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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Binary: Debunking the sex spectrum myth

10 replies

JustSpeculation · 16/06/2025 20:45

I've been reading this book by Zachary Elliott (of Paradox Institute fame). In it he debunks, as it says on the tin, the idea that sex is a spectrum. He main beef is to sustantiate the claim that sex is binary, and in this I think he succeeds. "Binary" reads like a book from an enthusiastic and informed amateur rather than a scientist. It is not very academic, being much more journalistic in style (though he uses citation heavily at main points). He comes across as nerdy, obsessive and as having a well organised mind. Despite this, the book is very readable. At least to me, but then I am also nerdy and obsessive. Arguments are well structured and well supported. I have found no glaring errors so far.

But I am not a biologist. I'm not any kind of scientist. Has anyone else here read it, and if so, how do you think it stands up to scrutiny?

OP posts:
LSTMS30555 · 16/06/2025 21:18

Binary in biology factually means biological sex in females and males; based on their gametes (sperm or ova) of their reproductive organs (gonads) they produce.
Or at least it did when I was in school.

NoBinturongsHereMate · 16/06/2025 21:27

Not read it, but debunking the idea that sex is a spectrum is much like debunking flatearthism.

NoBinturongsHereMate · 16/06/2025 21:29

I mean, it can be done, but it doesn't need a book. Engaging with that level of detail just encourages the nutters.

JustSpeculation · 16/06/2025 21:56

NoBinturongsHereMate · 16/06/2025 21:29

I mean, it can be done, but it doesn't need a book. Engaging with that level of detail just encourages the nutters.

That's an interesting take. "Nerdy and obsessive" I said. Anyway, I'll continue with it.

OP posts:
NoBinturongsHereMate · 16/06/2025 22:07

It's for the peole making an extraordinary claim to justify it. If scientists and other rational peole put in the effort needed to debunk every bit of half baked nonsense, we'd never get anything useful done.

There's some.fascinating science underlying sex differentiation and development though, so if well done I can see it making an interesting.read.

JustSpeculation · 16/06/2025 22:26

So maybe the book isn't so mmuch about binary sex as the psychopathology of nutters. It is readable, and that's all to the good. Thanks for the perspective.

OP posts:
GallantKumquat · 16/06/2025 23:03

So, I've only skimmed the book, but here are my thoughts. The debate about whether sex is binary or a spectrum is not really worth a whole book. In fact it's not really worth a whole chapter. Sex itself is a fascinating topic in biology and the popular literature and the 'hard research' is inexhaustible, but the concepts and mechanisms of sex are so well defined, and the binary categories are so obvious that there has never been a scientific debate about the its existence or relevance. Indeed the only interesting discussion is in evolutionary biology about why the large gamete/small gamete system is so uniform across complex life forms and why alternative strategies did not evolve. The basic, though speculative and contested answer, is that the cost of sex in term of reproduction is enormous. Asexual reproduction is vastly more efficient. But sexual reproduction confers one benefit that is essential to complex life, meiosis -- the ability to mix and match parent genotypes and therefor provide a genetic mechanism for evolutionary adaptation. Biway meiosis and large gamete/small gamete (biological sex) reproduction confers such a huge advantage in itself and is so adaptable, that alternate, more complex (and thus even more costly) schemes always result in evolutionary dead ends.

Seen in this light, the binari-ness of sex is not a scientific debate and therefor can't be argued from a scientific perspective. What has really happened is that a new concept, sociological sex, has been invented, and given a technical meaning, and that concept has been conflated with the commonly used term 'sex' and therefore with what must now be called 'biological sex' to disambiguate it. Since you're entering the realm of defining the terms of the debate, shared understanding and the definition of things (with a healthy dose of obfuscation), this is a debate that can't be 'won', all you do is describe what the gender ideologists' gambit is and to understand its history, context, and motivation.

To his credit Elliott provides considerable details on both aspects, scientific and sociological, and from that perspective is useful. But "debunking the sex spectrum myth" is a Quotidian quest. In the Popper sense, the concept isn't even debunk-able (falsifiable), except in the sense that it's self-contradictory.

