Thanks for this! My sense of the cultural context is that men and women of the past, say in my grandparents generation (both of my grandmothers, born around 1890, milked cows and engaged in outside farm work when the need arose) often were needed for helping with the babies, even if male--because of maternal mortality in olden days. Men died doing dangerous work, in wars and of heart attacks (who heard of cholesterol before 1984?) and the surviving widows did all kinds of "men's work" out of necessity. People wore practical clothing, did not have huge wardrobes and were grateful if they had enough to eat. Radical theories surrounding Joan of Arc's or Elizabeth 1's "gender" are ludicrous and disrespect the hard work of survival our ancestors did, leading to our very existences. uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com
Well written, First Principles focused, enlightening essay for anyone confused by the intentional ambiguity and obfuscation promoted by those advancing the current cultural driven chaos. Thank you for a damn fine piece of work!
Nov 16, 2022·edited Nov 16, 2022Liked by Colin Wright
Many of us mocked Ketanji Brown Jackson for refusing to define female because "(she is) not a biologist". Many of us watched "What is a woman" and laughed at all the circular definitions. This article kind of pokes holes in our conception of sex though.
Nevertheless I am ok with using a human definition of sex based on chromosomes even knowing 0.1% will have chromosomal anomalies and not all dichotomous species on earth have our genomes. There is enough information about our bodies conferred by chromosomes to know that males and females are compositionally distinct and have massively different evolutionary behavior strategies. It is also sufficient information to drive medical decisions. To eliminate intentional confusion I use terms like XY trans or XX trans. I hope that catches on.
Activists are very invested in overplaying phenotypic similarities and downplaying physiological and mental differences between the human sexes. It is a variation of the blank slate and it has wreaked far too much havoc on science and now society is being assaulted by it.
Thanks for all the detail. However, in 99% of current and recent human societies, there has been and there is no confusion about the sexes. The recent confusion is related to the agenda of very small and morally deranged groups within western countries. For adults with gender dysphoria, I have great personal sympathy. What an agonizing situation to be in! However, we must protect easily influenced children and adolescents from this scourge knowing that gender confusion is usually transitory UNLESS fostered and reinforced by well-meaning individuals with an agenda.
Not entirely a bad or useless article. In particular, there is more than a bit of justification for arguing that the “non-universal definitions of sexes” – i.e., those comprising the “chromosomal, phenotypic, and sociocultural” categories – lead to “absurd conclusions”.
However, one might reasonably argue that your [Zach’s] own bastardization of the standard biological definitions which you yourself quoted – i.e., “the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger [or smaller] gametes in anisogamous systems” – into the “type of reproductive strategy implemented in the individual organism” leads to the same type of “absurd conclusions”. It is simply NOT the “reproductive strategy” – which clearly, in your lexicon and that of Colin, encompasses those individuals which have no functional gonads at all – that qualifies organisms as members of the “male” or “female” sex categories. It is simply and necessarily ONLY the CURRENT ability to produce either of two types of gametes that so qualifies individual organisms, those with no ability to produce either being, ipso facto, sexless.
More particularly on those “absurd conclusions”, that is most evident from the article you linked to on clownfish which clearly endorses, in several passages, the view that all but two clownfish – i.e., a single male and a single female – in a school of them are sexless. Consider these two sections therefrom, and my commentary thereon:
1) “Sex change occurs in relation to the social hierarchy, where the two largest individuals (female being the largest of the two) forms a strong monogamous breeding pair while the rest are non-breeders .... When the female dies (or is removed), the male changes sex to become the dominant breeding female and the second largest member from the non-breeders becomes the dominant male ...”
The “non-breeder” can’t very well “BECOME the dominant male” if it was already “male” to begin with. ALL of those “non-breeders” – every last clownfish except the breeding PAIR (i.e., TWO clownfish) – are NEITHER male NOR female; they’re sexLESS. That IS what the word MEANS.
2) “The gonads of A. ocellaris are bi-lobed and asymmetrical .... Ovotestes are found in males and non-breeders. .... Histological examinations revealed that the ovotestes in male and non-breeders consist of both testicular and ovarian cells. ... Ovotestes of non-breeders consist mainly of oogonia and previtellogenic oocytes (OR) , with less area of the testicular region (TR) although all stages of spermatogenic cells can be found .... The presence of both ovarian and testicular tissues in the gonad of male and non-breeders and the absence of testicular tissues in the ovary of the females suggested that A. ocellaris undergo a change of sex from male to female (protandry) that may not be reversible.”
