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Three Biologists and a Psychologist Pick a Fight Over Trans Existence
What led up to Jerry Coyne’s ‘Losing My Nonreligion’ WSJ op-ed
On November 7, Freethought Now (a blog of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, or FFRF) published a 1,000-word essay by Kat Grant. It briefly asserted that people can assert for themselves what their own gender is.
Several anti-trans commentators used it as a springboard to make their own noise.
As Grant explains on their blog, Transing Boundaries, they come from rural southern Indiana, studied political science at Indiana University—Bloomington, and got their law degree from the same school in 2022. They interned for the FFRF during law school, and after law school they completed a two-year Equal Justice Works fellowship with the FFRF focusing on queer-related legal issues having to do with the separation of church and state.
Grant’s essay, “What Is a Woman?,” begins by noting “a particular episode between Plato and Diogenes the Cynic, who were both attempting to define a man,” a predecessor of Matt Walsh’s aggressive rhetorical game of defining woman. Grant then segues into pointing out that there are different ways to define sex and that any classification system will tend to overlook complexity and leave someone out.
