On June 11, there was a special issue of Nature with several articles devoted to sex and gender. In general the two terms were conflated (often used in the phrase “sex and gender”), and most of the issue was an example of a scientific journal being ideologically captured by gender activists. For example, on this site I criticized one of the articles, “Beyond the trans/cis binary: introducing new terms will enrich gender research“, which, as so often happens in science journals, introduces new and “inclusive” terms that, in the end, turn out to be confusing and useless. As I wrote at the time
Nowhere is this more obvious than the essay below, which is not only science-free, but wholly about semantics. And useless semantics to boot, at least to my eye. The whole purpose is to introduce a new term, “gender modality,” which, the authors say, will be of great help to people who don’t identify as “male” or “female”, and keep them from being “erased”. The thing is, the other terms that fall under this rubric already exist, so grouping them as aspects of “gender modality,” a term whose definition is confusing, adds nothing to any social discourse that I can see.
To be sure, a couple of the articles emphasized that in biomedical studies one should be aware of separating males from females when that’s relevant. But if researchers don’t know that by now, I feel sorry for them. And one of the article that scientists should also take gender into account in biomedical research, something that baffles me. To wit (my emphasis)
For Alzheimer’s and many other diseases that are common causes of death, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory conditions and diabetes, a person’s sex and gender can influence their risk of developing the disease, how quickly and accurately they are diagnosed, what treatment they receive and how they fare.
If you’re a tomboy (a female with male-like behaviors), which one can consider a gender identity, does this really affect your chances of getting cancer? If so, I don’t know about it. In fact, I’m not aware that gender can influence any diseases, and no references are given, but I doubt it. (Gender may be important in psychological maladies like gender dysphoria, but that’s not what the authors mean.) This paper is one example of sex and gender, two very different things, being lumped together. Do not fall into that semantic conflation!
Perhaps it was this mixing up of sex and gender that prompted two researchers to write this newly-published letter in the journal:
In the main I agree with them, but their arguments don’t really avoid the ‘sex binary,” which is simply the observation that there are two sexes: reproductive systems that are “male” and “female”, with the definitions based on gamete size and mobility, as well as the developmental apparatus that produces eggs and sperm. There are only those two types of gametes, and that’s the case for all animals and nearly all vascular plants.
In animals, which of course include humans, sex is as close to binary as you can come, with only 0.018% of individuals being neither male nor female, but intersex. Yes, some species can change sex, as in clownfish, and some can be hermaphroditic, an individual that is both male and femal at the same time. But even functional animal (or plant) hermaphrodites still produce only the two types of gametes. And intersex individuals in humans are not a “third sex”, because they don’t produce a third type of gamete. (In our species, there has never been a case of a hermaphrodite producing both sperm and eggs.) As Griffiths and Davies wrote in 2020:
The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two different strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes.
The Griffiths and Davis paper, by the way, is a very good resource for understanding biological sex, though I think it gives away too much to those who claim that they are really members of their non-natal sex.
As for pipefish and seahorses gestating eggs (true), that is a difference in sex ROLES, not sex itself. The same goes for female hyenas that have penis-like structures: they still produce eggs and produce offspring (through that penis-like structure!), but they remain female. The sex/gamete binary is real, and it’s important because gamete size differences, universal among animals and nearly all plants, produce a whole world of evolutionary differences, the most important being sexual selection based on differences in reproductive investment. And that helps us understand the evolution of genetically-based differences in morphology and behavior between males and females. (Sexual selection also operates in plants.) The biological definition of sex is important because it’s both universal and evolutionarily enlightening, similar to the biological definition of “species” (see Chapter 1 of Speciation by Coyne and Orr).
Remember, there’s a difference between the DEFINITION of sex (given above) and the ASCERTAINMENT of sex, with the latter made using secondary sexual traits like genitalia. Importantly, the traits used for ascertainment, which include chromosome complement, aren’t always a perfect correlate with biological sex. Still, those traits are used to ASCERTAIN sex, not to “assign” it, as in the ludicrous phrase “sex assigned at birth” or worse, “gender assigned at birth”. Those phrases should be completely eliminated because they’re a sop to the ignorant. Gender, which involves how a person identifies vis-à-vis sex, and can involve a mixture of male and female traits, non-natal traits, or even nonhuman traits, is completely different from biological sex, and cannot be assigned at birth.
