Courtesy of Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True website I get to this article by Andy Lewis, refuting an article by Sarah Hearne in The Skeptic magazine (of all places. Motto: "Reason with Compassion") which argued the now fashionable view that "sex is a spectrum". It's not. And no peer-reviewed scientific article claims that it is*. And that's been the case for all sexually reproducing animals for between 500 million and 1.3 billion years. There are two sexes, with the male defined as producing small, motile gametes, the female as producing large, immobile gametes. Gender may be a spectrum; but not to be conflated with sex.
Snip
The purpose of such arguments presented here in The Skeptic magazine is for us to be convinced that sex is arbitrary and not objectively knowable and to abandon objective attempts to define terms like male, female, man and woman. It is a textbook example of postmodernist denialism of science, reason and objectivity, using sleight of hand to undermine understanding. Such arguments are now so common and fashionable, even among those educated in medicine and biology, that recently the Endocrine Society in the US felt it needed to publish a position statement on the fact that sex is real, binary and immutable, and that recording sex accurately was vital in healthcare and research as we should not conflate sex and gender.
The rest of the argument presented in the Skeptic article then goes off on the predictable route of defending gender ideology that the only meaningful expression of sex (or gender) is through self-declaration – that you can be a man or woman only meaningfully though “identifying” as either. We are supposed to ignore the inherent incoherence and circularity here as otherwise we would would not be “kind” or, even worse, horrible bigots. We just have to accept that one can be a woman when the word “woman” has been denied any sort of objective meaning.
I do not believe for one moment we can help improve the lives of people with gender dysphoria and trans identities if we rob all the relevant words that might objectively describe those experiences of any stable and coherent meaning. And even more so, and despite Hearne’s wish to help women, we cannot help women if we cannot say what the word “woman” means. ... Read on...
*No peer reviewed biology paper has ever attempted to characterise sex as some sort of spectrum of possibilities despite absolute convictions about the matter from ideological positions. [Ref]
