anyone in any sociology or anthropology department will tell you how incredibly obviously false the biological essentialist position of gender is. it's literally only white men in tech or right-wing white male biologists writing outside their field of expertise who defend that position
> In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.”
> Why? There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys
> Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things.
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...
Thank god we have science to confirm that to us!
Sociology and anthropology depts can't handle this because they aren't interested in science.
the fact that you still think of sex as a binary difference between xx and xy shows how far outdated your ideas about the science of sex differences are. even "biological sex" (not even gender) is a spectrum influenced by a variety of different factors
"Light switches are in fact a binary difference, dimmer switches are a small portion of all switches."
"Life is in fact a binary difference, brain death patients are a tiny portion of all patients."
Metastable states[0] are a tiny portion of all logic values. They exist and are inherently unavoidable, but somehow massively complicated systems that fundamentally rely on the assumption that values are either 0 or 1 still work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_in_electronics
This seems analogous; we should design social structures (or allow social structures to emerge) that assume that individuals are male or female, but which handle the exceptional case of non-cisgendered individuals. Just like a software system that doesn't handle exceptions gracefully, a social system that lacks provisions for these is fundamentally flawed and can fail unexpectedly and potentially catastrophically.
Society also lacks "provisions" for violent criminals[0] but it still handles them and is yet to fail catastrophically.
[0] I'm not equating these two categories of people, merely illustrating that your example of comparing software exceptions to people is deeply flawed.
http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2015/02/24/sex-biology-redefin...