Biology and the Binary

Increasingly in recent years, trans (including nonbinary) and intersex people in the US and elsewhere have been facing increasingly vitriolic attacks by right-wing extremists who seem to delight in appealing to biology to defend their position. Demands that trans people be excluded from sports mingle with arguments that “XX is female, XY is male” and disingenuous questions about “what is a woman”. Anyone who has spent much time studying history will know these tactics are nothing new, as fascists have a perverse love of appealing to biology to defend their garbage position, and the same arguments were thrown around throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As a biologist with experience in the field who has actually taken the time to study the subject, I want to set a few things straight.

The first thing we need to clear up is that the ultimate goal of science is not to describe our universe, but to understand it. That may sound like a subtle distinction, and it is, but it’s also an important one. Understanding something requires that we take into account how the human brain processes and stores information. To make a very simplified story of the field of neurology, humans like to categorize things, be they colors (red, green, blue, etc.), organisms (subspecies, species, genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, kingdoms, domains), or sexes and genders. We do this because while it may not always be 100% accurate, it helps us to understand the world around us. We all agree that there is variation within each of those groups, such as how we can recognize that the sky is blue, but so is the skin of a blueberry, despite not being the exact same shade of blue. Both have similar enough wavelengths of reflected light that we group them together for the sake of describing them more easily.

We invented the conceptual box we call “blue” and put a set of similar shades of light together under that label. But we understand that this box is imperfect. We all understand that there are different shades of blue that all fall under the same category and accept that the category is imperfect. We continue to use it because it helps us to understand the world. By extension, if I got one million people together and showed them a picture of the electromagnetic spectrum and asked where the dividing line between blue and green is, I would probably get close to one million answers. Most would be centered around the same general part of the spectrum, and we could probably agree that our conceptual cut-off is somewhere near the middle of that distribution of answers, but we cannot ignore the fact that there is no one answer. If the answer was easy to distinguish, we should all agree where that line is. If we hold a green leaf up to the sky, we can see the difference in color, but once we put all of the shades of green next to all of the shades of blue, suddenly we disagree on exactly where the line is. That’s because we’re trying to take something that is innately a continuum and place it into categories, a process that can never be done with perfect accuracy.

So why am I spending all this time writing about colors? Because the question of how to categorize things is one that biology deals with constantly. As mentioned above, we categorize organisms into increasingly broad groups we call species, genera, etc. There are biologists who dedicate their entire lives to the subject, because classifying organisms into groups helps us to understand their relationships, and understanding, as stated above, is the ultimate goal of science. But ask any biologist worth their education, and we’ll tell you there are plenty of examples where those categories don’t always work perfectly. In the case of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), most people of European descent have some percentage of our genetic material that is descended from another species of human, H. neanderthalensis, often referred to as ‘Neanderthals’. This is especially important because the most commonly used definition of a species (known as the Biological Species Concept) says that two species shouldn’t be able to produce fertile offspring, and yet here we are. So why do we consider these populations that were clearly capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring as two separate species? Ultimately, it’s because it helps us to understand ourselves. It may not be a perfect description of how the world works, but it helps us to understand how the world works, and we care about that more. We’ve categorized ourselves into two separate species, but we also have to acknowledge that those categories are imperfect and exist for our own sake.

The categories of “male”, “female”, and “intersex” are conceptually very similar to the categories of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. They exist on a spectrum of variation that we have categorized for the sake of making that variation easier to understand. While those categories are useful to us, the field of biology absolutely does not insist that those categories are rigid and essential to the biology of the individuals we assign to them. The fundamental inescapable biological truth is that we made up these categories to help us describe and understand things. There is biologically real variation in size, shape, color, position, and many other characteristics in regards to any given anatomical, genetic, or chromosomal structures in the body, but we simply grouped that variation into categories. Men, women, intersex people, etc. all exist, yes, but those categories are social constructs invented to describe biological variation, not rigid biological dictates; if biology was as rigid and unchanging as bigots think, there would only be one sex-regulating system across all life, not hundreds, hormones would be rigidly binary (they aren’t), and life as we know it simply wouldn’t exist. Attempting to enforce rigid definitions and categories in this context is not only bigoted, but antithetical to the very field of biology, making it quite ironic that queerphobes are so quick to appeal to a field of science they clearly have at best a 3rd grade understanding of. Reducing all the variation we can observe to any number of categories can help us to understand the world around us, but arguing that these conceptual boxes must be rigid and insisting that we’re even capable of putting people into these boxes perfectly without any exceptions is utterly antithetical to the very field of biology, a field that very explicitly deals with variation in everything we do. Biology is the study of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and attempting to force the field to defend bigotry is beyond pathetic and ridiculous; it’s also a hallmark of fascists and racists (insofar as the two groups can be separated).

In short, biology as a field of study goes back thousands of years, and the existence of queer people fits perfectly into what we know about how life works. Trans people exist. Nonbinary people exist. Intersex people exist. Asexual spectrum and aromantic spectrum people exist. Multi-gender attracted people exist. Gays and lesbians exist. None of this should be at all surprising in the slightest given the billions of years of mutations that have occurred and been fixed. We weren’t designed in a factory, so why should our bodies conform to some arbitrary factory standards? Sex and gender each exist on a spectrum that we’ve simply categorized into groups to understand them more easily, but those categories we’ve classified people into absolutely do not erase the observed variation that exists. That’s the biology of it. Our work as scientists does not support transphobes or interphobes. No matter how much queerphobes, fascists, or racists want to appropriate the field of biology to defend their asinine positions, it simply never will. Biological essentialism is scientific garbage, and fascists’ arguments, which rely on biological essentialism, are equally garbage.