Well, Laura Helmuth may no longer be at the helm of Scientific American, but the magazine seems to have again again dipped its toes into the waters of unscientific ideology. To wit: they’re posted a 14-minute podcast emphasizing that nature—and that includes humans—is “non-binary”. The problem is that, as usual, they get what is binary (biological sex) deeply confused, conflating it with behavior and morphology of animals, features that, while they may be bimodal, are not nearly as nonbinary as biological sex, which, as I’ve explained ad nauseum, defined on the basis of gamete types. (See also this post by Richard Dawkins.)
If you click on the link below at Scti.Am, you can hear this ideologically-motivated discussion between writer Rachel Feldman and biologist Nathan Lents of John Jay College, who is touting his new book (see bottom). I haven’t read it, but he summarizes its thesis in the podcast. The ideology is implicit, not explicit, but is encapsulated in the constant and obsessive denigration of the binary by both Feldman and Lents. The problem is that they don’t understand what biologists mean by “the binary.” It’s the binary of gamete type (used to define biological sex), Jake!
Click to listen. It’s only 14 minutes, but I found it painful.
The mishigas begins at the beginning, when Feldman, touting the “nonbinary” thesis, proclaims at the start
“What we’ve often labeled as anomalies might actually represent successful evolutionary adaptations deserve serious study. And these creatures can help us understand how our own species breaks the binary, too.”
But of course nobody with any brains has ever said that the diversity of behaviors in human males and females, or the fact that there is some overlap in traits like height red blood cell count, ARE binary. We recognize that traits like height are bimodal (the modes certainly reflect some sexual selection), but Feldman, like Lents, misses the real binarythat’s at issue (and that has led to sexual selection): the binary of gamete type. For reasons Richard Dawkins, Emma Hilton, Colin Wright, Carole Hooven, and I have explained at length, gamete type is the concept of sex (not an a priori definition), because a binary of gamete type (large, immobile eggs vs. mobile sperm) is almost completely universal in plants and animals.
Nor has anybody with neurons that work said that the diversity of behavior, morphology, and so on in mammals is unworthy of study, or doesn’t exist. Look at all the attention devoted to the difference between bonobos and chimps, for example!
At any rate, Feldman says that Lents’s new book claims that biologists have completely failed to appreciate the role of diversity among individuals in the life of social animals. As she says, Lents’s book “breaks down the idea of there being a sex binary in most places in the natural world.”
This is confused. There is a binary of gamete type—eggs and sperm—in all animals and plants. While some creatures like earthworms can be hermaphrodites, they still carry only eggs and sperm, and thus are members of both sexes, not a third sex. There is no third type of gamete.
But of course if you take any other trait, there is variation within sexes. Even in humans there is variation within males in whether or not they have a penis, and this rare variation does not represent a third sex, or a breaking of the binary of sex, but a developmental anomaly. Nor does the variation among very rare “intersex” individuals represent a “successful evolutionary adaptation”, for most of these individuals in humans are sterile.
Now some variation in behavior can be an adaptation, for example the existence in some fish species of what is called “sneaky fuckers“: males that develop the appearance and behavior of females so they can get close to females to mate with them without attracting the attention of aggressive larger males. But these s.f.s are still males. There is a nonbinary of reproductive behavior, but not of sex. The sneaky fuckers are MALES. It is annoying that neither the interviewer nor Lents realize that this behavior not breaking the binary of biological sex, but affirming it. What is broken is uniformity of sexual behavior, but nobody every claimed it was unbreakable.
In fact, Lents pronounces here that “The binary is really the problem. . . instead what you see is a continuum. . of masculinity and femininity”. . . . The categories [of male or female] themselves are too narrow to be helpful. . . Natural variation doesn’t fit into those buckets.” I cannot believe that Lents is unaware that the controversy about sex has involved the binary of biological sex, and that this controversy exists for only one reason: some humans don’t accept their natal sex. Every biologist who has followed this ideologically-based disputation knows that. Instead, Lents asserts that “The binary is inhibiting us,” and implies that those who reject the binary are not “open minded”.
That is wrong and misguided. I propose that Lents wrote this book for the same reason Agustín Fuentes probably wrote his book: if you reject the male/female binary, it supposedly supports the worldview of those people who don’t think of themselves as male or female, or feel that they are really members of the sex that wasn’t their natal sex. This feeds into the “progressive” view exemplified by the mantra “trans females are females” (or the same for trans males).
This ideological rejection of the sex binary exemplifies what Luana Maroja and I called “the reverse appeal to nature”: imposing your ideological views of what’s good onto nature itself. (It’s the converse of “the naturalistic fallacy”). But recognizing that biological sex is binary in humans, all other animals, and plants is not constricting or inhibiting. Au contraire: it’s opened up whole new worlds of investigation, including theoretical investigations of why the sexes are always two (cf. Ronald Fisher) and, most of all, the recognition that sexual selection and sexual dimorphism is nearly always explained at bottom by differential investment of males and females in their different gametes. Ignoring the sex binary in this case would lead to our missing crucial understanding of traits that are ubiquitous in biology (e.g., ornamented and plumed males versus more drab females, males competing for females, etc., etc., etc.).
I’ll add one more evasion that Lents makes. He cites Joan Roughgarden’s book Evolution’s Rainbow as support for his views, but doesn’t note that Roughgarden herself, who is trans, nevertheless said explicitly that biological sex is binary. What Roughgarden got wrong was repeatedly committing the naturalistic fallacy: arguing that the diversity of sexual behavior is animals somehow justified the diversity of sexual behavior in humans. That was unnecessary, and a logical fallacy. Showing that female bonobos rub their vaginas together does not prove that lesbians in human are “natural” and not immoral. That has no bearing on the issue. The morality of same-sex behavior in humans doesn’t need justification by finding it in animals. Even if no animal showed it, there’s would still be nothing wrong with homosexuality. (I reviewed Roughgarden’s book in the Times Literary Supplement, and will be glad to send readers a full copy if they inquire, as it’s no longer on the Internet.)
But I digress, and will make only one more point. When Lents is asked to give a “nonbinary” example of behavior, he cites recent work showing changes in the behavior of Hawaiian crickets. A fly that parasitizes these crickets invaded the islands, attacking the males who chirp loudly to attract females. Chirping thus became maladaptive, and natural selection silenced males, so they had to attract females without chirping. Lo and behold, many (though not all) of the cricket males became silent. But they still got mates. Why? Because the silent males paired up with calling males, so they could still get females without calling attention from the parasitic flies. This pairing was adaptive for the silent males, though probably not for their chirping confrères.
This is interesting, and probably an example of evolved behavioral change in one sex—but note that Lents still refers to two sexes as “male” and “female”, implicitly accepting the sex binary. For crying out loud, no biologist doubts that there can be behavioral “polymorphism” in animals. In bees, females can be sterile workers and, less often in a colony, fertile queens. That is not a problem, nor does it even bear on the sex binary.
As I said, Lents surely knows that the binary at issue is one of sex definition, not sexual behavior or morphology. He doesn’t mention the binary of biological sex. Instead, he caters to “progressive” listeners by repeatedly assuring them that the binary (whatever it is) is dead.
It’s dead, but it isn’t lying down, and never will. To talk about the sex binary as Lents and the reviewer do, is, I believe, intellectually dishonest. (It may be in the book, but I’ll bet that if it is it will be denigrated as irrelevant and distracting).
I hoped that the new Scientific American, sans editor Laura Helmuth, wasn’t going the Helmuthian route of distorting biology to cater to the au courant liberal ideology. I’ll be watching them. In the meantime, sex is binary: there are two sexes, and that’s all she wrote.
Seems additional comment on why Science wrote such a glowing review of the book as seen on the cover, would also be in order.
My guess would be because the journal is woke, and found a woke reviewer.
I have to point out that the work on the crickets is from my lab, and we most certainly do not proclaim that it illustrates anything “non-binary.” The silent males are still male, and bear a single-gene mutation that alters their wing morphology.
Maybe I need to correct this more broadly.
