I guess the number of papers and articles people send me about the definition of sex is one sign that it remains an important issue for the populace. Indeed, I think that in future decades people will see the kerfuffle about a simple and widely accepted definition (the gametic one) as a tempest in a teapot, stirred up by activists who demand that nature conform to their own ideology.
Philosopher Alex Byrne of MIT, whose recent book Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions I recommend, has also written a short and useful article on the site Fairer Disputations (“Sex-Realist Feminism for the 21st Century”) that covers a lot of ground, including the recent definition of sex given by the Department of Health and Human Services, the history of the definition that was used (the gametic one), the opposition to that definition, and “the British gender wars”, which are particularly nasty but have some smart combatants, like Helen Joyce, Emma Hilton, and J. K. Rowling, to defend those women who lose their jobs or get demonized for speaking the truth.
You can (and should) read Alex’s article by clicking below (it’s free), and I’ll give a few quotes (indented)
The beginning of understanding the nature of biological sex. Nobody really knew about gametes until 1677, when the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek found little wiggly “animalcules” in his sperm. Over the years since then, biologists began to realize that all animals and plants have two sexes with different gametes, and those gametes must usually unite to produce to produce a new offspring. Further, regardless of whether the sexes are produced by chromosomes, the environment, genes, or social interactions, they are always two, and this condition has evolved independently nearly a dozen times. Here’s Alex’s description of the beginning, and how the definition continues–up to this day:
Sexual reproduction remained something of a mystery for the next five millennia, until the German physician Theodor von Bischoff hypothesized in the mid-nineteenth century that it involved the fusion of (in the EO’s language) two “reproductive cells”—one sperm and one ovum, or egg. The sperm is small and relatively simple, the egg large and much more complicated. When von Bischoff’s theory was later confirmed, it was a short step to uncovering the deep distinction between females and males: females produce large reproductive cells (or gametes), males produce small ones. What about producing both? Some animals (and many plants) do just that: they are hermaphrodites—female and male.
Here’s Robert Payne Bigelow, a biology professor from my own university, writing in 1903:
The ability to produce a macro- or microgamete constitutes the essential distinction of sex. The individual which produces the latter is said to be of the male sex, the individual producing the former is said to be of the female sex. In most of the higher plants and in a few of the lower animals both sexes are included in a single individual, which is then said to be hermaphrodite.
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir noted that the sexes are “defined primarily … by the gametes which they produce—sperms and eggs respectively” in The Second Sex, published in 1949. Yet in her 2023 book Beyond the Binary: Thinking About Sex and Gender, the feminist philosopher Shannon Dea tells us that “papaya trees come in three sexes—male, female, and hermaphroditic.” That is wrong, as Bigelow made clear 120 years earlier. Hermaphroditic papaya trees are both male and female, not a third sex.
The misguided critics. I can’t resist quoting this part, but the article has far more stuff in it:
In short, the EO’s [Executive Order’s] definitions of “female” and “male” are right, or at least substantially on the right lines. (On February 19, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a memo with improved versions.) So why the furor? What were the experts’ main complaints?
Some struggled with reading comprehension. The Director of the Centre for Indigenous Initiatives at Carleton University criticized the claim that there are “two genders” as “ignorant,” evidently thinking of so-called “third genders” in some traditional North American societies. But the EO pronounces on the number of sexes, not on the special cultural arrangements that have sometimes been made to accommodate homosexual men. In any case, even if the EO had said there were only two “genders,” it would have used the word as a synonym for “sex.”
Others were just painfully muddled. A biological anthropologist at the University of Urbana-Champaign declared that sex has multiple definitions, each valid for different purposes. One definition “is around typical hormone ranges. [For instance, people with] polycystic ovary syndrome end up having androgen levels that are very different from those of most people that we might put in the sex category of female.” The suggestion seemed to be that on one acceptable definition of “female,” people with polycystic ovary syndrome aren’t female because they have (relatively) high androgen levels. (The clue is in the name: polycystic ovary syndrome.)
Any acceptable definition of sex needs to get the right results for cats, ibises, and date palms, and one based on circulating hormones won’t. A definition based on chromosomes works for cats and date palms: they both employ the XX/XY sex determination system, with the males being XY. But ibises have it the other way round: the lady ibis is the one with different sex chromosomes. And what about other animals known to the ancient Egyptians, such as the Nile crocodile and the honeybee? The sex of a baby croc is determined not by chromosomes, but by the temperature of the nest, and male bees develop from unfertilized eggs, with half a set of chromosomes.
