Really? Do I have to rebut the same arguments about the definition of biological sex again? Well, here in American Scientist is a group of two anthropologists, one anatomist, and a gender-and-sexuality-studies professor, all telling us that there is no clear definition of sex, using the same tired old arguments to rebut the gamete-based sex binary. And once again, Agustín Fuentes from Princeton appears among this group of ideologues who say that the definition of the sexes depends not on gametes, but on a lot of stuff, depending what your question is. Their object, of course, is to reassure those who don’t identify as “male” or “female” that they are not erased by biology.
Click below, or find the article archived here
The ideological motivation is clear from several parts of the paper:
Worryingly, even within the sciences, the term biological sex has become a transphobic dog whistle. Whereas once some of us used this term to differentiate the biological factors we study from social or cultural ones, it has now been co-opted by those who insist on a sex binary and who deny the relevance or even reality of diverse bodies and of gender identities, roles, and expressions in humans.
I recognize a sex binary, but also know that diverse gender identities are a sociological and anthropological phenomenon in modern humans. I don’t “erase” them!
There’s more ideology in the last paragraph (my bolding):
In science, how sex is defined for a particular study is based on what organism is being studied and what question is being asked. The criteria for defining sex will differ in studies of mushrooms, orangutans, and humans. It will also change if the purpose of the study is to look at genetics, or gross anatomy, or hormones, or reproduction, or gender. The truth is, sex is defined a lot of ways in science, but in none of them should individuals who are part of nature be ignored and excluded. That would be bad science.
Yes, “bad science” is, to the ideologues, science that could be used to ignore or exclude people. But if that exclusion occurs, it’s not the fault of the science itself, but of bigots who use science to denigrate others. And so it is with sex. There are two sexes in all animals (and nearly all plants), but that doesn’t mean that the few individuals who are exceptions (0.018%, or about 1 in 5600 individuals) should be ignored or excluded. Only a callous person would treat people that way! As for those enacting “gender roles” that don’t mesh with the “traditional” behavior of human males or females, that’s irrelevant, for those roles have nothing to do with the definition of biological sex.
And so, in the service of Social Justice, we get the same arguments. (Excerpts from the paper are indented.)
Many factors define sex.
There are many factors that define sex, including chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitalia, and gametes (reproductive cells). But with so many variables, and so much variation within each variable, it is difficult to pin down one definition of sex. Some sex-defining factors are discrete traits, such as the number or type of chromosomes a person has. Other traits exist on a continuum, such as the arbitrary guidelines for how long an external genital organ must be at birth it to be classified as a penis instead of a clitoris.
Yes, some people may define sex using chromosome, genitalia, temperature (a sex-determiner in some reptiles), etc. But biologists have settled on the gamete-based definition (males produce small mobile gametes, females large immobile ones) because it is both universal in animals and plants (only algae, fungi, and some other unisexual organisms have “mating types” that aren’t seen as sexes), and deeply explanatory, giving us explanations for phenomena like sexual selection, parental care, the fact that females bear young and produce milk, and so on. No hormone- or chromosomal-based definition can come close to explaining these phenomena.
There are intersex exceptions. Although intersex individuals—which are not, by the way, members of a third sex—are rare, the paper uses them to make what the authors see as a telling point:
These different traits also do not always line up in a person’s body. For example, a human can be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina, or have ovaries while producing lots of testosterone. These variations, collectively known as intersex, may be less common, but they remain a consistent and expected part of human biology.
Yes, these exceptions to the binary are indeed very uncommon and, as I said, not members of a third sex since they produce, at best, only the two gametes characteristic of the sex binary. (I have found no record of an intersex human producing both viable eggs and sperm.) I don’t know what the authors mean by “consistent”, but yes, there will always be a low frequency of intersex individuals due to issues in development, but so what?
And “expected”? We don’t really expect intersex individuals from first principles, but we do observe them and have now, based on that, come to expect their appearance as rare phenomena. But that doesn’t matter, either: the way we treat such individuals doesn’t depend on how common they are or whether they’re “expected”. They are human beings like the rest of us, with the same moral claims as everyone else.
The definition of sex has changed over time. The authors then drag in the observation that definitions of sex, like race, have changed over time (of course they have: our knowledge expands!). But again, so what? Just because our understanding and hence definitions have changed doesn’t mean that what we use today is wrong. In fact, I suspect the gamete-based definition is here to stay, like the definition of a carbon atom. From the paper:
It may feel easier to accept that gender is a social construction given how rapidly gender norms can shift, the ample evidence of masculinity and femininity changing over time, and how entangled these constructions are with other aspects of identity such as race and ethnicity. We can recognize that how we understand what it means to be a Black man in 2024 is different than what it meant to be a Black man in 1992 after the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, which is different than what it meant to be a Black man in 1965 when Martin Luther King, Jr., set out from Selma. Gender and race—and sexism and racism—reinforce ideas about people that put them into categories with certain builtin assumptions.
Only a true ideologue could drag in differences in how black people were treated over American history as a way to show that the definition of “black” has changed. Rodney King? Is he relevant to a biological argument? What the authors are really describing is temporal change in how black people were treated. You could do the same with any group, like Jews, but that doesn’t mean that the definition of “Jew” has changed. It is in fact true that giving the definition of a black person is difficult task because of population admixture that blurs the edges of ethnic groups, but genetics can still identify a self-identified black person solely by looking at his DNA, and do it with over 99.9 percent accuracy. And again, the fact is that how people are treated has nothing to do with the biological traits that define their group.
Oh, and here’s an argument that I don’t understand at all:
Characteristics that may appear to be biologically determined sex differences can actually be the developmental product of entangled biological and social factors. For example, you may have heard that postmenopausal women have a disproportionately increased risk of developing osteoporosis. Yet the data show that the development of osteoporosis relates not to one’s sex but to one’s engagement in physical activity and exposure to sunlight—factors that are differentially encouraged along gendered and ra-cialized lines. A 1994 study published in Osteoporosis International found that Chinese women working as agricultural laborers actually had increased bone content and density correlative to the amount of time spent outside doing physical activity. The more we learn of the human experience and its embodiment, the less possible it is to argue for discrete differences and categories.
My response to this is “so what?” Just because a disease is affected by one’s environment as well as one’s sex says nothing about the definition of sex. Does a man with osteoporosis efface a gamete-based definition of males and females? Here the authors are just heaving a bunch of sand in the readers’ eyes, hoping that some of it will confuse them enough to accept their argument.
Here’s a common claim:
Humans differ in lots of traits, and accepting the sex binary ignores that variation.
It is important to recognize variations in biology related to sex, because the science of sex is impoverished by an over-reliance on binaries. When scientists fail to recognize the reality of variation in biological traits, and instead rely on simplistic assumptions about uniformity in “male” or “female” categories, the results are not only myopic research but also dangerous consequences for a wide variety of people. Healthy people with natural variation may come to see their biology as pathological, and people with health conditions may go untreated as a result of irresponsible, inaccurate science. When we limit the scientific understanding of sex to two distinct types and do not make the extra effort to include the totality of biological variation (not to mention its interconnectedness with gender and culture), we ignore the true shape of human existence. How scientists define sex, then, needs to be based on the particular research question they are asking.
Again, no biologist ignores biological variation, including in traits related to sex, like hairiness or penis size. But again, that doesn’t affect the sex binary. Again, what we have is a denial of the binary because it’s said to “pathologize” people.
And I have yet to see a biological question for which one needs to define sex as more than binary. But of course variations in how the sexes are produced, look, or behave is and has been recognized, and is the subject of a lot of fruitful research. But the binary, like the Dude, abides.
The Argument from Seahorses, Hyenas and Orangutans. This is funny, as these arguments have been rebutted before.
