This is an object lesson not only in the pollution of science by ideology, but also in how to make a fool of yourself by not learning about other areas of science before you pronounce on them.
A reader affiliated with a UK earth-sciences department sent me a letter circulated around that department, but it’s also circulating widely. The link goes to the whole letter but I’ll reproduce only part of it:
From an authority figure:
I know that many of us are concerned with the current ‘kicking woke ideology out of science’ rhetoric. An open letter drafted by a number of scientists urges politicians to reject that: ttps://hull.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/edi_in_science. Please do sign and share as you think appropriate.
Note the urging to sign the letter, which, since it comes from a university official, be considered a violation of the Kalven Principle of Institutional Neutrality if it were in Chicago.
Excerpts:
Thank you for expressing an interest in signing the letter to the Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology and Chairman of the Conservative Party, regarding their position on ‘kicking woke ideology out of science’.
The text of the letter is given below. This text has been generated collaboratively by scientists from different disciplines, people with expertise in the relationship between science and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), and those with lived experience of marginalisation. Some have signed the letter, while other valued contributers have felt unable to sign publically. A fully referenced PDF version of the text is available at Open Letter to UK Government.
Here’s a bit of the letter. You can see the full text at the link.
Dear Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology,
We are writing to express our anger and disappointment at the speech given by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology at the Conservative Party Conference 2023, and accompanying social media post. These state that government policy will be ‘kicking woke ideology out of science’ and that ‘Conservatives are safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness.’ This was described as a plan “to depoliticise science”.
We are extremely concerned about both the content and possible implications of the speech, and what it says about the government’s views on both science policy and inclusion. We address these directly as follows:
And here’s the invidious bit involving denialism of scientific fact in the name of ideology (it’s apparently in response to the speech discussed above):
- ‘Denial of biology’. From the Secretary of State’s speech it is clear that this refers to the government’s increasing adoption of policies that put the lives and wellbeing of trans people at risk. When it comes to sex determination it is simplistic binary arguments, such as those used by the Prime Minister himself, that deny biology. The biology of human sex is significantly more complex than just XX chromosomes = female and XY = male. There are multiple levels of “biological sex”, including genetic, anatomical, physiological and hormonal, which may not align with each other 11,12. Even within genetic definitions of sex, there are multiple interacting genes involved in complex networks 11,12. Sex determination at birth is on the basis of external genitalia, so does not consider the multiple factors contributing to “biological sex”. Additionally, up to 1.7% of the population have Differences in Sex Development (DSD) or are intersex 11–13. To appeal to “biological sex” as the Secretary of State has done is over-simplistic, unscientific and exclusionary rhetoric under the pretence of objectivity 14. Furthermore, as the Secretary of State acknowledges, biological sex and personal/social gender identity are distinct. At least 0.5% of the UK population identify as a different gender to their sex registered at birth 15. Combining DSD, intersex, non-binary and trans communities, this represents nearly 1.5 million people in the UK that the government implies should be excluded from participating in biomedical, sports science and other research. Research in many contexts does not need to (nor should) restrict itself to a binary definition of sex or gender, and can be inclusive of intersex, non-binary and/or trans participants without losing scientific rigour. The Secretary of State directly criticises initiatives such as the Scottish Chief Statistician’s guidance with respect to sex and gender 16, but such pragmatic advice ensures accuracy in data collection and research design, and alignment with legislation including the Equality Act 2010 and the Data Protection Act 2018. We find it disturbing that over-simplistic or scientifically illiterate arguments about complex biological systems are being used to stoke so-called culture wars and make the UK increasingly hostile towards people identifying as intersex, non-binary and/or trans. Reductive and discredited biological models have been used to underpin historical and contemporary human rights abuses through scientific racism and eugenics 17,18, and have no place in modern scientific inquiry.
Virtually everything in this section is a distortion or outright lie. First, if you’re defining male and female, then you don’t use chromosomal complement, even in humans, but rather determine whether someone has the equipment to make small mobile gametes (males) versus large immobile gametes (females). Determining someone’s sex is as simple as that, though the other stuff, like chromosomes, genitalia, and hormones, are highly correlated with biological sex. It’s a big mistake, but a deliberate one, to conflate the definition of sex, which shows that sex is indeed a binary, with the correlates of sex, which are bimodal and almost binary, but could be called “strongly bimodal.”
