There are many things to criticize about this new paper in Science (one of three “woke” papers in the issue), but to me the worst is its denial of the sex binary. For that binary, whose existence the authors even admit, is considered by them to exemplify “essentialism”—the object of the paper’s attack. By including more about variation in traits, including the sex of individuals, say the authors, there can be “a broad decrease in gender essentialist beliefs among US adolescents.” And they demonstrate this push for essentialism and neglect of trait variation by surveying genetics chapters of six high-school biology texts.
This, in other words, is an ideologically motivated paper, and it shows. And the object of its publication is a familiar one: to buttress people who see themselves as “variant” in terms of gender “nonbinary”. But of course the “essentialist” sex binary is simply a fact of nature, and should not lead to demonization of those who feel they’re of their non-natal sex. Nature gives us no lessons about how to treat people outside the “norm.” Yes, binary people don’t feel that they’re either male or female, and that’s okay and should be respected, but you can’t say that the biological sexes in plants and animals form a spectrum. Yet that’s just what the authors say.
Now there may be something worthwhile in this paper insofar as it points out how textbooks have neglectedf genetic and environmental variation that causes differences between groups. But whether one has to go into a long disquisition on variation in high school biology is debatable (see below for one of the confusing changes they suggest). Further, the examples of “essentialism” they show aren’t very convincing. Finally, most of the paper is simply confusing as well as tendentious.
Click on the title below to see the short paper (four pages, the pdf is here):
I read the paper three times, and my marking-up of my copy below shows how many comments I had. I won’t bore you with most of them, though!
The authors go after what they see as three misguided views promulgated in the textbooks they surveyed:
Three basic assumptions undergird the essentialist view of sex and gender (1): (i) there is little to no variation in traits or behaviors within a sex or gender group; (ii) differences between sexes or genders are discrete—the groups do not overlap substantially in traits; and (iii) internal factors such as genes are the best explanation for all forms of variation within and between sex or gender groups. Scientific research on sex and gender is inconsistent with these assumptions (3, 4), yet they are commonly held. For example, substantial portions of US adults (≈40 to 70%) attribute gender differences in traits and behaviors to genetic causes (5).
References 3 and 4 recur throughout the paper as “evidence”. I’ve glanced at one of them, and didn’t see it saying what the authors claimed, but readers should check for themselves. At any rate, certainly biologists recognize that these tropes are wrong. There is ample variation among individuals within a sex or gender group (the authors conflate sex and gender, and eventually combine them as “sex/gender”, which is a mistake); for nearly all traits there is substantial variation among individuals of a sex (I’ll leave gender aside for now); and, finally, saying that “internal factors such as genes are touted as “the best explanation for all forms of variation within sex or gender groups” is, to a biologist, nonsensical. We don’t use terms like “best explanation”. If we want to look at variation within a group, we can measure the proportion of variation among individuals by a figure called the heritability, which runs from 0 (no variation in traits due to variation among individuals in their genes [religion is a likely example] to 1 (all variation among individuals is due to variation in their genes). To say genetic or environmental variation is a “best” explanation is ridiculous because it depends on the trait, the environment, and the population.
What is the definition of sex? The authors first more or less admit that it’s indeed a binary based on gametes, but then say how “complex” it is, which of course sex determination, particularly with respect to secondary sexual traits is. The first conflation is how many sexes there are, which has a simple answer, with how sex produces an individuals’s appearance and other traits, which has a complicated answer. They then conflate sex with gender, using the term “sex/gender”. Bolding in the excerpt below is mine, and note how they confuse the definition of sex with the determination of sex through development. The former is a simple binary, while the latter is indeed complex.
Sexual reproduction generates new allelic combinations within a species (3). Sex determination is the process by which an organism develops a particular sex—the ability to produce a particular type of gamete, along with any associated phenotypic traits. This process is tremendously variable across species. In some species (such as cichlid fish), an individual’s sex can be determined by the temperature of their physical surroundings and can reverse. Some species have more than two sexes (for example, some fungi have thousands); others have more than two sex chromosomes (for example, the platypus has 10) or sex chromosomes other than X and Y (for example, birds have Z and W sex chromosomes).
But just because how gametes are produced within a species, or sex-associated traits are determined, are complex, doesn’t mean that sex isn’t a binary. It’s also a binary in animals where sex determination is produced by temperature (turtles), haploidy vs. diploidy (bees), or social environment (some fish). They tack on “associated phenotypic traits” as part of the sex definition, which is wrong.
The conflation of the sex binary with the variation in sex-associated traits leads them to somehow implicitly dismiss the binary:
As a result of this complexity, human sex variation is not strictly dichotomous at the biological level; rather, it is best described as a somewhat continuous, bimodal distribution (3). This biological variation intersects with the cultural practices of medical clinicians to influence sex assignment (3), often in ways that reduce the underlying biological complexity to a simpler binary: females and males. However, many intersex humans exist who blur the hard lines between males and females (3).
The proportion of individuals who are either male or female, based having the developmental equipment for making big or small gametes, is not “somewhat continuous”. It is nearly completely binary, with only 0.018% of individuals (as the authors admit, about 1 in 5600—they say 2 in 10,000—being of indeterminate sex, including intersexes). That means that 99.982% of individuals lie in the two peaks, or rather two straight lines shooting upwards. This is not at all “somewhat continuous” it is all but binary with a teeny blip in the center. Call that “very very very very strongly bimodal” if you wish, but the proportion of indeterminate individuals is miniscule, and these individuals are not a third sex, but represent developmental anomalies. Essentialism is in effect the case here: there are only two sexes and a very few individuals of indeterminate sex.
Another mistake they make is to claim that although gender (what sex role you think you enact) is socially constructed, that means that gender has nothing to do with biology:
Altogether, nearly all trait variation that exists within and between human sexes is not what essentialism predicts, and neither is the causal source of this variation (that is, there are no genetic “essences”).
The same arguments apply to gender, perhaps even more forcefully, because gender is a socially constructed lay interpretation of the biological phenomenon of sex (3, 4). Individuals who identify as women or girls are often expected to adopt a set of socially and culturally prescribed activities, abilities, and interests that distinguish them from individuals who identify as men or boys (3, 4). Thus, differences in complex traits (such as activities, abilities, and interests) between individuals who identify as different genders have no biological basis and are instead explained by sociocultural factors (4).
But the vast majority of individuals have a “gender” that corresponds with their biological sex, with individuals showing typical sex-associated traits such as differences in aggression, risk-taking, interest in people vs. things, and so on. As Luana and I showed in our Skeptical Inquirer paper, many of these traits have an evolved genetic/biological basis. If that’s the case, then a hefty proportion of “gender roles” also have a biological component (see #2 in our paper). To say that there is no biology in gender roles is simply ludicrous.
On to the textbooks.
Variation within sex/gender groups. Using rather fuzzy and subjective criteria, the authors argue that sex and gender are presented in textbooks as essentialist, even though the sexes themselves, as a binary, are essentialist. Gender is of course variable, but they don’t show examples of “essentialism” in gender in this paper. Here’s their analysis:
Twelve percent of paragraphs described individuals of a single sex/gender group as uniform [β = 0.12, 95% CI (0.08, 0.17)] (see SM for analytic strategy). In addition, 10% of paragraphs described individuals of a single sex/gender group as differing by type [β = 0.10, 95% CI (0.05, 0.16)]. By contrast, descriptions of continuous variation within a sex/gender group occurred in only 3% of paragraphs [β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01, 0.05)].
Note that “sex” has now become “sex/gender”. If you mix them together, then there’s a danger of textbooks conflating the sex binary with the variability of gender identification, and you wind up with a nonsensical analysis.
Variation between sex/gender groups. Here, coding the textbook paragraphs, the authors found no tendency for textbooks show discrete differences between sex/gender groups (note again how they confuse the results by mixing “sex” and “gender”) as opposed to showing overlaps and variation. In other words, their hypothesis of essentialism was falsified!
Sixteen percent of paragraphs described categorical differences between sex/gender groups [β = 0.16, 95% CI (0.10, 0.22)]. By contrast, only 11% of paragraphs described similarities or overlaps across sex/gender groups [β = 0.11, 95% CI (0.06, 0.16)]. The difference between these code proportions was not statistically significant [β = 0.05, 95% CI (-0.01, 0.11)].
But they decide the difference is significant anyway—because there is overlap between the groups, ergo no essentialism:
Yet because sex/gender groups overlap considerably on most complex traits (3, 4), even this seemingly balanced presentation of similarities and categorical differences is more consistent with essentialism than with the scientific consensus on sex and gender.
They try to save their hypothesis even though the statistics don’t support it.
