I just took a test to see whether I had a male or female brain. This is how it goes: you clasp your hands in front of you, and check whether your left or right thumb is on top of the other. Right thumb on top? You’re basically a woman. Left thumb on top? Come over and join me in the man camp — we have Nintendo 64s.
Devastated as I am that my brain is apparently in complete opposition with the gender I’ve always aligned myself with, I will attempt to take the results with a massive pinch of salt. For one thing, I’ve always been massively suspicious of attempts to gender the brain, whatever the source. And I had read about the test in the Daily Mail , whose scientific credentials on psychological theory go about as far as my mate Paul shrugging in the pub and saying, “Women, eh?”
Brain gendering isn’t just tabloid fodder, by any means, and it’s not a trend that died with Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The Guardian debunked various myths about male and female brains last December. Popular Science also pointed out last year that we should stop looking for “hardwired” differences in male and female brains because there’s no way for us to prove the direction of causation.
Whenever a press release gets written up into the mainstream media claiming to have found the key to supposed male and female differences because it’s all located in the brain, we go through the same rigmarole: everybody humours it for a bit; someone claims that it explains their ex-boyfriend’s thoughtless behaviour; someone else counters on a Reddit thread that he probably couldn’t help it if his neural connections weren’t dense enough to deal with the relationship; and eventually we all throw up our hands and admit what we’ve learned from all this to-ing and fro-ing related to a few MRI scans and a barely significant statistic: precisely nothing.
But that doesn’t stop us. It’s come around again, polluting everything from the Mail to the BBC, in the form of a programme called — what else? — Is Your Brain Male or Female? If you are old enough to read the headline, you might have already had some thoughts about whether your brain was male or female that are ultimately a lot more meaningful than anything you can learn from a picture of someone else’s synapses. You might even have come to the conclusion that you don’t fit easily into a gender binary that says men like spatial tasks, hunting antelope and fixing cars, and women like gossip, makeup and crying. You might not care to have a male or a female brain, but instead think of yourself as a person with various facets of traditional masculinity and femininity and a penchant for wearing blue eyeliner on a Saturday night because that’s just what Peckham’s all about. Imagine that.
There are biological differences present in most men and women that help medical experts come up with amazing things, such as pain medication or treatment for head injuries that take hormonal balances into account. However, the endless attempts to look at your brain — or, even more dangerously, your behaviour — and declare you a biological oddity have far-reaching negative consequences. What exactly are you supposed to do if you’re a feminine boy bullied by your macho father whose right thumb rests over his left when he clasps his hands? Resign yourself to the idea that you were born with a brain that somehow just isn’t right? And if you’re a female teenage tomboy flirting with androgyny, does it help if someone wants to medicalise your explorations into your own identity?
This paranoid, gender-obsessed landscape that uses evolutionary biology as a stick to beat us deserves to be taken seriously no longer. If we really want to progress radically, we’ll have to let go of the pink and blue safety blankets and start talking about the fact that everyone’s brain and behaviour are different — which is probably the scariest fact of all.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
