In a scientific journal, especially one as prestigious as Cell, publication of a paper is a kind of endorsement of its content, for the paper has to be vetted for accuracy and cogency. This is why I say Cell “endorses” the view of the paper below, which maintains that sex isn’t binary, and in fact that the very concept of “sex” is incoherent, harmful, and should be jettisoned. This is clearly an invited paper, but the standards of accuracy and rigor should still apply. They don’t.
What makes me even more sure that Cell endorses this message is that the journal itself is woke and rejects the sex binary in instructing authors (see below). Plus the article is part of a series of five papers in the journal under “Focus on sex and gender” (May 14), all of which reflect gender activism. In rejecting the sex binary, both via this article and in its own behavior, Cell is rejecting science in favor of ideology. That’s very sad, but it’s what’s happening—and not just in biology. The ideological camel is sticking its nose into the tent of science—and actually, the whole head is now inside.
This article was written by Beans Velocci, assistant professor of History and Sociology of Science and Core Faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. There’s little doubt that its motivation is ideological because Beans goes by “they/them” and specializes in research that buttresses the thesis below. You can see Velocci’s c.v. here.
You may read this short (3.5-page) paper by clicking on the headline below, or reading the pdf here.
First, here’s how Velocci tells us that the journal itself doesn’t agree on a scientific definition of sex:
Some scientists are already contending with this problem. Cell itself has taken steps in that direction: the author guidelines for submission include a note addressing the multiplicity of sex. “[T]here is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex,” the guidelines point out. “‘[S]ex’ carries multiple definitions” including genetic, endocrinological, and anatomical features.
Contributors should therefore reduce ambiguity by specifying their methods for collecting and recording sex-related data to “enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility.” The Cell guidelines are aligned with a broader conversation that names increased precision when talking about sex as a solution to these problems.
Yes, but one definition is far more universally agreed on than others, at least among biologists (last time I looked, Cell was a biology journal). But of course if researchers don’t mean natal sex when specifying “males” and “females”, then they are obliged to tell us how they recognize people. After all, if it’s solely via “self-designation”, then we have to be careful. Even so, Cell could have said this the way I just did.
Here are the main problems with Velocci’s paper:
- It conflates sex differentiation, sex determination, and the definition of sex
- It argues, wrongly, that no progress has been made in understanding the nature and definition of biological sex
- Its argument is ideological rather than scientific, yet is given the trappings of science
- It argues that the binary nature of sex, which the author rejects, somehow erases transgender and nonbinary people
- And, as usual, its supposed examples that make sex nonbinary, like the long clitoris of the hyena, are wrong. But where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!
Since the whole paper is motivated by ideology (and by now you should know what that ideology is), here are a few quotes to demonstrate the gender-activist underpinnings. Binary sex is a tool of white supremacy, for one thing!
In the present, this means that sex—a key research variable in the life sciences, not to mention its role in structuring our everyday lives—is not a singular and stable entity. This has real, practical ramifications. On one hand, it introduces a tremendous lack of specificity and rampant imprecision to scientific research; on the other, it fuels ongoing arguments about the purportedly biological reasons that transgender (and especially nonbinary) people are not deserving of rights or do not even exist.
This of course is nonsense. The argument that sex is binary, and defined by whether you produce small mobile gametes (sperm in males) or large immobile gametes (eggs in females) has no bearing at all on whether people who are transgender or nonbinary deserve equal rights. Of course they do. (There are a very few exceptions for trangender people involving things like athletics, incarceration, or rape counseling.) Further, both transsexual and nonbinary people are, biologically, either male or female, even if they feel like they’re a mixture of both, a member of their non-natal sex, or something else.
But wait! There’s more:
Binary sex, too, continued to structure day-to-day life throughout the United States and Europe, with science serving as justification for a whole array of patriarchal and white-supremacist social arrangements. The point is this: even as scientific inquiry produced endless evidence that sex was neither straightforward to identify nor binary, sex continued to function as a foundational classification system for science and everyday life.
But the facts are the fact, even if they’re misused by bigots to denigrate people. As Steve Pinker has pointed out, we don’t say that architecture itself (or chemistry, for that matter) are bad and should be ditched because Nazis used them to construct gas chambers. But wait! There’s more:
We live in a social world that is fundamentally structured around the idea that sex is a binary, biological truth. Scientists are therefore constantly conditioned to ignore anomalies that do not fit into that scheme. Precision and rigor are incredibly important. They’re also not enough to counter hegemonic social forces.
Here Velocci argues that scientists ignore anomalies in sex (e.g., intersex or other conditions that affect secondary sexual traits) because we’re conditioned by the sex binary. But Velocci has spent the whole paper before this arguing that there is no agreement on the definition of sex, so how can Velocci claim that the world is structured around the sex binary? At any rate, I don’t understand what Velocci means by saying that the world “ignores anomalies”. They are the subject of a huge activist literature as well as an extensive medical literature.
One more:
Questioning fundamental truths is, in its most aspirational form, the point of any knowledge-producing enterprise. Imagine what we might find out if we were to let go of a category that hundreds of years of history demonstrates to be more useful for maintaining social hierarchies than for generating scientific knowledge.
This last point not only argues that we hold onto the false sex binary because it helps reinforce the social hierarchy (e.g. “transphobia”, white supremacy, and so on), but also that it impedes the acquisition of scientific knowledge. That’s a lie, of course: we wouldn’t know about sexual selection, parental care, etc. without the binary sex definition. Finally, Velocci tells us that we should just deep-six the entire category of sex.
Here’s another of Velocci’s arguments for dumping the category (but then what do we replace it with? Nothing?):
The answer to the question “What is sex?” is, in both theory and practice, just about everything, and therefore also nearly nothing. This exercise demonstrates that sex is an incoherent category, one that has perhaps outlived its use.
Another:
Paisley Currah noted in his recent book on government sex classification, “is what a particular state actor says it means.”
So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage.
I’m not really going into the argument for why sex is binary in all animals and plants, with exceptions being only in groups like algae and fungi. You can read or hear the arguments for it by Colin Wright, for example here and here, or read Alex Byrne’s new book Trouble With Gender. But if you’ve been reading this website, you’ll already know the arguments. In humans, only one person in 5600 (.018%) is intersex and doesn’t fit the binary. Even so, such people are not considered members of a third sex (see Alex Byrne on this issue here). All I’ll say are two things:
First, Velocci maintains that sex is a gemisch of different things: hormones, chromosomes, secondary sexual traits like genitals or breasts, physiological phenomena like menstruation, and differential behavior like parenting and psychology. To prove that, Velocci asks the students in class, “What is sex?”, and their answers, written on the board, look like this.
But so what? Velocci hasn’t given them the reason why most biologists define sex by gamete type, which is not a simple argument that can be grasped instantly. The figure shows only that sex determination and differentiation involve a lot of stuff, both upstream (incubating temperature affects sex in some turtles, and of course there is the societal determination of sex in those fricking clownfish) and downstream (most of the other traits on the chart). Like all aspects of an organism, the genetics, morphology, and physiology of traits are complicated. The figure above, as I’ve noted, conflates the definition of sex, the determination of sex, and the differentiation of organisms based on sex.
Second, Velocci implies repeatedly that all the work of scientists over the centuries has not led to any increased understanding of sex. Apparently biologists have vacillated among chromosomes, gametes, hormones, and genitals, and other stuff but in the end. . . no new understanding. This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing that this sweating professor is trying to say. After going through how sex was regarded for the last two centuries or so, Velocci says this (note the ideological slant as well):
So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage. This does not make for accurate or reproducible science. As several scientists have pointed out, these contemporary uses of sex—simultaneously attached to an oversimplified binary, yet in practice depending on a vast, rarely analyzed multiplicity—actually make it harder to understand biological variation. There are also human costs: a broader cultural idea of “biological sex” as binary, imagined to be backed by science, is routinely deployed to exclude trans and intersex people and indeed anyone with bodily characteristics that do not fit neatly into male and female norms. The status quo, built on the history sketched above, therefore generates unsound research results that falsely uphold cis- and heteronormative assumptions.
But just because ideas, concepts, and knowledge change over time doesn’t mean that the object of study is elusive, ambiguous, or incohent. As Alex Byrne said in the link above (which uses the same diversion of historical change):
Naturally one must distinguish the claim that dinosaurs are changing (they used to be covered only in scales, now they have feathers) from the claim that our ideas of dinosaurs are changing (we used to think that dinosaurs only have scales, now we think they have feathers). It would be fallacious to move from the premise that dinosaurs are culturally constructed (in Clancy et al.’s sense) to the conclusion that dinosaurs themselves have changed, or that there are no “static, universal truths” about dinosaurs. It would be equally fallacious to move from the premise that sex is culturally constructed to the claim that there are no “static, universal truths” about sex. (One such truth, for example, is that there are two sexes.) Nonetheless, Clancy et al. seem to commit exactly this fallacy, in denying (as they put it) that “sex is…a static, universal truth.”
Here, for example, are some of the things that we now know from using a definitional binary for “biological sex”
- The binary is useful in all animals and vascular plants. No other definition of sex holds for almost the entirety of the species we know. The binary is thus, except for a few groups. universal.
- Why natural selection has resulted in a sex binary rather than a single self-reproducing sex or in three or more sexes. No matter what produces sex, be it environment, genes, or chromosomes, the end result is always two of them
- The binary has utility. Without it, we cannot begin to understand how sexual selection works. And sexual selection has resulted in the following phenomena, which we pretty much understand
- Sexual dimorphism in appearance (why males are most often the aggressive and ornamented sex
- Sexual dimorphism in behavior (why, in humans, are males more often the risk-takers, why females are more interested in people than things, and why males compete for females (seahorses are the exception that proves the rule
- Why organisms care more for their relatives than for unrelated conspecifics
- Why females are more often the caregivers of their children
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
In the end, as we wade through all Velocci’s unsound but familiar arguments, we have only casuistry motivated by ideology. Velocci’s intent is to show that because some humans feel as if they’re not male or female, or feel that they’re members of the sex other than their natal sex, then sex in nature must reflect these human feelings. This is what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”, which can be defined as the view that “whatever we see as moral or good in humans must be seen in nature as well.”
There’s even a section of the paper called “other ways of knowing”, which argues that scientists should partner with those in the humanities, including queer studies, and this partnership is the way forward:
Many of the scientists currently pushing for critical thinking about sex are engaged with STS [science and technology studies] scholars—many of us humanists and social scientists coming from disciplines like history, anthropology, and sociology, and fields like Indigenous studies, Black studies, and queer studies. We in STS are poised to offer life scientists additional conceptual and practical ways forward. Knowing the history of science is, of course, part of this equation: it shows us that knowledge production of all kinds (including the history of science!) is an iterative process, where what we know is always changing.
Well, make of that what you will, but I’d maintain that, like the definition of “species”, the definition of ” biological sex” is the purview of biologists. Yes, philosophers can help us think more clearly, and historians can tell us about the history of studies of sex, but I don’t know how indigenous studies, Black studies, or queer studies can contribute much to a concept that, in the end, is about biology. The fact that biology is thrown into a gemisch with “studies” disciplines only serves to show how ideological Velocci’s argument is. As Alex Byrne (a philosopher who knows his biology) said of the American Scientist paper he reviewed, this Cell paper is “rubbish”, and shame on the journal for publishing it. There is no place for catering to ideological currents in a serious scientific journal, for reports about empirical discoveries should remain “institutionally” neutral.
Now, do I have to go through the other papers in Cell‘s Panoply of Horrors? If not, who will? Or should we just ignore them? That doesn’t seem wise since gender activism is infecting science in a big way, and few people criticize it. If dumb arguments keep being made over and over again, then it seems wise to refute them over and over again.
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Velocci, B. 2024 The history of sex research: Is “sex” a useful category? Cell, online, May 14,2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.02.001