Myth of pink brain blue brain

Raising children child centrically, is just that. You can either reinforce or not reinforce, or simply not have it on your radar at all . It doesn't dictate the way you're going to raise them.

Yes, people get the balance wrong, but the rise of the individual surely has come about from challenging stereotypes, prejudices and preconceptions?

What has the 'rise of the individual' achieved, apart from a difference in clothing and appearance? And a determination that your self expression must, at all costs, be validated.

So I use the correct pronouns and recognise your right to self expression, then what?

Campaigning to encourage girls into stem subjects, is actually doing something. Encouraging boys to cook for themselves, sew up their own clothes, etc, dismantles the roles dictated by the notion of gender stereotypes.

Because whilst you have millennials becoming non-binary and saying they reject things, again, I don't see any real effect happening. Other than an insistence on respect and validation. (Albeit not just for themselves, but for other people's identity, too).

And yet at exactly the same time, the rise of transgenderism is actively reinforcing gender stereotyping.

The notion of a lady brain.

One can pontificate endlessly about concept of transgenderism, but in reality most transwomen will embrace the notion of 'femininity' as much as possible to express their 'inner woman'. But only the bits that they themselves find attractive. Would be great if they maintained they were still male, but no, this desire for femininity must mean they are female.

I see a high level of attention seeking in both these strands of self identity. It has always been my feeling that if someone craves attention, there's generally a good reason for it.

Could it not be that a child centric upbringing leaves a void when they suddenly go out into the world to, say, university? Particularly for the millennial kids who change their gender identity on a regular basis.

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

I agree. I find it quite baffling that on the one hand many will say gender stereotyping, roles etc are outdated and limiting then on the other support anyone being able to "identify as a woman" and that being enough for them to be one for the most spurious of reasons seemingly always around gender.

Jihebtseksmetezels I take your point and it is probably often the case but there are plenty of teenage girls who aren't bothered about boyfriends or being attractive to boys. I know of a number of schools which have feminist groups, my own included. Having said this I do realise these schools aren't reflective of most.

I'm also well aware of the reaction being a feminist gets from quite a number of boys (though not all as I have a few good male friends who are supportive).

Yes, chapter 11 pg 123 ish of Delusions of Gender if you happen to have a copy to hand.

From what I've seen of monkey social groups on TV, gender roles seem very defined. It does not mean they could not adapt, just have not.

I'm sure Fine discusses it in Delusions of Gender, and points out all the issues with it.

Has this study in monkeys been debunked?

www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/

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

But, surely, being more 'child-centric' is an appropriate response to the move to reject rigid stereotypes. What is good for one child, is not necessarily good for another. Yes, people get the balance wrong, but the rise of the individual surely has come about from challenging stereotypes, prejudices and preconceptions?

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.

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?!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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".

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

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!