In her new book, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society, the neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh provides an indispensable cultural sanity check. Our current obsession with gender identity has led us to treat the pronouncements of four-year-olds (“ No, Mommy, I’m not a boy”) with the reverence once reserved for oracles. In the last decade, gender has vaulted in the popular imagination from something we might dismiss as a dispensable collection of stereotypes to a matter of “identity”-humankind’s signal trait. This is “gender,” the behavioral manifestation of our sex. I, too, preferred the rough-and-tumble games of boys to the orderly domestic dramas of girls. I, too, had an attorney father who taught me to read in his broad lap, penciling out words on a page of yellow foolscap. The first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I loved Scout because I was Scout.
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