I'm reading Dr. Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters* and I'm struck by what seems to me to be a strange interpretation of the feminist perspective **.

Perhaps it is because I come to my feminism through Anthropology, not through Women's Studies, so it is more of an academic, personal thing than an activist thing, but I seem to have understood the importance of the difference between sex and gender (or at least the feminist perspective on same) differently than Sax and, in fact, a number of other people I have encountered lately.

The basic idea is that sex is a biological fact*** but gender is a social construction, that is, the meanings and status that a given society attributes to a given sex. And, given that, there is no biological reason or justification for discriminating on the basis of sex.

Okay, that much most of us can agree on.

But then Sax goes on to imply that the scientific, academic and feminist worlds have been trying to claim that gender is irrelevant, that we can eliminate it entirely, that we can have a gender-neutral world.

That's where I get lost.

See, I was never under the impression that we were seeking gender-neutrality, I thought feminism was seeking gender-equality. To stop discrimination based on cultural assumptions related to biological sex.

Yet, I can't dismiss what Sax (and the others) are saying about the goals of those different communities, I can't be sure that he is wrong. Now, I'm wondering if my anthropological lead-in to feminism has only exposed me to the less radical aspects of the movement, that there are feminists who dismiss gender as an irrelevant construction that has little to do with ability.

Because if those feminists do exist, and if they are anything other than a small group of radicals, then I have a lot of thinking to do.

I'm all about rooting out assumptions, and I'm all about encouraging kids (and adults) to take on roles that suit them rather than limiting people to cultural constructions, but I'm not all about ignoring scientific evidence that female and male brains process information differently, or that male and female eyes tend to pick out different things, or that female ears hear a wider range and volume of sounds than male ears.****

Biology is not destiny, but it is a factor in our personal development, along with how we were parented and the values of the society we belong to, and I don't think that any of those factors can be discounted.

So, now I must do some more research (us bookish dames do love us some research). Have I missed the boat? Is there a feminist agenda of gender-neutrality that I somehow missed? Or has Sax implied something that is not quite true?

*Why am I reading this? Well, as I've mentioned before, I'm always trying to sort out the difference between 'bad' behavior, 'boy' behaviour and television-induced behaviour. That is, is something like The Boy's fondness for identifying everything cylindrical as a bomb something I should curb, something I should ignore or something caused by an outside influence that I should re-evaluate the impact of? By the way, even with the possibility of a 'straw woman' (ooh, I *am* a feminist) argument going on, the Sax book is pretty interesting and informative for understanding why kids act like they do. You have to ignore some of his comments on how to prevent rampant teenage sex. And his idea that a four month old boy is trying to control his mother is out to lunch, but,overall, it is a very thought-provoking book. But I do have to check out the mystery feminists.

** Yes, yes, I know there are feminisms not a feminism but bear with me here, I'm trying to figure something out.

***Well for most of the population, I'm not sure how transgendered people feel about that.

****Of course, my suspicious feminist brain also feels a need to check out the studies that make these conclusions, to ensure that the study design was not gender-biased. I'm not even sure how I'd go about that, but I feel the need to.