Lawrence Krauss has edited a volume of essays and articles by 39 scientists writing about current threats to science, including censorship, ideological corruption, and so on. It also includes a revision of my paper with Luana Maroja on the ideological subversion of biology. The volume will be out this year, and that’s all I can say about it except that Richard Dawkins has published part of his contribution on his Substack “The Poetry of Reality”. You can read this part for free by clicking on the headline below. You can guess what the answer to his title question is, and it’s correct.
The essay begins by recounting what prompted its publication online: the kerFFRFLE with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) that led them to cancel my article on their website Freethought Now! discussing the binary nature of sex, an article that took issue with another piece on that site by an FFRF employee maintaining that “A woman is whoever she says she is.” (The original article is still there; my own critique was removed by the FFRF but you can read it here, here, here or here). This act of censorship—I wasn’t even informed about it in advance—led me to resign from the FFRF’s Honorary Board, followed by the resignations of Richard and Steve Pinker, and then the dissolving of the entire Honorary Board by the FFRF. Freethought Now indeed!
As Richard notes at the outset:
It makes me particularly sad that [Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, co-Presidents of the FFRF] have chosen to stray so far from their stated mission of promoting freedom from religion and the separation of church and state. They seem to think that opposition to militant trans ideology is necessarily associate with the religious Right. That is false. If it were true, it would be an indictment of the rest of us for neglecting our duty to uphold scientific truth. In fact there is strong opposition from feminists concerned for the welfare of women and girls.1 Also from within the gay and especially lesbian communities2, giving the lie to the myth of a monolithic “LGBT.” “LGB” represents a coherent constituency within which “T” is regarded by many as an interloper. Most relevant here, cogent opposition comes from biological science – and that, after all, was the whole point of Professor Coyne’s censored article.
FFRF does not lack support. Indeed, among the secular / atheist / agnostic / sceptical / humanist communities of America, the Center for Inquiry (CFI), with which is incorporated the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), is now the only major organization still standing unequivocally for scientific truth.
This lamentable affair is what has provoked me into posting the following critique on my Substack. It is an abbreviated extract from my article called Scientific Truth Sands Above Human Feelings and Politics, commissioned by Lawrence Krauss for a multi-authored volume on The War on Science, to be published in 2025 by Posthill Press3. The full article makes a comparison with the debauching of science by TD Lysenko in Soviet Russia in the 1940s..
He then gives a long and very clear explanation, in classic Dawkinsian prose, of why biologists say that sex is binary and how the binary-ness evolved.I’ll give three short extracts, but do read the whole thing (for me, at least, it’s a pleasure to read anything Dawkins writes, not just for clarity but as a model of popular scientific writing). Below you can read about as clear an explanation that a human can produce. Sadly, clarity and truth do not lead to enlightenment among a certain ideologically recalcitrant moiety of Anglophones. The piece also has sections on “transracialism” and “the theology of woke.”
How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes. Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, said that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants not our masters. One might say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.6” That is logically unassailable in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand. I shall make the case that redefinition of woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is close to that extreme. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.
. . . It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, social systems, for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.
. . . . Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male / female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedevilled by numerous exceptions. Especially those based on sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it. In mammals, sex is determined by the XX XY chromosome system, the male sex having unequal sex chromosomes. Birds and Lepidoptera have the same system, but in the opposite direction and therefore presumably evolved independently. It’s the females who have unequal chromosomes. How do we know? Couldn’t you define males as the sex with unequal chromosomes? Well you could, but then you’d to have to say it’s the male bird that lays the eggs, the females that fight over males, etc. You’d lose every one of the 14 explanations I discussed earlier. Far better to stick with the UBD and say birds use sex chromosomes to determine sex, but it evolved independently of the mammal system. Birds are descended from dinosaur reptiles, and most modern reptiles don’t have sex chromosomes at all. Reptiles often determine sex by incubation temperature. In some cases higher temperatures favour males, in other cases, females. In yet other reptiles, extremes of temperature, high or low, favour females, males developing at intermediate temperatures. Many snakes, some lizards and a few terrapins use sex chromosomes, but they vary which sex has unequal sex chromosomes. Amidst all this variation, the only reliable discriminator is gamete size.
The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is, therefore, separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we in practice recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.
And that is all ye need to know. You’ll have to wait for Richard’s full article, which I’ve read as I contributed to the book, as it has a nice section on censorship in biology as promoted by Lysenko and Stalin.
I still like my list of questions to ask people who claim that sex in humans (or other animals) is not binary but a spectrum. (The proportion of individuals who are exceptions to the gametic definition given above is minuscule, ranging from 1/5600 to 1/20,000):
- How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
- If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”)
- Now how many sexes are there in humans?
- If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, how many sexes are there in humans, then, and then how do you tell these more-than-two sexes apart?
Good luck getting an extreme gender ideologue to answer these questions!
Every human that has ever existed is the fusion of two very different sex cells. But if I say that simple fact out loud somebody might get hurty feelings and maybe kill themselves because the most evil word in the world – binary! The horror, the horror!
Now burn this post and say nothing about it.
For the “+” part of 2SLGBTQIA+, in which “+” stands for whatever we want it to stand for, I repeat my call on behalf of the furry community : a coatimundi is whatever it says it is.
Maybe “+” refers to the obese? As in “plus-size”?
OK, I’ll bite! 🙂
How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
We don’t know, since they can’t speak, so can’t tell us how they identify. This shows the limits of science. We need to turn to Indigenous Ways of Knowing which are more in touch with animal spirits. Of course no questioning of the Indigenous answer would be countenanced.
Channelling the dark side REALLY well there, Coel!
The whole piece by Dawkins is excellent – and beautifully written.
Also too — “Freemartins!
Checkmate, Gender Atheists!”
Meanwhile, America is under a coup. But all we hear from many scholars is an obsession with manufactured culture wars that truly don’t harm people in most cases. For the record, I don’t side with FFRF and don’t think trans women should compete against biological women in sports. But for gods sake our country is on fire folks and most are caught taking a nap. Our institutions are being dismantled and taken over as I type this. Yet most are carrying on as usual. I find this alarming. It’s like worrying about a jaywalker only and paying no attention to a known child serial killer beside him. This is insanity. I am thoroughly disgusted with this world and most people today. When will people wake up to what is taking place? Why such complacency? Why the silence to what REALLY matters to our way of life? Why has the right been coddled, yet the Dems get eaten alive for the slightest perceived indiscretion. How’s this not, cult behavior?
No, I’m not overreacting. Four years from now we may wake up in a world where trans women can’t compete in bio women’s sports and you’ll get to say there is only two sexes, but we may also resemble a country a lot more like fascist Russia.
I think you’re on the wrong website. Don’t tell me what to write about, please (see the Roolz). And don’t tell me I’ve coddled the right just because I don’t spend all my time attacking Trump.
If you don’t like the slant here, I suggest you start your own website and rant there. I write what pleases me, and if it doesn’t please you, write what YOU want to see.
Funny that you just happen to be injecting this argument into a post defending evolutionary biology from attacks from powerful ideologues instead of, say, any of the other far-ranging topics on the website (which do include major concerns about politics in general and Trump in particular.) What is it about the transgender issue that causes people to suddenly jump up and start wringing their hands over other issues that need to be talked about instead of the one that’s being talked about so pleeeze can we all just agree to move on to what’s really important and never, ever bring this up again?
No.
What you call “culture issues” are possibly more significant, and with longer-lasting, more extreme effects, than the dumpster fire of current politics. You complain about institutions being dismantled while we’re watching science being dismantled. I think you should knock it off.
“Coup” used to mean the military sending their tanks into the capital, arresting the government leaders, and taking over the media.
Then it meant a protest march on Capitol Hill.
Now it means a team appointed by a newly-elected president doing his bidding to implement the policies he was elected on.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Ties together so many topics today.
Richard Hanania has a take on this that I, as a Westminster foreigner where the Executive is responsible to the Legislature (because drawn from it), found illuminating. A coup it ain’t.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/trumps-executive-branch-revolution
Not to comment too frequently here, but — my take is that elements of the “illiberal left” have greatly weakened our political strength and the capacity to respond to right-wing Trumpazoid politics. I would not presume to speak for our host, but that’s one take-away (from this site) for me.
This postmodern erosion of the left was explicated by Alan Sokal, for example, in this preface to his book (with J. Bicmont) Fashionable Nonsense — Postmodern abuse of Science.
