As a clarification, I think Richard’s analogy to traffic lights is excellent. “There is no yellow light!” really is what the transphobes are saying. In virtually all of these cases, from gametes to chromosomes, there’s at least three categories: Male, female and “other”. As Hornbeck keeps pointing out, the very fact that there’s always a third category and yet people want to try to pretend that the third (or further) categories can just be ignored is just classic ambiguity intolerance cherry-picking. It’s invalid to just ignore 1% of the data, let alone much more of the data. It’s not an infinite spectrum, but it’s not binary. I used the phrase bimodal because that’s usually accurate. I just found it intensely funny that in this very conversation there are people for whom it is wholly comfortable to be able to see fuzzy boundaries between species, between taxa, between life and death… and then the sex binary suddenly magically is so utterly clear.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/ is a good breakdown. It’s particularly telling how cells in the body can vary by chromosmes. Microchimerism is apparently quite commonplace. I also read a City Journal article which was really remarkable in that it mostly correctly summarized the science and then made some incredibly silly strawmen while clearly implicitly trying to defend not letting trans women into sports, which is so telling from the simple question, “Would you let a hormonally or chromosomally unique AFAB cis woman into sports?” To which the answer either must be yes, in which case denying trans women is just special pleading, or no, in which case we now actually are creating biological discrimination even against women for no good reason.

And what’s so telling about this conversation is that the anti-trans crowd has to run back and forth between two bailies. If they run toward the scientists, the scientists point out that not only is gender not sex but more importantly that in their field actually properly sexing people is astonishingly complicated. Because for scientists, “Bruh, why are you even bringing up chimeras and Klinefelter, they’re not a majority of cases” is intellectual and practical suicide. The actual jobs that we need biology for need to be attentive to the complex (though, yes, not literally fully continuous) reality on the ground. But then when the anti-trans camp wants to run to the other side, and start whining that we can’t possibly have legislation and social systems that account for all of these tiny biological minorities, the gender camp points out that now we are talking about gender again, and now the binary is especially stupid and unnecessary.

As an example, something I missed the first time: “You conflated “sex as spectrum” with “sex as non-binary” when you said “more than 2 sex ‘theory’”. Even with the scare quotes on the “theory”. Hazur, if you were actually amenable to changing your mind on this front, cursory research would have made you realize that you can only get to a binary at best through highly restrictive definitions that literally can’t capture all human organisms. (The City Journal article tries that by trying to say that it’s a definitional fact that there’s only two sexes. Okay, then some people aren’t in either sex. This doesn’t do anything because reality doesn’t care about your definitions. So if you choose that definition, you still need three boxes: “Male”, “female”, “unsexed”. Which changes nothing). At this point we’re in the realm of scientific meta-theory, and it’s just so telling that the theoretical considerations for how to think about the topic bear so little resemblance to any other theory that is useful and has definitions that were chosen well, all to keep a binary and sweep by fiat everything that doesn’t match under the rug. And lots of supposed Rationalists(TM) seem to be wanting to do that. The reasons aren’t mysterious and we don’t need to pretend they are.

Hazur:

Lots of extremely telling moves.

First, “attacks”. What attacks? I didn’t use any name-calling from what I can see. I identified arguments and behavior I found to be disingenuous, and explained why. You clearly have no problem with this: My tone was scarcely different from Sokal’s, and in fact a good deal more reserved. Sokal dismisses entire philosophies and fields based on his experience with one journal and some people he cites to disagree with.

And it’s super precious to use the word “attacks” in this context. Hazur, what people taking your kind of tack don’t seem to get is that this is a topic where you really are treading on thin ice in terms of basic courtesy from the get-go. The entire conversation essentially involves interrogating people’s personal experiences and their own lives and second-guessing them. There’s actually fundamental ethical, social, psychological and scientific problems with doing so to begin with. The moment that anyone points out that what is being discussed is a phenomenological experience and not a biological claim, the conversation should be over. No one, even you, actually cares about the gametes, or the chromosomes, or anything else. If you did, you wouldn’t call anyone by any gender or sex at all until you had a lab report . No one does this because it’s nonsense. So when you’re effectively refusing to do what even Sokal did (an example of you being selective with your sources) and just admit that folks can have whatever gender experience they actually do and you can have no principled objection to it, you’re already fallaciously and erroneously attacking the competence, honesty, intelligence and/or mental capacity of millions of people. I’m glad you did not use overtly transphobic rhetoric, but if you don’t understand why the conversation may seem more heated than, say, a conversation about some detail of mythicism would, then you’re just not engaging with the topic. And in that case, why did you even comment?

