Despite the acceptance by biologists of the fact that all animals have only two sexes, and that include humans, people keep insisting that there is a “spectrum of sex”, especially in humans. The “spectrum” assertion is made for purely ideological reasons: to buttress the feelings of those who don’t feel that they are either male or female, including trans people. (The weird thing about the trans issue, however, is that transitions are made between characteristics of one sex, males, and another, females, and vice versa—an implicit admission of a sex binary.
There are other arguments for a human sex “spectrum” based on things like chromosomes and genital configuration, but in the end biological sex is defined by gamete type, as I’ve noted repeatedly. Recognizing biological sex, however, is often done by looking at traits like genitals or chromosome that are usually (but not invariably) correlated with gamete type.
The Definitions: Males have small mobile gametes (sperm) and females large immobile ones (eggs). This definition was not confected to produce some kind of nonexistent binary; rather, it is what biologists observe in nature, and the gamete-based definition not only places nearly everyone (exceptions are roughly, 0.018%, and don’t represent “other sexes,” but rather developmental anomalies), byut also is immensely useful in understanding a lot about biology, like sexual selection. Luana Maroja and I, in our paper “The ideological subversion of biology“, discuss the sex binary as one of the prime targets of biology ideologues.
But other people, including Colin Wright, Carole Hooven, and Emma Hilton, have spent much more time than Luana and I defending the sex binary and the biological definition of sex—not on political grounds but, well, because the sex binary is not only real, but immensely useful. If we let ideology corrupt biology, it distorts the whole purpose and interpretation of studying nature.
But I’ve said this many times before. Today, being under the weather, I call your attention to two articles and a video confirming and defending the sex binary. The first is by Eve Kurilova at the website The Distance, and I love the title (below). If you’ve read here, you’ve probably heard about clownfish (viz., Nemo) being used as an example of the “sex spectrum”. But they’re not. What happens, as we all know by now, is that there are males and females in clownfish, and males can change into females under certain circumstances. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:
In a group of anemonefish [clownfish], a strict dominance hierarchy exists. The largest and most aggressive female is found at the top. Only two anemonefish, a male and a female, in a group reproduce – through external fertilization. Anemonefish are protandrous sequential hermaphrodites, meaning they develop into males first, and when they mature, they become females. If the female anemonefish is removed from the group, such as by death, one of the largest and most dominant males becomes a female. The remaining males move up a rank in the hierarchy. Clownfish live in a hierarchy, like hyenas, except smaller and based on size not sex, and order of joining/birth.
Note that the words “male” and “female” are the only ones used. When a dominant female dies, one male, in a process called “sequential hermaphroditism”, turns into the alpha female, changing phenotype and ability to produce gametes. An individual that was a male, producing sperm, now changes its reproductive system to produce eggs, becoming a female. There are still two sexes, but one type can become another. But even that doesn’t somehow buttress humans of different gender, as it doesn’t show the existence of a sex spectrum. And, as Kurilova says anyway, “humans are not fish”, so even if the clownfish did demonstrate a sex spectrum, producing novel types of gametes (they don’t), it wouldn’t say anything about Homo sapiens. Click to read:
Kurilova (and Colin Wright) seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time correcting a misguided individual named Ian Copeland, who tweeted (or Xd) this:
Here we go again. (There’s some question about Copeland’s “Ph.D.” designation, but you can read that in the posts. At any rate, Copeland was corrected but refused to give in. Here are two responses from Zachary Elliott, who works at the Paradox Institute and has written three books on sex and gender as well as produced several videos on biological sex:
Another correction from Colin and one from Heather Heying:
And of course the wag Gad Saad weighs in, asking if Copeland was joking (he wasn’t):
These sex-spectrum addicts are like creationists: when they can’t convince others with data, they invite a “debate”. And so Ian Copeland set up a nearly three-hour debate with his detractors.You can listen to it by clicking below, but I’m not interested. Colin jumps into the fray from the outset, while Copeland comes off like, well, somebody that’s unhinged:
Kurilova ends her short piece this way:
It’s obvious that this is not an individual to take seriously, and many are recommending not to interact with him to hinder his engagement farming. I am inclined to agree, which is why I limited my own involvement to a couple of subtweets.
But I do feel like the response was very useful to show others how to deal with unscientific claims like the one Copeland was making. As I said, this is probably not the last time we will hear of someone trying to use the sex-changing abilities of fish to spread lies about human biology and call others bigots. The clear and concise rebuttals from people like Colin Wright can serve as an example of how to respond.
So, no, just because fish can change sex, it doesn’t mean that sex isn’t binary. And just because fish can change sex, it doesn’t mean that humans can. Humans are not fish.
But the ever-energetic Colin, who seems to think that Copeland has an open mind, recounts the debate in a post on his website. (Colin must have a masochistic streak!). Clicl below to reads Colin’s account his own site, Reality’s Last Stand. Click below to read:
I won’t go into the details, but do want to emphasize that Colin refutes Copeland’s claim, which is common, that sex is defined by genes or chromosome constitution. It isn’t, though of course in some groups sex is correlated with genes or chromosome constitution. (Howeveer, in some reptiles sex is determined by temperature but is still defined by gametes.) I’ll quote Colin briefly. As usual, his arguments are clear:
Put plainly, “genetic sex” is not a distinct type of sex at all; it is a convenient term or shorthand to denote that a person or cell contains the sex chromosomes that typically cause a [male/female] to develop. For a geneticist, knowing this about a cell culture might be useful if they are investigating sex differences or wish to control for cellular sex differences as a potential confound in an experiment. Additionally, medical professionals often describe sex in multifaceted terms because examining a person’s chromosomes, hormones, genitals, gonads, and their alignment aids in diagnosing potential issues along this biological chain. The use of terms like “genetic sex,” “hormonal sex,” and “genital sex,” is driven by practicality, not because they represent legitimate, separate types of sex.
“Genetic sex” is not an alternative type of sex. Sex only refers to the type of gamete an organism has the function to produce.
This becomes obvious when we look at other animals, such as turtles, that do not use chromosomes to guide their sex development. In the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), the sex of their offspring is not determined by a genetic coin flip, but by the thermostat setting. Eggs incubated below 27.7°C develop into males, and eggs incubated above 31°C develop into females.
Discussing humans as “genetically male or female” is as illogical as referring to a turtle’s “incubation temperature sex.” In experiments, it might be convenient to label incubators set below 28°C as “male” and those above 31°C as “female,” but there’s nothing inherently “male” or “female” about these temperatures. We may use terms like “male temperatures” for those under 28°C and “female temperatures” for those over 31°C as shorthand for “temperatures that typically lead to male or female development.” However, a turtle’s sex is ultimately defined by the gamete it produces, not the temperature of its early days in the egg. For instance, if a female turtle popped out of an incubator set below 28°C, we wouldn’t say she has a female “gametic sex” and a male “temperature sex.” She would simply be female, and the researchers would likely be intrigued to learn how she developed at a temperature typically associated with male development.
In a similar vein, the Blue Groper (Achoerodus viridis) is a fish species characterized by males that are blue and females that are brown. In the field, it may be useful for researchers to use color as a quick and accurate proxy when recording a fish’s sex. However, it would be incorrect to claim that Blue Gropers have a “color sex,” as there is nothing inherently “male” about being blue or “female” about being brown.
And he quotes philosopher Paul Griffiths (my bolding)
Like chromosomal definitions of sex, phenotypic definitions are not really ‘definitions’—they are operational criteria for sex determination underpinned by the gametic definition of sex and valid only for one species or group of species.
Copeland won’t give in, and even produced this tweet below. Look at that huge area of overlap, though individuals of indeterminate sex are only 1 in 5600! Plus intersexes are not “third, four, and fifth sexes,” and so on.
Finally, Colin just put up a 35-minute lecture on the nature of the sex binary, refuting arguments like that of Copeland and P. Z. My*rs, who’s gotten on the woke “sex-spectrum” bandwagon but should know better. You can go to Wright’s lecture by clicking Dawkins’s approving tweet below, or see it to Colin’s website here.
The attempt of ideologically motivated individuals to change the biological definition of sex, trying to turn it into a spectrum, is one of the most notable examples of how biology gets corrupted by wokeness. I’m grateful to those like Colin and others who spend much of their time correcting claims of ideologues and educating the public. As for correcting off-the-rails individuals like Copeland, well, that’s like like trying to change the mind of a creationist. It won’t work unless the person has an open mind, and creationists (and “sex spectrum” loons) don’t have open minds: they are all balled up in religion or ideology.
Superbly clear & totally correct lecture by Colin Wright @SwipeWright. There are only 2 sexes & they're defined by gamete size. Convoluted attempts to deny binary sex are like Ptolemaic epicycles.https://t.co/LS3PG54JBi
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 30, 2024
I’m sorry to say that ChatGPT falls down badly on this. When I asked it to “define sex”, this is what I got. Note that gametes are not mentioned.
“Sex refers to the biological attributes that distinguish male and female organisms, typically in the context of reproductive structures and functions. In most species, including humans, sex is determined by the presence of certain sex chromosomes. In humans, males typically have XY chromosomes, while females have XX chromosomes.
Biological aspects of sex include reproductive organs, secondary sexual characteristics (such as breasts and facial hair), and hormonal profiles. Sex plays a fundamental role in reproduction, as it involves the combination of genetic material from male and female parents to produce offspring.
It’s important to note that while sex is traditionally viewed as a binary concept (male or female), there are individuals who may not fit neatly into these categories due to intersex variations, which involve a combination of male and female biological features. Additionally, gender is a separate concept from sex and refers to the social, cultural, and psychological attributes associated with being male or female in a given society.”
ChatGPT is depressingly woke. I found it extremely difficult to even get it to stop using the ideological phrase “sex assigned at birth”
How can a tool producing an abysmal output be “falling down badly” when the expectation of that tools output is to perform badly. Given the tools work process (finding a lot of examples of the words in it’s “challenge” occurring close together in various texts on the Internet ; then trying to meld those text examples into a vaguely coherent “response”), it’s best expectation of results is going to be approximately the average of it’s inputs.
While there is a moderate amount of challenge to the LLMs (Large Language Models) use of existing online artwork (and thus violating copyright), I’ve never heard of a challenge to them for scanning the archives of a major academic publisher. Which suggests that they’ve avoided that challenge, by avoiding the challengeful (in the legal sense) area. And that is seriously going to worsen the average output of LLMs (such as ChatGPT).
I’d argue that ChatGPT is performing as badly as expected, given the technical nature of the question. For an essay on the influence of spandrels on jockstrap construction, I might be disappointed, but even that has too many technical aspects to have much hope for the LLM.
The argument that “humans are not fish” overlooks the species spectrum that units
humans and fish, exemplified by Esther Williams. And besides, that argument is
hurtful to those of us who feel an inner piscine identity.
It’s also factually incorrect. If you follow a cladistic phylogeny, humans (and mammals, and tetrapods such as “reptiles”, amphibians and birds) are within the clade of “fish”, while not in the clade of “sharks (skates and rays”. We’re also gnathostomes (jawed vertebrates), craniates (skulled vertebrates) and obviously, vertebrates. But by a grouping of shared characteristics, we’re fish.
We’re not teleost fish (by far the biggest group) and deciphering the fossils (and relict species) of the lobe-finned fishes, lung fishes and others (I’d have to re-read the monographs to refresh my memory on the terminology) is still somewhat fraught and open to argument. But we nest somewhere within that clade of peculiar fishes that raised their heads from the water 320-odd million years ago, and tried to crawl to a less stagnant pond.
Not that it’s a good argument for people who still struggle to recognise that humans behave like animals because we are animals.
Here’s what I got when I queried ChatGPT:
Is biological sex defined by gamete types?
ChatGPT
Biological sex is typically defined by the types of gametes an organism produces. In most sexually reproducing species, including humans, there are two primary biological sexes: male and female.
Male: Typically produces small, mobile gametes called sperm.
Female: Typically produces larger, non-motile gametes called eggs or ova.
The combination of these gametes during fertilization results in the development of a new organism. It’s important to note that while this binary system holds true for many species, there are exceptions and variations in nature, such as hermaphroditic organisms that produce both types of gametes.
In humans, biological sex is also associated with other physical and physiological characteristics, including reproductive organs, secondary sexual characteristics, and hormone levels. However, it’s essential to recognize that biological sex is not always a strict binary, as there can be variations and complexities, such as intersex conditions. Additionally, gender identity is a separate concept from biological sex, and it refers to an individual’s internal sense of their own gender, which may or may not align with their assigned sex at birth.
My comment: Hermaphrodites are not a third sex, and in humans there’s never been one fertile as both a male and a female. In some species they are, but they only produce sperm and eggs. As for it not being a “strict” binary, well, 1 exception out of 5600 people is strict enough for me.
Mentioning gender here is irrelevant, but of course we all know that ChatGPT is woke.
You can get any answer you want depending on how you ask the question. I can ask it a question to which it will respond that sex in humans is a spectrum.
Unfortunately large language models aren’t really intelligent, they’ve just seen huge amounts of words relating to various topics, and their programming teaches them to (re)string those together into sentences that ‘seem’ correct. They’re effectively very powerful bullshit generators that often do a passable job.
Also, clearly, a thumb has been put on the scale on certain issues.
IF question asked about sex
THEN add bit about intersex and gender identity even if it’s irrelevant to the question, because only evil bigots would ask a question about sex, and they need to be educated to the enlightened mode of thinking
Glad to see this, as I was “watching” it develop on eXtwitter.
1. I’d like to emphasize the importance of :
“… defending the sex binary and the biological definition of sex—not on political grounds …”
UNESCO:
“Sexuality is linked to power.”
p. 17 in
International technical guidance
on sexuality education – An evidence-informed approach
2018
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000260770
The term is “sexuality”, yes, but there’s a certain relationship to sex. I just note this argument and source, and it’s central role in sex education and politics – because it is a topic all to itself.
2: Should we make it a drinking game, every time we read “social construct”? I could use it! I left a comment on the idea of “social construct” just today on the Hili Dialogue. Also a topic all to itself.
3. The terms gender and mental gender can be found defined in the 1908 publication The Kybalion – an “occult” doctrine that elaborates on Hermetic alchemy (also free online now). The seventh of a total seven Hermetic principles is … drum roll…
gender.
Quick note :
The UNESCO book, p.49, has (bold my own):
“Key Concept 3 : Understanding Gender :
The Social Construction of
Gender and Gender Norms”
… to anyone playing at home,
DRINK!
I’ll confess that I am envious of people who are born with full, complete, and valid knowledge and understanding of reality. The rest of us ordinary people have to acquire our partial, incomplete, and often invalid knowledge and understanding through social processes such as teaching/learning and research. The social construction of knowledge is a drag: time-consuming, fraught with possibilities for error (even manipulation), and only partial at best. How nice it must be to have all of knowledge present at birth.
Right, it is true that everything is at some level social.
The question is whether it could be any other way – or, in the language Daniel Dennett uses (vide infra), “trivial“.
That would put social construct right into the big bag of Deepities.
Following Daniel Dennett’s idea of “Deepity” – any idea/thing that is true but trivial.
“Right, it is true that everything is at some level social.”
“Knowledge” of anything is social. The reason that might not be a trivial insight is that the social processes by which most of us acquire knowledge leave that knowledge open to error, manipulation, and even deception. In the context of knowledge of “sex” and “gender,” for example, a good deal has been written about the implicit politics imbedded in such knowledge – Barker-Benfield’s classic book “Horrors of the Half-Known Life” is a good example of the use of biological knowledge to justify the treatment of women in 19th century England and the U.S. Emily Martin’s more recent work on the language used in medical textbooks to describe menstruation and menopause – to create knowledge about menstruation and menopause among physicians – is equally insightful.
This blog is titled “Why Evolution is True.” But millions of people do not believe that evolution is true – they may even insist that evolution is imaginary. Prof. Coyne, like many biologists, often writes as though presenting more facts about evolution will persuade those people that they are wrong. But the notion of social construction urges us to consider what other issues lead people to deny that evolution is true, such that “facts” can be dismissed as contingent, changeable. A biologist who devotes a good bit of time to the issue might not consider the notion of “social construction” to be trivial when confronted with the problem of persuading students or lay people of the reality of evolution.
Part of the problem with discussions of “social construction” is one of language domains. A technical concept in sociology (anthropologists tend to prefer the similar notion of “cultural construction”) that opens consideration of the whole range of the sociology of knowledge, including the political economy of knowledge, the aesthetics of knowledge, etc, has been borrowed by other domains and transformed into a kind of simplistic dismissal: a “social construct” is something that lacks any empirical reality apart from our belief in it. But that is not the way the notion is used in the discipline that introduced it, and in which it is a useful way to think about the sociology of knowledge. It probably has less day-to-day use for a bench scientist than for a sociologist studying bench scientists (think Wolgar and Latour), but that is not grounds for dismissing it.
Appreciate that reply – so I take it to be an abuse of language like saying “evolution of cars”, or “quantum mechanics means anything can happen”.
This is a discussion I’m trying not to overdo per da roolz – but I’d ask as a way to conclude my part :
What thing/idea isn’t socially constructed?
Akin to social justice as applied to a person stranded on a desert island – how can justice be asocial? (Yes, that’s a Thomas Sowell idea).
Thanks, cheers.
Who is this Ian Copeland, PhD? I’m always suspicious of people who advertise their degrees, especially when they don’t give the field in which they get it. A Ph.D. in physics, e.g., gives no knowledge of biology.
Have a look at the comments on his degree in Eva’s and Colin’s articles.
Anne Fausto-Sterling (the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University), in 1993, published a paper entitled “The Five Sexes” [The Sciences (March/April 1993): 20–24].
So people who claim that adopting a non-binary view of sex pays off by yielding new scientific insights (one of these people is the Princeton University anthropologist Agustín Fuentes) have had, at least, about 30 years time to produce these insights. Where are these insights?
Well, we know that the spectrum view of sex has gained some currency for ideological reasons:
Daniel Williams: The marketplace of rationalizations. Economics & Philosophy, 39(1), March 2023 , pp. 99 – 123
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267121000389
Abstract:
Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation.
While not an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), I am pretty sure I recognize this (AI) entity as a 2020 incarnation of what was known as artificial neural networks (ANN) in the 1980’s as computers got faster and had vastly increasing amounts of memory available. I think even in the 80’s we recognized them as being simply massive dumb curve-fitting programs that produced results that reflect the data points that were the domain of fit and had roots in work by Minsky in the 50’s. I think today the data set is called a training set. So like with humans in Palestine, if the training set (school lessons for children in UNRWA schools) of data points says that the 1948 war never ended, then resulting adults will see a Palestinian refugee right of return; if the training set (k-12 history and civics in the U.S. South states) says the civil war lost cause is still in play, then Southern adults will believe that; and of course depending on the stories, papers, and the like that today’s ANN/AI are trained on and how a question is asked, it can focus on weighing the training data differently and can give sex as a binary or a spectrum I would think. It ain’t magic, so much as blind but weighted curve-fitting….and it ain’t intelligence in my book. But as I noted, I am not a subject matter expert these days.
Excellent piece, and kudos to all the biologists who are out there swimming against this unscientific tide.
I wanted to add to what Professor Coyne points out about people who are “trans:” they transition from characteristics of one sex, males, to another, females, and vice versa—an implicit admission of a sex binary.
I would add to that point that people who transition, especially when going from male to female, often adopt the most exaggerated and stereotypical characteristics of the opposite sex. Big breast implants, tons of makeup, high heels, sexy clothing, etc.
Their idea of what constitutes female-ness is very male-centric.
There is a very sharp discussion of this in Nora Ephron’s review of Jan Morris’s book Conundrum. Jan Morris, Ephron says, is perfectly awful at being a woman. What she has become is a girl. A forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl.
thanks — I just looked that up. I don’t think it could be published today.
I hadn’t really cottoned onto the detail about clown fish where only the dominant female and male are in a reproductive state.
But for my freshman bio class, I always ask a mini-research question about the Pixar movie Finding Nemo, where shortly after the movie opens Nemo’s mom is killed and his father is left grieving. I have them to look up reproduction in clown fishes, and tell me what would really happen afterwards!
Now there’s your remake!
How to put this in movie terms?
“Nemo, I am your mother!”
Forgive me, Common Core Bio was about thirty-five years ago, but Copeland says, “Sex (like all other traits) is not binary.” What traits would he be referring to? Is he thinking of things like hair and eye color? Are there other traits which are binary?
Anything that’s a classic Mendelian character, with 2 phenotypes. As Dawkins noted awhile back, this includes sex, at least in species with chromosomal sex determination!
