Some philosophy of science reflections on Sabine Hossenfelder's video on trans kids

The science is not a neutral storehouse of facts

Sabine Hossenfelder's recent video entitled “Is being trans a social fad among teenagers?”

What does “the science” tell us?

I often enjoy Sabine Hossenfelder's videos. I read her two popular science books, Lost in Math and Existential Physics, with great interest. But I have a lot of issues with her recent video on the rise of transgender identity among children and teenagers. I am a philosopher of science and have written extensively on how science relates to other aspects of our life (see e.g., The challenge of evolution to religion, papers on science communication, and recent academic and popularizing work on awe and wonder in science.)

Doing this work, I've noticed a presupposition among scientists, especially natural scientists who make popularizing work (you see it also in e.g., Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson). They think science is a neutral storehouse of facts that can tell us the truth or falsity of any societal hot button issue. You can just ask “the science” like you ask an eight ball, “Should I personally/we as a society do this/allow for this” (Y/N)?

However, as Mary Midgley keenly observed:

Science, after all, is not just an inert store of neutral facts. It always organizes them according to patterns which are drawn from ordinary thinking in the first place… and which often rebound in a changed form to affect that thinking profoundly in their turn — Midgley, Individualism and the concept of Gaia, 2000)

It would be great if you can just pull from the storehouse of facts the truth of the matter and thus how we should live. But this would ignore the broader social context in which science is done. That broader social context determines what questions we are asking and how we go about asking them. We are never “just asking questions,” we are doing this against a backdrop of our hopes, dreams, expectations and societal prejudices.

Sabine Hossenfelder begins her video rather unpromisingly by framing gender identity in terms of American culture wars. This is peculiar, because, as a German living in Germany, she will have noticed there is increased attention for trans people and their self-determination, reflected in among others, gender self-ID laws across Europe.

Then, she lays out two positions she frames as extreme (one that says that trans people are threatened minorities who should have access to healthcare and one that says it's social contagion and harmful) and concludes, “and there are normal people, like you and I who think both sides are crazy.”

So, Sabine doesn't seem to consider the possibility that quite a few of her viewers are in fact trans (as is the case if you look at the comments section). Also, I imagine quite some viewers will be opposed to gender-affirming care. She thus seems to make assumptions about her viewers that are unsubstantiated.

Wouldn't it be nice if the middle (sane? normal? etc.) position were the calm rational one? The one that takes the science seriously? This is the idea that somehow science will fall into the side of reason and will give us definite answers for what we're looking for. But is that the case? Some anti-trans people say that sex is binary and it is too much of a stretch to make gender distinct from sex. However, others, such as Agustin Fuentes argue that the science shows sex is not binary, notably

… while animal gametes can be described as binary (of two distinct kinds), the physiological systems, behaviors and individuals that produce them are not.

Regardless of the biology of sex, there is still the question of gender, and whether it is reducible to sex. Look all you will in the science, it will not give you the answer. As anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and many others have shown: our social categories don't cut nature at the joints. They are categories we make that help us to organize our social lives.

In fact, you even see this idea in the classical Chinese (pre-Qin, around 4th c BCE) thinker Xunzi who argued

The birds and beasts have fathers and sons but not the intimate relationship of father and son. They have the male sex and the female sex but no differentiation between male and female. And so for human ways, none is without distinctions (Xunzi, chapter 5)

For Xunzi, there are female and male birds but there are not “men” and "women” among birds, because these are human, social categories. Similarly, they have biological relations but the social relations between human children and their parents, of filial piety, for instance, they lack.

The idea of science as the arbiter of reason has an illustrious history in Enlightenment thinking, notably Auguste Comte and many others. But it's important to note how Enlightenment thinkers were also very clear about the limits of reason, and the limits of science. You see it in Kant, Cavendish, many others. So, science cannot be what we want it to be. It's not a crystal ball or lodestar that gives us a clear-cut answer, in this case, should we allow our trans kids and teens to transition (medically, socially?)

Science isn't like that. It's a tool, an instrument and ultimately we will have to make our own decisions about what we do with it.

