By Karawynn Long — Oct 17, 2024

Gender X

A middle-aged reappraisal of the whole damned idea

Ever since I became old enough to thoughtfully evaluate social norms, I have gravitated to progressive positions. I stood up against homophobia and advocated for ethical nonmonogamy starting in my teens (in Texas! in the 1980s!); by college I was challenging my racist relatives and marching against foreign wars and writing papers in support of abortion rights and running interference against abortion clinic protestors. For my entire adult life I have existed near the bleeding edge of social acceptance.

But I have to admit that what’s been happening societally with the concept of ‘gender identity’ over the past decade or so has really thrown me for a loop. For the first time in my life, I’ve been playing catch-up instead of leading the charge, and it’s not a comfortable place to be.

Bad Science

Until just a few years ago, I believed that innate genetic differences between men and women produced specific differences in personality and behavior. Sure, there would be overlap at the extremes, but on average, male and female personalities clustered around different traits. Besides being part of the general cultural atmosphere I’d breathed since birth, this belief had been reinforced over the years by reporting of scientific studies that 1) found gender differences even in young infants, and 2) attached specific biological sources — typically brain structure or hormone levels — to those differences.

Occasionally I would run across evidence that some distinctions between men and women were primarily, perhaps even entirely, societal. I remember learning, for example, of the large role stereotype threat plays in hampering women’s achievements in math and science. But I still thought that some aspects of gender — such as the way women were more often empathic, and men were more often aggressive — had a biological basis.

The ultimate reinforcing contribution to this viewpoint was Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain, a citation-heavy bestselling popular science book from 2006 that I read in about 2015. I was in the early stages of perimenopause at the time and desperately seeking relevant information about the neurological effects I was experiencing; The Female Brain wove a narrative that confirmed certain aspects of my experience, both perimenopausal and otherwise, and assigned them a neurobiological basis. It all fit neatly into my pre-existing paradigm.

Then about two or three years later I was doing some worldbuilding-related research into the effects of sex-differentiated hormones, and I ended up reading two books by Cordelia Fine: Testosterone Rex and Delusions of Gender. Testosterone Rex completely dismantled my understanding of the connections between androgens and behavior; Delusions of Gender repeatedly and pointedly attacked the premise of neurobiological sex differences in general — and The Female Brain in particular.

Turns out that Brizendine didn’t just cherry-pick her supporting citations (which would have been bad enough); she literally made most of them up. Perhaps assuming that few readers would have the time, ability, or inclination to analyze every paper she referenced (in some cases after translating them from Russian), she cited studies that had at best tangential, and often zero, relationship to the claims she was making. She even fabricated “personal correspondence” with at least one researcher to support her premise; when Fine wrote to confirm, the researcher not only said she had never corresponded with Brizendine, but that she draws the exact opposite conclusion from her research than the one Brizendine ascribes to her.

It is not possible to overstate the utter fury that I felt as I processed this new knowledge. I have always known better than to give credence to self-appointed “experts” trying to explain why women are like one planet-slash-ancient-Roman-deity and men are like another, but I expected Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale credentials to mean something — at the very least that the author was not going to fabricate her citations wholesale!

Brizendine wasn’t the only one faking her references, merely the most credentialed; Fine savages the scientific sourcing of several other popular books claiming to explain the biological basis of gender. She goes on to poke holes in the comparatively few studies that do appear to offer proof of innate sex differences in behavior, laying out all the ways in which other researchers have challenged them.

In almost all cases, the studies had such a small sample size that they run afoul of the law of large numbers.^[1] In some, a poor study design failed to account for basic alternative explanations, or allowed researcher bias to influence the results. She also points out the systemic bias common to all sciences known as the “file-drawer phenomenon”, in which only the most “interesting” results get published; in the case of sex differences, it skews publication toward findings of difference and buries the myriad studies in which no difference was evident, leaving us looking at only the outliers. Since up to five percent of studies will find a “statistically significant” difference by pure chance, this could easily mean that there are zero real-world sex differences in capability or behavior.

Two sunbirds — a brown female and a blue-green and red-orange male — drink nectar from a large yellow inflorescence.

Certainly, some of the supposed differences in the physiology of brains between men and women have, on subsequent examination, turned out to be false. And where the differences are real, current evidence suggests they aren’t salient. For example, human males on average have larger bodies than females, and this disparity extends to the average size of our brains. Yet some scientists now believe that the purpose of other structural differences in the engineering of smaller brains is to provide “alternative pathways to the same behavioral end,” such that the abilities of the brains are equivalent, regardless of size … or sex. Other studies show ways in which male and female structural differences actually reverse themselves under different environmental stimuli, making the whole concept of “male brains” and “female brains” nonsensical.

