Biology is not ethics: A response to Jerry Coyne's anti-trans essay

Aaron Rabinowitz offers his take on a controversial blog post

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The following is a guest post by Aaron Rabinowitz, the ethics director of the Creator Accountability Network and host of two philosophy podcasts: Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space.

Aaron Rabinowitz

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The Freedom From Religion Foundation recently faced criticism for posting and then removing an editorial by Jerry Coyne entitled “Biology is Not Bigotry,” which he wrote in response to an FFRF article by Kat Grant entitled “What is a Woman?” In his piece, Coyne used specious reasoning and flawed research to argue that transgender individuals are more likely to be sexual predators than cisgender individuals and that they should therefore be barred from some jobs and female-only spaces.

As an ethicist I’m not here to argue biology. I don’t know what the right approach is to balancing phenotypic and genotypic accounts of sex. Luckily, despite Coyne’s framing of the controversy, Coyne is also not here to argue biology. He’s here to argue ethics, and his ethics regarding trans issues consist of bigoted claims leading to discriminatory conclusions.

By making ethics claims like “transgender women… should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters,” while pretending to only be arguing about biological definitions, Coyne effectively conflates biology with ethics. By conflating biology and ethics, Coyne seeks to transfer perceptions of his expertise from one to the other, so that his claims in both domains are treated with deference, rather than challenged as ill-formed and harmful. Biology is not bigotry, but conflating biology with ethics is one of the most common ways to end up doing a bigotry. Historically, that’s how you slide from genetics to genocide.

If Coyne and his compatriots get to point to his expertise in biology as reason to take his empirical claims seriously, then it’s equally fair to cite my expertise in ethics as reason to take my evaluative claims seriously. That said, I’m also happy to explain how Coyne’s piece advocated for bigotry and discrimination towards trans individuals and shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate position worthy of inclusion in public discourse.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines discrimination as treating someone “differently, or less favorably,” based on their membership in a protected class. Ethically speaking, this is a functional definition of discrimination, and from it we can infer a definition of bigotry as beliefs and behaviors that suggest certain groups are inferior in a way that justifies discrimination.

Given those definitions, arguing that transgender individuals are more likely to be morally deficient—and so should be treated as second-class citizens—is a clear example of one of the most common forms of bigotry. The history of marginalization is filled with dominant groups using claims of moral deficiency as a pretext for both legalized discrimination and vigilante violence.

Coyne’s misuse of data is so egregious one could easily get sidetracked with extensive debunking of just his empirical claims. To take the most harmful example, Coyne supports his bigoted claim that transgender individuals are far more likely to be sexual predators by citing what he calls “a cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry and the U.K. Census,” which makes the data sound thorough and reliable. However, if you click the link he provides, it goes to an anti-trans activist group called Fair Play for Women, who in turn cite what they call a “freedom of information” request, but link to a BBC article that highlights several flaws with the data and concludes that “these figures are not yet a reliable reflection of the true numbers.” Crucially, the BBC notes that the study has a small sample size—only 125 transgender prisoners—and that it likely excludes a significant number of transgender prisoners for various reasons. It also does not clarify what behaviors classify a prisoner as a “sex offender.” You can find more thorough debunking of disinformation around the study here.

Coyne clearly knows this, since he briefly acknowledges that the numbers he’s citing are “imperfect” for some of the reasons mentioned, but that does not stop him from claiming “they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men” (emphasis his). He is claiming there is a significant correlation between simply being a trans woman and being a moral deviant who’s a danger to cis women. That is an extreme claim even amongst anti-trans activists, who more often argue that trans women are as dangerous as cis men because they just are cis men. The claim that trans women are more dangerous than cis men is reminiscent of earlier claims that gay men are more predatory than straight men. It is generally understood in progressive communities that policing and incarceration statistics do not justify the conclusion that people of color are morally deficient and criminal by nature because of the systemic injustices that shape those policing statistics. In all of these cases, there are far better explanations for those statistics than group dispositions towards immorality.

However, focusing too much on debunking Coyne’s empirical claims ignores how irrelevant their accuracy is to his ethical inferences. Even if the data was high quality, arguing from that data to the claim that trans individuals should be barred from various professions, social activities, and female-only spaces is not only straightforwardly discriminatory, it’s terrible ethics. To see why, consider how it is widely believed that atheists are less trustworthy, resulting in widespread discrimination against atheists across a variety of social spaces. Imagine if we actually had reliable data that atheists are less trustworthy, would we really just accept that data as sufficient to justify discriminating against atheists the way Coyne is suggesting we should towards trans people? Absolutely not! It’s just terrible ethics.

Atheists should know this better than most. We love to trot out Hume’s “is/ought problem” when we catch other groups making ethical inferences without expressing and defending the underlying principles. Yet, when a scientist like Coyne makes wild jumps from empirical to evaluative claims without a shred of argument, a distressing number of atheists act deferentially towards those conclusions.

While it is good that FFRF removed Coyne’s article, their statement regarding the controversy was unfortunately deficient on several fronts. Most notably, it lacked any explanation of the ethical flaws in Coyne’s piece that should have prevented it being published and necessitated taking it down. That approach only compounds the harms of publishing the piece in the first place, because now Coyne can claim FFRF caved to “critical social justice” zealots who want to suppress reasonable discussion of biological facts. By failing to make clear why Coyne’s piece was unethical, FFRF leadership is contributing to the perpetuation of “cancel culture” narratives that harm trans activism.

Ultimately, atheists need to work on noticing when someone conflates any form of science and ethics. It’s important to note that, even if Coyne’s biological definitions and data were high quality, a variety of confounding variables would still block the empirical inference that trans individuals are more likely to be sex predators. However, it is equally important to note that, even if all those variables were controlled for, Coyne would still need to make an ethical argument that the differences between trans and cis individuals are sufficient to justify denying trans individuals equal access in our society, with all the ethical costs that entails.

The same applies for any other policy conclusions, including the inference from biological sex differences impacting sports capacity to the conclusion that trans women should be prevented from competing in women’s sports. Coyne and his compatriots are pushing ethical and political conclusions; they’re not just doing biology. That is why it is our obligation as moral reasoners to point out when those conclusions are, in fact, bigotry.

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