On May fourteenth, at the Spring Commencement ceremony, Senator Cyn- thia Lummis made transphobic remarks during her speech.
“Even fundamental scientific truths, such as the existence of two sexes, male and female, are subject to challenge these days.” Lummis said.
I and many others of the Trans community are less than pleased.
Her words were followed by audible booing from the crowd, many of whom were the target of her remarks.
The statement shares echoes of transphobic rhetoric that many of us have become too familiar with.
There is likely a fundamental misun- derstanding of sex as Lummis seemingly confuses the term with gender.
These two concepts are separate. Sex is what someone is born with, while gender is what an individual may identify as.
While Lummis did say that her statement wasn’t targeted toward “those who transition between sexes,” it did leave out nonbinary and intersex individuals.
“The erasure of intersex individuals is cruel and fundamentally contrary to scientific understandings of biology,” said Hanna Crockett, Secondary Chairperson of the Queer Community Coalition on behalf of the QCC.
With her apology statement, Lummis did make her intentions clear, saying she wanted to address the changing definition of sex and how the differences between the sexes need to be recognized.
I’d argue that these differences do not matter, and that her statement leads to more problems for the community.
Lummis seems to believe in some form of biological determinism, which is a wrong and unscientific concept.
Sex is not a binary.
The broader scientific communities recognize it as a bimodal distribution of sexual characteristics.
Lummis claims scientific truth is being changed while blatantly ignoring scientific reality is laughable.
Her statement also fails to reconcile with the nature of science itself.
Science isn’t a fundamental law of reality but something that is ever-expand- ing to new ideas.
As new information becomes available, science moves to accommodate, not the other way around.
Even with her apology now released, I don’t forgive Lummis, nor do I think anyone should. Her words lacked a fun- damental understanding of the current scientific information, and her apology failed to acknowledge her inadequacies.
