Did you know that Richard Dawkins began his career as an ethologist? He got his Ph.D. studying animal behavior under Niko Tinbergen. If you’re an ethologist, you might study things like courtship behavior and parental investment and feeding strategies etc., etc., etc. Dawkins studied how animals make choices.
That was in 1966. Apparently he’s forgotten all that ever since.
Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by “assignment at birth”, but by gamete size. It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish. But it is universally DEFINED by the binary distinction between sperms and eggs.
You may argue about “gender” if you wish (biologists have better things to do) but sex is a true binary, one of rather few in biology.
Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily. To say that biologists have better things to do than study gender is ridiculous. Every biologist who looks at the plumage of birds or watches the courtship of spiders is studying a phenomenon far removed from basic gamete formation yet is an indispensable, unavoidable, intrinsic consequence of sex in that species…and the animal isn’t getting a semen count before engaging in it.
This is true of human biology, too. People don’t have to check their gonads before engaging in all kinds of sexual behaviors; they would rather not have to worry about the sex police telling them what they can and can’t do, and generally they disregard the prudes in private anyway. You can be a feminine man or a masculine woman, or any shade in between or beyond, and gametes don’t come into play at all, except in reproduction. Reproduction is not the sole function of sex.
Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.
P.S. Dawkins is not an embryologist. No, sex isn’t solely determined by chromosomes embryologically, but by a battery of influences that shape the embryo, including a few genes on some chromosomes. He is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t recognize that the fluidity of sex determination mechanisms suggests that maybe biology isn’t as rigid as he thinks?
Yet another stupid white man trying to protect some sense of superiority for himself.
Dawkins is no longer a scientist, Dawkins is a cult leader who is angry that his cult is shrinking and keeps trying to horn in on other people’s cults.
The tweet starts out like a Trump tweet.
People, tough guys, come up to Dawkins with tears in their eyes and say, “Sir… THANK YOU.”
So Dawkins agrees with Rutherford–all science is either physics or sperm collecting.
That isn’t true and never has been.
It’s something bigots like Dawkins thought up a year or so ago, in a desperate search for something to use to…claim that sex is a binary.
It’s a rationalization, not a fact.
Dawkin’s is arguing about gender while claiming he isn’t. This is pathetic lying.
His claim that sex is binary is irrelevant anyway. Trans people are people whose gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. That is the whole point of why they are termed “Trans”.
His claim that biologists have “better things to do”, is meaningless. He doesn’t speak for all biologists or even most of them. Only himself.
We are biologists and we choose to speak about gender.
We also choose to point out that Dr. Richard Dawkins is both wrong and showing signs of forgetting most of the biology he once knew.
Um…didn’t Dawkins used to say sex was determined by chromosomes?
I’m all in favor of people like PZ calling out bullshit, lies, insanity and con-games wherever they’re found; but we need to acknowledge that Dawkins is suffering from long-known cognitive decline, and should no longer be treated as fully competent. (That’s why his tweet starts out like a Trump tweet — his mind has declined to Trump’s level.) From now on, the public response to Dawkins should be only one word: “Goodbye.” Let’s save our energy for those who are still fully responsible and don’t have Dawkins’ excuse.
Also, people like Dawkins and Coyne are radicalized by being terminally online and getting exposed to rightwing propaganda. Coyne rants on almost weekly basis about DEI, the new scary threat to the western civizliation, manufactured by rightwing trolls. It’s absolutely sad.
So I guess there has to be three bathrooms, one for those who ovulate, one for those who ejaculate, and one for those who do neither, whether because they’re young or they’re old or some other reason. It’s maybe about a third of the human population in each category. And if it comes to pass that people must present their gamete before going into the proper bathroom, everybody will opt out and go in the no-gamete bathroom, and then we’ll finally have unisex bathrooms.
@9: And then everyone will stop talking about silly woke stuff like gender iden– wait, unisex bathrooms? NO, THAT’S WOKENESS AND WE CAN’T LET THAT HAPPEN!!
Nowadays, I just let people go on and on with whatever terrible analogy/long-winded diatribe/scientifically reductionist and/or illiterate pseudo-argument they like and, instead of dealing with whatever they’ve said point-by-point, I just say, “And yet trans people continue to exist. Weird. Almost like it’s something you can’t debate them out of.”
I read his stuff in the 1980s and liked it. I have not kept up with his career ( but I get he seems to have been attracted to regressive ideas). While English-language science authors usually get a lot of coverage in Sweden the atheist struggle is a nonissue here.
I will try not to sound patronising; when people feel secure they do not spend much time worrying, reducing the need for the nominal comfort religion can give. Religion simply just…evaporated during my lifetime.
When the State Church finally separated from the State after literally a millennium, the reaction was a yawn.
I mention all this, because the evaporation of old belief systems can come faster than you think. And the obsession with gender is another side of the same coin. Changes in attitudes in Sweden have come very fast. It is like those phase changes in physics.
Next week: Biologist Richard Dawkins arrested for harrasing a woman in the subway: “Show me your gamtetes now !”
Yes, but based on observed behavior, one would assume that male seahorses are female because they give birth to the young. The reason they are defined as males is because they produce sperm. They just happen to take the eggs from the female to brood them until hatching.
There are also species of octopus in which the sexes are so similar, even they can’t tell them apart. So if they encounter one another, they try to mate, only to find out then they are the same sex.
If we were to discover an unknown Phylum, which looked completely different from any other living organisms, but reproduced sexually with distinct differences between the two sexes, we would define the males and females based on the gametes they produced. Once that was determined, then we could use size, colour, palps, morphology, behaviour, chromosomes, or whatever other differences they had.
The point Dawkins was making is that gamete production is the primary method to initially determine sex, and everything else is secondary based on that. You don’t need to keep checking gametes after you have made the distinction, and you are being disingenuous to claim otherwise..
Holy crap. Hasn’t Dawkins heard of androgen insensitivity syndrome (formerly called testicular feminization syndrome), in which a fetus with XY chromosomes (genetically a “male”) develops phenotypically as a female because of resistance to the actions of androgens during development?
… and back to gametes. Genitals, gametes, genitals…
That isn’t true and never has been.
It isn’t even that old a claim.
It is a year or two old and was invented by Transphobes and Trans haters to claim that sex in a binary.
A lot of people on this blog are biologists including myself and PZ Myers, the host. In 40 years I never heard that claim that sex is defined by gamete size until last year.
We’ve already discussed the problems with that claim, which you and Dawkins ignored.
Huge numbers of the population don’t even produce gametes.
You aren’t being disingenuous.
You are being a low level boring troll and lying.
Sex is way larger and way more complicated than just gamete size and production. That also has been explained in this very post and you ignored that too.
Why is the claim that sex is a binary, which it isn’t, all of the sudden being made by a small minority of mostly old white male biologists?
This was never even a minor issue in biology up until a year ago.
No good reason.
It’s simply a way for Transphobes and Trans haters to attempt to insult, demonize, and erase Trans people.
Proof: The few people making that claim are invariably Transphobes and Trans haters. The fear and hate came first and the rationalizations came later.
It’s also rather stupid and has no relevance to what they are attempting to do.
Trans people are the result of a gender-sex assigned at birth conflict.
The Trans haters usually follow up their made up claim by denying that gender identity even exists.
Which is just another lie in a series of lies.
Most unicellular eukaryotes, and some multicellular fungi and algae, are isogamous. All their gametes are the same size, and they may come in anywhere from one to thousands of mating types. So Dawkins is wrong on that.
Many animals, including some fish like hamlets, produce two types of gametes simultaneously, and a few humans certainly have gonadal tissue of the right types to do so. So Dawkins is wrong on that too.
Many humans and other animals produce no gametes. So Dawkins is wrong in that way as well.
Many of the fish that change sex due to social factors are fertile adults when this happens, which means their sex is not “embryologically DETERMINED” at all. So Dawkins continues to be wrong there.
Even if you ignore personal identity, social sex assignment, individual behavior, external and internal anatomy, physiology and hormone chemistry, even if you only allow the criterion of “what gametes does your body produce?”, the sex binary is not universal within biology. Not even for humans.
If you want to bully trans people and intersex people and nonbinary people, just skip to the part where you call them weird and push them down and steal their lunch money. There’s no need to lie about the relevant science.
Here is what mainstream biologists have to say about sex and gender.
This is from the Society for the Study of Evolution, an old and large biology research organization.
They don’t agree at all with Dawkins.
Read it yourself.
Continue reading for a copy of the letter sent to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Secretary Alex Azar
Department of Health and Human Services
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Avenue SW., Room 445-G
Washington, DC 2020
Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity
Bruce Bagemihl
Homosexuality and other traits are common in the animal kingdom. So sex is not just about genes or sperm and eggs.It is all a lot more complex than that. Those goofballs who tell us that there are only two sexes, blah, blah, blah, have little understanding about any of this. A certain level of homosexuality among various species including homo sapiens is normal. Whether it is the lesbian Japanese macaques, or gay men and women, or bisexuals, it is a feature of nature.
Did you know that sex is a binary.
Except for the 33% of non insect animal species that are hermaphrodites that produce both gametes.
Sex is a binary if you also exclude plants, many of which are also hermaphrodites.
And fungi which can have hundreds or thousands of sexes.
Don’t forget to exclude all the isogamous species that have gametes that all look the same.
It doesn’t take long to see that this claim that sex is a binary and based on gamete size is both meaningless and wrong.
It’s not supported by anything in biology.
Human males don’t even begin to produce sperm until the onset of puberty. So, if sex is determined at birth, it would have to be defined by the distinction between testes and ovaries. And none of this has fuck all to do with gender identification.
Dawkins remains deliberately ignorant of the research on sex characteristics, which are linked in the SciAm blog, so he can deny that sex is a spectrum. If he was actually a scientist, he would read the published, peer-reviewed studies and see if they proved their conclusions (they do.)
And, lotharloo @8, you’re so right about Coyne shrieking that DEI will ruin everything, especially science! He needs to read the last reference in the SciAm article, which shows that diversity in researchers is directly responsible for better science.
feralboy12 @5:
An amusing play on a misunderstood quote. It’s widely used as an example of physicists dissing other sciences (which some foolish physicists actually do). But the probable intent (arrived at via rarely used concepts like “context”) was to insult theoretical physicists (like me!).
https://www.patreon.com/posts/did-rutherford-23413944
@17 it’s bacon-imbecile, he is like pschaeffer, a troll so stupid and without any rational capability that he is hardly a person, more like a poorly lubed flesh-robot
“Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly” so no change for recent Dawkins then.
@26 Ad hominem much?
“A study published by Leonard Sax reports that this figure includes conditions such as late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia and XXY/Klinefelter syndrome which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex; Sax states, “if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” stating the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018%. This means that for every 5,500 babies born, one either has sex chromosomes that do not match their appearance, or the appearance is so ambiguous that it is not clear whether the baby is male or female.”
So even if you want to argue sex isn’t binary, it is extremely bimodal in humans. For those who aren’t clear, this is about sex, NOT gender.
