How Biology and Culture Shape Gender Identity

One of the most problematic myths in Western culture (Europe and the Americas), arguably, is the origin story of man and woman: Adam and Eve. Whether or not one subscribes to a Christian denomination, our Western culture is thoroughly seeped in it. Man was created first (dominant), and woman came second, created from his spare rib (subservient).

In some ways, this myth arguably has a basis in biological reality. We know from research in cognitive archeology and paleoanthropology that ancestral humans, going back around two million years to Homo erectus, were primarily hetero-monogamous, based in part on the necessity to ensure breeding certainty, a consequence of bipedalism, tool manufacture, and hunter-gathering arrangements, and that women were the ones who bore children. Early forms of marriage rituals provided a guarantee of breeding certainty, ensuring cooperative behavior between males who needed to be away to procure a supply of food, allowing certainty that their offspring were indeed theirs (see, for instance, Steven Mithen’s book The Prehistory of the Mind).

But what of culture?

Marriage is itself a cultural artifact, confected by human minds to solve a particular biological imperative (see above). But with the advent of an advanced symbolic cognitive capability (of which language is the paradigm example), culture itself has influenced and shaped our very relationship with our lived biological experience.

In terms of culture, we use material artifacts to represent culturally incubated ideas. We then come to believe, through the use of these material anchors, that the abstract notion is objectively “real.” Take money as a case in point. You might think that money is objectively real. But the coins, notes, bills, or plastic we carry around with us do not have intrinsic value. They only betoken monetary value because we collectively agree and behave such they do.

This was also the case when money was measured in different ways at earlier points in history, such as silver or gold, for instance. The weight of the coins only betokened “value” because of the cultural compact that afforded these particular naturally occurring metals an agreed-upon value (see for instance Peter Harder’s book Meaning in Mind and Society).

The point here is that gender, like any other cultural construct, is made real by virtue of dress and physiology.

The feminist movement

One of the great achievements of the Western feminist movement during the counterculture of the 1960s and onwards was to challenge the prescriptivism that equated biological divergence with a particular (cultural) role in society (for instance, that men are the breadwinners, while women stay at home and raise the children), with the asymmetric power-dynamic that arose from that biological-cultural prescriptivism. This rejection by the feminist movement of societal roles based on biology was reframed by a new narrative: The patriarch is the oppressor, and the matriarch is the suppressed. From this re-framing, it followed that women should “fight” for equality and “take back” from the oppressor what was being withheld. While there have been many successes, there have also been some reverses (the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in the United States, for instance), and the gender pay gap across the Western world persists.

From feminism to TERFism to gender-critical feminism

More recently, the advent of so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) came to be a significant feminist ideology. In recent years, TERF has been “rebranded” as gender critical (GC) feminism, a “linguistic pivot from ‘anti-trans’ to ‘pro-woman’ … an attempted claim to legitimacy with an aim of accruing mainstream support,” according to a peer-reviewed research article by Claire Thurlow. Thurlow argues that despite the rebranding, GC feminism continues to deploy anti-trans tropes and alarmist rhetoric aimed at inciting moral panic. According to another commentator, Katelyn Burns (writing in Vox), GC feminism is now the de facto dominant ideology in the UK and a significant force in the United States, where, ironically, GC feminists ally with (male) “family-values” conservatives whose goals are often antithetical to those of GC feminism.

The GC ideology can be viewed as a reversal of the original move upon which the feminist movement was predicated. Rather than disavowing biology in service of (re)claiming cultural equivalence, it seeks to reclaim biological divergence as the decisive factor in the face of a new perceived threat: the transgender.

One reason that GC feminism unequivocally rejects the possibility of a transgendered individual is, according to Katelyn Burns, that it allows the possibility that a member of the oppressors (a man) can seek to masquerade as a woman. To reject the possibility of a man transitioning to a woman (and vice versa), GC ideology invokes biological essentialism: the idea that sex is binary and immutable, determined at the level of chromosomes. Thus, one’s gender must inevitably align with biological sex as assigned at birth.

Gender Essential Reads

Thinking About Gender

The Debate About Sex Assigned at Birth

This essentialist view of biological sex is, for many, just common sense (including statements on this made by former UK PM Rishi Sunak). The view has been given credence by expert commentators. For instance, Richard Dawkins in an article in The New Statesman claimed that biological sex is indeed immutable and binary, using what might be perceived as disparaging rhetoric towards those that might think and or behave otherwise.

However, as I have argued in a previous Psychology Today post, this is not entirely the consensus among medical professionals and researchers. Some view biological sex as better thought of as a spectrum condition.

Conclusion

Whatever one’s views on the immutability or otherwise of biological sex, gender is itself a sociolinguistic construct. While it certainly has a basis in biology, it is confected in a cultural context. And non-Western cultures take different views as to whether gender identity must align with biological sex as assigned at birth (see my previous post). The takeaway from this is that while freedom of speech is important, so is tolerance of opposing views, without resorting to perceived transphobic tropes.