UPDATE: Carole Hooven called my attention to a paper in Hormones and Behavior, on which Maney is co-author, which is far more explicit about the author’s motivation to depose the hegemony of binary sex. Carole also tweeted about Maney’s paper:
“This species challenges the practice of flattening nature’s wondrous diversity into two categories, male and female.” White-throated Sparrows are indeed fascinating, challenging stereotypes about sex differences. I learned lots from your explanation of how that works.
But sex…
— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) February 26, 2025
I had hoped and expected, after the departure of woke editor Laura Helmuth from Scientific American, that the magazine would go back to what it was good at and famous for: presenting solid articles on popular science actually written by scientists. The ideology-imbued science, I thought, would disappear, as readers were canceling their subscriptions.
Sadly, it appears that the magazine may well be creeping back to “progressive science,” at least as judged by the latest biology article I read, as well as a similar critique of binary sex and, as lagniappe, an op-ed promoting gender activism and “affirmative care”.
The good news is that the biology article presents some solid and interesting data on the white-throated sparrow, a bird with a unique system of genetics and mating behavior. The bad news is that the author, neuroscientist Donna Maney of Emory University, couches all her results, and those of her colleagues, as casting aspersions on the binary nature of sex. It’s the usual argument that “things are complicated here, and if we are blinded by the idea that sex is binary, we miss the complicated and interesting stuff.” In other words, the biology presented is used partly to do down the sex binary.
Click to read (the article is archived here).
The article is long and complex (perhaps too complex for the non-biologist reader), but the phenomenon is quite interesting. Here are the salient facts (wording is mine):
a.) The North American white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) comes in four varieties. There are two sexes (something the author admits but doesn’t emphasize), and each sex has two varieties that differ in color and behavior.
b.) Both males and females come in two flavors, and each sex has roughly 50% of each. Each morph behaves and looks the same whether it’s in males or females. The “white” morph, shown on the left below, has a white stripe on its head, and, in both males and females, is more aggressive, defending its breeding territories more vigorously than do individuals of the tan morph (right below), which has a tan stripe and spends more of its time bringing food to the offspring. The diagram below is from a paper by Romanov et al. in BMC Genomics.
c.) The genes for striping differences, as well as for the behavioral differences between morphs, reside on the birds’ second chromosome, and within an inverted section of that chromosome, where the chromosome has broken multiple times and been rearranged. The white morphs have one copy of the rearranged chromosome and one of the “normal” chromosome, while the tan morphs have two copies of the “normal” chromosome. You can see the difference in the chromosome-2 photo at the bottom left above: in the white morph, the copies of chromosome 2 are of different configuration because of the rearrangements.
d.) What happens if you get two copies of the rearranged chromosome containing the genes for aggression and white head color? Well, that doesn’t happen, and that’s the interesting part of the story. It turns out that white males will mate only with tan females, and tan males will mate only with white females. Because of this, the white chromosome can occur only in a single copy.
Note also that, as far as the sexes are concerned, males have two copies of the “sex chromosome” and are ZZ, while females have unlike sex chromosomes and are ZW; this differs from the way sex is determined in humans and many other mammals. The Z and W chromosomes are, like our Xs and Ys, members of a pair, but they are not the second chromosome, which carries the genes for color and behavior. It is not unusual for genes involved in producing sex-specific traits to reside on chromosomes different from the sex chromosomes. Each male in humans, for example, carries genes for other sex-related traits like breasts and vaginas, but they aren’t expressed because they aren’t activated. Even genes involved in producing the human male vs. female reproductive system, like SOX9, DMRT1, NR5A1, and DHH, are spread throughout the genome. We’ve long known this, and it’s not unexpected, but the author appears to think that this is an unexpected finding.
e.) Because there are two morphs of each sex, and each morph mates with a member of the opposite sex that has the opposite pattern and behavior, the system is stably maintained in this species. How it evolved is another question, and the author implies it’s a mystery. I can’t find any speculation about how the system arose in this species, but perhaps those speculations exists somewhere, and perhaps a reader/bird expert can help. All I can say is now is that this system of sex-morph variability can maintain itself, and, also, the fact that there is an inversion on the second chromosome prevents gene exchange (that normally occurs during gamete formation) between the “normal” and “inverted” chromosomes. Crossing-over between inverted chromosomes, which leads to gene mixing between the two copies of each chromosome, leads to wonky chromosomes that cannot function. This prevention of gene mixing allows the two versions of the second chromosome to diverge evolutionarily and accumulate different genes, explaining why the color and behavioral differences we see reside largely on that chromosome.
There’s a lot more stuff in the article, and some good biology, but the data relevant to this post is above. The system is fascinating and somewhat of an evolutionary puzzle, though Maney and her colleagues are working out which genes are involved in color and behavioral differences, and how they result in differences between the morphs.
Note that there are only two sexes here, not four. Some benighted authors have said that this species has four sexes, but they are deluded. We have a case of two sexes and “polymorphism” (different behaviors and appearances) within each sex. The author recognizes this, but, as you can see from the big-print heading below, she wants us to know that this system detracts from the importance of the sex binary:
The point is the usual one: “things are complicated here, and can’t be fully understood simply by recognizing that there are just two sexes.” And that’s true, but nobody thinks that recognizing two sexes brings a stop to further research on any biological system. After all, work on this sparrow had to begin by recognizing that there are two sexes, and then realizing that each of the two sexes comes in two forms. First, here are quotes showing that the author recognizes that there are two sexes. Bold headings are mine; the indented bits are quotes from Maney’s article:
Recognizing that there are two sexes, not four. Maney adopts the consensus definition of sex: males produce sperm in their testes and females eggs in their ovaries:
This interesting and complex situation has earned this species the nickname “the bird with four sexes.” But to be clear, White-throated Sparrows do not have four different types of gonads. As in other birds, each individual typically has either two testes that produce sperm or a single ovary that produces eggs.
, , , The sex chromosomes, which in birds are known as Z and W, influence whether primordial gonads develop as ovaries or testes. Birds with both the Z and the W typically develop an ovary, whereas birds with two copies of the Z develop testes.
. . . . Although color morphs in White-throated Sparrows are not technically sexes, the standard and supergene-bearing versions of chromosome 2 share features with the human sex chromosomes X and Y, respectively.
. . . . In White-throated Sparrows, we see “masculine” and “feminine” traits distributing themselves in a manner clearly orthogonal to gonadal sex. White-striped birds with ovaries behave in a way that is more masculine than we expect for female songbirds, and tan-striped birds with testes look and behave in a relatively feminine way.
So yes, the author admits that there are two sexes, with each having two varieties.
But despite that, she says that admitting the binary nature of sex somehow inhibits us from studying this system; it “flattens” the diversity. So throughout her paper there are attempts to show that recognizing that there are two sexes somehow either inhibits research or stifles our interest in how this system evolves. It does neither; this is pure ideologically-based attempts to do down the palpable fact, which the author recognizes, that there are only two sexes. As I said, that recognition is the very beginning of an attempt to understand the multi-morph system, and I know of no biologist who would say, “Yes, there are two sexes here. That’s the truth, and we needn’t study anything else or ask further questions. And so we get to this:
Dissing of the sex binary. A few quotes from the author:
Nevertheless, as recent research has shown, this species has much to teach us about the nature of sex variability—the way in which sex-related behaviors are influenced by genes, the complex structure of sex-associated chromosomes and the evolution of sexual reproduction itself. Importantly, this species challenges the practice of flattening nature’s wondrous diversity into two categories, male and female.
Um. . . well, the wondrous diversity is flattened into four categories: white males, white females, tan males, and tan females. But let’s pass on to more binary-dissing:
Even genes involved in gonadal development and hormone synthesis can be found on most any chromosome, mapping to locations throughout the genome that freely recombine. Each individual inherits a new combination of genetic and epigenetic material, resulting in diversity that defies binary categories.
We’ve known for years that sex-specific genes producing intraspecific or intra-sex variability don’t need to be on the sex chromosomes. There is no “defying binary categories” here.
A few more disses:
In most sexually reproducing species, making an embryo requires two gametes: one egg and one sperm. That binary is clear. But the egg-sperm binary does not apply to the eventual development of that embryo into a sexed body with sex-related behaviors. That development is conceptually separate and decidedly nonbinary in many ways.
This is the “development in sex is complicated, implying that the sex binary is simplistic” argument. Finally, there’s a Big Finish:
The development of sex-related traits is astonishingly diverse not only across species but within them. Every individual, sparrow or human, has masculine and feminine characteristics. That diversity is obscured when we lump individuals into two categories and consider each as a homogeneous group. When we compare the categories “female” and “male,” we often report a “sex difference”—a binary outcome made inevitable by a binary approach. This approach fails to acknowledge the profound overlap between sexes on almost any measure.
White-throated Sparrows help us see past the sex binary by forcing us to acknowledge sources of variability other than sex, which is, in reality, only a small contributor to variability for many species. Diversity and plasticity of phenotypic expression is the norm, particularly for traits that correlate with sex. Sex-related traits are simply not hardwired. Evolutionary biologists believe that this plasticity—like the dazzling diversity of sex-determining molecular pathways—may be adaptive in changing environments. Individuals retaining maximal flexibility in the expression of sex-related traits are better able to adapt quickly to changing environments or, in some cases, may even be able to change their sex.
I’m not sure what the author means by saying “every individual, sparrow or human, has masculine and feminine characteristics”. Males and females do of course share common traits, like having (usually) five fingers and two legs, but inspection of myself this morning revealed neither a vagina nor breasts. At any rate, the author is attacking a straw man here and throughout her paper. NOBODY argues that recognizing that there are two sexes in all plants and animals either stifles research or “flattens diversity”.
Once again, the recognition that there are just two sexes is the beginning of research to explain diversity. This recognition, as Darwin realized, for example, gave rise to his explanation of why there is sexual dimorphism (differences in temperament, behavior and ornamentation between males and females). Hie explanation was sexual selection (Darwin saw two varieties, “combat” and “preference for beauty”). And sexual selection that is the direct result of females investing more in offspring than do males, something that starts with the different gametes. Note that differences between animal sexes, which involve weapons like antlers, behavior like building bowers, or plumage and display traits, need not reside on the sex chromosome, and in fact cannot because there are simply too many differences between the sexes. The important part, though, is that this inter-sex and interspecific diversity can be understood ONLY as a result of the sex binary, which involves the ability to produce either high-investment eggs or lower-investment sperm.
I won’t go on except to say that perhaps we need a name for the tactic of doing down the sex binary (or pretending it doesn’t exist), by emphasizing both diversity of nature and the complication of sex determination and expression of sex-related traits. I will call it “The Argument from Complication” which says something like this:
“Nature, including the determination and expression of biological sex, is complicated and diverse.
Therefore the sex binary is relatively unimportant, because by itself it can’t explain everything.”
I’m not sure why the author flaunted this straw man, and I have no idea who the new editor of the journal is. But what is clear is that either the author or the editor, or both, decided to slant what is otherwise an informative article towards criticizing the very important fact that there are two sexes in all plants and animals, and that the defining traits of those two sexes, involving gametes, is both universal and explanatory. If you want to read more about this, see this free article by Richard Dawkins.
Two additional notes. First, this article appears on the website, published yesterday (click to read; I just saw it and haven’t yet); it’s by our old friend Agustín Fuentes, who is making a living attacking the sex binary:
And there is this one, reporting a new study that seems to lack a control (click to read):
An excerpt from the Santora piece:
Suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth jumped by as much as 72 percent from 2018 to 2022 in states that had recently passed laws to curtail their rights. And President Donald Trump took this onslaught to the federal level last month when he signed an executive order to cut federal medical care support for trans people aged 19 and younger, which two federal judges have since temporarily blocked. These political actions affect a set of young people who already had much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide attempts than their nontransgender peers. Many of the recent state laws ban gender-affirming care—which a 2022 study suggests is a lifeline for many trans youth. In the study, those who received gender-affirming care had 60 percent lower odds of depression and 73 percent lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up than those who did not.
A growing body of evidence supports the mental health benefits of gender-affirming care for trans youth—including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and, in very rare cases, surgery. Now a new study adds to this evidence: it’s the first of its kind to show that hormone therapy improves overall emotional health among trans youth.
For the new study, published in January in the Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers tracked the emotional health of 315 trans youth aged 12 to 20 for two years after they began using hormone therapy (testosterone or estrogen). Emotional health is a component of mental health that concerns feelings; it shapes how we act in relationships, react to struggles and generally behave in everyday life. The study also tracked appearance congruence, a measure of how much a person’s physical presentation matches their gender identity.
Two points about it. First, the “new study” doesn’t seem to have a control, so (and I just scanned it) the improvements in emotional health can’t be ascribed to hormone therapy. This is what controls are for! We know that gender dysphoria generally resolves and disappears in 80% of untreated children, so those controls are essential.
Second, the article does not mention the contradictory results in the literature, nor does it mention the famous but unpublished study of Johanna Olson-Kennedy that, over a period of two years (same as above) found contradictory results (the Olson-Kennedy study remains unpublished because the results weren’t ideologically acceptable!). From the NYT:
The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.
