At the dawn of what is now called the New Atheist movement, I proudly called myself one, seeing myself as an ally in the fight against religious obscurantism. I now feel embarrassed by being identified with that label and distance myself from it. This is not because of what the label itself might signify. Labels (and language) are malleable and transitory and the meaning that I ascribed to it, that it meant that I believed that at a fundamental level, science was incompatible with anything at all supernatural which, inter alia, means that there are no gods of any kind, is something I still believe.
The problem is that New Atheists are now identified not by any definition but by a group of people who wrapped themselves with that label in the early days and thus is now associated with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, along with those who later chose to be aligned with them. Three of them (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) have been revealed to have deplorable political and social views unconnected to the ones that attracted me. I now feel that the New Atheist label cannot be reclaimed from those associations and so feel compelled to abandon it in order to avoid being grouped in with them and their views.
Dennett and Hitchens have since died but others have joined with Dawkins and Harris to become part of the culture wars, moving away from dealing just with science and religion and going on to attack postmodernism and so-called ‘woke’ ideologies that they attack in the name of science. In the process, they have started to espouse deeply reactionary views and seem to now be more at home with right wingers and even MAGA types, as can be seen by their vociferous opposition to what they consider to be censorship by the left and what they call ‘cancel culture’. Under the banner of defending free speech and science, they now defend those who have been condemned for their sexist, Islamophobic, racist, and transphobic views.
In a comment to an earlier post, Bébé Mélange pointed me to an excellent YouTube podcast by someone named Shaun that informed me of a book published in 2025 titled The War on Science: that has the subtitle Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. This book seems to have brought together all the people with those deplorable views and given them a platform to advance them
My first reaction was shock that the book is edited by Lawrence Krauss! He is a notorious sex pest and friend and defender of Jeffrey Epstein. If that isn’t enough to make you gag, read this essay where, even though I thought I knew enough about Krauss’s awful behavior, he turns out to be an even worse. How could anyone still be publicly associating with Lawrence Krauss at all, let alone asking him to edit books? And furthermore, how could any self-respecting person, let alone a ‘renowned’ scientist or scholar, be willing to sign on to contribute to a book edited by him? I figured it must be a bunch of losers desperate to get some attention or people driven by some agenda that they think this book will advance.
And so it seems. The publisher’s blurb says that topics covered are: “Free speech, victimhood, ideology, corruption of academic disciplines, cancel culture, DEI, gender, and race, and what we can do.” When I saw that list, alarm bells went off. What would immediately strike the reader is that this is the typical laundry list of right wing grievances, all the dreary culture war issues focused on by right-wingers who feel that white cis heterosexual men are being unfairly displaced from their rightful place at the top of society. What is especially extraordinary in that although this book was released six months after Trump took office for the second time, it says nothing about the massively anti-science agenda that he and his ilk like RFK Jr quickly advanced, shutting down some research programs and starting others on seemingly ideological grounds and cutting grants and funding to organizations and researchers, all of which has resulted in large numbers of scientists leaving or being fired. It is as if the book emerged in an alternate universe in which Trumpism never existed.
The essays are being advertised as being written by ‘renowned’ scientists and scholars. The word renowned is highly subjective and whether someone is or is not is very much in the eye of the beholder. As far as my eye beheld, the list is underwhelming. I recognized only a handful of names and those too as popularizers (though there is nothing wrong with that) rather than for their science or scholarly work. You can read the full list and judge for yourself: Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson.
What drives many of these authors is their anger with ‘wokeness’. That should immediately tell you that these people are aggrieved that they can no longer freely indulge in sexist, racist, and transphobic language and behavior without being called out on it. They seem to see being harshly criticized for their views as censorship by the left. It is telling that some of them (like Krauss and Ott) lost their jobs for creepy behavior towards women. I was surprised not to see torture-supporter and Islamophobe Sam Harris on the list of authors, since he seems like a natural fit for this bunch.
The video by Shaun is a detailed takedown of the book and its contributors.
He says that (like me) he was enthusiastic about the New Atheists when they first appeared on the scene before (like me again) becoming deeply disillusioned. Although the video is four hours long (!) it is utterly engrossing, as the speaker has a droll style of delivery and mixes dry wit into his carefully documented exposes of the essays and their authors. Below the video. he also helpfully gives a detailed timeline of the topics covered and the sources he used so you can go directly to those parts.
One of the views that the book strongly advocates is that sex is binary, that there are just men and women, and that there is no such category as transgender. (There is a lot of transphobia in the book.) The section of the video on transphobia that begins at the 1:29:31 mark is particularly nauseating, showing how people like Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Alan Sokal argue that transgender is a creation of postmodernist wokeness and that sex categorization is entirely binary. But arguing for the binary nature of anything requires stating both necessary and sufficient demarcation criteria so that you can definitely put anything into one or other category, never into both and never into neither. They struggle mightily to find such criteria since the usual markers such as genitals and chromosomes clearly fail to meet the need since there are cases that cannot be classified as either. Dawkins is a big proponent of finding such criteria although he immediately undercuts his own argument by qualifying his binary criteria, by saying that males and females ‘mostly’ and ‘usually’ and ‘mostly’ having the characteristics. As Shaun points out, that will not do. If you are arguing that something is binary, you cannot allow for any exceptions, however few, and there are several.
Finally they end up deciding that the male-female gamete size distinction is what distinguishes men from women, with women producing large immobile gametes (ova) and men producing small mobile ones (sperm). But here too the existence of exceptions such as intersex people undermines their argument. Dawkins argues that such cases are very few but as Shaun says, the existence of even one exception destroys the binary claim. The desperation of Dawkins and his transphobic allies to find something, anything, that will support their case that sex is binary, even in the face of counter-examples, is reminiscent of the way that flat-Earthers and creationists keep shifting the goalposts whenever the weaknesses of their case is pointed out.
If you do not have time to watch the whole video, Sarah Jones in an article titled How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science provides a similarly scathing review of the book that covers some of the same ground as Shaun, though not in as much detail.
Krauss and his collaborators have identified an “emerging threat” to science and inquiry, as he writes in an introduction to the book. What threat? Wokeness, of course. Universities prize diversity over merit, while hysterics confuse words with violence and brave truth-tellers risk cancellation.
…Most contributors, Krauss included, have railed against DEI, and critical race theory, and social justice for years. Now their arguments are shaping policy, and the casualty isn’t creationism but science itself.
…There are nearly 40 chapters in The War on Science, all pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies. Each section of the anthology addresses a different facet of the woke threat to reason, but a few common obsessions emerge: Genitals and what people do with them, Israel, DEI, and various professional insults — it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page.
Jones expands her critique to look at the origins of the New Atheist movement and how it has became part of the Trump and MAGA movement.
The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “ but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.
…The Palestine exception to free speech existed well before October 7, 2023, and trans adults and youth have experienced authoritarian repression for years. By the time Krauss and his contributors started to put this cursed anthology together, conservative-run states were forcing queer teachers into the closet and forcibly detransitioning trans minors. Some families had already fled across state lines to get health care for their children. Teachers had lost jobs and faced extra scrutiny and harassment for teaching about civil rights, or the real history of slavery, and for assigning books some parents didn’t like. If that did not register to Krauss and his collaborators as a noteworthy war on inquiry or expression, perhaps that’s because they agreed with it. Put another way: If trans people don’t deserve the right to expression, there’s nothing to see here — move along. The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms.
What is irritating is that this bunch of losers is peddling their abhorrent views in the name of science. Krauss is particularly guilty of playing the scientist card to lend credibility to his views, most famously defending Epstein by saying that “as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people” even after Epstein was found guilty of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Some of them may have scientific credentials but they are peddling the same old dreary culture war tripe of right-wing ideologues. By wrapping themselves and their deplorable views in the cloak of science, these people are tarnishing science, not defending it.
It is possible that Dawkins, Harris and others who have been closely identified with New Atheism started out with better views and then went astray for some reason but it is also possible that they always had reactionary views on various social issues but that it was only after they began to see themselves as public intellectuals and branched out into talking about things other than religion that those views were revealed.
the real surprises in the video for me were just how many of them had ties to people explicitly advancing an agenda of scientific racism, to the bell curve crowd, and the european extreme right.
i half-remembered some long ago article about the anthropologist defending university’s right to keep a collection of the skulls of indigenous people -- an article that painted her in a positive light, seemed half reasonable. a thousand year old skull being connected with a more historically recent tribe is specious, scientific use of the remains should outweigh sentimental, essentially religious use, right?
but she’s literally married to an avowed scientific racist, wallowing in the same shit. this is how being “woke” works. somebody wakes you up to nefarious shit you had slept on. i’d rather accept a religiously motivated anticolonialism than shitty science that pushes fascism, eugenics, and genocide.
A lot of us were enthused about the New Atheism. A lot of us are now shuffling our feet and feeling very embarrassed.
I was never part of or associated with or supported the New Atheist movement. I had heard of Richard Dawkins, but mostly in the context of two of his books (The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion) though I never read those. At one point a Christian who I was “debating” accused me of being a shill for Sam Harris, but that name meant nothing at the time. Though I vaguely heard of them at some point, it wasn’t until Elevatorgate that I really learned about them. At that point, the rot was on full display, and I saw nothing to be impressed by. Mostly, I was baffled by the personality cults around some of the lead figures, because that’s not something I ever associated with atheism.
I suspect that, regardless of their actual age and whether they were directly involved in New Atheism, all of the people involved in this book are relics of an era when organized atheism was all about middle class cishet White people, and mostly men. And they inherited the biases and cultural sensibilities of the typical person who could afford to be openly atheist if they were one. This needs to fade into irrelevancy, if not die outright.
I have always been a simple ‘old’ atheist. It is a non-issue for me.
What they don’t say out loud about the cisnormative binary is that they consider people who don’t fit it to not be people. That’s why they don’t care about the exceptions, because they’re happy to abuse or murder us to maintain the binary
Ooh nostalgia time. I never had this problem since I have never identified as an Atheist. But being anti-religion , the rhetoric of the “new ” atheists and the willingness to challenge religion publicly did have a lot of appeal. There was also a sense of hope that the old power/religion structures of oppression of women, minorities , and everyone non conforming would finally be challenged. But after a few months the realization that quite a few of the new Atheists seemed to be completely devoid of empathy and kindness made me pause. And also a growing realization that people like Dawkins seemed to just be using the oppression of women as a tool to bash other cultures while actively reinforcing stereotypes.
A turning point for me finally was reading End of faith (a really bad book!) by Sam Harris and realizing that Harris does a lot of “your facts are nothing compared to my hypothetical scenarios” -- a creationist ploy if I ever saw one. Then we also had free speech absolutist and simultaneous ban master extraordinaire Jerry Coyne signing petitions to have people fired for opinions expressed on their personal blog ( with clear disclaimers that the opinion is theirs not their employers) that science and evolution are compatible. The social justice fracas , Elevatorgate and L’Affaire Shermer were the final straws.
… this bunch of losers is peddling their abhorrent views in the name of science.
Quite deplorable, but part of a long tradition: slave-holders, anti-Semites, Heinrich Himmler, anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, and a whole slew of crackpots and malefactors have left their jackboot tracks on that trail.
yuppp, and it’s been motivated reasoning leading to bad science on the subject of race for as long as science has existed. i guess these asswipes can at least claim an “intellectual” pedigree.
One of the most persistent and silly arguments, made all the more silly by how easily avoidable it is. Change the phrasing -- “there are two sexes” -- and refrain from the trap of defending “binary” as a term. I am wearied by all the times I have seen an otherwise sophisticated communicator be taken into that semantic trap.
There is a good bit in one of David Attenborough’s books (Life on Earth, IIRC) where he talks about the controversy that arose among European naturalists in the late 1700s when the first reports of montremes (i.e., mammals like the duck-billed platypus and the echidna) started coming back from Australia. Mammals didn’t lay eggs! The reports were mistaken or hoaxes! It was only when a platypus specimen was shot with eggs in its oviduct that the reports began to be believed. Attenborough uses this to point out that terms like “mammal” are human categories that arise from us generalising from observation. The map is not the territory. “Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist” makes as much sense as “Monotreme Exclusive Radical Naturalist”.
Dawkins is an interesting example to me of an author who has espoused views which are reprehensible, but are not obvious (and may not even exist) in some of their published works. I still have The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor’s Tale on my shelf, and I have no intention of removing them as I think they are well-written, thought-provocative, works. It may well be that I’m missing some subtlety in the prose which espouses misogyny or white privilege, but I tend to doubt it. Sub-liminal means sub-liminal, and actual experiments on subliminal messaging show little, or no, impact on the human psyche. I cannot judge if these books are at all revolutionary, The Selfish Gene has a reputation as being a revolutionary idea in evolutionary biology, but it Dawkins may have simply been a popularizer of an idea floating around already rather than an innovator.
I will say that The Selfish Gene did spark my interest into evolutionary theory. I quickly realized that while the concept of a “selfish gene” was an interesting, and important, perspective on how to view evolution, there are many others. So the concept went into my toolbox, and was pulled out when appropriate to help understand/explain phenomena which appears to be governed by similar rules. For what it’s worth, while Dawkins may have coined the word “meme” as a suggestion that symbiotics may benefit from using the tools of evolutionary biology, my additional studies into symbiotics suggested that while some of the models from evolutionary biology may have analogs in symbiotics, there isn’t a great deal of carry-over. Which is fine, that chapter in The Selfish Gene is really a throw-away thought. It is a shame that people didn’t recognize that when Dawkins coined the term he was thinking more about the old word game, telephone, and how genetic drift may relate to how phrases are modified as they pass through different minds (and different speakers), and not the incessant imitation of a inherent in a TikTok video. However, the change in meaning over time ironically falls into his own definition.
The New Atheist movement happened just at the time when I was deciding to change my view on the existence of a deity from agnostic to atheist. I firmly believe in religions, they exist. But the supernatural aspects, whether a bearded Papa in the sky or a void which erases the soul, of religion I wouldn’t immediately say were false until I spent some time looking for evidence for them. At about that time I finished my search, without finding any evidence, and started calling myself an atheist.
Shortly after that I was exposed to people who had made that journey before me, who had reached additional conclusions about what being an atheist means. Because atheism isn’t just rejection of a deity, it means that the rock which religions are founded upon is really mist. Which brings all of the moral teachings of religions, and the morality of cultures who have adopted those religions, into question. I can still call myself a cultural christian, as that is the society I am familiar with and that includes the mythology I practice, but I recognize that it is mythology. I reject those aspects which I find immoral, but because they give me some comfort and help give some meaning to my life, I retain some of the mythology. Even the overtly religious ones, I confess to enjoying singing christmas carols. But in my limited enlightenment, I will also adopt practices from other cultures, not as appropriation but in appreciation. If I espouse any philosophy it is epicureanism, in it’s original form.
At the root of all authority are the followers. Followers give up something when they accept an authority. They may give up resources (money, water, grain). They may give up freedoms (to move, to murder). They may give up thought (follow the law, obey the religion). We are all followers. In many ways we are followers because we find that by working together, and following the same rules, we can live happier, healthier lives, and so can our children, and neighbors. But we should be aware that we are following. Fervent religious belief does something which is far worse than allowing a group of people to create laws or to require a tribute of money in order to build freeways. Religion requires following a morality which may no longer be in sync with the world. Religious followers have given up their own thoughts about morality in deference to something else; a person or a text, or a person’s interpretation of a text. The sin of the 4 Horsemen of Atheism isn’t that they abandoned god, that is easy, the didn’t realize that abandoning god (the “source” of morality according to most religions) also means abandoning the morality taught by those religions and learning to think about morality for themselves. In that they failed.
@ 9 Holms
As Cat Mara says, “The map is not the territory”. “Sexes” refer to human created categories. “There are two sexes” can only be understood to mean the human created “map” has two categories. The territory (reality) shows no inclination to conform to human made models and continues to stubbornly produce individuals who conform to neither category.
We could draw a different map if we wished. We could model “sex” as purely about reprodutive ability. We could consider all prepubescents one neuter “sex”. People who ovulate another “sex”. People with spermatozoa another “sex”. Post-menopausal women another “sex”. Etc. That wouldn’t be “wrong”. It would just be a different way of drawing a map of the same underlying territory. But there would be a different number of “sexes”.
The patriarchal view of “sex” as a fixed property with two and only two classes doesn’t come from nature, but from society, and is firmly rooted in male dominant hierarchical ideology.
@Silentbob #12:
When dealing with the concept of “sex” (not gender) from a biological perspective, I don’t see this male dominant hierarchical ideology that you mention. The term sex, when discussing how mammals reproduce anyway, refers to the two sexes that mammals must combine material from in order to achieve reproduction. That doesn’t mean that non-reproductive variants don’t exist, just that no reproductive variants do. (Wikipedia tells me that parthenogenesis has been induced artificially in mice, but if it’s ever happened in humans I don’t know about it, although I might count Mary’s alleged virgin birth as one such case were there evidence that Jesus was female and the church covered it up).
When talking about other, non-mammalian, life, we already know many species in which no more than a single sex may be required (and in the realm of infinite possibility I don’t see any reason why two should be the limit). But it’s not unreasonable to categorise the number of reproductive sexes in mammals as exactly two. I agree with Holms: to refuse to refer to this setup as binary seems specious.
Bigots bring up binary sex because they think if they can convince you I am male they can get you call me a man. It’s a disingenuous argument, and you all fall for it by treating it as serious and relevant
#12 Silentbob
Cat Mara was wise to refrain from applying that aphorism to the sexes. The phrase is a reminder that we must cleave to the evidence rather than our model or prediction; if we survey land and find it disagrees with the map, we change the map. It does not mean that we can describe the terrain however we wish! The usefulness of a model hangs on its accuracy.
If you were to examine the cellular fusion at required for conception, you would characterise that as the fusion of… two cells. In organisms with fusing cells of different appearances, you would say there are… two types of fusing cell. In those organisms with distinct anatomy associated with those cells, you would say there are… two sets of anatomy. You can describe them with any combination of words and labels you wish -- other languages stand as testimony to this! -- but if your map is to be useful, it will describe two whatever-you-want-to-call-them.
In English, this can best be stated as ‘there are two sexes.’
belatedly, it occurs to me that you seem to be under the impression that intersexed bodies, humans or otherwise, contradict this statement. Rather than assume, I will ask for (dis)confirmation: is that truly your position? If so, you are mistaken. There are two sexes, male and female in English. Also! There are intersexed people, that is, people with some admixture of characteristics of the two sexes in the one body.
Holms @#15,
I am not sure that I follow the logic here.
You say that “there are two sexes” (which implies a binary classification scheme) and then proceed to say “There are intersexed people, that is, people with some admixture of characteristics of the two sexes in the one body”.
So where do intersexed people fit into that scheme? Are they in one or the other or neither or both categories?
@Mano #16:
The problem is that sex (X and Y chromosomes, binary, male and female being the reproductive adult manifestations) is easily confused with gender (man, woman, labels that don’t necessarily correlate with sex). That should answer your question Mano.
But @dangerousbeans #14 is not wrong: bigots find it easy to insist that all males (sex) are men (gender). I don’t see that pretending the issue is irrelevant helps through.
File thirteen @#17,
Sorry for seeming to be so obtuse but I’m afraid that does not answer the question which I posed to Holms which was very specific: are intersex people to be classified as male, female, neither, or both? What would be your answer?
I agree that gender is different from sex but that is not the issue here. I am just talking about the claim that sex is binary.
Mano I think the argument is that if sex is defined by gametes, in humans there are two sexes, and some people by definition between the two sexes, so it is accurate to say that there are two sexes, it just isn’t complete.
Seems I might need to expound further. This is my third comment so I’d better make it count! 🙂
In reply to @Mano #18:
In mammals there are exactly two sex chromosomes, X and Y. Most humans have two of every chromosome, include the sex chromosomes. When a mammal has XY we refer to them as male. When a mammal has XX we refer to them as female. A mammal with chromosomal abnormalities (XXX, XXY, XO etc.) is neither male nor female, and isn’t capable of (technologically unassisted) reproduction. Were you to define Intersex strictly as having chromosomal abnormalities, the answer to your question would be “Neither”.
However “Intersex” is a term that is commonly used to cover a whole variety of non-standard makeups, not just chromosomal abnormalities. Hormonal differences sometimes cause mammals with one of the “regular” two chromosomes, XX or XY, to manifest in different ways. There have been cases of males (XY) having uteruses and females (XX) having penises for example. It comes down to what you define Intersex as. In biology though, the difference is clearly defined. An XY with a uterus is still male, an XX with a penis still female, and others neither, whatever their physical characteristics might be. This is what DNA testing relies upon, because single every cell in the body contains the same DNA “recipe”* for making a body of the species that the DNA is for.
So the real answer to your question is “it depends on what you mean by Intersex”.
*assuming conjoined twinning hasn’t thrown a spanner in the works
Should we use “binary” when speaking about men and women?
