Binary sex

Carole Hooven was bullied out of Harvard for stating that in biology there are only two sexes. Now, shocked by an article in Lancet – a review of Agustin Fuentes' book which argues that sex isn't binary (see Jerry Coyne) – she takes to the pages of Tablet:

Recently I came across a book review by Sarah Richardson, professor of the History of Science and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the head of Harvard’s GenderSci Lab, whose work aims to “counter bias and hype in sex difference research, elevate the importance of context, contingency, and variation in the study of gender and sex in biology … and engage the implications of biological claims about gender and sexual diversity for law and public policy relevant to the lives of gender and sexual minorities."

Although Professor Richardson and I profoundly disagree about the nature of sex, I once invited her to give a guest lecture in my class, and we’ve had many cordial interactions over the years. So I was surprised by what she wrote in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. I was not surprised that Richardson lavished praise on the new book Sex Is a Spectrum, by Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes. However, I was taken aback at her attack on the character and motives of those who hold that sex is binary and that organisms are classified as male or female depending on their capacity to produce, respectively, sperm or eggs.

Richardson not only thinks the “gametic” definition of sex is wrong; she also insists that its adherents have sinister political motives:

Although the gametic definition makes reference to biological systems, it is sophistry, not science. Those who promote this definition favour the assertion that sex inheres in gamete (sperm and egg) production because, in part, it facilitates their political aims by fuelling unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles. … Like scientific bigots of yore … the recent favour bestowed on [this] definition of sex … appeals selectively to science to naturalise and rationalise inequality and exclusion.

Richardson goes on to praise Fuentes for recognizing scientists’ “responsibility to respond to harmful deployments of inaccurate, overly simplistic, and reductionist science by those attempting to naturalise and depoliticise their hateful views.”

It's the same old story. Objections to the view that sex is binary aren't because of the science, but because of ideology. People who who propose it aren't wrong: they're wicked. 

Previously on this. As I pointed out then the editor of the "prestigious medical journal" The Lancet, Richard Horton, has quite a history…

• on Covid, publishing that group letter organised by the zoologist Peter Daszak on the origins of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus  ‘strongly condemn[ing] conspiracy theories’ about a lab leak, and praising China on state-owned broadcaster China Central Television for how ‘tremendously decisively’ the Chinese Communist party had handled the pandemic.
• on MMR, publishing Andrew Wakefield – not retracted for twelve years.
•  publishing a letter in Lancet in 2014 from a number of pro-Palestinian activists which the Israeli Ministry of Health characterised as “bordering on blood libel".
• the case of Sir Roy Meadows.
•  railing against "the axis of Anglo-American imperialism" at a 2006 rally in Manchester.

Still editor-in-chief though.

Added: more on this from Jerry Coyne.