A Whale of a Tale: Activists Turned a Fascinating Discovery Into Political Propaganda

How activist scientists exploited a rare discovery about a whale to push an agenda intended to ‘queer’ basic biological facts.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

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In recent years, we’ve increasingly seen activist scientists, steeped in gender ideology and queer theory, attempt to undermine basic biological facts about sex for ideological and political reasons. A favored tactic among these activists involves highlighting certain non-human species that differ from humans in aspects of sex biology to mislead people about human biology. They frequently reference examples such as sex-changing clownfish, male seahorses that gestate and give birth, and even birds like white-throated sparrows, whose unique genetic mating and behavioral patterns are misrepresented as evidence that there are more than two sexes.

Last week, a new article employed this same tired playbook using an unexpected example—a whale.

The article, titled “To Discover the World’s First Intersex Southern Right Whale, the Third Test Was the Charm” by Vanessa Minke-Martin, a former fish biologist with a masters degree, published in bioGraphic, is the latest exhibit of this frustrating trend to obscure basic biology. In it, the author seized upon a genuinely fascinating discovery—a whale with unusual XXY chromosomes—and twisted it to promote a pseudoscientific political narrative. Minke-Martin dubs the whale “intersex” and declares it “neither male nor female,” implying that sex is far more complicated and fluid than we’ve all been led to believe.