Merged Strict biological definitions of male/female

[theprestige]

Right? It's like they are trying to be fractally incorrect.

I'm going to take a crack at this since Bob D. evidently won't do so: HRT for CAIS.

Estrogen replacement helps along female puberty, secondary sexual characteristics, and promotes bone mass.

I don't see how sex as a spectrum improves our understanding of CAIS and how to treat it. Your example makes perfect sense to me in a binary sex paradigm.

 

[d4m10n]

Which half of the binary paradigm applies here?

 

[ahhell]

While I'm having a go at SGU, here is the relevant transcript excerpt:

Emphasis mine.

Couple of things, they seem to be saying biological sex is pretty much the entirety of how sex is expressed in humans. Its not just what gametes you have apparently, its also how your brain functions, your gender identity, and who you are attracted to. It used to be the progressive notion to think of gender and sex as different things, I thought.

─of course the brain is a sexual organ as well. And there are features of you know in terms of sexual attraction and also gender identity that are developmental, that and along this you know sexually dimorphic system in the brain. And so that's part of sex too you know, part of biological sex is your sexual orientation and your gender identity.

Seems to me that they've redefined biological sex in order to make it a spectrum. They even note that the human brain is sexually dimorphic.

So when we talk about something being bimodal, it literally looks like a normal curve, except it has two bumps instead of one.

This seems to be saying, any to overlapping bell curves constitutes a bimodal distribution therefore the characteristic being measured is on a spectrum. I respectfully disagree.

ETA: It really seems to be arguing that because some men are not as strong as some women we all exist on a spectrum. My nearest analogy, some planets are more massive than some stars therefor stars and planets exist on a spectrum?

 

[theprestige]

Which half of the binary paradigm applies here?

Both. You said it yourself: half and half.

Furthermore, you've given no evidence that medical science was struggling to understand and treat this condition, without a spectrum view of biological sex.

I'm not interested in "if you squint you can kinda see a way to describe it in terms of some kind of spectrum". I'm interested in practical applications arising from taking a spectrum viewpoint with eyes wide open.

 

[d4m10n]

Well, I suppose it best to leave this one to Bob.

 

[jt512]

More on the Big KerFFRFle. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has quietly dissolved its Honorary Board following the high-profile resignations of three of its most prominent members: Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins. No reason for the move was stated, but Jerry speculates,

The conclusion, of course, is that the FFRF does not WANT an honorary board at all. Why? The only conclusion I can reach is that other honorary-board members could, in the future, cause “trouble” in the way that the three of us did, publicly criticizing the organization for its mission creep and adherence to woke gender ideology.​

Colin Wright, also a biologist, agreed, saying, "When your organization has abandoned its core principled, maintaining a Board of principled intellectuals becomes a liability."

https://twitter.com/x/status/1876396302516515231

 

[jt512]

Taking mode in the strict mathematical sense and taking "sex at birth" as a nominal distribution would result in a unimodal distribution, since most newborns are male. Once again, claims of bimodality just won't work.

Outside the walls of mathematical statistics classes, statisticians refer to distributions with two unequal peaks as "bimodal," and the term succinctly describes the kind of distribution that Jerry is talking about, one with two categories, nearly equal in size that contain nearly all cases in the population.

That said, the claims being made by the "sex is bimodal" crowd is not that sex is a nominal categorical variable but rather a continuous spectrum, as illustrated here.

Jerry is not a member of that crowd.

 

[Louden Wilde]

Sad to see that the once-respected Steven Novella has fallen into the trap of placing ideology ahead of objective, observable scientific truth.

Thank goodness for people like Dr. Colin Wright and Dr. Emma Hilton for always placing scientific truth at the forefront of this discussion.

IMO, anyone who thinks sex is a spectrum and not binary is every bit as much an evolution-denier as a Young Earth Creationist even if they deny it for different reasons.

There are others who have spoken out - Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins are prominent examples. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, renowned developmental biologist (& Nobel laureate), has publicly noted that sex is binary - see summary via Hilton here & interview translated from Deutsch here. Some may be wondering why more people don't speak out. One answer is fear and the ramifications. I spoke out on Twitter a bit, and suspect it cost me a job. I think some of the older biologists may not know about the "controversy", may not care enough, and/or may think it's unkind to point this out in the current climate.

 

[Louden Wilde]

I don't see how sex as a spectrum improves our understanding of CAIS and how to treat it. Your example makes perfect sense to me in a binary sex paradigm.

