When I initially posted this, I thought it was off-topic for Preface to Atheism. But thanks to the discussion with Blinn below, I'm beginning to think it was on-topic all along. Even disputes about sex and gender, it turns out, depend on how we understand our understanding of the world.
Funny. FWIW I think that along secular lines at with respect to questions of gender and sex, it clears up a lot of confusion just to use the two synonymously. Alex Byrne makes the case cogently (and to me anyway, persuasively) in his book _The Trouble with Gender_. The determining factor isn't "genitalia" so much as developmental gamete production pathways. Most of the rest strikes me as pretty thinly-veiled theology.
In that article, they attack "a misconception about our species that’s become quite common" which is that "Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum." But I strongly recommend reading PZ Myers reply to this (and their other claimed misconceptions), which is found here: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/24/moral-panics-and-the-bigoted-subversion-of-biology/
Myers writes,
<<Coyne & Maroja claim this is false because there are only two kinds of functional gametes, sperm and eggs, and therefore there can be only two sexes. The claims of gender ideologues can be trivially dismissed because they can’t trot out a third kind of gamete, or can’t name all the other sexes. Furthermore, people aren’t assigned sex at birth, so it is not a sexual construct, but rather, sex is an observation of biological reality.
The Coyne & Maroja argument is nonsense at every level. First, we humans are not our gametes — we are complex multicellular organisms. To argue that gametes are definitive is a gross oversimplification that ignores physiology, behavior, psychology, and culture, all of which are affected by sex. This is an example of extreme reductionism.
It’s also an argument designed to misrepresent and distort the positions of their critics. No one is arguing that there are other kinds of gametes; trans men and women are not claiming to have transformed their gametes to some other form, and the ones I’ve talked with are acutely aware that their gonads do not metamorphose. Trans men may still be capable of pregnancy, trans women will not ovulate, and they do not pretend otherwise. This is the kind of argument that shows that the ones proposing it are totally unaware of the nature of trans culture, they are arguing against a proposition that no one is making.
As for the claim that the definition of sex at birth is simply a biological observation…well, that wrecks their premise, because the sex of a baby is not a question of what kind of gametes they are producing. It’s a superficial examination of morphology. You can have a penis or vagina without any correlated gamete production!
Here’s what I, a biology professor and progressive Leftist, teach in my classes.
"Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors."
Thanks. I read both of those pieces around when they were published. I like PZ but I think he simply misrepresents a lot of the argumentative space, and on this one Coyne view is both better science and better at making relevant distinctions between distinguishable masculine and feminine traits, on the one hand, and the relevant production pathways that give rise to those distinctions, on the other. Myers is strawmanning Coyne while also just not keeping up with the kind of gross biological misrepresentation that happens a lot in the trans literature.
(Just by way of example, the widely cited Anne Fausto-Sterling just misrepresents the science on intersex conditions. See Sax's review: https://www.leonardsax.com/how-common-is-intersex-a-response-to-anne-fausto-sterling/. Another book by Jules Gill-Peterson, who has no relevant science training (and it shows!) wrote a whole book in which she constantly just mischaracterizes the history of sex and sex development research. This stuff just rules the roost.
I've read a lot of the literature and just don't find the characterizations of sex on the trans side coherent, much less compelling.
Byrne's very good. The one thing I do wish people would push back a bit harder on is just the phenomenology of sexed experience. This is, I suppose, a lot of what I find distasteful about the discussions. I've no idea what "gender identity" is supposed to pick out at an abstract level, over and above, say, the social conditioning that lands me reliably in one restroom rather than another in public spaces and has me walking to the men's clothing section rather than the lady's in department stores.
But insofar as I *could* try to articulate something that could reasonably called "sexed experience," it just does amount to facts about living life as a male, and having a penis and the like. I really don't know what it feels like to slide fingers into my vagina, and nobody without a penis knows what it's like to wake up with morning wood. There are, in fact, just countless sexed experiences like this that just do key into facts about bodily experiences. I can imagine these being intensely uncomfortable for somebody with gender dysphoria. But again, that strikes me as conceding the argument. The discomfort is a feature of sexed experience, and the psychological rejection of it. But I'm not a sex Cartesian, and don't think anybody else should be either--mainly because I don't think anybody should be a Cartesian.
That that kind of discomfort fosters fantasy isn't at all surprising. Whether and to what extent and how others should accommodate that is an open question, about which, apart from cases like sports and in some cases prisons, I'm a maximalist. But it strikes me as a silly language game to say, e.g., trans men *are* men, or trans women *are* women. They're simply not, and the arguments to the contrary are extremely bad, PZ's included.
Just one more quick point: The point that for me is decisive as between Myers and Coyne is that Myers is clearly just engaged in a form of special pleading for humans. The distinction between gamete production pathways and sex-based traits is present in every sexed species. But the distinctions he's making only apply to humans. That tells me he's not really engaging in biology, he's engaging in accommodation. Again, fine, but that's just not the point Coyne's making, which could just as well be put by saying, e.g., there are no "trans squirrels" or "trans cows" or the like. Which strikes me as perfectly adequate evidence to show it's not a biological category in any appreciable sense. And the sense in which "male" and "female" *are*, by contrast, biological categories, they roughly match the sex distinctions found in other species, most proximately other primates. There's lots of interesting science there. Some of it may be helpful in sorting out some of the biological basis of gender dysphoria. But well none of that undermines the basic sex gamete distinction in the slightest.
I think the position taken by Steven Novella at CSI Con last year makes the most sense. Thank you , Ross Llewallyn (see https://substack.com/@enduringbeta) for the link.
Another thing I don't like about the Coyne/Maroja position is that it seems to insist on prescriptive definitions, rather than on descriptive definitions. In other words, insisting on "gamete production pathway" to define biological sex and insisting that "gender" cannot (should not?) be mismatched to sex so defined.
But looking at these things descriptively, based on actual interactions with trans gender people, it is very clear that hormones can completely alter one's gender so that it differs from one's "gamete production pathway." A trans woman clearly has the gender of a woman; a trans man clearly has the gender of a man, and we know that hormone therapy made it happen. I guess Coyne/Maroja don't like this, but it's reality. They want to define it away, or say it's unnatural, but it's reality.
It's also a position that has political consequences for trans people today, treating them as an illegitimate under-class, or at least enabling the powers-that-be to do so. Is that really the side to be on?
All of us are biologically unique in multiple ways. At heart there is a disquality which makes each of us different from the other, and this means that there exists no "real" external criteria which can be used, as if from on high, to declare anyone illegitimate or less than human. (Political equality rests on this disquality between us.)
For this reason, I like what PZ Myers wrote:
"Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors."
Conservatives don't appreciate this, and want a under-class to condemn. It's how they achieve power.
More broadly, people with a prescriptive view of things fail to appreciate our disquality as well. They prescribe definitions that paper over the things which make us biologically unique. This enables repression from those in power.
All decent definitions have prescriptive content--if they didn't they just wouldn't function as definitions. But not much hangs on the difference here. Coyne's position is perfectly straightforward: Sex is particular means of reproduction. Every organism that reproduces sexually does so by producing differentiated gametes, and sexes are distinguished by the gametes they produce. For mammals, there's effectively zero overlap between the sex categories. No third gamete; no mixed gamete production.
There *are*, of course, ways that gamete production can misfire. And that takes us to nosology. Nosology has to be prescriptive in the sense that it has to distinguish normal from abnormal functioning. (There shouldn't be any moral content there, but of course people often get very confused on this point.)
On gender, you're not characterizing Coyne's position. (Byrne is a different matter; he thinks the term "gender" sows more confusion than help, and I'm inclined to agree.) Coyne's fine with using "gender" in a way that comes apart from sex; his claim is that even when we allow this, there's still extremely robust bimodalism and the sex and gender categories broadly align.
