Everyone at the table was looking at Greg again. Greg looked at Quiara in a desperate attempt to get her to bail him out. Quiara just shrugged.
“Well, fuck! Here we go,” Greg said to himself internally.
“Here is the argument,” he started. “As a species, Homo sapiens evolved to exhibit sexual dimorphism. There are different genders and each gender has a separate and distinct capabilities. That puts them into different roles vis-à-vis reproduction and child rearing.
“Ethically and morally speaking, the two genders are fully equivalent in value. A human life if a human life when considering subjective criteria, like ‘value’. Do you follow me so far?”
Greg could see people at the table nodding. Everything he said so far made sense to them.
“Ethics and morals have nothing to do with biology. Biologically speaking, when you get down to the hard facts of reproduction: ovaries, eggs, testicles, sperm, uterus, placenta, mammary glands, the male and female genders are not equivalent. They are complementary.”
“What about transgender?” asked Dorotea.
“Transgender is not a biological term. In biology, you can either be male, female, or intersex. Intersex has a precise biological definition in which gender cannot be classified, either because the genital anatomy and chromosomes don’t match, or due to a congenital defect that renders their sexual anatomy utterly ambiguous. The condition on Intersex is exhibited in only 0.018% of the population. That’s about fifty to sixty thousand out of the entire US population of 32 million.”
Greg said it like this to bait everyone to argue about transgender issues. Personally, he was sympathetic to people with gender identity issues. He suspected most of the people here tonight were too. His hope was that the table would take up this axe to grind and descend back into chaos. Greg looked meaningfully at Kailey hoping she’d pick up on his cue, but she was so busy giving her husband Radu a death stare, she missed her window of opportunity. Surprisingly, the blow up that Greg prayed for never came.
At this point. Churan came back to the table, intrigued at the silence and tension, “What did I miss?”
Chen shushed her and began whispering to her.
“Everyone with me so far?” Greg asked, practically begging someone to object. No one did.
“There are two arguments for this: disparate impact, and gender complementarianism.
“The disparate impact argument is that if you look at all of human history, around 85% of the women who made it to maturity reproduced. Less than 40% of all men who made it to maturity reproduced. In some eras, it was less than 20% of men. Women are far likelier to reproduce than men.”
Gerhart broke in at this point to ask a question, “What is the scientific basis for such a claim?”
“Have you all heard of the Human Genome Project, run by Francis Collins?” Greg asked. “They mapped the entire human genome back in the nineties.”
About a third of the guests nodded. “I heard about that on NPR!” said Fatima. She was delighted to be a part of the conversation at last.