© Los Angeles TimesStudents pass by a gender neutral bathroom at Santee High School in May of 2016.
In the world of radical identity politics, two groups with very different philosophies have been ignoring science in the name of advancing equality: gender feminists and transgender activists.
Gender feminists — who are distinct from traditional equity feminists — refuse to acknowledge the role of evolution in shaping the human brain, and instead promote the idea that sex differences are caused by a socialization process that begins at birth. Gender, according to them, is a construct; we are born as blank slates and it is parents and society at large that produce the differences we see between women and men in adulthood.
The idea that our brains are identical sounds lovely, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Many studies, for instance, have documented the masculinizing effects of prenatal testosterone on the developing brain. And
a recent study in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports showed that testosterone exposure alters the programming of neural stem cells responsible for brain growth and sex differences.
Gender feminists often point to a single study, published in 2015, which claimed it isn't possible to tell apart male and female brains. But when a group of researchers reanalyzed the underlying data, they found that brains could be correctly identified as female or male with
69% to 77% accuracy. In another study, published in 2016, researchers used a larger sample in conjunction with higher-resolution neuroimaging and were able to successfully classify a brain by its sex
93% of the time.
Comment: The injured toll has been increased from 50 to 68.