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

So, I know that male gametes are sperm. I know that female gametes are eggs. What sort of gametes do all these other alleged sexes have?

Rainbows?

🤔

Thank you this is perfect.

Oh, that's perfect.

It also includes women with endo, PCOS etc...I mean, it;s a pile of shit.

@MarieDeGournay So the male advantage in some sports is not nonsense as trans activists have asserted in university sports in the US. Females should never be expected to compete against males in all sports.

People with actual DSDs may be very rare, but it seems they appear to be miraculously over-represented at elite sport level. I'm sure I read here recently that in that famous race that gave Caster Semenya so much publicity, all the three podium places were held by people with DSDs. Funny, that.

Many supposedly peer reviewed journals have been captured.

Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose undertook a project to explore how DEI was affecting the integrity of research. Peter lost his job (technically I think he resigned) at Portland University as a result. The project became known as the Grievance Studies Affair. They submitted fake papers to reputable journals to test if they could get absolute bullshit published if they used the language of DEI. I think 7 were published, some of them were very funny and it seems incredible anyone could think they were real.

There is a series of YouTube videos about the project on YouTube.

Wow that's incredible (well, sadly actually credible but yswim). Nature, Cell and the Lancet are three high profile journals I now know are captured. Which others? Or perhaps more importantly which journals are NOT captured?

Beclownfish themselves...

Maybe those with an interest in the matter believe that, by some sort of epigenetic sorcery, human biology will come round to complying with whatever is written in the textbooks and formerly credible journals. I don't read sci-fi and fantasy, but wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere hasn't already had some fun with that concept in fiction.

In the meantime, sex remains obstinately binary and immutable. It will only take one human to change sex for me to review what I believe. Only one. It's not much to ask as evidence, is it?

I am not a scientist but my DC is in their first year of a medical science degree, and has already encountered this issue - compulsory couple of weeks of lectures on gender and biology, "highlights" of which were forwarded to me with suitable eyerolling emojis. The challenge has been working out how to answer questions in the "right" way.

Anyone care to comment on this question from a past exam paper?

Identify a sex characteristic that is usually binary:
A Gametes
B Gonads
C Chromosomes
D Genes

You can only pick one. I guess the answer is supposed to be B if chromosomes can't be sex characteristics - except Mr Google says otherwise? Why aren't gametes sex characteristics (adult women have eggs and adult men have sperm?) It's all too confusing.

@legalalien I'll have a bash! Surely a b and c are 'usually' binary. For them to fall outside of a binary is very UNusual.

Gametes are always binary.

Gonads can vary in size but are one or the other, even if at first glance they may occasionally be ambiguous, and I'd refer back to 'usually'.

Sex chromosomes are 'usually' xx or xy, so again binary, but 'usually' doesn't mean exclusively. And if it falls outside of the 'usual' that's how we know something is amiss, i.e. why it's a medical matter.

Not sure if you can answer about "genes" without knowing what they mean.

@legalalien

Aren't they all usually binary?

Sperm or egg (or, possibly, primitive germ cell precursor of same)

Testis or ovary (rarely, both because of mosaicism)

Y or not Y

SRY gene present (rarely, can be on X chromosome) or absent

Please tell us if you find out the answer.

Seems an appallingly worded question, certainly the first three all plausible answers.

I don’t know what the official answer is unfort, when DC messaged they wanted to put “all of the above” or “a,b,c, possibly d it depends on the gene”, but that wasn’t an option.

I imagine A is the 'best' answer. But I don't think anyone should be marked down for answering B or C.

I agree it has to be B as of that list only the gonads are sex characteristics, and it's true that they are usually only of one type or the other in individual humans and other gonochoric species.

Chromosomes and genes are neither sex characteristics (although a small proportion of them are involved in deteming either overall sex or the development of sex characteristics) nor binary (we have 46 of the fomer and tens of thousands of the latter, many of which come in multiple variants). They may mean sex-determining genes and sex chromosomes, but they didn't say it. So C and D are out.

Gonads are sex characteristics and are binary in type and bimodal in distribution (it really is a very poorly written question.

Gametes are binary, but not typically thought of as sex characteristics - although they could easily fit within the definition, so it's a matter of interpretation.

So, my answer is B-with-caveats.

I wondered whether 'characteristics' had some meaning like, structural elements of the phenotype, which would narrow it to B because C and D are genotype and A are genetically different and secreted by the body not permanent structural features.

It will not astonish anyone to learn that I do not have a biology degree!

That was why I thought it must be B. But there are some definitions on the internet that refer to sex characteristics as including chromosomes - it seems that may stem from this:
Sex characteristics (legal term) - Wikipedia

(They should never have let the lawyers near the biology!)

Update: I have the official answer.

It is apparently A. Gametes.

Yes, all four of A-D were salient for determining legal sex before the GRA, as well as external genitalia and gross body type. This was refined and codified in the April Ashley case, putting a stop to altering the birth registrations of trans people and kick-starting a liberation movement.

In the earlier Ewan Forbes case, an XX individual with breasts, and exogenous testosterone-induced clitoromegaly, managed to lay claim to a baronetcy by means of some jiggery-pokery with some testicular tissue they found down the back of a drawer. I think this was probably quite upsetting to the authorities. There's a very readable book about it, which I can recommend as an insight into the trans POV.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Case-Ewan-Forbes-Establishment/dp/1526619148/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1TC1TGN42YCRB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.svLLsJX_mDUzsBKkf58K4JWrQGVBnOGsxSNAVyjKx4Y.axfQd8WkG3dQWKn5_-YtfriWTJ5ozOKZiB8XpWafgMU&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+hidden+case+of+ewan+forbes&qid=1720698765&sprefix=ewan+f%2Caps%2C294&sr=8-1

Oh you are kidding! Why?