I sent my comments to Matthew, who added this:
The key point, of course, is that the vast majority of people are only interested in humans, where we cannot switch the kind of gametes we produce. There are no cases of this ever recorded, nor will there ever be. People can now do all sorts of things to alter their secondary sex characteristics, and – much more easily – to change their sex roles, but they can’t change the gametes they are born to produce, nor, in the case of people with disorders of sexual development, change their particular fundamental sex characteristics.
And although some species can change sex, either naturally (clownfish), or by being manipulated (crabs with parasites), they are extremely rare and I don’t know of any mammals that do this.
QED
(h/t to Matthew for finding the letter and for his comments)
I suspect you’re singing to the choir with your enfuriatingly irrefutable science and logic. The preoccupation with using neologisms to escape the indelible gravity defining binary sex reminds me of what the ingenious writer Douglas Adams said was the secret of flying unaided “Hurl yourself at the ground, and try to miss.”
I may be singing to the choir, but I hope the choir is learning something behind the song. I write about this for the same reason I wrote Why Evolution is True, which was partly to let people who already accept evolution know WHY they should accept it based on the evidence.
Similarly, I want people to know what biologists think sex is, and why a definition is important, etc. etc. There are plenty of scientists (including those who wrote in that issue of Nature) who, perhaps on ideological grounds, think sex is not binary and forms a continuum. The more we push back against this idea, while maintaining our empathy for transgender people at the same time, the more the truth will come out, and perhaps people will realize that biological sex is not a form of “transphobia.” Or so I hope.
As Goya said ‘The Sleep of Reason brings forth Monsters’. Keep singing, please, if only to drown out the cacophonous rantings of those who proclaim that men and women can change their sex.
It is Queer Theory that is being advanced as a competing Theory of Knowledge.
We all live on campus now – so, those who love the truth are eager to subject the clearest, strongest, most parsimonious Theories to rigorous refutation (as we learn here on WEIT).
I think that undoes a lot of confusion, generally.
I definitely appreciate your attention to this issue. I have learned a great deal in the past few months about it. I live in a conservative, red state. I consider myself very liberal, but have been insulated from much of the trans issues, I had my head in the sand, I guess.
So please, keep singing!
Even if we were to adopt a new definition of “sex” that accounted for variation in all different kinds of traits, we would still need terms to refer strictly to sperm- and egg-producing organisms. So why don’t we just keep using “sex”, “male”, and “female” for those purposes?
It’s obvious that their reason for changing the meanings of the terms is political. Make them invent brand new terms for their conception of “sex”, if they think it’s so important.
This is all so silly. It would be laughable if it weren’t actually kind of a frightening Lysenko-esque example of ideology eclipsing science.
The reason for trying to define sex in terms that make “behaviour” and “hormonal profile” two of many characters equal in stature to “chromosomes” is that a effeminate man who has suppressed his production of testosterone and is taking estrogen is in two real biological senses now of the female sex.
They don’t want to talk about gametes because as soon as they do the deliberate obfuscation collapses. Sometimes they deflect with, “People are more than their gametes,” or, “But you never see anyone’s gametes!”
As Bryan says, the point just is to confuse, to queer, not to explain or clarify.
Paul G. Griffiths
Hamish G. Spencer
Epistemology of the Based
(^^play on
Epistemology of the Closet
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
1990
)
The Griffiths and Spencer piece is good, and I’m glad to see that Nature published it. They could have left out the middle paragraph, but I suppose they needed to say something about the sex/gender confusion lest the piece get no attention.
Yes, I think they were afraid to say “sex is binary”, which is what their piece actually suggests.
They should have said “hermaphrodite (both sexes) and asexual (neither sex) are not sexes unto themselves”
Yes- this; the Griffiths/Spencer letter is too watered down for my tastes. And (for lurkers) – there really are NO exceptions to the binary in mammals (including humans). Everyone develops along one of the two reproductive pathways. Those pathways may get disrupted in some cases (via deleterious mutation in key genes or other insult that results in altered gene expression), but with modern methods, I’m not aware of any cases that defy classification (i.e. in which we can’t tell whether the individual would have developed to produce oocytes vs sperm). But – if there were such cases, these individuals would be incapable of reproduction and therefore not relevant to the definition of a reproductive method and its relevant classes. Put another way, to disprove the sex binary, you’d to show that there is a class of individuals who reproduce without producing one of the two established gamete types.