There is no definition of sex other than the standard gamete one that classifies female humans, cats, ibises, date palms, crocodiles, and bees correctly. That did not stop the anthropologist from saying that the EO “misunderstand[s] basic human biology.”
Anthropologists can be flaky. Still, one might have expected the Presidents of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists to get basic biology right. However, according to them, in a letter to Trump and members of Congress, sex is a spectrum, a “continuum of male to female.” This “continuum” apparently has something to do with “chromosomes, hormonal balances, … gonads, external genitalia,” although the three presidents declined to spell out the details. Presumably, on this account, women with polycystic ovary syndrome are mostly-but-not-entirely female—perhaps a slight improvement on the anthropologist’s position. The biologist Jerry Coyne dissected the letter on his blog, writing in an email, “I used to be President of the Society for the Study of Evolution. Now it embarrasses me.”
And I’ll add that while most of the evolutionists I know agree about the gametic definition of sex, there is of course still debate about how that definition will be used on documents, driver’s licenses, and the like. Alex recognizes that these issues are far more contentious—at least to biologists:
Trump’s EO does not rest with the biological facts; it also sets a raft of policies. Among other things, government officials are directed “to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex.” It is understandable that someone seeking peace of mind by living as a member of the other sex would want a sex marker to match, especially when traveling to the less tolerant parts of the world. We should hope that the EO does not make life more difficult for such people than it already is. That hope is undoubtedly in vain, but the problem with pushing the pendulum too far in one direction is that it will tend to swing too far in the other. The activists who—predictably—have produced an equal and opposite reaction have only themselves to blame.
Professor Coyne recommends Byrne’s book, Trouble with Gender. It is clear and helpful on all the issues concerning sex and gender, and is perceptively reviewed by Daniel Kodsi in The Philosophers’ Magazine.
There are more important things to be thinking about these days..
Yeah, like kicking your tuchas off this site. Did you read the posting Roolz? I didn’t think so.
Don’t tell me what to write about. Bye!
The top 3 objections to discussing the transgender political agenda:
1. Whataboutism – as exemplified here by commenter Mark Miller (comment # 2). Mark was even too lazy to tells us what we should be paying attention to instead (or was that strategic ambiguity?).
2. “This only affects a small group of people” – which is completely false since it directly affects women and children, and these two groups make up about 50% + the percent of the population that is male and minor. Then add about 2-3% of the population that is gay.
3. “This is right-wing culture war.” Again, wrong. The share of hard-core religious conservatives in the US is about 30%. But around 80% of the US population thinks that transwomen are not women. So there are plenty of centrist and center-left people in the US who don’t agree with radial trans activists and their allies, without being on the political right, let alone the far right. While public opinion has moved clearly against the radical trans agenda, the Republicans are not coming for gay rights nor has public support for gay marriage declined significantly. (Somebody please tell Masha Gessen and Lydia Polgreen at the New York Times.)
Evidently, what these 3 ways to derail a debate have in common, is that they don’t want to discuss the substantive demands of the transgender activists and their allies. I wonder why?
I tried to counter the #2 recently in a back and forth on a different web site, with someone who was really pushing the view that transwomen in sports are a tiny minority so c’mon, let them play. I cited the UN estimate on the subject: “…by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.”
It went nowhere.
Lay off the ad hominem remarks, please.
Not only that, you are writing about things that people need to know about that they can effect change in. Sex is important because it’s a truth question, as well as an issue that affects us and our neighbours. Local action, just saying “No, that’s not true,” can make a difference.
Writing about things that people need to know about even though they can’t do anything about them except vent is important, too. These aren’t mostly truth questions but rather ideological arguments.
But of course you write (knowledgeably and skillfully) about what interests you, and that’s why we follow your site,
This site discusses interesting issues of evolutionary biology. How could clarity about biological sex not be important for that?
“I guess the number of papers and articles people send me about the definition of sex is one sign that it remains an important issue for the populace.”
Contra Mark Miller’s suggestion, it is important, and not just important of itself, so I think it’s good that our host continues to write about this topic. I first got drawn into reading and thinking about genderism because I’ve done some research on the evolution of sex differences in gametes. But I stayed with it (and enjoy figuring out what I think of it partly through the discussion here in Jerry’s living room) because genderism makes such an interesting foundational demand: it requires adherents to deny the reality of their own observations. It’s so interesting to watch and think about people doing this to themselves, especially professional scientists who make a living from their observations of reality. Some resist and don’t agree that TWAW; others drink the koolaid.
