Fausto-Sterling: "5 genders? I was ironic. It's called scholarship"

[ArranUpsideDown]

I've paraphrased it but that's pretty much the content.

I'll inform your students IF you learn the history of scholarship in the field and drop the false indignation. It does not become such a young man. AND writing an ironic essay is not a lie. Get over yourself!

Excellent @LadyPrincesexual Jane Clare Jones thread in response:

I teach feminism. I see your essay on syllabuses all over the place. Your work is referenced by Stephen Whittle, who was the architect if this political movement in this country. He wrote an essay after the GRA announcing that biological sex was no longer legally relevant. [cont.]

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1229882673000304640?s=20]]

It's the Fox sisters all over again.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, and then they all start falling off at once.

I do think this is unfair to F-S in some ways. Agree with the pp (sorry only a few posts ago but I'm on my phone) saying that one or two papers by one individual shouldn't cause upheaval of entire legal/medical system. But when someone uses their own authority, however little they feel it, to float provocative or novel ideas,they should in my view try a little harder to minimise obvious damage caused by those ideas being used by damaged people to hurt others. Dr Andrew Wakefield springs to mind.

Yes, I am here now, though I probably won't visit often, and it was this blog post that led to a phone call from the police a year ago.
deadinteresting.blogspot.com/2018/01/death-doesnt-misgender-you-die-as-you.html

Just finished reading her Boston Review article and dear fucking god she's smug. The bit about world building, though...a more accurate description for that would be "fantasy". Which is fine if you're writing Game of Thrones, but not so great if you're writing laws.

What has become increasingly clear is that one can find levels of masculinity and femininity in almost every possible permutation.

What I’d like to see set out in clear language is just how Fausto-Sterling and other scientists engaged in this research determine which behaviours, choices, preferences, etc. are “masculine” and which are “feminine” and exactly how they measure that.

In my opinion, that issue lies at the heart of the cognitive bias inside all this work around gender identity.

If you define, for example, ability with spatial awareness as ability to read maps or work with geometric proofs on paper, then for a lot of social reasons you will find men have better skills with spatial awareness.

But if you define ability with spatial awareness as the ability to take one long strand of wool and create a perfectly tailored garment, which inherently means working with geometry, you’ll find that many men aren’t particular adept with spatial awareness while many women are quite adept.

How one conceives of a problem determines how one conceives of the tools necessary to solve that problem, and researchers studying “gender” bring already-biased tools to the problem of “gender.”