This time, I did the follow-up research that I failed to do after reading Brizendine’s book, and what I found was that neuroscientists and psychologists are currently very divided: for every Simon Baron-Cohen insisting upon consequential distinctions between male and female brains, there’s a Daphna Joel saying our brains are fluid and intersex. Because I had based my understanding only on what happened to cross my radar, I had been operating under an availability bias: studies that promoted a biological gender divide had been picked up more often by the popular press, whereas studies that debunked it had more often languished unseen.

There is no evidence of a sex-linked biological basis for any of the qualities that we label “masculine” or “feminine”.

Dr. Fine puts all of this in a historical context that really drives home how much of science has, from the earliest days, been a series of attempts to justify existing beliefs about how men and women are different. For example: in the nineteenth century, when the frontal lobes of the brain were considered the source of higher intellect, studies showed that men had larger frontal regions than women, whose mass was more concentrated in the parietal regions. Later, after the frontal regions in apes were shown to be larger than in male humans, science decided that whoops, the parietal lobes must be the source of higher intellect. And lo, subsequent observations reversed their findings! — showing women with smaller parietal lobes and larger frontal ones compared to men. This kind of expectation bias continues all the way up to the modern day.

I came out of this spate of research convinced that there is in fact no evidence of a sex-linked biological basis for any of the qualities that we label “masculine” or “feminine”. Our individual personalities seem to be about 40-60% genetically determined, but no traits have been proven to be innately sex-linked. Barring credible future scientific revelations to the contrary, I therefore had to believe that the whole idea of gender, top to bottom, is a purely cultural construct.

“Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.”

— Naomi Alderman, The Power

Now, I pride myself in being able to adjust my paradigm in response to new data, but this particular update left me with a deeply uncomfortable logic gap that I wrestled with for several years.

What I couldn’t immediately figure out was: if gender isn’t biological, why do transgender people exist?

A Brief History of ‘T’

I was in my early twenties when the acronym ‘LGB’ entered common parlance; the very concept of bisexuality was new to most people and highly controversial, and the inclusion of ‘T’ was still around a decade away. I don’t remember exactly when I first encountered the concept of trans people, but I do know that in the first iteration of my understanding, the term ‘transgender’ was used interchangeably with ‘transsexual’, and both were framed exclusively in the context of people who experienced body dysphoria around sexual characteristics like penises, breasts, body hair, and so on. The phrase “woman trapped in a man’s body,” and its inverse, were common metaphors.

I didn’t personally know anyone trans at the time, so my understanding remained entirely theoretical. And theoretically, I was on board! Social conservatives at the time were arguing that gender dysphoria either wasn’t real, or that it was a mental disorder which should be addressed not with sex reassignment surgery but psychological therapy to restore “right thinking”. That sounded a little too 1984 for my comfort, and science seemed to be coming down on the side of gender dysphoria being a legitimate phenomenon that was not under anyone’s conscious control. I’d already, at nineteen, sorted out that I believe every human deserves autonomy over their own body, and I saw no reason why that shouldn’t be as true for sex reassignment as it was for abortion.

As we moved into the 2010s, though, I started seeing more and more trans people who did not base their identity on body dysphoria but on a purely psychological affiliation with the opposing gender. Again, I rolled with it as best I could — I didn’t really understand what people meant by “feeling like a woman,” despite ostensibly being one, but one of my values is believing people about their own experience, and I support the right of anyone to define themselves in any way that doesn’t harm other people.

Then — in what has to be the fastest social change I’ve seen in my entire half-century of life — the idea of ‘nonbinary’ as a kind of third gender identity appeared and, within just a few short years, became the accepted social norm in most of my social circles.

I went into a mental tailspin trying to reconcile 1) the assertion by many nonbinary individuals that gender is an entirely social construct with 2) the assertion of many transgender individuals that gender is something they deeply and fundamentally experience.

It seemed like those two things could not both be true, and my eventual discovery of the science of nonbiological gender only upped the stakes. If gender is not inherently binary, how do you explain the existence of people whose experience of being a particular binary gender is so strong that they choose to reassign themselves, despite the extreme social stigma that results? If ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ are merely arbitrary social constructs, how do you get small children so certain of their identity as ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ that they insist upon it despite the full firehose force of culture telling them otherwise?

I had no answer to this, and my one attempt at asking trans people about this in an online community was assumed to be in bad faith and shut down. I was left to wrestle with the cognitive dissonance on my own.

Autigender

In the middle of this confusion, I stumbled into the profound revelation that I am autistic, and my whole relationship with gender took on a new dimension.

First of all, I discovered that good old Simon Baron-Cohen was preeminent in this area, too … and that the misery and confusion of two generations of undiagnosed autistic girls and women could be directly traced to his — I will charitably call them “extremely misguided” — theories about autism and “male brains”. The more of his work I read, the madder I got.

