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Opinion

Premier Scientific Journal Nature Takes on ‘Climate of Fear’ Surrounding Research on Sex and Genr

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2 years ago

8 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

“These articles are using phrases like ‘a person’s sex assigned at birth’. I find that phrase amusing. I don’t think sex is assigned at birth. Biological sex is a fact. It’s not assigned. It’s observed.”

Nature, one of the world’s premier scientific journals, has acknowledged the importance of studying sex and gender differences and officially denounced the “climate of fear and reticence” that is stymying research on the topic.

To that end, the journal in May launched “a collection of opinion articles” on the topic to be published over the coming months to foster honest and courageous discussions on a topic that many scientists shy away from due to fears of professional and personal repercussions.

“Some scientists have been warned off studying sex differences by colleagues. Others, who are already working on sex or gender-related topics, are hesitant to publish their views,” read the editorial introducing the series.

“…In time, we hope this collection will help to shape research, and provide a reference point for moderating often-intemperate debates.”

Headlines that kicked off the series include “Neglecting sex and gender in research is a public-health risk,” “Male–female comparisons are powerful in biomedical research” and “Heed lessons from past studies involving transgender people: first, do no harm.”

What the collection of articles represents and whether it will ease tensions surrounding this area of research remains to be seen.

Jeffrey Mogil, a neuroscientist and pain researcher at Mcgill University, as well as the co-author of one of the articles in Nature’s sex and gender series, told The College Fix there is an effort underway in biological research to do away with or minimize the importance of the concept of sex and sex as a binary variable.

This is problematic, Mogil said in a recent telephone interview, because sex in mammals is “either binary or it rounds to binary and in doing so it always has been useful and continues to be and any conception of it that isn’t binary would then impose practical difficulties on how science is done.”

Moreover, he noted, discarding the notion of binary sex in mammals would set back important advancements in how many biomedical researchers now do their work.

“There are sex differences in all kinds of traits that we’re interested in and where we didn’t know they existed,” Mogil said. “The reason we didn’t know they existed [is] because until extremely recently, essentially all biology pre-clinical experiments were done with males only.”

“Since regulatory agencies, funding agencies, have demanded that people start using both sexes [in research],” he said, “lo and behold, we’re finding sex differences.”

“We’re finding that what we thought was the biology of a thing was only the biology of the thing in males and the female biology is completely different,” he added.

“This is in our minds,” he said, “an incredible scientific advance and that advance is at risk of stopping and reverting if, you know, people start to believe…dividing animals into males and females is inappropriate.”

Although Mogil stated he did not know how Nature made editorial decisions regarding the selection of articles for their sex and gender collection, he said that he felt the article he and his co-authors wrote was intended to defend the status quo against those “advocating…either that gender is much more important than sex or that sex is more complicated than people have made it seem.”

The College Fix reached out to a senior communications manager from Springer Nature in early June regarding the selection process for the series, as well as how sex was presented in some of the other commentaries, but did not receive a response.

Daniel Barbash, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University, was more skeptical than Mogil of Nature’s sex and gender op-ed collection when he spoke to The College Fix in a late-May phone interview.

Although he said he generally held a positive view of the article Mogil co-authored and appreciated that it explicitly stated “there are only two sex categories in mammals,” he noted that he also felt the authors of other commentaries in the series were to some extent “further conflating sex and gender.”

“There’s little things that sometimes give the game away,” he said. “These articles are using phrases like ‘a person’s sex assigned at birth’. I find that phrase amusing. I don’t think sex is assigned at birth. Biological sex is a fact. It’s not assigned. It’s observed.”

“[For] the vast majority of humans, from the moment they’re born,” he said, “there is zero ambiguity whether they’re a male or a female.”

Furthermore, the “overall tone” of the collection, Barbash said, was that “there needs to be more research on gender variation and that there is more complexity to biological sex than a binary.”

According to Barbash, neither of these notions are “universally accepted” among biologists.

He said he believes the series has “the potential to drive funding agencies and other agencies that are involved in the intersection between politics and research in a particular direction that I don’t think would always be helpful.”

