Biological essentialism has no place in society

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

Defining people, putting the population into discrete boxes, has been a core function of governments since the Renaissance. Often this was done for tax and conscription purposes, with the primary aim to count the number of adult men within a nation’s borders for times of way and taxation. To be a man was to be a warm body upon which the Sate could build its dominion. This separation of male bodies from female ones, rich from poor, landed from unlanded, sits at the heart of all framings of national statistics. Nations seek to quantify because numbers give civil servant levers of control, in turn allowing politicians to set national policies based on how people are accounted for. This is turn has rooted a biological essentialism into society because it is easier to account for the manifestation of self through biology than accept that the boxes we squeeze people into are ill fitting and just as often ill-defined.

Biological essentialism is the notion that at its core society ought to be run along the lines of how bodies are perceived and categorised by others, usually based on a narrow biological framing that is constructed to erase all edge cases. Racists, gender critics, antisemites, ableists, and many others construct their world view through a narrow biological lens, using their own personal preferred version of biology to exclude anyone they deem not person…