A Widdershins Girl

Why Cordelia Fine Is Not Fine

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen several people I follow repost a Tumblr entry raving about Cordelia Fine’s book “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference”. As both a cognitive science and a trans girl, this bothers me a lot. As Elizabeth Farrelly of the Sydney Morning Herald aptly puts it, “Fine presents no original science but assiduously takes to task those who do, at least where the work seems to show brain gender.”

Like all too many radical feminists working in the social sciences, Fine has no interest in letting the evidence speak for itself. She is only interested in how she can make the evidence fit the conclusions she has drawn up in advance based on her ideological beliefs. In “Delusions of Gender”, she advances the radical feminist dogma that gender is purely a social construct by broadly attacking the entire field of neuroscience for finding evidence to the contrary.

At no point in her book does Fine actually refute the scientific evidence she criticizes. That’s because neurology falls outside her actual expertise as an academic psychologist: she knows more about it than the average lay person, but she isn’t qualified in the field. And precisely because she isn’t qualified, the critiques she makes are the same sort of pseudo-scientific sleight of hand games that young earth creationists have become infamous for.

Any reader with a scientific background will note that Fine carefully avoids making any kind of testable argument to the scientific theories she disagrees with, much less putting forth a viable counter-explanation of the data. Instead, she makes an ideological argument that research in neurology which suggests that there are significant differences between men and women need to be dismissed out of hand as “neurosexism”.

This concept of “neurosexism” goes far beyond the entirely reasonable idea of applying standpoint theory to neuroscience and analyzing the effects of Western cultural biases on research. Instead, it ventures into outright conspiracy theory territory by claiming that the scientific community and the media actively collude to suppress research which is antithetical to the ideology of the male establishment. Fine then demands that neuroscientists censor their own research when it contradicts feminist ideology because it is “dangerous” and “irresponsible” to publish such material.

It is really no surprise that a radical feminist psychologist would publish an anti-neuroscience screed such at the very moment when neuroscience begins to uncover evidence supporting what many in the trans* community have been arguing for years: that gender is not purely a social construct but rather has roots in brain biology. After all, radical feminists have always emphasized ideological purity over lived reality, and they will not tolerate anything which affirms trans* people.