The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.
But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.
My conclusion from all this: Scientific American is, after a short hiatus, going woke again. Keep your eye on it.
h/t: Robert
Article heading : “… help us see past the sex binary ”
I think that says everything about what the overt purpose of the article is – and it has everything to do with epistemic magic tricks.
IMHO this again is dialectical, synthesizing truth* with a belief in a critical theory – Judith Butler’s “gender performativity” – that is so important it has to be made to be true by force (“forcing us”, from the heading).
I really like the Argument from Complication (Argumentum ex Complicatione) which fits with *truth here being merely a ruse to develop thought into “gender performativity”. Complication is from Critical Social Justice, similar to mystification.
Really that has to be it. What else? The beauty is they never need to cite it somehow. Colin Wright made a related point – if you’re going to deconstruct parsimonious models for replicated, empirical observations, developed over decades, you have to propose a precise model – or something – to account for it :
x.com/swipewright/status/1894449393853763994?s=46
She writes, “In most sexually reproducing species, making an embryo requires two gametes: one egg and one sperm.” Are there exceptions that justify the “most” instead of an “all” in that sentence?
She may be referring to those species of algae and fungi that have “mating types” instead of “sexes”. But I doubt those isogamous species constitute the majority of all species that have sex.
Do “mating type” species have embryos, though?
How I think of an embryo is that it’s a stage in the life cycle where the business of making a living is put on hold for a time. Cells divide by mitosis to create a multicellular organism with some division of labor among the cells. I’ve never heard of an algae embryo, or a fungus embryo.
That’s really good, Mark. A beautiful expression.
Perhaps she’s referring to species where females can sometimes reproduce parthenogenetically.
The “The Argument from Complication” that they use seems intentional most of the time, including here, so let me suggest “Sex Category Obfuscation” (SCO) or “Sex Category Obscuration”, if it makes sense. Their approach involves obscuring the boundaries between the two different categories and masking the core functionality of each category, which is reproduction.
Maybe the gender theorists look away from the core functionality of gametes because the phenomenon of reproduction itself disturbs them somehow. They ignore
this disturbing concept to focus (á la Judith Butler) on “performativity”, which can in theory be chosen, even by children. Perhaps devotees of the gender cult also display a similar avoidance of concepts and words related to parentage, family, and so on.
Joining the other dubious phobia terminology – Islamophobia, transphobia – we now have another – binaphobia.
That aside, the bird study, in Jerry’s summary (I’m usually flummoxed by scientific research in its original form) was quite interesting.
The real shame of it is that SciAm still does publish good articles on science, but a lot of people, myself included, have now developed an aversion to reading anything there due to their politics-over-science stance on gender. Even after Helmuth’s departure I still haven’t been back to the site.
I realize I’m being hypocritical because I usually advise others not to let a distasteful stance on one issue lead to a broader negative judgment. Yet, that’s exactly what I’ve done with Scientific American.
“Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady.
You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.
When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong.”
-Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD)
from
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius)
Letter 2, often titled “On Discursiveness in Reading“
Well, there are two issues described in this article: biological sex and gender-affirming treatment. And three articles total
Three cheers for Prof Hooven AGAIN!
She has more patience than I do. This “hide the ball” crap to advance genderwang is so tiresome and blatant. You’d think (hope) people literate enough to read higher level science magazines would know this. You’d think.
D.A.
NYC
Genderwang!
lol!
Unfortunately, you cannot reason with unreasonable people; such are persuaded by demagogic-type arguments.
Often, without force, it is impossible to make headway with idealogues: while I’m not advocating his tactics, Mr. Capone made a good point, which I paraphrase: A kind word and a gun goes further than a kind word alone.
“Unfortunately, you cannot reason with unreasonable people; such are persuaded by demagogic-type arguments.”
More precisely; one cannot use reason to argue someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to arrive at.
Good point. They’ve started with trans ideology and gone looking for something, anything to try and justify it.
I’m still mystified by the whole thing. I can’t figure out why it’s so important to these people.
Hermaphrodites exist in our human family; does it bother you? Why yes or no?
There’s still only two sexes. Hermaphrodites are not a third sex.
Still I’m not objecting to hermaphrodites or trans people per se. I do object to individuals with a Y chromosome competing in women’s sports.