The “it’s complicated” argument floated above is made for only one purpose, and that purpose is outlined in the first sentence:
From the Secretary of State’s speech it is clear that this refers to the government’s increasing adoption of policies that put the lives and wellbeing of trans people at risk.
No, the “simplistic binary notion of sex”, which happens to be true, does NOT put the lives and wellbeing of trans people at risk. Biological truth doesn’t have the ability to do that. What would risk the lives and well being of trans people is true transphobia: the fear and hatred of trans people that could translate into mistreatment and denial of their fundamental rights. That’s a question of morality, not biological fact.
And this bit is wrong in three ways:
Additionally, up to 1.7% of the population have Differences in Sex Development (DSD) or are intersex 11–13. To appeal to “biological sex” as the Secretary of State has done is over-simplistic, unscientific and exclusionary rhetoric under the pretence of objectivity 14. Furthermore, as the Secretary of State acknowledges, biological sex and personal/social gender identity are distinct. At least 0.5% of the UK population identify as a different gender to their sex registered at birth 15. Combining DSD, intersex, non-binary and trans communities, this represents nearly 1.5 million people in the UK that the government implies should be excluded from participating in biomedical, sports science and other research.
Once again, we see exaggeration of the proportion of people who don’t fall into the sex binary. It is at most 0.018%, not 1.7%, the latter a frequently-seen and erroneous figure based on wonky data from Anne Fausto-Sterling, a figure that even she retracted later.
Second, trans people are not the same as intersexes. Trans people are, most often, people of one of the two sexes who want to assume the persona of a member of the other sex. The sex binary has nothing to do with invalidating trans people; in fact, trans people, being of one sex but wishing to be of the other, demonstrate the binary nature of sex.
Third, except for participation in sports, I don’t understand how the 0.018% of people who are true intersex, or people of different genders (a social construct) are “excluded from participating in biomedical and other research.” Perhaps the tiny number of true hermaphrodites would be excluded from being in the category “male” or “female”, but they could still be subject to biomedical research. As for sports, well, transwomen should not compete with biological women in athletics, and that’s the one “exclusion” I support.
The people who are circulating this letter are damaging science by denying scientific truth, as well as using outmoded data that we all know is wrong. They also damage the debate over trans people by pretending that their treatment must somehow depend on whether there’s a sex binary. Once again I’ll say it: the binary nature of human sex has no bearing on the debate about the rights and treatment of trans people.
To say that the sex binary is “overly simplistic” or “scientifically illiterate” is to brand oneself an idiot. If this reflects the conventional wisdom of the Labour Party (for the attacks above are on positions apparently espoused by two Tories), then Labour is in trouble. First they got in trouble by being anti-Semitic, now they’ll get into more trouble by being anti-biology.
The deterioration of science is happening so fast… It’s terrible to see.
I found a “new” insight to “gender” outside of linguistics. (It is of course not new nor mine). This is mostly from a previous comment:
Originally, I set the 1960s as the origin of the development of “gender identity” from Robert Stoller and John Money – as Kathleen Stock explains in Material Girls, and observed in Google Ngram plots.
But the notion of “gender” goes back further : check these excerpts, from The Kybalion (1908) – sorry this is long – I think it makes sense of a lot things:
Chapter 13:
“The great Seventh Hermetic Principle—the Principle of Gender—embodies the truth that there is Gender manifested in everything—that the Masculine and Feminine principles are ever present and active in all phases of phenomena, on each and every plane of life. At this point we think it well to call your attention to the fact that Gender, in its Hermetic sense, and Sex in the ordinarily accepted use of the term, are not the same.”
Chapter 14:
“The student turns back the pages of occult history, and away back in the dim beginnings of occult teachings he finds references to the ancient Hermetic doctrine of the Principle of Gender on the Mental Plane—the manifestation of Mental Gender. And examining further he finds that the ancient philosophy took cognizance of the phenomenon of the “dual mind,” and accounted for it by the theory of Mental Gender.”
“The “I” represents the Masculine Principle of Mental Gender—the “Me” represents the Female Principle. The “I” represents the Aspect of Being; the “Me” the Aspect of Becoming. You will notice that the Principle of Correspondence operates on this plane just as it does upon the great plane upon which the creation of Universes is performed. The two are similar in kind, although vastly different in degree. “As above, so below; as below, so above.” “
See the whole thing, esp. chapter 13 “Gender” and chapter 14 “Mental Gender”.
