Judith Butler writes “[Gender Studies] does not deny sex, but it does tend to ask about how sex is established, through what medical and legal frameworks, how that has changed through time…”
This is a typical postmodern Foucauldian move: “Oh, we’re not denying material reality; we’re only talking about how our concepts *about* reality are socially constructed over time.”
But in the very next paragraph she says, “even the ideals of dimorphism that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science as well as the intersex movement.”
This is false and misleading. Science has revealed the underlying complexities in the mechanisms which *determine* sex but it has done nothing to revise the “everyday conception” that there are still just bulls and cows, hens and roosters, males and females. Humans are not an exception to this basic schema.
She is famous for appropriating intersex politics for theoretical purposes in an attempt to undermine the reality of biological sex and make conceptual space for the possibility of trans people changing sex, or otherwise challenging “cis heteronormativity.”
But do not let these postmodernists fool you when they say, “We don’t deny material sex.”
By emphasizing our social and legal conception of sex they deftly sidestep the material reality of sex which plays a role in the trans sports debate, the debate about fully intact males having utter freedom to undress in front of females, the absurdity of thinking, for example, a male who self-IDs as a woman but absolutely doesn’t “pass” at all has a legal right to work as a female prison guard and strip search females. Or any male for that matter.
The list of examples proliferates. No amount of philosophical noodling about the social construction of concepts will alter the underlying objective, material reality of the differences between males and females.
So while it’s technically true Gender Studies does not “deny sex,” it still does everything in its power to diminish the reality of its material consequence by blurring the lines between male and female, gaslighting us into thinking the only reason we believe males are fundamentally different from females is because we haven’t thought as hard as they have about intersex people.
But this is sophistry and obfuscation. It’s using extreme edge cases in an attempt to do conceptual engineering and deconstruct our common sense, plain-as-can-be perception that males are different than females, an idea fully backed up by the evolutionary logic that no human or mammal has ever been born by any other mechanism than the binary combination of sperm fertilizing an egg and the subsequent pregnancy of a female.
“Medical and legal frameworks” cannot rewrite this basic evolutionary logic, anymore than we could socially construct a cow to impregnate a bull.
Gender Studies claims to not deny sex, but a postmodern emphasis on concepts and legal frameworks is exactly the wrong perspective when discussing the possibility of post pubertal males competing against females in sports.
We do not need to analyze our *concepts* about sex, but biological reality itself. Only then can we realize the absurdity of letting males compete against females.
Postmodernists can’t see this because they’re stuck in the world of concepts and only thinking about equity and social justice instead of objective reality. We must resist this obfuscation by sticking with the plain material facts and not letting a discussion of concepts distract us from our shared, objective understanding of reality.
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