On the first day of school, my 12th grade neuroscience teacher gave us a book review assignment. Yay!
By the end of our senior year, everyone must read and review a neuroscience-related book, chosen from nineteen options presented to us in a list. Scanning the suggested titles, all of the author names looked pretty masculine to me. Just to be sure, I asked the teacher if any books on the list were written by women, and to his embarrassment, he admitted that he didn’t see any. All the books were written by men. Every single one.
We just looked at each other for an awkward moment– my teacher standing up in front of the whole class, me sitting in my plastic chair attached to the desk.
… I internally sighed. There’s no way I’m not going to challenge this situation, but this is definitely going to cause more work for me. I can’t believe no one else brought this up in previous years.
I’d signed up for neuroscience because I loved my earlier biology classes, from nitpicky molecular structures to big-picture evolution of bodies and behaviors. But I also sought to learn more about my own brain– in a scientific way, not just the uncomfortable-talks-with-my-therapist way. Where does my chronic anxiety come from? How does my sensory processing disorder work? I’m pretty sure my gender falls outside the male/female binary, but do my brain structures tell a different story?
Since gender was one of those questions that led me to take neuroscience, I wasn’t about to accept that all the answers would come from cisgender men. Luckily, my teacher seemed to readily agree.
I decided to choose a new book for my project, one that wasn’t on the list, and try to help diversify the reading list for future years. My teacher was very helpful in recommending two female-authored titles to start with, and I soon checked out Testosterone Rex: Myths of Science, Sex, and Society by Cordelia Fine from our local public library.
Testosterone Rex is all about dispelling the titular myth. It’s a commonly held, if disliked, view that men are more prone to risk-taking behaviors and thus receive high rewards in sex and power, a quality attributable to testosterone— the key hormonal difference between men and women— but in fact, it’s so much more complicated than that. One major component of this book is reviewing the history of gender-based studies in neuroscience and criticizing earlier experimental designs. A landmark study in the mid-20th century by British biologist Angus Bateman seemingly demonstrated that male fruit flies benefited more than females from having a large number of mates. This study is used to argue that men, with their unlimited and cheap sperm, are more likely to be promiscuous than women. However, Fine goes into detail about the flaws with Bateman’s experimental design, confirmation bias in presentation of his data, and the way the scientific community just seemed to accept his conclusions for years without even replicating the study.
These mistakes in experimental design are everywhere: if your study entails offering hypothetical casual sex to random female-presenting students on a college campus, it can’t possibly be a good judge of female interests in sexuality, because “what this study is actually primarily showing is women’s lack of interest in being murdered, raped, robbed, or inflaming the interests of a potential stalker” rather than anyone’s sexual preferences or behaviors (55).
In the second chapter, Fine dispels the myth that men are more likely to be promiscuous than monogamous because their testosterone-fueled mindset drives them to fertilize as many eggs as possible. “Indeed, a promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 percent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year,” Fine explains (51). The math doesn’t check out– a testosterone rex lifestyle isn’t truly rewarded the way sexist people have hoped.
Fine uses examples from across the animal kingdom and across the human world (non-Western communities don’t always fit the norms the scientific community is used to) to demonstrate the diversity of ways biological sex determines mating and parenting behavior. Testosterone doesn’t always correlate with sex and power in the most basic evolutionary sense, and it makes even less sense that such an expectation translates to abstract concepts like personal finance (where men are assumed to be more successful because of their gender-inherent economic smarts, and certainly not a silly thing like the wage gap!). In Chapter 5, “Skydiving Wallflowers,” Fine reveals many studies in which risk-taking isn’t a stable quality across all activities for an individual (someone who enjoys skydiving might be risk-averse financially, and vice versa), so it can’t be a quality attributed to an entire gender and their associated hormone, either. Women take risks all the time, too– just not in ways that researchers are looking at. What about risking feminist backlash just by speaking out on a controversial issue? The degree of risk in many scenarios is indeed affected by gender, but not because the individual is helped or hindered by testosterone/estrogen. Rather, it’s the culture around them with its particular stereotypes, and other biological factors besides this single hormone influencing behavior— “men with higher T (women weren’t tested) play a riskier game in the Balloon task, but only if their cortisol (a stress hormone) level is low” (166). So, gender differences can be eliminated or exacerbated by something like stress? It sounds like they weren’t very set in stone in the first place, if they change so easily!
Finally, Fine challenges the very idea that testosterone makes people masculine– levels vary between individual men, and individual women, too! Chapter 6, “The Hormonal Essence of the T-Rex?” reminds readers that hormones don’t directly cause behaviors– only making them more likely, if anything– and environmental factors can influence the ways these hormones work in the body.
