We need to have a concern about the science because school children are going to be influenced by what goes on, and given the report covered today at the blog that one in four US school children identify as non-binary, reports such as the flowing need to be critically considered. For example, the journal Scientific American is in many high schools. Recently there was an article, by Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University, “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary.” The argument is not new and trades on the idea that because super-sharp distinctions do not exist, nothing does: that “most bodily systems overlap extensively across large (ova) and small (sperm) gamete producers, and the patterns of physiology and behavior in relation to birth and care of offspring are not universal across species.”
“The bottom line is that while animal gametes can be described as binary (of two distinct kinds), the physiological systems, behaviors and individuals that produce them are not,” he writes, as he cites a group of biologists who recently claimed, “Reliance on strict binary categories of sex fails to accurately capture the diverse and nuanced nature of sex.”
