Gender/Sex/ual Diversity and Biobehavioral Research

Abstract

Human biobehavioral research is often rooted in and supports two interrelated binaries: one that divides and essentializes humans into two sexes and values maleness over femaleness, and a second that divides behavior into two sides, assigning more truth to one—nature and sex—over the other—gender, nurture, and culture. As such, biobehavioral research can contribute to the marginalization of gender/sex/ual minorities and policing of people of all gender/sex/ualities. Yet biophenomena are important to psychology and understandings of human behavior. In this article, I lay out how concepts like gender/sex, and methodological approaches like social neuroendocrinology, can help provide a biobehavioral research framework for and from gender/sex/ual diversity. To do so, I go beyond the binaries to define gender, sex, and gender/sex in dynamic and multifaceted ways with aspects that branch and coincide. I delineate the utility of gender/sex, including over sex/gender. I explain how gender/sex and social neuroendocrinology offer biological dynamism, expansiveness/emergence, and contextualism to counter the problematics of biological determinism, reductionism, and essentialism. And, I provide two examples of how gender impacts sex, transforming understandings of each: a pretheory route that constrains biobehavioral research questions and thus understandings of testosterone that circulate in our cultures, and a biomaterial gender→testosterone pathway whereby acute or “chronic gender” modulate levels of testosterone that circulate in our bodies. Throughout, I make clear how this biobehavioral research framework can be a feminist and queer successor science that moves beyond binaries to more empirical, accurate, and just knowledge.