A good refutation of a bad article on the supposed “spectrum” of sex

On March 8, I wrote a critique of this article, which appeared in American Scientist (click sceenshot to read):

When I wrote my piece, I had grown weary of people making the same tired old arguments against the sex binary, arguments like saying that sex isn’t binary because male orangutans come in two forms (“flanged” and “unflanged”) while female orangs come in only one. That sentence is self refuting, of course, for the authors explicitly refer to two forms of MALE oranguatan. How do the authors know that they’re males, for crying out loud? The same goes for the authors going after the sex binary by noting the long clitorises of female hyenas and the gestation of young by male seahorses. Note that both of those sentences include either “male” or “female”, presupposing that these sexes exist and scuppering the four authors’ own argument!

I got splenetic and wrote this in my post:

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.

But you more or less have to keep rebutting this rubbish (as Byrne calls it below) because each new generation of students needs to be educated about how biologists define sex.  The reason that people say sex is a spectrum, of course, is ideological, not scientific: it’s because they want nature to correspond to their view of people’s self-image: today, some peopole can think that they’re varying mixes of male and female (one notion of “gender”). Ergo, nature must be that way, too. I call this the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”:  what we see as “good” in humans must also be seen in nature.

You can read my piece if you want, but better to read MIT philosopher and gender expert Alex Byrne‘s new takedown of the Clancy et al. paper at the Substack site “Reality’s Last Stand.” The subtitle below pulls no punches: the paper is indeed rubbish.

A few excerpts (indented). Byrne begins by giving the authors a bouquet of roses:

The essay is well-worth critical examination, not least because it efficiently packs so much confusion into such a short space.

Another reason for examining it is the pedigree of the authors—Kate Clancy, Agustín Fuentes, Caroline VanSickle, and Catherine Clune-Taylor. Clancy is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton, and Clune-Taylor is an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at that university; VanSickle is an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines. Clancy’s Ph.D. is from Yale, Fuentes’ is from UC Berkeley, and VanSickles’ is from Michigan. Clune-Taylor is the sole humanist: she has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Alberta, with Judith Butler as her external examiner. In short, the authors are not ill-educated crackpots or dogmatic activists, but top-drawer scholars. Their opinions matter.

But then come then brickbats. Unfortunately, as with me, Byrne thinks the arguments of Clancy et al. are misguided and thus injurious to science. It’s a long piece, worth reading in its entirety, so I’ll just give two quotes. The first is the common misconception that intersex people, who are only 1 in 5600 of all H. sapiens, are members of a third sex:

In any case, what reason do Clancy et al. give for thinking that the number of sexes is at least three? The argument is in this passage:

[D]ifferent [“sex-defining”] 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.

So the idea that there are only two sexes…[has] plenty of evidence [against it].

However, this reasoning is fallacious. The premise is that some (“intersex”) people do not have enough of the “sex-defining” traits to be either male or female. The conclusion is that there are more than two sexes. The conclusion only follows if we add an extra premise, that these intersex people are not just neither male nor female, but another sex. And Clancy et al. do nothing to show that intersex people are another sex.

What’s more, it is quite implausible that any of them are another sex. Whatever the sexes are, they are reproductive categories. People with the variations noted by Clancy et al. are either infertile, for example those with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) (“XY chromosomes and a vagina”), or else fertile in the usual manner, for example many with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) and XX chromosomes (“ovaries while producing lots of testosterone,” as Clancy et al. imprecisely put it). One study reported normal pregnancy rates among XX CAH individuals. Unsurprisingly, the medical literature classifies these people as female. Unlike those with CAIS and CAH, people who belonged to a genuine “third sex” would make their own special contribution to reproduction.

Here we have a philosopher who knows his biology, and this can make clear and piercing arguments.  (See below to see Byrne’s new book on sex and gender.)  And here’s Byrne on their view that sex is “culturally constructed”:

The problem here is that “Sex is culturally constructed” (as Clancy et al. apparently understand “cultural construction”) is almost trivially true, and not denied by anyone. If “X is culturally constructed” means something like “Ideas of X and theories of X change between times and places,” then almost anything which has preoccupied humans will be culturally constructed. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are culturally constructed: the ancients thought they revolved around the Earth and represented different gods. Dinosaurs are culturally constructed: our ideas of them are constantly changing, and are influenced by politics as well as new scientific discoveries. Likewise, sex is culturally constructed: Aristotle thought that in reproduction male semen produces a new embryo from female menstrual blood, as “a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood.” We now have a different theory.

Naturally one must distinguish the claim that dinosaurs are changing (they used to be covered only in scales, now they have feathers) from the claim that our ideas of dinosaurs are changing (we used to think that dinosaurs only have scales, now we think they have feathers). It would be fallacious to move from the premise that dinosaurs are culturally constructed (in Clancy et al.’s sense) to the conclusion that dinosaurs themselves have changed, or that there are no “static, universal truths” about dinosaurs. It would be equally fallacious to move from the premise that sex is culturally constructed to the claim that there are no “static, universal truths” about sex. (One such truth, for example, is that there is two sexes.) Nonetheless, Clancy et al. seem to commit exactly this fallacy, in denying (as they put it) that “sex is…a static, universal truth.”

To pile falsity on top of fallacy, when Clancy et al. give an example of how our ideas about sex have changed, their choice could hardly be more misleading.

I believe I mentioned something like this before, but only in passing and not nearly as clearly as does Byrne.

He finishes with a “J’Accuse” moment:

How could four accomplished and qualified professors produce such—not to mince words—unadulterated rubbish?

There are many social incentives these days for denouncing the sex binary, and academics—even those at the finest universities—are no more resistant to their pressure than anyone else. However, unlike those outside the ivory tower, academics have a powerful arsenal of carefully curated sources and learned jargon, as well as credentials and authority. They may deploy their weapons in the service of—as they see it—equity and inclusion for all.

It would be “bad science,” Clancy et al. write at the end, to “ignore and exclude” “individuals who are part of nature.” In this case, though, Clancy et al.’s firepower is directed at established facts, and the collateral damage may well include those people they most want to help.

There are, of course, words for people who retrieve and dispose of garbage: garbage collectors. But I know of know words for those who dispense garbage.

On a happier note, Alex has a new book on sex and gender out, and I have it on order. Early word is that it’s really good. Click below to get it from Amazon: