This time it’s a website called The Scientist.

The thesis of this article is the equivalent of saying that “because clownfish,” a human animal can change its biological sex from male to female (or female to male) and to any of many unspecified “sexes” between. The article ends by saying “If you don’t publicly proclaim that [the sun revolves around the earth] or [water boils at 150 degrees F] or [tectonic plates are made of cheese], you are a bigot.

I keep thinking back to the religious fundamentalists who developed numerous unhinged theological theories (“tennis without a net”) because they were not willing to face the fact that  we are human animals (and see here). The false idea that we are “blank slates” has dominated large swaths of academia for years, especially in departments of education and social work. I believe this false belief has now enabled modern gender ideology.

A much more fruitful approach to understanding human complexity would be to admit that one’s body is what it is. In a biological male, for instance, every one of the trillions of cells contains an XY (in the female sex, an XX). Here is a straight-forward explanation for why there are two (and only two) sexes.  An entirely separate issue from the biology is how a human animal expresses himself (or herself).

I have no problem with any human adult choosing how to express themself, choosing how to use their body, who to spend time with, how to use or change one’s physical appearance or how to involve anyone else in these activities, assuming everyone consents. What I’m against is the increasingly popular notion, reinforced by formerly respectable “science” publications, that we can pretend that our underlying biology is other than what it is. Nature doesn’t care about what we think. It is what it is. What anyone chooses to do with their primate body is totally up to them. But let’s not conflate what kind of biological body one has with how one chooses to change its appearance or use it.

[Added May 15, 2022]

Quote by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne:

But Fuentes has moved on to going after other aspects of biology, and in the article above he commits what I see as the cardinal sin of woke scientists who should know better: denying that, in humans at least, sex is a binary. (It also happens to be a binary in most other animals.) The biological distinction between the sexes, which I’ve written about too many times to count, is this: members of the male sex make small, mobile gametes—sperm. Members of the female sex make large, immobile gametes—eggs.

This has nothing to do with genitalia or other morphological characteristics. And using that (accepted) definition creates an effective binary in humans: if you can make sperm you’re male, if you can make eggs you’re female. Yes, there are some who are sterile, or who lack testes or ovaries, but those are not members of some “intermediate” sex: they are developmental anomalies, and they’re very rare. (Yes, their existence means that there are a few small blips on a chart of “frequency of sexes” with males at one end and females at the other, but for all practical purposes the plot is a bimodal one, i.e., showing a binary.) And yes, some people are postreproductive and have “outgrown” their ability to produce gametes. But there is no “sex” that doesn’t produce eggs or sperm. There are no individuals that produce intermediate forms of gametes who can be the basis of a third reproductive class of humans.

But for reasons that are purely political, people like Fuentes reject this binary, banging on about hermaphrodites, penises and labia that are not “normal”, hormone levels, fish that change sex, and so on, but let’s face it: in nearly all animals, biological sex, which is the way that “biological science” defines sex.