Category: sex

The Biden administration walks back Title IX improvements of Betsy DeVos

April 21, 2024 • 10:00 am

A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

You can read several of my posts on this issue here, but this one details the changes.  I believe they’re not yet finalized, but are nearing completion. It’s not yet clear whether this document, which is heavy on “gender identity”, will permit transgender females to compete athletically against natal females. The rules don’t seem to be finalized, but I’ve heard that Biden is holding off until after the election before allowing the athletic thing, since trans “inclusion” in women’s sports is opposed by most Americans.

You might also want to read Emily Yoffe’s Free Press piece criticizing Biden’s proposals (which are now law), as well as her other pieces on the issue cited at the bottom of her article.

If FIRE opposes something, I’m usually on their side, and I certainly am this time. These changes in regulations, as you’ll see below, are part of Biden’s increasing wokeness, and deny those accused of sexual misconduct of a fair hearing.  Biden will have the accused lose their right to contest the allegations against them in a live hearing, to cross-examine those who accuse him (yes, it’s usually men), and will allow a single person to be the original investigator of the charges, the adjudicator of the charges, and the jury who gives a decision. How fair is that? There are other changes, too, and if you have the time you can read all the rules here in a 1577-page document.

Here’s the FIRE summary:

Today the Department of Education released troubling new rules on how colleges investigate campus sexual misconduct allegations. The bottom line: Students who find themselves in a campus hearing are now less likely to receive a fair shake.

If reading this feels like déjà vu, you’re not alone.

For years the government has politicized college students’ rights under Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Bureaucrats play political games, taking away student free speech and due process rights during one presidential administration, then restoring them in the next.

Fairness shouldn’t be politicized. Campus hearings should be fair for every single student — accused and accuser alike. But these new rules deprive students of fundamental rights that help investigators uncover the truth in the most serious types of campus misconduct cases, including those that concern sexual misconduct.

The rules:

  • Eliminate the right to a live hearing to contest the allegations.
  • Eliminate the right to cross-examine one’s accuser and witnesses.
  • Weaken the right to be represented by lawyers in campus sexual misconduct expulsion proceedings.
  • Require colleges to adopt a definition of sexual harassment which will inevitably be used to censor constitutionally protected speech.
  • Allow for the return of the “single-investigator” model, in which a single administrator serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury.

“Justice is only possible when hearings are fair for everyone,” said FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley. “Rather than playing political ping-pong with student rights, the Department of Education should recognize that removing procedural protections for students is the exact opposite of fairness.”

Colleges and the government should not team up to deprive students of their rights. And no one should implement policies that make uncovering the truth in cases of serious misconduct even more difficult.

Riley Gaines has been an outspoken advocate of allowing only natal women to compete in women’s athletics. Here’s her take on the new rules, though, as I have no energy to plow through 1577 pages, I haven’t checked her assertsions:

I’ll still vote for Biden, but he’s making it harder and harder. But even with this change that makes adjudication of sexual misconduct an unfair process, he’s still miles and miles ahead of Trump. If I get too fed up, I simply won’t vote for President, which in this Democratic state won’t affect the presidential results at all.

h/t: Luana

Another refuted example of the reverse appeal to nature

April 17, 2024 • 10:30 am

As Luana Maroja and I wrote in our paper on the ideological subversion of biology, some of that subversion involves a fallacy that we called the “reverse appeal to nature”, an inversion of the naturalistic fallacy:

All the biological misconceptions we’ve discussed involve forcing preconceived beliefs onto nature. This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.” It demands that you must see the natural world through lenses prescribed by your ideology. If you are a gender activist, you must see more than two biological sexes. . . . .

In other words, people tend to justify something they consider morally desirable by seeing the phenomenon (or something like it) in nature. As we noted, the claim that sex is a spectrum in nature is a conclusion meant to buttress the value of people who consider themselves neither female nor male—those who are “nonbinary”. The problem here is twofold. Most important, biological sex is indeed binary in nature: all animals and vascular plants have just two sexes: males, making small motile sperm, and females, making large immotile eggs. I won’t defend this binary-ness now, as I’ve done it many times before, as have others. For a quick refresher, see this piece by Colin Wright.

The second problem is that the existence of something in animals or plants doesn’t buttress human morality.  Trans-identifying people should have all the same rights as other people, except that in some sensitive settings like sports, prisons, etc., segregation should be based on biological sex rather than gender. And that is regardless of what we see in nature. After all, we don’t think that theft, murder, and cheating are justifiable because we can point to these phenomena in various animals. (See my quote at the bottom.)

And yet there are still those, like gender activist Peter Tatchell, who fall victim to this fallacy.  In his tweet below, Tatchell claims to point out 18 animals that are transsexual (i.e., can change biological sex) and also show that “gender is not a simplistic binary, male & female”. This is a doubly incorrect instance of the reverse appeal to nature.

First, most of the animals in Tatchell’s litany of example do not change sex, and none of them are “transsexual” in the human sense (i.e., transgender humans who change their gender identity, not their biological sex, because they suffer from gender dysphoria).  And none of the animals that do change sex are mammals, since we know of no example of a mammal that can change from producing eggs to producing sperm or vice versa. (There are no examples, either, of human hermaphrodites that are fertile as both sexes.)

Second, not a single of Tatchell’s 18 examples shows that sex is “not a simplistic binary.” Every one of the animals shown instantiates that there are two sexes: males and females (or both combined in one body as simultaneous hermaphrodites). There are no third, fourth, or fifth sexes shown by Tatchell, for none exist.

His tweet:

In an earlier post I showed how Emma Hilton attacked Tatchell’s claims in jer twitter feed, with one tweet for each of Tatchell’s examples. Now she and Jonathan Kay have teamed up for a complete demolition job at Quilette, which you can read by clicking the headline below.

 

First the authors show the prevalence of using nature to justify nonbinary and transgender people:

Anyone who’s followed the debate about transgender rights will immediately understand why this type of fish now has a starring role in advocacy materials designed to convince the broad public that sex-switching is a common feature in the natural kingdom, including among humans [JAC: The preceding link goes to a Vice article by Diana Tourjée called “Yes, there are trans animals.”] In Canada, for instance, the publicly funded CBC is airing a documentary titled Fluid: Life Beyond the Binary, in which the self-described “non-binary” host, Mae Martin, invokes the existence of clownfish, and various other creatures, to argue that “each of us are on the gender spectrum.” Not surprisingly, Martin is explicitly promoting the documentary as a paean to social justice, and as a rebuke to anyone seeking to put limits on “gender-affirming health care” (such as the double mastectomy that Martin publicly announced in 2021).

This week, British human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell tried to advance similar arguments in a widely read tweet referencing—as the linked Gay Times article put it—“18 animals you didn’t know were biologically trans.”

“These animals show that gender is not a simplistic binary, male and female,” Tatchell gushed. “Trans and intersex are real. Get used to it!”]

