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  1. One sex or two? Kathleen Stock on Thomas Laqueur.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    I argue that Kathleen Stock omits crucial information in her 2021 book Material Girls, when she debates with Thomas Laqueur, information which enables readers to appreciate the excitement in relation to his historical discovery. I argue further that this is more than just a communicational problem. I then present a reason for rejecting the theory Laqueur uncovers: the initially strange theory that there is just one sex. But I argue that the one sex theory is unlikely to be killed off (...)
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  2. Sex and Gender.Esther Rosario - 2024 - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This chapter surveys essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of sex and gender. It does so by engaging three approaches to sex and gender: externalism, internalism, and contextualism. The chapter also draws attention to two key debates about sex and gender in the feminist literature: the debate about the sex/gender distinction (the distinction debate) and the debate about whether sex and gender have essences (the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate). In addition, it describes three problems that theories of sex and gender tend to face: the (...)
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  3. The easy difference: Sex in behavioural ecology.Rose Trappes - 2024 - In Annabelle Dufourcq, Annemie Halsema, Katrine Smiet & Karen Vintges (eds.), Purple Brains: Feminisms at the Limits of Philosophy. Nijmegen: Radboud University Press. pp. 98-105.
    This chapter questions the way “sex” features in behavioral ecological research as a standard explanatory variable. Researchers often use sex to explain variation in a trait or phenomenon that they are studying. This practice is widespread, partly because sex is often easy to identify and often explains some variation, thus making it easier to discover and test other causal patterns of interest. Yet, sex also frequently fails to explain variation. Using a couple of recent examples, it is shown how the (...)
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  4. Retro-Sex, Anti-Trans Legislation, and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.Marie Draz - 2021 - philoSOPHIA A Journal of transContinental Feminism 11 (1-2):26-48.
    This essay uses Maria Lugones’s account of the colonial/modern gender system to analyze the retro-use of “biological sex” in recent anti-trans legislation. The retro-use of sex refers to the role of sex in legislation that has been widely described by critics as moving the U.S. backward in time, or as a rollback of trans rights. The essay argues that Lugones’s theorization of the sex/gender distinction in the context of colonialism offers a better way of understanding the retro-use of sex in (...)
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  5. (1 other version)Monsters of Sex: Foucault and the Problem of Life.Sarah K. Hansen - 2018 - Foucault Studies 24 (2):102-124.
    This article argues, contra-Derrida, that Foucault does not essentialize or precomprehend the meaning of life or bio- in his writings on biopolitics. Instead, Foucault problematizes life and provokes genealogical questions about the meaning of modernity more broadly. In The Order of Things, the 1974-75 lecture course at the Collège de France, and Herculine Barbin, the monster is an important figure of the uncertain shape of modernity and its entangled problems (life, sex, madness, criminality, etc). Engaging Foucault’s monsters, I show that (...)
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  6. The Animal Sexes as Historical Explanatory Kinds.Laura Franklin-Hall - 2017 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge. pp. 177-197.
    Though biologists identify individuals as ‘male’ or ‘female’ across a broad range of animal species, the particular traits exhibited by males and females can vary tremendously. This diversity has led some to conclude that cross-animal sexes (males, or females, of whatever animal species) have “little or no explanatory power” (Dupré 1986: 447) and, thus, are not natural kinds in any traditional sense. This essay will explore considerations for and against this conclusion, ultimately arguing that the animal sexes, properly understood, are (...)
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  7. Intersex Diagnostics and Prognostics: Imposing Sex-Predicate Determinacy.Stephanie Julia Kapusta - 2017 - Topoi 36 (3):539-548.
    I offer a reconstruction of contemporary medical procedures of sex assignment for infants with intersex conditions. In the perspective adopted, sex assignment to intersexed newborns can be understood as a procedure that imposes determinate sex predicates. The account describes two stages of sex assignment. At the first stage of the process, the sex predicates ‘female’, ‘male’, or ‘intersexed’ are taken to denote genital morphology. Initial genital assessment of newborns imposes clear boundaries upon the extensions of these predicates through diagnostic schemes (...)
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  8. (1 other version)From ‘Intersex’ to ‘DSD’: a case of epistemic injustice.Teri Merrick - 2017 - Synthese:1-19.
    The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated (...)
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  9. Making Sense of Making Sense of Intersex. [REVIEW]Cressida J. Heyes - 2016 - Philosophy Today 60 (3):789-797.
    A contribution to a symposium on Ellen Feder's book, Making Sense of Intersex.
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  10. The History of Biology and its Importance for Gender Studies.Yusuke Kaneko - 2016 - GÉNEROS –Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies 5 (2).
    The aim of this paper is to call the attention, especially that of feminists, to the current progress in biology. It appears gender studies still confine themselves to outdated ideas of sex chromosomes like XX, XY (§10). However, science has been making progress. It no longer sticks to such matters as XX, XY. Its interest is now in Sry, a kind of gene (§11), and MIS, a kind of sex hormone (§14). Abnormalities of sex chromosomes are no longer evidence to (...)
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  11. Margins within the Marginal: Bi-invisibility and Intersexual Passing.Maren Behrensen & Samantha Brennan - 2012 - In Dennis Cooley & Kelby Harrison (eds.), Passing/Out: Queer Identities Veiled and Revealed. Ashgate.
  12. Microbial manipulation of host sex determination.Leo W. Beukeboom - 2012 - Bioessays 34 (6):484-488.
    Endosymbiotic bacteria can directly manipulate their host's sex determination towards the production of female offspring.
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  13. Explaining, or Sustaining, the Status Quo? The Potentially Self-Fulfilling Effects of 'Hardwired' Accounts of Sex Differences.Cordelia Fine - 2011 - Neuroethics 5 (3):285-294.
    In this article I flesh out support for observations that scientific accounts of social groups can influence the very groups and mental phenomena under investigation. The controversial hypothesis that there are hardwired differences between the brains of males and females that contribute to sex differences in gender-typed behaviour is common in both the scientific and popular media. Here I present evidence that such claims, quite independently of their scientific validity, have scope to sustain the very sex differences they seek to (...)
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  14. Ethical principles and recommendations for the medical management of differences of sex development (DSD) / intersex in.Claudia Wiesemann - 2010 - European Journal of Pediatrics 169:671-679.
    The medical management of DSD/ Intersex in early childhood has been criticized by patients' advocates as well as bioethicists from an ethical point of view. Some call for a moratorium of any feminizing or masculinizing operations before the age of consent except for medical emergencies. No exhaustive ethical guidelines have been published until now. In particular, the role of the parents as legal representatives of the child is controversial. In the article, we develop, discuss and present ethical principles and recommendations (...)
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  15. Commonalities in compensation.James A. Birchler, Harvey R. Fernandez & Harsh H. Kavi - 2006 - Bioessays 28 (6):565-568.
    The sex chromosomes of many species differ in dosage but the total gene expression output is similar, a phenomenon referred to as dosage compensation. Previously, diverse mechanisms were postulated to account for compensation in distantly related taxa. However, two recent papers present evidence that dosage compensation in Drosophila, mammals and nematodes share the property that there is an approximately two‐fold upregulation of the single active X chromosome in each case.1,2 The results suggest that a common mechanism might operate in these (...)
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  16. Explanations of the evolution of sex: A plurality of local mechanisms.Carla Fehr - 2006 - In Stephen H. Kellert, Helen E. Longino & C. Kenneth Waters (eds.), Scientific Pluralism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol 19). University of Minnesota Press. pp. 167-189.
    The evolutionary maintenance of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism of central importance to evolutionary biology. I analyze this pluralism from an epistemological perspective. My thesis is that the various explanations of sex are explanatory by virtue of local factors and hence are importantly distinct from one another and cannot be subsumed under a single unifying framework. A critic may argue that philosophical accounts of mechanism can provide just such a framework. I show that this attempt at unification (...)
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  17. The History of Sexual Anatomy and Self-Referential Philosophy of Science.Alan G. Soble - 2003 - Metaphilosophy 34 (3):229-249.
    This essay is a case study of the self-destruction that occurs in the work of a social-constructionist historian of science who embraces a radical philosophy of science. It focuses on Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud in arguing that a history of science committed to the social construction of science and to the central theses of Kuhnian, Duhemian, and Quinean philosophy of science is incoherent through self-reference. Laqueur's text is examined in detail in order (...)
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  18. (1 other version)A Woman Down To Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.Michael Stolberg - 2003 - Isis 94:274-299.
