It’s equally true to note that sex has been observed to be binary. You’re correct to note that they’re true for different reasons. If that is your only quibble, I appreciate your acknowledgement of the sex binary.

Most biologists accept the facts and move on to more interesting things. He’s willing to write the “no duh” explainers. If you don’t like him, take your pick of people with other relevant credentials listed here that signed a statement affirming the same (in addition to the other link I posted to another well-respected biologist agreeing with him)

https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/

In mammals, there are two types of gamete and two classes of reproductive anatomy. The male sex class produces many small motile gametes – sperm – for transfer. The female sex class produces few large immobile gametes – ova – and gestates/delivers live young. […] Biological sex does not meet the defining criteria for a spectrum. […] Not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class.

Immaterial to the truth of it. Dislike 1 + 1 = 2 all you want, it’s still true.

That paper cites her seriously when it was apparently “ironic”. I didn’t say that paper quoted her about 5 sexes, but nowhere does it note that it was “ironic”.

depending on how you see things.

Biologists have observed that sex is binary. She’s free to “see things” however she wants, but mistaking the basic variations within the binary for a non-binary spectrum won’t get her taken seriously by biologists (or anyone)

From the paper:

As we enter this complex conversation, we recognize that binary categories based on reproductive biologies or gender identities may make sense to include in analyses in order to address certain questions in human biology.

So even according to the paper, sometimes binaries are fine. Also, speaking of Fausto-Sterling, it cites her brainrot uncritically:

Although categories may be useful for addressing major issues of exclusion, feminist scientists have critiqued the concept of binary sex (e.g., Fausto-Sterling, 1993)

And have you read her paper?

For biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male; and depending on how one calls the shots, one can argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes-and perhaps even more.

There is zero indication that it’s tongue-in-cheek when reading it, it’s been cited seriously in literature such as your link, and a good faith reading of it leads one to think she believes in 5 sexes. I mean come on, this is just nonsense. She’s a clown.

Zachary Dubois has a PhD from the Department of Anthropology but doesn’t list it specifically as a degree in biological anthropology in his CV. I don’t think it’s worth quibbling over whether he “counts” as a biologist, but I wasn’t lying and at worst was too dismissive. Either way, he’s not the person to look to for fundamental definitions in the field of biology.

Do you know what your binary definition has been usefull for? […]

Again, it’s not my definition. It’s the common definition used in biology, and is very useful for science. That some people can misunderstand it and try “fixing” people using faulty logic is immaterial.

And hopefully this helps clear things up for you. From the same author I linked to before (PhD Evolutionary Biology):

Such mixed sex development is exceptionally rare because evolution has ensured developmental mechanisms to make sure this is so. A growing embryo will be wasting resources if it develops organs and tissues that cannot contribute to future reproduction. Novella’s paper on mice (above) is actually about a gene that appears to be involved in cross-sex development suppression. Put simply, our development of reproductive anatomy is absolutely not a pick-‘n’-mix of organs and tissues from male and female parts that might just result in enough of one’s sexed parts to enable an individual to be fertile and reproduce. Instead, it is a tightly regulated cascade of genetic events along a pathway that puts all development effort into male or female development. That is why pretty much everyone ends up as unambiguously male or female even when significant development conditions occur. Male and female development are mutually antagonistic.

Very rarely, and for reasons not well understood, the brakes may come off and tissue development that is normally suppressed starts to grow. It is a bit like a cancer where the normal growth regulating mechanisms fail. And indeed ovotesticular disorder is associated with malignancies of these tissues, so are often surgically removed soon after diagnosis to prevent lethal cancers.

What is not observed is an individual who is fertile both as a male and female. If fertile at all, it will be as one sex. The cross-sex tissue is typically under-developed. No human is a true hermaphrodite (in the biological sense as being able to reproduce as both a male and female). Unfortunately, medicine also uses the term “true hermaphrodite” to describe people with these very rare disorders. Do not be fooled by this equivocation.

So despite this cross-sex development, can we still say what sex a person is? That is a complex question as we are dealing with disorders that are so rare and with so many different causes and outcomes that a blanket statement is not easy. Doctors publish individual case reports where it may be clear a person has undergone predominately one sex development and in which case we may be confident in calling someone male or female. It is a matter of debate if there exist individuals where sex development is so mixed that such a classification is inherently meaningless. But even if some individual were truly sexually ambiguous, they would still not be a third sex.

https://lemmy.world/comment/21774618

Sure, can you clarify what you mean by “nazi argument”?

I’m honestly confused as to what you mean by “nazi argument”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34096131/: Not biologists, and not really relevant. The main thrust is saying “Don’t binarize phenotypes”, which sure makes sense. If you see a more specific claim in there it can be evaluated, but I don’t think it’s really worth getting into.

The author writing this is more concerned with the usefullness of the gamete size definition

Yes, that’s a biologist talking about why biologists define sex that way. That definition of sex is useful in biology. If it were redefined to something else, biologists would just invent a new term that meant the same thing, because they need it.

Regarding hyenas, what makes a hyena female? How can we talk about “female”, particularly across species? What makes the class of seahorses become pregnant “male”?

My claim isn’t about ASRM. It derives from this committee, which was tasked with a data collection task and did not have any biologists on the committee. You can see the people on the committee at the bottom. It wasn’t meant to be a committee to define sex, so it’s weird that they’re being cited as such.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/26424/Highlights_Measuring_SGISO.pdf

Your specific claim was “notable amount of biologists argue against this”, but that has not been substantiated. The authors are not notable and there aren’t a notable number of them. The paper has not resulted in any change to the consensus, and has been ridiculed by the rest of the field.

concretely, it just does stuff

Right, and biologists have defined sex around the end results.

My comment about Anne Fausto-Sterling was terse, but here’s more context, Intersex Is Not as Common as Red Hair and Responding to a ‘Fabulous Takedown’ of My Work. She is a deeply unserious person that wrote nonsense about 5 “sexes” and later responded like this when called out:

Sun finds Geoff Parker’s gametic explanation of biological sex

The PR person that wrote this doesn’t really understand what the person is actually saying. The cited paper from Geoff Parker is “The origin and evolution of gamete dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon” and considers how the sex binary came to be. Lixing Sun is saying that, even if you don’t produce gametes, you can play a role an evolutionary role.

No organs in their body are creating them, so that person has no sex?

There would still be structures in the body that only appear in one sex and not the other, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramesonephric_duct. That’s what “organized around” captures. It also includes other structures like uterus, that allow an individual to participate in one of the reproductive strategies for the species.

Ovotesticular syndrome isn’t what you probably think it is. It’s not “perfectly healthy gonads capable of producing both sperm and ova”. It’s “maybe one working gonad, with a bit of non-functional tissue of the other type”. An (imperfect) analogy is that transplanting an ovary into a male just makes him a male with a transplanted ovary, not a hermaphrodite or female. He can still only participate in the male reproductive strategy and lacks the rest of the structures necessary for participating in the female reproductive strategy.

It might help to think about what humans aren’t. There are trioecious species, with males, females, and hermaphrodites coexisting. That just doesn’t exist in humans.

I think you’re confusing sex with mating types again, but as long as we can agree for anisogamy

It’s rather silly that you say “inane assumptions about the future of scientific models” and then go on to describe the same thing in different words.

You’re saying “the map is not the territory”, which is true, but ignoring that the territory has been observed to have an attribute universally. The territory could change, but until it does, it’s correct to note the current universal reality of that attribute in the map.

You’re basically saying “Yeah, but you could just be a brain in a jar!” or “What if electrons stopped existing!”. Interesting thought experiment but silly to take seriously.

You’re confusing sex with mating types. But thank you for finally acknowledging that anisogamy is observed to be binary.

I realize that the accentuation there might come across as sarcastic, but it’s genuine. Too many people are trying to argue with me about things I’m not saying or they misunderstand. My original comment should’ve been an entirely uncontroversial minor correction.

The model could change if a third gamete type evolved, but that’s not a caveat worth mentioning. Maybe we’d get a sperg! Or a spegg!

Stop being silly because you’re pissy about being wrong. Another quote from the same Phd Evolutionary Biology as above:

contemporary scientific debates have long moved on from questioning whether the sex binary is a fact to questions about how anisogamy evolved, why it persists, and what its evolutionary consequences are.

What additional context is missing?

I’ll also cite another PhD Evolutionary Biology, also telling you directly that you’re wrong

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3

Across anisogamous species, the existence of two—and only two—sexes has been a settled matter in modern biology

You can read more of it if you’d like, but there’s no more context that softens that direct rebuttal of your point.

I just quoted people with PhDs in the subject at hand, telling you that you’re wrong. Do you think that they’ve maybe taken a single college level science class?

I don’t really show up a lot, but man do people get pissy when they find out nothing I’m saying is wrong.

I mean, you’re just flat-out wrong. You should listen to those lectures, they would do you some good.

https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/

In mammals, there are two types of gamete and two classes of reproductive anatomy. The male sex class produces many small motile gametes – sperm – for transfer. The female sex class produces few large immobile gametes – ova – and gestates/delivers live young. […] Biological sex does not meet the defining criteria for a spectrum. […] Not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class.

