Sex Contextualism

"Sex contextualism" offers an alternative to binary sex essentialist approaches to the study of sex-related variables in biological science. Specifically, sex contextualism recognizes the pluralism and context-specificity of operationalizations of ‘sex’ across experimental laboratory research. In light of recent policy mandates to consider sex a biological variable, sex contextualism offers constructive guidance to biomedical re searchers for attending to sex-related biological variation. This talk will give concrete examples of how “sex” in biomedicine is context-dependent construct, including in the design, interpretation, and communication of laboratory-based experimental research and outline some of the constructive work that embracing sex contextualism both within and beyond the laboratory might advance.