Reframing the sex debate in scientific research: three frameworks to support rigor without rigidity

HighlightsScientific and societal debates largely focus on whether sex is appropriately conceptualized as a binary, a spectrum, or other form. This is a pressing issue as political weaponization of binary sex continues to escalate. We offer a series of questions and three frameworks to guide a critical read of scholarship and scientific engagement of sex: (a) sex as a system of classification, (b) sex as a trait, and (c) sex as a dynamic system. Drawing on these frameworks could help to facilitate nimble engagement with what sex is being leveraged to do and why, reorient us to ask how a certain conceptualization could inform a given phenomenon, and thereby avoid pitting binary versus non-binary approaches against one another in a continued impasse.