Liberating Biology

suffering through the cisheteropatriarchal naturalizations in biology

18 March 2025

Please note, this blogpost has been rewritten. For the old version, see here.

There is a strange kind of hermeneutical injustice one faces as a transgender person in academia these days. We are recognized as valid whilst the language and lesson plans of the lectures and textbooks simultaneously construct the world in a way that denies us existence. We are told we live in a world where our existence is valid, where our experiences are true, but the world that is described to us is one where our existence is invalid, and our experiences are false.

I have experienced this in a number of classes, but most prominently in my Biological Anthropology class.

I label it hermeneutical injustice in dialogue with Miranda Fricker’s definitions of the term: an injustice one knows took place yet lacks the words to describe it. Hermeneutical injustice is an injustice that is only intelligible to the lived experience, only existent in a bottom-up epistemology. It is an injustice that our society, language, and laws do and can not even know exists because it simply is inexpressible in the governing agent of the human world: language.

The classic example is sexual harassment. In the past, many woman in the workplace knew that the casual groping, sexual comments, and other “small” infractions made them feel uncomfortable and unsafe for some reason, but couldn’t quite explain why. Complaining to their friends, it might be said that it’s just flirting, even said it’s a compliment. While the person’s lived experience instructs them that it is unjust, they do not know why. They might even leave their job, and not be able to collect unemployment because when they are asked why they quit, they cannot explain why. They lacked the words “sexual harassment,” and as such, they could not articulate the injustice they faced into words.

For the sake of comparison, I believe it important to highlight three key features of this form of injustice:

1. It is primarily or even exclusively intelligible through lived experience
2. The lack of understanding as to why it feels unjust compounds the discomfort
3. The lack of ability to express the injustice compounds the oppression

I believe that how gender and sex are discussed in academia, especially Biology, is an example of hermeneutical injustice. We know there is some kind of injustice occurring but we do not know why, we do not know what. Our lack of understanding of why we feel it unjust makes us feel insane and oversensitive (of course compounded by broader transphobic narratives that tell us this). And finally, we cannot explain to our professors why it is unjust, and so they cannot alleviate the injustice.¹

Funnily enough, it was my Biological Anthropology class that broke down the hermeneutical injustice.

Bitch: On the Female of the Species

In 2023, Lucy Cooke published her book Bitch, deconstructing the patriarchal ways through which Biology as a science has been controlled and used to reify and naturalize gender norms. For anyone who has knowledge or experience of the history of Biology in its relationship to gender knows that Biology, particularly animal biology (the focus of this writing), has justified and reified the domination of women by supposing it natural. Cooke points out that Biology has “just-so-happened” to prove that females are submissive, passive, home-makers, evolutionarily irrelevant, and, in multiple ways, sexually irrelevant. Simone de Beauvoir described this as the positioning of “female” as the second sex. Cooke instead goes with the perhaps more obvious “loser.”

Only, since Darwin, evidence has been tampered with and ignored to produce this specific outcome in accordance with western tradition and culture.

Now, much of Cooke’s work here (at least in the part of the book we were assigned) seems rather focused on the deconstruction of the naturalization of female submission, and the fact that actually, females and males in animals don’t seem to universally follow any set of stereotypes we prescribe them.

Just under a century ago, this book would’ve been in book burnings. But today, it doesn’t feel so impactful. The idea that women aren’t naturally submissive to men is, at least to me, a bit obvious. But really, it wasn’t Cooke’s thesis that led to the dissolution of the hermeneutic injustice I face, it was how she got there. As she cleared the shrubbery to make it to the beach, I discovered liberation on the jungle floor.

A relevant tangent on 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, gender, and sexuality.

When I initially read this paper, I was hooked, but I couldn’t exactly explain why. Frankly, plants being inter/non-sexed doesn’t really seem that important to me. But after I read Cooke’s ideas, it quickly became obvious why discussion of the sex of plants was so captivating to me.

It comes down to one very simple idea: if the sexing of plants is descendent from cisheteropatriarchy, why is the sexing of animals not as well?

