Is Nicholas Matte correct that there is no such thing as biological sex?

I already talked about this here at length: Jae Alexis Lee's answer to Why is it transphobic to say that trans women are biologically male? and I recommend checking that out but… well, nothing is ever simple so here’s the very long “Jae Answer” to the question.

Is he right that there’s no such thing as biological sex? No. That said, does the phrase “biological sex” have a specific and universal definition? No, not really.

We’re at a place where language and science and social issues are slamming into each other and the result is… messy. Science tells us how sexual reproduction works although we know more about it now than we did a decade or two ago and we’re learning that there are still things we don’t know… but we know that if you combine the appropriate two gametes you get a zygote that may (if everything goes right) develop into a child organism. That’s sexual reproduction, and it’s a biological thing.

Linguistically we label the contributor of one gamete male and the opposite gamete as female and that works fairly well for communication. Life moves on and no one has any problems.

Science goes deeper and we learned that you can predict the sex of an organism based on it’s karyotype (which chromosomes it has) and that most humans have one of two common karyotypes: 46 XX or 46 XY and that 46 XX is highly correlated with female sexual development and 46 XY is highly correlated with male sexual development.

We go deeper still and learn that the gene sequence that causes masculinization is usually at one end of the Y chromosome and we labeled that sequence SRY.

Notice how deep we went before I said causes instead of correlated?

Here’s where language gets wonky. We defined two sexes linguistically: Male and Female, and we did so on the basis of what kinds of gametes they produce. The problem is that some times, development doesn’t follow the same pattern that it does for the majority of human organisms. We see the SRY gene wander over onto an X-chromosome gamete and you get someone who develops as outwardly male, with an XX karyotype and they produce no gametes (XX male syndrome.) Sometimes, SRY works fine, but over on the X chromosome you get a really broken AR gene and the resultant offspring can’t process the hormones necessary to masculinize which results in someone who develops as outwardly female with an XY karyotype and again, produces no gametes (Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.)

No worries, language comes to the rescue! The term ‘intersex’ is coined, adopted by scientists and physicians and life moves on… though it really doesn’t change the way we socially think about sex. Arguably, at this point, we have 3 sexes: male, female, and intersex. Socially however, the general population continues to think of sex as being binary: either male or female.

As science moves forward in the understanding of intersex conditions (also referred to as DSDs or Disorders of sex development) we begin to sort out that gender and sex aren’t really the same thing and that people can have one sex with the opposite gender. Such individuals are transgender. Unlike many (but not all) intersex individuals, transgender people can produce gametes and evidence a phenotype that is in line with their natal sex.

It hasn’t been until the past 20 years, really starting with Zhou’s publication in Nature circa 1995 that we saw evidence that that transgender people had physiological development that’s similar to the gender they identify as as opposed to their natal sex. Those differences are largely neurological with some observed genetic characteristics. As recently as 2016 I’ve seen researchers using the term ‘brain intersex’ to refer to transgender individuals.

That’s a lot of science. Let’s talk about language and cultural adoption of scientific learning.

In scientific literature, you can get all sorts of really specific terms that mean exactly a specific thing, like, Congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 17 alpha-hydroxylase deficiency. That’s very specific language. Language that specific, however, isn’t useful to the general population.

Which… shouldn’t be an issue. This is all obscure edge case kind of stuff affecting a small percentage of the population with what are, essentially, medical issues.

The problem is that the world doesn’t seem to like people who don’t fit into the simple binary definitions of male and female that they had established. I’m not saying that in a “people are bigots that hate us” kind of way, but in a “life gets uniquely rough on people who don’t fit in the boxes” kind of way. Athletes have been barred from competition because of intersex conditions, transgender people have been banned from bathrooms because… I dunno, reasons I guess. Tens of thousands of intersex children have had their genitals surgically altered in an attempt to ‘normalize’ them.

We have a problem. While people who point to percentages like 0.6% of the population is estimated to be transgender to say that these issues don’t need attention or that society doesn’t need to change, in absolute terms we’re talking about the suffering and mistreatment of literally millions of individuals.

Culturally, we need to adapt. We need to think of sex as something more than just male or female. We need to understand that you can’t fit the whole of human experience into two boxes.

Linguistically, we need to make this fit into the way we talk about sex and gender. Ultimately, Nicholas Matte is wrong: Biological Sex exists. The point he’s trying to make, however, is that biological sex is more complicated than A or B.

As advocates on issues of sex and gender minorities, we’re constantly confronted with terms like “Biologically Male” being used to force people into box A or box B when they clearly don’t fit. Worse, the constant pressure to force people who don’t fit into Box A into said box has driven advocates to steadfastly assert that they belong in Box B… even though that isn’t entirely accurate either.

Some how we exist in a world where people are so concerned with which boxes we put people in that people are literally dying just because they don’t fit in a specific box. When your very safety and continued existence relies on your ability to fit in one box or another it makes it hard to have conversations about other boxes. When your worldview is so fixed on the idea that there are only two boxes it becomes hard to discuss anything else.

So… what should be simple has become a cultural conflict. In the midst of that conflict, language is floundering to keep up with competing social forces and it’s not doing so well.

Biological sex is a thing… but it doesn’t always mean what people think it means… which means that as a term, it’s failing linguistically to enable communication and that… that’s a problem.

No - clearly not. The XY chromosome system makes it very clear that humans (like most other mammals) have a clear gender.

That said, there are some very, very rare genetic weirdnesses - such as people with three sex chromosomes - and people with other strange mutations in the X and/or Y.

Almost all of the people who are “transgender” have a very genuine, quite real, feeling that their mental state disagrees with their chromosomal gender. We don’t yet have a good handle on why that is - but it is most definitely real.

But that doesn’t alter the fact that humans CLEARLY do have a genetically determined gender…and denying that this exists because a small percentage of people don’t feel right about the genes they have is flying in the face of biological facts.

What we need (as a society) is to recognize that it is possible for someone’s brain to produce sufficiently strong feelings of wrongness that there is something important going on in their heads.

Until we know what causes that - whether it can be repaired/diagnosed/whatever - we’ll have this strange situation where the genes clearly and unambigously say one thing - while the emotions say otherwise.

Would it be wrong to refer to humans as bipedal because a very few of them are born with only one foot?

This is “basically” Mr. Matte's argument against the idea of biological sex.

It’s not so that much biological sex isn’t real - it’s required for reproduction after all - but more that biological sex isn’t a binary system as most assume.

Speaking as a hermaphrodite I’m well-aware of this reality of biological sex. I have both male and female genitals and explored the spectrum of biological sex (and the gender spectrum) pretty much to its full extent.

So no, biological sex is real, it just isn’t binary. Genetics and other influences (e.g. chimaerism) aren’t neat little binary systems after all. What we call ‘males’ and ‘females’ are just the extremes of the spectrum, with a large section of the human population falling somewhere in between.

There is such thing as biological sex. Anyone who says other wise is specifically ignoring certain information on X and Y sex determining chromosomes and trying to replace this information with pseudoscience. These sex chromosomes contain specific information that creates very specific sexual features on their respective chromosome for example the SRY gene which contains the information to create testis is only found on the Y chromosome with exception of error/mistake/mutation. Having extra X or Y chromosomes also does not mean a new sex and is also an error/mistake/mutation and gives no extra sex determinations.

It’s not clear what he means by “there is no such thing as biological sex”. On one hand, it could definitely be argued that the entire idea of ‘sex’ is a flawed one because of how many cultures differentiate between people with different sets of genitals.

But generally when somebody talks about ‘biological sex’ they are talking about genitalia, and while not all humans have genitalia, the vast majority do. So I would say for lack of an explanation on Matte’s part, that he is incorrect, but I would definitely be interested to hear more about his idea.

I’m curious how Nicholas Matte would define this act without the required terminology to define who carries the sperm and who carries the egg and gestates the offspring.

Human reproduction - Wikipedia

<<Human reproduction is any form of sexual reproduction resulting in human fertilization, typically involving sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. During sexual intercourse, the interaction between the male and female reproductive systems results in fertilization of the woman's ovum by the man's sperm.>>

It’s fair to say that reproduction can take place without sexual intercourse but the respective and essential components, egg and sperm still come from specific identifiable sexes.

As a human I don’t identify as anything. I don’t identify as a male, it’s simply what I am. If I had the urge to wear my hair like many women do, or wear heels or dress like a woman, I don’t think it would stop me being a man. It certainly would likely not stop my ability to perform the sperm donator in the act of reproduction.

As soon as there’s someone NOT “born of man and woman”, we’ll talk about this again.

In the meantime, yup, sex (in the sense of gender) very much does exist.