The gonads of non-breeders – i.e., those clownfish which are neither male nor female – clearly change over the course of their life cycles. They have “developed anatomies” – in Colin’s lexicon – that have the potential to be EITHER testes OR ovaries. Which – both by your [Zach’s] bastardization and by Colin’s idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definition – means that, right from hatching, clownfish are BOTH males AND females.
Which has to qualify as another set of “absurd conclusions” that are flatly contradicted by the standard view that such fish are SEQUENTIAL hermaphrodites. I wait, with bated breath, your peer-reviewed article published in a reputable biological journal showing how “sequential” is no longer justified since your own idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions now have to qualify as trump ...
You (Zach) and Colin are both clearly rather desperate in your refusal to consider that there is any such category as “sexless”. Though, sadly, you’re hardly unique in that regard. But that largely because you (Zach), in particular and Colin presumably likewise, apparently “think” that it is “morally problematic” to even suggest that those who “differ from the [sex] norm are [of] neither sex”:
You’re clearly putting feelings before facts; you’re crippled by a “fear” of “offending” those who might be “discomfited” by being “deprived” of membership in the sex categories. Hard to imagine a more egregious case of unscientific if not anti-scientific claptrap, of being engaged in the “deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable” – Lysenkoism writ large:
You both might just as well argue in favour of “teaching the controversy” because teaching evolution and geology might “offend” religious fundamentalists.
You must have seen this (the mom in a cat costume reading a school board the riot act), it's priceless. My son has a Salacious B. Crumb costume somewhere. Cannot wait for the next school board mtg.
"This is what sexes ultimately are: discrete reproductive strategies involving the production of two different gametes."
Suppose someone is born with a condition that means they'll never produce gametes -- doesn't the definition of sex given here exclude them because they cannot produce gametes and therefore cannot implement a reproductive strategy?
Would you suggest that having the equipment for producing the relevant gamete (even if that equipment doesn't work) is what makes us one sex or the other?
I see a more formidable problem in the activists “revolutionary” movement to intentionally inflict ambiguity into the greater cultural/political discussion. Intentionally imposing ambiguity into precise, workable and established definitional systems of meaning erodes societal order, transactional trust, and ultimately, cohesive institutions. Ambiguity in any form eventually brings chaos. Our ancestral brains were refined by distant progenitors who weren’t afforded the luxury of giving ambiguity the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, it’s just a small snake in the brush — but it may transmit a poison capable of harm.” Successful societies developed low tolerance for all forms of potentially destructive ambiguity, including language. In structured, durable societies, languages developed to eliminate ambiguity. Why? To avoid incalculable confusion. Imagine a military unit, a city bus line, or an international network of commercial airlines operating on say, a “subjective interpretative standard.” Or a structural engineer hired on a bridge building project pretending that the word suspension now means cantilevered, or, perhaps more problematic, pretending not to know what load-bearing means. When ambiguity becomes a political tool, or is encouraged by a particular group, the “out group” is forced to spend time and valuable resources simply making sense of previously unambiguous usage. As a result, energy is expended on nothing more than an attempt to restore the communicative order that once existed as a low-to-no cost social bargain. Institutional progress is suspended or halted. Societal structures are consequently weakened.
So why engage in this verbal/cognitive cosplay at any level? Isn’t it unnecessary? Who benefits? Yes, language evolves, but it usually evolves organically from its roots, or existing etymological constructs. Sometimes a culture produces new words or concepts useful to greater society. For example, “Hip-Hop” means something different today than it did when I was nine. But society and its communicative capabilities won’t move forward productively when a culturally-driven claimant, hell-bent on ignoring the First Principles of the evolutionary calculus, places a different and subjectively interpreted definition on well-established combinations of vowels and consonants that have historically defined a certain person, place, or thing in matters ranging from western jurisprudence to restroom doors for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Structure, meaning, and definition within a language are the periodic tables of human communication. Which is better: a world where everyone has common understanding of words, terms and their meanings — or one in which meanings are arbitrary, where words, terms, and numbers are subject to volatile individual interpretation and whimsical challenge or spontaneous redefinition? Chaos will follow the society that encourages every member entitlement to their own personal, limbic-based interpretation of what someone else is, says, and does. Such a condition would be laughable, if not so destructive to human relations.
The current wave of language ambiguity is far from the first instance of this kind of thing. Political operatives have historically imposed ambiguity to deconstruct general social order. Marx was one of its earliest proponents in his mandate to “criticize everything ruthlessly,” which included extant language structures. The deconstructive underpinnings of postmodernism also provide abundant material on this. The Frankfurt School celebrated authors and thinkers whose aim was to “skeptically demonstrate the contingency of language.”
Subjectivity replaced objective rational analysis: “there can be no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding.”
Using language to dismantle cohesive institutions weakens any society at its foundational and infrastructural levels. Deconstruction has been a goal of all western revolutions. It amps up the utopian hope of hoisting high the “mission accomplished” banner — once and for all. As Sir John Glubb pointed out over 100 years ago: empires fall incrementally. Ceding linguistic territory hastens the collapse. History is (again) repeating itself. When Sapiens are involved, it always will.
Hi Zach. I read a news article about a hermaphrodite who impregnated herself and gave birth. How does your account of the sexes account for this event?
Finally finished this. Definitely had to engage my brain to follow, but it’s well-written and breaks down a fairly complex topic in a way that helps simplify the underlying objective considerations relating to sex. I need to keep this handy for the folks who want to argue otherwise!
Across the animal kingdom, male and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. Among humans, males and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. But all male humans have at least one Y chromosome. And no female humans have a Y chromosome. So, in practical terms, it seems to me that male humans could be thought of as humans with a Y chromosome. And female humans could be thought of as humans without a Y chromosome.
Thanks for this! My sense of the cultural context is that men and women of the past, say in my grandparents generation (both of my grandmothers, born around 1890, milked cows and engaged in outside farm work when the need arose) often were needed for helping with the babies, even if male--because of maternal mortality in olden days. Men died doing dangerous work, in wars and of heart attacks (who heard of cholesterol before 1984?) and the surviving widows did all kinds of "men's work" out of necessity. People wore practical clothing, did not have huge wardrobes and were grateful if they had enough to eat. Radical theories surrounding Joan of Arc's or Elizabeth 1's "gender" are ludicrous and disrespect the hard work of survival our ancestors did, leading to our very existences. uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com
Well written, First Principles focused, enlightening essay for anyone confused by the intentional ambiguity and obfuscation promoted by those advancing the current cultural driven chaos. Thank you for a damn fine piece of work!
Many of us mocked Ketanji Brown Jackson for refusing to define female because "(she is) not a biologist". Many of us watched "What is a woman" and laughed at all the circular definitions. This article kind of pokes holes in our conception of sex though.
Nevertheless I am ok with using a human definition of sex based on chromosomes even knowing 0.1% will have chromosomal anomalies and not all dichotomous species on earth have our genomes. There is enough information about our bodies conferred by chromosomes to know that males and females are compositionally distinct and have massively different evolutionary behavior strategies. It is also sufficient information to drive medical decisions. To eliminate intentional confusion I use terms like XY trans or XX trans. I hope that catches on.
Activists are very invested in overplaying phenotypic similarities and downplaying physiological and mental differences between the human sexes. It is a variation of the blank slate and it has wreaked far too much havoc on science and now society is being assaulted by it.
Wonderful <3
The talks shared on an earlier post of you and Billboard Chris, were excellent!
My wife hails from Thailand, and she assures me that NOBODY there would ever claim that the 'kathoeys' ('ladyboys') are actually women.
Thanks for all the detail. However, in 99% of current and recent human societies, there has been and there is no confusion about the sexes. The recent confusion is related to the agenda of very small and morally deranged groups within western countries. For adults with gender dysphoria, I have great personal sympathy. What an agonizing situation to be in! However, we must protect easily influenced children and adolescents from this scourge knowing that gender confusion is usually transitory UNLESS fostered and reinforced by well-meaning individuals with an agenda.
