Category: gender activism

Michael Shermer interviewed on WNYC, sandbagged on the issue of binary sex

January 29, 2026 • 10:30 am

Yesterday we were talking about Michael Shermer’s new book on Truth, but only insofar as I disagreed with his podcast characterization of free will.  Now, however, while promoting his book on the radio, Shermer encountered some misleading “progressivism” about sex from one of public radio’s most well-known announcers and on NPR’s biggest station: Brian Leher on WNYC in New York.  You can read about what happened by clicking on the sceenshot below at BROADview News. And below that you can hear the whole 35-minute interview of Shermer by Lehrer by clicking on the black screenshot and then on the “listen” arrow. You might want to start about halfway in (see below).

First, some excerpts from the article:

Like so many liberals, I grew up with NPR as my soundtrack: BJ Leiderman’s thumping theme songs in the background, or the soothing voice of the late great Susan Stamberg. I loved NPR.

It became difficult to listen to starting in 2016, as the mission changed from reporting to making sure that we all had the same opinion. Then, once Katie Herzog mentioned a game in which you turn NPR on at random times and see if they’re talking about race, NPR started to seem like a joke. But also: it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny when they reported on gender—because they often reported activist talking points about the medical interventions as facts, and labeled truths as disinformation.

We’ve seen shifts in other mainstream media outlets, even a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back movement in The New York Times’ reporting on gender. But NPR is more dug in than ever. I assume this is in reaction to the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To admit that they were so biased that they didn’t deserve public funding was to retire their pitch for more funding from listeners—although what they should have done was pivot, to do a better job and argue that they deserved the funding.

All this is background for what happened yesterday on WNYC, the most-listened-to public radio station in the country. Journalist Brian Lehrer has hosted a weekday news call-in show for some 35 years, and was widely admired as one of the best out there—fair-minded and willing to engage with different voices. Like many others in the media, he changed.

You can see the change when “Mabel” calls in at 16:23. Mabel apparently didn’t tell the call screener what she wanted to say on the air, because she actually got through to the broadcast.  Mabel then emphasized that there were two biological sexes and members of one cannot become members of the other. As you’ll hear, Lehrer pushed back, saying that biological sex can be changed through “transgender’ hormones and surgery. (Lehrer apoparently doesn’t know the difference between sex and gender.) More from the article:

Mabel likely didn’t tell the screener what she really wanted to say, because it started with how America is becoming a third-world country and complaints about the lack of affordable housing. But then she said “The Democratic Party has let me down,” because they’ve also been untruthful. “Now they’re saying that men can become women and I feel that you are just discounting women as a species,” she said. Dems were “trying to make us believe that you can turn a male into a female.” She added that women were more than their anatomy; they were also shaped by their experiences.

That last part allowed Lehrer to make his case that “trans women would say they had their experience of being a woman before they had any hormone replacement therapy or surgery.” Amazingly, he added: “Maybe you’re just biased against a segment of society who you don’t like.”

Actually, you don’t have the experience of being a woman before you transition; you have the feeling that you are a woman and want to change aspects of your body to conform to that. More:

This was absolutely shocking—to hear Brian Lehrer, the former Voice of Reason, tell a caller that because she feels lied to about this issue she’s hateful was astonishing, and just incredibly unprofessional.

Shermer, on the other hand, handled it like a champ. He went into the difference between subjective truths—I feel like I was born in the wrong body—and objective ones: we cannot change sex, which is binary and based on gametes. Shermer said he worried about the future of the Democratic Party because it cannot distinguish between objective and subjective truths.

Lehrer himself seemed to be in shock, having hermetically sealed his studio to protect against any facts that interrupted the narrative he’d constructed. “This is what the right wing says, that it’s gender ideology,” he retorted. WNYC has worked hard to exclude liberal dissident voices, which has allowed them to maintain that left/right framing.

But Shermer pushed on. He explained the difference between the vanishingly rare occurrence of childhood-onset gender dysphoria and rapid-onset, the theory of social contagion, the poor evidence base, the shift in several European countries. “The facts matter,” he said.

Lehrer: “It sounds like you’re being very dismissive.” He said doctors would disagree that you can’t change sex, or that sex is binary. And finally, when Shermer came back with reasonable answers, Lehrer said: “You’re here supposedly representing science.” That is: Lehrer believed Shermer had lost all credibility by applying the same lens to youth gender medicine that he applied to everything else.

Most shocking about this whole exchange was what happened after it ended. Lehrer invited people who were offended to call in. After Shermer was gone! “Equal time,” he said—as if they’d ever given a minute to any of us wanting to share another side of the story.

And so, the parents and grandparents and uncles of trans kids rang up. . . .

Shermer did handle it like a champ, acknowledging that biology is binary but gender is an “internal, subjective state.”   If you want to just hear the relevant exchange, start the podcast at 16:23.

At the end of the piece, author Lisa Davis gives the emails of the segment’s producers in case readers or listeners want to write them, but you can go to the site above and complain if you wish. Regardless, Lehrer shows how fully NPR has bought into the theory that humans can change from one sex into another. Shermer does a great job correcting Lehrer, emphasizing that gender is an internal, subjective state and, as far as biological sex goes, we are not clownfish: humans can’t change from one sex to another.

 

Dire-ish wolf

April 8, 2025 • 11:30 am

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s…

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

Oy! Women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Barnard

March 4, 2025 • 9:15 am

Barnard College was founded in 1889 as a woman’s school because only men were allowed in the nearby Columbia University. Now the two institutions are affiliated and share considerable resources, including classes and dining halls. Barnard students also get their diplomas from Columbia University.

As you may know, three Barnard students were expelled this month for sit-ins in University buildings, and the expulsions are, so far, still in force. Because of that, a passel of pro-Palestinian protestors of unknown origin held their own illegal sit-in in Barnard’s Milbank Hall, a sit-in that included vandalism.  And students also marched on Columbia University, injuring one worker and also committing vandalism. In neither of these last two cases were any protestors punished.

Over the last two years, Columbia has been an epicenter of pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic activity, so much so that the HHS has decided to review Columbia’s federal funding in light of their accused violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting “discriminationon the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.” (There’s a whole Wikipedia article on “Antisemitism at Columbia University,” a practice that goes back nearly 100 years but of course has ramped up since the Gaza War. Before she resigned as President of Columbia, Minouche Shafik created a Task Force on Antisemitism, but, given their laxity towards protestors who violated Columbia’s rules, I’m not expecting much from it.  All I can say is that if I were a Jewish parent or student, even a secular one, I wouldn’t ever send my kids to either Barnard or Columbia, not only because of their pervasive antisemitism but also because loud and illegal demonstrations are constantly interrupting academic activities.

Columbia is also uber-woke, which is another reason to avoid it, since it practices indoctrination of students. To see how it works, let’s just look at one ideologically-based department, Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies. Click on icon below to see some stuff about it:

 

Here are two of the three pictures on the front page. I don’t think this department is going to abide by institutional neutrality! (There is of course no pro-Israel photo.)

As the reader who sent this to me said:

I guess the “Inclusive” part of DEI at the school does not include Jews or white males.  But yeah — AAUP opposes institutional neutrality, arguing that it violates the academic freedom of departments to express their communal voice.

And on that front page, check out the articles.

Spotlight on Faculty Research:

Neferti Tadiar, “Why the Question of Palestine is a Feminist Concern”: “During our weeklong investigative trip, we were witness to multiple and varied testimonies to and clear evidence of the daily acts of violence, harassment and humiliation that Palestinians are subjected to, both massive and intimate.” Read the full article here.

See also: Neferti Tadiar, “Powers of Defending Freedom”

I’d suggest checking out Tadiar’s article for a real word salad that ignores the fact that Palestine, like many Arab countries, is explicitly anti-feminist. Dr. Tadiar, who is head of this department, includes this as the closing of her essay:

Ultimately, however, what makes the question of Palestine a feminist concern does not rest on any one of these analytical perspectives or points of critique. It rests rather on the connections that the oppression and struggle of Palestinians enables us to draw across those differences on which the oppression depends and that the question as it is now posed presumes. It is a feminist concern because it calls us to forge new relations beyond the province of interests and inherited forms of social belonging to which we might have become tethered and, for those of us not already called, to feel the suffering and aspirations of Palestinians as also our own. The strangulation of Palestinian life is, after all, not the accomplishment of one aberrant state, inasmuch as the latter is supported by a global economy and geopolitical order, which condemns certain social groups and strata to the status of absolutely redundant, surplus populations – an order of insatiable accumulation and destruction that affects all planetary life. The question of Palestine is thus an urgent question of a just and equitable future that is both specific to this context and to this people, and a general and paradigmatic global concern. To take a stand in solidarity with and to be involved in the struggle of Palestinians to resist and transform the conditions of their own dispossession and disposability – to join in their aspiration for collective freedom and self-determination – is also to participate in the remaking of global life, which cannot but be a paramount feminist act.

Also, have a look at the course offerings, which are heavily larded with Social Justice, though I do note one course on “Contemporary American Women’s Jewish Literature.” The rest of the courses comprise a farrago of courses with explicitly political aims, concentrating on victims.

But I wonder what kind of job a graduate in this department is suited for. I can think of only two: to become an academic in a similar department elsewhere, or go to work for a DEI organization.

Pamala Paul: Ideology impedes gender treatement in U.S.

July 13, 2024 • 10:45 am

If you’ve followed this website regularly, you’ll know that the UK’s Cass Review, which evaluated and criticized the NHS’s treatment of gender dysphoria, has been widely accepted in the UK, causing the country to slow down on “affirmative care”, following the lead of other European countries.  No longer will the NHS run a conveyer belt from childhood gender dysphoria to universal acceptance by therapists that a dysphoric child needs to transition, and from there on to puberty blockers, other hormones, and then, perhaps, surgery.  (See here, and here, for example.)

Despite the realization of European doctors and therapists that unbridled “affirmative care” is not only dangerous, but isn’t very effective, the United States has resolutely ignored Cass’s review, persisting in offering affirmative care despite the paucity of evidence that it works. Even the Biden Administration, with its increasing wokeness, has been lax about dealing with gender issues.

This is all discussed in a new article by NYT op-ed writer Pamela Paul—a thorough and sensible piece of reporting that will nevertheless infuriate gender ideologues and all the “progressive” NYT writers who beef on the paper’s Slack channel.

Gender issues are one thing that the Biden administration has fouled up, and here’s one example from Paul.  (WPATH is The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which isn’t very attuned to what the rest of the world is doing, but obstinately fights for affirmative care, no matter what):

The Biden administration has essentially ceded the issue to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, incorporating gender-affirming protocols into Department of Health and Human Services policy. Moreover, recently revealed emails indicate that President Biden’s assistant secretary of health, Dr. Rachel Levine, a pediatrician and transgender woman, successfully pushed WPATH to remove age requirements from its guidelines for gender medicine before their publication, because — mixing political and public health concerns — she thought supporters of gender treatment bans might cite them to show that the procedures are harmful. (WPATH’s draft guidelines had originally recommended age minimums of 14 for cross-sex hormones, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgery and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.)

Now there are no guidelines! Surgery and hormones at any age!

Paul is heterodox and brave, but her piece is now the third I’ve seen where the NYT reports objectively and sometimes critically on affirmative care. The progressive staffers, of course, got in a tizzy about the previous pieces, and Paul’s will increase their ire even more. But the fact that a Left-leaning paper is willing to publish stuff like this—it’s well referenced, too—may signal a sea change in the attitudes of “progressivists” towards affirmative care in the US. Click to read; you can also find the piece archived here archived here:

I’ve written about nearly all of what Paul says, but if you haven’t followed the controversy, her piece is the place to start.  As I’ve said, I think that in a decade or two Americans will look back at the dosing and mutilating of American adolescents and ask, “What were we thinking?”  Of course many people are happy with their medical transitioning, but remember that many cases of gender dysphoria in children and adolescents who aren’t treated with affirmative therapy tend to “resolve,” often with the young people becoming gay.  If you can cure dysphoria that way rather than by permanently changing bodies with hormones and surgery, then that’s surely a route worth investigating.

Here’s a long quotation from Paul’s piece, which is itself long:

Imagine a comprehensive review of research on a treatment for children found “remarkably weak evidence” that it was effective. Now imagine the medical establishment shrugged off the conclusions and continued providing the same unproven and life-altering treatment to its young patients.

This is where we are with gender medicine in the United States.

It’s been three months since the release of the Cass Review, an independent assessment of gender treatment for youths commissioned by England’s National Health Service. The four-year review of research, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s top pediatricians, found no definitive proof that gender dysphoria in children or teenagers was resolved or alleviated by what advocates call gender-affirming care, in which a young person’s declared “gender identity” is affirmed and supported with social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. Nor, she said, is there clear evidence that transitioning kids decreases the likelihood that gender dysphoric youths will turn to suicide, as adherents of gender-affirming care claim. These findings backed up what critics of this approach have been saying for years.

“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted.

After the release of Cass’s findings, the British government issued an emergency ban on puberty blockers for people under 18. Medical societies, government officials and legislative panels in Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium have proposed moving away from a medical approach to gender issues, in some cases directly acknowledging the Cass Review. Scandinavian countries have been moving away from the gender-affirming model for the past few years. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, called the review’s recommendations “seminal” and said that policies on gender treatments have “breached fundamental principles” of children’s human rights, with “devastating consequences.”

But in the United States, federal agencies and professional associations that have staunchly supported the gender-affirming care model greeted the Cass Review with silence or utter disregard.

There’s been no response from the Department of Health and Human Services, whose website says that “gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents” and which previously pushed to eliminate recommended age minimums for gender surgery. Nor has there been a response from the American Medical Association, which also backs gender-affirming care for pediatric patients.

When I reached out to H.H.S. officials, they declined to speak on the record. The A.M.A. referred me to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. The Endocrine Society, the primary professional organization of endocrinologists, told me, “the Cass Review does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in” the society’s own guidelines. (Cass’s mandate was to assess the quality and importance of existing research.)

Who is to blame for the situation in America? Ideologues—and those include WPATH, the many doctors and therapists who push affirmative therapy onto young people, and, of course, the Biden administration, especially Rachel Levine. It is worth considering that it may have been unwise to put the issue of age limits (i.e., none) on affirmative care and surgery into the hands of a transgender woman.

Why is this happening in the U.S. while Europe has taken a more cautious and sensible attitude towards this type of therapy? Paul gives several reasons, which includes more pervasive “progressive” ideology in the U.S., the fact that centralized medical care like that in Europe makes it harder to “give patients what they ask for” (and no, not all kids who ask for gender transitioning should automatically get it), and the litigious climate of the U.S., which make doctors hesitant to change course because they could get sued for admitting they were wrong.

I’m a big fan of Paul, not because she’s “antiwoke,” but because she’s sensible and has the courage to speak truths that will get her demonized in the fraternity of NYT “progressives”.  And, of course, because we tend to have confluent opinions.  We also agree on how gender dysphoric young people should be treated, and I’ll finish with Paul’s take, which agrees with the conclusions of The Cass Review:

The Cass Review recommends a more holistic approach to treating gender dysphoria in kids. This involves untangling gender discomfort from common pre-existing conditions like autism spectrum disorder and A.D.H.D. and treating it alongside frequent comorbidities, which include anxiety, self-harm and eating disorders. A mental health counselor can help children with any difficulties during puberty and in coming to terms with their sexual orientation — without pathologizing either.