I think Joyce's Trans is a better book for understanding the practical contours of the debate as it presents publicly in trans rights advocacy. She summarizes it succinctly as four arguments used to make the case sex is a spectrum:

  • Binary sex is an artefact of Western colonialism.

Answer: "such third genders have no bearing at all on these traditional societies’ understandings of biological sex. They are, rather, testimony to the rigidity of their sex roles: a way to prevent effeminate, same-sex-attracted males from sullying the class of men."

  • The clownfish trope.

Answer: "Since clownfish can change sex – or, more generally, that since not all living things are sexually dimorphic and incapable of changing sex – there can be no objective distinction between male and female. But you need a definition of male and female to observe that clownfish can change sex – or that some other living things are hermaphrodites, or reproduce asexually – and you will then be able to see that sex in humans is indeed binary and immutable."

  • Disorders of sex development (DSDs), i.e. the intersex conditions trope.

Answer: "As with any part of the body, reproductive organs may develop in anomalous ways, just as some people are born with extra fingers or toes, or missing eyes or legs, but humans are still ten-fingered and ten-toed, binocular and bipedal. For there to be even three sexes there would have to be a third gamete, and there is not."

  • Sex – not gender – is socially constructed.

Answer: "A remarkable example of deconstruction is provided by the definition of ‘female’ proposed by Andrea Long Chu, an American transwoman and author of Females: A Concern, published in 2019. ‘Everybody is female, and everybody hates it,’ writes Chu. ‘Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation . . . I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another . . . [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.’

"This definition is obviously influenced by pornography (and Chu has written that ‘sissy porn did make me trans’). It is striking that receptive anal sex, which is possible for people of both sexes, is the act that Chu regards as defining females. If you actually are female, it is also highly offensive – and would be incomprehensible, if you did not understand that the aim is to enable males to count as females. Deconstruction is supposed to free the members of a subordinate class from subjugation within a binary – and I suppose it does, in a purely linguistic sense. But it is freedom at a high price: denial that the subordinated class even exists in any clearly defined way.

"It is all an immense pity, because there is a concrete sense in which deconstructing binaries could be liberatory. As Simone de Beauvoir explains in her classic The Second Sex, published in 1949, patriarchy centres Man and defines Woman only in relation to him. This value-laden binary is reinforced by many others, including subject/object, order/chaos, active/passive, strong/weak, reason/emotion and light/dark. Feminism is the task of centring Woman in her own life, and unpicking these associations. In the binary reason/emotion, for example, emotion is both taken to be inferior to reason because it is Woman’s domain, and taken to be Woman’s domain because it is inferior to reason. Feminists reject both propositions. A rounded life requires both, and neither need be the domain of one sex or the other."

JustSpeculation · 17/06/2025 05:58

Thank you @GallantKumquat . It may not be necessary scientifically, but sometimes us non scientists need things spelled out in detail and at length. I'm now even more thinking that the book is really about the psychopathology of nutters...

OP posts:
Igneococcus · 17/06/2025 06:14

GallantKumquat · 16/06/2025 23:03

So, I've only skimmed the book, but here are my thoughts. The debate about whether sex is binary or a spectrum is not really worth a whole book. In fact it's not really worth a whole chapter. Sex itself is a fascinating topic in biology and the popular literature and the 'hard research' is inexhaustible, but the concepts and mechanisms of sex are so well defined, and the binary categories are so obvious that there has never been a scientific debate about the its existence or relevance. Indeed the only interesting discussion is in evolutionary biology about why the large gamete/small gamete system is so uniform across complex life forms and why alternative strategies did not evolve. The basic, though speculative and contested answer, is that the cost of sex in term of reproduction is enormous. Asexual reproduction is vastly more efficient. But sexual reproduction confers one benefit that is essential to complex life, meiosis -- the ability to mix and match parent genotypes and therefor provide a genetic mechanism for evolutionary adaptation. Biway meiosis and large gamete/small gamete (biological sex) reproduction confers such a huge advantage in itself and is so adaptable, that alternate, more complex (and thus even more costly) schemes always result in evolutionary dead ends.

