Toward a Biosocial Science by Alexander Riley

Author:Alexander Riley [Riley, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367750978
Google: r58SzgEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-01-15T02:19:17+00:00

The Sex–Gender Relationship

Much of the mainstream sociological effort to understand what sociobiologists refer to as the sex difference hinges on the rhetorical move away from the category “sex” and toward the category “gender.” The way this move works is that sex is considered a purely biological category and therefore abandoned to the biologists—though as we will see, there are sociological efforts to take on sex by undermining most of the aspects of the term that come to us from biological science—and gender is defined as a purely social and cultural category that has no concrete, determinable relationship to sex. But arguing for a neat separation between sex and gender is denying much empirical evidence present in real human beings and real human societies. The social and cultural categories we produce to talk about gender difference are unavoidably intertwined with the biological basis of the sex difference. It is not completely arbitrary that, for example, in virtually all societies, assertiveness is more frequently a character trait assigned to the masculine gender than to the feminine, and there are good reasons to believe that individuals at one end of the sex binary are much more likely to be more immediately and powerfully drawn to the gender role that includes assertiveness as one of its core traits. There is an evolutionary logic that describes why this would be the case. Anisogamy and sexual selection alone tells us that we might expect this. Social and cultural forces can of course shape that in many ways, and even work against the logic of anisogamy and sexual selection. But to completely separate the gender categories from the sex categories, as some contemporary feminist-based writing recommends, represents a fundamental misstep if the goal is the most accurate scientific knowledge of why human behavior and social arrangements look as they do.

The use of the term “gender” to refer to the social role differences that emerge from sex difference is relatively recent. Cultural anthropologists did early work to show the category’s variability across cultures, but some exaggerated a few exotic examples into a theoretical effort to undo the binary nature of the gender axis. The alignment of the sex binary with gender is a cultural universal, with some variation at the edges. Just as male and female are the two categories of the sex binary, with the vast majority of nearly 99.99% of empirical examples occupying one of those two positions, so with gender, albeit with more room for variation in the latter. Some cultures here and there will have an additional gender category or two, occupied by a small number of individuals, perhaps permanently, perhaps as a transitional or temporary identity, between the two main categories, but the two main categories are an overwhelming cultural universal.

Robert Trivers (2011:163–4) describes the “extraordinary verbal one-step” that has taken place in recent decades to effectively replace sex with gender as the basic term for denoting the sex binary in our species. Both terms have a long history of several centuries in

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