Kyra Hoerr's and Marina DiMarco's session at the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology meeting in Toronto (July 2023) was awarded the Interdisciplinary Organized Session Prize! This award is made to the organizer and participants of the session that best cohesively combines research and methodologies from several disciplines.  Their session, Biological Sex: Explanans and Explananda, featured presentations by Kyra Hoerr, Marina DiMarco, and Aja Watkins (Boston University). 

Session Abstract: In this session we reconsider biological sex as both explanans and explanandum. Sexes, and the differences between and among them, are a time-honored object of inquiry in the biological and biomedical sciences. While evolutionary and developmental biologists inquire as to the nature of sexual dimorphism and reproductive strategies, biomedical scientists, US policymakers, and regulators often explain observed gender differences by appeal to sexed biology, and invoke these explanations to justify a mandate to study sex in all federally funded preclinical research. In this session we trouble the history, philosophy, and social studies of sex from three perspectives. We begin with Kyra Hoerr’s history of 20th century sex reversal science, which sheds light on the Japanese embryologist Yo Kaname Okada’s developmental approach to sexual development and contrasts this with approaches which focused on sex determination. We then turn to the role of biological sex in a case of 21st century drug regulation, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) 2013 decision to half the recommended dose of zolpidem for women. Drawing on publicly available regulatory documents, scientific publications, gray literature, and media coverage, members of the GenderSci Lab (Marina DiMarco, Marion Boulicault, and Sarah Richardson) argue that this recommendation was the result of a contested attempt to address general safety concerns using subgroup analysis rather than sex-specific biology or adverse drug events, and explores how zolpidem nonetheless came to circulate as a touchstone “sex difference fact” in science, policy, and elite women’s health advocacy. We conclude with Aja Watkins’ and Marina DiMarco’s argument that we should consider sex eliminativism, the view that we can and should do without the concept of sex in wide swaths of philosophical theorizing and biological practice. This paper problematizes the idea that concepts of biological sex have a legitimate role to play in unifying biological theorizing, either as explanans or explanadum, and argues that taking eliminativism seriously has an important discursive role to play in conceptualizing sexes moving forward. Analyzing the concept of sex and its various uses in the biological sciences from these multidisciplinary perspectives has the potential to set a more rigorous and ethical standard for evolutionary, developmental, biomedical, and population health research.