Oh, Bill Nye the Science guy, what happened to you? In this episode, Trent takes aim at Bill Nye’s recent videos made in defense of legal abortion and transgender ideology.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
What do you do when your childhood heroes go off the rails? Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today on the show, I want to share with you a one of my rebuttals. By the way, your support at trenthornpodcast.com is what has allowed us to break out just from doing podcasts, but also to doing rebuttal videos. These have been very popular on YouTube. Each of them gets over 10,000 views. We have close to 10,000 subscribers now on YouTube. Consider going there to subscribe. I’d love to do a new rebuttal video each month, and they’re long. They’re beasts. I usually take longer anti-Catholic videos or videos that articulate points that are contradictory to what Catholics believe, to what the church teaches, and then offer a reply. My reply videos are usually about two to three times as long as the original video. I’ve done this for Protestant pastors, atheistic critics, and I decided to … I saw some stuff from Bill Nye, because I wanted to do something on the issue of abortion, but I wanted to get a fairly popular video. When I pick my rebuttal videos, I pick things if they have decent arguments. The number one would be popularity. If it’s a very popular video, even if the arguments aren’t decent, I feel like it’s important to rebut it because, look, it’s reaching a lot of people. A fair number of those people, especially if the video is well liked, may buy into those arguments, so it’s important to be able to rebut them. If it’s popular and has decent arguments, well, that’s a bonus. If you want to help us make more rebuttal videos like this, be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com and become a premium subscriber. I’m working on one now actually, a little a heads up for everybody, a little sneak peek here on the podcast. I’m going to do my first rebuttal video soon on Eastern Orthodoxy. A lot of people have been requesting this, and I found something I think is very a good video to reply to and rebut online in that regard. Working diligently on that now. Should have it out soon. Also, juggling the baby is on the way shortly, so trying to keep everything together, but pray for all of that. Without further ado though, here is my rebuttal to Bill Nye. I said at the beginning of the episode, what do you do when your childhood heroes go off the rails? That was Bill Nye. I loved listening to Bill Nye The Science Guy, Bill Nye The Science Guy. As a kid, I mean I loved listening to that stuff. Then the Great Awokening happened and he got all woke, and social justice, and talking about stuff that’s not science. We should really call this Neil deGrasse Tyson syndrome. The idea that just because you’re a scientist … By the way, Bill Nye, he’s not a scientist. He has a degree in mechanical engineering. He is a science educator, which is a good thing when you actually educate people on science, like he used to do. I think I talk about this more in the rebuttal video, but this happens a lot to people who are scientifically minded we could say. They think because they are smart that they can opine on subjects that they are not experts in, which can lead to errors, and fallacies, and falsehoods, which show up a lot in this video. Here’s my reply to Bill Nye first on the issue of abortion and then on the issue of human sexuality. Here you go.
Bill Nye:
Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans. Eggs get fertil-
Trent Horn:
Okay. Right off the bat, right off the bat, it’s only been … It’s been less than 10 seconds. We already have a scientific error, if Bill Nye is using the word human in a scientific sense. Here’s the problem here. When people say they have a scientific argument for legal abortion, well, that’s silly. You can’t have a scientific argument for or against abortion, because science only tells us what things are or how they work. It doesn’t tell us how we ought to live our lives or what we ought to do. Science cannot give us ethical principles. I’m sure I’ll have to make another rebuttal video to Sam Harris on that point. Maybe I’ll do that sometime in the future. But right off the bat, if Bill Nye, he’s either being irrelevant or completely wrong. If he’s using the word human in the philosophical sense, okay, you’ll have to give an argument for that. But if he’s talking about human in the scientific sense, like member of the species homo sapiens, then saying that an embryo becomes human, that’s just flat out wrong. Embryos, human embryos conceived from human sperm and human egg are human. The best source that I like to point people to on this are professional pro-choice advocates, like the leading intellectual pro-choice advocates instantly recognize this. Like, I’ll give you an example of two. First would be David Boonin. He’s a dean actually now, but prior to that he was a professor of philosophy at CU Boulder. He wrote probably one of the most sophisticated defenses of abortion, a book called, as you guessed it, A Defense of Abortion. Here’s what he says at the very beginning of the book. It’s like page 20. He says, “The most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand and every human fetus on the other is this.” What’s the relationship between us and every human fetus,? “All are living members of the same species, homo sapiens. A human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development.” Embryos don’t become human. They are human beings that continue to develop. Now, you can argue about their personhood. Maybe I’ll get into that in a future video. But right now, they’re clearly human beings. Peter Singer is another example of this. I love the stache that Singer used to rock way back in the day. This is the second edition to Practical Ethics. It doesn’t really differ that much from the third and more recent additions. But I’ve met Peter Singer. Gosh, I met him like 13 years ago when he was giving a lecture at Arizona State University. He’s dropped the mustache obviously decades ago, but I love it. Peter Singer’s a smart guy. I respect the fact that he’s smart and willing to think outside the box, even though he’s super wrong on a lot of things, but he’s right about one thing. He says, “Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically by an examination of the nature of the chromosome in the cells of living organisms. In this sense, there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.” You’ll notice also I’ve seen some atheists rip pro-lifers when they quote this from Singer. The pro-lifers put a period here instead of an ellipses. Singer goes on to say that this is also true of anencephalic infants, so an infant who is born without an upper brain is a biological human being, and that’s absolutely right. Then we may disagree about personhood. I think every biological human being is a person, but that is a separate matter. The point is Singer would agree that any individual member of our species is a biological human being. The same is true for human organisms before birth or shortly after conception that Bill Nye is talking about.
Bill Nye:
Fertilize, and by that I mean sperm get accepted by ova a lot, but that’s not all you need. You have to attach to the uterine wall, the inside of a womb, a woman-
Trent Horn:
Well, that’s like saying babies get taken home from the hospital all the time, but that’s not all that you need. The baby has to eat food and not die in their sleep in their crib. Sometimes that happens. Kids die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Does that mean that babies aren’t human, just because there’s fatal hazards that await them? As we go further, you’ll see that Bill Nye’s main argument on this point is really bad. I call it the argument for mortality, and I hear it all the time. We’ll let him unspool a bit.
Bill Nye:
Woman’s womb. But if you’re going to hold that as a standard, that is to say if you’re going to say when an egg is fertilized, it therefore has the same rights as an individual, then who are you going to sue? Whom are you going to sue? Whom are you going to imprison? Every woman who’s had a fertilized egg pass through her? Every guy whose sperm has fertilized an egg and then it didn’t become a human? Have all these people failed you? It’s just a reflection of a deep scientific a lack of understanding.
Trent Horn:
Okay, let’s look at Bill Nye’s argument. This is the basic argument. If a group of human beings has a high mortality rate, this means they aren’t human. I mean, that’s basically the argument he’s making. I’ve heard different statistics put forward. I can’t recall bill giving a specific percentage. I’ve heard one-third to one-half of embryos do not implant in the womb and are miscarried. Now, other embryologists will say that we don’t know how many of these embryos are human being. Some of them might be uncontrolled cellular growths that are not actually human organisms. That’s actually disputed among embryologist, how many of them, the ones that die are actually organisms rather than just uncontrolled cellular growth. But even if it … Let’s say, let’s grant Bill Nye’s point. Let’s say it was like 50%, like half of all fully developed human embryos. I don’t even think it’s that high, but let’s say half of them fail to implant. Half of all embryos at this stage of life die prematurely. The argument is that a group of human beings are not persons if they have a high mortality rate. This is clearly a bad argument. Your mortality rate does not determine your value or your personhood. By that logic, 100% of human beings will die before they reach the age of 125 or 130. Does that mean all of us are not persons because we all have 100% mortality rate at a certain age? Of course not. Here’s the counter example I would give to Bill Nye. When you look through human history, child mortality used to be obscenely high, obscenely high. This was true up through the Middle Ages, even up until the 19th century, and it’s still true today in some rural parts of the world. You go to rural parts of Afghanistan and other parts of the developing world. But throughout most of human history, child mortality was at 50%. What that means is half, 50%, half of all children died before they reached their fifth birthday. Usually it was disease. You died of diarrhea, dehydration, an infection you couldn’t fight off. That’d be probably when you were an infant. A lot of times, I mean, I have toddlers. This is sad to think about, but kids are inquisitive. Probably accidents, falling into rivers, falling into fires, choking on things. Children, half of all children before the age of five … Here’s a graph to show it from Our World in Data. It might be kind of hard to see, but these are the two different lines. This is the infant mortality rate, dying in the first year of life, and these are years down here. We go all the way back to like the ancient world up until this is 2017 and 1900 right over here. This is the 20th century at the end of the graph. You’ll see that infant mortality was about 25%, child mortality about 50% until we get to about the 1900s. But that didn’t prove that even though children had high mortality rates for most of human history, that didn’t prove kids under the age of five were not persons. It just proved that they had hazardous lives, and we should do our best to remove the hazards, not justify directly killing them. Let’s continue with the argument.
