Science, Exceptions, Intersex, and Transgender

Its been awhile since I wrote an article that was responding to a response to another one of my articles — and coincidentally enough, the response that I want to respond to is responding to one of my articles responding to a response to one of my articles. Basically, a fellow by the name of Rex Kerr spent over one thousand words responding to my article “Let’s Talk About Scientific Exceptions.” In the article, I address criticism of a previous article on the topic of gametes, specifically talking about the notion that the existence of intersex people does prove that biological sex is not fully binary.

One of the main points of the article is that dismissing anything — regardless of how small — as a scientific exception and therefore ignoring it is very dishonest, and I show various ways where such a method could easily be abused. However, according to Rex, this is actually an example of me tricking my readers by using numbers:

Firstly, you use (hopefully unwittingly) a cognitive trick to make people’s intuitions mislead them about whether an exception is rare (inherently a concept about frequency) by converting to numbers (where people have poor intuitions) and rank in a set where people have poor intuitions about distribution of sizes.