Indeed, the article that Tatchell cited goes further, denouncing the very idea of “biology” as a “pseudo-intellectual” fixation of “lesbian separatists” and “right-wing lobbyists.” The author, one Fran Tirado, warns that even mentioning terms such as “biological sex,” “biological male,” and “biological female” is a problematic affront to the supposedly non-binary, gender-bending nature of life—which, the author claims, has been in evidence since “the earliest recorded histories of the earth.”

Then comes the promised 18-point catalogue of “animals you didn’t know were biologically trans”—starting with the above-pictured clownfish (often described by scientists as anemonefish).

Hilton and Kay then run through the list, which I won’t repeat here. I’ll just say that none of the examples show that there are more than two sexes, though individuals of some species can embody both sexes in a single individual, like slugs (a ” simultaneous hermaphrodite”), or, like clownfish, can switch over time from one biological sex to another (“sequential hermaphrodites”). But that is a switch from one biological sex to another, something not seen in mammals, and of course not seen in humans (transgender people do not change biological sex, but switch from one gender identity to another).

That leaves us with the so-called “trans” animals, most of which don’t really change sex. Tatchell needs to bone up on his biology.  Here I list some of the biological phenomena cited by Tatchell

  • Real changes of sex (sequential hermaphrodites like clownfish, jellyfish, oysters, sea bass, sea snails).  That constitutes five species in his list.
  • Simultaneous hermaphrodites (banana slug): individuals can produce both sperm and eggs. There are a fair number of animals that do this, but no mammals and only a few fish (e.g., some gobies and serranid sea bass) There are no simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites known in mammals or birds.
  • Rare cases in which a single individual is known to have swapped testes for ovaries or vice versa (Boyd’s forest dragon, mandarin duck). These are rare exceptions to species in which there are two biological sexes that do not change.) They are developmental anomalies.
  • Parthenogenesis: species in which females can produce offspring without her eggs being fertilized (e.g., some Komodo dragons). Some animal species in which females can do this also have males (sometimes copulation is required to produce eggs, but there’s no fertilization). But all of these species are either completely female or have both males and females. They do not violate the sex binary
  • Species in which males look different from females (“sexual dimorphism”). The example Tatchell gives is a swallowtail butterfly. It doesn’t switch sex and there are only two sexes. Sexual dimorphism is widespread but doesn’t exemplify either changing sex or nonbinary sexes.
  • Species in which males can behave like females to get copulations (the ruff, a bird) or avoid predation (e.g., marsh harriers, a bird).  Again, it’s just a sneaky behavior; there is no sex-switching and all individuals are either male or female
  • Species in which males can get “pregnant”, like seahorses. Females stick their eggs into a the pouch of a male who fertilizes them and releases the newly-hatched seahorses. This is a reversal of sex roles, but not of sex: males still produce sperm and females eggs, and there is no changing of biological sex.
  • Hyenas (yawn). Females have long penis-like clitorises through which they give birth. There is no change of sex and individuals are either male or female. It baffles me why these animals are considered either “trans” or “nonbinary”
  • Gynandromorphs: individuals that, through a developmental accident, are part male and part female. Often the animal is split right down the middle with one half being one sex and the other being the other. I’ve seen them in fruit flies, and they are not all that rare in birds (see a gynandromorph cardinal here). These animals are developmental anomalies, not part of the regular constitution of a species, and most are sterile though some can be fertile.

So yes, some animals can switch sex, though none of those are birds are mammals. Those might be considered “trans” animals, but hardly (and shouldn’t) justify the existence of trans humans, which don’t change biological sex but gender identity.  And none of the species proffered by Tatchell show that there is a spectrum of sex.  As Hilton and Kay conclude:

Do some creatures change sex? Absolutely. But this isn’t new information. It’s a fact that biologists have known about for a long time.

What is also well-known is that none of these sex-changing creatures are mammals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine invertebrates whose biology is different from our own in countless (fascinating) ways.

What’s more, in every single case described above, there are always (at most) just two distinct sexes at play—no matter how those two sexes may switch or combine. One of those sexes is male, a sex associated with gonads that produce sperm (testes); and the other is female, with gonads that produce eggs (ovaries). There’s nothing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.

Yes, there’s a “spectrum.” But it’s not the imaginary sex spectrum that activists such as Martin, Tatchell, and Tirado are trying to conjure. Rather, it’s the extraordinary spectrum of traits, behaviors, and evolutionary adaptations that all of these creatures exhibit as part of nature’s grand pageant.

I swear that people like Tatchell need to learn some biology. If I hear about sexual dimorphism, gynandromorphs, or hyena citorises again, I’m going to lose it.  And people really need to learn not to scan through species in nature to buttress what they see as moral or “right”. That way lies considerable danger, as I wrote in my Times Literary Supplement review of Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow several decades ago:

But regardless of the truth of Darwin’s theory, should we consult nature to determine which of our behaviours are to be considered normal or moral? Homosexuality may indeed occur in species other than our own, but so do infanticide, robbery and extra-pair copulation.  If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers. And given the cultural milieu in which human sexuality and gender are expressed, how closely can we compare ourselves to other species? In what sense does a fish who changes sex resemble a transgendered person? The fish presumably experiences neither distressing feelings about inhabiting the wrong body, nor ostracism by other fish. In some baboons, the only males who show homosexual behaviour are those denied access to females by more dominant males. How can this possibly be equated to human homosexuality?

Dawkins and Sokal on the dumb ideological ploy maintaining that human sex is “assigned at birth”

April 9, 2024 • 12:30 pm

What a pair! The renowned biologist and the hoax-exposer/mathematician, teamed up to attack the medical profession’s new and woke tendency to deny the existence of biological sex as a reality. (Yes, all animals have exactly two sexes, which are not made up by society.) This eloquent op-ed is in the Boston Globe, and you can click below to read it for free, or find it archived here (h/t Mark, Barry).

It’s the “sex assigned at birth” meme, which any fool knows was made up to pretend that biological sex doesn’t really exist in nature, but is merely a “social construct”. This is the same risible meme taken apart by Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven in a recent NYT op-ed. As Alan and Richard note below, the distortion of reality was made for ideological reasons—by gender activists who want to see biological sex as a spectrum, and that is based on the the insupportable view that if you distort biology, transgender or transsexual people will not be “erased”. But, as I’ve said ad infinitum, you don’t need to distort biology to justify treating such people with civility and respect, and to confer on them the same moral value as everyone else has.

The excerpt from the above speaks for itself, but has a lot of useful links to show how well the termites have dined.

The American Medical Association says that the word “sex” — as in male or female — is problematic and outdated; we should all now use the “more precise” phrase “sex assigned at birth.” The American Psychological Association concurs: Terms like “birth sex” and “natal sex” are “disparaging” and misleadingly “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic.” The American Academy of Pediatrics is on board too: “sex,” it declares, is “an assignment that is made at birth.” And now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge us to say “assigned male/female at birth” or “designated male/female at birth” instead of “biologically male/female” or “genetically male/female.”

After discussing the biological definition of sex, which, as you know well by now involves differences in developmental systems that produce gametes of different size and mobility, Sokal and Dawkins give a sharp rap on the knuckles of the medical establishment. I’ve put the last two paragraphs in bold; the penultimate one shows the trend and motivation, while the last one shows the damage.

Much is speciously made of the fact that a very few humans are born with chromosomal patterns other than XX and XY. The most common, Klinefelter syndrome with XXY chromosomes, occurs in about 0.1 percent of live births; these individuals are anatomically male, though often infertile. Some extremely rare conditions, such as de la Chapelle syndrome (0.003 percent) and Swyer syndrome (0.0005 percent), arguably fall outside the standard male/female classification. Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.

So where does this leave the medical associations’ claims about “sex assigned at birth”?

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that. But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis. Of course, any observation can be erroneous, and in rare cases the sex reported on the birth certificate is inaccurate and needs to be subsequently corrected. But the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed — a person’s sex — is an objective biological reality, just like their blood group or fingerprint pattern, not something that is “assigned.” The medical associations’ pronouncements are social constructionism gone amok.

. . .For decades, feminists have protested against the neglect of sex as a variable in medical diagnosis and treatment, and the tacit assumption that women’s bodies react similarly to men’s bodies. Two years ago, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet finally acknowledged this criticism, but the editors apparently could not bring themselves to use the word “women.” Instead the journal’s cover proclaimed: “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” But now even this double-edged concession may be lost, as the denial of biological sex threatens to undermine the training of future doctors.

The medical establishment’s newfound reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality most likely stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people. But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided. Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned.”

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It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world.

And when an organization that proclaims itself scientific distorts the scientific facts in the service of a social cause, it undermines not only its own credibility but that of science generally. How can the public be expected to trust the medical establishment’s declarations on other controversial issues, such as vaccines — issues on which the medical consensus is indeed correct — when it has so visibly and blatantly misstated the facts about something so simple as sex?

 

Read also Byrne and Hooven; click below (or read it archived here):

Finally, the infamous Lancet cover:

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 25, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today’s instructive photo-and-text contribution comes from reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior and deals with a topic we’ve discuss a lot: biological sex and its consequences. In this case, we learn about how organisms adaptively adjust the sex ratio of their offspring when conditions change.

Athayde’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Sometimes snips, snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, other times sugar and spice

As the story goes, during a tour of a government farm, American First Lady Grace Coolidge was being shown around by a farmer when she saw a cockerel and a hen romantically engaged. She asked her guide how often the cockerel would mate, to which he responded: ‘dozens of times a day.’ Good-humouredly, Mrs Coolidge retorted: ‘tell that to the President’. The farmer dutifully did so, and President Calvin Coolidge asked: ‘same hen every time?’, to which the farmer replied: ‘No, Mr President, a different hen every time.’ And the president: ‘tell that to Mrs Coolidge.’

Psychology Professor Frank A. Beach (1911-1988) saw this improbable anecdote as an ideal model to name a widespread phenomenon among animals: the Coolidge Effect, which is the enhanced sexual interest of males whenever a new female is accessible, regardless of the availability of previous sexual partners – a behaviour rarely reported for females. This shocking manifestation of male chauvinism has been offered a biological explanation.

The term ‘gonochorism’ makes us scramble for the dictionary, even though one of the first things we learned from our Birds and Bees lessons – or used to learn before ideological gangrene poisoned Facts and Reality – is that our species is gonochoric (or dioecious), that is, it has two sexes: the male sex produces or is geared up to produce gametes (reproductive cells) called sperm, while the female sex is equipped to produce gametes known as ova or egg cells. The lesson’s climax was the revelation that some types of frolicking could result in the fusion of these two types of gametes to produce babies.

Male and female Mandarin ducks (Aix galericulata), a gonochoric and sexually dimorphic (sexes have different morphological characteristics) species © Francis C. Franklin, Wikimedia Commons

Later in life, when we took biology courses, we were told that many plants and some animals are hermaphrodites (they produce male and female gametes), while other organisms don’t need sex to reproduce. But the overwhelmingly majority of animals, and all mammals and birds, are sexually binary: they either produce male gametes or female gametes – leaving aside the rare cases of individuals that don’t fit in either category. And, from humans to asparagus, that is, for virtually all multicellular organisms, the female gametes are larger – often much larger – than the male gametes; that’s to say they are anisogamous: the two types differ in size and shape. And anisogamy has much to do with the Coolidge Effect.

Because sperm are relatively small, energetically cheap gametes, males can afford to churn out and distribute lots of them. By mating with as many females as possible, males increase their chances of passing on their genes. If a male gamete ends up in an unsuitable female, it’s not a big deal: there are plenty more fish in the sea. It doesn’t work like that for females. They put a lot of energy into their eggs, which are gigantic when compared to sperm. So, a female can only make a few of them in her lifetime. Adding gestation and time spent nurturing their young, females have a much lower reproductive capacity. As they invest a great deal more in producing an embryo than males, they need to choose their mates well to maximize their chances of success; if their Romeos are weak and unfit, females may have wasted all their reproductive potential. For females, it’s a matter of quality, not quantity.

Together at last. A human male sex cell (spermatozoon) penetrating a human ovum. The spermatozoon is ~100,000 times smaller than the ovum. Image in the public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

These biological particularities are strong incentives to polygyny, the mating system where a male has multiple sexual partners while the female mates with one or a few males. Polygyny is the most common mating strategy for vertebrates; about 90% of mammal species are polygynous. These males are, like the Coolidges’ rooster, always ready for a new romantic adventure.

Angus John Bateman (1919–1996), a botanist who worked with fruit flies, found one important consequence of the Coolidge Effect. For most polygynous species, a small number of males monopolize the females and prevent other males from mating. That is, some males are highly successful in reproducing, while many more have no success at all. Things are more predicable for females: most of them will mate – the few successful males will make sure of that. The upshot is that males’ reproductive success is more variable than females’.

The winner takes it all: while one red deer stag (Cervus elaphus) keeps harems of up to 20 hinds, other males go with no dates © Keven Law, Wikimedia Commons.

Enter evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and computer scientist Dan Willard (1948-2023) to thicken the plot by proposing that differences in reproductive success can bias the production of male and female offspring. Trivers and Willard argued, reasonably, that sons and daughters of females in good condition (that is, well-fed, healthy, and not pressured by competitors) would also be in good condition, whereas sons and daughters of females in poor condition (malnourished or debilitated by parasites or competitors) would also be in bad condition. But, when the reproductive success of one sex – males, in the case of polygynous species – is more variable than the other, diverging strategies emerge. In an evolutionary sense, it pays for strong, healthy females to have many sons, who mate frequently and produce lots of grandchildren for their mother. Daughters on the other hand are a less promising investment because, despite being strong like mum, they are restricted by low reproductive rates. But if the mother is in poor condition, having daughters would be a better deal because despite being feeble like mum, those who survive to adulthood are likely to produce some offspring. Feeble sons on the other hand may never breed, as they would be no match for males in good condition (Trivers & Willard, 1973). In other words, when things get bad, it’s better to have more daughters than sons. This risk-spreading strategy is a form of biological bet-hedging to maximize fitness and applies beyond mammal polygyny. If females’ reproductive success is more variable, we should expect more sons than daughters when the going gets rough.

