(OPINION) A survey highlighted by The Telegraph has found that only 58 percent of scientists at British universities believe that sex is binary. The poll also found that most of the 200 scientists surveyed believe that gender is fluid.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the survey agreed with the statement that “sex is not binary,” while 13 percent of respondents did not share a view on the question or preferred not to give an opinion. That means that 42 percent of the scientists would not classify sex as binary.
The poll, conducted by Censuswide, a market research consultancy, also found that 64 percent of scientists said gender is fluid, with only 22 percent saying the believe gender is binary, and a further 14 percent not providing an answer.
Commenting on the findings, Dr. Wolfgang Goymann, a professor of behavioral biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, said “To me this just means that at least 29% of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22% of them do not know what gender means.”
Goymann has noted that some scientists are now positing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.
“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he urged.
“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex,” Goymann continued.
He added, “On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Telegraph “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary.
The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.”
“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion,” Joyce further noted.
