> And note that her argument does not mean that people do not have a
> biological sex or that sex is a constructed category.
The endless repetition of this irrelevant lie half persuades me of the political correctness of Stalin's "Four walls are three too many for some people." No one -- NO ONE (not even Butler, really) -- has said "that people do not have a biological sex." All of us have said that over and over again. We have merely pointed out in more ways than I would have thought possible what ought to be apparent to a bright fifth grader-- that facts do not interpret themselves, and that *therefore* the definition and interpretation of "biological sex" is historically grounded.
(Catherine seems, I'm not sure, to accept Butler's "socially constructed," which I believe to be a rejection of history, though the phrase itself does not impose that ahistorical use of it.)
It is of great daily usefulness to males for everyone to assume that sex and gender are both "biologically determined" in the sense of imposing themselves on us willy-nilly. It takes it (male impulse) out of history even more fully than does Butler's implicit rejection of humanity's pre-history. I note that you have not performed the vulgarity of attributing any and all stray personal impulse to some universal human "instinct." But your endless reaching for this or that technical straw to avoid history is in some ways more serious just because it is a more successful filibuster -- more successful in keeping any forum from ever getting around to the questions of how to do something about the structure of sexual/gender relations under present historical conditions.
Fat right thumbs are every bit as much a biological fact as is any fact of reproduction. And for someone (my uncle) who both wanted to bowl and could not afford his own bowling ball that fat right thumb was a far more significant biological fact than their ovaries are for my two daughters. Anyone who put his/her mind to it could probably list (for a given woman or male) two or three thousand physical facts which were more relevant to socially classifying her than the physical facts you are hung up on as somehow having a mystical special signfiicance.
Biology exists. Homo erectus existed and formed social relations and an analysis of power that ignores this fact is empty. (I'm taking a swat at Butler.) But biological fact is utterly meaningless until it is interpreted within a given complex of social relations. And any *interpretation* of biological fact that ignores (for example) the large number of women who were never mothers and never will be (and never wanted to be -- a number which will increase steadily) is bad biology, bad history, and bad politics.
Carrol
P.S. Defenses of male supremacy if repeated endlessly wtih enough variation can achieve the same effect that the endless repetition of the same question in a police interrogation can -- lead to a verbal slip at some point in the responses. Perhaps that is the purpose of this endless pretense that feminists do not recognize the reality of biology. Get them restating the kindergarten facts often enough and they will generate a target one can attack.