I don’t know how many times Agustín Fuentes, an anthropology professor at Princeton, will keep repeating the same arguments about why biological sex isn’t binary (see these posts on my site). It never seems to end. You’d think he’d stop banging the drum now that he’s written a whole book on the issue called Sex is a Spectrum, but he keeps on making the same old arguments that have been refuted many times (see this review by Tomas Bogardus, for example). Why does someone make such weak arguments, and continue to do so without ever addressing the many criticisms he’s encountered?
I strongly suspect it’s because Fuentes is an ideologue: he believes that if people see biological sex as spectrum rather than a binary, opprobrium against trans people will lessen or vanish. But trans people should be treated with respect no matter whether or not sex is binary, for “is” does not equal “ought”—a lesson Fuentes should have learned. Further, nearly all trans people implicitly accept a sex binary: after all, they transition from having a male role or appearance to having a female role and appearance, or vice versa. But I’ve written about that before. Nor does the binary nature of sex have anything to say about how we should regard people of nonstandard gender.Making that argument is another violation of Hume’s Law.
Now Fuentes has been joined by Nathan Lents, a professor at John Jay College. Lents has done good work refuting Intelligent Design, and I’m sad that this essay, published in ProSocial World, an endeavor of biologist David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, is not of Lent’s usual quality. In fact, it’s a terrible article, replete with mistaken arguments and bad logic.
Now it’s possible that these authors really believe that biological sex is a spectrum and are not just trying to buttress a “progressive” gender ideology, but I would find that behavior obtuse. Read Dawkins (link below) or Bogardus to see why.
I am so tired of this misrepresentation and confusion that it deeply nauseates me to have to discuss them again, but I’ll try to do so briefly, using quotes from the article by Fuentes and Lents. Click on the headline below to read (it’s also archived here).
Fuentes and Lents (henceforth F&L) first admit the binary of gametes, a binary used to define the sexes by most biologists who aren’t ideologues:
The major clades of eukaryotes – plants, animals, fungi, and the many kingdoms of protists – have evolved both unique and shared aspects in their sexual reproductive mechanisms, but one such aspect – the differentiation of gametes into two major forms – is a common theme. Anisogamy, the property of having two types of gametes – one very large and relatively immotile and one very small and highly mobile – is a key feature of sexual reproduction in all animals, all land plants, and many protist kingdoms.
F&L’s beef is not that there is a gametic binary (see Richard Dawkin’s great Substack essay for why defining—actually, recognizing—the sexes this way is essential and useful), but rather that organisms recognized as “male” (small mobile gametes) and “female” (large immobile gametes) show variation in other traits related to sex. On average, human males differ in body size from females, but there is variation within each sex. And so it goes for body hair, gene expression, behavior, penis size, and so on. But of course these traits, while correlated and connected with sex, are not part of the definition of sex, which involves the gamete binary.
Some quotes from F&L:
In our view, this binary classification of sex in animals is insufficient for capturing the full breadth of biological sexual diversity.
Some of the inadequacies of the binary sex classification for individuals are uncontroversial, as it has long been known that a large number of species – around 20% of non-arthropod invertebrates – include individuals that are simultaneously hermaphroditic. Many others, including around 2% of vertebrates, are sequential hermaphrodites. Animal bodies exist in a variety of sexed forms, with some even reconfiguring their biology relating to sex, including for the production of gametes, within their individual life history, sometimes multiple times. The presence of simultaneous and sequential hermaphrodites vexes the binary classification for sexed bodies and demonstrates that sex is neither immutable nor neatly reducible to gamete production.
Furthermore, sexual dimorphisms, sexual bimodalities, and a spectrum of sex-influenced gene expression are observed throughout animal bodies and across animal species. Some of this variation is patterned in close association with gamete production, but much is not so simply described. Across bodies, behaviors, and physiologies, there is substantive inherent variety and diversity, creating a sexual continuum of genetic, developmental, and behavioral biology within and across species. Individual animals can vary widely in the development, patterning, and expression of sexual biology in a variety of ways, from body sizes and compositions, to color patterns and genital anatomy, to courtship behaviors and parental investment, to name some of the most commonly diverse components of sex. These biological variations rarely collapse into two discrete sex-based categories defined by gamete production. Moreover, much of the biological variations in bodies, even those closely associated with reproduction, are also engaged in a diversity of other bodily functions and processes with myriad phylogenetic, ecological, and behavioral constraints and affordances, which are also not ubiquitously or consistently associated with the type of gametes a body produces.
