A poll of scientists found that a majority of respondents view sex as binary while most believe gender is fluid, according to a report published over the weekend in the United Kingdom.
The Telegraph published a story on Saturday that said the newspaper conducted a survey with Censuswide, a market research consultancy headquartered in London, of almost 200 scientists at British universities from 2023 to 2024.
Sex is a biological classification, while gender, in modern times, generally refers to societal expectations for the two sexes.
Pollsters received feedback showing 58% of respondents believe sex is binary, with the caveat that excludes rare cases involving “intersex” individuals.
The Cleveland Clinic says people who are intersex “have genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit into a male/female sex binary.”
Twenty-nine percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “sex is not binary,” while 13% of respondents did not share a view on the question or preferred not to say.
The Telegraph also noted that 64% of scientists said they believe gender is fluid, 22% said gender is binary, and 14% did not provide an answer.
Dr. Wolfgang Goymann, a professor of behavioral biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, provided a comment to the newspaper about the findings.
“To me this just means that at least 29% of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22% of them do not know what gender means,” Goymann said.
The debate about sex and gender being binary has become a hot-button issue in the United States as policymakers consider measures that grapple with self-identity and biological traits in the eyes of the law.
As reported by The Daily Wire, Kansas became the first state last year to pass a bill that defines a “woman” as someone who is biologically born female, laying the groundwork for potential bans on males who identify as transgender women from using single-sex areas designated for females.
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The Public Religion Research Institute released a survey in 2023 that found 65% of Americans, up from 59% in 2021, say there are only two genders: male and female. Pollsters found a partisan divide in which 90% of Republicans supported the gender binary, 44% of Democrats agreed with it, and 66% of independents said they believed in two genders.