Biology is socially constructed y’all[1]
lots of people tell me “you’re confusing sex and gender” when i say biological sex is a social construction
no, i literally mean that naming biological structures “male” or “female” is arbitrary and not necessary to understand reproduction or the human body. it is not necessary for a doctor to label my body that way in order to treat me, even for matters of reproductive and sexual health (and my doctor would agree with me).
patriarchy preceded the concept of sex. it was a tool of patriarchy to label some bodies as male and some as female, in order to make us believe that oppression of women was a biological inevitability.
embodiment being a part of the oppression of women is not evidence that biological sex isn’t a social construction. it is evidence that the concept of biological sex is a tool of patriarchy, and that challenging patriarchy requires challenging the concept of biological sex.
science is not slow progress toward ultimate truth. it is a social process of paradigm shifts. this is true of every science, even physics and biology. any act of categorizing things in the world makes those categories (animal, plant, male, female) social constructions
thanks for coming to my tedtalk, I’d like to thank monique wittig for her essay one is not born a woman and thomas kuhn for his book the structure of scientific revolutions
Footnotes
This was written sometime in 2018, and I added the title in 2025. ↩︎