Thanks again Jerry and others for highlighting this issue. Unfortunately, I think this issue will aid in handing the US to the Trump/MAGA crowd, as it’s an instance where left-leaning folks are demonstrably wrong/anti-science.
I agree.
When teaching this material, I studiously avoid the term “intersex” for this reason. And not only because the term is now somewhat politically incorrect.
If sexes are defined by gamete production, there is no such thing as “intersex”. You can’t be *partway between* producing eggs and sperm. You produce either eggs or sperm (or both or neither).
“Differences in sexual development” is the politically correct term for “intersex”, and it’s also more accurate biologically. A person is still unambiguously male or female (or hermaphrodite or asexual) based on gamete production, but they may develop other phenotypic traits that are normally associated with the opposite sex.
Honestly, without understanding sex as being binary, I don’t get how people make sense of any of this. They are not thinking clearly, possibly intentionally.
As an added benefit, the binary gametic definition of sex also avoids uncomfortable ideas like a man being “more male” because he is taller, or a woman being “less female” because she has some facial hair.
There’s that cannard about the Inuit having 25 different words for snow. Now we have a hundred or so for the alphabet people. Is this supposed to enlighten us and create a kinder more inclusive world? I suppose the idea of exposing kids to this when they themselves are just getting used to the idea of being boys or girls is to normalize it so this will happen. One jr hs teacher in Davis, where I live, has a poster of 57 different gender identities on their classroom wall. Naturally, each has it’s own flag and colors. I think someone should create trading cards or super hero action figures on this topic.
Imagine a game where the transphobes and Islamophobes are fighting each other until the trans exclusionary radical feminists who have now joined red brigade, align themselves with a faction of antifa. This is ludicrous.
It could possibly be stopped quickly if there were enough of the unorganized masses to declare themselves transexual for a month and start using the wrong …er correct bathrooms, sports teams, etc.
The super hero action figures could have detachable parts. Sort of like Mx. Potato Head.
And sorry for overcommenting but I couldn’t resist this one.
“In fact, I’m not aware that gender can influence any diseases, and no references are given, but I doubt it.”
Jack Turban had a go at explaining the biology of transgenderism in the New York Times a couple days ago. With references!
“The most basic part of gender identity is what I call our transcendent sense of gender. In a way that goes beyond language, people often just feel male or female…As is the case with many emotions, it’s hard to describe this transcendent feeling in words. But it is the foundation of our gender identity, the scaffolding we’re born with. Research, including studies focused on twins, suggests these transcendent gender feelings have a strong innate biological basis.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/gender-identity-communication.html
So basically a gender soul that’s transcendent, emotional, and can’t be expressed in words but definitely exists when we’re born and has a biological basis that’s shared among everyone who “feels male” or “feels female”.
Turban’s last sentence includes his best shot at the biological basis for transgender identity. One is a twin study in which twins tend to have the same gender identity. But the article is in a crap journal called “International Journal of Transgenderism” that I can’t access.
doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2013.750222
The other is a genetics study that claims to scan the parts of the genome involved in sexually dimorphic brain development and find genetic variants in trans people that could explain their gender identity.
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53500-y
But the study is DOA: instead of finding, for example, genetic markers typical of female brains in the genomes of male trans people (which would be consistent with Turban’s claim of a transcendent gender identity), the study instead finds new mutations in these trans people that aren’t typical of members of the other sex. [edit to add: most of these new rare mutations affect the structure of the protein in a way that would make the protein non-functional, but the authors go to a lot of trouble not to describe these mutations the way a normal geneticist would do as “deleterious”] So this isn’t any kind of evidence of being born in the wrong body, or of Ellen Page having a male brain. The kicker is that some of these relatively rare mutations in genes expressed in the brain were shared among pairs of trans individuals in the study. In other words, the study identifies the possible genetic basis for unique syndromes of psychiatric disease (possibly many slightly different diseases) grouped together under gender dysphoria. But it doesn’t identify the genetic basis for a transcendent gender identity.
