Thank you for this. This is the clearest, most articulate expression I've seen yet of something that we all understand intuitively, but about which many of us find ourselves sputtering when confronted with obviously insane arguments to the contrary (e.g., "Oh, so when you say, 'females can have babies,' you must be saying barren and menopausal women aren't really women because they can't have babies!" and so on).
It must get so tedious to have to keep explaining something. Is their taking apart of the language in service to their ideology or I’m not sure why they choose to change the meanings of words. Puzzling.
Yes, taking apart language is in service of the ideology! Orwell explained this long ago. It is a very powerful technique, and the "trans" activists have been remarkably successful with it so far.
It should be resisted. For example, I always put "trans" in quotes, because it is in fact impossible to "transition" the sex of an organism from egg-producing to sperm-producing (or vice versa).
Another example: sex is not "assigned" at birth, sex is DETERMINED at birth (by a simple procedure that is 99.98% accurate).
Why have the majority of medical professionals started saying ‘assigned ‘ at birth? I guess I don’t understand why they have decided to go along with this when they should know )because if I can know sex is determined, they’re supposed to be smarter than me). They should know these most basic things.
I like to use "transwomen" - compound word like "crayfish" which ain't. Partly because it gets their knickers in a twist, but more importantly because it undercuts their claims to that estate.
But the only thing "determined at birth" is genitalia. We generally don't ACQUIRE a sex until puberty. As Tomas argued or suggested - even if he subsequently shot himself in the feet, it's function that determines category membership.
"It is crucial to note, however, that the sex of individuals within a species isn’t based on whether an individual can actually produce certain gametes at any given moment. Pre-pubertal males don’t produce sperm, and some infertile adults of both sexes never produce gametes due to various infertility issues. Yet it would be incorrect to say that these individuals do not have a discernible sex, as an individual’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of evolved reproductive anatomy (i.e. ovaries or testes) that develop for the production of sperm or ova, regardless of their past, present, or future functionality. In humans, and transgender and so-called “non-binary” people are no exception, this reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time."
This poster likes to argue on different comment sections and probably on different platforms in a very rude and dogmatic way that only fertile humans have a sex as you can tell by his comments. He also likes to argue with people who plainly know more than him about the subject but that never stops him.
You might consider that far too many "philosophers", "physicists", and "biologists" don't know their arses from a hole in the ground when it comes to the philosophical, logical, and biological principles which undergird their fields. Cases in point being the Nature and SciAm articles claiming that the sexes are spectra.
More recently, see this more article claiming that a species of birds has four sexes:
Absolutely flaming clueless that the sexes are DEFINED on the basis of the types of gametes produced -- historically or futurely among the unscientific -- and not on the basis of compatible genotypes. Still two types of gametes at last count -- a million dollar prize awaiting for anyone finding even a third one ...
You might try getting your head out of the sand ... and get a better handle on those principles yourself -- less likely to be taken in by various grifters, charlatans, and scientific illiterates. See my post for some starters:
Nothing you say is factual, the two human sexes are defined by which of the two developmental pathways their body took. It is not defined by their reproductive status, whether they are fertile or not at any given point in their lives. The publications you refer to are captured and what have the claims about bird sex got to do with humans? Humans are not birds just as they are not clownfish (which transactivists totally misunderstood anyway!). It is the possession of the relevant reproductive anatomy that is important not whether it works correctly!
Yup. Though you might note that it used to be "very far from the norm" to say that the Earth was NOT the center of the universe, that people got burned at the stake for saying that ...
But, somewhat more importantly, I'd say it was a stretch to suggest that dictionaries and encyclopedias which endorse and promote the biological definitions can be dismissed as mere "academic references".
Those sources endorse the stipulative definitions of biology by which to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types. It necessarily follows that those with neither type are, ipso facto, sexless. What Colin and company are peddling is little more than folk-biology, if not outright Lysenkoism and anti-scientific claptrap.
So what? Just SAYING, "2+2=5" doesn't actually make it true. No matter how many times one says it.
My point is that that is flatly contradicted by the standard biological definitions for the sexes. Look at the Lexico definitions for the sexes, "female" for example:
"female (adjective): Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes"
Diddly-squat about any "immature" organisms, about any past or future functionality as Emma Hilton, Colin Wright, & Heather Heying are wont to argue:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, [B]regardless of their past, present or future functionality[/B], are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
Just to add to possibilities for sexual reproduction, Iain M Banks created a species (the Azad) in "Player of Games" with three sexes - males (producing one set of gametes), spices (producing another type) and females (gestate the foetus). If I were to rack my brain, I could probably think of other fascinating thought-experiments scifi authors have come up with!
Ursula Le Guin's planet Gethen (setting of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness and various short stores, in particular Coming of Age in Karhide) is peopled by genetically-engineered humans who are usually sexless, but once a month go into "heat", and then become either male or female (each person capable of either each time).
By this usage that means an external incubator has a sex. If you can grow a baby in a robot goo bag like the Matrix you're saying the bag is female. It's not three sexes by the definition of sex, it's a scifi author not understanding what a gamete or sex actually is.
This is great, however, it seems to have a loophole that my annoying woke friends would exploit.
This is likely going to make you tear your hair out.
> If there’s no disorder... [a male body will produce sperm]. That’s the plan, so to speak. And similarly for females, with regard to ova. That’s all it is to be male or to be female. Simple.
My annoying friends would argue: "Ah, but a transman *would* produce sperm if only his body did not have the tragic dysfunction of female genes and phenotype. Similar argument applies to transwomen and ova. Transwomen are indeed particularly tragic, because it's perfectly possible to be born with XY chromosomes and develop into a fertile woman - alas in their case their bodies did not develop correctly."
(And then there's the mote and bailey: "Nobody's arguing that sex doesn't exist. We just think it's not relevant to gender and gender based sporting categories, like (checks notes) Women's Cage Fighting.)
Yes, I've encountered that response, though only on Twitter! I've had some success pointing out that, somehow, we can discern function in biology. We can know that this organ in my chest is a heart, rather than, say, a very strange kidney that pumps blood due to dysfunction. However it is that we know that, we can also know in the same way that some organism is a male, rather than a female who produces sperm due to malfunction. So, a practical strategy might be to ask your conversation partner whether they know the organ in your chest is a heart, as opposed to a dysfunctional kidney. If they say no, that's really implausible, and a reductio ad absurdum. If they say yes, ask how they know that. And then maybe apply their answer to the case of males and females. What do you think?
Thanks! Alas, I think they'd switch and say that sex need not determine gender.
Hmm. I think this approach gives them the internal lines. They throw out a bazillion points, and we have use far more words to refute each one, then they can switch to a different point, and/or accuse us of being obsessed with whatever we spent ages defending.
Useful and illuminating though your article is, I think we need a different rhetorical strategy.
You're friends have a poor sense of logic, lol. I go back to the starting point of GI that presupposes that post-modern subjective relativism is a shared world view. I don't share it, so going forward from there really is a no-go. I don't take my cues and understanding of reality from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler...
Sigh. It's... well I have fewer friends now than I did.
My new response will be to let them explain and ask questions, and also ask them to show how this doesn't apply to other categories. I identify as a Viscount....
This is so great, thank you. Regarding this: "And we’ve also seen that some say things like “sex is not a binary variable,” since there are really four things that can be going on in an organism when it comes to sex: male, female, both, or neither." I have never heard the "sex is not a binary variable" argument, I guess that is connected to what I think of as the Clownfish Argument. Are these people saying that because other individual organisms in nature can be "male, female, both or neither" that an individual human can potentially have that variety of sexual/non-sexual expression? Have real scientists with advanced degrees expressed this? It doesn't make sense to me at all, if you are using the term "sex" to actually mean something.
Elizabeth: "Are these people saying that because other individual organisms in nature can be 'male, female, both or neither' that an individual human can potentially have that variety of sexual/non-sexual expression?"
Think you're probably asking whether different individual humans can be "male, female, both, & neither". 🙂 Rather doubt any credible biologists have argued for "both" -- think the consensus is that there are no records of any human being a hermaphrodite, being both male and female.
However, in an essay over at Aeon, Paul Griffiths -- university of Sydney, philosophy of biology, co-author of Genetics -- more or less argues that many humans are neither male nor female:
"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless; my editorializing]."
And he didn't pull those definitions out of thin air -- they're more or less standard. For examples, see the definitions in the Glossary in the following article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction, and the following definitions from Oxford Dictionaries (more or less the gold standard):
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
By those definitions, and by Griffiths summary of them, prepubescent humans, for examples, are sexless because they can't produce either type of gamete. And, for the same reasons, transwomen who cut their nuts off don't change their sex -- except from "male" to "sexless"; the only way they could actually change sex is to grow their own pair of functioning ovaries, and everything else that goes along with them -- pretty much of an impossibility.
Isaac Asimov's 1972 novel "The God's Themselves" had an intelligent species in a parallel universe who had three sexes. I haven't read it since it came out, and have forgotten most of the details, but the wikipedia article has a good summary. Asimov well understood that sex denotes a functional role in the act of reproduction and took a lot of care in working out the social consequences of the sex structure, but I don't recall that he had an evolutionary reason for there to be three sexes. What I do recall was that the triple in the story were having a hard time conceiving, and had performance anxiety when they tried to mate. :-)
I don't think it's even theoretically possible for humans to be simultaneous hermaphrodites. Classifying sex as producing one or the other means in humans producing sperm is antithetical to producing eggs and vice versa. The #1 known cause (not STI related) of primary infertility in women is PCOS, which is essentially the ovaries churning out androgens at high levels. This inhibits ovulation or even full maturation of an egg let alone release. The free testosterone level isn't in the same magnitude of male levels unless those males have cancer yet it's still too high to successfully produce eggs. High estrogen in males does the same thing, inhibits sperm production. In the case of ovotestis, if any gamete is produced it's almost always ova, including leading to successful pregnancy, and there are no known cases of both.
I think it would be a stretch to say simultaneous hermaphroditism is even theoretically possible in humans knowing how complex the hormones have to be just for a successful regular production and how those are at complete odds with the other sex's hormones. It's reaching into the bounds of science fiction. Somehow we would have to have two cell types in the same person that are capable of full maturity and then exclude the gonads from the circulating hormones of the person in whose body they reside for the entirety of puberty while at the same time allowing the rest of the body to access the hormones produced by those gonads to complete puberty in order to allow for sexual maturity and development of said gonads.
The author points to being both female and male in the article; "There are, to my knowledge, no clear cases of true simultaneous hermaphrodites in humans. Perhaps the best candidate case is this one, from the 1970s. But my understanding is this patient’s condition was the result of mosaicism: the patient’s body consisted of cells with different genomes, most XY but some XX. Due to the relatively small proportion of the patient’s body that bore XX chromosomes—and, as a result, produced ovarian tissue—probably the right way to characterize this case is as that of a male who carried within himself a small amount of foreign, female tissue."
Fascinating article, particularly on the history of sexual reproduction and the Placozoa.
However, while there's much that I agree with, notably your emphasis of the centrality of function, I kinda think you've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by then asserting function really isn't all that essential. Something of a hail-Mary pass that seems characteristic of philosophers writing about the topic.
For instance, see an article by feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith, writing on Medium - from which she was defenestrated for running afoul of the Tranish Inquisition, where she says:
"It’s not as though every male person is such that he actually produces sperm. The best way to understand the ‘sperm or ova’ binary is that it’s true all going well. Of course an individual man could end up with testicular cancer and have to have his testicles removed. Does that mean he’s no longer male? Of course not. He’s the kind of individual who, all going well, produces sperm."
It's "nice" that she had also argued earlier in her piece that "produces gametes" is the "single necessary condition" for sex category membership. However, she then, in effect, argues that there is some wooish, je ne sais quoi element that leaps into the fray, a philosophical "Deus ex machina", that miraculously rescues such sadly “de-nutted” individuals from the shame and ignominy of no longer qualifying as members of that other exalted category, “males”.
Bit of a murky topic which I certainly haven't "plumbed the depths" of. But I kind of get the impression that function - present, right now, not some time down the road or in the distance past - is often the necessary and sufficient condition for category membership. You might note the definition for sex itself:
"sex (noun): 2) Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions."
"reproductive functions" - diddly-squat about any "past-present-or-future functionality".
Clocks tell time; that is their essential function, their sine qua non. Rather risible to try arguing that a mechanical "clock" that has had it's mainspring removed, or that has been pounded down into rubble can really still qualify as one. It may LOOK like a clock, may have a passing resemblance to one, and we might say that it WAS a clock, or is one nominally speaking or for reference purposes only. But it no longer exhibits or manifests its essential and defining property.
Kind of think any efforts to disconnect the biological definitions for the sexes from their functional roots is little short of outright Lysenkoism: "the deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable."
Think you and Colin are basically following in the footsteps of such Lysenkoists, are going down a blind alley by endorsing and promoting what Marco Del Giudice, of the University of New Mexico, called the "patchwork definitions of the [so-called] social sciences":
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
Thank you for this. This is the clearest, most articulate expression I've seen yet of something that we all understand intuitively, but about which many of us find ourselves sputtering when confronted with obviously insane arguments to the contrary (e.g., "Oh, so when you say, 'females can have babies,' you must be saying barren and menopausal women aren't really women because they can't have babies!" and so on).
And of course, they absolutely DO realize, but pretend not to.
It must get so tedious to have to keep explaining something. Is their taking apart of the language in service to their ideology or I’m not sure why they choose to change the meanings of words. Puzzling.
Yes, taking apart language is in service of the ideology! Orwell explained this long ago. It is a very powerful technique, and the "trans" activists have been remarkably successful with it so far.
It should be resisted. For example, I always put "trans" in quotes, because it is in fact impossible to "transition" the sex of an organism from egg-producing to sperm-producing (or vice versa).
Another example: sex is not "assigned" at birth, sex is DETERMINED at birth (by a simple procedure that is 99.98% accurate).
Why have the majority of medical professionals started saying ‘assigned ‘ at birth? I guess I don’t understand why they have decided to go along with this when they should know )because if I can know sex is determined, they’re supposed to be smarter than me). They should know these most basic things.
A minority has fallen into the ideology, the majority is too afraid to speak up.
https://genspect.org/north-american-medical-schools-prioritize-ideology-over-science/
https://www.commonsense.news/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological
https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/03/students-faculty-and-staff-embrace-transgender-medicine-curriculum-in-the-uc-college-of-medicine.html
Money speaks very powerfully. Surgeons should know better than to amputate healthy body parts on teenagers as well. :(
I like to use "transwomen" - compound word like "crayfish" which ain't. Partly because it gets their knickers in a twist, but more importantly because it undercuts their claims to that estate.
But the only thing "determined at birth" is genitalia. We generally don't ACQUIRE a sex until puberty. As Tomas argued or suggested - even if he subsequently shot himself in the feet, it's function that determines category membership.
"We generally don't ACQUIRE a sex until puberty."
This is wrong!
"It is crucial to note, however, that the sex of individuals within a species isn’t based on whether an individual can actually produce certain gametes at any given moment. Pre-pubertal males don’t produce sperm, and some infertile adults of both sexes never produce gametes due to various infertility issues. Yet it would be incorrect to say that these individuals do not have a discernible sex, as an individual’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of evolved reproductive anatomy (i.e. ovaries or testes) that develop for the production of sperm or ova, regardless of their past, present, or future functionality. In humans, and transgender and so-called “non-binary” people are no exception, this reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time."
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
This poster likes to argue on different comment sections and probably on different platforms in a very rude and dogmatic way that only fertile humans have a sex as you can tell by his comments. He also likes to argue with people who plainly know more than him about the subject but that never stops him.
Just the facts ma'am, just the facts.
You might consider that far too many "philosophers", "physicists", and "biologists" don't know their arses from a hole in the ground when it comes to the philosophical, logical, and biological principles which undergird their fields. Cases in point being the Nature and SciAm articles claiming that the sexes are spectra.
