> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.
Try and parse that into something intelligible. I dare you.
No the difficulty, in English, is that gender originally meant one's biological sex. There has been a concerted effort to assert that perceived gender and gender are the same. The confusion is deliberate.
From Webster's Dictionary (1828):
> 1. Properly, kind; sort.
> 2. A sex, male or female. Hence,
> 3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender
Nowadays, the political effort is to tie people in mental knots over how a person feels about their gender, how a person presents themselves, and how a person prefers to be addressed.
> "Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere."
AKA "you might ignore biology when it comes to make political decisions so that me and other biologists are not labelled bigots"? The conclusion of that article is a cop-out.
I'm not sure how you took that from the paragraph. What they're saying is that biological sex is a real, valid concept to biologists. No biologist is going to be called a bigot for saying that biological sex is a thing. (However, in non-academic contexts this statement is used by bigots as a dog-whistle. It's pretty darn obvious when this happens though.)
Made sense to me. It's basically saying a context-sensitive definition of "sex" does a disservice to either science or to society. There are people arguing literally that human sex is "assigned" at birth instead of just observed. This is all part of the gender identity and/or expression holy war currently being waged in the West and likely flamed by bad actors on social media, Twitter in particular.
It sounds like it's making a case that people pretend the concept of biological sex doesn't exist as some kind of defense for social concepts of sex, but that seems like a straw man. I've rarely (never?) heard anybody insist that there are not multiple contexts for the concept of sex/gender.
Yeah, when you get organic terminology like this it always kinda gets weird. The words sex and gender have been used to describe people's "social sex"/"gender identity"/"gender presentation" and their biological sex depending on the context.
Like a trans woman's drivers license and birth certificate will say female so it's hard to cleanly say that sex === biological sex.
I encourage you to google “biological sex isn’t real” and acquaint yourself with this line of thinking.
Radical gender theory does in fact make the bold claim that biological sex isn’t real. That’s right, sex, not gender. The postmodernist underpinnings used to support these types of ideas are rooted in concepts like “objective truth does not exist” and “everything is a social construct”.
I took your challenge, and, well I couldn't find it. I did find articles like this one https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth.... If you read only the headline you might think it's making the argument your implying, but if you actually bother to read it you'll find it doesn't.
From the article:
"The biology of sex is real, but it’s extremely complicated, and there is sometimes no easy way to draw a line between the biologically male and female."
Having now read the top 5 articles for that search term, I still haven't found one that makes the claim your suggesting.
I'm sure if I dig hard enough I could find that someone has said it non-ironically, but if I dig hard enough I can find someone saying the moon landing didn't happen or talking about lizard people non-ironically. That doesn't make it a mainstream movement.
The idea that sex is non-binary and socially constructed is certainly around. The first time I heard it was about a year ago on an podcast interview from Sam Harris with an expert in the field of gender studies or something, saying we should consider that gay men might actually be women.
One recent event that brings it to light is JK Rowling said something along those lines, basically that women menstrate¹, and that caused a lot of controversy. I'm sure you'll be able to find plenty of articles against her for saying that.
Sure. But they aren't saying biological sex doesn't exist. They are saying there is sex and gender and that these two things can be different. Specifically sex is biological, while gender is a social and physiological construct. What is explicitly NOT being said is that biological sex is non-existent. And they are saying that a person's gender may be female while their biological sex can be male (or ambiguous), and that these people should still be considered women. That's very different from saying biological sex doesn't exist.
That is comprehensible except it isn't related to what I said. This thread isn't about gender - it's about sex.
It's good you haven't understood people saying sex isn't biological, because it's not a defensible position. Hopefully their voices don't become more prominent.
Biological sex has more than two configurations of sex chromosomes possible, in humans. This isn't rocket science, although it is biology.
Also, on your other points: Objective truths can exist, but not all measurements are objective. Not everything is a social construct, but the things that humans believe without empirical evidence are all social constructs.
Postmodernism isn't hard. Y'all're just extremely convinced that reality is locally real, just because you can sense it so vividly, and you're blind to your biases as a result.
> Radical gender theory does in fact make the bold claim that biological sex isn’t real.
No.
Transphobes[1] will say that sex is obvious and the binary is clear.
The argument being made against transphobes is that definitions for "female" (or "male") can't exclude trans-people while including everyone else traditionally thought of as female (or male). That's something that transphobes claims is easy, and they're wrong.
[1] Many transphobes say this. It doesn't mean that anyone who says this is transphobic.
