Please help shed light on sex/gender debate in science

[YahdahYahdayYoo]

I have a PhD in biology but left research in my 20s and haven't kept up with the research since. Unfortunately, I've been spending the last day or two down a rabbit hole of discovery and depression. My once much beloved sphere has been shredded by DEI. We all knew Scientific American has been captured since that special issue a few years ago. It turns out now Cell and Nature are on to it declaring 'biological sex' difficult and not inclusive.

From Cell this year!
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1036931

Nature 2015
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”

Cell 2024
https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(24)00122-3
The history of sex research: Is “sex” a useful category?

Answer: no

However, this article is later cited by a scientist whose career has focused on sex differences. The author does suitable head bowing to the DEI lobby but comes out strongly in favour of biological sex given the atrocious history of overlooking the female sex category in scientific and medical research.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01205-2

I simply cannot believe we're in a place where sex is a spectrum and 'we can't know what sex someone is' has become cannon knowledge. Thank goodness for Richard Dawkins. That man might have been bolshy and annoying over his crusade against religion but we need all his oratory skills and insights to fight this plague. I really had no idea this has spread so far and so deep and so high (and I've been following this board for years - GI is a gift that keeps on giving 🙄).

Can someone explain where/why biologists went wrong because I missed this one

My daughter is a biology graduate and thinks JKRowling is a transphobe 🙁 I think she buys into the gender is a spectrum rather than sex. I have been very surprised that scientific journals have been captured in this way.

I'm too afraid to contact old colleagues. I don't think I could cope knowing they had flipped iyswim. Someone is teaching our undergraduates this nonsense.

Yes, aging medical biochemist here and I can’t believe the current situation. I even used to do some freelance work for Nature, which was then a highly respected journal.
i just quote Robert Winston to anyone who asks - if people don’t believe him, there’s no hope!

Was it Kathleen Stock who said she was told by the head of biology at the once fabulous university of York that sex is a spectrum? I wonder if a survey or investigation could be done examining GI beliefs being taught in biological/medical departments around the country? FOIs perhaps? Once this becomes accepted 'knowledge' we are truly f**ked. It all begins with the redefinition of sex.

"Cannon" or "canon"? Given this is a discussion about the weaponising of trashy science, "cannon" is a wonderful eggcorn.

That 2015 Nature article has been widely misrepresented. It's a good description of the parameters that make up sex, and the author makes a compelling case for people with complex DSDs to choose their sex. What else can they do, if their dna is inconsistent with their genitals, or their body type doesn't match their gonads? They're entitled to choose the medical treatment and sex category that works for them and this is literally the only situation where gender identity (a subjective feeling about one's sex) matters.

Trans people (whose sex-related parameters are all perfectly aligned as either M or F) have hijacked this rare situation and used it to argue for everyone to have this, completely unnecessary, choice.

One sex produces large gametes, one sex produces small gametes. Even in the very rare cases where humans are born with tissue that could produce both it still does not often happen. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10265381/#:~:text=Individuals%20with%20a%20condition%20known,are%20unable%20to%20produce%20sperm.

Whatever is going on in their head bodies are sexed.

There was an article in Scientific American in the late '80s implying that there were more than two sexes, I reported this in excitement to a friend who was a medical professional (I certainly wasn't and had picked up SA as a way of expanding my horizons). My friend told me I was being ridiculous. I was confused because...well... Scientific American.....
That's the earliest I can remember finding out about this, 1988-89.
Forgot all about it till last few years.

It has a long legacy. It feels like a tipping point has been reached in our universities though.

Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”

How can they still not get this?

Yes, it would be great if sex was irrelevant. Particularly for women. But until that happens, you've got to be able to identify why the sexes are treated differently. And you simply can't do that if you ignore sex.

Let's stop all the sex crimes being committed by men and women being the victims, then you can tell me that being a man is irrelevant.

Plus, transgenderism absolutely doesn't pretend sex is irrelevant.

How can a man identify as the opposite sex, if sex doesn't exist! What are all frocks, fake boobs and pronouns about in that case?

It's always been the same old nonsense. And if you want to pretend that sex and gender are different, then fuck off out of spaces that are designated by sex.

Not a biologist (nor a hard scientist) but my understanding of the papers I've read which talk about sex being a spectrum is that they are all talking principally about secondary sex characteristics, and to an extent, the different genetic combinations one might find. They also attempt to introduce confusion by including things like "hormonal sex", which they then use to pretend that by taking opposite-sex hormones someone "becomes" the other sex.

Sperm or ova aren't on a spectrum.

So when discussing these secondary sex characteristics, they introduce a number of sexist implications, for example that men are tall therefore taller people are more "like men", or people with smaller hands are more "like women", which is obviously nonsense but is the apparent basis of their argument. This rather than accepting that variation within a category doesn't invalidate that category.

No matter how much the trans captured scientists embarrassingly emote and flail - it's still only women who gestate and birth babies. Facts and science are just so transphobic

And sympathies to all those who have to watch their once serious academic colleagues beclown themselves with this nonsense.

I'm fairly sure my dd wasn't taught anything dodgy on her biology degree course but she has 'non binary' friends and obviously wants to 'be kind'. I'm amazed how the scientific establishment has been co-opted by genderists. Cass shone some light on the shoddy scientific papers.

I graduated from nursing school 50 years ago. In anatomy and physiology we were taught, backed up by physical evidence, that there were male bodies and female bodies. Nothing about that has changed. It doesn't require a massive change in society to acknowledge that. I consider the scientists who are trying to change this as crackpots.

Masculinity and feminity I believe are totally dependent upon personality.

Fwiw this is the author of the infamous Nature article

Here's what is in recent biology textbooks:

Babies are "assigned a biological sex", gender identity is "a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination, or neither", and "roughly one in 100" people are intersex, with the text implying that they are not "born male or female".

These are from Campbell Biology, 12th Edition, published 2020.

@zibzibara holy crap, it's terrifying that made it into the textbook...

Yes and they highlight in the preface too. It's so disappointing to see this in an otherwise decent textbook. There's no critical analysis, no indication that this is a philosophical belief, no consideration of the sexism that underpins it. Just presenting it as fact.

I thought that the body was irrelevant with regards to what gender you are? You can be a man or woman whatever sex your body is because it's your inner gender feelings that define you as that?

Are they saying that there is something female about women...?

I'm a secondary school biologist and the first thing I tell my students to do when learning about genetics is to write 'gender' under the title and then cross it out. Gender is taught in sociology, today we're learning about biology. They all get it.

The main mechanism for twisting science to make it appear sex is a spectrum is to take disease and abnormalities and use them as descriptors of normality.

Chromosomal aneuploudies: abnormality
CAIS: abnormality
5 ARD: abnormality
Swyer: abnormality

And so on. It doesn’t matter how the people who have these conditions feel about themselves, they are still abnormalities of normal biology. They don’t help define a variation of what’s normal, they reinforce the fact there is a normal and things can and do go wrong.

A person born with one leg doesn’t redefine humans as a vario-pedal species.

I’m a biology graduate and fortunately none of this came up in the content of degree. However, there was one occasion during a lecture where a tutor used the term ‘assigned female at birth’ and afterwards my (mature student) friend said ‘WTF was she on about, why didn’t she just say WOMAN’. I thought maybe she was GC but it turned out she had genuinely never heard that expression and didn’t understand why it was being used.

I do have a dear friend who has a medical degree and is very much a trans ally. She has close friends who are trans though so I can understand why, even if I don’t understand how she can be ok with women losing their spaces. I don’t know if she believes sex is a spectrum / sex can be changed as I’m very careful to avoid the topic. She has no idea about my beliefs.

That's sad to hear. This mania is damaging in so many ways, even to friendships.

Campbell?? Campbell? I've used Campbell. They used to be a bog standard bio text.

Horrifying that actual biologists with actual degrees and university jobs are now spouting this confusion. Dishonest, too. Because there's no way they don't know perfectly well that sex in vertebrate mammals comes down to who produces egg or sperm. There are no intermediate speggs. Variation is found in secondary sexual characteristics, depending on the evolutionary history of the species, and doesn't change the animal's sex. They know that too.

(For truly bizarre sexes, study fungal mating strains. That's something else again. Not terribly applicable to humans though. Nor is it applicable to gender since fungi don't do gender as far as anyone knows.)

I'm middle-aged. I'm a molecular biologist working in a university as a lab-based research scientist. As far as I know none of the people I currently work with believe this nonsense, it hasn't come up in our work. OTOH, I doubt I would ever find out what any of my colleagues really think - because in academia you keep your mouth firmly shut on this particular topic, at least if you still have decades to retirement, a family to support and a massive mortgage to pay. We've all seen what happens to those who put a foot wrong and we know the union will join in the witch burning.

Recently though, I went to a reunion of a previous group I had worked in elsewhere - the old boss was retiring and many of my old colleagues were also approaching retirement age so weren't worried about being hounded out of their jobs. Several of them openly brought up the topic and said "WTF is going on with this complete crap?" - it was so refreshing to have a full and honest discussion picking through all the pseudoscientific nonsense.