    Based on a wide range of Latin and vernacular sources, this essay reexamines Thomas Laqueur’s and Londa Schiebinger’s influential claim that the idea of incommensurable anatomical difference between the sexes was “invented” in the eighteenth century, reflecting, in particular, a need to resort to nature in order to justify female subordination against new ideals of equality and universal rights. It provides ample evidence that already around 1600 many leading physicians, rather than proclaiming a “one‐sex model” of female inferiority, insisted on (...)
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  19. Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Philosophical Issues of Identity and Justice.Jami L. Anderson (ed.) - 2002 - Prentice-Hall.
    This anthology of contemporary articles (and court cases provides a philosophical analysis of race, sex and gender concepts and issues. Divided into three relatively independent yet thematically linked sections, the anthology first addresses identity issues, then injustices and inequalities, and then specific social and legal issues relevant to race, sex and gender. By exposing readers to both theoretical foundations, opposing views, and "real life" applications, the anthology prepares them to make critically reasoned decisions concerning today's race, gender and sex social (...)
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  20. Emergence and maintenance of sex among diploid organisms aided by assortative mating.Klaus Jaffe - 2000 - Acta Biotheoretica 48 (2):137-147.
    Using computer simulations I studied the simultaneous effect of variable environments, mutation rates, ploidy, number of loci subject to evolution and random and assortative mating on various reproductive systems. The simulations showed that mutants for sex and recombination are evolutionarily stable, displacing alleles for monosexuality in diploid populations mating assortatively under variable selection pressure. Assortative mating reduced excessive allelic variance induced by recombination and sex, especially among diploids. Results suggest a novel adaptive value for sex and recombination. They show that (...)
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  21. Where “Sex” Is Born(e): Intersexed Births and the Social Urgency of Heterosexuality. [REVIEW]Roger Adkins - 1999 - Journal of Medical Humanities 20 (2):117-133.
    Our beloved “genders” of the present moment are neither universal nor trans-historical presences in the world. The specific gender order which we employ today is the legacy of a particular cultural and political history, and there is still a great deal at stake in preserving it. As a graduate student I stumbled upon the topic of intersexuality a few years ago and found myself enthralled with its implications. Continuing to present itself inspite of all our scientific knowledge about the supposed (...)
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  22. Unnatural Selection.Lisa Heldke - 1998 - Ethics and the Environment 3 (1):41 - 54.
    The notion that "nature" comes equipped with its own set of categories, enabling us to divide up everything that exists without overlap or leftovers, has considerable explanatory and prescriptive power. I examine two apparently unrelated arenas in which this notion is at work; namely, in the alleged discovery and subsequent physical "improvement" of the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and in the surgical alteration of intersex infants. In both cases, reconstruction is undertaken as a means of eliminating an ambiguity regarded (...)
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  23. Resisting sex/gender conflation: a rejoinder to John Hood-Williams.Robert Archer - 1996 - The Sociological Review 44 (4):728-745.
    The irony of the rejection of the sex/gender distinction is that it renders sociology per se an impossible enterprise. For it is my submission that, contra Hood-Williams (1996) and others, the biological and the social constitute distinct, irreducible levels of reality: to conflate (in a ‘downwards’ or ‘upwards’ direction) the two levels is immediately to render analysis of their relative interplay at best intractable. It is indeed arguable that Hood-Williams is not so much concerned with (rightly) rejecting the so-called ‘additive’ (...)
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  24. Sex and the single Y.Nabeel A. Affara - 1991 - Bioessays 13 (9):475-478.
  25. Women and the Mismeasure Of Thought.Judith Genova - 1988 - Hypatia 3 (1):101-117.
    Recent attempts by the neurological and psychological communities to articulate thought differences between women and men continue to mismeasure thought, especially women's thought. To challenge the claims of hemispheric specialization and lateralization studies, I argue three points: 1) given more sophisticated biological models, brain researchers cannot assume that differences, should they exist, between women and men are purely a result of innate structures; 2) the distinction currently being drawn between verbal/spatial thinking abilities is fraught with ideological commitments that undermine the (...)
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  26. What Determines Sex? A Study of Converging Approaches, 1880-1916.Jane Maienschein - 1984 - Isis 75 (3):457-480.