look. the thing is. nothing is 100% biological. humans are meaning-making machines, and this includes things we typically think of as "biological realities". even in the labelling of something as "biological", we are interpreting and categorising the world around us, and nothing about that process is natural. that doesn't mean it isn't *real*. what it means is that it is *constructed*, and therefore open to contestation
when I say that I'm sick of the phrase "sex is biological", I don't necessarily mean that sex isn't biological, I mean that the phrase carries a lot of specific political meanings that are antithetical to intersex justice, trans justice, BIPOC justice, and disability justice. and I don't believe shifting towards "sex is biological, it's just not binary" necessarily solves all the underlying issues with the "sex is biological" claim
when someone says "biological" or "natural", this is usually shorthand for "thing that is objectively real and true", and usually carries positive implications. "natural" is held up as the opposite as "constructed", and is often used alongside ideas of purity or being untouched
so I hope you can understand why someone who has had "biological reality" weaponised against them would be wary of anything that tries to draw these kinds of distinctions, yeah?
Also sex is a spectrum
yes, that's (kind of) true*, but you're missing the point
it's not necessarily helpful to move from "sex is biological" to "sex is biological BUT [series of caveats]", if you're still carrying the same assumptions about what it means for something to be biological
the word "biological" (as applied to human categories) has history that it carries with it. famously, race is often considered a biological category, but talking about race as a series of naturally assigned biological features is fundamentally linked to race science. regardless of what is or isn't true about human bodies, it is humans who give those truths social meaning. and the social meanings we ascribe to biological characteristics are linked to histories of oppression, because that is what is politically convenient
science isn't an objective series of facts that emerged naturally from the ground up. science coevolved with human society. the history of science IS the history of politics and philosophy, but expressed in a different way. and appealing to science is a way that people attempt to hide the political nature of claims they want to make about how the world works. Linda Tuhiwai Smith has a lot of good shit to say on this
in some ways it Does Not Matter how we redefine sex if we insist on clinging to a sense of biological reality. if that makes sense
*I think it's actually more useful to understand "sex" as a group of different spectrums that tend to line up with each other in various ways, but don't always (i.e. "sex" = the interaction between where you are on various hormonal spectrums + external sex characteristics + sex chromosomes). but as I said. that's beside the point
