Predictably, the Washington Post has screwed up again, and this time they did so in my wheelhouse: Biology. So let's start with some basic biology. Humans are mammals. Mammals are sexually binary; there are two sexes, male and female. Sex is determined genetically at conception. In the case of humans, there are two chromosomes involved, X and Y, which combine into a pair. The genotype XX presents as female. The genotype XY presents as male.
These are facts. These are the facts that President Trump has made a matter of national policy. The Washington Post is trying to correct the president by claiming that sex in humans isn't binary - and they are using a perfectly ridiculous argument to do so.
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The Federalist's Elle Purnell has the details.
This week, the Post is at it again, with an equally obvious fact of mankind’s sexual existence: the fact that, when you come into the world, you are either male or female.
Once again, Post writers were responding to a scientific reality that even young children understand, but which is inconvenient for them politically. Following President Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing “two sexes, male and female,” the Post went searching for “experts” and “science” to prove him wrong.
“Trump says there are ‘two sexes.’ Experts and science say it’s not binary,” is the headline they chose.
The Washington Post has been talking to the wrong "experts." Here is the anchor for their argument.
But letting men use the bathroom with little girls is not a very popular hill to die on, so the Post pretends its objection is actually about people with chromosomal abnormalities or whose reproductive and sexual organs did not develop properly.
As the Post pointed out, boys with Klinefelter syndrome are born with an extra X chromosome. Girls born with Turner syndrome only have a single X chromosome. Some boys are born with a resistance to male hormones, and some girls are born with overactive male hormones, both anomalies that affect anatomical development. In extremely rare cases, babies are born with chromosomes that don’t match their anatomy or with both ovarian and testicular tissue. But the number of babies affected by these uncommon cases is nowhere near the “close to 2 percent of the U.S. population” for whom the Post’s experts suggest sex is hard to “assign.”
There are a couple of serious problems with this argument.
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First of all, as Elle Purnell points out, the number of people with these extra chromosomes - that's called a polysomy - is vanishingly rare. The "close to two percent" claim isn't just wrong, it's ridiculously, laughably wrong. An analysis in PubMed indicates the correct figure is closer to 0.018 percent - almost 100 times lower.
Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.
Yes, these people exist. Yes, it's sad that these chromosomal abnormalities cause these unfortunate people a great deal of suffering, as most of these conditions are debilitating. These are not people, by and large, who will be seeking to be student-athletes. President Trump's primary concern in this area is the horrendously unfair practice of allowing boys and men who claim to be "transgender" to compete in girls' and women's sports teams, with the predictable results that girls and women are being unfairly deprived of scholarships, awards, and trophies by boys and men who did not earn them fairly.
Also, while these genetic abnormalities do exist, we do not tailor the policy in things like sports in education to accommodate a tiny fraction of one percent of the population who likely will not be participating in any case.
In this case, the Washington Post tried a Hail Mary in an attempted "fact check" of President Trump's transgender policies, and as seems to be normal for them, they stepped on a rake and got smacked in the face.
