Interesting framework! It reminds me of biocultural approaches to anthropology that acknowledge an irreducible and ongoing interaction between biology and culture that makes it impossible to discuss one independently of the other. It makes sense to turn to reproductive roles and capacities as the “seat” of gender, but I as a queer person who has no interest in reproduction take issue with these explanations because they don’t seem able to account for my own and my communities’ existence without presuming normative gender-sexual expectations. I do, however, think that gender roles are based in symbolic projections of genitals, and that the work of culture is to cover up that this is what’s going on. I think Freud was spot on about this.

I’m wondering to what extent the concept of gender in relation to eidoi can be thought of as a semiotic phenomenon… as in, gender is a network of symbols about the reality of biological sex differences. Symbols point toward but are not the realities to which they pertain, so in this context I think gender is the symbol that “points toward” sexed bodies. This said, though, there is an important Zen koan about the finger pointing at the moon: in the West we focus on the finger and forget about the moon. Alan Watts expresses this idea when he said “The menu is not the meal”: meaning the symbol of something is not the thing itself, and that we will starve by eating menus. “Eating the menu” in this case is failing to distinguish between gender and sex, and assuming that gender is sex instead of a representation of it. This is how we can hold both the biological reality of sex differences along with the cultural reality of gender. I share this because it seems similar to the idea of eidoi, but I’m not sure how similar.