Internal versus external explanations. What the authors are looking for here are whether textbooks describe variation within and between “sex/gender” groups as having an internal explanation (genetic) or external explanations (presumably environmental and social factors). Here they find mostly internalist explanations—that is, their hypothesis of textbooks being “essentialist” is confirmed:
Internal explanations were given in 12% of paragraphs [β = 0.12, 95% CI (0.06, 0.20)]. External explanations were given in only 1% of paragraphs [β = 0.01, 95% CI (0.003, 0.02)]. This difference was statistically significant [β = 0.11, 95% CI (0.05, 0.19)].
To see how they coded textbook passages as essentialist (or internalist), and how the authors recommend that textbooks be rewritten, here’s their table (click to enlarge):
It’s true that tongue-rolling is no longer seen as a dominant, single-gene allele, so correcting that is okay. Note, though the authors’ admission (yellow) that intersex individuals are rare, so that one really falls more into “discreteness” rather than “continuity”.
The second paragraph from the textbook (lower left) is much better than the authors’ revision (lower right), particularly for recessive traits, because the “suggested” version is simply confusing. They throw in “variation” simply because, as any geneticist knows, the severity of a genetic disease varies among people. Yet they see the revised version as infinitely superior to the textbook version because their revision less uniform and more continuous. I find it overly complicated and confusing.
The lesson the authors draw from looking at single chapters of six high-school biology textbooks, then, is that essentialism is the norm, and that’s bad. But I suspect, given how they treated “variation between sex/gender groups”, and their conflation of sex and gender, that there’s some cherry-picking going on. At any rate, having taught genetics, though not in high school, I think this paper is making a great deal out of relatively little. It is paragraphs like these that make me think the motive is ideological, and thus the textbooks must be altered to conform with the authors’ preferred ideology:
One limitation of our study is that we did not search for sex and gender terms outside of genetics chapters. We may have thus underidentified messages that are inconsistent with essentialism about sex and gender. However, qualitative studies that have analyzed the nongenetics chapters of biology textbooks by using the lenses of feminist and queer theory—which were developed to uncover and counter gender essentialism—do not support this optimistic view (15).
Readers who are interested in this claim can read reference 15 here.
The authors continuously argue that textbooks are “inconsistent with scientific reality”, as if the sex binary were not “scientific reality” (notice that they concentrate on sex and gender, which itself is telling). Their object is clearly to show that everything forms a spectrum, and so any variation in gender (I won’t admit that there’s variation in sex, except for the 0.018% of indeterminate individuals) is fine. And it is fine, but not because biology is always a spectrum.
Here’s another paragraph
When describing sex/gender groups as uniform, or as composed of different types, biology textbooks are expressing essentialist views that are inconsistent with scientific reality: It is continuous variation that is the norm within sex and gender groups. When describing between-group variation, biology textbooks discuss differences and similarities at similar rates. In actuality, sex and gender groups overlap substantially on most complex traits (3, 4). Rather than reflecting this reality, textbooks paint a picture that is consistent with the essentialist notion that sex and gender groups are discrete.
Note that again they get themselves into the weeds by conflating sex (which is discrete) with gender (which isn’t). They themselves promulgate confusion in this paper which, in the end, seems to me to make no progress in achieving social justice. Yes, the authors correct a few biological errors in textbooks, like the genetics of tongue rolling, but it takes a while for high-school texts to catch up to recent research.
I received a link to this paper from several colleagues I respect, all of them more or less outraged by the sloppy methodology, tendentious analysis, and ideological overtones.
I’ll quote one colleague’s view:
This paper on sex and gender in biology textbooks was recommended to me yesterday, and I was baffled by it. First, I was baffled that a paper with such a short and simple statistical analysis would be published in a journal like Science. Second, I was baffled that the paper promotes a blank-slateist view os sex differences which considers differences between men and women to be the product of “social construction” (note how they support their claims about gender by repeatedly citing the same two papers). Finally, I think the alleged examples of “essentialism” that they cite from biology textbooks are no such thing, and in fact I could not detect mistakes in the paragraphs that they showed.The worst part is that they claim that their misguided views are the “consensus” in biology, while only citing a few papers that support their views. I think this paper is a perfect example of how ideology is perverting science and science education, because it uses gender theory in place of mainstream biology.
But of course colleagues who liked the paper (I know of none) wouldn’t be likely to send me the link and beef about thje paper!
I should add that there’s one more paper in this series of three, but I won’t bother you with it. The title and link are below, click if you can bear reading more of this stuff. The ideological leaning of the triumvirate is clear:
OK, I gotta try a new angle from my usual :
There’s a show called Mystery Science Theater 3000 that plays “cheesy” B-movies while a comedic trio “riffs” on the movie, live. Frequently, a movie is selected to specifically produce
DEEP HURTING
… Have publications in Science Magazine ironically reached the DEEP HURTING stage of ideologically subversive idea laudering, previously known only to the comedic B-movie entertainment industry – and with the word “science” in its title, even?
I read this paper and had a similar reaction. I saw it posted with much agreement from anthropologists (Bioanthropologist News on Facebook) and decided not to comment. Far as I can tell, most scientists have been made up their minds on this one. Amazing how evidence can be interpreted in different ways.
Regarding that last paper on racism, perhaps someone can help me out on this ideology, because I find it incoherent. According the Woke, the following statements are true:
1.) Race is a social construct (i.e. made up with no genetic basis whatsoever).
2.) Further, this social construct is harmful (the concept of race has done far more harm than good).
3.) Everybody should strongly identify with their race and embrace this social construct, to the point where it is the most important thing about them.
To me, #3 does not follow from #1 and #2.
So, I mostly agree with #1 in terms of the traditional categories of race (our host has pointed out that we could, however, speak of “populations” of humans that have some average genetic differences). I agree with #2…traditional categories of race are not a useful social construct (although the concept of “populations” might be for things such as medical information).
Therefore, I would logically want to de-emphasize and move away from the entire concept of race, and not be obsessive about it. I can only conclude that the Woke are either extremely confused, or certain of them have more nefarious reasons for holding to these (seemingly to me) contradictory positions.
Since this is a sorta off-post-topic/overcommenting scenario, I’ll point to a possible origin of how race came under the spell of dialecticians as a social construct – as cited by Delgado and Stefancic in Understanding Words That Wound (2004) :
The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice
Haney-López, Ian
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, v.29, pp.1-62, 1994
https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1115043
Even if we followed Jerry’s suggestion to talk about populations instead of races, there would still be this. Geneticists ask individual humans “What race or ethnic group do you identify with?” Purely social construction of course. Then the geneticists sample each person’s genome, and find that people with the same ethnic or racial identification tend to cluster together into easily identifiable groups with many genetic differences from other groups. This isn’t the geneticists slapping racial labels on people in different genetic clusters. It’s people adopting those racial or ethnic identities, and geneticists finding that they covary with lots of (not all) genetic variation. And ofc it all says nothing about how individuals should treat each other.
[And sorry for overcommenting – I’ve been discussing this series of Science Policy Forum articles with my genetics and evolution colleagues so I have too much to say.]
… and if a thing can be convincingly shown to be socially constructed, it can be used for political warfare.
Person A says sex is materially defined.
Person B says person A hates Queers and People of color because person A is white and cis-heteronormative.
See?
TP, you don’t have to convincingly show that something is a social construction – a bald-faced assertion will do! And then just yell at those who disagree with you: Okay, boomer! Transphobe! Racist! Right-wing extremist! Fascist! Misogynist! It’s not my duty to educate you! It’s my lived experience! Stop trolling me!
The authors of this study complain that science textbooks mix up sex and gender while doing so themselves. Gender involves masculinity and femininity, which is distinct from sex. “Gender Essentialism” isn’t claiming that there are biological reasons behind social beliefs about masculinity and femininity — it’s claiming that these tendencies define what men/males and women/females are, so that a woman who takes leadership roles is going against her nature and should try to become more submissive.
A few years ago I came across this handy way to understand “biological essentialism:”
It seems to me that someone who claims that men and women are distinguished only by some hidden, indescribable feminine/female or masculine/male type of mental identity is invoking essences.
Exactly! I was going to write something similar..as in what is the “thing” that makes a trans-woman a woman if this person is biologically a man. That speaks to some kind of ineffable essence.
But your post nails it!
Great comments! The authors go to some trouble not to mention people who say they are transgender or non-binary. But it’s easy to see that the political interests of such people are the basis for the authors’ project.
I don’t get the argument that essentialism is bad. To me, an essentialist definition is a definition that has content, that is not empty. To say that a woman is a human with a reproductive apparatus geared toward producing eggs (no matter whether this apparatus has ever been or is still functioning) is as essentialist as claiming that a women is whoever identifies as one. The latter claim often goes together with the claim that transidentified males have female brains. It cannot get any more essentialist.
