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Thank you for a really great topic.

I'm taking a philosophy class right now called Feminist Theory, and in this post I'd like to use an example that we discussed in that class (and that I'm writing a term paper on!) of how the gender binary negatively impacts science. As a disclaimer, I missed the discussion on animal models in science, so I don't know if this topic has already been discussed. Our philosophy class has spent a lot of time talking about hard to pin down, hard to define, structural sexism in science and in other disciplines, something the Dean article alludes to. This example is one of many that shows this bias.

In science, sex is thought to be two binary categories, and though data may suggest otherwise, these two sexes are thought to be morphologically distinct. The supposition that these two sexes are inherently different would suggest that research should be done on them separately because they would react so differently to experimental variables (drug administration, surgeries, etc.) Considering that science admits and advocates this binary and acknowledges that both sexes would react differently to experiments in such a way that would confound data, why is it that primarily male subjects are used but then the results are extrapolated back to females without running the same tests on female subjects?

Examples of this are everywhere. One that's particularly relevent to humans is that many cases of heart attack and stroke in women are overlooked because women present differently, but those differences aren't known becuase the only data we have used primarily male test subjects. In other words, women were excluded from these trials because their female morphology was thought to be so different that it would confound the data, and yet in the same breath the scientific community then tried to apply the male data to the females. This is not only a contradiction, it creates harm by disadvantaging women from appropriate medical care. Additionally, in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, women were systematically excluded from clinical vaccine trials, and reserachers sited the binary to support this. The argument to exclude female test subjects of all species (including in my senior thesis on rat models of anxiety!) is that their hormonal cycles like the estrous cycle and the menstruel cycle will confound the data. The question that I'm curious to hear discussed is why the criteria used to exclude female subjects from testing don't either discourage the scientific community from extrapolating the data back to them, or encourage tests to be run on female subjects. It's a pervasive catch-22 in experimental design that affects all of us and, I think, produces stilted and biased data that's touted as universal. I think this is a real problem.

I have to say, it's very hard for me to hold in my mind the image of a society without this binary and simultaneously to recognize that this binary reinforces inequality and exclusion. I don't think that the sex binary is a wholly bad thing, just as I don't think that racial categories are a wholly bad thing. They have the capacity to unite groups of people in useful ways, but it's essential to examine how these categories negatively impact people as well. Even though it's difficult and uncomfortable to conceptualize a society without two discrete sex categories, I think that it's worth talking about, imagining about, and thinking about, if only because it might shed valuable light on the system we currently have.