The Historical Jesus

[Belacqua]

For humans, I do think there are differences between male and female brains.

This got me wondering, so I did some lazy Googling. One article, from WebMD, points out brain differences which may typically be associated with men or with women. But they also emphasize that there is a lot of variety. Very few brains show exclusively one sex or the other. 

https://www.webmd.com/brain/features/how...ins-differ

I don't know enough to say how reliable the article is.

But this points to something we have to be very careful about when discussing gender. It is now said that gender is not determined by anatomy. Someone who has all the anatomy that people used to say was determinative of maleness (penis, beard, etc.) are not determinative of gender. Someone with the appearance which was traditionally associated with maleness may in fact be female. 

The brain is also anatomy. It's a physical object, with structures, identifiable parts, etc. Even if it turned out that there are some elements of the brain which are 100% correlated with the kind of anatomy we used to associate with maleness, a person with those brain elements might not be male. This is the consequence of the discovery that sex and gender are not the same. Today a doctor could examine a patient's anatomy in detail and conclude with certainty that the person has the kind of anatomy we used to associate with maleness. But that person could still say, no, my true gender is female, and we would accept that. The physical examination cannot discover gender. Likewise, if brains are gendered, then a person with a brain of the type traditionally associated with maleness could still say that she is female, and we would accept that, because gender and sex are different. 

So gender is no longer something that can be identified on a brain scan, through anatomical investigation, or any other empirical objective method. Gender is determined by the individual's identifying with that gender, and not anything physical. 

There could be research done on how brain structures associate with lifestyle choices. For example, it might work out that people with certain brain traits are more likely to enjoy violent sports, more likely to present themselves as tough, more likely to prefer pickup trucks and motorcycles. But there can be people who have all of these traits and still identify as female. So apparently neither anatomy nor preferences and habits -- of the type which people used to associate with one gender or the other -- can be called determinative any more. 

This leads to some interesting issues, I think.

First, if a person has a body of the type which was traditionally considered a male body, but this person is in fact of the female gender, then it means that in fact females can have that kind of body. A female can have a penis, a beard, all of those things. However, if such a person wants surgery to get the appearance which was traditionally associated with femaleness, that seems to indicate that one kind of body is in fact more female. She's already really truly female, but she wants to look "like a female." But females, we now know, don't look any particular way.

In other words, if a person who looks like Clint Eastwood is of the female gender, then she's a female. She's a female no matter what her body looks like. So the idea of getting surgery to "look female" is a kind of paradox -- she's already female. The only people who don't accept that by looking like Clint Eastwood she's not really female are old fashioned people who don't yet know the difference between sex and gender. 

Second, this throws a monkey wrench into a belief which used to be common among atheists. We used to say that the mind is what the brain does. That there is no mind independent of body. That mind is not in fact some separate thing, trapped in the physical dross of a body. Yet the idea that a person can have a mind of one gender and a body of the other contradicts this. If there are truly brain (anatomical) differences between male and female brains, and the mind arises from what the brain does, then the physical anatomy of the brain would inevitably determine what kind of mind occurs. If there are differences in male and female anatomy, and yet this does not affect one's gender, then the mind and the body are in some way separate. 

We're getting close here to a kind of Cartesian mind/body dualism, in which mind and body are separate substances, which may be imperfectly mixed. In fact the whole argument sounds very Gnostic -- the idea that mind is not an emergent property of physical structures, but some other thing. Such an idea could explain how the mental (gender) could be unaligned with the physical body.