How the 2022 zeitgeist makes talking about biological sex impossible
Cancel culture has fully arrived on German campuses, as talking about the sex of a kiwi has become a discriminatory act.
A commentary on “Geschlechter-Vortrag abgesagt: Humboldt-Uni in der Kritik” (published in Welt on July 4, 2022)
Academic freedom in Germany took another blow this month when biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht wanted to give a talk at Berlin’s Humboldt University called “Sex isn’t bad: Sex, gender and why there are two sexes in biology”1. Yes, you read that right. Two. Sexes. Two! In the woke zeitgeist of 2022, a lecture with such a title is just heading straight for a shitstorm.
And a shitstorm it received. A day before the talk was scheduled, Ms. Vollbrecht got an email by the university’s General Students’ Committee objecting to her talking about sexual dimorphism. The “Work Group of Critical Law Students” (Arbeitskreis Kritischer Jurist*innen) called for public protests, deeming Vollbrecht’s thesis about the duality of biological sex “inhuman”. Trans activists were furthermore outraged over a paper she had co-authored which criticized German public broadcasters for “indoctrinating children” as young as three years old with trans ideology. It was entitled “Ideology instead of Biology in public service broadcasting”.
According to Vollbrecht, she wanted to deescalate the situation, but in the end, Humboldt University got cold feet and decided to cancel the presentation, fearing that activists would cause violence. While trans activists naturally praised the university’s decision to censor a “transphobic scientist”, the President of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers, Bernhard Kempen, heavily criticized that a graduate student was denied the right to present her research.
Not ready to back down, Vollbrecht moved to YouTube where she livestreamed her “outrageous” presentation about the sex of kiwis, sea anemones and gametes. Around two weeks later, in an attempt to keep face, Humboldt University allowed Vollbrecht to finally give her talk. On the same evening – but on a different campus – a panel discussion was held in order to discuss the controversy around Vollbrecht’s lecture, with guests such as Secretary of Education Bettina Stark-Watzinger (Free Democratic Party), Heiner Schulze of the Gay Museum in Berlin and Jenny Wilken of the German Association for Transidentity and Intersexuality. Vollbrecht did not attend the panel. Humboldt’s acting President Peter Frensch defended the decision to cancel her talk, noting yet again that security concerns over the activists’ protests were the cause of cancellation and emphasizing that it actually never was a cancellation but a postponement. But it was Humboldt’s Vice President Christoph Schneider who sounded the death knell for academic freedom at his university: “We don’t want to have every debate”, he said on the issue in an interview with German newspaper ZEIT.
But if a university does not want to have controversial debates, then what is it there for? It becomes useless. If you just need enough activists that rally against any given topic that does not suit their worldview in order to shut down discussion and impose their opinion, however unscientific it may be, we might as well give up the enterprise of scientific progress altogether (the insane “math is racist” claim comes to mind). The Vollbrecht incident shows that cancel culture has finally pervaded German campuses, a dangerous trend that Prof. Dr. Christian von Coelln already cautioned against last year, but that has now come to full force. Of course, this has been happening in the Anglo-Saxon university sphere for quite a while now, from Psychology and Neuroscience Professor John Staddon at Duke University who was cancelled for suggesting there are two sexes, to Professor of Criminology Jo Phoenix who was outed for saying that male-bodied prisoners should not be in women’s prisons, to University of Sussex Professor Kathleen Stock who experienced such massive backlash and bullying for “questioning the idea that gender identity is more ‘socially significant’ than biological sex” that she resigned.
And those are just few examples of many professors and scientists in academia who were ousted for stating what, until about five seconds ago, was considered a biological reality. Debate is not welcome. Scientific discourse and academic freedom have been sacrificed at the altar of woke ideology and cancel culture. No wonder that academic rigor has become alarmingly feeble in the last two decades and that a both hilarious and frightening academic hoax called Sokal Squared by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian (the latter of which resigned from Portland State University following a smear campaign against him) was able to show that the most ludicrous pseudo-intellectual papers are quite easily published in renowned scientific journals as long as they follow a certain worldview. Ideology now trumps Science.
Consequences for Science might be devastating. In the case of Biology, if we cannot acknowledge fundamental facts like the existence of an individual’s chromosome pairs (which count for biological males, females and a very small percentage of intersex people), what do we base our science on? And if we cannot state the most basic fact that the human species has reproduced using male sperm and female ova (yes, binary) since the beginning of time, whether you like it or not, what happens to biological research as a whole? It is nullified, obsolete.
Finally, the accusation of sexual dimorphism being “transphobic” is a logical fallacy and nothing but an ad hominem argument, at least as far as I'm concerned. The reality of two sexual biological categories does not deny the reality of transgender people, it makes their reality possible. If there is no such category as sex in its duality, then what are we talking about when we talk about “transitioning” to male or female? What about cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery? From where do you cross then and where to? What about the idea of being “born in the wrong body”? How is that a reality if we deny the reality of two biological sexes?
The way Humboldt University has treated the controversy around Ms. Vollbrecht shows that academic freedom at German universities has become alarmingly endangered. Activists’ upset and rage can now cancel anybody in academia (presumably a place of intellectual excellence and freedom of speech), just on the simple grounds of being offended. Alexander von Humboldt, the great German explorer and scientists after whom the university is named, would probably turn over in his grave. But he already knew one of man’s biggest flaws: “Man does not judge things for what they really are, but rather for how he conceives them and how they fit into his mindscape.”2
About the author: Born 1987, with roots in Germany and the Philippines, living in Spain. Constantly curious and eager to learn new things. Freedom > safety. Your own opinion > groupthink. Coffee > tea. Recommended essay: “Somewhere over the Rainbow, something went terribly wrong” by London-based German artist Jess de Wahls about the topic of gender ideology. Give it a try.
Die deutsche Version des Artikels findet sich hier:
This is a loose translation of the German title “Geschlecht ist nicht (Ge)schlecht, Sex, Gender und warum es in der Biologie zwei Geschlechter gibt”; it does a pun on the German words Geschlecht (meaning ‘sex’) and schlecht (meaning ‘bad’).
My best attempt at the translation of Humboldt’s words: “Der Mensch beurteilt die Dinge lange nicht so sehr nach dem, was sie wirklich sind, als nach der Art, wie er sie sich denkt und sie in seinen Ideengang einpasst.”
This is a superb article. It really is. You lay out the reality of the situation in clear and concise language. A measure of how good your writing is, is that I became angry while I was reading it. Indeed, you are a much better writer than I am. Thank God I'm not in the workforce any more.