It's a political hot potato. It gets misused to constrain and contain people.
How we talk about biological sex is a battleground of conflicting agendas and experiences.
But Nature offers us a much wider and wilder view than a basic binary - male and female.
In the confusing maze that is sexual reproduction, sex hormones, sex chromosomes, and genitalia.. are there just two biological sexes ... or could biological sex exist on a continuum just as gender does?
Guests:
Art Arnold
Distinguished Professor
Integrative Biology and Physiology
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
Jenny Graves
Vice Chancellor's Fellow & Distinguished Professor
Ecology, Environment & Evolution
Latrobe University, Australia
Paul Griffiths
Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Philosophy
Co-author of Genetics and Philosophy: an introduction (2013)
Griffiths Lab
University of Sydney, Australia
Dr Simón(e) Sun
@simonedsun
Neurobiologist
Postdoctoral fellow, Tollkuhn Lab, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL)
Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Transgender Studies
Further information:
Sex is real (Aeon Magazine, 2021)
By Paul Griffiths
Stop using phony science to justify transphobia (Scientific American, 2019)
By Simón(e) Sun
Quantum Sex: Intersex and the Molecular Deconstruction of Sex (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2009)
By Vernon Rosario
A general theory of sexual differentiation (JNR: Journal of Neuroscience Research, 2016)
By Arthur Arnold
Human Y Chromosome, Sex Determination, and Spermatogenesis— A Feminist View (Journal of Biology of Reproduction, 2000)
By Jennifer Graves