I can hardly believe this but the science museum are working with gendered intelligence

[ageingrunner]

genderedintelligence.co.uk/arts-projects/past

Can this be true?

Plus, of course - it's not just actually that they have 'boy-brains' - but that they should* be boys - and in comes the breast binding, the puberty blocking hormones and stuff.

Probably most kids old enough to do this 'test' will be able to guess the 'right' answers?

DespairingPhysicist, do you know any well known scientists and what they might think about this kind of thing? I guess we need experts to speak out.

It's not the first time I've been told that having spatial awareness is a male quality but previously I don't recall that being endorsed by anyone important. I can't pretend to be an expert on any scientific matter but I am seriously concerned about this. It was never the case that I'd get told anything like this at school. I can really see young girls being steered away from STEM and told to just marry a man or something...how is this happening? id say it's setting feminism back much more than ten years.

I meant ten decades, Lorelei. I think this is taking us back to the times prior to winning the vote - because 'lady brains' in those days weren't deemed capable of enough rational though to vote.

*thought to vote.

Sorry Under, my fault for skimming.

Utterly depressing

oh no I've just done the test and I have a man's brain. What do I do now?!

Lorelei, I was thinking it through. I was originally thinking 30 or 40 years - but that just took us back to the 70's.

I grew up in the 70's - and there was not so much rigid gender roles then - no way. It's actually got worse.

There was a (humorous) saying when I was in my teens (I'm 45) hat such-and-such had "put feminism back 30yrs" - such things would be "page 3 girls" and such.

Now I'm thinking this goes so much further back.

Problem solved. DH has done the test and has a woman's brain so we can just swap...

Just looked at Twitter on this subject
iPad gives me a weird view so it's not quite up to date
However I can see one person who I'm quite sure thinks that a trans woman means someone who doesn't have a penis
A reasonable assumption but sadly no longer accurate
Once again, I wonder how many people, women in particular, say they support trans rights because they are assuming surgery has happened.

And the naïveté of someone saying she can't imagine a man pretending in order to access a women only space

Argh, I don't cope well with idealists!

From the photos of the exhibition shared on this thread, it's clear that the creators of this exhibition think that gender identity and gender are the same thing. Was this done as deliberate misrepresentation or just through lazy ignorance? Either way, I think it reflects very badly on the so-called "Science" Museum. Then there is the scientifically unsupported "ladybrain" rubbish. I suspect these are not the only shortcomings.

The supporters of gender identity take someone saying "I have a man's body but I feel like a woman" and then add "feelings are scientific evidence that biology is wrong". That's not science. (It's like claiming that it's impossible for rape victims to become pregnant).

Science museums have a long and dark history of presenting pseudoscience and popular social philosophies as if they were science , for example, many supposedly "serious science" exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s about eugenics, and phrenology before that.

I think that a museum of social philosophy could probably legitimately examine gender identity as social philosophy but not as science.

vesuvia "it's clear that the creators of this exhibition think that gender identity and gender are the same thing"

now I'm confused. Gender isn't a real thing anyway so what would gender identity be....I can see why gender and gender ID would be the same thing if you believe in gender in the first place.

but if you think gender is a social construct then the two are the same thing?

Lorelei76 wrote - "Gender isn't a real thing anyway so what would gender identity be"

It depends what you mean by real.

Gender is an idea or a set of rules. Gender is a social construct. It is a social hierarchy that values men above women, and oppresses women because of female biology. These rules would not exist without social support. Gender could be stopped today if society really wanted to stop the oppression of women. Unlike the sun rising every morning, gender is not a physical phenomenon, independent of people's attitudes and feelings. We can't touch these gender rules like an object but we can observe their real effects on real people. People don't have a gender as part of their biology. Gender is about the ways in which people are "encouraged", expected or more usually forced to adopt a masculine gender role based on their male biological sex or a feminine gender role based on their female biological sex.

Gender is also used as a supposed synonym for biological sex e.g. on application forms and official documents.

Gender identity is e.g. males saying "I feel like a woman" etc.

Supporters of the idea of gender identity believe that everyone is born with a gender and that some people are comfortable with the gender they were born with and other people are uncomfortable with the gender they were born with.

There is no scientific evidence to support gender being a biological phenomenon and not a social phenomenon

By that I mean scientists can't say this body part is called a person's "gender" like we can point at a liver and say this organ is called "the liver". So, supporters of gender identity are forced to retreat to the last bastion of soundrels, the "ladybrain".

right vesuvia, so we agree that gender is a nonsensical social construct?

so why does it matter what gender identity is, all it is doing is allocating more crap to the social construct.

in that respect I'd say gender and gender identity are the same thing but why would I care?

what I care about is that "gender" is becoming more important when it should be gone by now.

Lorelei76 wrote - "why does it matter what gender identity is, all it is doing is allocating more crap to the social construct."

It matters because gender identity's contributions to the social construct of gender are some of the most patriarchy-reinforcing and influential ideas ever encountered by gender-critical feminists.

Gender identity needs gender roles and it needs them to be as restrictive and as unchangeable as possible. In an attempt to ensure it's survival, the social construct of gender identity has had to search for something that it reckons it can get away with claiming is innate and unchangeable. It has chosen to stake its existence on gender. Therefore, gender identity is now claiming that gender is a biological fact and innate and not a social construct.

In a world that worships gender identity and therefore gender, which is patriarchy's foundation, patriarchal society cannot fail to be better equipped to justify its unfair and harmful treatment of women and girls as second-class people by claiming that it is natural and inescapable, like it did until feminism came along. This reinforcement of patriarchy could undo all the gains of second wave feminism of 1960-1990 and reset the rights of women and girls in the developed world back to pre-1960 levels. We have already started moving in this direction.

• in this post I've used "gender identity" as shorthand for "the ideas used to justify the existence of gender identity"

vesuvia "therefore, gender identity is now claiming that gender is a biological fact and innate and not a social construct. "

no offence, probably me being thick, but what you are saying is actually the same as what I'm saying I think.

my worry is that people are trying to mix up biological facts with gender crap that's based on nothing scientific. Is it fair to say that's your worry too?

Gosh. Im not well read up on all this but my daughter (7) is proud to say things "for boys" should be for everyone, likes all sorts of activities etc. We're in a low income, very pink princess area and already shes had people call her a tomboy. She watched a cbbc my life story about a "boy in a girls body" which was bad enough with her questions. Can't believe the science museum could add to her idea that's something wrong with her brain as ot doesn't just like stereotypical girly things.

Scarf - Yesterday on another thread I said I was glad my DD is 17 not 7 . When she was 6 and a teacher told her that girls couldn't be 'builders' she was outraged, and had no doubt that it was the teacher who was wrong, not her - which of course we confirmed. (Miss M was being a bit old-fashioned and silly, of course girls can build things) .Shes at a uni open day today checking out an engineering department - her 100% female brain is good at that stuff!

Hum well.... Hopefully a museum will one day have this sort of tripe correctly identified as old-fashioned sexist psuedoscience ...I think its really some sort of arts project.

I'm not sure science is a great well to dip into here at the present moment. We are colossally in the dark when it comes to the brain. Very fundamental questions are still yet to be answered, like how does consciousness form? or even why we even need sleep?

Even neuroscience hasn't allowed us to conclusively answer central philosophical conundrums concerning nature vs nurture, or even determinism vs free will.

I can see why current feminist thought has a vested interest in debunking this lady brain concept, just as the powers that be may have in promoting it. However I don't think either side conclusively has enough understanding to say definitively.

The recent study that indicates we all mostly have mixed brains seems eminently reasonable, but it does indicate that some % of people (6-8% iirc) have stereotypically male/female brains. I think could still account for things like gender dysmorphia, as transsexuality is not that common, so if you have this relatively rare male/female brain AND your body doesn't match up it would account for trans experiences.

I also question why the brain itself has become the battleground it has in the gender wars. We could all have exactly the same factory default settings brains, and have everything thrown into disarray by the endocrine system particularly with the onset of puberty. Although even that doesn't resolve questions over nature vs nurture or determinism vs free will.

Dervel wrote - "I can see why current feminist thought has a vested interest in debunking this lady brain concept, just as the powers that be may have in promoting it. However I don't think either side conclusively has enough understanding to say definitively."

I just want to clarify that "ladybrain" is not opposed by feminists on the basis that differences in the brains of male and female people have never been found or will never be found. It's opposed by feminists because feminists are confident that any differences would be used to justify discrimination against women and girls. This confidence is based on actual evidence of assumed or bogus differences already having been used to discriminate against women in the past.

Dervel, you believe in male and female brains? In what way do they differ?

I don't "believe" anything with regards to the brain Lorelei76. That's my whole point we don't know. Considering how little we know about the brain.

I've observed differences in male/female behaviour, what the causes of those differences are re: nature vs nurture I am completely lost at sea, and have no earthly clue.

I have also observed similarities in men and women also, which leads me to align with Socrates position from over two thousand years ago which is to say any differences between men and women are so slight that there is no logical grounds from barring women from any endeavour a man might choose to do.

Furthmore measures of general intelligence reveal no major differences between men and women, so that leads to the conclusion that there should be no impediments to opportunity for either sex.

Where I am a little cautious in going too far down the rabbit hole of assuming our brains are identical is that I am dyslexic and as such have more than a passing interest in how my brain is structured vs a normal one.

When last I looked into it (and more current research may supersede it), there seemed to be data to suggest differences between male and female dyslexics. Which iirc involves more the connections between regions of the brain rather than the regions themselves.

A case was made at the time that services designed to help dyslexics assumed male as the default, and there may be ways of assisting female dyslexics tailored to them.

It would be a shame to close off avenues of inquiry that could help more women achieve their potential simply over an ideological purity.

Furthermore there are correlations between some psychiatric disorders and sex, like for example ASD which something like four times as likely in boys (although the jury is out on wether girls are are better at hiding the symptoms).

It's possible that the answer doesn't lie in the brain at all, but perhaps the endocrine system. It's possible girls are insulated through the social bonding hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.