Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. - Areo

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Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn
Binary.
05/01/2022 · 169 comments · 11 minute read · Richard Dawkins
L
ong ago, on my father’s farm, we had a particularly bumptious, mischievous, even
aggressive cow called Arusha. The herdsman, musing one day on her obstreperous
behaviour, remarked, “Seems to me, Arusha is more like a cross between a bull
and a cow.”
Er, yes!
Arusha came to mind recently when I was interviewed by Josh Glancy of the Sunday Times.
The interview was supposed to be on my new book, Flights of Fancy—about all the ways
birds, bats, pterosaurs, insects and humans can defy the mundane pull of gravity. But in
addition, perhaps pressed by his editor to deliver the kind of clickbait to which birds and bats
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cannot rise, Glancy mentioned that I had been publicly disowned by the American Humanist
Association. Having named me as their Humanist of the Year in 1996, they retrospectively
negated the honour in 2021. The reason? A tweet inviting discussion about the habit of
“identifying as.”
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Rachel Dolezal
In Glancy’s words,
“Back in April, Dawkins caused o�ence when he wondered why identifying across racial
barriers is so much more di�cult than across sexual barriers. He wrote: ‘In 2015, Rachel
Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People], was vili�ed for identifying as Black. Some men choose
to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vili�ed if
you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.’” [1]
Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of
NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some
men choose to identify as women, and some
women choose to identify as men. You will be
vilified if you deny that they literally are what they
identify as.
Discuss.
11:20 AM · Apr 10, 2021
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A lifetime as an Oxford tutor has ingrained in me the Socratic habit of raising questions for
discussion, often topics with a mildly paradoxical �avour, conundrums, apparent
contradictions or inconsistencies that seem to need a bit of sorting out. I have continued the
habit on Twitter, often ending my tweets with the word, “Discuss.” That tweet was one such.
Here are two other typical examples of raising a question to stimulate discussion:
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Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
Ants communicate by slow-diffusing chemicals
(pheromones). If their brains had radio-speed links, would
“distributed consciousness” emerge at the colony level,
while no individual ant had any conscious awareness at
all? Discuss, perhaps with reference to the Internet.
10:36 AM · Nov 13, 2021
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Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
Conjecture: “There must be a moment in history
when two siblings born to the same mother were
destined, one to become the ancestor of all humans
and the other to become the ancestor of all
wombats.”
Is the conjecture necessarily true? Discuss.
6:25 PM · Nov 14, 2021
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The second question, by the way, has the interesting property that some people think the
conjecture is obviously and trivially true, others that it is obviously and trivially false—binary
opposite “trivially obvious” opinions. The answer (spelled out in The Ancestor’s Tale) is that
the conjecture is true but by no means obvious.
What is obvious—it is second nature to any teacher worth the name—is that inviting
discussion of a question is not the same as taking a position on the answer. Nevertheless,
Glancy invited me to take a position: to enter, as it were, the discussion I had initiated with
my Rachel Dolezal tweet. And so I said to him the following:
Race is very much a spectrum. Most African­Americans are mixed race, so there really is a
spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very
slight [African inheritance]. People who have one great­grandparent who is Native
American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn
binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race
they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you
could choose what to identify as.
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The Sunday Times condensed my words into the headline that I have adopted for this piece:
Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary. Unlike my wombat conjecture, this point
really is childishly obvious. When a female and a male mate, each o�spring is either female
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or male, extremely seldom a hermaphrodite or intersex of any kind. [2] Arusha really was a
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cow, not a half­way bull. But her intermediate colouring made us suspect that this “pedigree
Jersey” was actually half Ayrshire—an arti�cial insemination screw­up. When two people of
di�erent races mate, their o�spring is of mixed race and this shows itself in many ways,
including skin colour. After generations of intermarriage, beginning with the exploitation of
enslaved women and girls, African Americans constitute a rich spectrum such that some
individuals, when required to tick the “race or ethnicity” box on o�cial forms, might
justi�ably feel free to “identify as” whatever they choose.
