In 2015, The Guardian featured an article on the practice of excluding women in medical research. It revealed that gender bias is partly responsible, but also that so, too, was feminist criticism. In the article, Tamarra James-Todd, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, says medical researchers use more men as test subjects than women because they are afraid to acknowledge the genetic differences between the sexes:

"It's taboo in some circles to suggest that we're genetically different from each other, and yet we are," she says. "Sex is a biological construct. There are sex differences between men and women, and how those differences manifest and what happens, from a genetic level to how the body operates, is different."

Acknowledging such scientific truths as the one above is not only taboo in "some circles" of medical researchers, but evidently at universities other than Harvard. I've experienced this first-hand at Penn State Harrisburg. During one classroom discussion about feminist criticism, a classmate raised his hand and, after the professor prompted him/her to speak, asked why the class hadn't considered the innate differences between men and women. Our professor said the idea was off-limits. His/her belief, he/she said, is that all thought and behavior is socially constructed, so whether we possess innate qualities is below consideration. Our professor's espousal is a staple of contemporary (postmodern) schools of thought in the social sciences.

Feminist criticism is founded on the broader concept of social constructionism. Social constructionism, the theory that all knowledge is culturally constructed, is ubiquitous in the social sciences and underpins many of the current dialogues in popular culture, whether in the realms of politics, literary criticism, anthropology, and otherwise. And the theory of social constructionism as feminist criticism adopts it dictates that men and women are not innately different: instead, humans are born as blank slates and programmed by their culture to think and behave in certain ways. Thus, "women are not born feminine and men are not born masculine," and "all the traits we associate with masculine and feminine behavior are learned, not inborn." The above quotes are from chapter 4, "Feminist Criticism," of my textbook, Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide 3rd edition by Lois Tyson, a standard-issue text on literature course syllabi across the country.

According to Tyson's feminist criticism, all "women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically," and "all of Western civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology." Furthermore, "gender issues play a part in every aspect of human experience." So, if "in every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other," then patriarchy oppresses at least all women of the Western world. Applying these principles means any idea that contradicts feminist theory is effectively part of the patriarchy—not only intended to oppress women but, as Tyson writes, "to keep men and women in traditional gender roles and thereby maintain male dominance." The human experience, then, is reduced to a binary set of actors: the oppressors and the oppressed (this is not an untrod concept, of course). These ideas are so influential in academia that researchers at Harvard Medical School are reluctant to admit the existence of genetic differences between men and women.

Feminist criticism (and by extension social constructionism) is overtly incompatible with science. To demonstrate, I'll list three of Tyson's claims, two of which are quoted above: "women are not born with a maternal instinct"; "women are not born feminine, and men are not born masculine"; and "all the traits we associate with masculine and feminine behavior are learned, not inborn." The first claim is negated by world-renowned anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, quoted by National Geographic as having written, "all mammalian females have maternal 'instincts.'" The latter two quotes echo fundamental principles of social constructionism, which posits that all humans are born as blank slates (known as blank slate theory)—an idea which was debunked 16 years ago by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Innate differences do exist between genders, including the following three, listed in Pinker's book:

• "The brains of men differ visibly from the brains of women in several ways. Men have larger brains with more neurons (even correcting for body size), though women have a higher percentage of gray matter."
• • "Variation in the level of testosterone among different men, and in the same man in different seasons or at different times of day, correlates with libido, self-confidence, and the drive for dominance."
• • "When women preparing for a sex-change operation are given androgens, they improve on tests of mental rotation and get worse on tests of verbal fluency."

(For further reading on this subject, which has advanced since 2002, I suggest reading the study in Heterodox Academy's online post, "The Most Authoritative Review Paper on Gender Differences.")

As feminist criticism is partly buoyed by fallacies, it is apparent that feminist criticism and social constructionism enjoy a double standard of the burden of proof and academic integrity. It is taboo to challenge them. However, feminist criticism circumvents the burden of proof by dismissing the very notion of objectivity: "to claim that we are objective, as patriarchy encourages men to do, is merely to blind ourselves to the ways in which we are not so." Further, Tyson writes, "how can we ever know that our speculations about human experience, or about anything else for that matter, are anything but expressions of our own subjectivity?" In other words, feminist criticism surrenders the domain of objective reason and scientific truth as the property of patriarchy, which uses objectivity as a tool to oppress women. To achieve gender equality, then, we must eschew objectivity and embrace subjectivity—as well as relativism.

Under feminist criticism, all knowledge is both subjective and relative. This means everything one can know is based on the context of one's cultural upbringing and, as the theory goes, one's authority to speak about any subject is determined by one's racial and gender identity (black female, white male, et cetera) among other markers. (Tyson takes care to mention at certain points in her writing the racial and gender identity of whom the section concerns, including "(white) males" and "(white) females.") But, the fact that all one of A culture can know is essentially different from what one of B culture can know, neither can be more right than the other. Thus, all knowledge is relative, meaning it is all either equally true or untrue. This theory creates a major dilemma regarding the nature of who can know what and how (the rather abstract basis of the study of epistemology). Christian Alejandro Gonzalez, a fellow undergraduate student at Columbia University, explains eloquently in his article for Quillette the fundamental limitations of relativism:

If all knowledge is just the subjective product of an author's race/class/gender, then why should we listen to any one person over another? Wouldn't the narrative of a white male be just as useful—or just as useless—as that of a black female? Why is social justice preferable to social injustice? And, if there is no capital-T Truth, independent of personal identity and 'lived experience,' then upon what basis does [social constructionism] purport to offer an accurate analysis of the world?

Gonzalez also writes about intersectionality, a theory which is established by and merely extends the practical application of the concepts of feminist criticism and social constructionism (the binary actors of the oppressors and the oppressed define human experience, we are born as blank slates, and knowledge is subjective and relative). He demonstrates the irreconcilable issues posed by these schools of thought by quoting the book Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, and Sirma Bilge, Professor of Sociology at the University of Montreal:

During a discussion of the socialist critics of intersectionality—many of whom argue that intersectionality is an intellectual toy for privileged professors and a distraction from the urgency of class struggle—Collins and Bilge scornfully note that such qualms are disproportionately voiced by "white feminists." They go on to write that, "…the resistance, even downright hostility, which some white feminists express toward intersectionality in the name of populism or socialism indicates a tricky interaction wherein racism masquerades as class politics."

This is the definition of an ad-hominem response. Gonzalez rightly points out that, under the dialectical rules of feminist criticism and social constructionism, any challenge can be dismissed by resorting to attacks on the challenger's identity. Collins and Bilge show that, even in its purest form, subjectivism and relativism are not viable. When one's identity is the primary standard by which to determine the truth, how is it possible to have productive discourse?

Feminist criticism is founded on very simple—and reductive—principles. Make no mistake: it is incompatible with science and reason, and it does not work. Let us have productive discourse.