Between Subjectivism and Biologism: A Response to Daniel Alarcón Díaz's “Philosophical Critique of the Trans Law”

This article offers an ontological critique from the perspective of dialectical materialism regarding the Spanish “Trans Law” and the subsequent reply by Daniel Alarcón Díaz. The author shares Alarcón's correct rejection of the law's subjective idealism, but denounces that his counterproposal falls into mechanical materialism or vulgar biologism. By mechanically reducing gender to biological sex, Alarcón naturalises socio-historical categories and falls into ideological univocism. Drawing on Marx and Engels, the text argues that sex is the necessary, but not sufficient, material base of gender relations, with the latter understood as a normative and historical superstructure. Furthermore, it reconceptualises gender dysphoria not as a simple voluntarist fiction or a mental pathology, but as an objective material contradiction between multiple divergent biological determinations and coercive social norms. It concludes that only a truly dialectical approach allows effectively addressing this complexity, successfully overcoming absolute biological determinism.