US high school biology books are teaching Sex and Gender essentialism creating conditions where discrimination and violence exist as was the case with Nex Benedict
The first scientific study examining this found that publishers are driven by sales and profits and largely ignore science.
People who hold essentialist beliefs tend to believe that sex/gender groups are mutually exclusive—that members of one group are entirely dissimilar from those in another group. By contrast, the reality is that most traits overlap considerably across sex/gender groups.
What is being taught in the classroom? You might think just read the books, but that presents a unique problem."Because textbook manufacturers do not publish statistics on how many schools or students use their textbooks in the US and school districts do not report complete and reliable information about adopted textbooks, researchers interested in examining the most frequently used textbooks in US high schools must rely on other methods, Science reports"
"For example, researchers typically sample textbooks with multiple editions under the assumption that these textbooks’ repeated use by schools indicates they are successful in the marketplace. Furthermore, decades of research demonstrate that decisions about which textbooks to adopt in each US state are strongly influenced by which textbooks are adopted in California, Texas, New York, and Florida because these states are the most populous and have the largest textbook markets."
"Due to their importance for publishers’ revenue, textbook developers in the US tend to write textbooks that will be easy to adapt to the standards of these four states. Therefore, we purposively sampled textbooks that had multiple editions from the four most populous states in the US (i.e., California, Texas, Florida, and New York) to construct our own database of texts that had the highest probability of representing the curriculum materials most readily available to biology students in US high schools."
In other words, the study found publishers set the bar to the lowest level regarding instruction about sex and gender hoping that California and Connecticut will find the text acceptable.
Biology books that appear acceptable to those who are simply uninformed appeal to purchasing agents in Texas and Florida.
Methodology
"We initially attempted to make a systematic distinction between terms that pertained to sex (such as “Y chromosome”) and terms that pertained to gender (such as “men”). However, it quickly became clear that this would not be feasible. The information available in the textbooks was not sufficient to make this distinction. This blurring of the linguistic boundary between sex and gender suggests in and of itself that textbooks may conflate the two. Going forward, we use the term “sex/gender” when appropriate to describe our results."
"Despite the imprecision in how sex and gender terminology was used, we were able to code whether sex and gender were explicitly differentiated in a paragraph. Of the 362 paragraphs coded, none differentiated between sex and gender in any way. Thus, textbooks inappropriately conflate between a biological phenomenon (sex) and a sociocultural phenomenon (gender)."
