No abstract

Policy debates have focused on who can participate in or access single-sex activities or services. This article describes how science of the biology of sex is relevant to three major policy areas: parenting (including leaves), sports, and public spaces. We focus on what scientists know about sex and gender (and gender/sex, where gender and sex are intertwined), and the role of various biological factors, including hormones such as testosterone and estradiol as well as genetics, gonads, genitals, and more. The policies under debate often use “biological sex,” but this fails to account for scientific understandings of sex and gender, misrepresents sex as single-faceted and binary, and overlooks scientific consensus about the importance of gender and identity.

Diversity-focused research can provide important insights about gender/sex and sexual diversity, including in relation to oppression and privilege. To do so, it needs to critically engage with power and include minoritized and majoritized participants. But, the critical methods guiding this are typically aimed at empowering marginalized groups and may “overempower” majority participants. Here, we discuss three diversity-focused research projects about gender/sex and sexual diversity where our use of critical methods overempowered majority participants in ways that reinforced their privilege. We detail how diversity-focused research approaches thus need to be “majority-situating”: attending to and managing the privilege and power that majority participants carry to research. Yet, we also lay out how diversity-focused research still needs to be “minority-inclusive”: validating, welcoming, and empowering to people from marginalized social locations. We discuss these approaches working synergistically; minority-inclusive methods can also be majority-situating, providing majorities with opportunities for growth, learning, and seeing that they—and not just “others”—are socially situated. We conclude by laying out what a diversity-focused research program might look like that includes both majority-situating and minority-inclusive approaches, to work towards a more just and empirical scholarship that does not lead to majorities who are even more overempowered.