In a scientific journal, especially one as prestigious as Cell, publication of a paper is a kind of endorsement of its content, for the paper has to be vetted for accuracy and cogency. This is why I say Cell “endorses” the view of the paper below, which maintains that sex isn’t binary, and in fact that the very concept of “sex” is incoherent, harmful, and should be jettisoned. This is clearly an invited paper, but the standards of accuracy and rigor should still apply. They don’t.
What makes me even more sure that Cell endorses this message is that the journal itself is woke and rejects the sex binary in instructing authors (see below). Plus the article is part of a series of five papers in the journal under “Focus on sex and gender” (May 14), all of which reflect gender activism. In rejecting the sex binary, both via this article and in its own behavior, Cell is rejecting science in favor of ideology. That’s very sad, but it’s what’s happening—and not just in biology. The ideological camel is sticking its nose into the tent of science—and actually, the whole head is now inside.
This article was written by Beans Velocci, assistant professor of History and Sociology of Science and Core Faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. There’s little doubt that its motivation is ideological because Beans goes by “they/them” and specializes in research that buttresses the thesis below. You can see Velocci’s c.v. here.
You may read this short (3.5-page) paper by clicking on the headline below, or reading the pdf here.
First, here’s how Velocci tells us that the journal itself doesn’t agree on a scientific definition of sex:
Some scientists are already contending with this problem. Cell itself has taken steps in that direction: the author guidelines for submission include a note addressing the multiplicity of sex. “[T]here is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex,” the guidelines point out. “‘[S]ex’ carries multiple definitions” including genetic, endocrinological, and anatomical features.
Contributors should therefore reduce ambiguity by specifying their methods for collecting and recording sex-related data to “enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility.” The Cell guidelines are aligned with a broader conversation that names increased precision when talking about sex as a solution to these problems.
Here are the main problems with Velocci’s paper:
- It conflates sex differentiation, sex determination, and the definition of sex
- It argues, wrongly, that no progress has been made in understanding the nature and definition of biological sex
- Its argument is ideological rather than scientific, yet is given the trappings of science
- It argues that the binary nature of sex, which the author rejects, somehow erases transgender and nonbinary people
- And, as usual, its supposed examples that make sex nonbinary, like the long clitoris of the hyena, are wrong. But where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!
Since the whole paper is motivated by ideology (and by now you should know what that ideology is), here are a few quotes to demonstrate the gender-activist underpinnings. Binary sex is a tool of white supremacy, for one thing!
In the present, this means that sex—a key research variable in the life sciences, not to mention its role in structuring our everyday lives—is not a singular and stable entity. This has real, practical ramifications. On one hand, it introduces a tremendous lack of specificity and rampant imprecision to scientific research; on the other, it fuels ongoing arguments about the purportedly biological reasons that transgender (and especially nonbinary) people are not deserving of rights or do not even exist.
This of course is nonsense. The argument that sex is binary, and defined by whether you produce small mobile gametes (sperm in males) or large immobile gametes (eggs in females) has no bearing at all on whether people who are transgender or nonbinary deserve equal rights. Of course they do. (There are a very few exceptions for trangender people involving things like athletics, incarceration, or rape counseling.) Further, both transsexual and nonbinary people are, biologically, either male or female, even if they feel like they’re a mixture of both, a member of their non-natal sex, or something else.
But wait! There’s more:
Binary sex, too, continued to structure day-to-day life throughout the United States and Europe, with science serving as justification for a whole array of patriarchal and white-supremacist social arrangements. The point is this: even as scientific inquiry produced endless evidence that sex was neither straightforward to identify nor binary, sex continued to function as a foundational classification system for science and everyday life.
But the facts are the fact, even if they’re misused by bigots to denigrate people. As Steve Pinker has pointed out, we don’t say that architecture itself (or chemistry, for that matter) are bad and should be ditched because Nazis used them to construct gas chambers. But wait! There’s more:
We live in a social world that is fundamentally structured around the idea that sex is a binary, biological truth. Scientists are therefore constantly conditioned to ignore anomalies that do not fit into that scheme. Precision and rigor are incredibly important. They’re also not enough to counter hegemonic social forces.
Here Velocci argues that scientists ignore anomalies in sex (e.g., intersex or other conditions that affect secondary sexual traits) because we’re conditioned by the sex binary. But Velocci has spent the whole paper before this arguing that there is no agreement on the definition of sex, so how can Velocci claim that the world is structured around the sex binary? At any rate, I don’t understand what Velocci means by saying that the world “ignores anomalies”. They are the subject of a huge activist literature as well as an extensive medical literature.
One more:
Questioning fundamental truths is, in its most aspirational form, the point of any knowledge-producing enterprise. Imagine what we might find out if we were to let go of a category that hundreds of years of history demonstrates to be more useful for maintaining social hierarchies than for generating scientific knowledge.
This last point not only argues that we hold onto the false sex binary because it helps reinforce the social hierarchy (e.g. “transphobia”, white supremacy, and so on), but also that it impedes the acquisition of scientific knowledge. That’s a lie, of course: we wouldn’t know about sexual selection, parental care, etc. without the binary sex definition. Finally, Velocci tells us that we should just deep-six the entire category of sex.
