Making himself sound clever since 2002

[hirez]

Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women.

[ From here]

Comments

[bogwitch64]

So...you're not diggin' this, eh? ;)

[hirez]

I merely report, though I do agree. Men are from Earth, women are from Earth; get over it.

[bogwitch64]

While I do believe there are inherent differences between PEOPLE, those differences are not simply relegated to gender, and it's stupid to state that it is. The problem with the word "normal" is that no one seems to remember that it doesn't mean "this is the way everyone is and those outside this parameter are DIFFERENT." Normal is simply midway between one extreme or another. There are as few "normal" people as there are on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Most of us live, love, and EXIST in those places between.

[aca]

I was totally with you until you brought Reddich into this. Toilet of a town.

[sarah_mum]

Yes, but doesn't the Mars/Venus myth prop up the whole transgender business rather neatly? I mean, if there is no real difference between the male and female brain, then there's less force behind the "trapped in the wrong body" thing.
Tremendous over-simplification there, and yet it troubles me that people who strongly support transgender issues can simultaniously argue that there is no gender difference.
Societally, of course there is and that's where changes need to be made, not to the individual but to the collective.

[hirez]

Only if you take the Essentialist/Bindel viewpoint.

[hirez]

To expand, I think the things are orthogonal. Inasmuch as some people are good with OS maps and other people aren't, meanwhile some people are happiest presenting as female and other people dig to present as male.

Fitting into tiresome little boxes is a 'problem' caused by outside influences.

[sushidog]

Not hugely; we know that at least part of gender identity is innate (see the tragic John/Joan case from the 60s), but innate doesn't necessarily mean "hard-wired at the neural level by genetics". In utero environment, for example, seems to have some effect on both gender identity and sexuality.

To be fair, there actually are some (minor) structural differences between male brains and female brains (and transgendered brains seem to fall somewhere in between). But so far, we can't actually find any cognitive abilities, personality traits, or whatever, which seem to be linked to those differences; they appear to be purely structural and not functional. We may figure out, at some point, that they do do something interesting, but we can say, fairly definitively, that they don't, as some have claimed, make men good at science and women good at language, or control our urge to shop, or whatever.