From Testosterone to Racialization to Knobby Knees: 15 Years of Gender/Sex

Abstract

This paper discusses ~15 years of my research on gender/sex. I first discuss how “sex versus gender” is an overlay onto “nature versus nurture” ideologies, and the ways these are unempirical (if not anti-empirical), inaccurate, and unjust. I provide definitions of gender/sex, as well as gender and sex, and the pitfalls of “getting sex right” ideologies that aim to provide a singular universal definition of sex that belies its multiplicity, dynamism, and social situatedness. I discuss how these ideologies are often rooted in “bio/logics” that seek to define sex in ways that restrict human rights, especially for gender/sex minorities. I focus on my own research on testosterone (T) beyond masculinity that highlights the importance of gender/sex. This includes thinking about T in terms of social and biomaterial construction, including a “gender → T pathway” and “chronic gender”. I then describe how discussions of T are also rooted in racism, racialization, colonialism, and settler colonialism. In addition, I delineate how this makes not just for “sex versus gender” dichotomies and gender binaries, but ladders or helices that include gender/sex and race/ethnicity, among other social locations. I also point to gender/sex as an important lens for understanding bodily formations beyond T, that include a new “knobby knee hypothesis”. In discussing these topics, I focus on an array of important feminist science principles, including epistemic injustice, pre-theory, intersectionality, and diffraction. I close by discussing how gender/sex can provide an avenue for bioscientific research that is more empirical, accurate, and just.