Richard Dawkins, Sex, Gender, and Why Minds Are the Primary Reality

Richard Dawkins, Sex, Gender, and Why Minds Are the Primary Reality

Andraž Đurič

Created: 21 November 2025

Last updated: 21 December 2025

Introduction

Richard Dawkins is one of the most influential science communicators alive. His explanations of gene-level selection, extended phenotypes, and cultural “memes” have shifted how many people think about evolution and information. 

For anyone interested in how complex structures arise from simple replication rules, his work is hard to avoid and hard to replace.

That makes his public stance on sex and gender especially important. When someone with that much epistemic capital talks about contested topics, their framing does not just describe reality; it shapes how countless others think about it.

The aim here is not to dismiss Dawkins, but to locate precisely where his framing is strong, where it narrows tooo soon, and how the whole conversation changes when the focus moves from bodies to minds — and beyond that, to transhuman possibilities.

What Dawkins Is Protecting

In broad strokes, Dawkins’ public position on sex and gender can be summarised like this:

● In biological terms, sex is defined by gamete type: small motile gametes (sperm) and large non-motile gametes (eggs).

● Human bodies cluster into male-typical and female-typical patterns built around those reproductive roles.

● Intersex or DSD cases are real but statistically rare and treated as deviations from an underlying binary.

● “Gender,” as a concept rooted in identity or social roles, is viewed with suspicion when it appears to compete with or overwrite biological sex.

On the level of evolutionary biology, this is coherent. Anisogamy really does yield two reproductive roles. 

The male/female distinction is not arbitrary; 

it is built into the mechanics of sexual reproduction.

If the only question were, “How do we best describe the reproductive structure of human populations?” Dawkins would be on solid ground. 

But the current societal dispute is not primarily about the reproductive structure of populations. It is about how individual subjects of experience should be recognised, named, and treated.

What Sex Actually Tracks

When stripped of politics, the concept of sex is doing a particular job:

● It tracks the reproductive role of bodies in a sexually reproducing species.

● It acts as a proxy for correlated traits: hormone profiles, anatomy, certain disease risks, and physical performance patterns.

● It matters in medicine, demographics, and evolutionary modelling.

At the same time, real biology is noisy:

● Chromosomes, gonads, genitals, secondary traits, and hormone levels do not always align neatly.

● Intersex and DSD conditions demonstrate that sex-related traits can combine in atypical ways.

A more reality-aligned summary looks like this:

● Human sex traits are multi-dimensional.

● They cluster into two dominant peaks — male-typical and female-typical — but the boundaries are not perfectly sharp.

● Describing this as a binary, a bimodal distribution, or a spectrum with two peaks are different emphases on the same underlying landscape.

Sex, in other words, is a powerful but approximate way of categorising bodies. It tells something important about implementation details. It does not, by itself, tell what it is like to be the system from the inside.

What Gender Actually Tracks

“Gender” is a single word covering several different layers:

● An internal sense of self (gender identity).

● Patterns of expression and presentation (how one moves, dresses, and signals socially).

● Social expectations, norms, and roles attached to perceived sex.

Empirical work suggests gender identity is not pure whim or mere fashion. It has biological and developmental correlates, even if it is shaped heavily by culture. It lives in brains, yet it is also co-authored by the surrounding social world.

A more precise way to see it

Sex: a description of bodily configuration relative to reproductive roles.

Gender: part of the self-model that a brain uses to understand itself and navigate a social environment.

Both are real. Both matter. But they matter in different ways. Sex is about how the organism is built; gender is about how the organism experiences and represents itself, and how it is treated as a result.

The Ethically Relevant Unit: Not “Male” or “Female,” but the Subject of Experience

If ethical concern is grounded in wellbeing — the reduction of suffering and the promotion of flourishing — then the fundamental unit that matters is the subject of experience: whatever system is capable of feeling, wanting, fearing, and reflecting.

From that vantage point:

● Biological sex is an implementation detail: it influences health risks, capacities, and constraints.

● Gender identity is part of the structure of experience: it shapes self-understanding, social stress, dysphoria, or comfort.

The crucial point: suffering tracks the mind’s self-model and its interaction with the world, not the abstract label on the gametes. When a person with male-typical anatomy experiences themselves persistently as a woman, that fact about their self-model has immediate implications for mental health, suicide risk, and social functioning.

Sex is still real. It still matters. But ethically, it is downstream. The direct object of moral concern is the experiencing system itself, not the reproductive category it falls into.

A Three-Level Framework

To avoid talking past each other, it helps to separate three levels of description:

1. Bodies (Implementation Level)

Chromosomes, gonads, genitals, hormone profiles, secondary sex traits.

