I saw a thing a while back, talking about the science that shows identifiable differences between male and female brains. Rather than saying "HA! told you there's a biological difference" it looked at how we know brains to be plastic, and how brains change due to the things we do -- they're not set in stone when we come out of the womb, they develop over time. Specifically it looked at how boys are encouraged to engage in certain types of play, and girls in others. Encouraged not just through one specific thing, like a teacher saying "you're a boy, you go play with that" but rather a whole host of things from familial reinforcement, branding and marketing, peer pressure, etc. It's never just one thing, it's a huge messy web of many.
Anyway, boys were seen to be doing more things like block work, and girls were doing more stuff around dolls. (This is broadly - there will have been overlap, differences, outliers, etc, as well as other activities, I'm just mentioning two in particular.) As a result, brains will develop in relation to those tasks and activities. It's not hard to see how from that we get the idea that boys are good with spatial awareness and girls are good at creativity. They well might be, generally - but because their brains were trained to be like that. But that tendency towards being good at certain things gets used as essentialist proof that boys and girls are biologically hardwired to be different from the get-go.
We don't understand the extent to which -- to use simplistic terms but ones that everyone understands -- nature and nurture interact, but it becomes increasingly clear year after year that it's not a simple either/or, but a complex interaction between the two.
It's not enough for feminists to say "gender is a construct" because it oftentimes ignores the biological reality of brains seemingly being wired in different ways within gendered groups. And likewise it's disingenuous to say "boys and girls are inherently different, the science says so" because it ignores the feedback loop of nature-nurture influencing each other.
I understand (don't agree with, but understand) the fear some feminists have around trans issues because of how it makes 'gender is a construct' far more difficult to talk about, especially when that has been the primary argument against sexism. But that isn't solved by telling trans people they're wrong, or by holing yourself up in some essentialist notion of gender -- because not only are you throwing an entire group of people under the bus, you're misrepresenting the science, and you're undermining your own bloody arguments about gender construction to begin with (gender is a construct; I as a woman have a unique experience that men can't understand; my body codes me in a certain way and I am disadvantaged in society because of that; there's nothing inherent about being a woman; I am a woman and you are not).
Far better to be open about how there's a lot we don't understand, and find better ways to tackle sexism that embrace everyone rather than clinging desperately to one argument that doesn't actually fully realise the ways biology and society interact and constitute each other. Even if it means having to do the very hard work of developing a more nuanced and complex understanding of something that has worked quite well for feminism so far.