Until modern times, “man” was used to refer to a human XY male and “woman” to a human XY female, and humans were considered binary. That served a scientific purpose, although there were annoying exceptions (XXY etc.). But modern technology is capable of modifying human characteristics, by drugs, surgery and so forth, so that one has characteristics notable of a gender (sic) other than their own. Consequently “man” and “woman” have become more fluid concepts to suit. I argue that the terms “male” and “female” are still useful for biological science and accurately reflect a (non-chromosomally-intersex) person’s chromosomal makeup, but “man” and “woman” no longer have to match “male” and “female”.
As a thought experiment, consider what would happen if I used CRISPR, a tool for generic modification, to modify all of Mano’s cells to replace all his Y chromosomes with X chromosomes. Initially when that happened, Mano might seem exactly the same; however in biological terms he (sic, still) would be female rather than male. Theoretically this is even close to possible with today’s technology! This would not have turned Mano into a woman though -- although biologically female, he would still be male in every visible sense, and while whatever changes might happen in Mano as a result of this are speculative, he would be unlikely to lose his male organs or develop any female ones.
In short, asserting that man and woman, as opposed to male and female, are binary, is like insisting that marriage must be reserved for male and female to procreate. When marriage was all about reproduction that may have made sense, but it is an outdated concept in the modern world.
One consequence of this is that there should be no confusion about Men’s and Women’s bathrooms since they are a social construct (gender) based on characteristics rather than determined by biological Male/Female sex.
Women’s sports
Roughly half of humanity has enjoyed a physical advantage of having had a Y chromosome through their body development, providing long-lasting physical advantages on average, notably increased strength and endurance. Is that a problem? You might argue that it’s just a fact of life, no different than the obstacles facing a 4’6″ would-be high jumper. Taking that view, some argue that there should be no women’s-only sports but only a free-for-all.
That’s a heartless view though. Humans without Y chromosomes have unjustly been treated in this world, and I think it’s one of the cases where an exception should be made. The mistake though is in the name: Women’s sports, when the term “women” is necessarily becoming more fluid. My solution to this is to break the connection from Male/Female to Man/Woman and call it something else -- Female sports? -- with the demarcation occurring along the chromosomal line. That is what has provided the advantage, not the subjective notion of whether a human wants to be man or woman or what they want to be now. This will not suit everyone, and I feel for those that wished they were born XX rather than XY, but there is no avoiding the fact that they have had a physical advantage which makes them unsuitable for selection in what should be non-Y* sports.
*At conception. CRISPR will no-doubt throw a spanner in the works here too, but I think it will be easier to codify than the current confusion.
Jazzlet @#19,
File thirteen @#20 has provided a comprehensive discussion of some of the issues.
I want to make a simpler point.
What you (i.e. Jazzlet @#19) say is perfectly reasonable. But you can ALWAYS find two markers and say that one denotes male and the other female. This used to be done with genitals (a penis denotes male and vagina denotes female) or chromosomes (XY is male and XX is female).
What makes this issue contentious is the claim that there are ONLY two sexes and that all humans fall into one or the other. In other words, that it IS complete (to use your phrasing).
It was fairly easy to show that genitalia and chromosomes did not span all humans and that there were people who did not fit into that binary.
The goalposts were then shifted to gamete sizes. But here too there are people (intersex for example) who do not fit into that binary. So we do not have sex markers that are BOTH binary AND complete.
“In mammals there are exactly two sex chromosomes, X and Y. ”
Offer not valid in rodents
“Until modern times, “man” was used to refer to a human XY male and “woman” to a human XY female, and humans were considered binary. ”
Except chromosomes weren’t known until the beginning of the 20th century. So it must have been based on something else…
And plenty of cultures had other gender structures
And that crap about sports is exactly what I predicted in 14. There’s no evidence trans women have a systematic advantage, plenty of groups do have advantages but are allowed to participate, but cisnormativity says “men” must be better so trans women are assumed to have an advantage
#16 Mano
There are anatomical, hormonal etc. characteristics that are associated with one gamete or the other, and as there are two gametes, there are two lists of associated characteristics. These are the sexes. Virtually all people have characteristics from one list or the other, not both, and so are stated to be that sex or the other. The exceptions, those people who have characteristics from both lists in the one body, are described as intersexed.
As for which sex they are, that depends on the individual (see also: how long is a piece of string?). Most intersex conditions -- all that I can think of off the top of my head -- have anatomy from one sex only (at the macro scale), and genetics from the other. In these cases, they are described as whichever sex matches their gross anatomy. There are a fair number of described intersex conditions, yet add them all together and you find this category reaches less than 0.1% of the population. Instances where a person truly cannot be described as one sex or the other are a rarity even amongst that group, but I don’t know their proportion.
As for “the claim that sex is binary”, I’ll remind you that I did not describe it that way at all, and indeed suggested phrasing it as: there are two sexes.
Ah, and then in #21 you make an even stronger statement, even further removed from my phrasing: “there are ONLY two sexes and that all humans fall into one or the other.” I hope the first part of this comment addresses that.
#22 dangerousbeans
““Until modern times, “man” was used to refer to a human XY male and “woman” to a human XY female, and humans were considered binary. ”
Except chromosomes weren’t known until the beginning of the 20th century. So it must have been based on something else.”
Yes: anatomy. See preceding reply to Mano.
Mano @ #21
I should have been clearer. What I wrote was what I think the argument being put forward, as a means of avoiding the ‘trap’ of being forced into the binary male or female box, is saying. I don’t think it’s a very good argument both because I don’t think it would work for that purpose and because I prefer labels that are nearer the messy reality, ie male, intersex, female, using intersex to cover the variety of genetic and somatic variations we know exist.
@Holms It’s a binary, it’s based on genes, except when your genes are weird then it’s based on anatomy, except when your genes are weird then it’s based on gametes, except when your gametes are weird then it’s based on chromosomes, except when your chromosomes are weird. All we know is it’s a binary and virtually all people fit it except the freaks we don’t want to consider people
The relevant thought experiment for trans inclusion is this:
If you woke up one morning to find that, by some unspecified process, you had acquired an “incorrect” set of genitals while retaining all your own secondary, tertiary and quaternary gender characteristics, should you still be welcome in spaces where you were accepted before?
I have several disagreements with your post #20, file thirteen.
Actually, those listed chromosome abnormalities are: female, male, female respectively. This is because that level of genetic information -- a simple count of chromosome type -- sex rests on the presence or absence of the Y chromosome, at least when talking about humans. Other organisms can have different sex determination systems, even amongst mammalia… best not to make big sweeping statements. Oh and fertility varies.
Perhaps most important -- those karyotypes don’t even indicate that the person is intersexed. A person with female body and XXX karyotype for instance is not intersexed at all -- because the sex indicated by both body and chromosomes are congruent. The term intersexed, if it is to mean anything at all, refers to those conditions where there is some mixture of female and male traits, or where sex is truly indeterminate. What you are thinking of is perhaps better stated as a disorder of sex development -- DSD -- which is an umbrella term for condition involving any oddity with a person’s sex characteristics, incongruity or not.
Not at all! The terms were always applied on the basis of phenotype -- macro-scale anatomy, not genetics. And as I noted in my previous reply, in cases where there is incongruity between them, we go with the phenotype. This is why, when you google various intersex conditions, many of them will be described as male or female intersex conditions.
And on that note…
No, he would still be male. Because we use phenotype rather than genotype for that.
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#25 dangerousbeans
Was that intended to be a paraphrase of my #23? If so, it is inaccurate. In particular:
“It’s binary…” -- Both posts of mine specifically avoid this wording, suggesting instead to use ‘there are two sexes’.
“it’s based on genes…” -- neither post of mine makes any reference to genes. The closest I get is mentioning genetics, but that is broader than just genes.
“…except where your genes are weird then it’s based on gametes, except when your gametes are weird then it’s based on chromosomes, except when your chromosomes are weird.” -- I wonder if this point is what tripped you. There are two contexts at play here. When describing the traits of a sexually reproducing species, sex is determined by the observed gametes. When describing a specific individual, we say they are male or female on the basis of the development of that particular body.
“All we know is it’s a binary” -- again, I specifically avoided this term. Are you deliberately mischaracterising me?
“and virtually all people fit it except the freaks we don’t want to consider people” -- At no point have I stated, implied, or relied on an implicit assumption that intersexed people are not people. Again I ask, are you deliberately mischaracterising me?
This is a short fourth comment just to correct a misleading statement I made. In my head it was clear, but it should have been better phrased.
This correction is not meant to repudiate anything anyone else said, just to clarify what I meant to say. I have been rightly called up on it a couple of times.