Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A science heavy debunking of contemporary gender essentialism.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

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I tried to read this book near the beginning of quarantine, in hard copy, and my poor overloaded brain just couldn’t handle it. If I had read this in audio, a format my brain can handle for serious subjects, I probably would have rated it much higher, and gotten through it much faster (and I’ll be honest, retained more than 10% of it). So take this review with a grain of salt. (P.S. I just googled that phrase, and it evolved from something Pliny the […]

Evolutionary Biology is on notice

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3.5 stars I like Cordelia Fine and her work. Part of that, I’m willing to admit, may be confirmation bias — she clearly identifies herself as a feminist and is very upfront that her work is reflective of that viewpoint. But I was also trained as a scientist, and from that perspective my position is that many of her critics and detractors (and I’ll note here that for brevity’s sake I’m not including in this category people who have fundamentally sexist views and who probably […]

Biological imperative, my ass

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Delusions of Gender is a truly interesting study of the (mostly flawed) studies in neurological science intended to explain gender differences between men and women that originate in the brain. It got a lot of press when it first came out a few years ago, and deservedly so — with nearly 100 out of 340 pages dedicated to footnotes and the bibliography, it’s impressively researched and satisfyingly comprehensive. Cordelia Fine’s main argument, after definitively surveying the field, is that neurological claims to identify and explain […]



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