What’s Gender Got to Do with It? Dismantling the Human Hierarchies in Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Toxicology for Scientific and Social Progress
Melina Packer, Max R. Lambert
Abstract
AbstractThis article argues that the concepts of "normal" reproductive development that biologists rely on are undergirded by heterosexism, ableism, and White supremacism, even if implicitly. We illustrate our argument by critically analyzing toxicology's use of reproductive fitness, focusing on the field of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Toxicology both informs and is informed by fundamental evolutionary and ecological questions as well as environmental health. Throughout, biologists overwhelmingly assume that "abnormal" reproductive physiologies both are generated by EDC exposure and necessarily threaten species survival. Such assumptions unwittingly obscure fundamental scientific insights while further discriminating against queer, trans, nonbinary, and differently abled human communities. We agree that scientists should be sounding the alarm over unavoidable, unevenly distributed, highly hazardous EDC exposures-which cause metabolic dysregulation, cancer, and death-but not because gonads and genitals look different. Instead, we encourage scientists to directly confront how chemical corporations profit from innumerable, irreversible harms to ecological and societal well-being, harms that may very well have nothing to do with gonads or genitals. We close with three specific suggestions to help scientists dismantle the human hierarchies embedded in biological frameworks, toward better science and environmental justice. By refusing the oppressive social ideologies assumed by prior research, toxicological and biological scientists will offer exciting new insights into evolutionary processes and urgent, justice-centered findings for environmental health.