I don’t think it’s anything you did; I think Lents just appropriated your work to buttress his thesis. Any variation in sexual behavior in any sex in any species would buttress his thesis!
Thanks, Jerry, believe me, I didn’t mean to accept any blame — he does that all by himself just fine! I’m just wondering if/how to correct this, perhaps by contacting Sci Am. Even the links in the transcript are wrong; one of them goes to a paper on the effect of traffic noise on behavior in a different species. It might be an opportunity to counter some of the nonsense.
What was especially interesting to me is that the mutant male crickets have lost the specialized resonating structures on their fore-wings, so that they can’t chirp. Do they still try to call for females?
Yes, it’s kind of fun, but a little sad, to see — they still rub their wings together but it doesn’t produce any sound. A couple of my colleagues did this very cool study with elaborate videos that showed that the wings move in exactly the same way as the males without the mutation.
But they certainly don’t “pair up” with the normal-wings. Not sure where he got that (among other weird errors).
Yes SA, their are mutable characteristics surrounding sex. But there is something non-mutable about sex or the term would not exist. Speak it’s name! Speak it’s name!
And this project goes on at the same time they’re trying to get people to separate sex and gender. While that’s an easier sell, they simply end up with feminine males and masculine females. Trans identities are explicitly NOT supposed to be reducible to that.
Thus we end up with
1) Nature is Complicated
2) Steal Underpants
3) Trans People!
HAHAHA 100% Satra. The underpants gnomes sure have a lot to answer for.
Fuentes and this guy have a VERY profitable scam/grift going here, telling deluded people what they WANT to believe. Be paid to virtue signal, make Money and be a hero and “thought leader”. Irresistible as Jim Jones in the Peoples’ Temple or Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh.
D.A.
NY
This is about politics and not science. Both Fuentes and Lents are active on x and myself, among others, have asked them some question about sex as a spectrum (with male/female on each ends of an axis)
Difficult to get clear answers from these guys, it’s always “sex is really messy ” and “It’s more complicated than that”….etc
I’ve wondered what they would say if asked “how do you identify organisms as eukaryotes versus prokaryotes?” They can’t rightly deflect around that by saying “its too complicated”, or that “these cell types are in a spectrum”.
“[W]hat you see is a continuum, and there’s a continuum of masculinity and femininity[.]” – Nathan Lents
It is beyond me why Lents—a professor of biology!—doesn’t recognize the difference between a continuum of masculinity and femininity relating to sexual appearance and behavior, which does exist, and a continuum of maleness and femaleness relating to sex as such, which does not exist. A very masculine female is still female, and a very feminine male is still male. Simple as that!
Re. “a continuum of masculinity and femininity relating to sexual appearance and behavior”
But even the various aspects of sexual appearance and behaviour are not really a “continuum,” but rather like two more or less rounded and more or less overlapping camels’ humps or groups with fuzzy edges, depending on what aspect is being discussed and how one graphs the data points. No?
I think one would be hard pressed to find an aspect that truly lies on a “continuum” or reveals a “spectrum,” though there may be some, perhaps.
No? No.
It is one curve because we are plotting vs “humans”. [A plot showing separate curves for males and females as well as both combined is much more informative. In this case continuity occurs if there is any overlap at all (assuming each separate curve is continuous).] Whether the plot is bimodal or not depends on the trait. N.B. Bimodality is independent of continuity. Most traits (i can think of) have some overlap. What are some which don’t? I can’t think of any offhand and would appreciate examples.
“Most traits (i can think of) have some overlap. What are some which don’t? I can’t think of any offhand and would appreciate examples.”
Sex-specific traits.
As certain trans-women are that they ARE women, they will never have to worry about ovarian or cervical cancer. Prostate cancer, on the other hand, even after the knife, can be something they’ll have to deal with and which is something that ‘real’ women never have to worry about.
Thanks. I didn’t think of sex-specific traits. In fact i am not quite sure what i meant by “trait”.
Trans health is important. I have warned many trans activists that they shouldn’t claim humans can change sex because trans people still need some medical care based on their sex and must ensure they get it. Telling them that they are the opposite sex risks them missing the appropriate health checks. When a man takes female hormones the chance of prostate cancer reduces, but it is not eradicated.