For my part, I just don't see "gender," in the way it's typically deployed, having any relation at all to the sexed body. The literature typically describes "gender identity" in terms that make very clear that it's an internal psychological state, that it's durable, and that there's no external vantage point from which to determine what it might be. It's also why we don't have "trans frogs," by the way. (Because I'm not a Cartesian and I also think markers of psychological identity are much more plastic than we're comfortable admitting, I think a lot of this stuff is self-serving nonsense, but that's a longer conversation.)
(This is, incidentally, why mixing DSDs in here is almost always a red herring. The vast majority of trans people are unambiguously male or female.)
So when you talk about trans men having a "male gender," that's simply nothing to do with their bodies. And their bodies aren't male. They're (typically) female bodies who've taken some combination of estrogen suppression therapy and testosterone. And similarly for trans women. They've promoted the appearance of superficial masculine (or feminine) secondary sexual characteristics, but of course, that doesn't do anything to alter their sex (though of course it can have profound effects on their sexual function and their reproductive capabilities.
And PZ--though he's perfectly right about the "complex cascade"--is just trying to disappear that the cascade is about reproduction, and the gamete production defines the normal case.
Another last aside--one great reason to talk about gamete production pathways is that it's just more accurate. We understand DSD's precisely by understanding normal hormone cascades and the triggers that affect normal sexual development. So when we get a situation like 5-alpha reductase deficiency, we can explain precisely why we get the traits that we see. But we can also see that it's a pathology of male development. A *big* part of my distaste at the dialogue on the other side is that a lot of it retreats to woo here. PZ has sadly fallen down that trap. I think his heart is in the right place, but he's let his heart and his totally understandable rage at lunatic religious fanatics drive an intellectually incoherent stance.
If I understand correctly, the argument on one side is that trans male/female are not natural biological categories. And the argument on the other side is (or should be) that trans male/female are indeed factual biological categories today, perhaps due to the appearance of endocrine disruptors throughout natural environments. Thus, the widespread production of these biological disruptors during the latter half of the 20th century is a plausible explanation for the advent of gender identity disorder/gender dysphoria among humans in recent decades.
One side argues that gender dysphoria is a social construct; the other side argues (I take it) that it might be a consequence of chemicals messing with typical biological/sexual development. One side, in other words, puts its head in the sand and presumes that nothing we have manufactured has interfered with typical sexual development. On the other side we have trans people saying that something has messed with their sexual development. (I understand that some trans people do blame atrazine or other endocrine disruptors for their situation.)
Scientists are almost certainly decades away from providing an answer. If indeed they ever can because of the ethics of performing double-blind studies of endocrine disruption during pregnancy—Do you want to be in the control group or do you want to be in the group that gets atrazine injected into your amniotic sac? Oh, wait, it's double-blind so we won't tell you which group you're in.
I bet that what we don't know can harm us, and probably has. But then, maybe I'm a pessimist.
There are (initially) male frogs that have actually changed sex under pressures from atrazine, such that they product viable eggs.
There are, of course, no known therapies that produce anything like this in mammals at any point after very early gestation.
As to external chemical causes of trans gender identities, I wouldn't prejudge the issue one way or another. I would, though, suggest that for the majority of cases the causes are rather more mundane. Ray Blanchard's typology remains the most rigorous we currently have.
That's another good reason to read Byrne, who has good and very accessible coverage of the development of the therapies and the psychological literature.
When I initially posted this, I thought it was off-topic for Preface to Atheism. But thanks to the discussion with Blinn below, I'm beginning to think it was on-topic all along. Even disputes about sex and gender, it turns out, depend on how we understand our understanding of the world.
Funny. FWIW I think that along secular lines at with respect to questions of gender and sex, it clears up a lot of confusion just to use the two synonymously. Alex Byrne makes the case cogently (and to me anyway, persuasively) in his book _The Trouble with Gender_. The determining factor isn't "genitalia" so much as developmental gamete production pathways. Most of the rest strikes me as pretty thinly-veiled theology.
Not familiar with Alex Byrne's book, but it sounds like a similar argument to that made by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja in Skeptical Inquirer about a year and a half ago: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/
In that article, they attack "a misconception about our species that’s become quite common" which is that "Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum." But I strongly recommend reading PZ Myers reply to this (and their other claimed misconceptions), which is found here: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/24/moral-panics-and-the-bigoted-subversion-of-biology/
Myers writes,
<<Coyne & Maroja claim this is false because there are only two kinds of functional gametes, sperm and eggs, and therefore there can be only two sexes. The claims of gender ideologues can be trivially dismissed because they can’t trot out a third kind of gamete, or can’t name all the other sexes. Furthermore, people aren’t assigned sex at birth, so it is not a sexual construct, but rather, sex is an observation of biological reality.
The Coyne & Maroja argument is nonsense at every level. First, we humans are not our gametes — we are complex multicellular organisms. To argue that gametes are definitive is a gross oversimplification that ignores physiology, behavior, psychology, and culture, all of which are affected by sex. This is an example of extreme reductionism.
It’s also an argument designed to misrepresent and distort the positions of their critics. No one is arguing that there are other kinds of gametes; trans men and women are not claiming to have transformed their gametes to some other form, and the ones I’ve talked with are acutely aware that their gonads do not metamorphose. Trans men may still be capable of pregnancy, trans women will not ovulate, and they do not pretend otherwise. This is the kind of argument that shows that the ones proposing it are totally unaware of the nature of trans culture, they are arguing against a proposition that no one is making.
As for the claim that the definition of sex at birth is simply a biological observation…well, that wrecks their premise, because the sex of a baby is not a question of what kind of gametes they are producing. It’s a superficial examination of morphology. You can have a penis or vagina without any correlated gamete production!
Here’s what I, a biology professor and progressive Leftist, teach in my classes.
"Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors."
I would say that claiming that humans are trivially reducible to two simplistic categories is the greater distortion of biological facts and diminishes the evolutionary consequences of the differences within a sexual category.>> --PZ Myers, https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/24/moral-panics-and-the-bigoted-subversion-of-biology/
Thanks. I read both of those pieces around when they were published. I like PZ but I think he simply misrepresents a lot of the argumentative space, and on this one Coyne view is both better science and better at making relevant distinctions between distinguishable masculine and feminine traits, on the one hand, and the relevant production pathways that give rise to those distinctions, on the other. Myers is strawmanning Coyne while also just not keeping up with the kind of gross biological misrepresentation that happens a lot in the trans literature.
(Just by way of example, the widely cited Anne Fausto-Sterling just misrepresents the science on intersex conditions. See Sax's review: https://www.leonardsax.com/how-common-is-intersex-a-response-to-anne-fausto-sterling/. Another book by Jules Gill-Peterson, who has no relevant science training (and it shows!) wrote a whole book in which she constantly just mischaracterizes the history of sex and sex development research. This stuff just rules the roost.
I've read a lot of the literature and just don't find the characterizations of sex on the trans side coherent, much less compelling.
Byrne's very good. The one thing I do wish people would push back a bit harder on is just the phenomenology of sexed experience. This is, I suppose, a lot of what I find distasteful about the discussions. I've no idea what "gender identity" is supposed to pick out at an abstract level, over and above, say, the social conditioning that lands me reliably in one restroom rather than another in public spaces and has me walking to the men's clothing section rather than the lady's in department stores.
But insofar as I *could* try to articulate something that could reasonably called "sexed experience," it just does amount to facts about living life as a male, and having a penis and the like. I really don't know what it feels like to slide fingers into my vagina, and nobody without a penis knows what it's like to wake up with morning wood. There are, in fact, just countless sexed experiences like this that just do key into facts about bodily experiences. I can imagine these being intensely uncomfortable for somebody with gender dysphoria. But again, that strikes me as conceding the argument. The discomfort is a feature of sexed experience, and the psychological rejection of it. But I'm not a sex Cartesian, and don't think anybody else should be either--mainly because I don't think anybody should be a Cartesian.
