A survey of behavioral ecology fails to show that male and female differences provide the sole or even most important motor for evolutionary development, while surveys of brain studies and endocrinology fail to show that brains and hormones are fundamentally sexed. Still, these failures need not lead us to question whether we are men and women at all, or whether there are any differences between men and women. Instead, they raise the question as to why we are so interested in precisely these as opposed to the myriad of other differences and other motors of change. In this chapter, I want to suggest that our identities and identifications as men and women have the same status as identities and identifications as Red Sox and Yankees fans or Irish Americans and Polish Americans. Identities and identifications as men and women are no less partial than the other identities and identifications we possess. Nor are differences between men and women, however different cultures define them, any less situationally restricted than differences between left- and right-handers.

In order to make these claims, I shall argue that, like these other identities and identifications, our identities and identifications as men and women are understandings of who and what we are. As such, they are historically “effected” and intelligible parts of only particular interpretive wholes. As I did in the case of racial identity, I shall use accounts of the socially constructed status of sex and gender to set the stage for my claim.