Representation of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis for polygynous species. Low-quality females are more successful than low-quality males, but high-quality males and more successful than high-quality females © Shyu & Caswell, 2015.

The Trivers–Willard hypothesis provides an explanation for a common occurrence among animals: sex ratios going astray. In theory, a species should produce about the same number of sons and daughters (1:1 ratio) to maintain long term stability. This is known as the Fisher’s principle – although it would be fairer to call it the ‘Cobb’s principle’ after the solicitor and amateur biologist John Cobb (1866-1920), who first proposed it (Gardner, 2023) (Cobb’s work is virtually unknown today, and academics from the Church of Woke would have conniptions at citing his paper, published in The Eugenics Review).

The Trivers–Willard hypothesis has had an enormous influence in evolutionary biology. Its predictions have been supported by studies with a range of species, although its universality has been debated and questioned. Nonetheless, the hypothesis has encouraged much theoretical and empirical research about sex allocation. This body of work has revealed that variation of reproductive success between sexes is not the only driver of sex ratio skewness. Food, mothers’ age, litter size, population density, the weather, or some other environmental or physiological factor may induce females to adjust the sex ratio of their offspring to maximise fitness.

UK’s age-sex pyramid illustrating the population’s distribution by age groups and sex. The male to female ratio is 1.05 at birth, shifting to 0.73 for those aged 65 and over © Kaj Tallungs, Wikipedia.

It turns out that food availability is an important inducer of sex ratio fine-tuning for one group of animals of enormous ecological end economic importance: cavity-nesting solitary bees. Most of the 20,000 or so known species of bee build their nests in the ground, but about 30% of them took another path regarding housing. They occupy or expand naturally occurring cavities such as crevices under or between stones, cracks in a wall, holes in dead wood, hollow stems and tree bark, transforming them into cosy, safe environments in which to raise their young.

Like all solitary bees, cavity-nesting species are on the wing for a small portion of their lives, sometimes weeks. After mating, each female spends her short adult life tirelessly victualing her nest with pollen and nectar to provide for her brood. It’s a race against time and over hurdles such as bad weather, competitors, flower scarcity, pests and parasites. Reproductive success depends on the amount of food available for the young, and here their sex can be the decisive factor. Female bees – like most insects – are in general bigger than males, so they need more food. As these big eaters could be a survival risk, some tinkering may be in order.

A red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) man-made nest with brood cells well-stocked with pollen.

A red mason bee couple. The female is 20-25% bigger than the male © Aka, Wikimedia Commons.

The orchard mason bee or blue orchard bee (Osmia lignaria), a cavity-nesting species from North America, is a valued pollinator of several fruit trees. During the early nesting season, when pollen and nectar are most abundant and mum is in top shape, her offspring comprise mostly females. As the season progresses, flowers become scarce, so she has to work harder to provision her nest. Now the sex ratio tilts towards the smaller males, who have better chances of survival because they need less food (Torchio & Tepedino, 1980).

The scenario is similar for the related red mason bee (Osma bicornis), a Eurasian species, but here parasites play a part. As the nesting season advances, females become less efficient and take more time to gather food, creating opportunities for nest-invading parasites. Females deal with the problem by reducing the amount of food stored, with a corresponding shift in the sex ratio towards the less demanding sons (Seidelmann, 2006). In the case of the Australian endemic banksia bee (Hylaeus alcyoneus), the growing food scarcity causes the reduction of the brood’s body mass and a shift in their sex ratios. But contrary to the prevailing pattern found in bees, male banksia bees are significantly larger than females. So unsurprisingly, the energetically cheaper daughters became more abundant late in the season (Paini & Bailey, 2002). Other cavity-nesting bees have also shown declines in foraging efficiency as the season progresses, and these changes have been linked to reduced size of their offspring and shifts in their sex ratios.

Seasonal variation in sex ratio of emerging banksia bee adults (sex ratio = number of males/total number of emerging adults) © Paini & Bailey, 2002.

A male banksia bee. They become progressively scarce in coastal areas of southern Australia as the season advances © The Packer Lab, Wikimedia Commons.

The facultative, condition-dependent shift of sex ratios is a remarkable survival tool. The power to quickly tilt the offspring’s sexual balance could make the difference for a species’ success. In the non-nonsense, unforgiving great outdoors, where long-term existence hangs on the ability to adapt to changes, boys and girls are not always equally valued: these are the times when a Sophie’s choice of sorts is necessary.

JAC note:  Just to put an evolutionary-genetic gloss on this, the changes of sex ratio with environmental or other conditions are the result of evolution. That is, those individuals having genes enabling them to adjust the sex ratio in adaptive ways leave more copies of their genes than individuals who can’t adjust their offspring’s sex ratio. Or, to be even more accurate, genes that affect sex ratio in adaptive ways leave more copies of themselves than genes which can’t do that.

The journal Cell endorses the view that sex isn’t binary

March 17, 2024 • 10:00 am

In a scientific journal, especially one as prestigious as Cell, publication of a paper is a kind of endorsement of its content, for the paper has to be vetted for accuracy and cogency. This is why I say Cell “endorses” the view of the paper below, which maintains that sex isn’t binary, and in fact that the very concept of “sex” is incoherent, harmful, and should be jettisoned. This is clearly an invited paper, but the standards of accuracy and rigor should still apply. They don’t.

What makes me even more sure that Cell endorses this message is that the journal itself is woke and rejects the sex binary in instructing authors (see below). Plus the article is part of a series of five papers in the journal under “Focus on sex and gender” (May 14), all of which reflect gender activism. In rejecting the sex binary, both via this article and in its own behavior, Cell is rejecting science in favor of ideology. That’s very sad, but it’s what’s happening—and not just in biology. The ideological camel is sticking its nose into the tent of science—and actually, the whole head is now inside.

This article was written by Beans Velocci, assistant professor of History and Sociology of Science and Core Faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. There’s little doubt that its motivation is ideological because Beans goes by “they/them” and specializes in research that buttresses the thesis below. You can see Velocci’s c.v. here.

You may read this short (3.5-page) paper by clicking on the headline below, or reading the pdf here. 

First, here’s how Velocci tells us that the journal itself doesn’t agree on a scientific definition of sex:

 Some scientists are already contending with this problem. Cell itself has taken steps in that direction: the author guidelines for submission include a note addressing the multiplicity of sex. “[T]here is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex,” the guidelines point out. “‘[S]ex’ carries multiple definitions” including genetic, endocrinological, and anatomical features.

 Contributors should therefore reduce ambiguity by specifying their methods for collecting and recording sex-related data to “enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility.” The Cell guidelines are aligned with a broader conversation that names increased precision when talking about sex as a solution to these problems.

Yes, but one definition is far more universally agreed on than others, at least among biologists (last time I looked, Cell was a biology journal).  But of course if researchers don’t mean natal sex when specifying “males” and “females”, then they are obliged to tell us how they recognize people. After all, if it’s solely via “self-designation”, then we have to be careful. Even so, Cell could have said this the way I just did.