Radical Science for a Radical Idea

There are a few key ways in which sex is generalized and naturalized in Biology:

1. The male sex organ is external, the female sex organ is internal
2. The male is masculine, the female is feminine
3. The male inseminates, the female gestates
4. Sex originates at conception and goes unchanged till death²

Each of these are misleading, inaccurate, and ultimately violent claims.

Sexual Organs

This first point is very quickly pointed out as false in Cooke’s writing. The first example of this is the spider monkey:

The first time I saw a female spider monkey in the Amazon I assumed it was a male because of its dangling sexual appendage, the ostentatious size of which seemed to me frankly hazardous as it cavorted about the canopy. The primatologists I was with politely corrected me. Male spider monkeys are the sex with no apparent penis, since they keep theirs tucked away inside.

Interestingly, this critical example is not an animal distant from us in the animal kingdom. It is a primate. Primates are considered so closely related to humans that Primatology, the study of primates, is considered a sub-field of or at least intimately related to Anthropology, the study of humans. In this example, what amounts to basically a cousin of ours has the sexual organs “flipped” from how we naturalize. The female has the external organ, the male the internal. Interestingly, scientists like to call the female’s penis/clitoris³ a “pseudo-penis” which Cooke laughs off, pointing out “that the female spider monkey’s ‘fake’ phallus is in fact longer than the male’s ‘real’ phallus” (4).

Another notable example that Cooke points out is the spotted hyena:

Not only does the female spotted hyena have an eight-inch clitoris that’s shaped and positioned exactly like the male’s penis but she also gets erections. Both female and male spotted hyenas display and inspect one another’s sexual tumescence during ‘greeting ceremonies’. Crowning all this female virility is what appears to be a prominent pair of furry testicles.

Fascinating stuff. I probably should note, of course, that the pair of testicles are not actual testicles. Instead, Cooke says,

the hyena’s labia have fused and filled with fatty tissue and merely resemble male gonads. This means that the female spotted hyena is the only mammal with no external vaginal opening at all… . In more recent years, scientists have noted that males and females are so similar that they can be differentiated only by ‘palpation of the scrotum’ — something of a last resort, one assumes, when sexing an animal famous for its bone-crunching bite. (5)

To point out the obvious, it seems a glaring contradiction of how “natural” our sex really is. Female spotted hyenas have external sexual organs, rather significant ones at that. But even more interesting (to me at least) is that is is very difficult to discern the difference between the male and female sexual organs. Despite the actual sexual differentiation, they do not seem to look too different, strangely enough. I guess that must be nice for the trans spotted hyenas? (joke)

Phenotype: Masculinity and Femininity

I want to preface this section by explaining the most influential source of my understanding of sex, prior to this class: the dysphoria bible.

Human Sex (the adjective, not the verb) is broken down into three categories:

• Genotype: The genetically-defined chromosomal kareotype of an organism (XX, XY, and all variants thereof)
• Phenotype: The observable primary and secondary sexual characteristics (genitals, fat and muscle distribution, bone structure, etc.)
• Gender: The unobservable sexual characteristics, the internal mental model of a person’s own sex, and the way that they express it.

Any of these three aspects can fall into a position on a range of values. Your elementary school health class probably taught you that genotype is binary, either female (XX) or male (XY), when the reality is that there are a dozen other permutations that can occur within human beings.

When we’re talking about how “masculine” or “feminine” an animal is, we’re usually going to be referring to the phenotype. Some animals are more sexually differentiated than others. Generally, the more sexual competition there is, the more sexually differentiatated they are. For example, male gorillas tend to be bigger and bulkier, looking more “masculine” as a part of sexual selection.⁴

In essence, phenotype is a fundamental way in which sex is naturalized. It is how sex and gender are established, it is how, as Judith Butler puts it, gender is inscribed onto the body, and is how the patriarchy has often times been justified. The man is bigger, stronger, tougher than the woman. It only makes sense that they control us. It is also a critical element of key intersections between race and gender, and how gender non-conforming and transgender folks are erased. After all, how can you even be a man without masculinity? Or a woman without femininity?

