Noah’s justified thrashing of a New Yorker article needs to get in one more kick. Author Paisley Currah complains that an executive order of President Trump

declares that sex is binary and immutable, “grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Female “means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Males belong, at conception, to the sex that produces the small one. That definition — nonsensical because there are no distinguishable reproductive cells at conception — applies to all agencies and programs of the federal government.

Currah is right, as Noah allows, that zygotes do not have “distinguishable reproductive cells.” But that’s not what the order claims. A female zygote, at conception, belongs to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell even though it does not itself, at that moment, produce the large reproductive cell — just as the order says.

Whoever wrote the order understands that the newly conceived human being is on a developmental path that will lead, if all goes well, to the production of one or the other kind of reproductive cell. If the drafters of the order labored under the misapprehension that female zygotes produce large reproductive cells, they could have dropped some unnecessary verbiage from their definition. They could have just said that female “means a person who produces the large reproductive cell.” They didn’t say that, because they understand the point that Currah is trying to obscure in order to portray the order as scientifically ignorant.