Male seahorses produce sperm, but they also gestate embryos and give birth. Female spotted hyenas produce eggs and gestate their young, yet they give birth via a sex organ that is larger than that of male hyenas. Even though these naming conventions stem from arbitrary size thresholds, people still typically refer to hyenas’ larger female organ as a clitoris and the smaller male organ as a penis.
Yes, male seahorses have a pouch in which fertilization of the female’s eggs takes place and gestation of the embryos occurs, and then the pouch opens to release the newly-hatched seahorses. As I described in WEIT, this is because females produce eggs at a higher rate than they can gestate them, so there is competition among females for access to male pouches This is the reverse of the usual situation in animals, and so, according to sexual selection theory, it is the females rather than the males who are ornamented, trying to attract male attention to appropriate their pouches. But this is a difference in gestational roles, not in sexes. I’d like to ask Clancy et al, this question: “How do you know that the seahorses that gestate are males? And how do you know know that the hyenas with a big clitoris are females? Here they implicitly assume a gamete-based definition of sex, and they’ve lost their argument.
Likewise, the orangutan argument is silly. There are two types of males and one of females, a phenomenon called “sex-limited polymorphism”. Here, read for yourself:
Physical and behavioral traits may distinguish types even when gametes do not. Orangutans include flanged males with impressive cheek pads, throat pouches, and gorgeous long auburn fur, weighing in at almost 90 kilograms. But they also include un-flanged males who, although they are also fully mature adults, have none of the fun bells and whistles of the flanged males, and weigh only slightly more than females. Both flanged and unflanged males mate with females and father children.
Yes, but how do the authors know that the flanged and unflanged individuals are male? It’s simply crazy to say that there are three sexes here. There are two, with sperm-producing males coming in two varieties. Again, the authors are implicitly admitting the sex binary. Yet later on they imply that the definition of sex in orangutans differs from that in humans (my bolding):
In science, how sex is defined for a particular study is based on what organism is being studied and what question is being asked. The criteria for defining sex will differ in studies of mushrooms, orangutans, and humans. It will also change if the purpose of the study is to look at genetics, or gross anatomy, or hormones, or reproduction, or gender. The truth is, sex is defined a lot of ways in science, but in none of them should individuals who are part of nature be ignored and excluded.
Mushrooms have mating types, so yes, the definition of “sex” involves the ability of gametes to fuse with different gametes of like morphology. But for nearly all plants and for all animals, the definition of sex is the same, and based on gametes. In what way do “the criteria for defining sex” differ in studies of orangutans and humans? It doesn’t! We explicitly recognize that the two types of male orangutans produce sperm, and they compete for the females, who produce eggs. The authors are dead wrong: the criteria for defining sex don’t differ between humans and orangs. Again, more sand in the readers’ eyes.
But they’ve forgotten to mention the clownfish, in which males can change their sex to female if an alpha female dies. Where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!
There’s a lot more sand flung about, like conflating how sex is recognized in humans (usually by the genitalia of a newborn) with how sex is defined, but you’ve heard those arguments before, and I have to go to the dentist. All I can say is that this paper a root canal is no worse than the authors’ argument. And we keep hearing those same arguments, often from the same people, over and over again. That’s because the authors are committed ideologues, and won’t rest until they twist and distort biology until it fits into the Procrustean bed of their ideology. They are determined to see in nature what they want to be the case in human society.
Great piece there, PCC(E).
Augustine Fuentes is a known bad actor and not a serious academic.
There are (fellow) attorneys who’ll tell you the income tax is “optional”, just as there are anti-vax doctors. These people exist.
Fuentes is one of them, in ev. biology. And can be dismissed as a crank.
It is concerning how many formerly respectable publications have fallen to ideological nonsense as collective decision making institutions. Fuentes, etc. are individuals and ugly flies will buzz about, but the real problem is the institutional rot.
D.A.
