Colin Wright: "Are There More Than Two Sexes?"

Of course not.

   Leftist, Lysenkoist "scientists" are using the same strategy--and in fact the very same argument forms--here that they've been using with respect to race for at least ten years: knock down outrageously absurd straw men that no one has ever accepted, make a few proclamations about "social justice" and declare victory. 

   Wright does a better job controlling his outrage than I would. Here's the thing: no one has ever thought that all males have exactly the same characteristics. And no one has ever thought that there was exactly one phenotypic difference between males and females. Nor that there's exactly one genetic difference. 

   Biology: how does it work?

   It takes an astonishing combination of low IQ and intellectual dishonesty to produce such a collection of sophistries. For posterity, here's the info:

Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution

 J. F. McLaughlin, Kinsey M. Brock, Isabella Gates, Anisha Pethkar, Marcus Piattoni Alexis Rossi, Sara E. Lipshutz

You'll note that they've adopted the convention of putting 'sex' in scare quotes, like so: "sex". This is the convention Lysenkoists about race adopted a decade or so ago. Like so: "race." I expect we'll get the same kind of equivocation re: sex that they've adopted re: race. To wit:  race is a "social construct!" This has the following advantage: it equivocates (inter alia) between meaning (a) the thing in question isn't real and...(b) something far more ridiculous: it is real!..."socially real"... Since "x is socially constructed" can mean something like 8-10 different things (I counted once), it's a very handy equivocator to have in your bag of tricks. Great for motte-ing and bailey-ing--at which the left excels. Depending on how the argument is going for them, leftist can speak as if race is a fiction--until it's handy not to. And, of course: like 50% of the 75% of college professors who profess to study race don't particularly want to be studying a fiction. So it's handy to be able to proclaim--as they do as convenient--that "calling x a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't exist." Well, that's the thing. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't... If there's a more deeply confused quasi-philosophical pseudo-concept than socially constructed, I haven't stumbled across it.

   Oh and: by "socially real," they mean: has social consequences. So Bigfoot is socially real. As are witches. And ESP. If someone believes in x, x probably has social consequences. "Socially real" actually means: not real. It's like saying Oh, ghosts are real alright--psychologically real...

   Anyway. 

   That this kind of madness is not only being tolerated, it's flourishing--and in science--should horrify everyone. 

   Supposing sanity someday returns, there should be a new branch of the Smithsonian dedicated to insuring that we never forget the madness. And never forget that scientists have turned out to be no more immune to the bullshit of the humanities than humanists have been.