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In recent years there has been a concerted effort by activists to debunk the longstanding scientific consensus that the categories male and female represent real and discrete biological categories in humans. The Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, for instance, rejects the notion that biological sex is “natural,” “pre-political,” or “objective,” claiming instead that it is “a cultural thing posing as a natural one.” UC Riverside’s Gender and Sexualities Chair, Brandon Andrew Robinson, claims that we “should stop teaching that sex is biological” because we “assign meaning to certain things…because of dominant gender ideologies.” In this view, categorizing people as male or female is not only biologically incorrect but also harmful and oppressive.

For a long time these ideas festered away in humanities departments without serious inroads with the hard sciences. But as Queer Theory and social constructivism became entangled with notions of “Social Justice” and Left-wing politics, and as political discourse has become increasingly polarized, many activist scientists have been attempting to provide an imprimatur of legitimacy to these anti-scientific beliefs.

Early attempts at debunking the two-sex model sought to expand the number of sexes beyond two. One such example is Brown University Professor Emerita Anne Fausto-Sterling, who claimed the “two-party sexual system” in humans was “in defiance of nature,” and that there were instead “at least five sex categories, and perhaps even more.” However, the additional sexes she proposed simply corresponded to various intersex conditions, not new sexes akin to the functional reproductive roles that universally define all males and females.

More modern attempts to debunk the binary nature of sex have moved away from trying to discover new sexes, and have instead called for the elimination of sex categories entirely in favor of viewing sex as a continuous, although perhaps bimodal, spectrum consisting of many traits. Such ideas have found homes in the pages of Nature and popular science magazines like Scientific American. Figures like the one below are often used to visualize this model.

This representation of sex has proven popular because it accords with our intuitive (albeit naïve) sense that most of us cluster around a typical male or female typology while recognizing that our various anatomical traits are quite variable. I’ve written a lengthy rebuttal of the sex spectrum model here, but the short version of it is that the sex spectrum model conflates traits that are influenced by one’s sex—such as breast size, body hair, voice pitch, hip morphology, etc.—with sex itself, which is defined by one’s primary sex organs (i.e., testes versus ovaries).

Because the sex binary has been deemed “oppressive” and invalidating of transgender identities and experiences—cardinal sins of our age—this has started an arms race among activist scientists to come up with a model of sex that is the least binary thing imaginable. Since the “bimodal spectrum” concept still entails two of something, this must be abandoned as it may be seen as problematically implying a fundamentally binary underlying property that’s producing the bimodal distribution of sex-related traits—and they’d be right!

In pursuit of this goal, a “Multimodal Sex literature survey team” composed of researchers from UC Berkeley and Loyola University Chicago has been assembled to “re-imagine a more inclusive framework for biological sex.” On January 27, 2023, the team produced their first pre-print titled “Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution.” The paper argues that sex is best viewed as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels” (C) rather than binary (A) or bimodal (B).

To support their assertion, the authors first survey sex at four different “levels”—genetic, endocrine, morphological, and social—in order to interrogate the degree to which these traits can be considered binary. Next, they present three “case studies” where they claim sex “may be better categorized as multimodal” as opposed to “binary or bimodal.” The authors conclude that their “expanded understanding of ‘sex’ better equips us to understand evolutionary processes on their own terms,” and will help biologists “push back against misunderstandings of the biology of sexual phenotypes that enact harm on marginalized communities.”

The arguments presented throughout the paper are not just poor, but are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the universal defining property of all males and all females across all taxa—having the function of producing sperm or ova, respectively. That any individual scientist, lab, or “survey team” could claim to be expanding the boundary of our knowledge on a topic that they do not understand at its core is embarrassing.

In saner times such a paper would perhaps elicit a small chuckle from a journal editor before issuing a swift rejection. But current times are far from sane, and the quick ascendance of fashionable pseudoscience in academia on the biology of sex gives us ample reason to worry this paper will not receive the withering review it deserves.

So allow me to provide that now.

Lengthy and thorough rebuttals like the one below take considerable time and effort to produce, but are necessary. If you find my work valuable, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to access the rest of this post.

This paywall will be lifted at a later date so that everyone can learn from it.

Sincerely,

CW