While thinking about about objections to the sex binary—usually discussed in humans but sometimes in other species—they all seem to come down to a single assertion:
“Sex is complicated in both development and expression, involving chromosomes, behavior, hormones, genitals and even psychology. Therefore there are more than two sexes.”
One example of this is from the deeply misguided anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, who has a book coming out about why sex isn’t binary. On Twitter he says this:
It turns out that both Darwin and Bateman made assumptions that don’t always hold up across species. Plus, there is much biological research that challenges the assertion that diffs in gamete size (anisogamy) means the same thing, or has the same impact, across all animals.
So, at least some awareness of these important discussions is necessary before simply accepting that anisogamy, and gametes, tell you everything you need to know about sex for a species, and the individuals in it. Esp. if you are making laws based on this assumption.
But nobody has ever maintained that whether an individual falls under the definition of “male” or “female” tells you everything you need to know about sex for a species. You’d have to be a moron to accept that. There is variation in how sex is determined, how biologists recognize sex, in secondary sexual characteristics and behavior (in seahorses, for example, the sperm-producing males actually incubate eggs from fertilized females, getting pregnant).
I keep pondering what kind of mentality would reject the male/female sex binary simply because there is variation in how sex is determined (not “defined”) and how sex is expressed in the bodies and behavior of different species. When I sent the above to a colleague, she responded:
Is he then saying that a seahorse who produces sperm is a female? I don’t even get the argument.
And that leads to the question posed to Fuentes on Twitter when he touted his book:
@Antrofuentes Since you are an expert, what would be the third or fourth sex, choose one of your choice that is not male or female and tell us what gametes it produces?
— Nemesi2024 (@Nemesi_Nemesi) February 19, 2025
It’s funny, but telling, that those who claim that sex is a spectrum or continuum never specify how many sexes there are, either in humans or other species. I suspect that if they responded—based on their “multivariate, multidimensional” definition of sex—that “there are many, many sexes,” or “I can’t answer that”, they would be laughed out of the house.
But we all know that that the “spectrum” people are not dumb or willfully ignorant. They are simply imbued with a certain ideology.
For more on this, I defer to Richard Dawkins and his elegant explanation of the sex binary on one of his Substack posts.
PCC(E) : “… what kind of mentality would reject the male/female sex binary simply because there is variation in how sex is determined (not “defined”) and how sex is expressed in the bodies and behavior of different species. ”
My answer is a Gnostic mentality – specifically, gnosis of Judith Butler’s “gender performativity”.
I was trying to come up with a model of how it works like illusions – but epistemologically. Mirrors, angles, ideas and thought held in certain positions so it sounds so baffling, and immune to conjecture/refutation/falsification (Popper) – until at the right angle, you see the mirror – gnosis…. in fact there’s a tradition of speculative philosophy…. so Fuentes is operating from that layer, with scientific characteristics.
Fine-adjustment of the above :
“mentality” is one thing, but the accurate term that expresses gnosticism would be consciousness.
I think that’s part of how it works – conventional rationality is on a different wavelength compared to consciousness.
It’s political, Jake. Not science. This is a resurgence of politicized science. to be remembered like Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Good thing this is not very emotional. Love and respect for all.
And it had political consequences, getting Trump elected.
That’s the thing. They aren’t rejecting it because there is variation. They are rejecting it a priori because of ideology, and then they look for supporting arguments.
“But we all know that that the “spectrum” people are not dumb or willfullyignorant. They are simply imbued with a certain ideology.”
It’s obvious that this is ideology. Fuentes and Nathan Lents are deep into postmodern queer theory. They flood X with this pseudoscience now and asking for straight answer from them is futile. Believe me; I have tried
As a Norwegian, I am shocked to see how deep some American biologist and anthropologist are into pseudo science. We have it here in Europe also, but the level of pseudo science I have seen in American publications is simply depressing to watch. They completely erode trust in science
The problem is really the Anglo-sphere (of which the US is part). You can find the same ‘sex is a spectrum’ disease, run rampant in all English-speaking countries. Why English-speaking countries? I don’t know. I wish I knew. The answer may be that English-speaking countries tend to be the WEIRDist of all. WEIRD is actually an acronym. WEIRD stand for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”.
While it might have originated there, it has unfortunately spread to other countries as well. The two-party system makes things worse, so I had hoped that countries with proportional representation and several parties would have a sensible party come along. Recently, a new party was founded in Germany which is best described as left-wing but non-woke, but unfortunately it is pro-Putin. 🙁
Interesting – maybe we should all start referring to these arguments as “pseudo-science” every time they are raised.
My theory, which is mine, is that the gender activists don’t care about sex at all. They claim that gender, a self-affirmed construct distinct from sex, is on a single continuous spectrum from fully masculine to fully feminine and that this gender sense trumps whatever sex-binary argument the detractors might make. They simply don’t care. (Note I’m using the grammatical terms masculine and feminine because gender is itself a quality that exists only in grammar, not in living beings.) Goes their argument, if a person “knows” herself to be more feminine than masculine, then she is entitled to call herself a woman, and force others to do the same. If it turns out that she happens to have a penis, well so what? It’s just that her clitoris is bigger than most and her vagina never formed…and she’s going to get all that normalized as soon as the law says insurance has to pay for the surgery.
Because this argument would be dismissed with riotous, derisive hooting and scoffing in any sensible public forum, the activists needed to cook up some theory that sex, which they don’t otherwise care about, being involuntary incels , is also on a spectrum to make their gender argument sound less like pseudoscientific nonsense. If you get people nodding along with seahorses and clownfish and tapeworms you can get them to accept the existence of women born with penises who are now simply waiting for surgical correction of a birth defect.
That’s pretty much it; sex and the different atypical conditions that could arise during development are used as an intermediate rhetorical tool to muddy the waters and take people on their side, to actually proselytize them, by nearly any means necessary.
Note one of the initial queer dogmas (maybe I am paraphrasing): “in order to liberate women, we need to destroy the category woman”. I think there is a long chain of pathological thoughts and processes that ultimately build up to what we are seeing today. It would be the work of a Ph.D. to meticulously decode all or part of this on a psychological, historical and philosophical level, but regardless everyone should work towards all these ideas and confusion slowly but steadily dissapearing.
“.. this gender sense trumps whatever sex-binary argument the detractors might make. ”
Almost as if the activist can transcend – in its entirety – any knowledge or material understanding of Nature, to reach a higher level,…
Transcendence
Sublation (Marcuse)
Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought : Behmenism and its Development in England
Gibbons, B. J.
Cambridge University Press, 1996
ISBN : 0521480787
This is also why the argument for evidence-based medicine fails. Because they don’t care about this evidence, either. Those who want these interventions available to all at any age (and those who want to profit off of them) are not interested in outcome data.
“My theory, which is mine, is that the gender activists don’t care about sex at all. They claim that gender, a self-affirmed construct distinct from sex, is on a single continuous spectrum from fully masculine to fully feminine and that this gender sense trumps whatever sex-binary argument the detractors might make”
You theory is spot on. Been trying to ask some sex confused biologists and antropologists direct question on X like: if sex is a spectrum, from fully male to fully female, isn’t the logical conclusion then that one may talk about being 90% man, 10% woman? If they answer it’s always something like this: You like simple answers, don’t you. You see, it’s complicated
During college orientation back in ’67, we freshmen were required to complete a survey about our interests. Imagine my surprise when the graded survey stated my interests were overwhelmingly feminine. (I forget the percentages.) This was so because my interests were music, art, and philosophy. Had my interests been football, the military, and big business, no doubt the grading would have been overwhelmingly masculine. According to progressive thought, I should have applied for a sex change operation years ago. But no, the grading was mere stereotyping.
A progressive today who wakes up on Saturday wanting to go to the opera, but wakes up on Sunday wanting to go to a football game, might claim to be gender fluid. It is an oddity that progressives interested in changing society submit to the stereotypes of society and conclude that they themselves must change, often through body modification. Would it not make more sense to realize that the masculine/feminine labels given opera, football, and many other things, were nonsense in the first place? For all their interest in changing society, progressives see society as unchangeable.
Misgendering is looked upon as a high crime. But given that there are claimed to be an infinite number of genders, misgendering is inevitable. Indeed, descriptions of multiple genders are so subtle that distinguishing one from the other can become a study in frustration.
Stereotypes change every decade. Your “sex confused biologists” must realize this. Could it be that their “it’s complicated” reply to your question is a way to avoid facing their own errors?
Complexity = another aspect of gnosis.
Only experts with special knowledge can really understand what’s going on, and they’re the ones who should be trusted with power.
The DSD meme shell game has been a remarkably successful tool for spreading disinformation, even as it is mostly true, because these memes are written to imply “sex is a spectrum ” when all they really say is “there are different paths to becoming male or female.” A very large number of objectively very bright people have chosen not to look behind the curtain of these viral DSD posts, I imagine, for “be kind” reasons and also their assertion by organizations that liberals trust based on long association.
Fuentes does not understand that the sociology surrounding sex is not the biological sex that biologists talk about. Every human on earth is the product of an egg and a sperm, what is that biological fact called? And screaming ‘but the sociology is really really complex!’ is irrelevant.
Sociologism is a scourge and needs to be stamped out, especially in the Democratic party if it ever wants to gain power again.
