Beyond the Binary Is a Sea of Nonsense

What Fuentes and Lents get wrong about the sex binary.

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About the Author

Alex Byrne is a Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and the author of the book Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions. His main interests are philosophy of mind (especially perception), metaphysics (especially color) and epistemology (especially self-knowledge).

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The latest front in the gender wars concerns passports: in a reversal from the Biden administration, the Trump administration is “requiring everyone’s passport to reflect the sex on an original birth certificate.” The word “gender,” previously on passport applications, has been replaced by “sex.” As the New York Times reported:

In the Trump administration’s paradigm, gender “ideology” stands in contrast to an understanding of biology that divides nearly all animal and plant species into males with small, mobile reproductive cells and females with large, immobile ones.

Parachuting into the battlefield is the biologist Nathan Lents, a professor at John Jay College:

As the idea that gender exists on a spectrum has taken hold on society, the distinction between gender and biological sex has increasingly become the subject of controversy and disagreement, even among those who are not otherwise transphobic or reactionary. Because of the very human tendency to prefer categories and dichotomies, for many, letting go of the gender binary has meant tightening the grip on the sex binary.

Biologists aid and abet this effort when we insist that males make sperm and females make eggs and that’s all there is to it. This is a linguistic and scientific trap, and it is altogether unnecessary. But like all traps, the sex binary is tempting. It has the allure of clarity and absolute certainty.

This is from his book The Sexual Evolution. A prominent public intellectual who agrees with Lents is the Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, author of Sex is a Spectrum. Both books appeared this year and are worth reading. The pair have recently teamed up to write an essay, “Beyond the Binary: The Compounding Complexity of Biological Sex.”

Is the sex binary a trap, perhaps sprung by conservative reactionaries? Or is it a widely known scientific fact that well-intentioned progressive academics have squirted out much squid ink to deny, clouding the public discourse to no valuable end? “Beyond the Binary” is as compelling a statement of the progressive view as any. Especially given the distinction of its authors, it deserves to be scrutinized carefully. (The biologist Jerry Coyne made an earlier attempt.)

What We Are Not Saying

To start, it’s probably a bad sign when a short article includes a table with two columns, “What we are not saying” and “What we are saying.” Why not say it clearly in the first place? Here’s the table from Fuentes and Lents’s essay:

Fuentes and Lents are not saying, “There is no such thing as biological sex,” or that “sex differences are purely the result of culture.” Good! The authors have a passed a sanity check. They are not saying, “Male and female are not real or useful categories for humans.” Another sanity check passed. However, in the “What we are saying” column, Fuentes and Lents cannot admit the obvious, namely that male and female will continue to be indispensable because people need to categorize others as one sex or the other. People of one sex usually want to find someone of the other sex and make babies. To meet girl, boy must recognize girl, which means being able to categorize others as girls (a type of female).

Fuentes and Lents might object that this is problematically heteronormative. According to them, the main reason why “sex categories remain important” is “equity and justice.” Perhaps they think that when full equity and justice have been achieved, the words “man” and “woman” will become as outdated as “Betamax” and “VHS.”