Why is it so hard for a scientist like Richard Dawkins to understand the difference between sex and gender?

Richard Dawkins find it hard to grasp the difference between gender and biological sex, reducing gender identity to a matter of procreation in the process. No wonder he is loved by transphobic TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).

Richard Dawkins is now actively helping anti-trans activists. How can such a renowned scientist end up in such a bad place?

Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Ray Blanchard all belong to what I would call a school of traditional gender role thinking masquerading as science based facts. 

If  you go through their arguments it soon becomes clear that the statement "gender is biological sex" is simply a rephrasing of the sentence "biological sex is biological sex and biological sex," which explains nothing. But this is clearly about reproduction. Gender is reduced to sperm and eggs. They cannot grasp reality of the concept of gender as something related to, but still different from, biological sex. 

Dawkins discusses trans people with a gender critical TERF

In the video below, where Dawkins discusses transgender identities with Helen Joyce,  Dawkins find it "distinctly weird that people can simply declare that 'I am a woman, though I have a penis'". He sees this as "a strange distortion of language."

In other words, this renowned scientist is not even able to imagine that a gendered sense of self can be influenced by other factors than his own understanding of biological sex, whether these factors are biological (pre-natal hormonal development) or caused by the simple fact that gender (as in identity, expression or sexuality) is not binary. 

In the end what we are facing here is a man who is deeply anchored in traditional gender thinking that his own scientific work cannot but reinforce existing stereotypes. Which is why he now ends up helping a transphobic TERF like Helen Joyce. 

Richard Dawkins. Photo by Marty Stone (CC)

Intellectual lock-in reinforces stereotypes

How is it possible for a man that is clearly able to read science papers to have missed all the research on the formation of gender identity?

As one who has studied the history of science, I think it is important to keep the following in mind:

1. Scientists are human beings, and as such they are affected by cultural prejudices and interests as much as everyone else.

2. The scientific method aims at liberating scientists from such intellectual lock-ins, and in many cases it does help them achieve this goal. Still, most scientist  only win the publish or perish race if they stay within their own disciplinary silo, interacting with scientists like themselves. This leads to an intellectual feedback loop reinforcing existing beliefs.

3. The different disciplines of scientific cultures are affected differently by different cultural prejudices. Sciences who believe they are completely "objective" and "disinterested" are more likely to exhibit political and cultural bias than those who recognize the effects society has on all researchers.

This does not, of course, apply to all researchers within a discipline. A broad interest in history and psychology will normally inoculate them from the hubris of The Infallible Professor. Note also that scientists and scholars from the humanities and the social sciences may be just as biased.

Evolutionary biology

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. Evolutionary biology is based on the premise that human traits are developed through an evolutionary process. Beneficial abilities and behaviors helps individuals survive in a  specific environment, which increases their chances of having offspring. These scientist believe that a division of labor between male and females are based on different inborn abilities and traits, and that this also – at least to some extent – applies to humans. 

Even though history has shown that the abilities assigned to men and women  by evolutionary scientist  is mostly based on cultural prejudices, many of them stick to the idea that biology is at the core of the differences between men and women.

It is this that causes some of them to believe that gender identities have to be in harmony with "the biological sex", even if the very existence of trans people shows that this is not always the case.

A lot of evolutionary biologists know that their discipline often leads scientist to replicate traditional gender views, and they take that into consideration, but Dawkins is clearly not among those.

Transgender identities are real

Science is about looking at specific observable phenomena, trying to explain why they are as they are and to understand their role in larger systems. Science is not limited to physical objects that can be weighed and measured. Science also look at behaviors,  emotions and thinking.

Transgender identities are real. They are observable.  There are people who persistently and strongly experience that their gender is not in harmony with the gender role they are forced to play. This is a scientific fact. And trans people  have been around for millennia. 

Gender incongruence is real. Gender dysphoria is real. This is clearly not about people just deciding, on a whim, that they are male or female.

So would it not make sense for a curious scientist to try to understand this phenomenon  instead of dismissing it is a "distortion of reality"?

Dawkins reminds me of the Jesuit scholars who dismissed Galileo not because he was wrong, but because his heliocentric view of the universe was unthinkable within the traditional Christian view of the universe.

And the idea that we cannot change the use of language or come up with new concepts to describe observable phenomena is just preposterous in a scientific context. This is the man who came up with the original concept of a "meme" (which in turn became a meme). He knows that science often needs to coin new terms when exploring unknown phenomena.

Helen Joyce

Helen Joyce, who turned the renowned news and business magazine The Economist into an anti-trans publication, is a mathematician. She makes a point of this in the interview. I know of a lot of mathematicians that understand the way culture, prejudices and politics affect human beliefs. Joyce, on the other hand, dismisses gender studies as not being based in reality. 

She also seems to believe that an understanding of gender that is not based on biology is a new idea, which it is not. For instance: Most feminists have, for the last hundred years or so, argued that the way we experience and understand gender and gender roles is strongly influenced by cultural mores and social power structures. In pre-modern Western societies gender was defined by law and divine decree, not by biology.

Professor Grace Lavery has written an excellent essay on the way transphobic "gender critical" thinking has shaped the current discourse on transgender lives. She writes this about Joyce:

Helen Joyce, an Irish mathematics scholar who had a stint editing the finance pages of The Economist, embarks upon the 2022 reprint of her book Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality with the following words: “The arguments in this book are based on facts that until recently were universally accepted: that humans cannot change sex; that males are on average much stronger than females and commit nearly all violent and sexual crime.”

An emphasis on the novelty of the position Joyce calls “gender self-identification” underpins much that follows. It is as though Joyce has wandered into a classroom during the penultimate lecture of the course, declared that feminist philosophy as such is garbage, demanded the right to deliver the final lecture herself, and inexplicably been granted it. 

Lavery refers to Joyce's book "an incoherent set of vapid polemics by an author of singular incuriosity." 

Indeed, incuriosity is the keyword here. Neither Dawkins nor Joyce understand what they are talking about. Nor are they interested in learning more about the complexity of the world of sex and gender, because they like the simplicity of the misleading "gender is biological sex" trope. It makes them feel superior to the  trans activists and gender scholars. But they are still talking about trans people as if they understand. 

That tells us a lot about how a social system can harness the work of anyone to make sure existing power relationships remain the way they are.

See also:
Science and Transphobia: Ray Blanchard is Now Assisting TERFs and White Supremacists. Why?
Richard Dawkins used his new podcast to promote more transphobic lies
Elevatorgate, Richard Dawkins and sexism in the atheist community
Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia