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Well it seems like our class discussion on binary vs spectrum has carried on to this forum!  From reading all the comments posted above, I feel like we might need some clarifications from Prof Grobstein about his argument; I seem to have a slightly different understanding of the argument from some of the other students... I didn't think the argument was that people don't or shouldn't identify themselves as one sex or the other.  Of course they do, and as Rebecca mentioned, there are some benefits of gender categorization such as the power to unite people of the same gender.  What I understood Prof Grobstein saying was that there is an issue in conducting research with the sole purpose of trying to find a distinction between the two genders by putting each subject into the "male group" or the "female group", because there really are no set of criteria which would allow people to be 100% male, or 100% female, and even if there were, there would be no group of individuals who would fit all the criteria.  

In the posts above and during our discussion, several people mentioned the benefits of studying gender differences using the binary gender model, because the findings may allow us to provide more appropriate treatments.  However, as I briefly mentioned during class I personally think it is so much more important for us to focus on why it is that there is a difference in the way different individuals benefit differently from a certain treatments. For instance, ebilter raised an example that a different diet may be more effective for males with high blood pressure while females may benefit more from a different medicinal option. If this was the case, I think it is really important to examine what it is about the certain male subjects in the study that makes them so much more responsive to a change in diet.  I can't imagine that it is just the title "male", so it must be something about the biological, psychological or habitual characteristics of the certain male subjects in the study that allowed them to benefit from the diet change.  If we could pin point what it is, then we can predict that females with this characteristic may also benefit from a change in diet, rather than the medicinal option.