You began by highlighting a phrase I wrote in Item #9: “they treat the concept of biological sex as incontrovertible fact”.

I was not claiming (as your comment seems to suggest) that “there's no biological sex,” nor did I “attack the article for accepting that biological sex is real.”

To return to the context of what I was saying in #9:

I pointed out that the authors used the term “assigned” 23 times in quotation marks while using “biology” or “biological” 10 times without quotation marks.

Then, I wrote:

“With this choice of punctuation, they treat the concept of biological sex as incontrovertible fact while casting the concept of assigned sex in the skepticism of scare-quotes…”

(Incidentally, the observation wasn’t mine; I credited the person who made it. I paraphrased it and added detail. That doesn’t matter right now, though.)

All words are conceptual. Words are not the thing itself; the world is mediated by language. Thus I specifically contrasted “the concept of biological sex” with “the concept of assigned sex” [emphasis shifted to concept]. Not the things themselves, but our understanding and linguistic representation of them.

Yes, the world is full of facts, but the way we conceptualize those facts may be inaccurate or have room for improvement. That is why humans generally are picky about language. The original NYT authors were being picky about language, and I was being picky about the way they were picking on language.

My complaint in #9 wasn’t specific to whether sex is real, whether any biological facts exist, etc. It was about the deliberate use of punctuation in a linguistic argument to express bias for one term over another. The authors put quotes (arguably, scarequotes) around the term they don’t like and intend to problematize; they omitted the scarequotes around the term they prefer and want to be uncritically accepted. In so doing, they’re enabling readers to subconsciously assume the conclusion.

If they wanted to have a fair face-off between two terms, they might have put both terms — or else neither term — in quotation marks. Omitting the quotation marks around the word “biological” suggests that when we utter the word “biological,” we attain some unmediated and essentially correct view of reality, while when we utter the word “assigned,” we are more fallible. This observation of mine doesn’t knock down their whole argument; it's a criticism of their use of punctuation/formatting as a tool in framing their argument.

To use your example about how there are days “where you can't tell whether it was rain or not”— Yes, and so there could indeed be reasons for someone to say the day is “assigned as rainy” in the morning and perhaps reassigned as “cloudy” in the afternoon. (Maybe they're a meteorologist who pays extra attention to what people are saying when they say "rain.") That’s potentially a coherent way for them to say they briefly thought it was “really raining” but then the rain stopped or they realized the ground had never gotten wet to begin with. If we were having that linguistic argument, and if you wrote an argument in which you used the terms “assigned as rainy” and “really raining” a few dozen times, it would be a relevant style choice whether you chose to consistently put only one term — or both — in scarequotes.

I don’t imagine the question would be whether there are “really” facts about whether it is “really raining.” Probably there are, just as on the fictional planet Zormia there would be “really” facts about whether it’s “really zormying.”

I was saying that, if the NYT authors intended to call into question which concepts/terms are best, when to use them, what they mean, and if some terms are so useless that they should be mostly discarded, then it’s relevant that the NYT authors assumed that one term successfully represents important realities (or wins a cost/benefit analysis) while the other doesn’t represent anything useful at all (or loses a cost/benefit analysis), which they revealed and communicated by putting only one term in scarequotes.

I put this criticism in a section about ways in which the authors’ “analysis falls short,” saying that it was one of my “observations” and “things I noticed,” and that this is among nine other “problems” that “went wrong” with the article. I criticized “this choice of punctuation.”

I did not say that biological sex doesn’t exist.

If this observation about how people use punctuation and formatting to cast doubt on a word “gets some people worked up” and “generate[s] extra opposition where there wasn't any before,” I would like whoever those hypothetical angry people are to please take a deep breath and please reconsider why they are worked up and exactly what they are declaring themselves in "opposition" to. Do they oppose my observation about how quotation marks are sometimes subtly used as scarequotes, or do they oppose...something else? (That's a rhetorical question. I know it's something else. You don't need to explain it, thanks.)