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Across the U.S., legislators are debating how and when sex and gender should be discussed in the classroom and beyond. Specifically,\u00a0these bills<\/a>\u00a0are considering whether anything beyond male or female can be included in library books and lesson plans. These bills are part of a larger debate on how to define and regulate sex and gender, and there are no immediate answers that satisfy everyone.<\/p>\n Many of the bills draw on science to make claims about sex and gender. For example,\u00a0Florida House Bill 1069<\/a>, which legislates pronoun use in schools, assumes that all of a person\u2019s sex markers \u2013 listed as sex chromosomes, \u201cnaturally occurring\u201d sex hormones and internal and external genitalia at birth \u2013 will align as female or male \u201cbased on the organization of the body \u2026 for a specific reproductive role.\u201d The bill claims that \u201ca person\u2019s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person\u2019s sex.\u201d<\/p>\n Invoking biology is a way to sound objective, but it\u2019s not so simple. Science itself is still grappling with the nature of sex and gender.<\/p>\n My co-author Sam Long and I are\u00a0high school<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0college science educators<\/a>\u00a0who research how to\u00a0increase student motivation, interest and retention in biology<\/a>. Our work and that of our colleagues show that teaching sex and gender more accurately in classrooms benefits not only gender-diverse students but all students and the field of science.<\/p>\n Bills like Florida\u2019s define sex as a binary set of biological traits. But scientists know that sex is far more complicated.<\/p>\n In nature, there is a\u00a0huge diversity<\/a>\u00a0in how sexes are arranged within bodies. For example, the sex of some organisms is classified by the size of their gametes, or sperm and eggs. Some species produce both gametes in one body. Some change whether they produce sperm or eggs over their lifetime. Others technically don\u2019t have a sex at all.<\/p>\n Sex in humans is actually an\u00a0amalgamation of many traits<\/a>, which include the type of gametes a person produces as well as their reproductive tract anatomy, hormone levels and secondary sex characteristics like hair growth and chest shape. These traits are determined not just by a few genes on the X and Y chromosomes but also by a\u00a0myriad of genes<\/a>\u00a0on other chromosomes as well as the\u00a0developmental environment<\/a>. When\u00a0many genes<\/a>\u00a0contribute to a trait, it appears as a continuum.<\/p>\n The continuum of human sex is illustrated by the experiences of intersex individuals. For nearly two out of every 100 people, a binary definition of sex\u00a0would not work<\/a>. People\u00a0who are intersex<\/a>\u00a0don\u2019t have chromosomes, hormones or internal and external genitalia that completely match cultural expectations of what males and females should look like. Under these bills, what pronouns would they be allowed to use? There is\u00a0no universal scientific rule<\/a>\u00a0for pronoun assignment.<\/p>\nScience of sex and gender<\/strong><\/h4>\n