I’ve been saying all along that good biology doesn’t categorize sex into two inflexible bins, but what does that matter — I’m just one weirdo liberal biologist at a liberal arts college, so I can be ignored. When our awful president puts out an executive order decreeing that there can be only two sexes, it’s only reasonable to ask other, bigger named biologists whether that reflects a scientific consensus.
HuffPost reached out to seasoned biologists around the country to help make sense of Trump’s definitions of sex, gender and “reproductive cells.”
They don’t know what he’s talking about, either.
Yeah, it doesn’t. They should have just asked me, or just about anyone teaching biology at the college level. Or look, they talked to experts in reproductive biology!
“Lots of folks are wondering the same thing!” Dr. Francisco Diaz, director of the Center for Reproductive Health and Biology at Pennsylvania State University, said of the Trump White House’s understanding of how biology works.
Embryos are “neither male nor female” by Trump’s definition, Diaz said, since there are no germ cells present at conception. Germ cells are reproductive cells that later become eggs and sperm, and that are set aside early in embryonic development.
“How about men after vasectomies? No germ cells there, are they still male?” asked Diaz, who is also an associate professor of reproductive biology at the university. ”Are postmenopausal women still female?”
“Not a super tight definition!” he concluded. “The ‘at conception’ wording seems forced to define personhood as beginning at conception and not really to define sex.”
They asked anthropologists!
Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.
“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”
Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.
Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”
The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”
They asked health experts!
Some health experts said the problems with Trump’s definitions of sex and gender go beyond his ill-informed understanding of embryonic cells. Put simply, neither sex nor gender is a simple binary.
This executive order “is highly problematic from a biological standpoint because it overly simplifies what we know to be an incredibly complicated developmental process,” said Dr. Josh Snodgrass, a professor of anthropology and global health at the University of Oregon. “It’s just not that simple from a genetic standpoint, and then becomes even more complicated with time under the influence of hormones, environmental exposures, and social experiences.”
They asked the president of the Human Biology Association!
Snodgrass, the past president of the Human Biology Association, noted that Trump’s order also doesn’t account for people who are intersex, which means they are born with genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit into the typical male/female sex binary.
“This reads to me as coming from people who desperately want the world to be simple — for sex to be a simple binary and for us to return to some imagined time when this was more broadly accepted,” he said. “The problem is that it’s not only science that shows us that human biological variation is more complicated, but other cultures do and have also appreciated this for thousands of years.”
Snodgrass added that there is one more thing missing from the executive order that belongs in all conversations about sex and gender: empathy.
“The authors of this executive order seem like they are trying to twist science to fit their worldview, but that this worldview is painfully out of step with reality,” he said.
I tell you, it’s exhausting dealing with all these people who write to me to explain how biology works…and I’m cis. I don’t know how trans people deal with it, especially since stupidly flawed ideas about biology are being used to legally discriminate against them.
I’m going to have to blame the neo-liberal cabal of Dawkins-Pinker-Coyne for spreading the anti-trans propaganda and presenting their authority as superior to all of modern biology. Ignore them.
As I wrote in another comment, the subject of those sentences is not the Zygote, but the people engaged in conception/copulation. It is still simplistic, ambiguous, biologically inaccurate and ultimately stupid. But there are at least some cases where this would apply.
Why do you all assume this comes from a person who values accurate grammar and word usage? Do you remember the “covfefe” affair?
Snodgrass added that there is one more thing missing from the executive order that belongs in all conversations about sex and gender: empathy.
We can add that to the list of attributes that the White Christian Nationalist Fascists creatures lack. Empathy, morals, ethics, and mercy are good start.
Funny story. I worked as an attorney in the biotech field for twenty or so years. My background is in mechanical engineering but I developed a keen interest in biology–cell, molecular, biochem.
I was having a business conversation with a university professor that taught cell biology. We got off track and I was whining about how people just didn’t understand that sex is the result of dozens of steps that occur after fertilization; that any step could go haywire; and that there was a spectrum of people (a bimodal distribution, if you will, between male and female as a result.
He was not quite shocked but he really had a moment of revelation and understanding. He suddenly saw this matter in a new light.
My point of this story is that the male/female dichotomy is hardwired into our reptilian brain and even folks that work in this field for years can be blind until they see the light.
They should have just asked me, or just about anyone teaching biology at the college level.
Alas, so far as I can find out, Michael Behe (still an active professor) has yet to expound on biology of gender.
Is Behe really still “active?” Last I heard, after getting his tenure he came out as a cdesign proponentsist, and Baylor promptly took away all his actual classes out of sheer embarrassment.
It’s really not. The subjects are not adults engaged in copulation. We know this because we can see how it’s written in such a way as to be consistent with their anti-abortion agenda, which requires (despite the steadfast opposition of the facts) that a zygote is a fully formed human in miniature. Feel free to read the Project 2025 text if you don’t believe me.
Yes. That doesn’t imply that there is no intended meaning behind these executive orders, or that the ExOs might have more thought put into them than Trump is able to summon on the toilet. Numerous word choices indicate that an actual lawyer(s) was involved in crafting these ExOs.
It doesn’t matter if it comes from a person who values these things. The wording and punctuation matter because the courts are largely staffed by people who can read and who look to the wording and grammar of a document to determine its meaning.
Therefore the word usage and grammar matter tremendously to the order’s enforcement whether Trump is an idiot (he is) or not (hahahaha).
@Brayton #3:
male/female dichotomy is hardwired into our reptilian brain
Not convinced. This can easily be explained by culture.
I’ve seen speculation that Rump is using ChatGPT or another generative AI program to write his executive orders for him. This attempt to define biological sex at conception being one of the things being pointed to (others include the attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico including a paragraph about how Americans use the Gulf for fishing and recreation that seems to have been lifted directly from Wikipedia and another order having a list where everything on it is labeled number one being others).
@ 8
Oooo.. That’s got to make Elon mad.
I think the ability to conceive of an other is in the brain and there are some feelings for “kinds of others” in positive and negative feeling ways. But it requires some role-modeling and socializing. See birds and the specific song that originated in their version of babbling, or a specific dance.
One thing I’ve wondered about was mentioned in the article – how does this EO propose to classify intersex people with other than XY chromosomes and/or ambiguous genitals? I thought they stopped assigning such people a sex at birth years ago, so what do they currently put on the almighty birth certificate? I know some states allow birth certificates with an ‘X’, but I don’t know how other states or the feds deal with that when confronted with such a designation. Will they force it back to “doctor’s choice” or what? And what of the people who already have such birth certificates?
Ridana: they’ll probably say that’s an issue for states to decide.
Re: Crip Dyke @6:
Wikipedia – Homunculus
Among Ted Chiang’s Bible-adjacent scifi, Seventy-Two Letters pointed out the implication of preformationism.
“One thing I’ve wondered about was mentioned in the article – how does this EO propose to classify intersex people with other than XY chromosomes and/or ambiguous genitals?”
Pretty sure chromosomal testing is not normally used to assign sex at birth.
Basically, outie/innie is the criterion. Only two options, of course.
So, no penis means female, penis means male.
—
From the preface to the section PZ quoted in his previous post about this (https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/22/our-government-has-officially-gone-full-terf/), my emphasis:
@Ridana:
Birth certificates aren’t the main issue, because as you note, they’re state-level documents, and this executive order really only applies to the federal level.
The real issues are going to be with passports and with ‘Real ID’ compliant driver’s licences, because those are under federal rules.
According to an article in the Guardian, Marco Rubio has already stated that passports are not going to allow sex changes and that an ‘X’ designation will no longer be available going forward. Technically existing passports with an ‘X’ sex designation are still valid, but you won’t be able to renew them without changing that. And with a comment on ‘guidance on existing passports containing an X sex marker will come via other channels’, don’t expect them to actually be valid for long.
There’s apparently already been at least one case of somebody getting their passport confiscated wen they went in to change something else, but as the order technically hasn’t even gone into effect yet (the State Department hasn’t finished writing the formal rules to implement the order yet) that was some local employee acting on their own bigoted initiative, and there’s still some minor hope of fixing that before the window slams shut.
I’ve seen it pointed out that passports technically fall under international treaty law, which means it’s Constitutional-level stuff… it’s not something that can be set aside or ignored easily, and even some of the conservative parts of the U.S. Supreme Court aren’t that comfortable with saying the quiet part out loud yet. (When Amy Coney Barrett is being the voice of reason on the conservative side of the Court, it’s time to worry… and she has been a few times already, as while she’s staunchly anti-abortion and something of a Christian nationalist, she’s not as much a total partisan hack the way Alito and Thomas are.)
