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Needless to say, the combination of Tuesday's lecture and Roughgarden's book has been blowing my mind for the past few days. Unlike (what appeared to be) a good portion of the class, I do not think that Roughgarden is doing little more than pushing a biased personal agenda and has strayed almost entirely off the scientific path. As we mentioned in class, she does openly admit to being rather invested in the observations she's managed to gather and has specific beliefs, but just because she openly states her presumed lack of objectivity does not mean that the observations she's made are false; it only means that the way they piece together a particular story might be questionable. I think even as she injects new observations into our preconceived versions of certain stories, urging us to reconsider their usefulness, a good reader would inevitably understand that the same skepticism should be applied to her version of the story as well. In other words, we cannot be moved to skepticism and reevaluation of ongoing stories without also becoming skeptical of the very observations that compelled us to that skepticism in the first place. The choice of which story to keep and which story to throw out is ultimately up to us, although what is really being asked of us is to piece together our own version of the story.

This brings us to the question of why we continue to keep the story of a gender binary. The notion of convenience is what first comes to mind. I do not simply the mean the convenience of black and white categorization, but also the convenience of constancy and consistency as far as the ongoing story is concerned. It’s far more convenient to believe in a permanent truth, a set of facts, then to take a conditional approach to reality and always be ready to adjust to a shift, to embrace paradigm shifts. Predictability is valued and defended to the point of obstinacy. It is far more difficult to live with the notion of a relative and temporary truth.