According to this account, feminist writers had devoted themselves to rooting out the scourge of “neurosexism”, and they had been all too successful. By rejecting the idea of inherent sex difference, writers such as Cordelia Fine (in Delusions of Gender) and Rebecca Jordan-Young (in Brain Storm) had effectively undone the very class they claimed to represent. The most appealing part of this story is, of course, that it takes a particularly virulent attack on women’s rights and pins the blame for it on women.

But it also has a germ of truth to it: there is a strand of feminism that has always seemed deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sex difference. “Born this way” might make strategic sense as a slogan for other civil rights movements, but for the women’s movement, it would have come close to an admission of defeat: born to be underpaid and sexually harassed. No wonder there was an insistent pull towards a form of blank slatism for some feminists.

At its most extreme, this becomes the “gender performativity” theory offered by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, which claims that gender and sex are shaped by social influence. And it’s a theory that goes even further back. In the 1969 book Sexual Politics, for example, Kate Millett quoted approvingly from the work of sexologists to support the argument that “Psychosexual personality is… postnatal and learned.” Regrettably, the particular sexologist she was referring to in this section was John Money. And though Money was much cited and widely respected, he would also be entirely discredited before the end of the century.

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The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Money’s most influential work was probably the twin study now widely known as “John/Joan”. In 1965, a pair of male twins were born in the Canadian city Winnipeg, named Bruce and Brian Reimer. At seven months old, their mother noticed that their foreskins seemed to be closing up, and they were advised to have both boys circumcised. In the event, only one would be operated on: the first procedure was botched so badly that Bruce’s penis was entirely burned, and eventually (in the journalist John Colapinto’s account) “dried up and broke away in pieces”. Brian was left alone after that.

For the family, this was a dreadful event. For John Money, it was an opportunity. Money had already achieved some measure of fame as a pioneer of (what were then called) “sex change operations”, and also worked with (again, what were then called) intersex patients. In both cases, his aim was to use surgery and hormone treatments to bring about alignment between what he called the “psychological sex” and the “sex glands”.

Now Money had the perfect opportunity for a rare empirical study of his theories. The uninjured twin would be the control, while the injured twin would be the test. The baby was castrated and furnished with a rudimentary vulva, and the parents were given strict instructions on how to raise their newly-minted daughter as a girl. Brian would become Brenda. And, up until 1997, all the public knew of this experiment was that it had been a huge success — because all they knew was Money’s version. In his book Sexual Signatures, he described the case like this: “by the time the children were four years old, there was no mistaking which twin was the girl and which the boy. At five, the little girl already preferred dresses to pants, enjoyed wearing her hair ribbons, bracelets and frilly blouses, and being her daddy’s little sweetheart.”

It was, continued Money, “dramatic proof that the gender identity option is open at birth for normal infants”. It appeared to be indisputable evidence that the brain was plastic, and gender a work of culture rather than nature.

The real child had a very different experience. Far from the stereotypically girlish interests listed by Money, Brenda enjoyed playing with model aeroplanes and CB radios. By the age of 11, Brenda was struggling with anxiety and social isolation, and suffered (according to a clinician’s report) from “strong fears that something has been done to her genitals” and “suicidal thoughts”. As signs of puberty kicked in, other girls treated Brenda with suspicion and cruelty: they could tell this child was not like them. Compounding the trauma, Money forced the twins into sexual roleplay under the belief that this was necessary to gendered socialisation.

In 1980, Brenda was finally told the truth. He immediately made the decision to live as a boy, and adopted the name David. Money never reported that his experiment had been a failure. It wasn’t until 1997 that the sorry episode was added to scientific literature, in an article by Milton Diamond; this was followed by Colapinto’s Rolling Stone article (expanded into a book called As Nature Made Him in 2000), which brought the case to wider public attention. Gender plasticity was declared over. The harm to David Reimer was not: in 2004, he killed himself. His family squarely blamed Money’s experiment.

This awful episode perhaps demonstrates little except that sexologists should be treated with grave suspicion: it is so extreme and grotesque, it can hardly be treated as indicative of anything in normal childrearing. Certainly, if Money’s twin experiment had any influence on the development of gender identity theory, it surely ought to have been discrediting, given Money’s direct involvement in medical transition.

