The gendered brain myth and excusing sex-based discrimination

 Everyone knows that women are more emotionally sensitive, while men have the emotional capacity of a turnip. It's also a common fact that men have better spatial awareness, can read maps unlike women, and this is then portrayed as an evolutionary left-over from our hunter-gatherer days. Back then, it is said, women would stay back at the camp to take care of the children while the men would take their grizzled selves out to take down more big prey.

In many ways it's a comfortable fantasy, one which supports the current societal notion that men and women are simply different, and thus it is only natural to assume that they will have different interests and paths in life. While some changes here are noticeable - such as in most societies granting women personhood in the form of voting rights and not requiring a guardian to handle their affairs - the notion that a child is confronted with even before they are born is that men and woman are simply different.

Although the generally less muscular nature of women is used with these arguments too, primary to this statement is that male and female brains are somehow 'different' (dimorphic). Essentially this is a modern-day version of phrenology, the once seriously considered pseudo-science that assumed that it could deduce anything of worth from a person's skull and related features. Phrenology supported everything from slavery (as non-Caucasians were deemed 'inferior') to the treatment of women as less than men, along with other pseudo-scientific views that excused what was essentially wide-scale discrimination against anyone born with female genitals.


Many years ago, I was indoctrinated in this way of thinking as well. All of these statements about how men and women were supposedly different rang true for me, even though neither I nor my brothers were raised in a gender-discriminating manner by our parents. It was just the way that the world supposedly worked. What changed my views there were the years that I spent dealing with the discovery of my intersex body, and coming to terms with the fact that my body was not as assumed previously male, but phenotypically primarily female.

What did this mean for my brain? Based on what I had been told, and what I had grown up with, the assumption was that this meant that my brain had to be either male or female. For years I would struggle with this notion, while being reassured by psychologists and medical professionals that I just had to figure out whether I 'felt' more 'male' or 'female' so that I could decide on what my body should look like to match my brain's gender.

The irony here is perhaps that while initially I translated my discomfort with my situation into the notion that I 'felt female', while having a male body, and even began hormone therapy to establish female hormone levels, at some point my body reasserted its own female hormone production and I was hurled straight into a proper female puberty. My 'male' body turned out to be a hermaphroditic intersex body, with naturally female phenotype and hormone levels. Some biochemical messages had apparently just been delayed by years.


When it came to figuring out the 'feeling' part, one of the biggest revelations came to me in the form of a study by Daphna Joel et al. (2015) [1], which examined the brains of male and female participants with an fMRI scanner to see whether in their brain activity any indications could be found of this purported 'male/female divide' within the human brain.

As it turns out, they couldn't find any indication of this, with each individual brain forming its own unique mosaic of activity. Alongside my own experiences this completed the picture of each human being having their own unique brain, without any sign of dimorphism, together with a body that showed many degrees of variation as well.


Today's society still seems to insist on discriminating between individuals based on their genitals and presumed 'brain gender', with no sign of letting up on this practice. Yet as science shows, this is an outdated practice, with no basis in reality. Individuals are denied or granted privileges purely based on this presumed 'gender', and societal gender-based roles are the norm rather than the exception. All of which raises the question of just how far society has truly progressed since the first cries for equal rights for men and women.

What was instructive for me here was how many years I could live as a 'male' in society with only the occasional bouts of confusion due to my more feminine build. When asserting a female identity, however, society's views and treatment of me as a female person changed noticeably, even though I did not.

This raises the uncomfortable question of why society continues to discriminate between men and women, when in the end the only aspect that truly differs between them is their reproductive system and associated hormones. If that is the aspect that matters, then intersex people would necessarily be partially carved off into their own 'societal gender roles'. After all, where does a person like me with female hormone levels, but both male and female genitals fit in with?

Any division made here that doesn't acknowledge people as their own person without segregation feels both unnatural and unethical.


Maya


[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468