The article he's talking about has a section about DSDs that I think also covers what his response would be to sterility
However, the existence of such conditions does not undermine the binary nature of sex, because the sex binary does not entail that every individual can be unambiguously categorized as male or female. Rather, the claim is that in anisogamous organisms there are only two gamete types, sperm and ova, and thus only two sexes. Sexual ambiguity is not a third or intermediate sex because developmental variation does not correspond to producing new gamete types.
I think you're right that people are talking past each other on this. Biologists use gametes because they care about defining sex in a meaningful way when talking about both humans and crabs. We don't care about crabs using the bathroom though.
Not saying they've got a point but if someone is shaping public policy, no matter how dumb, you can't ignore them. Like RFK pushing the circumcision autism thing.
Genitalia doesn't determine gender. That's a cis normative fallacy. My trans-affirming doctor told me I can think of my genitalia as 9 inches of clitoris.
Royce White for President
WNBA #LetHerPlay
It seems unlikely that White is actually trans, tweets like this are obviously not serious. The best defense I've seen of this is that right now the WNBA has 0 rules about eligibility, and this will force them to pick some policy. Not sure that that's a particularly strong defense though.
Hard to say without more context how significant this is, or if it's standard legal maneuvering. The GC crowd certainly seems to think it's significant.
oof. I'm used to seeing coded terms like "Israel has a right to defend itself" that are meant to sound reasonable. It's rare to see full-throated defense of not just Israel but specifically the IDF.
Defense of this from a GC biologist, acknowledging it's a stunt, but pointing out that the WNBA doesn't have any written policy. Regardless of what they decide, it seems that it's time to pick a lane.
Some policies are ‘hybrid’: inclusive in some domains and exclusive in others, and some use developmental thresholds like whether an athlete went through male puberty.
Scientific American is sadly no longer the organization they used to be. Bad headline, it didn't cite previous work perfectly but still provided a novel result. Here is one of the authors of a paper it built on, talking about the result
So, that is the proof of Proposition 2.3. It is a creative and at the same time elementary construction that uses not just property (T) for an application of my result with Kun, but also for the ambient group G in order to overcome the problem, that the Γ-components might be of different size. Once this is achieved, the rest of the argument is straightforward.
I think it is too early to judge if this construction will serve any other purpose than providing the right framework to apply these earlier results efficiently. On the other side, I was looking myself for such a mechanism ever since we wrote the paper in 2019 and admire the efficiency of this construction.
First off, thanks for the critique! That's what this community is for. I'll admit I went down a bit of a rabbit hole recently, but that's just how I work and im sure I'll move on something else. There will probably be a lot of posts about sex and gender in general, because that interests me and also seems to get the most votes here.
I think the history here is interesting, and not as simple as "Blanchard is transphobic" or "AGP is a terf word". Briefly, Blanchard's typology was incomplete at best, but the concept of autogynephilia existing is accurate. Some people don't like the term and some trans authors prefer female/feminine embodiment fantasies, but that's referring to the same thing and it's just a dispute about terminology. There's also other people that embrace the term and identify with it, are they wrong?
That's basically refuted though. Autogynephilic biological males score 5.0+, a 2.4 standard deviation difference. This is larger than the male-female IQ difference, one of the largest sex differences in psychology.
Last month, Queer Majority published an essay of mine titled “How to Fix What Ails Trans Activism.” It looked at where activists went wrong, charted the erosion of public support, and offered a philosophically liberal framework for how to reorient trans activism away from a zero-sum power struggle and toward a universalist vision centered around discussion, mutual respect, and winning hearts and minds.
Of course everyone wants a universalist vision centered around those things. Did that essay actually accomplish that?
Generally a strong study, addressing some common "correlation != causation" responses
Children with a higher genetic propensity for ADHD were significantly more likely to be followed by their parents separating. The effect held even after accounting for the parents’ own genetics. It was not simply that ADHD traits run in families and parents with ADHD genes are also more likely to split up. When the researchers statistically removed the parents’ genetic contribution, the child’s own genetic profile still predicted parental separation independently.
Hard to evaluate if that result came from p-hacking though
The finding that emerged was specific. Across traits including educational attainment, cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, the children’s genetic propensities showed limited ability to predict what happened to the parents. The exception was ADHD. A one standard deviation increase in the child’s ADHD polygenic index was associated with a 7% higher likelihood of parental separation in the years following the child’s birth.
By virtually any measure, trans activism has failed in the US. It has proven itself a decisively losing electoral issue, been repudiated by the Supreme Court, lost the culture war, alienated a majority of society, and caused public opinion to turn against trans people. Trans activism ignited a trans backlash — one whose flames now threaten to consume LGBT rights more broadly.
So, when people use the word “woman”, it’s important to distinguish between “adult human female” and the perception of an adult human female. Almost all the time, those two categories are the same, but the distinction is crucial to understanding the rows like the one over the intersex boxers and passionate debate over what it means to be trans and how trans people should be accommodated in society.
The author is trans, does that affect how they view things and how the article was written? Should it matter?
That argument applies much more to other organizations listed in the report. But even in the article, Beira's Place is described as
a sexual assault support center founded and funded by billionaire J.K. Rowling that explicitly excludes transgender women from its services and was established after Rowling objected to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s inclusive policies.
She didn't like the way an organization was run, and made her own. The case can be made that it's anti-rights, but thoughtlessly throwing around labels like Amnesty UK did here against someone with the time, money, and motivation to respond with lawyers was an own goal.
Regardless of your feelings on Rowling, Amnesty UK fucked up big time and realized it. For better or worse, the UK doesn't have the same speech protections or values that other countries like the US do. Throwing around vague labels like "anti-rights" was a terrible idea.
The article he's talking about has a section about DSDs that I think also covers what his response would be to sterility
I think you're right that people are talking past each other on this. Biologists use gametes because they care about defining sex in a meaningful way when talking about both humans and crabs. We don't care about crabs using the bathroom though.
IMO the blame is on Cambridge. They had the chance to quietly let him go when it was clear he was both a plagiarist and a fantastic liar.
This feels true, regardless of the rest. These arguments probably need to be addressed head-on.
EDIT: I should clarify, I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it's not really in question
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/26/americans-have-grown-more-supportive-of-restrictions-for-trans-people-in-recent-years/
Not saying they've got a point but if someone is shaping public policy, no matter how dumb, you can't ignore them. Like RFK pushing the circumcision autism thing.
One of many critical flaws. If you can obscure your intent, it's not genocide?
The community note speaks for itself. Weird topic to jump in on with a hot take like this
There soon might be at least one
https://xcancel.com/Highway_30/status/2087700989990121532
It seems unlikely that White is actually trans, tweets like this are obviously not serious. The best defense I've seen of this is that right now the WNBA has 0 rules about eligibility, and this will force them to pick some policy. Not sure that that's a particularly strong defense though.
Hard to say without more context how significant this is, or if it's standard legal maneuvering. The GC crowd certainly seems to think it's significant.
oof. I'm used to seeing coded terms like "Israel has a right to defend itself" that are meant to sound reasonable. It's rare to see full-throated defense of not just Israel but specifically the IDF.
Defense of this from a GC biologist, acknowledging it's a stunt, but pointing out that the WNBA doesn't have any written policy. Regardless of what they decide, it seems that it's time to pick a lane.
https://xcancel.com/FondOfBeetles/status/2086055493533855783
Scientific American is sadly no longer the organization they used to be. Bad headline, it didn't cite previous work perfectly but still provided a novel result. Here is one of the authors of a paper it built on, talking about the result
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/513866/what-are-the-key-new-ideas-in-the-proof-of-nonsoficity-of-groups-in-openai-s-con
First off, thanks for the critique! That's what this community is for. I'll admit I went down a bit of a rabbit hole recently, but that's just how I work and im sure I'll move on something else. There will probably be a lot of posts about sex and gender in general, because that interests me and also seems to get the most votes here.
I think the history here is interesting, and not as simple as "Blanchard is transphobic" or "AGP is a terf word". Briefly, Blanchard's typology was incomplete at best, but the concept of autogynephilia existing is accurate. Some people don't like the term and some trans authors prefer female/feminine embodiment fantasies, but that's referring to the same thing and it's just a dispute about terminology. There's also other people that embrace the term and identify with it, are they wrong?
There's claims of "93% of cis women are autogynephilic" based on an older paper
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00918360903005212
That's basically refuted though. Autogynephilic biological males score 5.0+, a 2.4 standard deviation difference. This is larger than the male-female IQ difference, one of the largest sex differences in psychology.
Many people preoccupied by culture wars are scared of the term autogynephilia, but why? What's wrong with just accepting oneself as they are?
Of course everyone wants a universalist vision centered around those things. Did that essay actually accomplish that?
Commentary
https://thesciverse.org/new-research-challenges-the-assumption-that-family-breakdown-is-purely-a-a-story-genomic-data-from-40000-children-tells-a-more-complicated-picture/
Generally a strong study, addressing some common "correlation != causation" responses
Hard to evaluate if that result came from p-hacking though
Is the thesis broadly correct? It certainly seems so
Having no standards or gatekeeping will end up with a deluge of AI slop. Doesn't seem like the criticism is warranted here though.
The meat of the article:
The author is trans, does that affect how they view things and how the article was written? Should it matter?
That argument applies much more to other organizations listed in the report. But even in the article, Beira's Place is described as
She didn't like the way an organization was run, and made her own. The case can be made that it's anti-rights, but thoughtlessly throwing around labels like Amnesty UK did here against someone with the time, money, and motivation to respond with lawyers was an own goal.
Regardless of your feelings on Rowling, Amnesty UK fucked up big time and realized it. For better or worse, the UK doesn't have the same speech protections or values that other countries like the US do. Throwing around vague labels like "anti-rights" was a terrible idea.