BIOLOGICAL DETERMINIST....

The terms' sex' and 'gender' mean different things to different feminist theories and neither are easy or straight forward to characterize. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides  a helpful starting point.

   

      Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive. Women are human females, men are human males.Many feminists have historically disgreed and have endorsed the sex or gender distinction.Provisionally : ' sex' denotes human females and males depending on biological features chromosome, sex organs, hormones, and other physical features. ' 'gender' denotes women and men depending on social factors such as social role , position, behavior, identity. The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

      A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Genders and Thompson who,in 1889 ,argued that social,social, psychological, and behavioral traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy being' anabolic' and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being 'katabolic') and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate,variable and thereby , interested in political and social matters. These biological 'facts'  about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) "what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament" . It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology)would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioral and psychological differences have social, rather than biological causes. For instance , Someone's behavior famously claimed that one is not born , but rather becomes a woman and that "social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature". Commonly observed behavioral traits associated  women and men , then are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

    Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon , the idea that behavioral and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In 1970's, sex differences were used to argue that women shoulD not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and therefore unable to perform their duties as well as men. More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular the anatomy of corpus callosum , a bundle of nerves that connects the rights and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible  various psychological and behavioral differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women's thicker corpus callosums could explain what 'women's intuition' is based on and impair women's ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills , like reading maps.Anne Fausto - Sterling callosums cause behavioral and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants this may suggest that physical brain difference actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills can be improved by practice , even if women and men's corpus callosum differ  this does not make the resulting behavioral differences immutable. FEMINISTS ARE THE DETERMINISTS.