"As tavern keepers, soldiers, sailors, mountebanks, builders and itinerant tinkers, they rejected the belief that those born female couldn’t do men’s work. Husbands were not born, but made."
This can be taken as the "message" of not just this book but the whole narrative around it. And it is a very logically and scientifically flawed statement and message.
No, the subjects of this book were not ordinary females aka women who just came to think "We reject the 'belief' that men and women have certain traits - in fact we can be men!" Rather, they were people with a certain birth defect that caused them to be anatomically female but otherwise exhibited male biological traits as well. This may have various reasons such as genetics, hormonal imbalances etc, but that's besides the point. They did not develop any "beliefs" or "convictions" that "You know what, why the heck are we supposed to be women? Let's just be men!".
Bigger muscle mass, facial hair, deeper voices, slightly heavier brains, are literally biological traits of human males. Just because there can be exceptions to this due to birth defects, just like there can be exceptions to having eyesight or being able to hear due to birth defects, which are also biological traits in humans, doesn't mean there is no biological truth about what constitutes male and female.
Contrary to that, i.e. to science, logic and biology in particular, the above quote and the narrative around it is trying to suggest that literally any and every healthy woman is just being pressured into being a biological and social female by society, and needs to be liberated into thinking "Heck I can be a man too!". That they just need to "reject the belief that biological men are men and biological women are women". In other words, that they need to "reject science, logic and biology".
Yes, husbands, and wifes - or men and women - were, are and will be born, not made!
P.S.: Just as some more food for thought, here is another perspective: If it was merely a matter of believing that you are male or female, then why do they give trans-men testosterone and trans-women other hormones (estrogens?) to become more biologically of the desired sex? Wouldn't it be only consequential e.g. for a trans-man to "reject the belief that a man ought to be muscular, deep-voiced" etc. and thus avoid the whole hormonal transition altogether?
I'm both baffled and amused, yet somewhat unsurprised, that stating mere, observable facts about biology will earn you the silent downvotes of what is supposed to be an educated, intelligent audience. In a way I am disappointed, too.
Am I to assume that all of the objections to my post are merely of dogmatic and/or emotional nature or is anybody going to try and articulate their rebuttal of it here? Sadly I have enough reason to assume that the former is the case ...
