And so we come to the last sex post of the day—about a new piece by Richard Dawkins on his Substack site, The Poetry of Reality. Richard points to what he sees as arrant hypocrisy in the statement on biological sex by the Presidents of the SSN, ASN, and SSB. As I mentioned in my first post today:
Note that the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists issued a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration archived here), a statement deliberately aimed at contradicting the first Executive Order by declaring that sex is not binary but a spectrum—in all species!
Richard shows, in his post (click below to read), that even the Presidents of these societies act, in their scientific publications, as if sex is binary, and he considers the disparity between their statement and their scientific behavior to be hypocritical.
An excerpt:
The presidents of three American societies of evolutionary biologists and ecologists have written a joint letter to President Trump and members of the US Congress stating that “extensive scientific evidence” contradicts the view that “there are two sexes . . . [which] are not changeable.” Also the view that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce”. Their statement is false and their letter is riddled with hypocrisy. In my opinion Donald Trump is a loathsome individual, utterly unfit to be President, but his statement that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce” is accurate in every particular, perhaps the only true statement he ever made.
The fact is, of course, that paper after paper in the scientific literature refers without qualification or equivocation to “males” and “females”. Biologist authors correctly assume that their readers will know the meanings of “male” and “female” without further explanation, and will accept the authors’ unsubstantiated recognition of the sex of the animals they study. I shall quote just three examples, which happen to be papers authored by Carol Boggs, Daniel Bolnick and Jessica Ware, the three society presidents. A conceivable riposte would be that “humans are not animals”. But then at what point in the evolution of Homo sapiens did sex suddenly became non-binary, a single exception to the general rule pervading the whole of the animal and plant kingdoms? And indeed, the three presidents explicitly disavow human exceptionalism when they say, “Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.”
You can read the three examples yourself, for free, in his piece. (I used different examples in my own post here.) Note in the last sentence above that the three Presidents imply that sex is a spectrum in all species! I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t make such a foolish assertion were they to rewrite their letter. But I’m not sure they have even sent that letter, and have heard noises that they haven’t.
After Richard gives his examples, he says this:
When I wrote this, I was unaware that Jerry Coyne had already made the same point, quoting three different papers written by the three society presidents. He was too polite to accuse them of hypocrisy.
Finally, I want to add something important: If you want us to consider adding your name to the letter above, for we’re still accumulating signatures, please click on the link below, which is an early version of the letter with some signatures.
At the bottom of the letter, you will see this form:
If you want your name to be added to the letter to the SSE, ASN, and SSB, please go to that site and fill in the blanks. I ask only two things: you be affiliated with biology in some way, and that you be willing to have your name publicized, not only to the society but on this website (I’m not sure if I’ll post the final version, though). Your response will automatically be added to an Excel document from which we’ll draft the final letter. Thanks!
From a language perspective, one way of disentangling the sex/gender confusion which is often at the core of heated debate could be as follows –
human = social (temporary relative construction) + biological (permanent empirical fact)
Hence:
man/woman = masculine/feminine (social construction) + male/female (biological fact)
This is why ‘adult human male/female’ works as a relative definition of man/woman but not an absolute definition. For example, in the eighteenth century a fourteen year old would be classified as a man/woman (albeit a young man/woman) who was of marriageable age. Today they would not be classed as a man/woman.
Also:
A/
feminine+female = idealised woman
masculine+male = idealised man
B/
masculine + female = stigmatised woman
feminine + male = stigmatised man
A———————B = gender continuum
Notions of “gender” and masculinity/femininity are indeed partially social constructs, but they also have a fair amount of biological underpinning as well.
It is not arbitrary that, for example, more women than men opt for roles such as nurse or primary-school teacher, while more men than women becomes lumberjacks or construction workers.
That’s undoubtedly true. The evidence provided by Evolutionary Psychology makes that clear. I would argue that the biological influence is subsumed within that social construction. All cultural human behaviour is ultimately tethered to the biological at some level unless you believe in an uncaused cause. The biological, if you like, is the raw material from which the social/cultural constructs.
We’re largely in agreement, but I do think that it’s good to distinguish between behavioural differences that have no biological component at all (such as the difference between the French language/accent and the English language/accent), and behavioural differences that are sufficiently biological that they would hold in nearly all cultures (such as the skewed sex ratio in the carers of young children).
Possibly, but I’m not convinced it is so straightforward to divorce the cultural from the biological. The language example you give does have evolutionary biological roots re: kinship, belonging, social networks, hierarchy, free rider detection etc etc.
But if you’d looked at the proportion of elementary school teachers in earlier eras, they might have been mostly male. Did the biology change? Similarly, veterinarians in the US were almost all men before about the mid-late 20th century, while now a majority of them are women. I think we need to be cautious before interpreting these statistics.
Indeed you do have to be cautious. There are some areas that are pretty clear, where disproportionately sex related patterns of behaviour can be found not simply across cultures (and cultures across time) but across species, but there are also plenty of grey areas that require more research.
Unfortunately, it’s too late to change the letter, but thanks for the references!
So is this where we are at now in the U.S.?
#1. If you are an ideologically-based Republican, then you say there are only two sexes and only two genders.
#2. If you are an ideologically-based Democrat, then you say there are an infinite number of sexes and an infinite number of genders.
#3. If you are scientifically-based, regardless of party affiliation, then you recognize that there are only two sexes and up to an infinite number of genders (depending on the definition of gender).
Thanks for stating this clearly. This general idea has been on my mind in some form but this really solidifies it.
I suppose, on reflection, it might be better to argue that there are two genders that come in many different as well as overlapping flavours, although secondary sex characteristics might allow you to maintain the continuum comparison. The problem with the continuum/infinite idea is that the meaning of ‘gender’ becomes unstable if not, in fact, entirely unusable as the word acquires so many different meanings.
“The problem with the continuum/infinite idea is that the meaning of ‘gender’ becomes unstable if not, in fact, entirely unusable as the word acquires so many different meanings.”
Dave do you think this comes close to the true meaning(lessness) of “gender”? Many genderists claim the right to create novel genders for themselves (my favourite is “cake gender”, which is fluffy and sweet apparently), or to change between genders from day to day, or to be part of a system of alters (sometimes called dissociative identity disorder) who differ from each other in gender identity. Nothing seems to be gained by calling all of this “gender” instead of calling it personality plus in some cases a significant mental health disorder. What am I missing?
Hi Mike – There is no ‘true’ meaning of any word in an absolute sense. Words mean what people intend them, and understand them, to mean (intersubjective truth, if you like). Different speech communities have every right to use words as they mean them. Individuals are members of different speech communities and generally understand that word ‘x’ means one thing in one speech community but could mean something different in another (eg age-based, colloquial usage). For the vast majority of words and speech communities there is pretty close agreement. Many disputes that arise are, in fact, based on a difference in the understanding of a word not what a particular person is, in fact, intending to mean. I know that’s a bit long-winded but I suppose the answer is to try to work out what somebody is intending to mean by a contended word like ‘gender’ and see if it is consistent with what you believe it to mean. Don’t assume that there is some deeper – ‘correct’ – meaning that can reconcile the usage. And yes – if people just insist on creating their own, unique meaning for a word, then that word/signifier loses much or all of its power to communicate to others.
Thanks Dave. Because there is no generally understood meaning of “gender” I still don’t know what you mean when you say “there are two genders”. I don’t have the time or energy to try to work out what you mean, or compare that to what I believe gender to mean (I have no idea any more what it means). The point of language is to convey meaning. This feels like the opposite.
Please read the bit in The Roolz about posting too many comments on a thread.
#3+𝜖. If you are pedantically based then you recognise that there are only two sexes and an unlimited number of genders (depending on the definition of gender).
I’m not sure I understand “pedantic” here. I don’t think, for example, that arguments about biological sex and women’s sports are pedantry. Neither, I suspect, do you.
The mathematically pedantic aspect was to replace “infinite number” with “unlimited number” — in normal arithmetic there ain’t no such thing as an infinite number. Want proof? Pick any number; there is always a larger one.
The “3+𝜖” was an attempt to indicate both the mathematical nature of the pedantry and the fact that my comment was almost but not precisely the same as comment 3. Oh well.
Fear not. I got you.👌
I’m partial to there being two sexes, no genders — and an infinite spectrum of personalities.
Exactly. I tried to write a comment earlier about being on the spectrum, personality wise.
Algorithms and Computational Complexity professor from Greece here, have been watching this blog for quite some time, trying to make sense of all the weird things going around the world in this frontier.
I honestly find the notion of gender a bit dysfunctional, at least as used by activists, the one main reason being the overload of semantics of “man” and “woman”, and the other main reason is that it comes with a demand about a new kind of metaphysics. Also, is seems to me that any behavior has at least two components: a biological component and a social component, along with an underlying mechanism how these two interact (which I guess should be the study of fields like Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology). In this light, I find all this debate about gender and “social constructs” somewhat misleading, and at times a bit solipsistic, creating way more confusion than the problems it supposedly solves.
