There are times when I regret having dropped biology before starting my GCSEs. It’s not that I think I’d be using it today (as with the exams I did take in 1991, I’m sure I’d have forgotten the content years ago). Even so, as a feminist I sometimes wonder if having formal biology credentials would come in useful.
I could add “biologist here!” at the start of any statement of the bleeding obvious. Don’t mess with me — I’ve got the academic qualifications which allow me to participate in the age-old debate over whether female people exist in our own right!
Agustín Fuentes is a biological anthropologist at Princeton University. This allows him to adjudicate on this particular issue. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of many a great man (we know, by the way, that men exist). Take Aristotle, for instance, who believed that females were “less developed” males, or Galen, who saw women as ”defective men”. For millennia, the general idea has been that females aren’t a distinct and diverse group of humans, with both variations between us and multiple overlapping qualities with males. We’re more a rag-tag group of smaller, penis-less males, males gone wrong — tolerated, in the words of Philomena Cunk, “for their ability to excrete new humans from their front parts”.
This is the tradition that Fuentes picks up on, though I doubt that he sees it that way. In 2023, he wrote an article for Scientific American purporting to demonstrate why “human sex is not binary”. This he considered such a resounding success that he has now published a book, glowingly reviewed in The Lancet, on why female people aren’t identifiable in any meaningful, consistent way — certainly not any way which would make it clear when and where our needs and experiences might deviate from those of the default human.
Naturally the argument has been framed somewhat differently. It’s patriarchy but not as we know it, recasting a classic denial of female specificity as a brave rejection of the “limits of the binary” and of prescribed gender roles. There are, the blurb tells us, “multitudes of ways of being human” in a world where “none of us fits nearly into only one of two categories”, as though recognising this basic fact were somehow contingent on thinking the categories “male” and “female” are themselves unclear. We are meant to see what is essentially a repackaging of the male default as liberatory. It’s impossible, apparently, to think of female people as a clearly defined class of humans without believing all female people are the same, never have varying physical qualities, desires and interests, and don’t share multiple qualities and aptitudes with male people.
The way in which this argument works, smooshing together actual sex differences and patriarchal gender stereotypes, is already clear in the 2023 article. “We know,” Fuentes writes, “that humans exhibit a range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge”:
Producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially, about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports.
Fuentes uses this somewhat mundane observation — essentially, a list of behaviours and qualities which the patriarchal mindset has categorised as either masculine or feminine — to conclude that “sex is very complex in humans” and that “binary and simplistic explanations for human sex biology are either wholly incorrect or substantially incomplete”. Have a vagina but don’t like gossip? Sex is so very complex! Who knows what anyone is?
As I point out in my own book Unkind, it’s a patriarchal two-step of the kind practiced a generation earlier in neurosexist works such as Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference, and by queer theorists such as Judith Butler. It’s profoundly anti-feminist, since feminism differentiates sex from gender for two purposes — both to show the artificiality of hiving off some behaviours, roles and feelings as “masculine” or “feminine”, and to show when and where sex difference matters. Thinkers from Fuentes to Butler push sex and gender back together again while claiming to offer an improvement on traditional patriarchy on the basis that everything is now pick and mix. You might have a female gender identity but you could have a penis!
A refusal to distinguish the socio-cultural from the biological, far from being complex and nuanced, ends up conflating being less feminine with being less female
If you don’t think about it for very long, you could miss the way in which this gives with one hand and takes with another. Far from avoiding “binary and simplistic” conceptions of male and female, this way of thinking re-inscribes the notion that it is harmless — even essential — to categorise things which are utterly unrelated to sex difference as male/masculine or female/feminine. A refusal to distinguish the socio-cultural from the biological, far from being complex and nuanced, ends up conflating being less feminine with being less female. It tells all female humans that if we do not wish to be shoved into the “feminine” box we must abandon any ideas about being clearly distinguishable from male humans.
That this benefits all male-bodied people — regardless of their own particular “engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip” — ought to be obvious. As Caroline Criado Perez wrote in 2019’s Invisible Women, treating male bodies as the default bodies “has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate”:
It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren’t designed for our bodies. It leads to us dying from drugs that don’t work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don’t fit very well.
Pointing out that there are variations between female bodies, or suggesting that since everyone is different, there’s no such thing as “male” or “female” design, is not helpful here. A world which takes female bodies into account — even if it can only do so in the broadest terms — is better than one that does not. What “sex isn’t binary” does is leave the world as it is — designed for men — while rendering the problem unspeakable.
Obviously I’m claiming all this having given up biology lessons at 14. Yet while I appreciate the scientists who have been brave enough to stand up to this nonsense, I can’t help feeling anyone should be able to challenge it. There is a long history of women being bullied out of asserting ourselves on the very question of what we are and why we matter.
We’re meant to feel too ill-qualified (where’s your science degree?). We’re meant to feel threatened (what to end up back in the kitchen?). We’re meant to feel behind the times (don’t you understand that no one thinks this any more?).
Ultimately, we’re meant to feel small, too irrelevant to expect more than a choice between non-existence as a sex class or existence as a conservative stereotype. That, by the way, is an age-old, harmful, socially constructed binary. If we want to reject such things, how about starting there?
