Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female Hardcover – Illustrated, February 13, 2017

Men and women are different. The extent and significance of their differences has long been a matter of considerable dispute. If Ashley McGuire is to be believed, some now deny that any meaningful differences even exist.A 2014 article in the online magazine Slate, for example, was titled, “Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn.” The author, Christin Scarlett Milloy wrote, “Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infant every single day, in every single country. It reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents’ consent, making this practice all the more insidious.”What insidious procedure was Milloy talking about? “It’s called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It’s a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring’s genitals.”Look, I get that a person’s sex should not trap them in rigid gender roles. I’m the son and brother of strong women, I married a strong woman, and I’m raising my two daughters to be strong women. I’m even an ordained minister in a Pentecostal denomination that ordains women. I get that society places constraints on women that are rooted in cultural traditions and prejudices rather than in realities about their sex.By the same token, however, a doctor looking at a baby’s genitalia is looking at a biological fact, not just a social construction or a parental fantasy. It’s foolish to deny this. Unfortunately, as McGuire points out, “we live in a world of sexual denial. We are increasingly trying to treat men and women as if they were exactly the same. And then we’re surprised by the growing sexual confusion.”Milloy’s article is just the opening example in an example-rich book. As the examples pile up—from infant gender assignment to gender-normed firefighting tests to transgender youth athletics—you begin to see McGuire’s point. And as a parent, I’ve got to admit that it’s not an encouraging one.Men and women are different. Rather than denying this elementary biological fact, let’s celebrate it. After all, without those differences, none of us would be here today.

The modern feminist movement has gotten it all wrong.We thought that the way for women to get ourselves some respect was to insist that we be treated exactly the same as men.But it turns out, this puts a far greater burden on us than we ever dreamed.An attempt to treat the sexes exactly the same ends up being not androgynous, but rather an attempt make women be and function exactly like men.This leads to women being thought of as - and feeling - inferior when we can't keep up the same physical pace as men, or when we interrupt our careers to have children, or when we want to raise those children ourselves rather than doing something else with our adult years, or when we experience the mood swings, sensitivity, and depression that come with hormones that come with the unique design of our bodies.It leads to insanities like ... asking a mother of toddlers to go to war. Refusing to give a pregnant woman a seat on the bus because "she chose to get pregnant." Asking college women to behave like drunken frat brothers and then acting surprised when they get raped. And on and on and on. The "men and women are exactly the same" movement has a lot to answer for.McGuire, who used to buy into this movement herself, lays out these and many other, very depressing examples and gives us a little bit of analysis about how the "we are exactly the same" philosophy has led to them. The book is alarming and, as I said, depressing, but I have given it five stars because everyone ought to read it. The claim that "gender is a fluid concept" is actually an anti-woman claim, because it denies the unique things about being a woman, the unique vulnerabilities that come with that, and the, yes, special treatment that we, as a society, ought to resume giving that half of the population whose biology makes us uniquely vulnerable.

I’m in love with this book! Even if you fall more on a leftists point of view on gender fluidity and how our society is shifting to better adapt to those few individuals choices, this book helps you fully process the two sexes differences scientifically. Women and men are both built and wired differently. It’s science. I also love how it focuses on how our shift in society to revolve more around these 70 to 90 different genders, is causing one sex to slowly become extinct in the way it gives to humanity and society and how it’s viewed, the female sex. I wish it would delve into the individuals who went through being transgender and regretted it, but maybe it still will since I still have about 1/3 of it left to go.

The book is an eye opener on how far or extreme the women's movement has gone. The damage to society, the sacred unity of marriage, the open minds of children in our schools, the attempted effort to silent freedom of speech on the college campus. I got said reading the book thinking about the many lives that have been affected from this push by a few women who's own failed lives have driven them to foster misguided position on sex and the relationship between man and woman. It is one thing for a woman's right to vote and another to told she should cast away the very parts of her that give comfort to her children, the homemaker that provides a stability for the family, a loving wife who softens the often harsh activity her husband experiences in his work, her gently touch that warms his heart. Why must this woman's moment try to deny all the sacred elements of love, marriage, and children for a woman of today to be successful in their eyes? You need to read the book to know where to draw the line that they are not allowed to cross.

I found this a great feminist read, it deserves its place among some of the more perennial classics of that genre for sure. Even if it could appear somewhat contemporaneous to some readers, each of the books which have proven their themselves "timeless" did so too.The content deals with some of the ideas described as "female erasure" and some of the content may even lead to some readers categorizing the author as a TERF, that is a Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist. I would encourage readers to read the book themselves and make their own mind up about. A lot of the content which could be thought of that way deals with topics that I really do believe should be talked about and has been very difficult for anyone to introduce into discussion without running the risk of being labelled negatively. For that alone I would laud this author.I would not deduct any stars from the book as a result but I do think it has a certain American style of writing, not exactly sensationalist but in the same family tree maybe, the title of the book itself maybe conveys something of that. It may not be that the author is to blame either, it could just be a consequence of publishing in the "attention economy". Also, as far as the title goes, it is not entirely a misnomer, a lot of people think right away about sexual behaviour rather than sex as defining characteristics. I did like what the author had to say about the difference between sex and gender.I think radical feminists, although I by no means know if the author would define themselves that way, have always seen a value in sex differences and never held fast to the "equality as sameness" or "uniform androgyny" ideas that I despise and have come to characterise much of troubled liberal thinking on these topics.

An excellent read, at last somebody who is not afraid to tell the Emperor that he is in the nude!!

This is well written. The arguments were presented succinctly.I hope this discussion get taken further. As a man I always thought the modern male expectations of today’s society were ridiculous. I just rejected those parts of them as I saw fit - bugger that for a joke! I didn’t think many women thought they had the same option for rejecting the female expectations they didn’t like.

A challenging story about one of the great hot button issues of today.