a bonobo humanity?

The first time I lived completely away from family, when I was twenty-one, I shared house with two males, an older homosexual who never wore clothes in the house, and a bisexual who was more sexually interested in me than I was in him, so it was a challenging but fascinating environment. The older man introduced me to his subculture, which included a couple of men, quite elderly, at least from my youthful perspective, who wore dresses and had male partners. I think the word transvestite was used. This wasn’t particularly in-your-face stuff, with heavy make-up, flashy jewellery and fake busts, or whatever, though of course I was a bit nonplussed. These guys were softly spoken, feminine in their gestures, simply but femininely dressed, and clingy with their partners. This was all a revelation to me, and I remember being quite moved, even teary about it all. They seemed so quietly defiant, and contented. 

I presume there have always been humans who have felt they were born into the wrong gender. Girls who, even before they really gave it much conscious thought, preferred the shapes, colours, textures and activities that we adults or parents associate with boys, and who, over time, became embarrassingly consistent about their ‘odd’ choices. And maybe it’s just a phase, but sometimes not. And some parents might push their kid to behave more ‘appropriately’, and some might not. And maybe science has an answer for all this, but maybe not. 

All of this might involve genetics, epigenetics, pre-natal experience, parental treatment or a host of other causal factors I know next to nothing about. We’re surely the most complex species on the planet, which should make us proud but wary. 

Transgender stuff is very newsworthy at the moment, with passions running high. My own position would be to accept people’s deeply felt views about themselves and never mind what the science says. But what does the science say? Can biology and psychology be separated? Is psychology a science? Can the brain and the body be seen as separate? (My answer to that last one is no, obviously). 

So in exploring this issue I’d prefer to avoid youtube debates and legal decisions. As described in my previous post, I went through a period, particularly in my mid-teens, of what might be called ‘gender uncertainty’, though I found it more thrilling than disturbing, and tended to be proud of my ‘sophistication’. Perhaps ‘gender fluidity’ would be a more accurate term. But this faded over time and I came to be happy to accept that I was a boringly heterosexual male (cisgender, as they now call it). But I also recognised that this had to do with appearance. Fifteen year-old boys become twenty-five year olds, but not in the same way, physically, that fifteen year-old girls do. You could say that it was the ‘feminine’ side of boys that attracted me, which faded as they became ‘masculinised’. Note that there are many descriptions of boy lovers among the ancient Greeks – Achilles derived strength from his love of Patroclus and Aristophanes spoke favourably of ‘hermaphrodites’ in Plato’s Symposium. We’ve become rather more conservative in our sexual outlook since then, methinks. I blame patriarchal religion.

So, contradicting myself, I want to understand the British Supreme Court’s recent decision on sex and biology and why so many women seem to be very pleased about it – and I’ll start by saying I currently know very little about it. CNN London reports it thus:

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is defined by “biological sex” under the country’s equality law – excluding transgender women – in a case that is expected to impact accommodations for trans women in bathrooms, hospital wards, sports clubs and more. The court ruling on Wednesday is limited to defining the term “woman” within the country’s Equality Act 2010, meaning trans women are no longer protected from discrimination as women, although they remain protected from discrimination in other forms.

But, as the reporter points out, this will have wider implications, not only for what trans people will be able to do, but for how they’re perceived. 

I note that the reporter puts “biological sex” in quotes, which is as it should be. A legal definition of an essentially biological matter is always going to be problematic. There are those who, from an early age, behave in a way that is seen as ‘gender inappropriate’ to what might be expected by noting their genitalia (see Donna the chimp as described in my previous post). They’re generally not doing it to seek attention, it just comes automatically. You could say their brain makes them do it, and not particularly consciously. And the brain is a 100% biological entity. 

But the UK Supreme Court has chosen to consider ‘biological sex’ in a more reductive way, as have many conservatives. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a science and skepticism podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly over the past 15 years, recently featured an interview with Dave Farina, a popular science communicator on YouTube, in which the transgender issue was briefly discussed. It seems there are some other science communicators, notably Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, who take a strong line on ‘biological sex’, largely based on gametes. And shamefully, I had to look the term up, though I’ve doubtless written about them before. Gametes are the sex cells – ova in females, sperm in males, which combine with their opposites to produce offspring. So, according to Dawkins, Coyne et al, the whole gender controversy can be reduced to these  haploid cells (cells containing half the genetic material of diploid cells, the somatic cells of all mammals). You are what your gametes reveal. According to these scientists, this isn’t reductive, but entirely determinative, regardless of thoughts or ‘gender-affirming’ surgery. Farina and the principal host of The Skeptics’ Guide, Steven Novella, firmly disagreed, and more or less dismissed Coyne and Dawkins as members of a ‘passing generation’. We shall see.

So what to do with these trans people, with their wayward thoughts, their fantasies? And why was the Supreme Court’s decision met with such glee, by so many women? A spokeswoman for the campaign to prevent transgender women from being recognised as women, on being interviewed after the decision was handed down, expressed ‘great sympathy’ for their position, but common sense had prevailed, and – what? These people, a tiny proportion of the population, have been left in no man’s land, and no woman’s land either. If this is sympathy, I wouldn’t like to experience her hostility. What solution has been offered, apart, it seems, from forcing them to recognise that they’re deluded?  

This is obviously not going to be the end of the matter, and indeed it will create greater acrimony within and between genders than there ever was before. 

Meanwhile, I’m still wondering about those unisex toilets. I like the suffix uni-. I like to think it stands for ‘united’. 

References

https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-identity-gender-expression

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/19/europe/uk-supreme-court-biological-woman-intl/index.html

on gender, and bonobos