Not entirely a bad or useless article. In particular, there is more than a bit of justification for arguing that the “non-universal definitions of sexes” – i.e., those comprising the “chromosomal, phenotypic, and sociocultural” categories – lead to “absurd conclusions”.
However, one might reasonably argue that your [Zach’s] own bastardization of the standard biological definitions which you yourself quoted – i.e., “the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger [or smaller] gametes in anisogamous systems” – into the “type of reproductive strategy implemented in the individual organism” leads to the same type of “absurd conclusions”. It is simply NOT the “reproductive strategy” – which clearly, in your lexicon and that of Colin, encompasses those individuals which have no functional gonads at all – that qualifies organisms as members of the “male” or “female” sex categories. It is simply and necessarily ONLY the CURRENT ability to produce either of two types of gametes that so qualifies individual organisms, those with no ability to produce either being, ipso facto, sexless.
More particularly on those “absurd conclusions”, that is most evident from the article you linked to on clownfish which clearly endorses, in several passages, the view that all but two clownfish – i.e., a single male and a single female – in a school of them are sexless. Consider these two sections therefrom, and my commentary thereon:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687428518300426
1) “Sex change occurs in relation to the social hierarchy, where the two largest individuals (female being the largest of the two) forms a strong monogamous breeding pair while the rest are non-breeders .... When the female dies (or is removed), the male changes sex to become the dominant breeding female and the second largest member from the non-breeders becomes the dominant male ...”
The “non-breeder” can’t very well “BECOME the dominant male” if it was already “male” to begin with. ALL of those “non-breeders” – every last clownfish except the breeding PAIR (i.e., TWO clownfish) – are NEITHER male NOR female; they’re sexLESS. That IS what the word MEANS.
2) “The gonads of A. ocellaris are bi-lobed and asymmetrical .... Ovotestes are found in males and non-breeders. .... Histological examinations revealed that the ovotestes in male and non-breeders consist of both testicular and ovarian cells. ... Ovotestes of non-breeders consist mainly of oogonia and previtellogenic oocytes (OR) , with less area of the testicular region (TR) although all stages of spermatogenic cells can be found .... The presence of both ovarian and testicular tissues in the gonad of male and non-breeders and the absence of testicular tissues in the ovary of the females suggested that A. ocellaris undergo a change of sex from male to female (protandry) that may not be reversible.”
The gonads of non-breeders – i.e., those clownfish which are neither male nor female – clearly change over the course of their life cycles. They have “developed anatomies” – in Colin’s lexicon – that have the potential to be EITHER testes OR ovaries. Which – both by your [Zach’s] bastardization and by Colin’s idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definition – means that, right from hatching, clownfish are BOTH males AND females.
Which has to qualify as another set of “absurd conclusions” that are flatly contradicted by the standard view that such fish are SEQUENTIAL hermaphrodites. I wait, with bated breath, your peer-reviewed article published in a reputable biological journal showing how “sequential” is no longer justified since your own idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions now have to qualify as trump ...
https://nitter.it/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554#m
You (Zach) and Colin are both clearly rather desperate in your refusal to consider that there is any such category as “sexless”. Though, sadly, you’re hardly unique in that regard. But that largely because you (Zach), in particular and Colin presumably likewise, apparently “think” that it is “morally problematic” to even suggest that those who “differ from the [sex] norm are [of] neither sex”:
https://nitter.it/zaelefty/status/1592711689438662656#m
You’re clearly putting feelings before facts; you’re crippled by a “fear” of “offending” those who might be “discomfited” by being “deprived” of membership in the sex categories. Hard to imagine a more egregious case of unscientific if not anti-scientific claptrap, of being engaged in the “deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable” – Lysenkoism writ large:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
You both might just as well argue in favour of “teaching the controversy” because teaching evolution and geology might “offend” religious fundamentalists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy
Classy ...
You must have seen this (the mom in a cat costume reading a school board the riot act), it's priceless. My son has a Salacious B. Crumb costume somewhere. Cannot wait for the next school board mtg.
https://twitter.com/kingojungle/status/1592934867167514624?s=20&t=i-Lj8FUDbTWOZnG6d-fL3g
"This is what sexes ultimately are: discrete reproductive strategies involving the production of two different gametes."