But instead, it seemed to sow the seeds of what was to come. The New York Times’ report on the 1997 revelations had ended like this: “And it is the head, Dr. Diamond added, that holds the primary sexual organ, the source of one’s identity, and the organ that does not lie.” In other words, gender is in your head. One reading of this was that the experiment on Reimer was not wrong because it mauled the body of a child; it was wrong because it put the brain and body out of alignment.

The Nineties were also a time of considerable public interest in the idea that “masculine” and “feminine” had a biological basis. John Gray’s blockbusting 1992 book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus had established a popular narrative of psychological sex difference as a kind of relationship self-help. (Men couldn’t help being inconsiderate — they were born that way!) In 2003, Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference had brought a neuroscience gloss to the position. As he summarised it in his introduction: “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

The Noughties critics of neurosexism were not, or were not all, rejecting the idea of sex difference in totality. As Fine wrote in her 2010 book Delusions of Gender: “There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large (although generally decreasing) sex differences in who does what, and who achieves what. It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are.”

But the way in which they were widely claimed to be connected was, plainly, influenced by sexism more than science. Baron-Cohen’s questionnaires used items like “I enjoy participating in sport” and “I try to avoid doing household chores if I can” to establish someone’s “systematising quotient” — as though women had equal access to sports, as though there was anything “systematic” about not doing the washing up, and as though playing in a team didn’t demand a certain level of empathy.

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The taboo trans question

By Sarah Ditum

The ultimate implication of The Essential Difference was that men were designed for thinking, and women for caring. It is substantially the same vision of gender that you can see in the notorious Mermaids “Barbie to GI Joe” gender scale. And this is a very appropriate thing for feminists to critique, especially when the level of “empirical” evidence underpinning it is so flimsy. Applying a rigorous eye to the science of sex difference is hardly the denial of sex difference: you could even call it a systematising impulse.

Fine herself has written, in a 2021 article, about the threat that gender identity theory poses to women’s rights. Replacing the category of woman as sex class with the category of woman as gender essence potentially deprives women of “the concepts to explain the disadvantages they face in virtue of their sex, and a commitment to accurate data to test and understand it”. In other words, when you make the idea of sex taboo, you make sexism impossible to name, or to counter.

Jordan-Young, however, took a very different direction, and ended up arguing not only against the idea of men and women having different brains, but against sex categories altogether. In 2019, she coauthored an article arguing that Caster Semenya (who is chromosomally male) should be eligible for women’s competition, which stated it was “simply not true” that testosterone played any role in athletic performance — a position that not only stands in opposition to every race result ever recorded, but which is also belied by the observable outcome of doping regimens.

It is hard to understand how anyone could be at once so deeply in denial about reality, and so cavalier about fairness to female athletes. The answer, perhaps, is fear. Like Kate Millett, Jordan-Young correctly deduces that sex difference has been used as the alibi for sex discrimination; in order to prevent the discrimination, one must therefore deny the difference.

Or as the science writer Angela Saini (author of the book Inferior) put it in a 2019 radio discussion: “We have to be careful that we don’t treat women as categorically different, and the reason we have to be cautious of this is because in the past this is a stick that is used to beat women with.” There is logic here, but a fragile, partial kind. Turning away from science may be tempting after the ways science has been abused to further sexism, but if you base your claim to sexual equality on the idea that men and women have no meaningful differences, your claim will fail.

Gender identity theory required two parents. One of them, yes, is the fearful strand of feminism that tends towards science denial. But the other was the tradition of scientific chauvinism in which femaleness amounted to being “daddy’s little girl” or doing chores: a tradition in which sex is reduced to stereotypes. If the only lesson we learn from this century’s strange diversion into gender identity mysticism is that we should blame women alone, then we’ve learned nothing at all.

The two groups, yoked together under an uglier-than-ever rainbow flag, have diametrically opposed objectives. For the LGB wing to achieve progress, the only tool we have is visibility. We have to come out. We have the constant advantage or penalty, depending on circumstance, of the closet. Years ago I wrote a joke which reflects a profound truth about gay life: the difference between being gay and being black is that if you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother. 

But what trans people need, want and campaigned for is the opposite. They fight for invisibility. That was the explicit objective of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which was designed to enable trans people to live quiet lives, precisely without being noticed as different. As so many trans people have told me, they transitioned in order to “pass”.