What are the chances, that Stoller and Money simply grabbed “gender” from a weird, obscure cult book from 1908 – The Kybalion, because nobody would notice? Or Judith Butler read The Kybalion? I’d say almost 100%.
It is hermetic alchemy which goes back to antiquity. The “as above (…)” is a dead giveaway. “Gender” is literally cult doctrine – or in The Three Initiates own words, “occult”.
The Kybalion
The Three Initiates
The Yogi Publication Society
Masonic Temple
Chicago, IL
1908, 1912, 1936, 1940
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Kybalion
+1
All in one piece we have a comprehensive example of the many fallacies that have been put forward, and a very complete and to-the-point rebuttal of them.
I wonder if this argument might work: Imagine a parallel universe where everything is exactly the same as it is in this universe, only there are no people who identify as trans (and lets’ face it, that is really the fuel that stokes all of this moral panic). In this universe, do you think that there would be a whiffle of a movement to re-write 200 years of solid biological consensus in order to make a word salad about what is biological sex?
Yes, it’s a bingo card of trans rights activists’ fallacious claims. How embarrassing for the signatories when this nonsense is finally over.
On the topic of exaggeration, regarding this claim:
“At least 0.5% of the UK population identify as a different gender to their sex registered at birth …”
This comes from the 2021 UK Census. And it is notable that the “identify as a different gender” fraction was much higher for ethnic minorities whose first language is not English. This suggests they simply weren’t understanding the question properly. Indeed, that question *was* hard to understand, even for a native English speaker, unless they were fully up with “culture war” terminology, which many people aren’t.
So, this figure is utterly unreliable.
Scott Alexander once introduced the “lizardman constant”: there is a small fraction of people (in the example he gave, around 4%) who will give nonsensical answers to any given poll question (in his case, “is Earth ruled by lizardmen in disguise?”) Some people are trolls, some are clueless, some make honest mistakes when filling out the form, and maybe some are serious (source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ )
So, any number from a poll which is on the order of one percent or less should be taken with a massive dose of NaCl.
I agree that ‘polling’ is not the ideal way to acquire knowledge.
I guess adequate polling is an art a as well as a science all by itself. And even when it is done really well, it is not really very ‘hard’ data. I pity the social sciences they have to work with generally inadequate data. It makes firm conclusions so much more difficult and wobbly.
Sadly, these wobbly results are used more confidently by those that have an agenda (and I mean that from ‘left’ or ‘right)’ than is warranted by the methods used.
If you try to trace the letter, it looks as if one of the people most involved is Katharine Hubbard. See her website. Her field is Biology Education, i.e. teaching of those who will teach high school biology. Like much of the pushing of wokeness, schools and departments of education are particularly prominent.
Surely these people are looking at the wrong population for their evidence. If we look back at our ancestors, as far back as millions of years before we were primates, every one of our ancestors has had exactly two parents, one producing eggs, one producing copious sperm. No exceptions in perhaps 10^12 individuals.
Sad. This is one of the reasons that Labour keeps losing, which will also happen to the Democrats if they make this kind of thing a campaign issue. Both need to explain the issue as clearly as Dr. Coyne has.
The Green Party, which should be focused on science and the environment, is also a massive disappointment on the sex and gender issue: https://archive.ph/MNm2G
For better or worse (in this case worse), the Green Party is very much an upscale, highly-educated, elite outfit. For people like this, gender-ideology is a religion. Worse, a religion that takes precedence over all other religions.
I completely agree that this is a damaging letter and I expect that the conflation of the definition of sex with its correlates is purposefully designed to mislead. Shameful, if true.
That said, the distinction between how something is *defined* and how a particular state is *recognized* is one that is commonly mixed up. The distinction between the definition of sex (based on gamete size) and how one recognizes a person’s sex (the “correlates” of sex) is a hard one for people to understand and is a distinction that needs amplification. The same occurs with the definition of species (as actually or potentially interbreeding populations) vs. how one recognizes species, e.g., by morphology, behavior, chromosomes, etc. Lots of people blur these distinctions.
Politicians and activists take advantage of the public’s lack of discrimination, but we can improve the situation by continuing to offer clarifications for the public. This is the case for biological sex vs. its correlates, for the definition of species vs. the recognition of species, and for the difference between equality (of opportunity) and equity (of outcomes). All of these are purposely blurred for political gain, and we need to speak out about them.
Perhaps … if we mistake one animal (e.g., dog) for another (e.g., cat), that doesn’t make it a cat.