(Because it sadly needs to be said, I’m not “citing wordpress”, I’m citing a project created by a PhD Developmental Biology with many signatories with relevant credentials, which she chose to host on wordpress)

Bringing up hyenas is ironic, because it’s a great illustration of why sex is defined that way. Female hyenas have a pseudopenis. But how can we tell that they’re female? Because they produce the larger of two gamete types! Without the gametic definition of sex, there’s no way of talking about “female” across species.

Sex is defined by gamete production because it’s the only coherent way to describe the reality that biologists have found across all anisogamous species.

Sex currently has 2 plus several proposed additional definitions.

Biology has one definition of sex, that has remain unchanged for well over a century, and has no serious attempts to change it.

I’m sure everyone would like to see said refutations. You’re not lying, are you?

As stated elsewhere, I’m not the arbiter of knowledge on this topic, and I’ve helpfully included links that you can use to educate yourself when you’re ready.

You keep on obsessing about me. I should be flattered I guess, but it seems unhealthy for you.

You’re confusing prescriptive vs descriptive. I agree that a third sex might be selected for in the future, but that’s not the current reality. Until that happens it’s correct to note that, based on how sex is defined in biology, it’s binary in humans.

I’ve explicitly differentiated between sex and gender. Your paraphrasing is misreading what I’ve written. Sex is binary in humans, and gender isn’t.

Most of my post history is correcting misinformation of the sort you spew out. I’ll post once and then spend many more comments responding to people doubling down on being wrong, like you.

This user is weirdly obsessed with me to the point of eroticism. You’ll want to be careful around them.

I’ll explain again though that “pretending to be the last word” is the opposite of what I’ve done. I’ve cited many reliable sources to demonstrate that I’m merely conveying the consensus in biology. This user has done nothing serious.

One of those papers gets to the heart of your confusion and is interesting to consider, but first:

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40199245/
  • Did you read this before you linked it? “Here, we argue that dispensing with sexes would be a grave scientific error, depriving biology of one of its most powerful tools for explaining biological diversity. […] Hence, it is essentialism and typological thinking that we should dispense with, not biological sexes.” It agrees with everything I’ve been saying!
• https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.26.525769v1
  • Biologist adding commentary to another biologist’s takedown of this. It’s nonsense: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/04/23/colin-wright-debunks-a-dreadful-paper-claiming-that-sex-is-multimodal/

    The authors of the MEA paper actually recognize that sex is binary when making arguments against it. For example, they mention the damn penis in the female hyena without realizing how they know she’s a female, and somehow think that variation within a sex effaces the sex binary.

• https://www.asrm.org/advocacy-and-policy/fact-sheets-and-one-pagers/just-the-facts-biological-sex/
  • Mostly uncited and wrong. The one definition it cites for biological sex comes from a committee of non-biologists tasked with improving data collection. Irrelevant (and also wrong).

You’re confused about what determination means. It’s not cyclical, please read and understand

Your other link isn’t saying what you think it’s saying (https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/ideology-versus-biology). I’ll start off by noting that it agrees with me:

Within the scientific community, Sun notes, Parker’s gametic definition of biological sex was generally accepted

It’s also frequently incorrect (unsurprising since the article was written by a PR person), “binary definitions of biological sex fail to account for roughly 1.7 percent of the population according to one estimate” is false and relies on work from a deeply unserious person, Anne Fausto-Sterling, who got called out on her bullshit and said she was being “tongue-in-cheek” and “ironic”.

But this is the real claim from that link:

Variations in genes, chromosomes, and internal and external sex organs are often called disorders in sex development in the medical community. I think that’s wrong in many cases. It’s just natural variation

It’s not actually disputing the sex binary. It’s basically a dispute about the term “Disorders of sex development” vs “Differences of sex development”. So it doesn’t disagree with me, though the question of “disorder” vs" difference" loops back to your confusion.

You’re confusing the various meanings of the word “should” (or supposed to, or take your pick of terms). It can be used descriptively or prescriptively. You’re saying that incorrect prescriptive use invalidates descriptive use, and that’s wrong.

Using this interpretation, it would be ridiculous to define a human empiricaly around the fact that they are “supposed” to have feet at the end of their leg,

Humans aren’t defined that way. Someone missing a foot is still human. You have the definition the wrong way around and complaining that it doesn’t make sense, when in fact it doesn’t make sense because you’re thinking wrong.

A completely non-teleological definition is that sex is defined by what structures one has in their body that are required for production of one gamete type that are not required for production of the other gamete type.