>Asking "why" when you should be asking "how" makes you less scientific than
>religious.
Usually am interested in how questions. Yet it may be interesting to explore the fertilisation and developmental process to find why humans overwhelmingly take either the male or female biological sexual identity, not one of three others that F-S has suggested (or what happens at the genetic or developmental level when one of these three other identities is formed and why these irregularities do not happen more often). And as Roger pointed out, those other identities do not prove that biological sex is a constructed category or that there is only one such category; rather it suggests that there are more than two such categories. And I certainly haven't provided any warrant for interning hermaprhodites, as the Japanese were.
>The politics of gendering sex(es) is less quantitative than qualitative.
Not at all what Hubbard suggests. Her main argument is that quantitative differences between the sexes (height, weight, muscular development, hormonal production, infant mortality, etc) arise from the interaction of biology and society, making it impossible to assign a partial coefficient to either the biological OR SOCIAL variables. She argues for interaction effects, sometimes calling this dialectics. She does not privilige society over biology.
And note that her argument does not mean that people do not have a biological sex or that sex is a constructed category. It means that the differences that develop between women and men cannot be ascribed to biological sex differences alone and that any attempt to do so in a patriarchal society can only be dishonest. She argues that women's biology and psychology are socially constructed, not biological sex per se. From the Hubbard passage you post (and from my memory of her argument) I remember (to repeat myself) Hubbard's main point being that we cannot figure out how much biological sexual difference itself accounts for specifiable, clearly quantifiable differences between the sexes. She may be bending the stick too far in the other direction, but it seems to me a point a well worth heeding.
>. Ruth Hubbard asks why a tiny area of
>differences between men and women, in contrast to overwhelming similarities
>between them, has been made to color our understanding of sexes, creating
>"a false dichotomy," a metaphysics of "opposite sexes."
And your use of Lacquer to offer an explanation for how this has come about is most fascinating! Kaminer shows Stossel to grap at any evidence to make sweeping, unjustified claims that women and men think in deeply different ways. Certainly a grave problem.
Yours, Rakesh