You mistake the author's central claim. The central claim is that certain things cannot be taught or even researched if they appear to hurt the feelings of students.
Sex being binary (and the author carefully distinguishes between sex and gender) based on the size of gametes was simply one example. Other examples are discussed in the article:
- the inability to use the terms male and female
- fear of mentioning historical figures that are white and male to students
- teaching the concepts of sexual conflict, kin selection, heritability
- research about sexual selection and cultural differences
- NIH is denying scientists access to data if their research appears to be "stigmatizing"
Your focus on one example as the central claim that invalidates the author's thesis seems like a giant evasion of the real issue.
Communication and honest debate about facts and details, such as the ones you bring up yourself, is impossible when the people you are attempting to communicate with don't care about the truth -- they only care about how the words you are using make them feel.
Which is the whole point of the article: when feelings take precedence over truth and knowledge, science is at threat.
1) If you're busy maintaining backward compat, you're not busy building innovative new things -- Microsoft. 'nuf said.
2) You have a built-in excuse to not make your new stuff equal in functionality or greater to the old stuff, because hey, customers can just use the old stuff right? I built some software that talks to O365 Sharepoint. Ok, I have two choices of API: the older Sharepoint API or the newer Graph API. They recommend Graph, ok. Build the product and put it into production. Get a new customer requirement for fine-grained auth, and then find out that Graph doesn't handle fine-grained auth -- only the Sharepoint API does that. Oops. Ask Microsoft when that capability is coming to Graph? No timeline, because the Sharepoint API isn't deprecated.
3) Keeping old stuff working may be easier, but building new stuff is harder because the landscape is muddier -- how many times have you looked at Microsoft docs and found multiple ways to do things with no idea if the docs you're looking at actually apply to the approach you're using now?
I think there are ways to have (mostly) the best of both worlds. Linux does it by bring as much stuff in-tree as they can -- they break compat all the time for out-of-tree stuff. Ever try to keep a proprietary VMWare module building without errors? In-tree KVM never breaks because they're super careful with the ABI. Some languages have explicit mechanisms by which they attempt to keep things current, but make it easier on users -- Kotlin is an example of this [1] but its a young language so time will tell whether they can actually thread this needle. My experience so far is yes, I think they can -- I've updated code from Kotlin 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 with relatively little pain.
Wonderful story. Both the janitor and the CEO epitomize Ayn Rand's "ideal man":
> "The moral issue is: how do you approach the field of work given your intellectual endowment and the existing possibilities? Are you going through the motions of holding a job, without focus or ambition, waiting for weekends, vacations, and retirement? Or are you doing the most and the best that you can with your life? Have you committed yourself to a purpose, i.e., to a productive career? Have you picked a field that makes demands on you, and are you striving to meet them, to do good work, and to build on it -- to expand your knowledge, develop your ability, improve your efficiency?
> If the answers to these last questions are yes, then you are totally virtuous in regard to productiveness, whether you are a surgeon or a steelworker, a house painter or a painter of landscapes, a janitor or a company president."
Sex being binary (and the author carefully distinguishes between sex and gender) based on the size of gametes was simply one example. Other examples are discussed in the article:
Your focus on one example as the central claim that invalidates the author's thesis seems like a giant evasion of the real issue.