Now I'm absolutely certain that I was wrong.
There are varying degrees of truth in science, and instead of seeing it as stable and constant, it should be seen as a fluid, changing path toward truth. Kant's (?) paradigm of a thesis, antithesis and synthesis can help us explore this idea.
In this paradigm, the thesis is an idea, the antithesis is a negation of the idea, and the synthesis is a combination of the thesis and the antithesis made up from the logical 'truths' of both. The synthesis can then become the thesis for further arguments. This can be seen in technology. Cornelia Fine reminds us "state-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated." (2010, p. 133) This demonstrates the way science changes through processes of being the current 'truth', being criticised, and eventually changing to satisfy those criticisms so that it can once more be considered truth,
Gender studies provides an antithesis to the male-female dichotomy that is still prevalent throughout society "...at increasingly early ages, making the two-sex system more deeply a part of how we imagine human life and giving it the appearance of being both inborn and natural" (Fausto-Sterling 2000, p.31).
Haraway states that "struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see." (1991, p. 194) Haraway demonstrates that scientific knowledge is based on power and is thereby susceptible to bias.
If we look at science as a paradigm rather than a truth, and consider that it doesn't go unaffected by bias, then we can begin to pull apart 'knowledge' about gender and the male-female dichotomy to better understand the existence of gender as a spectrum.
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