Arguments about sex being a spectrum are addressing a perceived problem: though some males want to use the Women’s facilities, it’s possible to claim that these are female spaces and thus exclude them — and they don’t want people to be able do that. One solution is rationally dismantling the scientific distinction between male and female — though not enough to eliminate the distinction between men and women.
This distinction between men and women must still allow all individuals free rein on their behavior, preferences, style, and other attributes without typecasting. A “binary” in this sense is a strict rule that enforces the idea that there are no exceptions: women must be “womanly,”men must be “manly.”
Because they mix up sex and gender, they take the Bad type of binary from society and apply it to biology. Saying that human sexes consist of only two options is therefore like saying a male can’t be enough of a female to knit, wear dresses, or be nurturing and, likewise, that a male can’t be enough of a female to use the women’s bathroom.
A binary is only considered a legitimate binary if it’s a Platonic form of a broad-based perfect ideal which includes everything, everywhere, all at once. If there are only two sexes then sexism is okay and trans people aren’t allowed to be their chosen gender/sex. That’s what they think is being promoted by Only Two Sexes. They think we’re missing the obvious connections.
My hat is off to the clear-thinking biologists who don’t look at sex as an exercise in how to justify males in female spaces.
Yes, that is what they do. It’s sad, really. They believe that they are trailblazers moving society towards better ethics, and yet they base their position on an ancient human fallacy that is emblematic of just the sort of primitive instinct driven behavior that we are trying to get rid of. Rather than progressive, it’s regressive. They think their argument is obviously true, but actually it is non sequitur. They make themselves look silly by denying reality and they put themselves in the position of having to make enemies out of those that would otherwise be their allies. At this point I think they are probably causing the majority of their problems themselves.
It’s not just males in female spaces. This is part of Queer Theory which has a long term goal of removing ALL societal barriers. Including age of consent barriers that protect children. Here’s what is going on….
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-real-story-behind-drag-queen-story-hour
Trans ideology is homophobic as it erases homoSEXuality and pushes homoGENDERality, so AGP men can expect sex from lesbians, but some high profile gay men, like Peter Tatchell support it because of the long term goal of removing all boundaries. Tatchell is the one who defended children having sex with adults. He wrote that in some societies “inter-generational sex is considered normal, beneficial and enjoyable by old and young alike” but didn’t comment on the damage it can do to kids.
I like to refer it as men are colonizing women spaces, awards and prizes and prisons.
Simple and obvious.
They are trying to create an empire with women being considered to be irrelevant members.
They are. 100%. It’s the same patriarchy oppressing women as they always have done. Just that now they do it wearing heels.
It’s great that so many men are standing with women on this. They can see where it’s headed. First they came for the lesbians, then all other women. Now they are attacking gay men. I’m waiting to see how they are going to persuade your average Joe down the pub that he must include ‘women’ with penises in their dating pool.
When your parliament fights an amendment saying that women should be entitled to ask for her rape kit to be taken by a biological woman, you realise there are no depths to which these ideologists won’t sink.
As the link says, their end goal is to remove all societal barriers.
“[…] eroticism that transgresses generational boundaries [..]”
-Gayle Rubin
Thinking Sex
Essential reading. On the web.
Hm, I must have accidentally changed my name from Sastra to Sastr and now it’s messing with my legitimate right to post a comment. I put it back.
Edited: never mind, there it is.
You’re right about sex-spectrum folks being like creationists. And like creationists, their minds cannot be changed. They are so wedded to their distorted ideology that they can’t afford to have their minds change.
I too was thinking about Creationists and their habit of getting degrees from theological colleges on a “weigh don’t read” dissertation basis when the second doubt was expressed about the arguer’s “PhD”.
Unfortunately, since many institutions don’t publish the dissertations of their PhD. candidates, it’s hard to challenge them with a simple “may I read your dissertation?”
Really, that needs to change. I can’t think of any reason for keeping them inaccessible.
I asked for a definition of what makes a trans person trans and their trans response was:
denoting or relating to a person whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex registered for them at birth.
Here in a nutshell is the problem. The use of the words sex and gender. They seem to think they are different but same or something. Honestly their logic is very confusing.
There needs to be a consistency in the meanings of words.