Even if transgenderism was a choice, and it’s not, why is that so bad? I use to think transphobia was a fear of men not conforming to the standard gender role, but now I’m starting to think transphobes are afraid they’ll some how be transformed into another gender.
So because Bacon posts an unsourced person with an opinion about what to call intersex we have to what?
I don’t care what that person thinks about strict definitions and adherence without any of the variables and specific reasoning. It’s about counting all of the variations to me, and the intrusion of gametes and genitals into non-reproductive parts of our social structures. Including non-reproductive sex. It’s the same sensitivity as far as I’m concerned.
Just because the underlying biology might be pointed mostly towards a bimodal lump in an individual doesn’t make the different bits go away.
It’s not about sex or gender. It’s about human rights and not discriminating against other humans even if they are “extremely” in the minority.
And that’s not a debate invitation for Bacon.They would have already had the variables and reasoning, which are still people that exist and want acknowledgement.
Therefore, the threshold for concern is when 0.018% of the population has a morphology you don’t like. Got it.
I guess all that matters in romance is gametes. Do you swipe right on photos of sperm or ova?
Being largely ignorant of biology, but not ignorant of language, it strikes me that there is a huge difference between “true binary” (Dawkins) and “extremely bimodal”.
A true binary might be something like “fermion” versus “boson”, but things can get complicated. Is a helium atom a boson or a fermion? Depends on the isotope. Helium-3 is a fermion, while helium-4 is a boson. But they’re both helium!
So the answer to “is helium a boson or a fermion?” is “yes”.
I think people are a bit more complicated than atoms.
Phew, thanks for the insight! Far too many intersex people wake up every day foolishly believing themselves to be normal.
Yes, Bacon@28, sex is bimodal, aka a spectrum. Not binary, as Dawkins wrongly insists. It is Dawkins (and Coyne) who throws out the 0.018% of the population as “not large enough to count”. Meaning, they’re just freaks, not-fully-human genetic defects who don’t have a sex, so that Dawkins can claim his binary.
But, 0.018% of eight billion is 1.44 million people. Not “too few to count”, as Dawkins puts it, is it? He can lie with small numbers like 0.018% and 1 out of 5500 births, but the actual number of people between the two modes is not insignificant. Sex is a spectrum.
@36 garnetstar:
But good sex is a BBC micro.
That number isn’t even close to being right.
If you have to start making up numbers, you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
The number of intersex people is more like 1.7% of the population.
I see where that .018% comes from. One guy who throws out most of the intersex people. Leonard Sax is an obscure crackpot and a vicious right wingnut hater. This guy is about the least reliable person anyone can cite.
Leonard Sax is a gender essentialist, a misogynist, and a serious propagandist for right wingnut and fundie xian views from several centuries ago.
When someone cites a troll like Leonard Sax, you know you are dealing with an idiotic troll.
@28 There is not much to do in your case, every sex or gender post you decide to pollute with your nonsense, heaps of studies and statements posted by scientists and whole societies about it being non-binary ,showing hows and whys, and you spew the same nonsense over and over, it is just a way to cope woith you, call it “ad hominem ” call it “boo hoo internet guy mean”, I do not care. And of course , dumb as you are, you will not even touch the question of ethics: why is it so important what “true” intersex now is? Even if “true” intersex was well below .01 % (the question here is obvious:why do you again need to have a rigid definition of it, this can only be because you again arbitrarily exclude some factors that you deem unimportant somehow cause you are very gifted of curse , like a piece of bacon) this still would not make sex binary, not even concerning endosex individuals and it would for sure not justify any discrimination against gender diverse or trans people, as is . If you insist sex is only gametes , if you insist that Medival Richie and you and your flock of selected “experts” who confirm your reductive brain feces are holding da twoof, go for it, but please do not appear every now and then to play your same old stinky tape, it is not at all entertaining
@38 raven:
It’s 0.018% if you put the whole global population on the denominator, but only count on the numerator people in places where they won’t just fucking kill you for even conducting the poll.
I’d never heard of Leonard Sax until his fake number for intersex people came up on a Google search.
Leonard Sax is an obscure lunatic fringe quack that very few people have even heard of. He is a nobody in science and medicine.
And, there are so many Red Flags and obvious things wrong with his garbage work that it would take pages to explain.
A few highlights.
.1. Sax believes in gender isolated education. For no obvious reason except that lady brains are too fragile to I don’t know, go to college and university I guess.
He lies to support this position.
“Education Week: In sum, Leonard Sax’s commentary did not provide an accurate portrait of trends in women’s attainment in science and engineering. Women still have a way to go before achieving parity in computer science, physics, and engineering, but there’s little evidence that gender-based education a la Sax is going to get us there.
.2. Book Review–“Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences”
Posted byDr. Andrew Joseph PegodaMay 22, 2018
Last night I read Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences published by Penguin Books. The author–Leonard Sax–has a Ph.D. and a M.D., so I expected a monograph of quality.
However, I’ve never read an academic book more offensive, problematic, inaccurate, queerphobic, transphobic, sexist, hateful, opinionated. I’m still in shock.
“I’m still in schock.” So am I. It is scary that mental defectives like this guy walk among us in our society.
I’ve wasted 10 minutes of my life on this lunatic fringer, Leonard Sax.
That is way more than he is worth.
This is what the Transphobes/Trans haters do.
They just make up data and publish it in obscure places and then it gets cited by other Transphobes and Trans haters
.1. We saw that with ROGD, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.
One Trans hating MD made up a bunch of data and published a paper. Every reputable researcher in the field tore it apart and rejected it.
