Biological sex is binary. Not all humans have two arms, but it would be wrong to say the number of arms we have is “a spectrum”. 99% of people start out with two arms. If you think that the number of arms humans have is some unknowable value because amputees exist, that doesn’t make sense to me, it favors a technically correct philosophical argument over reality.
Dawkins knows better and knows that that humans are born that are not clearly male, not clearly female, and also very clearly neither male nor female.
That's actual empirical observed science. There are peer reviewed medical papers in respected journals that look at hundreds of thousands of birth records and break the numbers down on distributions of chromosonal variations at birth.
I bought a first edition copy of Dawkin's The Selfish Gene in 1978 and a good number of his books since.
He understands genetics and these days, when talking to the likes of Piers Morgan et al. he plays a cagey game and talks about reproductive sex, what is required to make a baby outside of a lab the good old fashioned way, when a sperm fertilises an egg.
He's well aware there are more than two types of human birth, he glosses over what he knows to keep things simple to avoid contraversy or something.
If this is all news to you, rather than something you might have read, as I did, some 40+ years ago, then you might choose to start with:
There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport.
Doctors and genetics experts gave evidence, the Australian passport system was changed.
This wasn't some "cultural gender" thing based on someone's feelings about gender, it was stone cold genetic reality about "sex" at birth .. which in reality is a lot more complicated than many Fox cable hosts claim it to be on camera.
> There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport.
Do you have a reference for or link to the details of the court case? It would be very interesting to understand the details.
There are several Family Court of Australia decisions, along with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and its underpinnings that go with the 2003 decision of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to recommend that Australian passports allow the indeterminate category and for the State of Victoria to change their policy.
Thanks for the link. Looks like Alex MacFarlane was the test case for this. Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them that he needed a passport with an "X" in it, because according to the articles on his case linked from the Wikipedia page, he has Klinefelter syndrome - which is an unambiguously male condition.
Alex MacFarlane publicly brought the case and was the only person publicly named in the press, correct.
> Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them
Would you be equally suprised that Perry Mason won a case concerning a woman? Do you require that a fully limbed wheelchair bound lawyer be disqualified in a disability case about a blind amputee?
The key result here is that people of unambiguously indeterminate sex actually exist and government forms in Australia now recognise that.
A wider realisation that some may not reach is that various syndrome might not unambiguously define male or female for the people borm with such syndromes or be clear to the parents that raise them.
All the examples I can find include people with conditions that are either male DSDs or female DSDs. Seems to me that this system of marking passports with an "X" is flawed by being overly broad, including people who are unambiguously male or female.
If you have specific examples to the contrary, I'd be interested to read about them.
There's a weird thing that occurs in Australia, civil servants tend to respect citizens right to privacy. Not always, of course, but by and large identities are preserved and hefty fines come into play when privacy is violated.
Hansards and Court transcripts, as you would have found, obfuscate identities in various contexts and reporters that attend are aware of guidelines to follow.
> Seems to me that this system of marking passports with an "X" is flawed by being overly broad, including people who are unambiguously male or female.
Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?
It's a very simple Yes or No.
Regardless of your personal belief here, expert testimony in multiple court cases adjudicated by various seperate judges, along with a federal department and a state tribunal all aligned together to agree that Yes was the case in the world in which we live.
> Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?
Yes, some people are born who have differences of sex development, and this might require further investigation as to what abnormal event has actually happened in their development, and the root cause. This is for clinicians and developmental biologists to understand and elucidate for the rest of us.
However my point is this "X" marker tells us nothing much useful about this at all, as it's being applied to individuals who are unambiguously of one sex or the other even with DSDs, as with the Klinefelter syndrome cases.
The "X" is even being given to people whose sex is unambiguous, who don't have any DSD condition, but for some reason have come to believe that they are neither a woman or a man. A wholly psychological condition.
[3], [8], [9], and all the numerous other references that appear immediately after a "%" sign in the already provided link.
[3] is Selma Feldman Witchel (2018). "Disorders of Sex Development". Best Practice & Research. Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology. 48: 90–102. doi:10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2017.11.005. PMC 5866176. PMID 29503125. The estimated frequency of genital ambiguity is reported to be in the range of 1:2000–1:4500
Those referencess of the 218 references provided are the ones that mainly focus on various aspects of distribution frequency.
By chromosomal variations, do you mean sex chromosome aneuploidies? If so, individuals with this particular class of conditions aren't ambiguous with regards to their sex. The Y chromosome still determines if someone is male.
For example, XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) is a male condition, X0 (Turner syndrome) is a female condition, XYY (Jacobs syndrome) is male, and so on.
Of all the humans born, some are clearly and unambigiously male and check all the many boxes that make them male, some are equally female, some others are not so clearly male and only check some of the boxes leaving the gate open for the "but they're really male (even if only a bit)" arguments. Some others again are neither male nor female.
This is the spectrum of human physical and genetic birth presentations as described by peer reviewed medical papers (a number linked in the intersex wikipedia link).
Venn diagrams are not difficult to grasp and anyone taking issue with the categorisation in the field is more than welcome to submit their work and arguments to the relevant journals.
Thanks for replying. That doesn't directly answer my question but it sounds like you meant to refer to differences of sex development (DSDs) more broadly rather than just those caused by chromosomal variations.
Though for competitive sports, and protecting the women's category in particular, it is only a smaller set of DSDs that eligibility policymakers need to be concerned with: those that confer male physical advantage.
As a follow up just because I’m still thinking about it. I had a long discussion with a friend about this one time and he advocated for a tiered approach. So instead of having a men’s league you would have an A, B, and C league and people are placed based on performance. If we go just based on pure athletic ability then the A league would be mostly men and the C league would be mostly women, but there would be upward mobility and likely a mixed league in the middle.
This might be a good model for younger kids, but by the time kids reach high school the biological gap is too great. See https://boysvswomen.com/#/ This is a problem because high school is the time when college scholarships become a thing, performance in competitive high school sports matters. Also, you now need three leagues instead of two, which could get expensive depending on the sport.
Obviously so trans people can play sports, I think it's a laudable goal but I agree that people are going to great lengths to make sports 'fair' in ways that seem to only make them less fair to 99% of participants
Interestingly there were a couple of transgendered athletes competing in this year's Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, a female boxer who identifies as a man, and Nikki Hiltz, a female runner who identifies as a non-binary. Both competed in their respective sports in the category congruent with their sex.
I guess your friend was aiming more towards not upsetting male athletes who identify as women and who desire to compete in the female category, by abolishing the category altogether, rather than these male athletes being told "no".
Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees (though his argument is much better stated than mine): https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-bi...
Note that this doesn’t really “solve” all parts of the debate around gender and sports, but it’s a good starting point.