By thinking more like men
Oy. Seen on Twitter –
I match 3 items under “you have a male brain if” and only 1 under “you have a female brain if.” I must be trans!
Or wait, maybe the list is bullshit.
Tip Jar
Oy. Seen on Twitter –
I match 3 items under “you have a male brain if” and only 1 under “you have a female brain if.” I must be trans!
Or wait, maybe the list is bullshit.
Wait, since my brain is in a female body, it is a female’s brain by definition. So I say this list is complete bullshit.
ooh…. but then again, what’s the definition of female these days? Or was that just ‘woman’ that has been re-defined, but somebody, somewhere, but I’d better know how they defined it so that accused of being something so vile that I should be shunned.
WTH are people still actually printing this moronic bullshit? Unbelievable.
Oh and all 10 things are true for me :)
Proof positive that you are in possession of a whole brain!
(Oops, almost typed ‘bran’ there, but fortunately my rye porridge caught that errol – whew!)
Yup–as I suspected. The graphic was created by the Daily Mail. That’s all the explanation needed…
Very common in pop-psychology – take some finding of difference between population and present it as if the two are some non-overlapping groups with respect to the trait of interest.
Take any population. Break it down by some category (tall vs short, people who like cheese vs people who hate cheese, doesn’t matter what). Measure some trait in all individuals, group the results by category and average. The averages are not going to be identical. So now you are ready to write a pop-psychology article about differences between your two sub-populations!
Forget about asking what are the error bars? What is the statistical significance of the difference? How big is the difference anyway?
I’m female! Woo Hoo!
This post makes me feel tired, which is better than the next post, which makes me feel sick and angry.
I only match one on female, and most of them on male – I think I have a human brain…As a woman, I don’t believe I have a male brain. Because it isn’t male if it’s mine….
“How women could ear more by thinking more like men.”
My supposedly “male” brain has yet to pay off.
Hey, I hit 5/5 on the man-o-meter! I’ll just sit back and wait for all my latent male privilege to start rolling in.
Any minute now….
Any minute…
5 on the male side, one on the female side: I am interested in the relative timeline of historical events but exact dates are kind of trivial? Almost as if the person who wrote this doesn’t understand that the true understanding of history comes from understanding trends and movements; exact dates of events are influenced by chance.
I match 5 on male, 1 on female.
It may very well be true that, on average, women tend to exhibit the traits on the female side and men on the male side, but of course the differences within each gender far exceed the differences between the averages.
And that comment about women being able to “earn more by thinking more like men”? Utterly bogus. All other things being equal, women will earn less than men doing *the same job*. And, last I heard, this holds true for STEM jobs too.
Big difference between “sense of being male/female” and this.
Ophelia (and others) – is THIS what you think I think is going on, when I’m describing my son as a boy? Have I ever given the impression that I think he’s a boy based on how his behaviors match up with gender stereotypes? For all my efforts at clarity; am I failing that miserably? Are people reading my words and walking away thinking “Sheesh, that Kevin guy is messed up – telling his daughter she’s a boy just because she likes to make to-do lists?” That I might some day see a bad score on a math test and think, “Hmmm, not very good with numbers… maybe he’s not a boy after all!”? Or take his enjoyment of wearing earrings and fingernail polish and think “Maybe his brain is part-female after all”?
I mean, yeah – the list isn’t even bullshit – that’d be setting the value of male cow fecal matter way short. The male-brain/female-brain idea, as expressed here, is utter pseudoscientific claptrap, gleefully pursued and endorsed by sexist asshats. I wholeheartedly support all expression of derision and contempt anyone would like to throw at it.
But the image itself makes no mention of transgender issues. *That* connection was made by you. It’s not a natural connection to make, so I have to wonder what line of reasoning led to the words, “I must be trans!”
Kevin – what???????
No, of course not. This has nothing to do with trans issues, as far as I’m concerned. It has to do with gender, and stupid gender stereotypes, and gender as hierarchy, and the way all those items subordinate and degrade women. That’s a subject I’ve been blogging about as long as I’ve been blogging, I think. (Which is 13 years now.)
Oh, I see what you mean (I skipped over your last paragraph). That was just a joke. I forgot I’d made it.
It was a joke aimed at whatever chucklehead compiled that stupid list.
