ttractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports.
This is such an astonishingly bad argument that it's amazing to me that anyone would actually set it down in writing, let alone make it the central thesis of a whole book. Of course knowing an individual's sex doesn't tell us everything about them. Whoever thought it did? It's like saying that the definition of a chair – something you sit on – doesn't tell us whether it's made of wood or steel or has legs or runners or if it's in Norway or Tanzania, so chairs don't really exist as such and we should just stop talking about them.
Have a vagina but don’t like gossip? Sex is so very complex! Who knows what anyone is? …
Obviously I’m claiming all this having given up biology lessons at 14. Yet while I appreciate the scientists who have been brave enough to stand up to this nonsense, I can’t help feeling anyone should be able to challenge it. There is a long history of women being bullied out of asserting ourselves on the very question of what we are and why we matter.
We’re meant to feel too ill-qualified (where’s your science degree?). We’re meant to feel threatened (what to end up back in the kitchen?). We’re meant to feel behind the times (don’t you understand that no one thinks this any more?).
Ultimately, we’re meant to feel small, too irrelevant to expect more than a choice between non-existence as a sex class or existence as a conservative stereotype. That, by the way, is an age-old, harmful, socially constructed binary. If we want to reject such things, how about starting there?
It's not so much now that academics can and should be challenged by non-academics – that was always the case – but that academics are now in fact far more likely to come up with nonsense than any other demographic. Dispensers of anti-expertise. Our new bullshitters-in-chief.
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