Sex, Not Gender

THE ASSORTATIVE MATING THEORY; A Talk with Simon Baron-Cohen

...It was interesting for me to discover that there's been a sleight of hand, mostly in the States, such that the word 'sex' has been replaced by the word 'gender'.

This has happened in a very subtle way over the last century, so that in the States, nobody talks about sex differences; they talk about gender differences. Whenever you want to refer to somebody's sex you refer to their gender. I call it a sleight of hand, because actually 'sex' is the older word. Your sex is either male or female, and in biology your sex is defined by whether you have 2 X chromosomes or an X and Y chromosome. There's been a subtle shift into talking about gender, to whitewash the word sex.

Why has this happened? Presumably, because your sex is determined by your chromosomes. And in the States the ideology is that we shouldn't be determined by anything; we should be able to be anything we choose. The blank slate. Gender refers to how you think of yourself: as masculine, or feminine, It's much more subjective, and is commonly believed to be culturally constructed. Italian male gender behavior is expressed differently from English male gender behavior. This gives the impression that people's gender behaviour can change as they change culture, even if their biological sex is fixed.

Talking about gender is therefore much more optimistic than talking about sex. It's the rags to riches idea — you can become anything...

...the higher the baby's level of fetal testosterone, the less eye contact the child makes at 12 months old. And also the slower they are to develop language at 18 months old. To me these are really fascinating results, because we're looking at something biological, in this case a hormone which presumably is influencing brain development to produce these quite marked differences in behavior. We always knew that girls talked earlier than boys — that there is sex difference in language development — and we also knew that there's huge variability at 18 months: some kids have no words at all, and other kids have huge vocabularies, about 600 words. No one's really been able to explain this variability. Why should one kid be almost mute and another kid be very verbal?...

I don't argue it's all biology. But for a long time social behavior and language development were seen as purely environmental or learned experience. These hormone studies suggest hormones are also part of the explanation.

...we presented each baby with a human face to look at, and then a mechanical mobile suspended above the crib. Each baby got to see both objects...

The results of the experiment were that we found more boys than girls looked longer at the mechanical mobile. And more girls than boys looked longer at the human face. Given that it was a sex difference that emerged at birth, it means that you can't attribute the difference to experience or culture. Twenty-four hours old. Now you might say, well, they're not exactly new-born, it would have been better to get them at 24 minutes old — or even younger. But obviously we had to respect the wishes of the parents and the doctors to let the baby relax after the trauma of being born. And let the parents get to know their baby. So strictly speaking, it might have been one day of social experience. But nonetheless, this difference is emerging so early that suggests it's at least partly biological.

Funny guy.