Words: Lani Heywood (she/her)
What is “natural” doesn’t seem to have anything to do with science at all, and more to do with fitting naturally into the social structures of “traditional” society.
‘Don’t use the natural world as an excuse for your bigotry, nature is too weird for that shit’. This was the final line of a tweet by a science teacher named Grace Ann in 2017, in response to a transphobic comment online claiming, ‘I’m not a bigot, it’s just science’ and wielding the biological “fact” that females have 2 X chromosomes and men have an X and and Y as dogmatic dynamite.
Grace Ann responded with instances of biological diversity in the natural world, including occurrences of gender being determined by whether a sexual species was developed in a warm or cold environment, the ability for parrot and clownfish to change their sex from female to male if the only male in their school dies, and the growth of a penis in early puberty in human ‘biological’ females as caused by an enzyme deficiency. Her declaration that nature is too ‘weird’ for uncomplicated binaries is one that sums up, and should shut up, much of the debate surrounding gender identity and its validity. If everything is so complex out there, then why should it be so rigid here? While a transgender person is not a fish, nor is their gender identity or sex developed based on what side of the equator they live on, the “weirdness” of these species’ flexible biologies begins to invalidate the claim that the rejection of non-binary peoples’ existence is ‘just science’.
Effort to label people who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community as “unnatural” or “abnormal”, while framed via its language as grounded in science and objectivity, is in fact effort to maintain the credibility of oppressive social structures pervading a heteronormative, eurocentric, patriarchal world. What is “natural” keeps capitalism alive, women in their place, and the 1% firmly on their throne. What is “natural” doesn’t seem to have anything to do with science at all, and more to do with fitting naturally into the social structures of “traditional” society.
In a brilliant essay by Abha Sur, Persistent Patriarchy: Theories of Race and Gender in Science, the work of feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial critics is brought forward in identifying the ‘production of scientific knowledge as well as the practice and use of science as inextricably linked to power’. Sur states, referencing theories of social Darwinism, “eugenics”, reports of women’s intellectual inferiority in the journal Scientific American, and other past examples, that science’s dubious history would suggest one of its main functions to be the ‘legitimisation of inequitable social functions’. In other words, science works to serve the agenda of power, not reality.
Upon considering the description of LGBTQ+ people as “unnatural”, it is increasingly evident that it is not the inherent naturalness of the trees, insects, and animals these bigots are defending, not the pureness of science and objective knowledge, but the “natural” order of heteronormative society, of conservatism. The identification of this dichotomy of language can be useful as the pervasive use of adjectives such as ‘natural’, ‘typical’, and ‘normal’, can be properly situated as attempts to perpetuate a binary within the natural and human world that is purely social and not inherent.
This binary is mirrored within efforts to separate sex and gender as “biology and science” vs “ephemeral identity stuff”. In an interview with Current Affairs Magazine, biologist and trans-activist Dr Julia Serano explains how this oversimplification of sex as biological, and gender as purely “psychological and social” is repeatedly used defensively by anti-trans activists to shut down discussion in the pursuit of a quick win. Its simplicity is ignorant of the symbiosis of many factors that act upon human beings in ways known and unknown, yet it is the simplicity that gives it power – wishy-washy gender ‘stuff’ is not necessarily tangible, chromosomes are.
Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro continually uses the argument that how someone feels about their identity is a product of rampant gender ideology, irrelevant to their biological sex and indisputable chromosome combination. The attempt is to separate gender identity from biology in order to prove its position as a modern imposition – a delusion. However, it seems only to be in protection of his own conservative delusions. While these ideologies are born out of enlightenment theories of racism, christian bigotry, and a man’s right to ‘sow his seed’, the gender ideologies that they have villainised are born instead out of acceptance, expansion and ultimately – love.
If these anti-LGBTQ activists wanted to deepen their understanding of the world, it would require a departure from the binaries that rule their worlds. They might find that gender ideology is not a cult-born radical theory, but an expansion of understanding – a product of progress, not madness. Except, I think they know that, it would just cost them too much to admit it.
