I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's like trying to move away from "male/female" in biology and is just trying to describe the dimorphism by reproductive role without assuming that role needs to be gendered
yeah, it may seem kinda futile because like, we have literally all the literature to face up to lol, and like you’ll get people saying ‘“male” and “female” in biology are technical terms referring to the behaviour of gametes, they’re nothing to do with Gender’ but seeing just how many assumptions and perceptions get smuggled in through those words I’d like to avoid them, to the extent I can.
there’s an interesting paper that I unfortunately no longer have the link to, that looked at the different language used to describe the process of conception in human biology textbookss - the way active, masculine verbs are used for the sperm, passive ones for the egg etc. and how this obscured actual important parts of the egg’s role in the process for hundreds of years.
or alternatively like, I know a nature documentary isn’t a scientific paper, but the way you hear the presenter - David Attenborough, say - project gender onto animals is so striking! over and over we see the plucky male competing to win the affections of the discerning female, the mother defending her children, like the different animals come and go but there’s only a handful of ‘stories’ they tell with it.
(and like, on that note, of course it’s not news that in nature docs, the ‘action’ is edited together from probably multiple days of shooting, the animals may not even be the same individuals from shot to shot, the audio is almost certainly dubbed in... all defensible as practical necessity but it’s fascinating how they try to tell a story of ‘scientific truth’ by deliberately obscuring the more direct ‘truth’ of what’s happening in the videos... they try their best to make it easy to buy into the illusion that you’re just witnessing nature unmediated, that the humans who created the film are ‘faithfully reporting the science’ rather than actively creating an interpretation that could be disputed)
or take for example how people report that ‘male’ seahorses are the ones that gestate internally. this is a technical distinction on the basis of gametes, but in popular reporting, you’ll see how quickly we impute gender to the seahorses without any discussion of what is actually meant by the terms. everyone knows what a ‘male’ is, right? haha, ~a man getting pregnant~, how strange nature is...
i feel like someone will come and have a go at me for ‘ignoring’ that most species are, whatever my feelings on the matter, more-or-less dimorphic in terms of behaviour and morphology, that I’m missing the forest for the trees or w/e, but I feel like gender-as-practised-by-humans (and more specifically, humans in our present time and specific place), especially when we are actually an extremely non-dimorphic species, is sufficiently separate from any ‘natural’ dimorphisms that i would prefer to sever the two completely - in language and imagination!
of course evolutionary biologists are gonna continue arguing about stuff like “Bateman’s principle” using ‘male’ and ‘female’ language, regardless of what I think of the matter. I don’t have any real hope of change in how science is practised, certainly not emanating from me, but it brings me some personal satisfaction to excise that language...