Here’s another of Velocci’s arguments for dumping the category (but then what do we replace it with? Nothing?):
The answer to the question “What is sex?” is, in both theory and practice, just about everything, and therefore also nearly nothing. This exercise demonstrates that sex is an incoherent category, one that has perhaps outlived its use.
Another:
Paisley Currah noted in his recent book on government sex classification, “is what a particular state actor says it means.”
So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage.
I’m not really going into the argument for why sex is binary in all animals and plants, with exceptions being only in groups like algae and fungi. You can read or hear the arguments for it by Colin Wright, for example here and here, or read Alex Byrne’s new book Trouble With Gender. But if you’ve been reading this website, you’ll already know the arguments. In humans, only one person in 5600 (.018%) is intersex and doesn’t fit the binary. Even so, such people are not considered members of a third sex (see Alex Byrne on this issue here). All I’ll say are two things:
First, Velocci maintains that sex is a gemisch of different things: hormones, chromosomes, secondary sexual traits like genitals or breasts, physiological phenomena like menstruation, and differential behavior like parenting and psychology. To prove that, Velocci asks the students in class, “What is sex?”, and their answers, written on the board, look like this.
But so what? Velocci hasn’t given them the reason why most biologists define sex by gamete type, which is not a simple argument that can be grasped instantly. The figure shows only that sex determination and differentiation involve a lot of stuff, both upstream (incubating temperature affects sex in some turtles, and of course there is the societal determination of sex in those fricking clownfish) and downstream (most of the other traits on the chart). Like all aspects of an organism, the genetics, morphology, and physiology of traits are complicated. The figure above, as I’ve noted, conflates the definition of sex, the determination of sex, and the differentiation of organisms based on sex.
Second, Velocci implies repeatedly that all the work of scientists over the centuries has not led to any increased understanding of sex. Apparently biologists have vacillated among chromosomes, gametes, hormones, and genitals, and other stuff but in the end. . . no new understanding. This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing that this sweating professor is trying to say. After going through how sex was regarded for the last two centuries or so, Velocci says this (note the ideological slant as well):
So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage. This does not make for accurate or reproducible science. As several scientists have pointed out, these contemporary uses of sex—simultaneously attached to an oversimplified binary, yet in practice depending on a vast, rarely analyzed multiplicity—actually make it harder to understand biological variation. There are also human costs: a broader cultural idea of “biological sex” as binary, imagined to be backed by science, is routinely deployed to exclude trans and intersex people and indeed anyone with bodily characteristics that do not fit neatly into male and female norms. The status quo, built on the history sketched above, therefore generates unsound research results that falsely uphold cis- and heteronormative assumptions.
But just because ideas, concepts, and knowledge change over time doesn’t mean that the object of study is elusive, ambiguous, or incohent. As Alex Byrne said in the link above (which uses the same diversion of historical change):
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 are 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.”
Here, for example, are some of the things that we now know from using a definitional binary for “biological sex”
- The binary is useful in all animals and vascular plants. No other definition of sex holds for almost the entirety of the species we know. The binary is thus, except for a few groups. universal.
- Why natural selection has resulted in a sex binary rather than a single self-reproducing sex or in three or more sexes. No matter what produces sex, be it environment, genes, or chromosomes, the end result is always two of them
- The binary has utility. Without it, we cannot begin to understand how sexual selection works. And sexual selection has resulted in the following phenomena, which we pretty much understand
- Sexual dimorphism in appearance (why males are most often the aggressive and ornamented sex
- Sexual dimorphism in behavior (why, in humans, are males more often the risk-takers, why females are more interested in people than things, and why males compete for females (seahorses are the exception that proves the rule
- Why organisms care more for their relatives than for unrelated conspecifics
- Why females are more often the caregivers of their children
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
In the end, as we wade through all Velocci’s unsound but familiar arguments, we have only casuistry motivated by ideology. Velocci’s intent is to show that because some humans feel as if they’re not male or female, or feel that they’re members of the sex other than their natal sex, then sex in nature must reflect these human feelings. This is what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”, which can be defined as the view that “whatever we see as moral or good in humans must be seen in nature as well.”
There’s even a section of the paper called “other ways of knowing”, which argues that scientists should partner with those in the humanities, including queer studies, and this partnership is the way forward:
Many of the scientists currently pushing for critical thinking about sex are engaged with STS [science and technology studies] scholars—many of us humanists and social scientists coming from disciplines like history, anthropology, and sociology, and fields like Indigenous studies, Black studies, and queer studies. We in STS are poised to offer life scientists additional conceptual and practical ways forward. Knowing the history of science is, of course, part of this equation: it shows us that knowledge production of all kinds (including the history of science!) is an iterative process, where what we know is always changing.
Well, make of that what you will, but I’d maintain that, like the definition of “species”, the definition of ” biological sex” is the purview of biologists. Yes, philosophers can help us think more clearly, and historians can tell us about the history of studies of sex, but I don’t know how indigenous studies, Black studies, or queer studies can contribute much to a concept that, in the end, is about biology. The fact that biology is thrown into a gemisch with “studies” disciplines only serves to show how ideological Velocci’s argument is. As Alex Byrne (a philosopher who knows his biology) said of the American Scientist paper he reviewed, this Cell paper is “rubbish”, and shame on the journal for publishing it. There is no place for catering to ideological currents in a serious scientific journal, for reports about empirical discoveries should remain “institutionally” neutral.
Now, do I have to go through the other papers in Cell‘s Panoply of Horrors? If not, who will? Or should we just ignore them? That doesn’t seem wise since gender activism is infecting science in a big way, and few people criticize it. If dumb arguments keep being made over and over again, then it seems wise to refute them over and over again.
_____________
Velocci, B. 2024 The history of sex research: Is “sex” a useful category? Cell, online, May 14,2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.02.001
This is a massive effort on PCC(E)’s part – its the Dennettian directive to show as accurately as possible the thought process of which one might be critical – encomiums.
I’d note the interest in “category” has a Hegelian vibe… and “conflation” might instead be a clear result of dialectic (thanks again, Hegel).
That said – I find that a short musical intro (in my head, at least) works great for these sex articles that continually materialize – from certain movies from the funky 70s with the wah-wah guitar and slap bass going :
“Wocka chicka bow-wow wah-wah”
I agree: for these folx everything is about categories. They assume that scientists think in this categorical way as well, and that telling a biomedical scientist that “sex is not binary because there is variation within a sample of females” is some kind of revelation. There is a shortage of statistical thinking about variation, its distribution around a central tendency, and how to compare those distributions or tendencies among different samples. One conclusion is that, instead of embedding an STS scholar in a biomedical lab, one might need to embed a biomedical researcher with rudimentary statistical understanding into the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. But as usual the question arises: who would pay for that? and who would want the job?
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Do you remember WEIT’s discussion of a Sci Am article which completely misunderstood the normal distribution?
Wokely believers reject statistical thinking per se. After all,
if half a distribution falls below the median, that contradicts social justice.
Freddie deBoer wrote about this problem (half of all individuals in a sample fall below the median) today. Different context (college admissions into high-paying STEM fields relative to the distribution of abilities to do well in those fields) but same idea: lack of statistical thinking.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-some-college-administrators
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I think there should be more high school classes in probability and statistics, which most of us can use in our daily lives, rather than so much emphasis on calculus, which, though necessary for the professions of science and technology, would be rarely used by most people in daily living.
Reply to Stephen. Statistics is so much easier to understand by using calculus. f(x)=d(F(x))/dx is pretty fundamental. Without this sort of approach, too many statistics books and courses are promulgating recipes: just plug in the numbers and this is what you get. This is more like rote learning than understanding.
I can understand what’s happening with pop science magazines like Scientific American.
But why are prestigious science journals like Cell allowing this complete nonsense to be published ?
It’s a really frustrating situation for non-experts like me, since somehow can always cite articles like this as “proof” that sex is not binary or is undefined or something…
When I was in graduate school in the mid 1990’s, several notable PIs in my department referred to Cell disparagingly as “Cell magazine.” It’s had a reputation as semi-serious for a while.
We hope you will fight on the front lines in this war, PCC, as many of us are full of despair and have no effective ammunition.
Exactly how I feel. So grateful for Professor Coyne and others. Keep waiting for this house of cards to fall.
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Likewise.
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Yes, my thoughts exactly
Thank you for continuing to comment on this stuff. Pseudoscience should not be ignored. This comment was made in a political context, but it’s true here as well, “When someone says something bad, we pretend to not hear it.” We, those who believe in rationality, cannot do that. Otherwise the inmates will run the asylum. Unfortunately, in some cases they already are, e.g. the wellness industry. Anyhoo, I write a lot – my congressional representatives, my newspaper (we still have one) and online news sources. I do it when they publish or promote irrationality. Voting is an important way to fight but it is not the only one. Good scientific communication is also required. Thank you for doing this.
Only in the penultimate paragraph does Beans finally get to the point:
“This kind of cross-disciplinary work [to ‘improve healthcare for queer and trans people’] is hard. Our disciplines are not set up for it, from funding opportunities to tenure processes.” Ha, well, the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania is not set up to fund it, but hey the medical school has tons of money we could siphon off to pay Beans.
How can one work around this? “One approach involves embedding an STS [science and technology studies] scholar in a lab setting.” With salary and benefits for the embedded scholar ofc.
It’s all a grift. The ideology might have arisen, as TP has gone to some lengths to explain to us all, as an offshoot of cheap marxism. But the operationalization of the ideology is all about grants, salaries, and CVs lined with this kind of garbage. People like Beans are barely pretending to care about anything other than the creeping irrelevance and financial peril of their university humanities departments.
Good point!
Embed a well-compensated commissar in every lab!
I would suggest that responses to such papers should be both defensive and offensive in nature and PCC’s response is a good illustration of how.
