I never said otherwise. What is your point? We are discussing JK Rowling’s erroneous claim.
I think you should do some self reflection on why it’s so important to you that this conversation shift away from the OP towards everyone acknowledging your point the definition of biological sex. Nobody here ever disagreed with you on the meaning of the words in scientific contexts.
You were incorrect to state this, and why I clarified:
By jk’s definition that person is a woman. Which is wrong.
Some people want to define woman as something other than “adult female human”, but it’s incorrect to rely on a redefinition of the word to declare her wrong, when she wouldn’t agree with that redefinition in the first place.
TBH the meme in the OP is silly anyways, because it’s clear that she was talking about humans in this context, unlike the original “behold a man” reference. When talking about about humans, Rowling is entirely correct.
No. She’s very much wrong. Human men can be born with non-functional ovaries. Her statement is factually inaccurate. She didn’t say anything about gametes or chromosomes. She said “born with egg producing equipment, even faulty”. That is a VERY specific phrasing and she is wrong.
You are obviously just trying to force a conversation about term usage and insisting that the words we use for both gender and sex should only ever be considered under the sex-based definition.
Language changes constantly. It’s all made up, literally. Words mean what the populace uses them to mean.
Lastly, nobody in this thread is arguing the science. If you’re talking to me, talk to me instead of building a straw man that’s easy to feel superior to. I get that calling trans women women makes you uncomfortable. Get over it. Stop trying to shift the conversation to a framing that puts you on sturdier ground when it isn’t what people are talking about.
JK Rowling’s a TERF. She makes factually inaccurate statements (e.g. the tweet in the OP). That isn’t up for debate. It’s self evident. If you want to have a conversation about science deniers, do it somewhere else. Because nobody here is denying the science except Rowling.
Language changes and that’s great. It’s intellectually dishonest to rely on a redefinition that someone wouldn’t agree with to “prove” them wrong. You’re essentially saying “If I define equals as not equals, then your statement that 1 + 1 = 2 is clearly false, ha!”
Our language changing doesn’t affect the reality of biological sex, and relying on a redefinition of “woman” that isn’t based on biological sex to “prove” someone wrong that wouldn’t agree with that redefinition in the first place isn’t a serious argument. She’s clearly using the common definition as “adult female human” that most people still use.
No, that’s not clear at all and you’re the only one here who thinks she’s talking about chromosomes and gametes. YOU’RE doing that. She is a fucking TERF, has shown it repeatedly, and she doesn’t think trans people are real or have a right to exist. She won’t use preferred pronouns for someone who identified as a gender that doesn’t match their sex.
We’ve been using “man” and “woman” to talk about gender and sex for a long, long time. YOU don’t get to decide that only one half of that reality is valid and tell people “you can’t use ‘woman’ to talk about your gender. That’s reserved for sex now”
I’m not really sure how you can say “She’s a TERF” and also “She’s not using the sex-based definition” with a straight face. Clearly she’s using that definition, because she’s a TERF. How is that something to argue over?
It’s not hard to understand. She is a TERF. Her statement was that she believes people with female sex characteristics must also be female gendered. It’s blatantly obvious to everyone but you.
TERFs use the sex-based definition of the word “woman”. That’s like, the whole point of being a TERF. She’s doing so right in the OP screenshot, saying “if <you are female>, it’s proof you are a woman”. I can’t spell it out more clearly to you than redirecting you to literally the OP, in which Rowling does precisely that.
That doesn’t mean you have to agree with the definition, that’s just a simple statement of fact.
You clearly disagree with the definition of “woman” that she’s using, which is fine. But you can’t invalidate her argument by relying on a definition she doesn’t agree with in the first place.
So you’re saying her post was an attempt to say that only female sex people have ovaries? A factually inaccurate statement? Or is it that female sex people with a non-functioning uterus are still female sex, a position that nobody is arguing against?
You’re being willfully blind to her bigotry at this point
The core idea she’s presenting is wrong, (even in your interpretation) because biological sex is not binary. Computers are binary, biology rarely is.
There are biological males, biological females, and there are perfectly normal people who fit into ‘biologically neither’ (intersex people). Just because you have ovaries, does not make you female. Women typically have ovaries, but not always. Women typically have cells containing two X chromosomes, but not always. According to the current definition and overwhelming scientific consensus in the relevant fields, having neither of those things does not preclude you from being a female or a woman.
JKR seeks to rewrite terminology to exclude a significant swath of the population from the definition, not the other way around. From many, many statements and actions she’s taken, her primary drive to do this seems to be hatred and bigotry.
Sorry, but that’s simply incorrect. The overwhelming consensus in the field of biology is that sex is entirely defined by gametes and nothing else. Intersex people are either male or female with DSDs. Here’s a biologist stating the obvious
Across anisogamous species, the existence of two—and only two—sexes has been a settled matter in modern biology. […] Here I synthesize evolutionary and developmental evidence to demonstrate that sex is binary (i.e., there are only two sexes) in all anisogamous species and that males and females are defined universally by the type of gamete they have the biological function to produce—not by karyotypes, secondary sexual characteristics, or other correlates.
That’s the point of separating the idea of gender from sex. Gender captures the complex social aspects of sex, which remains binary and immutable.
And if you don’t like that guy, here’s a statement affirming the same signed by lots of people:
Your first reference is Colin M Wright, whom is a conservative anti-trans activist. Why would I believe him to be a good source? The second blog link is for a petition by two other anti-trans activists - Emma Hilton, a founding member of Sex Matters, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Matters_(advocacy_group)) and Ms Jenny Whyte, NZ activist whom I can only find notable for denying her group had involvement with vandalizing a local MPs office with anti-trans graffiti… (Won’t bother linking it).
I don’t really understand how you can assert a binary system exists, when there are many individuals (between 0.018% to 1.7% depending on definition of intersex) that simply do not fit the binary definition, having a genotype that doesn’t match male XY or female XX. That’s not what a ‘binary’ is.
Colin Wright and Emma Hilton are well-qualified to talk about the biological basis of sex, with phds in evolutionary biology and developmental biology, respectively. Project Nettie isn’t about who started it (though Emma Hilton is certainly qualified), it’s about collecting signatories with relevant credentials, which you should feel fee to peruse. The great thing about science though is that you don’t have to trust credentials. The linked paper conveniently cites many other works to support every claim, and in fact cites and refutes several of your links:
Hodgepodge of silly arguments that fall into the above bucket, and also some that aren’t even science like “A definition of sex that begins and ends with anisogamy is going to be simply not very useful because it will exclude people who need to be included”
Relies on people with the credentials of “transgender activist” and “independent scholar” (will you disregard those like you do “anti-trans activists”?). It also cites Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is deeply unserious. When called out on her bullshit, she claimed she was just being tongue-in-cheek and ironic:
Shes also the source of your 1.7% intersex claim (also seen as “intersex is as common as redheads”) and was completely wrong on that as well and should have known better. She’s a clown.
Again, genotype is simply not how sex is defined. Those intersex people still fall within the binary definition because sex is defined by gametes, not genotype. They’re examples of variations within the sex binary. Sex is binary because there are precisely two types of gametes in anisogamous species. Even your links acknowledge this indisputable fact.
Also here’s Jerry Coyne commenting on the paper and adding additional insight:
Cool, so ‘oh I didn’t mean ovaries’ (like in the fricken OP that were discussing), ‘I didn’t mean chromosomes’ (because oh dear they are very much a spectrum), actually “sex is defined by gametes”, and it’s not a spectrum because gametes are either big or small. Keep in mind that this definition is literally ‘males have the smaller gametes, females have the larger ones’. For starters, that’s not a binary system. You will find no mention of the word ‘binary’ in the Wikipedia articles on Sex, Anisogamy, Gamete because it’s a not an observed binary system. The people insisting it’s binary have a political agenda, as I have made clear (outwardly TERF and anti-trans activists). I’m sure you’ll say the same for those I have referenced though so that doesn’t get us far.
