One view of science is that it tends to be reductionist, making it easier to deal with the complexity of reality by lumping down to useful, workable simplifications such as male vs. female. A more popular view lately is that, well, actually, The Science is inherently splitterific, meaning that everything is vastly more complicated than it appears to folk wisdom, even though folk wisdom tends to lack the reductionist urge.
For instance, we are always being lectured on “folk categories of race” but then it turns out that they are talking about not something that peasants came up with, but with the 4 or 5 continental-scale racial models devised by High Enlightenment sophisticated science geniuses like Linnaeus and Blumenbach.
