Recently, Fox News aired a segment on gender-inclusive language in science with a lecturer in Harvard’s HEB department, who contrasted the scientific “facts that there are in fact two sexes [...] designated by the kind of gametes we produce” with the “ideology [...] infiltrating my classroom” that “biology really isn't as important as how somebody feels about themselves,” a supposed obstacle for students learning “the tools of science and critical thinking.” In response, our fellow student worker Laura Lewis expressed her disappointment and frustration on Twitter, noting her professional respect for the lecturer while observing that the segment pointedly excluded intersex, gender-nonconforming, and transgender people. Laura was then subjected to a multi-day deluge of personal harassment, racist abuse, and threats of physical harm after her response was amplified by the lecturer, prominent critics of the transgender rights movement, and several tabloid publications.

        We condemn these personal attacks without qualification. Harassment and abuse are never acceptable responses to any side of an academic dispute. Members of our community with large public platforms have a professional responsibility to avoid using them in ways that threaten the safety of their interlocutors.

        In addition, we respectfully challenge the lecturer’s framing of gender-inclusive language as an impediment to scientific thinking. While it is convenient and often adequate in biology to model sex and gender together using a single binary variable, it is hardly unscientific to point out that this model excludes a clinically important population of intersex and gender-nonconforming individuals, who may produce spermatozoa, ova, or neither while presenting diverse combinations of other causally significant biological sex and gender characteristics. We believe science is made stronger when scientists critically probe the limitations of their simplifying assumptions.

        We affirm our commitment to fostering an academic community inclusive of a wide range of intellectual and political views, as well as a diversity of historically marginalized identities. We call on our colleagues to join us in this commitment, and to uphold high standards of civility and intellectual rigor when invoking scientific authority in the public sphere.

        Respectfully,