Sex and Planets: Social Constructs in Science

What might it mean to say that sex is a social construct? I've recently come to realise how we can understand the male/female distinction in humans as a social construct. Here's an attempt at explaining it. In biology, a definition of sex that applies across the animal kingdom is based on the production of gametes: males produce sperm, and females produce eggs. This seems to be the most stable definition, because reproductive organs and chromosomes exhibit too much variety, both within and across species, to serve as a reliable basis. Gametes, however, seem to capture the dichotomy required for reproduction. It doesn't matter what the reproductive organs look like or their organisation, nor does it matter which chromosomal configurations are at play. When individuals manage to combine sperm and egg, each is fulfilling their biological sexual role towards reproduction. Thus, there is a plausible biological definition of sex.

When I say that the male/female distinction in humans is a social construct, I'm not denying that there is a biological distinction. What I question is whether the biological definition in terms of gametes is what underpins the distinction operative in human society. In human society, the distinction often boils down to the "eye-ball test," which is the inspection of genitals at birth by doctors. The issue is that there isn’t a neat match between what doctors observe in newborn babies and the production of gametes. A significant amount of conceptual work and mental gymnastics are required for the eye-ball test to reliably match the biological definition. Consider a human who never produces gametes in their life, perhaps because they die before reaching puberty or for some reason, it just never happens in their bodies. What if the gametes someone produces don't correspond to the visible organs at birth? Questions like these need answers, and because there are billions of us, millions of cases simply fail to fit the biological definition. The social construction then occurs in insisting that there's a biological distinction in humans between male and female that matches the eye-ball test. It's a social obsession with finding reasons to preserve a dichotomous distinction claimed to be based in science but actually matches social categories.

Sex is not the only domain where science is pressured by society to provide a definition that matches social expectations. In Logic in the Wild, I discuss the demotion of Pluto as a planet in 2006. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) brought the definition of a planet to its members and voted on a new definition: “A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” This new definition of a planet resulted from a vote! The reasons leading the association to vote for the new definition included the discovery of several objects in the Kuiper belt very much like Pluto, which would dramatically increase the number of planets in the Solar System, becoming a tedious exercise in categorising and naming all those objects. Instead of increasing the number of planets from 9 to hundreds or thousands, the society voted to demote Pluto and retain a manageable number of planets. If anything is a social construct in science, the definition of a planet is a prime example. Unlike individuals, however, Pluto isn't affected in any way by whether we call it a planet or not, and the scientific interest in it, its composition, and sending probes to it are not affected by how we name it. Trans people, however, are significantly affected by the social pressure to enforce a biological definition that captures a distinction fitting social patterns and legal requirements, allowing doctors to assign sex to babies with the eye-ball test. To say that sex is a social construct isn't to deny that there's a biological definition of the male/female distinction but to highlight that the definition doesn't fit with social expectations. Reinforcing the eye-ball test as the measure of sex is what creates social oppression, for social pressures to match social patterns, as a social construct.