>In other words, the primacy of
> the physical difference between men and women is something that is
> produced and reinforced by comments like the one you made above.
I know that's what she SAYS. but I don't agree with her. i think she encodes her conclusion in her premiss. BECAUSE she has already decided that physical sex is discursive, any argument one makes to the contrary is part of that discursive system. But she never shows that physical sex is discursive in the first place. She merely asserts this. Again, it really is a lot like Freud, another great mental manipulator: yes means yes and so does no. Everything the patient says merely confirms the doctor's theory, because "there is no NO in the unconscious."
By the way,
> if you perform gender differently and engage in various
> procedures to better meet the criteria of being a man in our
> society (e.g., breast removal), then your gender performance does
> influence your chance of breast cancer.
I don't think a woman with a double mastectomy is meeting a criterion of being a man in our society. She is a woman who has had her breasts cut off. If you saw a photo of a male chest and one of a doubly=mastectomized female one, you'd have no trouble at all telling them apart. Men don't usually have huge scars all over their chests, and no nipples.
Also, not to beat this thing into the ground, a more manly gender performance (as you would see it, not me) may well INCREASE a woman's chances of getting breast cancer: never having been pregnant or breastfed a baby, for example.
Katha