Second, it seems as if you just decided to puff up your chest, but the problem is that you yourself conceded that there’s disagreement on this topic from informed people. And you never once articulated why you’ve decided to land where you have. You cited Sokal without even bothering to explain why we should take it seriously. All you said is that you found their arguments compelling. Great. That’s a verbal shrug. I know you found the opposite position compelling, Hazur. I don’t agree. But, unlike you (and, actually, unlike Sokal), I took the time to explain why, including making the kind of distinctions that Richard keeps asking you to make and stick to .

So when you then say that the gender issue can’t be framed based on a flawed understanding of sex, great! No one is doing that. Because no one cares about sex. Sex determination is strictly a medical and biological matter. The social interactions we have are actually wholly divorced from sex. When a firmly AFAB, cis-gender woman who presents even slightly masculine gets harassed or attacked in a bathroom, it’s not because the people in there had some kind of flawed chromosome detector.

But if you actually want to talk about the sex topic, why don’t you? Why is it that you try to arbitrarily pick a definition when you have been shown that, actually, no one definition will actually do, so that people in the field use an array of definitions as needed? Right, because you actually are having the gender conversation. There is absolutely no reason to do so otherwise.

And this is revealed by you citing Sokal. Who pretends that he’s talking about sex but really isn’t. Sokal is huffing about culture war nonsense. He didn’t write some detailed, interesting analysis. Because he couldn’t. It’s not his field. If your goal was to settle the sex question, you’d have cited a scholarly paper on sex determination. But we all know why you couldn’t do that. Because none of them are going to agree with you. Again, even Dawkins could do this better than you have because Dawkins knows enough to engage in the goalpost moving. And you find the “sex is a spectrum” stuff funny, but the Dawkins article that Hornbeck fisked is precisely about how nature is actually continuous and spectral all over the place with no clear lines… until it comes to sex when suddenly magically it is, evidence be damned. So even Dawkins disagrees with your binary thinking… everywhere except the place it counts.

Nature had a recent excellent piece about the challenges of exploring gender in a useful way. I recommend you read that if you decide that the science actually matters to you.

And as a case in point. You humorously didn’t even read the paper you linked to. It agrees with me. You didn’t even read its abstract!

It says the facts “may reveal less strict sex roles than previously presumed and help with the identification of crime victims” and “forensic anthropologists should also increase their efforts to identify whether individuals have undergone medical procedures intended to change one’s gender due to the current rise in transitioning individuals” are sentences even in the abstract.

The paper itself is not about denying mixed-sex (out-of-binary) outcomes, but about misclassifying a gender spectrum to sex, and thus is all about the importance of distinguishing sex from gender, and argues for specific distinctions only in respect to specific forensic goals; and thus unlike you, it picks a lane, and starts with a genetic definition of sex, and points out that a phenotypical definition won’t always agree with it (not all female sexed skeletons turn out genetically female). Hence Weiss qualifies herself even in her abstract: “skeletal sex differences are in large part biologically” determined, thus not strictly correlative to any biology, acknowledging out-of-binary possibilities. Likewise the very first page of her paper lists specific examples of out-of-binary binary deviations in the medical literature.

Weiss’s point (if you will read the paper) is that with respect to this one specific goal (forensic identification), the genetic definition is most useful, and outliers are rare, yet must still be taken into account, lest forensic examination miss them, e.g. a man with AIS will present with a fully female skeleton, so a genetic test for AIS, from extractable DNA, is still necessary to be certain whether you are looking at someone who would have been classified and treated as male or female in their culture. She also makes the point that anthropologists need to separate sex from gender because it is gender that is on a spectrum, while sex is binary with outliers. And so how someone is treated (whether their society assigned them to men’s roles or women’s) might not be clear from the sexing of the bones, but the DNA status of the bones can be clear—including outlier, and hence out-of-binary, cases like AIS and body modification.

This is exactly everything we have been saying.

Hazur: None of us have ever said sex is a spectrum.

This illustrates your either delusional or disingenuous engagement here. You fake a position we did not take, and then attack that. To what point? All you have done is avoid our actual arguments and evidence. Evasion is not resolution.

Our position on sex is the position of literally the entire actual field of biology: that it has messy mixed cases and is not neatly divided into a binary outcome. For a logical analogy, there is no “spectrum” between whether a traffic signal is red or green, but there are messy mixed cases (both red and green; and neither). So it is false that traffic lights are “a binary.” There are modes outside the binary. There is still no “spectrum.” This is still true even if we add other permutations, like yellow lights and other colors, and combinations of colors blinking or not; the permutations are still not a spectrum, but a fixed number of discreet outcomes, many of which are mixed outcomes.

This is why it matters that you keep avoiding our request to pick which definition of sex you want. You are avoiding our entire actual point.

Gender, by contrast, is a spectrum, because there is available a fairly continuous degree of femininity or masculinity in any culture; but it, too, has off-axis outcomes (e.g. someone who switches where they are on that spectrum by context, e.g. drag and gender fluid identities) and mixed outcomes (what positions someone on the same place on the spectrum can vary, e.g. someone can be 30/70 masculine for different reasons than someone else at 30/70 masculine, because genders consist of large and arbitrary sets of features, like who wears skirts or makeup and of what kind and when). But to talk about gender is a completely different matter from talking about sex.

Hence you have to choose a lane. Failing to do that commits you to just wasting everyone’s time (including your own) with pointless grievance-marching rather than getting to anything to do with even reality, much less policy.

Frederic, so much wrong with your comment, let aside the attacks. You want to know what I’m committed to, science and fairness for as many as possible, including trans-people of course. The problem is, you want to force me to accept your account of matters while I find your arguments weak. I don’t think trans-people and people in general are well served with an erroneous account of reality, which is, as far, how I see the sex spectrum or more than 2 sex ‘theory’. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to change my mind, I’ve done so on other matters, is just that I find the better arguments in the binary camp. And of course, things like ‘sex assigned at birth’ nonsense doesn’t help. (talking about semantics, Richard)

What about gender, you ask? I have opinions, but find the sex issue more fundamental, I don’t think the gender discussion can be correctly framed based on mistaken concepts of sex. Importantly, I don’t see a binary paradigm as detrimental to trans-people. There’s going to be people misusing that, of course. The same is true of your newly adopted dogma.

To Richard, I find ironic the stance the ‘sex is a spectrum’ camp have adopted in this matter, it reminds me of the attitude Bart Ehrman and the historical Jesus camp takes in relation to the mythicist arguments (I’ve been reading you since the beginning). You may check this peer reviewed paper to see what I mean: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02851-3. I hope you denounce this way to do things now that you are on the other side.

Hazur:

“I disagree with some” is the hallmark of the crank. Like all people trying to defend a transphobic and irrational worldview, you started with an implication that sex is actually really super simple to understand and the science is unequivocal. That’s the bailey. But the moment anyone points out that, no, that’s not actually true, whether by Richard asking you to commit to the consequences of a single definition (which you repeatedly failed to do) or by me pointing out that your underlying reasoning is hopelessly fallacious with citations to the science, suddenly you have to admit that, yeah, of course science isn’t wholly behind you. You retreat to the motte.

But even the motte isn’t really defensible.

In matter of fact, of course, we’re the ones the science is behind . And not just the anthropology, sociology, history and social science, which is often ignored by people in the physical sciences or who begin with frameworks (ostensibly) based in the physical sciences to their detriment when they want to talk about human affairs (see: evo psych). But the biology too. The overwhelming consensus of all of the sciences is that sex is complex and so is gender, and they are only loosely connected. And so even trying to say that you disagree with some of the science is again exposing an irrational commitment on your part. You can find ideologically-motivated cranks, out-of-date science and bad explainers to back you, the way that HBomberguy caught people doing with the Bill Nye episode on gender when people tried to find Nye being a gender binarist in the past and found bits from Nye’s episode about probability that clearly reduced the complexity of sex determination to a 50/50 and didn’t even mention gender because it was a goddamn kid’s show trying to teach the absolute basics.

And then, once a failure mode of your thought is pointed out to you, you duck and weave to an implicit argument from authority, one that doesn’t even carry any water. Sokal is a math professor. His original hoax wasn’t even that impressive ( https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/10/06/this-isnt-incompetence/ ) and really poorly engaged with postmodernism. (And I’m anti-postmodern, but it’s actually kind of embarrassing in retrospect to see people like Chomsky and Albert overhype the hoax). But in any case, he’s eminently not qualified to speak here, either on the biology or the sociology.

I know you find the argument compelling, Hazur. Because you’ve already admitted that you’ll just bin the science you don’t agree with.

And Sokal’s argument sucks . He fails to actually address the point about gender assignation, which is already a strawman because he’s not addressing the arguments in totality, which is that *there is actual intervention done to assign people outside of a binary into the binary *. He’s flatly wrong when he says that the binary is just observed. It’s enforced, by decision and even by medical intervention. https://affirm.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2023/06/01/beyond-the-binary-making-space-for-gender-expansive-health-care/ . He can address that argument if he wants to, but he didn’t. His biases are really, really transparent, and actually always have been.

In any case, though, he still doesn’t line up behind you. He states this: ” Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned”.” He never actually ignores gender the way you are insisting. He cites Carol Hooven, but like most of these citations of supposedly neutral scientists, he ignores who Hooven actually is and implies she just said something and got cancelled: https://www.transgendermap.com/issues/anthropology/carole-hooven/ . Sokal’s axe to grind here is telling, and it’s clearly not motivated by the science.

Which means all of that, all the misrepresentation and incompetence, flew over your head.

All because you needed to cite an authority, any authority.

Despite that authority not being one.

I’m going to harp on this for a bit. I pointed out that all the biologists are telling you one thing, quite consistently. You cite a mathematician in response, while trying to pussyfoot around what being rational means. And Sokal isn’t responsive to anything Richard has said, either. Indeed, Sokal falls into the exact trap Richard pointed out, and he’s apparently not informed or bright enough to get out of it by moving the goalposts the way Dawkins did: He chooses one criterion, in this case gametes, and doesn’t even bother addressing the obvious problem. To quote Hornbeck (who, yes, is not a biologist, but does actually cite the biological literature properly instead of trotting out grievances):

“This view is comically reductionist: it doesn’t matter how large your breasts are or whether you lactate, it doesn’t matter whether you can get an erection or possess a uterus, your sex is 100% determined by whether your gametes are large or small. At this point you’re probably queuing up examples where small gamete producers put in extraordinary investment in their young, which is a waste of time.

‘Hermaphrodites such as earthworms and land snails have testes and ovaries all in the same body at the same time. Snails are capable of exchanging sperm both ways, having first violently fired harpoons into each other.’

See, Dawkins just did your work for you, by giving two examples where gamete size does not determine sex. He straight-up admits his dichotomy doesn’t exist! But he has a way to get out of the box he’s placed himself in”.

So why are you letting politically motivated non-experts decide your beliefs, again?

Hazur, you just confirmed my every prediction. Thank you. I am uninterested in your game.

As for how sex and gender work, everything I said is correct and you have offered no legitimate alternative, just semantics that have no significance to any fact of the matter.

RC: “Just FYI, Fred, I don’t believe at this point that Hazur is sincere.
I suspect he is running a motte and bailey game where he wants to establish a trivial premise …”. Well, yes, trivial like the earth circles the sun rather than the other way around.

RC: “… in order to pivot to a bullshit premise (sex is gender, therefore gender is binary and determined by sex).” That is a bullshit consideration, same as considering that a binary sex paradigm is incoherent because leads to the conclusion that everyone not producing gametes constitute another sex. That gender is not binary is not something I dispute, nor it follows from considering sex in binary terms.

RC: “Seeing this coming, …”, you saw that wrong.

Frederic, I appreciate the time you took responding and listing several references. You ask: “The biologists are overwhelmingly rushing to tell people like you that this is an immensely complex, at-best-bimodal, medically-difficult topic of ongoing research. Why would you ever disagree with them?” Well, I disagree with some, but agree with others (that happen to disagree with you). I don’t agree that ‘overwhelmingly’ is accurate either (despite appearances; see link to Sokal’s article below).

FC: “why do you find it at all reassuring that your deliberate flaunting of the scientific paradigm also happens to dovetail with simplistic, reductionist thinking that lets you preserve comfortable mythology and limit your ambiguity in life?” I just don’t see a problem with the binary paradigm (for sexual reproduction) explaining our observations. Reproduction in mammals is a complicated affair that may lead to ‘non-canonical’ situations, yet I agree with those that don’t see the need of the multiplication of the sexes that is being pushed around. I see this attitude akin to creationists that when presented with a new transitional fossil go out claiming ‘see, we had one gap and now there are two’.

FC: “I submit that any rational person should immediately panic when their simplistic binaries are being overwhelmingly obliterated by the evidence, given what we know about our tendency to use simplistic binaries to avoid having to think too hard.” I submit that who is and isn’t being rational in this matter is very much in dispute. For instance, Alan Sokal (who would not have been decried as irrational by anybody until not so long ago) has this to say (https://thecritic.co.uk/woke-invades-the-sciences/): “the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.” He, naturally, presents arguments defending this position, which I find rational and compelling. (If it hasn’t been clear, I’m no authority on the matter, but I’m interested on it from a scientific point of view.)

Sokal also writes: “The bottom line is this: It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world; if that cannot be done, then the cause is not just.” I believe RC has also expressed this type of sentiment, are we simply going to doubt everybody’s sincerity or discuss arguments properly?

Oh, I don’t think so either, Richard. But my point was to note that the pseudo-intellectual artifice that gets built over bad arguments, basically cargo cult logic, always includes things that sound reasonable but really aren’t. All those disconnects are why the motte isn’t the bailey.

Steven, this dishonest and disingenuous reply to Fred is your last post here. You are banned for life. Do not ever comment on my blog again.