I had to chuckle at Ian Copeland with his affirmative action PhD saving what he must have thought was his best ammunition for last: his intersex Venn diagram tweet:
The chromosomal abnormalities that he labels in the intersection set as “Intersex” all produce unambiguously, at-a-glance male or female infants. They may be infertile and may have serious medical problems but intersex they absolutely are not. Most individuals with ambiguous genitalia (“intersex”) have typical XX or XY chromosome complement. A few are XX/XY mosaics or chimeras, which “Dr.” Copeland didn’t even mention. And of course none produce any spectral gametes. None break the binary rule and wouldn’t even if they were as common as the size of Copeland’s Venn diagram implies.
That tweet is so wrong it’s not even wrong, as the saying goes.
Copland claims he’s a “PhD level geneticist”. The word ‘level’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. He doesn’t have a PhD, just wants people to think he does.
He makes the classic, and very insulting, error of claiming that those with Intersex/DSD medical conditions are neither male nor female. Ironically, people with those medical conditions actually PROVE the binary. They show clearly that, even when human sexual development goes awry, we STILL end up with only binary male or female. No third gamete. No third sex.
XY with negative SRY is a women with Swyer syndrome. XXY with positive SRY is a man with Klinefelters.
I follow several people with these conditions and have seen the abuse they get from trans activists and their ‘allies’. An XXY guy was told he isn’t a ‘proper’ man.
Many ignorant trans activists have appropriated these medical conditions and claim to be ‘intersex’ but can’t specify which of the 40+ medical conditions they have. They are clueless.
Zach’s excellent Paradox website explains it all fairly simply, I share it regularly, but trans activists prefer delusions to facts.
“Level” is, indeed, doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’ve a friend with a PhD in tin mineralisation in “Andean” style porphyry copper. But I wouldn’t take his word for it on genetics.
Exactly, how can someone transition from one gender to another if they can’t define what male and female are or they aren’t legitimate categories? The kicker for me is ‘how do you transition again?’ Oh, by perpetually taking doses of THE OTHER SEX’S hormones – testosterone (made in testes) and estradiol (made in ovaries) or their synthetic drug equivalents.
Trans people claiming that intersex is a real gender or that sex is on a spectrum, making gender fluid, gets a failing grade in biology, genetics, and anatomy. FAIL, so shut up and stop butchering science. And they are either lying or are too uneducated or ideologically motivated to see the glaring F- on their science test which is instantly disqualifying and that they know whereof they yap.
I love Eva’s newsletter and her youtube interviews. She’s so spunky and great!
“The Definitions: Males have small mobile gametes (sperm) and females large immobile ones (eggs).” – J. Coyne
As for the (im)mobility condition, John Avise writes that there are exceptions:
“If the chromosomal or other proximate mode of sex determination is not the deciding criterion for gender in the biological world, what then universally distinguishes a male from a female? Perhaps the gender that produces mobile gametes (e.g., sperm with tails for active swimming, or pollen with a propensity to disperse from the parent plant) is invariably male, and the sex that produces non-mobile gametes (tail-less oocytes or mostly stationary eggs) is invariably female. The mobility criterion works well for vertebrate animals and for many plants, but it can fail elsewhere. In some algae and plants, for example, male and female gametes are both tail-less (unflagellated); whereas in some other such species, both male and female gametes are flagellated and mobile. To distinguish males from females in general, various other possible criteria, such as hormonal profiles, behaviors, physiologies, or morphologies, likewise are far too variable across all plants and animals to suffice as any universal basis for the definition of maleness versus femaleness.
From an evolutionary vantage, the one-and-only phenotypic feature that consistently distinguishes males from females is gamete size. In any multicellular organism, individuals that produce smaller gametes are males, by definition; and individuals that produce the larger gametes are females, by definition.”
(Avise, John C. Hermaphroditism: A Primer on the Biology, Ecology, and Evolution of Dual Sexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. pp. 6-7)
“The weird thing about the trans issue, however, is that transitions are made between characteristics of one sex, males, and another, females, and vice versa–an implicit admission of a sex binary”
Precisely! This is where I become incredulous over trans’ demands to play sports on the opposite sex’s teams.
(A bit off topic, I realize)
Human intersexuals are people with some disorder of sex development (DSD); and having some type of DSD doesn’t mean being neither male nor female, or being both male and female. What I’d like to know is whether there are DSD types which really preclude any categorization as either male or female on the basis of the gametic definition of sex.
The Swyer Syndrome (46,XY Complete Gonadal Dysgenesis) is a plausible example, isn’t it?
“The first step in sexual differentiation is the activation of the SRY gene to trigger testicular development at 7-8 weeks of development. When there is a mutation or deletion of SRY, or one of the early downstream genes in gonadal differentiation, then the gonads fail to mature into either ovary or testis and become nonfunctional streak gonads.”
(Hutson, John M., Garry L. Warne, & Sonia R. Grover, eds. Disorders of Sex Development: An Integrated Approach to Management. Berlin: Springer, 2012. p. 41)
I don’t think so. A conceptus with a defect in SRY or genes downstream will develop as a female other than not having ovaries. The doctor will announce “It’s a girl!” in the delivery room.* Some years later (typically prompted by puberty not happening) the diagnosis will be made. Despite the Y chromosome she is still a girl and will be offered hormone replacement with estradiol, not with testosterone. The abortive (“streak”) gonads are advised to be removed to prevent cancer.
That’s what we mean when we say chromosomes, SRY genes, and hormones don’t define sex. Her body plan, albeit without ovaries, otherwise hews to the female phenotype. Female, check. No ambiguity.
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* Of course, today a routine obstetrical ultrasound might detect no fetal ovaries and this would lead to investigation at birth.
“[T]he biological definition of sex involves having the reproductive equipment to make either small mobile gametes or large immobile ones. This doesn’t require that your equipment is actually functional.” — J. Coyne: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/06/my-letter-about-binary-sex-in-the-san-francisco-chronicle/
Having non-functional ovaries or testicles is one thing, and having no ovaries or testicles at all (due to a failure of gonadal differentiation) is another. People afflicted with the Swyer Syndrome lack not only the requisite reproductive functions but also the requisite reproductive structures; so I don’t think they are classifiable as either male or female on the basis of the gametic/gonadic definition of sex.
I think you misunderstand the definition of sex, Oliver. It is based on the body plan organized around the production and conduction of either of the binary gametes. As all good definitions do, it marries common sense observation with something (internal anatomy and cell production) that can’t be directly observed, certainly not at the birth of an apparently healthy infant.
If the incidence of these conditions was much much higher, it would be part of the usual expectations of parenting that a female infant might well have a condition that required operation to prevent cancer. All baby girls would have to be scanned for streak gonads or undescended testes. Instead we wait for puberty when these rare conditions will declare themselves. As for fertility, parents already know that merely having a child does not, for a hundred reasons, guarantee that he or she will give you grandchildren. In this context, the remote possibility of Swyer syndrome is just one more.
I stress that parents imprint the sex of their offspring the instant it is revealed at ultrasound or at birth. There is no sense that mentally healthy parents ever regard a baby girl as only tentatively female. In the case of a Swyer child they would say, upon discovery, “Our daughter is one of those rare girls who has a Y chromosome and was born without ovaries.” It would be unhealthy for them to try to imagine she had no sex, or was really a boy. With female hormones she will grow into a healthy woman albeit without natural fertility.
Is this the same Ian Copeland who’s a Captain in the US Army? He has a PhD in biology? How can someone who has a PhD in biology be so confused about the true nature of sex?
It’s bad enough that people such as Copeland use their qualifications to add legitimacy to the nonsense they spread on the internet, particularly when they aren’t forthcoming about in what discipline they earned those qualifications but instead allow the reader to make the assumption that their PhDs and the subject matter match.
Far worse are educators such as PZ Myers who are indisputably qualified as biologists and who use their qualifications and positions to teach this nonsense as fact to their students.
I asked myself the same about the Biblical literalist geologist I shared a class with. Well, obviously not about sex, about geology. He simply accepted the cognitive dissonance with a “God set these things up to test my faith” (his verbal capitalisation). Then he went on to a career in hydrogeology (water resources), in which most of the time he was dealing with near-surface sediment aquifers, which he could treat as “Noachian flood debris” while typing “glacial outwash deposit” in his reports.
Cognitive dissonance minimised.
Dawkins :
“Convoluted attempts to deny binary sex are like Ptolemaic epicycles.”
^^^that.
Colin Wright is a shining new star in the constellation of rational and reasonable thinkers who I hope will be in the battle for years to come.