Meghan (née Markle), Duchess of Sussex
The Duchess of Sussex identi�es as “mixed race” but is frequently referred to in the press as
black. Barack Obama sees himself (and is commonly described) as black although, having one
white parent, he might equally well tick the white box. The “one­drop rule,” once enshrined
in the laws of some segregationist states, asserted that one drop of African “blood” was
enough to make a person count as black—thus making blackness the cultural equivalent of a
genetic dominant. It never worked in reverse, and it still exerts a powerful hold on American
discourse—while “African Americans” actually run a smooth gamut from those of pure
African descent to those with perhaps one African great great grandparent. Were race not a
spectrum, Rachel Dolezal’s critics should have spotted that she wasn’t “really” black, simply
by taking one look at her. It’s precisely because black Americans are a spectrum that it wasn’t
obvious. With negligible exceptions, on the other hand, you can unwaveringly identify a
person’s sex at a glance, especially if they remove their clothes. Sex is pretty damn binary.
If I chose to identify as a hippopotamus, you would rightly say I was being ridiculous. The
claim is too facetiously at variance with reality. It’s marginally more ridiculous than the
Church’s Aristotelian casuistry in identifying the “substance” of blood with wine and body
with bread, while the “accidentals” safely remain an alcoholic beverage and a wafer. Not at
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all ridiculous, however, was James Morris’s choice to identify as a woman and his gruelling
and costly transition to Jan Morris. Her explanation, in Conundrum, of how she always felt
like a woman trapped in a man’s body is eloquent and moving. It rings agonizingly true and
earns our deep sympathy. We rightly address her with feminine pronouns, and treat her as a
woman in social interactions. We should do the same with others in her situation, honest and
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decent people who have wrestled all their lives with the distressing condition known as
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gender dysphoria.
Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and
familial—not to be undertaken lightly. I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for
a man who simply �ings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.” For Dr Morris, it
was a ten­year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social
conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect
for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such
respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the
race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a
continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.
Changing your “race” should be even easier if you adopt the fashionable doctrine that race is
a “social construct” with no biological reality. It’s less easy with sex, to say the least. Even the
most right­on sociologist might struggle to argue that a penis is a social construct. Gender
theorists bypass the annoying problem of reality by decreeing that you are what you feel,
regardless of biology. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman even if you have a penis.
It would seem to follow that, if feelings really are all that matter, Rachel Dolezal’s claim to
feel black, regardless of biology, should merit at least a tiny modicum of sympathetic
discussion, if not outright acceptance.
Changing the subject to something much more interesting, the binary nature of sex very
nearly handed Charles Darwin the key to discovering the genetic laws now correctly
attributed to Gregor Mendel. What we call “Neo­Darwinism” (see below) would not have had
to wait till the twentieth century, and would indeed be just plain “Darwinism”—the great
naturalist came that close. And it was the binary nature of sex that brought him there.
Darwin was troubled by an anonymous 1867 article in the North British Review, which later
turned out to be by Fleeming (pronounced “Flemming”) Jenkin, a Scottish engineer who
coincidentally worked on the transatlantic cable with Darwin’s other leading critic, Lord
Kelvin the eminent physicist. Jenkin’s argument was couched in the horribly racist terms that
were part of the intellectual wallpaper of the time, so I’ll rephrase it more neutrally to avoid
distraction. A new genetic type (we’d nowadays call it a mutant) couldn’t be favoured in the
long term by natural selection, said Jenkin, because it would be swamped. No matter how
bene�cial at �rst, as the generations go by it would be diluted to nothing. Darwin was
convinced by the argument and it’s a shame he didn’t live to see the fallacy exposed. Jenkin
and Darwin, and everybody else at the time, wrongly assumed that heredity was “blending”
and that children were a kind of �uid mixture of mother and father: intermediate, like
mixing paint. If you mix black with white paint you get grey, and no amount of mixing grey
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with grey can reconstitute the original black or white. Therefore, so the erroneous argument
ran, selection can’t favour a new mutation so that it comes to dominate a population. It will
be diluted out of existence as the generations go by.
It should have been noticed at the time, by the way, that Jenkin’s argument is obviously
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