More recently, see this more article claiming that a species of birds has four sexes:
https://www.iflscience.com/meet-the-sparrow-with-four-sexes-66879
Absolutely flaming clueless that the sexes are DEFINED on the basis of the types of gametes produced -- historically or futurely among the unscientific -- and not on the basis of compatible genotypes. Still two types of gametes at last count -- a million dollar prize awaiting for anyone finding even a third one ...
You might try getting your head out of the sand ... and get a better handle on those principles yourself -- less likely to be taken in by various grifters, charlatans, and scientific illiterates. See my post for some starters:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/on-being-defrauded-by-heather-heying
Nothing you say is factual, the two human sexes are defined by which of the two developmental pathways their body took. It is not defined by their reproductive status, whether they are fertile or not at any given point in their lives. The publications you refer to are captured and what have the claims about bird sex got to do with humans? Humans are not birds just as they are not clownfish (which transactivists totally misunderstood anyway!). It is the possession of the relevant reproductive anatomy that is important not whether it works correctly!
What horse crap.
You might note my "rebuttal" of that post of Colin's:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum/comment/6213355
So your claim is that a boy with testes and a penis and a girl with ovaries and a uterus both do not have a sex before puberty?
Okey dokey.
That is a definition of "sex" that is very far from the norm, no matter how many academic references you cite.
Yup. Though you might note that it used to be "very far from the norm" to say that the Earth was NOT the center of the universe, that people got burned at the stake for saying that ...
But, somewhat more importantly, I'd say it was a stretch to suggest that dictionaries and encyclopedias which endorse and promote the biological definitions can be dismissed as mere "academic references".
Those sources endorse the stipulative definitions of biology by which to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types. It necessarily follows that those with neither type are, ipso facto, sexless. What Colin and company are peddling is little more than folk-biology, if not outright Lysenkoism and anti-scientific claptrap.
He literally says that immaturity does not negate sex. In more than one of his articles. Juveniles of any species with a sex have a sex.
So what? Just SAYING, "2+2=5" doesn't actually make it true. No matter how many times one says it.
My point is that that is flatly contradicted by the standard biological definitions for the sexes. Look at the Lexico definitions for the sexes, "female" for example:
"female (adjective): Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes"
https://www.lexico.com/definition/female
Diddly-squat about any "immature" organisms, about any past or future functionality as Emma Hilton, Colin Wright, & Heather Heying are wont to argue:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, [B]regardless of their past, present or future functionality[/B], are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
Those definitions are all about present functionality - no gonads, therefore neither male nor female.
See too the Glossary in this article in the Journal of Molecular Reproduction which endorses, if not wasn't the source of, those Lexico definitions:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Love your papers! Keep up the good work!
Just to add to possibilities for sexual reproduction, Iain M Banks created a species (the Azad) in "Player of Games" with three sexes - males (producing one set of gametes), spices (producing another type) and females (gestate the foetus). If I were to rack my brain, I could probably think of other fascinating thought-experiments scifi authors have come up with!
Ursula Le Guin's planet Gethen (setting of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness and various short stores, in particular Coming of Age in Karhide) is peopled by genetically-engineered humans who are usually sexless, but once a month go into "heat", and then become either male or female (each person capable of either each time).
By this usage that means an external incubator has a sex. If you can grow a baby in a robot goo bag like the Matrix you're saying the bag is female. It's not three sexes by the definition of sex, it's a scifi author not understanding what a gamete or sex actually is.
This is great, however, it seems to have a loophole that my annoying woke friends would exploit.
This is likely going to make you tear your hair out.
> If there’s no disorder... [a male body will produce sperm]. That’s the plan, so to speak. And similarly for females, with regard to ova. That’s all it is to be male or to be female. Simple.
My annoying friends would argue: "Ah, but a transman *would* produce sperm if only his body did not have the tragic dysfunction of female genes and phenotype. Similar argument applies to transwomen and ova. Transwomen are indeed particularly tragic, because it's perfectly possible to be born with XY chromosomes and develop into a fertile woman - alas in their case their bodies did not develop correctly."
(And then there's the mote and bailey: "Nobody's arguing that sex doesn't exist. We just think it's not relevant to gender and gender based sporting categories, like (checks notes) Women's Cage Fighting.)
Yes, I've encountered that response, though only on Twitter! I've had some success pointing out that, somehow, we can discern function in biology. We can know that this organ in my chest is a heart, rather than, say, a very strange kidney that pumps blood due to dysfunction. However it is that we know that, we can also know in the same way that some organism is a male, rather than a female who produces sperm due to malfunction. So, a practical strategy might be to ask your conversation partner whether they know the organ in your chest is a heart, as opposed to a dysfunctional kidney. If they say no, that's really implausible, and a reductio ad absurdum. If they say yes, ask how they know that. And then maybe apply their answer to the case of males and females. What do you think?
Thanks! Alas, I think they'd switch and say that sex need not determine gender.
Hmm. I think this approach gives them the internal lines. They throw out a bazillion points, and we have use far more words to refute each one, then they can switch to a different point, and/or accuse us of being obsessed with whatever we spent ages defending.
Useful and illuminating though your article is, I think we need a different rhetorical strategy.
Lol I bet they think they only thing stopping us from flying is that we don't identify as trans birds.
You're friends have a poor sense of logic, lol. I go back to the starting point of GI that presupposes that post-modern subjective relativism is a shared world view. I don't share it, so going forward from there really is a no-go. I don't take my cues and understanding of reality from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler...
Sigh. It's... well I have fewer friends now than I did.
My new response will be to let them explain and ask questions, and also ask them to show how this doesn't apply to other categories. I identify as a Viscount....
Love the perspective and the analogy!
This is so great, thank you. Regarding this: "And we’ve also seen that some say things like “sex is not a binary variable,” since there are really four things that can be going on in an organism when it comes to sex: male, female, both, or neither." I have never heard the "sex is not a binary variable" argument, I guess that is connected to what I think of as the Clownfish Argument. Are these people saying that because other individual organisms in nature can be "male, female, both or neither" that an individual human can potentially have that variety of sexual/non-sexual expression? Have real scientists with advanced degrees expressed this? It doesn't make sense to me at all, if you are using the term "sex" to actually mean something.
Elizabeth: "Are these people saying that because other individual organisms in nature can be 'male, female, both or neither' that an individual human can potentially have that variety of sexual/non-sexual expression?"
Think you're probably asking whether different individual humans can be "male, female, both, & neither". 🙂 Rather doubt any credible biologists have argued for "both" -- think the consensus is that there are no records of any human being a hermaphrodite, being both male and female.
However, in an essay over at Aeon, Paul Griffiths -- university of Sydney, philosophy of biology, co-author of Genetics -- more or less argues that many humans are neither male nor female:
"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless; my editorializing]."
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
And he didn't pull those definitions out of thin air -- they're more or less standard. For examples, see the definitions in the Glossary in the following article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction, and the following definitions from Oxford Dictionaries (more or less the gold standard):
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
By those definitions, and by Griffiths summary of them, prepubescent humans, for examples, are sexless because they can't produce either type of gamete. And, for the same reasons, transwomen who cut their nuts off don't change their sex -- except from "male" to "sexless"; the only way they could actually change sex is to grow their own pair of functioning ovaries, and everything else that goes along with them -- pretty much of an impossibility.
Isaac Asimov's 1972 novel "The God's Themselves" had an intelligent species in a parallel universe who had three sexes. I haven't read it since it came out, and have forgotten most of the details, but the wikipedia article has a good summary. Asimov well understood that sex denotes a functional role in the act of reproduction and took a lot of care in working out the social consequences of the sex structure, but I don't recall that he had an evolutionary reason for there to be three sexes. What I do recall was that the triple in the story were having a hard time conceiving, and had performance anxiety when they tried to mate. :-)
I don't think it's even theoretically possible for humans to be simultaneous hermaphrodites. Classifying sex as producing one or the other means in humans producing sperm is antithetical to producing eggs and vice versa. The #1 known cause (not STI related) of primary infertility in women is PCOS, which is essentially the ovaries churning out androgens at high levels. This inhibits ovulation or even full maturation of an egg let alone release. The free testosterone level isn't in the same magnitude of male levels unless those males have cancer yet it's still too high to successfully produce eggs. High estrogen in males does the same thing, inhibits sperm production. In the case of ovotestis, if any gamete is produced it's almost always ova, including leading to successful pregnancy, and there are no known cases of both.
