Petition rejects effort to place biological sex on a spectrum

Recasting the fact of biological sex as a changeable social construct is ideological, scientifically inaccurate and socially irresponsible, according to a new international petition in defence of human biology at a time of identity politics.

“In contradiction of evolutionary history and millennia of human observations, highly ­esteemed scientific periodicals are running articles undermining the observable reality of biological sex,” say organisers of the ­online Project Nettie, named after US female geneticist Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes in 1905.

The Project Nettie statement says: “Biological sex is fundamentally defined by male and female reproductive anatomy (which) differ qualitatively, not quantitatively, and there are no intrinsically ordered states between male and female reproductive anatomies. Biological sex does not meet the defining criteria for a spectrum.” British developmental biologist Emma Hilton is a prime mover behind the petition, which disavows any political ideology and is pitched at scientists and science educators, and medical and health professionals, as well as scholars from other disciplines.

Source: Petition rejects effort to place biological sex on a spectrum

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