From Sexed Bodies to Gendered Agencies in Human and Nonhuman Organisms

This paper offers a biological concept of gender for human and nonhuman organisms, by intersecting recent debates on male and female anisogametic sex categories with hypotheses for gender concepts in biology and the organismal-relational and agential perspective regarding sex and reproduction. By looking at real-life cases of sex-changing fish, parasitised arthropods, and gender-traitor primates, it argues that male and female sexes are problematic functional categories (sect. 2), that gender can describe sexual reproductive agency beyond the binary (sect. 3), and can also be extended beyond sexual reproduction in human and nonhuman organisms (sect. 4). In doing so, the paper formulates a novel biological concept of gender as gendered agency that overcomes human exceptionalism about gender while also articulating both the distinction and relation between sex and gender in biology.