Gotta hand it to Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, he’s a brave one. He is taking on the Woke claim that sex isn’t really binary in animals:
It is a constant uphill battle for biologists to keep defending the truth that animals have but two sexes, defined by whether they have the reproductive apparatus to produce small, mobile gametes (the males) or large immobile gametes (the females). I’m not going to go into this again as you can read my explanation here. I have a longer and more popular explanation coming out in a big paper in June (stay tuned).
There are just two sexes in animals (and in nearly all vascular plants): male and female. Clownfish are not a third sex (they change from male to female.) Seahorse males are not a third sex (they are males who produce sperm and carry the fertilized eggs of females around in a pouch). Hermaphrodites are not a third sex (they combine aspects of male and female sex), and I’m aware of only one case in which a human hermaphrodite, whose male parts produced sperm, fathered an offspring. Hermaphroditic plants are not a third sex; they are simply hermaphrodites that contain male tissue and female tissue (producing small sperm and big eggs, respectively). There is no individual in animals or vascular plants that produce a third type of gamete. Ergo, sex is binary. – Jerry Coyne (March 8, 2023)
According to Colin Wright at City Journal, the Woke are on the march in science on this topic:
In pursuit of this goal, a “Multimodal Sex literature survey team” composed of researchers from UC–Berkeley and Loyola University Chicago has been assembled to “re-imagine a more inclusive framework for biological sex.” On January 27, 2023, the team produced their first pre-print paper, titled “Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution.” The paper argues that sex is best viewed as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels” rather than bimodal or binary.
In saner times, such a paper would perhaps bring a small chuckle from a journal editor before issuing a swift rejection. But current times are far from sane, and the quick ascendance of fashionable pseudoscience in academia on the biology of sex is ample reason to worry that this paper will not receive the withering review it deserves. (March 2, 2023)
It will probably receive accolades from science bureaucrats. Sanity was cancelled some time ago anyhow.