(This is a repurposed blog post) *
Back in February I did a blog post responding to neurologist Debra Soh, who claimed that research backs the idea that men and women are naturally gendered at the brain level — that male and female brains are different.
Today I want to write in response to a different neurological study (Daphna Joel, , et. al., Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic) that concludes that no, men and women are not fundamentally different at the brain level, that there isn’t a “female brain” and a “male brain”, that there is, instead, a moderate statistical tendency for some constellations of brain features to exist more often in female subjects than in male subjects and vice versa for other brain features, but with a whole lot of overlap between the sexes as well as a whole lot of variance within each sex.
Their findings were reported in the popular press as meaning there’s no brain difference to account for gender difference. *
Taking the popular press interpretation at face value for the moment, what are the implications for variant gender identities such as mine?
In my Oct 23 post, Some People See Me as THE STRAIGHT DOPE, I took people to task for being dismissive of my gender identity because it wasn’t one of the variants they were familiar with. A lot of the pushback I received took the form “OK, smartass, name some characteristics of yourself that are inherently feminine and not accepted in men. What ‘makes you’ a feminine person? If you aren’t one those transgender people who feel the need to transition to the other sex, what makes you so damn different from typical guys?”
It’s a good question. In fact, I regarded it as a “gotcha” question, because there’s no single characteristic (or short list) that exists only as characteristics of female people and also is strongly typical of all female people, so anything I named would provoke the response from some male critics that “Hey, I have those characteristics too but I don’t go around telling people I’m a male girl”, while at the same time provoking this response from some female critics: “I’m a women and the things that you said about yourself don’t apply to me at all, does that make me somehow ‘not one of the women’?”
It’s a good question that sort of asks itself if we dismiss the idea of built-in mental/behavioral differences between the sexes, because if there aren’t any, how can anyone “be” more like the people of a different sex than the sex they are perceived as belonging to?
Transgender blogger MxtrMeike13 addresses this question on their blog entry, referencing the Joel et. al. research. It is a world where a whole lot of transgender politics revolves around the twin notions that there are brain differences between the sexes and that transgender people are people who have the brain characteristics of their target gender, making transgender identity also biologically “built in”; but MxtrMeike dismisses that with a cite of this study and then muses about it, ultimately concluding that nobody knows a reason or a cause for why people are transgender, and, in MxtrMeike’s own case, “I am transgender because I am”.
That position, of course, invites its own type of hostile responses: “Yeah, OK, it’s how you identify, but, hell, you can identify as anything you want if it doesn’t have to tie back to anything except what’s in your own head! You want to identify as a pine tree, go for it, be a pine tree, but if you want us to behave differently towards you, if you want us to go around thinking of you as a pine tree, if you expect us to care, well, why should we if it’s all just stuff that’s in your own head?”
Let me paint an entirely social explanation, one that doesn’t depend at all on biological differences. Even if there are no built-in behavioral differences between the sexes, we still live in a gendered world, a world in which different things are expected of people based on their sex, and also a world in which the same behavior is interpreted quite differently based on the sex of the person.
Think about a boy growing up. At some point, let’s say he gets some feedback about his personality and behavior, a confirmation that he is acting masculine, as expected. For as-of-yet unknown reasons, he experiences this confirmation as a positive thing, whereas the boy in the next row, exposed to the same feedback, experiences it as a criticism. It could be because of things that happened to them in their own pasts, prior to that point. Doesn’t matter: let’s look at how this simple divergence in interpretation of similar experience shapes them differently moving forwards, in their respective futures. The first boy is more likely to think of himself, affirmatively, as one of the boys. The other boy may be prompted to do things to reduce the likelihood of having this kind of thing said to him again.
Next Tuesday, the two boys both receive a different kind of feedback: that how they are behaving seems to some observer to be what would be expected from a girl. The first boy, who had a positive reaction to being viewed as typical of boys, does not care for this new piece of feedback: he finds it insulting, a contradiction of how he currently likes to think of himself. Now it is him, the first boy, who may be prompted to do things (or avoid doing things) so as to limit the likelihood of things like this being said to him again. Meanwhile, the second boy hears this feedback and likes it a whole lot more than being characterized as being typical of boys, and so instead of making it less likely that he’ll behave that way in the future, it makes it more likely that he’ll do so.
So their experiences with social feedback shapes them. They are each forming a sense of self, a gendered sense of self, of how their self its in against the backdrop of boys and girls in general. And the sense of self that they hold in their heads affects their future behavior, and that in turn feeds back into their sense of self, making a loop. After a few years of this, each of these two boys has formed priorities and embraced values; they’ve practiced and honed behavioral nuances, paid attention to some things while ignoring other things. They are learning different lessons. They are becoming gendered, both of them.
But differently. The first boy is growing up mainstream, cisgender, a masculine boy who will probably not significantly question his identity as a man. The second boy on the other hand is already somewhat gender variant and may someday identify as one of the minority orientations or gender identities. There’s a sense in which — for both of them — all this is “in their heads” — but you should be able to see that the process by which it got into their heads is an interactive social process, a process of interacting with real stuff, actual social feedback that’s every bit as tangibly real as differences in neuronal brain structures would be.
- And, meanwhile, the Joel et. al. article does not actually say there are no built-in brain differences. That’s an oversimplification. What it says is almost exactly what I said in my reply to Debra Soh: that there are a set of characteristics that are somewhat more likely to manifest in male brains than in female brains, and other characteristics more likely to manifest in female brains than in male brains; but there’s so much variation within the same sex that almost none of the characteristics more likely to be in male brains are found in nearly all male brains, and so much overlap between the two sexes that none of the characteristics more likely to be in male brains are nearly entirely missing among female brains. This is an important distinction, I think. The social belief system about differences between the sexes could be adequately supported by these general tendencies, so that there’s a shared social “sense” of what male people are like when compared to female people, a socially shared sense of what “masculinity” and “femininity” consist of.
But at the same time, the looseness of it, the extreme variation within each sex and the high degree of overlaps between the sexes, fully supports the assessment of people that there are no characteristics that make me a woman instead of a man (because no such list of characteristics will ever fit nearly all women but fail to fit nearly all men except me) At the same time, it also supports my own assessment that in our society there are notions of how guys are and how gals are and that I’ve spent most of my lifetime identifying with the latter, embracing other folks’ statements that reinforce that identification and resenting and pushing back against other folks’ statements that put me in the same category as the other male folks. I’ve said it before: I’m an outlier. An exception to the general rule. I’m not unique in being so (other males also fit in better into the constellation of traits associated with female people). Not every male who could be thusly described came to identify with people of the female sex and to reject identification with the other males as “the people who are like me”, but I did and I’m not unique in that either. Those of us who did so are differently gendered. I identify as genderqueer, and as a gender invert.
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AHunter3 blogs weekly on the subject of being genderqueer, gender politics issues in general, and his ongoing attempts to get his book published. These blog posts tend to be anywhere from 500 to 2500 words in length and are written in the style of a regular column in a periodical.
The reposting of these blog posts has been cleared with the moderators in advance.
