> Biology is often invoked to
> put an end to debate or analysis. Even such raw biological facts as
> childbirth and lactation take on very different meanings depending on
> social arrangements
Though at some point Doug and I seem to have a disagreement, here he is almost tautologically correct, and someone who can't see his point is indeed clueless.
The difficulty comes when classifications to which we are accustomed come to seem somehow more "real" than unaccustomed categories. It would be just as "Real" to divide humanity into those under 5'2'' in height (women) and those over 5'2'' (men). That is every bit as much a *biological* marker as is lactation. Why in the world should we pick out lactation rather than height as the basis for splitting the human species into two categories? Why should gender be a privileged classification? All classifications are arbitrary.
Any answer given to that question will, upon examination, turn out to be a social or political rather than a biological proposition. The division based upon lactation, we will be told, is more "important." It is only important, however, because of a political decision to continue the human species indefinitely. We could decide to cease reproducing but spend most of our time in volleyball playing, with leagues divided up in a similar fashion to boxing. "Shorties." "Mediums." "Real Talls." Et cetera. Now capacity to lactate would be as trivial and invisible as the number of clogged pores on the back of one's hand.
This is why Kelley has every right to be annoyed when someone tells her she is ignoring biology. The clueless simply cannot see that all the "natural" or "biological" differences between "men" and "women" are only meaningful within a given set of historical (political) contingencies. The interesting question then becomes why so many people are so insistent on claiming that two genders is a "real" and lasting categorization.
I know why I am insistent on the importance of maintaining the importance of biology in human life (even while insisting that the meaning of any biological fact is always politically established) -- the denial of biology is always, at some point, also the denial of history. But the attempt to assert biology by ascribing some independent "meaning" to lactation or child birth also denies history.
Try it yet another way. Kelly's interlocutor admits that women aren't pregnant all the time and that many women don't ever have children, while all women sooner or later are unable to have children any longer. So a classification of "women" based on this pregnancy is really pretty trivial -- unless he wants to claim that certain forms of activity or certain social relations should be denied to those who are merely (at some point in their lives) potentially capable of pregnancy. THis is really wild. If no political/social decisions are to be made on the basis of the division, why make it?
Twist and turn as you want, there is no way of saying that such and such "really" makes one a woman without sneaking in some political element to give the claim substance. I am potentially capable of having an utterly crippling headache every 5 to 7 days should I stop taking 12 mg. of a rather expensive medicine (Zanaflex) each day. Why not divide the human species up into the Zanaflex-dependent and the Zanaflex-independent. It would under many conditions be far more useful thatn the division into male and female genders.
And so forth. And playing with various Logic 101 games is not relevant, because "If P then Q" is irrelevant until you make a political decision that Q has some particular meaning.
Someone did try not long ago to give the "capacity for pregnancy" such an intrinsic meaning by his insistence that the abortion rate was somehow related to women's fear of motherhood, or something like that. That is, he insisted that roughly one-half of all humans were *politically* defined by a physical attribute which was trivial unless someone chose to make it significant.
Carrol