The biologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine (1995, embryonic development) Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard has become involved in the ongoing debate about sex and gender. When it comes to biological sex, there is “only female or male”, while there is a range when it comes to social sex (“gender”), she told Emma magazine on Monday.
There she also sharply criticized the federal government’s queer commissioner, Sven Lehmann, after he had denied the fact of biological dual gender in a WELT article. “Mr. Lehmann may have missed the basic course in biology,” said Nüsslein-Volhard.
Sven Lehmann’s contribution was created as a reply to another WELT contribution by child psychologist Alexander Kortes, among others. The article presented and problematized a collection of evidence for the uncritical treatment and adoption of activist arguments by identity-political leftists by public service broadcasting. As a result, a broad debate arose, in which Lehmann and the CEO of Axel Springer SE, to which WELT belongs, also got involved.
Nüsslein-Volhard not only commented on the statements made by Sven Lehmann, but also spoke about the reform of transsexual and gender legislation planned by the traffic light government.
When asked whether Nüsslein-Volhard thought it was right that the legislature wanted to enable people to undergo so-called gender reassignment, she replied: “The legislature cannot enable gender reassignment at all. He just says: From now on, this woman can claim to be a man. And vice versa. The biological basis cannot be changed at all.” Also on a 2017 ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court on the subject of transsexuality and intersexuality, which stated that gender cannot be “determined or even produced solely on the basis of genetic-anatomical-chromosomal characteristics”. but is “partly determined by social and psychological factors”, Nüsslein-Volhard found clear words.
“That’s nonsense,” she said; how one feels can be changed by social and psychological circumstances. But: “Not the biological sex. That is completely indisputable where science is really being done,” said Nüsslein-Volhard.
Nüsslein-Volhard even judged the federal government’s plan to allow young people to change their gender entry themselves from the age of 14 as “madness”. “A lot of girls are unhappy in puberty at 14,” she said. “I know it myself. I was also unhappy at 14 and preferred to be a boy. I wasn’t even allowed to wear pants or cut my hair back then,” said the biologist.
Nüsslein-Volhard was also outraged by an incident at Humboldt University in Berlin that had also made headlines in recent weeks. What is meant is the short-term cancellation by the university management of a lecture by the biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht as part of the “Long Night of Science” event, in which she wanted to discuss the basics of biological dual sex. The lecture was canceled after activists from the identitarian left protested against the project, whereupon the university canceled the lecture, claiming “security concerns”.
Nüsslein-Volhard: “It is fundamentally unacceptable to ban a lecture because you think something may be wrong with it. In this case, however, the doctoral student wanted to explain something that is in every textbook. This mixture of sensitivity and moral arrogance paired with ignorance is simply fatal.”