But I think Trump is going too far. Removing the T from the LGBT sign
at Stonewall Inn (it’s a federal park or monument) is just plain mean.
I disagree; the T never belonged with the LGB in the first place, and many gay people have said so for many years.
“Trans” isn’t a sexual orientation. And it isn’t a homogeneous category to begin with; gay men who transition are very different, psychologically, from autogynephiles (who are straight men.)
+1, Lady M.
Trans-identified people are not hermaphrodites. And hermaphrodites are intersex, not a third sex.
Today, the term “hermaphrodite” is reserved for organisms where both types of gonads normally develop in the same body, e.g. the earthworm.
Maaaaybe the author is somewhat walking back the argument of there being 4 sexes in this species? The content of this paper seems palpably softer on that claim than they were on an earlier paper where D. Maney was the first author. That paper was “Inside the Supergene of the Bird with Four Sexes”. And in there the claim of 4 sexes was not subtle. I had recently looked at it again and could not wrap my head around how they were explicitly saying 4 sexes when there was really just 2. With a bit of polymorphism.
It was in the paper that the authors mentioned that homozygotes for the inverted chromosome do exist, but they were rare. They were called Superwhites.
One thing that bugged me was the pushing of the claim that the rearranged chromosome, bc is suppresses transmission of recombination events, was sort of evolving into a new sex chromosome. This being because some sex chromosomes have that property. But inversions are very widespread. Humans have them. Fruit flies sure as hell have loads of them. What’s next? A claim that sex chromosomes are popping up everywhere??
Ok, two more things.
1. I pray they don’t discover damselflies and dragonflies. There, males are known for being especially randy and pesky toward females, so in many species some females display colors that make them look like males and this earns them a lot less harassment. So some females look like males??? Sshhhhh! Don’t tell anyone!
2. Maybe a road to settling all this down is to express that there are two biological sexes. Yep. That’s true. But gosh, the sexes are so variable and diverse in how they are expressed between species and even within species! It’s not that sex itself is a spectrum bc it isn’t. It’s about how it is phenotypically expressed and sometimes that expression is not an anomaly but is part of the evolutionary story. I find that to be very palatable bc it’s true.
RE item 1: Maybe the dragonfly translation to humans is that “trans-women” are the way they are so they don’t get hit up by girls for Sadie Hawkins dances?
HAhah. Hilarious Mark, again.
“Superwhites” – my god – you’ll be cancelled any day now my friend!
The dragonflies seal your sad fate. Back to intersectionality class for YOU Mark!
D.A.
NYC
It cannot be emphasized enough:
Civil rights for transgender people are not predicated on the idea that ‘sex is a spectrum’. It is not necessary to posit non-scientific ideas to assert that transgender people should not experience discrimination.
Similarly, trans women who went through puberty as boys are going to have an unfair advantage over women who went through puberty as girls. This fact must be dealt with when considering women’s athletic competitions. There may be several approaches to the issue, but all must deal with the facts.
Locker room/bathroom issues can be dealt with partly by not forcing anyone to have to be publicly naked. I know many women and men who hated having to shower with a bunch of other adolescents in middle/high school.
I confess that I do not entirely understand what trans people mean when they say that they are ‘really’ the opposite sex. I have, however, talked in depth to enough people – who are not mentally ill – who assert that they have felt more comfortable as the opposite gender since they were very young. What is going on in their brains is an interesting scientific question, but, again, not relevant to whether they should be denied basic civil rights.
Your fourth paragraph is a non-starter because public toilets don’t involve being seen nude by others yet public toilets separated by sex exist in most places. If there is no need to exclude transwomen from womens’ toilets, then there is no need to exclude men. Of course, gender-neutral toilets are not what most transpeople want; they want to be validated by being allowed in to where they think that they belong.
As for civil rights, in most countries trans people have the same ones. What, specifically, are “trans rights”?
As for sex is a spectrum, that is often in contrast to the idea that “transwomen are women”, no spectrum involved. Of course, logic is not necessarily a strong point in such arguments. In some cases, it might be a tactic to get people to accept that sex is a spectrum (thus bringing in the red herring of “truly intersex people”, who usually have nothing to do with trans issues and are tired of being used for that purpose) as a means to accepting all gender-nonconforming things which in turn is a bridge to the ultimate goal.
Define “opposite gender”. It’s essentially pre-1950s stereotypes which true progressives got rid of back in the 1960s.
