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

I've always had the impression that it's possible to get a biology degree without doing very much maths. Is this the case? This might account for all the nonsense about sex being "bimodal on a spectrum" rather than binary....

I know of a medical student who took a year out to transition to trans man . Now qualified. Complete late ROGD after Covid. As a teen wore flowery dresses and long hair.

@JustSpeculation depends what you mean by "very much maths". Biology is a numerate degree and every biology sub-subject is full of numbers, measurements, statistics and calculation. Some more than others, to be fair. It's a huge subject, and you could graduate with very deep knowledge of some topics and barely more than GCSE in others.

So if some seemingly authoritative source says something like that, you might just go "seems legit".

American universities have been captured and they are very wealthy and hugely influential. The backlash is starting.

we KNOW it’s not a spectrum - there are genetic anomalies that present and those have always been discussed. Spectrum like personality? Absolutely not

Thanks. I graduated in applied linguistics, which also has it's numerate side. The frequent lack of mathematical understanding though is startling.

Thank goodness for you being a teacher!👏

I'm shocked to see the text book! I'm startled at how this ideology has taken hold of a rational subject. Typically biology students have poor maths. There is normally a Mathematics or Statistics for Biologists course run for undergrads to address this. I helped one year and the engagement let's say was woeful. Perhaps things have changed (I've been out of the loop for nearly nearly 2 decades). I still believe the biological sciences (less so the medical sciences) are rigorous for developing scientific thinking however. That should be enough of a bulwark against the weight of the gender lobby. But it seems not so. As pp says, the spread of biology at uni can be wide making it perfectly plausible that an ecology leaning student to defer to Scientific American on the definition of biological sex. I despair!

Spectrum: a broad range of varied but related ideas or objects, the individual features of which tend to overlap so as to form a continuous series or sequence 'the spectrum of political beliefs'

Collins definition

I'd love someone to show me the spectrum of gametes in any mammalian species

Aaaand I've gone clicking down a rabbit hole. "Why human height is not a bimodal distribution, despite commonly being cited as an example"

Is Human Height Bimodal?: The American Statistician: Vol 56, No 3 (tandfonline.com)

I loved that. It seems to be saying that significant differences only result in a bimodal distribution when they meet the conditions of bimodality. Which is beautifully tautologous. But the point about sex being bimodal is that you would need to be able to plot it on a graph. Which you can't as it has no degree.

Rank amateur here, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

I seem to remember a friend telling me that some surprisingly high percentage of published biology papers were based on spreadsheet analysis where those spreadsheets contained demonstrable errors. Lots of biology degrees don’t require A’level maths, so unless the universities are teaching statistics properly this skill will be lacking. I say this as a science undergrad whose uni is literally teaching regression analysis incorrectly 🙄

Strictly speaking this should probably be on a different thread, but hey, it's somewhat relevant, I'm here now so..

I was doing something I know I shouldn't do, consulting Doctor Google, and I came across this Wikipedia entry on ACL injuries. I thought you'd like to see it as it is so gloriously blatantly wholeheartedly 100% unequivocally unquestionably women-are-not-physiologically-the-same-as-men!
Even though it's only Wiki. there are lots of references to journals etc
Anterior cruciate ligament injury - Wikipedia

Female athletes are two to eight times more likely to strain their ACL in sports that involve cutting and jumping as compared to men who play the same particular sports
Hormonal and anatomic differencesedit]
Before puberty, there is no observed difference in frequency of ACL tears between the sexes. Changes in sex hormone levels, specifically elevated levels of estrogen and relaxin in females during the menstrual cycle, have been hypothesized as causing predisposition of ACL ruptures. This is because they may increase joint laxity and extensibility of the soft tissues surrounding the knee joint.[13] Ongoing research has observed a greater occurrence of ACL injuries in females during ovulation and fewer injuries during the follicular and luteal phases of the menstrual cycle.[22]......
...Additionally, female pelvises widen during puberty through the influence of sex hormones. This wider pelvis requires the femur to angle toward the knees. This angle towards the knee is referred to as the Q angle. The average Q angle for men is 14 degrees and the average for women is 17 degrees. Steps can be taken to reduce this Q angle, such as using orthotics.[24] The relatively wider female hip and widened Q angle may lead to an increased likelihood of ACL tears in women.[25]
ACL, muscular stiffness, and strengthedit]
During puberty, sex hormones also affect the remodeled shape of soft tissues throughout the body.........

Although the two distributions (male height and female height) do have different peaks, they're not distinct enough.