NYC
Bro just got elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
https://anthropology.princeton.edu/news/agustin-fuentes-elected-american-academy-arts-sciences
The arguments are tiresome. But I take some solace that academics who have become ensnared by this reverse naturalistic fallacy/moralistic fallacy must live in the same house with Fuentes and his a-biological nonsense. He can declare completely made up things about multiple sexes in reptiles, birds, and mammals, and they must just grit their teeth and pretend that there is nothing wrong here folks!
They seem to be operating under the illusion that the more they say it the more people will believe it, despite the plain facts of the matter. These arguments diminish the legitimacy of science in the public eye because the claim isn’t nuanced, it’s just silly.
No always an illusion, I’m afraid.
Only …
Only that we see these articles in Sci. American and Science magazine rather regularly. But could someone of greater stature like Jerry or someone else publish the other side in those venues? With all the caveats reassurances that no, this is not transphobic? No they cannot. And notice how F* declares that the other view — the view that always existed and makes universal sense and evolved – is now a transphobic dog whistle! That means that the other side better stfu and the editors better stay the hell away from it.
This jumped out at me, too, Mark. It made me think of something Ian Leslie wrote in his excellent book, “Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes”:
“[O]ur brains are always looking for ways to conserve energy, and one way to do that is to shrink the number of of people and views that we deem worthy of our attention. So we reach for labels – racists, deplorables, idiots – that give us an out. That surge of certainty you feel when you dismiss someone isn’t a signal that you’re right, it’s the satisfaction of getting out of some work.”
Love that quote!
My guess is this is an attempt at a bad analogy. They’re implicitly arguing that “Women whose choices are partly responsible for the expression of a sex-related condition like osteoporosis” are in the same category as “’Women’ whose choices are partly responsible for the expression of a sex-related condition like female appearance (large breasts, feminine face, etc.)” It’s in support of the claim that males who undergo ”gender affirming” hormones and surgeries now have bodies which legitimately qualify as female bodies, so the science says they’re female.
They don’t want to ask for consideration; they want to claim a right. This is what it takes.
Yes, exactly.
I’m a professional research geneticist who studies the ecology of sex in invertebrate animals and in humans. There are lots of researchers (and non-academics) with that same range of interests. We define sex in all of those organisms the same way: by gamete type. This is neither controversial nor old-fashioned and has not “evolved over the centuries” (jfc only a gender studies professor could use “evolved” in that way in a science journal).
It’s all so tiresome.
That, Sastra, is a great and not so obvious observation. It’s all seeming increasingly sneaky and devious. The lengths gone to to “proove” a lie is incredible
Or perhaps they have found a cosy niche to support them, whether or not that niche is worthy? I keep getting echoes of Intelligent Design… mangling science in the support of ideology.
” That’s because the authors are committed ideologues, and won’t rest until they twist and distort biology until it fits into the Procrustean bed of their ideology.”
As a turn of phrase, that one there is ‘cherce’!
Fuentes et al seem to be “refuting” a bizarre strawman, which goes something like:
If sex is binary then humans have to be binary; if humans are binary then all members of Category A need to be identical and all members of Category B need to be identical.
Hence, sex can only be “binary” if all men are identical and of all women are identical. Since they’re not, sex is not binary.
He’s looking for the contradiction which arises in the thing itself
This is supposed to be really how dialectic works.
I’m looking for some good quotes for that in Kant and Hegel, so give me some time.
I think you’re right.
Many bad arguments seem to be refuting strawmen.
I found something – but from V. I. Lenin :
Excerpt (source below):
” 1. the objectivity of consideration (not examples, not divergencies, but the Thing-in-itself).
[…]
3. the internally contradictory tendencies (and sides) in this thing.”
The Meaning of Hegel’s Logic
X: The Dialectical Method
Lenin’s “Elements of Dialectics”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean10.htm
And then the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy – look like Kant is the origin :
” As Kant had to admit, according to his theory, there is still a world in itself or “Thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich) about which we can know nothing (see, e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxv–xxvi). Hegel rejected Kant’s skeptical conclusion that we can know nothing about the world- or Thing-in-itself, and he intended his own philosophy to be a response to this view (see, e.g., EL §44 and the Remark to §44).”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
… so I guess the idea is to beat the thing with dialectic until the contradictions are shaken out – like dirt out of a carpet. If that’s the case, then the endless stream of sexy sex articles would make some sense – eventually, they think something will fall out.
