You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Or Can You?

In an essay published by the online magazine Quillette titled “‘I Basically Just Made It Up’: Confessions of a Social Constructivist,” Christopher Dummitt, associate professor of Canadian Studies at Trent University, confesses to “making up” his argument in defense of the dubious proposition—now widely accepted in academia as well as the culture at large—that “gender” is a social construct.

The view he promulgated through a book published in 2007 and an article based on his master’s thesis that the differences between males and females that are observed in virtually all cultures throughout history are wholly constructed by culture, he now rejects. He also admits the thinness of his past support for this thesis, which was built on little more than the regnant ideology in academia during the 1990’s when he identified as a “gender historian.”