criticalsexualitytheories

Untitled

550 posts

ALT

Screenshot of Tweet. Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): When people, including bioscientists, say that "sex is a social construct," we don't mean it's a random thing totally unrelated to anything else that we can just change willy-nilly. That "blank slate" position is a strawman. We mean something way cooler and more legitimate. 1/ 30 Jan 22

ALT

Screenshot of Twitter thread. Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): "Sex" is a human word for the observation that many different things are somewhat correlated. Some things tend to appear together: more muscle mass, testosterone, testicles, Y chromosomes, SCOTUS seats, jail sentences, body hair, height, shorter life expectancy... correlated 2/ Because we see all of those things more or less tend to go together, and people like finding & naming patterns, we group people into categories--male and female--then call that categorization sex. 3/ Importantly, though, sex is not any of the physical things in a body (chromosomes, hormones, gonads, hair, muscle mass...), nor is it any of the social things in a life (outfits, jobs, interests, actions...). Sex is our name for the correlations among them. It's a human idea. 4/ So "sex is a social construct" in the sense that sex is an idea people discussed together (social) and built up (constructed). Of course we constructed sex using observations of "real things" in the world, gonads and so on. Being socially constructed doesn't deny that. 5/

ALT

Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): (Cont'd) So why emphasize that sex is a social construct at all? Why point out the gap between the "reality" of bodies and our human description of it? Well, because our human description "sex" oversimplifies things, and sometimes those oversimplifications are wrong and/or harmful. 6/ When we construct sex, we make a bunch of choices about what things to count as part of it. In 1900, education correlated very strongly with gonads. We saw much talk about how intelligence was part of sex, same as ovaries. Less now that women get more college degrees than men. 7/ 30 years later, we found some chemicals that seemed correlated with other things in sex. So we added them to the rest in our idea of sex, calling them "male and female hormone." Some scientists were very displeased to later discover "female hormone" in urine from horse penises 8/ Penises and estrogen weren't supposed to go together! We called it "female hormone" exactly because we were sure it was correlated with *not* having a penis. Still today, some propose estrogen to treat covid because women have lower covid morbidity & sex says "estrogen=woman" 9/

ALT

Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): (Cont'd) The biological correlations and differences we think of as part of sex change with time and social context. Women now run much closer to men's speeds than they once did (access to sport), scholars use sex differences in height as a measure of "son preference" (via nutrition). 10/ There are many examples like these, indeed a whole vibrant field of STS scholarship about it. And there is an even bigger, more vibrant field of biological research on variations in sex, i.e. the ways that lumping many different things into a two-category idea is wrong 10/ Some of this is research on intersex conditions (e.g. a Y chromosome does not guarantee development of testicles), but much of it is 'boring normal science' on physical and developmental pathways showing levels of, timing of, & complex interactions among things in sex matter. 12/ Of course, if this were just academics talking among ourselves, I wouldn't be tweeting about it (or writing a dissertation on it). Where things go really awry is when people start making prescriptive claims about how society should be based on their understanding of sex 13/

ALT

Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): (Cont'd) Instead, sadly, we are in the midst of intense public and legislative battles over sex. 14/ For example: HRT is increasingly difficult for trans people to access, but it remains easily available for people like Jo* Rog*n. Why? For trans people, HRT is technology to change and defy the expected correlations of sex. For Joe, taking testosterone confirms them. 15/ Here we mistake of confusing sex, our human idea summarizing how the world works, our mental model, for not just the truth of the world, but also the morally correct way of being. 16/ We mistake the descriptive truth of a loose correlation, "having between 264 and 916 ng/dL Testosterone often correlates with having Y chromosomes, a penis, a beard, etc..." for the moral assertion that, "Testosterone must be below 5 nmol/L if you were not born with a penis." 17/