Here are the main problems with Velocci’s paper:

  1. It conflates sex differentiation, sex determination, and the definition of sex
  2. It argues, wrongly, that no progress has been made in understanding the nature and definition of biological sex
  3. Its argument is ideological rather than scientific, yet is given the trappings of science
  4. It argues that the binary nature of sex, which the author rejects, somehow erases transgender and nonbinary people
  5. And, as usual, its supposed examples that make sex nonbinary, like the long clitoris of the hyena, are wrong.  But where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!

Since the whole paper is motivated by ideology (and by now you should know what that ideology is), here are a few quotes to demonstrate the gender-activist underpinnings. Binary sex is a tool of white supremacy, for one thing!

 In the present, this means that sex—a key research variable in the life sciences, not to mention its role in structuring our everyday lives—is not a singular and stable entity. This has real, practical ramifications. On one hand, it introduces a tremendous lack of specificity and rampant imprecision to scientific research; on the other, it fuels ongoing arguments about the purportedly biological reasons that transgender (and especially nonbinary) people are not deserving of rights or do not even exist.

This of course is nonsense. The argument that sex is binary, and defined by whether you produce small mobile gametes (sperm in males) or large immobile gametes (eggs in females) has no bearing at all on whether people who are transgender or nonbinary deserve equal rights. Of course they do. (There are a very few exceptions for trangender people involving things like athletics, incarceration, or rape counseling.) Further, both transsexual and nonbinary people are, biologically, either male or female, even if they feel like they’re a mixture of both, a member of their non-natal sex, or something else.

But wait! There’s more:

Binary sex, too, continued to structure day-to-day life throughout the United States and Europe, with science serving as justification for a whole array of patriarchal and white-supremacist social arrangements. The point is this: even as scientific inquiry produced endless evidence that sex was neither straightforward to identify nor binary, sex continued to function as a foundational classification system for science and everyday life.

But the facts are the fact, even if they’re misused by bigots to denigrate people. As Steve Pinker has pointed out, we don’t say that architecture itself (or chemistry, for that matter) are bad and should be ditched because Nazis used them to construct gas chambers. But wait! There’s more:

We live in a social world that is fundamentally structured around the idea that sex is a binary, biological truth. Scientists are therefore constantly conditioned to ignore anomalies that do not fit into that scheme. Precision and rigor are incredibly important. They’re also not enough to counter hegemonic social forces.

Here Velocci argues that scientists ignore anomalies in sex (e.g., intersex or other conditions that affect secondary sexual traits) because we’re conditioned by the sex binary.  But Velocci has spent the whole paper before this arguing that there is no agreement on the definition of sex, so how can Velocci claim that the world is structured around the sex binary? At any rate, I don’t understand what Velocci means by saying that the world “ignores anomalies”. They are the subject of a huge activist literature as well as an extensive medical literature.

One more:

Questioning fundamental truths is, in its most aspirational form, the point of any knowledge-producing enterprise. Imagine what we might find out if we were to let go of a category that hundreds of years of history demonstrates to be more useful for maintaining social hierarchies than for generating scientific knowledge.

This last point not only argues that we hold onto the false sex binary because it helps reinforce the social hierarchy (e.g. “transphobia”, white supremacy, and so on), but also that it impedes the acquisition of scientific knowledge. That’s a lie, of course: we wouldn’t know about sexual selection, parental care, etc. without the binary sex definition. Finally, Velocci tells us that we should just deep-six the entire category of sex.

Here’s another of Velocci’s arguments for dumping the category (but then what do we replace it with? Nothing?):

 The answer to the question “What is sex?” is, in both theory and practice, just about everything, and therefore also nearly nothing. This exercise demonstrates that sex is an incoherent category, one that has perhaps outlived its use.

Another:

Paisley Currah noted in his recent book on government sex classification, “is what a particular state actor says it means.”

So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage.

I’m not really going into the argument for why sex is binary in all animals and plants, with exceptions being only in groups like algae and fungi. You can read or hear the arguments for it by Colin Wright, for example here and here, or read Alex Byrne’s new book Trouble With Gender. But if you’ve been reading this website, you’ll already know the arguments. In humans, only one person in 5600 (.018%) is intersex and doesn’t fit the binary. Even so, such people are not considered members of a third sex (see Alex Byrne on this issue here).  All I’ll say are two things:

First, Velocci maintains that sex is a gemisch of different things: hormones, chromosomes, secondary sexual traits like genitals or breasts, physiological phenomena like menstruation, and differential behavior like parenting and psychology.  To prove that, Velocci asks the students in class, “What is sex?”, and their answers, written on the board, look like this.

Figure 1. Diagram of student-provided responses to the question, “What is sex?”

But so what?  Velocci hasn’t given them the reason why most biologists define sex by gamete type, which is not a simple argument that can be grasped instantly. The figure shows only that sex determination and differentiation involve a lot of stuff, both upstream (incubating temperature affects sex in some turtles, and of course there is the societal determination of sex in those fricking clownfish) and downstream (most of the other traits on the chart). Like all aspects of an organism, the genetics, morphology, and physiology of traits are complicated. The figure above, as I’ve noted, conflates the definition of sex, the determination of sex, and the differentiation of organisms based on sex.

Second, Velocci implies repeatedly that all the work of scientists over the centuries has not led to any increased understanding of sex. Apparently biologists have vacillated among chromosomes, gametes, hormones, and genitals, and other stuff but in the end. . . no new understanding. This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing that this sweating professor is trying to say. After going through how sex was regarded for the last two centuries or so, Velocci says this (note the ideological slant as well):

So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage. This does not make for accurate or reproducible science. As several scientists have pointed out, these contemporary uses of sex—simultaneously attached to an oversimplified binary, yet in practice depending on a vast, rarely analyzed multiplicity—actually make it harder to understand biological variation. There are also human costs: a broader cultural idea of “biological sex” as binary, imagined to be backed by science, is routinely deployed to exclude trans and intersex people and indeed anyone with bodily characteristics that do not fit neatly into male and female norms. The status quo, built on the history sketched above, therefore generates unsound research results that falsely uphold cis- and heteronormative assumptions.

But just because ideas, concepts, and knowledge change over time doesn’t mean that the object of study is elusive, ambiguous, or incohent. As Alex Byrne said in the link above (which uses the same diversion of historical change):

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 are 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.”

Here, for example, are some of the things that we now know from using a definitional binary for “biological sex”

  1. The binary is useful in all animals and vascular plants. No other definition of sex holds for almost the entirety of the species we know. The binary is thus, except for a few groups. universal.
  2. Why natural selection has resulted in a sex binary rather than a single self-reproducing sex or in three or more sexes. No matter what produces sex, be it environment, genes, or chromosomes, the end result is always two of them
  3. The binary has utility. Without it, we cannot begin to understand how sexual selection works. And sexual selection has resulted in the following phenomena, which we pretty much understand
  • Sexual dimorphism in appearance (why males are most often the aggressive and ornamented sex
  • Sexual dimorphism in behavior (why, in humans, are males more often the risk-takers, why females are more interested in people than things,  and why males compete for females (seahorses are the exception that proves the rule
  • Why organisms care more for their relatives than for unrelated conspecifics
  • Why females are more often the caregivers of their children

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

In the end, as we wade through all Velocci’s unsound but familiar arguments, we have only casuistry motivated by ideology. Velocci’s intent is to show that because some humans feel as if they’re not male or female, or feel that they’re members of the sex other than their natal sex, then sex in nature must reflect these human feelings. This is what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”, which can be defined as the view that “whatever we see as moral or good in humans must be seen in nature as well.”