That difference leads to all the other interesting secondary features: the groupthink, the takeover of institutions, the vitriolic social media exchanges, the cancellations, the political blowback, the lawsuits, the desperate rear-guard actions (e.g., the parents of “trans” kids who as Helen Joyce points out will never admit they’ve horribly harmed their own children).
If I don’t think too much about the horror of tens of thousands of “trans” people who have been surgically mutilated by genderism (from that new Journal of Sexual Medicine article Jerry has promised to write about soon), for no apparent mental health benefit, then the whole thing seems like a fascinating cultural phenomenon.
Well, that was good. I especially valued the history of the discovery of biological sex, beginning with Leeuwenhoek — I can never spell that name right!
I think it’s extremely unfortunate that gender (formerly the legal term of art for sex, at least in the U.S.) has been conflated with the stereotypes associated with sex (and the associated performance of those stereotypes). This historical use of the term has enabled gender activists to lead people to thinking that feminine males and masculine females have somehow changed sex, when they’ve simply chosen to not perform the stereotypical behaviors associated with their sex. More importantly, it has enabled the elevation of gender performance over the reality of sex in law (e.g., allowing males to invade female-only spaces and categories).
I wish there was more discussion of the fact that the opposition to the conflation of gender with sex in the U.K. is in fact rooted in discussions of gender vs sex that were started by second-wave feminists (i.e., it’s not a right-wing movement in the U.K.). I’m an American, but I’m on the left politically, and how I first learned about gender is by reading second-wave feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond. I despair that the left and moderates in the U.S. have allowed the right-wing to “own” this issue in the U.S., both because the right-wing have their own destructive version of gender and it’s “proper” performance and because so many on the left and in the middle in U.S. automatically reject anything that is perceived as a right-wing issue.
I would urge anyone on the left or who is a moderate who thinks this is a right-wing issue to read Alex Byrne’s book and also Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality which will clearly outline why elevating gender over sex is both an incorrect (and profoundly regressive and sexist) way of defining women and men and, more importantly, why doing so is damaging to the rights of women and girls and of gay and lesbian people.
I would recommend also Nora Ephron’s review of Conundrum, the account by Jan Morris of her experience. It’s included in Ephron’s collection Crazy Salad. One of the earliest as well as wittiest critiques of transgenderism.
I agree. It’s good. Ephron wites that Morris’ book Conundrum (1974) is “mawkish and embarrassing.” Morris (1926-2020), a Welsh historian, author and travel writer, underwent sex reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1972, going from James to Jan. In his 1974 book he communicates that to be a woman is defined by traditional female stereotypes (a woman is weak, meek, etc.).
Ephron: No, it isnt. If Morris were right, I would not be a woman.
Anybody can read the review here for free (registration required – it’s easy and no credit card required; this is an internet library – it’s good for accessing older books, anything at least 10 years old)
Nora Ephron: Review of Conundrum (1974), by Jan Morris. June 1974, reprinted in Nora Ephron: Crazy salad: Some things about women. New York, 1975, pp.197-201
https://archive.org/search?query=Nora+Ephron+crazy+salad
Byrne’s article should be required reading. Part of the value is that it right up to date, addressing the President’s executive order as it’s starting point. Thank you for being it to my attention.
The astonishing thing is, as early as 1677, Leeuwenhoek demonstrated “gender performativity” – but it took some 300 years until Judith Butler discovered it in 1990!
This was a really good article. It did a great (and amusing) job of distilling the bullshit while covering all the necessary facts. As Norman said, it’s particularly valuable in that it covers up to date events (trumps EO, the letters from the 3 societies and Jerry and others’ rebuttal in their letter). Great read from an interesting website. Thanks for this.
I am with the EO about “All official documents should accurately reflect sex.”
Among other things, it has laid bare the other big lie of trans activists, namely “Being trans is all about gender identity and nothing to do with sex.”
If that were truly the case, then we wouldn’t have the current meltdowns in the trans world over sex being correctly reported on the passport.
The entire trans movement is founded on dishonest arguments and equivocation.
“There is no definition of sex other than the standard gamete one that classifies female humans, cats, ibises, date palms, crocodiles, and bees correctly.”