So for the sake of the discussion, let’s say I accept your definiton that sex is a binary and that humans only fit into male with smaller gametes and female with larger gametes.
Now explain where people who are born without the ability to create gametes fall into the ‘sex binary’.
I look forward to reading the next shifting of the goalposts to affirm that a binary exists.
So the fundamental definition is that sex is defined as the type of gametes that one’s body is organized around producing. Everything flows from there.
If someone is born without the ability to produce gametes they still fall into the binary, because their body is still organized around the production of one of exactly two options, sperm or ova. Their body still has structures for producing those gametes, and if not for a developmental issue, would produce those gametes. There is nobody whose body just doesn’t have the concept of gamete production. Nobody is healthy and mature and simply lacks any structures related to gamete production.
Going backwards from there, chromosomes are merely how sex is determined in humans. It has a strong correlation with sex, which is why people often use it as a shorthand, but it’s technically incorrect to define sex that way. The reason it’s how sex is determined is because humans are very different than other animals such as chickens, with ZW chromosomes, or alligators that have sex determined by the temperature as they incubate. The animal kingdom varies drastically in how sex is determined, and it would be impossible to find any universal way of talking about sex if you tried to define it through that lens, to speak nothing of plants.
So how do we know which animals and plants are male or female? Through the type of gametes they produce! That definition is universal across all anisogamous species, and provides an explanatory framework for higher level abstractions like behavior. We can talk about how female hyenas have a pseudopenis. How do we know they’re female? Because they produce the larger of two gamete types. Male seahorses can get pregnant. How do we know they’re male then? Because they produce the smaller of two gamete types. Sex has also evolved several times independently in very different ways, and was clearly highly selected for. We can’t talk about why that is by obscuring sex and talking about anything other than gametes.
Going back to the OP, ovaries can be used as shorthand for gametes, because it’s correct 99.999+% of the time in humans. It’s not moving the goalposts to talk about sex through gonads, it’s just a slightly-technically-incorrect way. It’s really the case of ovotestes that needs particular consideration, and when gamete production matters more than gonads. Ovotestes doesn’t disprove the sex binary either, because it’s not “perfectly healthy mature ovaries and testes” as you might think, it’s “maybe a somewhat function gonad, with bits of non-functional streak tissue of the other gonad”. Much like above, nobody’s body is organized around the production of both gametes. It’s not impossible that it could happen someday, through science or evolution. Other species are hermaphroditic and produce both gametes, but not humans. Even if you found somebody technically capable of producing both gametes due to some rare ovotestes situation, they’re still missing the rest of the body organization for the second gamete (and probably the first), unlike those hermaphroditic species that are organized around the production of both gametes. In other words, if you graft an ovary into a man, that doesn’t make him a hermaphrodite, it just makes him a man with an ovary grafted onto him.
Now as far as the binary goes, the simplest way I can explain it is that the type is binary, even though each type has variation in it. If you have a vending machine that dispenses either juice or crackers, there’s a binary option of juice or crackers, even though the juice and crackers aren’t each perfectly the same as each other in their category. There’s exactly 0 overlap, just like there’s exactly 0 overlap in sperm and ova. This is backed up by the links you posted as well (in order of which you linked them):
The bottom line is that while animal gametes can be described as binary (of two distinct kinds) […]
In your piece ‘Sex Redefined’ are you making the claim there are more than 2 sexes?
No, not at all. Two sexes, with a continuum of variation in anatomy/physiology.
Both arguments demonstrate that from the fact of two types of gametes […]
Some people who advance a binary view of sex have embraced a concept called anisogamy, which defines sex according to gametes—reproductive cells such as sperm and eggs. Anisogamy says that an organism is male if it produces small, mobile gametes and female if it has large, immobile gametes.