When you combine them, there isn't enough distinctiveness to call the combined distribution (height including males and females) bimodal.

If you, for example, used Number Of Testicles, you'd see a very bimodal distribution, with a cluster at 0 for females, and the male cluster at 2 (with a tale for those who have lost or didn't develop one or both of their balls).

I know that in my degree a lot of students were struggling with statistics for their research project. The general consensus was that we hadn't been given enough guidance throughout. I enjoy statistics and spreadsheets so I think I just about got away with it, but struggled a lot with the maths involved in neurobiology. It was hammered into us, however, not to just blindly accept what a paper was saying, the limitations (and complete fuck ups) of peer review, the limitations of p numbers, and to critically evaluate everything, which we were required to demonstrate in most assignments. In one of my final assignments, one of the papers they tested us on was an absolute shitshow and I enjoyed explaining why. There's a website/project that picks apart supposedly peer-reviewed articles, wish I could remember the name.

Is it accurate that 1 in 100 are intersex? Wouldn't that be discovered at the blastocyst stage with genetic screening? I'm curious as I've had 22 IVF embryos, although only 5 made it to genetic testing. Since it's chromosome analysis and I asked for the details of aneuploidy I'm wondering if they know about intersex but don't tell parents to be.

I thought it much less than that, and Google seems to agree.

The proportion of people with DSDs ('intersex' conditions) is 0.018%. Conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female, occur in 0.018% of the population [1].

A professor of biology and gender studies [interesting combo..] called Anne Fausto-Sterling suggested a figure of 1.7%, This has been disproved and I think even she conceded something like that she would no longer 'stand over' those figures.

Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.
How common is intersex? a response to Anne Fausto-Sterling - PubMed (nih.gov)

Whenever I see 'the same number as red-haired people' in something about intersex people, I know the author is using the old figures, and if they're still using them in 2024, they aren't doing their research very diligently. Or they prefer to quote inaccurate figures because it suits their argument...

I imagine it depends on what their definition of intersex is.

Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Experts estimate that up to 1.7 percent of the population are born with intersex traits.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity/intersex-people#:~:text=Intersex%20people%20are%20born%20with,are%20born%20with%20intersex%20traits.

It's a bit vague. I remember reading an argument that women with polycystic ovarian syndrome are intersex because symptoms can include clinical signs of hyperandrogenism (defined by NICE as e.g. hirsutism, acne, or elevated levels of total or free testosterone). Which is obviously fucking stupid, and in any case it's not something you're born with.

And what is an intersex trait? Are hirsutism, acne, or elevated levels of total or free testosterone considered traits? Is not wanting to play with stereotypical gendered toys a trait? As we have seen in this whole clusterfuck, biology can mean whatever people want it to mean, and no doubt you can find a paper or statistic to back up whatever you think it should mean.

Snap @MarieDeGournay

Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Experts estimate that up to 1.7 percent of the population are born with intersex traits.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity/intersex-people#:~:text=Intersex%20people%20are%20born%20with,are%20born%20with%20intersex%20traits.
That source comes with a health warning because it's a United Nations publication, and the UN haven't shown themselves to be even-handed in the debates around trans rights/human rights/women's rights.
In fact, seeing them still using the 1.7% figure is an indicator of how little objectivity there is in their approach. To repeat what I said in my previous post:
if they're still using them in 2024, they aren't doing their research very diligently. Or they prefer to quote inaccurate figures because it suits their argument...

This is an interesting article on DSDs (intersex). It seems that ‘intersex’ as an identity - without any diagnosis is quite the thing.

differently-normal.com/2021/10/25/the-invention-of-intersex/

I remember that some of the dodgy "intersex" data includes women with PCOS....

Also if we're talking stats may I just have my wee rant about "as common as red hair". Globally red hair is very rare in many many places it's pretty common (eg Scotland/Ireland) so it's a disingenuous comparator to use designed to make "intersex" seem more common to people in those areas - no one is using "as common as red hair" to make their spurious argument in, for example, China.

I've just checked. Red hair may be up at 10% in England, so very far from the inflated claim of even 1.7% 🙄

Exactly. It's all deliberately obfuscatory word salad.

I'd say there's hardly anything more diagnostic of being female than having ovaries! I also recall that another example given to inflate the supposed percentage of "intersex" is hypospadias, a condition in which the urethra opens not at the end but somewhere on the underside of the penis.

Yes, there are loads of conditions that wrongly get shoved into the 'intersex' box - it's pretty offensive, and illogical, to tell someone who has a male or female condition that they're not actually that sex because of it.