Gender, categories, science (Ariel Levy)
March 5th 2010 23:56
Ariel Levy, "Either/Or: Sports, sex, and the case of Caster Semenya", The New Yorker, 30 November 2009: --
"Unfortunately for I.A.A.F. officials, they are faced with a question that no one has ever been able to answer: what is the ultimate difference between a man and a woman? 'This is not a solvable problem,' Alice Dreger said. 'People always press me: "Isn’t there one marker we can use?" No. We couldn’t then and we can’t now, and science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that’s what it means to be male.'
[...]
'There are philosophers of science who argue that when scientists make categories in the natural world -- shapes, species -- they are simply making a list of things that exist: natural kinds,' Fausto-Sterling said. 'It’s scientist as discoverer. The phrase that people use is "cutting nature at its joint." There are other people, myself included, who think that, almost always, what we’re doing in biology is creating categories that work pretty well for certain things that we want to do with them. But there is no joint.'"
"Unfortunately for I.A.A.F. officials, they are faced with a question that no one has ever been able to answer: what is the ultimate difference between a man and a woman? 'This is not a solvable problem,' Alice Dreger said. 'People always press me: "Isn’t there one marker we can use?" No. We couldn’t then and we can’t now, and science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that’s what it means to be male.'
[...]
'There are philosophers of science who argue that when scientists make categories in the natural world -- shapes, species -- they are simply making a list of things that exist: natural kinds,' Fausto-Sterling said. 'It’s scientist as discoverer. The phrase that people use is "cutting nature at its joint." There are other people, myself included, who think that, almost always, what we’re doing in biology is creating categories that work pretty well for certain things that we want to do with them. But there is no joint.'"
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