Two problems:
1) Trans activists insist that a) denying their claim that sex is a spectrum and they lie wherever on it they feel like and b) keeping the male ones out of women’s sport (and shelters and prisons and barracks) both just are discrimination and therefore both “sensible” positions violate their civil rights. A) particularly denies their fundamental belief as to who they are. It is at the base of why they resent “misgendering” so much and want to punish it…and why they can’t accept b), either. It is not for you, they say, to decide that trans people should have only those rights that you the cis majority who oppress us decide we can have. That’s not how rights-seekers work, never have. A transwoman is a subset of “woman” self-defined according to how she feels. She can go anywhere and do anything that any other woman can.
2). It’s not clear what you mean by discrimination. “Civil rights” cover only the enumerated categories such as race, sex, and religion. If the group you belong to isn’t on the list, you don’t have a civil-rights case when you think you’ve been discriminated against. Civil liberties apply to everyone. Do you mean that I as as a straight male should not be permitted to say in public that I would never on this earth date a trans-identified man? That transwomen are men? That I don’t want schools to be teaching children that their parents might be mistaken about what sex they are? That I can’t insist (on pain of discipline and dismissal) that a man I hire dress in sex-appropriate clothing that the other men have to wear, that he not throw a hissy fit if a customer misgenders him, and that he stay out of the women’s bathrooms so my valuable female staff don’t quit? (And no, I am not renovating the plumbing facilities just for him.)
All these expressions of “trans-hate” can be illegal only in jurisdictions that enshrine gender expression and identity as a protected category against which one cannot discriminate. Is that what you are saying should be written into the laws that cover discrimination? And once you do that, you won’t be able to make your sensible exceptions, like sport, stick. We know this because that’s what Canada and its provinces have done.
Squidmaster, I agree that “Civil rights for transgender people are not predicated on the idea that ‘sex is a spectrum’.” And most readers of this website will agree with this as well since they accept David Hume’s argument that you can’t derive an OUGHT from an IS. (Science can’t tell us how to live since it can make only if … then statements.)
A national survey of adult Americans done in Nov.2022, commissioned by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, revealed that a majority of Americans support laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people in housing (74%), at their jobs and workplaces (73%), at colleges and universities (73%), in K-12 schools (69%), in the US military (65%), by medical professional (71%), and when it comes to getting health insurance (72%)
Source: Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows. Washington Post, May 5, 2023
That said, several national polls (from 2022-2025) are consistent in showing that between 70 and 80% of adult Americans do not think that transwomen are women. These Americans subscribe to the standard biological definition of woman as an adult female (a category nobody can identify into). Hence they do not support the abolition of female-only spaces. That’s why the title of the just cited Washington Post article is “Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows.” The WaPo editor could as well have titled the article “The GOP supports anti-trans policies favored by a large majority of adult Americans” or “A large majority of adult Americans rejects pro-trans policies favored by the Democratic Party.”
A second point: radical trans activists and their allies in the sciences have pursued a strategy of trying to redefine sex so that, under a new definition, trans-identfying males are capable of changing sex, so that it would then be true that transwomen are indeed women, and then should be admitted to all tradionally female-only spaces. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, in 2023, co-authored an article published in City Journal entitled:
Gender Ideology’s Shaky Twin Pillars. May 22, 2023 [freely accessible on the web]
A Washington Post essay provides a case study in the substitution of dogma for biology.
The articles starts as follows [emphasis added]:
A third point: the political strategy of radical trans activists is simple: First condition the public to the idea that a man can be a woman by allowing trans-identified people to falsify the sex entry on their identifying documents by replacing sex with gender identity (birth certificate, drivers license, passport, etc.). This will be asked for in the name of kindness and respect. Next you lobby for a self-ID law that allows anybody to choose their legal sex. Once a man is able to change his legal sex to female, use discrimination law to force open female-only space to trans-identifying men. After all according to the self-ID law these men are female (so keeping them out of traditionally female-only spaces would be discrimination). This third step can be either accomplished in one swoop with step 2 or, if the self-ID law does not explicitly state that all female-only spaces are off limits to biological males (never mind their legal sex), then use the courts to pry open female-only spaces. As the brilliant and indefatigable Helen Joyce recently wrote:
Helen Joyce: Beware the slippery slope. The Cut, Jan 31, 2025 [freely accessible on the web]
Other parts of the political strategy of radical trans activists are: No debate (that is, “Our demands are nondebatable and non-negotiable.”), piggybacking on gay conversion therapy bans and ruthless cancellation attempts aimed at anybody who dares to question trans demands (that is, trying to get them fired from their jobs and denying them any tribune in academic journals, in the media and on social media; and when the right-wing media platforms critics, then those critics will be dismissed as right-wing, as religious biggots, never mind that most of the time they are atheists, or worse, as Nazis).
