#biological essentialism

[fozmeadows]

As someone who hasn't read the works of radical feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, could you explain what's wrong and what bothers you about biological essentialism? I'm curious about your opinion after reading your post on radfems (and I'd like a perspective that isn't so based on biological gender essentialism, which I honestly have a hard time moving away from because I don't understand other perspectives well). 👀

The problem with biological essentialism is that purports to answer the eternally unanswered question of nature vs nurture in a wholly one-dimensional way - ie, with biological sex as The Single Most Important Aspect Of Personhood, regardless of any other considerations - while simultaneously ignoring the fact that biological sex is not, in fact, a binary proposition. We've learned in recent decades, for instance, that intersex conditions are much more common and wide-ranging than previously thought, not because scientists have arbitrarily changed the definitions of what counts as an intersex condition, but because our understanding of hormones, chromosomes, karyotpying and other physical permutations has expanded sufficiently to merit the shift. So right away, the idea that humanity is composed of Biological Men and Biological Women with absolutely no ambiguities, overlap or middle ground simply isn't true. Inevitably, though, if you mention this, people with a vested interest in biological essentialism become immediately defensive. They'll start saying things like, oh, but that's only a tiny minority of the population, they're outliers, they don't count, as though their argument doesn't derive its claim to authority from a presumed universality. To use a well-worn example, redheads are also a tiny minority of the population, but that doesn't mean we exclude them when talking about the range of natural human hair colours. But the fact is, even if humans lacked chromosomal diversity beyond XX/XY; even if there were no cases of cis men with internal ovaries or cis women with internal testes or people with ambiguous genitalia - and let's be clear: all of these things exist - the fact is, our individual hormones are in flux throughout our lives.

There are standard ranges for estrogen and testosterone in men and women (which, again, vary according to age and some other factors), but two cis men of the same age and background could still have completely different T-counts, for instance - meaning, even the supposed universal gender factor isn't universal at all. More, while our hormones certainly play a major role in our moods and cognition, so do a ton of other genetic and bodily factors that have nothing to do with the sex we're assigned at birth - and on top of that, there's nurture: the cultural contexts in which we're raised, plus our more individual experiences of living in the world. One of the most common, everyday (and yet completely bullshit) permutations of biological essentialism comes when parents or would-be parents talk about their reasons for wanting a son or a daughter. Very often, there's a strong play to stereotypical assumptions about shared interests and personalities: I want a son to play football with me, for instance, or: I want a daughter to be my shopping buddy. But even within the most mainstream channels of cishet culture, it's understood that these hopes are not, in fact, grounded in any sort of biological certainty. The dad who wants a sporty son might be just as likely to end up with a bookworm, while the mother who wants a little princess might find herself with a tomboy. We know this, and our stories know this! For the entirety of human history - for as long as we've been writing about ourselves - we have records of parental disappointment in the failure of this child or that to embody what's expected of them, gender-wise. More than that: if biological essentialism was real - if men were only and ever One Type Of Man, and women were only and ever One Type Of Woman, with recent progressive moments the sole anonymous blip in an otherwise uniform historical standard - then why is there so much disparity and disagreement throughout human history as to what those roles are? The general conception of women espoused in medieval France is thoroughly different to that espoused in pre-colonial Malawi, for instance, and yet we're meant to believe that there's some innate Gender Template guiding all human beings to behave in accordance with a set, immutable biological binary? And that's before you factor in the broad and fascinating history of trans and nonbinary people throughout history - because despite what TERFs and conservative alarmists have to say on the matter, our records of trans people, and of societies in which various trans and nonbinary identities were widely understood (if not always accepted), are ancient. We know about trans priestesses from thousands of years before Christ; the Talmud has terms describing eight different genders, and those are just two examples. All over the world, all throughout history, different cultures have developed radically different concepts of femininity and masculinity, to say nothing of designations outside of, overlapping with or in between those categories - socially, legally, behaviourally, sexually - and yet we're meant to believe that biology is at all times nudging us towards a set, ideal gender template? There's a lot more I could say, but ultimately, the point is this: people are different. While some aspects of our personhood are inevitably influenced by genetics, hormones, chromosomes and other biological factors, we're also creatures of culture and change and interpersonal experience. The idea that men and women are fundamentally different, even diametrically opposed, at a biological level - that the major separator in terms of our personalities and interests isn't culture, upbringing and personal taste, but what's between our legs - is just... so reductive, and so inaccurate.