You say, generously, “I recognize a sex binary, but also know that diverse gender identities are a sociological and anthropological phenomenon in modern humans. I don’t “erase” them!” (My emphasis of the generous part.)
Where I think this is going is that unless you give up the sex binary, you can’t truthfully (in the view of the ideologues) say you do recognize gender identities on their terms. Your loyalty oath isn’t worded strongly enough.
In order to make the concept of gender mean what the ideologues want it to mean, sex can’t be binary. And they are trying to get the law on their side. If to say, “Transwomen aren’t women,” is to be hateful, then by Heaven we are going to criminalize that hate.
This might be gender’s fatal flaw, which does it in in the same way the concepts of phlogiston and humoural balance were done in: they relied on what were later found to be non-facts. Gender ideologues must defeat the sex binary (by “going beyond gametes”.) If they can’t, their ideology collapses and becomes just “feelings”. That’s why they press their nonsense so hard.
This doesn’t mean that people who think they are some metaphysical gender that doesn’t match their sex shouldn’t be treated with tolerance and dignity as long as they stay away from children and don’t hurt anyone else. But having this non-fact-based belief then wouldn’t gain them any special rights against discrimination. An employer can fire a school science teacher who teaches that the earth is flat. It is not a protected belief. Neither ought to be “gender expression” which, as Jordan Peterson says, is just fashion sense.
Of course, Leslie, radical trans activists and their allies claim that unless and until you satisfy all of their demands you are a transphobe. It’s part of their catechism.
They are just stupid: don’t know much about biology nor about politics. In politics, you usually have to compromise. You won’t get everything you want.
Like the DEI people, they have little support among the public. But they have their heads too far up their own asses to realize it. Like Claudine Gay, going to Congress, after having been coached by some high-priced lawyers who specialize in coaching clients for Congressional testimony, with the message that Harvard is “deeply committed to free speech.”
You hit the nail on the head (again):
Hear, hear !
“Gender identity” is quasi-religious hocus pocus – nobody is obliged to “affirm” it any more than they need to affirm the the Earth is flat.
Ooo, my favorite topic for Friday night :
The Binology of binexuality
[ wacka chicka wacka chicka ]
[^^^ soundtrack to certain 70s movies]
“Send in the clownfish” 😄.
Maybe they think everyone’s already familiar enough with this trope, despite it being a farcical naturalistic fallacy. Or maybe they think it’s not “inclusive” enough, as it only refers to “trans” female clownfish. Why haven’t they brought up the various species of parrotfish and wrasses that change from female to male when the dominant male disappears? Then they could include “trans” males as well.
Can I offer two small quibbles? Prof. Coyne writes
“I … also know that diverse gender identities are a sociological and anthropological phenomenon in modern humans.”
I assume that Prof. Coyne would not object to adding “psychological” to “sociological and anthropological”?
Second, I wondered if the authors’ point that “…what it means to be a black man….” refers simply to the fact that even in fairly recent history American assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes about race have changed. If the way that Black people have been treated has changed, that might be in part because “what it means to be” Black has changed. I remember the essay by Dr. Alvin Poussaint, the well-known Harvard psychiatrist, about his visit to a town in Alabama a number of years ago, where he was threatened and verbally abused by a police officer who clearly felt that Poussaint was less than a full person, and even ridiculed Poussaint’s audacity in claiming to be a physician. Presumably that kind of treatment is now a thing of the past, but is so in part because what it means to be Black has changed enough to include the possibility of being a respectable upper-middle class citizen, even in Alabama.