Not telling medics your sex can be even worse. A woman nearly lost her life because the hospital emergency department didn’t link her abdominal pain to a miscarriage as she didn’t tell them she was female.
There are many documented cases of this false belief injuring trans identifying people. There’s paper on a man who got penile cancer in the tissue from his penis, which had been inverted to create a neo vagina. There is another on a woman who was intubated with male equipment and suffered serious throat damage.
I understand that there are several medications where males and females need different doses. Here people can change their sex indicator on their medical records, which may result in the wrong doses being given. It has already meant that many women who pretend to be men have not been called for cervical smears. These people are putting their ego above their health.
And tom-boy women and effeminate men who are also cis and heterosexual would be rightly be pissed off about being used!
I’m very glad you spend a lot of time shouting about this topic from the rooftops. Kudos. It seems the non-binary bs is so deeply embedded in our culture.
How do we get out of this? Like the “trans suicide” myth once a wrong idea gets a firm foothold it can last generations. Or the “Palestinian Victim” idea, created in the 60s.
I’m well aware of the sneaky f’er strategy in fish but I’d never heard of the silent crickets story/study. How interesting. Parasitology is a fascinating field. An aside there is a whole Parasite Museum in Tokyo, visit it if you’re there. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Google my name and “crickets” and you will find way more about the story than you probably would ever want. But I’ve just listened to the podcast (and also realized that there is a transcript below), and he gets it so completely, absolutely wrong that as the kids say, I can’t even.
I will. Thank you Ms. Zuk! I love that kind of stuff.
D.A.
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
Marlene please if you can find the time and energy follow up with the podcasters. Sometimes people don’t know that they’ve got things wrong. You might do those guys (and everyone else) a huge favour by walking them thru their errors. Maybe they would do a podcast with you about it?
Plus a right of reply in the magazine to state the facts?
Thanks to both Mike and Joolz for the support! I’ve been emailing with some of my previous postdocs and students and I think I am going to contact Sci Am. I am not holding my breath about them letting me correct things, though. I was thinking about asking them if they’d let stand an interview in which a purported physician claimed that blood was pumped by the lungs and circulated by the liver. On second thought, they probably would.
Thank you for the suggestion. Like David I love that kind of info. I just googled and have bookmarked the National Geographic and Wired pieces. I’ll read them tomorrow as it’s after 1am here and I think I’ll need to be properly awake to read them 😁
Yes, Nathan Lents want to sell books and also become as famous (?) as Fuentes.
Activists often use the following strategy to challenge the concept of a binary sex framework:
Acknowledge the existence of two gametes (sperm and egg) but…
Highlight diverse biological phenomena, such as intersex conditions (DSD) in humans, sequential hermaphroditism in clownfish, simultaneous hermaphroditism in earthworms, female pseudopenises in hyenas, millions of mating types in fungi, and “trans” palm trees, among others.
Emphasize secondary sex characteristics—such as hormone levels, muscle mass, and behavior—that are not strictly binary but often bimodal or exist on a spectrum.
Deliberately conflate sex (a biological reality) with gender (a social construct) throughout the discussion.
Stress that sex is highly complex and variable, celebrating the diverse manifestations of sex in nature.
Conclusion: Given the complexity and variability of sex (it’s really messy) , the argument is made that to avoid harming marginalized individuals, sex (and gender) should be defined as whatever an individual declares it to be at any given moment.
The behavior seems very familiar to me. It is a common tactic among ideologues of all kinds. They are like jelly that you want to pin down.
Well, yes. I just listened. It was painful. A giant smokescreen of confusion, if you asked me. The confusion is that between sex and the correlates of sex. Bringing attention to the diversity of sex traits does not touch the fact that there are only two sexes. Surely the interviewee is aware of this distinction, no?
That’s a real shame. I quite liked Lents’ previous book “Human Errors”; while its thesis (that our weird imperfections can tell us about our evolution as much as or perhaps even more than our exquisite adaptations can) is not original to him (and I don’t recall him claiming that it was) it was an engaging and well-written book, and I did actually learn some interesting things about our biology and history from it.
I even recall Lents making perfectly reasonable points about the evolutionary roots of different behavior among male and female humans–that human men (and boys) tend more to risk-taking, as part of their selected-for strategy to attract human women (and girls) and so eventually reproduce. As a cisgender heterosexual male who has also been a bit of a nebbish my whole life, I certainly didn’t object to that fact-based discussion of human nature! Oddly enough, Lents is a gay man and married to another man (at least according to public information; i.e., his Wikipedia article) yet seven years ago that didn’t stop him from discussing human behavior in a completely rational and scientific way.
It’s depressing that even some evolutionary biologists don’t understand the sex binary.
Posts on last year’s Eco/Evo jobs spreadsheet criticized Colin Wright for promoting the sex binary. Including some gems, where these supposed “scientists” were confused about how you can have continuous variation within binary groups. They said that this was contradictory, and showed Wright’s argument to be nonsense.
In other words, there are evolutionary biologists with PhDs out there who don’t understand that you can have a group of egg-producers and a group of sperm-producers out there whose distributions overlap in height, hairiness, etc. but that this does nothing to undermine the sex binary because the sexes are defined based on gamete production, not height or hairiness.
Our schools and universities are failing at teaching very basic critical thinking.
Concerning Fuentes, lents and other biologist claiming “sex as a spectrum”
I think this quote sums it up:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” (Upton Sinclair 1878–1968)
I’m talking about run-of-the-mill evolutionary biologists who are posting anonymously on a job board. They have nothing to gain by echoing this stuff. They say it because they can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag.
But the existence of binary gamete types imperils the political belief that humans are born as ‘blank slates’ and their behaviour can be modified by progressive education.
As a minimum there could be large gamete blank slates and small gamete blank slates and this would be contrary to political ideology. One size, one education, does not fit all.
But the trans rights people do not believe in the blank slate when it comes to gender. They believe in gendered souls that occasionally end up in the wrong-sex body. It is a quasi-religion.
As a psychologist who isn’t as versed in the biological science as this good company, it’s mystifying (literally and figuratively) why some scientists need to find some biological explanation by distorting science for something that is entirely psychological and social, an historically rising questioning of gender identity. According to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/trans-people-us-data?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other as many as 1% of adults (nearly 3M) and teenagers (nearly 1M) identify as trans, the older adults mostly as male vs female, the teenagers as mostly nonbinary. I think we need a middle ground as scientists, neither accepting bogus science that attempts to find a biological law in nature where there is none (much psychological phenomena is poorly explained or contributed by biology alone), nor accepting an extremist right-wing attempt to erase these young people from society, who are also people and Americans, and render them invisible and an object of derision. Wisdom requires compassion and an ability to avoid extremes, as well as to query our own biases.
Sorry, but if you’re implying that those of us who defend the biological sex binary are trying to “erase” or eliminate trans people, or deny them moral and legal equality (with a few exceptions like sports), you are dead wrong. Most people here are already occupying the middle ground that you say doesn’t exist.
I’m not sure what the purpose of your lecture is here.
Not you or scientists, the Trump administration, of course, the state attempting to erase the existence of trans people, climate change, vaccine prevention,etc
I disagree that you couple “erase existence of trans people” (whatever that means?) with real and urgent questions of science policy.
Dr. – (self) “Identify” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there given it is a totally opt in/out category — making it a meaningless category for the sake of law, rights, or benefits. It is unprovable, undiagnosable by any scientific metric and not disprovable (see Popper). And activists have intentionally muddied the waters.
Politically the activist hyperbolic word “erase” doesn’t do any argument any favors at all. In fact it is almost always a red flag for “no critical thinking from me.”
It is also a fashion trend.
A corollary is “Aboriginality” in Australia where “I’m an Aborigine” is enough for me to get all sorts of government goodies.
respectfully,
D.A.
NYC
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
No one is trying to deny them moral or legal equality even in sports.
So-called “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” don’t want to exclude trans-identified people from sports at all. They want to include them. But they want to include them with other members of the sex to which they belong.
There is no exclusion or “erasure” happening at all by so-called “TERFs”.
It’s the gender activists who are trying to do the erasing. They want to erase the sex binary (and “biological women” as a protected category).
What gets up our noses about trans people and tempts us in our dark moments to want to figuratively “erase” them is their activists’ recruitment of the power of the state and its administrative organs to compel us to give public obeisance to their disordered sense of inner reality. It started with making “misgendering” something you could actually get in trouble for because you are forced to accept in silence a man’s claim to be a woman in whatever senses he makes that claim. It ends with doctors being compelled to mutilate children on their own say-so on pain of losing their licenses. It also means men go into women’s prisons because it would be misgendering to put him in with the other men.
If a man thinks he’s a woman, fine. He can think he’s a talented poet (like McGonnagle the other day) for all I care. What should be erased is the notion that this private false belief obligates the rest of society to respect it in any public way. If I say I have clairvoyance, the public is not obligated to change its behaviour to accord with my predictions. Nor should my belief that I am clairvoyant entitle me to any special civil rights other than the usual ones that everyone else has. Further, a belief in clairvoyance should exclude me from being hired as a financial planner, just as a belief in a flat earth should exclude me from civil engineering and the space program. Neither of these beliefs are protected classes against discrimination claims. Nor should believing one was born in the wrong body.
Whatever is wrong with these mixed up adolescents, it isn’t because their brains don’t match their body plans and they need their sex organs tweaked to match their brains. That is the same kind of belief as animal magnetism.
I’m a now politically homeless, former lifelong Democrat, and the last to praise Trump, but are you saying that being accurate and honest about biology is a bad thing because it “erases” people? His EOs are pretty much dead on. And I don’t think there’s a rational middle ground where we pretend you can think and feel yourself into another sex class without having to force that belief onto people, policing their speech and punishing them for wrongthink.
I have yet to hear a definition of “gender identity” that doesn’t devolve into a mess of regressive sex stereotypes, and the “affirming” medical model has been proven by every systematic evidence review to be reckless — based on low quality evidence at best and unsupported by credible evidence. This “medical care” harms people and there’s no proven protocol (or even a genuine effort in many cases) to determine who, if anyone, benefits long-term. The “born in the wrong body” rationale has been a failure, hence the move to “bodily autonomy” and “embodiment goals” as a justification to keep messing up functional endocrine systems and reconfigure and remove healthy body parts. This is not medicine. It’s ideology-driven quackery.
There is nothing compassionate about lying to people — especially vulnerable, impressionable children, telling them that they can change their sex, that there’s something wrong with them if they don’t feel like they match up with cultural standards of femininity or masculinity (think proto-LGB and kids on the autism spectrum) and should get their healthy bodies irreversibly fixed with damaging drugs and surgeries, and that they require — and are entitled to — the continual validation of strangers (and policies that trample all over the sex-based rights of primarily women and girls) to reflect their distorted sense of self.
We’re well past the BeKind™️ point. It’s time to stop lying about biology. It harms vulnerable people and it’s wrong.
I join you in your political homelessness, Ms. Swimmer. I am (was) a lifelong Dem who actually volunteered and worked for the Hillary campaign!
We are leftugees!
best,
D.A.
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
Nobody is erasing “trans” people. They’re welcome to believe whatever they like about themselves. But nevertheless each of us is either male or female, we all can tell who’s male and who’s female, and nobody wants to be told to deny the evidence of our own senses. That’s what’s objectionable.
“The fact that society believes a man who says he is a woman, instead of a woman who says he is not, is proof that society knows exactly who is the man and who is the woman.”
Jen Izaakson
“One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.“
Christopher Hitchens
Excellent quotes, Mike. I wanted to add the Hitchens quote myself. I had not seen the quote by Jen Izaakson.
Many good comments that go to the heart of the matter in this thread.
My other favourite, more a meme than a quote (has many iterations all over the place)…
With sexism, women do the dishes.
With equality, both men and women do the dishes.
But with transgenderism, whoever is doing the dishes is the woman.
Thumbs up 🙂
A relative has started seeing people who don’t exist, playing football in her yard, visiting in her home at odd hours. She didn’t want leftovers from our Sunday meal because they would eat anything she brought home. She has no doubt that they exist.
As a psychologist would you counsel that because she believes this to be true, I should take it at face value?
I think Jerry may be too generous in his estimation of some of these biologists and other scientists when he repeatedly describes them with words such as “mistaken” or “misguided” or etc. which imply innocent error. Some of their arguments are so crashingly illogical and anti-scientific I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that they are knowingly spouting BS with full malice aforethought because they think it is to their advantage or because they emotionally need the approval of the woke crowd. Why assume any intellectual honesty on their part?
Exactly. Donald Trump isn’t the only one in the Anglosphere who is a calculating bullshit artist. Part of the calculation is that when the ideological fever breaks, the opportunists will not face accountability. It’s all potential gain and no loss for them. Most educated people who swallowed this gender and “sex as a spectrum” nonsense will be so eager to shove it down the memory hole they will not dare to even discuss it—let alone hold themselves and others accountable. Similar dynamics played out on the right regarding Iraq war cheerleading and are ongoing on the left for pandemic-era panic and policies. It is not only the views that become distasteful and subject to willful forgetting or revisionist histories; it is the way that misguided notions were forced upon those who disagreed. Few are the people who want to revisit what their worst moments reveal about themselves.
“We recognize that traits like height are bimodal”?
“The combined distribution of heights of men and women has
become the canonical illustration of bimodality when teaching
introductory statistics. But is this example appropriate? This article investigates the conditions under which a mixture of two
normal distributions is bimodal. A simple justification is presented that a mixture of equally weighted normal distributions
with common standard deviation a is bimodal if and only if the
difference between the means of the distributions is greater than
2sigma. More generally, a mixture of two normal distributions with
similar variability cannot be bimodal unless their means differ
by more than approximately the sum of their standard deviations.
Examination of national survey data on young adults shows that
the separation between the distributions of men’s and women’s
heights is not wide enough to produce bimodality. We suggest
reasons why histograms of height nevertheless often appear bimodal.”
https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth031/ihhb.pdf
Being “trans” is supposedly “all about gender identity and not biology.” Yet these activist academics just can’t stop going after biology and muddying the waters !
Something seems very dishonest here..
Where female and males characteristics overlap, here there be a rainbow spectrum of male/females.
And where the weight distributions of adult male grey wolves and adult male humans overlap, here there be werewolves.
In my meanderings in science I’ve been party to work with fluorescent molecules and phenomena in fluorescence. All of this sex spectrum stuff — I think it’s some sort of metaphor, a poor one, too. Will I be upbraided & canceled if I point out, that a fluorescent molecule has an excitation spectrum and emission spectrum (ha ha, see the adolescent joke there?), and they are certainly distinct. Excitation spectra are higher energy (shorter wavelength) than emission spectra (longer wavelength) In many circumstances each may be broad, distributed over 100-200 nm wavelength, and there can be some overlap of the lowest energy of excitation and the highest energy of emission. What does this have to do with sex and gender? nothing, but it’s sciencey or something.
And there’s the menage a trois photon where there is a two photon excitation and a single emission at higher energy.
I nearly lost the will to live as I was reading this piece as it’s frustrating that so many supposedly intelligent people can be so clueless. I almost gave up part way, but I’m glad I didn’t because the information about the crickets was fascinating.
These people know exactly who to mate with if they wish to produce offspring. It’s ridiculous to pretend that they don’t. Neanderthals may not have been able to speak, but they sure figured out who to breed with.
Rachel Feldman knows she we’ll never produce sperm. Nathan Lents is unlikely to approach a male to have a child for him. It’s worrying that these people are trying to push misinformation onto others.
I especially enjoyed the cover of a recent issue, “Is Greenland Collapsing”. Supposedly highly educated journalists, I knew what I was getting into when I bought that issue at the airport. Once upon a time, I had a subscription, lasted for 2 decades. Now every couple of years, when traveling, I’ll buy one just to see if it’s reverted back to “scientific”. Still disappointed.