What’s at Stake in Sexual Difference?
Book Review: By Rachael M Coleman, Public Discourse.
Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions by Alex Byrne
Until everyone, including Byrne, sees that the point of gender ideology is to change our understanding of human being, our arguments and clarifications will ultimately be impotent.
It is not an overstatement to say that the question of sexual difference, and its counter-concept, gender, is among the most contentiously debated today. We should think about why the topic inspires such vitriol, but one possible reason is that everyone has skin in the game: to be human is to be either a man or a woman, and therefore, being human requires us to think about what it means to be a man or a woman. Every bit of ourselves is expressed either as male or female, and therefore, the questions surrounding sexual difference touch on—or perhaps coincide with—questions of our humanity.
One of the consequences of this, however, has been an absolute morass of once unquestioned terms. On the face of it, this seems silly: there are men and there are women, and we all bring something different to the table when it comes to being human. It shouldn’t be that complicated.
And yet those who pay even the least attention to this discourse (and even perhaps those who wish to pay no attention) know that it is complicated. Part of the reason is that sexual difference is more nuanced than we have previously thought it to be, but another part—probably the larger part—is that the terms of the discourse are intentionally confused and obfuscated by gender ideologues (those who contend that gender is different from sex). Gender ideologues want us to think that sex and gender are much more complicated than most of us can understand, and that the evidence we collect from the world with our own senses (as well as that of the billions of humans who preceded us in history) is not reliable.
Alex Byrne’s Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions (TWG) is a mostly successful attempt to cut through the intentional discomposition of the terms of discourse about sexual difference. In an extremely well-researched manner, Byrne addresses many of the “fictions” gender ideologues use to make their arguments. One example: many note that 1.7 percent of the population is intersex, which would mean one out of almost every fifty people have some combination of both male and female genitalia. As Byrne demonstrates in chapter three, that number was made up by Anne Fausto-Sterling in her article “How sexually dimorphic are we?” and that the number is probably 0.015 percent. Such research and clarification alone make the book worth reading.
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