Functional brain networks are associated with both sex and gender

This is one of those butter-side-down papers, in that it demonstrates scientific proof of what to many of us seems perfectly obvious but that others can find difficult to accept: using fMRI imagery, Elvisha Dhamala et al have now actually shown that—in children at least—sex and gender are reflected in different neural networks.

Sex and gender are associated with human behavior throughout the life span and across health and disease, but whether they are associated with similar or distinct neural phenotypes is unknown. Here, we demonstrate that, in children, sex and gender are uniquely reflected in the intrinsic functional connectivity of the brain. Somatomotor, visual, control, and limbic networks are preferentially associated with sex, while network correlates of gender are more distributed throughout the cortex. These results suggest that sex and gender are irreducible to one another not only in society but also in biology.

That’s all I’ve got to say, really. Go read the paper at Science Advances for yourself. Yay science!