Sex on the Brain?

In the seventeenth century, it was believed that because men had, on average, larger skulls than women it meant that men were more intelligent than women. It proved, many said, that men were superior and women were inferior.

But if intelligence could be measured by the size of a skull, surely that meant that the likes of elephants and whales were far more intelligent than humans? Men or women.

That wouldn't do for the male/human supremacists so, instead, they decided that the skull measurement was still relevant but that we had to measure it differently. It was the size of the skull in relation to the entire body that was important. Which put men back ahead of beasts.

But had the unintended side effect of placing women ahead of men. Oops! By the nineteenth century we'd moved on - a bit. In that era, it was a widely held belief that girls and women should only receive a rudimentary education. They were banned from going to university.

For their own good! It was thought that if a woman was to study too hard, the blood would all go to her brain. Even the blood that was needed to provide her with a working womb.

To us, at least most of us, now, that sounds utterly ridiculous but are there beliefs, specifically about male and female brains, that we have now that will, in time, come to be seen as equally preposterous? Dr Daphna Joel, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Tel Aviv University, has, with the help of Luba Vikhankski, written a book, Gender Mosaic:Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain, about some she thinks may fail the test of time and she was at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub (in its new venue, Davy's Wine Vault - and my first visit to Greenwich SitP since March 2020 - before the pandemic) to talk about just that in a lecture she'd called Rethinking sex, brain and gender:Beyond the binary.

Male brains ARE usually bigger than female brains but, besides that, are there any meaningful differences? We know that our chromosomes are the key to which gender we become and what kind of genitalia we have but do chromosomes also define if we have male or female brains and, as with intersex people (of which there are an unknown number of people but Dr Joel put the estimate at a surprisingly high, to me, 1% of the population), are there some people whose brains are both male and female?

Or, perhaps, neither. Dr Joel felt that not only are there people whose brains are not gendered but that nobody has a gendered brain. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. We're all from Earth and ought to try and get along.

She'd started her studies (often on rats but sometimes on humans) by using the term 'intersex brain' but intersex awareness campaigners asked her to stop using that term as they felt it may undermine their work. So she's now using the term 'mosaic' to talk about these brains. Our brains.

Dr Joel believes that there are typical male brain features and there are typical female brain features (though what these are seems to descend entirely from custom and habit and are, therefore, almost completely different in different parts of the world) but that most of us have some male brain, some female brain.

Not only that but our brains can switch at times of stress or tension. Typically male brains can become typically female brains when put under stress but typically female brains don't become more female. They too switch and become what would be identified by professors like Dr Joel as typically male brains.

In this, the make up of our brain is very different to the make up of our genitalia. No matter how stressed a woman becomes she doesn't, to the best of my knowledge and I've not checked recently, grow a penis.

It was Dr Joel's contention, and not all in the roughly thirty strong audience - seated around a giant oval table as if in a cabinet meeting - agreed, that, with the honourable (and, to my mind, quite important) exception of sexual reproduction, women and men are exactly the same and should be treated as such. That a person's gender is no more important to their make up than the colour of their eyes or whether or not they're right handed or left handed.

Or even ambidextrous. I'm with her most of the way. I believe fully in equality and I certainly don't believe there are such things as male jobs and female jobs or gendered ways of behaving acceptably. It's okay for men to cry and it's okay for women to cry. It's not okay for men, or women, to be violent. It shouldn't be swatted away by claiming that "boys will be boys".

But, as one attendee pointed, where do you draw the line? Would it be acceptable to put a female boxer in the ring with Tyson Fury? It's not something that would probably end well. I don't know where the line is and I don't even know if there is a line. Dr Joel was more confident in her view and if we disagreed a little, that didn't matter at all. These talks are more about provoking thought and discussion as they are dogmatic lectures filled with certainty - and this particular one had been an interesting one.

I missed the old Star & Garter pub but Davy's Wine Vaults seems, for now, like a decent place to have moved to (even though there was no wine for me, I had a funeral the next day and wanted to stay fresh so stuck to lemonade) and it was good to be back in Greenwich on a midweek night too. Not least because I managed a long awaited visit to Goddard's Pie & Mash shop. Something that any brain (male, female, intersex, mosaic) would tell you is always brilliant.