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Sex should be understood as ‘mosaic,’ professor writes
A University of Oklahoma professor claimed that “biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum” in a recent article published by The Conversation.
Pulling from his new book, “The Binary Delusion: How Biology Defies the Myth of Two Sexes,” Ari Berkowitz, a professor of biological sciences, stated that not everyone is purely female or purely male with no overlap.
“Even primary sex traits – sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive ducts that transport eggs or sperm, and external genitals – are not always consistently female-typical or male-typical,” he wrote.
However, treating sex as a spectrum is also inaccurate because “primary sex characteristics … can differ in their ‘femaleness’ or ‘maleness,’” according to the professor.
Further, each person has a different combination of these traits.
“For example, you might have female-typical height and coarse body hair, male-typical voice pitch, and intermediate muscle strength and facial structure,” he wrote.
Berkowitz argued that sex should be understood as a “mosaic” of traits rather than a single binary category or a single spectrum position.
He wrote:
Many people are more typically female in some biological traits, more typically male in others, and intermediate in still others. In such cases, people can’t be placed accurately at one location along a single biological sex spectrum because there are multiple traits that can vary, and an individual’s biological measurements can land in different locations along these different axes.
In other words, biological sex is multidimensional.
But some scholars are pushing back.
Colin Wright, a Manhattan Institute fellow with a PhD in evolutionary biology, wrote on X that he is “convinced these people are either stupid or consciously deceptive.”
“Nobody ever engages with the actual arguments people like me are making when we claim ‘sex is binary,’” the scholar wrote.
He noted that in his own scholarly article titled, “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes,” he debunks the idea that sex is “multidimensional.”
“Yet these activist scientists refuse to engage with any of the actual substance. They just keep arguing against strawmen,” he wrote.
Berkowitz is not the first professor to argue that sex isn’t binary.
In fact, University of Pennsylvania Professor Beans Velocci took it a step further and argued that “sex isn’t real” in a book published this year.
Velocci claims in the book that “cisness” is unnatural and that people fitting into their “assigned sex category” took a large amount of work to construct and maintain, The College Fix previously reported.
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