There’s even a section of the paper called “other ways of knowing”, which argues that scientists should partner with those in the humanities, including queer studies, and this partnership is the way forward:

Many of the scientists currently pushing for critical thinking about sex are engaged with STS [science and technology studies] scholars—many of us humanists and social scientists coming from disciplines like history, anthropology, and sociology, and fields like Indigenous studies, Black studies, and queer studies. We in STS are poised to offer life scientists additional conceptual and practical ways forward. Knowing the history of science is, of course, part of this equation: it shows us that knowledge production of all kinds (including the history of science!) is an iterative process, where what we know is always changing.

Well, make of that what you will, but I’d maintain that, like the definition of “species”, the definition of ” biological sex” is the purview of biologists. Yes, philosophers can help us think more clearly, and historians can tell us about the history of studies of sex, but I don’t know how indigenous studies, Black studies, or queer studies can contribute much to a concept that, in the end, is about biology. The fact that biology is thrown into a gemisch with “studies” disciplines only serves to show how ideological Velocci’s argument is.  As Alex Byrne (a philosopher who knows his biology) said of the American Scientist paper he reviewed, this Cell paper is “rubbish”, and shame on the journal for publishing it. There is no place for catering to ideological currents in a serious scientific journal, for reports about empirical discoveries should remain “institutionally” neutral.

Now, do I have to go through the other papers in Cell‘s Panoply of Horrors? If not, who will? Or should we just ignore them? That doesn’t seem wise since gender activism is infecting science in a big way, and few people criticize it.  If dumb arguments keep being made over and over again, then it seems wise to refute them over and over again.

_____________

Velocci, B. 2024 The history of sex research: Is “sex” a useful category?  Cell, online, May 14,2024.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.02.001

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:

Science, essentialism and the sex binary: an annoying new paper in Science

March 4, 2024 • 9:30 am

There are many things to criticize about this new paper in Science (one of three “woke” papers in the issue), but to me the worst is its denial of the sex binary.  For that binary, whose existence the authors even admit, is considered by them to exemplify “essentialism”—the object of the paper’s attack. By including more about variation in traits, including the sex of individuals, say the authors, there can be “a broad decrease in gender essentialist beliefs among US adolescents.” And they demonstrate this push for essentialism and neglect of trait variation by surveying genetics chapters of six high-school biology texts.

This, in other words, is an ideologically motivated paper, and it shows. And the object of its publication is a familiar one: to buttress people who see themselves as “variant” in terms of gender “nonbinary”.  But of course the “essentialist” sex binary is simply a fact of nature, and should not lead to demonization of those who feel they’re of their non-natal sex. Nature gives us no lessons about how to treat people outside the “norm.” Yes, binary people don’t feel that they’re either male or female, and that’s okay and should be respected, but you can’t say that the biological sexes in plants and animals form a spectrum. Yet that’s just what the authors say.

Now there may be something worthwhile in this paper insofar as it points out how textbooks have neglectedf genetic and environmental variation that causes differences between groups.  But whether one has to go into a long disquisition on variation in high school biology is debatable (see below for one of the confusing changes they suggest). Further, the examples of  “essentialism” they show aren’t very convincing. Finally, most of the paper is simply confusing as well as tendentious.

Click on the title below to see the short paper (four pages, the pdf is here):

I read the paper three times, and my marking-up of my copy below shows how many comments I had. I won’t bore you with most of them, though!

The authors go after what they see as three misguided views promulgated in the textbooks they surveyed:

Three basic assumptions undergird the essentialist view of sex and gender (1): (i) there is little to no variation in traits or behaviors within a sex or gender group; (ii) differences between sexes or genders are discrete—the groups do not overlap substantially in traits; and (iii) internal factors such as genes are the best explanation for all forms of variation within and between sex or gender groups. Scientific research on sex and gender is inconsistent with these assumptions (3, 4), yet they are commonly held. For example, substantial portions of US adults (≈40 to 70%) attribute gender differences in traits and behaviors to genetic causes (5).

References 3 and 4 recur throughout the paper as “evidence”. I’ve glanced at one of them, and didn’t see it saying what the authors claimed, but readers should check for themselves.  At any rate, certainly biologists recognize that these tropes are wrong. There is ample variation among individuals within a sex or gender group (the authors conflate sex and gender, and eventually combine them as “sex/gender”, which is a mistake); for nearly all traits there is substantial variation among individuals of a sex (I’ll leave gender aside for now); and, finally, saying that “internal factors such as genes are touted as “the best explanation for all forms of variation within sex or gender groups” is, to a biologist, nonsensical.  We don’t use terms like “best explanation”. If we want to look at variation within a group, we can measure the proportion of variation among individuals by a figure called the heritability, which runs from 0 (no variation in traits due to variation among individuals in their genes [religion is a likely example] to 1 (all variation among individuals is due to variation in their genes).  To say genetic or environmental variation is a “best” explanation is ridiculous because it depends on the trait, the environment, and the population.

What is  the definition of sex?  The authors first more or less admit that it’s indeed a binary based on gametes, but then say how “complex” it is, which of course sex determination, particularly with respect to secondary sexual traits is.  The first conflation is how many sexes there are, which has a simple answer, with how sex produces an individuals’s appearance and other traits, which has a complicated answer. They then conflate sex with gender, using the term “sex/gender”.  Bolding in the excerpt below is mine, and note how they confuse the definition of sex with the determination of sex through development. The former is a simple binary, while the latter is indeed complex.

Sexual reproduction generates new allelic combinations within a species (3). Sex determination is the process by which an organism develops a particular sex—the ability to produce a particular type of gamete, along with any associated phenotypic traits. This process is tremendously variable across species. In some species (such as cichlid fish), an individual’s sex can be determined by the temperature of their physical surroundings and can reverse. Some species have more than two sexes (for example, some fungi have thousands); others have more than two sex chromosomes (for example, the platypus has 10) or sex chromosomes other than X and Y (for example, birds have Z and W sex chromosomes).

But just because how gametes are produced within a species, or sex-associated traits are determined, are complex, doesn’t mean that sex isn’t a binary. It’s also a binary in animals where sex determination is produced by temperature (turtles), haploidy vs. diploidy (bees), or social environment (some fish).   They tack on “associated phenotypic traits” as part of the sex definition, which is wrong.

The conflation of the sex binary with the variation in sex-associated traits leads them to somehow implicitly dismiss the binary:

 As a result of this complexity, human sex variation is not strictly dichotomous at the biological level; rather, it is best described as a somewhat continuous, bimodal distribution (3). This biological variation intersects with the cultural practices of medical clinicians to influence sex assignment (3), often in ways that reduce the underlying biological complexity to a simpler binary: females and males. However, many intersex humans exist who blur the hard lines between males and females (3).

