https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2851743

Given these factors—from absent temporal sequencing and unmeasured baseline severity to exposure misclassification and dataset limitations—I do not believe that the study can substantiate the suggestion that PBs confer MH benefits or justify their further implication that earlier hormonal intervention may be beneficial.

58% of the group didn’t respond. That creates a huge selection bias that doesn’t make it worth getting into the study’s other flaws.

Tautological definitions clarify nothing.

What matters is what someone means with a word. If someone says they’re straight, what do they mean?

What do you do when the ideas are “sex-based bathrooms and nothing else will do”? Yawning seems unlikely to make any progress.

Where do you see meaningful progress coming from? To read into your response a bit via “I would be surprised if they’re substantially wrong”, are you saying that sex is binary and immutable in humans? That’s a falsifiable claim, and progress could be made by either proving or disproving it.

they’re too busy policing women’s bodies

I think the standard answer is “Men should just respect women’s spaces”. What do you tell someone that agrees with “The biggest threat to women’s safety is men” and also believes sex is real, i.e. a TERF? It doesn’t seem like a lot of progress will be made with “The biggest threat to your safety is just a distraction”

Posted for critical analysis.

Are the models correct, or biased? How does that reflect their training data and how people use them? What makes those discussions tired?

The biggest threat to women’s safety (and perception of it) is men

Interesting, that’s exactly what TERFs say

Completely unscientific, but here’s what duck.ai says

GPT-5.6 Luna

The community note is substantially correct, and the response is not a sound biological rebuttal.

The first tweet gives a basically standard account of human biological sex: females are organized around the production of ova, while males are organized around the production of sperm. A more precise formulation would be:

In humans, female refers to the reproductive organization or developmental pathway centered on ova production, whether or not an individual currently produces viable ova.

That qualification matters because children, postmenopausal women, infertile women, people with certain disorders of sexual development, and people whose reproductive organs have been removed may not actually produce eggs. Their sex classification is based on the reproductive system they developed—or were organized—to have, not on current fertility.

The claim “I just described every female on earth” is too broad if intended across all animals, because reproductive systems and sex classifications vary among species. But for humans, it is a reasonable simplified description.

“Being female means having the brain of a woman” is not an established biological definition. Human brains show some average sex-associated differences, but those differences are generally small, highly overlapping, affected by development and environment, and not a reliable binary test for whether someone is biologically male or female. There is no medically accepted “female brain” criterion that defines sex.

There is also a category distinction:

• Female/male ordinarily refer to biological sex.
• Woman/man can refer either to adult sex categories or, in contemporary gender terminology, to gender identity.
• A person’s gender identity is not determined by a measurable “brain of a woman” classification.

So the best assessment is: the response is biologically unsupported; the community note correctly identifies the relevant scientific distinction; and the original tweet is broadly right about humans but could be worded more precisely.

Gemma 4 (2nd opinion)

This dispute centers on the distinction between biological sex and gender identity. The original tweet defines female based on the biological principle of anisogamy, where sex is determined by the type of gamete an organism is organized to produce—eggs for females and sperm for males. This is the standard scientific definition used in biology to categorize sex across species, regardless of whether an individual’s reproductive system is functional or has been altered.

The response shifts the definition from biological sex to a neurological or psychological framework, claiming that being female is defined by having the brain of a woman. This perspective aligns more with concepts of gender identity or “brain sex” rather than biological classification.

The community note functions as a factual correction of the response’s biological claim. It clarifies that biological sex is defined by reproductive anatomy and gamete production, not by brain structure. It further notes that differences in brain structure between males and females are small and overlapping, meaning they are not distinct enough to serve as a primary defining characteristic for biological sex.

Ultimately, the dispute is a clash of frameworks. The first tweet and the community note operate within a biological framework, while the response operates within a neurological or identity-based framework. The community note concludes that the response is factually incorrect because it attempts to use brain structure as the defining metric for a biological category.

Nathan Cofnas is the one that broke the story about Jason Arday

https://xcancel.com/nathancofnas/status/2079542388389724403

The article he’s talking about has a section about DSDs that I think also covers what his response would be to sterility

However, the existence of such conditions does not undermine the binary nature of sex, because the sex binary does not entail that every individual can be unambiguously categorized as male or female. Rather, the claim is that in anisogamous organisms there are only two gamete types, sperm and ova, and thus only two sexes. Sexual ambiguity is not a third or intermediate sex because developmental variation does not correspond to producing new gamete types.

I think you’re right that people are talking past each other on this. Biologists use gametes because they care about defining sex in a meaningful way when talking about both humans and crabs. We don’t care about crabs using the bathroom though.

IMO the blame is on Cambridge. They had the chance to quietly let him go when it was clear he was both a plagiarist and a fantastic liar.

It’s 2026 and we’re winning the argument and shaping public policy.

This feels true, regardless of the rest. These arguments probably need to be addressed head-on.

EDIT: I should clarify, I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s not really in question

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/26/americans-have-grown-more-supportive-of-restrictions-for-trans-people-in-recent-years/

Not saying they’ve got a point but if someone is shaping public policy, no matter how dumb, you can’t ignore them. Like RFK pushing the circumcision autism thing.

that the inference of genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available.

One of many critical flaws. If you can obscure your intent, it’s not genocide?

The community note speaks for itself. Weird topic to jump in on with a hot take like this

There soon might be at least one

https://xcancel.com/Highway_30/status/2087700989990121532

Genitalia doesn’t determine gender. That’s a cis normative fallacy. My trans-affirming doctor told me I can think of my genitalia as 9 inches of clitoris.

Royce White for President

WNBA #LetHerPlay

It seems unlikely that White is actually trans, tweets like this are obviously not serious. The best defense I’ve seen of this is that right now the WNBA has 0 rules about eligibility, and this will force them to pick some policy. Not sure that that’s a particularly strong defense though.

Hard to say without more context how significant this is, or if it’s standard legal maneuvering. The GC crowd certainly seems to think it’s significant.

oof. I’m used to seeing coded terms like “Israel has a right to defend itself” that are meant to sound reasonable. It’s rare to see full-throated defense of not just Israel but specifically the IDF.

Defense of this from a GC biologist, acknowledging it’s a stunt, but pointing out that the WNBA doesn’t have any written policy. Regardless of what they decide, it seems that it’s time to pick a lane.

https://xcancel.com/FondOfBeetles/status/2086055493533855783

Some policies are ‘hybrid’: inclusive in some domains and exclusive in others, and some use developmental thresholds like whether an athlete went through male puberty.

The point is: the rules are written down.

Not so for the WNBA.

Scientific American is sadly no longer the organization they used to be. Bad headline, it didn’t cite previous work perfectly but still provided a novel result. Here is one of the authors of a paper it built on, talking about the result

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/513866/what-are-the-key-new-ideas-in-the-proof-of-nonsoficity-of-groups-in-openai-s-con

So, that is the proof of Proposition 2.3. It is a creative and at the same time elementary construction that uses not just property (T) for an application of my result with Kun, but also for the ambient group G in order to overcome the problem, that the Γ-components might be of different size. Once this is achieved, the rest of the argument is straightforward.

I think it is too early to judge if this construction will serve any other purpose than providing the right framework to apply these earlier results efficiently. On the other side, I was looking myself for such a mechanism ever since we wrote the paper in 2019 and admire the efficiency of this construction.

First off, thanks for the critique! That’s what this community is for. I’ll admit I went down a bit of a rabbit hole recently, but that’s just how I work and im sure I’ll move on something else. There will probably be a lot of posts about sex and gender in general, because that interests me and also seems to get the most votes here.

I think the history here is interesting, and not as simple as “Blanchard is transphobic” or “AGP is a terf word”. Briefly, Blanchard’s typology was incomplete at best, but the concept of autogynephilia existing is accurate. Some people don’t like the term and some trans authors prefer female/feminine embodiment fantasies, but that’s referring to the same thing and it’s just a dispute about terminology. There’s also other people that embrace the term and identify with it, are they wrong?