Meza, José (2026) Relational ontology of sex, gender, and identity: a proposal from the philosophy of biology. [Preprint]
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Abstract
This paper develops a relational ontology of sex, gender, and identity from the philosophy of biology. Against both strong biological reductionism and radical social constructivism, we propose a three-level ontological architecture: (1) biological sex, defined by reproductive dimorphism and anisogamy as an evolutionarily stable structure; (2) gender, understood as psychobiological differentiation that emerges phylogenetically from dimorphism through functional emergence in the sense of Millikan and Cummins, canalized by selection pressures derived from parental investment asymmetry as formalized by Trivers; and (3) gender self-perception, a second-order reflexive operation ontologically distinct from gender. We argue that gender constitutes a natural category with a wide reaction norm, statistically robust and anchored in neural developmental biology, modulated historically by the social but not founded in it.
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