approach that is both more just and scientific, by offering biologicaldynamism, biological expansiveness/emergence, and biological con-textualism. These, in turn, help us to move beyond not just biolo-gisms, but related regressive ideologies that enact real harms topeople, groups, and hermeneutical justice or knowledge frameworks.ConclusionsHow can biobehavioral research move beyond binaries andbiologisms? In this article, I have laid out how concepts like gen-der/sex and methodological approaches like social neuroendocri-nolog

Biobehavioral research beyond biologisms offers a way to incor-porate biological parameters into psychological research beyond bio-logical determinism, reductionism, and essentialism. It offers an

Social neuroendocrinology and gender/sex can provide a usefulapproach to biobehavioral research because they offer some spe-cific ways to avoid biologism. But, like most of what I have dis-cussed in this paper, biologism is not just one thing. There arethree important and commonly discussed iterations of biologismand, moreover, three biological ways beyond them that I propose(see Figure 2).Biological determinism holds that biological factors, and notsocial or environmental ones, are the real, main, or most signifi-cant cause of life-related phenomena. It involves searching onlyfor biological causes and/or articulating explicitly or implicitlythat only biological causes matter.

The first involves “pretheory.” Pretheory refers to the cul-tural ideas that infuse scientific theory but go unrecognized,unstated, and untested; pretheory is quite literally pre (prior) totheory since theory is developed partially out of it (Lloyd, 1993).Pretheory is informed by social constructions—for example, howwe scientists study testosterone is influenced by cultural percep-tions of testosterone because these shape what we as scientiststhink about the hormone and what questions we think to ask about

Gender shapes and impacts what behaviours people engage in:competition is encouraged for men and punished for women, andespecially vice versa for nurturance. These aspects of gender canhave biomaterial consequences as per the S/P Theory, since com-petitive and nurturant behaviors are hormonally-salient (vanAnders et al., 2011). Gendered forms of engagement in competi-tive and nurturant behaviours might actually lead to differentiallevels of testosterone that overlap with gender/sex, which is why Ihave spoken of “gender?testosterone pathway” (van Anderset al., 2015). Research supports this, with evidence showing thatmany competitive behaviors increase testosterone and many nur-turant ones decrease it

Gender refers to sociocultural aspects of femininity, masculin-ity, and gender diversity, which can include minds, behavior,expression, appearance, people, relationships, structures, policies,laws, and cultures (van Anders, 2015). Accordingly, gender occursat many levels that are themselves interconnected and overlapping,such that gender is multifaceted and multiple, and can branch andcoincide. Gender shapes and constrains people’s behavior, withpractices and institutions rewarding those who meet genderexpectations and punishing those who violate them