The defensive response is to highlight the unsound arguments, inaccurate data and fallacies advanced in the original paper. The problem with that approach is that it rarely, if ever, has the impact of the original paper, as those who have grappled with anti-evolutionist cranks can attest. Effective replies are necessarily longer than the original “Gish gallops” and run into the tl;dr response.
The offensive response is to point out forcefully, as PCC has done here, that this paper is not science, it is commentary. It enlists whatever science it can find to buttress controversial cultural and political ideologies and a journal like Cell does science no favors by presenting it as something more respectable. Science depends on such journals to be reputable and rigorously scientific vehicles for the best science available. Where they fail in that duty they should be called out for it by as many scientists as are able.
It’s Velocci who is introducing a “tremendous lack of specificity and rampant imprecision” by throwing a smokescreen up in front of something that is, in fact, quite clear. His approach to obfuscation is now the apparent standard: blur the distinction between the *definition* of a thing and the *characteristics* that are used to recognize it. If there is a lack of “specificity,” it’s there because of this now-current rhetorical move, not because there is any real lack of clarity.
Indeed, Norman.
Are all scientific journals, especially in the Anglosphere, now at risk of capture by ideologues whose views/epistemogies are not at all representative of their readership? We are accumulating quite a list: Cell, Science, The Lancet, etc.
Is there a phenomenon in editorial staffs that mirrors that in university administrations- the sense that certain ideologies must be platformed, at least performatively, to avoid attacks from strident social Justice critics?
AAAS Science, SciAm & Nature were already ideologically captured by the turn of the century. Editors (and funders) have huge power of what gets printed & what doesn’t.
It’s sad to see a string of reputable journals fall for ideological arguments, compromising their own integrity. Why would they do this? I guess the editors are emotionally influenced to defend the transgender community, whose existence has sparked a culture war. But in doing so they are neglecting their jobs, which is to publish scientifically rigorous research. That author’s article does not meet that standard.
Does Cell Press have an ESG score? I am guessing yes.
How does the ESG score change when Cell Press publishes “social” articles as shown here?
How does the ESG score change with DEI activism?
Questions to think about, IMHO.
They/he/she/it just had to throw in
“Binary sex, too, continued to structure day-to-day life throughout the United States and Europe, with science serving as justification for a whole array of patriarchal and white-supremacist social arrangements.”
I suppose the US and Europe should try to be less patriarchal, and perhaps emulate the sex/gender equity/equality of the Muslim Mid-East and other non “western” cultures.
Meanwhile, I’m confused. If sex is a meaningless category, why bother with issues of equal rights, discrimination, Title IX, Women’s Studies Departments, etc.
Thank you for this column. This plus the discussion/review of a recent “similar” paper in Science (!!!) document the error of this strange drift in the literature.
Big long sigh.
If only someone could publish rebuttals in the same journals. But I bet one can’t get it past the censors. And yet I do have the belief that there is a silent majority out there, fuming away and wondering what the hell is going on.
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I sometimes think the insistence that “sex is not a binary” is fueled by a basic confusion between different definitions of the term “binary.”
A binary doesn’t just indicate a system with two separate parts (i e male and female.) In feminist and gender studies, it means “ a conceptual hierarchy which is formed by taking a term with a dominant positive value and creating a subordinate value by negating the privileged qualities of the dominant term (i e masculine and feminine.)”
In other words, a natural difference in nature now includes a value hierarchy. If there are only two sexes, then it stands to reason that little boys are supposed to play with trucks and little girls must play with dolls and anything else is wrong. It also naturally entails that men are above women. “Binaries” consist of ideal Platonic forms without variation. If two things are not absolutely distinct in every way, then they must collapse into each other.
As the authors of the paper write:
Social hierarchies? They seem to be collapsing the sex binary into a value-laden gender binary. Since we know there’s nothing “unnatural” for a boy to play with dolls or for a girl to play with a truck, they then conclude that sex can’t be a binary using either definition.
Good point but I think the “category” Beans wants to collapse is “sex”, not the “binary”. However, it must be that Beans thinks that the binary of sex did serve to oppress people (perhaps now women but “cis” people). At any rate, he seems to me to be clearly attacking the biological concept, not the feminist-and-gender-studies concept. Who knows?
Yes this is really important: it’s all about the values of the people who are pursuing this project to queer the sciences through a gigantic moralistic fallacy. Their project is fundamentally linguistic not scientific, and through a linguistic process they have come to a set of moral values, especially the value of total freedom from social expectations or biological norms and constraints in all realms related to sex (both the category and the act). The book review in New York Magazine last week by Andrea Long Chu is an extraordinarily clear example (sorry link may be paywalled, I read it for free but could be temporary).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biological-sex-gender-judith-butler.html
This would all be fine-ish if the queering project did not also have a required anti-intellectual mechanism for implementation. Because the queer view is the morally correct one, patterns in nature are required to conform to that morality. The sexes cannot, must not, be binary because this would violate the moral terms of the queer project.
Sadly, in nature the sexes are indeed binary; gender is an undefinable subjective experience; Lia Thomas is a male; and there are benefits to keeping male rapists out of women’s prisons.
So how to rescue queer theory? Strong-arm the editors of Science, Nature, Cell, & American Naturalist to publish garbage essays by gender studies professors; require biologists to agree that the sexes are not binary; deny the past research evidence for the sex binary; rewrite the theory (like you know real theory with equations, not the “theory” of queer theorists) that accounts for the evolution & development of binary sexes; teach students that sex is not binary; and (the real kicker) stop doing any more research that might show that the sexes are binary.
It’s the anti-intellectual element of the queer project that is most objectionable imho. It qualifies some of these humanities and social sciences professors for removal from the academy: they don’t want to find out how the world works (including the world of human cognition and social and economic interaction), they just want to make the world conform to their values.
It’s all about values.
[and sorry again for overcommenting; these posts are a sensitive subject for me bc they touch on both personal and professional interests]
See this by Andrew Sullivan (about Andrea Long Chu and Jutith Butler):
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-transqueers-take-the-mask-off-f7c?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=rz1of&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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The article is archived here: https://archive.ph/npPLm
Let’s not forget that Andrea Long Chu has written about how his transgender identity was driven by sissy porn and has written (my apologies for Chu’s offensive language) that “Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”. An utter misogynist, clearly demonstrating how men who “identify” as women have no actual understanding of what being a woman actually means.
Good reminder. The horrible negative connotations of coitus that he ascribes to women are a huge giveaway: he doesn’t think that women like, initiate, or control their sexual encounters. IOW he doesn’t think a woman ever fucks a man. I have it on fairly good authority that this is, um, totally wrong.
Exactly (referring to Mike’s post at 12:41 PM)! Looking back, the amalgam of post-modernism with moralizing “Progressive” activism was anti-intellectual from the very start, and should have disqualified its avatars from the academy 40 years ago, when this all began. The culprits are the academic committees who let the entire grievance studies charade get established in the ivory tower.
We cannot forget that light, which suffers from the familiar wave/particle ambiguity, “functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage”. Moreover, the word “light” itself could be used to promote white supremacy.
We should therefore prohibit the continued use of the word “light”; and we should bring scholars of “Indigenous studies, Black studies, and queer studies” into the work of Astronomy, Physics, eyeglass manufacture, and ophthamological surgery.
Good point. And the use of hierarchical terms such as “ultraviolet” must be discarded since it implies superiority over ordinary violet, creating an unjust power structure.
Marginalized wavelengths.
I have to ask people in the US
We have seen quite a few of these kind of articles in recognized (?) journals (SciAm, American Scientist, and now Cell) but it seems that opposing opinions in the same journals are missing.
Comparing to here in Norway, in 2018 this article was in Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association.
https://tidsskriftet.no/en/node/56692
The author was the current editors of the journal ( a medical doctor)
The reactions to this article was quite strong (mostly negative) and not only in the journal itself, but also in major newspapers. There was no censoring of opposing views and major newspapers regularly report on these kinds of issues, from both sides. In the US, it seems like there some kind of censoring going on in the journals that publish these articles. They don’t seem to publish opposing opinions. If so, this is really worrying. I find it hard to believe that major US science journal have been ideologically captured like this.
Although I think that article makes a better argument, it is still much like the one in Cell in terms of point of view. That it received a strong negative reaction is good, but perhaps give it time. In about 10 years this article from Norway could become the norm and dissent will be censored.
“In about 10 years this article from Norway could become the norm and dissent will be censored.”
In fact, I think it’s more likely ( I hope) that, seeing the trend critical of “Gender Affirming Care”, it may very well be the opposite that will be the norm. I may be wrong, but hope not
As I am sure you know, compared to Europe, the US is an outlier in this debate.
Thanks for your continuing, Viking comments, Bjorn, I enjoy them.
The US (and Australia and Canada) are indeed outliers.. so far.
The turn around of the Scandinavian countries lately has given humanity a shot of sanity in the arm. Again. You guys do that a lot: props.
With some luck – and the continuing devotion and efforts of those on the side of reason – these efforts will be fruitful EVEN in the Anglosphere, I hope.
D.A.
NYC
I was later thinking the same. The sensical restrictions against free-rein affirmative care over there would spread to this side of the pond. Here is to hoping!
From Sweden: a positive review of a gender critical book in the Journal of the Swedish Medical Association.
https://lakartidningen-se.translate.goog/aktuellt/recensioner/2024/01/lasvart-om-transvarden/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=es&_x_tr_hl=no&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Would probably not be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Thanks for (yet again!) taking the time to critique this nonsense. That a journal as prestigious as Cell has published such ideologically driven claptrap is both astonishing and appalling..
Here’s a “60-Second Lecture” (which is actually 3min long) by Beans Velocci titled “Sex Isn’t Real: A Historical Perspective”:
And comments are off, of course.
Wow there is so much wrong with that, and in only the first 10 seconds. Frank Lillie was talking about sex determination mechanisms, not sex categories or genders or anything else that a gender studies professor could even begin to understand. Lillie studied the endocrinology of sex determination, iow the sort of thing that trans activists like Beans Velocci routinely embrace when advocating for “life-saving” child sex change.
Also god this made me laugh “a lot of theoretical groundwork” (0:40).
Lillie was a University of Chicago alum and (arguably) the most important developmental biologist of the first half of the 20th century. Lillie was also an ardent eugenicist, and the kind of unperson whom an intersectionalist like Beans Velocci might not want to be caught citing as historical support for her queering project.
Lillie is one of my heroes and I think Beans should keep his name out of her mouth. Bah.
This Frank Lillie ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Rattray_Lillie
Seeing the video I tried to find this biologist that in 1939 claimed that there was no such things as sex. I found it highly unlikely that this could be true, at least in 1939
Anyway, the video by Beans Velocci was embarrassingly stupid to say the least, is this the standard we should expect of an associate professor in a proper university?
Yes that’s him. Lillie was talking about mechanisms of sex determination (how an organism is directed to develop into a male or a female) – his area of research. In that quotation he just meant that there was no single way in which sex determination happens. He was not saying that sex does not exist.
A little hunting around shows that this misquotation of Lillie is a widespread tic among trans activists and “scholars” like Beans. Shameful.
Thanks Mike
I am a biologist myself (MSc Evolutionary Developmental biology) and found it highly unlikely that any proper biologist already in 1939 would claim that sex does not exist.
So unPC to note this, but many of the hard core TRAs are of… let’s say.. in the words of David Buss, “low mate value.”
How would our reception be if this drivel were spoken by Sydney Sweeney, say?
Hopefully it’d be disposed of as it should be, but we’d listen. A lot MORE people would listen.
D.A.
NYC
“[T]rust me when I say that objects don’t just exist out there in the world waiting to be described. Instead, they’re produced by how people talk about and use them.” – Beans Velocci
This is an expression of…
“…linguistic idealism—the thesis that the world is, in some sense, produced by language.”
(Gaskin, Richard. Language and World: A Defence of Linguistic Idealism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. p. vii)
“There is nothing, neither substance nor form, without language. That is a kind of linguistic idealism that has been common enough in our century. I introduced this phrase “linguistic idealism” as a name for the extraordinary idea that nothing exists unless it has been spoken about (…). To paraphrase Berkeley, “to be is to be mentioned”.”
(Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. p. 138)
“There is no such biological entity as sex. Frank Lillie, a well-respected biologist, and one of the founders of endocrinology said this in 1939.” – Beans Velocci
Lillie really said that, but the context is important in order to understand what he really meant:
“Sex is a nearly universal attribute of living things as determined by various criteria of which amphimixis, or union of gametes, is the most general.
…
A brief definition of the biological conception of sex is impossible. As a matter of fact we do not know “sex” but only sexes. There is no such biological entity as sex. What exists in nature is a dimorphism within species into male and female individuals, which differ with respect to contrasting characters, for each of which in any given species we recognize a male form and a female form, whether these characters be classed as of the biological, or psychological, or social orders. Sex is not a force that produces these contrasts; it is merely a name for our total impression of the differences. It is difficult to divest ourselves of the pre-scientific anthropomorphism which assigned phenomena to the control of personal agencies, and we have been particularly slow in the field of the scientific study of sex-characteristics in divesting ourselves not only of the terminology but also of the influence of such ideas.
In the strictly historical sense of the words a male is to be defined as an individual that produces spermatozoa; and a female one that produces ova; or individuals at least bearing the characters usually associated with these functions. But, by extension, these terms have come to be applied also to the gametes themselves, to the determiners of male and female characteristics, and to the zygote destined to produce a male or a female.
Intersexual conditions of various kinds introduce other difficulties of terminology and even lead to absolute contradictions in terms, as in the case of animals that are of one sex with reference to their genetic determiners, but in structure and function of the other, as in cases of so-called sex inversion.
Such difficulties can hardly be completely avoided, and it appears inadvisable to attempt to restrict the use of the terms male and female to their historical simplicity of meaning, as Link (1929) has suggested. On the other hand it is necessary to distinguish carefully the radical difference between the qualities of gametes which fit them for the fundamental function of amphimixis, and the qualities of the differentiated individuals which bear the two kinds of gametes.”
(Lillie, Frank R. “General Biological Introduction.” In Sex and Internal Secretions, 2nd ed., edited by Edgar Allen, 3-14. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1939. pp. 3-4)
Excellent thanks for the extended quotation. That’s super helpful in explaining the nature of the misquotation by Beans and others. Lillie is explaining polysemy in relation to “sex”. His area of research was sex determination mechanisms that lead to the differences in gamete types and the diversity of secondary sex traits. One wouldn’t think this would be so hard to understand, even for a gender studies professor. One would be wrong I guess.
Yes, thanks, very helpful. Context is vital when quoting someone
WOW – bravo.
Good one. Thanks for that.
Absolutely excruciating to listen to. Made zero sense and just a string of gobbledygook tied up into a contortion of conflicting statements.
Imagine having that being on your scientific team .. their contribution for the study would be not even neutral but a complete black hole to achieve utterly nothing valuable. Time wasting humanities will contribute a negative value to any real scientific research.
This makes me furious and afraid for the direction of research.
Too right, Kelcey. I’m not a science person but an interested layman – though I’ve learnt a lot over the years from PCC(E) and commenters – and I found it nonsensical. Sorry to bring the tone down but too much beans makes for too much farty hot air and this person is full of it.
It’s utterly baffling how one can parade around as a professor at a top-tier university, peddling such dubious theses as if they were profound scholarship.
One thing I notice about gender ideologues is their false confidence, really the smarminess of someone pushing fake goods. Beans really has that ‘Trust me, bro’ manner well-honed, so unlike the true modesty of a real scholar whose results speak for the themselves.
Each time Jerry presents another example like this (which, incidentally, is helping me learn more about science than I ever learned in my required courses in Uni as a non-science major) the main question I ask myself is “why is this happening?” Are the journals and universities caving to this because they are afraid that if they don’t, enrollment will plummet?
See my above questions on ESG scores – one of my top explanations (if I can find the Cell Press / Elsevier ESG documentation). I found the “sustainability” page, but not ESG.
As for higher ed, we already have :
“Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet.
Parr, et. al.
“Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
2022
UNESCO
https://doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653
… ESG directly relates to SDGs.
Yesp. We’re thinking alike.
PCC (E) and Colin Wright are the Terminator and Godzilla warriors holding the scientific line against the encroachment of idiots and culture warriors. The fact they’re political lefties (like me) increases their superpowers. (Like Nixon in China).
Other people do the cultural aspect well (Joyce, Dawkins, JK Rollins, Genspec and now Shellenberger I’m happy to report.)
The scientific argument is more important because, for elites who can read without moving their lips, and get followed, the scientific argument usually wins the day.
So in this debate nothing is more important than the base scientific facts: all flow from them. And it is our friends Terminator and Godzilla who are taking a lot of flack defending the truth.
Hold that line, guys. Biological truth matters.
D.A.
NYC
What about Gamera?
Kaiju Justice Now!
😉
Sorry, this is driving me nuts. Who is PCC(E)?!?
I know it’ll obvious when someone tells me 🙂
Jerry: Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus).
Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) is a honorific for our host Prof. Coyne.
Our friend Bjorn linked it above, but let me further endorse:
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-transqueers-take-the-mask-off-f7c?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=rz1of&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Sullivan is a guy I sometimes agree with, sometimes not, but he nails this issue here.
The Bulterisms were more insane than even I’d read before. Such high octane crazy! Like a computer game with better effects and score, Andrew picks and excerpts the ugly foul smelling minutiae of this incredibly obtuse female’s idiocy so well and makes them RUN.
read it my friends,
D.A.
NYC
Maybe the dispute should be settled in the way of scientific inquiry: With an experiment.
Have Nature, Science, Lancet and Cell remove sex as a category from research in medicine and biology and publish only studies that don’t use sex as a variable.
Have another group of other journals, where medical researchers and biologists who think the binary gamete definition of sex is useful and predictive can publish their work.
After a period of lets say three to five years, compare the results, quality of research and predictive power of the produced results. That should settle this, once and for all and maybe in the process shake up the rigid hierarchy of scientific journals. I know where I would publish and where my wife (who is still active in the field) will publish.
has no bearing at all on whether people who are transgender or nonbinary deserve equal rights. Of course they do. (There are a very few exceptions for trangender people involving things like athletics, incarceration, or rape counseling
Even here, transgender or nonbinary people DO have equal rights – with their own sex class, which is the true comparator in these situations.
True! I should have been clearer by saying “there are situations in which they don’t have equal rights with members of the sex they claim to have transitioned to,” which of course is awkward but no time to edit it!
It is difficult to formulate an argument as to why trans people should have any rights at all, qua trans. As people in civilized countries, they have habeas corpus and the other civil liberties against arbitrary state power that everyone enjoys. No one is suggesting that trans people should be rounded up and sent to labour camps or treated with any kind of medical therapy against their will just because they are trans. If this is all that is meant by “equal rights” even as amended to mean according to the sex they really are, I don’t think this is controversial to anyone in the liberal democracies.
Where we get into trouble is the claim that other people’s rights to be left alone should be abridged by state power to prohibit employers and public-facing businesses from discriminating on the basis of gender identity or expression, or even (in countries without a robust First Amendment, which is everyone outside the U.S.) from saying unkind things about them that trans people deem “transphobic”. In other words, being trans is to be regarded as a protected human or civil right, like being black, or homosexual, or female. The state gives itself the power to punish you if you don’t behave in accordance with those rights granted at your expense. (In Canada we call this “the weaponizing of niceness” — Bruce Pardy.)
For a self-identified emotional personality state that can vary from day to day and can’t be externally validated this is a big ask. If a worker says his gender expression (“fashion sense” as per Jordan Peterson) entitles him to wear an elaborate drag costume to his job on a police force or in an investment bank, does the employer have to go along with this and not demand he wear a business suit like all the other cops and bankers? Does the employer commit an offence merely by asking why the drag costume, so doesn’t even dare? The Halton School Board clearly thought so in the case of the teacher with the huge rubber breasts. They were scared witless of him.