Some of the wisdom of Helen Joyce:
https://thecritic.co.uk/author/helen-joyce/
It is difficult to get a professor of gender studies to understand the importance of a clear definition of “woman” to women’s legal rights when her grant to study pregnant men depends on her not understanding it.
[In the eyes of radical trans activists] everything has to do with trans. This must be the most narcissistic movement in history. Women’s objections to trans-identifying men in their spaces can’t possibly be because we’re thinking of our own interests; we must be doing it to hurt trans people. My objections to reality-denialism can’t be because I think it’s dangerous to deny reality, it has to be because I hate the people trying to impose their fantasies on everyone. They genuinely seem to think that they are the stars not just in their own lives but in everyone else’s.
Helen Joyce: Being cruel to women. The Critic, Feb 7, 2025
“JustBeKindism” conceals the fact that sometimes doing right by women means taking from men
Review of (Un)kind: How “Be Kind” Entrenches Sexism, by Victoria Smith, Fleet, February 2025
Execerpt:
“What about men?” Anyone who runs something solely for women — a women’s centre, a course for female leaders, International Women’s Day — gets used to being asked this question.
In recent years, the spread of trans ideology has strengthened this assumption that anything reserved for women must be a theft from men. Women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, even prison cells: women who want them protected can’t possibly be motivated by concern for women. Their true aim must be to spite men. Why can’t they just be kind?
In this elegant and insightful book, Victoria Smith dubs this mindset JustBeKindism: a “toxic mutation” of an entrenched belief that when women focus their care and attention on other women, they are being big meanies. Womanhood itself is now a good unjustly hoarded: TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), with their insistence on recognising that men cannot be women, are the epitome of unkind. Even feminism cannot be for women. In the words of American writer Julia Serano, a trans-identifying man: “It is negligent for feminists to focus only on those who are female-bodied.”
In JustBeKindism, Smith points out, men make the best women. Proving her point, since 2013, when the BBC started an annual award for 100 “women of the year”, nearly every list has included at least one trans-identifying man. This year’s is Brigitte Baptiste, a Colombian biologist who “uses a queer lens to analyse landscapes and species” and gave a TedX talk in which he claimed that the Quindío wax palm, Colombia’s national tree, is transsexual. These meagre achievements were deemed more worthy of recognition than anything done in 2024 by 4 billion actual women.
In JustBeKindism, actual women are beneath contempt. Smith quotes Andrea Long Chu, a trans-identifying man and the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Females: A Concern (the title alone merits an award for mansplaining). “Female,” says Chu, means “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”
“JustBeKindism: a “toxic mutation” of an entrenched belief that when women focus their care and attention on other women, they are being big meanies”
That’s a valid point. Many times it feels to me as as a manifestation of a psychological schema of self-sacrifice: “you should put the needs and emotions of others first, re-enforcing their beliefs, and you are going to be valued for that”. I’ve noticed this pattern among some young women I’ve known, coming from families where this type of behavior was valued, praised or even enforced. Of course this is speculation, and does not explain all the data, but I believe it plays a role in shaping this mentality.
“Toxic femininity”.
+1, to put it mildly!
This comment is more than twice as long as the limit–600 words. Please keep them within the limits in the future, as we want comments, not essays.
As I mention for another comment below, please stick to the recommended length of 600 words; this is over 1000 words.
Advisor: Put in a sentence or two about… how about ‘seeing PAST the sexual binary?’
Prof. Hooven: But that’s not how it works!
Advisor: Can’t hurt.
Prof. H: Oh, all right.
There are many species that don’t fit a sex binary, including humans. It can’t be naturalized neatly because nature is messy and diverse; diversity is a feature not a bug.
If not binary, how many sexes do you believe there are?
… and what do the gametes for each sex look like? What role does each one play in reproduction of a new individual? How does the carrier of the large sessile gamete recognize which of the non-large gamete-emitters she needs to be receptive to in order to complete a set?
… and are you going to contact all the publishers of school textbooks with this information? Because, if you’re right, then every single school biology textbook will need to be rewritten. For some reason, they all teach that sexual reproduction requires two parents, one of each sex.