We must understand phenotype and the hormones that produce it as an essential and necessary element of the naturalization, enforcement, and restriction of sex/gender as we move into the next passage from Cooke on the nature of sex in nature:

Scientists have also been fascinated by [the female spotted hyena’s] similarly ‘masculinized’ body and behaviour. Females can be up to 10 per cent heavier than males in the wild (20 per cent in captivity). This is unusual, as amongst mammals males are generally larger in size,” In the rest of the animal kingdom, and thus the majority of animals, sexual size dimorphism is however generally the reverse. Fatter, more fecund females produce more eggs, so amongst most invertebrates and many fish, amphibians and reptiles it is the females that often outsize the males.’ (5-6)

Let me reiterate Cooke’s words: in most species of animals, it is the female that is bigger than the male. Yet, according to (at least) western cultural images of “natural” sexual dimorphism, it is the masculine that is large, the feminine that is small. In contrast, this key cultural imagery of the big male and the dainty female is actually reversed in most non-mammalian species, and even many mammals, such as “a South American bat, Ametrida centurio,” and “many species of baleen whale[s]” (6).

If phenotype is one of the most essential indicators of sex, how is it that the phenotype of males in one species bears a shocking resemblance to the phenotype of females in another species? In other words, how can we prove one’s sex with one’s body if the same body type can indicate two different sexes? After all, would that not result in phenotype both proving and disproving a certain sex? A litmus test that returns both positive and false?

I do want to make something clear: phenotype still has bearing within a species. Meaning that, yes, testosterone tends to make humans more “masculine,” and estrogen tends to make humans more “feminine.” But this is not a universal thing. This matters because it affirms the idea that we in the queer community already know: femininity and masculinity are not necessarily tied to sex or gender. It isn’t in nature, so why would we enforce it on ourselves in society?

Reproduction

Reproduction is a major struggle for transgender (and cis!⁵) people. The book Irreversible Damage has done, well, irreversible damage to transmascs in particular. In essence, this 2020 nightmare of a target on the trans community argues that transmasc people have merely been seduced by some kind of social contagion, delegitimizing transgender experience has just another fad, or worse, a lie pushed onto youth,⁶ and further continuing the trend of revoking autonomy to those society decides to view as women.

What is most mortifying, however, is that there is a clear trend that the author seems most focused on, the “irreversible damage” of the book: reproduction. Really, it seems the author “specifically is concerned about afab people not growing up to be beautiful and fuckable and impregnable,” as one trans man put it, as a result of masculinizing medical transition (i.e. the process of taking testosterone as an AFAB person). Despite the book being written by a woman, it is excruciatingly obvious the extent to which the cisheteropartriarchy’s misogynist valuations of women’s lives as for reproduction has seeped into each and every page of this vile book.

Reproduction is often the standard for which sex is reduced to. “Female” is often defined in relation to gestation, and male in relation to insemination. But there are several key issues with this framework. Firstly, not all endosex (non-intersex) and cisgender people can reproduce. There simply are (“normal”) mutations that result in some people not being able to reproduce. Now, people who think they know more about evolution than they actually do will tell you that animals that cannot reproduce are mistakes in the objective gaze of evolution. This is a very common homophobic argument, for example. But actually, having members of the group who can/do not reproduce is vital for the survival of the group, especially in humans.⁷

Another critical issue is simply the existence of intersex people. If sex is about your role in reproduction, what happen if your sex results in you being unable to reproduce? Is that simply its own third sex? No, because many intersex people can actually reproduce. Or, what happens if a cis woman can’t reproduce? Is she suddenly intersex? Is she not female? Maybe, maybe. It’s really hard to say. The crux of the issue here is that sex is complicated, and reducing it to reproduction does not make it any less complicated, it just makes the “fringe” cases even more confusing.

