#Biological essentialism

[walks-the-ages]

let's play a game.

Biological Essentialism/Determinism can be summed up as, in the most simplified way, "what you are born as intrinsically determines your behavior and destiny".

"Gender Essentialism" uses the exact same framework but with a thin veneer of "trans inclusivity" slapped on top, to say that while your biology does not determine who you are, your gender identity does. Even before you realize you are trans or come out of the closet.

Under the framework of "Gender Essentialism" you're viewed as being X gender and somehow getting all of those 'benefits' from society even before you realize or come out as X gender.

So, some examples:

W is a member of a sentient Fantasy Race who is created to be Ontologically Evil. W being born into this Fantasy Race means that W is destined to be Evil and cruel no matter what and W and the rest of W's race will never ever be able to change their Evil ways.

X is assigned Female at birth. X is expected to be subservient, loyal to a single husband, and want to have children. X is expected to want these things from an early age and can and will be ostracized if X expressed any disinterest in these things or opposite behavior to the things expected of X's gender. (not wanting kids, not being interested in men, etc)

Y is assigned Male at birth. Y is expected to be fierce, strong, and to father many strong sons. Y is expected to want these things from an early age and can and will be ostracized if Y expresses any disinterest in these things or opposite behavior to the things expected of Y's gender. (being physically weak, not minding having daughters instead of sons, not being interested in women, etc)

Z is born into a strict caste system, and is born in the lowest caste. Z is expected to spend Z's whole life serving those 'better' than Z without recompense or complaint, with *no* possible avenue to advance in society due to the caste system.

This is inspired both by the wave of trans inclusive radical feminists who say that

"because trans men are of course men, that means they are inherently evil and oppressive and part of the patriarchy that seeks to tear trans women down."

and also because I've seen too many fantasy and scifi series way too comfortable with making Ontologically Evil Species and strictly enforced Caste Systems where everything is fine and dandy and everyone's happy with their lot in life as long as the ones with a caste system are the

"Beautiful, Pure and Good Elves, because as we all know, Happy Slaves aren't really Slaves, right? And if the Ruler has the Divine Right of Kings and all the little people think that's good, that makes it good, right?" (sarcasm).

If you've ever considering giving your fantasy or scifi race as 'caste' system that determins who does what based on their lineage or their body type and its apparently 'good and natural and everyone loves being their caste and wouldn't have it any other way'

....have you considered that Caste Systems have always been used as tools of oppression and discrimination and this is something real people face, and that we should not be writing "good caste systems" from the comfort of Western Society and perhaps consider the harm in romanticing these very real frameworks of systemic oppression?

Anyways, both in literature and real life:

do you agree that Biological Essentialism, Biological Determinism, and yes, "Trans-Inslusive Gender Essentialism" are ever correct and a good framework for viewing other people?

Or do you agree that this is an absolutely bullshit way to view individuals and that all it does is uphold systems of oppression, especially when it comes to queer people, people of color, disabled people, intersex people and more?

anyways just gonna leave you with this gif.

[ID: a gif from Pokemon the Movie 2000, showing Mew and Mewtwo floating over a battlefield, with Mewtwo having the realization "I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are." End ID]

[rjalker]

It's 2024. Stop saying that there are male and female brains. That's literally fucking misogyny. It doesn't become progressive because you're using it to quote unquote prove that trans women really are women and trans men really are men. Nobody needs to get a fucking brain scan for you to respect their fucking gender. If you require brain scans for quote unquote proof that trans people are the gender they tell you they are you don't actually support trans people. You don't actually support trans people.

[image descriptions start. A comic panel showing it Batman snapping a rifle labeled "biological essentialism" in half, snarling, " this is the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it. ".. The background of the comic panel has been edited to have the progress trans flag, with stripes of purple, black, blue, pink, white, yellow, black, and brown. In the center are concentric circles of gold, purple, and black. Image description end.]

Feel free to save this image and use it whenever the fuck you want Just include the image description.

[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.

[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.

[nonbinarymlm]

It’s really awful that my partner is treated as predatory, dangerous, and unwelcome by the world for being bisexual and nonwhite. It’s doubly awful that so many queer spaces near us also treat him as predatory, dangerous, and unwelcome for being a cis man while ignoring his queer and non-passing mixed race experiences.

There is no way to make general queer spaces unwelcoming to cis men without throwing intersectionality out the window. No one needs to coddle cis men, but general queer spaces are not the places to treat queer cis men as dangerous or unwelcome or to randomly vent about men without checking in. (Generally you should be checking in before venting, by the way, this goes out the window way too much in progressive spaces.)

Queer men are already treated as dangerous and unwelcome by society for being queer. Men of color are already treated as dangerous and unwelcome by society for not being white. When queer spaces treat cis men as dangerous and unwelcome, they are repeating those societal patterns toward queer men and men of color.

Intersectionality means recognizing that privilege does not cancel out oppression as much as it means oppression does not cancel out privilege. All queer people face harm by society, all queer people need safe queer spaces. Choosing a subset of queer people to exclude from general queer spaces isn’t okay, even if it’s a relatively privileged subset in one specific way.

There are a lot of posts talking about how exclusion of cis men from queer spaces negatively impacts trans people of all stripes, and that is true and worth taking about! But also: cis queer men deserve to be in queer spaces because they are queer. Their relative privilege in one area does not cancel out their experiences of oppression.

And it truly is “relative privilege in one area” because some queer cis men are disabled, neurodivergent, black, Asian, indigenous, mixed race, working class, and many other marginalized identities not determined by gender.

All queer people deserve queer safe spaces. Period.

[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 🤷‍♀️

[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.

[creature-wizard]

it's a fact that trans "women" are more conservative than straight cis men, it's a fact, there's study about it. these trans"women" don't have female chromosomes.

Transphobes just can't stop making shit up, can they?

[morallygay]

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

[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!

[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.

[rjalker]

"Trans women are women because they have biologically structured female brains and transm men qre men because they have biologically male structured brains!!!!"

Hey hey did you know that biological essentialism is bad even when it supports your arguments did you people know that. Do you know that. Do you know that biological essentialism is bad. Do you know that non-binary people exist. Do you know that multi-gender people exist. Do you know that you should be accepting that people are the gender they tell you are even if they haven't had a fucking brain scan to prove it to you. Do you know that gender is a social construct. Do you understand that biological essentialism is bad. Do you understand that misogyny is bad. Do you understand that you should be accepting the people are the gender they tell you are even if there's no scientific proof to back it up because gender is a social fucking construct and nobody has to prove their fucking gender to you and if you only accept that people are the gender they tell you because you think their brain secretly matches that fucking gender that's fucking bad. That's bad that is extremely fucking bad.

[haggishlyhagging]

The “male violence is a result of socialization” argument falls apart for me because if, as some of the authors I’ve read have posited, some sort of egalitarian, cooperative society did exist in the ancient past, obviously it did not work to keep all men peaceful. Even if one particular society managed to keep men from becoming violent, they were at some point annihilated and/or subsumed by another society that was not so fortunate. We can talk about environmental stressors and how that drove certain groups to male supremacy as a coping strategy. But that still supports a weakness in the fundamental character of the males.

[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.

[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.

[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