I generally love Star Talk. I don't have tiktok because I limit my social media, but Facebook's creepy spy algorithm knows I'm interested in the sciences, astrophysics especially, and enjoy deepening my understanding of the vastness and marvels of God's creation by watching educational documentaries every now and then. It's a genuine interest, but it also partially stems from a barely conscious need I have for a counterbalance to the constant stream of subjective, often barely coherent arguments to which I am constantly exposed in the literary, political, moral, and ideological realms in which my ideas almost constantly swim in my professional environment.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of my favorites. He offers keen insights in his field, often with pedagogical panache, attention to current events, and doesn't just know how to make a point, but how to ground it in the history of ideas so that its impact has context. He delivers epic smackdowns on flat-earthers, notes how the rotation of the earth might have "helped" a football go through the uprights, and is generally engaging all around, and does so with various guests with various public profiles so he's genuine when he brings complex concepts to the level of his interlocutors.
However, he has also been known to dip his toes into domains in which he is not an expert--and while he's generally pretty well backstopped and balanced in his judgment, there are a few issues where his own bias gets the better of him. Religion being the first--he's a militant atheist with little patience even for eminently reasonable scientific arguments if they have an "intelligent design" component that might hint at a Creator. The second just hit a few days ago as he broached the subject of gender spectra.
The tiktok video walks us with his interlocutor, sometimes controversial sports journalist and culture commentator Stephen A. Smith, through the scientific method as he discusses an "experiment" (that I put in quotes for reasons that I hope will be abundantly clear as I describe his process):
1. Curiosity: He begins with his musings on a subway train wondering whether his own assumptions about each passenger's gender were "correct";
2. Hypothesis: That the common markers that reveal gender are superficial--secondary and tertiary "added features" in his manner of speaking--and that therefore gender is a matter of preference, the signs are merely cosmetic, and the construct is nonbinary;
3. Observations: He lists some cosmetic differences between those he assumes the masc-presenting folks in his 10 person pool of the fem-presenting folks.
4. Analysis: He also brings in supporting evidence from outside his experiment--stores divide clothing by gender, and 300k women in the US get breast surgery in the US to alter their natural anatomy in some way.
5. Conclusions: It's incontrovertible. Gender is a choice that the XX/XY chromosomal binary is insufficient to explain, ergo gender is a spectrum and anyone who disagrees deserves having shame and anger directed at them because their narrowmindedness unequivocally attempts to enforce and impose the cessation of everyone's pursuit of happiness because of their inability to conceive of gender as anything other than binary.
Did you catch the logical errors along the way? Outspoken de-transitioned commenter Chloe Cole points out some of the most salient ones in her takedown here.
I'll summarize:
1. Tyson confuses cosmetics with basic biology, artificial aesthetic choices with natural facts
2. Tyson pretends that his own preference that the endurance of his own 1950s stereotypes about how the social norms of how gender maps onto biological sex should be done away with is the same thing as proving that the stereotypes don't exist, even though his own "enlightened" breakdown of the binary into "percentages" actually affirms the binarity of the norm.
3. Tyson confuses the infinity of personalities which each individual decides their own expression of, with gender binary through which all personalities express themselves variably.
But Chloe missed the biggest one: Tyson is making the most egregious two errors for a scientist to make by pretending an unfalsifiable matter of opinion is within the realm of scientifically testable facts, and then by elevating his preconceived conclusions into "facts" without testing them. Nowhere in his "experiment" does he actually even attempt to confirm anyone's gender. Nowhere in the formulation of a hypothesis or a test to confirm or deny it--which are the first steps in the scientific method--does he stop to ask whether what he's wondering is testable scientifically, or whether it belongs to one of the many realms of life where science's purview ends. If you have a question about the factual nature of an observable phenomenon, use the scientific method. If you want to know what it MEANS, or what meaning your fellow humans make of it, the question you're asking is NOT scientific, but subjective, philosophical, moral, religious, or any of a million other domains outside of the sciences.