The background to that 2004 Act was the case of Christine Goodwin. She argued in the European Court of Human Rights that — and this was before gay civil partnership and equal marriage would have allowed him to do so — she was being discriminated against because, among other issues, she couldn’t marry her boyfriend. Without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) that the Act would grant, every time she needed to show her birth certificate she’d be outed as male and, therefore, as trans; her privacy would be breached. Which was the exact opposite of what she — who had undergone sex reassignment surgery more than a decade earlier — actually wanted. 

The GRA was a direct consequence of Goodwin’s ECHR win. It included an explicit provision to safeguard this essential privacy for transgender people. It made it an offence for any official who knew the birth sex of a trans person to disclose it. The GRA gave trans people the comfort of a legal fiction, on which they could rely fully, that they could be treated as the opposite sex. And more than that, it guaranteed that they would not have to come out as trans. It was a political triumph for invisibility. 

The effect of this was to create a social contract. Society would pretty happily go along with the GRA’s legal fiction because, as remains the case today, the majority of people think that transgender people should be free from discrimination. But that deal has been broken by the current generation of transactivists — often to the horror of many trans people, especially those who, under the auspices of the GRA, have fully transitioned. Those transactivists are making a fundamental error by enforcing the coupling of the LGB and the T: they have seen the campaigning success of lesbians and gays through coming out, and mistakenly think they should copy it. 

But unthinkingly merging the two makes little sense. As an idea, it is based on nothing more than the rather flimsy notion that “alphabet” people are united under a banner of similar oppression. And other letters, increasingly opaque in their relevance, are added daily to the Ts & Qs. Not long ago I was sent a leaflet circulated by the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario which invited to an “inclusiveness training” session for those who were “LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP”.  To be fair, the leaders of the group did subsequently say they were trying to be “a bit tongue-in-cheek” — but the current fashion for salami-slicing personal identities made it depressingly believable.

The fact that prejudice, in its stupidity, cannot tell the difference between anyone who is gender non-conforming, trans or gay, and in their eyes is just a “poof” or a “lezza”, is no reason for us to copy their idiocy by lazily conjoining the two under some generalised feeling of discrimination.

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The perversion of lesbian envy

By Julie Burchill

There is an obvious disparity. Sexual orientation — the sex or sexes to whom you are attracted — is a totally separate phenomenon from gender identity, a subjective feeling of who you think or claim you are. The specific needs and disadvantages of each are markedly different. Unless gays wear our badges and T-shirts and tell people that we’re gay, we can go about the world unnoticed, wearing what a friend of mine calls “heterosexual drag”. But to gain equality, we had to wave our flag and drop our disguise. We needed to march in protest and to lobby politicians, we had to show our difference in order for us to win the rights to marry, to adopt, to serve in the military, to have an equal age of consent. 

But transactivists muddle these different requirements of visibility and invisibility for the LGB versus the T. As we saw in Scotland, they want society to accommodate an even wider extension of the GRA’s legal fiction, an even more public profile, to those who, without any kind of diagnosis or process of actual physical transition, can simply self-identify as the opposite sex. However, they also then want everyone to ignore completely the very obvious differences — sporting advantages where they occur, and visual clues, especially in the transwomen who have chosen to remain physically unchanged in any way.

The case of Adam Graham, the Scottish rapist who claimed trans status as Isla Bryson in order to be housed in a women’s prison, graphically illustrated the problem, with Scottish politicians tying themselves in linguistic knots trying to justify their legislation. Transactivists have threatened women with guns if they question their right to using a women’s loo. Amara Vasquez, a trans social media influencer, shouted at feminists on a march in 2022 that “these titties are more real than you, bitch…” These may be particularly egregious examples, but they are not untypical of the kind of belligerently conspicuous behaviour rejected by those who have fully transitioned. 

What the Gender Recognition Act did for those who needed to live as the opposite sex was provide them with a way of doing it, without being unmasked or forced to admit their history. But the ideological insistence of transactivists that “transwomen are women” has blown that apart. They have opened every trans person’s history to scrutiny, while at the same time insisting that the rest of society turn a blind eye to it.

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What's the point of a gay dating show?