One embodiment of this is the so-called trans-rights movement which, in its current extreme form, tramples on women’s rights, demands adherence to non-reality, is culturally regressive on sex/gender roles, can medically damage children and adolescents. This is a cultural Achilles heel to the politics of well-meaning liberals (like me) who hadn’t a clue to what it was about until the likes of J.K. Rowling, Kathleen Stock, Carole Hooven, Helen Joyce — and others — began to educate the public.
It was a factor in the defeat of the Democrats in 2024, and if they double-down on it as a tribal response to Trump et al., it will contribute even more to future defeat. I see it as a catastrophic error.
“Not to comment too frequently here, but — my take is that elements of the “illiberal left” have greatly weakened our political strength and the capacity to respond to right-wing Trumpazoid politics.”
And you wouldn’t be the only one who feels that way. By being slaves to Wokeism and continuing to push the Trans, DEI, and soft-on-crime agendas, Democrats all but ensure that Trump and those like him continue winning.
Exactly! I just got a breaking news alert that Trump has banned biological males from women’s sports.
Why was it necessary to elect someone like Trump to get this common sense and very fair to women rule passed? Will the Dems please wake up!!!
I think your hopes are in vain. Seth Moulton (D-MA) stated that “doesn’t want his daughters getting run over on the playing field by a male or formerly male athlete”. For that (rather tame) remark he was called a “Nazi cooperator” by a Democrat (Liz Bradt). His campaign manager resigned. There were public demonstrations against him.
I had been lately casting around for the reference (and here I must be terribly vague) about a priest, centuries ago, who was bemoaning how Christian missionaries created more skepticism about the church by making claims that distant peoples know to be false. What was that story?
Anyway, it reminds me a bit of this present situation.
Trans-activists:
1. Sex is a spectrum and a social construct.
2. There are 3 sexes in orangutans, 5 sexes in white-throated sparrows. 3 or more sexes in side-blotched lizards (all of these are claimed, without rebuttal even by captured biologists who should know better).
3. All adolescents claiming gender dysphoria are trans and are to be believed and fast-tracked to hormone therapy.
4. Trans women athletes should compete with biological women. They are so rare that it won’t matter.
See, I think the majority by now would have been willing to be far more open to trans rights to the extent that they can be granted. Trans rights are human rights, and i deeply believe that. But we are told to believe in the above things that we know are false. And so here we are with the Orange One again.
Even if all four of those points were true — as you say, none is — , we’d still be left with the problem of figuring out what trans rights actually are. As each one of those points become falsified, it gets harder to see what remains of a “trans right.”
A person who believes he is trans shouldn’t lose any of the rights he enjoys as resident or citizen of a western liberal post-colonial democracy: Habeas corpus, the right to a jury trial in criminal cases, no arbitrary search and seizure, no billeting, no discrimination by race, the right to file a lawsuit, etc. But who is proposing taking away any of those rights from people who say they are trans? The demand from trans-rights activists seems to be reduced to a “Give me this privilege free” card just because we are trans. And the case for that evaporates when Mark’s four falsehoods are rejected.
I think that the reference you’re looking for is Augustine (De Genesi ad litteram, 415 AD) – “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.”
👍
“[T]he so-called trans-rights movement…demands adherence to non-reality.”
This is arguably the worst part (a close second to surgical mutilation for treatment of mental health disorders in “trans” people). Having to pretend to agree with or just not notice the widespread industrial-scale institutional application of “trans” ideology and its denial of reality is a kind of defeat for the rational and reality-based majority.
Funny enough, it was the far left who were vehemently attacking the Dems before and after the last election. Remember when they kept on banging on about “Genocide Joe”? Now they’re crying because Trump is in office.
And yes, you ARE overreacting.
The Democratic party has a 31% approval rating. Pretty much because of the stuff this board talks about. Men in women’s sports and prison, children being castrated for mentioning they question their gender, protestors calling for annihilation of Israel and yelling ‘death to America’ while they are dressed up like terrorists and defacing War Memorials. Democrats are demonizing themselves but sure, Trump is the problem. Voters just think the Democrats are a bigger problem. Give people a reason to vote Democrat. A women having the hell beat out of her in a Paris Olympics boxing ring by a male isn’t that reason.
Brian, I and many others share your concern re the illegal dismantling of government by President Trumusk, their sycophant minions, and a complicit Congress and SCOTUS. Others including members of the press and Democrats have referred to these lawless activities as a coup. However as our host pointed out, his website, his rules.
