Mick Hartley

Further to the previous post on PZ Myers and his "bimodal" take on sex, here's an article by Colin Wright in City Journal (via Jerry Coyne) on the same subject – Are There More Than Two Sexes? No.

It seems that the bimodal approach has now been superseded in ideologically correct science circles in favour of a multimodal model: bimodal, it seems, is just too, well… binary.

More modern attempts to debunk the binary nature of sex have moved away from trying to discover new sexes. Instead, they call for the elimination of sex categories entirely in favor of viewing sex as a continuous, though perhaps bimodal, spectrum consisting of many traits. Such ideas have found refuge in the pages of Nature and popular-science magazines like Scientific American.

Because the sex binary has been so thoroughly stigmatized as inherently “oppressive” and invalidating of transgender and “non-binary” identities and experiences—cardinal sins of our age—this effort has started an arms race among activist scientists to create the least binary model of sex imaginable. Since the “bimodal spectrum” concept still entails two of something, it must be abandoned. After all, the bimodal distribution of sex-related traits may problematically stem from an underlying property that remains fundamentally binary.

Does Myers know about this? 

In pursuit of this goal, a “Multimodal Sex literature survey team” composed of researchers from UC–Berkeley and Loyola University Chicago has been assembled to “re-imagine a more inclusive framework for biological sex.” On January 27, 2023, the team produced their first pre-print paper, titled “Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution.” The paper argues that sex is best viewed as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels” rather than bimodal or binary.

In saner times, such a paper would perhaps bring a small chuckle from a journal editor before issuing a swift rejection. But current times are far from sane, and the quick ascendance of fashionable pseudoscience in academia on the biology of sex is ample reason to worry that this paper will not receive the withering review it deserves.

Time and again, the paper argues with ideological opponents who simply don’t exist. Take the authors’ baseless but repeated claim that the binary model of sex necessarily requires that any and all measurable genetic, hormonal, morphological, or behavioral difference observed between the sexes must also be a strict binary (i.e., these traits will have no overlap):

‘Sex’ is often semantically flattened into a binary model, for which individuals are classified as either ‘female’ or ‘male.’ A more expansive definition of sex is bimodal—with most individuals falling within one of two peaks of a trait distribution. However, even a bimodal model is an oversimplification, since ‘sex’ comprises multiple traits, with variable distributions. Individuals may possess different combinations of chromosome type, gamete size, hormone level, morphology, and social roles, which do not always align in female- and male-specific ways or persist across an organism’s lifespan. Reliance on strict binary categories of sex fails to accurately capture the diverse and nuanced nature of sex.

The authors then quote renowned transgender biologist Joan Roughgarden, who similarly fails to grasp the meaning of the sex binary: “the biggest error in biology today is uncritically assuming that the gamete size binary implies a corresponding binary in body type, behavior, and life history.” I am not aware of any biologist having ever made this claim, but this (perhaps willful) misunderstanding leads the authors to believe that if they’re able to locate a sex-related difference that does not conform to an absolute binary, then they will have successfully refuted the claim that only two sexes exist.

It's the same old nonsense: as though the assertion that sex is binary requires that every man is identical in characteristics and behaviour, and every woman is identical in a different way in characteristics and behaviour, and the fact that this is not the case therefore refutes the sex binary. Put like that, it's clear how ridiculous the claim really is.

It's astonishing how people can twist themselves into these absurd positions in the name of the gender cult…in the name of fashionable pseudoscience.