To be fair, Tyson fashions himself a philosopher, and he has every right to opine on matters of opinion--in fact he brings evidence from his field to inform his opinions and thereby makes many of them more solid logically. And many of our scientific friends do this all the time. They themselves who engage in the dry, repetitive testing of the natural world to determine its properties by direct experience, can't escape from the task all humans have of making sense of their experiences and imagining their own place in the world, in the natural order, in the vast cosmos for themselves. Humans are meaning-making entities. It's what distinguishes us from machines. Philosophers have been trying to make sense, with the tools available in their time periods and environments, of the world long before our current body of scientific knowledge was established through testable methods because the lack of knowledge doesn't prevent our inherent agency from moving us to seek out theories of our moral context. And, as one brilliant colleague put it. when philosophy gets good, they call it science.
But the first question of science is and should always be: is this a scientific question. If it's not, don't pretend, just move on. If it is, move on to the scientific method and experiment.
There's another thing Chloe misses that's important to address. And that is that BOTH her and Tyson are performing logical sleight of hand maneuvers hoping you won't notice that they are crossing categories that deserve to keep their integrity and rigidly in focus. Gender is NOT the same concept as sex. As wrong as she was on many of her moral opinions, Simone de Beauvoir was not wrong that while it's scientifically, factually verifiable that some are born female, no one is born a woman, because the gendered MEANING individuals and societies attach to the biological fact is a social construction that we can logically abstract and analyze outside of the concept of sex. Tyson is not technically wrong when he says that XX and XY chromosomes are insufficient to explain why certain bundles of clothing, hair, and other cosmetic features get attached more strongly to one sex than another, because while gender roles and styles ARE binary and DO map onto a biological reality, they are ultimately styles and roles--socially constructed, arbitrarily connected, differently so by differing cultures, and with norm enforcement and diffusion practices that vary with respect to history and individual agency to change. But he's elevating that correct understanding of gender's cultural construction into a claim that others can incorrectly coopt and misuse--the idea trans-theorists advance, which is that sex is ALSO a social construction in and of itself, and that no biological reality exists behind gender expressions and markers. Calling gender a spectrum conflates gender with sex, and gives license to think of sex on a scale rather than as the binary it is. Calling gender a spectrum conflates the choices people are free to make of an infinite range of ways of expressing their gender with the illusion that anyone can choose an infinite range of sexes. This conflation is harmful because no matter how successful a person can become at fooling their fellows through superficial products, practices, perspectives, or performances that they belong to the opposite gender, they are not, in fact, making themselves anything less than illusory--they are not escaping their sex, and are still bound by all of its biological imperatives. Medical science has advanced to be able to remove some of the consequences of these biological imperatives, but this is only a costly (in terms of financial burdens as well as in moral, psychological, and long-term physical burdens) avoidance of the unavoidable nature of sex. As one astute lawmaker put it recently in the Congressional record during a back and forth with a medical expert witness in a hearing: "sex change operations have a 100% failure rate" (and the witness, who mistook the purpose of the question, nevertheless correctly reported that they fail in another way: they don't accomplish the therapeutic purpose under which such expensive, extensive, and mutilating operations are "justified"--suicide rates after these surgeries are still 19 times higher than the average!).
What a profiteering, dishonest culture we've developed that so many of our prominent scientists pronounce the popular to be truth without test, in flagrant denial of obvious reality. Where so many of our doctors, in the name of care, intervene so deeply into doomed attempts to alter the basic architecture of their patient's sex, rather than help their patients learn to live with the unalterable sex they have. Where right gets called wrong, black gets called white, and opinions get called facts in an effort to shame the truthtellers into self stifling. Where the closed minded are hailed as open because the publicly deny the consequences of the true in the name of caring for the freedom of a group whose popularity is surging whose currency is victimhood.
The liberty to pursue happiness is good and right and available. But not every choice is morally equal, not every way to pursue happiness achieves it, and no choice is free from its natural consequences. the only way to truly be happy is to accept truth and base behavior on it. Even Tyson agrees in every other aspect of his scientific practice. Gender is not merely a matter of personal choice. It's a matter of meaning-making into which a range of choices present themselves, but you have not undone the binary simply by asserting the anti-scientific notion that cosmetics determine belonging anymore than I can destroy the fact that humans are a bipedal species just by amputating one of my legs.
For another takedown of Tyson, it's instructive to review Matt Walsh, who deftly dismantles him on the grounds that he doesn't even believe what he's saying, and on the grounds that spectra don't work the way Tyson claims they work for gender.
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