I don’t disagree with any of this article, but surely if you define sex in a particular way, it must classify organisms correctly according to said definition.
Fair enough. The gamete definition of sex could be tested against other possible formulas to see which discriminates most accurately and reproducibly. One could propose a definition of sex that took into account anatomy, social sex role (including interest in procreation), hormone levels, and fashion sense — whatever they wanted to put into the definition — and then ask proponents of the definition to diagnose the sex of a range of people specifically selected to be challenging. Then rate the inter- observer variability in their diagnoses. You could allow the definers to make statements like “80% male”. (It’s a spectrum, right.). Then ask them to rate the same people next month to assess reliability of the same observer.
Having done all that you could calculate a kappa statistic that measures how much agreement there is within the tribe that proposes the multifactoral definition. If you found that even though all the tribe agreed on the components of the definition but there was little agreement as to how to apply it to an individual person, or to the same person a month later, it would mean the sex (or gender) scheme might have value as a theoretical construct but would have little practical use as a definition. One rater might attach a lot of weight to genital anatomy, another more weight to the subject’s internal gender feelings, another might go big on hormones.
Using a gamete-plan definition of sex, kappa will show perfect agreement among observers for that set of “challenging” subjects presented to the multifactoral tribe. Indeed there will be perfect agreement for all human beings, there being no life forms that produce spectral gametes from spectral body plans.
What the proponents of any non-gametic definition of sex need to do is show that their system is reliable enough to be used by other scientists to classify the same individuals the same way on different occasions….better than gametic sex does. Gamete sex could be “wrong” in some fundamental way, but a competing approach must at least show that it measures something real, i.e., reliable.
Fuentes et al are flooding X and other sites with “sex in not binary”. If you politely ask these multimodal /multivariate people some question the common response:
They ignore you (but respond to praise of course)
They give the answers:
“You like like simple answers, don’t you”.
“It’s complicated”
Byrne mentions Kellie-Jay Keen’s Adult Human Female billboard in Liverpool, but not what happened next: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45650462
Keen also paid for an I ❤ JK Rowling poster to be put up at a railway station in Edinburgh to mark the author’s birthday. Despite having no other text, it was swiftly complained about and removed for being “political”. Of course, Canadian nurse Amy Hamm has faced a four-year legal struggle over her fitness to practise for arranging for a similar poster to be displayed.
A couple of other things:
Byrne writes “One bunker buster bomb dropped by the gender-critical side was J. K. Rowling’s tweet (322,000 likes to date)”. The number of likes the tweet has had is far, far higher but for some reason they keep disappearing – I’ve added my like back many times but it never sticks. (My bookmark does, however, stay there.)
Maya Forstater losing her initial employment tribunal turned out to be a good thing, because the subsequent win at the Employment Appeal Tribunal set a legal precedent that gender critical beliefs are legally protected. A win at the first tier tribunal wouldn’t have done so.
I think we can agree on some basic principles:
1. Sexual reproduction has advantages over asexual. The genetic variety of offspring is increased, allowing evolution to proceed faster than with asexual reproduction, where only mutations introduce variety.
2. Sexual reproduction requires a minimum of two sexes, conveniently described by their different gametes.
3. There is no further advantage to be gained by having more than two sexes, making organisms with three or more sexes less efficient and thus less likely to survive.
4. No organisms with three or more sexes exist, indicating that point #3 has been at play.
5. The economy of nature makes none of this surprising or controversial: it is exactly what we would expect the simplest, most successful solution to look like.
6. Proponents of multiple sexes, or gradations of sex have the burden of proving how their proposed scenario is more efficient and successful in evolutionary terms.
Discuss.
Science News just posted an article that says “Sex is messy.
It’s not just about chromosomes. Or reproductive cells. Or any other binary metric” and then introduces a lot of discussion about traits such as height, and also chromosomal definitions and intersex people.”…
“For me, the definition is really painful because it reduces a human being to their chance of reproducing,” says Anna Biason-Lauber, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
No, a person is not defined solely by their chance of reproducing, unless you’re living in a very strange world.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/biological-sex-male-female-intersex?utm_medium=email&utm_term=N%2FA&utm_source=D365&utm_content=SN%20Latest%20Headlines%202025%2002%2027&utm_campaign=SN%20Latest%20Headlines%202025%2002%2027#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=ae27d172-0b0e-41e2-bc87-6ee562f9ae6e