Agree. In fact, you need to know they are male (i.e. have testes) to monitor for their increased risk of gonadal tumorigenesis. That was the circumstance in the one case I've seen presented in my current gig (assessing genetic causes of pediatric disease at a large hospital) - the initial thought was to do androgen injections, but the testes were already revealed to be cancerous (and hence removed).

 

[d4m10n]

Outside the walls of mathematical statistics classes, statisticians refer to distributions with two unequal peaks as "bimodal," and the term succinctly describes the kind of distribution that Jerry is talking about, one with two categories, nearly equal in size that contain nearly all cases in the population.

Jerry is talking about a distribution with three categories, two of which are nearly equal in size and dwarf the third. I agree that it makes more sense to call this discrete distribution bimodal than binary, but I don't think that's going to dispel any confusion until we see an actual histogram making the rounds.

 

[Steersman]

Jerry is talking about a distribution with three categories, two of which are nearly equal in size and dwarf the third. I agree that it makes more sense to call this discrete distribution bimodal than binary, but I don't think that's going to dispel any confusion until we see an actual histogram making the rounds.

"Ask and it shall be given ..."



What is illustrated there is 48% males, 47% females, and 5% intersex/sexless. And it's more or less based on the standard definition for sex:




As indicated, males and females have a reproductive function because they can reproduce, because they produce small or large gametes. The other category -- the one outside of those "two main" ones -- don't have any such reproductive function, and can reasonably, if unpopularly, be called sexless.

If Jerry -- et al -- want to say that the intersex are a sex then he's making sex into a spectrum of three which is basically what he is at least implying. Or he's waffling, clueless, or talking out of both sides of his mouth about what it takes to qualify as male or female.

And, as suggested, that "Reproductive Function" graph -- including the sexed and the sexless -- might, at a stretch, be called bimodal. But there really aren't any intervening "sexes" between "male" and "female" so apparently not consistent with mathematics terminology about peaks, about values on either side that are of lower frequency.

ETA: Jerry has apparently crossed the Rubicon here by explicitly asserting that the intersex are neither male nor female, i.e., they're sexless:

In fact, you don’t seem to understand the issue under discussion. Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female. They are almost never fertile (two hermaphrodites in history are known to have produced either eggs or sperm but never both) and they are NOT a third sex.

SF Chronicle gets biological sex badly wrong

If ever there were a headline designed to get my dander up, it’s this one from a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed (click screenshot below to read, or see it archived here). The author’s se…

whyevolutionistrue.com

Though he still seems somewhat unclear on the concept -- many of the intersex are sexless BECAUSE they don't have functioning gonads of either type -- ergo, infertile.

 

[Joe Random]

Okay, then can you list a specific right or rights which you feel trans people should be given, which would require defining biological sex as a spectrum rather than a binary? I don't mean something general like 'to be able to live as their authentic selves' or the like. But at least one specific 'should be allowed to ____' right which would not be possible if biological sex were binary, but would if it were a spectrum?

I realize it's a total twat move to quote myself, but I - and apparently a few others - are still keen on an answer to this. What specific rights and/or proper medical treatments are only available if sex is treated as a spectrum, and which would be impossible/denied if it were treated as a binary ?

 

[d4m10n]

What specific rights and/or proper medical treatments are only available if sex is treated as a spectrum, and which would be impossible/denied if it were treated as a binary?

That depends on what you mean by treating sex as a spectrum. The example I provided involves giving genetically male patients the sort of female hormones they cannot possibly produce on their own, thereby nudging them towards more female appearance (in terms of secondary characteristics) along with other health benefits. The idea of moving someone genetically male towards a more female body strikes me as dabbling with a morphological spectrum, if not a strict categorical one.

 

[smartcooky]

There are others who have spoken out - Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins are prominent examples. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, renowned developmental biologist (& Nobel laureate), has publicly noted that sex is binary - see summary via Hilton here & interview translated from Deutsch here. Some may be wondering why more people don't speak out. One answer is fear and the ramifications. I spoke out on Twitter a bit, and suspect it cost me a job. I think some of the older biologists may not know about the "controversy", may not care enough, and/or may think it's unkind to point this out in the current climate.

