NIH defends booting critical scholars from symposium on sex as a spectrum

Are participants in federally sponsored events on science sex and gender identity allowed to challenge the claim that sex exists on a spectrum, even with civility?

That's not clear based on the National Institutes of Health's response to Just the News questions about moderators removing a scientist, professor and third unknown person from an online symposium on "the many dimensions of sex and gender in the genomics era."

Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and academic adviser to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, and Pepperdine University philosopher Tomas Bogardus are prominent academic critics of gender ideology. 

The former filed an expert declaration supporting female prison inmates challenging California's law that gives men who identify as women, regardless of intact male anatomy or hormone therapy, presumptive transfers to women's prisons. He's been deplatformed by PayPal and Etsy for his views.

Wright also criticized NIH in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal for including only "one side of the debate" when the symposium's speaker list was released, echoing a previous decision by North America's largest annual gathering of anthropologists to remove a panel on the necessity of sex to their field.

Their view is based on a mischaracterization of "disorders/differences of sexual development," misleadingly called "intersex," despite it describing about 1 in every 5,500 people "born with sexual anatomy that may appear sexually ambiguous or opposite to their sex at birth," which doesn't change their sex, Wright wrote.

He said the U.S. "still lags far behind the rest of the world" in grappling with the "remarkably weak evidence" in favor of medicalized-gender transitions, quoting the multiyear Cass review that prompted the U.K.'s reversal on so-called gender affirming care, recently affirmed by the new Labour government.

Bogardus is known for his 2022 paper in Philosophia on the "transgender inclusion problem," which he says is plagued by the fact that "no matter what it means to be a woman, it’s one thing to be a woman, and another thing to identify as a woman."

Wright demanded an explanation Wednesday for their repeated removal, then ban the first day of the July 17-18 symposium hosted by the National Human Genome Research Institute, which the NIH component and presenters have promoted all month on social media.

Happening this month! 🚨On July 17-18, join NHGRI for a virtual symposium that will explore the many dimensions of sex and gender in the genomics era. https://t.co/RSS5JO4RJ9 pic.twitter.com/LRCk0BxgYY

— National Human Genome Research Institute (@genome_gov) July 2, 2024

Pitched as an "interdisciplinary conversation," the "speaker lineup consists entirely of ideologically aligned sex and gender activists who promote radical and pseudoscientific views of sex and gender," he wrote in an X thread.

He said he was still blocked for the second day despite the relevance of Thursday's presentation on "The Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Sex and Gender in Public Policy" to Wright's work "writing expert reports for court cases and clarifying biology for policymakers."

High-profile academics spoke out against NIH for its actions. 

"It is completely unacceptable … to kick a (non-disruptive) citizen off a public webinar," Yale social scientist and physician Nicholas Christakis, himself a cancelation target for offending students' sensibilities, wrote Wednesday on X.

"This must surely be illegal and it’s certainly un-American," Christakis said Thursday, tagging Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf and New York Times medical reporter Gina Kolata.

It is completely unacceptable for @NIH to kick a (non-disruptive) citizen off a public webinar. Whoever did this should be reprimanded, as they are not fulfilling the proper duties of a civil servant or federal employee or contractor. https://t.co/1Fzv8hTPHw

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) July 17, 2024

"As a current postdoctoral researcher with previous active and successful collaborations with genetic types at Bethesda," where NIH is based, who is "aligned (and maligned)" with Wright, "would I be allowed to attend?" developmental biologist Emma Hilton asked on X. She has spoken against men competing athletically against women based on physiological differences.

NHGRI Communications Director Sarah Bates told Just the News on Friday its platform records show that "three attendees were removed for disrupting the event by repeatedly posting questions unrelated to the session topics in the virtual Q&A forum."

They violated the code of conduct they accepted when registering for the public event, according to Bates, without specifying which part. She declined to identify the third removed person for "privacy reasons."

"NHGRI will not tolerate harassment, discrimination, or any behavior that is deemed unprofessional at NHGRI or NHGRI-sponsored events and people who display such behavior will be held accountable," the code reads. Attendees "agree to abide by the highest standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity."

Bates said those removed "are certainly welcome to watch the proceedings when they are posted in the near future on YouTube and our website."

Wright told Just the News on Friday in an email that "I was not given any more information about how my questions violated the Code, and [my] subsequent email asking for more details has been ignored." 

He said he was "super professional the entire time" while others participating in the Q&A forum "were overtly harassing me and calling me names," evidence of which Wright provided on X. Bates didn't answer when Just the News asked whether those attendees were also removed.

Wright said he was quietly watching a presentation Wednesday morning by Children's National Hospital clinical geneticist Tucker Pyle, who uses plural pronouns, when a pop-up said the "host has removed you from the webinar."

"I did not submit any questions in the Q&A chat window either," he wrote in the Wednesday X thread starting at 2 p.m. Bogardus was removed "around the same time" for responding to a presenter's argument that "sex is a phenotype" by asking if it "follow[s] that some (many?) trans women are male?" 

Unlike @SwipeWright, I was definitely asking questions in the little "Q&A" Zoom feature, under the misapprehension that the speakers might actually respond to critical yet civil questions. Nope! On the contrary, it seems they wanted an insular echo chamber. https://t.co/E56incLdMk

— Tomas Bogardus (@TomasBogardus) July 17, 2024

Wright was back in the event less than half an hour later after contacting Bates, who couldn't explain what happened, he said. 

But moderators removed Wright again following "very polite and straightforward" questions he asked of presenters when they downplayed the determinative role of gametes and conflated changes to "secondary sexual characteristics and behavior" with changing sex itself.

When he tried to rejoin again, "I received a pop-up window telling me that I could not rejoin because I had previously been removed by the host," Wright told Just the News. 

The first time NHGRI promoted the symposium on social media with language that challenged a viewpoint was Thursday morning, the day after Wright called out the feds. 

Sex is "not as binary as researchers once thought," the institute wrote in an X thread.·"While genomics has provided much insight into our understanding of human biology, it has also been misused to support inaccurate claims about people in sexual and gender minority groups."

"Wow, you sure make it sound like a great symposium!" Bogardus responded on X on Friday. "Wish I hadn't been ejected for asking a few critical questions and raising a few objections" in a chat that didn't interrupt the speakers. 

He conceded to writing "one slightly aggressive thing" – that the moderator was ignoring chat questions.