My sympathies lie with Coyne et al, but I want to be sure I'm not missing something. Here's an instructive exercise, perhaps. For those in sympathy with Coyne, can you imagine an guest article posted up to a national non-profit blog that you would approve removal for similar reasons as Coyne's article was removed?
This is a tricky exercise, because we'd have to posit first that the non-profit
waded into the issue on one side and then approved a rebuttal and then subsequently took it down in order to squelch the conversation
which they started. The squelching won't work, of course, because someone else will just repost the (Streisand-boosted) rebuttal like so:
This piece from the biologist Jerry Coyne original appeared on the Freedom from Religion blog FreeThought now, but was later removed for dogmatic reasons. Critical Mass subscribers can read it here
substack.com
The problem with trying to steel-man this is that most thoughtful non-profits aren't going to embroil themselves in an argument against something manifestly false and harmful (e.g. vaccine denial) unless those false claims have been gaining traction in the broader culture. If such ideas have been gaining a following, though, then it's probably good to take the strongest version of them apart in public. All that said, Grant's article isn't a very strong example of the genre and Coyne's isn't particularly responsive to it. The former is mostly about "woman" as a social role (e.g. people who use the
women's changing room and restroom in places that accept progressive thinking on gender) whereas the latter is mostly about "woman" as a reproductive role (i.e. people born with oocytes). Since words carry different meaning in different contexts, it's hard to say whether linguistic battle has substantively been joined here.
Grant gets some pretty basic stuff wrong about sex, e.g. patients "who receive bottom surgery have vaginas."
She They ought to look up what this organ actually
does and run through the checklist.
By the same token, Coyne gets some pretty basic stuff wrong about gender, such as claiming "
it still has two camel’s-hump modes around 'male' and 'female,'" when in point of fact (1)
female refers to sex;
feminine to gender and (2) there is no ordinal variable which would allow such a plot to even exist.
This latest kerfuffle isn't a battle of steel-men, it's
Amateur Hour On Sex and Gender.