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The statement you are quoting first appears after a paragraph talking about lifestyle and not the first usage of the word which could create ambiguity. The article also does not make an explicit reference to "sex" or "gender" at any point.
> The issue is the political (mis/dis/ab)use of language in all contexts.
While there may be some truth to this statement, this article isn't a particularly striking example.
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".
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").
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.
In the context of this paper, no one is gonna ask “what do you mean by men” if you remove that disclaimer. Sure, another paper that discuss some social issues with men might have to clarify whether it is the y-chromosome men or all men, but this isn’t the case here
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 miss elegant, succinct language. George Carlin's point about "shellshock" vs "posttraumatic stress disorder" deserves mention here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Irrelevant.
The term “man” is understood by a very broad swath of society, and overwhelmingly the educated class who writes for and reads these journals, to refer to the gender construct, not the biological fact. Clarity is always better.
Are you saying that without the clarification, readers might be confused by what's implied by "man" here?
Do we have to add this everywhere we use the term "man" now?
No; the journal article made the clarification because it was intentionally using the incorrect, not widely-understood definition ("people with a Y chromosome") for brevity. This group includes cis men, trans women, and — perhaps most surprisingly — XY people born intersex with "enough" feminine primary sexual characteristics at birth that they were then assigned to be female through genital surgery and lifelong estrogen injections. You might grow up all your life as female, and yet be more prone to these cancers, because you happen to have a Y chromosome — i.e. because you are "a man", in the chosen terminology of the paper. This is not how the word "man" is normally used!
Without context? Literally, never.
When interpreting a study like this, the results should not be taken to be to be reliable when applied to trans men, to intersex individuals, or to anyone that exists with other rare conditions.
A study dealing in averages cannot describe those edge cases by definition. That's why it's amusing to have it be pointed out, as it's self evident.
They could apply to trans women, so it’s a worthwhile thing to clarify.