The Queen - Matt Ridley

Women with a condition known as Turner 's syndrome (they are born without ovaries) have even less testosterone in their blood than do women who have ovaries: (Ovaries produce some testosterone, though not as much as testicles do.) They are exaggeratedly feminine in their behavior, with typically a special interest in babies, clothes, housekeeping, and romantic stories: Men with less than usual testosterone in their blood as adults—eunuchs, for example—are noted for their femininity of appearance and attitude. Men exposed to less than usual testosterone as embryos—for example, the sons of diabetic women who took female hormones during pregnancy—are shy, unassertive, and effeminate: Men with too much testosterone are pugnacious: Women whose mothers were injected with progesterone in the 1950s (to avert miscarriage) later described themselves as having been tomboys when young; progesterone is not unlike testosterone in its effects. Girls who were born with an unusual condition called either adrenogenital syndrome or congenital adrenal hyperplasia are equally tomboyish: This disorder causes the adrenal gland, near the kidney, to produce a hormone that acts like testosterone instead of cortisol, its usual product."

Somewhat like in the zebra finches, there are two periods when testosterone levels rise in male children: in the womb, from about six weeks after conception, and at puberty. As Anne Moir and David Jessel put it in a recent book, Brain Sex, the first pulse of hormone exposes the photographic negative; the second develops it: 1° This is a crucial difference from the way the hormone affects the body. The body is masculinized by testosterone from the testicles at puberty, whatever its womb experience. But not the mind.

The mind is immune to testosterone unless it was exposed to a suf-

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ficient concentration (relative to female hormones) in the womb. It would be easy to engineer a society with no sex difference in attitude between men and women: Inject all pregnant women with the right dose of hormones, and the result would be men and women with normal bodies but identical feminine brains: War, rape, box-ing, car racing, pornography, and hamburgers and beer would soon be distant memories: A feminist paradise would have arrived: SUGAR AND SPICE

The effect of this double-barreled burst of testosterone on the male brain is dramatic: The first dose produces a baby that is mentally different from a girl baby from its first day on the planet: Baby girls are more interested in smiling, communicating, and in people, boys in action and things. Shown cluttered pictures, boys select objects, girls people. Boys are instantly obsessed with dis-mantling, assembling, destroying, possessing, and coveting things.

Girls are fascinated by people and treat their toys as surrogate people. Hence, to suit their mentalities, we have invented toys that suit each sex. We give boys tractors and girls dolls: We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them.

This is something every parent knows. Despairingly they watch their son turn every stick into a sword or gun, while their daughter cuddles even the most inanimate object as if it were a doll. A woman wrote to the Independent, a British national newspaper, on November 2, 1992, as follows: " I would be interested if any of your more learned readers could tell me why, from the time my twins could reach for toys and were put on a rug together with a mixed selection of 'boys ' and 'girls ' baby toys, he would inevitably select the car/train items and she the doll/teddy ones. "

The genes cannot be denied. And yet, of course, there are no genes for liking guns or dolls, there are only genes for channeling male instincts into imitating males and female instincts into imitating female behavior. There are natures that respond to some nurtures and not others:

SEXING THE MIND

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At school, boys are fidgety, difficult, inattentive, and slow to learn, compared to girls. Nineteen out of every twenty hyperac-tive children are boys. Four times as many boys as girls are dyslexic and learning disabled: "Education is almost a conspiracy against the aptitudes and inclinations of a schoolboy, " wrote psychologist Dianne McGuiness, a sentiment to which almost every man with a memory of school will raise a hearty cry of assent:"

But another fact begins to emerge at school. Girls are simply better at linguistic forms of learning, boys at mathematical and some spatial skills. Boys are more abstract, girls more literal. Boys with an extra X chromosome (XXY instead of the normal XY) are much more verbal than other boys: Girls with Turner ' s syndrome (no ovaries) are even worse at spatial tasks than other girls but just as good at verbal ones: Girls who were exposed to male hormones in the womb are better at spatial tasks: Boys who were exposed to female hormones are worse at spatial tasks. These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls: According to one researcher, such suppression has done both boys and girls far more harm than good. i8

And the brain itself begins to show strange differences.

Brain functions become more diffuse in girls, whereas they take up specific locations in the heads of boys: The two hemispheres of the brain become more different and more specialized in boys: The cor-pus callosum, which connects the two, grows larger in girls: It is as if testosterone begins to isolate the boy ' s right hemisphere from colonization by verbal skills from the left: These facts are far too few and unsystematic to be regarded as anything more than hints of what actually happens, but the role of language acquisition must be critical: Language is the most human and therefore most recent of our mental skills—the one we share with no other ape: Language seems to come into the brain like an invading Goth, taking the place of other skills, and testosterone appears to resist this: Whatever actually happens, it is indis-putable fact that at the age of five, when they first arrive at school, the average boy has a very different brain from the average girl.

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Yet at five the testosterone levels in the average boy are identical CO those of the average girl, and a fraction of what they were at birth: The pulse of testosterone in the womb is a distant memory, and there will be little difference between the sexes in testosterone levels until the age of eleven or twelve. A boy of eleven is far more similar to a girl of the same age than he has been before or will be again. He is academically her equal for the first time, and his interests are not so far apart. Indeed, there is one piece of medical evidence that at this age a person can still grow up to be, mentally, either a typical man or a typical woman, despite the hormonally induced differences of childhood: This evidence comes from thirty-eight cases of a rare congenital disorder in the Dominican Republic: Called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, this disorder causes its male possessor to be unusually insensitive to the effect of testosterone before birth. As a result, such people are born with female genitalia and reared as girls. Suddenly, at puberty, their testosterone level rises, and they turn into almost normal men: (The main difference is that they ejaculate through a hole at the base of the penis:) Yet, despite their childhood as girls, these men have for the most part adapted fairly easily to male roles in their society, which suggests either that their brains were masculinized even as their genitalia were not or that their brains were still adaptable at puberty."