Prum, Richard O. Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference. The University of Chicago Press, 2023.
On April 16th of this year, I attended a hastily-assembled meeting of shell-shocked trans people in my town. Under a rapidly falling dusk, people packed into the outside seating area of a local watering hole—over fifty of us in all—and hashed out a plan to make a show of force and solidarity against the British Supreme Court’s most recent ruling. Earlier that day, we had all heard the news that the highest court of the land declared that the definition of “woman” in a certain equal rights law would be determined “by biological sex.”[1]
Though I knew that the state would likely take a tastelessly commonsensical definition of “biological sex” as the basis for its policy, I had some inkling that this everyday idea about what “the science” has to say about sex was deeply flawed and freighted with ideological baggage.
Serendipitously, I soon found a library copy of Richard Prum’s 2023 monograph Performance all the Way Down. Copy on the back of the book proclaims that this is “a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists.” Rightly so, for the book seeks to develop a performative theory of individual human development and to deny that any binary idea of “biological sex” is essential to genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Unusually for a biology book, it uses critical theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault to ascribe ideas like discourse and performativity into biological explanations for cell expression and intercellular interactions.
Though I would recommend reading the entire book, this review is meant to cover one specific section that is the most relevant to a historically curious audience. Central to this review is his assertion that sex is a history. Because of the technical quality of Prum’s language, this requires some careful unpacking. Still, I think that, as historians and those interested in history, we can find a great deal of value in Prum’s arguments and strengthen our understanding of what sex is and, therefore, how ideological assertions about sex are used to construct harmful social orders. It also gives environmental historians another way of talking about the body, which is a fundamental unit in that interface between “nature” and “culture,” which we all try to elucidate.
Let’s follow Prum’s argument for a spell. He identifies the major error most people make about the sexes: “Most people, including many biologists, think of male and female as ontological classes that can be defined by essential properties.” In the context of a woman’s bathroom, for instance, the “essential properties” at hand are phenotypical and ultimately reducible to the lack or presence of certain external genital shapes, which can be seen either directly or, more commonly, guessed by assessing certain secondary characteristics like hair growth, physical size, gait, etc. Prum’s argument is that sex is, instead, “historical sets of (intra-acting) reproductive possibilities that are iteratively realized in bodies within each generation. In short, sex is a history.”[2]
Prum observes that sex is real in the sense that all human beings must grow from a fertilized egg, but it is not an essence that determines that any individual human must be one sex or another. To say that sex is a history, then, is that sex, like all historical entities, arises at a given time, will perish at a certain future time, and manifests itself differently in each individual human being with no essential characteristics forcing any body into one binary category or another. Every individual’s sexual being develops as a contingent result of their specific developmental history, which is influenced but not determined by anything about their genes, chromosomes, or fetal development.
My sex, for example, arises from some chromosomes (I have never had them checked), a specific social and cultural history, and surgical and chemical intervention according to my aesthetic desires. My sex is real even if its reproductive capacities are close to nil. It’s not that I am therefore “biologically female.” Rather, no individual person can essentially be “female.” There are instead, for Prum, certain capacities associated with egg production that each individual can perform more or less depending on their specific history. As Prum argues in the closing parts of the book, “individual organisms are each performances of themselves,”[3] at each level from the cellular to the organismal.
This leads us to the crux of the matter: Prum’s definition of “history.” He writes, “I do not mean human history, the history of human thought, or the history of human interaction with [scientific ontological entities] but rather the material existence, persistence, and iterative reproduction of these entities over a span of time.”[4] Given Prum’s insistence on separating his notion of history from what environmental historians usually use, it seems as though this puts it beyond our reach. I think, however, that we can use his discussion of sex and history to resist dominant ways of writing about queer and trans people and our relationship to history and biology.
Here we can re-examine both the Supreme Court’s ruling that the definition of an individual’s sex is based on “biology” and the activist rejoinder that we “have always been here.”
Because we are so frequently attacked on the basis of our cultural deviance from a commonsensical idea of “naturalness,” much of our queer and trans resistance has centred on either separating sex from cultural gender or asserting that queer and trans essence always exists in human culture. Frequently, I think trans people, especially, appear in discourse as cultural problems, as the abstract subjects of sympathy, or as fascinating curios of anthropology. Our bodily existence rarely comes up except, again, as part of medical and pathological controversies (AIDS, “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” “social contagion”) where we are again treated not as whole organic beings but as problems to be managed or political subjects to be appeased. We are, in other words, surfaces essentially severed from our historical existence and from our authentic performances of humanity.
By thinking through Prum’s idea that “sex is a history,” we can begin to notice our place in history is therefore re-embodied, and queers and trans people can write ourselves as fleshy individuals whose bodies matter just as much as our cultural signalling. We can recontextualize the slogan “we have always been here,” then, not as a longing for or assertion of participation in an ecologically destructive civilization but as an affirmation of each of our unique performances of animal capacity. We can, therefore, recognize that, far from cultural ghosts separated from the world of biological life, queers as historical subjects participate in what Prum calls “ecological co-performances”[5] alongside the wider community of life on Earth.
As environmental historians, we can use this example to reaffirm the centrality of embodied humans at the centre of our narratives. Rather than assuming an abstract human subject that can be generalized, we can understand all of our historical research as both concerning and produced by exquisitely unique animal beings. Despite my current distress at the state of trans life in the UK, therefore, we can take heart in the trans population’s evident vitality and resilience. Our claims to natural humanity are more and more clearly warranted as biologists like Prum adapt to our presence and self-knowledge.
Edited by Teja Šosterič; reviewed by Deniz Karakas.
[1] Ben Hatton, “UK’s highest court says legal definition of woman is based on biological sex,” BBC News, April 16, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t.
[2] Prum, Performance all the Way Down, 43.
[3] Prum, Performance all the Way Down, 275.
[4] Prum, Performance all the Way Down, 40.
[5] Prum, Performance all the Way Down, 275.