We can absolutely have common experiences on the basis of a shared gender, but gender is not the only possible axis of commonality between two people, let alone the most salient one at all times, and the idea that we're all born on one side of an immutable biological equation that cannot possibly be transcended makes me feel insane. According to modern biological essentialism, intersex, trans and nonbinary people are either monstrous, mistakes or imaginary; all men are fundamentally predisposed to violence, all women are designed for motherhood, and we're meant to just hew to our designated places - which, conveniently, tend to echo a very specific form of Christian ideology, but which in any case manifestly fail to account for how variedly gender has been presented throughout history. It's nuts.

#foz answers things #gender #feminism #biological essentialism #history #sociology

[catgirl-kaiju]

biological essentialism is not only objectively incorrect and harmful but entirely antithetical to feminism

as an example, i do janitorial work in an office building, and part of that is cleaning the bathrooms. the men's bathroom is almost always more messy than the women's and requires significantly more time and attention to keep clean.

now, someone like, say, a TERF might look at that scenario and see it as validation of the idea that men are inherently more piggish and messy than women.

but, if you view it without the lense of biological essentialism, you see something very different. the men's bathroom is actually more likely dirtier than the women's because it has higher traffic due to there being significantly more men in the workplace than women. THAT is an actual feminist point about inequality in hiring practices. THAT is something that can be addressed with feminist activism, and you would have missed it if you explained the scenario away with imagined inherent attributes in a false binary sex & gender paradigm.

#feminism #biological essentialism #intersectional feminism #intersexism #transphobia #trans #intersex #queer #women's rights

[whatbigotspost]

Seeing baby “boys” and “girls” as distinct, immutable groups from birth and treating them differently as such for any reason, is a fucking sickness that has infected large parts of humanity from TERFs to Evangelicals.

We’ve got stacks and stacks of science, biology, anthropology, sociology, and history to “prove” it is not “natural” or “innate” to view life like this and we should all be fucking over it by now.

But if you’re a product of modern white supremacist, colonial, cis, misogynistic culture you probably have been infected and if you don’t treat the wrongness you’re doomed to believe the lies 🤷‍♀️

#fuck off terfs #and all transphobes #forever and ever amen #biological essentialism #binariast programming

[nochd]

This came across my dash via the #lgbt tag yesterday. I don't want to engage with the OP because that would get me into fights on radfem tumblr and I don't have the energy for that. But the post itself I think is worth answering, just because it's so neatly and exactly wrong.

(Not that my answer is going to spread very far, because I have 37 non-bot followers, of whom I think roughly 35.5 are just here for the nude photos. But anyway.)

Even if I agree just for argument's sake that the existence of intersex people proves that some people can have "nonbinary" sexes, or "third" sexes, and that "sex is a spectrum," how does that have any relevance to people who are not intersex? Like okay, let's "agree" for the moment that intersex people are something other than male or female. How does that make YOU, as a person who is not intersex, something other than male or female? Saying that intersex people's existence somehow makes sex "complicated" for you specifically is like saying that the issue of whether or not you can hear is "complicated" because some other people who are not you suffer from hearing loss or deafness. Like sorry but for 99% of the human population it is not "more complicated" than born with perfectly normal male genitalia = male and born with perfectly normal female genitalia = female, and chances are you fall into that 99%. Sex is not a social construct or a nebulous enigma of a concept. It is not debatable and made up in the manner that gender is. You cannot philosophize about whether there are two sexes any more than you can philosophize about whether humans have two kidneys. Someone having a missing or malformed kidney or accessory kidneys does not change the fact that humans as a species have two kidneys. Humans are gonochoric just like nearly all other animal species on Earth.

Let's start with the arithmetic. If 99% people are of binary sex, that leaves 1% of people who aren't. There are approximately 8 billion humans on Earth. 1% of 8 billion is 80 million -- about sixteen times the population of my entire country. Even just the number of intersex Americans is something like two-thirds the population of my country. This is not a negligible number of people.

There's a deeper error here, one that goes to the root not just of this misunderstanding but of many. Biology is always complicated, at every scale and at every level of explanation. It's messy, it's fuzzy, and it's always bottom-up, never top-down. Everything biological is the way it is because it grew that way. Biology never does the same thing twice.

Why does it seem like it does? Because, of all the ways you can arrange the parts of a living body, only an astonishingly tiny fraction of them actually make a living body. Any genetic mutation that nudges an organism outside of that fraction dies out and doesn't get passed on. Embryonic development is a gruelling tight-rope walk over a vast pit of non-existence.

Now for most of the body's systems, evolution has only had to produce one arrangement that works and survives. There's not an alternative plumbing plan where the oesophagus goes to the lungs and the trachea to the stomach. But for the reproductive system, evolution has to allow for two arrangements that work and survive, and it has to grow them both from the same starter kit.

What it does, therefore, is grow a body plan that works with a continuum of possible arrangements that includes both of those two. Various other points on the continuum may or may not be capable of producing viable gametes, but they're all survivable.

What biology doesn't do -- what biology never ever does -- is run new products on a conveyor belt stamping them into shape with cookie-cutters. The only things made that way are artificial constructs.

#science #biology #sex determination #evolution #embryology #lgbt #intersex #transgender #nonbinary #essentialism #biological essentialism #essentialism is not biological #biology is not friendly to transphobes

[rjalker]

People keep recreating the gender binary and insisting that they're not defining people by bioessentialism and trust them, transmasculine and transfeminine are totally not about defining you by your body or the gender you were assigned at birth, they're about presentation!!!

Until people who were AMAB identify as transmasculine, or people who were AFAB identify as transfeminine. Then suddenly everyone is flipping tables and screaming.

So, what was that about these terms not being a new gender binary and not being just more bioessentialism for you to force on nonbinary people?

If you're gonna claim these terms are just about how you choose to present yourself when nonbinary people get pissed about being shoved into more binary boxes, then you have to actually fucking believe that. You don't get to get pissed when people use these terms to actually convey their presentation rather than just being another way of saying AMAB or AFAB.

You can be AFAB and transfeminine. You can be AMAB and transmasculine. You can be anything and identify as trans- anything you fucking want. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a bioessentialist asshole.

Some other options include but are not in any way limited to:

Transqueer

Transfuckyou

Transno

Transvoid

Transnonbinary

Transneutral

Transzero

Transplus

Transmystery

Transfluid

Transxeno

Transother

and anything else you want. Or literally nothing. You do not have to use any of these terms if you don't want to. and anyone who tells you you must pick one is, again, a fucking bigot not to be listened to.

#exorsexism #intersexism #transmisia #biological essentialism #bio essentialism #the gender binary

[librarycards]

hi!! do you have any recommended readings on why sex based oppression is not real? I'm trying to explain to a friend but she doesn't get it

yes! assuming your friend isn't an academic, these readings do well at debunking "sex-based oppression" by destabilizing "sex" 1) as a category of analysis, period and 2) as an axis of privilege/oppression, and are available to mainstream audiences

The Transfeminist Manifesto, Emi Koyama (with emphasis on a critical intersex lens)

Against Sex Class Theory, Nsambu Za Suekama (with attention to the enforcement of sex with/by/through/as white supremacy)

Gender Critical = Gender Conservative, Sara Ahmed (Ahmed takes down terf claims that trans rights somehow threaten 'sex-based' rights gained for '''females'''

From ‘sex-based rights’ to ‘become ungovernable’: from supremacy to solidarity, Ali Phipps (genealogizes "sex" as a contemporary category and exposes it as unstable + a tool of patriarchal domination rather than reason for it)

hope this helps!

#ask #anonymous #essentialism #biological essentialism #readings #gender #cissexism

[morallygay]

sexism and gender essentialism is still sexism and gender essentialism "even if" it's trans friendly btw.

#doing it in a trans friendly way does not negate or excuse it...... #gender essentialism #biological essentialism #bioessentialism #transgender #moralgayness

[uncanny-tranny]

Your body isn't meant to do anything beyond housing you, and it's really harrowing how many people don't recognize this.

It's harrowing how people talk about how bodies must "serve a purpose", to be little more than breeding stock. That if your body doesn't serve a purpose - serve the right purpose - that it is, essentially, a "useless body"

You are a human being. You aren't breeding stock. You aren't a sounding board for other peoples' desires. You aren't a "worthless body". Your body houses you, and beyond that? That is up to you.

#biological essentialism #hate how people use this for trans/intersex/disabled bodies. like the fact we exist means maybe (just maybe) your theory is wrong #that nature isn't this divine god who makes you either right or wrong and if it made you wrong then you shouldn't exist #maybe applying humanistic ideas to the concept of being born or nature is like... not a good framework #like. y'all see what biology does? it's fucking bananas. it's the wild fucking west out there amd that applies to humans #i dunno. this is just another shot of thoughts about a topic that deeply affects not only myself but so many people i love #eugenics tw

[stopcannibalizingourown]

ive seen some ppl discourse abt people who were not amab who identify as trans calling themselves "trans lesbians" (or other terms) & how it's like, bad for transfems. and idk i was wondering if u had a take on this?

I don't especially care for any sort of takes on gender that require people to divide themselves by their assigned sex. I think anything along these lines is at the absolute best well-intentioned but inevitably a precursor to outright separatism.

At worst it is a manifestation of separatism, designed to sew discord and partition off certain parts of the community from the rest, because the people saying it are caught in a loop of trauma-induced nihilism, and genuinely believe they can't trust anyone but those they can convince themselves are safe because they're part of the in-group.

Suffice it to say, while I have sympathy for the people who feel that way, I think that sort of mentality is fundamentally harmful.

#also if anyone tries to tell my fiancee it can't identify as a trans lesbian i WILL fistfight them in a Denny's parking lot #and i might dislocate some of my shitty joints to do it but i'll win #biological essentialism #separatism

[tostonera]

If you consider “woman” to mean “feminine gender” I suppose I can finally understand why people say that feminists are “biological essentialists” (false, but I’m trying to understand). People are under the belief that in calling women members of the female sex, what is being said is that to be part of the female sex you must have a feminine gender (or vice versa) which is biological essentialism. But this is a huge misunderstanding. Women are a sex, not a “feminine gender” under any circumstances. The whole concept of “feminine gender” is what should be questioned and criticized. Instead, it’s what is being preserved uncritically over conversations regarding sex.

#feminism #radblr #radical feminism #radfem #femininity #gender #biological essentialism

[uter-us]

radfem question

can someone explain the difference between biological determinism and biological essentialism?

cuz I see TRAs accuse radfems of these two a lot but I don't understand the actual difference between the two-- the definitions seem kind of the same to me ??

im googling it and am more confused than ever lol

thank you

#radfem #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist safe #terfs please interact #terfsafe #biological determinism #biodeterminism #biological essentialism #bioessentialism #question tag

[glitter-soda]

TRAs heard about how “biological essentialism” is bad, then proceeded to make up their own definition and wildly throw it around at anyone who makes them mad

The actual definition, from Oxford Reference:

Or more simply:

#the average genderist is far more likely to believe in biological essentialism than the average rad/gc lol #but then again this is how the majority of people online use terminology #definitions aren’t important just use scary sounding words however you want #terf safe #radfem safe #biological essentialism

[catsanddemonssystem]

BTW if you criticize aspie surpemcy but your silent on the medical model of disability, your not a ally to autistic people.

If you think autism is always a disability 100% of the time and you think disability is 100% biological your not a ally of disabled people.

If you don't understand that there are many reasons why society might decide something is a disability outside of a medical problem that is inherently harmful to the disabled person your not a ally to autistic people.

So ableism detected at level ones is disguised as criticism of aspie surpemcy. Biological essentialism has no place in the disabled community.

#aspie supremacy #ableism #level 1 autism #social model of disability #biological essentialism #level 1 autism ableism #autism is a disability #autism #actually neurodiverse #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #actually neurodivergent #neurodiverse stuff

[small-strong-bookish-butch]

I'm almost done reading The Handmaid's Tale, and I don't like it. I've never read it before, I know it's a classic, and I was intrigued enough to keep reading.

But.... God, where do I start? Ranty jumble below the cut.

Especially after Roe V. Wade got overturned, a lot of people were like "Ooooh, it's just like Handmaid's Tale!"

I Googled if Atwood is transphobic, and got mixed results.

Within the interview I read, she said she doesn't predict the future, she just reads a lot of history, which put a lot of the book into context....

I think, as someone who does not know a lot of history and isn't interested in history, a lot of the events in THT seemed to be just:

[Atwood in 1985 voice] "Ooooh, what if slavery [against Black people] in the U.S. happened to white women?"

The no-reading rule. Only used for their bodies. Punished by mutilating their hands and feet. Public lynchings, to put it bluntly. De-gendered (?) for 'running away.' All dressing the same. Not allowed to use their own names. Being sent to 'the Colony.' Being traded among men if they misbehaved.

There are probably many more examples I'm forgetting.

But what really got it for me was the mention of the "Underground FemaleRoad." Really?? You're going to basically name-drop the historical way that enslaved people could actually escape and give them and their allies no credit for any of it???

I know, I know, practically the definition of cultural appropriation is "a white person does something that POC have been doing for a while and doesn't credit them/takes it as their own invention", but like, seriously?!

She wrote this whole book about "oh no what if Bad Things happened to White women 😢😢😢" and didn't mention anything about like, slavery or colonization or imperialism or anything like this that's happened to people of color in history, let alone the US Slave Trade.

Uhhhhh what else....

A lot of the ways the book talked about sexuality and purity culture and Christianity felt very like.... a mix of dramatic irony, regular irony, and almost post-ironic?