That that kind of discomfort fosters fantasy isn't at all surprising. Whether and to what extent and how others should accommodate that is an open question, about which, apart from cases like sports and in some cases prisons, I'm a maximalist. But it strikes me as a silly language game to say, e.g., trans men *are* men, or trans women *are* women. They're simply not, and the arguments to the contrary are extremely bad, PZ's included.
Just one more quick point: The point that for me is decisive as between Myers and Coyne is that Myers is clearly just engaged in a form of special pleading for humans. The distinction between gamete production pathways and sex-based traits is present in every sexed species. But the distinctions he's making only apply to humans. That tells me he's not really engaging in biology, he's engaging in accommodation. Again, fine, but that's just not the point Coyne's making, which could just as well be put by saying, e.g., there are no "trans squirrels" or "trans cows" or the like. Which strikes me as perfectly adequate evidence to show it's not a biological category in any appreciable sense. And the sense in which "male" and "female" *are*, by contrast, biological categories, they roughly match the sex distinctions found in other species, most proximately other primates. There's lots of interesting science there. Some of it may be helpful in sorting out some of the biological basis of gender dysphoria. But well none of that undermines the basic sex gamete distinction in the slightest.
I think the position taken by Steven Novella at CSI Con last year makes the most sense. Thank you , Ross Llewallyn (see https://substack.com/@enduringbeta) for the link.
https://youtu.be/D3z5kIANta0
Another thing I don't like about the Coyne/Maroja position is that it seems to insist on prescriptive definitions, rather than on descriptive definitions. In other words, insisting on "gamete production pathway" to define biological sex and insisting that "gender" cannot (should not?) be mismatched to sex so defined.
But looking at these things descriptively, based on actual interactions with trans gender people, it is very clear that hormones can completely alter one's gender so that it differs from one's "gamete production pathway." A trans woman clearly has the gender of a woman; a trans man clearly has the gender of a man, and we know that hormone therapy made it happen. I guess Coyne/Maroja don't like this, but it's reality. They want to define it away, or say it's unnatural, but it's reality.
It's also a position that has political consequences for trans people today, treating them as an illegitimate under-class, or at least enabling the powers-that-be to do so. Is that really the side to be on?
All of us are biologically unique in multiple ways. At heart there is a disquality which makes each of us different from the other, and this means that there exists no "real" external criteria which can be used, as if from on high, to declare anyone illegitimate or less than human. (Political equality rests on this disquality between us.)
For this reason, I like what PZ Myers wrote:
"Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors."
Conservatives don't appreciate this, and want a under-class to condemn. It's how they achieve power.
More broadly, people with a prescriptive view of things fail to appreciate our disquality as well. They prescribe definitions that paper over the things which make us biologically unique. This enables repression from those in power.
Is it really the side to be on?
All decent definitions have prescriptive content--if they didn't they just wouldn't function as definitions. But not much hangs on the difference here. Coyne's position is perfectly straightforward: Sex is particular means of reproduction. Every organism that reproduces sexually does so by producing differentiated gametes, and sexes are distinguished by the gametes they produce. For mammals, there's effectively zero overlap between the sex categories. No third gamete; no mixed gamete production.
There *are*, of course, ways that gamete production can misfire. And that takes us to nosology. Nosology has to be prescriptive in the sense that it has to distinguish normal from abnormal functioning. (There shouldn't be any moral content there, but of course people often get very confused on this point.)
On gender, you're not characterizing Coyne's position. (Byrne is a different matter; he thinks the term "gender" sows more confusion than help, and I'm inclined to agree.) Coyne's fine with using "gender" in a way that comes apart from sex; his claim is that even when we allow this, there's still extremely robust bimodalism and the sex and gender categories broadly align.
For my part, I just don't see "gender," in the way it's typically deployed, having any relation at all to the sexed body. The literature typically describes "gender identity" in terms that make very clear that it's an internal psychological state, that it's durable, and that there's no external vantage point from which to determine what it might be. It's also why we don't have "trans frogs," by the way. (Because I'm not a Cartesian and I also think markers of psychological identity are much more plastic than we're comfortable admitting, I think a lot of this stuff is self-serving nonsense, but that's a longer conversation.)
(This is, incidentally, why mixing DSDs in here is almost always a red herring. The vast majority of trans people are unambiguously male or female.)
So when you talk about trans men having a "male gender," that's simply nothing to do with their bodies. And their bodies aren't male. They're (typically) female bodies who've taken some combination of estrogen suppression therapy and testosterone. And similarly for trans women. They've promoted the appearance of superficial masculine (or feminine) secondary sexual characteristics, but of course, that doesn't do anything to alter their sex (though of course it can have profound effects on their sexual function and their reproductive capabilities.
And PZ--though he's perfectly right about the "complex cascade"--is just trying to disappear that the cascade is about reproduction, and the gamete production defines the normal case.
Another last aside--one great reason to talk about gamete production pathways is that it's just more accurate. We understand DSD's precisely by understanding normal hormone cascades and the triggers that affect normal sexual development. So when we get a situation like 5-alpha reductase deficiency, we can explain precisely why we get the traits that we see. But we can also see that it's a pathology of male development. A *big* part of my distaste at the dialogue on the other side is that a lot of it retreats to woo here. PZ has sadly fallen down that trap. I think his heart is in the right place, but he's let his heart and his totally understandable rage at lunatic religious fanatics drive an intellectually incoherent stance.
See my reply by scrolling down to bottom of comments.
If I understand correctly, the argument on one side is that trans male/female are not natural biological categories. And the argument on the other side is (or should be) that trans male/female are indeed factual biological categories today, perhaps due to the appearance of endocrine disruptors throughout natural environments. Thus, the widespread production of these biological disruptors during the latter half of the 20th century is a plausible explanation for the advent of gender identity disorder/gender dysphoria among humans in recent decades.
One side argues that gender dysphoria is a social construct; the other side argues (I take it) that it might be a consequence of chemicals messing with typical biological/sexual development. One side, in other words, puts its head in the sand and presumes that nothing we have manufactured has interfered with typical sexual development. On the other side we have trans people saying that something has messed with their sexual development. (I understand that some trans people do blame atrazine or other endocrine disruptors for their situation.)
Scientists are almost certainly decades away from providing an answer. If indeed they ever can because of the ethics of performing double-blind studies of endocrine disruption during pregnancy—Do you want to be in the control group or do you want to be in the group that gets atrazine injected into your amniotic sac? Oh, wait, it's double-blind so we won't tell you which group you're in.
I bet that what we don't know can harm us, and probably has. But then, maybe I'm a pessimist.
But there are trans frogs, thanks to atrazine. And I think this is pertinent to the debate. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/100301-atrazine-frogs-female-chemical
And atrazine is omni-present in human drinking water, albeit our exposure is many times lower than tadpoles receive.
Atrazine has also been found in human amniotic fluid.
There are (initially) male frogs that have actually changed sex under pressures from atrazine, such that they product viable eggs.
There are, of course, no known therapies that produce anything like this in mammals at any point after very early gestation.
As to external chemical causes of trans gender identities, I wouldn't prejudge the issue one way or another. I would, though, suggest that for the majority of cases the causes are rather more mundane. Ray Blanchard's typology remains the most rigorous we currently have.
That's another good reason to read Byrne, who has good and very accessible coverage of the development of the therapies and the psychological literature.
More grist for this mill: https://open.substack.com/pub/richarddawkins/p/denying-that-sex-is-binary-a-study?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6ah4v
https://fairerdisputations.org/the-british-invasion/