No, Equality Doesn’t Mean Separate Roles for Men and Women

The emergence of feminist politics has led to a patriarchal counter-revolution that pays lip-service to “equality” while insisting that women and men should occupy different, separate places in society. In the case of Islamists, this ideology takes the following form: Islam recognizes the equality of men and women but underlines their separate and complementary roles/responsibilities based on God-given differences.

First, men are generally regarded as physically stronger, which is why they are assigned the role of protectors and providers. Second, women’s ability to conceive, give birth, and nurse children is treated as a natural sign that they are destined for child-rearing. Since pregnancy and childcare entail time and efforts, women are expected to focus on this domain, instead of attempting to assume financial responsibilities. Third, since women have a natural propensity for caregiving, they are more emotional and sensitive, in contrast to the rational decision-making capacities that men possess. Because men are perceived as more rational and stable, they are given roles of leadership in marriage, politics, religion, and society. This system of natural, complementary differences is supposed to form a harmonious order.

When Biology Ignores God’s Blueprint: The Myth of a Binary Sex System

There are three rejoinders to the Islamist theory of gender. First, the existence of God-given biological differences can be asserted only if they are binary, universal, and deterministic. According to the Great Cosmic Bureaucrat, men come with XY chromosomes and women with XX chromosomes—neat, simple, and factory-sealed with no exceptions. Except, well… biology didn’t get the memo.

Because in reality, some people are XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), some are XO (Turner syndrome), and some are XY women thanks to conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS)—where their bodies do not respond to testosterone. Others are genetic mosaics, meaning some of their cells are XX, others XY, like a gender-themed tie-dye experiment. If God had hardcoded sex into our DNA, then biology should have followed His perfect blueprint, right? And yet here we are, with chromosomes scattering in every direction like God sneezed into the primordial soup and called it “intelligent design.”

But wait! Maybe chromosomes are messy, but hormones surely separate the sexes? Think again. Testosterone and estrogen are in everyone, just in different amounts, and those amounts overlap between men and women. Some women naturally have higher testosterone than some men. Some men produce more estrogen than their wives. If hormones were the holy markers of gender, we’d need blood tests before using public restrooms – which, thankfully, even the most committed sex-essentialists haven’t suggested (yet).

Fine, fine—what about genitals? Surely, that’s where the Big Guy drew a clear line, right? Nope. Some babies are born with ambiguous genitalia. Some have ovotestes—gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissue, because why settle for one? Others have internal reproductive organs that don’t match their external ones. Sex diversity is about as common as naturally red hair (1.7% of the population). So if you wouldn’t tell a ginger that their hair is a “biological mistake,” maybe rethink how you treat intersex people.

If biological sex were truly binary, there should be one undeniable trait that separates men from women. But let’s check: Chromosomes? Nope—some men are XX, some women are XY. Genitals? Nope—the penis and clitoris are made from the same embryonic tissue and develop on a sliding scale. Hormones? Nope—everyone has a mix, with no clear male/female cutoff. Reproduction? Nope—some women can’t give birth, some men are infertile, and some intersex people have reproductive traits of both sexes. If no single trait defines “male” and “female” in all cases, then sex can’t be asserted as a fixed, universal, God-ordained category.

People cling to the male/female binary because they assume that bodies develop like a two-track train system—one for men, one for women. But biology is not a train track. It’s more like a choose-your-own-adventure book written by a half-drunk author—with different genes, hormones, and environmental factors nudging development in unexpected directions.

In the womb, all humans start the same—with the potential for both male and female traits. Everyone begins with a genital ridge (which could become testes or ovaries) and two sets of ducts—one that could form a uterus, one that could form male structures. Whether these traits develop is not automatic, but depends on complex signals, genetic switches, and sometimes, just sheer randomness.

So when people say, “Men and women are opposites by nature!” the real response is: What nature? The one where sex is a sliding scale? The one where even chromosomes don’t follow a strict rulebook? If sex itself isn’t binary, then building society around rigid gender roles is like trying to hammer water into a table—it was never going to hold shape in the first place.

The truth is, nature didn’t draw a strict male/female line. Society did. And blaming it on biology is just science-flavored wishful thinking.

Why Sex Isn’t Just Biology – It’s a System of Control

If no single trait sharply divides “male” from “female,” then why does this binary persist? This question brings me to my second rejoinder: sex is not a neutral, pre-existing reality that society simply recognizes—it is a mechanism of power imposed on bodies, abstracting some differences as meaningful while ignoring others. While human biology exhibits vast variation, this variation does not naturally resolve into two stable categories. What we call “sex” is already the product of classification, a way of organizing bodies according to pre-existing social logics.

This does not mean that bodies lack differences. It means that differences are only legible as “sexual difference” because society makes them so. Far from being a neutral descriptor of anatomy, “sex” is a way of stabilizing certain bodily traits as foundational while rendering others irrelevant. No one insists that metabolic rates or lung capacity dictate identity, yet reproductive anatomy is elevated to a structuring principle of human society. This is not because the body demands such organization, but because social systems have historically required such a division to justify power, labor roles, and inheritance structures.

