In 2016 the US National Institutes of Health introduced a policy mandating consideration of Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV) in preclinical research. In this article, I ask what, precisely, is meant by the designation of sex as a 'biological variable', and how has its inclusion come to take the form of a policy mandate? Given the well documented complexity of 'sex' and the degree to which it is politically and scientifically contested, its enactment via policy as a biological variable is not a given. I explore how sex is multiply enacted in efforts to legitimate and realize the SABV policy and consider how the analytical lens of co-production sheds light on how and why this occurs. I show that the policy works to reassert scientific and political order by addressing two institutional concerns: the so-called reproducibility crisis in preclinical research, and pervasive gender inequality across the institution of biomedicine. From here, the entity that underpins this effort - sex as a biological variable - becomes more than one thing, with enactments ranging from an assigned category, to an outcome, to a causal biological force in its own right. Sex emerges as simultaneously entangled with yet distinct from gender, and binary (female/male) yet complex in its variation. I suggest that it is in the very attempt to delineate natural from social order, and in the process create the conditions to privilege a particular kind of science and account of embodied difference, that ontological multiplicity becomes readily visible. That this multiplicity goes unrecognized points to the unifying role of an overarching ideological commitment to sex as a presumed binary and biological scientific object, the institutional dominance of which is never guaranteed.

中文翻译：

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共同生产，成倍增加：性行为作为美国生物医学中的生物学变量

2016 年，美国国立卫生研究院出台了一项政策，要求在临床前研究中将性别视为生物变量 (SABV)。在本文中，我想问，将性别指定为“生物变量”究竟意味着什么，以及它是如何以政策授权的形式出现的？鉴于“性”的复杂性以及它在政治和科学上的争议程度有据可查，因此通过政策将其作为生物变量来制定并不是必然的。我探讨了性是如何在努力使 SABV 政策合法化和实现的过程中多重制定的，并考虑共同制作的分析镜头如何阐明这种情况是如何发生的以及为什么发生。我表明，该政策通过解决两个制度问题来重申科学和政治秩序：临床前研究中所谓的可重复性危机，以及整个生物医学机构普遍存在的性别不平等。从这里开始，支撑这一努力的实体——作为生物变量的性——变得不只是一件事，其制定范围从指定的类别到结果，再到其自身的因果生物力量。性别同时与性别纠缠在一起，但又与性别不同，二元（女性/男性）的变化又复杂。我认为，正是在试图从社会秩序中划定自然，并在此过程中创造条件以赋予特定类型的科学特权和对具体差异的解释，本体论的多样性才变得显而易见。