Indeed.... Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying. Its worth noting how they were treated for daring to speak objective, scientific truth

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on sex, lies, and ideology

Here we have Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a couple who were both biology professors at The Evergreen State College (TESC) but were driven out of that place by Authoritarian Leftists whose act…

whyevolutionistrue.com

and Georgi K. Marinov published despite his fears

In Humans, Sex is Binary and Immutable by Georgi K. Marinov | NAS

www.nas.org

A disclaimer: I am not a tenured faculty member and have no job security; I am well aware that my career prospects could be jeopardized by this essay. I also write from a perspective—not widely shared—that anyone who pledges allegiance to any political party or ideology cannot rightly call himself a scientist. Political and ideological loyalties, in my view, violate the epistemic practices scientists are supposed to follow.​

​

Its also worth noting that the cancelling, disgusting rhetoric and threats of violence always come from the pro-spectrum side of the debate, and never from the pro-binary side. You never see people like Novella being driven out of academia the way Dr. Colin Wright, Heather Heying, Brett Weinstein, Dr. Kathleen Stock, Prof. Selina Todd, Prof. Nate Hiers, Prof. Kathleen Lowery, Laura Tanner, Stephen Gliske, Linda Gottfreidson, and Lisa Littman were!

People who support and participate in the ideologically-driven "sex is a spectrum" crowd are the intellectual hand-puppets of the TRA crowd.

 

[bobdroege7]

And you claim to be formally trained as a biologist?

The Y-Chromosome in Animals | Embryo Project Encyclopedia

The Y-chromosome is one of a pair of chromosomes that determine the genetic sex of individuals in mammals, some insects, and some plants. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of new microscopic and molecular techniques, including DNA sequencing, enabled scientists to...

embryo.asu.edu

Y-chromosomes contain the master-switch gene for sex determination, called the sex-determining region Y, or the SRY gene in humans. In most normal cases, if a fertilized egg cell has the SRY gene, it develops into an embryo that has male sex traits. If the zygote lacks the SRY gene or if the SRY gene is defective, the zygote develops into an embryo that has female sex traits.​

FFS, I learned this in high school. As a claimed formally trained biologist, there is no question you should already know this.

Where did I claim to be a formally trained biologist, I only claimed to have taken a college level biology class, the one biology majors are required to take.

And I see your cite supports my claim that sex is determined, not defined.

Thanks for seeing it the way I do, thanks for playing.

 

[Steersman]

And I see your cite supports my claim that sex is determined, not defined.

None so blind as those who will not see. Here are a set of gold standard definitions for the sexes from the Oxford Dictionary of Biology:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1039879009407037441

 

[pipelineaudio]

Sad to see that the once-respected Steven Novella has fallen into the trap of placing ideology ahead of objective, observable scientific truth.

Its certainly not the first time

 

[Steersman]

Its certainly not the first time

Lumpers and splitters:

Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example, schools of literature, biological taxa, and so on. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.

Lumpers and splitters - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Different philosophical perspectives.

Most scientific disciplines worthy of the name tend to be based on the concept of natural kinds, something that Novella clearly hasn't a flaming clue about, though many others are rather too quick to dismiss insights from that field:

Scientific disciplines frequently divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings.

Natural Kinds (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Fairly large body of work that views the sexes as such "natural kinds".

 

[angrysoba]

Indeed.... Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying. Its worth noting how they were treated for daring to speak objective, scientific truth

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on sex, lies, and ideology

Here we have Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a couple who were both biology professors at The Evergreen State College (TESC) but were driven out of that place by Authoritarian Leftists whose act…

whyevolutionistrue.com

Total nonsense. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were not “daring to speak objective, scientific truth”.

The whole Evergreen kerfuffle was entirely unrelated to sex and gender.

Besides, during the Covid pandemic, they turned from mild cranks to completely insane quacks with their promotion of ivermectin, fear-mongering about Covid vaccines which morphed into a general anti-vaxx tendency, promotion of RFK Jr, promotion of the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS and practically every conspiracy theory you can think of and more that you have probably never heard of.

 

[ahhell]

Total nonsense. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were not “daring to speak objective, scientific truth”.

The whole Evergreen kerfuffle was entirely unrelated to sex and gender.

Besides, during the Covid pandemic, they turned from mild cranks to completely insane quacks with their promotion of ivermectin, fear-mongering about Covid vaccines which morphed into a general anti-vaxx tendency, promotion of RFK Jr, promotion of the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS and practically every conspiracy theory you can think of and more that you have probably never heard of.

I listened to them a bit at the start of covid, based on that, wouldn't shock me if everything you said there was true. They were definitely on that trajectory when I last heard them.