With due respect (I'm a big fan of Professor McWhorter), I don't think he's been paying attention to this issue very closely. He says some version of "every idiot knows that sex is a binary, and only biological women can get pregnant, etc." two or three times. I don't think that's true. For one, the evidence is in hindsight...they pulled this conversation from youtube. For another, look to Colin Wright, who was banned from paypal (and etsy, of all places) for making it his mission to argue that sex is a binary. They literally tried to destroy his ability to provide for himself by kicking him off of what is supposed to be a dispassionate payment-processing program. Check out his substack post, where he references reputable books and journal entries, written by real scientists, who are making the claim that sex (not "gender") is a spectrum.
From Colin Wright:
The view that sex is a spectrum is no longer confined to university humanities departments and hermetic internet communities. It has now made considerable inroads into mainstream culture, thanks in part to a highly sympathetic media environment. Even prestigious scientific journals such as Nature have given space to authors who argue that “the idea of two sexes is simplistic” and that “biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” Another Nature editorial insisted that attempts to classify an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.” A recent book, The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex, argues this position from cover to cover. Its publisher, a Canadian academic press, gushes that “this transformative guide completely breaks down our current understanding of biological sex.”
With due respect (I'm a big fan of Professor McWhorter), I don't think he's been paying attention to this issue very closely. He says some version of "every idiot knows that sex is a binary, and only biological women can get pregnant, etc." two or three times. I don't think that's true. For one, the evidence is in hindsight...they pulled this conversation from youtube. For another, look to Colin Wright, who was banned from paypal (and etsy, of all places) for making it his mission to argue that sex is a binary. They literally tried to destroy his ability to provide for himself by kicking him off of what is supposed to be a dispassionate payment-processing program. Check out his substack post, where he references reputable books and journal entries, written by real scientists, who are making the claim that sex (not "gender") is a spectrum.
From Colin Wright:
The view that sex is a spectrum is no longer confined to university humanities departments and hermetic internet communities. It has now made considerable inroads into mainstream culture, thanks in part to a highly sympathetic media environment. Even prestigious scientific journals such as Nature have given space to authors who argue that “the idea of two sexes is simplistic” and that “biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” Another Nature editorial insisted that attempts to classify an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.” A recent book, The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex, argues this position from cover to cover. Its publisher, a Canadian academic press, gushes that “this transformative guide completely breaks down our current understanding of biological sex.”
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum