The worldview promulgated by Butler, Fine, and their followers now constrains what neuroscientists are allowed to say in public. A professor of neurophysiology at Lund University in Sweden recently told undergraduates that the categories of female and male are, to some degree, biological realities rather than social constructs and that some differences in behavior between women and men might, therefore, have a biological basis.
He was promptly denounced by students who claimed that his remarks were “anti-feminist.” The dean of the medical
school duly launched an investigation.
I have debated this topic with followers of Butler and Fine in various settings. When I share with them research showing, for example,
robust female/male differences in the trajectories of brain development, the most common response is sheer ignorance of the finding in question. It is unusual for a devotee of Butler to say, “
Yes, I am aware of that research. However, I consider that research invalid because of XYZ.” Instead, they more often claim that the research must be meaningless because it involved children or adults. Children and adults have spent years being subject to the heteronormative patriarchy.
Parents interact differently with girls and boys from the moment of birth, these critics (correctly) observe. So any study of adults, or even of children, is hopelessly marred by the sexist societies in which we all live.
Fair enough. For the sake of argument, let's grant that point. So let’s study humans
before birth. In recent years, there have been fascinating studies in which neuroscientists have studied the brains of babies in their mothers’ wombs. One remarkable study was a
collaboration among neuroscientists at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institute of Mental
Health, alongside neuroscientists from Germany, the UK, Croatia, and Portugal—more than 20 researchers in all. These investigators looked at how individual
genes are transcribed in the human brain from the prenatal period through infancy,
childhood,
adolescence, and throughout adulthood. They found that
the biggest female/male difference in gene transcription in the human brain, for many genes, is in the prenatal period. (See for example their graph of the transcription of the IGF2 gene, a gene known to be involved in
cognition: male/female differences in transcription for IGF2 are huge in the prenatal period, and nonexistent among adults.) Again, I have not yet found an advocate of the Butler/Fine school who is even aware of this research, let alone responded to it. If the Butler/Fine theory was correct — if gendered differences in brain and behavior are primarily a social construct, and not hardwired — then we ought to see zero differences between the female brain and the male brain in the prenatal period, but large differences between adults, who after all have had the misfortune of living all their lives in a heteronormative patriarchy. But the reality is just the opposite: Female/male differences are generally largest in the prenatal period, and those differences diminish with age, often dwindling to zero among adults.