In the Wikipedia articles for Anisogamy and others, you’ll see text like “Anisogamy is a form of sexual reproduction that involves the union or fusion of two gametes that differ in size and/or form”. This is a binary, because there are two options.
Nobody is disputing the binary nature of gametes in anisogamous species, not even people wanting to redefine sex. They’re just pushing for a definition of sex that isn’t gamete-based. The reason you see biology as a field pushing back is because then you lose a useful description of reality. Biologists would quickly invent a new term that described what sex does now.
I never said otherwise. What is your point? We are discussing JK Rowling’s erroneous claim.
I think you should do some self reflection on why it’s so important to you that this conversation shift away from the OP towards everyone acknowledging your point the definition of biological sex. Nobody here ever disagreed with you on the meaning of the words in scientific contexts.
You were incorrect to state this, and why I clarified:
Some people want to define woman as something other than “adult female human”, but it’s incorrect to rely on a redefinition of the word to declare her wrong, when she wouldn’t agree with that redefinition in the first place.
TBH the meme in the OP is silly anyways, because it’s clear that she was talking about humans in this context, unlike the original “behold a man” reference. When talking about about humans, Rowling is entirely correct.
No. She’s very much wrong. Human men can be born with non-functional ovaries. Her statement is factually inaccurate. She didn’t say anything about gametes or chromosomes. She said “born with egg producing equipment, even faulty”. That is a VERY specific phrasing and she is wrong.
You are obviously just trying to force a conversation about term usage and insisting that the words we use for both gender and sex should only ever be considered under the sex-based definition.
Language changes constantly. It’s all made up, literally. Words mean what the populace uses them to mean.
Lastly, nobody in this thread is arguing the science. If you’re talking to me, talk to me instead of building a straw man that’s easy to feel superior to. I get that calling trans women women makes you uncomfortable. Get over it. Stop trying to shift the conversation to a framing that puts you on sturdier ground when it isn’t what people are talking about.
JK Rowling’s a TERF. She makes factually inaccurate statements (e.g. the tweet in the OP). That isn’t up for debate. It’s self evident. If you want to have a conversation about science deniers, do it somewhere else. Because nobody here is denying the science except Rowling.
Language changes and that’s great. It’s intellectually dishonest to rely on a redefinition that someone wouldn’t agree with to “prove” them wrong. You’re essentially saying “If I define equals as not equals, then your statement that 1 + 1 = 2 is clearly false, ha!”
Our language changing doesn’t affect the reality of biological sex, and relying on a redefinition of “woman” that isn’t based on biological sex to “prove” someone wrong that wouldn’t agree with that redefinition in the first place isn’t a serious argument. She’s clearly using the common definition as “adult female human” that most people still use.
No, that’s not clear at all and you’re the only one here who thinks she’s talking about chromosomes and gametes. YOU’RE doing that. She is a fucking TERF, has shown it repeatedly, and she doesn’t think trans people are real or have a right to exist. She won’t use preferred pronouns for someone who identified as a gender that doesn’t match their sex.
We’ve been using “man” and “woman” to talk about gender and sex for a long, long time. YOU don’t get to decide that only one half of that reality is valid and tell people “you can’t use ‘woman’ to talk about your gender. That’s reserved for sex now”
I’m not really sure how you can say “She’s a TERF” and also “She’s not using the sex-based definition” with a straight face. Clearly she’s using that definition, because she’s a TERF. How is that something to argue over?
It’s not hard to understand. She is a TERF. Her statement was that she believes people with female sex characteristics must also be female gendered. It’s blatantly obvious to everyone but you.
TERFs use the sex-based definition of the word “woman”. That’s like, the whole point of being a TERF. She’s doing so right in the OP screenshot, saying “if <you are female>, it’s proof you are a woman”. I can’t spell it out more clearly to you than redirecting you to literally the OP, in which Rowling does precisely that.
That doesn’t mean you have to agree with the definition, that’s just a simple statement of fact.
You clearly disagree with the definition of “woman” that she’s using, which is fine. But you can’t invalidate her argument by relying on a definition she doesn’t agree with in the first place.
So you’re saying her post was an attempt to say that only female sex people have ovaries? A factually inaccurate statement? Or is it that female sex people with a non-functioning uterus are still female sex, a position that nobody is arguing against?
You’re being willfully blind to her bigotry at this point
The core idea she’s presenting is wrong, (even in your interpretation) because biological sex is not binary. Computers are binary, biology rarely is.
There are biological males, biological females, and there are perfectly normal people who fit into ‘biologically neither’ (intersex people). Just because you have ovaries, does not make you female. Women typically have ovaries, but not always. Women typically have cells containing two X chromosomes, but not always. According to the current definition and overwhelming scientific consensus in the relevant fields, having neither of those things does not preclude you from being a female or a woman.
JKR seeks to rewrite terminology to exclude a significant swath of the population from the definition, not the other way around. From many, many statements and actions she’s taken, her primary drive to do this seems to be hatred and bigotry.
Sorry, but that’s simply incorrect. The overwhelming consensus in the field of biology is that sex is entirely defined by gametes and nothing else. Intersex people are either male or female with DSDs. Here’s a biologist stating the obvious
That’s the point of separating the idea of gender from sex. Gender captures the complex social aspects of sex, which remains binary and immutable.
And if you don’t like that guy, here’s a statement affirming the same signed by lots of people:
https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/
Your first reference is Colin M Wright, whom is a conservative anti-trans activist. Why would I believe him to be a good source? The second blog link is for a petition by two other anti-trans activists - Emma Hilton, a founding member of Sex Matters, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Matters_(advocacy_group)) and Ms Jenny Whyte, NZ activist whom I can only find notable for denying her group had involvement with vandalizing a local MPs office with anti-trans graffiti… (Won’t bother linking it).
I don’t really understand how you can assert a binary system exists, when there are many individuals (between 0.018% to 1.7% depending on definition of intersex) that simply do not fit the binary definition, having a genotype that doesn’t match male XY or female XX. That’s not what a ‘binary’ is.
Several major biology publishers agree with me.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/genomics/Scientists-reject-binary-view-human/102/i33
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/medgen-2023-2039/html
Colin Wright and Emma Hilton are well-qualified to talk about the biological basis of sex, with phds in evolutionary biology and developmental biology, respectively. Project Nettie isn’t about who started it (though Emma Hilton is certainly qualified), it’s about collecting signatories with relevant credentials, which you should feel fee to peruse. The great thing about science though is that you don’t have to trust credentials. The linked paper conveniently cites many other works to support every claim, and in fact cites and refutes several of your links:
Hodgepodge of silly arguments that fall into the above bucket, and also some that aren’t even science like “A definition of sex that begins and ends with anisogamy is going to be simply not very useful because it will exclude people who need to be included”
Relies on people with the credentials of “transgender activist” and “independent scholar” (will you disregard those like you do “anti-trans activists”?). It also cites Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is deeply unserious. When called out on her bullshit, she claimed she was just being tongue-in-cheek and ironic:
Shes also the source of your 1.7% intersex claim (also seen as “intersex is as common as redheads”) and was completely wrong on that as well and should have known better. She’s a clown.
Again, genotype is simply not how sex is defined. Those intersex people still fall within the binary definition because sex is defined by gametes, not genotype. They’re examples of variations within the sex binary. Sex is binary because there are precisely two types of gametes in anisogamous species. Even your links acknowledge this indisputable fact.
Also here’s Jerry Coyne commenting on the paper and adding additional insight:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/11/06/once-again-why-there-are-two-sexes-and-no-more/
Cool, so ‘oh I didn’t mean ovaries’ (like in the fricken OP that were discussing), ‘I didn’t mean chromosomes’ (because oh dear they are very much a spectrum), actually “sex is defined by gametes”, and it’s not a spectrum because gametes are either big or small. Keep in mind that this definition is literally ‘males have the smaller gametes, females have the larger ones’. For starters, that’s not a binary system. You will find no mention of the word ‘binary’ in the Wikipedia articles on Sex, Anisogamy, Gamete because it’s a not an observed binary system. The people insisting it’s binary have a political agenda, as I have made clear (outwardly TERF and anti-trans activists). I’m sure you’ll say the same for those I have referenced though so that doesn’t get us far.
So for the sake of the discussion, let’s say I accept your definiton that sex is a binary and that humans only fit into male with smaller gametes and female with larger gametes.
Now explain where people who are born without the ability to create gametes fall into the ‘sex binary’.
I look forward to reading the next shifting of the goalposts to affirm that a binary exists.
So the fundamental definition is that sex is defined as the type of gametes that one’s body is organized around producing. Everything flows from there.
If someone is born without the ability to produce gametes they still fall into the binary, because their body is still organized around the production of one of exactly two options, sperm or ova. Their body still has structures for producing those gametes, and if not for a developmental issue, would produce those gametes. There is nobody whose body just doesn’t have the concept of gamete production. Nobody is healthy and mature and simply lacks any structures related to gamete production.
Going backwards from there, chromosomes are merely how sex is determined in humans. It has a strong correlation with sex, which is why people often use it as a shorthand, but it’s technically incorrect to define sex that way. The reason it’s how sex is determined is because humans are very different than other animals such as chickens, with ZW chromosomes, or alligators that have sex determined by the temperature as they incubate. The animal kingdom varies drastically in how sex is determined, and it would be impossible to find any universal way of talking about sex if you tried to define it through that lens, to speak nothing of plants.
So how do we know which animals and plants are male or female? Through the type of gametes they produce! That definition is universal across all anisogamous species, and provides an explanatory framework for higher level abstractions like behavior. We can talk about how female hyenas have a pseudopenis. How do we know they’re female? Because they produce the larger of two gamete types. Male seahorses can get pregnant. How do we know they’re male then? Because they produce the smaller of two gamete types. Sex has also evolved several times independently in very different ways, and was clearly highly selected for. We can’t talk about why that is by obscuring sex and talking about anything other than gametes.
Going back to the OP, ovaries can be used as shorthand for gametes, because it’s correct 99.999+% of the time in humans. It’s not moving the goalposts to talk about sex through gonads, it’s just a slightly-technically-incorrect way. It’s really the case of ovotestes that needs particular consideration, and when gamete production matters more than gonads. Ovotestes doesn’t disprove the sex binary either, because it’s not “perfectly healthy mature ovaries and testes” as you might think, it’s “maybe a somewhat function gonad, with bits of non-functional streak tissue of the other gonad”. Much like above, nobody’s body is organized around the production of both gametes. It’s not impossible that it could happen someday, through science or evolution. Other species are hermaphroditic and produce both gametes, but not humans. Even if you found somebody technically capable of producing both gametes due to some rare ovotestes situation, they’re still missing the rest of the body organization for the second gamete (and probably the first), unlike those hermaphroditic species that are organized around the production of both gametes. In other words, if you graft an ovary into a man, that doesn’t make him a hermaphrodite, it just makes him a man with an ovary grafted onto him.
Now as far as the binary goes, the simplest way I can explain it is that the type is binary, even though each type has variation in it. If you have a vending machine that dispenses either juice or crackers, there’s a binary option of juice or crackers, even though the juice and crackers aren’t each perfectly the same as each other in their category. There’s exactly 0 overlap, just like there’s exactly 0 overlap in sperm and ova. This is backed up by the links you posted as well (in order of which you linked them):
Nobody is disputing the binary nature of gametes in anisogamous species, not even people wanting to redefine sex. They’re just pushing for a definition of sex that isn’t gamete-based. The reason you see biology as a field pushing back is because then you lose a useful description of reality. Biologists would quickly invent a new term that described what sex does now.