Like, especially with the prayers— you could tell that the Aunts did mean it sincerely, but I couldn't tell how much Offred herself did (or would have) actually disagreed with the Biblical teachings if they hadn't been used to like..... oppress her into subservience or whatever.

(Like when she talked about how her mom was pro-choice and how she, as a teenager, was 'humiliated' by how her mom would like, go to pro-abortion protests and be proud of people's right to choose. My personal reading of it was that, had they not been in this new overdramatic apocalypse, Offred would still feel like that and not be pro-choice at all.)

I think I need to cite my sources on all that; like, most of the time, with how THT talked about [patriarchy, reproductive rights, 'women's' bodies, abortion, Bible verses, the paranoia of getting caught doing something wrong, etc.] I couldn't tell if the narrator was saying something ironically, or if it was meant to be taken ironically, or if it was supposed to be post-ironic, and we all— including the narrator— were supposed to understand that it had started ironically and had now evolved past that to mean something totally opposite its original meaning....

(Though honestly, I don't think the book or Atwood is smart enough to be as post-ironic as you'd think for most of it.)

The fucking. "Pen Is Envy." I wanted to scream. 'Aunt Lydia told us that. They were right. I see the pen and do feel envy" are you serious right now? Really?! Really. It's all so fucking absurd. To take Freud's words, who was well known as a pseudoscientist, and use it as a 'male privilege' analogy in the sense where it's logical??? Get real.

The Marthas were mentioned briefly as having brown skin, and I assumed, given the almost no context of any of it, that they're women of color who are like, housemaid slaves and aren't seen as good for anything else?

I don't remember any mentions about what happened to the men of color, anywhere.

Overall? I hated the book. I spent most of it waiting for it to get interesting, or even to feel like Offred gave any fucks about like, courage or anything meaningful (beyond surviving a room without a light fixture or whatever the fuck). I didn't like her as a character, I didn't think she was a useful narrator, I think there were whole swatches of things that were left out and unexplained, and the book doesn't make sense. Full stop. It doesn't make sense. I felt a sense of unease while reading.

Overall I interpreted the book to be very...... pro-gender- and biological essentialism and white supremacy and eugenics in a "white people can be the only people" kind of way, and I think Atwood's perspective is NOT well-clarified enough to be strongly against any of that in a way that is meaningful, let alone action-oriented.

#personal #the handmaid's tale #i have opinions #abortion #margaret atwood #reproductive rights #gender essentialism #biological essentialism #white supremacy #tw white supremacy

[rjalker]

People who were AMAB are not inherently masculine. And they sure as shit are not inherently masculine or male presenting.

People who were AFAB are not inherently feminine, and they sure as shit are not inherently feminine or female presenting.

You just hate trans people and are still drinking the biological essentialism koolaid.

And if you describe AFAB nonbinary people as a whole as "women+" or "women lite" you're an exorsexist sack of shit.

#transmisia #exorsexism #misgendering #transandromisia #transmisogyny #biological essentialism

[librarycards]

Trans misogyny magically converts trans women from the empirically disproportionate recipients of sexual violence into its all-powerful, ontological perpetrators. While trans women are in truth perhaps more than four times as likely to experience intimate violence than non-trans people of all genders, the trans misogynist instead fantasizes that trans women are responsible for that violence simply by existing. This is the logic of trans panic, a legal defense still admissible in most US states through which a defendant can be acquitted for murder, or have their sentence reduced, if they claim to have lost their sanity in a consensual sexual experience with a trans woman.

Trans panic remains a potent idea outside the law because it is circular. On the one hand, it charges that trans women are not women, because their “gender” is really a dangerous sexuality, reducible to an inherently violent penis (though actual men with penises, who outnumber trans women in the world by massive numbers, are conspicuously not the central targets of such TERF campaigns). On the other hand, it claims that non-trans “sexuality” is truthfully a matter of gender (or sex, used synonymously). Women are biologically endangered by penises, and men are driven to legitimate homicidal rage at their sight. When it is convenient, the TERF will ontologize gender as sexuality, turning trans womanhood into a sexual perversion. But, just as soon as it suits her, she will turn around and ontologize sexuality as gender, making non-trans sexuality derivative of immutable manhood or womanhood—of fossilized biological sex. It is, ironically, one of the most ideologically structured accounts of gender to be found anywhere in the world. This closed circuit forms the resilience of trans misogyny, where to be a woman is to be in constant danger and to be a man is to be inherently violent—no exceptions. Such a ghastly definition of feminism is made respectable by blaming trans women for the whole thing.

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny. [emphasis added]

#jules gill-peterson #transmisogyny #cissexism #readings #essentialism #biological essentialism #mine