Check out this quotation from the Associated Press. It’s from January 23, but is quite relevant: https://apnews.com/article/trump-transgender-passports-prisons-eggs-sperm-da1d1d280658a8c85c57cfec2f30cefb
“It [Trump’s executive order] defines the sexes in an unconventional way, based on the reproductive cells — large cells in females or small ones in males.“
Unconventional?
I mention the AP piece because mainstream media outlets, too, are not doing their homework. Given how such confusion spreads, is this even fixable? Sometimes I think we’re pushing on a string.
It’s the Associated Press. On this issue they lost beeing trustworthy years ago.
Along with most of the rest of the mainstream media.
The idea refuses to go away.
Excuse me! There is scientific evidence of many sexes! Have you never read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five? People! There are many ways to procreate and with a multitude of sexes:
“There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual. They looked identical to Billy–because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension.
One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn’t possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.
The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
😉
<3
Ice-cream cone emoji? Rating of 0, 1, or 2? Something else? Typo?
A sideways heart, I think?
+1
Yes, I thought it was obvious. A heart. I havent learned how to do emojis or even italics here, sorry (and if you could provide link to explanations it would be appreciated)
To do italics, bold, etc. you need to use hypertext mark-up language (html) tags. For italics type the less-than symbol followed by i followed by the more-than symbol at the start of text you want to italicize. To turn the italics off again type the less-than symbol followed by /i followed by the more-than symbol.
For bold, use b instead of i in the tags.. For underlining use u and for strikethrough use s.
Hope that helps – unfortunately I can’t type the symbols here or WordPress will get confused!
This is awesome
I have to admit, when my bookclub decided to read Slaughterhouse Five a few months ago, I initially thought, okay, but I’ve read it before. Then I came across this passage and was simply stunned at the genius of Kurt Vonnegut – again! Did he have an inking back in 1969 when he wrote this that this would be debated? Not only are the gender idealists getting sex confused with gender, but they are confusing science with science fiction.
I think the sex-spectrum mindset requires a refusal to focus on sex as the means of reproduction. This in turn depends on a conclusion that doing so is “too narrow” and/or “too reductive.” There are some superficially plausible reasons which might make doing this seem like the right approach.
First, sex in humans is indeed embedded in social systems. Mentally grouping reproductive sex with everything connected to how the sexes think and behave as well as how they’re expected to think and behave — while refusing to give biology any priority — can seem like an epistemic version of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Male and female becomes an equal-opportunity spectrum of male, male with female characteristics, a balance, female with male characteristics, female, and outside. An individual might fall anywhere, and they’re just as valid as anyone else when they do.
Second, it’s apparently easy to confuse “women are the sex which evolved to birth offspring” with a sexist “women as a sex ought to birth offspring which means childless women aren’t real women.” The fact that this last bit requires a sex spectrum in which some females are more female than others – thus rejecting the binary – doesn’t register as much as the knee jerk reaction to “reducing women to their gametes.”
Believing in a sex spectrum probably indicates a mentality which worries about missing something important and curtailing freedom because of it. It also requires sloppy, imprecise thinking mistaken for nuance.
I suspect that the ‘sex spectrum’ is merely a corollary of the Blank Slate theory that some progressive still embrace against the evidence.
So in typical politics speak where you work backwards from consequences to ideology:
If biological sex is determined at conception then individuals are not naturally free to express a chosen gender… therefore they cannot be Blank Slates with no built-in mental content… therefore they cannot be educated by the State to be ‘better people’… therefore the march to Utopia would be slowed down by biology if there were only two sexes.
The parallels to creationism are there in the sex-is-a-spectrum community. One parallel is that they will never issue rebuttals against their own if someone says something really dumb. Fuentes claimed that orangutans have 3 sexes, but actually young male orangs just don’t develop display traits of a sexually mature male if a mature male is around. But those juvie males sure will mate with females if given a chance! Did anyone on that side ever issue a rebuke? No.
There is the admittedly interesting example of white-throated sparrows, where males and females come in two main color morphs, either tan striped or white striped. If I have this right, both males and females almost always mate with partners with the opposite color morphology. But some miscreants have declared that this means there are 4 sexes in these birds (!) [See https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01484-0 for an example], all the while referring to them as males and females as everyone does. In no way are the different morphs different in reproductive morphology or in their Z and W sex chromosomes, although the white striped birds do carry an autosomal chromosome with inversions. Does this get chewed up and spat out by anyone who thinks sex is a spectrum? As in saying that that is interesting, but declaring additional sexes here makes us look dumb? Nope.
So another parallel to creationism is an astonishing ability to mentally partition away their ideology when the moment suits them.
Fuentes floods X with stuff, some truths, some half truths, some things so strange you start to wonder if he try to top Judith Butler in non-sensical statements. All to sell his new book of course. Wonder how biologists at Princeton see him?
Great to see you explicitly pointing out the parallels with creationism.
It’s often struck me how ironic it is that folks like Jerry who fought the good fight against right wing motivated creationism are now fighting the trans ideology crap from the woke left. 🙂
Which is as it should be – reason and science stand above politics !
Yes, the article I linked to in comment #18 below shows how “Forrest Valkai, self-described science educator and activist, is known for debunking young earth creationism. But when it comes to the biology of sex, he uses their same fallacious tactics”.
As Roman procurator Festus once said to another idealogue, “Paul, you are mad!”
Et tu Fuentes?
Now I know where actor/singer Ken Curtis, formerly of The Sons of the Pioneers, (apparently) got the name of his character on “Gunsmoke.”
Honestly, what do these people suggest we use in place of a gametic definition of sex?
“Males” across species have literally nothing universally in common except that they follow a developmental pathway that normally enables them to produce the smaller gametes.
If we don’t use gametes to define sex, how do we even know which turtle or flower is “male” and which is “female” in order to define what “masculine” and “feminine” traits look like in those species (and define each end of the “spectrum” they are proposing)?
These people seem incapable of clear thinking. Like their minds have been totally rotted out by partisanship.
The ideology is what Ayn Rand calls “primacy of consciousness.” She holds there is a razor-sharp demarcation in metaphysics … either you hold that reality exists in itself (primacy of existence) with no necessity of any consciousness, or it is created by a consciousness, “God” or man or Gaia or ?
Thinking a woman IS a man … for real … is clearly an example of primacy of consciousness. One guru famously says, “Thought is creative.”
Also Aristotle … per Grok …
Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction is a foundational concept in classical logic. Aristotle articulated this idea in his work Metaphysics, specifically in Book IV (Gamma). The principle states that a thing cannot both be and not be something at the same time and in the same respect. In other words, contradictory statements or properties cannot both be true simultaneously about the same subject under the same conditions.
His formulation can be summarized as: “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.” For example, a door cannot be fully open and fully closed at the same moment in the same way—it’s either one or the other.
That’s a good point about primacy of consciousness! As a commenter tried to argue here a few days ago on this subject,
“There is no ‘true’ meaning of [“closed door”] in an absolute sense. Words mean what people intend them, and understand them, to mean (intersubjective truth, if you like)…Individuals are members of different speech communities and generally understand that [“closed door”] means one thing in one speech community but could mean something different in another (eg age-based, colloquial usage)…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…[T]he answer is to try to work out what somebody is intending to mean by a contended word like [“closed door”] and see if it is consistent with what you believe it to mean.”
The important thing isn’t the door itself, it’s the conversation about the door: if two people from different language communities try to talk about the same door, it doesn’t matter whether the door is open or closed so long as the two interlocutors try to understand what the other person means by “closed door”. It’s all gnostic language games.
Words only mark the place of concepts, and concepts have an objective existence if induced from objective reality.
But what if the door is a jar?
+1
I guess that would require a third person from a third speech community to join the conversation. Or something?
And they would need their own third-person pronoun.
What is that up in the road – a head?
It’s true that “being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture”, but reproduction doesn’t: culture is completely irrelevant. You can even do it in vitro. I’d like Fuentes to explain me how he thinks IVF works.
The “sex” confusion and distortions will remain for as long as we bandy about the ideological nonsense word “gender” and until the overly kind people quit calling some of their penised colleagues “she.”
What kind of mentality ? Easy. The mentality of a religious apologist.
A priest who tells you – “God exists because God is energy” has no interest in discussing what type of energy this might be or debating energy conservation laws.
They just want to fob you off so they can go back to worshipping “Our Father in heaven”.
So this “multivariate, multimodal, multidimensional sex” is just to create enough obfuscation so as to then claim that people can be whatever sex they say they are and must be treated accordingly. 🤷
Back in April 2023, Zachary Elliott wrote a good rebuttal of the disingenuous arguments used by those trying to deny the sex binary and pretending that the identification of males and females is all very complicated: https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-biology-and-the-gish-gallop
In 1990 Judith Butler, building on Simone De Beauvoir, Irigaray — wrote a book, unfortunately….
“If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”
But but but, I thought the mantra of the transactivists was “It is all about gender, which is totally different from sex.”
Is the Great Gender Guru is saying that sex and gender are the same ??
I think my analysis in an earlier comment was correct – this is just religious hocus pocus with no interest in being honest or logical.
I address this nonsense by asking for where each person is hiding their Nobel prize (for finding a third sex). Some folks suggest that chromosome anomalies (for example, 47-XXY) are additional ‘sexes’. Of course, they are not. Some folks suggest that ‘intersex’ persons are a third sex. ‘Intersex’ persons are real, but are just one of the two well-known sexes (a very few Intersex persons might have no sex or both sexes).