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 There were so many interesting points brought up from last weeks class and I’d like to touch on just a few—again mostly as they relate to the binary v. spectrum debate. I think I’m somewhat oddly in the middle of the debate in terms of what I believe—I think that the spectrum model is actually much more accurate. Im not sure what I believe about the physiological basis for gender, but I think that the point about multiple factors contributing to percieved gender is incredibly important and that in this way there is indeed a spectrum for gender. For some reason I find this spectrum analogy much easier to justify in terms of sexual preference, which I think is probably true for most people—we accept that sexual preference is not necessarily just homo or heterosexual, and Im interested as to why this is the case. (sort of off topic I admit, but why are we much more willing to accept this spectrum? Perhaps because of all the media coverage it has gotten within our lifetimes? You never see much press on the “gender spectrum”). Anyway, to reiterate, I feel that the spectrum model is definitely more accurate. Where my views start to diverge however is how this affects research and how we can apply this. Honestly, maybe I’m being pessimistic here, but I think it is impossible to consider all the variables that would need to go in to creating such a spectrum in order for people to be able to “accurately” identify themselves as male or female. And the whole idea of self report isn’t failsafe either, because self report is inherently affected BY all those criteria so it probably wouldn’t provide more useful information. Therefore, I think to do research at all you need to take some “shortcuts” (though I hesitate to call them that) in terms of category definition. No, we’re not all the same. No, we didn’t all have the same experiences growing up… or the same genes… and even if we did have a ton of clones of one person that we could study the results wouldn’t be interesting because they wouldn’t be applicable to the wider population. So I think in order to make research generalizable—and therefore applicable on a wider scale—it becomes necessary to make categories and to put similar subjects into groups so that they can be compared to subjects who are less similar. That’s just how research works, and I can’t think of any good productive way to account for all the differences found in a subject population—and even if I could, im not sure I would want to. 

Just a quick note on the other thing that has been brought up: the whole idea of women as learning and excelling at different things. Like Kara brought up earlier, I think it is interesting that this concept has come up with the discussion of “disease states” such as autism among other things. I think it is entirely possible that women are hardwired differently and therefore may excel at different things. HOWEVER, I think the minute we make generalizations about these characteristics we get into trouble—as we’ve said so many times in the past, we as a society need to be much more accepting of neurodiversity and allow people to excel as they are capable. It does rub me the wrong way that we can say that men are “better at complex engineering” or something, because I think this then leads to the thought that no woman can be better than a man. (Which I don’t believe is true at all—I think predisposition only has so much to do with it, so any broad statements like that really worry me). 

Thanks again for the discussion