I'm not poo-pooing that idea. The issue is the political (mis/dis/ab)use of language in all contexts. This is Nature journal, for goddakes, using the term "man" in a completely obvious biological convention to discuss chromsomal effects on cancer prognosis. They have no reason to latently apologize for that by acknowledging gender sex disparity in this piece.

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It is totally obvious that the usage refers to sex. The title is "How the Y chromosome makes some cancers more deadly for men", how much more obvious could it be?

Pre-emptive edit: Given that this is a press release for a broader audience, rather than the primary research, I suppose there might actually be some readers who don't make the connection between "Y chromosome" and "sex".

Ding ding ding. The research articles being cited both explicitly state "sex" and make no disclaimer.

The statement reads as having been added after the fact due to potential ambiguity by not explicitly stating (gender|sex) once and/or misquoting by the audience intended to be reached ("Nature says gender = sex").

Think of it as men = "people with y chromosome" varible setting, or a "People with y chromosome (hereinafter referred to as men)" in a contract.

The scientifically accurate way to describe the subject of the article is "people with y chromosome" but that is clunky to repeat so they want to designate a shorthand for it, while acknowledging that without proper definition the shorthand would be vague and not accurate description.

I'd think defining your terms clearly is perfectly suitable for a scientific journal.

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To be clear this isn't a research paper, it is a PR news summary designed to be accessible.

> used for thousands of year (in the context of scientific writing)

The Middle English word was "mannen" and in old english "mann" meant roughly the same as we mean with "human" now, i.e. without respect to sex.

I don't think the paragraph will be looked back on as anything except a sign of troubled political times (rather than communicating anything of use with regards to the information in the article) but what you've written is incorrect.

I don’t mean the exact term “men”, just the generic word that is used to describe the concept of men.

Seems like you're redefining the term right now to better suit your argument.

The correlation between Y chromosomes and sexual characteristics wasn't discovered until the early 20th century, so no. For the vast majority of human existence, the term "Men" has been used without reference to any underlying genetic status.

Sure, we didn’t know the relation, but the y-chromosome didn’t spring to existence the moment we discovered it. The point is that whatever we wanted to use the word to describe was clear.

...and was not defined by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. Using genetics to define sex is (by historical standards) extremely new.

It still isn't defined by the presence of absence of the Y chromosome. Some animals have sex defined by incubation temperature; there are species with inbuilt hermaphroditism; male birds are WW, female birds are WZ. Biologically sex is defined by gamete size. It's a construct used to link together behaviours in many different species that are derived from a variety of mechanisms.

My understanding is that in humans that meiosis (production of gamete) begins in females whilst they're embryos whereas in males it only begins at the onset of sexual maturity. I would be interested to know if this is the same in other species because my working theory is that male meiosis is the fuel of evolution because there are more mutations in the male germ line cells. The female gametes having differentiated earlier and undergoing fewer replications provide a working original template as opposed to the male gamete's likelier deleterious replications. One small set of large well provisioned gametes likely to work, many large sets of likely mutated gametes hopefully with some useful mutations amongst the bad ones which can be rooted out by selection.

The fundamental existence of sex is interesting and its implementation is pretty complex. 99.9% of references to it in the "trans debate" are reductionist misrepresentations. Either of mystifying complexity making its existence meaningless or as if an authoritative revelation from an omniscient, omnipotent being.

And it now infects every discussion that we have about sex in humans. It's made sex, one of the most fundamentally interesting (and considering the success of its possessors) facets of life on Earth, torturous to discuss because it has become about the limits of society's ability to limit freedom of conscience, individuals rights to identify, and the right of the individual to self identify. It's narrow, myopic, fundamentally boring in the context of biology.

EDIT: for the record I agree with you in spirit. The rant was my thoughts following on from my minor point of information.

Medical writings have been ascribing disease to bad airs, humors, gods, and curses, head shape, and all kinds of junk for thousands of years, yet somehow we evolved past that, no?

>Men == people with y chromosome is something that has been used for thousands of year (in the context of scientific writing)

The pattern of sexual inheritance in humans was only discovered in the 1920s, and the link between sexual inheritance and the X and Y chromosomes was not discovered until 1959. (Before that, sex was identified based on secondary sex characteristics, which do not perfectly adhere to the XX/XY inheritance system.)

Scientific research journals date back only to the 1600s, and they did not develop the rigorous standards we expect today until the 1800s.

not all men have xy-chromosomes and not all xy-chromosome bearing people are men. it’s really simple, tbh

I get what you're saying, but do you feel that you require that nuance to be acknowledged to understand what the article is getting at with the word "man"?

I miss elegant, succinct language. George Carlin's point about "shellshock" vs "posttraumatic stress disorder" deserves mention here.

Not all dogs have dog chromosomes and not all dog-chromosome bearers are dogs. Some are cats.

It’s really simple, tbh.

It's religious. If you have an opportunity to signify that you're on the right team and don't take it, it casts suspicion on you. Maybe you're one of those dirty transphobes.

The article literally shows in its second paragraph that "XY" entails male is not valid; it describes an extremely common occurrence of cells losing their Y chromosome. For overall humans, when Y is present, and SRY isn't, advocates for chromosomal definitions fall flat. When SRY is present but not expressed, same thing. When SRY is expressed but receptors are insensitive to androgens, chromosomal definitions fall flat again.

Aknowledging that there is a difference between "man" and the XY genotype, and being clear about the definitions the article will employ is not some concession to wokeness. It is a scientist being interested in their tools, their theories, and the limits of them, and an article in Nature is a perfectly appropriate place for this; just as much as we can and do to expect articles in nature to differentiate MSM and "gay man".

> This is Nature journal, for goddakes, using the term "man" in a completely obvious biological convention to discuss chromsomal effects on cancer prognosis.

Its not an “obvious biological convention”, its a simplification that is seen as useful in the context of the article and it is very good to be clear about it, because in the biomedical world (not even considering gender identity issues) things like “a fertile woman with 46,XY karyotype and female phenotype” are actually observed and documented.

I think the issue is that men can clearly observe people in public these days, saying that they are men, when they are clearly not men, and are women, without ambiguity or any intersex condition. You are not able to say this to them without offense and thus... tension right?

Wittgenstein would have such a field day with the semantic games we're playing these days. The disclaimer basically says: "man" has a purely subjective meaning, but we're going to keep using the word anyway because we know you know what we mean objectively. Kind of funny if you think about it. I think that's what the (̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶n̶u̶k̶e̶d̶) comment was pointing out.

It’s a wee bit silly given that the article has “Y chromosome” all over it. But this is an article about cancer, and one could just as easily imagine that testosterone levels, or estrogen levels, or amounts of various types of tissue, etc could affect incidence of various types of cancer.

For example, brief searching found:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitiv...

XY people with this condition have rather different cancer risk profiles than the general population of XX cis females or XY cis males.

Sure, but their gonads don't produce eggs.

They're socially female and in many ways physically female, but from a reproductive perspective (the reason for sexual dimorphism in the first place) they're not female.

They're males with transformative hormonal disorders.

Also, arguments regarding legitimate medical issues like this and CAIS are completely orthogonal to the ideological reason behind the caveat on the article.

I’m sorry, it’s not clear to me who you’re talking about

Then we both get to be confused by each other's comments.

The article is talking about colorectal cancer and bladder cancer, y chromosome owners can get those cancers too whether or not they have female phenotype or not.

I was replying to a subject forked sub-thread, so what I said isn't directly applicable to the article.

So by your own argument, are men that are infertile not men, then? If so, then I believe we have quite the reckoning with how many people think they're men when they're not.

They're not complete men.

They're the whimper at the end of a 4,000,000,000 year long bloodline (I say blood). Our ability to replicate is and ever has been and will remain the primary guiding factor of our evolution.

The meek be damned, it's the fertile who shall inherit the earth.

Swyer syndrome is exceedingly rare. Where else do we muddy the waters of understanding for a 1 in 100,000 exception?

Some people are born with only one arm. It is for this reason that we can no longer describe humans as having two arms. /s

I will steal this one.

Reminds me of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone. He mentioned it doesn’t need a stylus, but something all of us are born with!

However, if it turned out that having two arms meant you were at a higher risk for a specific cancer, you would probably describe it as 'two arms leads to higher rate of X cancer' rather than 'all humans are at higher risk of X cancer' because it's burying the lede.

If it's so rare that it needs to be explicit defined as a medical syndrome, a disclaimer should be unneeded.

Biological sex is a pretty clear and straightforward concept if you don't happen to be girded up for ideological battle around it. The idea that clear semantic categories somehow lose validity if they're fuzzy at the edges is unique to the gender wars; no one seems to find it problematic to talk about sandwiches, or childhood, or the fruit/vegetable binary, all of which are way muddier categories than sex.

Is anyone seriously debating that sex isn't binary?

Gender being different from sex is not a new concept, from the 2001 IOM report (predating the "gender wars"):

The committee defines sex as the classification of living things, generally as male or female according to their reproductive organs and functions assigned by the chromosomal complement, and gender as a person’s self-representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presen- tation. Gender is shaped by environment and experience.

Not much has changed regarding sex from 2001, we've expanded the definition of gender which is clearly much more complicated.

http://elibrary.pcu.edu.ph:9000/digi/NA02/2001/10028.pdf

There indeed are many people pushing the idea that sex isn't binary using things like Disorders of Sexual Development (intersex), other species that can change sex like clownfish (pretending this says something about humans), and also creating confusion between sex and gender and conflating them (such as how your sex is listed on ID, but people claim a gender, such as the opposite sex or non-binary, and have that gender listed as their sex).

I should have been clearer, sex is generally binary there are obviously rare exceptions like chromosomal abnormalities.

Who's making these arguments? A quick Google scholar was not fruitful, do you have any sources or is this a fringe minority?

> such as how your sex is listed on ID

This presupposes that sex be listed on ID rather than gender. I don't follow this in the news so I'm not sure what the arguments are but at face value using the IOM definition from 2001 ("how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presentation.") gender seems like the more appropriate choice for identification.

Scientific American is probably the most prominent exponent of the novel idea that binary sex is an oversimplification and sex is in fact a spectrum. The claim is ubiquitous and held as dogma in online circles that it seems the protecting hand of a merciful God has so far shielded you from.

> Fewer than 100 cases have been reported as of 2018.

Irrelevant.

They explicitly say that men=people with Y chromosomes in this article.

Then they talks about “men” loosing the Y chromosome in some cells.

“As men age, the proportion of Y-less blood cells increases, and an abundance of such cells has been linked to conditions including heart disease, neurodegenerative conditions and some cancers.”

Sex and gender are lumped together in English and this creates some vagueness. Especially in the paragraph where they’re indicating that “lifestyle” plays a role in those differences in cancer rates.