analyzing gender through the biocultural approach of anthropology
31 January 2025
Hi there. Recently I’ve been struggling in Anthropology hearing too many of my quite educated professors reference gender/sex in quite essentialist ways, even the well-meaning ones. It’s made me question the field of Anthropology, and flung me into confusion and doubt on how my experience with and understanding of gender factors into Anthropological knowledge.
Recently, however, I read about a paradigm of studying humans that refutes the separation between biology and culture, instead combining them into one concept of “bioculture.” First, I’m going to explain how I was initially taught to think about the relationship between biology and culture. I will then explain, in contrast, the biocultural paradigm. Finally, I will integrate that into a radical, holistic, complete understanding of gender/sex to firmly reject both essentialist sex and, more broadly, the Gender/Sex Distinction.
Last semester, when I took my first Anthropology classes, I learned that the way culture functions in relation to biology is that while biology is a strict, necessary thing that all humans share universally, culture is a group’s interpretation of their biology. For example, we all have hunger, but what we choose to eat, how we choose to eat, when we choose to eat, all of that is decided and performed culturally.
This creates the idea of biology as an essential matter. We are all essentially human, with the same biologies that unify us. It is our culture that marks us as separate.
Understanding gender through this lens left me with confusion and question after question. It justifies and supports the idea that some of us are essentially male and some of us are essentially female (and perhaps some of us are essentially “intersex” in some way), but how we interpret that is different. This could even be understood to say that biologically, I am “male” but culturally, I am “female.” This seems to be how many anthropologists understand gender/sex. My professors certainly seem to. On the first day of class, one of my professors made a casual aside to “biological males” and “biological females,” connoting the notion of a universal, biologically understood sex.
I have a strong disdain for textbooks. In my experience, they are usually decades behind the times, with a serious lack of multidisciplinary or intersectional understanding, showcasing a lack of curiosity or any real depth. So imagine my surprise when I opened up my textbook for my Biological Anthropology course and it began to discuss a more critical approach to understanding the relationship between biology and culture.
In this approach, Anthropologists understand any given human to be a product of both their biology and their culture, but not in a separable way. Part of this is understanding that biology represents both the immutable as well as the mutable aspects of our body—genes, organs, skin, hair—the inside as well the outside. In essence, our biology is our body.
An obvious example is hair; while the “culture interprets biology” argument might say that hair is essential and biological, but that one’s culture interprets its value and form, the biocultural approach highlights that the form one’s hair takes is simultaneously interpreted, instructed, and shaped by one’s culture as well as one’s biology. If a person lives in the cold, their biology may adapt to fit the cold weather, growing thicker hair. Yet, their culture tells them how to shape it, where to let it grow and where not to grow, which may or may not keep them warm. If a person is lost in the cold and their culture instructs them to shave their facial and head hair, they may die of frostbite. If a person is lost in the cold and their biology does not grow thick, bushy hair, they may die of frostbite. These necessarily and inherently overlap and combine—they are inseparable from one another.
Another good example is what you eat. If you eat unhealthily, your biology will reflect that, perhaps becoming overweight. However, your culture is what instructs what you eat, either through norms or through the restriction of your choices. Your culture affects your biology. However, if your biology limits what you can eat, perhaps with some kind of digestion issue, your biology affects how you exist within culture. You may only be able to eat the unhealthy foods your culture gives as an option. In this case, biology and culture come together to affect itself. The distinction between biology and culture stops functioning properly, because they intersect to have several effects, caused by your bioculture.
In essence, this approach rejects the idea that culture interprets biology. No, in fact, culture influences biology, and biology influences culture. If my culture shifts from a foraging economy to an agricultural economy, I may end up with more cavities due to a greater reliance on grain. Culture directly affects biology.
The first time I really got into Gender Studies was when I watched How Conservatives Invented Gender Studies from Alexander Avila. What most stuck out to me in this video was when he pointed out that the idea of gender and sex as being separate things was not at all an idea that came from Gender Studies, or queer people at all for that matter. In fact, it came from cis people trying to justify gender roles in the face of intersex people’s existence. To make it brief, as they realized that sex was not binary, they rationalized binary gender as a separate, still natural and essential, phenomenon from sex. Frankly, the idea of being “biologically” your assigned gender at birth is quite distressing for most trans people. It rationalizes and justifies the transphobic narrative that we are distorting reality and subverting the natural order of things. The understanding that the Gender/Sex Distinction was in fact a construction by binary gender essentialists was incredibly comforting and empowering to me as a trans person.
This is why I am so disturbed each time I hear a professor of mine make reference to the Gender/Sex Distinction. When they do so, it naturalizes and enforces a binary and essential stratification upon us. It is what distorts, corrupts, and subverts reality. It delegitimizes my reality and imposes their own construction of what is and what can be onto me, demanding I accept that I am somehow “biologically male” regardless of how I look, how I speak, how I dress.
Some of my professors have talked at length about how we can decolonize Anthropology. But I say that to talk about “decolonizing” Anthropology is easy, yet there’s no such thing as decolonization without radicalization. And to radicalize Anthropology, we must reject the fundamental colonial and essentialist paradigms with which we are armed.
So here’s my first step towards radicalizing Anthropology: the Culture/Biology Distinction is to Anthropology what the Gender/Sex Distinction is to Gender Studies. It denies the reality that these things came at the same time, intimately influence one another, and are fundamentally oppressive power structures. In reality, gender constructs sex, and sex constructs gender. Gender is not simply the “interpretation” of sex, and to posit such an idea is to construct hierarchy between the validity of these two concepts.
Gender/Sex is understood by the people around you both biologically and culturally, both by how you look and how you act, how others treat you and how your body is—if a person has boobs, then according to the Gender/Sex Distinction, that person is, at least in some way, “biologically female,” right? Guess what: the sitting President of the United States of America has boobs. To refer to “biological sex” is functionally meaningless because it is not just our biology that matters when it comes to gender/sex, it is also our culture to such an extent where these two blend and influence one another that they become, functionally, the same. I modify my biology by shaving my legs because our culture says that less body hair is more feminine. People treat me differently culturally because my biology is more feminine—or, as a darker example, I have to justify my cultural expression because I had testosterone running through my body for years.
These are not separable. Does this mean that, in many ways, my gender/sex is different from a cis woman’s? Yes, of course! It also means that one cis woman’s gender/sex is different from another’s. Does a tall, hairy cis woman experience gender/sex in our culture that defines femininity in accordance with white supremacist standards the same way as a short, skinny cis woman? No. This also highlights that my biology is not the same as a cis man’s. I am not “biologically male,” lmao. Honestly, the fact that some people think that is kind of hilarious to me, because it is so painstakingly obvious to me that that is not true, as someone who lives it.
Gender/Sex is biocultural. Just as to place an essential distinction between biology and culture denies the nuanced reality of humanity, so to does the essential distinction between gender and sex. Do these things differ? Absolutely. But fundamentally, they must be understood as intersecting, with a tight relationship, influencing and affecting one another.