Suppose someone is born with a condition that means they'll never produce gametes -- doesn't the definition of sex given here exclude them because they cannot produce gametes and therefore cannot implement a reproductive strategy?
Would you suggest that having the equipment for producing the relevant gamete (even if that equipment doesn't work) is what makes us one sex or the other?
I see a more formidable problem in the activists “revolutionary” movement to intentionally inflict ambiguity into the greater cultural/political discussion. Intentionally imposing ambiguity into precise, workable and established definitional systems of meaning erodes societal order, transactional trust, and ultimately, cohesive institutions. Ambiguity in any form eventually brings chaos. Our ancestral brains were refined by distant progenitors who weren’t afforded the luxury of giving ambiguity the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, it’s just a small snake in the brush — but it may transmit a poison capable of harm.” Successful societies developed low tolerance for all forms of potentially destructive ambiguity, including language. In structured, durable societies, languages developed to eliminate ambiguity. Why? To avoid incalculable confusion. Imagine a military unit, a city bus line, or an international network of commercial airlines operating on say, a “subjective interpretative standard.” Or a structural engineer hired on a bridge building project pretending that the word suspension now means cantilevered, or, perhaps more problematic, pretending not to know what load-bearing means. When ambiguity becomes a political tool, or is encouraged by a particular group, the “out group” is forced to spend time and valuable resources simply making sense of previously unambiguous usage. As a result, energy is expended on nothing more than an attempt to restore the communicative order that once existed as a low-to-no cost social bargain. Institutional progress is suspended or halted. Societal structures are consequently weakened.
So why engage in this verbal/cognitive cosplay at any level? Isn’t it unnecessary? Who benefits? Yes, language evolves, but it usually evolves organically from its roots, or existing etymological constructs. Sometimes a culture produces new words or concepts useful to greater society. For example, “Hip-Hop” means something different today than it did when I was nine. But society and its communicative capabilities won’t move forward productively when a culturally-driven claimant, hell-bent on ignoring the First Principles of the evolutionary calculus, places a different and subjectively interpreted definition on well-established combinations of vowels and consonants that have historically defined a certain person, place, or thing in matters ranging from western jurisprudence to restroom doors for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Structure, meaning, and definition within a language are the periodic tables of human communication. Which is better: a world where everyone has common understanding of words, terms and their meanings — or one in which meanings are arbitrary, where words, terms, and numbers are subject to volatile individual interpretation and whimsical challenge or spontaneous redefinition? Chaos will follow the society that encourages every member entitlement to their own personal, limbic-based interpretation of what someone else is, says, and does. Such a condition would be laughable, if not so destructive to human relations.
The current wave of language ambiguity is far from the first instance of this kind of thing. Political operatives have historically imposed ambiguity to deconstruct general social order. Marx was one of its earliest proponents in his mandate to “criticize everything ruthlessly,” which included extant language structures. The deconstructive underpinnings of postmodernism also provide abundant material on this. The Frankfurt School celebrated authors and thinkers whose aim was to “skeptically demonstrate the contingency of language.”
Subjectivity replaced objective rational analysis: “there can be no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding.”
Using language to dismantle cohesive institutions weakens any society at its foundational and infrastructural levels. Deconstruction has been a goal of all western revolutions. It amps up the utopian hope of hoisting high the “mission accomplished” banner — once and for all. As Sir John Glubb pointed out over 100 years ago: empires fall incrementally. Ceding linguistic territory hastens the collapse. History is (again) repeating itself. When Sapiens are involved, it always will.
Hi Zach. I read a news article about a hermaphrodite who impregnated herself and gave birth. How does your account of the sexes account for this event?
Finally finished this. Definitely had to engage my brain to follow, but it’s well-written and breaks down a fairly complex topic in a way that helps simplify the underlying objective considerations relating to sex. I need to keep this handy for the folks who want to argue otherwise!
You have a gift for communicating this stuff very clearly, Zach.
Across the animal kingdom, male and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. Among humans, males and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. But all male humans have at least one Y chromosome. And no female humans have a Y chromosome. So, in practical terms, it seems to me that male humans could be thought of as humans with a Y chromosome. And female humans could be thought of as humans without a Y chromosome.