The proportion of individuals who are either male or female, based having the developmental equipment for making big or small gametes, is not “somewhat continuous”. It is nearly completely binary, with only 0.018% of individuals (as the authors admit, about 1 in 5600—they say 2 in 10,000—being of indeterminate sex, including intersexes). That means that 99.982% of individuals lie in the two peaks, or rather two straight lines shooting upwards.  This is not at all “somewhat continuous” it is all but binary with a teeny blip in the center. Call that “very very very very strongly bimodal” if you wish, but the proportion of indeterminate individuals is miniscule, and these individuals are not a third sex, but represent developmental anomalies. Essentialism is in effect the case here: there are only two sexes and a very few individuals of indeterminate sex.

Another mistake they make is to claim that although gender (what sex role you think you enact) is socially constructed, that means that gender has nothing to do with biology:

Altogether, nearly all trait variation that exists within and between human sexes is not what essentialism predicts, and neither is the causal source of this variation (that is, there are no genetic “essences”).

The same arguments apply to gender, perhaps even more forcefully, because gender is a socially constructed lay interpretation of the biological phenomenon of sex (3, 4). Individuals who identify as women or girls are often expected to adopt a set of socially and culturally prescribed activities, abilities, and interests that distinguish them from individuals who identify as men or boys (3, 4). Thus, differences in complex traits (such as activities, abilities, and interests) between individuals who identify as different genders have no biological basis and are instead explained by sociocultural factors (4).

But the vast majority of individuals have a “gender” that corresponds with their biological sex, with individuals showing typical sex-associated traits such as differences in aggression, risk-taking, interest in people vs. things, and so on. As Luana and I showed in our Skeptical Inquirer paper, many of these traits have an evolved genetic/biological basis. If that’s the case, then a hefty proportion of “gender roles” also have a biological component (see #2 in our paper). To say that there is no biology in gender roles is simply ludicrous.

On to the textbooks.

Variation within sex/gender groups. Using rather fuzzy and subjective criteria, the authors argue that sex and gender are presented in textbooks as essentialist, even though the sexes themselves, as a binary, are essentialist.  Gender is of course variable, but they don’t show examples of “essentialism” in gender in this paper. Here’s their analysis:

Twelve percent of paragraphs described individuals of a single sex/gender group as uniform [β = 0.12, 95% CI (0.08, 0.17)] (see SM for analytic strategy). In addition, 10% of paragraphs described individuals of a single sex/gender group as differing by type [β = 0.10, 95% CI (0.05, 0.16)]. By contrast, descriptions of continuous variation within a sex/gender group occurred in only 3% of paragraphs [β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01, 0.05)].

Note that “sex” has now become “sex/gender”. If you mix them together, then there’s a danger of textbooks conflating the sex binary with the variability of gender identification, and you wind up with a nonsensical analysis.

Variation between sex/gender groups.  Here, coding the textbook paragraphs, the authors found no tendency for textbooks show discrete differences between sex/gender groups (note again how they confuse the results by mixing “sex” and “gender”) as opposed to showing overlaps and variation.  In other words, their hypothesis of essentialism was falsified!

Sixteen percent of paragraphs described categorical differences between sex/gender groups [β = 0.16, 95% CI (0.10, 0.22)]. By contrast, only 11% of paragraphs described similarities or overlaps across sex/gender groups [β = 0.11, 95% CI (0.06, 0.16)]. The difference between these code proportions was not statistically significant [β = 0.05, 95% CI (-0.01, 0.11)].

But they decide the difference is significant anyway—because there is overlap between the groups, ergo no essentialism:

Yet because sex/gender groups overlap considerably on most complex traits (3, 4), even this seemingly balanced presentation of similarities and categorical differences is more consistent with essentialism than with the scientific consensus on sex and gender.

They try to save their hypothesis even though the statistics don’t support it.

Internal versus external explanations.  What the authors are looking for here are whether textbooks describe variation within and between “sex/gender” groups as having an internal explanation (genetic) or external explanations (presumably environmental and social factors). Here they find mostly internalist explanations—that is, their hypothesis of textbooks being “essentialist” is confirmed:

Internal explanations were given in 12% of paragraphs [β = 0.12, 95% CI (0.06, 0.20)]. External explanations were given in only 1% of paragraphs [β = 0.01, 95% CI (0.003, 0.02)]. This difference was statistically significant [β = 0.11, 95% CI (0.05, 0.19)].

To see how they coded textbook passages as essentialist (or internalist), and how the authors recommend that textbooks be rewritten, here’s their table (click to enlarge):

It’s true that tongue-rolling is no longer seen as a dominant, single-gene allele, so correcting that is okay. Note, though the authors’ admission (yellow) that intersex individuals are rare, so that one really falls more into “discreteness” rather than “continuity”.

The second paragraph from the textbook (lower left) is much better than the authors’ revision (lower right), particularly for recessive traits, because the “suggested” version is simply confusing. They throw in “variation” simply because, as any geneticist knows, the severity of a genetic disease varies among people. Yet they see the revised version as infinitely superior to the textbook version because their revision less uniform and more continuous. I find it overly complicated and confusing.

The lesson the authors draw from looking at single chapters of six high-school biology textbooks, then, is that essentialism is the norm, and that’s bad. But I suspect, given how they treated “variation between sex/gender groups”, and their conflation of sex and gender, that there’s some cherry-picking going on. At any rate, having taught genetics, though not in high school, I think this paper is making a great deal out of relatively little. It is paragraphs like these that make me think the motive is ideological, and thus the textbooks must be altered to conform with the authors’ preferred ideology:

One limitation of our study is that we did not search for sex and gender terms outside of genetics chapters. We may have thus underidentified messages that are inconsistent with essentialism about sex and gender. However, qualitative studies that have analyzed the nongenetics chapters of biology textbooks by using the lenses of feminist and queer theory—which were developed to uncover and counter gender essentialism—do not support this optimistic view (15).

Readers who are interested in this claim can read reference 15 here.

The authors continuously argue that textbooks are “inconsistent with scientific reality”, as if the sex binary were not “scientific reality” (notice that they concentrate on sex and gender, which itself is telling). Their object is clearly to show that everything forms a spectrum, and so any variation in gender (I won’t admit that there’s variation in sex, except for the 0.018% of indeterminate individuals) is fine. And it is fine, but not because biology is always a spectrum.

Here’s another paragraph

When describing sex/gender groups as uniform, or as composed of different types, biology textbooks are expressing essentialist views that are inconsistent with scientific reality: It is continuous variation that is the norm within sex and gender groups. When describing between-group variation, biology textbooks discuss differences and similarities at similar rates. In actuality, sex and gender groups overlap substantially on most complex traits (3, 4). Rather than reflecting this reality, textbooks paint a picture that is consistent with the essentialist notion that sex and gender groups are discrete.

Note that again they get themselves into the weeds by conflating sex (which is discrete) with gender (which isn’t). They themselves promulgate confusion in this paper which, in the end, seems to me to make no progress in achieving social justice. Yes, the authors correct a few biological errors in textbooks, like the genetics of tongue rolling, but it takes a while for high-school texts to catch up to recent research.

