Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

How Sex Became Gender The modern denial of biology undermines an essential part of the human story. by Robert Lynch Jim Gaffigan has this joke about a scientist who mistakes the male seahorse for the female and then stubbornly refuses to admit his mistake after learning that the one he’d called the male is pregnant. It’s a funny bit, but it hinges on a common misunderstanding that sex designations are arbitrary. The biological definition of males and females is entirely based on the size of the sex cells, called gametes, that they produce. Males produce the smaller gametes and females produce the larger ones. When scientists discover a new sexually reproducing species, gamete size is how they determine the sexes. In humans, males release between 200 and 500 million tiny sperm in each ejaculation while females have a lifetime supply of around 400, much larger, eggs. This initial asymmetry in gamete size may not seem like a big deal, but it leads to a whole cascade of evolutionary effects that result in diverging paths for each sex, which we call sexual selection. If male and female bothers you, call them little and big, but regardless of what you call them, this foundational cell-sized difference in gamete size has profound effects on both evolution and behavior. Continued (with an important afterword...): https://losthorizons.com/N/200.htm#4