The goal throughout is to help. This includes working with kids to understand the causes of their gender dysphoria, relieve its symptoms, help resolve it or, in a case that proves persistent, consistent and insistent, help kids understand the pros and cons of pursuing gender reassignment for when they enter adulthood.

Once again we see ideology not only impeding science, but screwing up people’s lives.

A good refutation of a bad article on the supposed “spectrum” of sex

March 13, 2024 • 12:15 pm

On March 8, I wrote a critique of this article, which appeared in American Scientist (click sceenshot to read):

When I wrote my piece, I had grown weary of people making the same tired old arguments against the sex binary, arguments like saying that sex isn’t binary because male orangutans come in two forms (“flanged” and “unflanged”) while female orangs come in only one. That sentence is self refuting, of course, for the authors explicitly refer to two forms of MALE oranguatan. How do the authors know that they’re males, for crying out loud? The same goes for the authors going after the sex binary by noting the long clitorises of female hyenas and the gestation of young by male seahorses. Note that both of those sentences include either “male” or “female”, presupposing that these sexes exist and scuppering the four authors’ own argument!

I got splenetic and wrote this in my post:

Really? Do I have to rebut the same arguments about the definition of biological sex again?  Well, here in American Scientist is a group of two anthropologists, one anatomist, and a gender-and-sexuality-studies professor, all telling us that there is no clear definition of sex, using the same tired old arguments to rebut the gamete-based sex binary. And once again, Agustín Fuentes from Princeton appears among this group of ideologues who say that the definition of the sexes depends not on gametes, but on a lot of stuff, depending what your question is.  Their object, of course, is to reassure those who don’t identify as “male” or “female” that they are not erased by biology.

But you more or less have to keep rebutting this rubbish (as Byrne calls it below) because each new generation of students needs to be educated about how biologists define sex.  The reason that people say sex is a spectrum, of course, is ideological, not scientific: it’s because they want nature to correspond to their view of people’s self-image: today, some peopole can think that they’re varying mixes of male and female (one notion of “gender”). Ergo, nature must be that way, too. I call this the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”:  what we see as “good” in humans must also be seen in nature.

You can read my piece if you want, but better to read MIT philosopher and gender expert Alex Byrne‘s new takedown of the Clancy et al. paper at the Substack site “Reality’s Last Stand.” The subtitle below pulls no punches: the paper is indeed rubbish.

A few excerpts (indented). Byrne begins by giving the authors a bouquet of roses:

The essay is well-worth critical examination, not least because it efficiently packs so much confusion into such a short space.

Another reason for examining it is the pedigree of the authors—Kate Clancy, Agustín Fuentes, Caroline VanSickle, and Catherine Clune-Taylor. Clancy is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton, and Clune-Taylor is an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at that university; VanSickle is an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines. Clancy’s Ph.D. is from Yale, Fuentes’ is from UC Berkeley, and VanSickles’ is from Michigan. Clune-Taylor is the sole humanist: she has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Alberta, with Judith Butler as her external examiner. In short, the authors are not ill-educated crackpots or dogmatic activists, but top-drawer scholars. Their opinions matter.

But then come then brickbats. Unfortunately, as with me, Byrne thinks the arguments of Clancy et al. are misguided and thus injurious to science. It’s a long piece, worth reading in its entirety, so I’ll just give two quotes. The first is the common misconception that intersex people, who are only 1 in 5600 of all H. sapiens, are members of a third sex:

In any case, what reason do Clancy et al. give for thinking that the number of sexes is at least three? The argument is in this passage:

[D]ifferent [“sex-defining”] traits also do not always line up in a person’s body. For example, a human can be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina, or have ovaries while producing lots of testosterone. These variations, collectively known as intersex, may be less common, but they remain a consistent and expected part of human biology.

