Scientific American published an opinion piece insisting that claiming sex is binary is “bad science.”
The article, “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary,” written by Princeton University anthropologist Dr. Agustin Fuentes, mocks Republicans, saying, “Republican Congressional representatives upset at the nominee’s refusal to define ‘woman’ took it on themselves to define the term.”
Fuentes quotes a group of biologists declaring, “Reliance on strict binary categories of sex fails to accurately capture the diverse and nuanced nature of sex.”
“Today dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, target LGBTQIA+ individuals broadly and, most recently, attack the rights of transexual and transgender people,” Fuentes proclaims, concluding, “Given what we know about biology across animals and in humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but are about trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society.”
Other scientists hotly disputed Fuentes’ perspective. University of Chicago biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Chicago, told The Daily Mail that Scientific American is promulgating an “authoritarian progressive leftist agenda.”
“When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes,” evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright wrote. “This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms.”
“This is the biological definition of sex that all biologists adhere to,” Coyne added. “An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. This true of all animals and true of almost all plants. It’s a binary because there is no middle sex. This fact has been believed by biologists for many years. This fact has been denied by ideologues.”
“Teaching there is not two sexes in humans distorts the facts of nature. You distort people’s understanding of reality,” he concluded.
As far back as 2016, in a biology review titled “How a Transgender Woman Could Get Pregnant,” Scientific American’s Dina Fine Maron suggested that transsexual male-turned-females might be able to become pregnant.
Maron wrote about the work of Mats Brannstrom, a Swedish gynecologist.
According to a study Brannstrom published, his first successful patient started her first menstrual cycle “43 days after transplantation and she continued to menstruate at regular intervals of between 26 and 36 days (median 32 days). 1 year after transplantation, the recipient underwent her first single embryo transfer, which resulted in pregnancy.”
Brannstrom implanted an artificial or human-extracted uterus into a womb for the purpose of helping women who wanted to have children but were missing a uterus. Scientific American then extrapolated from that action that men who identified as women might be able someday to become pregnant.
“First, a patient would likely need castration surgery and high doses of exogenous hormones because high levels of male sex hormones, called androgens, could threaten pregnancy,” Maron wrote. “The patient would also need surgery to create a ‘neovagina’ that would be connected to the transplant uterus, to shed menses and give doctors access to the uterus for follow-up care.”