Resisting sex/gender conflation: A rejoinder to John Hood-Williams.

The article argues that sociologist John Hood-Williams article on the rejection of sex/gender distinction is not so much concerned with rejecting the so-called additive approach to the biological and the social where the biological base is seen a priori. Throughout this article the author's main concern is with defending the analytical indispensability of the ontological sex/gender distinction. Whether people are naturally aggressive, or males, or patriarchal or whatever can only be decided by research which pays careful attention to stratification and emergence and is alive to the problems of defining the natural and the social. The prevalent notion that women, naturally want to be mothers because of a supposedly intrinsic maternal instinct, it is in their biological make-up to do so. If everything social could be reduced to the biological then logically there would be no pre-dispositional hormones: either hormone determines or they do not. Whether there may be a biologically based potential for heightened maternal investment is irrelevant, since it is the case that mothers and fathers are equally nurturing.