suffering through the heteropatriarchal naturalizations in biology
28 February 2025
Studying biology has me feeling isolated. It has me feeling like, as I recently read Lucy Cooke, in her 2023 book Bitch, put it, a freak. And I think that Lucy Cooke and I can actually relate in a number of ways. For one, we both have studied the biology constructed by those wholly unlike us. We both felt isolated, alienated, and maybe even erased by these constructors of our fields, at least our nuance. And we both want to make our field accept our being.
You see, Lucy Cooke wrote about what it was like to be a woman studying biology, a field that positions the “male” as the dominant, important sex, and the “female” as the less important sex, the second sex, even, submissive and done-to.
And today, I write about what it is like to be a trans person studying biology, a field that positions “male” and “female” as immutable, naturally derived categories that harmlessly and objectively describe reality.
Firstly, let’s define these two terms. Within biology, males and females are two parts of a reproductive whole, the former inseminating the latter, the latter delivering the offspring. There’s a more technical way to put it, but that’s the one you’re getting. If you wanna get into advanced biology (ooo scary) you’ll learn that sex isn’t binary, that intersex is common, and that, of course, not all creatures can or simply do take part in this reproductive process.
But this isn’t what I’ll be worried about today. I’m not discussing sex itself, or the mechanical functions of bodies. There are, of course, important critiques to be made on that subject, but this is not the time for it.
Instead, I want to expand on Lucy Cooke’s foray into the field of feminist biology, deconstructing biology to reveal the heteropatriachal foundations and the violence that has transpired and continues to transpire in our textbooks, our universities, our laboratories.
Because largely, there is this idea that how we talk about sex today is largely benign, that violence in this space is in the past. After all, we know intersex people exist! We know race isn’t biological! We have truly progressed.
But the reality, unfortunately, is far more complicated.
If you’ll allow me, I will briefly tangent on the topic of plant sex. Last semester, my partner sent me a paper they were assigned for a feminist studies class that discussed how we talk about plant sex:
How did plant biology come to theorize plant sexuality with binary formulations of male/female, sex/gender, sperm/egg, active males and passive females—all of which resemble western categories of sex, gender, and sexuality? (1)
The paper goes on to explain the number of ways in which this human sex/gender analogy being inscribed onto plants is of course not only violent, but rather absurdly inaccurate. Shockingly, it is a rarity for plants to conform to our human constructed sex.
So to answer the paper’s question, then, how did plant biology come to inscribe these ideas onto plants? Well, as Lucy Cooke understood, it naturally stems from who is doing the studying. If it is cishet white men drafting up papers and drawing up plants and labeling parts and processes, that which they create are likely to conform to how they believe reality works, as skewed or violent as it is.
So how does this relate to me? Well, I may not be a plant, but I sure as hell am an animal.
When I initially read this paper, it gave me an inkling: if plants are falsely “sexualized” (as in, gendered sex is enforced upon them ideologically), what if animals are, too? At the time, it was, of course, merely an inkling. But when I learned about the idea of bioculture, I realized that the concept of “male” and “female” as human categorizations, being inherently gendered, are themselves biocultural categories.
Now, this creates a bit of a problem for biologists. Because if “male” and “female” are biocultural, then it doesn’t exactly make sense for animals to be male or female. After all, animals are mostly culture-less. Or, to put it another way, animals don’t have gender.
An important note to consider is that “male” and “female” are gendered terms. As much as some try to suggest that these can be separated from gender, they simply are. I mean, literally, if you call someone a “male,” you will be understood to be calling them a man, linguistically speaking this is how the English language works. So when we call an animal a “male,” we are plainly pronouncing them a man. This is why I use she/her on my cat, because I have been taught that because she is a female, we use that language on her.
In essence, I am arguing that the language we use on animals emphatically enforces gender as this natural concept that is firmly rooted in our ecosystems as a necessary, inherent, obvious category. Not only does this erase transgender and especially non-binary identities, but it naturalizes gender hierarchy and encourages the reproduction of patriarchal norms like the misogyny that Cooke discusses.
As an aside, I would love to talk about the phenomenon in nature of animals switching their sex. For example, clownfish are either male or unsexed (depending on your perspective) until the largest one in the group becomes a female for the sake of reproduction, taking on the dominant role. In some cases, a male clownfish will then switch sex, becoming a female. Essentially, it seems that clownfish change sex depending on reproductive need. To put it another way, sex, for clownfish, is entirely mutable, mostly depending on social factors.
Now, this is interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, if sex is commonly mutable in different species, then it means sex as a biological category is not static in the way it is presented to us. Instead, sex can change. It is not inherently “natural” in the sense that you are born with it and it can never change. It is, for the clownfish, social, environmental, fluid.
However, these fish are not transgender. Transgender is a human concept. It is a cultural construction, because it is predicated upon gender. Again, fish do not have gender.
Also note that it is the female clownfish that is dominant. I was shocked to learn that many people still seem to think that a rigid sexual hierarchy is universal or “natural.” It’s not.
Anyways, just keep this in mind next time you watch Finding Nemo.
To be clear: I am not advocating for abolishing gendered language for animals, especially pets. I think that gendered language itself is okay. But what I am arguing is that by naturalizing terms like “male” and “female,” we lose out on a lot of nuance, distort reality, and erase trans people from existence. I believe that when we talk about biology, we must not use these terms.
I would also like to quickly point out that at the end of the day, this is a blogpost that I wrote in an evening, not an academic paper. A rant, not a formulated critique.
To you, this might not seem like a big deal. A lot of cis people seem to have this idea that we’re just making a mountain out of a molehill, or that there’s no reason to modify our language, or that really, words are just words. I can’t really express to you the pain I and many other transgender people feel when we read a textbook and know that according to it, we do not exist. The other day, a friend texted me gushing over his biology professor who made sure to use non-gendered language (again, yes, male and female are gendered), and I shared his joy. I’m not sure how to fully communicate this, but it is a really good feeling to have your existence affirmed when it is so rare.
This shit matters. It is important to think about what your words are communicating, not just what you teach, or what you think, or what you’ve learned, but the underlying assumptions, ideas, naturalizations that are encoded in the fiber of your ideology, in the fiber of your beliefs, your thoughts, your ideas. It matters because there is someone who you are erasing.