Take this for what you will, since my first view came from the New York Post. However, the Post reported a piece by the science editor of the Telegraph, a more respectable paper. Both sites are below; click on the headlines to go to the articles.
NY Post:
Telegraph:
An excerpt from the Telegraph:
The difference between sex and gender has become an increasingly incendiary topic as activists, scientists and politicians all debate the terms and the implications they have for policy.
But a survey of almost 200 scientists at British universities, conducted by The Telegraph and Censuswide, found 58 per cent of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals.
Less than a third (29 per cent) agreed with the statement “sex is not binary”, while one in eight people (13 per cent) had no views or preferred not to answer.
However, almost two thirds of scientists (64 per cent) said gender was fluid, while 22 per cent said gender is binary, and 14 per cent gave no answer.
The Telegraph figure:
I like the snark of this scientist, but Dr. Goymann is correct (further excerpt from the Telegraph piece):
“To me this just means that at least 29 per cent of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22 per cent of them do not know what gender means,” Dr Wolfgang Goymann, professor for behavioural biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, told The Telegraph.
Yes, I think that a fair number of academics, and that includes biologists and doctors like Steven Novella, don’t understand the nature of biological sex, and why the gamete-based definition that leads to the binary conclusion derives from a long history of observing plants and animals. (Again, for a clear explanation of all this, see Richard Dawkins’s article on his site “The Poetry of Reality.”)
It strikes me that those who say that sex isn’t binary, invoking other factors like hormones, chromosomes, genital configuration, and so on, never really tell us how we should define males and females, implying that the sexes comprise some unspecified multivariate mixture of these traits. How do you define a male and a female, then? Even the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists, riddled with ideology and the desire to flaunt their virtue, have fallen into this misguided multivariate trap. Further, they imply that sex is a non-binary spectrum in all species, not just humans (see their original statement here and my post with a group response here). The embarrassing statement of these three societies has been archived here in case they change their minds.
But I digress, so let’s continue with the Telegraph piece:
Dr Goymann recently published an article in the journal BioEssays, where he said some scientists are arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.
“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he said.
“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex.
“On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”
. . . .The survey touched on a range of topics that are divisive in the scientific community such as the origin of Covid, the Government’s pandemic modelling and gain-of-function research, as well as the gender/sex debate.
Only UK lecturers were invited to fill in the form and more than half were educated to PhD level or higher. The faculty of social sciences accounted for 18 per cent of the participants, 13 per cent were medicine and 12 per cent were life sciences.
. . . . Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights organisation that campaigns for clarity on sex in law and everyday life, told The Telegraph: “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary.
“The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.
“Most ordinary people think “gender” is just a polite alternative to “sex”, so are these academics talking about personal style – masculinity or femininity; or assertions about “identity” – that is, states of mind?
“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion.”
Here’s Goymann’s essay (with two coauthors), which you can access for free by clicking on the headline:
Goymann uses the gametic definition of sex with which we’ve become familiar. From that paper:
BIOLOGICAL SEX AS A BINARY VARIABLE
Biological sex is defined as a binary variable in every sexually reproducing plant and animal species. With a few exceptions, all sexually reproducing organisms generate exactly two types of gametes that are distinguished by their difference in size: females, by definition, produce large gametes (eggs) and males, by definition, produce small and usually motile gametes (sperm).[9–12] This distinct dichotomy in the size of female and male gametes is termed “anisogamy” and refers to a fundamental principle in biology (Figure 1).
. . . . A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. (e.g., Ref.[1, 3, 6, 26–28]) or that biological sex is a social construct.[2] These notions very much reflect our own anthropocentric view. In fact, femaleness or maleness is not defined by any of these features that can, but do not need to be associated with the biological or gametic sex.
. . . . CONCLUSION: DENYING BIOLOGICAL SEX ERODES SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND TRUST IN SCIENCE
It is clear that the biological definition of the sexes cannot be the basis for defining social genders of people, as forcefully pointed out by the philosopher Paul Griffiths.[8] Likewise, the socio-cultural, and thus anthropocentric, construct of gender cannot be applied to non-human organisms.[7] There is a red line that separates humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender from non-human animals and plants, which only have two distinct sexes – both of which are either expressed in the same or in different individuals. As much as the concept of biological sex remains central to recognize the diversity of life, it is also crucial for those interested in a profound understanding of the nature of gender in humans. Denying the biological sex, for whatever noble cause, erodes scientific progress. In addition, and probably even worse, by rejecting simple biological facts influential science journals may open the flood gates for “alternative truths.”
