Weekly Recap

Multimodal sex pseudoscience, transphobic 'dogwhistles' that are actually homophobic, Harry Potter game creators distance themselves from JK Rowling, Utah bans transitioning minors, and more!

New Paper Argues for ‘Multimodal’ Model of Sex

A new paper—currently an unreviewed pre-print on bioRxiv—argues to abandon the binary model of sex in favor of viewing “sex” as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels.” They call this new model the “multimodal model of animal sex,” and argue that it is “a more inclusive and expansive framework” that adds more clarity than confusion and helps “to push back against misunderstandings of the biology of sexual phenotypes that enact harm on marginalized communities.”

There are many things wrong with this paper, which I will be fleshing out in more detail in City Journal next week. The main issue is that it begins by constructing a strawman of the “sex binary” position that no biologist, in my experience, actually holds. For instance, the authors claim that “sex” is claimed to “describe a suite of phenotypic and genotypic traits of an organism related to reproduction,” such as “gamete type, chromosomal inheritance, physiology, morphology, behavior, etc.” They further state that because these things are not “necessarily linked,” the term “sex” hides a lot of meaningful variation among these traits, and that a “multimodal” concept of sex would allow us to consider this variation.