In any case, please keep fighting the good fight, the fight of accurate representation of reality. I think it is of ultimate importance, especially to people developing their identity, to be grounded in empirical reality. The amount of intentional obfuscation is quite damaging.
IMHO when terms are used to make serious points – especially loaded activist terms like “gender” – literature citations are necessary.
Which literature, precisely, will be cited to describe “gender”? Might it be Judith Butler’s gender performativity (her major claim to fame)? Gayle Rubin? David M. Halperin, or even the totally wacko The Kybalion (1908)?
To expand upon Christopher Hitchens (who referred to Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur):
That which can be asserted without literature (“gender”) can be dismissed without literature – but also filled in with the competing, epistemically subversive literature underneath that somehow always evades citation.
Nice to see the large gamete small gamete idea entering the mainstream.
There is a hook there for promoting/explaining evolution and its resulting wonders.
Should we also say that a big gamete and another one of the same size don’t allow for reproduction? You can’t fertilize an egg with another egg, or mix sperm together and get an embryo. I am not a scientist so maybe this is not an educated question. It’s not just size, but also function?
I would say that’s a good question, Johnathan. The interactions between the outside surface of a sperm and that of an an ovum allow the former to penetrate the “capsule” — that’s not what it’s called but that’s what it does — of the latter to gain access to the nucleus and then fuse with it to form a new diploid cell which, unlike a haploid ovum, knows to start undergoing mitosis…very rapidly. These processes do, as you intuit, require that ova and sperm recognize each other as opposites in some fundamental way that enables the interaction. There is nothing about the 23 haploid chromosomes of a sperm that makes them different from the 23 haploid chromosomes of an ovum. It’s all in the packaging.
The point in anisogamy is understanding the evolutionary pressure for the two indeed opposite gametes to become so vastly different in size, not just recognizably opposite. The lock recognizes the key as its opposite but why is the lock in addition so much bigger than the key?
I confess to being a little surprised that all the comments so far have been about the sex/gender controversy in general, rather than about the specific point made above, and earlier by Jerry, that all biologists, including the three society presidents, refer in their research papers to “males” and “females” without fuss, qualification or doubt. Biologists, as they write their papers, assume that their readers all know what the words “male” and “female” mean, and will accept without equivocation the authors’ binary diagnosis of the sex of the organisms they study. Under what circumstances, and why, does this suddenly change where Homo sapiens is concerned?,
“… comments so far have been about the sex/gender controversy in general, rather than about the specific point made above”
I’d say because there is a competing postmodern epistemology which seeks to dialectically synthesize a higher form of itself by targeting precisely such minutiae. Successful subversion reifies the postmodernist doctrines.
I guess my comments focus on the absurd language because I’m no longer surprised by (and sometimes don’t even notice) the hypocrisy 🙁
I’ve heard exasperated activists insist that the fact that human biology and human culture evolved in tandem means our sex classifications must involve both biological and social roles.
As I understand it, the usual interpretation of this would be pointing towards sex-based psychological tendencies such as women being more nurturing and men being more aggressive. But that’s not really where Genderists are going. They seem to want the human sexual reproduction system, under the selective pressure of human societies, to have evolved a brain component which tells the individual whether they ought to be considered male or female within that society.
Other animals don’t have it because their societies were neither as complex nor as critical for survival.
I find that unlikely, but I’m not an evolutionary biologist so won’t be able to articulate why it’s unlikely as well as an evolutionary biologist can.
Agreed – the true scandal here is the hypocrisy of the unscientific joint statement that the presidents have made in full knowledge that sex is, in reality, binary and that their own scholarly works reflect that simple fact. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Myself and others posting here are also concerned, however, by the extent to which the statement will be leveraged to erase the boundaries of women trying to secure single-sex spaces, services, facilities, and sports.
People like the three presidents are bolstering the nonsensical gender identity ideology, who will point to the joint letter as evidence of it. Last week, a recently qualified medical doctor gave evidence under oath in which he claimed that he was a “biological woman”, that the sex binary does not exist, disparaged the fact that it requires one small and one large gamete to produce a baby, and said that he would treat a female patient requesting same-sex care. The General Medical Council lists him as a female doctor (using “gender” and no mention of sex).
We’ve a long way to go before this crap is jettisoned into the dustbin of history – and the new joint letter from the societies’ presidents won’t make the task any easier. Ideologically captured fools!
The doctor should be tried for perjury.
Indeed! First, he tried to have the entire hearing held behind closed doors. When that failed, he tried to have his name redacted from the proceedings in perpetuity. Fortunately, that failed too and there has been widespread media coverage in the UK.
The case was brought by a nurse who objected to a man in the women’s changing rooms – you’ll never guess which of the two that the hospital suspended and brought disciplinary action against…!
The poor nurses can’t win. Where is their powerful union in all this? Have their locals been captured by transwomen?
There was a recent case in Ontario where a nurse complained to her boss, a doctor, that there was a man in the women’s bathroom in the clinic. Going to bat for his employee, the doctor remonstrated with the patient, who was not previously known to the doctor, attending only to be assessed for enrolment in a clinic trial. In Ontario you can use any bathroom that matches the gender you feel like.
The patient complained to the regulatory College that the doctor had misgendered her. The College decided not to refer the complaint to disciplinary proceedings after the doctor apologized to the patient for not recognizing that of course she was a woman, promising to do better, etc. etc. (The accepted form is to grovel, thanking the victim for her patience in giving us the opportunity to learn. That’s what we are told to do when we misgender someone, and the activists know what’s in the script because they wrote it for us.)
Colleges don’t usually publish complaints that don’t go to Discipline. (As in the UK, Disciplinary hearings are public.) The reason we know about this one is that the patient appealed the College’s non-punitive resolution of the complaint to one of our many administrative tribunals operated by the government, which do publish their findings. I guess he felt the doctor should have lost his licence and been barred for life from ever practising in Canada again. You do hear activists saying exactly those words. Sadly for him, the Health Services Appeal and Review Board agreed that the College’s decision was a reasonable application of the College’s policies and upheld its resolution of the complaint.
So the message to nurses and other women is clear: if you find a man in your bathroom at work, deal with it yourself. Don’t expect a doctor to do anything about it just because s/he’s a traditional authority figure. Especially if the doctor is himself the miscreant! And, as Jez says, you the nurse will get in trouble yourself if you do raise a fuss. In the Ontario incident, by rights the doctor-boss should have disciplined his nurse-employee for transphobia in misgendering the man in the bathroom. But he didn’t, and got in trouble himself. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.
The good news is that the GMC doesn’t seem sympathetic to the UK doctor’s case. Surely they must have doubts about the doctor’s bona fides in his claim to be a biological woman. But then the statement from the Three Societies won’t help, will it. It would be hard to accuse him of perjury in denying the primacy of the egg-sperm business if these august learned societies agree with him. All from people wanting to enforce kindness toward diversity. This is what you get.
The General Medical Council has been very sympathetic to Dr Theodore “Beth” Upton – it has allowed him (and 61 others) to change his registration to female, with no paperwork required. (By changing their “gender” any previous suspensions or disciplinary actions magically disappear from their public records, a privilege not extended to any other doctor on the GMC register): https://archive.is/5jSjb
Despite Dr Upton’s ludicrous remarks – made under oath and on the public record – the GMC has so far declined to open a fitness-to-practise review.
The poor nurses can’t win. Where is their powerful union in all this?
Not on the side of the nurses struggling against gender identity ideology:
https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2025/02/21/gender-self-identification-and-the-royal-college-of-nursing/
Classic Orwellian doublethink! Would be happy to sign, but as an independent researcher I’m not affiliated, unfortunately.
To Richard’s point about the human/animal distinction: there isn’t one. Once we knew we had evolved that idea was definitively rebutted. Dan Dennett’s “universal acid” (the idea that Darwinian thinking will eat through all traditional thought) has a lot of work to do.
“Affiliated with biology” – may a humble medical doctor add his signature?
I was afraid to ask and I’m glad you did. I honestly don’t know if our opinion is sincerely not wanted — I don’t want to be gauche enough not to recognize it — as we are not academic biologists who could be members of the referenced organizations. But on the other hand I would hate to give the authors the back of my hand and make them wonder why sympathetic doctors aren’t chiming in. Maybe they just can’t imagine that any medical doctors are actually with them, since we were the cause of so much of the trouble.
I’m reasonably sure we aren’t the only two gender critical physicians in the world!
Perhaps the three organizations are following their own law of public perception: it’s more important to be perceived as relevant and authoritative than as absolutely factually accurate since relevance and authority can be harnessed to shape perceived reality.