Anne Fausto-Sterling - Feminist Biologist

[MalagaNights]

Has anyone listened to this discussion between Scott Barry Kaufman (psychologist) & Anne Fausto-Sterling (a feminist biologist and gender studies professor.)?

It confused me. She seems to be arguing from a biologists position that gender is socially constructed (even the biological aspects are culturally influenced and defined) and that everyone goes through a gender identity development to establish where they are on the sexgender (she uses it as one word) spectrum.

She believes we are defined by how we socially present in the world rather than our genitals.

Anyone come across her before? I found it so hard to follow. I was really surprised a feminist biologist was taking this position.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/044nrzEOPAERfIvEg70bik?si=BtshLgZoS9mzEnUCzje48Q&dd=1

Well she is a biologist by any accepted measure.

She studied zoology and genetics and is a professor of biology and gender studies of an elite university.

Yes I think she's talking nonsense but that's because social constructionism has infected biology not because she's not a biologist.

She is the starting point (in the 1990s) for everyone who wants to claim that biological sex is a spectrum - because she claimed 2% are intersex - and posited five basic genders. The 2% figure was shown to be a massive over-estimate (it is about 1 in 2,500) based on a misunderstanding of all the various birth abnormalities affecting genitals. She was taken apart in the early C21 and had to find some way to retreat (hence the "joke" claim) but propagandists (like Amnesty International) still use the 2% claim. I think she is best consigned to the rubbish bin of history, along with everything she has ever written.

She promoted a definition of 'intersex' so broad that it means that any slight departure from the most common sexual developmental arrangements counts as intersex, allowing her to say that intersex is about 1.7% of live births, instead of the true figure of 0.0018%. Her supporters then pushed the idea that intersex is as common as red hair, for political purposes. Leonard Sax debunked the false figure in the medical literature but it's a zombie statistic - it keeps popping up in discussions

Some men don't have the hole in the penis at the tip of the glans but underneath it. Fausto-Sterling would count such a man as intersex, which is absurd. Awful woman.

Mary Harrington says that it is the most privileged women - elite liberals - who are most keen to deny the reality of sex. The women who are working in media, creative industries, digital, knowledge based fields. Ther are often those who have most benefitted from equalities legislation and are relatively shielded from the immediate impacts of sex based differences.

That doesn't stop them from requisitioning the services of poorer women, though, when it comes to out-sourcing their domestic/childcare/ gestational requirements.