"Biology is real."

What does that mean exactly? Because the people who seem to use it most think it means "biology as I want it to be is real".

This statement is not biology but philosophy of language or epistemology.

The problem with claiming something is real is that, once u dissect the "reality" u find its just forms of words which shape an understanding. In other words its just a contigent description that can be redescribed another way.

And "real" ends up just being a word people use.

Meanwhile, I read that someone "is stopping women defining themselves as a group". Who is doing that? What political or legal action have they taken to enforce this?

Oh, u mean its just some other people using language in ways you don't like and you're the ones being political.

The thing about "real" or "reality" is that they are both words. Which is to say they are of human invention. They don't define or condition anything. They are just linguistic tools for descriptive purposes. They persuade. When someone uses such words, examine their purposes.

The statement "X is real" is rhetoric. Words don't have the power to set nature in stone.. although their users often try to achieve this end by means of language use.

What X is, is always a claim for how things should work best. Whether you call it biology or not. That's all.

If there are people out there who want to argue that everything that exists is set is stone, is one way, is unchangeable and unchanging, and that us "knowing" something is corresponding with such things, let them go ahead.

Such philosophy was out of date centuries ago.

If there are people who argue that changing things, whether descriptions of people or how they are organised, human appearance or human scientific thinking, or any number of other things, is wrong, then reply to them with all of human history which simply is CONSTANT CHANGE.

If something "is real" [such as sex differences] then wouldn't you expect that all people everywhere throughout human history would have adhered to the same differences?

Simple anthropological research will establish human thinking on this is diverse rather than hard and fast.

Of course, the anarchist me would point out [and has done in my most recent book - see my pinned tweet] that any classification procedures on human bodies are authoritarian and hegemonic actions for the purposes of control and division. The first truth of all is WE ARE HUMANS.

Yet, when classifying people, why classify them this way or that? Why "by colour"? Why "by certain physical characteristics" Why "by sexuality"? None of these are given. All are choices. Are any of them reasons to separate? Only if motivated by an ideology.

In "The Intervention of Women" Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí points out that the way "the West" sees gender is only one way and not a way that makes sense of how various African tribes saw gender. The Yoruba, she says, had no conception of opposing men to women based on biology.

There are 2 things here. One, how people are organised as a society is not, is never, a given. Multiple ways have happened and can happen. Two, "people are who they say they are" is actually not a bad description of how people in many different places have organised themselves.

My point is that "reality" is always a social reality and it is always different from place to place and ever changing. There is no "given". Every given is rhetorical. This is as true today with the words "man" and "woman" as at any other time, words which are always cultural.

Language is social and language is cultural. It is not something which corresponds to reality. But it is something used, rhetorically, politically, ideologically, to attempt to shape it.

How does "biology is real" look now?