The sex binary in animals: a defense by Colin Wright

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https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/0...in-wright/

INTRO (Jerry Coyne): 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), [...] There is no individual in animals or vascular plants that produce a third type of gamete. Ergo, sex is binary.

This assertion, accepted for decades by biologists, is offensive to ideological Pecksniffs because they want sex to be a spectrum, as gender is. (Gender and sex are different, and gender really isn’t a spectrum, but bimodal, with the distribution looking like the back of a two-humped camel, with one hump being those identifying as the male gender and the other identifying as the female.)

Under woke ideology, what you think is good in society must be seen as true in nature, an inversion of the “appeal to nature” that argues that something that’s natural is perceived to be good. In this new fallacy, which is still a fallacy, something that’s good is perceived to be natural.

[...] Colin Wright, who spends much of his career ably defending the two-sex paradigm against the onslaught of The Elect, has just fought off yet another attempt to argue that sex in humans (and presumably other animals) is a spectrum... (MORE - missing details)

[confused2]

If male monkeys don't dress up as female monkeys what does this tell us? It really doesn't tell us much because monkeys don't wear clothes. If you had a sort of monkey that wore clothes and some of the male monkeys wanted to dress up like female monkeys - you'd almost be forced (if you were honest) to accept that that is what the sort of monkey that wears clothes actually does.

We need look no further than squid and a fish (which I can't remember the name of) to see examples of 'cross dressing'. There's a type of squid (cad) that when he sees a male and a female together .. no problem. On the side facing the male he wears - "I'm a female - don't even think about it." and on the side facing the female he shows "Fancy a bit of rumpy-pumpy?". Guessing what females are thinking is risky at the best of times - a female squid perhaps more risky than usual. Regardless. She thinks he's brave because he's willing to fight the other squid so she falls for the night.
https://www.livescience.com/21374-cuttle...guise.html

The fish is the real cad because it pretends to be female and zapparts females when given half a chance. I can't be bothered with it - I've already fallen too far into the trap of insane logic.