I'm genuinely impressed with this article, it manages to talk about a topic rife heated opinions in a very level headed way! Kudos to the author to presenting biological sex as something real and fundamental while not falling into the trap of concluding that one's 'social sex'/gender must follow from it.
The author seems to be some sort of ill-read hack. There are fungi [0] with thousands of biological sexes. Additionally, within humanity, there are more than two configurations of sex chromosomes [1].
I'm not exactly being Gettier over here; if y'all have reasons why my counterexamples are wrong, then speak up. Otherwise maybe sit back and consider exactly why it's interesting that a professor of philosophy rattles off all of these biology facts in an attempt to back up the hilariously-bullshit utterances:
> The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. It would be quite straightforward to engineer a species that has three, but none has evolved naturally.
This is straight-up wrong, and he attempts to use the nomenclature of "mating types" to dismiss the obvious counterexamples. He's attempting to be some sort of deep thinker about genetics, but he's reaffirming the idea that somehow there's only ever two sexes, which is literally binary gender theory and has already been debunked.
Probably going straight for the ad-hominem is a reason why people are bothered by your otherwise reasonable observation. Not everyone that's wrong is a "hack". If I remember correctly HN encourages discussions in the spirit of being charitable to another person's opinion.
We shouldn't be charitable to racism, sexism, delusional religious beliefs, or fascism; they are too harmful to the world. In this case, you're asking me to be charitable to a sexist article whose author does not justify their credentials beyond being a professor of philosophy; perhaps they are only accidentally sexist here?
Seriously, do some close-reading. The very first sentence:
> It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes.
Note the word "many" here; not all species, but just some. In other words, many species do not have two distinct biological sexes. They then continue:
> It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of.
Ah, so while many species do not have two sexes, we're not likely to have heard of them. Okay, that's a fair cultural idea, I suppose... And then, suddenly, a one-two punch:
> Not all species have biological sexes, and biology seeks to explain why some do and others don’t.
Wait, okay, so some species have more than two sexes, and some don't have sex at all? This is a confusion tactic, because the very next sentence is:
> The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle.
We've done it. We went all the way from some species, to no species that we've heard of, to no species at all having more than two sexes. This is a famous rhetorical technique known as Iago's whispers [0]. By carefully restating the original thesis over and over, but gently changing it each time, the meaning of the entire article is shifted.
Now with this discrediting in hand, the author can continue safely down their binary-gender-theory path, writing slapstick like:
> Now imagine if there was a whole species like this, where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’.
You see, the idea of more than two sexes is now imaginary, relegated to thought experiments. And we see species that are like having more than two sexes, as a simile. But the author's carefully removed the actual physical reality from consideration.
HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article.
> We shouldn't be charitable to racism, sexism, delusional religious beliefs, or fascism; they are too harmful to the world. In this case, you're asking me to be charitable to a sexist article whose author does not justify their credentials beyond being a professor of philosophy; perhaps they are only accidentally sexist here?
If author justified his credentials with more titles, it would be better? If he was a biologist, his paper would stop being sexist in your opinion? Why does it matter?
As for the article itself, it isn't sexist IMHO unless you believe that stating that the biological sex exists and in human case there are two sexes is sexist. If that's so then the most biologists I've met are jest sexists and I should probably call the police and denounce them as petty criminals.
You're right that author contradicts himself in the sentence "The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle". It's definitely a logical error on the author's side and is plainly wrong, but it's not the main point of the paper.
No, the entire point of critiquing the author's qualifications is to break apart the idea that, because the author is well-spoken, they are therefore correct or even reasonable. If the author had declined to publish a miniature biography beside the article, then I would not have said anything. I haven't, for example, examined the rest of his body of work; I don't have any predictions to make about what else he may have written.
> stating that the biological sex exists and in human case there are two sexes is sexist.
You got it! Sort of. It's not a problem to use the concept of biological sex, but it's completely wrong to say that humans have two biological sexes. The main problem is in the assignment of chromosomal configurations to sexual configurations; humans have a dozen or so intersex [0] configurations which don't fit neatly into binary gender theory.
And this has real-world consequences. There are many countries which have canonicalized various sorts of human-rights abuses based on the binary theory, mostly by establishing some sort of concentration camps for homosexuals. The author's writing forms a small but real brick in the wall of these camps.
> If that's so then the most biologists I've met are jest sexists and I should probably call the police and denounce them as petty criminals.
This is the error. It doesn't make sense to criminalize sexism, and indeed it's not criminalized in any jurisdiction that I know of. Instead, what's criminalized are specific deleterious pragmatic aspects of sexism: Sexual harassment, genital mutilation, conversion therapy, forced emancipation of trans children, human trafficking. When biologists are sexists, they are usually being reductionist as the author is doing, by minimizing and ignoring the diversity of the real world's biosphere; they are not directly advocating for the harm that is done by other, more hateful people, based on their reasoning.
Also, yes, my priors are that people are 99% racist, 80% sexist, 85% delusionally religious, and 20% fascist; this gives me a weak but steady belief that the typical person I talk to is, in some way, a sincere believer in deeply harmful and falsifiable cultural beliefs. I'm in the USA, for what it's worth; hopefully it's not like this everywhere.
> No, the entire point of critiquing the author's qualifications is to break apart the idea that, because the author is well-spoken, they are therefore correct or even reasonable. If the author had declined to publish a miniature biography beside the article, then I would not have said anything. I haven't, for example, examined the rest of his body of work; I don't have any predictions to make about what else he may have written.
So basically you make an attack ad personam because it is effective way to win the discussion. It is not enough to dismantle his argument, you have also to make him unreliable source of knowledge. For my part, I haven't noticed the little bio, but I know it's a common practice to show a short info about the author under his article. It's a two edge sword, some readers may be impressed, some may feel like you.
> but it's completely wrong to say that humans have two biological sexes
So I guess saying that humans have two arms and five fingers per hand is also completely wrong. You know that due to strange genetic conditions, some people are born with more fingers, etc.? Some people get Down syndrome due to an extra chromosome, but still it's correct to say that humans have 20 chromosomes. It doesn't mean that there are no exceptions and doesn't dehumanize those exceptions.
I believe you're oversensitive in this area, but I guess you already told me why.
It's all a matter of how wrong you want to be, and what information you want to use for deduction. If you see a humanoid approaching you, do you start with "that is a human (99.99% certainty)" or "that is a man or woman (98% certainty)"? I can see the use in the latter, but only here when quantified and compared to more generic alternatives.
I assume that you know about the facts that some humans have fewer than two arms, and some humans have not just fewer than five, but also sometimes more than five fingers [0]. In what way, then, do you hope to show that the facile versions aren't wrong? I think that what you're saying is that it is quite common for human genetics to plan for people to have two arms and five fingers. But it's not universal. We must distinguish between the two, because every time we make a universal claim about humans, we implicitly exclude the humans who aren't covered by the claim. Indeed, intersex folk, polydactyls, amputees, and folks with Down syndrome are all marginalized in our society, and all via this same mechanism of minimization and normalization.
On personal attacks: I've only lost karma in this thread and I'm going to continue losing it; I'm not sure by what means you could imagine that I'm effectively winning.
> It's all a matter of how wrong you want to be, and what information you want to use for deduction. If you see a humanoid approaching you, do you start with "that is a human (99.99% certainty)" or "that is a man or woman (98% certainty)"? I can see the use in the latter, but only here when quantified and compared to more generic alternatives.
Generalization is one of the main mechanisms making the communication (language) work. Otherwise one should probably treat every human as an individual, similarly to the Duns Scotus and his haecceity concept.
It's somehow related to the concept of overfitting, you acknowledge existence of the outliers but at the same time you may want to generalize them for the sake of the better generalization...
> On personal attacks: I've only lost karma in this thread and I'm going to continue losing it; I'm not sure by what means you could imagine that I'm effectively winning.
Who cares about karma. What's important is that your comments may encourage some readers to think ;)
> HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article
I see that your indignation makes you read right past me.
I wasn't expressing any disagreement with your post, I was just trying to offer a theory why people would find it questionable. Calling me out in a passive aggressive way that I haven't read the article has no bearing on my previous statement and it only enforces that sentiment.
Relax already. Count your karma; I'm pretty sure that you're positive in this thread. Please, instead, reflect upon why you've felt the need to post multiple times in this thread without actually talking about the original article's content.
If you actually read the article properly, you'll read the author has adequately anticipated and dealt with your objections. Please read the article before you comment.
Some species have many hundreds of these ‘mating types’, and newspapers often report research into this phenomenon under headlines such as: ‘Scientists discover species with hundreds of sexes!’ But, formally, biologists refer to these as ‘mating types’, and reserve the term ‘sexes’ for gametes that are different in size and structure. Why distinguish between these two phenomena? One reason is that the evolution of anisogamy – gametes that differ in size and structure – explains the later evolution of sex chromosomes, sex-associated physical characteristics and much more. But the existence of mating types doesn’t have these dramatic knock-on evolutionary effects.
Intersex:
Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.
37 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 87.1 ms ] threadTry and parse that into something intelligible. I dare you.
From Webster's Dictionary (1828):
> 1. Properly, kind; sort.
> 2. A sex, male or female. Hence,
> 3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender
Nowadays, the political effort is to tie people in mental knots over how a person feels about their gender, how a person presents themselves, and how a person prefers to be addressed.
AKA "you might ignore biology when it comes to make political decisions so that me and other biologists are not labelled bigots"? The conclusion of that article is a cop-out.
The fact that this article was flagged proves you wrong.
> However, in non-academic contexts this statement is used by bigots as a dog-whistle.
A dogwhistle for what exactly? please explain.
Like a trans woman's drivers license and birth certificate will say female so it's hard to cleanly say that sex === biological sex.
Radical gender theory does in fact make the bold claim that biological sex isn’t real. That’s right, sex, not gender. The postmodernist underpinnings used to support these types of ideas are rooted in concepts like “objective truth does not exist” and “everything is a social construct”.
From the article:
"The biology of sex is real, but it’s extremely complicated, and there is sometimes no easy way to draw a line between the biologically male and female."
Having now read the top 5 articles for that search term, I still haven't found one that makes the claim your suggesting.
I'm sure if I dig hard enough I could find that someone has said it non-ironically, but if I dig hard enough I can find someone saying the moon landing didn't happen or talking about lizard people non-ironically. That doesn't make it a mainstream movement.
One recent event that brings it to light is JK Rowling said something along those lines, basically that women menstrate¹, and that caused a lot of controversy. I'm sure you'll be able to find plenty of articles against her for saying that.
[1] https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313
It's good you haven't understood people saying sex isn't biological, because it's not a defensible position. Hopefully their voices don't become more prominent.
Lots of women don't menstruate. Children, older women, women who've had hysterectomies, some women with intersex conditions, and transwomen.
Some men do menstruate. Transmen, and some people with intersex conditions.
This argument is not saying that "sex isn't real". It's saying that using terms that define sex are not good enough for some topics.
Also, on your other points: Objective truths can exist, but not all measurements are objective. Not everything is a social construct, but the things that humans believe without empirical evidence are all social constructs.
Postmodernism isn't hard. Y'all're just extremely convinced that reality is locally real, just because you can sense it so vividly, and you're blind to your biases as a result.
No.
Transphobes[1] will say that sex is obvious and the binary is clear.
The argument being made against transphobes is that definitions for "female" (or "male") can't exclude trans-people while including everyone else traditionally thought of as female (or male). That's something that transphobes claims is easy, and they're wrong.
[1] Many transphobes say this. It doesn't mean that anyone who says this is transphobic.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
> The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. It would be quite straightforward to engineer a species that has three, but none has evolved naturally.
This is straight-up wrong, and he attempts to use the nomenclature of "mating types" to dismiss the obvious counterexamples. He's attempting to be some sort of deep thinker about genetics, but he's reaffirming the idea that somehow there's only ever two sexes, which is literally binary gender theory and has already been debunked.
Seriously, do some close-reading. The very first sentence:
> It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes.
Note the word "many" here; not all species, but just some. In other words, many species do not have two distinct biological sexes. They then continue:
> It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of.
Ah, so while many species do not have two sexes, we're not likely to have heard of them. Okay, that's a fair cultural idea, I suppose... And then, suddenly, a one-two punch:
> Not all species have biological sexes, and biology seeks to explain why some do and others don’t.
Wait, okay, so some species have more than two sexes, and some don't have sex at all? This is a confusion tactic, because the very next sentence is:
> The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle.
We've done it. We went all the way from some species, to no species that we've heard of, to no species at all having more than two sexes. This is a famous rhetorical technique known as Iago's whispers [0]. By carefully restating the original thesis over and over, but gently changing it each time, the meaning of the entire article is shifted.
Now with this discrediting in hand, the author can continue safely down their binary-gender-theory path, writing slapstick like:
> Now imagine if there was a whole species like this, where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’.
You see, the idea of more than two sexes is now imaginary, relegated to thought experiments. And we see species that are like having more than two sexes, as a simile. But the author's carefully removed the actual physical reality from consideration.
HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago
If author justified his credentials with more titles, it would be better? If he was a biologist, his paper would stop being sexist in your opinion? Why does it matter?
As for the article itself, it isn't sexist IMHO unless you believe that stating that the biological sex exists and in human case there are two sexes is sexist. If that's so then the most biologists I've met are jest sexists and I should probably call the police and denounce them as petty criminals.
You're right that author contradicts himself in the sentence "The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle". It's definitely a logical error on the author's side and is plainly wrong, but it's not the main point of the paper.
> stating that the biological sex exists and in human case there are two sexes is sexist.
You got it! Sort of. It's not a problem to use the concept of biological sex, but it's completely wrong to say that humans have two biological sexes. The main problem is in the assignment of chromosomal configurations to sexual configurations; humans have a dozen or so intersex [0] configurations which don't fit neatly into binary gender theory.
And this has real-world consequences. There are many countries which have canonicalized various sorts of human-rights abuses based on the binary theory, mostly by establishing some sort of concentration camps for homosexuals. The author's writing forms a small but real brick in the wall of these camps.
> If that's so then the most biologists I've met are jest sexists and I should probably call the police and denounce them as petty criminals.
This is the error. It doesn't make sense to criminalize sexism, and indeed it's not criminalized in any jurisdiction that I know of. Instead, what's criminalized are specific deleterious pragmatic aspects of sexism: Sexual harassment, genital mutilation, conversion therapy, forced emancipation of trans children, human trafficking. When biologists are sexists, they are usually being reductionist as the author is doing, by minimizing and ignoring the diversity of the real world's biosphere; they are not directly advocating for the harm that is done by other, more hateful people, based on their reasoning.
Also, yes, my priors are that people are 99% racist, 80% sexist, 85% delusionally religious, and 20% fascist; this gives me a weak but steady belief that the typical person I talk to is, in some way, a sincere believer in deeply harmful and falsifiable cultural beliefs. I'm in the USA, for what it's worth; hopefully it's not like this everywhere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
So basically you make an attack ad personam because it is effective way to win the discussion. It is not enough to dismantle his argument, you have also to make him unreliable source of knowledge. For my part, I haven't noticed the little bio, but I know it's a common practice to show a short info about the author under his article. It's a two edge sword, some readers may be impressed, some may feel like you.
> but it's completely wrong to say that humans have two biological sexes
So I guess saying that humans have two arms and five fingers per hand is also completely wrong. You know that due to strange genetic conditions, some people are born with more fingers, etc.? Some people get Down syndrome due to an extra chromosome, but still it's correct to say that humans have 20 chromosomes. It doesn't mean that there are no exceptions and doesn't dehumanize those exceptions.
I believe you're oversensitive in this area, but I guess you already told me why.
I assume that you know about the facts that some humans have fewer than two arms, and some humans have not just fewer than five, but also sometimes more than five fingers [0]. In what way, then, do you hope to show that the facile versions aren't wrong? I think that what you're saying is that it is quite common for human genetics to plan for people to have two arms and five fingers. But it's not universal. We must distinguish between the two, because every time we make a universal claim about humans, we implicitly exclude the humans who aren't covered by the claim. Indeed, intersex folk, polydactyls, amputees, and folks with Down syndrome are all marginalized in our society, and all via this same mechanism of minimization and normalization.
On personal attacks: I've only lost karma in this thread and I'm going to continue losing it; I'm not sure by what means you could imagine that I'm effectively winning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyly
Generalization is one of the main mechanisms making the communication (language) work. Otherwise one should probably treat every human as an individual, similarly to the Duns Scotus and his haecceity concept.
It's somehow related to the concept of overfitting, you acknowledge existence of the outliers but at the same time you may want to generalize them for the sake of the better generalization...
> On personal attacks: I've only lost karma in this thread and I'm going to continue losing it; I'm not sure by what means you could imagine that I'm effectively winning.
Who cares about karma. What's important is that your comments may encourage some readers to think ;)
> HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article
I see that your indignation makes you read right past me.
I wasn't expressing any disagreement with your post, I was just trying to offer a theory why people would find it questionable. Calling me out in a passive aggressive way that I haven't read the article has no bearing on my previous statement and it only enforces that sentiment.
Schizophyllum:
Some species have many hundreds of these ‘mating types’, and newspapers often report research into this phenomenon under headlines such as: ‘Scientists discover species with hundreds of sexes!’ But, formally, biologists refer to these as ‘mating types’, and reserve the term ‘sexes’ for gametes that are different in size and structure. Why distinguish between these two phenomena? One reason is that the evolution of anisogamy – gametes that differ in size and structure – explains the later evolution of sex chromosomes, sex-associated physical characteristics and much more. But the existence of mating types doesn’t have these dramatic knock-on evolutionary effects.
Intersex:
Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.