I received a link to this paper from several colleagues I respect, all of them more or less outraged by the sloppy methodology, tendentious analysis, and ideological overtones.

I’ll quote one colleague’s view:

This paper on sex and gender in biology textbooks was recommended to me yesterday, and I was baffled by it.  First, I was baffled that a paper with such a short and simple statistical analysis would be published in a journal like Science. Second, I was baffled that the paper promotes a blank-slateist view os sex differences which considers differences between men and women to be the product of “social construction” (note how they support their claims about gender by repeatedly citing the same two papers). Finally, I think the alleged examples of “essentialism” that they cite from biology textbooks are no such thing, and in fact I could not detect mistakes in the paragraphs that they showed.
The worst part is that they claim that their misguided views are the “consensus” in biology, while only citing a few papers that support their views. I think this paper is a perfect example of how ideology is perverting science and science education, because it uses gender theory in place of mainstream biology.

But of course colleagues who liked the paper (I know of none) wouldn’t be likely to send me the link and beef about thje paper!

I should add that there’s one more paper in this series of three, but I won’t bother you with it. The title and link are below, click if you can bear reading more of this stuff. The ideological leaning of the triumvirate is clear:

Chicago cop, citing gender precedent and seeking affirmative-action benefits, prevented from changing race to person of color from Caucasian

February 29, 2024 • 9:30 am

This event was more or less inevitable given that organizations can allow people to change their genders (a social construct) but won’t allow them to change their race (another social construct).  That is, many people and groups approve of “transgenderism” but strongly oppose “transracialism”.

It’s a mystery to me why, if you feel you’re of a different sex or gender than your natal sex, it’s okay—and often approved by authorities—to be identified by your assumed gender. But if you truly feel that you were born as a member of the “wrong” race, as was, famously, Rachel Dolezal in Spokane, Washington, then you are not allowed to identify as a member of  your chosen race. When Dolezal was outed as white by her family, she was demonized, universally excoriated, and then fired from her job as chapter president of the local NAACP.

Defending the idea that you could be sincerely “transracial,” philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel compared transracialism with both transsexualism and transgenderism in an article in the journal Hypatia, and ignited a huge academic firestorm. As I wrote at the time:

. . . . more than 400 academics have signed an open letter to the editor of Hypatia calling for the article to be retracted. “Our concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement; we can only conclude that there has been a failure in the review process, and one that painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege,” the letter says.

The journal’s Facebook apology responded to those concerns by saying that it would be looking closely at its editorial processes to make sure they are more inclusive of transfeminists and feminists of color, whom the journal said had been particularly harmed by the article. The journal also apologized for its initial response to the backlash, saying that an earlier Facebook post had “also caused harm, primarily by characterizing the outrage that met the article’s publication as mere ‘dialogue’ that the article was ‘sparking.’ We want to state clearly that we regret that the post was made.”

But Tuvel’s article wasn’t pulled, and it’s still up (see first link above).  I defended her because I think Tuvel’s argument for tranracialism, assuming someone’s desire to change races is sincere, showed clear and strong philosophical parallels with transgenderism. But for some reason I still can’t fathom, even progressive whites oppose transracialism, including the kind like Dolezal’s in which one identifies as the member of a group said to be oppressed. The differential response must have something to do, I think, with an assumed “sacredness” of racial minority status.

Well, according to the New York Post, a Chicago cop named Muhammad Yusuf, who initially gave his race as “Caucasian,” but could easily be considered a person of color, has decided to change his racial designation so he can take advantages of perks given to PoCs.  It’s not a ruse, for he really is a minority-group member, and after joining the force he realized that he might have been promoted faster had he provided a more accurate racial designation. Click on the screenshot below to see the archived Post article:

The cops, by the way, refused to change his racial designation even though Yusuf gave them the results of a 23andMe test showing his genome had a non-Caucasian origin. So Yusuf is suing them.

Excerpts:

A Chicago police officer is suing the city to change his race on his official records after the department said it would allow officers to freely change their gender to match their identity.

Mohammad Yusuf, 43, said in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed last week that he is looking to change from “Caucasian” as he “currently identifies as Egyptian and African American.” However, the Chicago Police Department is not allowing him to change his race.

The lawsuit comes as the department allows an officer’s “gender identity [to be] corrected to match their lived experience,” Yusuf’s lawsuit alleges.

And, the decision is impacting Yusuf’s professional advancement, he claims.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Chicago Police Department for a statement, and it said: “We do not comment on pending litigation.”

According to the lawsuit, Yusuf alleges that he has been repeatedly overlooked for promotions due to his “Caucasian” race. These promotions, he claims, have been given to other minority applicants with only very few going to Caucasian applicants.

The 20-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department points in his lawsuit to CPD’s promotion system that “particularly” benefits “minority candidates,” even if they did not score well on promotional exams.

Yusuf specifically claims he “scored in the first promotional tier” on the sergeant’s exam in 2019. But, he was not promoted then and has still not received such a promotion.

Since that time, he alleges in the lawsuit to have seen “over 75 Merit Promotions to sergeant,” with “less than five” going to candidates who identify as Caucasian.

“Despite Yusuf’s exemplary qualifications and the purported race-neutral policy of the Merit System, Yusuf has been repeatedly bypassed for promotion in favor of less qualified candidates, based on their race, specifically African American officers, some of whom had disciplinary issues and were not suitable for the responsibilities of a sergeant,” Yusuf said in his complaint.

Yusuf said he first joined the force in 2004 and, at the time, the department only offered three race selections: Caucasian, Black and Hispanic. He chose “Caucasian” and it was put on his official record, he said.

Now, the department offers “over nine” different racial designations for incoming officers. But, it is stopping him from changing his race to more accurately reflect his identity due to a “blanket prohibition” against changing an officer’s race, the legal filing said.

. . . . After repeated rejections, Yusuf claims he was told he would first have to produce a DNA test before his race could be changed on his record. He then provided the results of a “23 and Me” genetic test, which showed his heritage and race, but the department ultimately said it was “not possible” to change his official record, he claims.

So Yusef is suing Chicago for a Title V civil rights violation.  He has a good case, for if the Police Department allows a gender (or sex) transition, it should allow a race transition, so long as it’s sincere. And although Yusef is doing this for reasons of ambition, he nevertheless has a good claims, for he’s not really Caucasian.  Further, gender is said to be a social construct, and so is race, so what’s the difference? (Race isn’t really a pure social construct, for even the wonky “traditional” races like black, white, and East Asian have diagnostic genetic/biological differences if you do a multivariant DNA test.)

At any rate, Yusef seems to have a valid claim and I’m curious about whether the Police Department, which surely does practice a form of affirmative action for promotion, will fold.

And speaking as an observer of human nature, I still don’t understand why transracialism, particularly like the case above—but also in the case of Rachel Dolezal—is considered a no-no by both members of minorities and white “progressives.”

Below: Rachel Dolezal (photo taken from Wikipedia), speaking at a civil rights rally before being outed:

Aaron Robert Kathman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

 

h/t: Jez