Nobody does in fact deny that there is a lot of variation within each sex on most traits and that trait distributions of the two sexes overlap. The fact that trait distributions overlap is used to argue that men and women are not distinctive groups. This is wrong. Is the fact that we have an obesity epidemic called into question because the weight or the BMI distribution of adult US Americans of 1965 and 2024 overlap? Of course, not. There was no such epidemic in 1965 but there is one now.
This is all so stupid.
“… invoking essences.”
Yes, I see that – let’s see what David M. Halperin writes in Saint Foucault: “Queer […] is an identity without an essence”. He also describes “queer identities“.
… I must say, I am mystified…
Full of errors (e.g., that some fungi have thousands of sexes – they have thousands of mating types).
The Science authors are of course not evolutionary biologists or geneticists. They’re faculty members in learning centres or a not-for-profit called the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study.
And they’re concerned about representations or essentialism in textbook treatments of *human* sex and gender. Indeed their whole project is to ensure that highschool biology textbooks treat gender as a separate topic and not conflate gender with sex.
The authors care little about the continuity of sex and its definitions (based on gamete type) across all other animals and plants, or the lack of a meaningful category called gender in any non-human animal. Unfortunately that continuity or generality is the main point of highschool biology textbooks.
The authors readily concede that gender is a sociocultural phenomenon. But they want it taught in biology textbooks. This is bullying pure & simple.
The BSCS seems to be quite an operation, with 53 individuals in the Staff Directory. The senior author of both of the “policy forum” papers, Brian Donovan, is the PI of a $1.29 million NSF funded project (EHR Core Award #1660985) “that uses experimental, quasi-experimental, and qualitative research methods, to identify the cognitive, social, and educational factors that link the learning of human genetics to reductions in racial bias.” One of his several publications in the Science Education journal is entitled “Framing the genetics curriculum to support social justice”.
Sounds like the NSF is getting into the social justice business, funding groups with a clear political agenda. Federal funding agencies shouldn’t be doing that.
Probably thanks to articles such as the one discussed in this post, and others like it, in the UK The Daily Telegraph has just published a poll of lecturers that finds that 3 in 10 don’t believe that sex is binary. https://archive.ph/0Fi8j
Likely the younger ones don’t believe sex is binary.
The time has come to demand citations for “gender”. This will be very interesting.
Cults use exoteric terms like “gender” that everyone figures is feminine and masculine, while applying the esoteric meaning – is it John Money’s definition? Or the ideas in the “occult” Hermetic doctrine The Kybalion from 1908? Or secret knowledge from the Inner Circle?
It is never clear – precisely how cult manipulation works.
See also conceptual polysemy (“pa-LI-sem-ee”) and mystification.
And ponder this quote (which I found after this post – please forgive the post-edit deadline addition – bold added) :
“The development of Gender-Identity/Role is multivariate and sequential. Its determinants are not […] essentialist versus social constructionist.”
Money & Ehrhardt
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
preface to 1996 edition
original publication 1973
Yet, that “work” was not cited – not to mention Butler, Rubin, Stoller,…
even in the supplemental material.
#Concealment
Also see (for some sanity):
Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender
https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/delgiudice_2023_ideological-bias_sex-gender_chapter.pdf
Measuring Sex Differences and Similarities, Marco Del Giudice
https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/delgiudice_2022_measuring_sex_differences-similarities_chapter.pdf
Those look interesting and, at first glance, clear-headed. Thanks.
Kathleen Stock, in her book Material Girls, observed four uses people make of the word ‘gender’ – often combining them in a single sentence!
So, I always have to ask what someone is referring to when they use the word.
– A favorite of mine responding to a comment I made: “sex is obviously not binary since people can present as other than male or female.”
1908
That is the earliest I can find literature which substantially developed the idea of “gender” in these two chapters :
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Kybalion/Chapter_13
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Kybalion/Chapter_14
In The Kybalion. Is that where John Money found it? Judith Butler?
You might find reading MIT philosopher Alex Byrne’s new book Trouble with Gender (2024) interesting. Byrne is married to biological anthropologist Carole Hooven (Harvard Ph.D., 2004), who recently left Harvard after being a lecturer there for almost 20 years. You remember Harvard, the university that, in Claudine Gay’s words, “is deeply committed to free speech”?
Here’s the table of content of the book (with the conclusions in blockquotes):
Introduction
Ch.1 Gender, double toil and trouble
Ch.2 ‘Gender trouble’
Ch.3 Clownfish and chromosomes
Ch.4 I am woman
Ch.5 The rise of gender identity
Ch.6 Born in the wrong body
Ch.7 Is biology destiny?
Ch.8 True selves and identity crises
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing.’ Oct 5, 2023
Emma Park speaks to Alex Byrne, professor of philosophy at MIT and author of ‘Trouble with Gender’, about what a philosopher can bring to the trans debate, and why some philosophers have shrunk from ‘questioning orthodoxy’.
https://freethinker.co.uk/2023/10/alex-byrne-interview/
+1
The idea of “identity crises” takes a new, chilling meaning as I learn it was used in Mao’s thought reform/ideological remoulding programs (Lifton, 1961).
Jerry: References 3 and 4 recur throughout the paper as “evidence”. I’ve glanced at one of them, and didn’t see it saying what the authors claimed, but readers should check for themselves.
I agree with Jerry here (checked the two papers) and can say that this way of advancing an ideological view in science and other academic subjects seems to be common in the sex/gender academic debate:
Example from activist: “science now show that sex is a spectrum…..” and then there’s a few references to paper saying nothing of the sort or papers written by other activist authors claiming the same.
An example of a highly misused paper is the Nature article “Sex redefined” by Claire Ainsworth illustrates the problem: This article was used (still is) to “prove” that sex is not binary. Interestingly, when a twitter user asked Ainsworth: In your piece ‘Sex Redefined’ are you making the claim there are more than 2 sexes?
She answered No, not at all. Two sexes, with a continuum of variation in anatomy/physiology.
Since then (2017), Claire Ainsworth seems to have stopped saying anything about this issue, perhaps she understood how toxic the debate had become and decided to stay out of it
I am fairly certain that most of the former Directors and Board Members of BSCS are either squirming in their graves or biting their tongues re the current state of affairs at BSCS as evidenced by these papers/
The current state of affairs:
“SOCIAL JUSTICE We are committed to being anti-oppressive. We recognize that dismantling oppressive structures requires the ongoing examination of our own beliefs and behaviors within our organization.”
https://bscs.org/about/values/
Not sure how this fits with their claim to be “Transforming science education through research-driven innovation” Guess that depends on what research they are using.
I did my homework and read the paper, but only once. Thank you, Jerry, for mining it with such care.
A couple of thoughts.
I don’t think that the essentialism angle does any work for the authors. They could have simply said that sex traits are highly variable and not as uniform as the textbooks imply. Done. Perhaps they talk about essentialism in order to appear erudite. Perhaps they see it as something that will draw the ire of biologists who, if they’ve read Ernst Mayr, have read that essentialism is bad. In any case it doesn’t do them any substantive good.
Next, the authors come close to the definition of sex in terms of gamete size in one place, yet they then seem—as do so many other authors—to conflate the definition of sex with the traits to which sex is correlated. An example of such a trait is chromosome configuration, which is clearly a biological trait often correlated with sex (sensu gamete type). Another example is gender, a psychosocial trait that is usually correlated with sex but, obviously, not always. In fact, by referring to “sex/gender groups” so prominently, the authors quite explicitly lump sex and its correlates together when they are in fact quite different things.
Since almost all of their article is about variation with respect to biological and psychosocial traits such as these—and *not* about the very real binary of gamete size, it seems that the article misses the mark entirely; it is not about sex at all.
If textbooks underestimate how much variation there is across people with respect to the traits correlated with sex, then the textbooks should be altered to better reflect that diversity. (I will leave to one side the question of whether their analysis is valid.) But altering coverage of the diversity of the biological and social correlates of sex does not alter the fact of the sex binary itself.
Humans are highly variable regarding their sexual identities and behavior. It seems better to advocate directly for greater acceptance of that variation than it is to go after the definition of sex.
Norman, regarding:
I think you are misunderstanding the political strategy behind the attempt to go after the definition of sex: Sex is a category in the law. If you can redefine sex so that a man (by the old, conventional definition) is actually a woman, then you have abolished the category of sex in the law. That is the real goal here.
The problem for the activists is that they cannot achieve their goal democratically (voters won’t go along with it). So they try to circumvent the democratic process by getting the experts to agree (if necessary, by censorship and cancellation of dissenters) that the old, conventional definition of sex is outdated (because of “scientific advances in our understanding”), and then you get this new and improved definition of sex ratified by the courts of law who defer to the experts.
