As Gould explains, _some_ of the sexual organs are identical in both "sexes," merely differently developed. Others are different from the beginning. If we focus on the first set, then biologically we have to assume one sex, with variation (or as Lauer put it in Body and sex from the Greeks to Freud_, the one-sex model prevailed from the time of Aristotle up to the end of the 18th-c. The difference (according to ancient and medieval medicine, was that men were more fully 'cooked.' The two-sex model of the last two centuries has no better 'scientific' basis than did the one-sex model of Aristotle et al. I haven't looked up the specific reference to Yoshie raghu gives, but I know that she has argued vigorously in many contexts for a one-sex/many gender model of human sexuality. It is convincing to me.
There are others that go further than Yoshie, denying that sex is any more "biological" than gender. But in any case, gender is not bioological, nor is it biology 'socially" understood. It is a purely social reality. Carrol On 7/19/2011 11:43 AM, Jim Devine wrote: > Carrol Cox wrote: >> Re Charles's statement below that gender boundaries can't be crossed. A >> fairly competent biologist named S.J. Gould, reviewing a book by Thomas >> Laqueur for NYRB declared flatly that there was no scientific basis for >> either the one-sex or two-sex models of gender. Parts of the body show >> that there is only one-sex; other parts show that there are two sexes. >> So differntiation has to be on social/historical rather than biological >> arguments. > > this last sentence doesn't follow from the rest. One thing is that our > "human nature" is limited and shaped by both social/historical _and_ > biological forces. It's not an either/or thing. > > CB basically had it right. Despite shades of gray (hermaphrodites, > etc.), there is a pretty strong biological -- sexual -- distinction > between males and females. There are two different sexes (and some > ambiguity for some cases). On the other hand, the gender distinction > is much more ambiguous, while it changes a lot over time and varies a > lot between societies. The sexual male/female distinction does put > constraints on the gender masculine/feminine one, but the latter > cannot be reduced to the former. > > Now, to some extent by changing gender roles, social/historical forces > change the environment in which biological evolution occurs and thus > the biological results. But that seems to be a very slow process with > no obvious effects. Technology (surgery, etc.) can also be used to > change the sexual boundary. But that's a pretty small part of what's > happening. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