Prof. Coyne then shifts from a cultural understanding of “Black” to a biological understanding of Black, reminding me of the classic Fawlty Towers scene in which the crusty old Colonel – I think it was – explains to Basil the difference between people labelled by the n-word and those who were “wogs,” since in British racial ideology both are “Black.” Yet for Americans, African-Americans are Black but people from India are not. And, again in our recent American history, “Black” included people of Mediterranean descent… It’s no wonder that many anthropologists prefer that the biology and science set aside racial categories such as “Black” and focus on genetics instead.
As for #1, yes, of course. But what is your point?
As for #2, note that the topic of the post is the binary nature of sex, and they follow that paragraph with this:
So I think they’re setting up the idea that social factors can look like biological differences, which of course is true. But their claim that social factors change over time is trivial at best, and they’re trying to argue, I believe, that these factors can give us a false idea of the binary. In fact, the whole digression is a non sequitur that I think is meant to show the reader how malleable categories like biological sex are.
As you must know if you read this site and some of my popular papers, my view of races is based solely on genetics, not on social treatment, and I’ve written about this quite a bit. And perhaps you know that even self-identified blacks can be identified independently and blindly by multilocus genetic analysis with over 99.9% accuracy.
Quote from article :
“Characteristics that may appear to be biologically determined sex differences can actually be the developmental product of entangled biological and social factors.”
My dialectic-O-meter is in the orange with this quote – especially as a contradiction that arises in the thing itself (I’m looking for quotes on this as noted up above).
Thanks for your reply, and please forgive a quick response.
I suggested adding “psychological” as a way of suggesting that “gender identity” is not simply the product of exogenous factors, but also of endogenous factors.
Regarding my second point, I do not want to imply, let alone suggest, that I am disagreeing with you, but perhaps I read the quote from Clancy et al a bit differently. I took it that their reference was to changing cultural assumptions, beliefs, attitudes about the racial category “Black”, but perhaps it was not, or was not merely that. To be honest, their original article did not seem worth my time, so I could be interpreting the summary incorrectly.
And I am aware that, as you note, self-identified blacks can be identified [as black presumably] by genetic analysis with nearly 100% accuracy, but that kind of claim always seems to me to be on the order of saying that people who believe they have red hair can be identified as red-heads by genetic analysis with over 99.9% accuracy. I was more interested in the people who one culture regards as “Black” but another culture does not, which always struck me as a good example of the difference between cultural assumptions about race, and scientific facts about race.
Yes, still needs rebutting. This is important work you do.
“Sand in the eyes…” like that, but it’s also the grains in the mouth we have to spit out everytime. Staying with it…
The attempt to bend nature to suit an ideologue is a soap opera. whining drama and pleading with measured wimp tones.
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”
“where we waste our time on people who lie”
sure, make stuff up, crap ideology needs to be aired and picked apart
but what, FOR EVER!
Apparently, like a soap some can’t get enough.
My God, the seahorse argument!
What is it that these people think makes the male seahorse, male? (I.e if not that it’s the one that produces the small gametes.)
I recently had some ill-informed person arguing the same mistaken points on X/Twitter. Outlets like Sci Am, and even Nature, (!) are complicit in the undermining of the understanding of basic biology. This period in the popular understanding of science is not going to look good in hindsight.
What do you call the fact that every human ever conceived is the product of sex, the fusion of a sperm and egg? Does not matter if one of the donors is ‘intersex’, or has the ‘genderly feelze’ of something other than male or female. What do you call the fact that all humans are conceived from the fusion of two differentiated sex cells?
I think I will open from now on every discussion I get into about the binary nature of sex with your thought-provoking post, with your permission if you don’t mind.
Repeat and amplify. No attributions needed as I am not the creator of this thought.
Fantastic write up. Question.
I have heard you mention in previous articles that Fausto Sterling herself walked back the 1.7% intersex number. But I’m having trouble finding it. A link from your last article directed me to your letter to the editor. But I didn’t take that as her or her colleagues correcting it themselves. And as far as I can see her paper still says 1.7%.
Please advise.
You could have looked it up on Google.