By John Maier

The great success of the Stonewall campaigns — I was one of the charity’s six co-founders in 1989 — came from creating a shared goal with the rest of society. The wider population agreed that it was damaging to democracy and all of us for any one group of people to be discriminated against under the law. The accomplishment was not just to right a wrong, but to create a platform from which lesbians and gays could contribute fully to a society in which we all could live well together.

But for those born male now to push themselves into women’s sport, spaces and services was never the intention of the Gender Recognition Act. It was to give dignity to people whose lives would be immeasurably improved, psychologically and socially, if they took the enormous step of transition. Society responded by accepting that shared goal and the contract which that implied. But activists are trying to trash that social bond which was created by their own campaigning legacy.

By trying to copy the successes of the lesbian and gay movement, transactivists misunderstand their own history and drag trans people into the unwelcome glare of exposure. They should be unsurprised that the rest of society is now pushing back — and that the LGB seeks separation from the T.

At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence of advertising in the built environment as an unacceptable invasion. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder every three seconds by annoying canvassers while enjoying a quiet ciggie break.

So I set out to see if it was possible to ignore them. It was, it turned out, difficult: advertisers spend a great deal of money on being attention-grabbing, and it took a huge mental effort to tune out all that expensive effort to snag my awareness.

The “attention economy” was first theorised by the economist Herbert Simon in 1971: he called attention to the “bottleneck of human thought” and argued that in a world where this was a scarce resource, the smart money focused on grabbing a slice of it. After all, you can have the best product in the world but if no one has noticed you exist, you’ll still sink without trace. An immense amount of lucrative time and effort goes into the arms race for attention, and the results — not just on the Tube — are often eye-watering.

If it was difficult to swim against the commercial messaging tide two decades ago, it’s even harder now. When I did my Tube experiment, averting my eyes from the tsunami of paid-for messaging became exhausting after a few days. After a while, it was easier just to give in and swim on the tide of people trying to tell me what to buy. And today, the experiment would be harder still, with adverts covering every available surface and sometimes moving as well.

Over the same period, too, something equivalent has happened to the whole media universe. A vast commercial and political industry has developed with the aim of grabbing the punter’s attention and persuading us to buy, say or think something or other. The boundary between PR, journalism and propaganda is blurry to say the least, and flourishes atop an immense ecosystem of opinion-havers. And there’s no outside to it, short of moving to an uninhabited island with no internet access and never talking to anyone.

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We are all Teletubbies now

By Mary Harrington

As a result, we don’t just have an attention economy. We also have an attention politics: a byproduct of the explosion of content that came with the transition to digital culture. In that politics, what gets noticed isn’t just a bottleneck on the way to commercial success; it’s also the gateway to political power.

In the new attention politics, older information ideals curl up and die. For the liberal framework for thinking about communication dates back to a point before the internet, when information was relatively scarce, and could be suppressed. In that context, liberals wanted to resist such suppression, arguing that “free speech”, would enable a collective search for objective truth via a “marketplace of ideas”.

Along with this came the belief that free information and lively debate carries us all toward objectively agreed truths, while religious faith and moral principles should be as much as possible a private matter. Contemporary defenders of this gestalt gather at Quillette and other such “classical liberal” outlets, ever ready to mount a defence of free speech as a bulwark against bad ideas, or the importance of debate to the scientific method.

Now, though, we all have free speech. In a digital environment, you can’t really suppress it. Ban someone, and they’ll just pop up elsewhere (or in the case of Donald Trump, start their own social media platform). Not unrelatedly, what we have is no longer a scarcity of information but a superabundance.

The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long. So a great deal of soft social effort goes into constraining free speech, while still permitting speech to be (at least nominally) free. We can all say what we like; the battleground is now what gets noticed, and by whom.

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No woman is safe on Twitter

By Kate Clanchy

What does or doesn’t make the public eye is managed by a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; what should be boosted by algorithms; and what should make it into the respectable press. Even the original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, has fallen foul of this, after committing the dastardly crime of publicly noticing a Tweet by JK Rowling.

At the same time, too, “facts” have also become visibly unstable. In some cases, they vary dramatically according to local political conditions: for example, according to US officials, “gender affirmation” for children is officially “suicide-prevention care”. Meanwhile, officials in the UK and Sweden are rowing swiftly in the opposite direction.