It’s not just scientists as a whole who can be confused. I suspect that even many biologists don’t know the biological definition of sex, or have forgotten it, particularly now that “sex” and “gender” have gotten all mixed up in the popular press and in society at large. How can that be? It can be because many biologists work on things that have little or nothing to do with sex. Some who originally learned of the binary nature of sex may think that the definition of sex has changed over the years and, since they don’t work with sex directly, are just reflecting the current zeitgeist. It’s good to see that a majority view sex as a binary, but it’s not great. Imagine if only 58% of scientists accepted the germ theory of infectious disease. (Oops. That’s a topic for another day.)
“gender theorists”
LOL
I think a New Rule when using “gender” anything is to give citations and literature so we know what is being talked about.
Spoiler : “gender” is Hermetic alchemy of “soul”, accidentally usurped as a synonym for “sex” by John Money and Robert Stoller, further usurped by Judith “Performativity” Butler.
Really, that’s her big claim to fame : performativity of gender, and performativity of assembly.
Life is drag and drag is life
(I have to look this up – I have a pile of books of Butler and Foucault, et. al. I have to pick up today)…
Lol yes “gender theorists”.
Ecologists have a good theory of sex ratios that predicts the proportion of females vs. males in a population or the proportion of female vs. male reproductive effort in a hermaphroditic individual, or the age and size at which an individual should change from one sex to the other.
I want gender theorists to give us a quantitative theory that predicts the frequency of “trans” people. Doesn’t even have to be a precise theory and prediction, just something that would get us to the correct order of magnitude.
Why are ~0.3% of Canadians “trans” (including “nonbinary, in 2021)?
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm
Why aren’t 30% of Canadians “trans”? Why not 0.003%? What’s the mechanism causing some people to be “born in the wrong body” that works at that specific rate and not a rate 100x higher or lower?
Analogous/parallel/independent theory that comes to mind is string theory.
I’m all for string theory – might even have a case of string theory envy – but I’m pretty sure that those theorists – quantitative for sure – at the end of the day are all about the gold-standard of empiricism.
From the link (large headline bragging “Canada is the first country to provide census data on transgender and non-binary people”)
“Beginning in 2021, the precision of “at birth” was added to the sex question on the census questionnaire, and a new question on gender was included. As a result, the historical continuity of information on sex was maintained while allowing all cisgender, transgender and non-binary individuals to report their gender.”
Does that mean the new nebulous “gender” has replaced the concrete sex? Have we lost biological sex?
All told, I can see Trudeau enthusiastically pushing this through.
John Money died in disgrace (well-deserved). See the tragic Reimer case. See the book “As Nature Made Him” by John Colapinto.
I got the books! Try a short follow-up and connect with my comment below about “expert” input :
Excerpt from Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Butler, 2024), after defending her idea against Christopher Rufo’s (apparently) uninformed attack (p. 22-23, bold added):
“Has he attended such classes? Has
he studied such curricula? If he were a student in any of those classes, his teachers would doubtless ask him to support his argument with evidence or a good reading, since such protocols are, in fact, what we teach.”
See how Butler makes the attack of her ideas “part of a broader anti-intellectual trend marked by its hostility to all forms of critical thought” (same page), genuine values of the university itself, etc.
This conceals her ideas among a forest made of every faculty member in the University, and amounts to scolding attackers into taking gender studies courses to understand – or at least require the “expert” – Butler.
This is in stark contrast to empirical – and even theoretical – science, e.g. w/ sex… or string-theory.
We are all “gender theorists” since we argue now over what the hell the term is supposed to mean.
LOL yes!
“Yes, I think that a fair number of academics, and that includes biologists and doctors like Steven Novella, don’t understand the nature of biological sex
I reckon Steven Novella is just a coward who is lying. He’s scared of being told off by Hemant Mehta, Matt Dillahunty, Rebecca Watson, or PZ Myers.
That’s like being afraid of being injured if somebody throws a Marshmallow Peep at you.
Penis did not develop). His medical records leaked from the French Bicetre hospital confirming all of this.
A majority of folks (American and UK) agree that sex is binary. Indeed, a famous Brit (R. Dawkins) has stated that “sex is pretty damn binary”. A majority of scientists (American and UK) would also agree that sex is binary. However, the minority view (“sex is a spectrum”) is held by elites (American and UK). My guess is that 99% of Harvard folks (students, faculty, administrators, etc.) would argue (at least publicly) that “sex is a spectrum” (privately the number would be lower). Who has real power?
Comments like this are when I miss having a like button here.
So here we have two conflicting views on the finding that 22% of scientists do NOT believe gender is binary while 64% DO believe gender is binary. There’s:
vs Helen Joyce:
I’m with Joyce on this one. I don’t think Wolfgang Goyman knows what “gender” means — at least not the way it’s used by people explaining transgenderism. The statement “gender is fluid” ought to be interpreted as sometimes-I’m-masculine/sometimes-I’m-feminine, which is a silliness and even the TRAs know it, which is why they deny that this is what it means. Instead, gender is apparently a state of mind which defies all attempts to give clear examples.
I would have answered the question “Do you think gender is binary?” with “No views on this.” Gender meaning what, exactly?
“I’m with Joyce . . .” Agreed.
Kara Dansky’s book The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls (2023) has the following tweet as epigraph:
Weird is right. I find myself wanting to argue with them by suggesting an absurd analogy: “It’s as if you were being told that people can switch sexes just by deciding to, that sex is hard to define, that there are many, etc.” But that is their position. One cannot out-weird them.
The survey should have included the question “What is your own biological sex (female, male, or other), and how do you know it?”
Your excellent comment brings up some important distinctions. There’s the “definition” of sex by gamete size. There’s the “determination” of sex by events that take place during meiosis and fertilization and development that specify what one’s gametes will be. And there’s the “elucidation” of one’s sex—how one recognizes one’s sex—by looking in the mirror, for example, at one’s sexual characteristics. All three need to remain separate but are often conflated.
The elucidation step would be easier (and the epistemological problem would go away) if humans were like some other animals and had a transparent body wall thru which one could see sperm or see egg follicles in the gonad.
That elucidation step is the main point in the case of transsexuals who undergo sex trait modification. The basic question there is – “If someone modifies their features enough, then should they be socially accepted as the opposite sex ?”
Similar questions could be :
“What color are your eyes, and how do you know it?”
Same for curly/straight hair, detached/attached earlobe, how many legs/arms/nostrils,…
I.e. sex is something like many other things that is usually as obvious as how many fingers a person has – and an expert commentary is superfluous, except in corner cases.
How do I know what everyone’s experience of fingers is? Well,… I think that’s how the magic spell works – social construction.
“… as obvious as how many fingers a person has…” But Bryan, surely you are
aware of polydactyly, not uncommon in cats, and even observed very rarely in our
own species. Surely this means that fingerness is fluid, and is a mere social construct; and furthermore that the number of fingers we enjoy is on a spectrum, perhaps to be modified if we feel like it.
Seriously though, I wonder if it’s on driver’s licenses – in theory, it’s important for safety from how the levers, steering wheel, buttons are used.
But I wouldn’t know unless I knew someone, or worked in the licensing bureau. Seems not to be something for an ID.
This is good. I wonder if some who declared themselves to be ignorant about the biology sex did so not out of actual belief, but but instead did so out of a sense of loyalty to the loudest voices of the liberal tribe who now (sadly) speak for several leading journals and science societies. Or being cowed by them. We all know what can happen if you openly scoff at the notion that sex is a spectrum.
It would be good to put out an open letter on the subject, to be signed by academics. This would be much like the Project Steve letter. There is good reason to believe that the letter would garner a lot of signatories, and as this becomes better known, fewer would feel the need to whisper about the evolved binary nature of sexual reproduction in most species.
I’m with Helen Joyce on the “gender” nonsense. The definition of “gender” is analogous to the “Holy Spirit” of Christianity- strongly dependent on whom you ask with no consensus.
I find that many scientists, including Jerry, do an excellent job of refuting the pseudoscience around sex, but then shoot themselves in the foot a little by making statements like “we acknowledge that gender is a spectrum” – when it’s actually an incoherent idea.
Sorry, but my foot is intact. If gender is how you conceive your social role in the male-female continuum, then yes, it is a spectrum.
Let’s set aside the assumption of preexisting and differing male and female social roles (What are these? Who decided? As these two roles shift, what happens to “gender”?). I am curious what it is that you believe to be gendered. Is it the role, or is it the person? If it is the person who has a gender, then am I correct in assuming you don’t support “gender” designations on birth certificates–the newly born not yet having social roles?
I also wonder what other “roles” should be divided into a countless degree of shades and variations, with each having a name applied to it. For instance, should we subdivide professors into labeled types, using subject expertise, teaching style, grading rigor, assignment types, availability to students, preference for graduate seminars versus undergrad lectures, etc.?
I am trying to understand what “gender” as you describe it adds to the human conversation given the damage and confusion this ideological construct has caused.
The question is, “Is there a male-female continuum, or a female continuum and a male continuum?”. I think there are two.
But “how one conceives ones social role” isn’t what gender ideologues and trans activists define “gender identity” to be !
If that was the case, then how could young children have a “gender identity”, as they claim ?
The activist definition of gender identity is more like a “sexed soul” – some kind of mysterious innate feeling whereby someone JUST KNOWS that they are male or female or nonbinary or moon gender or whatever.
Transactivist doctor Jack Turban even wrote a big article on this in the NYTimes with repeated mention of “transcendent feelings”
You give too much credit to gender ideology when you assume they are talking about comfort with social roles rather than what I mentioned above.
Maybe a topic for a future blogpost ?
Helen Joyce is fantastic, I’ve followed her since her book some years ago. She put to rest the confounding terminology of “trans” this and that. She said “When you hear trans, think fake.”
So a “trans man” is a “fake man” i.e. a woman.
That is surprisingly useful as MANY people ask: Is that a woman who wants to be a man, the opposite, or a real woman? About a decade ago it confounded me also.
Hear “trans” think “fake”.
D.A.
NYC
The word “fake” has a pejorative connotation (“deception”, “imposture”, “fraudulence”), so calling “transwo/men” “fake wo/men” is unfair toward all those gender-dysphoric transsexuals who just want to pass socially as wo/men without having any immoral intentions. Their desire to be perceived by others as wo/men is not a case of intended deceit.
I’m not so sure: a gender-dysphoric transsexual can’t satisfy his desire to be perceived by others as a woman unless he fools them or they (not fooled) falsely agree he’s a woman. Either way he’s not a woman, so it’s dissembling on someone’s part. But maybe you’re right this is more the fault of others who flatter him that he passes. As Jen Izaakson said, “The fact that society believes a man who says he’s a woman, instead of a woman who says he’s not, is proof that society knows exactly who is the man and who is the woman.”
How can the effort to be perceived by others as something you’re not be called anything but deceit? Isn’t that close to the dictionary definition? Fraud requires the attempt to gain something of value by false presences. But deceit or fakery is in the act not the motivation.
What if no one is fooled by the perfectly obvious deception? Does “social passing” then not require the compelled acquiescence of those of us who didn’t buy a ticket to the performance?
pretenses. (Grr, autocomplete.)
Perhaps they would have got a more accurate survey if they asked farmers who deal with this in real life about the sex and gender of their animals.
Remember, though, that three biology societies, many of whose members deal with animals and plants, have decreed that SEX is a spectrum IN ALL SPECIES. Or at least their Presidents’ Diktat said that.
I have pretty much expunged the word “gender” from my vocabulary. It seems to mean everything and therefore nothing. Sex is a perfectly good word.
Of course sex is binary – for some lifeforms at least – I’m a virologist.
I have run into heated discussions about this issue and others, when ideology tries to relegate scientific facts to the fuzzy world of personal opinions. I can sound left wing or right wing when discussing what facts are, based on rigid scientific studies, but the left or right part is missing the point. I tend left politically but, if data tells me I’m wrong about something I have to change my position. My wife, family and the people I work with are thoroughly board hearing me say – follow the facts (when they are demonstrated by high quality research).
I might as well take this occasion to ask a virologist, where do you come down on the question of whether viruses are best considered “living” or not? Vincent Racanielo takes the view that a virion is not alive, but it kind of springs to life after it has invaded a cell. Or perhaps pursuing a purely semantic question isn’t really helpful to our understanding? What are your thoughts on this?
We need to ask each virus whether it identifies as “alive” or not.
Haw, haw. But isn’t there a paradox if a virus tells me it identifies as not alive?
Would you think there was a paradox if a robot identified as not alive?
D.A, #8 — I’ll look for that particular H. Joyce comment. Agreed, she’s fantastic. Yes, yes, I’ve been railing about this here — Helen Joyce — I was a bit late to the party, but after the first time I saw her in interview I binged in her speeches and interviews. Just finished her book & now it’s in my spouse’s hands. She and Kathleen Stock, remarkable to hear together and of course, there are others.
The link to Dr. Goymann’s essay brings up nothing but a screenshot.
I fixed it, thanks.
Permit me a suggestion about linguistic reform. Of course we need to purge the
use of the word “gender” for anything but grammatical rules in French, Spanish, and
some other languages. On a more fundamental level, we need to purge the use of the word “theory” in academia. Theories like the atomic theory or the kinetic theory of gases make predictions which can be tested empirically. Word constructions which do not make testable predictions—obviously “gender theory”, but also the entire use of the word “theory” in literary studies—should be called something else. Any suggestions as to what they should be called?
I had this conversation last night on the evening walk with the humanities professor to whom I am wed.
Kind, socially astute, and non-interrupting spouse: “Remember, she has this theory that”
The other spouse: “It’s not a theory. It’s a WAG.”
Kind one: “What?”
Me: “At best, her idea is a wild-ass guess. Or we could use opinion, assertion, belief, or idea. Not theory. Unless we want to talk about ‘Theory’ with a capital ‘T,’ which isn’t theory.”
I favor WAG.
Agreed, I think “theory” is overused in academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences. I usually prefer the term “framework” or “model” to describe a set of assumptions that guide the analysis.
” Any suggestions as to what they should be called?”
Fiction.
Also, the people who purvey such nonsense should never be flattered with the label “scholar”.
I’m amazed. Men and women of science and only 58% think that sex is Binary? Are we including the social sciences in this? I’m glad that I’m not employed in a British Institution (I would be most unpopular)
I just wanted to point out that twice as many of the surveyed people (58%) see sex as binary than as nonbinary (29%). To put that into perspective, compare it to the latest Gallup survey of American acceptance of evolution. A total of 71% of Americans see a divine role in evolution, with 37% being young-earth creationists. Another 34% think God played some role in evolution. That makes 71% of Americans thinking that god played some role in evolution compared to a paltry 24% of Americans accepting naturalistic evollution, which is in fact the truth.
Perspective — and a stark reminder why I shouldn’t get too fussed about stuff. Consigned to a minority viewpoint, a fact of life in USA.
I wonder though how many of these people are rejecting evolution, or how many are rejecting absurdly false ideas of evolution they have in their heads such as “scientists say people evolved at random”. They mostly don’t understand the theory they reject.
I also think many people simply dislike “nature red in tooth and claw”. I once met a fundamentalist who argued against evolution on the grounds that it describes nature as cruel. It never occurred to him that nature IS cruel. That is simply an observable fact of the world that exists irrespective of the question of origins. As we speak, a tiger is killing an antelope and the herbivore is dying in terror and pain. Somewhere else a tiger has failed to catch an antelope and suffers from hunger. Don’t blame Darwin for that, that’s reality. I tried to reassure the fundamentalist that nature comes up with nice things too, such as the relationship between honeybees and flowers.
It seems to me that the believer in a benevolent Creator has some explaining to do. Why would a merciful God make tigers and antelope suffer? Why on earth did God see fit to create Ebola and smallpox and the crab louse? The believer in undirected evolution has no problem here. Whatever works for the creatures to survive and pass on the genes is what nature does. It could be nice like the bees and the flowers, or it could be unpleasant like humans and tsetse flies. Nature is neither kind nor unkind, just indifferent.
“intersex” is an outdated and inaccurate term.
Differences in Sex Development underscore the sex binary rather than being exceptions to it.
Speaking of terminological accuracy, there is a relevant distinction between normal and abnormal differences of sex development (SD). For example, regarding human males, there is a normal range of different penis sizes that has nothing to do with intersex phenomena. For these result from disorders of SD, which constitute abnormal differences of SD.
(I know that—for the sake of “political correctness”—woke lefties prefer to speak of “differences of SD” or “variations of sex characteristics”, because they regard “disorder” as a discriminatory term and “normal”/”abnormal” as an oppressive, unjustly pathologizing distinction that needs to be discarded.)
You’re referring to secondary sex characteristics, which is a different topic.
I think Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and many others, including the paper linked to above do a great job of bringing the way evolutionary ecologists think about sex and sex roles to broad audiences. Marlene Zuk, a very distinguished evolutionary ecologist(she is a member of the US National Academy of Science) who has long worked on sex and sex roles, gave us the link to the Goymann paper above.
Geoff Parker, whose early work defined the field [ think evolution of Anisogamy ( big,small gametes), sperm competition, and so,so much more] is on Google Scholar, and many of his publications, including recent reviews, are available for free with easy links through his Google Scholar. profile He even has a personal history of his 2 seminal papers on anisogamy and sperm competition, available here for free: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/10/2/287.
One commenter above noted that there exists a general theory of sex ratio evolution, including allocation of resources to male and female function in simultaneous hermaphrodites, and the timing of sex change in simultaneous hermaphrodites. Its important to realize that anisogamy is central to all that theory, backed up by tons of data; We begin with the trivial sounding observation that everyone has one mother and one father [ half the (autosomal) genes come from sperm and half from eggs] and we unpack it through population genetic equations to predict all sorts of stuff that turns out to be true. Sex ratio theory is probably the most successful quantitative theory of phenotypic evolution of all time, if viewed from the perspective of working out the consequences of a basic principle, aka anisogamy. John Avice’s book HERMAPHRODITISM is a non-technical review of this literature.
There is another evolutionary ecology literature that readers of this blog may find of interest: Called ‘ALTERNATIVE REPRODUCTIVE TACTICS’, it deals with the question of big ‘with-in sex ‘variation in reproductive tactics, but really goes all the way to within-sex variation in all phenotypic traits that play roles in the life history of the individual; For example Bluegill Sunfish, have 2 entirely separate life history pathways among the males: Large , old Males build nests and give parental care while tiny young males sneak in to steal fertilizations when females lay eggs in the parental male’s nests. The tiny males get beat up a lot, have a high death rate, and so forth. we can even calculate the equilibrium frequencies of the 2 morphs.
This literature is represented by many components : how do hormones control the development, what is the expected frequency of the various morphs…. and perhaps the biggest question of all: why are large, alternative ways of reproducing within a sex so much more common among males than among females?
There is a great book on all this : ALTERNATIVE REPRODUCTIVE TACTICS 2008, Cambridge U Press , edited by Oliveria, et all. The introductory chapter is free on the web….just look around under the title and Oliveria , I think its at Reed College. I tried to link to it but that did not work.
https://oliveiralab.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2008_taborsky_etal_artbook.pdf
is a working link to the introductory chapter of the book ALTERNATIVE REPRODUCTIVE TACTICS.
I goofed in my discussion of sex ratio above: its sequential hermaphrodites that change sex and the sex ratio question is ….when to change?… the age of sex change. Some of the most successful predictions in all of sex ratio theory are about this question. Yes, including sex changing fish…like Nemo, the Disney cartoon character.
The ‘males in female sports’ issue seems ripe for a compromise that Democrats and Republicans can support. For the Democrats the potential gains are clear. Trump and the Republicans in general would lose a powerful issue. Of course, women would also be protected. Public opinion strongly supports expelling males from female sports. It is easy to imagine a compromise with such strong bipartisan support that a potential Trump veto would not matter. They veto would be overridden.
Will any of this happen? Of course, not. The left hold that ‘trans’ is sacred. Since the left has veto power in Democratic party, no compromise is possible (or even wanted). The sad truth is that ‘trans’ is a religious issue on the left and has long since left the realm of practical politics.
Society, like most living things, is evolving how to deal with a new question. Just like the definition of species (which has several variants, and can generate heated arguments), the term “sex” (in humans, mind you. Plants and animals don’t give a hoot what you call it) is fraught with human emotions. There are so few transgender athletes that, amazingly, we get so worked up about them. Even among children, those with gender dysphoria are a small subset of the population. Don’t the rest of us have more important things to get bogged down in so that we can leave those decisions to the parents and doctors involved? In a decade, all this will probably be resolved, because the bigger problems of global warming, people in love with their AI lover so much so that they no longer reproduce, catastrophes worldwide because the US aligned with Russia against Europe because of the current president and other, global issues, will have a much larger impact on all of our lives than trying to decide which person uses which restroom.