Dawkins’ entire essay is brilliant and a must-read for a clear explication of some of life’s mysteries and also flashes of his underappreciated sense of humor, like “If you want to speak French properly, you really do need to respect every noun’s preferred pronouns.”
Ha! Il a raison!
For a short period of time gender ideologues tried to reconcile there only being two biological sexes with people’s mental identification not matching the sex of their body. This apparently proved to be unworkable for several reasons.
For one thing, it went against the dominant conceptual narrative of non-binary-ness, with everything being diverse, unique, and of special snowflake significance. Categories are things which society forces everyone into, binding and restricting their free choices. We can always rearrange how we categorize things. Binaries are thus a primitive version of colonialist oppression imposed on reality. Life is so much more!
But, perhaps just as important, admitting that there are two legitimate sexes meant that it was far too easy for people to interpret single-sex spaces as being about sex. This created a loophole where people who identified as transgender could be kept out of the bathroom they wanted to be in. That could not remain.
So neither could sex.
I had read this the other day. Its long but amazing. After all that has been written on this, Richard still manages to tell me things that I did not know….
I hesitate to open a can of worms here, but my first reaction to the title of Dawkins’ essay – Is Male Female Divide a Social Construct or Scientific Reality – was “Yes.”
The problem is that Dawkins does not seem to understand what a “social construct” is, and he misrepresents “postmodernism”. I would challenge Dawkins to identify an element of scientific knowledge that has not been produced socially, has not been taught and learned in a variety of ways, and has not changed (and presumably improved) over the centuries. The phrase “social construct” refers to knowledge – it does not refer to empirical reality. Processes of social construction hopefully get us closer and closer to that empirical reality, but we are simply not born with all knowledge and understanding of that empirical reality already present in our brains: we have to acquire it through social processes. When Dawkins writes “Money, unlike science, really is a social construct”, he confuses “science” with knowledge: knowledge of science and knowledge of reality. Money, the sociologist would clarify, is a social convention.
Thus, I wonder to what extent Dawkins’ skepticism about the point made by Collins or Gergen is his confusion of knowledge – which is always contingent – with reality. Historians of science have pointed to numerous cases in science in which “factual evidence” is ignored – Collins devoted two books to a number of case studies of exactly that. It’s a standard framework for the history of science, not unrelated to the observation of another physicist that a scientific theory is replaced only when the last adherent of that theory dies.
All of that aside, I think Dawkins’ points about sex are important and his essay is welcome.
It took me a couple tries, but I think I get your points. Science is a social construct in that it is a thing that humans do together to reach knowledge by consensus. The aim is to discover Truths – and the Truths are what is reality.
Under your definition of “social construct” everything we could talk about would be a social construct, and thus it would not be a useful concept.
The whole point is to distinguish stuff that has reality independently of what humans think about it from stuff that doesn’t (the latter including Greek mythology, national borders, and Dawkins’s example of money).
I submit that most people construe the concept of a “social construct” as Dawkins does. That’s very different from recognising that (as you correctly point out) our attempts at science are fallible.
Remember that the notion of a “social construct” comes out of history and sociology, where it is a useful concept because of the implications of knowledge being a “social construct.” It invites historians and sociologists to explore how and why forms of knowledge took hold and were considered valid or true, forms that are now recognized as saturated with cultural bias, for example.
What “most people” think about the concept of a “social construct” is not relevant in discussions of science, any more than what “most people” think about the Krebs Cycle is relevant to discussions among biologists, or what “most people” think about neutrinos. “Most people” don’t have much depth of understanding of the technical concepts in academic disciplines, and sadly Dawkins is one of them when it comes to the technical concepts in history or sociology.
Some of the more interesting examples come from my own field, medicine, in which 19th century knowledge of the body, disease, etc — to take only a simple example — was accepted as valid science and today seems absurd. See, for example, Barker-Benfield’s classic study “The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in 19th Century America.” My own small contribution to this was my study of “Greensickness” or “Chlorosis,” which was thought to be a special form of anemia that only afflicted working class girls — scientists and physicians would confirm that it resulted from the sinful sexual behavior of such working class adolescents, while middle and upper class girls, who would never indulge such animal passions, would always be diagnosed with simple anemia. You think chlorosis was NOT a social construct as well as a scientific fact at the same time? Read the 19th century literature. (Or give the Biology 101 final exam to students on their first day in class and see just how their performance depends on a social process we call education…)
The way that statements about reality are tested to establish their independence from what people might think is part of the social construction of science, and if done well lends credibility to claims of independence.
You see why I was hesitant to bring all of this up….
Hydrogen has three isotopes. The third one (Tritium) is radioactive. The existence of Hydrogen is not a social construct. The isotopes of Hydrogen exist with/without any human help.
I think your objection conflates the notion that our conceptual scheme describes the world with the notion that it constructs it. To believe the answer is yes, you are subscribing to the latter notion. That one doesn’t contain any idea of new descriptions aiming to get closer to the truth, only the former does.
“I think your objection conflates the notion that our conceptual scheme describes the world with the notion that it constructs it. ”
Not at all. My point was that our “conceptual scheme” is constructed out of social processes such as experimentation, discovery, teaching and learning. It does not “construct” the world outside of our knowledge of it, which presumably exists independently of that knowledge. But the history of science is so saturated with knowledge that is wrong, that historians and sociologists have found it useful to ask how that could have happened, and what creates “knowledge” that later turns out not to comport with other evidence of the nature of the empirical world. Biology exists apart from knowledge of it. But a biology textbook from 1850 looks very different from a biology textbook in 2025. If both are “biology”, how can they differ? And what is “biology” apart from the knowledge presented in each text?
“But a biology textbook from 1850 looks very different from a biology textbook in 2025. If both are “biology”, how can they differ?” They differ because biological science, like other areas of science, is a process for expanding our knowledge of the independent reality. The process, I grant, is partly social–but it also depends on the interactions with reality we call experimentation and observation. That is why these interactions yield up surprises.
Before 1977, our DNA textbooks would never have mentioned introns, but afterward they did. This does
not mean that introns are a social construct. They were there all along, but the process of the science of biology took until 1977 to find them.
[I deleted my comment which was posted at the same time as David’s and is resolved by his clarification]
Regarding that wonderful quiz at the end:
Raises hand, quickly, wriggling with anticipation, ooh, ooh, call on me! —
— Yes, (name redacted?) —
Responds with a 15-minute rant derivative of J. Butleresque bullshit —
My goodness. I have always had a high opinion of Dawkins’ writing, but I think he has outdone himself. The essay is quite a masterpiece of clarity.
Brilliant piece. Dawkins covers a lot of ground, some parts more thoroughly than others. His most fully fleshed-out section is on the sex binary, and here he does an incredible job of tying the sex binary to both empirical observation and to evolutionary theory. The sex binary is not only empirically valid; it explains so much as well.
Here is an excellent couple of sentences that describe some critically important distinctions. The italics are mine:
“The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is, therefore, separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we in practice recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two.”
Activists often—perhaps universally—confuse the three concepts above. Since they regularly employ that confusion to gain advantage, it’s hard to accept that they are being intellectually honest.
Finally, regarding the topics Dawkins discusses more in passing—such as the question of why it’s OK to choose one’s sex but not one’s race, or why “violence” has been redefined as emotional hurt, rather than its original meaning involving physical damage—it seems that Dawkins wanted to get these related topics onto the table but didn’t want the essay to become too long. What that tells me is that there could be an entire book that he could write on this collection of related topics. I’m not suggesting that a man of his talent should spend his time addressing such nonsense, but since the nonsense has become so consequential in today’s society, maybe a book would be worth it.
Yes. What particularly struck me about Dawkins’ essay is how much natural variety and variation he ties in with the binary nature of sex. I’ve read pieces put out by Genderists who use similar examples to argue that see, it’s not all black-and-white the way the “anti-trans” people think it is. They’re clearly creating a straw man and arguing against that, while failing to have a coherent conception of what they think they’re arguing for.
When I was a (high) school biology teacher, the definition of male and female was pretty basic stuff. I used the mnemonic Male = Many, Minute, Mobile gametes and Female = Few, Fixed, Food gametes (fixed and food aren’t great, but they’re the best words being with F I could come up with).
Also, another question to ask the gender ideologues: who are you going to get to rewrite all the biology textbooks, because apparently they’re all wrong now? I don’t think they realise how much basic biology they are rewriting.
“another question to ask the gender ideologues: who are you going to get to rewrite all the biology textbooks, because apparently they’re all wrong now?”
At risk of exceeding the limit on posts here, I’ll ask for clarification. “Gender” is a psychological state, so I am not sure why gender would call for any rewriting of biology textbooks. As I understand it, what makes trans people trans is a conflict or mismatch between their experience of their bodies and their psychological sense of their gender — that does not depend upon any formal definition of biological sex, and is distinct from biology, isn’t it?
If you want the psychological sense of gender to become more important than the biological sex — the real way of being a man or woman — you have to undermine sex’s significance and status as a simple and legitimate category. That presumably requires rewriting textbooks.
As Colin Wright put it:
Yes, you have exceeded the limit. Could you please follow the Roolz?
Here’s a counter-factual “if”
Suppose it were discovered that pregnant women with certain genes were more likely to have children with gender dysphoria and that giving a larger dose of some food supplement could more or less eliminate that dysphoria. Do we recommend that supplement to the mothers-to-be? Yes or no? And the pros and cons … answers on the back of a postcard, please.
I wonder if we will get illiterate rants from Nasty Atheist Hemant Mehta, and creeper PZ Meyers, foaming at the mouth at Dawkins, again?
[goes and checks]
Yes, PZ has already crapped out a string of words and invective. Remember, he is the weirdo arguing that there are SEVEN sexes of HORSE. But then again, PZ has an interesting history regarding the animal kingdom and sex.
There should be a hyphen in “male female divide,” right? While it’s a non-substantive comment, I’m not wrong on this, am I?
The official Olympic Portrayal Guidelines included “TERMS TO AVOID: “born male”, “born female”, “biologically male”, “biologically female”, “genetically male”, “genetically female”, “male-to-female (MtF)”, “female-to-male” (FtM)”. I found the following statement online “the distinction between man and woman is not a natural one but an artificial one”. This statement came from a person who had actually seen his wife, give birth. Christy Hammer (U of Maine) dared to claim that “there are only two sexes”. For that heresy she was investigated by the Maine Human Rights Commission (MHRC) for two years. She was eventually cleared.
I am one of the people who claim that sex in humans is not strictly binary, but a spectrum. So I will try to answer your questions:
How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
The way I see it there are two concepts of sex, the roles that have evolved through evolution and the category that an individual organism belongs to. In nonhuman animals like cats, horses, hyenas, ducks and sharks there are two sex roles, “male” and “female”. But a case can be made that the categories that individual organisms belongs to are not exclusive.
If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”)
It depends which concept of sex we are referring to. If we are talking about the roles, then gametes define those roles. If we are talking about how to classify individuals into sexes, then gametes are not always the best option, but it is a strong consideration in most species and most individuals.
Now how many sexes are there in humans?
Same answer as #1, two sex roles, but some individual organisms cannot be strictly classified into one of the two categories.
If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, how many sexes are there in humans, then, and then how do you tell these more-than-two sexes apart?
The answers don’t differ, again two sex roles in humans, if you are referring to what defines the sex roles, then gametes. The word sex has different meanings and even in science a term can have different meanings. I think this is where the sex debate comes from. People like me that believe in the “spectrum” concept don’t think that there are more than two roles defined by gametes, we are just against strictly classifying every organism into one of the two categories.
Sorry, but you didn’t even answer the first question. You simply redefine sexes as “sex roles”. And “roles” conflates sex with gender. Sorry.
My answer to #1 is that there are two concepts of sex at play in the discussion. By “role” I don’t mean genders, by role I am referring to the categories in biology, which are clearly defined by gamete production. But there is another concept of sex, we classify individual organisms into categories and that is what we call the “sex” of the organism which is different than “sex” as defined by the number of gamete types. To me, the blurring of the distinction between these two concepts of sex is the root of the debate.
Sorry but you’re just making this discussion more confusing as you haven’t clarified the difference betrween the two categories. Please do not bother to reply; this is not the place for back-and-forths about this. You had your say and your say is still not clear.
Ok, would love to engage with you on this amicably what would be a good place to do that? I am with you on the concept of hearing differing opinions and civil debate. I can send you an email if that would be better.
Sorry but I’ve argued myself blue in the face about this. My method is to write what I feel and to give talks or interviews, not to debate.
Bullseye! Excellent piece.
I’ve asked trantifa droids your questions, PCCE, and others. They are always stunned. Since they have no answer and we all know that, they resort to screaming ‘phobe’ and ‘racist.’ I don’t know where race is involved, but I guess it’s their other go-to label.
Hearing atheists argue for a ‘special creation’ for humans and ‘gendered souls’ is extremely sad.