If you want to talk about biology, we can talk about about biology.
I don’t know why you’d want to. Maybe you’re a biologist? The point is that biology is something we can talk about. We could talk about the nature of chromosomes and the most common ways in which they’re expressed. Okay. That is certainly a topic that can be discussed. It’s not a topic I find compelling, but different strokes for different folks.
But then you want to talk about rights? About roles? About social and personal boundaries?
That’s not biology.
Those aren’t biological concepts.
They aren’t biological concerns.
(And when somebody wants to talk about rights in terms of chromosomes, you should run away from them very, very quickly.)
Does a music festival have chromosomes? Does a shelter have chromosomes? Do sisterhood and solidarity have chromosomes?
As soon as you start talking about “females” banding together, carving out a safe space, carving out respect, carving out rights… you’re no longer talking about biology. You have left the realm of the biological and the genetic in the dust.
You can presume that people have a certain chromosomal structure or not, but what you’re talking about doesn’t flow from that structure. What has brought those people together isn’t a twist in their genes, but a shared identity, a similar sense of self.
Which is why you’re not talking about “females” butwomen.
You’re not talking about a breeding population of specimens of an animal species. In technical terms, yes, we’re animals, but when you’re talking about rights and protections and spaces and boundaries you aren’t talking about biology or zoology or taxonomy, you are talking about humans in terms of people… and people aren’t biology.
Gender is a construct, you say? In the sense that it does not exist in the same tangible plane as cells and genes, yes, you could say it is. The same is true for the rights you want to talk about. The same is true for the concept of safety and security. Biological security is not imperiled by the same things as personal security. Genes have their own imperatives. Biology has its own imperatives.
If we’re going to have a conversation that’s framed entirely in terms of biology and genetics and not people… well, genetics don’t care about consent, for one thing. Biology has nothing to say about the autonomy of a person carrying a fetus. Biology doesn’t provide the need or basis or right for a safe space.
Talk about biology all you want, if that’s what you’re interested in. Maybe if you have enough conversations about it you’ll learn that it’s more complicated than the sections of your junior high textbook that you read conveyed. Maybe you won’t.
You can talk about the human race in terms of males and females when you’re talking about matters of biology. It’s reductive and it’s rude, but you can do it and make at least a kind of sense.
But when you want to talk about rights, you’re not talking about genes any more. You’ve entered the realm of the “construct”… the intangible, the notional, the things that make us human beings and not just fragile, slow-growing animals with horribly damaging posture for a quadruped and massively inefficient resource-hogging brains where all our instincts and stuff should be.
TL;DR - Anybody who says they’re talking about “females” and “males” not “women” and “men” because biology isn’t talking about anything that has bearing on anything other than biology. If you want to talk about human rights, you need to talk about human beings, not chromosomes.
