Page - 178 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

gender theory back to a fictive founding father, psychologist John Money, who tried to prove that gender identity only depends on culture: he advised people whose son had been accidentally castrated during surgery to raise the boy as a girl. The experiment failed: the boy rejected the female gender identity imposed on him. Some of the critics use this monstrous story to defame gender studies (e.g., Kutschera 2016: 277-289). Apart from Money, scientists often named as promoters of constructivism are Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler (e.g. see Gerl-Falkovitz 2011, Meyer 2015). Also, most of the gender studies critic scientists construct a conspiracy theory that feminists somehow aim to brainwash and subvert society. Ulrich Kutschera (2016) and Günter Buchholz (2016) state that at the world women conference of Beijing, feminists conspired to promote homosexuality and to fight Cristian values and the heterosexual family, and that out of this conference, a worldwide plan was formulated to abolish the sexes and to morph mankind into, as Kutschera puts it, “unisex-persons”, and that gender mainstreaming was one of the steps to implement a totalitarian society (Kutschera 2016: 44-47). By the way, all of the critics define gender mainstreaming wrongly as some measure for re-education to support their argumentation, while in fact it is only the implementation of gender perspectives regarding decisions in organizations and in politics (see the UN-definition, United Nations 1997). In this plan of world domination, Gender scientists have the function to infiltrate the universities and to impose sex-education programmes for schools which destabilize the gender identity of children and lead to a premature sexualization (Kutschera 2016: 5, 27, 399; Meyer 2015: pos. 5484). Gender studies thus are a danger for children, but also for women and men because they set new behaviour norms which are opposed to the nature of the sexes and which do not take into account gender differences. Neuroscientist professor Manfred Spreng points out that regarding women, psychological inner conflicts would be the consequences, and regarding men, a diminishing bonding capacity (Spreng 2015a: 72), and biologist Kutschera states that it is wrong to force women and men to act against their nature, for example to pressure women to study engineering, and men to become active fathers, when they can´t help reacting aggressively to toddlers crying because of their higher testosterone levels (Kutschera 2016: 48, 307). Often the devaluation of gender studies is supported by a homophobic positioning: for example, professor Buchholz argues that gender studies intend to normalize homosexuality and to abolish what he calls heteronormality (Buchholz 2016). Some of the critics even resort to pathologizing gender scientists as childless, butch lesbians – as Kutschera (2016: 52) does – or as irrational women ridden by envy, like Gerhard Amendt (2016b). Those of the critics who are not themselves religious compare gender studies with a devaluating aim to religion (Kutschera 2016: 7, 55), and some compare them to ideologies like Marxism (Amendt 2016, Buchholz 2014, Kutschera 2016: 15f., Seubert 2014). Often the critics confound “gender” as such, gender mainstreaming, and gender studies, subsuming it under the pejorative terms “gender ideology” or “genderism” (Kutschera 2016: 26; Meyer 2015: pos. 5519; Seubert 2014: 260). In this context some criticize difference feminism, which they interpret as notion that women think themselves better and of putting women against men who are seen as adversaries (Gerl-Falkovitz 2009: pos. 994; Seubert 2014: 278). However, most gender critic scientists assume postmodernism especially constructivism as epistemological basis of the gender studies and reject it, for example philosopher Alexander 178