GSL made a teaching slidedeck that walks through the central ideas of Richardson’s paper “Sex Contextualism,” with the aim of equipping students with critical tools for understanding sex contextualism as a conceptual and practical framework and why it matters.

New and out from the GenderSci Lab this week in the journal Social Science and Medicine is a comprehensive paper characterizing extensive heterogeneity in COVID-19 sex disparities over time and across states in the U.S. The paper is the first longitudinal study to quantify variation in COVID-19 gender/sex disparities across U.S. states.

We wanted to understand whether sperm counts were truly declining and whether evidence supported the authors' claims of imminent danger to fertility, health, and the environment. That analysis led us to be skeptical of claims of dramatic global sperm decline leading to an imminent crisis in male fertility and health. We think the patterns hinted at in Levine et al.’s meta-analysis rather offer compelling evidence that sperm count can vary both pathologically and non-pathologically under different conditions and environments.

Last week was big news for LGBTQ+ rights in the US. Two major pieces of law came out just days apart, changing the landscape of sex-based anti-discrimination law and the way sex is understood in federal law. In this post, we briefly outline these new legislative policies, consider the implications for LGBTQ+ rights in the US, and think about how this changes legal reliance on biological claims about sex.

In the Gender Equality Paradox, gender equality is assumed to imply gender neutrality. In this post, I explain why this assumption is unfounded, drawing on social psychological research. When we recognize that gender-equal is not synonymous with gender-neutral in terms of stereotypes and attitudes, the Gender Equality Paradox falls apart.

Does human sexuality have a genetic component? In an era of genomics that allows parents to select for traits such as the skin color or eye color of their baby, and of continued discrimination, imprisonment, and even death penalities for LGBTQ+ people globally, questions around the genetic determinacy of sexuality require close ethical consideration.

The SWHR task force operationalizes ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as research variables with sweeping explanatory potential in biomedicine. The manner in which they do so reveals a theoretical gulf between a widely practiced genre of bioscience knowledge production in women’s health research and critical feminist approaches to science, medicine, and the body.