US Biology Textbooks Promoting 'Misguided Assumptions' on Sex and Gender
newsweek.comin the journal Science analyzed six of the most widely used high school biology textbooks in the United States, and found that most of them conflate sex and gender, which are considered two separate concepts by scientists.Instead, these textbooks focus on a more "essentialist" view of sex and gender—the idea that sex and gender are interchangeable, and men and women are fundamentally different—which the researchers note may lead to discrimination towards women and gender non-conforming people."Our study suggests that the material that adolescents are exposed to in school textbooks might itself—even if unintentionally—be a source of essentialist ideas," paper co-author Brian Donovan, a senior research scientist at BSCS Science Learning, a nonprofit organization in Colorado Springs, said in a statement."It's not unusual for textbooks to discuss ideas that were considered accurate earlier in the history of science and are now known to be incomplete.
But essentialism is not a scientific model—it's an overly simplistic lay view that is at odds with the scientific consensus on sex and gender," Donovan said. "It should have no place in the biology curriculum."The six textbooks studied in the paper were published between 2009 and 2016, and comprise about two-thirds of the introductory high school biology classes across the U.S.
They found that none of these textbooks differentiated between sex and gender as different concepts, which goes against the scientific literature-backed view that sex is a biological phenomenon and gender is a sociological construct.Scientific study into sex and gender makes it clear that while sex and gender are often referred to interchangeably, they actually refer to different aspects of identity.
Sex typically refers to the biological characteristics that define male and female bodies, such as reproductive organs, chromosomes, and hormones.