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria doesn’t even exist and never did.
.2. Leonard Sax, who is an open Trans hater himself, did the same thing. His number for intersex people isn’t accepted by anyone in the field.
It just exist to trolls like the sick in head Bacon can drop it on websites and hope no one knows how to use Google.
BTW, Bacon, just so you know. You are a lying, hate filled troll and you aren’t even here for any real reason. No one here believes your lies. Just acting out the sickness in your mind.
@Prax #19:
There very much is a need to lie about it: they want to manipulate the rest of us into not calling them out on their bigotry and their spiteful behaviour.
This is your aperiodic reminder that Dawkins is a signatory to the “Women’s Declaration of Sex-Based Rights,” an open petition that, among other things, calls for governments to ban scientific research into sex organs, under the reasoning that any research about sex organs might be used to help trans people and that makes it bad enough to ban.
I don’t think anyone looking at that fact can in good faith say Dawkins is an authority on the science of sex.
@183231bcb #44, I thought you were kidding.
So they’re parasitizing legitimate concerns over the ethics of various cases of surrogacy and egg donation, in order to condemn an area of research that hasn’t actually existed since 1931, thereby screwing over surrogates, egg donors and all the women who could benefit from fertility research. All of this so that some hypothetical trans lady in the 24th century won’t be able to have a kid.
That’s so feminist!
Ahem…
https://www.treehugger.com/animals-can-change-their-sex-4869361
I have a dream that one day my children will be judged by the content of their character, and not the content of their underwear
With apologies to Dr King…
@19. Prax : “If you want to bully trans people and intersex people and nonbinary people, just skip to the part where you call them weird and push them down and steal their lunch money. There’s no need to lie about the relevant science.””
But, but, but then you look like you’re just being jerks and bullies for no rational or justifiable reason and look really bad. Gotta find a way to do it whilst not looking like just hateful people which .. yeah. Sorry.
Alternative of NOT being hateful and accepting others, well, some just donnn’wanna!!! Wah.
@8. lotharloo :
Truth.
Well, at leats he’s moved on from Critical race Theory and Cultural marxism and “woke.” Although I guess DEI is the new recihwing way of saying that & meaning anything w edon’t like..
I can’t believe this “BACONSQAUDgaming” person/bot/whatever isn’t even smart enough to get theyself a less ridiculous-sounding screen-name. Seriously, what does “BACONSQAUDgaming” even mean? Where did they even get it? A gamer who likes bacon and can’t even spell “squad?” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!
BaconSQUAD did not reference that quote because he doesn’t want you to know that it came from trawling the internet for any paper that would support his position without regard for whether the paper was good or well regarded. I’m also suspicious that he didn’t want readers to realise that it was written for the sole purpose of making intersex seem so rare as to not be worth talking about (completely ignoring, of course, the fact that unless the frequency is zero, then rarity is meaningless for existential definitions). Here is the original source of the quote:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
And here is the IHRA’s response: https://isna.org/faq/conditions/
In short, Sax came up with an inconsistent, arbitrary definition for the purpose of excluding the most common known intersex conditions, just so he could claim that intersex is much rarer than the best published estimate based on review of the literature.
There’s more at the IHRA site, including an excellent explanation of why these kind of weasel-word definitions are not helpful to people’s actual lives, but I would like to point out that they have been very generous to Sax, probably because their PR people discouraged them from pointing out that Sax lied. There is no other way to put it. He lied. Blatantly. Contrary to his statement, the vast majority of medical professionals consider Klinefelter’s, Turner’s and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia to be intersex conditions and always have. (The term ‘intersex’ was coined by German researchers decades before Turner’s, Klinefelter’s, and CAH were even reported in the literature. Also, ‘intersex’ originally came from research on gypsy moths — so the idea that all this gender variation is somehow ‘unnatural’ is wrongheaded.)
I would also point out the hypocrisy of Bacon’s using this quote — which explicitly defines sex by chromosome — in the process of defending Dawkins’ use of the gamete-size definition, a definition in recent use solely because the gender essentialists were being hammered by the scientific evidence on chromosomal sex. It’s almost as if the argument doesn’t matter so long as it promotes transphobic rhetoric!
Good rebuttal Chris. Not that it matters but I think the level of intersex cases is higher than documented. As a cytogeneticist I picked up many XX ” males” and “XY ” females. DSD referrals were also very common.
fergal@52–
Between the difficulty of defining intersex precisely, the difficulty of identifying all affected individuals (doctors having a quick look at external genitalia immediately after birth is not the robust method transphobes think it is), and the stigmatisation of intersex people, I agree that most published figures probably underestimate prevalence.
sorry about the misspelt name, fergl!
I don’t think it’s true that the idea of classifying animals as male or female according to gamete size and mobility is a thing that was made up in the last few years. E.g., I just did a little experiment: I pulled biology books off my shelf, looked up “sex” in the index, and looked to see if there was anything like a definition of a male/female distinction in them. The first thing I found that was approximately that was in “The origins of life” by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary (apologies to any Hungarians for the missing accents), published in 1999. “In animals, males produce small motile gametes (sperm) and femals large non-motile ones (eggs)”.
S&S don’t quite say “and this is the definition of ‘male’ and ‘female'” and they certainly don’t yell as loudly about it as some people have been doing recently; I think the insistence that there’s One True Way to define sex and this is it is probably new. But it’s not like the anti-trans brigade just invented a definition that no one had been using before.
(It’s unfortunate that in the ongoing culture war over transgender people everyone seems determined to try to win arguments by definition, which basically never actually gives good results.)
gjm11 @55, the problem is that the transphobes are sticking to the old definition of sex (gametes only) instead of reading the enormous body of published in peer-reviewed quality journals that have proven the old definition inadequate and established that sex is a bimodal distribution, based on a large number of factors. Deliberate ignorance.
Just like creationists, in fact! In the moon dust fracas, they clung to a dust-falling-rate published in 1959 to insist that dust on the moon must be many feet thick. They wholly ignored newer, more accurate, data that showed that the moon’s dust layer should be just what it actually is.
If you want to claim you’re thinking scientifically, you must know the modern literature and acknowledge when it proves that the old theories are inadequate and the new ones have become scientific facts.
In the moon dust fracas, they clung to a dust-falling-rate published in 1959 to insist that dust on the moon must be many feet thick.
I remember reading “A Fall of Moondust” by Arthur C. Clarke, which assumed there were sizeable lakes or seas of such dust on the Moon, and that in a vacuum the dust would behave more like a liquid. Colonists would ride tour-boats over the dust (IIRC some sort of hydrofoil-esque propulsion). Ten one day a gas bubble is released from the depths, and it comes up right under one of those tour-boats, which then sort of capsizes and sinks under the dust; and all the people on it are forced to figure out how to stay alive and how to actually get out if/when another vehicle came to rescue them. Not the best novel he wrote, but I did like the problem-solving process that went on after Clarke had set the situation up.
It’s been known for decades that there are two gametes, one large and one small.
This isn’t new at all.
Nor is it controversial.
.1. What is new is the incredible reductionism that reduces a complicated many layered phenomenon like sex and gender to…two gametes that look different. In some organisms some of the time. Isogamy also exists and 33% of all non insect animal species are hermaphrodites.
This is about a year old and is clearly a club invented by Transphobes to beat Trans people up with and erase them.
.2. What is also new is this incredible life and death struggle to claim that sex is binary and not bimodal.
This is also new and about a year old. It was invented by Transphobes to use as a weapon to erase Trans people.
They also erase Intersexes, but you know, they are just collateral damage, and since they are in the way, it is their own fault.
A year ago, no one worried about whether sex was binary or bimodal.
The difference isn’t all that great and it didn’t change much of anything.
It was a minor detail that almost no one even thought of.
Until the Transphobes, in their desperate search to rationalize their hate and fear, made it into an issue by trying to use this to beat up and erase…Trans people.
Transphobes really are vicious and desperate. Their other tactic is mostly just to lie and make up data such as ROGD and denying that intersexes even exist.
I think there’s space between (1) “most kinds of animals have two kinds of gametes, one large and one small” and (3) “there is One True Definition of sex, which is in terms of which of those sorts of gametes one’s body produces or would produce”. Everyone agrees that #1 is true and has been known for ages. The anti-trans brigade is very keen to claim #3. But I think there’s also something like (2) “most kinds of animals have [etc], and for technical purposes in biology this serves as a good definition of ‘sex’ when you need one”, and I think #2 has been around for quite a while. (Another example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423151/ from 2004: “One thing biologists do agree on is that males and females count as different sexes. And they also agree that the main difference between the two is gamete size: males produce lots of small gametes […] and females produce a few big eggs”.)
I think what’s new isn’t the idea of defining sex that way, it’s the idea that it’s terribly important that everyone must always define sex that way. Which I agree seems like it derives from wanting something to be obnoxious about trans people with.
It looks to me as if there’s been a sort of coevolution. A while ago, few people cared much about exactly how to define “sex”, though there were technical definitions for those who wanted them. As awareness of trans people became much more widespread, lots of people started talking about sex and gender and trying to figure out (usually with some sort of political motivation) what definitions to use. Initially this was mostly about gender, but more recently (1) the anti-trans brigade has become extra-insistent that Sex Is Binary, Dammit, while (2) people on the other side have become extra-insistent that Sex Is A Spectrum, Dammit. And it looks to me as if a lot of the emotional investment on both sides comes from reacting against the other side: I am having trouble seeing how any actual consequences for e.g. how individuals or organizations or states should treat trans people would follow if everyone suddenly agreed that sex is a spectrum, or if everyone suddenly agreed that sex is binary — but if your enemies are loudly insisting that sex is/isn’t binary, then of course you have to insist equally loudly that it isn’t/is.
(If everyone suddenly agreed that sex is literally absolutely binary with no exceptions, there would certainly be consequences — very bad ones — for intersex people. But I don’t think even the people screaming “sex is binary” actually believe quite that. Even Leonard Sax is prepared to admit that 0.000000000017% of people are intersex.)
This process is recent, but not quite as recent as raven@58 suggests. For instance, here’s a snapshot of an earlyish stage: here’s Jerry Coyne in late 2018 https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/10/28/sex-in-humans-may-not-be-binary-but-its-surely-bimodal/ saying: sure, human sex isn’t exactly binary, but it sure is bimodal; and here’s P Z Myers in 2019 https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2019/12/23/a-science-writer-who-doesnt-understand-the-difference-between-binary-and-bimodal/ saying: no no no, human sex isn’t binary, you fool, it’s only bimodal. But although in some sense they’re saying the same thing, albeit with very different spins, you can see that this is more or less the same argument people are having today: PZ is arguing against someone who claims “human sex is binary”, and Jerry is arguing against someone who (I think — most of the op-ed in question is behind the NYT login wall) claims something along the lines of “human sex is a multifactorial spectrum-y thing and it makes no sense to think of it as binary”. Which isn’t so far from the arguments that are going on today.
@garnetstar #56, I think it’s more complicated than that. For some purposes the gamete-size definition is an excellent one.
Suppose you’re an evolutionary biologist investigating the origins of the complicated multifaced thing that we call sex. Then it’s interesting and important and insightful to realise that in some sense all the complicated multifaceted stuff is downstream of a simple gamete-size distinction, and that that distinction gives you a nice unified way of classifying organisms in any anisogamous species.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to decide who gets to use which public bathrooms, or compete in which sporting events, then the gamete-size definition is junk and won’t help you at all. Different tools for different jobs.
There totally is a more-or-less binary thing, defined by gamete size and motility, that for some purposes you might want to call “sex”.
There totally is a complicated multifaceted spectrum-y thing, defined by all the different characteristics that usually go along with different gamete-size in humans, that for some other purposes you might want to call “sex”.
There’s no contradiction whatsoever in the existence of both. And neither of them really tells us anything much about any of the real-world questions people get angry at one another about when it comes to trans people. The answers to those depend on empirical questions like “if trans women use women’s public bathrooms, how often will they do anything harmful?” (seems like it’s vanishingly rare) and “if trans women are instead required to use men’s public bathrooms, how will they feel about it?” (terrible) and “if trans women are required to use men’s public bathrooms, how often will bad things happen to them there?” (I think much more often than they will do anything bad if they use women’s bathrooms) and so forth. So far as I can tell, none of those things would change if it turned out that physical sexual characteristics in humans were either much more binary or much more spectrum-y than they actually are.
At some point individual experience of sex and gender language becomes relevant even if anatomy from sets of people is itself is a place to anchor things.
I experience the struggle with the words, and I don’t personally care if we keep these specific ones around or not (and I acknowledge my fellow meat computers have a range of different experiences). We are sensitive to anatomy in language. The differences between how profanity works here are like variables based on the sensitivities of others.
I see the existence of “fuck” as significant and wonder at the sensitivity in others while having none of my own.
Sure there is an anatomy but how the words are used and felt beyond sterile anatomy matter. The range of non-literal use and policing matters. Rowling displaying a willingness to go to jail for misgendering, an act on another person, for example. Harassment, needless except for the display.
#60: No. The first distinction would have been molecular markers to distinguish compatible mating types. The gamete size distinction would have come along later.
@PZ #62 I wasn’t saying that gamete size differences are the very first steps towards differentiated sexes. Only that the sex differences we see now are all downstream of the gamete-size distinction.
Maybe that’s wrong — I’m not a biologist and may have got the wrong end of some stick somewhere — but unless I’m all confused it’s a separate question from what other things may have happened on the way to those differing gamete sizes.
Forrest Valkai has a video on this very topic.
@gjm11
I don’t have gametes at all. How does the binary classification you claim exists and has uses classify me?
@183231bcb #64, I think the usual dodge is to say something like (1) go by whatever gametes the organism in question has previously produced or will in the future produce, and (2) if that doesn’t give a definite answer but there’s a definite answer to “which sort of gamete is it nearest to producing?” then use that, and (3) if that doesn’t give an answer then congratulations, you’ve got a special case that doesn’t fit the classification. That’s why it’s only “more-or-less binary”.
As I understand it, the people who find this classification useful aren’t using it directly for practical purposes — its point is to give a unifying framework when you want to talk about the phenomenon of sex differentiation more broadly, across species. If you specifically want to know the sex of a spider or a bird or a human being or whatever, usually you look at other things.
For most purposes, when you want to know one of those things, you also want a different notion of sex. And all these notions of sex will also have special cases where they don’t deliver a definite answer, just as the gamete-size one does, and that’s fine for everyone except foolish people who need everything to be black and white.
gjm11, NO. You must accept the latest proven scientific literature, no matter if the old definition had one or two correct aspects. Even if you’re not anti-trans and have an ulterior motive, the newer, more correct definition is what is right.
Chemist have completely stopped using the planetary model of the atom, even though it has some correct aspects and predicts some atomic behavior correctly and we used that definition for at least more than a decade. But, the newer Schrodinger model definitely proved, in the newer scientific literature, to be more accurate, and that is the correct definition until some other definition is proved in the literature to be more accurate. Even though the planetary model has some correct features, like gametes in the sex definition, anyone who used (let alone insisted on) the planetary model as the best or the easiest description would be laughed out of science. Even freshman chemistry teaches the Schrodinger model.
And, BTW, Jerry Coyne has changed his mind, and now goes around shrieking that sex is defined only by gametes, and therefore it is a “scientific fact” that there are only two sexes. He actually said that the distribution between the two modes is “too small to count in defining sex” and should be thrown out.
The latest data that the scientific literature has proved is scientific fact, end of story.
Definitions aren’t the sort of thing that can be correct or incorrect[1]. They can be more or less useful for a particular purpose. The difference between the “planetary” model of the atom and Schroedinger’s isn’t a matter of definition; the two models say actually different things about the world. It might have been the case that electrons are like tiny little billiard balls flying around the nucleus on well-defined orbits, but as it happens they aren’t, and Schroedinger’s model gets that right where the solar-system model gets it wrong.
The difference between “sex is defined by gametes” and “sex is defined by chromosomes” and “sex is defined by dozens of complex interacting things” isn’t that sort of difference. It’s not that someone who says “sex is defined by gamete size” and someone who says “sex is defined by gamete size and chromosomes and morphology of the fully-grown organism and and and and” have different opinions about what sorts of organisms exist, or what characteristics they have. It’s that they’re choosing different aspects of those organisms to focus on for their particular purposes.
[1] Though of course you can be incorrect about a definition. If someone says “transcription is what happens when DNA codons are interpreted as specifying amino acids” they’re just wrong about how the term “transcription” is used. If someone says “we call an organism male if it has large less-mobile gametes”, they’re just wrong: no one has ever used that definition.
I am, as already mentioned, not a biologist. But so far as I can tell the “gametic” notion of sex hasn’t in fact been shown to be useless. (Though it certainly is useless for many purposes, as I already said.) A bit of searching for recent biology textbooks that talk about sex turns up, e.g., Understanding Reproduction by Fusco & Minelli, published last year by Cambridge University Press. First they talk just about gametes. “Gamete dimorphism may come in different degrees. At one extreme, the two types of gamete are similar in shape and function (e.g., both being flagellated and motile) but one of the two, indicated in Figure 4.1 as the female gamete, is much larger than the other, indicated as the male gamete. […] At the other extreme, gamete dimorphism involves both size and shape. The larger (female) gamete is immobile and generally full of nutritional reserves, while the male gamete is much smaller and usually mobile.” And then, later in the chapter, the organisms themselves: “In separate-sex species, the fundamental asymmetry between male and female gametes extends to the male and female individuals that produce them”. So this notion of sex is still being used in a context where it’s appropriate by at least some actual biologists as recently as last year.
Again, I am very much not saying that this definition is a good one for any purpose other than surveying the phenomenon of sex across multiple species. If you want to understand sex in humans, or in spiders, you can’t and shouldn’t just talk about gametes.
And I am certainly not saying that the possibility of giving this sort of very simple definition of sex when surveying the phenomenon of sexual reproduction across the whole of biology means (e.g.) anything about what fraction of people are intersex, or how they ought to be treated, or what anyone ought to think about trans people, or any of that nonsense. Human beings are complicated, sex in human beings is complicated, gender is complicated, and no one (other than maybe a few bigots) is well served by pretending that what’s technically convenient for one purpose in biology gives you a licence to ignore that complexity.
(Yes, I am aware that Jerry Coyne has grown more extreme on this stuff over time. That’s an unfortunate thing that tends to happen to everyone in a culture war.)
OH FFs, Read what real biologists have to say about sex determination.
You don’t have to look too hard to find out.
As I’ve pointed out already, PZ Myers and others on this thread are…real biologists and at least as qualified as Dawkins is to comment on his fake claim Sex is Binary.
This is from the Society for the Study of Evolution.
A mainstream biology group that has…3,000 members.
Today, SSE’s membership includes over 3,000 students and professionals in a variety of career paths and stages in the evolutionary biology community.
Continue reading for a copy of the letter sent to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Secretary Alex Azar
Department of Health and Human Services
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Avenue SW., Room 445-G
Washington, DC 2020
Yeah, I already posted this at #20.
Some people just don’t like to read comments longer than a few sentences.
@68
A)So, not binary.
B)Actually, if you talk to transmisics like the troll in the next thread, the most common dodge is to use creationism: what gametes is your body “intended” to produce. Sometimes it’s “intended by evolution.”
@raven #69
I assume you’re addressing me, but I’m confused because I never claimed (nor do I believe) anything at all like “there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait determined by genitalia at birth”. Gender isn’t about genitalia (though there is a rather interesting etymological connection…), nor is it the same thing as sex, nor are genitalia the same as gametes.
(“Look, they say ‘sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum.” Yes, and they immediately attach a footnote explaining that here they are talking about “the multi-dimensional aspects that underlie male-ness and female-ness” — because in different contexts “sex” means different things. I agree with every word[1] of what they wrote, and if you expected me not to then either I wasn’t clear enough or you weren’t reading carefully enough or both; to whatever extent it was the former, my apologies.)
[1] Maybe not quite every word. I think “backs up” is unfortunately ambiguous and while I strongly agree that science doesn’t support the idea that any such definition is adequate to capture the reality of sex in humans, I think science perfectly well permits using simple binary definitions in particular contexts where they’re appropriate. I suspect that the authors of the letter would agree with that if asked in so many words, but of course I don’t know for sure.
@183231bcb #70
(a) Right: “more-or-less binary” is how I described it. It isn’t a perfect binary; pretty much nothing is, and even though the whole point of this definition is to make a nice simple clean distinction (in those species where it makes any sense; of course it’s no use for isogamous species) there are cases where it doesn’t work.
(And, again, the point of this distinction isn’t to give a tool for classifying individual organisms you might come across. It’s a systematizing thing, gesturing at what’s common across sex differences in lots of otherwise-radically-different organisms.)
(b) Maybe that’s common among people whose real goal is to be obnoxious to/about trans people. I wouldn’t expect it to be very popular among actual biologists. But, I dunno, it’s not that uncommon to use teleological language for shorthand purposes. What it would be shorthand for is pretty much my #2, I think.
Er, at the end there I don’t mean to imply that “actual biologists” are never “people whose real goal is to be obnoxious to/about trans people”; e.g., I fear that Messrs Dawkins and Coyne have both slid into that category, though I don’t think they started out that way. But I don’t think most biologists have that goal and if you asked a random sample of biologists I wouldn’t expect most of them to like that sort of teleological language.
gjm11, instead of pulling textbooks off the shelf, please read the literature on sex in humans. You can insist on your definition all you want, but in ignorance of the literature you can’t possibly come to an informed opinion.
Learn the scientific facts, there is no other way to assess science. Your opinion in ignorance of the facts is useless.
Textbooks aren’t necessarily a reliable source in fast moving fields.
They usually lag the field by years or longer because they are based on the published literature.
Here is a simple summary on current views of sex in humans.
Dawkins hates this article which tells you it must be good.
