In her new book, Gender Hurts, the radical feminist Professor of Sexual Politics at the University of Melbourne Sheila Jeffreys [1] claims that gender disorders like “gender dysphoria” are only problems because we have gender at all [2]. So, while Facebook now offers 56 genders [3] (sadly, still one less variety than Heinz beans, but give them time), Jeffreys wants none. Indeed, Jeffreys describes “gender” as placing girls in a “sex caste,” behind “bars of a cage.”
So do we have an innate gender or it is all a social construct? Norwegian comedian and documentarian Harald Eia examined exactly this question in this documentary [4]. One of his findings in that in very egalitarian Norway the small entry levels of women into engineering and men into nursing has barely shifted in 20 years despite every effort to change this.
And there’s the work of Jonas Himmelstrand [5] exposing the, um, rather heavy-handed state policies in Sweden, where, once you go beyond the state-mandated parliamentary male-female ratios, the working world is deeply segregated along sex lines. Women are still much more likely to dominate the caring professions despite aggressively anti-gender-stereotype [6] policies and despite ranking highest in “gender”-equality [7].
What about the research of Cambridge University Neuropsychiatrist Simon Baron Cohen [8]? He’s been finding significant sex-differences, such as testosterone levels, in utero that lead to marked personality and propensity differences in childhood – even in studies on one-day-old babies.
And Durham University’s Prof Anne Campbell [9]’s explanations of the inherent evolutionary value of sex-stereotypical traits? And Dr Richard Lippa [10]’s studies into the occupational preferences [11] from 200,000 males and females, finding consistency across 53 nations based strongly on sex-differences? (He finds nature and nurture play a part in determining gender).
And the Israeli researchers [12], examining male and female brains, finding distinct differences in the developing foetus at just 26 weeks of pregnancy, such that sex hormones begin to exert their influence during development of the foetus?
Now, remember that the radical “gender” theorists claim that the only physical differences between boys and girls are things like genitalia and muscle density; brains are identical. It’s at Wellesley College Centers for Women [13] where you find the like of Dr Nancy Marshall who believes that a child’s sexual identity is learned by observing others. Indeed, “gender” is indeterminate at birth, and is then formed and fixed through socialisation. (For more, read Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War Against Boys [14].)
So, when a Norwegian report reads, “The division of gender in the workplace is astonishingly stable,” we should ask, astonishing to whom? Well, likely not any parents with a girl and a boy.