The women's movement of the last century, with emancipation, raised the question of women's rights and of the equality between men and women, neglecting the important issue of sexual difference.
It was only in the 1970s that feminism began to consider the sexual difference that the aspiration for equality could neither cancel nor erase. Sexual difference focuses on motherhood and being a mother as an irreducible fact of reality from which to start. If equality referred to an undifferentiated man-woman world, in which women's aspiration was to achieve the male position in society by eliminating inequalities, sexual difference undermined this aspiration and rendered it non-existent.
Sexual difference posed another challenge. The world had to be two in all its aspects. The masculine, the universal rule and measure, had to give way to difference, to the division of the one into two, to the coexistence of the masculine and the feminine.
The sexual difference that is rooted in different bodies (who does not remember the book that marked this change of pace, Us and our body?) guides the formation of a different and divergent thinking about the world compared to men's. The female body imposes itself in its complexity as a thought of the world, supported by the mind/body, and rewrites history starting from women's daily life and care activities. Thus, everyday life also enters the story with force, and within the daily life linked to sexual difference one discovers the hitherto hidden and denied world of male violence, of oppressive man-woman relationships in the family, at work and in society, marked by the logic of possession and domination. We also discover the prejudices and discriminations against women as women's bodies.
The identification of sexual violence as the ultimate and critical point in the contextuality of female-male relations becomes crucial in the formation of women's political subjectivity. So crucial that it prompts the "Women's Daily' (born in 1978) to renounce being conveyed by authoritative newspapers to become self-financed and focus its political attention on issues of sexual violence. The separatism to protect the formation of women's autonomous thinking and the relationship between women as a source of change in power relations.
But it is not enough for the feminism of sexual difference to observe and divide the one into two and discover a female reality denied and subjugated to male power, it is necessary to look at, recognise and change the paradigm of power. It is necessary to rewrite history and the history of everyday life from the point of view of the female body/mind in order to discover and change the imbalance of power between men and women and the superstructure represented by the prejudices that harness women's lives. (but also, conversely, to a lesser extent that of men) into patterns and cages of pre-established social behaviour, responding to logics that follow neither the desire nor the rights of individuals. And so it is that the ally of sexual difference is the gender difference, that point of view which, starting from the difference of bodies rooted in sexuality, sees and looks to all other differences that dwell not only in sexed bodies (marked by belonging to one sex) but also in the interactions of those bodies with the outside world and with others, men. And so the point of view of difference looks at the world by recognising the sign of the female presence, hitherto denied, in art, science, language, production processes and the economy as well as in reproductive processes.
The point of view of difference holds together the gendered bodies, i.e. the biological determinants of men's and women's lives, and gender, i.e. the psycho-social determinants (relationships, work, environment) by imparting change to both.
Sex and gender together in the new point of view of difference dominated the change by imposing a different view of the world, starting with the break-up in all fields of the undifferentiated unity of the two genders/sexes that hid the dominance of men, the male gender and the inferiorisation of women and the female gender.
Sex and gender have entered with the breakdown of unity into the rewriting of economics, language, history and science and every other area of human life. Science as part of the patriarchal cultural domain is re-examined and becomes a dynamic and questionable element.
The thought of difference also finds in medical science the signs of ideological violence disguised as neutral thought.
The big changes due to the spread of the sex/gender difference viewpoint come to medicine, denying the neutrality of the definition 'Homo sapiens-sapiens'.
In the 1990s, the point of view of difference, which had already divided the one into two in so many areas of knowledge, led in the United States to highlight two phenomena: one linked to biology and one linked to gender, that is, to the superstructure laden with prejudice that accompanies the reality of sexual difference between men and women, loading it with meanings of power of the one (the man) and discrimination of the other (the woman).
It turns out as the first act of this new medicine (which also divides the one into two) which the calibre of women's arteries had never been measured independently and that lack of this knowledge was the cause of more frequent deaths in women during unblocking operations. And so it turns out that thenothing in medicine is women-friendly but everything is measured and calibrated on male biology, with serious damage to female health. And also that in the pathways of health and illness men and women have different aetiologies, different symptomatic manifestations, different reactions to drugs.
Everything has to be rewritten in medicineand it is still being done.
In this way we discover that the sexual difference inscribed in bodies is not only the difference linked to the reproductive genitalia, but is present in every segment of male and female bodies. It would be very serious to change the methodology and return to an undifferentiated man-woman, subscribing to a gender identity divorced from biological and sexed bodies.
And again: this new medicine, combined with the difference between sex and gender, discovers that there are prejudices between the two genders (social representations of the two sexes). These prejudices pollute the diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic activities of doctors, and it turns out that women receive less treatment, more misdiagnoses, more inappropriate aetiological assessments, and almost no prevention for the same disorders. Prevention is done before a body falls ill, and is done by taking into account the external environment in which that body is inserted. If, for men, the social environment has always been well known and present, such as working conditions (think of Charcot who posited a different aetiology, the result of prejudice, for male and female hysteria: for men it was work-related traumatism, for women only hormonal cycles), For the woman, on the other hand, the prejudice that her body was only linked to reproductive activity did not generate an appropriate knowledge of her pathogenic habitat, linked to both the family and non-family environment. Women for years, for example, have been precluding the benefit of a stress study (which originates outside the body and concerns the activities and doing of that body in the external space/environment) as the cause of many diseases.
Gender-based medicine based on difference revolutionises every field and sector and also introduces the issue of the stress of double work and violence as an aetiology of many diseases with a large impact on women's health.
The emergence of gender medicine ended the male monopolyand it is still true that the path is long, but it has been stated that the observation of bodies must follow a binary pattern and that equal treatment must be ensured on these two tracks. Equality in sexual and gender diversity. And medicine has also discovered that the sexuality of bodies is not only linked to genitalised and reproductive sex, but is widespread sexuality branching out to the last inch of skin. And therefore You don't get rid of your biological sex just by getting rid of your male or female genitals. Everything is different in men and women, from the heart to the liver to bone health. And again: differences are not only biological but also due to gender or the social implications of that body, here and now, at interactions of that biological body, male or female, with the environment and the outside world. Bodies are not suspended in a vacuum, the processes of health and illness must be looked at from the bodies but also in their interactions with the outside world.
In this outlined historical framework, A construct, such as that of gender identity separated from the reality of bodies as represented in the Zan DDL, which rewinds the film of women's struggles and feminism, is truly a denialist work of the change wrought by women in politics, philosophy and science.
To think that we are returning to sexual indeterminacy, by denying the difference between the sexes and disassociating gender differences from gendered bodies, instead multiplying them by the countless perceptions of men and women, it stands out not only as a dangerous indifference to healthalso as a chaos in which no phenomenon is recognisable anymore that makes sense to realistically define the processes and factors of risk and illness for men and women, starting with male violence against women.
Variable gender identity through self-declaration (self-id) and self-perception cannot be a viable route in scientific research and medicine without considerable damage to everyone's health, but primarily to women's health.
Elvira Reale