Here is a current article from the scientific literature on sex in animals and why sex isn’t binary.
It was published in November, 2023 which makes it up to date.
Really, the only biologists who claim sex is binary are a few old white male Tran haters.
I’ve already listed thousands of biologists who strongly disagree with that.
And, this issue only came up a year or so ago.
The Trans hate came first which tells you that it isn’t for a reason, It is a rationalization for their hate and an attempt to persecute and erase Trans people.
@raven #75
As I already said, it’s demonstrably not true that the idea of defining (one particular notion of) sex (for one particular sort of purpose) in terms of gamete size is new in the last year or so; it’s been around for ages, and until recently it’s been there just because some biologists find it useful; what’s new (and does I think come largely from anti-trans sentiment) is the insistence that this is the One True Definition Of Sex.
I get the impression that you’ve pigeonholed me as someone who wants human sex to be binary. That’s not so at all. Sex is complicated and multifaceted, and none of the facets is quite binary, and some of them are quite substantially not-binary.
The only things I’m pushing back against are (1) the insistence that there’s never any use for the simple more-or-less-binary notions and (2) the idea (which I think is implicit in some of what you’ve been saying) that there’s One True Notion Of Sex at all.
Simple abstractions are useful! Economists get useful mileage out of treating people as monomaniacal rational money-maximizers, even though real human beings are far more complicated than that. You can get a space probe to Neptune by modelling it and the rest of the solar system as a bunch of point-particles obeying Newton’s laws and ignoring all the smallest ones, even though Einstein superseded Newton and there are vast numbers of asteroids etc. in addition to the actual planets. Simplification always loses something (as e.g. that paper by McLaughlin et al points out), but it also gains simplicity, and simpler models are easier to work with, and sometimes the gain is worth the cost.
(The gametic definition of sex isn’t quite the same sort of thing as these: it’s a classification rather than a model, as I was at pains to point out before in response to someone else. But the advantages are similar.)
And, more broadly, when someone says “sex is binary” or “sex is bimodal” or “sex is complicated and fuzzy and multifaceted”, they’re really always talking about some particular notion of sex, and more than one is possible, and those contradictory-looking claims don’t actually contradict one another if they’re talking about different things.
Again, I’m not actually a biologist and maybe it really does turn out that the simplification in gamete-sex always turns out to cost more than it gains. But I’m not persuaded of that by the things that have been posted here saying “look, sex is complicated” — because they aren’t making that argument, they’re saying that when you think about sex you need to be aware of its complexity, which of course is very true. But that doesn’t mean that for particular purposes it can’t be useful to work with a simpler notion that does well enough for those purposes!
I would also rather not see an otherwise-useful scientific tool made unusable just because some bigots have decided they like it. (You can see that that’s a major motivation in e.g. the Scientific American article and the McLaughlin et al paper — when you’re making a scientific proposal purely on its scientific merits, you don’t need to draw attention to how it relates to current culture-war topics, as those do.)
Anyway, this discussion is running pretty long and beginning to repeat itself. I suggest we leave it here?
Yes, just leave yourself where you are, ignorant of the scientific literature and why your definition is not useful. After all, Dawkins prefers willful ignorance too, you’re just following in his footsteps.
gjm11, I personally get what you’re communicating. Quite a reasonable set of comments, I think.
FWTW.
As I already said, it’s demonstrably not true that the idea of defining (one particular notion of) sex (for one particular sort of purpose) in terms of gamete size is new in the last year or so; it’s been around for ages…
It’s “been around,” yes, but it’s never really been RELEVANT or USEFUL for humans. NO ONE has EVER used “gamete size” to determine what sex any other human is — determining sex at birth that way would mean an invasive, painful and probably traumatizing surgical procedure on every single newborn baby everywhere, forever. And we’d still have all the same problems we get with determining sex by just a quick look at visible genitalia. It is utterly vacuous and pointless to say “but it’s been around for AGES!” Lots of ideas have been around for even longer, but they’re so irrelevant to real human experiences as to be nonexistent. Or to put it another way, they’re “around” in some scientists’ labs or bookshelves, but they’re not “around” most ordinary people at ground-level, so they’re not really “around” most real people…except maybe when some bigot or charlatan finds them useful to defraud or discriminate against someone else.
Right, it’s not useful as a practical tool for classifying humans. That’s not what it’s for and anyone who says it is is being stupid or dishonest or both. Originally I was responding to raven’s saying “It’s something bigots like Dawkins thought up a year or so ago” and “In 40 years I never heard that claim that sex is defined by gamete size until last year.”. I agree that the recent use of the gamete-size definition is clearly politically motivated, but it was being suggested that the definition itself is a recent politically-motivated thing, and that isn’t so. That’s all.
This is a weird piece. Does Myers think sexual behavior and sex are the same thing? He seems to think that because both human sexes have crossover behaviors, then sex itself isn’t binary? What a weird argument.
Do you want to know how normal people learn that trans activist “scientists” are not actually interested in science at all? When “scientists” are like “yA BuT sEx iN hUmAnS iSn’T BiNaRy BeCaUsE cLoWnFiSh aNd SeAhOrSeS aNd eUkArYoTeS aNd sPiDeRs.”
You’re right, humans are SO similar to clownfish and seahorses. Practically indistinguishable 😂.
Sex isn’t a binary just because of crossover behaviors. Sex is not a binary because whatever metric you use, there exist and have existed human individuals that are outside of the metric. For example, with Dawkins’ “gamete size” metric, there are those who produce gametes of both sizes (true ovotestis), and those who produce no gametes at all. So what sex are they?