“I don’t think any serious biologist would deny that sex is a hugely important factor in both basic research and in biomedical research,” said Barbash. “Of course, any study on the effect of drugs should be tested separately in males and females, otherwise it’s a hugely confounding factor if you ignore that.”

Yet, he said, “the notion that we need to do the same thing for gender…is really not supported,” and may not be very feasible.

“Half the population is male and half the population is female,” Barbash said. “We see all kinds of estimates for gender nonconforming and transgender individuals but, no doubt, they’re much less frequent than males and females.”

On account of this, he said, even if research questions regarding gender divergence and transgender individuals are worthwhile, “it would be problematic, for example, to necessitate that all NIH studies of humans include males, females and gender nonconforming individuals or transgender individuals.”

However, he said, he feared “this series of articles could have that kind of impact in influencing policy.”

Originally published by The College Fix. Republished with permission.

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The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal. Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.

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Automotive

Canada’s EV gamble is starting to backfire

Published on December 22, 2025

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Things have only gone from bad to worse for the global Electric Vehicle industry. And that’s a problem for Canada, because successive Liberal governments have done everything in their power to hitch our cart to that horse.

Earlier this month, the Trump Administration rolled back more Biden-era regulations that effectively served as a back-door EV mandate in the United States. These rules mandated that all passenger cars be able to travel at least 65.1 miles (and for light trucks, 45.2 miles) per gallon of gasoline or diesel, by the year 2031. Since no Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle could realistically conform to those standards, that would have essentially boxed them out of the market.

Trump’s rolling them back was a fulfillment of his campaign promise to end the Biden Administration’s stealth EV mandates. But it was also a simple recognition of the reality that EVs can’t compete on their own merits.

For proof of that, look no further than our second bit of bad news for EVs: Ford Motor Company has just announced a massive $19.5 billion write-down, almost entirely linked to its aggressive push into EVs. They’ve lost $13 billion on EVs in the past two years alone.

The company invested tens of billions on these go-carts, and lost their shirt when it turned out the market for them was miniscule.

Ford’s EV division president Andrew Frick explained, “Ford is following the customer. We are looking at the market as it is today, not just as everyone predicted it to be five years ago.”

Of course, five years ago, the market was assuming that government subsidies-plus-mandates would create a market for EVs at scale, which hasn’t happened.

As to what this portends for the market, the Wall Street Journal argued, “The company’s pivot from all-electric vehicles is a fresh sign that America’s roadways – after a push to remake them – will continue to look in the near future much like they do today, with a large number of gas-powered cars and trucks and growing use of hybrids.”

And that’s not just true in the U.S. Across the Atlantic, reports suggest the European Union is preparing to delay their own EV mandates to 2040. And the U.K.’s Labour government is considering postponing their own 2030 ICE vehicle ban to align with any EU change in policy.

It’s looking like fewer people around the world will be forced by their governments to buy EVs. Which means that fewer people will be buying EVs.

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To bolster those investments, Ottawa introduced its Electric Vehicle mandate, requiring 100 per cent of new light-duty vehicle sales to be electric by 2035. This, despite the fact that EVs remain significantly more expensive than gas-and-diesel driven vehicles, they’re poorly suited to Canada’s vast distances and cold climate, and our charging infrastructure is wholly inadequate for a total transition to EVs.

But even if these things weren’t true, there still aren’t enough of us to make the government’s investment make sense. Their entire strategy depends on exporting to foreign markets that are rapidly cooling on EVs.

Collapsing demand south of the border – where the vast majority of the autos we build are sent – means that Canadian EVs will be left without buyers. And postponed (perhaps eventually canceled) mandates in Europe mean that we will be left without a fallback market.

Canadian industry voices are growing louder in their concern. Meanwhile, plants are already idling, scaling back production, or even closing, leaving workers out in the cold.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney, while sharing much of the same environmental outlook as his predecessor, has already been compelled by economic realities to make a small adjustment – delaying the enforcement of the 2026 EV sales quotas by one year.

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