From a recent article in Vox: https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/395804/trump-mandate-poll-support-executive-action-policy-immigration-mass-deportation-tariff-pardon (hyperlinks elided):
Public opinion these days is shaped more by social media than by papers and TV, and the persistent and relentless anti-trans messaging is prevalent in all those.
Recently in the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/gender-diverse-australians-could-face-us-visa-delays-due-to-trump-executive-order-on-gender
15) @jenorafeuer: But the Feds rely on those state level documents to know which box to confine people in. And all those states with bathroom, sports and other anti-trans laws also do. So what do those states currently put on babies’ birth records when the sex is unclear?
Just a reminder that Revolutionary War Hero Casimir Pulaski, “The Father of the American Cavalry”, was almost assuredly either female or intersex. The intersex condition could have been caused by congenital adrenal hyperplasia.
(Many Chicagoland natives will be familiar with Pulaski Road and Casimir Pulaski Day).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47842307
Very much on Dr Diaz’s side here, but he’s made a mistake when he says men with vasectomies don’t make gametes. They still make gametes, it’s just that the gametes can’t escape the vas. His point still stands if the example changes to any of the many biological conditions that cause non-spermatogenesis.
David C Brayton@3–
As Erlend Meyer says, sexual dichotomy is not likely to be “hard-wired” into human thinking. Plenty of cultures (including Western cultures) recognised non-dichotomous sex and gender states long before the sciences of genetics, biochemistry, or embryology.
Raging Bee @ # 5: Is Behe really still “active?”
According to his wikipfft page:
NB: They (Wiki) mention no Baylor affiliation. They do note that both Lehigh’s Bio Department web page and Behe’s personal page thereat both disavow any connection between their respective stances on “intelligent” “design”.
Also, Behe just recently
celebratedobserved his 73rd birthday. Evidently, Lehigh’s retirement plans are no more generous than those of U Minn/Morris. :-(Lehigh University Biology Department’s statement on evolution and “intelligent design” from https://bio.cas.lehigh.edu/about/department-position-evolution-intelligent-design
Perhaps I got it wrong about Behe’s “active”-ness: The Wiki link to Lehigh U’s “Faculty” listing (“Retrieved January 31, 2024.”) redirects to a general Bio Dept page, and his Wiki “External Links” biography link goes to a web.archive.org piece.
Wiki also lists a bio at the Disco ‘Tute, which uses present tense to describe his position at Lehigh but has no date.
The Lehigh U site offers multiple links which use the words “Faculty” or “Directory”, but so far I have failed to find a Faculty Directory as such.
It seems Behe embodies an important evolutionary science breakthrough, the long-sought “Missing Link”!
Aha – Prof B does show up on the current Lehigh Faculty & Staff page.
I don’t think we should be calling them “ExOs”. Executive orders normally are constrained by the Constitution and by legal constraints on executive branch authority. I propose instead that these writings of Trump’s be termed “Executive Leavings Arising Exculo”, abbreviated where convenient to “ExLAXs”, instead.
That last one doesn’t prove that Trump uses a chatbot to generate his ExLAXs; all it shows is that Trump cannot count to two, which we knew already. :)
You could call them whatever, but you know, Shakespeare and all that; if they actually are executive orders, then that’s what they actually are, whatever they are called.
(I know, I know. It was an attempted witticism, but it fails because EOs are EOs and renaming does nothing)
On how this will affect intersex people: they don’t care
The point is to give them a tool to bludgeon us freaks with, if it make life hard for intersex people then the intersex people must also be wrong somehow. Look at how the deportation squads are treating American Indians and legal immigrants
@27: It was more legit than the “Gulf of America.” The President doesn’t have the authority to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Crip Dyke @6:
It’s pretty clear you are only trying to shut me down, but I will take the bait just this once:
Words matter immensely, particularly in legal proceedings. In this case though, for the person ultimately responsible for putting them out, it does not. Until you accept this, you cannot correctly understand the motivations behind this person’s actions. Also, never confuse the motivations of a despot with that of their associates.
Colbert’s intro makes a point here – under a minute long.
Is it possible that the debate over the biological definition/determination of “sex” is a bit of a red herring when it comes to trans issues? The major problem with the appallingly stupid executive order on “sex” is that it treats sex as fixed, permanent, and immutable, however we define it, and treats biological sex as so fundamental that no other form of identity (e.g. “gender”) is relevant, again, however we define it.
The executive order would make those assumptions even if it adopted all of the details about the biology that Prof. Myers makes here. In other words, how would the trans issues change if even Donald Trump understood that biological sex is not as simplistic as he currently thinks it is?
If anyone’s interested the next episode in Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ is devoted to Pope Joan 09:00 GMT Thursday morning BBC Radio Four. I read Peter Stanford’s book on the subject and was surprised that he came down in favour her reality despite the near certainty of the Vatican’s ‘Gooly Grabbing Chair’ being in fact a ‘Birthing Seat’ though why the Vatican should need one of the latter is a bit puzzling.
Is it possible that the debate over the biological definition/determination of “sex” is a bit of a red herring when it comes to trans issues?
Possible? I’d say it’s a certainty. This is all about finding as many scapegoats as possible. That’s all the Republicans have.
@dragon hunter:
Wait, what?
I disagreed with you. I said why. I never told you to shut up. I never asked for your comments to be deleted. I have no idea why you think I’m trying to shut you down unless you think disagreement and education are evil efforts at silencing or some shit?
Seriously — not shutting you down, but honestly wanting to know — what specifically did I say that you perceived as intended to prevent you from participating?
I don’t see anything obliquely shutting you down, much less “pretty clearly” shutting you down.
A typo? Shut down vs shout down.
Dropping discussions of gender entirely and pivoting to “sex, and only two sexes”, is implicitly ceding the argument about gender. They’re tacitly acknowledging that gender is, or might be, a social construct — but (quickly moving on) that doesn’t matter because only sex matters, and sex is inborn and immutable.
A transgender person could well change their name, and their pronouns, and the way they dress, and take hormone therapy, and even get reassignment surgery — but (say the the transphobes/TERFs/essentialists), sex can never change. That’s why they call themselves “gender critical” — they criticize the question of gender by waving the question away as unimportant and distracting from the “real” question of sex.
Acknowledging that “biological sex is not as simplistic [as only two immutable inborn sexes]” would therefore undermine their whole argument.
I’m pretty sure that all of these EOs were all drafted by lawyers who are directly or indirectly part of Project 2025. They care because they want to advance their agenda.
I do have to wonder if there was pushback from someone who thought (or who thought people might think) that “sperm” means “jism” rather than “spermatozoa”, and/or that “spermatozoa” is too sciencey, so they went with “small reproductive cell”.
Didn’t the Indiana state legislature try to make pi equal to 3 in the late 1800’s? This sounds just about as looney.
@14 John Morales wrote: penis means male.
I reply: Your supposition seems sound. But, what about the dickhead magat who is destroying this nation? Is he some kind of super penis? That’s not what Stormy Daniels experienced.
@37 Owlmirror. Apologies if I did make myself more clear. My question had to do with the disagreement among Prof. Myers, Prof. Coyne, Prof. Dawkins, et al, and did not really have anything to do with Donald Trump. Those biologists debate the nature of “sex” as a biological feature, but I was not clear about how any of their positions would relate to trans issues. Coyne insists that “sex” is a simple matter of gamete Size. Myers argues that “sex” is a more complicated biological feature. I wondered if the trans issues would be the same regardless of which of those biologists was correct, since “trans” status depends upon a mis-match between one’s biological sex (however one defines it)/anatomy/physiology on the one had, and one’s experience of one’s gendered identity on the other.
@davetaylor #41,
Well, most transgender people do not define transness in a way that depends on “biological sex” at all. It is simply a mismatch between one’s gender identity and the gender to which one has been socially assigned, typically at birth. Many trans people are therefore not interested in transitioning medically, only socially. Given this understanding, yes, arguments over biological sex are not directly relevant.
(A minority of trans folks, often called transmedicalists, do not share this understanding, and deny that you can be transgender without dysphoria and a desire for medical transition.)
However, most people who oppose trans recognition, rights and services are gender essentialists. They believe that socially assigned gender is (or should be) based on a critically important biological reality. So the proper definition of measurement of biological sex is quite relevant to their arguments. For instance, the concept of a “mismatch” itself presumes that biological sex is a discrete binary. If it is multidimensional, variable over time, and continuous or many-valued, then there is no “natural” way of mapping it to a binary gender classification in the first place. This undermines the position that the gender binary should be socially enforced and considered immutable.
So basically, if Coyne was right, it wouldn’t affect my understanding of myself as transgender; but if PZ was right, it would weaken the arguments of transphobes and cissexists.
This should be “definition and measurement,” sorry.