Dawkins on the binary nature of sex, the kerFFRFle, and more

Lawrence Krauss has edited a volume of essays and articles by 39 scientists writing about current threats to science, including censorship, ideological corruption, and so on. It also includes a revision of my paper with Luana Maroja on the ideological subversion of biology. The volume will be out this year, and that’s all I can say about it except that Richard Dawkins has published part of his contribution on his Substack “The Poetry of Reality”. You can read this part for free by clicking on the headline below.  You can guess what the answer to his title question is, and it’s correct.

The essay begins by recounting what prompted its publication online: the kerFFRFLE with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) that led them to cancel my article on their website Freethought Now! discussing the binary nature of sex, an article that took issue with another piece on that site by an FFRF employee maintaining that “A woman is whoever she says she is.” (The original article is still there; my own critique was removed by the FFRF but you can read it here, here, here or here).  This act of censorship—I wasn’t even informed about it in advance—led me to resign from the FFRF’s Honorary Board, followed by the resignations of Richard and Steve Pinker, and then the dissolving of the entire Honorary Board by the FFRF. Freethought Now indeed!

As Richard notes at the outset:

It makes me particularly sad that [Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, co-Presidents of the FFRF] have chosen to stray so far from their stated mission of promoting freedom from religion and the separation of church and state. They seem to think that opposition to militant trans ideology is necessarily associate with the religious Right. That is false. If it were true, it would be an indictment of the rest of us for neglecting our duty to uphold scientific truth. In fact there is strong opposition from feminists concerned for the welfare of women and girls.1 Also from within the gay and especially lesbian communities2, giving the lie to the myth of  a monolithic “LGBT.” “LGB” represents a coherent constituency within which “T” is regarded by many as an interloper. Most relevant here, cogent opposition comes from biological science – and that, after all, was the whole point of Professor Coyne’s censored article.

FFRF does not lack support. Indeed, among the secular / atheist / agnostic / sceptical / humanist communities of America, the  Center for Inquiry (CFI), with which is incorporated the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), is now the only major organization still standing unequivocally for scientific truth.

This lamentable affair is what has provoked me into posting the following critique on my Substack. It is an abbreviated extract from my article called Scientific Truth Sands Above Human Feelings and Politics, commissioned by Lawrence Krauss for a multi-authored volume on The War on Science, to be published in 2025 by Posthill Press3.  The full article makes a comparison with the debauching of science by TD Lysenko in Soviet Russia in the 1940s..

He then gives a long and very clear explanation, in classic Dawkinsian prose, of why biologists say that sex is binary and how the binary-ness evolved.I’ll give three short extracts, but do read the whole thing (for me, at least, it’s a pleasure to read anything Dawkins writes, not just for clarity but as a model of popular scientific writing). Below you can read about as clear an explanation that a human can produce. Sadly, clarity and truth do not lead to enlightenment among a certain ideologically recalcitrant moiety of Anglophones.  The piece also has sections on “transracialism” and “the theology of woke.”

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes. Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, said that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants not our masters. One might say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.6” That is logically unassailable in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand. I shall make the case that redefinition of woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is close to that extreme. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.

. . . It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, social systems, for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

. . . . Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male / female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedevilled by numerous exceptions. Especially those based on sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it. In mammals, sex is determined by the XX XY chromosome system, the male sex having unequal sex chromosomes. Birds and Lepidoptera have the same system, but in the opposite direction and therefore presumably evolved independently. It’s the females who have unequal chromosomes. How do we know? Couldn’t you define males as the sex with unequal chromosomes? Well you could, but then you’d to have to say it’s the male bird that lays the eggs, the females that fight over males, etc. You’d lose every one of the 14 explanations I discussed earlier. Far better to stick with the UBD and say birds use sex chromosomes to determine sex, but it evolved independently of the mammal system. Birds are descended from dinosaur reptiles, and most modern reptiles don’t have sex chromosomes at all. Reptiles often determine sex by incubation temperature. In some cases higher temperatures favour males, in other cases, females. In yet other reptiles, extremes of temperature, high or low, favour females, males developing at intermediate temperatures. Many snakes, some lizards and a few terrapins use sex chromosomes, but they vary which sex has unequal sex chromosomes. Amidst all this variation, the only reliable discriminator is gamete size.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is, therefore, separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we in practice recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

And that is all ye need to know. You’ll have to wait for Richard’s full article, which I’ve read as I contributed to the book, as it has a nice section on censorship in biology as promoted by Lysenko and Stalin.

I still like my list of questions to ask people who claim that sex in humans (or other animals) is not binary but a spectrum. (The proportion of individuals who are exceptions to the gametic definition given above is minuscule, ranging from 1/5600 to 1/20,000):

1. How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
2. If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”)
3. Now how many sexes are there in humans?
4. If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, how many sexes are there in humans, then, and then how do you tell these more-than-two sexes apart?

Good luck getting an extreme gender ideologue to answer these questions!