Thread by @jessesingal

1/ At some point I'm inevitably gonna make more people mad by critiquing this burgeoning "biological sex isn't real" subgenre more fully but, briefly, it's SO rife with just weird/faulty/misleading/confused reasoning.

Great example from Slate: Of course, sex being complicated,

2/or on a "spectrum" (sorta faddish/overhyped claim), has NOTHING TO DO with the question of whether people are born WITH a sex. People are, in fact, born with a sex. Mostly M/F, some intersex. Later: "false perception that there are two distinct biological sexes[.]" There are!

3/ There are also intersex people, but in the overwhelming majority of cases you can tell whether someone is male or female, and while there is obviously variation within those categories, everyone knows what they signify reproductively Last one for now, from Bleacher Report:

4/ This wonderfully captures the deep, deep level of bullshit going on with so many of these articles. Here it's subtle: Has anyone anywhere claimed being male is the "only" characteristic that gives athletes an advantage? Is that at all the debate? Of course not. Non sequitur.

5/ But sex is by far the most important zoomed-out characteristic determining, on average, who is bigger and stronger and faster. I don't understand how a professional outlet, in 2018, published a sentence like "There is no proof that cisgender men are inherently more capable

6/than cisgender women" if the subject is athletics and we're using standard language/definitions here -- *average* speed/size/strength, whatever, with 2 bell-curve(ish) peaks and some overlap. What's the point of this? Does *anyone* believe it? Doesn't it come across way more as

7/ mantra-recitation than an honest attempt to engage with the science? It's science denialism. We call it out when the other side does it and now we're waist-deep in it because it's been determined (by who?) that you can't support trans rights and also believe in biological sex?

8/Editors gotta take a deep breathe and be a bit more careful w/this. I understand the desire to be on the right side of a civil-rights struggle but you do NOT need to discard common sense and solid science (which, yes, includes acknowledging intersex people) to do so! Yikes man.