What is Biological Truth?

Kiki Smith: Tale, 1992. Beeswax, microcrystaline wax, pigment, and papier-mache.

Quick Thought(s):

I was taken aback by a recent executive order titled, in part, “Restoring Biological Truth.” While others have undoubtedly analyzed the Order’s views on sex, gender, ideology, extremism, and more, what intrigued me—and truly rattled me—was the strange pairing of biology and truth.

The Order performs what is at stake in its assertion of “truth.” First, it is notable that the Order claims (the meaning of) truth precedes critical investigation: “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”

Moreover, the Order claims that truth is both traditional and “immutable.” Truth is a product of accrued cultural experience and is also somehow synonymous with “immutable. . .reality.” Gender ideology is “an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”

Furthermore, the Order asserts that reality is “fundamental and incontrovertible.” Yet, it requires an executive order to enforce and promote it? “These sexes [male and female] are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality, . . .”

The Order’s claim that gender ideology is “unmoored from biological facts” is bizarre, given that Trans* people, for example, are biological facts. We also know that some portion of the population is intersex. The order to “restore biological truth” not only ignores Trans* and intersex bodies—it ignores all animal bodies.

A less comfortable observation: What disturbed me about “biological truth” is the idea of human frailty and biological grossness. Who wants “biological truth”?

But this takes us in a different direction from the Order, which denies biological truth and what it means for our human lives precisely by asserting it. The Order tries to end the conversation about what is truly disturbing—and what disturbed me: messy, changing, mortal, material biological reality.

In his study of William James, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, in On Getting Better, makes helpful observations about both truth and biology. First, truth—Phillips writes: “Here in brief is James’s credo: . . .believe and consider true whatever you need to believe, even God, in order to be the person you want to be. . . (145). On biology, Phillips notes: “As what James calls ‘natural men,’ we are ineluctably in the flux of biological change, a change running alongside and in tandem with our ideals for ourselves that our cultures provide” (155).

As a pragmatic idea, what is true is what gives you the life you desire. Apparently, what is true for Trump is a life sans biological reality. For him, the truth is what does not embody the ineluctable “flux of biological change.” But what about those of us who do not desire an exclusively ideal life? Or, what about those of us who know that so much of human tragedy results from attempts to live an ideal life?

Trump’s Order gives renewed meaning to David M. Halperin’s argument, made in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography: Whenever we (i.e., bodies that incarnate queer truths [i.e., biological truths]) hear the Trump Administration “invoke the notion of ‘truth,’ we reach for our revolvers” (185).