In all likelihood, you've heard about the controversy that surrounded author J.K. Rowling last year and may have noticed that discussion continue in some circles to the present day.
As the BBC reported, this matter centered around tweets that saw critics accuse Rowling of making transphobic statements as well as supporting similar behavior in others. In response, she claimed to "speak the truth" about biological sex and accused her critics of trying to erase the very concept.
As Scientific American reported, however, such rhetoric tends to assume that the way scientists understand biological sex involves a rigid and clear-cut female/male binary. Yet as this article outlines, research into everything from brain structure to chromosomal and hormonal development does not support this way of conceptualizing how people come to exist.
And as one biology professor took to Twitter to explain, "biological sex" is more difficult to define and involves more variables and factors than those claiming to fight against the erasure of this concept tend to assume it does.