Remember Ketanji Jackson-Brown, now justice at the Supreme Court of the US? During her confirmation hearing in the US Senate she was asked to define the term woman. She declined to do so, explaining that she is not an expert. (You won’t have any trouble finding a clip of this exchange of words between her and a Republican senator on YouTube.)
Remember Keir Starmer, the leader of the British Labour Party. He has claimed that “it [is] ‘not right’ to say that only women have a cervix” and that a woman can have a penis. Because he wants to win the next election and become prime minister of Britain he had to repudicate these statements because enough voters will not vote for somebody who says thinks like this or bases policies on such views.
A more concise way to describe the anti-democratic political strategy behind attempts to change the definition of sex:
Of course, the activists cannot admit to this strategy. Instead, they talk about how adopting the new definition of sex will lead to new scientific insights. When you ask about these new insights, the response is: silence.
Hi Peter.
You are probably right about this. I was particularly stopped in my tracks with this sentence: “Sex is a category in the law.”
If this movement is about changing the interpretation of law, then the conflation of biological sex with its correlates isn’t really about biology at all. Seeing as this is largely about changing the law, should I conclude that what I’m reading from activists is a conscious effort to deceive? They do seem sincere for the most part. Sincere or not, I wonder how far one can get by invoking empirical science and reason against what is fundamentally a political movement. Perhaps not far.
Again, thank you for your thoughtful comment.
RE: Seeing as this is largely about changing the law, should I conclude that what I’m reading from activists is a conscious effort to deceive?
The answer is “Yes”. Though, sometimes to deceive others people first somehow – by the alchemies of the mind – manage to deceive themselves. (And not everybody who participates in the con is in on it. Some are just useful idiots.)
Maybe of interest:
Lixing Sun: The liars of nature and the nature of liars: Cheating and deception in the living world. Princeton University Press, 2023
Publisher’s description:
Blending cutting-edge science with a wealth of illuminating examples―from microscopic organisms to highly intelligent birds and mammals―Lixing Sun shows how cheating in nature relies on two basic rules. One is lying, by which cheaters exploit honest messages in communication signals and use them to serve their own interests. The other is deceiving, by which cheaters exploit the biases and loopholes in the sensory systems of other creatures. Sun demonstrates that cheating serves as a potent catalyst in the evolutionary arms race between the cheating and the cheated, resulting in a biological world teeming with complexity and beauty.
Brimming with insight and humor, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars also looks at the prevalence of cheating in human society, identifying the kinds of cheating that spur innovation and cultural vitality and laying down a blueprint for combatting malicious cheating such as fake news and disinformation.
The author: Lixing Sun is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Central Washington University. He is the author of The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature and the coauthor of The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer.
Adrian Bardon: The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion. Oxford UP, 2019
She missed the opportunity for the second-greatest one-liner of all time: “I know one when I see one”. (If you get it, you get it.). The missed opportunity for the all-time greatest one-liner goes to Monica Lewinsky: “But I didn’t inhale”.
A good example of mystification. Even Gorsuch had some writing that showed mystification…
.. which is demystified by dialectical thought manipulation – I’m sure everyone has read how things get demystified and mystified in post-whateverism literature.
Among the biological errors (and there are many!) we have some other claims that are definitely aimed at giving the reader a “nothing about sex can be clearly defined” state of mind. Any notions of binary-ness is homeopathically diluted out of existence.
So we have the claim that there are fungi with thousands of sexes. Well, no. Those are an extreme example (and of course one must always give extreme examples if the aim is to bury binary sex, right?) of what has for a very long time been formally categorized as mating types. Mating types are akin to biological sexes while not being quite the same thing.
And then we read that platypuses have 10 sex chromosomes. We are, I think deliberately, left to imagine all kinds of variations there like 10 different sex chromosomes??? Holy cow. But in fact platypuses (and echidnas) have 5 short “X” chromosomes and 5 Y chromosomes, where females have 10 X chromosomes that are strictly segregated into 2 sets of 5, so they act like 2 big X chromosomes, and males have 5 X (acting as one big X) and 5 Y chromosomes (acting as 1 big Y). So it’s a bit weird, but not that weird, really.
Yep. A giant smoke screen has descended, frustrating every effort to clarify.
A thought to add after reading comments :
Hegel – Dialectics
Dialectic is at work in the article. This should clarify some of the “conflation” – it is an attempt at dialectical synthesis – not empiricism, nor based on the same epistemology.
This is standard for the sex papers PCC(E) reviews regularly – marrying truth to …something the author needs to be true in order to mould the world in the way they think the world should look.
I’d like to argue that while high school and college introductory biology texts and teachers should try to be reasonably accurate, they should not be going off ‘into the weeds’ about all the exceptions and nuances in the name of absolute current accuracy, which may well change anyway with further research. This just leads to confusion and introductory science is already quite overwhelming. I’d like to see students emerge from introductory science classes with general concepts, beginning with how science works and consequently changes with new information and perhaps ending with awe of nature, how far we’ve come in our understanding and where we can go next. The scientific illiteracy of the general population is staggering and leaves them afraid or disdainful of science. Introductory science, which is all the science most will ever study, should also strive to connect what is being taught to student’s lives, so that they have somewhere to ‘attach’ new ideas and facts. Almost every lesson should probably end with a ‘why this might matter to you’ segment.
Patricia, I agree with you about not going off into the weeds. But there is a movement among science education “researchers” to do something called “teach diversity first.” In this movement, variation is to be emphasized before central tendencies or modes or means or categories. Its specific goal is as Peter explained above: to support the elimination of sex as a category in law, and allow males to claim in law to be women (and female). Its practical application is to emphasize *human* sexual and gender variation first, and avoid as much or as long as possible any focus on teaching students about a two-state category for sex based on gamete type that is shared among all plants and animals. But clownfish are ok, and so are fungi with thousands of mating types.
If we could just accept that gender is an imaginary concept, like phlogiston, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s not even a social construct like fiat currency that everyone accepts because it does useful work in society. We didn’t accept gender. It was imposed on us by cultural elites. It doesn’t illuminate, only confuses. It’s just made up and should be ex-communicated except as a grammatical term.
People who believe or claim to believe they are uncomfortable being the sex they were conceived as may be troubled, mentally ill, brainwashed, or dissembling, or they may get simple satisfaction from adopting the behaviour more typical of (or exclusive to) the opposite sex and may or may not interpret this to mean they are not their own sex. As with all behaviour that deviates from the norm it should be tolerated (but not indulged by compulsion) until the point where it harms children, interferes with productive work, or becomes false signalling that puts others at risk. There is no need for a high school biology textbook to give this behaviour a name as it has nothing to do with sex. It’s in the realm of personality.
The news headline, “Cycling union to ban transgender riders from competition,” is so much easier to understand when rendered as, “Cycling union to ban men from women’s races.” You’d find yourself wondering what the fuss was.
Amen!
Indeed!
I agree. For decades “sex” and “gender” meant the same thing. Then suddenly, just a few years ago, we are told that’s not the case. I’m too old for this.
I’m also having problems with people who want to be called by newly invented pronouns or “they.”
I was reading a book review that sounded interesting…until it mentioned that the subject of the book went by “they.” Sorry, I find that too confusing. Sale lost.
As per always:
1. Conflate definition (ontology) with diagnosis (epistemology).
2. Exploit polysemy of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ to conflate several meanings of each at will.
It has to be deliberate. It’s always the same.
My contribution to combatting the second point is to emphasize that sexes are binary. It obviates the usual PZian schtick like:
>Sex is binary
>Nuh-uh! ‘Sex’ is a huge Thing of great complexity and endless variation!
>I meant biological sex.
>It’s all biological! What, you don’t think culture is biology too? Plus, intersexes! Oh and then plus ‘gender’, I mean sex/genders.
>I meant gametic sex.
>Oh so now you’re defining people solely by unseen sex cells? Essentialist! And also what about menopause!!
etc.
Had hoped these papers would get mentioned! I had not picked up on this tern “essentialism” before these papers.
Thank you Jerry for this thorough review and discussion of the paper. I was reading the section front to back and got bogged down in a critical reading of the first article on “genomics essentialism”. This had a social justice / anti-racist agenda and to me oversimplified things. Hard to comment at all without getting verbose. I appreciate Jerry taking time with second paper to point to what he sees as the weak spots.
Why are we allowing amateur psychologists to shape and control our social relationships? They allowed themselves to be intimidated by people with all kinds of psychological problems enhanced by social networks and all kinds of theories that solve none of their problems but impose mandates on others on how they should be treated. There are heavy forces in society that force people to not only join weird movements but which reinforce their neuroses. Psychologists are playing along to look”woke” and rake in money for issues ordinary treatment would suffice. I am not going to change my principles and behavior every time someone expresses his/hers/theirs feeling of victimization. They need help, not me.
Thanks for the good review of this paper and thanks to all those for their comments.