When my son was younger, I fell prey to the temptation to buy books about adolescence. I made a little pile of them to take to the charity shop, but before I took them, I checked each one’s index for mentions of gender. I’ve got a few to talk about; this is the quickest and easiest to cover, but in some ways it’s the strangest one.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a big-time, influential academic psychologist. She is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK, and leader of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group, as well as co-director of the Wellcome Trust PhD Programme in Neuroscience at University College London, and the recipient of all sorts of awards and prizes, and doubtless large quantities of research funding.
She gave a TED talk in September 2012 on the subject of The Mysterious Workings of The Adolescent Brain which has apparently had millions of views. In 2018, she published a book entitled Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, which won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Obviously, with a fourteen year old in the house, I had to buy it.
I didn’t find the book all that interesting, probably because I had already absorbed most of the important stuff via other channels, and was already well aware that my son’s frontal cortex was a decade away from being fully mature.
Before I took it to the charity shop, I checked the index to see if “gender” was mentioned. Yes, of course it is, in the context of “gender differences”, with an interesting final mention of “sex and gender”.
It’s confusing, isn’t it? “Gender differences” in brain development, depression, eating disorders and so on are surely sex differences? Don’t worry, Professor Blakemore is, as you’d hope, a step ahead of you. “There’s a difference between sex and gender. Sex is usually defined biologically, in terms of reproductive organs and sex chromosomes (in rare cases, this is difficult because some people are born with ambiguous sex organs, and others are born with an abnormal number of sex chromosomes). In contrast, gender is the state of being male or female, and is defined more by social and cultural differences, and how an individual feels, than by biological factors. In this book I use the term ‘gender’ rather than ‘sex’ because in most studies we simply ask people whether they are male or female, we don’t check their biological sex by, for example, assessing their sex chromosomes.”
There’s a lot in there to take issue with. People with ambiguous genitalia and/or abnormal numbers of sex chromosomes aren’t not male or female, for starters. I wouldn’t say “the state of being male or female” was a good definition of gender; it’s more like a definition of sex. She also sneaks a popular TRA gotcha in there - you’d think a psychology professor would know that we don’t need to assess anyone’s sex chromosomes to know what sex they are. At least she didn’t say “we don’t check their biological sex by, for example, looking in their pants”.
There are two disturbing takeaways for me here. One is the implication that self-ID has always been the norm in psychological research at Cambridge, or at least in Professor Blakemore’s lab. The other is that Professor Blakemore was, as late as 2018 when the Gender Wars were already very much under way, pretending that gender and sex were not the same thing, but that it was fine to use gender rather than sex, because although they weren’t the same thing, there wasn’t a way of distinguishing anyone’s sex from their gender. Or something. It’s not really good enough from a big-time psychology professor who won a Royal Society prize, is it?