And even where the facts themselves are not disputed, they aren’t really the main event any more. Instead, they’re data points for curated narratives. “NJ woman who forced daughter she fathered into child porn sentenced to 25 years in prison” is, on its own, just a story; but added to a curated list of related stories such as this one, it looks like a pattern of criminality worthy of notice — or of being deliberately ignored.

This sort of attention politics, the manipulation of narratives, sounds a death knell for the liberal ideal of politically neutral individuals or institutions. For confronted with an excess of competing and contradictory messaging, most sensible people don’t want to spend all their time working out what’s real. And when attention is scarce, political power accrues to those who are trusted to curate.

Most visibly, legacy media outlets now play this role: filtering the chaos of possible stories for a selection that fits (or at least doesn’t jar too sharply with) the readership’s worldview. But the facts, or stories, or data points we curate add up, cumulatively, to moral choices. If I notice the vulnerability of males who identify as women within all-male prisons, while (deliberately or not) ignoring stories that point to the vulnerability of women to males who claim to identify as women within all-female prisons, this adds up to a statement about what (or who) I think is important.

This variation in what’s emphasised (or mentioned at all) is easy to see across the national press: try toggling between New York Times universe and that of the New York Post, or between the Guardian and the Telegraph. You don’t need a media studies degree to infer the differences in moral framework that drive this differential noticing. And in any case, this isn’t an abstract game for media studies nerds. Our moral choices have real-world consequences.

Which set of “facts” is accepted by officials as true, about the right way to care for gender dysphoric children, will have significant medical consequences for youth in different jurisdictions. Or consider recent news that the state of New York is proposing to legislate for prisoners to be “presumptively placed” in accordance with their “self-attested gender identity unless the person opts out of such placement”. Set that against the list of crime reports above, and the decision to notice or not notice the link between the male sex and sex-offending adds up to a political choice that — as others have noticed — places real women at risk.

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Why Libs of TikTok terrifies the media

By Kat Rosenfield

And this is where the politics of noticing grows more contentious. For the general public aren’t mere passive bystanders. Noticing subcultures have swiftly emerged, sometimes sharply at odds with the official ones, and in which an effective curator can have real-world political impact. For example, the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account is credited with having transformed US education debates — simply by collating video statements made by progressive teachers.

In turn, this has spawned a whole meta-industry of NGOs whose remit is to stop unofficial noticers getting out of hand. Recent years have seen a boom in “fact-checking” organisations, who aim to extend the governance of noticing out into the internet badlands, often funded by immensely wealthy philanthropists — many of whom have well-documented political agendas.

This looks variously like an attempt to defend truth from manipulation by bad actors, or else covert censorship riddled with obvious bias. But the internet abounds with people who have assembled truly outlandish narratives from their preferred data points, such as in the QAnon conspiracy. And “misinformation” isn’t just a self-serving elite story: bot farms are routinely used in information warfare, to give the appearance of mass support to overseas messaging operations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that even the US Government is now an overt player in the politics of noticing. Last week, Joe Biden launched a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose job it is to tell the rest of the English-speaking world what is or isn’t real on the internet. Predictably, though, the reaction to this body was cynical. And no wonder: for Biden’s intervention does no more to address the loss of facts, objectivity and truth-seeking driven by information superabundance, than obviously biased “fact-checking” bodies funded by progressive philanthropists.

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What fact checkers get wrong

By Gavin Haynes

But no amount of such “governance” will stop people noticing when narratives are uplifted, deprecated, or transformed from “disinformation” to accepted fact — or prevent them wondering about the context for such shifts.

Many Americans noticed, for example, when the insalubrious contents of a laptop belonging to then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter went from “Russian disinformation” to “authenticated by the Washington Post” in the time it took his father to beat Donald Trump at the polling booth. We’ll never know if burying that story swung the election. But it probably helped: an intuition that is, for many, just one more data point in the pattern of “neutrality” and “objectivity” serving as mere fig-leaves for partisan manoeuvring.

It’s common now to complain about the other side being guilty of “post-truth” politics, or to blame variously “woke tyranny” or “Right-wing authoritarianism” for the sense that truth has been replaced by something dismayingly slippery and chronically biased. But it’s a mistake to imagine that this is all the fault of whoever you consider your political enemies.

Free speech, objectivity, facts and the “marketplace of ideas” really are hopelessly compromised. But what killed them wasn’t Those Bad People Over There; it was the internet. It gave us too much information, and with it came attention politics. Now even the most die-hard defenders of political neutrality might as well lean into their own biases, because even if they don’t people will still notice them.

What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue. That’s ultimately a question of how completely a given elite is able to control the public sphere, in a hyper-mediated culture, if a critical mass of ordinary people doesn’t want to play ball. In any case, I suspect we’re on track to find out.

There’s a reason this setup is a classic. Most of us feel that there’s an “us” conceptually distinct from the body we inhabit. In fact, anthropologists suggest it’s a belief held in some form or other across all human cultures.

This ancient dichotomy crops up in Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, a new book from primatologist Frans de Waal. Most of the book is about sex differences in our closest cousins. But de Waal briefly touches on the experience of transgender humans as evidence, supposedly, of innately gendered brains that can be effectively the opposite sex to the rest of the body.

The hypothesis he advances is a steelman of gender identity theory: the idea that whether we’re “really” a man or woman depends on an internal state knowable only to ourselves. In de Waal’s conception (the “scientific” version of the theory), gender identity isn’t an immaterial essence but is physically located in some part of the brain. Supposedly this brain module develops in utero and tells women and girls “this brain is in a female body”, and men and boys that their body is male — but it is possible for this module to find itself in the “wrong” body. De Waal suggests that “in a fraction of human pregnancies, the body takes off in a different direction to the brain”, and this physical mismatch is the cause of gender dysphoria.

De Waal’s argument rests on claims, made by a number of studies, that the brains of transgender people are closer in structure or function to their target sex than to their natal sex. But, unsurprisingly, this is far from settled science.

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The taboo trans question

By Sarah Ditum

For one thing, studies of the brain involve either the very expensive process of imaging living brains, or brain tissue from deceased donors. It’s hard to get a decent sample size — and harder still when the group you’re interested in makes up just a tiny minority of the population. Plus, the pressures on scientists and journalists to produce eyeball-grabbing #content to keep their careers afloat can lead to conclusions being brazenly over-interpreted, especially in areas in which research often attracts media buzz.

On top of this, there are a number of complicating factors, which most of these studies are much too small to control for (if they even attempt to — plenty don’t). Hormones are one such complication: if people have medically transitioned, it’s difficult to say whether any resemblance to their target sex is because they were born that way, or because of their newly cross-sex hormonal profile. Many studies acknowledge this problem, but small sample sizes mean that their efforts to address it are often not statistically meaningful.

The fact that trans people are more likely to have autism or mental illnesses is another potential confounder, one that’s rarely mentioned. These diagnoses are thought to be associated with physical changes in the brain, so any study of average differences between trans people and control groups would need to rule them out as explanations.

Sexual orientation, too, should be taken into account. People who are trans are much more likely to be non-heterosexual pre-transition; if they are only compared to heterosexual controls, then it’s impossible to tell whether differences are down to gender identity or sexuality — especially if your experiment, like this one, is based on volunteers’ responses to an erotic film. This particular study found that trans women responded differently from straight men and similarly to straight women. Is this a sign of a “female brain”, or could they just be attracted to men, like straight women are? We don’t know, because the paper doesn’t say.

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Feminism has a biology problem

By Ellen Pasternack

Since sexual orientation is the single most binary psychological variation between men and women (well upwards of 90% of women are attracted to men, and vice versa — a fact often considered so obvious that it goes without saying), you’d think it would be important to carefully control for. Most studies don’t adequately do this, though, and at least one actually does the opposite. The methods section of this paper published in Nature explains that for trans women to participate as subjects, they had to be exclusively attracted to males (i.e. they had to be homosexual), while to be in the male or female control groups, participants had to be heterosexual. The confounding variable of sexual orientation is therefore completely baked into the study, so that it’s impossible to draw separate conclusions about gender identity.

On the other hand, the first study to explicitly factor this into the experimental design reports that once sexual orientation is accounted for, the brains of trans people were sex-typical in most of the variables measured. In other words, comparing like for like, trans people’s brains were similar to people of the same (natal) sex and sexual orientation, rather than the opposite sex.

I don’t think it’s implausible that gender dysphoria could be caused in some cases by some kind of neurological similarity to the opposite sex —just that the evidence for it is currently not especially convincing. On top of this, there are a few troublesome observations that suggest the “brain in the wrong body” narrative can’t be the whole story.

Why have gender clinic referrals skyrocketed for girls in particular — in the UK, there’s been an increase of 4,400% in less than a decade — when gender dysphoria used to be diagnosed primarily in boys? This looks suspiciously similar to documented cases of peer-to-peer social influence in teenage girls (which can be facilitated by social media), but is usually explained away as a decrease in the stigma that would otherwise prevent people coming out. If this is the case, though, then where are all the middle-aged women who should also be coming forward after years of repressing a trans male identity?

And what about the large numbers of male-to-female transitioners who do not seem to suffer from gender dysphoria, may have no desire whatsoever to alter their male anatomy, and behave in strikingly male-typical ways? News of women arrested for sexual crimes — especially those involving a penis — used to be a rarity; now it is increasingly commonplace. One such headline from a few weeks ago reads: “Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public”. Are we really meant to believe this is the behaviour of a “woman trapped in a man’s body”?

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Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

Undeterred, however, de Waal concludes that “it seems […] the brain offers a better indicator of the gender people claim for themselves than their genital anatomy.” This statement borders on the pseudoscientific. How can we believe that the brain, with all its vagaries, is a “better indicator” of whether the average person describes themselves as a man or a woman than the simple binary of what’s in their pants?

But let’s say it’s true that gender identity is an immutable physical property of our brains, and one day we will be able to point to it on a fancy type of scan. Even with this newfound neurological knowledge, wouldn’t we still need to recognise that male and female bodies are different, for instance in contexts such as sports?

De Waal doesn’t think so: to him, rulings that restrict female sports to people with female bodies are no more than “attempts to demonise [transgender people] and make their lives more difficult”. This is despite a less conspiratorial explanation being within reach — as he himself states in another chapter: “body strength is a glaring exception to the general rule that gender differences are gradual and overlapping […] More than two out of three men can lift 110 pounds directly off the ground, but only 1% of women can do the same.”

De Waal refers here to a gender difference, though actually it’s a difference of sex, caused by the physical characteristics of our bodies. Such mix-ups are not infrequent. And matters are not helped by a glossary inset. “Sex”, we are told, refers circularly to “the biological sex of a person”; “gender” is “the role and position of each sex in society” (emphasis mine), while a “gender role” apparently is something else entirely. With a guide like this, the blind are led by the blind.

Suggested reading

How philosophy sacrificed the truth

By Kathleen Stock

Perhaps the strangest thing is how at odds this all is with the rest of the book, in which de Waal is scathing of over-simple politicised narratives from all sides. In a final chapter titled “The Trouble with Dualism: Mind, Brain, and Body Are One”, he argues that thinking the human mind can be separated from our bodies and our animal natures is an arrogant form of “neo-creationism”. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is approvingly quoted as saying that “a mind is so shaped by the body and so destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it”. In other words, you are your body, and the idea of being born in the “wrong” one is a logical impossibility.

It’s hard to believe this chapter is written by the same man who uncritically adopts the language of “boys born with female anatomy”. It’s as if there is a set of beliefs on gender identity which have been downloaded as a self-contained unit, prevented by some kind of firewall from mingling with pre-existing knowledge.

Perhaps this makes sense. Many universities officially subscribe to this set of beliefs (in fact, in the UK they’re likely to pay money to do so, via Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme), and increasingly ask that new hires do, too. Students enforce the beliefs among their own ranks and among their lecturers. Research that asks the wrong questions may be pulled from publication, or have ethical approval retracted. You don’t have to understand — just profess your allegiance so that we all know you’re on the side of decency.

It’s no wonder that some intelligent and well-meaning people seem to decide, consciously or unconsciously, to think the right thing and reach the right conclusions without worrying about whether they’re sound.

When it comes to sex, gender and trans issues, it’s hard to know which information to trust. There is a clear market for non-partisan scientific expertise, to help us sift through the propaganda and hype. In books like Different, we trust that the authors will hand-pick reliable facts for us, rather than buying them wholesale from the merchants. But if even the experts are too befuddled to look at the evidence with a critical eye — or worse, self-censoring — then there is little hope for the rest of us.