Myth of pink brain blue brain

[Thelilywhite]

I was pleased to see this posted from the let toys be toys campaign. It's easy to read and I think useful in our gender critical arguments. I've been away and not up to speed on individual threads so thought it better to make a new one.

[Thelilywhite]

Oops helps if you post the link!
www.fastcompany.com/40441920/everything-you-believe-is-wrong-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain

[SteppingOnToes]

I thought that until at 38 I suddenly got this need to have a baby - I had always been anti kids even went to ask about sterilisation when I turned 18 but yep, there are definitely things we cannot deny are inately female. And I hate myself for saying this...

[glenthebattleostrich]

Why stepping? Why can't we celebrate our different strengths?

[SteppingOnToes]

Glen - Apparently the OP thinks that it's a myth...

[MsPassepartout]

I thought that until at 38 I suddenly got this need to have a baby - I had always been anti kids even went to ask about sterilisation when I turned 18 but yep, there are definitely things we cannot deny are inately female.

The urge to have babies may well be innate, but it's certainly not uniquely female. I know several men who've ended relationships because they wanted children and their partners didn't.

[iismum]

The urge to have babies may well be innate, but it's certainly not uniquely female.

^ this

Women may feel a more concentrated urge after their mid 30s because they know there is a harder time limit for them, but this is not an innate difference between men and women and I don't know why you think it should be.

[claritytobeclear]

I posted this in another thread but I think it also fits here:


Whilst, I think, it is undoubtable gender perceptions are strongly influenced by culture, variance across different societies is testimony to this, I do believe there is some cross over as there is a complex interaction between biological and cultural influences, generally. For example different levels of sex hormones have been shown to affect behaviour, the link between testosterone and aggression and Pre-Menstrual Psychosis illustrates this, but whilst variant hormone levels might mean someone is pre disposed to certain behaviours, it does not mean engaging in these behaviours is a pre-requisite. I actually also read a study in New Scientist that noted different hormones levels amongst men in different societies and linked this to aggression. Added to this, persistent patterns of behaviour, experience and thought patterns can actually alter brain physiology and environment can affect gene expression.

So there is a complex interplay between biology and culture, nature and nurture. Thus it would follow that there might be a complex interplay between some sex determined biological differences (which might also differ between different societies) and gender expression. I don't just think all sexually determined differences are distinct enough, because there is variance within the same sex and across different cultures, to label them purely biological differences. Equally, I think, because some less distinct sex determined biological differences can be explained biologically, we cannot say they are purely cultural.

Don't get me wrong, I still think ideas of gender undoubtedly vary across societies and throughout history, thus have a strong cultural influence. However I think we are only just finding out how our biology predisposes us to all sorts of things as well as how our own choices can affect this biology throughout generations.

Where this leaves people, I don't know.

[hi6789]

This talk really helped me to understand gender identity:

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

OP, you might well find Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Elliot an interesting read. She's a neuroscientist whose field of expertise is brain plasticity in early infancy. In a nutshell, her argument is this: insofar as some (some, by no means all) studies have shown a small cognitive difference between the average of the female population and the average of the male population, this difference has a very small d-value (typically below 0.5), and because the brain is so plastic in early infancy through to 5 years, and we know from observational psychological studies that male and female infants and children are treated differently by the adults around them, it is impossible in principle to tell whether these tiny differences are due to nature or nurture.

The picture is a plot of different d-values - as you can see, for d-values less than 0.5, the overlap between the populations is huge. So, say (just making up an example - my copy of the book is on loan to a friend) the average age at which a female toddler gets to a vocabulary of 20 words is 18 months, and the average age for a male toddler is 18 months and 2 weeks - you might well find that 48% of boys still reach that 20 word milestone before the average for girls. Tiny difference, not worth basing your future educational practises and employment practises on.

