How Activists Weaponize America’s Science Illiteracy
The sex binary is not oversimplified ‘high school biology,’ it’s the foundation upon which all higher-level biology rests.
Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.
About the Author
Dr. Greg Brown is a professor of Exercise Science at the University of Nebraska at Kearney where he also serves as the Director of the LOPERs General Studies program. He is a member of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), and the Association of American Educators (AAE).
Trans rights activists often dismiss the reality that human beings are either male or female as mere “basic biology” or “high school biology.” The implication is clear: this is just a crude, introductory understanding, the sort of thing you might learn in a sophomore classroom before moving on to the “real” science in college. It’s meant to evoke parallels with subjects like chemistry, where high school students are taught simplified models of the atom—neat electron shells circling a nucleus in tidy orbits—before discovering in advanced courses that this picture is a vast oversimplification, replaced by probabilistic quantum models that practicing chemists and physicists actually use. The rhetorical suggestion is that the sex binary belongs to the same category: a simplistic, outdated framework that higher-level biology has long since left behind.
But this analogy is entirely misplaced. Unlike the high school model of the atom, which is later refined by more complex and accurate models, the sex binary is not an oversimplification that advanced biology corrects. Rather, it is the foundation upon which all higher-level biology rests.
In his essay explaining why The Sex Binary Is Not High School Biology, biologist Colin Wright includes a video exchange between conservative commentator Matt Walsh and a trans rights activist that illustrates this manipulative rhetorical move. The activist leans on their credentials as an EMT and cites “advanced training in healthcare”—an appeal to authority meant to suggest that higher-level biology has somehow disproven the sex binary. It’s a logical fallacy, and Walsh rightly calls it out as being “full of shit.” This exchange exemplifies a broader rhetorical strategy used by trans rights activists to discredit arguments grounded in biological reality.
Rather than rehash the well-established fact of the human sex binary, which Wright’s article does well, I want to examine why activists rely on this tactic. Their use of phrases like “high school biology” is deliberate. It’s designed to undermine the credibility of anyone who affirms this foundational scientific truth. As Wright shows, this framing isn’t based on evidence but on intellectual posturing. It’s a bit like the scene in Star Wars: Episode III when Obi-Wan Kenobi declares, “It’s over, Anakin—I have the high ground.” The difference is that here the supposed high ground is an illusion. Dismissing biology confers no advantage; it only obscures reality.
This tactic works not because it reflects genuine scientific authority, but because it exploits widespread insecurities about science education. Even though the vast majority of both the general public and the scientific community recognize the sex binary, many people worry that their understanding of biology is outdated or simplistic. The implication from activists is clear: if your view of sex aligns with what you learned in high school, you must be uneducated or misinformed.
To see why this framing resonates, we must consider the state of science education in America. Just over 47 percent of Americans hold an associate’s, bachelor’s, or graduate degree, and fewer than 8 percent have a college-level or industry-recognized certification. Of those with degrees, over 80 percent are in non-biological disciplines. Most students satisfy their general education science requirement with chemistry, physics, earth science, or astronomy—not biology. As a result, many college graduates have never taken a biology course beyond high school, let alone studied human anatomy and physiology in any depth.
For most Americans, then, high school was their last formal exposure to biology. And those memories are often hazy: frog dissections, cell diagrams, a quick introduction to Darwin and genetics, and maybe a unit on basic human anatomy. Trans rights activists know this. When they dismiss the sex binary as “high school biology,” they aren’t offering a more advanced perspective. They’re strategically exploiting gaps in scientific literacy to sow doubt and discredit well-supported biological facts.
What’s more, many activists making this argument likely haven’t studied biology beyond high school themselves. Their tactic depends not on superior knowledge but on rhetorical superiority, projecting intellectual authority without substance. It’s like claiming that calculus disproves the basic truth that 2 + 2 = 4. In reality, advanced knowledge builds upon foundational truths; it doesn’t erase them. Likewise, no amount of complexity in developmental biology undermines the fundamental fact that human sex is binary and rooted in reproductive function.
One of my dad’s favorite sayings has always been: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with b.s.” That’s exactly what’s happening when activists dismiss the sex binary as “high school biology.” Even those with advanced degrees in medicine or biology often use this rhetoric not to enlighten but to obscure. They’re not trying to educate. They’re trying to silence, confuse, and discredit with rhetoric.
But truth doesn’t need a graduate seminar to be valid, and clarity is not the enemy of complexity. The human sex binary is not a relic of outdated science—it is a foundational biological reality, observed across the natural world and affirmed by generations of research. When activists mock “high school biology,” they aren’t demonstrating scientific sophistication. They’re revealing an ideological contempt for facts that remain stubbornly resistant to revision. The only way to counter that is to speak plainly, stand firmly, and refuse to be cowed by condescension masquerading as expertise.
If you enjoyed this free article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or making a recurring or one-time donation below to show your support. Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication, and your help is greatly appreciated.
If you enjoyed this article, you may also like…
 | A guest post by
|
When I discovered my husband's 3 crossdressing diaries in 1992, and began the rollercoaster years until 1998 when the divorce was finalized, he posed that he had a "psychological intersex condition." What he had was trauma from childhood abuse from a father with OCD--based on my observations of my father-in-law's rages, my husband's and his sister's stories, and my training in Special Education. Psychiatrists, who do have advanced training in human biology as medical doctors--and psychologists, who should have advanced training in human biology, went along with these descriptions of "wrong body" and "known since birth," from their patients, which do not comport with the long-accepted Piaget stages of cognitive development from birth to age 14.
My ex-husband also had deeply ingrained homophobia, which turned his attraction to males into a wish to be female and be the focus of male sexual desire. Not discussed in the "trans narrative" are addictions to pornography (a placebo activity which distracts from the anxieties resulting from childhood trauma, etc) and drug/alcohol excesses in the mix. Clearly, violent threads are also at play, as demonstrated from the stats on men serving time in women's prisons for violent crimes, the recent mass shootings by trans identified criminals and my data on the rate of physical/sexual assault of the wives by suddenly "female identifying" husbands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yLZp789HU&t=15s
Not to pick nits but do we really need generations of research to confirm that there are exactly two sexes? This unconsciously falls into the same trap the author decries -- that one has to be up to date on the 'latest research'. That there are two sexes is as obvious as that water flows downhill.