Ok, then how many human sexes are there? What chromosomes do the non-binary, non-XX and non-XY humans have? What types of gametes do they produce, or would they produce?
By the way, Intersex people don’t prove that human sex is non-binary; they are genetic or developmental mistakes deviating off of the basic binary template. Hermaphrodites are the same: very rare mistakes or strange developmental blips like twin chimerism that occur as deviations off of the human binary template.
There are two (2) sexes.
We are all aware that sex-linked traits (including psychological ones) are not binary.
That fact is not in dispute. It does not render human sexual dimorphism irrelevant. And it certainly doesn’t mean that men who “identify as” women are women.
Permit me to repeat my call for a Progressive approach to the continuous and diverse spectrum of animation between what is conventionally called “living” and those who are what some call “departed”. We deplore the harm done to members of the latter community by labelling them with marginalizing words like “departed”, “deceased”, or, worst of all, “dead”. We advise a more respectful term, such as “vitally challenged”. My essay on what Critical Élan Vital theory teaches us about the animation spectrum will soon be submitted to Scientific American.
Then I made subscribe to SciAm for a trial period.
We also don’t use the derogatory and clearly discriminatory term “decaying”. We refer our vitally challenged colleagues as “bacteriologically festooned” and “distinctly aromatic”.
+1
(Have shared a screenshot on Facebook. If this is objectionable, let me know.)
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0rWeq9Md4izqgDfmPEZ5SL4cREyXEvQNA4ATsvjLdTg5jbHEzCFtmK6gQb7bKfhrml&id=1173053812&mibextid=Nif5oz
Puts an interesting new spin on “dead naming”.
As the barrister Naomi Cunningham once wrote, in an amusing review of the book “A practical guide to Transgender Law” by Robin Moira White (a male barrister who identifies as female):
https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2021/09/02/a-practical-guide/
I just got my SciAm in the mail (the paper version), so it’ll take a while for me to get to the sparrow article. (I tend to read cover to cover.) I did read the Fuentes piece which, to me, releases a smokescreen that does not touch the reality of two (and only two) types of gametes—the basis of the sex binary. Annoyingly, he also takes the opportunity to excoriate those whose “lack of familiarity” with “how sex categories are understood by biologists” “enables idealogues to deploy distortions to achieve their agendas of exclusion.” Those who accept the anisogametic definition of sex are the ideologues?
The details about the sparrow are very interesting. I can almost picture the cover of the “classic” Sci Am with an illustration depicting the four “states” with an explanation in the article similar to that of PCC(E).
I was just told in Diversity training at work this very morning that this subject is very complicated, and the trainer referenced these sparrows!
The trainer also said that we (as engineers) can’t hope to successfully navigate all the nuance associated with the spectrum of sex and gender and that we need to allow for a certain level of forgiveness when we make mistakes, such as if we hear someone say “there are only two sexes”. We should gently correct them and then let them know that our Diversity team (HR staff) is available to help, and that if we feel this is a problem, then I as the hearer of the statement can also go to HR to initiate additional training for the offender or additional further action if needed.
It’s clear that this is a type of Gnosticism in which only the chosen ones can decipher the complexity of gender politics, and that their main intent is to gain and hold power. These low ranking people who generate no value for the company other than in an administrative role (which more and more is being automated) have more power than engineering directors to get people fired! If I have an engineer who isn’t producing, I have to work on an improvement plan with them for months, and go through a ton of rigamarole, with the most likely result that they get transferred to some other dept. . But if he/she states there are only two sexes, or violates some other code (that we “can’t be expected to understand”), then HR can step in and take action completely on their own.
We thought this was changing with the new anti-woke sentiment, and the high priestesses of DEI here have all received new titles, but the power remains in their hands.
Sorry for the length, just wanted to give an example of how this kind of thing gets propagated for use in the corporate world.
Good lord you know it’s bad when the engineers are captured 🙁 Hang in there Darryl.
Is that a veiled threat or what! Rat out the offender or face the consequences. Someone else will surely know that you overheard Something Bad and he can go to HR himself to rat out both of you.
This sounds like something straight out of Orwell.
Diversity Trainers and Team Members can’t hope to successfully navigate all the nuance associated with reality, and we need to allow for a certain level of forgiveness when they damage people’s lives for no good reason.
Yes, the nuance associated with reality is indeed difficult for them to navigate! 🙂
“Some benighted authors have said that this species has four sexes, but they are deluded”.
Indeed! Helmuth was one of them: https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1857174695507833262