Okay, if social "gender" means "ideas we apply to sex [biological gender]" then so be it. But what that means to me is that the only reasonable definition of gender is the biological one. If being good at math was a "gender difference" did that mean that women who actually were good at math were less than female? Or was there a special "women good at math" gender. I don't think so, so what you're saying is that performance on math was considered a gender difference but now it's not. But your construction assumes that biological gender is real and consistent and social gender is illusory.
But here's the thing, if linking math performance and biological gender was a false assumption of causality (we observe the social and assume the physical must cause it) then so must transsexuality imply a false causal link. If the assumption that being female caused poor math performance is not valid because it assumed a false causality then why assume that removing the observable social cues of maleness actually makes a person female. If you can't assume that the biological fact causes the observed social behavior then certainly you can't assume that altering what can be observed changes the biological fact.
So here's the thing, because I think we should be honest here. What people here are concerned about is how gay people and transsexuals are thought about. Okay, until very recently nobody would have accepted the proposition that you could turn a man into a woman. Now we do. But the idea of transsexuality came about at a time when genetics were not well-understood. So the idea that you could change a person's sex by applying all these neat hormones doctors had learned so much about at the time made sense. Well, does it still make sense? Or would it be better to broaden our notion of what each gender implies by limiting our definition of what gender is to what is knowable and consistent?
It seems to me that changing the social ideas that people associate with biological gender starts with the acknowledgement that biological gender exists and social gender is what we put on top of it, not by trying to say that biological gender is irrelevant. If saying someone is male or female implies no more about that person than karyotype, then we get rid of sexist notions altogether.
boddi
On 12/2/05, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> boddi satva wrote:
> > C. Carrol,
> >
> > It's not that it "cuts you off from reading a huge body of feminist
> > literature, where the distinction is simply taken for granted." It
> > just makes you not believe the conceit, which you shouldn't because
> > it's not all that useful.
>
> Okay, I'll try again, because I'm stubborn, I've had a coupla glasses of
> wine, and (sadly) I've nothing better to do on Friday night. Social
> scientists distinguish between sex (the biological distinction you
> valorize) and gender (socially created, enforced, and enacted roles).
> For instance, I agree that the capacity to bear a child is a sex
> difference; however, the assumption that women will take care of elderly
> relatives or men are good at math is a gender difference. The point
> social scientists stress is this: no matter what the sex differences
> between men and women, they cannot explain the gender differences,
> because the gender differences are socially produced. With adequate
> control over social structure, socialization, and everyday social
> interactions, I could create a society in which women excel at math, men
> do the laundry, and so on.
>
> There are few necessary linkages between sex differences and the social
> roles "men" and "women". Time and time again, enthusiasts of biological
> explanations like you have insisted that men are like this and women are
> like that because it's a sex difference (XX and XY and all that), and
> time and time again, it's been demonstrated that what was confidently
> presented as a sex difference is in fact a gender difference created and
> enforced through social relations.
>
> For instance: the male-female gap in math performance. Fifty years ago
> in the U. S., men massively outperformed women on tests of math
> aptitude. At that time, the most common explanation among educational
> psychologists was that this is a clear sex difference: women's brains
> must not be capable of mastering algebra and calculus. Today, women in
> college math classes outperform men! Given the fact that the biological
> characteristics of men and women in the U. S. have not changed in any
> meaningful way in the past 50 years, we know that the huge gap in math
> ability 50 years ago was a gender difference, not a sex difference.
> --In fact, it's quite obvious: women then did not take as many math
> courses as men, so of course they performed worse on the tests! Today,
> women are required to take about as many math courses as men do in
> high school and college, and the gender gap has more or less disappeared.
>
> Does this clarify the usefulness of distinguishing sex differences and
> gender differences?
>
> Miles
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>