I think it would be a stretch to say simultaneous hermaphroditism is even theoretically possible in humans knowing how complex the hormones have to be just for a successful regular production and how those are at complete odds with the other sex's hormones. It's reaching into the bounds of science fiction. Somehow we would have to have two cell types in the same person that are capable of full maturity and then exclude the gonads from the circulating hormones of the person in whose body they reside for the entirety of puberty while at the same time allowing the rest of the body to access the hormones produced by those gonads to complete puberty in order to allow for sexual maturity and development of said gonads.
Very well-written.
Not just yeasts...
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-only-have-two-types-of-sex-to-reproduce-Could-there-be-more-Not-talking-about-gender-just-reproduction/answer/Jamie-Bechtel-%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%80-%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%9F%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%8D
That should get a rise out of someone ... 😉
But as you point out I can be male and female. Which means they are not binary but endpoints on a scale.
The author points to being both female and male in the article; "There are, to my knowledge, no clear cases of true simultaneous hermaphrodites in humans. Perhaps the best candidate case is this one, from the 1970s. But my understanding is this patient’s condition was the result of mosaicism: the patient’s body consisted of cells with different genomes, most XY but some XX. Due to the relatively small proportion of the patient’s body that bore XX chromosomes—and, as a result, produced ovarian tissue—probably the right way to characterize this case is as that of a male who carried within himself a small amount of foreign, female tissue."
But there aren't any points in between the end points. If there were then sex would be spectrum.
"spectrum (noun): 2) Used to classify something in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme points."
https://www.lexico.com/definition/spectrum
Absent things in between the endpoints, all that we have is a binary.
Fascinating article, particularly on the history of sexual reproduction and the Placozoa.
However, while there's much that I agree with, notably your emphasis of the centrality of function, I kinda think you've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by then asserting function really isn't all that essential. Something of a hail-Mary pass that seems characteristic of philosophers writing about the topic.
For instance, see an article by feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith, writing on Medium - from which she was defenestrated for running afoul of the Tranish Inquisition, where she says:
"It’s not as though every male person is such that he actually produces sperm. The best way to understand the ‘sperm or ova’ binary is that it’s true all going well. Of course an individual man could end up with testicular cancer and have to have his testicles removed. Does that mean he’s no longer male? Of course not. He’s the kind of individual who, all going well, produces sperm."
https://web.archive.org/web/20190502004710/https://medium.com/@aytchellis/is-it-possible-to-change-sex-8d863ce7fca2
"all going well" 🙄
It's "nice" that she had also argued earlier in her piece that "produces gametes" is the "single necessary condition" for sex category membership. However, she then, in effect, argues that there is some wooish, je ne sais quoi element that leaps into the fray, a philosophical "Deus ex machina", that miraculously rescues such sadly “de-nutted” individuals from the shame and ignominy of no longer qualifying as members of that other exalted category, “males”.
Bit of a murky topic which I certainly haven't "plumbed the depths" of. But I kind of get the impression that function - present, right now, not some time down the road or in the distance past - is often the necessary and sufficient condition for category membership. You might note the definition for sex itself:
"sex (noun): 2) Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions."
https://www.lexico.com/definition/sex
"reproductive functions" - diddly-squat about any "past-present-or-future functionality".
Clocks tell time; that is their essential function, their sine qua non. Rather risible to try arguing that a mechanical "clock" that has had it's mainspring removed, or that has been pounded down into rubble can really still qualify as one. It may LOOK like a clock, may have a passing resemblance to one, and we might say that it WAS a clock, or is one nominally speaking or for reference purposes only. But it no longer exhibits or manifests its essential and defining property.
Kind of think any efforts to disconnect the biological definitions for the sexes from their functional roots is little short of outright Lysenkoism: "the deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable."
Think you and Colin are basically following in the footsteps of such Lysenkoists, are going down a blind alley by endorsing and promoting what Marco Del Giudice, of the University of New Mexico, called the "patchwork definitions of the [so-called] social sciences":
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
No gametes, no reproductive function, no sex.