I'd much rather prefer to lurk Hacker News but these comment chains have just been so exasperating.
I'd like to know how many people actually believe that science is engaged in a widespread effort to dissimulate the truth of sex differences? Everyone knows that there is a sexual dimorphism in humans. It's not that pronounced compared to other species. Our dimorphism is not anomalous amongst great apes, nor is it indicative of much: Our closest relatives are Chimpanzees and Bonobos where the former form hierarchical male dominated communities while the latter form egalitarian communities.
Let me ask some questions just as an efficient way of throwing up historical and social context. These questions are rhetorical and aren't even the best questions to ask. I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking up the best questions. I think a few examples are enough to convey the general line of inquiry I'd like to show is possible.
Do the differences between humans caused by sexual variation account for the structure of our society? If yes, when did this become the case? Was it the case in 1800 United States of America when married women could not own property? Was that caused by some sort of sex-linked genetic variation?
Was it the case in the 1940's when lobotomies were in vogue, and most of the operations performed were on women? Do women have some sort of sex-linked genetic flaw that leads to brains that need to be lobotomized?
Is the nuclear family a primordial family unit optimized for the innate sex-linked variations between humans that form viable reproductive pairings, or is it optimized for the division of labor and capital of bourgeois society?
When exactly were the unimpeachable doctrines of male supremacy promulgated by law, church, and capitalism purged from our consciousnesses, our institutions, our social networks, our education centers, our philosophy, our _science_ so that society immediately restructured along more _objective_ lines where all individuals realize their full potential and enter into the social relationships most suitable to their essential nature?
Because that is the subtext that speckles this page. That male supremacy was banished from human reason and what remains is a hegemony based on some _rational_ _objectively verifiable_ sex-linked variation that is unimpeachable by human means. The power structures in which this truth is intelligible, that verifies and reproduces this truth is left implicit, because it is normalized in so many social groups, HN intersecting with a great many of them. I don't think I am capable of deconstructing this logic, but I will just throw out my conjecture:
This is the neoliberal paradigm squaring its beliefs in the free market, meritocracy, minimal governance, the free flow and concentration of capital, dissimulation of relations of power, the privatization of ever more institutions, the application of market rationality to all spheres of human activity, an epistemology based on private institutions and capitals competing in a market of ideas, and the refusal to regard as legitimate any theory that posits power structures and modes of truth that do not follow analytically from these doctrines, with systemic inequality. The cause _must be_ the sublimation of truth from the market of _free_ individuals pursuing their rational self-interest, where the market and the pursuits it comprises _define_ truth.
As a last note, I don't think I am familiar with much feminist theory that tries to dissimulate sexual differences. In fact, many feminists would probably agree that the most significant and easily verifiable sex-linked variation between people accounts for a great deal of interpersonal inequality between men and women: Men are bigger and stronger and thus have an easier time getting what they want through personal violence. But this is in fact a minor point. There have been a great many societies on this Earth, in spite of their systematic obliteration and assimilation throughout the years, ever accelerating to meet the hunger of capitalist societies for new places and peoples to put on the market. They have had varying levels of equity between people-- there are even non-binary systems of gender, and their existence ought to pique and interest to critically examine the cultural institutions that separate and regulate the biopolitical realities of people in bourgeois society.
Feminist theory, by and large, especially the theories of leftist feminists (none of that bourgeois, liberal crap) emphasize systemic inequality, not interpersonal variation. They certainly don't need to resort to such minutiae when so much effective theory and action has been executed against institutionally imposed male supremacy. It seems that it is a tenacious enemy though. Once it can no longer reproduce itself along certain power structures (e.g. church) it will find ways through more contemporarily legitimate power structures (e.g. neoliberal rationality).