First, an admission that her first letter was written “tongue in cheek”: https://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202016%20readings/IPD%202016_3/FAUSTO_STERLING-2000-The_Sciences%205%20sexes%20revisited.pdf
Yes, and a correction by her colleague to 0.37%: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ajhb.10122
If you read down below that paper, you will see a short note by Fausto-Sterling approving of and accepting that 0.37% estimate.
The best estimate is that of Sax: 0.018%
Which is the same probablity as a tossed coin landing on its edge. (I love that comparison)
Why are diseases being treated like evolved varieties anyway?
Thanks for the clarification. Not that it wasn’t clear before. I just misread it and suck at google apparently
I can’t believe I missed this:
“Healthy people with natural variation may come to see their biology as pathological.”
This is the definition of transgenderism: healthy and natural psychological variation (in masculinity or femininity) leads to the view that one’s biology (genitalia and secondary sex traits) is pathological.
Amazing lack of self-awareness by the authors eh?
Great post as usual !
However, I think you are being far too generous about “gender identity”.
I have yet to see a consistent definition of gender identity from the transactivist crowd.
In some cases, it’s ” social norms imposed based on sex” – in which case, gender would ALSO be binary.
In other cases, there’s this weird attempt to define gender based on various stereotypes – “If you like guns, then you are male gender. If you like dresses you are female gender”.
Yet others claim that gender is all about some mysterious “innate sense” of being male, female or other (like “moon gender”).
The transactivist brigade opportunistically switches between these various mutually inconsistent definitions in every argument (then the bleating about “transphobia” begins).
My position on this is:
Sex is binary. Gender is hocus pocus.
I feel like this post ignores that while biology is indeed the field that studies life on earth and thus understands the biology of sex more than most fields, it does not necessarily have the final say on a useful definition for human beings.
I would argue that biology having a clear definition for its purposes does not mean that society should acquiesce and use it alone, or treat it as the true, superior definition. I think this would actually lead to worse outcomes.
Intersex people do exist, as you acknowledged, but gametes were never the dominant technique used to sex them at birth. While I think denying an intersex identity to children has been a greatly flawed process, that often leaves intersex people feeling like they don’t belong in their sex, I think it is not a mistake that they use a mix of techniques rather than the stated biological definition of sex.
They have to consider social ostracizing, the child’s comfort in their own body, their future gender identity, fertility, and so much more. If only gametes were used, then you would have more cases where people would feel great shame about their bodies because they are closer to the other sex in terms of genitalia than the one they are expected to socially conform to. And to little purpose sometimes if the child was born infertile anyway. While I think the best solution is to simply accept intersex people as not being either sex or both, even when one forces a binary, a gamete definition is never used alone.
While the biological definition makes a lot of sense for broad work on life on earth, I think it’s best that the human definition has a bit more input from those that study humans alone.
You seem deeply confused. We’re supposed to make an exception to an empirical scientific rule to buttress the self-esteem of one person in ten thousand? You don’t fiddle with scientific truths to conform to social justice. And besides, as I’ve said before, I’m happy to consider interses people as not being of either sex, but as rare exceptions to the sex binary. But they are not a third sex. In fact, I doubt that intersex people feel “great shame about their bodies because they don’t conform to the gametic definition of sex. If they do feel shame, is is probably due to an intermediate morphology or other secondary sexual characteristics that are correlated with but not part of the definition of sex
Replying once, then denying my reply’s approval to get the appearance of a last word is embarrassment on your part. You talk about buttressing self-esteem, yet here you are. I’ve lost my respect for you, goodbye.
I put you under moderation so I could see your comments before replying, and then took a nap. Waking up, I see you made another confused and obtuse one, which I was going to answer and then saw this one.
You are a whining little infant that doesn’t have the slightest idea how I run this blog. Now that you’re whining about having been moderated, I won’t let you comment here any longer. You know what? I don’t give a rat’s patootie if someone like you, confused both biologically and philosophically, has any respect for me or not. Why should I care?
I don’t, so goodbye—oh, and grow up.