Share Letters from Suzanne

Those people who won’t have a vaccine or don’t believe Covid is real they so are dumb right?  Some of them will die because of their beliefs, some of them will infect others because of them. Science, ‘big pharma’, ‘jews,’ the government is lying to them. These people with little understanding of virology or epidemiology know better than those who have devoted their lives to studying these subjects.. 

But should any of us be surprised that when Covid is happening before our eyes, some people choose to close theirs ?

Other kinds of anti-science arguments are now part of our culture and are now considered not only acceptable but “radical”. The current row about The Feminist Library stems from it’s new mission statement.  It certainly won’t be having certain books in it and it certainly won’t be welcoming to all women. 

In a wordy statement they declare that they now understand  “gender and sex as constructed categories”.  Sex is a constructed category . Rightio! “We whole heartedly reject any feminist  framework that seeks to define womanhood solely using biological essentialism or any feminism that seeks to re-inscribe rigid idea of sex”.

So if biological reality does not exist (biological essentialism), or indeed science which sees us as mammals (we are mammals not slugs or fish or is this now controversial to say so ?) then  we are to understand that sex is not binary and that we are not a sexually dimorphic species.  If women don't exist really what is feminism for?  Apparently it’s for everyone . Except obviously woman like me. Whoopi da doo da day. I will have to get my own library I guess. 

Lola Olufemi  who is the  organiser of The Feminist Library is an interesting thinker and I don’t need to agree with someone to want to read their books. Mad I know!!  She tweeted that “Sex categories are something we created to make us intelligible to each other . Because of that they *feel* real and innate, but pretending like ‘male and female’ predate the human beings who invented these categories to make us us legible is a bit weird isn’t it (!!)”

It is a bit weird indeed. I don’t suppose gravity existed until someone had a name for it. I don’t really understand how other mammals manage to reproduce at all without being told what category they are.

Science and medicine has indeed benefitted trans people who I presume this gobbledegook is meant to help with better surgeries and hormones though health care could be vastly improved . Science has at times also damaged gay people and women and trans people and black people at times using our bodies to experiment. It’s still happening. 

But to see a profoundly ant-science argument right now is galling. Everything is socially constructed? Really?  Look at FGM, rape, domestic abuse which do not arise out of linguistic categories.

The virus is not a social construction either. It is all too real ,

Just as new vaccines come on line, we are living in a profoundly anti -science moment and these arguments around biological sex are part of it . 

They come from people who should know better but sadly refuse to see what is actually going on all around them. The anti-vaxx brigade do not have the monopoly of cult thinking.