@Norman totally agree. Ideologues get a lot of traction from deliberately confusing the ontology of sex (gametes) versus the epistemology of sex (chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia). The latter is what the letter writers mean by “multiple levels of ‘biological sex’”. This is pure obfuscation, and anyone who argues this way is not a serious person or an ally of “trans” people.
Yes! Always with the epistemology instead of ontology.
And then they wiggle around in the polysemy of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ enough to conflate them.
Every time.
“Reductive and discredited biological models have been used to underpin historical and contemporary human rights abuses through scientific racism and eugenics […]”
Iron Law of Woke Projection predicts “scientific racism” and “eugenics” would be forthcoming – but the good kind because it will be Woke.
I’m not sure what the difference is between “racism” and “scientific racism” – or “scientific eugenics” – suggestive of a gnostic wizard insight that ordinary people cannot discern… as if “racism” needs to be broken into categories sorted by increasing reprehensibility…
Maybe the changes the conservatives will be making aren’t all changes you want, either. They *are* conservatives after all, not liberals who think the “progressive” left has shorted out its brains and abandoned women.
Conservatives have a different and broader definition than liberals do, from what I read.
What are their ideas more concretely? How would they go about this project of “kicking woke ideology out” and “safeguarding scientific research”, and what’s included in “denial of biology” and “political correctness”, according to them?
How do you offset the quote?
By using blockquote HTML tags. I don’t know which tags are allowed, but if you see something in a comment you want to do yourself, you can look at the page source to see how it was done.
Testing…
thanks!
^Conservatives have a different and broader definition of “woke” than liberals do …
It’s interesting to me that key contentions of queer theory vis a vis biology could be true if creationism is true since it attempts to treat human biology as a creation apart from all others.
At heart, a denial of evolution, as does blank-slatism.
The letter makes a lot of mistakes in a small space, as dissected thoroughly.
Transgender people should certainly not be excluded from biomedical research. Quite the contrary. The scientific quality of studies that claim benefit from these cross-sex hormonal treatments (and puberty blockers) is uniformly abysmally poor. It would be good to see more researchers and subjects step up to the plate and do some placebo-controlled double-blinded randomized controlled trials.
“It would be good to see more researchers and subjects step up to the plate and do some placebo-controlled double-blinded randomized controlled trials.”
Mmm.
I can imagine the post-modernist alchemy on the above bolded words already – there’s a whole career ahead!
The knowledge revolution is just beginning.
But the very last thing some people want is actual science on the issue. The safety and reversibility of GnRH antagonists is just like our residential school mass graves: an unassailed fact as long as no one digs.
“Transgender people should certainly not be excluded from biomedical research.”
Let me (partially) disagree. If transwomen were treated as women (in research) confusing or invalid results might a consequence. If trans people are treated as members of their biological sex and they are not on puberty blockers / HRT and they have had no gender surgery of any kind, then their should not be problem. However, those are big ifs.
I was being ironic, Frank. Transgender people should be recruited as transgender people to research studies trying to find out if gender-affirming care is more beneficial and less harmful than talk therapy. This remains completely unknown except by glowing testimonials from people who say their lives were saved, and anguished testimonials from people who say their lives were ruined.
You are of course entirely correct that allowing transgender people who have been castrated or who are getting hormonal manipulation to be subjects in other types of research, e.g., heart attack, stroke, arthritis, and cancer, raises problems for the validity of the research. There is no human right to be a subject in research. And it should go without saying that subjects must be enrolled under their sex, not their gender. Both these issues have to be confronted squarely with granting agencies and IRBs.
Clinical research nowadays has to recruit women as well as men in order that the results can be generalized to women in clinical practice, which is a good thing. But this admirable goal is defeated if many of the women recruited are actually men.
Sorry, I missed the irony. My fault.
It may have been happening for years. Back in 1995 I was doing database work for the National Cancer Institute at NIH. Reviewing their existing databases I came across an item labeled “Gender”. I replaced that with “Sex”, as that is clearly the relevant biological attribute for a medical study. I was told in no uncertain terms by the then director of NCI that “Gender” was indeed the attribute they recorded. At the time I thought it was merely a labeling issue as I saw no other values than “M” and “F” in the data. But it is now clear that they would have put any enrolled transwomen into the “F” category and vice versa. I don’t know how many doctors then would have enrolled such patients in cancer studies, but every such U.S. study in at least the past 18 years may have reported unreliable statistics on the prevalence of disease and the effectiveness of therapies.
I doubt that the numbers can have been large enough to have clinical significance, but the NCI had no way to tell and probably still doesn’t.
“To say that the sex binary is “overly simplistic” or “scientifically illiterate” is to brand oneself an idiot.” I felt much better after reading that.
I can think of at least one once-respected professor of biology and ‘freethinking’ blogger whose ears should be incandescent right about now.
For an idea of where the enthusiasm for “debunking the entire concept of biological sex” (ref. upon request) comes from, try a search for :
“supremely intelligent writing”.
I tried on Duck Duck Go and my local public library computer system. Maybe Google produces different results.
Why would writing be described that way? What roles might such a figure have? Hmmm…
Test for sub, seems to be working.
As I have commented before, the existence of Turner, Klinefelter, and Down Syndrome individuals shows that 46 is not the only chromosome number of the human species. So It is reductive, overly simplistic, and out-dated to refer to human chromosome number at all. Chromosomes are evidently on a spectrum, and their number and segregation are just too complicated to be summed up in a karyotype. Besides, it is denigrating and therefore harmful to the karyodivergent population, and it minoritizes them. Moreover, the very word “segregation”, used so often in Genetics and Cytology, has a most unsavory
history and associations. We have a lot to do to reform language along Progressive lines.
“Perhaps the tiny number of true hermaphrodites would be excluded from being in the category “male” or “female”…” – J. Coyne
According to Wikipedia, there are only ~500 known cases of humans who have both testicular tissue and ovarian tissue in their body; so they are a tiny minority even among the tiny minority of individuals who have some form of DSD.
Moreover, no human hermaphrodite is known to produce both sperm and eggs. (Correct me if I’m wrong!)
The only catch there is that a person with ovotestis (the “progressive” moniker for true hermaphroditism) might have external genitalia that caused her to be observed female at birth but is later found to have, in the ovotestis, cell lines that produce spermatozoa while the ovarian lines don’t produce oocytes. Some cases of ovotestis arise as the chimeric fusion of two zygotes, one XX and one XY. Depending on which cell line predominates in which organs such discordance might occur. (Some chimeras are perfectly normal phenotypically. The state, and the different state of mosaicism, may be discovered only by chance, in 23andMe testing for example.)
Every patient is unique. In medicine, anything that can happen, will happen if you wait long enough (and if the affected zygotes are viable to be carried to term, or at least to where miscarriage can be recognized.) Colin Wright advises, and I agree, that most people refuting the notion that sex is a spectrum should refuse to be drawn into these “coin-on-edge” error scenarios because they are posed as “gotcha”s or “just asking questions”. For a doctor treating a patient who has a DSD, though, the coin on edge is not an abstract statistical concept but a flesh-and-blood human in front of him. To that patient, it might not matter so much what gametes he harbours inside (if any.) Rather, his (and parents’) concerns might be whether he will have sexual function, whether he can stand up to pee, and what changes in body and mind will take place at puberty. Is there a risk of cancer in the malformed or ectopic gonad?
It is possible that such an individual will feel male at puberty or earlier because of natural testosterone and pre-natal brain conditioning despite having superficially female external genitalia. She may have been raised as a girl for convenience or out of ignorance of the diagnosis. Well, so be it. There are far worse misfortunes that befall those who lose the genetic lottery and have developmental or metabolic disorders. You can see how the theoretical existence of such a person is used by gender activists as a Swiss Army knife to prize open the armour of the sex binary in order to stick their crowbars in to admit 57 genders. That’s why they bring up DSDs, not to improve care and support of those affected.
That’s why the letter from the “science-savvy” UK liberals is so wrong-headed.
See “Self-fertilization in human: having a male embryo without a father” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20452130/). Of course, these conditions are very, very rare.
“Group of “science-savvy” UK liberals urge denial of the sex binary” – That is what results from constructing a pseudo-science such as (trans)gender studies around an ideology. (I’m not saying that there is no genuinely scientific psychology/sociology of sex.)
Bravo. Well written.
“The sex binary has nothing to do with invalidating trans people; in fact, trans people, being of one sex but wishing to be of the other, demonstrate the binary nature of sex.”
Let me disagree (to some extent). As a logical statement, the above statement is entirely correct. However…. The trans lobby has chosen to make ambiguity about sex, a key part of the their justification. I don’t know why (see below). However, allegation of a ‘sexual spectrum’ show up all over the place as part of the gender-ideology thesis.
My sense of it, is that this is part of the PoMo rejection of reality. For them, reality (as in the sexual binary) does not exist. 2 + 2 = 4 might seem like a fact to most people (it is ‘true’). To them, it is a statement of power.
“It is at most 0.018%”
My guess is that the actual percentage is much lower (but not 0.0%). For example, CAIS persons (note the use of ‘persons’) look entirely female. However, they are not female. They are 46,XY males with a defective SRY gene. They have no ovaries, Fallopian tubes, uterus, etc. They do have a vagina (which may be short in some cases). However, CAIS is quite rare (fortunately). One estimate is 1:20,400 male (defined in this case by 46,XY) births.
My guess is that most of the 0.018% are either male or female. It may not be possible to determine (correctly) sex from genitalia at birth. However, chromosome tests and ultrasounds should provide additional information.
Let me rise in defense of the British Labor party. For the record, I am not an advocate or member or an authorized spokesperson for the British Labor party. However, let me quote from Atlantic.
“Starmer was asked to define woman. He responded simply, “An adult female.””
Just for interest sake, I asked Bard, Google’s AI, the question and the following are its responses:
Q – How many sexes are there?
Bard A – There are two sexes: male and female. This is based on the production of gametes, or reproductive cells. Male gametes, or sperm, are small and motile, while female gametes, or eggs, are large and non-motile.
However, it is important to note that sex is not a binary. There are people who are born with intersex conditions, which means that they have sex characteristics that do not fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Intersex people may have a combination of male and female sex characteristics, or they may have ambiguous sex characteristics.
Intersex conditions are relatively common, affecting approximately 1 in every 100 people. However, they are often underdiagnosed and misunderstood.
Q – If there’s only 2 sexes, as you point out, then how can sex not be a binary?
Bard A – Sex is often thought of as a binary, with only two options: male or female. However, this is not always the case. Some people are born with intersex conditions, which means that they have sex characteristics that do not fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Intersex people may have a combination of male and female sex characteristics, or they may have ambiguous sex characteristics. They may also have different genetic or hormonal makeup than a typical male or female person.
Intersex conditions are relatively common, affecting approximately 1 in every 100 people. However, they are often underdiagnosed and misunderstood.
Q – So there is male, female, and ambiguous? Three sexes? Because an intersex person may have male and female characteristics, still 2 sexes although in the same person.
Bard A – I stand corrected. There are two biological sexes: male and female. Intersex people have biological characteristics that do not fit neatly into the female or male category. Their biological sex may be ambiguous.
So while there are two sexes, there are people who may not fit perfectly into either category. Intersex people are often underdiagnosed and misunderstood. It is important to respect intersex people’s identities, regardless of whether they identify as male, female, or something else.
I apologize for my previous response, which was inaccurate. I am still under development and learning to be more accurate and inclusive in my responses. I appreciate your feedback and will use it to improve my performance in the future.
Google’s AI is wrong. Ther are NOT 1 in 100 people who are intersex. As I’ve said repeatedly, the figure is AT MOST 0.018%, or one out of 5600 people. Have you read that. Is your point that sex isn’t binary because of the fake figure of 1%, or are you showing that Bard is wrong?
The higher numbers include all persons who deviate from the platonic idea of male or female. For example, I fall into the 1%/1.7% group. I have never thought of myself as ‘intersex’. However, using Anne Fausto-Sterling’s rather broad definition, I am. I would limit ‘intersex’ to persons born with ambiguous genitalia, the ‘wrong’ genitalia, and both types of genitalia (classic hermaphrodites). The numbers for these DSD conditions are far lower. Does ChatGPT / Bard have a clue? No. Because these biomedical details are really only known to a few specialists. Worse, the far more numerous and influential trans lobby has gone out it’s way to muddy the waters. ChapGPT / Bard reflect that.
To use a sad/funny example, I once typed ‘Ana Kasparian’ into Google. I got back ‘Birthing Person’. Why? Because that is the way Google works. Google has fixed this, by the way.
Another note in this context, is that intersex people have a sex (male or female). Parents, Doctors, and Nurses may not be able to tell from external genitalia (or worse, reach the wrong conclusion). However, intersex people have a sex. Genetic testing and/or ultrasounds may be needed to determine sex. However, it is almost always one of the two. Note, chimeras and CAIS persons are very rare exceptions. Presumably, a person with CAIS and intersex would be exception to this rule. That combination (which I have never seen documented), must be very, very, very rare.