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 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.
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 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.
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.