Anne Fausto-Sterling - Feminist Biologist

Mary Harrington says that it is the most privileged women - elite liberals - who are most keen to deny the reality of sex. The women who are working in media, creative industries, digital, knowledge based fields. Ther are often those who have most benefitted from equalities legislation and are relatively shielded from the immediate impacts of sex based differences.

That doesn't stop them from requisitioning the services of poorer women, though, when it comes to out-sourcing their domestic/childcare/ gestational requirements.

She promoted a definition of 'intersex' so broad that it means that any slight departure from the most common sexual developmental arrangements counts as intersex, allowing her to say that intersex is about 1.7% of live births, instead of the true figure of 0.0018%. Her supporters then pushed the idea that intersex is as common as red hair, for political purposes. Leonard Sax debunked the false figure in the medical literature but it's a zombie statistic - it keeps popping up in discussions

Some men don't have the hole in the penis at the tip of the glans but underneath it. Fausto-Sterling would count such a man as intersex, which is absurd. Awful woman.

She is the starting point (in the 1990s) for everyone who wants to claim that biological sex is a spectrum - because she claimed 2% are intersex - and posited five basic genders. The 2% figure was shown to be a massive over-estimate (it is about 1 in 2,500) based on a misunderstanding of all the various birth abnormalities affecting genitals. She was taken apart in the early C21 and had to find some way to retreat (hence the "joke" claim) but propagandists (like Amnesty International) still use the 2% claim. I think she is best consigned to the rubbish bin of history, along with everything she has ever written.

She calls herself a biologist.

It is about language then isn’t it? No biologist could say sex can be self defined (how does a courgette do that?).

The basic point - that there are differences in the typical ways males and females behave, and these differences exist on a spectrum - is valid, I think.

Where TRAs go wrong is in the bizarre conclusions they draw from this point.

That's a large part of Colin Wright's article above- there are a whole bunch of "these things are on a spectrum" papers, many talking about how behaviour is spread across the two sexes - but as he points out, all those papers are totally relying on there being two sexes and knowing what sex people (or animals) are (based on gametes), otherwise they wouldn't be able to analyse how the behaviour is distributed in each sex, or identify atypical behaviour.

Eg:

Importantly, the authors of this paper clearly understand that sex is rooted in gamete size. This is evident because of their ability to track instances of “conventional” verses “reversed” sex roles across species. If sex were not defined according to gametes, then “conventional” and “reversed” sex roles would be impossible to identify.

This paper unequivocally affirms the sex binary.

And there have to actually be defined sexes for you to even start talking about "gender". The sexes underpinning the concept are the only thing that stops it just being "personality".

The basic point - that there are differences in the typical ways males and females behave, and these differences exist on a spectrum - is valid, I think.

Where TRAs go wrong is in the bizarre conclusions they draw from this point. For example, that because these behavioural differences exist, the purely physical differences aren't really worth mention. Or that a male who behaves in a largely male-typical way is a woman just because he says so.

Thing that worries me is that she has serious academic credentials: Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University.

Except that's not a serious title, is it? It's like "Astronomy and Astrology Studies".

It's a bizarre association in the first place, but then I fear she takes it even further by quietly diassociating the "Studies" so she thinks she can do "Biology Studies" in the same sort of hand-wavey make-anything-up way as you can do for "Gender".

She also counts conditions such as PCOS as "intersex".

Thanks Necessary. I will be very interested when that analysis comes out from behind the paywall.

It really is ridiculous that Fausto Sterling has no remorse about what she has written being considered seriously.

She said she suggested five sexes thinking she was having a laugh, if I remember correctly. She never expected anyone to take it seriously.

She just popped up in the latest piece by Colin Wright - it's currently paywalled, but that particular exchange is recalled above the line.

https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/responding-to-a-fabulous-takedown

She said she suggested five sexes thinking she was having a laugh, if I remember correctly. She never expected anyone to take it seriously.

What she has said about DSD has been very harmful and that bit about sexual partners was disgusting.

She seems to be wedded to spreading falsehoods and probably thinks she is actually progressing the needs of the rare minority.

She’s responsible for a lot of the gender idiocy out there. Absolutely batshit and her ridiculous ideas are easily shot down. She’s neither a biologist nor a feminist.

Is she an embryologist? My colleagues inform me that they tend to be weird 😁

Are the sexes of animals and plants socially and "even the biological aspects are culturally influenced and defined"?

https://twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1230128097376243720

Think of her as a pioneer on genderist anti-science and then as a pioneer on how to disingenuously slope away from the mess they've made.

She is the woman who originally came up with the idea that there are five sexes. So she's not a very reliable source.

After she allowed this to inform much of the anti-science that sprung up over the following decade or so, she then gave an interview suggesting that her earlier position was some kind of joke on her part.

A strange and damaging individual.

And then recalculated, but was still out by more than an order of magnitude IIRC?

Fausto-Sterling is also the idiot who claimed there were as many people with DSDs as redheads.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/