The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [171]
He doubts that most will see things that way, though, either within the trans community or without. “I’ll wager that if a positive correlation is found, it will enter my community through statements like ‘it isn’t our fault!’” he says. Research on possible gender-bending effects of EDCs, just like previous research on sex and gender, is a double-edged sword, he points out. “Sometimes biology dismisses our freedom and sometimes it is a source of healing. Really the issue I think is how our society uses biology and science to control and diminish us. There is nothing inherently good or bad about our biology.”
Sennett’s comments echo those I’ve heard from others in the trans community following the publication of the hardcover edition of this book. Like Sennett, many people have written to thank me for writing the book. “This is the most in-depth piece on the subject that I have read in many, many years,” one middle-aged transwoman e-mailed me. “I was not able to stop once I began. I learned so much about the transgender movement that I simply did not know. For all of that, and for the stories you related, I thank you. For so many years, I thought there was hardly anyone else in the world like me,” she added. “It is so comforting to know there are so many others like me out there.” At readings and on radio shows, people seemed particularly intrigued by the science; the great majority of questions put to me have been about the biological basis of sex and gender. Clearly, there is a great deal of interest, both within the trans community and without, on this subject.
I’ve also been cautioned by some trans people about the dangers of biological reductionism, and heard concerns that once again science and medicine are being used to define transgendered people, to pin a label on them, even if the label may ultimately be a less stigmatizing one. “Some folks firmly believe in a biological component while others think their experience remains largely socially constructed,” says Sen-nett. “What is missing from these discussions remains an understanding that scientific ‘facts’ are constructed over time.” This point resonates not only within the trans community, but in the straight community as well, as an acrimonious public debate on sex and gender that broke out the month before the hardcover edition of The Riddle of Gender was published in February 2004 illustrates.
In January 2005, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, delivered a lecture that touched on the continued under-representation of women in tenured positions in science and engineering at top research universities. Summers proposed three possible explanations—many women may be either unwilling or unable to put in the long hours requisite for high-level achievement; women in general may have less aptitude for high-end achievement in science and engineering; lingering patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping may prevent women from achieving their full potential. It was the second speculation that ignited a firestorm of controversy, beginning at the actual presentation when an MIT biology professor, Nancy Hopkins, walked out, telling The Boston Globe that if she had remained, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”
I had mixed feelings about the Summers controversy. On the one hand, I know plenty of female researchers who exhibit no less aptitude for the practice of high-level scientific achievement than their male peers, though it seems that they often have to work harder to balance the demands of family life and research. On the other hand, the research for this book has convinced me that there are, in fact, differences in male and female ways of perceiving and responding to the world, and that these cognitive differences may help