“Biological Men” Is a Slur

Democrats need to stop using it. Trans women are women.

Kentucky Senator elect Adam Hamilton in 2016

As I wrote last week, the midterms gave people of good will a lot of great things to celebrate. Seizing the House and Senate, liberating Texas, trifectas in Arizona and Pennsylvania for the first time in decades, the humiliating defeat of scoundrels like Greg Abbott, Vivek Ramaswamy, Susan Collins, Mike Lawler, Lauren Boebert, and more…it was a moment of ice cream and schadenfreude for all!

There were also, though, some uglier takeaways. For me, one of the biggest of those is the way some Democratic victors have approached trans issues.

Numerous Democrats—such as incoming Ohio Governor Amy Acton and Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur—ran while denouncing trans people’s participation in sports. Incoming Iowa Senator Josh Turek went farther and released an ad saying he wanted to ban all government funds for gender affirming surgeries—for adults as well as children, a shocking attack on bodily autonomy and trans rights. Anti-trans ballot measures, mostly targeting trans participation in sports, passed in blue states like Arizona, Colorado, and Washington.

These are ugly policies. And they are framed in extremely ugly language. Democrats like Acton have claimed that they want to prevent “boys playing in girls’ sports.” Incoming Kansas Senator Adam Hamilton said in a debate that he opposes “biological boys or men” playing in girls’ leagues as well.

Acton openly misgenders trans women. Hamilton’s use of “biological” is supposed to be slightly kinder and gentler. But it is not. On the contrary, calling trans women or girls “biological men” adopts right0wing framing, which is to say it is (a) inaccurate and (b) a slur. It is used because it dehumanizes trans women, and therefore justifies stripping them of rights. It is imperative that Democrats stop using this language as part of recommitting to defending the rights and dignity of trans people.

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“Biological men” is inaccurate

When people say that trans women are “biological men” they are claiming that there is some baseline strata of true manliness that is scientific, objective, embodied and transcendent. The not very buried presumption is that trans women may be women in some sort of social sense, but we all know (wink wink) that when it comes down to the things that matter—genitals! DNA! hormones!—trans women aren’t really women.

This is all lies. There is no scientific distinction between “biological men” and “men”. Nor is there some embodied, transcendent biological marker that determines gender for all. Genitals come in a lot of shapes and sizes, and there are numerous intersex people (some of whom are trans) whose bodies do not fit neatly into gendered boxes. Similarly, it is not that uncommon for women to have Y chromosomes, and/or for people to have other intersex conditions which don’t slot their DNA easily into male or female.

Men and women can also have a wide range of hormone levels, which is why some cis women (not coincidentally, often Black cis women) have been banned from Olympic sports for daring to fall outside gender norms. And of course people can take hormones, and doing so has a powerful effect not just on gender presentation, but on “biological” gender, inasmuch as changing your hormone levels changes your biology, not (or not only) your social niche.

There is then no stable “biological” gender which can be used to identify people uniformly as “biological women” and “biological men.” Nonetheless, we know that people’s biology does affect their gender in complex ways. Genitals, DNA, hormones, bodies—all of those affect how people interact with their own sense of their gender, and with other people’s genders.

This is true for cis people. But it is also true for trans people. Trans people often (not always! But often) know that they are trans from an early age—sometimes from the time they are 3 or 4, sometimes from the time when they start to go through puberty. We do not know exactly what makes someone trans or cis—genes? brain chemistry? hormones? some combination of all of those?—just as we don’t know exactly what makes someone queer or het. But we know that people’s sense of their sexuality and of their gender is powerful, that it is linked to embodiment, and that it is not simply social. Transphobia, after all, is pervasive; if social pressures determined gender, everyone would be cis. (Which would, in my opinion, be a loss for the world.)

As trans theorist Julia Serano puts it in her book Excluded, “we are biological beings, and…nothing can exist outside biology.” She adds:

exceptional gender identities, expressions, and sexual orientations seem to exist across cultures and throughout history, and analogous behaviors have been observed in nonhuman animals—this suggests that they are at least somewhat intrinsic to bodies rather than societies.

Biology does not provide a single simple rubric for determining someone’s gender. But everyone, very much including trans people, has a gender rooted in biology in complicated ways. That biology can include—for cis and trans people—HRT, which, again, is a treatment that affects biology and one’s sense of one’s own gender. The best way to figure out how someone’s biology manifests in gender, then, is simply to ask them what their pronouns are. Asking them to see their genitals or to hand over DNA testing is both indeterminate and disgustingly abusive, and should be avoided.

The term “biological men” is, therefore, a meaningless obfuscation. It is not a scientific category. It does not clarify or enlighten. It is not a truer, more rigorous way of referring to trans women. It is a slur.

“Biological men” is intended to harm

If “biological men” is misleading, inaccurate, and unscientific, why do so many politicians embrace the term? What work is it doing, and why is it preferable to simply identifying trans women as “trans women”?

The answer isn’t complicated. People use “biological men” for the same reason they use racial slurs when referring to Black people or gendered slurs when referring to women. Slurs are dehumanizing and stigmatizing; they normalize prejudice and hate. Republicans, and some Democrats, use the term “biological men” because they believe that doing so helps to normalize anti-trans sentiment and anti-trans policies.

More specifically, misgendering trans women, and insisting that they are men, feeds into a range of negative tropes, conspiracy theories, and stigmatizing stereotypes. To say trans women are men (or “biological men”) suggests that trans women are deluded about their own identity, and/or that they are duplicitous and trying to deceive others. Further, to call trans women men suggests that they are concealed predators, invading women’s spaces, or threatening women with their (supposed) non-womanly size and strength. “Biological men” is evoking texts like Psycho or Silence of the Lambs, or Janice Raymond’s ugly, genocidal scholarly work in which she claims that all trans women are rapists. It is meant to short circuit critical thought, and to erase all the research that shows that trans women and girls are not in fact a threat to cis girls or women, or to anyone, when they play sports, and have no special advantages.

You can see that “biological men” is a slur clearly in the way Democrats deploy the term. Adam Hamilton for example, specifically said he does not want “biological boys or men” competing against his cis 12-year-old daughter. The use of “biological men” in contrast to a 12-year-old girl is meant to suggest that trans girls (who are girls, not boys, and certainly not men) are a danger to the innocent, weak cis child playing sports. Trans girls are not children who might want to play with their friends; they are looming men who are using deceit to harm girls. If a politician said, “I oppose trans girls playing with my daughter” it would sound like that politician was being cruel and bigoted. By saying, “I oppose biological men playing with my daughter” makes the bigotry sound reasonable—like it is the fault of trans girls, rather than of those who hate them.

Hamilton goes on to say that he does not want the government to regulate sports, and that leagues should determine their own rules. That is good; it’s what we want officials to be saying. But when you use slurs and stereotypes to demonize trans people, you are harming them, even when you advocate for good policies. I believe Hamilton would see this in other contexts. He would not say, for example, “I think those conniving kikes should have equal rights to practice their religion,” because, even if the policy is right, the language is hateful and hateful language can lead to hateful actions and policies.

The disconnect between Hamilton’s policy proscriptions and his language suggests that part of the problem here is ignorance and an unfamiliarity with trans issues. Hamilton does not seem to entirely understand what his language is doing, or how he is adopting right wing and bigoted frames. There could, then, be a relatively easy path to change the minds and approach of at least some Democrats if they can be pushed to meet with LGBT organizations and advocates. (I’d certainly urge Hamilton’s constituents to contact him and explain why his language is stigmatizing and hateful.)

Other Democrats, though—like Amy Acton, like Marcy Kaptur, like Josh Turek—do seem to use dehumanizing language because they want to dehumanize trans people out of personal bigotry, or electoral calculus, or (most likely) some combination of both. It’s going to be a slog to convince them that the cost of being ugly bigots is more than the (personal and electoral) benefits.

I think we can make progress here, and push Democrats to stand up for trans rights. But that’s only ipossible f we’re honest about the problem. That problem is that many Democrats are embracing slurs and bigotry to target, harm, and bully marginalized people. That’s unacceptable, and it needs to stop.