Second, hanging out in autistic spaces online, I found that a majority of autistic people share my lack of any gender-specific affinity; “feeling like a girl/boy” just doesn’t tend to resonate with most of us. (And in fact, a much greater percentage of autistic people identify as trans or nonbinary, compared to neurotypicals.)

Third, I was now able to perceive all the many ways in which I’d been struggling throughout my life to reconcile societal expectations — many of which related to gender — with my autistic traits.

As a child I was naturally a full-on ‘tomboy’; I was vaguely aware that gender expectations existed but was only lightly affected by them. And then I hit thirteen, and began actively trying to conform to societal expectations in an attempt to reverse my outcast status. I didn’t feel “like a girl”, but ‘girl’ nevertheless became a lynchpin of my identity.

A lot of performative femininity — and in hindsight I recognize how much it was a performance for me, always — is deeply uncomfortable from an autistic standpoint. Sensory hypersensitivity means wearing makeup is distractingly uncomfortable and bras are flatly tortuous. Lace has been my mortal enemy since birth. My proprioceptive deficit makes walking in heels an extra challenge. And so on.

Also autism: the way I’ve always been shit at the sort of subtlety women are supposed to employ in order to wield influence without bruising male egos or otherwise transgressing gender norms. Behaviors that in a man might be considered “effectively assertive” are taken as “inappropriately aggressive” coming from me; half a lifetime of trying, but often failing, to soften my phrasing enough that I don’t come off as “blunt” now made a whole new kind of sense.

In fact, masking my autism and conforming to gender expectations were two lifelong endeavors that were inextricably intertwined — a concept which the autistic community has labeled ‘autigender’.

In the wake of my Autism Epiphany, I consciously decided to jettison both. I forced myself to utterly stop making choices based on what (I guessed) other people were thinking when they look at me — something that was a great deal more difficult than it might sound. Among the things I yeeted right out of my life: heeled shoes, tight clothes, makeup, and bras.

Even so, no one is going to look at me and see anything other than a woman: I still have long hair (because it’s easier to maintain and more sensory-friendly than short hair), and often now I’m wearing a flowy dress (because I find loose garments easier to bear).^[2] I’m not going out of my way to present as androgynous; I just avoid doing anything because it’s expected of women.

A large multicolor rooster stands over a smaller red-brown hen.

I am of course still permanently aware of my social status as a woman in a patriarchal society; that’s inescapable. I also still understand myself as female … although now that I’m fully menopausal — as well as asexual and voluntarily celibate — my genitalia and reproductive system don’t seem especially relevant.

The bigger shift is that I no longer perceive myself as feminine. This didn’t happen in an instant, but somewhere over the past five years since my Autism Epiphany, I seem to have reclaimed the essentially gender-free identity of my childhood self.

If I were Gen Z instead of Gen X, I likely would have already publicly claimed a nonbinary identity. But I’m long accustomed to “she” and “her”; applying “they/them” pronouns to myself feels odd.

Also, one gets tired in middle age, and I’m engaged on a lot of other fronts already; insisting that I be universally recognized as nonbinary (despite the context of my long hair and dresses!) is not a battle I feel compelled to fight.

Cognitive Harmony

One day last year, in the space of a few seconds, a series of thoughts clicked into place, and the cognitive dissonance around gender that I’d been experiencing — for years by this point — dissipated.

My reasoning went like this: in a large sample population with a normal statistical distribution, some fraction of people would naturally present with genetic traits that happened to closely correlate with the ones society has assigned to the “opposite” sex. And maybe some of those kids would be swayed by societal expectations, but in others, those innate personality traits would be strong enough to persist in defiance of societal cues. Thus we get toddlers who identify strongly with the gender that doesn’t “match” their genitalia.

And it also makes sense that another percentage of people would present with personality traits that do closely match the ones society prefers in their biological sex, and that percentage would appear larger because for them, genetics and social shaping are pulling in tandem. Thus you get people who report “feeling like a man” or “knowing I’m a woman”; their internal character has never conflicted with what our culture tells them it should be.

And then you have the rest of us in the messy middle, who naturally have some mixture of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits and — when we stop bonsai-ing ourselves — do not fit neatly into either box. Under a typical bell-curve distribution, most of us should be ‘nonbinary’ … and if the culture continues to evolve in the direction of nonbinary acceptance, I predict that a majority of people will eventually identify as something other than ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.

Until now, I haven’t shared my restructured theory of gender with anyone except my spouse, so I don’t know if it is a paradigm that actual transgender people will be comfortable with, or reject … or some of both. I don’t even know for certain that it is correct, just that it is the most logical explanation I’ve found that fits the known facts.

Or maybe it’s not an uncommon insight at all, but completely obvious! And I was just geologically slow on the uptake. In any case, I offer it here in case there are any other fossils out there in my reading audience experiencing a late-life confusion around the idea of gender.

Tip Jar

Bad Science

A Brief History of ‘T’

Autigender

Cognitive Harmony

Further Reading:

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