This level matters for medicine, fertility, some sports, and risk patterns.

2. Minds (Self-Model Level)

How the system represents itself: “I am a man,” “I am a woman,” “I am nonbinary,” “I am beyond these categories.”

This level is where dysphoria, identity stability, narrative continuity, and many forms of suffering live.

3. Institutions (Coordination Level)

Legal categories, identification documents, bathroom policies, data collection, sports rules, and so on.

This level has to balance fairness, logistics, safety, and respect, using inputs from levels 1 and 2.

Much of the public conflict arises when one of these levels is mistaken for the whole reality.

A pure “biological sex only” stance collapses everything into level 1 and treats levels 2 and 3 as distractions or ideology.

A pure “identity is all that matters” stance can underplay the ways level 1 remains relevant for medicine, safety, and some physical competitions.

A reality-aligned approach acknowledges all three, keeps them conceptually distinct, and then openly negotiates the tradeoffs when they collide.

Dawkins’ Frame and Its Limits

Within this framework, Dawkins’ core focus is clear: he is defending level 1, the integrity of biological sex categories. 

In that domain, his insistence that sex is not infinitely malleable is simply a defence of basic evolutionary facts.

The difficulty appears when this focus is implicitly extended to the other levels:

1. When disagreements about social categories or first-person identity are treated as if they were attempts to falsify biology.

2. When the methodological authority of evolutionary biology is used to dismiss claims about self-models and wellbeing that belong at the cognitive and institutional levels.

This is not a claim that Dawkins denies the existence of gender identity, or that he is ignorant of intersex conditions. 

It is a claim about weighting: the weight of biological classification is allowed to overshadow the moral significance of how minds experience themselves and the world’s response to that experience.

If the subject of experience is the ethically primary reality, then the direction of explanation runs the other way: sex categories and gender categories are tools that should ultimately serve the reduction of suffering in minds. 

They are not sacred objects that minds must be forced to fit at any cost.

Transhumanism and the Shrinking Centrality of Sex

Transhumanist thinking makes this clearer by changing the background question from “What is a man or woman?” to “What could a person be?”

Consider a future where:

● Minds can run in non-biological substrates.

● Bodies can be swapped, edited, or duplicated.

● Identities can fork and merge in structured ways.

In such a context, the male/female division inherited from mammalian gamete sizes becomes one implementation detail among many. It may still matter for specific biological instantiations, but it cannot plausibly serve as the primary axis of personhood or moral status.

Even in the present, anyone who would be willing, in principle, to cease being “human” in the biological sense in order to become a better, more capable, less suffering system, has implicitly adopted a mind-first ontology. The meaningful “I” is the pattern of cognition, not the ape that currently implements it.

This perspective does not erase biology. It repositions it. Bodies, sexes, and genders are early-generation design constraints. They inform the engineering problem of how to support minds, not the metaphysical problem of what ultimately matters.

Toward a More Coherent Synthesis

A more coherent, reality-aligned stance would include at least the following components:

Maintain biological sex categories for the domains where they are genuinely doing non-substitutable work: reproductive medicine, certain health risks, and specific performance contexts.

Treat gender identity as part of the real architecture of experience, not as mere decoration or “ideology,” and recognise that it has strong claims when designing institutions that shape people’s daily lives.

Make the domain boundaries explicit: when an institution chooses to prioritise sex over gender, or vice versa, that choice should be justified in terms of concrete consequences for wellbeing and fairness, not in terms of asserting one word’s absolute supremacy.

Keep an eye on the longer horizon, where minds may detach further from current biological constraints, so that present-day systems are not frozen around contingent mammalian features.

Within such a framework, Dawkins’ defence of biological sex is not the enemy. It is one input into a larger optimisation problem: how to structure concepts, institutions, and technologies so that conscious systems suffer less and flourish more.

Closing Perspective

The underlying disagreement here is not about whether evolution produced two main reproductive roles in humans. That point is settled. The deeper question is: at which level of description should moral and political decisions anchor themselves?

A body-first stance treats sex categories as the bedrock and negotiates everything else around them.

A mind-first stance treats the subject of experience as the bedrock and uses sex and gender categories as tools whose value is measured by their impact on those subjects.

Dawkins’ work has helped many people embrace a reality where comforting stories give way to hard facts about selection and survival. Extending that spirit one step further would mean applying the same discipline to our own categories: keeping biology intact where it is doing real explanatory work, and at the same time recognising that the ultimate fact that matters morally is not the configuration of gametes, but the configuration of consciousness.