Green sea turtles' gender is temperature dependent

[Ekphrasis]

Surely their SEX is temp dependent? Ffs.

This isn't the feminist in me it's the biologist!

Great Barrier Reef: Warmer seas 'turning turtles female'www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42626574

Sorry, as you were....

Luckily the rest of the report uses the correct language :)

I'm doing an MSc in a biological science-based discipline at a well-regarded university and my lecturers frequently conflate sex and gender (mostly because they feel icky about saying the word 'sex' I suspect). If they can't get it right what chance does the BBC stand?!

Really?!

Pretty certain David A got it right with the sex changing fish!

Actually, I was wondering, do such creatures have xx and xy or is different?

Maybe if the weather is very nice they shrug off those practical but unappealing shells and slip into an attractive figure-hugging bikini.

Really?! Not getting how this is a feminist problem... The editor probably didn't want to print the word sex.

For fuck's sake, off all the things to get upset over....

It's pissing the biologist in me off! Pretty light hearted.

I'm very upset about climate change.

And how 'gender' is everywhere when they mean sex.

Lol naut!

But a lot of characteristics are dependent upon sex so I think it's actually pretty accurate to be fair. Gender isn't just about xy chromosomes in fact in many species it simply isn't so simple. It's not just whether you get a foof or a Willy that is a result of what is on the x or y. Bit I'm too sick to care

Just to clarify; turtles don't change sex. As with many (all?) reptiles and some fish, the sex of the offspring is affected by the temperature during incubation.

''the sex of some species ... is determined by sex chromosomes, but this is over-ridden by temperatures that are tolerable but extreme''

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination

I don't buy this idea that people don't like to say sex so say gender instead. We are living in a sex-obsessed age where the word is all over the place and spoken about more than it has probably ever been.

Jeez, even the nuns at my convent school used the word sex in biology class, not gender and that was in much more uptight times.

Really, who? I think prudishness is behind quite a bit of the language fudging.

Gosh where are you studying badidea? My lecturers seemed to relish the word sex and drag it in at any opportunity (to be fair, biology does tend to boil down to sex and genes in the end). Sperm competition was also a department speciality.

Yes really Olennas: Of course I could well be wrong of course but I do struggle to believe it. I think it is much more likely that people who use gender when sex is the appropriate word simply don't understand that the two are not interchangeable or genuinely believe they mean the same thing.

I suspect that the word "gender" may have been chosen for the article title as this would lead to more clicks, and would exploit search algorithms better.