Bill Nye:
You literally or apparently literally don’t know what you’re talking about. When it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women. Really you cannot help but notice … I mean, I’m not the first guy to observe this. You have a lot of men of European descent passing these extraordinary laws based on ignorance.
Trent Horn:
All right, so this is an ad hominem fallacy, unless it’s just an irrelevant observation. Either Bill Nye is making a kind of a racist, irrelevant observation or he’s making a logical fallacy. If he’s saying that pro-lifers are wrong because they’re white men, well clearly that’s a fallacy. A person’s argument, its truth doesn’t depend on who’s making the argument. It depends on the evidence for and against it. We should judge a person’s argument based on the merits of the reasoning behind it, not on their skin color or gender, whatever that may be. Or if it’s just an observation he’s making, it’s just kind of racist. Like why does that matter? Why do you have to bring that up? Once again, we should judge people based on the positions they put forward, not by things about them they can’t change, like their race for example. Also, he’s wrong when he says, well, we should just let women decide. Well, if that’s the case, when you look at polls on who identifies as pro-choice, who identifies as pro-life, actually women are more likely to identify as pro-life than men. If you see here in this Gallup poll, more men identify as pro-choice than pro-life, whereas women are more likely to identify as pro-life than pro-choice. Now, of course, that doesn’t prove who’s right just because you do a poll, but it kind of upends this narrative that pro-lifers are just a bunch of white men trying to boss everyone around when women are more likely to be pro-life than men. In fact, you go back to the very first feminists. This is Alice Paul, who helped to spearhead the movement to secure the right to vote for women. You think also of Susan B. Anthony and others. They believed abortion was wrong. They said abortion was akin to child murder. It was a crime against children and a crime against women. The very first feminists were actually pro-life themselves as well. Yeah, so I think that’s something you’ve got to take into account, and Bill Nye has a lot of things he needs to take into account. He hasn’t totally thought through on these issues.
Bill Nye:
Sorry, you guys. I know it was written or your interpretation of a book written five centuries, 5,000 years ago, 50 centuries ago.
Trent Horn:
Well, the New Testament was written 2,000 years ago, and the Old Testament somewhere between 2,500 to 3,500 years ago, based on the documents, but who’s counting? By the way, just because something was written a long time ago doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Many of the modern principles we have today about democracy, basic logical thinking from Aristotle, those were written thousands of years ago in ancient Greece and they’re just as true today as they were thousands of years ago when they were written. An argument’s truth does not depend on who makes it or how long ago they made it. It depends on the evidence for and against it.
Bill Nye:
Makes you think that when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse, they always have a baby, that’s wrong. To pass laws based on that belief is inconsistent with nature.
Trent Horn:
I’m really baffled by this one. Like I have never met anyone in my life, I’ve never met anyone in my entire life who thinks that every time men and women engage in sexual intercourse, they become pregnant and have a child. I don’t … or the idea that … I’ve never met a pro-lifer who thinks every time a man and woman engaged in sexual intercourse an egg is fertilized. I mean, maybe there’s someone out there who’s grossly ignorant to biology who thinks that, but from practical experience, pro-lifers know, people know that sometimes when you engage in sexual intercourse, no conception happens. You may not be ovulating at the time. They may be a whole host of reason. I don’t get where he’s getting this observation that there are these people out here that ignorant, because that’s not the case. That’s what we call a caricature or a straw man of someone’s position rather than an accurate representation of it. I try very hard. I believe in accurately representing the best pro-choice arguments that are out there. I’ll cite Peter Singer. I’ll cite David Boonin. I’ll cite these different sources. I just wish pro-choice advocates would do the same thing and take on the best pro-life arguments that are out there.
Bill Nye:
I mean, it’s hard not to get frustrated with this, everybody, and I know nobody likes abortion. Okay?
Trent Horn:
Why? Why don’t people like abortion? That’s the question. That reveals, Bill, you know there’s something wrong about abortion. What is it? Well, it’s killing of some kind. You take something that is a living … Bill Nye The Science Guy would have to admit there’s something living and growing that dies. All right, we don’t like abortion because it’s a kind of killing. Then we have to figure out what is being killed, and the only thing that logically emerges from that discussion would be a developing member of the human species or a human being. Anytime a pro-choice advocate says they don’t like abortion, that reveals a fatal weakness in their case, specifically if their case is that the unborn are not human beings or that they’re not persons. Some people who make bodily rights arguments against abortion might be able to get away with this line of reasoning, but if you say the unborn is not a person that has the same value as your tonsils, then you shouldn’t say nobody likes abortion just like nobody likes tonsillectomies. Tonsillectomies aren’t convenient, but nobody is saddened by them. But if abortion is not like appendectomies or tonsillectomies, then what is it? Well, it’s the killing of a human being, which is something that can never be tolerated, the killing of an innocent human being.
Bill Nye:
But you can’t tell somebody what to do. I mean, she has rights over this, especially if she doesn’t like the guy that got her pregnant.
Trent Horn:
That’s the one that I haven’t heard before. Like abortion’s okay if the guy is a real scumbag. Otherwise, if he’s a decent guy, there’s more of a case that can be made there. But I don’t understand Bill’s point that, well, you can’t tell people what to do. We tell people what to do all the time. Bill Nye tells people what to do all the time. I think about climate change. Here’s a video that he did. I forget what it was for. It was like Jimmy Kimmel or something, and this is Bill Nye’s take on climate change.
Bill Nye:
Here. I’ve got an experiment for you. Safety glasses on. By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees. What I’m saying is the planet’s on … fire. There are a lot of things we could do to put it out. Are any of them free? No, of course not. Nothing’s free, you idiots. Grow the … up. You’re not children anymore. I didn’t mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12, but you’re adults now, and this is an actual crisis. Got it?
Trent Horn:
Notice the disconnect here, that if Bill Nye sees a problem, that human beings are damaging the environment, he is outraged and says, “Wake up. You have to stop doing this. You’re hurting innocent creatures and innocent people.” Well, if you think the unborn are innocent creatures, innocent people, human beings, then you should have the same kind of emotionally indignant response. If you don’t see the unborn are human beings, of course you wouldn’t understand that, but at least you should understand, well, if those people, if they really were human beings … I wish sometimes pro-choice advocates would at least put themselves sometimes in this shoe. “Well, I disagree with pro-lifers.” I’ve met a few pro-choice people who do this, but not a lot. “I understand pro-lifers being angry and upset about abortion, because if these are human beings, they’re acting perfectly rationally in opposing abortion in this way.” I wish there were more pro-choicers who would recognize pro-life advocates are rational in their response if their beliefs about the unborn are true. Whereas a lot of pro-choice advocates will say, “I can’t believe pro-lifers would show pictures of dead babies and pro-lifers would talk about dead babies all the time.” Well, if they are dead babies, what would you do in this situation? What would you do in that situation?
Bill Nye:
She doesn’t want anything to do with your genes. Get over it. Especially if she were raped and all this.
Trent Horn:
It’s interesting. I hear pro-choices do this argument as well. What about the case of rape? I’ll go into that in another video, but I just want to bring up one observation. If the unborn are not human beings, then that doesn’t matter. You don’t need justifications. You don’t need to say, “What if a woman has been raped? What if she’s in poverty?” You don’t need to bring up hard cases or difficult cases to justify abortion if the unborn are not human beings. You could just say, “Well, they’re not human beings, so it’s not a big deal. Have an abortion for any reason you want.” Also, it’s funny when pro-choice advocates will appeal to a pregnancy, tragic, unjust pregnancies that come from rape, I will say, and other difficult situations. It almost like implicitly says, “Well, what about a woman who wants an abortion because she doesn’t want to have to drop out of college, or she doesn’t want to give up a lucrative career?” You as a pro-choice advocate would say they have the right to do that, so you’re almost marginalizing some people within your own community instead of being universal in this scope. You’re just picking these hard cases for almost like PR reasons. If the unborn are human beings, no reason justifies abortion. If they’re not human beings, you don’t need a justification any more than you would need one to justify a tonsillectomy.
Bill Nye:
It’s very frustrating on the outside, on the other side. We have so many more important things to be dealing with. We have so many more problems. To squander resources on this argument based on bad science, on just lack of understanding, it’s very frustrating. You wouldn’t know how big a human egg was if it weren’t for microscopes, if it weren’t for scientists who were medical researchers looking diligently. You wouldn’t know the process. You wouldn’t have that shot, the famous shot or shots where the sperm are bumping up against the egg. You wouldn’t have that without science.
Trent Horn:
What this is saying, and I hear this all the time, that the pro-life position is unscientific, when it’s backwards. It is the pro-choice position that denies the humanity of the unborn. That is the unscientific position. Lots of things I could cite. Lots of embryologists textbooks I could cite in defense to that point. I want to show you an article written by Steve Jacobs. He did a survey of biologists on this question. It’s fascinating. It’s available on quillette.com. I think it was published October 16th, 2019. The title of the piece is called I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins: The Answer Wasn’t Popular. This guy just asked thousands of biologists, the people we should go to for the question of when does life begin, and this was the … He asked them this question. “From a biological perspective, a zygote that has a human genome is a human being because it is a human organism developing in the earliest stage of the human life cycle.” He asked, how many biologists, do you agree with this perspective that a zygote … This is even before implantation, when Bill Nye is talking about, a one-celled organism that is the product of sperm/egg combination, that that is a human organism. It is a human organism in the earliest stage of the human life cycle. It’s a human being. He asked biologists this question and similar ones, and these are the responses that he got. Out of 5,337 biologists, 96% affirm that a human being’s, a human’s life begins at fertilization. 96%, and only 4% rejected that view. Who are these people? When you look at who they are demographic wise, 89% say they’re liberal. 85% of them are pro-choice. 63% are nonreligious, and almost all of them, more than 90%, identify as Democrats. These are not stooges for the Republican Party or something like that. These are what the biologists say. They recognize this is a human being, but they’ve got other non-scientific reasons to justify their defense of abortion. Okay, so that was Bill Nye talking about abortion. I want to shift to his Netflix show where he talks about sex and sexuality, which usually scientists just have to be careful. Bill Nye is not a scientist. He doesn’t have a PhD in anything, much less a hard science. He has a degree in mechanical engineering, so he’s a science educator. But even Neil deGrasse Tyson, other scientists, sometimes they’ll start to pontificate and opine about subjects that are far outside of their wheelhouse, and so they have to be careful when doing that because they’re not doing science anymore. When they do that, they’re at the same level as other lay people and are prone to make mistakes that lay people are prone to making. Let’s see what he says about sex and sexuality, the science to it.
Bill Nye:
One thing’s clear about sexuality. There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. Female or male, gay or straight, pink or blue, we were taught to see these as binary. Now we’re realizing it’s more like a kaleidoscope, and this stuff isn’t just for adults. Parents know this already. Kids explore gender, expression, attraction before they’ve ever heard of a spectrum. Take sex. We used to think it was pretty straight forward, X and a Y chromosome for males, two Xs for females. But we see more combinations than that in real life. Even for people with just two sex chromosomes-
Trent Horn:
Okay, there are more combinations than XX and XY. You have Turner Syndrome. You have Kleinfelter Syndrome where you have like a single X or XXY. But in all of those cases of sex chromosomal abnormalities, you can tell whether this is a biological male who might have more feminine characteristics or a biological female that might have more masculine characteristics. You can still determine in these cases whether it’s a single X, XXY, XXYY, these different sex chromosomal abnormalities, you can still determine what sex a person belongs to. It’s not as complicated as Bill Nye makes it out to be. It’s still very clear XX are females, XY are males. We can determine this, even though people might have developmental or genetic abnormalities. The fact of the matter is people who claim to be the opposite sex usually do not have these kinds of chromosomal abnormalities. It’s usually quite clear.
Bill Nye:
Hormones can vary wildly. So can anatomy. What makes someone male or female? This is so clear cut. How about attraction?
Trent Horn:
Well, that’s not what you used to say. I remember the old school Bill Nye show. Well, this is what used to be on the old Bill Nye.
Bill Nye:
Consider the following.
Speaker 4:
I’m a girl. Could’ve just as easily been a boy though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always one in two. See, inside each of ourselves are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl.
Trent Horn:
Life used to be so much simpler in the 90s, wasn’t it? Good old days of playing Pogs and not worrying about TSA at the airport. Oh, those were the days. Let’s go on with Bill Nye.
Bill Nye:
Some people argue the natural thing is to only be attracted to the opposite sex, but in practice, it ain’t so simple, kids. Some people are gay, some are bi, some are asexual, and some will take whatever they can get. You know what I mean?
Trent Horn:
I am very uncomfortable right now, so, so very uncomfortable. Also, I’ve noticed in the past, I think Bill Nye was also still this weird. He was just more correct back then. Here’s another one from the old school Bill Nye. Let’s see if I can get that focused right up here. All right.
Bill Nye:
Sex takes a lot of energy. You have to find a mate. Then you have to set the mood, and then you have to … Well, it takes a lot of energy. See, why do we have sex? Why don’t we just divide ourselves in half like our good friends the amoeba? Well, asexual reproduction is probably not as much fun for one thing. The other thing is when you have sex, you come up with new combinations of genes that help us stay ahead of germs and parasite. That’s why we have sex. Excuse me.
Trent Horn:
Ugh. This was, you know, for kids. This was a kids’ show. But I mean, it’s important to talk about sexual development because sex is something that happens across species. Here, when Bill Nye’s talking about sex, he’s not even using the proper definition of it, which involves the exchange of gametes ordered towards reproduction and procreation. That’s what sex is. I think Bill Nye now on his Netflix show, and just what many people today, that sex is just whatever it makes you orgasm. Orgasm is the encouragement. It’s the reward mechanism to get people to exchange gametes and genetic material. It’s not the end all-be all of what sex is for. It’s an important part of it. They lose sight of sex, and to say it’s natural. Like, well, it’s natural for men to be attracted to women, women to be attracted to men. Well, yeah, if sex is for its natural purpose, it’s for the exchange of genetic material old-school Bill Nye would say, then those attractions are natural. Obviously, some people have unnatural sexual attractions. I mean, there’s some people, given the way the world is today, who aren’t willing to say that because they don’t want to have their own attractions judged, but some are unnatural. You go online, look at a list of paraphilias on Wikipedia. These are attractions to all kinds of things, all different kinds of people. I mean, pedophilia is a common example of that, of a paraphilia, sexual attraction to children. You ought not be attracted to children. That’s disordered, because children are not a proper object for sexual relations. But even beyond that, like I would say to Bill Nye, is it unnatural for someone to be attracted to a car? Isn’t it unnatural for someone to want to have sex with a car, or a tree, or an animal? Why? Well, if it’s unnatural, we have to find the naturally ordered means for what sex is for in order to say what is and isn’t natural. If it’s just, well, whatever you feel is natural, that just doesn’t work when we have very clear cut cases of sexual desires that are unnatural. They’re unnatural, like let’s say the least inflammatory examples I’ll pick are a tree or a car. Why is that unnatural? Well, because sex is for with human beings. But why is it only between human beings? If it’s just for orgasm, there’s lots of things that could give you an orgasm out there, I suppose. But human beings make sense of it’s naturally ordered towards a procreate event.
Bill Nye:
It’s another sexy sliding scale. When you throw in gender, it gets even more colorful. By three or four, most kids identify with a gender, and it doesn’t always match the sex they were assigned at birth, and a person’s gender identity may change over their lifetime, and culture is getting us new ways to express all of this.
Trent Horn:
Alrighty. Let me wrap this up here. When we talk about gender, look, people will say, “Oh, it’s so complicated. There’s like 58 genders out there.” Yeah, it’s complicated how people choose to live their lives. You know, what they identify as being masculine or feminine. I mean, pink used to be a masculine color. Now it’s a feminine color. Those kinds of things will change. But at the end of the day, there are men, women, and then there’s a small, tiny, tiny minority of cases … I’m not talking about intersex. Even with intersex, we can often determine if someone’s a biological male or female with developmental abnormalities. A tiny, tiny percentage of cases where we’re not sure male or female based on a genetic genotype, genotypical or phenotypical abnormality in someone’s development. But just because there are tiny cases where we’re not sure doesn’t invalidate the other broad cases where we are sure. There are a tiny number of cases where you can’t tell if somebody is alive or dead, like they’re may be brain dead, maybe not, but that doesn’t mean we have no idea who’s alive and who’s dead. Much the same way, there might be a tiny number of cases where we can’t tell if someone’s a man or woman, but that doesn’t invalidate the vast number of cases where we can tell. The fact of matter is you look at things like these 58 gender options that are out there. I think these are all of them from the Facebook list. Who knows how many are out there? At the end of the day, all these gender options to show that there is a binary, there are men and women. You can prove there’s a binary by showing that sex is not like race. Like there’s no race binary. It’s not like there’s just white and black, because you have people who are Asian, South Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, African, Aboriginal, First-World, Native American. Race is something that exists on a spectrum, but sex is not like race, right? Because if it were, you would identify these things, but you can’t define race by he’s either white, black, a mixture of white and black, or neither white and black. I mean, you don’t really define race that way. But look at all these 58 genders. You can define them that way. All of these examples, you can define them as biological male, biological female. It’s either all the definitions here are male, female, both, or neither. It’s not like you have one that’s just a random third party that’s out there that is neither male nor female. There’s no Green Party or Constitution Party among the genders that stands on its own. All of these 58 genders are derivative of male/female. It’s either male, female, both, or neither, which actually proves there is this gender or sexual binary.
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