SEX IS BINARY.

Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up.

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

That's Skeptic contributor Robert Lynch, and he continues at some length.  The problem might be as simple as a word, "gender," being overused.  When I started messing about with the National Income and Product Accounts and something called "quality of labor," there was a five-way taxonomy of occupations, by sex, age, education, experience, and nature of the work.  Open any economics journal these days, and you see references to "gender," which might be current noodling in the income accounts, or it might be something from the culture studies crowd, and it's likely that saying "quality of labor" gets you scolded.

There's good reason, he notes, to use "sex" in a precise way.  "Male and female are not capricious categories imposed by scientists on the natural world, but rather refer to fundamental distinctions deeply rooted in evolution."  It matters not, he notes, whether you say "female" or "the sex that invests more in its offspring."  A lot of in principle and practice falsifiable statements follow from that distinction.  Alas, the academy decided to overwork "gender," and not in the sense of hours worked.

In the 50 years since Trivers’ epiphany, much has tried to obscure his crucial insight. As biology enters a golden age, with daily advances in genotyping transforming our understanding of evolution and medicine, the social sciences have taken a vastly different direction. Many are now openly hostile to findings outside their narrow field, walling off their respective disciplines from biological knowledge. Why bother learning about new findings in genetics or incorporating discoveries from other fields, if you can assert that all such findings are, by definition, sexist?

Prior to 1955, gender was almost exclusively used to refer to grammatical categories (e.g., masculine and feminine nouns in French). A major shift occurred in the 1960s when the word gender has been applied to distinguish social/cultural differences from biological differences (sex).

If academicians had, at the time, looked at the ways in which personality types varied among men or women, without overworking either "sex" or "gender" in the analysis, perhaps we would not find ourselves at the pass we do.

This change is not merely stylistic. Rather, it is part of a much larger cultural and political movement that denies or attempts to explain away the effects of biology and evolution in humans altogether. The prevailing dominant view in the social sciences is that human sex differences are entirely socially constructed. In that interpretation, all differential outcomes between men and women are the result of unequal social, economic, and political conditions, and so we do all we can to eliminate them, particularly by changing our expectations and encouraging gender-neutral play in children. This received wisdom and policies based upon it, however, are unlikely to produce the results proponents long for. Why is that?

Read on, and behold the continuum.

Because sex differences in behavior are among the strongest effect sizes in social, and what might be better termed, behavioral sciences. Humans are notoriously inept at understanding differences between continuous variables, so it is first useful to define precisely what “statistical differences between men and women” does and does not mean. Although gamete size and the reproductive organs in humans are either male or female at birth in over 99 percent of cases, many secondary sexual characteristics such as differences in upper body strength and differences in behavior are not so differentially distributed. Rather, there is considerable overlap between men and women. Life scientists often use something called the effect size as a way to determine if any observed differences are large (and therefore consequential) or so small as to be ignored for almost all practical purposes.

"Statistical difference" is often a difference in central tendencies, or non-equality of means.  That's why we have confidence intervals, but it is so much easier to grouse about how non-equality of means becomes an apology for some sort of oppression (we could be writing easily enough about Charles Murray's Bell Curve here) than it is to understand that a central tendency has a dispersion with it.  As Mr Lynch puts it, "In other words, men and women may, on average, be quite similar on a given trait but will be quite different in the number who fall at the extreme (low and high) ends of their respective distributions."  Reality, though, gets in the way of the Anointed.

If so, why then has the opposite message — that these differences are either non-existent or solely the result of social construction — been so vehemently argued? The reason, I submit, is essentially political. The idea that any consequential differences between men and women have no foundation in biology has wide appeal because it fosters the illusion of control. If gender role “theories” are correct, then all we need to do to eliminate them is to modify the social environment (e.g., give kids gender-neutral toys, and the problem is solved). If, however, sex differences are hardwired into human nature, they will be more difficult to change.

Yes, but whose control? Let us be grateful, dear reader, that when Lionel brought out those pastel pink "Train for Girls" in 1957, that the girls who wanted a train under the tree but not that one weren't fast-tracked for gender-affirming therapy.  Whistle out the flagman!  Later in the essay Mr Lynch went there!

Pathologizing gender nonconforming behavior often does the opposite of what proponents intend by creating stereotypes where none existed. Boys are told that if they like dolls, they are really girls trapped with male organs, while girls who display interests in sports or science are told they are boys trapped with female organs and born in the wrong body. Feminine boys, who might end up being homosexual, are encouraged to start down the road towards irreversible medical interventions, hormone blockers, and infertility. Like gay conversion therapy before, such practices can shame individuals for feeling misaligned with their birth sex and encourage them to resort to hormone “therapy” and/or surgery to change their bodies to reflect this new identity. Can that be truly seen as progressive and liberating?

No.

Let us also contemplate why, in supposedly more "inclusive" places the sexual division of paid labor is more pronounced.  Why are males more "underrepresented" in nursing in Scandinavia, for instance, than in Morocco?

Why, it's as if denying coherent beliefs produces incoherence.

The rhetorical contortions and inscrutable jargon required to assert that gender and sex are nothing more than chosen identities and deny what every parent knows require increasingly complex and incoherent arguments. This not only subverts the public’s rapidly waning confidence in science, but it also leads to extreme exaggerations designed to silence those who don’t agree, such as the claim that discussing biological differences is violence. The lengths to which many previously trusted institutions, such as the American Medical Association, go to deny the impact that hormones have on development are extraordinary. These efforts are also likely to backfire politically when gender-neutral terms are mandated by elites, such as the term “Latinx,” which is opposed by 98 percent of Hispanic Americans.

Ultimately, the deconstructionists deconstruct themselves.

The assertion that children are born without sex and are molded into gender roles by their parents is wildly implausible. It undermines what little public trust in science remains and delegitimizes other scientific claims. If we can’t be honest about something every parent knows, what else might we be lying about?

He's not arguing that nurture doesn't matter. He is arguing that Nature doesn't like experiments against reality: and we all know reality bats last.  We're also sick of the stupid.

The push for a biologically sexless society is an arrogant utopian vision that cuts us off from our evolutionary history, promotes the delusion that humans are not animals, and undercuts respecting each individual for their unique individuality. Sex is neither simply a matter of socialization, nor a personal choice. Making such assertions without understanding the profound role that an initial biological asymmetry in gamete size plays in sexual selection is neither scientific nor sensible.

So mote it be.