ALT

Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): (Cont'd) When we say that sex is socially constructed, we are trying to remind people of this. To remind them that our ideas about what things do and should go together are just that: human ideas. They are sometimes wrong about what does, in fact, go together. 18/ And they are sometimes immoral when they make claims about what should go together (e.g. women in engineering). If we remember that sex is a human claim about the world, then we have the tools to change it, to make it more accurate, more ethical. 19/ This understanding also changes how we talk about sex. Sex can't cause things biologically. It can't be the source of differences. It is our name for the patterns we observe. Sometimes it's a useful proxy for them. But it can prevent us from looking into actual mechanisms 20/ Similarly, "being male" or "being female" can't cause things either. Those names for our socially constructed categories of sex. As recent calls for precise language note, they mostly obscure the biological and social mechanisms of phenomena. e.g. [Science.org link] 21/

ALT

Jeff Lockhart (@jw_lockhart): (Cont'd) As this thread circulates, the "sex is about reproduction and gametes" crowd is likely to find it. Yes, it is! "Sex" is also the word for fucking that doesn't make babies, as in "to have sex." But the social conversations aren't about either of those meanings of sex 22/ Nobody runs around with calipers measuring gamete size to determine access to sports, bathroom, healthcare, education, employment, etc. Those conversations aren't about banning infertile people. They make guesses based on things like face structure, breast tissue, voice pitch 23/ I.e. they're using sex the way I describe in this thread. (Although there are a ton of fun facts in sexual reproduction of other species where it works way differently than humans, so even in reproduction only land, sex is way cooler and messier than we give it credit for.) 24/ This thread is now a blog post, with some added context based on the comments and lots of links to further reading. [link to article "sex as a social construct" on scatter.wordpress.com]

ALT

(Alt text included)

Link to blog post

Link to Science.org article: Transgender Rights Rely On Inclusive Language

Link to Twitter thread

More Posts from Criticalsexualitytheories

criticalsexualitytheories

3 years ago

my hottest take is that i genuinely don’t believe it’s possible to have a healthy social attitude toward sexual education/consent/rape culture/etc until we systematically eliminate the idea that ‘sexual violence’ is A Sex Act That Is Violent, rather than A Violent Act That Is Sexual

Tags :

rape culture

7K notes View Post

criticalsexualitytheories

3 years ago

People comparing men’s fetishization of lesbians to slash fandom is always so funny like imagine a world where large amounts of men did get extremely emotionally invested in potential romantic relationships between fictional women

Tags :

accurate the male gaze anyway i dont see many men interacting with slash of any kind. femslash or slash why are men like this

27K notes View Post

criticalsexualitytheories

3 years ago

obviously theres only been one episode so i cant speak to the entire season but when the showrunners for house of the dragon said there wasnt going to be sexual violence against women, the sexual part was very, very heavily emphasized, but just because there isnt sexual assault doesnt mean there isnt extreme violence against women, and honestly the super fucking graphic scene in the first episode of a forced c section that she knew would kill her, while she was being held down by the people who were supposed to be caring for her and screaming for her life, might be more horrifying than anything game of thrones did, especially in the context of the fall of roe in the US, so like, dont go into this expecting it to be kind to women. it is just as horrifying as before, under the justification of “historical accuracy” but idk man, maybe in a world with dragons and magic we dont need historical accuracy

Tags :

misogyny in the media and this is why i didnt go in there the first time misogyny ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ cw c section cw childbirth childbirth as murder cw pregnancy

184 notes View Post

criticalsexualitytheories

3 years ago

??????

Tags :

weird why are men so weird about sex why are men so weird and creepy about sex?! why are men like this

28K notes View Post

criticalsexualitytheories

3 years ago

My aunt and uncle were Catholic and strongly pro life and adopted a 9/10 year old child named Sean. He had Down’s Syndrome. He was lovely. Moody, big and mischievous.

When you are 7 years old, you barely notice the difference. I didn’t even realise he was disabled till I was told.

He died five or so years after I met him. Heart disease.

While I may not have agree with my aunt and uncle’s super pro-life views, I respected they took in “an undesirable.”

At least they were not hypocrites.

Tags :

pregnancy cw pregnancy Later°• pro life people are usually only pro forced pregnancy

2K notes View Post