The body, with all its chaotic variety, gets forcibly squeezed into the rigid boxes of “man” and “woman,” and suddenly, an incidental anatomical variation (which doesn’t even hold across all cases) becomes the blueprint for social hierarchy. The fact that some people get pregnant does not mean that pregnancy is a universal, cosmic law for structuring identity and social life. It’s like saying people with naturally curly hair should be legally required to make rope. Yes, some people give birth. No, that doesn’t mean we should build civilization around it.

Sex is not just a neutral biological given; it’s the way a society represents biology to itself. We pluck certain bodily traits from the mess of human variation, harden them into rigid categories, and then use those categories to decide who gets power, who gets subordinated, and who gets stuck with unpaid labor. And because we’ve done this for so long, we assume it’s all just “natural.” But in reality, these divisions aren’t dictated by biology—they’re manufactured, reinforced, and upheld through an entire system of exclusionary meanings.

So the next time someone tells you that “biology” demands strict gender roles, remember: biology also gave us webbed toes, extra nipples, and vestigial tails. If we’re going to build society around human anatomy, we could just as easily divide people by who can wiggle their ears. But we don’t—because it would be absurd. And yet, here we are.

Sorry, But Allah Didn’t Code Gender Roles into Our Brains

The third and the last point concerns the existence of psychological and emotional differences between men and women. Yaqeen Institute, ever eager to turn scientific findings into divine decrees, triumphantly waves around a 2020 National Institutes of Health report as proof that men and women are biologically programmed for their God-given roles. According to their grand revelation, women have a bigger prefrontal cortex (PFC), responsible for decision-making and social cognition, while men have larger visual-processing areas—so naturally, this must mean that Allah has designed women to be empathetic nurturers and men to be logic-driven visionaries. Case closed, right?

Well, not quite. What Yaqeen Institute conveniently omits is the report’s own disclaimer: “what underlies these differences isn’t fully understood.” In other words, the study itself refuses to chalk these brain differences up to biology alone. But why let a little nuance ruin a perfectly good divine mandate?

Brains don’t sprout from the womb pre-engraved with “male” and “female” like some angelic clerk stamped them with divine approval before shipping them to Earth. The PFC is larger in women not because Allah designed them for emotional labor but because society relentlessly pushes them into caregiving, emotional intelligence, and social navigation. Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reshape itself based on experience—ensures that whatever skills a person repeatedly uses get reinforced. So when girls are expected to be emotionally perceptive, polite, and accommodating, they practice those behaviors until the brain adapts.

Meanwhile, boys are nudged toward activities that require spatial awareness—sports, video games, and mechanical problem-solving—strengthening the visual-processing areas of their brains. Not because they are born to fix car engines and mansplain directions, but because they are repeatedly encouraged to engage in these tasks.

And here’s the real kicker: genes don’t even operate in isolation. Epigenetics tells us that genes are more like switches, turning on and off in response to environmental signals. That means brain differences aren’t dictating social roles—social roles are sculpting brain differences. Girls don’t magically become better at face recognition because of some divine feminine essence; they become better at it because they are expected to be socially attuned and spend more time practicing. Similarly, the cognitive control women supposedly excel at? That’s just the result of a lifetime of being forced to regulate emotions, multitask, and perform the exhausting labor of managing everyone else’s feelings.

So, rather than proving that God willed gender roles into existence, this research actually exposes them as artificial constructs. If Allah really designed men and women’s brains for distinct roles, why would their very structure be so sensitive to culture and experience? Why would supposedly “male” or “female” traits only emerge when society enforces them? If divine wisdom built these differences, then Allah must have outsourced brain development to social conditioning—an odd design choice for an all-knowing deity.

Freedom Begins Where Gender Scripts End

Having dismantled the theological fairy tale that gender is neatly sorted by divine decree, we can now ask: what would a truly free society look like?

Instead of parroting the claim that God personally assigned men and women their separate life scripts, we must insist on something far more plausible: social roles should be completely indifferent to sex or gender. No preordained destinies, no divine pink-and-blue sorting system, no celestial bureaucracy stamping “man” and “woman” on social function.

Real equality does not mean carving out separate-but-equal spaces where men and women graciously receive their respective rights within their designated enclosures. It means abandoning the idea that gender should determine what people can do in their lives. It means ensuring that individuals have the same access to roles, opportunities, and responsibilities – without a heteronormative system constantly interfering to classify them based on sexual/anatomical markers.

Take work, for example. Why should a woman be expected to sacrifice career ambitions for caregiving, while a man who chooses to be a stay-at-home dad is seen as a failure? Why should we assume that leadership, intellectual authority, or religious interpretation belong to men, while emotional labor and servitude belong to women?  Why should laws governing modesty, movement, or inheritance care about what chromosomes someone has? If society truly functioned on justice rather than biological determinism, none of these divisions would make sense—because they don’t. Why should laws governing modesty, movement, or inheritance be tied to biology when they’ve always been about power?

No more justifications for why certain tasks belong to one sex over the other. No more sacred hierarchies masquerading as “natural order.” A just society doesn’t sort people by biology – it dismantles the patriarchal system that turns sexual markers into a tool of domination. The only rightful determinant of a person’s path should be the collective power of democratic decision-making.

Yanis Iqbal is an undergraduate student of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia. He has published more than 300 articles in different magazines and websites on imperialism, social movements, political theory, education, and cultural criticism.