Gender theory may seem far-fetched, but if the body has no intrinsic telos and evolution grants authority only to efficient causality, it is hard to understand why an evolutionary scientist would necessarily regard it as problematic.  

On December 30, Richard Dawkins resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) after it retracted an article arguing that gender is based on biology. Steven Pinker, who also resigned, accused the foundation of “imposing” a “new religion”—trans ideology. Debbie Hayton, in the U.K. Spectator, was quick to argue that Dawkins’s longstanding polemics against religion are not incidental to the world where trans ideology has become so plausible: “Maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.” (Hayton, curiously, is a man who identifies as a woman but is critical of transgender ideology.) Dawkins understandably bristled at this, a useful reminder that he considers himself a “cultural Christian” only in a highly qualified sense.

As Dawkins has admirably stated elsewhere, sex is biological. I am myself grateful for his clarity and courage on this point. It does not matter how sincerely someone believes that he is a woman trapped in the wrong body—every cell of that body indicates the opposite. One need not be a theist of any variety to understand and acknowledge that.

And yet, there is an issue here. The concepts of maleness and femaleness typically do a lot more than refer to biological differences. When we think of “man” and “woman,” we generally do not think purely in terms of chromosomes or genitalia. We think of social and cultural roles as well. The authority that Dawkins appears to grant to the body is itself not a matter of purely empirical analysis. The question of what the body is for is rather different from the question of what the body is. Or, to reframe the issue: Once one adopts an approach to the body that radically detaches the former question from the latter, Dawkins’s obvious truth-telling starts to look somewhat less convincing. Gender roles relate to the teleological significance of biological sex. The question is: Are they intrinsic to it or socially constructed and mapped onto it by cultural forces?

A significant part of the answer to that question has historically related to the possibilities offered by the technology available at any given time. For example, a thirteenth-century woman would have a hard time being a blacksmith, given the raw physical strength involved. And it has thus far proved impossible for men to bear children due to their lack of ovaries and wombs.

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