Gender: The Last Word

Sex differences may not be as clear-cutas they seem.

By Susan Baxter, published on March 01, 1994 - last reviewed on June 03, 2009

What does all the research say about why men are men and women are fed up? Why ask why?

Once upon a time, men were men, women were women, and anyone who rocked the boat got eaten by sharks. Men walked tall, lords of everything they surveyed--including women. It was the natural order of things; any gibbon could tell you that. The truth was that women weren't really necessary at all, even for reproduction, since the mighty sperm carried the blueprint for life. Women were mere biological incubators. Which may explain why the 17th-century scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the first person to see bacteria under a microscope, also saw "exceedingly minute forms of men with arms, heads, and legs" inside sperm.

Well, in vitro veritas, as they used to say.

Fast forward to a time of fax machines and heart transplants, when real men change diapers and real women carry guns. A time when it's not always easy to pinpoint what traits are strictly male or female. Norms change quickly, and one decade's meat is another's high-cholesterol poison. So, today, how should we differentiate between sex (innate, physiological) and gender (socialized, learned) differences?

Or, perhaps a better question is: Should we even be discussing it at all?

There are three kinds of lies, said Mark Twain: lies, damn lies, and statistics. And however gingerly one steps through the minefield that is the study of biological sex differences, one cannot help but be struck by all kinds of intellectual and statistical rubbish.

Take the case of the AGS girls.

Back in the 1950s, before we knew that acronyms and pharmacology could be hazardous to our health, some pregnant women were given the synthetic steroid progestin. Which led, in turn, to some female fetuses receiving, in utero, a dose of androgens (male hormones, chiefly testosterone). Unremarkable in itself (drugs causing side effects, what a revolutionary concept!), these girls were born with adrenogenital syndrome (AGS)--meaning they had masculinized genitalia requiring surgical correction.

Enter Doreen Kimura, a 30-year veteran of neuropsychology, whom Scientific American dubbed "perhaps the world's authority" on sex differences. "There are less obvious aspects of female/maleness [other than physical height and weight] such as aggressiveness, nurturance, and intellectual style or ability." The reason, she says, lies in the one piece of genetic equipment men and women don't share: the sex chromosome. More precisely, she claims that prenatal hormones so affect the developing fetus that "from the start, environment is acting on differently wired brains in girls and boys."

Emphasis on the prenatal, boys and girls. As for the AGS girls, the fact that they behaved more "tomboyish and aggressive than their unaffected sisters," says Kimura, provides "compelling" evidence that hormones do, in fact, seal your sexual fate.

Uh, hold on, let's backtrack here. Tomboyish?? Now there's a word that zips us back a quick century or two. For a long time, as you'll no doubt recall, femininity was just another word for delicacy, modesty, gentleness--and weakness. Of course, constricting clothes and corsets can work wonders at ensuring compliance. Heck, even when I was a kid, little girls couldn't wear pants to school--and I've got the scabby knees to prove it. So how did the retrogressive term " tomboyish," a social value judgment if ever I heard one, become part of scientific "proof"?

In addition, in "objective" observations of these girls at play, psychologists noted that they preferred rough-and-tumble play and opted for "typically masculine toys--for example, they played with cars for the same amount of time normal boys did." Well, as a matter of fact, I was the nerdiest bookworm that ever lived, and I've always preferred cars to babies. Anyway, scads of studies show that girls happily play with trucks, trains, or any other boy toys, provided no boys are around to stop them.

Still, language aside, what about these girls, "normal" except for that brief exposure to male hormones? These girls were not normal at all, not unless you consider a tiny penis and scrotum normal for a girl. Goodness knows what effect this extreme genital ambiguity had on them--and their parents.

In a different case study, in a freak accident, a baby boy's penis was burned off during what was supposed to be a routine circumcision by electrocautery. After some agonizing soulsearching, the parents decided to authorize sex-change surgery to turn him into a her. (Wait for it, it gets weirder.) Amazingly, this boy had an identical twin brother, which made it possible to compare two genetically identical individuals raised as a boy and a girl. (Never mind the fact that the boy's hormone-producing testes were removed--remember we're talking about prenatal influences here.)

The upshot? Except for some tomboyish tendencies (sorry), our hero became the perfect little girl, the very picture of adorable femininity. She even asked for a doll house for Christmas, versus the toy garage her brother had wanted.