Seen in this light, the binari-ness of sex is not a scientific debate and therefor can't be argued from a scientific perspective. What has really happened is that a new concept, sociological sex, has been invented, and given a technical meaning, and that concept has been conflated with the commonly used term 'sex' and therefore with what must now be called 'biological sex' to disambiguate it. Since you're entering the realm of defining the terms of the debate, shared understanding and the definition of things (with a healthy dose of obfuscation), this is a debate that can't be 'won', all you do is describe what the gender ideologists' gambit is and to understand its history, context, and motivation.

To his credit Elliott provides considerable details on both aspects, scientific and sociological, and from that perspective is useful. But "debunking the sex spectrum myth" is a Quotidian quest. In the Popper sense, the concept isn't even debunk-able (falsifiable), except in the sense that it's self-contradictory.

I think Joyce's Trans is a better book for understanding the practical contours of the debate as it presents publicly in trans rights advocacy. She summarizes it succinctly as four arguments used to make the case sex is a spectrum:

  • Binary sex is an artefact of Western colonialism.

Answer: "such third genders have no bearing at all on these traditional societies’ understandings of biological sex. They are, rather, testimony to the rigidity of their sex roles: a way to prevent effeminate, same-sex-attracted males from sullying the class of men."

  • The clownfish trope.

Answer: "Since clownfish can change sex – or, more generally, that since not all living things are sexually dimorphic and incapable of changing sex – there can be no objective distinction between male and female. But you need a definition of male and female to observe that clownfish can change sex – or that some other living things are hermaphrodites, or reproduce asexually – and you will then be able to see that sex in humans is indeed binary and immutable."

  • Disorders of sex development (DSDs), i.e. the intersex conditions trope.

Answer: "As with any part of the body, reproductive organs may develop in anomalous ways, just as some people are born with extra fingers or toes, or missing eyes or legs, but humans are still ten-fingered and ten-toed, binocular and bipedal. For there to be even three sexes there would have to be a third gamete, and there is not."

  • Sex – not gender – is socially constructed.

Answer: "A remarkable example of deconstruction is provided by the definition of ‘female’ proposed by Andrea Long Chu, an American transwoman and author of Females: A Concern, published in 2019. ‘Everybody is female, and everybody hates it,’ writes Chu. ‘Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation . . . I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another . . . [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.’

"This definition is obviously influenced by pornography (and Chu has written that ‘sissy porn did make me trans’). It is striking that receptive anal sex, which is possible for people of both sexes, is the act that Chu regards as defining females. If you actually are female, it is also highly offensive – and would be incomprehensible, if you did not understand that the aim is to enable males to count as females. Deconstruction is supposed to free the members of a subordinate class from subjugation within a binary – and I suppose it does, in a purely linguistic sense. But it is freedom at a high price: denial that the subordinated class even exists in any clearly defined way.

"It is all an immense pity, because there is a concrete sense in which deconstructing binaries could be liberatory. As Simone de Beauvoir explains in her classic The Second Sex, published in 1949, patriarchy centres Man and defines Woman only in relation to him. This value-laden binary is reinforced by many others, including subject/object, order/chaos, active/passive, strong/weak, reason/emotion and light/dark. Feminism is the task of centring Woman in her own life, and unpicking these associations. In the binary reason/emotion, for example, emotion is both taken to be inferior to reason because it is Woman’s domain, and taken to be Woman’s domain because it is inferior to reason. Feminists reject both propositions. A rounded life requires both, and neither need be the domain of one sex or the other."

Edited

My first reaction (as a biologist) when I saw there was an entire book about it was wondering how you would fill it. For anybody who has even the most basic idea about how the world works (especially evolution) and isn't beholden to GI the fact that sex in mammals is binary and immutable is blatantly obvious.

NoBinturongsHereMate · 17/06/2025 18:33

@JustSpeculation, if you want to follow up with a deep dive into the neurology I recommend Gina Rippon's The Gendered Brain next. It unpicks a lot of the brain-scan and gendered-behaviour studies that are often used to back up the sociological argument.

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