For example, early philosophers of science e.g., Carl Hempel and more recently Heather Douglas argue that science poses inductive risk. Science, unlike dogmatic systems, is always provisional. It is always open to correction and change. It never holds the final answers. So, what if you reach wrong conclusions? What are the societal effects? Science alone cannot help you decide on your values or which risks to take. We need to make these decisions on our own.

Gender as an evolving concept

Gender is an evolving concept, as recent reference to King Louis XIV's appearance remind us. He was the apex of masculine power in 17th century France, but he also wore high heels, a wig, lace, perfume, bows, and he loved dancing and music. To understand this evolving concept of masculinity and also understand it cross-culturally, you need at the very least history, anthropology, and other humanities.

Portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud

Woodaabe men (from Niger) will have extensive makeup and dance to impress women

A physicist can, of course, get great insights into the complex dynamics of gender and how it relates with biology, but she will need to put in the work.

One of the central ideas Sabine Hossenfelder centers is gender dysphoria, which is often the basis or a requirement for medical (and even social!) transitioning for children and teens. But there remains a question whether dysphoria is always the best way to frame gender identity. Speaking as a non-binary person, I haven't experienced anything like these devastating levels of dysphoria. Exploring your gender and identifying with a different one that was assigned at birth also has to do with free exploration of your identity and how you relate to the world, as this beautiful essay by Luke Roelofs on their non-binary identity indicates.

I am just speaking from my own experiences and I think there is a kind of privileged access to one's own thoughts you can't erase with a third-person appeal to "the science". This risk eliding a lot of individual differences, which are hard to handle by science.

A lot of kids identify as nonbinary than ever before, a phenomenon that causes a lot of anxiety among some people and eyebrow raising in people such as Sabine Hossenfelder. Hossenfelder says there are not many studies on trans kids, but that's in part because she looks very narrowly at gender dysphoria and how hormonal treatment impacts that particular medically diagnosed condition. If you look a bit broader than this at what gender is, more science becomes relevant. This is another issue with making “the science” the arbiter of societal issues. What we select to be the relevant science is never a theory-neutral choice.

The left-handed analogy

Sabine discusses the infamous left-hand analogy for being trans. I am left-handed and quite frankly the way these analogies are made stuns me. In particular, Hossenfelder seems to think that it's OK to let people be left-handed, because choosing a hand would be easily reversible, whereas e.g., surgery or hormonal treatment isn't. I was allowed to write with the left hand. But the decision to play musical instruments left-handedly was less obvious. I learned to play the guitar and lute left-handedly too, though I was recommended to learn right-handed because it's easier to acquire instruments.

Now that I've done that pathways in my brain have formed and I cannot go back. I have foreclosed buying second-hand lutes or playing on other instruments largely because there are almost no left-handed lutes. I can't now suddenly decide to play right-handedly! In fact my choice of hand orientation is less reversible than e.g., hormonal treatment (I took hormonal birth control for many years and it took a while to wear off, but did eventually). The fact of the matter is (and Hossenfelder should know this, as she seems to know more about neuroscience than gender)--you cannot make a neat distinction like that between irreversible (bad) and reversible (good).

I think here the hesitance to give minors access to hormonal treatment (note we have no problems giving hormones to cisgender women as birth control or for menopause) is the spontaneous feeling of discomfort. However, such feelings should not be guiding policy, nor should they lead you to read the science in a selective way. If you want to be dispassionate, be dispassionate.

Social acceptance

Speaking from personal experience, questioning gender orientation and embracing other modes (like being nonbinary) are ways about being creative about yourself and your mode of being and your bodily and mental possibilities. My personal take on the rise of children and teens identifying as transgender is increasing social acceptance (especially among their peers) of such explorations.

Now, I do think the science is informative, and I am a proponent of having science and evidence based policy, but this policy should also take into account sociological factors, evolving modes of self-expression that are not reducible to medicalized models about gender dysphoria. Though such studies are important, they're not the only relevant thing.

So, you cannot just slap "the science" (selectively picked medical studies from a much bigger pool of historical, sociological, anthropological work on gender that is relevant) and say that there is no evidence for two very idiosyncratic American positions on being trans. That's not good science and not good science communication.