Regardless, this ultimately highlights how reproduction is constructed as a central element of sex—arguably the most important component. Biologically, this goes back to sexual dimorphism. In sexual species, two animals are needed to reproduce, as opposed to asexual species that reproduce individually. So the common conception is that males impregnate the female, and females gestate and give birth. Funnily enough though, this isn’t actually universally true.

There are many species of animals where it is the female who “impregnates” the male, and the male who “gives birth.” Seahorses are the quintessential example. The female inseminates their eggs into the male, and the male carries them to term before they literally go into labor to release the babies. So, if you carry the idea that pregnancy is exclusively a female thing, and insemination is exclusively a male thing, go tell that to all the animals for whom it is literally the exact opposite. Biology really is so cool.

We are really running out of ways to define sex. Before we finalize that discussion, let’s take a look at the final, and perhaps most important, way cisheteropatriarchy has defined sex.

The Mutability of Sex

Sex is often considered immutable, or unchanging. According to the White House on January 20, 2025, sex refers to “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”

I also want to point out here that they deem the origin of sex as something “a person [belongs to] at conception.” In other words, sex is something innate to a person, determined at the exact moment of a person’s coming into existence. Funnily enough, Judith Butler makes a similar point, arguing against the idea of a “pre-discursive” person that is free from gender or sex. Instead, Butler argues, the person’s being is constructed by sex/gender. Trump instead shifts this a little, arguing that a person simply is their sex/gender. In other words, it is the distinction between seeing a subject of sex/gender and seeing a female/male.

But that distinction matters. Because if sex/gender is something that is a component of how one is culturally constructed, then we understand it to be culturally constructed itself. Or, we could say, socially constructed.

Let’s talk clownfish. Clownfish are either male or unsexed (more on that later) until the largest one in the group becomes a female for the sake of reproduction, taking on the dominant role. Then, the male clownfish are submissive to the female. But if that female dies, then the biggest male/unsexed clownfish will become a female, taking the female role. As one article humorously puts it, “This is the natural order of things when it comes to clownfish.” In essence, it seems that clownfish change sex primarily based on social context. A group of clownfish always need a female, and so if there is no female in the group, one must become female. And this is decided on social grounds: the largest clownfish becomes female, as the most dominant. To put it another way, sex, for clownfish, is entirely mutable. It is constructed and reconstructed based on the social context.

So, the thing is, regardless of what the Trump administration has stated, it is simply a fact that sex is not immutable. Clownfish change it on a regular basis, and they don’t even have all the fancy technology we have. Humans might not “naturally” fly, but we do now. We might not “naturally” be able to dive deep into the ocean, but we can now. Really, most of human history seems to be about seeing cool things other animals can do and then figuring out how to do them. I think that’s pretty cool. So if animals can change their sex, why can’t we? Well, we can! And that’s awesome. So why does it seem to bother so many people, so much?

There is a reason I noted it as a fundamental element of the cisheteropatriarchal definition of sex. Because if even sex is mutable, then how could gender be immutable? And as so many trans people have pointed out for so long, if gender is mutable, how could any kind of gender-based oppression ever make sense? If gender is mutable, then every bit of cisheteropatriarchy completely breaks down. Nothing within its web of logic makes any bit of sense. Therefore, the immutability of sex is not just an important argument of cisheteropatriarchy, it is its founding principle.⁸

The Liberation of Sex

After discussing all this, you may be left wondering what sex even is at this point, as a broad categorization of animals. After all, if sex does not instruct body type, social function, reproductive function, and is mutable, then what the hell does it describe?

Ultimately, sex is simply what it is. It is differentiation. That is truly the only accurate way to describe it. Sex is the dimorphic differentiation of a species into two. I think it would also be accurate to specify the differentiation into one that produces the ova and one that produces the sperm.

And I think at this point, the terms “female” and “male” really start to struggle to have meaning. It seems we have simply reduced them to the most simplest of meaning. At one point, the word “female” said submissive, mother, home-maker, feminine, birth-giver, internal sex organ haver, passive, asexual. We now know that none of these things are necessitated by the label of “female.” So should we keep using it?

