'Biological essentialism'?

[BenjiCat]

I'll start with thanking wise Mumsnet contributors. I've learnt so much about women's rights, single sex spaces and transgenderism by lurking in the background of these boards.

I've (unwittingly) gotten into the 'debate' with a friend and looking for your support. He shared a news article about single sex spaces and this being an 'attack on trans' and the argument that 'men already exist in women's spaces' and it's not a problem.

I felt I couldn't hold my tongue and challenged this. I said single sex spaces (e.g. rape crisis, healthcare, intimate care, prisons) are incredibly important for women due to trauma, safeguarding etc. and that 98% of sexual crimes are committed by men. I also pointed to recent issues. For example, the communal mixed sex toilets in schools and reports of sexual assaults on girls. Also the 26 nurses taking the NHS to court for being forced to share changing rooms.

He didn't address my specific points above other than to say 'of course there should be women's spaces, but transwoman need healthcare and support too'. I also felt like he was simply trying to 'gotcha' me by saying 'you think transwoman are pretending to be woman'. It basically resulted in me being labelled a 'biological essentialist' 😔

I don't have enough knowledge of feminism history to challenge this point about 'biological essentialism' - but it doesn't sit right with me being labelled as this. I'm not saying people are destined to certain characteristics and traits, but being female is innate and our needs should be considered.

I'm seeing him soon and I know it will come back up in conversation. Wise Mumsnetters help me challenge this!

To me, being a 'biological essentialist' means believing that only women have periods, babies and the menopause, and only men have cocks and balls. One can't become the other through some magical transubstantiation of chromosomes.

There's nothing in that about believing that a woman has to like pink, wear high heels, can't add up and must prefer making cupcakes to mending bicycles.

Mebbe it means something different in critical theory circles.

@EdithStourton possibly. It was definitely being used as a dig followed with imploring me to 'challenge my thinking'!

But trans women are pretending to be women

they are not actually women because they can’t be because they’re men - it’s the literal qualification

honestly if he says that as a kind of gotcha just say yes you’re right they are pretending to be women. It’s true! They are!

And I strongly suspect if he’s straight he wouldn’t challenge his thinking enough to sleep with a TW because he knows damn well they’re men too

It’s just words. Your ‘friend’ is using it as an insult. But, until you understand what he means by it, you can’t really engage with the insult or defend yourself.

Ask him what he means by the phrase.

I don’t imagine he will be able to articulate it particularly well as it’s just a sort of dog whistle phrase.

You can think that what makes someone make or female is physical and biologically based without believing that your biology (sex) determines your potential, ability, and value to society.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the term, it's just fact. I'd simply agree, "Yes, I believe in biological reality" and see what he comes back with.

If “Biological essentialism” means understanding that women are adult human females and men are adult human males and that swapping between those two is not possible, then I’m a biological essentialist.

Understanding science and maintaining boundaries for women is not something I will ever be ashamed of.

Some people use the phrase ‘biological essentialism' to describe the thinking that because women can have babies then that is what nature designed them to do and that should be all that they do - be mothers and housewives and nothing else.

I would say your friend is using a term that he doesn’t understand or that he thinks refers to the fact that mammals have two sexes and, for some reason, he thinks that humans are different to every other mammalian species in some way 🤷‍♀️

Feminism (of many different types) recognises the unique ability of women to be able to give birth but it also argues for women to be given choice to control their own fertility and to live their lives as they see fit i.e. working mother, stay at home mother, not a mother at all.

He is the one with the thinking problem and is silencing you with his disapproval.

There is nothing inherently insulting in his choice of words but the interpretation that he has used them as an insult.

I have taken to using the phrase womanface. Being a woman is not a costume, in many parts of the world it must feel like a life sentence.

Understanding biology is important, essential even. Anyone who pretends the difference between males and females is not vitally important under some circumstances is either stupid or cruel. I wouldn't waste any more time on him.

I think bioessentialism means sex and gender are perfectly aligned and should determine social roles. So women are childbearing and should therefore stay home to look after babies while the men hunt and earn money or whatever.

It is import to argue that sex is unchangeable but sex does not determine your role in society or your job or your intelligence. Hence, gender critical feminism rejects bioessentialism because we reject fixed gender roles and all the gender stereotypes that go with them.

Wear what you want, work where you can get hired but you can't change sex.

Interesting. Do you have any references or further info on this? I have never heard this word before. It is disturbing that it drags gender into the meaning, as it just sounds like shorthand for "biology is an essential factor" which it is of course.

Biological essentialism is the belief that such things as masculinity and femininity, plus one's personality traits, are inborn rather than a product of the environment.
Specifically in terms of gender, it means that males and females are different because of biology, and it's not culturally influenced.
As feminists, we certainly know the influence that socialization can have, so that theory is bunk.

I'm not understanding how he thinks this relates to you.
If he's trying to say being trans is not anything biological, such as the gender non-conforming brain differences trans people claim to have, but entirely a product of cultural socialization, then he's essentially admitting it's made up bullshit. You can point out that he defeated his own argument by opening up that can of worms.

He is saying what most unthinking men are saying about this. 'Of course you need single sex spaces, but it's important that you take in and nurture men in them who want to be there'.

Basically he does not believe that women should have the right to say no to men, and that the first responsibility of a space and of women is to nurture men. In many ways he's the biologically essentialist one, he is the one who believes a man's need outweighs all women's.

The question to ask is what does he plan for the women who have to leave the space when a man walks in due to his gender identity. You'll get a lot of fudging that moves through 'there aren't any' and goes through 'but they're women with issues that shouldn't be allowed so it's their fault (which is a variant on if she hadn't annoyed him he wouldn't have had to hit her)' and eventually you'll get to the bottom line which is that excluding some women from women's spaces is right and ok if it benefits men. And men have no duty of reciprocity or care because men. (Even the ones who say they are women.)

Which is in essence a belief that all spaces are first and foremost for men and their needs, and women who are willing and able to be useful to men may use the women's space too. And women who aren't or can't deserve to be punished.

By this point they've usually got quite cross because they do not like facing their own misogyny. They identify as being nice people, hence the needing to dress all this up in pretty terms and wankery to hide it.

I agree with asking him what he means by it.

It's usually an allegation that by saying 'woman' is a word defining a physical reality/sex class, that we therefore think all women are only 'real women' if they have kids, or have sex with men.

I've no doubt that there are quite a lot of people who believe that - you can find people who believe the most ridiculous nonsense. And even on MN you will find quite a lot of women and men have a belief in something like 'maternal instinct'. I think that is in fact an interesting subject and worth exploring more deeply.

I very much doubt he has thought about it very deeply though. If he really thinks it's OK to tell a woman that her physical body is irrelevant to her life and can't be defined beyond being an individual, I think he's wrong.

A man should be able to put on a dress, grow out his hair, paint his nails, take up every feminine hobby he can find, and even change his name and still be considered a man. He shouldn’t be criticized or endangered for not conforming to male stereotypes.

Biological essentialism says that our choices should be constrained by our sex.

biological essentialism is what says a man can’t be a man if he wants to do things society associates with femininity. It’s discriminatory and wrong.

the world would be a much better place if males could just accept that men are a varied and interesting group of people that do not fit one standard. They are much like females in that regard, but we have made more progress in allowing women to express themselves, though I fear that progress may be waning.

He doesn't understand the term. Biological essentialism means believing that men and women should have separate roles in life by virtue of their sex, so the very opposite of what any gender critical feminists believe since they want us to get out of gender straightjackets. What he's describing applies to rhe anti-gender right but not to anyone who simply recognizes the reality of our sexed bodies and the constraints this places on us.

You might want to point out that what his crowd is doing instead is essentializing gender - they reify feminity and pretend a taste for pink fingernails gives somebody the right to invade female changing rooms or menopause support groups.

I’d just agree with him on pretty much everything.

Yes, biological essentialism, knowing that we can never change sex, just our clothes.

Yes, transwomen need spaces that help them stay safe, just like women do.

Yes I do think transwomen are pretending to be women- I know I am not a transwoman. I am a woman and I can’t ever be a transwoman, I could only pretend to be. We aren’t the same.

And ask whether he’d view transwomen as sex partners, and be happy for his teen daughter to play rugby or swim with Hannah Muncy or the creepy middle aged Canadian swimmer who competes with children.

Wow speedy replies! Thank you.

@parietal you described that well. It definitely felt like a insinuation of me saying men and woman having predetermined roles. He's big on societal structures and systems being broken down.

BenjiCat · Today 17:32

definitely being used as a dig followed with imploring me to 'challenge my thinking'!

I think that you already have challenged your thinking and concluded that men can't be women and even if they pretend that they are, they have no rights to women's spaces.

As I understand it, gender ideology includes the belief that an innate sense of gender is real and is more important than biology. Some even believe that biological sex is a social construct or is a spectrum. In short, this innate sense of gender determines whether one is male, female or one of the numerous neogenders.

So a biological essentialist is a person who believes that biological sex is the determinant of whether one can be called a man or a woman and rejects the theory of innate sense of gender.

I think it's generally a good idea to ask people who use a particular phrase to score points in an argument to define what they mean by it. I suspect a lot of the time they have heard these phrases used as a kind of winning goal in an argument but don't really know what they actually mean. Or at least the weakness of their argument becomes evident when they have to break it down into everyday words.

Biological essentialism - the idea that an entity must have some concrete attributes, in this case biological ones.

Its antithesis is “wibbly wobbly gender essence” essentialism. The idea that womanhood is woman essence but we have no idea what that is, ergo we can never have a concrete definition of what a woman is.

I read it as the view that a person born a man should present in a way that socially signals maleness. It is just another term for sexism. In fact our culture had pretty done away with these notions between around 2000 and 2015. It is infuritating that they are resurging in such a backwards looking and damaging way. He is calling you sexist without really understanding what he is saying. I imagine your own view is the opposite to that. A person born a man should be able to present as he wishes. But it doesn't make him a woman. The bio essentialist argurment is made by those lacking understanding (is a polite way of putting it - I can think of other terms!).

For context the other point made by him when I first went down this conversation was that 'transwomen's material oppression overlaps with ciswomen'. 🤣😂