Earlier this year, geneticist-turned-science writer Tina Hesman Saey wrote an article in Science News asserting that
Sex is messy.
It’s not just about chromosomes. Or reproductive cells. Or any other binary metric. Many genetic, environmental and developmental variations can produce what are thought of as masculine and feminine traits in the same person. And so sex, scientists say, should be viewed in all its complex glory.
“Biological sex is not as simple as male or female, February 20, 2025
She is unhappy about a January White House executive order that aimed at “restoring biological truth to the federal government” by insisting on a biological definition of sex rather than an emotional one based on self-identification.
In the article, she quotes various researchers who back up her concern, namely that “Any definition of sex used to determine who can get an identification card or use a public restroom needs to account for variation, they and other researchers say.”
In short, those women who thought that guys could be kept out of the women’s change room are put on notice here that science — as Saey understands it — is not on their side.
One of the sources she turns to for support is John Jay College biology professor Nathan Lents.
Lents acknowledges that biological sex gametes are “about as close to a true binary as nature gets.” But then,
“Biology doesn’t operate in binaries very often,” Lents says.
Instead, most characteristics ascribed to males and females fall along a spectrum with two peaks, one the average for females and the other the average for males. For instance, on average, males are taller than females and have more muscle mass, more red blood cells and a higher metabolism.
But almost nobody fits in the peak for all those measures for their sex, Lents says. “There’s plenty of women who are taller than plenty of men. There are plenty of women who have higher metabolic rates than some men, even though the averages are different.
“If you define biological sex purely on the gametes, you’re going to ignore most of what actually matters to your daily life, including in your social life,” he says. “Reducing sex to a binary really doesn’t make a lot of sense for how we actually live.” “Not as simple“
This is, of course, utter nonsense. For women, it is dangerous nonsense. Readers can unpack for themselves whether it really doesn’t make any difference in critical situations whether we are dealing with a man or a woman…
Lents? Name rings a bell…
That said, some readers will likely remember Lents for another reason: He wrote two books attacking design in nature. From a John Jay media release:
As an evolutionary biologist and author of such books as Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals and Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, Nathan H. Lents, Ph.D., Professor of Biology and Director of the Honors Program and the Macaulay Honors College at John Jay College, has joined the ranks of scientists whose work is under attack by proponents of intelligent design.
There is no coherent theory about intelligent design; according to Lents, the one commonality is that supporters “don’t buy modern evolutionary theory, or some part of modern evolutionary theory. They hold a whole variety of incompatible positions.”
“Professor Nathan H. Lents Refutes Criticism from the Intelligent Design Community,” February 15, 2019
So back in 2019, Lents wanted to position himself as a mainstream evolutionary biologist, attacking design in favor of Darwinism.
But then something happened…
Shortly afterward, mainstream evolutionary biologists started falling one by one at the hands of Cancel Culture. That was specifically because they insisted on the sex binary nature of humans (and all other creatures with a primate body plan).
And now Lents has fallen in with those who would agree with him that ““Reducing sex to a binary really doesn’t make a lot of sense for how we actually live.”
One of the Canceled evolutionary biologists, Colin Wright, is not having any of that. At X, he pointed out that he has just published an open-access paper titled “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes.” From the Abstract:
Here I synthesize evolutionary and developmental evidence to demonstrate that sex is binary (i.e., there are only two sexes) in all anisogamous species and that males and females are defined universally by the type of gamete they have the biological function to produce—not by karyotypes, secondary sexual characteristics, or other correlates.
Wright, C.M. Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes. Arch Sex Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3, November 4, 2025
And today he called out Hesman, Lents, and the others while discussing it:
No. We’re not doing this anymore. Those pushing this view are either ideologues, ignoramuses, or both. Stop misleading the public for political ends.
This feels like the clash between modernism and post-modernism that Houston Christian University philosopher Nancy Pearcey talks about.
A modernist may be a materialist atheist but he believes in the existence of external facts like the sex binary in humans. The post-modernist sees all reality as socially constructed, so there are no external facts. There is only an infinitely fuzzy gradation of maybes.
Wright is correct in seeing that science is incompatible with the private truths of post-modernism. But they will not disappear by themselves. A major rift in biology may be looming ahead.
