Oh, I comprehend very well the “science” behind this nonsense. As usual, it begins with morons in academia. And no, Matteo, academia is not a kind of nut.
The idea that gender identity is fluid has its roots in post-modern philosophy, as exemplified in the writings of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and later interpretations of these works by the American philosopher and feminist Judith Butler. Put simply, post-modernism proposes that our ways of understanding the world need to be ‘deconstructed’, and conventional boundaries need to be broken, in order to expose the multiple oppressions inherent in traditionally accepted knowledge structures, including science and medical science. Post-modernism privileges the subjective over the objective, the emotional over the rational. It holds that language shapes our understanding of what we experience as being reality to an extreme degree, with words having extraordinary power. According to Butler, gender is ‘performative’, by which she means that it comes about as a result of acts rather than representing who someone is (Butler, 2006). In this sense, her definition corresponds to the notion of gender as socially constructed, rather than innate.
