Sex—What It Is and Why Do We Need It?

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Sex – What Is It and Why Do We Need It?

1.2 Addressing Common Sex Myths

Over the past decade, an influential movement has emerged that seeks to undermine our fundamental understanding of sex. Under the banner of “transgender rights,” this movement alleges that the binary concept of sex is outdated and inherently oppressive and invalidating of transgender identities and experiences. This perspective has given rise to a genre of discourse—spread through social media and appearing in prominent news outlets and scientific journals—falsely asserting that a new scientific consensus on the biology of sex has been established.

Denials of male and female as concrete biological categories, however, are not entirely new. In her 1990 book Gender Trouble, philosopher Judith Butler famously floated the idea that the distinctions of male and female lacked a solid biological foundation, asserting they were “as culturally constructed as gender” (Butler, 1990). Similarly, in 1993, sex-ologist Anne Fausto-Sterling authored a paper titled “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough” (Fausto-Sterling, 1993). Fausto-Sterling contended that the “two-party sexual system” in humans was “in defiance of nature,” and that there were instead “at least five sex categories, and perhaps even more.”