The "treating boys and girls differently" example I particularly remember is the crawling babies (about 9 months) and ramps test. When the babies were put in a room with care workers who didn't know their sex and let loose on ramps of varying steepness, there was no difference in the steepness of ramps the sexes could tackle. When put back in the room with their mothers, mothers of boy babies tended (on average) to correctly estimate the steepest ramp their child could tackle and leave them to get on with it, while mothers of girls tended (on average) to underestimate the steepness their child could tackle, and intervene and lift them off ramps they were perfectly safe and happy to explore. Multiply this effect over all the various small but significant sex-stereotypes we all carry around, and impose it on children whose brains are developing in response to the stimuli around them, stimuli which in turn are being selected and amplified or suppressed by the adults caring for them, and you get a situation where there is no way of knowing of a cognitive sex difference measured in adulthood whether it's innate or down to social conditioning.

Oh, and remember when people pop up to say "I thought it was nurture until my (single, unrepresentative sample of a) child did XYZ" that the plural of anecdote is not data!

[msrisotto]

Delusions of gender is another excellent book which debunks junk science and examines the real evidence. I'd highly recommend it.

[Trills]

People's brains vary among a large number of different axes, and I think that one person can be "in the typically-female direction" in one aspect and "in the typically-male direction" in another aspect.

I think it's highly likely that the curve for the majority of those axes looks like the d = 0.5 curve shown above, and so it's silly to do anything with those differences other than say "people vary - both men and women are most likely to be in the middle, and a man or a woman may be further along in either direction".

[Datun]

M0stly

In terms of transgenderism my niggling concern with this kind of study is that could a transperson, for instance, have a brain that is in the 3% of one of the extremes mentioned?

Could that give them the feeling that they were more one sex than the other?

From what I have read, there may well be a difference in the brain of a trans person, but it is a difference that is exclusive to trans, rather than any correlation with the sex they identify with.

[Trills]

you get a situation where there is no way of knowing of a cognitive sex difference measured in adulthood whether it's innate or down to social conditioning

Yep.

I think that what we are growing in, currently, is awareness of how much we don't know and how much we can't know.

We cannot know how much of "wanting to reproduce" (an example from above) is innate unless we take a large sample of newborn babies (unethical to obtain) and raise them entirely in an environment unaffected by existing culture (impossible to do) and then measure their desire to reproduce (tricky to measure). If we wanted to measure "ability at rotating 3d shapes in your head" the measurement step would be easier but the first two steps are still a bit of a problem.

[claritytobeclear]

because the brain is so plastic in early infancy through to 5 years, and we know from observational psychological studies that male and female infants and children are treated differently by the adults around them, it is impossible in principle to tell whether these tiny differences are due to nature or nurture.

However brain plasticity means that marked differences in the socialisation of males and female could potentially result in physiological differences. The New Scientist article, I made reference to in my previous post, IIRC found that men in societies that had more 'traditional' gender stereotypes had different levels of testosterone which is linked to aggression.

I was thinking that with the advance of feminism, and gender stereotypes being less rigid than previously, maybe what we are seeing, with people questioning their gender identity, is people who are physiologically different from previous generations reacting to traditional gender stereotypes and finding them insufficient? So they don't feel they 'fit' and decide that they are 'gender fluid'. But why we can't accept gender needs be more inclusive of how people want to present as belonging to their sex and reject the rigid gender stereotypes, I don't know. Maybe some people have also a need to identify with something?

[Datun]

reacting to traditional gender stereotypes and finding them insufficient? So they don't feel they 'fit' and decide that they are 'gender fluid'.

I'd find that more plausible if it was less about appearance and more about behaviour. If there was a sudden spike of women taking up stem subjects, or boys enrolling in cookery, campaigning for part time work and paternity pay.

If sexual objectification levels were going down, rather than up.

It all seems to be about the label, the clothing and an 'identity' that doesn't translate into real life behaviour.

Feminists want to dismantle gender roles, but you don't see a whole hoard of youngsters taking up feminism. If young women are feeling the constriction of gender roles, you would expect them to be drawn to feminism. If anything, the opposite is true.

[Trills]

brain plasticity means that marked differences in the socialisation of males and female could potentially result in physiological differences

True. Like taxi drivers doing The Knowledge.

So when we talk about "having different brains" we should be clear as to whether we are talking about having brains that were different to start with, or brains that may have been the same to start with but are different now.

My experience suggests that it will be difficult to talk about acquired brain differences without being drowned in people insisting that this means men and women are different (and meaning innately different).

[Trills]

you don't see a whole hoard of youngsters taking up feminism.

I think that's at least partly due to the relative amounts of coverage you get

[claritytobeclear]

Datun but like lots of things, there are fluctuations in how rigid gender stereotypes are. There might have been advances in the socialisation of children, with regards to gender stereotypes being less rigid than before, whilst some of this generation were in infancy. However this is set against there being still many mixed messages regarding gender, with more traditional cultures also coming to the fore and different ideologies being increasingly accessible with advancing technology. So what the current generation of young people has had is very mixed messages. Is it any surprise the reaction might be not as we expected?

[Trills]

You get coverage for Emma Watson speaking at the UN, or possibly for Maisie Williams saying “I [also] feel like we should stop calling feminists ‘feminists’ and just start calling people who aren’t feminist ‘sexist’ – and then everyone else is just human,” but non-famous women being more interested in feminism doesn't get into the news, whereas "trans" is the current clickbaity word, where any tiny thing will get coverage and some people are inventing things just for the clicks (see recent articles on women dressing as men to go to war, with no indication that they identified as men, just that they wanted to go to war and this was the only way).

So of course it's going to feel like more people are talking about being gender-fluid than are talking about feminism, but that doesn't mean that's what's happening in people's actual lives.

[claritytobeclear]

So when we talk about "having different brains" we should be clear as to whether we are talking about having brains that were different to start with, or brains that may have been the same to start with but are different now.

Hate to say it, but this is further complicated by Epigenetics, that is altered gene expression caused by environment, being able to be passed from parent to child. So some (sex determined) differences could be 'innate', that is present at birth, within some societies/pockets of society but not to others as a result of environment.

[Trills]

Good old epigenetics, making things more complicated since before we knew it existed :o

[Datun]

Is it any surprise the reaction might be not as we expected?

Except the reaction is exactly what I would expect.

Youngers have rejected norms in appearance in every single generation. Mods, punk, goth, emo.

It's a necessary part of the rejection of authority and a useful boundary pushing exercise.

Helicopter parenting has been in existence for the last 15 odd years.

A lot of these children would have had far more of a child-centric upbringing than the previous generations.

I'm not sure it's a coincidence that when youngsters talk about their identity, they come across as ego-centric. It's rarely just an incidental part of their life. It is their life.

[claritytobeclear]

Well, yes trills. But don't forget Epigenetics is good also, as it shows that the right socialisation can impact more than a single generation. It does show how important socialisation is - it actually rewrites our biology to some extent. However this does mean though, whilst extremely worthwhile, it might be harder to tackle rigid gender stereotypes within very traditional (pockets of) societies, as people can be essentially biologically adapted, at least in part, to some of them.

[Jijhebtseksmetezels]

Feminists want to dismantle gender roles, but you don't see a whole hoard of youngsters taking up feminism. If young women are feeling the constriction of gender roles, you would expect them to be drawn to feminism. If anything, the opposite is true.

I would say it takes a brave teenage girl to declare herself a feminist when the peer culture that she seeks to fit into equates feminism with man-hating ball-breakers who will never get a boyfriend.

And when she seeks, quite naturally, to make herself attractive to the opposite sex. Feminist discourse isn't exactly "cool" is it?!

[Datun]

Jijhebtseksmetezels

Sadly, I agree. But it flies in the face of the assertion that this generation wants to deconstruct gender.

They can't have it both ways. Either they want to deconstruct gender and find some movement to do that, or deconstructing gender is only the superficial expression du jour.