But nobody contests this form of variation; but to pretend that hermaphrodites refute the sex binary is disingenuous. Yes, some individuals can make both types of gametes, and some, like the infamous clownfish, can actually change their sex, but the gametic binary remains. (I don’t much care if you call hermaphrodites a “third sex”, but they still bear only two types of gametes—the only types that exist.) Human hermaphrodites, like other individuals called “intersex,” are vanishingly rare, and none have been able to produce viable gametes of both types. But F&L’s arguments are not about hermaphrodites or “intersex” individuals with differences in sex development. Instead, their arguments are about variation among individuals, most of them of regular sex.
They also extend their argument among species. In various species of animals, for instance, biological sex can be determined by genes, chromosomes, rearing temperature, social milieu, haploidy versus diploidy, and so on, but there are only two types of gametes and reproductive systems, no matter how sex is determined. That in itself should tell you something important about the binary. Nevertheless, F&L persist with their “variation means there’s no binary” argument:
Dramatic sexual diversity and variation is not limited to adulthood. There is also substantive diversity in mechanisms of sex development across various animal taxa. There are chromosomal systems, other genetic systems, as well as systems based on season, temperature, age, social status, and population density, most of which have convergently evolved in multiple disparate lineages, emphasizing the relative genetic, cellular, and developmental flexibility and adaptability of these sex systems.
But, to paraphrase Ronald Fisher, the sexes are always two. Why is that? F&L are using a familiar but misguided tactic trying to refute the sex binary. I call this “The Argument from Complexity” and it can be stated this way:
There is variation among individuals in traits related to and correlated with gamete type, and that variation is often not binary but bimodal or even forming a spectrum. Further, the determination of these traits, like body size or behavior, depends on a complex interaction between genes, development, and the environment. Therefore biological sex itself is not a simple binary, but a spectrum.
You can recognize the fallacy in this; I believe Emma Hilton calls it a “bait and switch”. Yes, determination of ovaries and testes itself is complex, with many genes (as well as the internal environment) involved. And individuals vary in gene expression, body size, ornamentation, and other traits connected with sex. But there are still only two types of gametes and two sexes. Male and female peacocks look very different, but nobody says that refutes the sex binary. (In fact, the sex binary explains this difference.) And individuals of the two sexes must mate with each other to produce offspring—save for parthenogenetic or self-fertilizing species, which still participate in the gamete binary. Regardless of the complexity of development in humans, you get an offspring only when a male having sperm mates with a female having eggs. If the male is very short, or has a tiny penis, that makes no difference!
Here’s F&L’s version of The Argument from Complexity:
Importantly, the recognition that sex can be a complex mixture of anatomy, physiology, and behavior does not serve to deny or minimize the existence and impacts of sex differences. In fact, it affirms them and emphasizes their importance. While the matter of which gamete an animal body makes – its gametic sex – is clearly important, it is not the only variable by which animal morphologies or behaviors can be, or are, sexed. If these other variables were neatly binary, immutable, and non-overlapping, it would not be necessary to distinguish between gametic sex and biological sex. But, since nearly all other sex traits are either continuous or bimodal, are not always immutable nor perfectly correlated, a simple and categorical definition of sex that is based purely on gamete production is both unwarranted and potentially misleading.
. . . Animal morphology and physiology are the product of complex interactions of biological, developmental, and environmental systems, and the human environment is a particularly complex assemblage of biotic and abiotic factors: what we refer to as human culture. Human phenotypic expression is always mutually shaped by cultural milieu. It is well-established that adult height and weight, childhood development trajectories, taste bud reactivity, muscle development and coordination, patterns of sexual arousal, resistance (or lack thereof) to disease-causing bacteria, and nearly every other aspect of human bodies emerge from mutual and interactive development of physiology, morphology, cultural context, and lived experiences.
All that is sand thrown into the eyes of the public; it has nothing to do with the binary nature of biological sex.
Finally, N&L even make the bonkers argument that the athletic advantage of males or females may not be a result of their evolved differences (based on gene expression), but could be a result of social conditioning. This is an argument made by those “progressive” individuals who think that we should not be dividing sports into male versus female leagues. (The Olympic Committee has just decided otherwise.):
Furthermore, it is not currently known which, or how much, of all of this patterned variation is shaped by differences in how boys and girls, and men and women, use their bodies on a daily basis. While human anatomical development is a fairly canalized pathway producing a relatively consistent phenotypic range, the developmental process itself both affects and is substantively affected by how that anatomy is physically and socially engaged, especially during childhood and adolescence. Indeed, there is emerging evidence that persistent culturally mandated gender differences in play behaviors and sports participation, which are quite substantial in many cultures, have clear and strong effects on the developmental dynamics of skeletal and muscle formation.
Similarly, gendered differences in the social environment likely contribute to differences in sexed bodies in ways that are probably impossible to untangle. For example, it is well established that hormone levels and ratios are affected by the social environment, and these same hormones directly impact both the development of many tissues and sex-related and non-sex-related behaviors (muscle hypertrophy, hair distribution, metabolism, mental alertness, and libido, to name a few). Such complexities are not limited to humans by any stretch, as Patricia Brennan explains in another essay in this series, in Ruddy Ducks, social interactions directly impact the seasonal growth and development of the penis, emphasizing the dynamically responsive nature of sexual anatomy, even in adult animals.
It’s not clear to me what the penis of ruddy ducks has to do with human behavior and sports participation. Sadly, F&L don’t discuss the evidence that even injecting biological males with hormones and giving them puberty blockers, an important change of internal environment, nevertheless still gives these trans-identified males an athletic advantage over biological women.
I hope that I don’t have to make these points again, but I suspect I will. The ideological termites have dined well, and have even managed to convince biologists and science popularizers like Steve Novella and Bill Nye that sex is a spectrum. Have a look below at Bill Nye using the Argument from Variation to claim that sex is a spectrum. (I have never liked his arguments, and this bit shows he’s drunk the Kool-Aid.) Nye also notes that sex is “assigned at birth”. What is extra confusing is that he conflates sex with both “sexuality” and gender.
Good on you, PCC(E) for fighting this fight. F&A are examples of ideology trying to bugger facts – Lysenko anybody?
It is a noble but huge fight you’re on. I had to beat somebody up lately, somebody with a stem PhD in brain science!, about what Colin Wright calls “the intersex trap”. (sigh)
Sex as a spectrum is a deeply embedded idiocy which will be hard to dislodge, esp with bad actors like the herein clowns F&A.
Kudos boss!
D.A.
NYC
There’s a song lyric, Nice Work If You Can Get It
It makes me wonder – do they find this “work” fulfilling, and how?
Why does F&L do this?
Because they believe it, and also they get accolades from their camp when they do so. They are thought leaders who are only encouraged by their camp.
That bit about questioning whether activities and social norms influence female versus male athletic performance is especially bonkers. Where just because we haven’t tested if girls could match boys if we expected them to, we can’t prove that they can’t! Structurally, this is the same goal-post moving argument that RFK Jr. makes about early childhood vaccines.
“Why does F&L do this?”
Because lots of liberal chicks dig it?
Ellie Kildunne is an outstanding Rugby player, recently voted woman player of the year and rightly so. Until she was around 11 she played with boys, and was better than most of them. Then puberty struck. If F&L were correct she should have continued to be competitive: she was not.
“Why does F&L do this?”
Because to an ideologue “ought” is much, much, stronger than “is”. Trying to achieve a political outcome by an act of will.
Hegel’s philosophical Idealism has a lot to answer for, capital-w Will included. (Riefenstahl’s greatest film has a disturbingly appropriate title).
Some people claim you cannot define a women’s biology because of this rare condition or that rare condition. But are completely ok with the definition of a women being ‘if they say they are a women then they are’
I’ll ask again, what are the womanly feelze? Or the manly feelze? What are they strict air-tight definitions only people?
The question is, what policy objectives do they derive from their position?
In a way, they really admit that there are two gametes/sexes. There is no third sex. But they don’t agree that it is useful to classify people into males and females based on that.
Why don’t they just clearly say what they really want to say: Although gametes define sex, that kind of classification is not useful, and we should instead focus on secondary sexual characteristics.
I think they avoid getting there because then they would need to answer the hard questions:
(1) How exactly is that more useful?
(2) How does that help us classify people based on sex when we need to?
They cannot clearly answer these, and therefore just hide behind “it’s more complex than binary” while not even having a coherent definition of sex.
“Although gametes define sex, that kind of classification is not useful, and we should instead focus on secondary sexual characteristics.”
Your statement well summarizes their claim. This is the “bait and switch” that N and L make.
It is very clear that this entire made up biology, all of it, is bc there are people with gender dysphoria AND bc some need to be seen as more compassionate than thou by loudly moving to defend the vulnerable. Theirs is a strange kind of narcissism where telling falsehoods in plain sight is seen as a Great Virtue.
The situation is terrible for those with g.d. Yes, some are simply gay and confused, according to data, but gender dysphoria is still real enough in others, according also to data.
Anyway, we would be in a different place right now if the activists simply Told The Truth rather than also trying to gaslight everybody about sex being a spectrum.
They don’t want to even think of “gender dysphoria.” The word dysphoria implies something abnormal.
Better to pretend sex is a spectrum and they’re 100% normal.
It’s more subtle than that, Fr Katz, at least in some formulations. Dysphoria is not a pathological mental state like a delusion. Rather it is a natural, appropriate psychological response to the discovery that your body doesn’t match your brain’s true knowledge of your gender. It’s as if you discovered that the reason you get tired, breathless, and blue when you try to skate with the other children your age is because you were born with a large hole in your heart. Naturally on making this discovery you would want it fixed to bring your body in line with your internal sense of being a young, fit hockey player. If a doctor said, “No, you need to come to terms with the way your heart was made and adjust your psychological perception of yourself to be a chronic invalid. We need to treat your dysphoria about this because it is out of sync with your physical reality,” you would call this denial of medically necessary care, covered up as conversion therapy. (Never mind that before the Mustard operation, that’s what doctors told parents of affected children.)
I can’t see how sex-is-a-spectrum has anything to do with this sleight of hand because trans people are no more likely than anyone else to have a DSD where some ambiguity in sex recognition might be parlayed into an individual biologic substrate for trans. But it almost never is, and can’t be the refuge for ordinary trans people. No one who has normal male external genitalia ever has anything but testes and internal Wolffian differentiation. No clownfish there. So I don’t get the ideological investment in sex-is-a-spectrum except as another brick winkled out of the wall of objective science in the name of inclusivity.
Yes. The wider claim is that everything is socially constructed. Therefore, everything can be socially deconstructed and re-constructed. The world they would like to construct from the rubble is a sexless, genderless world because they believe such a world would be better, more just. The problem, of course, is that in a sexless, genderless world we’d need new explanations for why penis-possessors disproportionally win Olympic Gold Medals over non-penis possessors, not to mention the need for new re-constructions to close the PP/No PP gap.
Moreover, their model of the spectrum is offensive. They seem to be saying that a taller man is less male than a shorter man. Or a woman with smaller breasts is less of a female than a woman with large breasts. But what frightens me most is that people at the top of our intellectual institutions, like Princeton, can be so stupid and driven by ideology as opposed to coherent scientific thinking.
When someone claims that sex is a spectrum I ask them how someone who is only 60% male finds someone to mate with if they want to produce offstring. Do they need to find a 60% female? I don’t think I’ve ever had a reply.
Then again one of my twitter permabans was in response to a woman who claimed her child was ‘non binary’. I told her not to worry and that her child would soon figure out which sex they are if they decided they wanted to reproduce. Apparently that comment was considered hatred on old twitter. 😂
The sex-spectrum argument from complexity rather resembles the “irreducible complexity” argument Michael Behe and co. used to make against evolutionary biology. and so in support of intelligent design. One obvious defect of the Behe position is that it leads to nothing in terms of further science. One could ask what new discoveries in biology stem from the spectral view of the vast complexity of sex. [Someone once pointed out that writing can be classified into two categories: one kind that clarifies and another that turbidifies. The clarifying kind lights the way to further discovery.]
Good one. She probably thought you were being hurtful because she knew deep down that the joint chances of her non-binary child being able to attract a sexual partner and then being able to reproduce with him/her were just about zero.
Sorry, Jon. Meant for Joolz, tagged to you by sunspots or something.
Good point. Interesting that both creationists and the trans do not believe they are defined by DNA.
I can’t fathom how a biologist and a professor at Princeton could make such incoherent and terrible arguments. I mean, I’ve seen laypersons invent terms like “gametic sex” as a post hoc justification for being confronted with the fact that primary literature absolutely does not support them but professors? Same with “sex biology” which conveniently is equivocated with and distinguished from sex when needed. It is entirely bizarre for Lents to argue for anthropocentrism and in his previous writings, justify his incoherent claims based on what matters to people’s day to day social lives. This kind of poor reasoning is indicative of post hoc justifications to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Strangely, both are comfortable playing loose with words in their own positions, yet both require absolutely rigid and nonsensical interpretations of words for rejecting sex is binary along with some serious strawman arguments that amount to suggesting that accepting the well accepted understanding of sex means we cannot discuss anything related to sex (as he suggested in his scientific american op-ed that understanding what sexes are means saying that is all there is needed to know about sex).
Fuentes and Lents are both aware that sex being binary means there are two sexes. They are aware of how sexes are defined in biology. So their arguments are purposely dishonest. Their choice to invent “gametic sex” then distinguish it from their invented definition biological sex was just a fallacious way to sidestep the glaring issue with their poor conceptualization of sex.
On a side note, the bibliography is entirely bizarre. As they do not offer proper citations it is difficult to understand how several of the sources fit with the essay. For example, why was the “four sexes sparrow” article cited? The extreme blank slateism is also bizarre. Sexual dimorphism exists all over and evolution has resulted in undeniable differences in males and females. Apparently it conveniently was turned off for all anything related to current social issues though.
So now I am prompted to look at the article.
For some reason, I am very irritated by the repeated use of the terms “animal bodies” and “sexed bodies”.
Yes, the citation of four sexes in that species of sparrow is there. But why not the one about orangutans having THREE sexes?
“For some reason, I am very irritated by the repeated use of the terms ‘animal bodies’ and ‘sexed bodies’.”
Me too (also a biologist). Of course, the use of these terms is certainly intentional. It is because they believe that “brain sex” and “sexed bodies” can be different. I find both F and L to be purposely highly unclear and therefore also dishonest.
Regarding Fuentes, I know there is an Evolutionary/Ecology Biology department at Princeton. I have never seen anyone from this department go public about Fuentes’s nonsense. I find this strange, but I guess it says something about the political climate in the USA nowadays.
At this point the similarity in style between Fuentes and the creationist brigade of the 2000s should be quite apparent.
I suspect the reason is the same.
The trans movement is effectively a religion, these guys are apologists preaching to the converted.
It really is very simple. A person who believes they are something they are not is suffering from a delusion. A schizophrenic who believes he is Napoleon, a starving anorexic who believes she is obese, a male who believes himself female – all these are just psychological delusions. There is no need to overturn physical reality just because such delusions exist in some people’s minds.
But if no need, then why do they do it? Or, rather, why do they demand that we do it. Gluttons who just ate a big meal don’t “need” to eat more. But they do. Eating serves a psychological goal for them. The alcoholic companion doesn’t listen to our pleas that no, we don’t need another drink right now. He demands that we drink with him because he needs us to validate his desire or compulsion to drink. It’s not about our needs. It’s about his demands.
Whence cometh his demands though? Why does he “need” us to validate his belief system? Why does he try to punish us for misgendering him? This is where most of the opprobrium directed at trans people comes from. Their activists are not nice people. They are an illiberal threat. What motivates them?
I know, I know: the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution. Each according to his ability I guess.
Academics often take a position and “dig in”, putting themselves in Legacy Mode: they will go to the ground (6 feet under) fighting…. In the Arts, some will argue to the end that Olaudah Equiano was born in Africa and not South Carolina. They’ve put too much of their academic reputation on the line to say “maybe” or admit that they are wrong. In Anthropology or various Studies programs, oral traditions are taken as factual history when clearly most traditions are not supported by physical or written evidence–evidence that of course ideologues simply dismiss or ignore. Then of course, there is Linguistics, such an overrated discipline, no major arguments that are resolvable, now populated by educationalists, sociologists and qualitative types….
If I remark that humans walk on two legs and dogs on four legs, people usually don’t quibble by mentioning amputee humans and amputee dogs who have a different number of legs. Nor do they mention rare 1 in a 100,000 cases of genetic defects or developmental anomalies that might cause a human or dog to have a different number of legs.
But if I say that sex in humans is binary, immediately they quibble about rare intersex conditions and mention clownfish who are totally irrelevant to human biology. It is absurd.
The Argument from Complexity seems to be a favorite of genderists who have argued against creationism. There’s a type of thinking that is appropriate in some scientific contexts, but not others.
The belief that God originally created all of life in discrete forms or kinds, and that all the life we see today is faithfully descended from these, is refuted by considering the vast complexity and variations of species over time. Creationists believe the Kinds have distinct boundaries that can’t be crossed. Like comes only from like: dogs are descended from the dog-type; monkeys are descended from monkeys; humans are descended from humans.
“Not so,” say the evolutionists – life is a spectrum. The belief in original kinds is simplistic and narrow. It’s more complicated than that. Creationists can be counted on to try to put biology into boxes.
Some evolutionists then appear to apply this heuristic to sex, drawing not just from their experience arguing against creationists who deny “macro evolution,” but from their experience arguing against the religious conservatives who try to force boys and girls into rigid gender roles of masculine and feminine. But sex actually is binary. They don’t seem to know when to slow down and consider the issue on its merits.
“Many others, including around 2% of vertebrates, are sequential hermaphrodites.”
Without further clarification, this is obviously a deliberate attempt to mislead.
There are no hermaphrodite mammals. Almost all hermaphrodite vertebrates are fish. Our closest relative exhibiting hermaphroditism diverged from the human lineage over 300 million years ago.
Words are slippery things, not at all linked to Platonic Ideals, leaving them open to be used as weapons of ideology and lobbying. This, I think is at the root of the “Sex is a Spectrum vs Binary” conflict.
The Binary side (to which I belong) focuses on the clarity of biological categories: there are two distinct gamete types that correlate pretty well with a range of dimorphisms critically important (but not definitive) to make sense of a wide variety of medical and behavioural responses to environmental conditions.
In contrast, it seems to me that the Spectrum side rejects rigid (and largely arbitrary) social/cultural responses to these dimorphism distributions, and tries to hijack the language of hard biology to bolster their case for changing (broadening) these responses. They justify this approach by pointing to the historical hijacking of “Binaryanism” to enforce rigid and discrimatory social rules. They fear that ceding any ground to the Binary side will undermine their (legitimate) goals of creating more openings for people with “non-normative” views of how they want to live their lives. And, like any good debating coach would advise, they attempt to expand their definition to the extremes in order to place their opponents on the defensive, distracting them from the issue at hand.
So Binaryans are discussing science and Specrumists are focussing on social structures. (Then there is a third group, “Social Binaryans” who misuse the Binary nature of sex to impose their view of social rules, the true target of the Spectrumist assault.)
In my view many of the social rules advocated by the hard Spectrumists are fool-hardy and counter-productive (eg. transwomen in elite women’s and women’s prisons), but these are open to discussion. That they use the undermining of Binary biology to do so is wrong headed and damaging.