From Testosterone to Racialization to Knobby Knees: 15 Years of Gender/Sex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses ~15 years of my research on gender/sex. I first discuss how "sex versus gender" is an overlay onto "nature versus nurture" ideologies, and the ways these are unempirical (if not anti-empirical), inaccurate, and unjust. I provide definitions of gender/sex, as well as gender and sex, and the pitfalls of "getting sex right" ideologies that aim to provide a singular universal definition of sex that belies its multiplicity, dynamism, and social situatedness. I discuss how these ideologies are often rooted in "bio/logics" that seek to define sex in ways that restrict human rights, especially for gender/sex minorities. I focus on my own research on testosterone (T) beyond masculinity that highlights the importance of gender/sex. This includes thinking about T in terms of social and biomaterial construction, including a "gender → T pathway" and "chronic gender". I then describe how discussions of T are also rooted in racism, racialization, colonialism, and settler colonialism. In addition, I delineate how this makes not just for "sex versus gender" dichotomies and gender binaries, but ladders or helices that include gender/sex and race/ethnicity, among other social locations. I also point to gender/sex as an important lens for understanding bodily formations beyond T, that include a new "knobby knee hypothesis". In discussing these topics, I focus on an array of important feminist science principles, including epistemic injustice, pre-theory, intersectionality, and diffraction. I close by discussing how gender/sex can provide an avenue for bioscientific research that is more empirical, accurate, and just.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".