But there certainly are trans people – mostly trans women, in my experience – who do talk about “gender” that way. There are trans women who embrace the stereotypes, and with them, the hierarchy.
My scores now are quite different to what they’d have been say ten years ago. I wonder what THAT means.
I get it was meant as a joke, and perhaps not intended as a shot at trans people; but note how the connection, once made, immediately flowed into Comment #1 mixing the bullshit sentiment of the poster with a sloppy rendition of points trans activists try to make.
Speaking for my son – his “embracing” of gendered expression followed a consistent pattern:
1) Observe that a certain form of expression seemed to be a cultural marker of femininity or masculinity (“girly” or “boyly” in his parlance).
2) Shun those variants that marked him as a girl.
3) Embrace those variants that marked him as a boy.
I can only imagine what a life of us forcing him to only don forms of expression that reinforced everyone’s perception of him as a girl would do to strengthen #2. I can only imagine what a life of making various form of culturally masculine expression “off limits” to him would do to heighten the sense with which he experienced #3. And, in that vein, I can absolutely understand how a person culturally trapped by a lifetime of such confines might have an incredibly strong affinity for all such forms of expression that’d been off limits prior to their transition. I’m not saying that transwomen embracing gender stereotypes is a “good” thing – but I do think that holding them culpable for reinforcing those stereotypes is 100% putting the carriage before the horse. And I can’t say that the first thing a person transitioning from a lifetime of being forced into expressions they abhorred needs to hear is, “you STILL can’t express yourself with these feminine cultural markers – that would strengthen the hierarchy”.
I’m not “holding them culpable.” That’s a bizarre way of putting it. I’m arguing with some of the dogma and some of the practices. I don’t see why you need to frame that as “holding them culpable.”
As has been said here often (by me and others), there are some people who are very strongly identified with their gender. For some of those people (apparently like Kevin’s son), that gender does not match their physical characteristics. For others (like Greer), their gender matches their physical sexual characteristics. And Greer can apparently not imagine how someone else without those physical characteristics could possibly consider themselves (or be considered by others) to be a *true* woman. I disagree with Greer on this.
I’m not convinced that people are saying that it’s a problem for trans people to express themselves with the cultural markers of their gender, if that’s what they choose. But I do think it’s a problem when trans people (and especially trans allies) interpret preference for certain cultural markers as categorical evidence of a person’s gender. I’d like women to be able to wear pants and boots and jackets and ties and close-cropped hair if they so choose (which is not too difficult for the most part), and men be able to wear long hair and earrings and gowns and frills and sparkles if they so choose (which is a bit more challenging).
Apart from what the graphic reveals about its creators’ “thinking,” it’s a stupid graphic. It’s men who supposedly make to do lists? And men who are always spotting grammatical errors? (Publishing has historically been very female.) And men enjoy learning a bunch of dates? (I didn’t know anyone enjoyed that.) And if men are the paragons of honesty, unfazed at the prospect of speaking bluntly, where did the millions of unfunny jokes about a woman asking “Do these jeans make me look fat?” come from?
4 male, 1 female (I gave myself two half points.)
And yeah, full-on bullshit.
Sorry, that’s how I took “embrace the hierarchy” (with no good reason, honestly, as to why it struck me as ‘accusatory’ in some sense).
Circling back to the statement, though… can you clarify “in that way” in your statement? I think there’s an important distinction between “embracing stereotypical expressive behavior” and “embracing stereotypical capabilities”. So much so that I initially read your statement as referring to the former (and jumped into a defense of such). But now re-reading, it seems that you are saying that you have experience of transgender women who actually accept (even “embrace”) the truth of the “capability stereotypes” depicted in the poster.
Is that the case? In your experience, are transgender women more inclined to believe things like “men have brains naturally better at reading maps”?
Note, by “more inclined”, I mean, this male/female brain crap is a pretty pervasive meme – I’m not asking if you’ve ever heard a *single* trans woman express something along the lines of “I’ve never been very good at reading maps; that’s what convinced me that I might really be a woman.” It’s just that it would come as a huge surprise to me to hear that those in the trans community were more susceptible to this line of thinking than other groups.
I wasn’t carving it up that way when I said it. I suppose I meant expressive more than capability…but I also don’t think there’s a clear distinction between them. Expressive stereotypes tend to “express” capabilities or the lack of them, if only implicitly. Check out the photos in the Posing post – the poses all express fragility, daintiness, lack of strength. That’s true even for incredibly strong athletes like dancers and gymnasts and skaters, ironically – they’re dressed daintily and they’re made to pose daintily, even in their sport.
Very much in agreement with this. But it is not my experience that this inclination is more prevalent among trans people (or allies) than in the general population. Quite the opposite, at least in the circles I’ve engaged with: most trans people and (families thereof) I’ve met have been “wear what you please, express yourself how you’re comfortable, and by the way, independent of both of those things, do you prefer male/female/neutral pronouns?”) But it is a huge problem when it does crop up: I’m still bitter at my son’s decision to stop wearing his earrings thanks to a week-long summer camp full of kids asking, “Why are you wearing earrings? Aren’t those for girls?” (note – that has been offset with a happy burst of optimism at his putting them back in this Fall, thanks to his classmates and teachers asking, “Why aren’t you wearing your earrings anymore? They were so awesome!”).
Ahhh, that’s nice. Well done them.
@Kevin Kirkpatrick #23
Not sure exactly what “this line of thinking” encompasses, but: I have heard a trans woman say, in response to the “when/how did you know” question that when she was in high school she always felt like she should be a cheerleader instead of a football player. I have heard a (different) trans woman say that figuring out that she was trans explained why when she was a child she had always loved cute fluffy things. On the other hand I also know other trans women who are into typically masculine pursuits like trains and electronics and computers. (But I’m sure my sample size is too small to be statistically significant.)
My parents are not at all on board with all things LGBTQI+. Yet, at least for our first few years, my siblings and I were brought up much more gender-neutral than perhaps one would expect considering the culture of the time and place. My brother naturally gravitated towards dolls, as did my sisters. Not only did I prefer other kinds of toys (cars, construction sets, train sets; I also had a model farm and zoo) I actively loathed dolls.
I’m still not entirely sure, though, which preferences were down to personality, perhaps influenced by my being autistic, and which, if any, were options chosen unconsciously because of all the subliminal messages that they were “boys’ toys”.
It does sometimes feel that trans people’s choices are being unfairly focussed on in this regard; there are far too few of us that our choices can have any impact whatsoever on whatever is seen as acceptable behaviour, and behaving according to an out-dated gender stereotype has always been necessary to be accepted by the gatekeepers of all the necessary services (although recent legislation, at least in Ireland, means that those gatekeepers won’t be necessary to change identity papers any more).
But it is also unfair for trans people to turn on feminists – who are, after all, trying to break those stereotypes, instead of the people imposing them.
I now understand that (and I’m sure I shall be corrected if my understanding is mistaken) that Ophelia’s exasperation with the hyper-feminine, hyper-sexualised Caitlyn Jenner spread was not directed at Jenner herself, but at the patriarchal system that spawned it. It was more of a “Dammit! Why do even trans women only get exposure if they are glamorous?” than a “Dammit! Why do trans women reinforce the glamour narrative?” I was pretty pissed-off at the time, to be honest, because I had interpreted it the second way – i.e. as accusation that trans women, having been perceived and treated as men for so long, were deliberately undermining feminist attempts to dismantle socially-imposed gender roles, and I am sure that there are some feminists who do think that. People aren’t clones.
In an ideal world, all children would be able to play with anything they chose, dress however they please – my now four-year-old grandson has loved sparkly nail polish since he was three, and it was a sad day when he found out that it was considered an odd thing for boys to do, and decided to stop wearing it – and there would be no pressure to conform to any kind of stereotype. Yes, I believe that cis men, straight or gay or bi or whatever, should be able to dress in sparkly gowns if they want to, without harassment – just as I could, when in stealth mode.
Kevin, your younger son and his choices are not being impugned, maligned or criticised here. I’m delighted for him that he has a father looking out for his interests, instead of denying (like mine did) that being trans was even possible; which, along with a Roman Catholic education, led to almost half a century of denial of my true self in an attempt to avoid self-loathing. After all, if being trans or gay was to be mentally ill, then to be trans AND gay was obviously to be seriously mentally deluded. The blog post was making fun of stupid memes like that picture, that arbitrarily assign traits to one half of the human race or the other, and then says that anyone with one set of random traits has a brain that matches the sex they allocated those traits to. It is utterly ridiculous, we all know that isn’t how being trans works, and that is why Ophelia joked about it.
There is a complex relationship between hormones and embryonic development. Testosterone in unexpected quantities or at unexpected times, can cause weird things to happen. In my case, I ended up with a mind body-map that doesn’t fit the body I actually have. In that sense, I have a ‘male brain’. My body, however, is female. It has gestated many embryos, several of them to term. It has breast fed five babies. It almost got ovarian cancer – fortunately, the tumours were symptomatic in the pre-cancerous stage so I didn’t have the same fate as my aunt and great-aunt, thanks to modern medicine/surgery. Because of the way the English language is constructed, it is also possible to say that it is a man’s body – i.e. it is a body that is owned by a man – but that doesn’t make it male, and that distinction is important when it comes to making health decisions (I’ll never be at risk of prostate or testicular cancer, for example).
Unlike that ridiculous picture above, I make no claims as to particular skills being ‘male’ or ‘female’ – that is, I am almost certain, a social gendering ‘thing’, seeing as I was raised as a girl, in a school with no cis boys, and we were all expected to be good at all the sciences, and maths, and contact sport (field hockey is terrifying against a team of aggressive teenage girls armed with heavy sticks). I also make no claim as to preferences – like a lot of autistic people, I love all things sparkly; hot pink and intense blue are my favourite colours, but the whole rainbow is wonderful; occasionally, I love dressing in clothes that my culture codes as female (even if it does feel like drag – lots of gay men do). I have no intention of sticking to gender stereotypes, I intend to continue to smash them.
Oh, and none of that stops people correctly assuming I’m male at least as often as they assume I’m female.
@Kevin #25 – Love the story about the earrings. In my family, my husband got his ear pierced about 5 years before I did. And it’s very encouraging to hear about the support your son gets from his teacher and classmates.
@Ophelia,
Agreed, but even where there’s overlap, I’ve typically in the realm of physicality. Not less problematic that such expressions of weakness/daintiness *are* used as gender markers; but at least there, I can see a transgender woman’s situation as a “rock vs hard place” and would be loathe to cast judgement.
I do think the poster is operating at a whole different level though. In terms of physicality, there is at least a broad statistical truthfulness to “adult males, on average, are taller than adult females and can develop more muscle mass with less effort than adult females”. If the poster were “Do you have a male or female body?” and said things like “male bodies are typically taller than female bodies” or “male bodies typically have higher percentages of muscle mass”, I’m not sure I’d do anything more than scratch my head at someone putting something so mundane into an image. Though certainly I’d be irked at the implication that said generalizations ought to translate into justifications of higher pay of men vs women.
But in this case, the poster focuses exclusively on the “male capabilities vs female capabilities” in terms of mental proficiency. *That* is utter crap (and is also the meme I’d be astonished to hear transgender women being more susceptible to).
Oh, and in that great lot of waffle, I completely forgot to mention the most egregious comment in the picture.
How much a woman earns has absolutely nothing to do with the way she thinks, and everything to do with the historical assumption that women are worth less than men, if not totally worthless.
Because saying that anyone ‘earns’ anything is a crafty use of terminology to imply that the worker chooses how much money they get from the employer – no, people don’t earn money – they get paid; usually, as little as the employer reckons they can get away with. I reckon that most workers, especially women, actually earn far, far more than they’ll ever be paid.
@tiggerthewing,
Thanks for sharing your experiences/insights. I now agree, the joke itself was not impugning trans people.
“…we all know that isn’t how being trans works…”
It’s the “all” in there that I question. See comment #1 (which really drove me to respond); at least some people took the linkage between the poster and “trans” as grounds for a “yes, aren’t all these ideas (the poster and autonomous gender identity) collectively absurd?” post.
Very eye-opening point on “earn” vs “paid”. I’ll be taking care hereafter to interject when I hear “women earn less than men on average” with “Whoa – hold on. Women *earn* just as much as men. Our sexist society just sees to it that they are *paid* less.”
I will earn more if I make ‘to do’ lists?
That’s hilarious.
2/2 is my score. Who am I?
I must warn you that a mere mention of these dreadful “to-do lists” is enough to make me shudder, desperately fluttering my eyelashes. Please Ophelia, no more. It was triggering and cruel.
Oh, am I intruding? I always sense that I’m intruding… but even a broken clock shows sometimes the proper hour.