Micah Zarin's Blog

Suppose I adopt a child, let’s call him Alex, whom I am not biologically related to. Would it be incorrect for me to say Alex is my son? In the legal sense, no. Assuming I have filled out the proper paperwork, Alex is legally my son. But in the biological sense, it is incorrect to claim that Alex is my son, as I have no blood-relation with him. Yet, when I say that Alex is my son, I am not really making a biological claim, nor am I making a legal one. If that were the case I may say something like: “I have custody over Alex” or “I am Alex’s biological father.” Rather, I am making an anthropological claim.

To understand what I mean, we must discuss the idea of social constructs. To say something is socially constructed is to say that it does not exist independent of human beings, and our belief that it exists. For example, the land which comprises the United States of America literally exists independent of humans. But our notions of borders are socially constructed, they do not exist independent of humans. There is nothing inherent or objective about them. They only exist because we believe they exist.

This does not mean, however, that borders aren’t “real.” They exist insofar as they have an impact on the real world. It is not just belief that makes the border. It’s repetition plus coordination plus enforcement mechanisms. The enforcement mechanism can be hard (law) or soft (reputation, shame, praise, exclusion, trust, gatekeeping). Most constructs sit on a blend. Money is the obvious one: paper and digits don’t compel anything by themselves; the compulsion arrives from institutions, habits, and the fact that everyone else will accept it tomorrow. Time zones too: they’re agreements that create predictable schedules, transportation, broadcasts, payroll, and missed calls. Language itself: “chair” isn’t in the object; “chair” is in the shared practice of classifying and using. And the practice is real enough that you can fail at it and get corrected.

Kinship terms are a particularly sharp case because they look like they’re about biology even when they aren’t. I almost want to say kinship is biology because reproduction is a constraint on human life and it reliably generates social patterns. But that’s me being seduced by the fact that biology supplies raw material. The actual kinship system is the human layer: which connections count, which obligations follow, what gets inherited, who lives with whom, who can marry whom, who gets called what. Anthropologists have been loud about this for a long time: kinship systems vary in what they treat as primary: descent, marriage, residence, nurture, naming, ritual, clan affiliation, adoption, godparenting, household formation, and so on. Even when the biology is known, the question “what does this relationship mean?” is still answered socially.

So, if we are being precise, we must separate paternity from fatherhood without pretending that separation is tidy. Paternity, in many contexts, is the biological link. Fatherhood is the recognized position in a kinship network. But even “paternity” isn’t purely biological once you look at how societies decide what counts as proof, what counts as legitimate birth, who gets named on forms, who gets blamed, who gets praised, who gets excluded. Biology gives facts; societies decide which facts matter and what they imply. So the “biological sense” versus “social sense” split is helpful, but it isn’t a clean firewall.

Now I want to bring it back to my exact worry: Is it incorrect for me to say Alex is my son?

If “son” means “shares my DNA,” then yes, it’s incorrect. But that definition is not the only one in actual use, and it might not even be the dominant one in many everyday contexts. People routinely mean “child I parent.” They mean “child who is situated in my family as my child.” They mean “child for whom I take the primary obligations that the local kinship system assigns to parents.” None of those meanings require DNA. They do require recognition and practice.

But, sometimes when someone says “that’s your son,” they are making a biological assumption, even if they don’t think they are. The listener can import biology into it automatically. So the statement can be socially correct and pragmatically misleading in a particular room. Which means correctness isn’t just dictionary semantics; it’s also conversational expectations. In one setting, “my son” communicates “this is my child and I’m responsible.” In another setting, it communicates “genetic relation,” and you might need to disambiguate. Not because you owe anyone your family’s details, but because language always rides on what the audience presumes.

So, the more precise framing is: “son” is a role-term in a kinship system. Biology can be one route into that role. Law can be one technology for stabilizing the role. But the role itself lives in the mesh of expectations, repeated practices, and shared recognition. It has consequences because other people act on it, and because you act on it, and because Alex acts on it back. That reciprocity matters: it’s not only that I claim “son,” it’s that Alex can claim “parent” of me, and the community can uphold or contest that claim.

For some reason, this often makes a lot more sense to people than the idea of transgender people. They, for some reason, believe that genders are “real” biological categories. But biology does not come pre-labeled. It presents variation. Humans decide which variations matter, how many categories there are, where the boundaries sit, and what follows from being placed on one side rather than another. That decision process is not optional. Every society has to do it. And different societies do it differently, at different resolutions, for different purposes.

So when someone says “gender is biological,” what they usually mean is “this classification tracks some biological features.” Which is true. But tracking is not identity. Height tracks biology too, but “tall” is still a social category. There is no natural cutoff point where tall begins. We set it. Then we act as if it were obvious.

Now, trans people enter the picture and expose the machinery by refusing to let one variable dominate the whole classification. When someone states that they are trans, the assumed hierarchy of variables is being contested. Instead of saying “this one biological marker decides the category,” trans people are saying “the category is a social role, and this is where I belong within it.”

And immediately people respond as if a factual claim has been falsified, when what’s actually happening is a dispute about which facts matter and how much weight they carry.

Notice how similar this is to the adoption case. If someone insists “Alex isn’t really your son,” they are usually not confused about paperwork. They are asserting that biology should outrank lived relationship in defining kinship. That is a value judgment, not a discovery. And societies routinely override biology in kinship without collapsing. Adoption, stepfamilies, inheritance rules, naming conventions, clan systems. None of this breaks reality.

The same move happens with gender. When someone says “you’re not really a woman,” they are asserting that one criterion must dominate all others. They are not pointing to nature; they are enforcing a rule. And enforcement, again, can be hard or soft. Law, ridicule, exclusion, denial of services, forced disclosure. Same structure, different target.

What makes gender especially charged is that it is used as a sorting mechanism at enormous scale. Bathrooms, sports, prisons, documentation, medical care, dating, violence statistics, economic outcomes. So any challenge to the classification feels destabilizing, not because it actually destroys coordination, but because it threatens the idea that the system was ever simple or natural to begin with.

So when a trans woman says “I am a woman,” the structure of the claim is the same as “Alex is my son.” It is not a denial of biology. It is a placement within a social framework that already knows how to operate once the placement is accepted. The friction arises not from incoherence, but from resistance to updating which signals the framework treats as decisive.

At the end of all this, the question “is it incorrect?” is not very interesting. The more precise question is: does the claim successfully coordinate behavior, recognition, and obligation in the relevant social context? If it does, it is real in exactly the same way borders, money, kinship, and time zones are real.