Ironically, such research will eventually turn transgenderism back into a disease instead of an identity, like cancers that we now know have a vast number of different genetic causes that lead to phenotypically similar (not identical) disease. I predict the “born in the wrong body” folx will regret this line of discovery, and will wish they had stuck with gnostic language about essences.
Mike, that’s probably as good a definition of “gender identity” as I’ve seen and it’s still crap. This nebulous, indescribable, inborn “sense of being male or female” is supposed to take proud place among scientific theories while the rich body of evidence for children being bombarded with constant cultural messages about how boys and girls ought to think and behave differently is ignored. It reminds me of how people will insist that God is necessary for science or morals or brick making and then go on to define God as “That which is beyond our comprehension.” Yeah, I see how that fits.
I would like to look to evolution to explain how this pure “inner sense of being male or female” developed outside of reproductive sex. Was it a mutation? What was the selective pressure? What sort of reproductive advantage did it give? It seems to me that a large, comprehensive explanation for how things got to be the way they are is going to have trouble dealing with this transcendent form of gender identity.
A half-dozen psychiatrists have submitted a letter rebutting Dr. Turban’s formulation. If the Times doesn’t print it, you’ll know the fix is in.
@Sastra on what’s ignored yes we’re all bombarded with gender role stereotypes that dudes like Turban never address.
About how evolution could help understand all this I often think of this study
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53500-y
which does the most important work I know of to explain the evolutionary origins and maintenance of same-sex sexual attraction in humans. I find the study very convincing, mainly because it has real theory behind it.
tl;dr there are lots of common genetic variants in human populations that contribute to attraction to same-sex partners; if you get a few of those genetic variants from your parents you’re more sexually attractive than average; if you get a lot of them you’re gay.
But nobody is trying to do anything similar wrt transgenderism. I think the effort would fail because transgenderism can’t be objectively identified or quantified the way same-sex sexual attraction can and because it seems transgenderism is not one thing but instead a galaxy of different psychiatric disorders associated with different suites of new deleterious mutations.
@Lesie please follow up on that letter (and how you know about it?). Would be v. interested.
And if the results didn’t accord with ideology, the trans activists would claim that the trans subjects weren’t “really” trans and should have been vetted by activists. This in the same breath that trans identity can’t be refuted and the claim has to be accepted on its face in all cases.
As to the letter, omertà for now. I wanted only to alert readers of Turban’s piece to watch for the letter, which these practising psychiatrists have had the courage to put their names to.
Turban is one of the people involved in a recent attempt to cast doubt on the Cass Review. This was put out by the “Integrity Project”, an outfit at Yale Law School, dedicated to defending the kind of “gender affirmation” treatment of young people with gender dysphoria that was investigated and subjected to criticism in Hilary Cass’s investigation and report.
great post. They may also find that possibly causative variants are in the same loci associated with (other) psychiatric disease/conditions, which would work against their message. Moreover, most advocates I see argue for self-identification – that is, I think they really don’t want a diagnostic test. Finally, I always feel obligated to point out that acceptance in the form advocates want will never happen – that is, people are never are going to widely regard any sub-class of males as women nor any sub-group of females as men in a meaningful sense (i.e. as that class for long-term relationships).
“They may also find that possibly causative variants are in the same loci associated with (other) psychiatric disease/conditions, which would work against their message.”
Yes. A similar model with many genes each of small effect accounts for the evolutionary maintenance of psychiatric diseases on the autism-schizophrenia spectrum.
Crespi B, Badcock C. Psychosis and autism as diametrical disorders of the social brain. Behav Brain Sci. 2008; 31: 241–61. doi:10.1017/S0140525X08004214
And as we all know around here, people with autism are vastly over-represented among the clients of clinics that treat gender dysphoria.
Kathleen Stock, in her book Material Girls, lists four common usages of the word ‘gender’ – one of course being a synonym for biological sex.
Since trans rights activists love to mix and match these, often in the same sentence, I always have to ask what they mean when they use the word ‘gender.’
consider that the glorification of mental disorders is on mainstream social media. The cause celebre must relate to the explosion in trans identities. Either that or forever chemicals are crushing endocrine function.