Unfortunately, I am but a humble college student who is probably talking about things she needs more experience on. After all, that’s why you’re reading this on a blog and not an academic paper. At the end of the day, I have little control over what is and is not used, how sex is and is not viewed. But I want you to understand that largely, our understanding of sex has been enforced, imposed, constructed, prescribed, and generalized onto animals, often violently so, that violence returning back onto our own neighbors. It is frustrating to me that so many turn to animals to cite the essential naturalness of sex. Because really, the sex of animals has been constructed by humans based on very human, very violent definitions of our own.

”The Ancestral Sex”

To close out this discussion, I want to remark on the origin of sex, developmentally speaking. As noted before, the Trump administration seems to think sex is something one has at conception. And, many people, in allyship with the queer community, have argued that actually, all humans are female at conception. In fact, Cooke highlights this herself, suggesting that females are the “original” sex:

‘There is little doubt that the first creatures reproduced by cloning,’ [David Crews] told me. ‘The earliest reproductive organism had to be able to lay eggs and that’s a female.’ … ‘Maleness evolved as an adaptation to femaleness,’ Crews continued. ‘When males came along what they did was to facilitate reproduction in the female. To stimulate and coordinate the neuroendocrinological processes that underlie the shedding of gametes. Males are behavioural facilitators.’ (26)

When the executive order was still fresh in everyone’s minds, I recall reading an article that was arguing that actually, everyone is not female as conception. Everyone is unsexed.

Recall that just a few paragraphs ago, I argued that the fundamental definition of sex should be no more than sexual differentiation. So if sex is about sexual differentiation then how could there be sex before differentiation? In other words, if there is no sexual differentiation to speak of, then how could we speak of the representation of sexual differentiation? That, in essence, is the argument of the article.

Ultimately I think the reason why Cooke’s approach to understanding the development of sex bothers me so much is because it is very cisgender and endosex centered. It’s clear to me she considers it subversive, yet it is subversive only to the misogynist element of cisheteropatriarchy, not to the sex essentialist elements. In fact, its subversion acts within those essentialist elements, because it suggests that if it was actually “male” that arose secondarily to “female” then it is “man” who is secondary to “women.” Cooke personally relates to the pre-sex “female” and relates men to the post-sex “male” and yet I and all other people who do not fit neatly into female/woman male/man can personally relate to neither. Her language erases us.

To me, it is a failing of our language that creates this problem. It is that when we say the pre-sex animal was “female,” we are not just describing that yet-nonexistent differentiation, we are implicitly bundling in many other elements that may or may not be accurate at all. To suggest the pre-sex animal was “female” is to suggest that it was also a woman, perhaps even a feminine birther with internal sex organs, even as many of these characteristics only arose post-sex, and differing wildly from species to species.

What if we instead were to use something like ‘Type A/B’? The pre-sex animal is neither Type A nor Type B. At the point of sexual differentiation, Type A and Type B emerge. In the example of clownfish, the largest clownfish becomes Type B, and the rest become Type A. Neither Type A nor Type B necessitate any particular trait or set of traits. There is no end to the number of Types there might be, no overly strict binary, no limitations that nature refuses to abide by.

Considering the origins of sex forces us to radicalize our language to enable our understanding of the radicalism of nature.

Concluding Words

When I read Gender Trouble that long ago, I remember Butler’s explanation that at its core, Gender Trouble was a book from and for the queers. At the time, I don’t think I fully understood that. To me, the discussion of gender/sex was more of a fun, academic discussion than anything else. But as this subject has (quite painfully) made its way into my personal experience, their words have become more and more obvious and plain to me.

At its core, this blogpost is from and for the queers. We queers know that sex and gender are far more complicated than is let on in the sciences. We queers know that there is some kind of injustice going on in the language of Biologists, in the language of Anthropologists. But we’ve lacked our own language to express why, and to better the situation.

And more importantly, we queers need this language. I hope that my foray into the queer construction of that language has alleviated some of the hermeneutical injustice that we queers face. At its core, that has always been the goal of this writing.