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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the ‘biosocial’ in our current conjuncture in which distinctive models of biology and psychology are deployed in the service of radical sociopolitical projects of the right. It addresses specifically the current lure of cisness as that which insists on sex as biological fact.

Paper long abstract

One re-animation of biology in our time of reactionary and fascist politics is the allure of the phrase ‘biological sex’. There are numerous attempts to nail down sex as biological fact through legislative judgements, policy interventions, and the work of right-wing social movements. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government-commissioned independent Sullivan Review on data, statistics and research on sex and gender (re)installs ideologically driven models of ‘biological’ sex as well as a hygienically maintained separation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that casts ‘biology’ as ‘material reality’ in distinction to the sphere of psychological self-understanding to which ‘gender identity’ is relegated (Todd and Callard 2026). What are we to make of the category of the ‘biosocial’ as distinctive models of biology and of psychology are hardening in the service of radical sociopolitical projects of the right? I pursue this question by taking up arguments made by feminist and trans scholars about ‘cisness’. If cisness has been named by Heaney (2026) as the concept which ‘recasts sex as a biological fact following political challenges to the sanctity of sex as an ordained social order’, its lure for right-wing politics, in the current late-capitalist conjuncture, cannot disguise that category’s ever-intensifying (biosocial) contradictions (Wallenhorst, 2026). The paper considers whether the category of the biosocial is able, today, in the face of counter-revolutionary projects, to help crack sex open or whether we ought, instead, to consider it as a kind of out-of-joint artefact of the early twenty-first century.