Charles Arthur
1 min readJul 30, 2023

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>> I put the phrase “the gametes a body is organised to produce” into PubMed and>>

Discovered that PubMed isn't a textbook? Well done. It's a repository for peer-reviewed science. That tends not to give basic definitions of words.

>>To say that a person who is sterile is “organised to produce gametes” is like saying that someone with diabetes is nevertheless “organised to produce” the amount of insulin sufficient to ward off diabetes.>>

Well, you'd find a pancreas, and perhaps the remnants of the islets of Langerhans, but non-functional. Do you see how it works? That the pathway to functionality is interrupted, but that doesn't make them a non-human, nor a totally different species?

>>Your insistence that this teleology [that human sex is binary and immutable and applies to everyone] is something that mainstream biology accepts, something that “biologists will tell you”, is both arrogant, farcical, and a provable lie.>>

If it's a provable lie, prove it. Show us a human who, by my definition given above, has changed sex (ie gone from producing large to small gametes, or vice versa), or is not either male or female (bear in mind DSDs are all that). You'll not just impress me; you'll make medical history.

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Charles Arthur
Charles Arthur

Written by Charles Arthur

Tech journalist; author of “Social Warming: how social media polarises us all” and two others. The Guardian’s Technology editor 2005–14. Speaker, moderator.

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