I don't think this article does a very good job expressing the nature of the disagreement among people who are actually thoughtful.

You will find some people ignoring and distorting facts to try to make it sound like sexual differentiation is like a properly-working light-switch: two, exactly two, always, unambiguously, nothing else, ever.

You will find some people ignoring and distorting facts to try to make it sound like sexual differentiation is anything goes, a full spectrum where dividing things into male and female makes about as much sense as dividing all colors into "hot colors" and "cold colors".

But then you'll find people who acknowledge something like the actual complexity of the matter--like much of biology, it usually works out like this but occasionally goes like that, or that, or that, or that, or.... And there are people on both sides of this, too, and too many of them fail to have the intellectual integrity to avoid trying to paint their opponents as the type who are merely ignoring and distorting facts.

This means that the core disagreement barely gets any attention at all--with even the people who see the reality of it more still often misrepresenting the science, just more subtly, to try to paint their opponents as one of the bad, dumb, fact-deniers.

The core complaint of the Dawkins types, which doesn't even get properly acknowledged by the likes of Novella despite Novella pretty much describing the reality of the matter correctly, is that the frequency and magnitude of exceptions is extremely important when deciding how to talk about something. Reality is hard enough to understand--science is hard enough to make progress in--when we pick the very most effective means of description at our disposal, much less if we intentionally choose bad ways of describing phenomena in the hopes that the warped descriptions will help us solve social problems.

Did you know that gravity isn't the same in Chicago as in Los Angeles? It's true! But does that mean that the effective, minimally-misleading way to talk about gravity is "Chicago gravity" and "Los Angeles gravity"? Not at all! The reason is because although they aren't the same, they are almost the same. There's almost never a case where you have to worry about the 0.1% difference. It's just gravity at the surface of the Earth, and in rare cases where you need to apply a correction factor, absolutely--apply the correction factor. But the overwhelmingly parsimonious way to talk about it is that g is a constant at the Earth's surface.

Novella pretty much sweeps this under the rug in his response, which would make it very disappointing if Coyne hadn't done an even worse job of responding to Novella's points. Coyne's response doesn't even get Novella's position right. Novella, as far as I can tell (which is not definitive because the videos don't seem to be posted yet), gets Coyne's mistakes right, but doesn't--not anywhere I've seen--actually address the anti-scientific newspeak tendencies that raise Coyne's hackles (and those of other skeptics) to begin with.

What, pray tell, is "assigned female at birth" but "Chicago gravity"? Novella, as a scientist, has a duty to explain that because of the rates and magnitude of DSD, this type of phrasing is highly misleading. A child's sex is declared on the basis of an observation which is rarely mistaken. Because it's biology there will be a few ambiguous cases and because it's also a human endeavor there will be a few mistakes and arbitrary declarations made. But fundamentally the assignment aspect of it is almost never relevant. It's like saying someone has been assigned as cancer-having instead of having a diagnosis of cancer--in fact, cancer diagnosis is gotten wrong at least an order of magnitude more often than is there anything to do with sex but report what it is because things went normally, and observably so, like they normally do.

But I haven't ever seen Novella do this--maybe he has and I just can't find it, but it sure would be off-brand for him. He's doing the "it's complicated!" thing, which is fine, but a lot less fine when the implication is that because we can't perfectly define what makes something a chair, you can't ever sue the manufacturer for misleading advertising if they say they're selling you a chair. This isn't okay even if there are a lot of spurious lawsuits over three-legged "chairs". The answer to "people cause problems by (claiming to be) confused this way" is not "so be confused the opposite way". The answer is "be clear; avoid confusion".

You really have to get through this stuff to clear the decks enough so you can actually talk about the core issue which is: there are exceptions and so what do we do? How frequent are they? What is their nature? How do we know what their nature is? How do we balance the needs of the many against the needs of the few--is there even any balancing to do? How do you tell? How do you test?

There's no reason you can't face reality and also be tolerant and accepting. There's no reason you can't face reality and also care about building norms that make for a good community. There's no reason you can't stand with those who want to face reality when other people who have some good points and good goals fail to maintain the discipline to face reality; and yet stand against those same people to the extent that they endorse hurtful or hateful actions (or when they, in turn, fail to have discipline to face reality).

Regardless, it doesn't appear that Coyne or Novella or you are actually quite embracing the "reality is what it is" thing, because reality includes frequency and extent, and parsimonious classification schemes are sensitive to both; and that is being swept under the rug in order to properly align with the tribally-endorsed consensus, apparently on both sides. There are a variety of positions that could be reasonable, but mostly people aren't exploring them reasonably. This is bad for everyone, because you invariably will end up with mismatches between social consensus and the actual state of affairs that will lead people to act in accord with consensus in ways that work out poorly in reality.