From a NYT op-ed by Elinor Burkett called "What Makes a Woman?" Read the whole thing. Burkett makes a lot of points, though virtually nothing the actual organ, the brain. Burkett finds a neuroscientist to quote who asserts that that "the difference between male and female brains are caused by the 'drip, drip, drip' of the gendered environment." Focused on preserving the success of the women's movement, Burkett ends up here:
The struggle to move beyond [gender] stereotypes is far from over, and trans activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.This NYT piece does have a comments section. By far, the most up-voted comment is: "I was disappointed that Caitlyn Jenner came out as a sexpot. A stereotypically male stereotypical vision of what a woman is."
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50 comments:
Women's brains are shaped by the drip drip drip of not being interested in math.
The question "what do you want to be when you grow up" just added a lot more options.
I am Laslo.
Female human's brains average less mass than male human's brains.
Richard Herrnstein once asked in lecture, roughly, "Who here thinks African Americans and white Americans have different DNA?" About half of the students raised their hands. He said that he had been asking that question routinely and that in the 70s, almost nobody raised a hand.
Come, let us be obvious.
"For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it." - http://biblehub.com/matthew/19-12.htm
I know facts no longer matter. But I'll try anyway. Look at the freshman class entering engineering vs the graduating class. I know anecdotally that with my son, the freshman orientation was 58% female, and at graduating there were 3. The female freshman were all in the top 2% of their highschool class. All with AP credits that allowed them to skip some freshman classes. In the end, the girls dont like the puzzle that is engineering. Engineering is much more than book learning, where girls exceed. The notions that there are 2 or three or six correct solutions drive girls nuts.
Girls and boys are different.
Who knew?
I will not read the whole thing. I rely on Prof. Althouse to read dopey liberal feminists wrestling with the contradictions of their ideology so that I don't have to.
iowan2, but interestingly, some of the best mathematicians have been women.
I think the popular notion that women lead with emotion and men with logic is backward. Both can be emotional and logical. But women, in my experience, tend to be more logical, on average, than men, and men tend to be more fanatic, on average, than women.
We need both.
Jenner (see what I did?) has a male vision!
Unexpectedly.
The Left calls the Right anti-science !!!
Ugh, More of the weird obsession to make women more like men and men more like women. There are differences between the sexes. That's a good thing for both. Deal with it.
It would be good if Althouse gave up the New Times and the New Yorker for a month, to see how her blogging was impacted. In my opinion, she built this blog with her awesome, first hand accounts of the Walker battles with the Wisconsin Legislature (flee-baggers). Gender-bending and navel gazing re the New York Times? Not so much.
Jenner should become President of Harvard and make a movie about it, "Legally Male."
There are very significant differences between male and female brains and the activity patterns within them. With the advent of advanced imaging, more stress was placed on the activity, but before that it was known that there were structural patterns of difference.
Wiki has a decent introduction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences
Upon thinking it over, I have to say that there is lot wrong with the women's equality movement in more recent times and that Jenner can have nothing to do with it. We are moving steadily back to the cultural idea that women are fragile objects who must be sheltered and protected and treated very differently than men in a number of environments that are NOT sexually biased naturally, and obviously that is fatal to the essence of the original movement.
A return to the concept of individuality and choice might be useful here. One can accept that Jenner's body is now closer to Jenner's conception of what it ought to be while also accepting that Jenner's view of what that body ought to be doesn't match with that of most women his age, that the pressures and ideals Jenner has may be different than the female norm, and that we are all free to go our own ways.
I write as someone who often comes up as "male" in various tests designed to determine psychological/cognitive differences, although I am biologically female and comfortable being so.
Jenner is in the Hollywood environment, and that is about as far from the average experience as one can get.
Yup. Transgender ism is at odds with feminism. Point it out then get out the popcorn.
almost entirely mutable.
Almost entirely ignorant.
Here's the thing. There is no science behind the fact that transgendered people have "male" or "female" brains. That is simply JUNK science.
If someone had a brain and held it up and said "is this the brain of a transgendered person" would they be able to tell? No because there is no way to tell.
At the same time we know that there are inherent characteriztics that most boys or girls share that identify them as girls and boys. Not to mention behaviors. So, the feminists are wrong. But, so are the transgendered.
Well for one thing:
"The corpus callosum and its relation to sex has been a subject of debate in the scientific and lay communities for over a century. Initial research in the early 20th century claimed the corpus to be different in size between men and women. That research was in turn questioned, and ultimately gave way to more advanced imaging techniques that appeared to refute earlier correlations. However, advanced analytical techniques of computational neuroanatomy developed in the 1990s showed that sex differences were clear but confined to certain parts of the corpus callosum, and that they correlated with cognitive performance in certain tests.[6] One recent study using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) found that the midsagittal corpus callosum cross-sectional area is, on average, proportionately larger in females.[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum)
Headline reminds me that men have a penis that has its own brain linked to make a super brain that comes in handy in war. The women are unibrained and must be protected by the bibrained aggressives.
There are behavioral differences that are almost certainly dude to hormone effects. Some of these hormones have different effects on males and females.
Feminism is turning in upon itself and, like most OCD behavior, is going to end up immobilized by its neuroses.
One small example.
The findings seem to reflect an up to now unknown long-term influence of the physiological early hormonal surge on the subsequent male but not female somatic development.
Jenner is in the Hollywood environment, and that is about as far from the average experience as one can get.
This! I am so glad I got outta there 40 years ago. The place was dominated by gays even then..when my best friend from high school said she felt *guilty* for basically being hetero, I decided the place was just tooo crazy to live there the rest of my life.
I came to Mantana, she moved to NYC and her ex stayed in LA and died of AIDS.
Yes!!
Because "It was on sale" is completely meaningless to a man.
That piece does little to represent women as capable of thinking well nor being independent.
That piece does little to represent women as capable of thinking well nor being independent.
Well, to be honest, that is a tough job.....
Today's Ace of Spades has an entry worth thinking about.
However, how men and women interact with each other, the steps of the mating dance, is far more complicated. And the feminist square-peg-in-a-round-hole narrative totally ignores the popularity of the "bodice-ripping" romance novels, which are almost universally written by women for women, and hardly ever read by men. And the market is huge. Women are buying these books by the truckload. I found a list of supposedly the best bodice ripper novels and the intro is instructive:
This is a list for Bodice Ripper romance novels that you think are a 5 star read. The best of the best - with alpha heroes, un-politically correct action, forced seduction, rape, sold into slavery plot lines, mistresses and cheating - the no-holds bar world of Bodice Ripper!
There are demonstrated, gender-based, differences in functions as shown by differences in the "Bell Curves" as to such matters as engineering and mathematics. (It appears that, on that basis, young women may have an advantage in high-level mathematics.)
Military performance is likely based on: Upper body strength; And, the history of males a aggressive hunters VS. females a gatherers.
"Do women and men have different brains?"
I thought everyone had a different brain. I didn't know you could share.
They can't even answer: what makes a human. What makes them believe that they can answer a question about gender? Progressive confusion has taken its tool on civilization.
I love that word, "sexpot." I remember the first time I heard it was in a letter to the editor complaining that Cheryl Ladd on Charlie's Angels was just a sexpot. The etymology suggests that it may have derived from fleshpot (places offering unrestrained sexual amusement or a vessel containing flesh).
I would assume that the female brain has a vestigial vagina in it, somewhere, but I'm not a scientist.
"but interestingly, some of the best mathematicians have been women."
Not surprising or paradoxical to anyone with a knowledge of statistics and probability distributions.
Of course there are sexual differences between most male and most female brains, and to pretend differently is silly. For example, the two hemispheres in female brains tend to be better interconnected than for males. And the speech centers for females tend to be more diffuse, apparently allowing themto regain speech more often than males after suffering a stroke. I expect that doctors or researchers who spend their careers looking at images of brains are pretty good at guessing at the sex of a brain, just as there are small differences that an expert can use to distinguish between many/most bones in the body. The author was just exhibiting their progressive biases when claiming the opposite. Anyone married long enough knows that the two sexes are different. The reason that I was qualifying though is that there are apparently males with more female looking brains, and maybe visa versa. No surprise that there is sometimes a sexual orientation correlation here, since both appear to be a function of male hormones in utero changing the default female brain.
Which brings us to more of the core here. At least with male homosexuals, there appear to be two different places or aspects involving brains. One is actual sexual orientation, and the other is sexual strategy, and maybe receptivity. The first is whether someone sexually prefers (or even demands) male or female sex partners. The other is whether someone prefers being the sexual aggressor or the recipient of sexual aggression (which is why the Dear Colleague letters from the Dept of Education inherently violate Title IX). Males tend to prefer sex with females and to be the sexual aggressor, and females tend to prefer the opposite. But not always. For example, there are gay males wired to be the sexual aggressor, and some wired to play the female role.
But that really isn't the issue here, except for tha author to proclaim their progressive/feminist bona fides. Rather, I suspect what is really going on is a fight for victim/aggrieved status on the left. Guys are getting to horn in on women's special victim status by just taking some hormones, and maybe ultimately having a bit of cosmetic and reassignment surgery. And, indeed, M/F trannies are especially blessed in this regard by being able to take advantage of female victim status PLUS being LGBTetc. So, essentially, we are now seeing women having to put up with guys in their bathrooms just because the guys dress as women and claim to be transvestites. That, of course isn't fair to the women who grew up female, having periods and subjugated to the patriarchy. And, hence the article.
But, they have to tread a fine line. If you have to walk in the shoes of a class in order to gain the benefit of their victim status, then why did they support Barack Obama as the first Black President? He most likely faced few, if any, of the Black experiences that Blacks claim make them specially victimized. He wasn't descended from American slaves, but more likely the slavers who sold those slaves. He grew up either abroad or with white grandparents, and went to an exclusive interracial school in interracial Hawaii. And he had none of the qualifications that would suggest that he would do a decent job, or be successful in the position.
Paco Wové said...
Bob Ellison said... "but interestingly, some of the best mathematicians have been women."
Not surprising or paradoxical to anyone with a knowledge of statistics and probability distributions.
Not true, either.
Mathematics is a man's game. A gender gap appears early in life, blossoms with the onset of puberty and reaches full bloom by mid-adolescence. ... A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years.
Trigger warning: statistics and probability distributions.
Also.
"But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism. 'My brain is much more female than it is male,' he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender….""
Right. Jenner is a conservative Republican playing a deep game messing with the Progs, reinforcing old gender distinctions by exploiting PC pop culture tropes to claim sympathy for a "transgender" woman-with-a-penis. Brilliant.
"A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years."
Your reference is slightly outdated, as there has been 1 (one) female Fields Medalist since. And after a mere 84 years!
The NYT said... buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks...
I am inclined to stop here. Minor differences from chimp brains create Beethoven.
If gender is real it is brain anatomy. We have not mapped the brain and indeed human beings may never map the human brain (I suggest a robot will accomplish that first). No one on any side should be arguing with any confidence for or against gender itself. It is like the soul, or god, in that if it did not exist we would have needed to invent it anyway.
I wonder what conservatives would say if gender is discovered as brain structure. This would be a microscopic portion of tissue that was as definitively masculine or feminine as is balls or vulva. (Which is to say, an inconvenient spectrum.) The discovery would verify the claims of transgender people but also provide a path to a cure to their angst about being in the wrong body. I as a gay person find the idea of a gay cure offensive. However. If a pill could solve the feeling of being transgendered, wouldn't that be preferable to any set of surgeries and need for psychotheraphy?
Well, Althouse, your brain obviously works differently from mine. I doubt that that's all gender.
"there has been 1 (one) female Fields Medalist since. And after a mere 84 years!"
And Lisa Sauermann won the International Mathematics Olympiad in 2011, so there's that.
The U.S. team rarely has a female member. Few, if any, have won a gold medal (Sherry Gong in 2007).
It will be interesting to see where this conflict goes, because it is a very deep conflict between groups that want to be allies.
An axiom of the 70's based feminists is that other than trivial and unimportant external ones, there are no differences between men and women. This is an extremely powerful axiom. If you accept it then any differences between men and women that appear in society can only be explained by the repression of that society of women and hence the patriarchy. Historically anyone who questioned this was, if a man, denounced as merely a man and supporting his own interest, or if a woman, a turncoat and someone deluded by the system.
However, it is an axiom of the transgender community that there are significant and important differences between the minds of men and women and that those differences are not a societal construct but have real physiological basis. Otherwise, how can one support the concept that one is in the wrong body for one's mind?
These axioms are incompatible. One cannot hold both as true without running into contradictions. And as can be seen in the conflict in women's colleges these contradictions are arising and unresolvable.
These groups are natural allies in that both wish to gain position in society by being an oppressed group. In the current system, such usually work together. But these incompatible axioms will cause strong tension that must ultimately disrupt this alliance. The article in question is an example and a good indication of the problems that will become more manifest over times.
It will be interesting to see where this conflict goes, because it is a very deep conflict between groups that want to be allies.
It is. And how typical of feminists' sense of entitlement that Burkett should treat this fundamental disagreement on a question of fact as if it were an etiquette fail on the part of the trannies.
DougWeber:
They will avoid reconciliation of diametrically opposed positions, logic, morality, etc. through establishment of separate domains, and what animosity, integrity, conscience remains, will be suppressed with redistribution of secular incentives and other inducements (i.e. opiates). They will appoint "minority leaders", teachers, journalists to ensure the narrative is spun and propagated, and the people will comply with their plan.
Burkett finds a neuroscientist to quote who asserts that that "the difference between male and female brains are caused by the 'drip, drip, drip' of the gendered environment."
What utter nonsense not supported by research.
You'd think there would be some common sense in the world. One is to believe that male and female bodies look different, their organs are different, their hormones are different, their rates of diseases are different, but their brains are exactly alike. Males and females should let them know that they are alike in at least one respect: they're not stupid enough to believe that.
Can't we all agree: Women are better at some things, and men are worse at some things.
"...thousands of women once confined to jobs as secretaries, beauticians or flight attendants now work as welders, mechanics and pilots. It’s why our daughters play with trains and trucks as well as dolls, and why most of us feel free to wear skirts and heels on Tuesday and bluejeans on Friday."
I remember in the 60's when women demanded the right to wear pants to school, and in the 70's there were women studying engineering. I was happy to see them expand their lives. They were staking out the territory in these and many other arenas that would ultimately empower me to swap sides. I'm not inclined to the skirts and heels and thankfully I don't have to.
Women are better at nice to look at. Also flowers.
My take on the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner story is the following: It is a circus, and I would include as one of the rings in that circus all the feminists prattling on about how Jenner has upset the apple cart by reinforcing stereotypes about women's essential nature. If these feminists were not just one of the circus rings in the show, they'd have long ago given a lot of attention and praise to Deirdre McCloskey, and paid very little attention to Jenner. Deirdre McCloskey is in my view the greatest living economist. Deirdre was also once Donald McCloskey, and along with her enormously significant work on economic history, she has also written intelligently about her passage from one to another gender. So why don't the feminists tout McCloskey as a roll model and give her even a tenth of the attention they have of late lavished on (while complaining about) Jenner? Could it be because they are all awash in the celebrity culture they claim to disdain? Could it be because McCloskey is a libertarian economist who celebrates the bourgeois virtues as the engines of the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries? Who knows. They are all too fake and pretentious to bother with even this much, so I will just leave it at that.
I'll take "McCloskey is a libertarian economist who celebrates the bourgeois virtues as the engines of the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries" for a dollar, Alex.
No useful narrative traction, no "fame" for Deirdre.
The author of the NYT piece is a typically dishonest feminist. She writes When Mr. Jenner looked for a job to support himself during his training for the 1976 Olympics, he didn’t have to turn to the meager “Help Wanted – Female” ads in the newspapers.
There wasn't a "Help Wanted - Female" section by 1976. And if jobs for college-age men paid better than jobs for college-age women back then, that's because they required physical strength of the sort most women don't have.
You can know when you're movement has been infested by Leftists when the goal shifts from equal opportunity to equal outcome.
Did somebody say McCloskey?
Ow...teaming up with SPLC...
From http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/opinion/the-price-of-jenners-heroism.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0:
The French writer Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born a woman, one becomes one.” She was referring to the innumerable embellishments, codes of behavior and self-censoring acts required by femininity, the turning of the self into a prestige commodity. In becoming a woman before our eyes, Caitlyn Jenner proves that little has changed since 1949, when de Beauvoir wrote those words. To be admired in the public eye, to be seen, a woman must still conform to an astonishingly long, often contradictory list of physical demands — the most important being that she not visibly age.
While the fanfare around the emergence of Caitlyn may advance our acceptance of transgendered individuals, it does so, in this case, at a price: the perpetuation, even celebration, of narrow and dehumanizing strictures of womanhood sustained by the fashion and entertainment industries. True liberation of gender’s vast spectrum should ask more of us than that we simply exchange one uncomfortable, oppressive identity for another.
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