Though George Orwell would down a fifth of vodka were he alive to see it, we’re in an era where we’re having to fight some of the best-educated people in the world to establish that, in humans, sex is binary and dimorphic: There are two sexes, male and female, and they are different.
But for many feminists like me, the idea that having different bodies means having different brains—brains are, of course, part of the body—has been difficult to process. That argument has historically been used to “prove” that women are fundamentally ill-equipped for education, work outside the home, command of their own lives. It has also been used to “prove” gender identity; having a girl brain in a boy body, as Jazz Jennings explained to preschool children for the last decade, means being transgender.
But we can’t let the possible uses and misuses of knowledge get in the way of seeking it.
This conversation with philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith grew from a series of exchanges on a listserv of [mostly] psychologists and sexologists, talking about biological and psychological differences between men and women, and how much feminism is responsible for the current gender culture war.
Tomorrow I’ll post part two. Comments are open to all.
Holly’s talk: Is Feminism Finished?
Her book: Gender-Critical Feminism.
Share this post