This view is at odds with the scientific understanding of human sexuality. Many activists now define homosexuality as attraction to the “same gender identity” rather than the same sex. The denial of biological sex also erases homosexuality, as same-sex attraction is meaningless without the distinction between the sexes. The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce. The different reproductive roles of males and females require laws to safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. Separate sporting categories are also necessary to ensure that women and girls don’t have to face competitors who have acquired the irreversible performance-enhancing effects conferred by male puberty. Female-only spaces are necessary due to the pervasive threat of male violence and sexual assault. Women have fought hard for sex-based legal protections. It raises serious human-rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children. To assume otherwise-to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself-is a category error.ĭenying the reality of biological sex and supplanting it with subjective “gender identity” is not merely an eccentric academic theory. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a “spectrum” or a “social construct.” Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex in order for biological sex to be functionally binary. The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. There is a difference, however, between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorized as either male or female (false). No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex “spectrum” or additional sexes beyond male and female. The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova.
In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time. In humans, as in most animals or plants, an organism’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of small or large sex cells-sperm and eggs, respectively-and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.
To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement.