Biological sex

Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes. In a human context, it is often distinguished from gender.

Quotes

Scientific

• Inasmuch as peculiarities often appear under domestication in one sex and become hereditarily attached to that sex, the same fact probably occurs under nature, and if so, natural selection will be able to modify one sex in its functional relations to the other sex, or in relation to wholly different habits of life in the two sexes, as is sometimes the case with insects.
  • Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter 4.

Political

• If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction. If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. ... [E]rasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.
  • J. K. Rowling, Twitter (7 June 2020)

Literary

• The poets feign that when the world began,
  Both sexes in one body did remain;
  • Joshua Sylvester (in) Francis Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1602)

• ... Come, you spirits
  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
  And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
  Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
  Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
  That no compunctious visitings of nature
  Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
  The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
  And take my milk for gall, ...
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606), 1.5.

• With these came they, who from the bordring flood
  Of old Euphrates to the Brook that parts
  Egypt from Syrian ground, had general Names
  Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male,
  These Feminine. For Spirits when they please
  Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft
  And uncompounded is their Essence pure,
  Not ti’d or manacl’d with joynt or limb,
  Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
  Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
  Dilated or condens’t, bright or obscure,
  Can execute their aerie purposes,
  And works of love or enmity fulfill.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1.

• You bid me lift my mean desires
    From faltering lips and fitful veins
  To sexless souls, ideal quires,
    Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
  • W. J. Cory, "Mimnermus in Church", Ionica (1858)

• Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
  • Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1956)