STOP OVERWORKING THE WORDS.

Our President laid down a marker in favor of sanity in youth sports, but in so doing got it about half right.  It's an overworked word or two doing the damage.

I forget when the overworking of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex" began.  Years ago, when I was helping construct Divisia indices of labor quality, which, these days, might have to be prefaced with an apology for "neoclassical economics" and insufficient "decolonisation," I recall something like a five-way classification of workers by sex, age, experience, industry, and occupation.  My own research focused on location problems in heavy industry, and some years into that work, all those dummy variables for "sex" became dummy variables for "gender."

Blast furnaces are still "she," but the word-noise goes on forever.

Accordingly, the federal government will now use the word “sex” for male and female, not “gender,” in its official documents, including identification forms such as passports and visas.

But the directive is even broader: Agencies must now remove any content “that promotes or otherwise inculcates gender ideology.” That could be interpreted as an almost completely discontinued use of the word “gender.” Let’s hope so. Good riddance!

Today, the word “gender” seems to be everywhere. It wasn’t always like that. Not long ago, “gender” was heard almost exclusively in grammar lessons, including pronoun-antecedent agreement, and also for foreign languages since their nouns often have genders. For example, “fork” in French is feminine (la fourchette), while “knife” is masculine (le couteau). Nouns in German can also be neutral such as the word “child” which is das kind.

When officials replaced the word “sex” with “gender” on government forms, they were intending to signal that “male” or “female” are also man-made, the way grammar rules are. In this way, they set the stage for the larger “gender identity” movement, which is really a war on reality, though it’s marketed as a war on man-made power structures or “social constructs.” This obsession with power by the political left, including the gender movement with its manipulation of language, is distorted and destructive. Any doubt about that is resolved when one sees how the movement has metastasized to the point of falsely claiming that mutilating an individual’s genitals can change his or her sex. It can’t.

Even on this aspect, Trump is doing what can be done: EO 14168 not only bans federal funds for these “transition” procedures (on inmates, subject to the Bureau of Prisons, for example) but also points out the movement’s internal inconsistencies: It insists one’s sex is fluid—“an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity”—but at the same time insists that one must have access to clinical and chemical castrations because someone was born in the “wrong sexed body.” (Maybe the body will be correct next year?)

In sum, with this administration, the grown ups are back: Trump is replacing confusion and chaos with clarity and common sense—not just for women’s sports but also for America.

It might be a start.

Academicians, however, have to make the most convoluted arguments.

Prominent scientists are sparring over President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring there are “two sexes, male and female,” with some pushing back on the claim that a “scientific consensus” disagrees with the president.

On one side are the leaders of three scientific organizations – the Society for the Study of Evolution, American Society of Naturalists, and Society of Systematic Biologists – who think Trump is wrong.

On the other are a group of approximately two dozen biology scholars, including noted University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Jerry Coyne. They say sex is binary and scholars who claim otherwise are “[d]istorting reality to comply with ideology,” according to Coyne’s blog “Why Evolution is True.”

Earlier this month, the presidents of the three scientific societies, Carol Boggs, Daniel Bolnick, and Jessica Ware wrote to Trump to state their disagreement with his order.

“Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics,” they wrote in a Feb. 5 letter, published on the Society for the Study of Evolution website.

They said “extensive scientific evidence” contradicts Trump’s statement that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce.”

“Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment,” they wrote.

There they go again, overworking the words.  From "scientific consensus" on comes one horrendously complex proposition, which might be understood (thinking like a post-modern academician being difficult for me with my eighteenth-century mind) as "Almost all people are born with one of two possible configurations of gamete factories.  They choose to interact with other people in the use of those gamete factories in a variety of ways, subject to conventions governing those interactions that are historically contingent and probably arbitrary.  People also have brains, whose functioning is subject to many more influences than the nature of their gamete factories."  I prefer to distill that as "sex is binary, personality a continuum."

The declaration at the center of the academic dispute says as much, if in more words.

Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one's identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

Professor Coyne takes issue with the tone of the letter, without addressing the confusion at the heart of that "sex (and gendered expression)."

A number of biologists I talked to had strong objections to both this wonky declaration, which of course is based not on biology but on ideology (see my posts here and here), as well as to its implication that biologists, including members of the three societies, generally agreed with it. But the societies did not poll their members before issuing a general statement in their name!

The statement is in fact is a prime but embarrassing example of societies being ideologically captured to the extent that they misrepresent science to cater to “progressive” liberalism. The object of course is not foxes, horses, or oak trees, but humans; this is meant to reassure people who feel that they are “nonbinary” in gender that nature is just like them.

A reader at Evolution is Real tackles the overworked words, with citations.

For a nice paper on the topic, I like this one in BioEssays:

Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles
Denying biological sex is anthropocentric and promotes species chauvinism
Wolfgang Goymann, Henrik Brumm, Peter M. Kappeler
First published: 21 December 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200173

All of those authors are biologists.

Paul Griffiths is a philosopher of science whose paper Sex is Real is also excellent.

Whether that conversation will have any effect on the sort of English professor who posts photos of homosexual penguins on her office door remains to be seen.

For that matter, psychology and its medical cousin psychiatry are still such young disciplines that any hope of their work being able to codify normal, let alone abnormal, behavior is likely still a century away.