
The Problem with Gender Studies (2016) - Tomte
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/07/17119/
======
HelloNurse
According to the notes at the end of the article, the author is a professor of
Moral Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, which suggests some degree of
prejudice against gender studies; apparently enough to cause serious
misunderstanding of "gender differences" and "gender inequality".

------
eesmith
> When I recently asked a class of undergraduates at Oglethorpe University if
> any of them thought there were “no meaningful differences between men and
> women,” two female students raised their hands. When I pointed to the
> obvious reproductive differences between males and females,

What a baity question.

If you don't believe in the one-to-one mapping from "men/women" to
"female/male" than the author's response comes across as ignorance of the
basics of gender studies. Since the author, based on the later text, knows
about that distinction ("Indeed, the very distinction between sex and gender
is itself a modern social construct.") it's at the very least sloppy.

To avoid being categorized as a "Courtier's Reply" argument, it seems
important to show how the arguments are invalid. But the arguments are more
along the lines as follows:

> even we in the twenty-first century recognize that there are some basic
> physical differences between women and men—differences that have important
> social implications for the way we order society.

There are some basic physical differences between left-handed and right-handed
people, between tall and short people, etc. The questions then are _why are
they important_ and _should they be important_?

Which is part of what gender studies does.

> The problem is not that they fail to appreciate the facts about human
> genitalia, which any three-year-old could explain to them.

So, if even one three-year-old states that "some girls have penises" then that
would undermine the argument, yes?

And if we teach three-year-olds that "some girls have penises and some boys
have vulvas", then it becomes a baseless argument, yes?

That is, this doesn't seem like a solid argument as it's based entirely in
social practices. Quoting the Wikipedia entry for "Third gender":

"The traditional Diné of the Southwestern US acknowledge four genders:
feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, masculine man.[10] The term
"third gender" has also been used to describe hijras of India[11] who have
gained legal identity, fa'afafine of Polynesia, and sworn virgins of Albania."

If we ask a three-year-old from those cultures, would they give the same
answer?

> Kimmel concedes that women and men are physically and sexually different,
> but he refuses to recognize that such sex differences have any necessary
> gender implications. He ignores the fact that for all of human history human
> beings have assumed the opposite.

"All of human history"? See earlier comments about cultures with more than two
distinct genders.

Or quoting from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender#History)
:

"The two great Sanskrit epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,[99]
indicate the existence of a third gender in ancient Indic society."

"In the Buddhist Vinaya, codified in its present form around the 2nd century
BC and said to be handed down by oral tradition from Buddha himself, there are
four main sex/gender categories: males, females, ubhatobyañjanaka (people of a
dual sexual nature) and paṇḍaka (people of non-normative sexual natures,
perhaps originally denoting a deficiency in male sexual capacity)."

"Contrary to what is often portrayed in the West, sex with male (specifically
receptive oral and anal sex) was the gender role of the third gender, not
their defining feature. Thus, in ancient India, as in present-day India, the
society made a distinction between a third gender having sex with a man, and a
man having sex with a man."

And so on.

