Sharp: Closing a door [LWN.net]

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:04 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Sharp: Closing a door by mrshiny
Parent article: Sharp: Closing a door

> Gender is not about "plumbing". It's way more complicated than that. The existence of transgender people would seem to prove that. But in any case, I wasn't speaking only of gender diversity, though the kernel dev team has driven away its fair share of women.

Give me a scientific definition of sex, or gender, that actually works and I'll be amazed.

The ONLY definition of gender that I know of that works 100% is "you are the sex you feel you". There is not a perfect correlation between your genotyope (which can not only be XX or XY, but can be XXX or XXY, and probably other variations too) and your phenotype (the "plumbing" as someone called it) which can not only be male or female, but hermaphrodite and/or other variations on a theme.

As I say, the ONLY 100% sure fire definition is a brain scan. There are differences between male and female brains. There is, apparently, a 100% perfect match between people who say "I feel a male" and have a male brain, and people who say "I feel a female" and have a female brain.

Cheers,
Wol

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Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 19:08 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not even clear what it means to have a male or female brain. There are so many factors involved in the biology and socialization that you can't just divide brains up that way.

"male" and "female" brains

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:36 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Yes, it's not clear but there have been interesting studies that hint at differences. There have been both live brain scans and and post-mortem dissections of brains that suggest that transsexuals brains are more similar to other brains of the gender they identify with and less similar to other brains of their biological sex.

We also know that different parts of the fetus develop at different times; genital differentiation occurs way before brain development is far along and there are hints that during fetal development, a baby may develop a female body but a more typical "male" brain and vice-versa. Again, so far we only have hints, but not exact details.

I'm pretty familiar with this topic as a modicum of googling will reveal.

-- Dianne Skoll.