The best books that most challenge myths about gender and sex

A scientist shows that the science of sex is not as biologically binary as everyone thinks. Before reading this book, even though I had understood gender to be socially constructed, I thought gender was ‘built’ on a clear biological sex difference.

Fausto-Sterling explains, in language that my high-school biology could understand, how the biology of sex is much more complicated and socially constructed than I had realized. The rug was pulled out from under me.

Le Guin is my favorite author, and all of her power is on display in this science fiction novel about an emissary who visits a planet (Gethen) where, most of the time, the people have no sex differentiation. Sex traits only become apparent in the two days per month of “kemmer,” and Gethenians may kemmer as male or female (and which is not completely predictable).

Because of Le Guin’s skill as a novelist, the implications of this arrangement are explored in subtle but powerful ways, more as the warp and weft of the cultural background than the main feature of the plot (although it is definitely significant). The book shows how deeply gender and sex infuse our own culture through the contrast with Gethen. The bonus is that this is a masterpiece of a novel, one often mentioned on lists of the best science fiction novels of all time. Le Guin’s style is beautiful, and the plot is compelling. 

We all think testosterone is the ‘male hormone’–it’s what makes men, well, men. It’s what is measured to decide who is a woman in the Olympics, and it is injected or ingested by some people to become more masculine. But ‘T,’ as this book and many others refer to it, is not as straightforwardly any of the things we think it is–all of these views of T come from how society and ideology have constructed it, sometimes in contradiction to clear fact.

Across 223 detailed but surprisingly engaging pages, the authors show how T has been mythologized and misunderstood, and moreover how these myths and misunderstandings have affected not just popular conceptions of T and masculinity, but the very science of T, as well.

When talking about how gender can be disconnected from bodies, I like to tell the story of when my very young son called a Hummer truck ‘masculine’ and then wondered aloud how a car can be masculine. In that vein, this book shows how the idea of masculinity is something much wider and more complicated than a ‘trait of men’ connected to the bodies of men.

With grounded and deeply researched examples, Halberstam shows how these masculine traits not only can be ‘de-linked’ from the ‘male body,’ but how they have been so throughout history. He also shows how female masculinity has often been hidden or forgotten. This book is a classic in gender studies, and once you have read it, it’s impossible to think of gender in the same way as before.

This book thoroughly debunks one of the biggest gender myths that have emerged over the last 50 years. It takes as its jumping-off point the media empire that started from John Gray’s books (based on an idea first argued for, less essentially, by linguist Deborah Tannen), books which have been one of the main forces in perpetuating the myth that men and women are categorically different from one another in terms of interactional behavior and temperament.

The reality is that there is more difference between women and other women and between men and other men than there is between women and men.  It is, in fact, the myth that creates the differences by pointing us to see gender differences while ignoring other reasons for difference. Cameron is forceful and witty, and the book is an enjoyable read even as it does its work of revealing the powerful effects of gender ideology.