Where you run into trouble with your carve-out of keeping men out of women’s spaces like sport, rape counseling/shelter, and prisons is that they will reject those exceptions as being inconsistent with the larger argument, which people of good will have just conceded, that gender identity will be a prohibited ground for discrimination. Rights-seekers don’t generally agree in advance to limitations on their rights, rather they litigate to have those rights expanded. This is what we see in Canada where self-identified gender identity and expression are enshrined in Human Rights Codes and lo and behold, no, we can’t keep them out of women’s sport, change rooms, prisons, and rape shelters. Few small businesses and sports federations would dare: a Human Rights complaint is ruinously expensive for the respondent and usually lucrative to the complainant.
The binary of sex is of course an important scientific fact worth fighting for. It’s important to understand why the activists try so hard to defeat it: it’s in order that the formulation of trans rights shall make it impossible to keep them out of women’s spaces because that’s the prize they seek. They don’t really care about the correct diagnosis of intersex people.
“Around the 1870s, a gonadal model of sex rose to prominence.” – Beans Velocci
What Alice Dreger calls “the Age of Gonads” actually began much earlier, viz. in the early 19th century. For example, in 1830 the famous German physiologist Johannes Müller (1801-1858) stated:
“Zu einem Manne ist ein für allemal das männliche Secretionsorgan, Hoden, zu einem Weibe Eierstock nothwendig.”
—
“Once and for all, for a man the male secretory organ, testis, is necessary, and for a woman the ovary.”
(Müller, Johannes. Bildungsgeschichte der Genitalien [Developmental History of the Genitals]. Düsseldorf: Arnz, 1830. p. 123 [§151])
Yes! It’s not an accident that a universal definition of the two sexes based on gametes arose shortly after the advent of microscopes that could be used to see the gametes themselves.
I love “The Age of Gonads.” Alice Dreger is awesome.
Why doesn’t he ask a farmer, or anybody else who breeds animals. Our entire food market industry relies on people being able to identify animal sex.
Requesting over-commenting exception:
Looking for this pattern can help understand these articles:
There is a carceral entity (here, sex), imposed upon and preventing humanity from achieving its full potential – against the will. To break the Spirit free from the prison, a consciousness is required. This is liberation.
Such a pattern is gnostic in its insight, and hermetic in its claims of escape from imprisonment. Society is the evil demiurgos that created the prison.
These notions originate in numerous ancient cult religions.
correction: the demiurge is the artisan creator of the world.
I am increasingly thinking that we will get nowhere by insisting that “sex is binary”.
As pointed out above, the nonbinaristas are engaged in a linguistic project, and linguistically the word “sex” is just too damn polysemous to pin down; in their (intentionally conflated) usage it is NOT binary. We can’t win that argument.
Even in the restricted (scientific) sense of reproductive physiology, sex(ual reproduction) is not always binary (i.e. isogamy).
Sexes are binary.
Thank you Jerry.
P.S. “Beans”?
Red flag of a narcissist.
What figure 1 depicts may be called the sex complex (in the non-psychoanalytic sense), but only one part of it—gonads/gamete size—is the sex-defining one. It’s that simple!
The problem boils down to biologists talk about sex. The blue-haired group come in and talk about the sociology of sex, the social/psychological baggage humans wrap around it. The first organisms that reproduced sexually were a billion years ago. They did the dirty deed of mixing their DNA into a new member of the species with no concept of their sexuality, their favorite sex practises, their genderly feelze, etc. They didn’t even have brains. Yup, you can do sex without a brain, as many of us have proven after a late night out at the bar. All the other stuff is what we add in and it is sociology/psychology and what not. Interesting stuff, worthy of research, but it is not what biologists are talking about.
Are you going to submit a comment to Cell? Please do!
That IS my comment and it’s too damn long to submit to Cell. They wouldn’t publish it anyway as it’s antiwoke!
This is such an articulate and persuasive comment, whyevolutionistrue – it really needs to be seen by a wider readership. Could you edit it for brevity and consider sending to Cell? Even if they say no, they need to get push-back against this nonsense, especially from recognised experts in the field of evolutionary biology
It’s way, way too long to publish as a comment, and cutting it down would basically destroy the critique. So I haven’t really considered it.
Thanks.
Well, isn’t this a gem of an article? It’s almost laughable how something so devoid of scientific rigor and basic reasoning managed to sneak its way into a flagship journal like Cell. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, seeing the standards of academic publishing take such a nosedive.
Funnily enough, Velocci appears to blissfully ignore the glaring irony in the discussion of interdisciplinary research beyond the realm of gender studies:
“This kind of cross-disciplinary work is hard. Our disciplines are not set up for it, from funding opportunities to tenure processes. Ideas of what counts as rigorous scholarship differ—collaborating across disciplines means having to accept there are different ways of knowing that may not align with the evidentiary standard one has spent a career developing.”
I’m late to the party, but in reading this Cell article I got the feeling that something was missing. So I read it again, and yes, despite the title, and despite a section about the “history of “sex” in science” *it does not even mention the standard definition of biological sex*. In the whole piece, gamete size exists only as a citation of a “biology major” in Velocci’s undegraduate seminar.
Maybe he should have listened to him.