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when things happen fast.
The second network for stress is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA). The HPA axis is what triggers the release of cortisol—the classic “stress molecule.”
If you tell a woman that girls are bad at math and then give her a math test, she’s not going to do as well as a woman who wasn’t exposed to that threat. This effect is astonishingly robust; it works at every age, in nearly every possible experimental scenario, and even when you’re not testing women.
Human brains are long evolved to carefully track how each individual fits into a larger group.
We spend years carefully learning how to successfully live inside our deeply social world.
It’s one of the most characteristic features of our species: that extended period of social learning. Our brains are built...
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until puberty hits, there’s no reliable way to tell the difference between an XY brain being raised as a boy and an XX brain being raised as a girl.
To find a model “Female” human brain, in the way most people mean it, you probably need to find an adult mind that’s been convinced it’s terrible at math, hyper social, sort of flighty, super moody, a bit fragile, and generally good at only a narrow range of things.
It’s true that no one knows what functional features of the brain make any given individual identify as a gender other than what that person was assigned at birth. But so what? We also don’t know what makes a woman like me identify as a woman.[*36]
It’s clear that there’s nothing in one’s DNA that codes for wearing a dress,
in other words, but there might be things that “code” for being more likely to have positive feedback loops with social affirmation around gender presentation, or negative responses when one’s internal sense of a gender identity doesn’t seem to match with social expectation and/or when that person perceives negative social feedback.
what lies with one’s genetic predisposition and what lies with one’s social environment are not going to be easily parsed. And that’s because the human brain is simply too social, too plastic, too malleable, too revisable to pin down like that.
As our world becomes less and less sexist, being trans will become less distressing for the people who experience it.
And so, because our girlhoods are different now, the average adult female’s brain is also probably a bit different from what it was a hundred years ago.
You wouldn’t expect someone who’d been starved as a child to be six feet tall, even if her genes hold that potential. Neither should you expect a brain that’s been effectively starved to reach 150 IQ, even if the genetic potential is there.
The results of those two tests tend to be correlated: if you took the test in the 1980s or 1990s, just divide your SAT score by 10, and you’ve got your likely IQ score, plus or minus 10.
Taking a test in a non-native language is almost always a drag on your score—most
one recent study from 2015 did show race outweighing both family income and parent education levels as a driver for SAT scores
more nonwhite SAT takers are going to exclusively nonwhite schools, regardless of family income, and these “American apartheid” schools are famously underfunded and underserved.
What’s more, your IQ scores tend to vary over your lifetime—tests designed for five-year-olds show a lower degree of difference between poor people and wealthier people than tests designed for eleven-year-olds (von Stumm and Plomin, 2015). Maybe instead of thinking of that as a “failure to thrive” because of some innate predilection for stupidity, it’d be better to think about that as potential evidence of accumulated harm.
Though the mobile uterus was disavowed, “hysteria” remained: As late as the 1920s, clitoral stimulation was considered the proper treatment for feminine hysteria. That meant doctors—typically male—were obliged to stimulate moody women to orgasm in clinical settings. Hilariously, most of the doctors seemed to find the task boring and tedious, which drove the invention of the electric vibrator in Paris in the late nineteenth century.
That could mean that male bipolar disorder is driven by different underlying functional mechanisms from women’s. Or it could mean that the hormone balance in the typical female brain is somehow interfering with how certain drug therapies work in these brains.
As the psychiatric community is discovering, one need not be depressed to be suicidal—they just tend to go together. In fact, 54 percent of people who die by suicide did not have a diagnosable mental disorder, which may be because they failed to receive treatment and be diagnosed or because the onset was simply too rapid or unusual to catch
the most obvious root is a social norm that makes motherhood more immediately “important” than fatherhood and ties a woman’s worth to her ability to care for children. Men are left with a model of fatherhood that doesn’t seem all that vital.
As mentioned previously, some girls are now beginning puberty as young as age eight, clearly before their bodies or brains are ready to become mothers! No one knows why this is the case, but researchers suspect rising obesity, genetic predisposition, and hormones (potentially estrogen-mimicking molecules in the environment sending a false trigger to the ovaries, or some other unusual new factor)
Simone de Beauvoir, who held that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” you’re not wrong
Complex systems naturally behave complexly, so being genderqueer is just as “natural” as being cisgender. And for me, given what we now know about human brains, the idea that “girlhood” (that is, childhood brain development as a female-identified person in a sexist society and the accumulated, influential, remembered experiences associated with those years) might be one of the driving features of the rather odd set of things that happen to so many adolescent girls’ cognitive test scores is both true and ultimately freeing.
In other words, I suspect what’s innate is a drive to construct some kind of gender identity in the deeply social lives of sexed hominins like Homo sapiens, and because we’re the only primates who can talk, we’re the only ones who can self-report our experience with depth and nuance.
Tenrecs are the mammalian equivalent of “hold my beer.”
I’ve never met a woman, cis or trans or otherwise, who 100 percent enjoys the experience of living as a woman or girl in a sexist society….Sexism
One can be comfortable with one’s gender identity and still be exhausted by the experience of living it.
ORDINARY MAGIC
We are the only talking ape.
We’re so linguistic, in fact, that we’ve even managed to figure out ways to create language without any sound at all.
animals’ vocalizations—they
But those messages are usually as simple as a smoke alarm.
No other animal has human grammar.
every living human culture has language. We might have started talking as far back as 1.7 million years ago. Or as recently as 200,000 years. Some think it was only 50,000 years ago, which might as well be yesterday in our evolution.
When Homo habilis started making her stone tools, she probably wasn’t speaking yet—the configuration of her throat and mouth and chest would have made it very hard to pull it off.
Her immediate descendants probably weren’t talking, either.
Their throats were wrong. Their mouths were wrong. The...
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If that’s accurate, then all those elaborate stone tools and early gynecology were learned and passed on through direct observation and super-simple gestures and sounds.
The soonest hominins seemed to have a modern vocal apparatus—throat, jaw, and tongue in the right place—is only a few hundred thousand years ago.
Neanderthals, Heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens. Those three alone.
There is one point in human history, between fifty thousand and thirty thousand years ago, where innovation seemed to explode.
What’s more, we had symbolic culture: Cave paintings. Symbolic carving. Burial cultures.
We took our old stone tools and made far better ones. These innovations spread rapidly—up
What is humanity’s earliest art all about? Hunting.
Also, most of humanity’s ancestors weren’t particularly adept hunters.
If anything, we were scavengers and prey—the favorite snack of large hyenas and lions and pretty much anything else that managed to catch us.
