Is gender a social construct or a biological imperative?
” Babette Francis National & Overseas Co-ordinator Endeavour Forum Inc The nature vs. nurture debate on whether it is biology or environment that causes human beings to choose certain roles and lifestyles is a perennial controversy in sociobiology, but since the seventies the debate has been extended to whether nurture, i.e. culture, can override biology and be a determinant of sex itself. This paper critiques the ‘gender agenda’ of contemporary feminism and the politicization of the word ‘gender’ as a substitute for the sex of a person. This issue reached high drama at the June 2000 Beijing + 5 United Nations Women’s Conference in New York when the development agencies of the Scandinavian countries and Germany threatened to withhold development money from Nicaragua unless the Nicaraguan Government sacked the head of their delegation from his Cabinet post as Minister for the Family. His offence, on-going from the 1999 Cairo + 5 Conference on Population and Development, was to refuse to
