Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!aero-c!nadel From: huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Kathryn Huxtable) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: physiological differences between male and female brains Message-ID: <29049.27de0118@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Date: 13 Mar 91 16:38:15 GMT References: <1991Feb22.215346.8448@aero.org> <7141@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> Sender: news@aero.org Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services Lines: 60 Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Originator: nadel@aerospace.aero.org In article <7141@emory.mathcs.emory.edu>, kim@mathcs.emory.edu (Kim Wallen {Psy}) writes: > .... Interestingly in the > human study three transsexual males (male to female) all had sexually > dimorphic nuclei in the female, but not the male range. > This is very interesting. Can this test be performed before death (or non-intrusively)? My main concern with findings like this (valuable though they may be) and with findings concerning sexual orientation and the like is that it isn't clear how much, if any, of human sexuality/gender stuff is determined or influenced by such structures. Our mentation seems to be several orders of magnitude higher than that of rats, so it's not clear that something which is completely determined by some brain difference in rats is also determined the same way in humans (or in all humans). *Any* human behavior seems to be affected by culture and upbringing (though not necessarily by *deliberate* attempts to mold). I suspect that sexual orientation/gender identity/gender roles are much more complex in humans than in any other creature on Earth and that non-human animal studies won't generalize to humans. At best they will indicate directions for research to go. A large potential problem I see with this kind of research, and more importantly with the way it is reported and interpreted, is that when researchers determine that some large percentage of MTF transsexuals have some structure associated with the female pattern rather than with the male pattern, then this can be used to say things like "You're not really transsexual unless you have blah, blah, blah..." The same can be read for sexual orientation. Many gay and lesbian people I know are worried about research into the "causes" of their sexual orientation, because it presumes two things: 1) that their orientation is somehow unnatural and has to have a cause, whereas heterosexuality is normal and has no cause; and 2) that there is just one cause for all cases of homosexuality. (Notice how we slip into the medical mode of speech---gays and lesbians are "cases" and "have something"). We are all people here. We were all born with human genes and raised in human societies. How we turn out is a human phenomenon. I don't see why sexual orientations and gender identities that don't quite fit with the majority's are necessarily pathological. Yet that seems to be the model under which they are studied. Our unconscious biases are the most dangerous, for those are the ones we leave out of account when we try to design controlled experiments. Until an unconscious bias (such as that there are two and only two sexes and everybody is either one or the other. If they aren't, then there's something wrong with them) is brought to our attention, we can't do reasonable research in these areas, because the questions are wrong. When the questions are wrong, the data is usually irrelevant because attention wasn't paid to variables that were not thought to be variables. Etc, etc. ad nauseam.... -- Kathryn Huxtable huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu