Right of passage?

[TheFeistyFeminist]

I've just been allied with "outmoded science and prejudiced social attitudes" for holding the view that human (and all mammalian) biology is sexually dimorphic. The person is now refusing to engage further with me, despite having encouraged the discussion after I politely said we would never convince each other to change sides. Partly very angry right now and partly feeling like I have played a small part in demonstrating the weakness of the "sex is a spectrum" argument. Bringing it out into the light, for discussion in the mainstream.

"outmoded" is unusually honest. It primarily means "out of fashion", so no actual claim about truth.

In my experience, refusing to engage is often a tacit acceptance that you have made points that are not possible to refute.

It baffles me that there are scientists that are prepared to back the "sex is a spectrum" ideology.

Silly untrendy facts! Science should know its place and stay in fashion.

Of the many, many bad faith posters who have come onto the FWR board to claim that 'sex is a spectrum' and accuse us of 'ignoring the science', not one has been able to produce an actual piece of actual evidence to back up their claims. If someone has this evidence (and I mean actual evidence, not a blog post or similar), then please come forward!

Science doesn't become outmoded. Hypotheses may be refuted but that's not what this person was talking about was it.

An awful lot of science got outmoded in the Soviet Union, for example.

"A spectrum is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without steps, across a continuum."

"Spectrum: The observed distribution of a phenomenon across a range of measurement."

Spectrum works brilliantly for light, for politics (left to right) and for Gender (femininity to masculinity).

It does not work for Sex, where the presence* (male) or absence (female) of the Y chromosome creates a bimodal distribution.

*Well, at a push, you might see it as a 'spectrum' if you want to 'other' women with CAIS which would be a pretty 'prejudiced social attitude' to have towards people with DSDs.

Not much of a scientist, are they...

Even if it was a continuum, with DSDs being the intermediates, it's wouldn't be a spectrum. Mixing proportions of discrete "X" and "Y" is not moving across an axis with some concrete value changing.

I wrote a long boring colour-theory post on Ovarit about this.

TL;DR - you'd be on a red->blue fade passing through magenta. Not a rainbow.

If the factual science of sex being binary is outdated and unfashionable, then the evolution deniers need to show us the Nobel prize for this amazing, groundbreaking and revolutionary discovery that there are more than two sexes.