A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed....
For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. ...It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.
It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. Among the relevant findings:
- Two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s patients are female;
- Seventy-five percent of people with autoimmune disorders are female;
- Females are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease;
- Adult females have twice the rate of depression as adult males;
- Females have outbreaks of genital herpes at higher rates than males;
- Male and female brains respond differently to early childhood neglect, with males losing gray matter in areas governing impulse control and females losing gray matter in areas governing emotion;
- Women are more likely to abuse alcohol after trauma;
- Males and females smoke for different reasons and have correspondingly different success rates with the nicotine patch;
- The X and Y sex chromosomes, whose pairing determines a person’s sex, influence how the other 23 chromosomes in each cell read the genetic instructions contained in DNA.
...And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously. ...An assistant professor at the medical school suggests asking students how the prognosis of a disease changes “if the patient identifies as a woman or a man.” But if, as documented, females are not just a “subgroup of the human population,” but physiologically and psychologically different, how a patient “identifies” should not change the prognosis. What matters is the patient’s actual biological sex....
Expect to see millions of taxpayer-derived research dollars directed toward the first reading—that someone’s self-declared gender identity should be taken into account in diagnosing disease—even as the evidence piles up that males and females are not a political construction, but a biological one. Given that we are now up to over 100 different gender identities, the diagnostic complications will be enormous. Nevertheless, the march of academic identity politics through the institutions continues.