Nature, perhaps the world’s premier science journal, has, like most of its kind, gone woke. Nowhere is this more obvious than its abandoning of science articles in favor of ideological ones, so it’s undergoing convergent evolution with not only its competitor Science, but also Scientific American.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the essay below, which is not only science-free, but wholly about semantics. And useless semantics to boot, at least to my eye. The whole purpose is to introduce a new term, “gender modality,” which, the authors say, will be of great help to people who don’t identify as “male” or “female”, and keep them from being “erased”. The thing is, the other terms that fall under this rubric already exist, so grouping them as aspects of “gender modality,” a term whose definition is confusing, adds nothing to any social discourse that I can see. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Click below to read; you can also find it archived here.
The usual caveat applies again: people of non-standard gender, including transgender people, deserve nearly every right—and certainly every moral and legal right—as well as every civility, as people of the two standard genders. (My exceptions, as usual, include sports, where one is incarcerated, sex-specific shelters for the abused and rape counseling.) That said, let’s proceed to the semantics.
The authors are promoting the term “gender modality” because it was invented by the first author, Florence Ashley, whose page says she is “metaphorically a biorg witch with flowers in their hair.” Dr. Ashley is a transwoman who uses the “they” pronoun.
The term gender modality was coined in 2019 by one of us (F.A.) in response to frustrations felt as a trans bioethicist and jurist with the limits of existing language (see go.nature.com/3×34784). The term has since been used by transgender communities, clinicians and policymakers to describe the realities of trans communities and the heterogeneity of trans experiences.
So what is the definition of the term? Here it is (bolding is mine):
A person’s gender identity is their sense of gender at any given time. By contrast, gender modality refers to how a person’s gender identity relates to the gender they were assigned at birth (see go.nature.com/3×34784). It is a mode or way of being one’s gender.
The best-known gender modalities are ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’, but the term allows for other possibilities, such as ‘agender’, which includes those who do not identify with any gender, and ‘detrans’ or ‘retrans’ for people who have ceased, shifted or reversed their gender transition. The term also makes space for gender modalities specific to intersex individuals, gender-questioning people, people with dissociative identity disorder and people with culture-specific identities (see ‘Many ways of being’). Gender modality serves a similar purpose to sexual orientation, which describes a facet of human existence and makes space for orientations beyond gay and straight.
Well, this is confusing. First of all, I reject the notion of “gender assigned at birth”. The proper term here is SEX DETERMINED AT BIRTH. Once again, like so many gender ideologues, the authors think that sex is not a binary, but represents some point on a spectrum that doctors “assign”. But sex is a reality, not a semantic, socially constructed invention, and, using the gametic definition for “biological sex”, 99.82% of humans (and surely an equally high percentage of other animals) fall into the classes “male” or “female” depending on whether they have the developmental equipment to make small mobile gametes or large, immobile ones.
Leaving that aside, I still can’t quite understand how “gender modality” differs from “gender identity”. Doesn’t “agender” or “intersex” refer to a person’s sense of how they feel? If not, what does it mean to say that those two terms “refer to how someone’s gender identity relates to the ‘gender they were assigned at birth’”? In fact, neither of those terms say anything about what sex someone was determined to be at birth. Those terms, and the ones the authors list below as “gender modalities”, leave the question of “gender assigned at birth” undetermined, so the notion of “relating how you identify with what you were determined to be at birth” seems meaningless. For example, here’s the list they give of these terms.
You’ve probably seen many of these terms before, and they all refer to people’s sense of who they are. In fact, you can simply eliminate the term of gender modality and just use the identities themselves, perhaps—as in complicated cases like “two spirit identities”—with some necessary explanation. If you’re asked by a person or on a questionnaire, “Are you transgender?” You can either say “yes” or “no”, or explain how you identify (in many cases you ‘ll have to do this).
For some reason, the authors, who simply reiterate only part of a list of gender identities, but call them gender modalities, think that the “gender modality” term itself can improve the work of scientific researchers in three ways:
First, scientists can expand the gamut of gender modalities included in questionnaires given to participants, to capture a broader range of experiences than those represented by the binary of cis and trans. Formulating new categories, adapted to the study design, will enhance the validity of the research7,8. It could also improve response rates and reduce the likelihood of people dropping out.
