and the denial of biological reality did not lead to prosperity, bounty, and social cohesion; just the opposite: it ripped societies apart, and Lysenko is probably responsible for the deaths of more people than any other scientist in the twentieth century. In fact, it is the acceptance of genetics that has taught us how to make hardier crops, feed more people, and cure countless diseases, advancing society by leaps and bounds. Likewise, gender ideology and the denial of biological reality is not leading to an era of free and healthy gender expression; it’s creating a vast population of disillusioned, distressed and severely harmed detransitioners; it’s creating so much hostility to gays and lesbians that our heroes can’t even attend Pride parades without being violently assaulted by ideological mobs; and it’s gutting the legal rights and protections for women and girls that feminists have built up over more than a century of struggle.
Just like with genetic denialism, every single one of the ideals that gender identity ideologues aspire to is hindered, not helped, by the denial of biological sex. The acceptance and understanding of same-sex attracted people is entirely dependent on the acknowledgement of the facts of biological sex. Understanding and accepting the variety of gender expression in humans, and how it relates to our sexuality and our attraction to each other, is entirely dependent on acknowledging the facts of biological sex. Ensuring that women and girls can live their lives with as much freedom and dignity as men and boys do is entirely dependent on acknowledging the differences between male and female bodies.
Everyone’s got to start paying attention. This is all just history repeating.