Article written by Alexandra McPhee and Morgan Haddock
Do you know the sex of the crash test dummy that safety tested your car? How about the rat in the clinical trials for the latest research in brain disease?
Radical gender ideology may demand that we ask their pronouns. But matters ranging from automotive safety to health care research are just more examples of how there is no rejecting the inherent differences—especially biological differences—between males and females. Our society rejects these differences only to the detriment of women’s safety and well-being.
When it comes to current automotive safety standards, women are not “in the driver’s seat.” The automotive industry’s models for crash test dummies in safety trials are biased towards “average” sized men in their impact testing. According to the Automotive Safety Council—and it is reasonable to assume as a result—women experience up to 79.7% increase in injuries in certain areas of the body compared to men.
Fortunately, there is an increased emphasis on including crash test dummies that reflect women’s body structure, organ placement, and size difference. A recent congressional report directed a government agency overseeing research for car crashes to continue research on “the latest crash test dummy technology in tests” with periodic updates to “enhance crash protection to male and female occupants of different sizes.” In this vein, some companies have created “female” dummies in order to evaluate how a woman’s body is affected upon collision with various seating positions within a vehicle. This is an important development.
Then there are the rats. Unfortunately, current brain research insufficiently reflects how men’s and women’s bodies respond to diseases and treatments differently. The 1993 National Institute of Health (NIH) Revitalization Act mandates that women be included in NIH-funded clinical trials. However, the mission of this law is incomplete because, during the animal-testing stage of brain research for women, 66% of research using rats was either performed on male rats or performed without identifying the sex of the rat at all.
Why does this matter? There are simple and sobering biological realities about injury and illness that beliefs about gender can never erase. But if key sectors of our society ever fully succumb to radical gender ideology, we will overlook facts as unchangeable as women’s and men’s biology to potentially harmful consequences on matters as basic as physical safety.