What they’re really saying is that sometimes, for some purposes, it’s useful to use gender identities to avoid “erasing” people. (Yes, they use that term, saying that using the wrong term will “erase gender trajectories and experiences”. No, they don’t get erased: you still have yours!) It’s just that if it’s important to researchers to know these things, then you they have to ask specifically how you feel about yourself. Using the word “gender modality” instead of “gender identity” adds nothing to this endeavor.
Number two:
The second way in which researchers can use gender modality to improve their work is by using it to refine how they phrase questions or discuss results.
By reflecting on gender modality, researchers can better ensure that participants feel respected, and can avoid assigning gender modalities that conflict with participants’ identities. Recognizing gender modalities beyond cis and trans is a matter of justice. In some studies, offering write-in opportunities can help participants to feel respected despite the nuances of their experiences not being captured. But it could be as simple as using ‘gender modality’ instead of ‘gender identity’ or ‘transgender status’ in a table heading, because the last two terms can be seen as inaccurate or marginalizing.
If gender identity is important in a study (and realize that this applies only to humans and gender identity isn’t relevant for every study involving sex), then by all means use in a write-in option, which to me, given the number of “gender identities” available (there are over 100 now!) seems necessary in any case.
The key to this paper lies in the second paragraph above: getting people’s gender identity correct is a matter of “justice”, and by that they mean “social justice”. Well, sometimes it is important, in which case you must use the write-in option (given 100d+ different gender identities, ticking boxes won’t work. Or if identity isn’t important, and the issue is biological sex, you can use a questionnaire like this
Sex
Male
Female
Other (please explain)__________Gender identity
Male
Female
Other (please explain)__________
That should take care of everything.
“Advantage” number three is like number two, but is about civility rather than justice:
Finally, researchers can use gender modality to think more meticulously about what it is that they are really trying to capture in their study.
Linguistic gaps abound when it comes to our ability to describe trans people’s experiences. For instance, discrimination against trans people is often described as discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Although this shorthand might be workable, it is not entirely accurate. If a trans woman is fired for being trans, should we say that her gender identity was targeted when she has the same gender identity as cis women? Although her gender identity was part of the equation, it would be more accurate to say that she was discriminated against on the basis of her gender modality. Gender modality, not gender identity, is what distinguishes trans women from cis women.
No, what distinguishes trans women from cis women is their biological sex, not “modality rather than identity”. Adding “modality” here doesn’t change the legal case, which is this: someone was fired because their gender identity didn’t match their biological sex. As you can see, this whole mishigas comes from the authors’ refusal to use the word “sex”, which does not appear by itself in the whole article (it shows up a few times in words like “intersex”).
The authors say this at one point: “Not everyone is male or female.” Well, only one out of 5600 persons is not, and they’re exaggerating that number, as many do, thinking that it somehow empowers those of different gender identity. But biological sex is a scientific term with a well-understood meaning, and those who feel that they don’t conform to the “male” or “female” stereotypes still have a biological sex, but sense their nonconformity with the stereotypes associated with that sex. That’s fine, and they can explain their feelings to anyone they want—if explanation is important. (Like race, gender identity has become someone’s single most important characteristic.) In fact, I think that everyone who has a gender identity different from male or female would explain the differences in a unique way, so explanation is nearly always imperative.
Towards the end, the authors sort of admit that using the term “gender modality” isn’t a big fix:
Gender modality is not a panacea. Rather, it is one piece in the toolbox of those who engage in research involving human participants, whether in the medical, biological or social sciences. Its power lies in what people make of it. Our hope is that researchers and others will play with it, stretching it and exploring its full potential. Rather than foreclosing the evolution of language, gender modality welcomes it.
“Its power lies in what people make of it.” Well, I don’t make anything of it; it seems to me identical to “gender identity”. And I’m not going to “play with the term.” That suggestion itself shows the postmodernism inherent in this view.
The most important aspect of this article to me is this: Why on earth did one of the world’s best science journals publish it? The answer is undoubtedly this: Nature is virtue signaling, publishing an article on semantics to cater to gender activists. It’s progressive, Jake! But it also demeans the journal. Just think: there could have been three pages of real science in its place, science from which you could learn something. Did you learn anything from this article beyond the fact that Nature is falling prey to ideology?