Just on the biological sex front: Lucy Cooke has a really good book called “Bitch” that does a great job deconstructing the binary of sex. The book is mostly about how female animals have historically been treated by male scientists and how humans have projected their misogyny on animals and how that’s gotten in the way of real scientific progress and understanding of animal behavior and biology.
One of the first chapters actually opens up discussing sex and how the development of it isn’t as simple as XX being female, and XY being male. While certain hormones are important for the development of one or another, the process is a lot more complex than just what hormones are there. The development pathways for male or female are closely interlinked, and even when female development pathways involve a lot more testosterone than usual (such as in female spotted hyenas, which are indistinguishable from males and even have a penis), they still wind up able to reproduce as a female successfully. If sex were really so simple that an animal can only develop one way or another, that wouldn’t be possible. Clearly the process is more complicated than that.
This is part of why saying “biological sex” is this concrete, immutable thing is just wrong. Time and time again we see examples of animals that just completely defy that. Of course the counter argument is always “well, humans aren’t hyenas”, but personally I don’t really think that’s a great argument. Firstly, because animals have been used as proxies for human biology for a long time, and secondly, because animals are used all the time to explain why things like the patriarchy or bigotry are totally acceptable. I’m not saying human sexual development is the same as spotted hyenas’, just that it’s also similarly complicated!
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