Mick Hartley

More on Agustín Fuentes, whose book on sex being non-binary was just given a rave review in Lancet. Victoria Smith at The Critic.

Agustín Fuentes is a biological anthropologist at Princeton University. This allows him to adjudicate on this particular issue. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of many a great man (we know, by the way, that men exist). Take Aristotle, for instance, who believed that females were “less developed” males, or Galen, who saw women as ”defective men”. For millennia, the general idea has been that females aren’t a distinct and diverse group of humans, with both variations between us and multiple overlapping qualities with males. We’re more a rag-tag group of smaller, penis-less males, males gone wrong — tolerated, in the words of Philomena Cunk, “for their ability to excrete new humans from their front parts”.

This is the tradition that Fuentes picks up on, though I doubt that he sees it that way. In 2023, he wrote an article for Scientific American purporting to demonstrate why “human sex is not binary”. This he considered such a resounding success that he has now published a book, glowingly reviewed in The Lancet, on why female people aren’t identifiable in any meaningful, consistent way — certainly not any way which would make it clear when and where our needs and experiences might deviate from those of the default human….

The way in which this argument works, smooshing together actual sex differences and patriarchal gender stereotypes, is already clear in the 2023 article. “We know,” Fuentes writes, “that humans exhibit a range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge”:

Producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially, about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports.

This is such an astonishingly bad argument that it's amazing to me that anyone would actually set it down in writing, let alone make it the central thesis of a whole book. Of course knowing an individual's sex doesn't tell us everything about them. Whoever thought it did? It's like saying that the definition of a chair – something you sit on – doesn't tell us whether it's made of wood or steel or has legs or runners or if it's in Norway or Tanzania, so chairs don't really exist as such and we should just stop talking about them.

Have a vagina but don’t like gossip? Sex is so very complex! Who knows what anyone is? …

Obviously I’m claiming all this having given up biology lessons at 14. Yet while I appreciate the scientists who have been brave enough to stand up to this nonsense, I can’t help feeling anyone should be able to challenge it. There is a long history of women being bullied out of asserting ourselves on the very question of what we are and why we matter.

We’re meant to feel too ill-qualified (where’s your science degree?). We’re meant to feel threatened (what to end up back in the kitchen?). We’re meant to feel behind the times (don’t you understand that no one thinks this any more?).

Ultimately, we’re meant to feel small, too irrelevant to expect more than a choice between non-existence as a sex class or existence as a conservative stereotype. That, by the way, is an age-old, harmful, socially constructed binary. If we want to reject such things, how about starting there?

It's not so much now that academics can and should be challenged by non-academics – that was always the case – but that academics are now in fact far more likely to come up with nonsense than any other demographic. Dispensers of anti-expertise. Our new bullshitters-in-chief.