What does diversity have to do with gender norms? To understand their connection, this project argues that we must trace their history back to the idea that sexual reproduction evolved as a mechanism for producing hereditary variation. Far from being self-evident, such a hypothesis allowed biologists to employ gender norms to structure their investigation of heredity. Gender norms reflect an ideal relationship between order and variation, entrapping women and men within a rigid sexual division of labor while celebrating that structure as an invaluable source of pluralism. This made them instrumental in appraising hereditary variation as a source of progress rather than a threat to social order.
This work spans three major historiographical periods: late nineteenth-century developments in evolutionary theory and cytology, the founding of classical genetics in the early twentieth century, and scientific debates about race after World War II. By employing queer and trans theoretical analysis, this project complicates existing narratives in the history of biology premised on a dichotomy between sameness and oppression on one side, and diversity and progress on the other. Through this research, I seek to understand how contemporary valuations of cultural and biological diversity remain rooted in a historical paradigm that privileges the experiences of cisheterosexual people.