So the idea that there are only two sexes…[has] plenty of evidence [against it].

However, this reasoning is fallacious. The premise is that some (“intersex”) people do not have enough of the “sex-defining” traits to be either male or female. The conclusion is that there are more than two sexes. The conclusion only follows if we add an extra premise, that these intersex people are not just neither male nor female, but another sex. And Clancy et al. do nothing to show that intersex people are another sex.

What’s more, it is quite implausible that any of them are another sex. Whatever the sexes are, they are reproductive categories. People with the variations noted by Clancy et al. are either infertile, for example those with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) (“XY chromosomes and a vagina”), or else fertile in the usual manner, for example many with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) and XX chromosomes (“ovaries while producing lots of testosterone,” as Clancy et al. imprecisely put it). One study reported normal pregnancy rates among XX CAH individuals. Unsurprisingly, the medical literature classifies these people as female. Unlike those with CAIS and CAH, people who belonged to a genuine “third sex” would make their own special contribution to reproduction.

Here we have a philosopher who knows his biology, and this can make clear and piercing arguments.  (See below to see Byrne’s new book on sex and gender.)  And here’s Byrne on their view that sex is “culturally constructed”:

The problem here is that “Sex is culturally constructed” (as Clancy et al. apparently understand “cultural construction”) is almost trivially true, and not denied by anyone. If “X is culturally constructed” means something like “Ideas of X and theories of X change between times and places,” then almost anything which has preoccupied humans will be culturally constructed. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are culturally constructed: the ancients thought they revolved around the Earth and represented different gods. Dinosaurs are culturally constructed: our ideas of them are constantly changing, and are influenced by politics as well as new scientific discoveries. Likewise, sex is culturally constructed: Aristotle thought that in reproduction male semen produces a new embryo from female menstrual blood, as “a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood.” We now have a different theory.

Naturally one must distinguish the claim that dinosaurs are changing (they used to be covered only in scales, now they have feathers) from the claim that our ideas of dinosaurs are changing (we used to think that dinosaurs only have scales, now we think they have feathers). It would be fallacious to move from the premise that dinosaurs are culturally constructed (in Clancy et al.’s sense) to the conclusion that dinosaurs themselves have changed, or that there are no “static, universal truths” about dinosaurs. It would be equally fallacious to move from the premise that sex is culturally constructed to the claim that there are no “static, universal truths” about sex. (One such truth, for example, is that there is two sexes.) Nonetheless, Clancy et al. seem to commit exactly this fallacy, in denying (as they put it) that “sex is…a static, universal truth.”

To pile falsity on top of fallacy, when Clancy et al. give an example of how our ideas about sex have changed, their choice could hardly be more misleading.

I believe I mentioned something like this before, but only in passing and not nearly as clearly as does Byrne.

He finishes with a “J’Accuse” moment:

How could four accomplished and qualified professors produce such—not to mince words—unadulterated rubbish?

There are many social incentives these days for denouncing the sex binary, and academics—even those at the finest universities—are no more resistant to their pressure than anyone else. However, unlike those outside the ivory tower, academics have a powerful arsenal of carefully curated sources and learned jargon, as well as credentials and authority. They may deploy their weapons in the service of—as they see it—equity and inclusion for all.

It would be “bad science,” Clancy et al. write at the end, to “ignore and exclude” “individuals who are part of nature.” In this case, though, Clancy et al.’s firepower is directed at established facts, and the collateral damage may well include those people they most want to help.

There are, of course, words for people who retrieve and dispose of garbage: garbage collectors. But I know of know words for those who dispense garbage.

On a happier note, Alex has a new book on sex and gender out, and I have it on order. Early word is that it’s really good. Click below to get it from Amazon: