Hey there, I saw your post about WEG and the gender conversation. Please do not claim that the differences between men and women's brains are cultural. They are biological and this is a fact. Please stop speaking on these things you know nothing about. Thank you.
Hey anon! I don’t know if this is a serious message or not, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt + I’d like to take this as an opportunity to talk about sexed brains (because this is probably my favourite topic in neuroscience at the moment, and I could go on about it for days). I’m going to go right ahead and assume that you’re taking gender and sex to mean roughly equivalent things -- that is, they’re both the going ons in the brain that makes someone “male” or “female”.
I want to start by noting that nowhere in my essay did I say that the difference between “female” and "male” brains are purely cultural. In fact, differences in “female” and "male” brains are by definition, a biological difference... because a difference in brain structure is a difference in biology. (And I do, explicitly say in my essay that “female” and “male” brains are different. Did you even read my essay? Or did you just see “gender essentialism” and write my essay down as load of bull?) What I did, however, say is that a purely biological account for differences in gender is insufficient, and that WEP’s narrative is particularly interested in the cultural and social aspects of gender.
Next, “female” and “male” brains don’t differ as much as you think. There’s actually way more variation within a given sex’s brain than between the “two sexes” (I don’t think the traditional binary model of sex, at least when talking about brains, is nuanced enough. Hence the quotation marks). For instance, a study looking at brains of 1.4k people actually found a huge overlap in “female” and “male” brains in terms of structure of grey and white matter... and when they averaged across all the brains scanned, 92% of the participants didn’t actually follow the averaged sex-typical pattern (Joel et al., 2015). Basically, there’s no such thing as a “male” or “female” brain. If you gave a neuroscientist a brain and asked them if it was a “male” brain or a “female” brain, their chances of getting it right won’t be greater than if they were just guessing lol. And we get this much variation just by looking at cis brains; we haven’t even touched intersex brains. I’m not saying biological differences don’t exist, but I’m just saying that they, by and large, aren’t as great or all-encompassing as you may think.
I think the most important problem with the argument, “Well, sex differences are biological, so they can’t be cultural!” is that.... biology is literally influenced by experience. There’s a huge body of neuroscientific literature pointing to the plasticity of the brain in relation to sex! We know that AFAB and AMAB people have hugely different experiences navigating the world, and that these differences can lead to structural sex differences in the brain. Just to give an example, did ya know that soothing a crying baby actually decreases testosterone levels in cis men? Or that when cis women roleplay having power over someone (eg. firing a subordinate), they actually show increases in testosterone? Even the smallest experiences such as these can create significant differences in the brain! Now imagine what repeated and constant exposure to sex-typed roles can do, especially in the developing brains of children. Basically, what I’m trying to get at here is that the observation that the “female” brain is different from the “male” brain tells us very little about what role culture/experience does or does not play in the sexed brain. Biology is not immutable. Biology does not exist in a vacuum.
Sex is complicated, and without a doubt, partially situated in biology. But to pretend as if biology isn’t deeply entangled with lived experience is straight up incorrect.
love your thoughts on wonder egg priority ep 4, will you be writing any more analysis of the show? :)
hi anon, thank you! yes, i do have plans to keep writing about wep. i am just taking a break because it’s midterm season, and i am being massacred. i hope to be back my next week!