Fine presents all this evidence with a clear call to action for equality between men and women, showing why this neuroscience applies to daily life– from the “stereotype threat” that initiates a self-fulfilling prophecy for women in male-dominated fields, to a status quo that normalizes being lenient with men committing sex crimes. If we get rid of the testosterone rex myth, it’s harder to justify our society’s sexism.
I enjoyed the humorous writing style and easily readable length, and I’d highly recommend the book to anyone interested in brains or gender studies, even a busy high school student. I can imagine many teenagers would chuckle at the line describing brutal, aggressive male behavior as “less like a manifestation of uncompromised, evolutionarily honed male sexual nature, and more of a symptom of the fact that Mr. Bloodthirsty was a despotic asshole” (75). Not only that, but there were several concepts I learned from this book that challenged what we’d discussed in the classroom. For example, my class notes emphasized the importance of the SRY gene, and how humans simply default to female development unless the Y chromosome is present. From Testosterone Rex, however, I was introduced to the idea that it’s not that straightforward, and “female development is as active and complex a process as male development” (86). Genes of the X chromosome, not just Y, and even other chromosomes in the genome, are all responsible for directing sex determination. Additionally, Fine spends a lot of time reviewing the ultimate reasoning for the promiscuous or monogamous behavior of many species, from bush crickets to chimpanzees. From the first two chapters especially, I learned about how social status, gender, and environmental factors influence expectations and behaviors regarding promiscuity in a species. Humans are no different– an idea we didn’t have much time to discuss in class this year, when we spent two class periods learning the arguments for and against humans being a naturally monogamous species.
One thing I particularly wanted to talk about was my experience reading and reviewing Testosterone Rex from a feminist LGBTQ+ lens. For one thing, LGBTQ+ bodies and identities aren’t really discussed beyond casual mentions, but I was constantly drawing my own connections anyway because of my personal gay and genderqueer indentity, as well as my academic interest in queer studies. (I spent the second semester of senior year in an independent study with the history department, exploring LGBTQ+ Jewish history.)
The first direct mention of LGBTQ+ people in Testosterone Rex (unless I missed something) doesn’t arrive until page 67– Fine discusses the frequency of nonreproductive sex in humans, to point out how procreation cannot be the only explanation or ultimate reasoning for trends in human sexuality or gender roles. With one line out of all those paragraphs, she acknowledges “And sometimes, of course, it is not men with whom [women] are having sex, just as nontrivial proportions of men sometimes, often, or always prefer to have sex with other men” (67). The rest of the few LGBTQ+ mentions are similarly single-sentence and surface-level, the kind of thing any middle school student with a basic understanding of Pride vocabulary could point out, rather than thought-provoking evidence presented by a neuroscience writer.
I would have liked to see a chapter on how queer theory and the testosterone rex myth contradict each other, or perhaps just a few solid paragraphs to address the topic and introduce some evidence. From the introduction right away, Fine shows the urgency of the topic, quoting a Manchester Business School academic who believes “Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species” (17). If that were true, how uncomfortable it must be that some people exist as neither a man or a woman, or a bit of both! Queer theory could add another dimension to strengthen Fine’s argument. Disappointingly, she doesn’t go there in this book.
I would recommend Testosterone Rex to future neuroscience students without hesitation. Not only is it manageable reading for a high school book review assignment, highly relevant to our daily lives, and advocates an empowering social call to action, but it also raises further unanswered questions about gender and sexuality to explore beyond the binary. If the traditional understanding– that sex and gender are both firmly fixed, while also fragile enough categories to be defined largely by one hormone– is bogus, as Fine’s book concludes, then how are we to think about gender going forward? Fine frequently suggests that human brains are a mosaic of feminine and masculine qualities; a natural follow-up question asks in what ways this validates queerness as biologically and evolutionarily sound. This book does not address that question. I bring it up in my review to point out that this is worth reading precisely because Fine doesn’t hold all the answers. It is, overall, a very good start.
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In the spirit of offering not just a single book against the dozens of male-authored texts already presented in our class, I've provided a sample of my new reading list and I encourage future behavioral neuroscience students to check them out. Some are focused on the same gender-in-the-brain topic, while some explore other neuroscience-related questions. I haven’t read any of these yet, so this is not an endorsement– just an invitation. (Based on what I’ve Googled about the authors, I’m pretty sure all the authors are non-men, but that’s often an assumption made based on pronouns. I am still unsure where to find a neuroscience book written by an openly non-binary author.)
Further reading:
Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley
Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally
The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures by Christine Kenneally
Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain by Daphna Joel and Luba Vikhanski
The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine
Hormones and Animal Social Behavior by Elizabeth Adkins-Regan
If you read this far, have an edit of Boris the Neuroscience Rat as a reward! :)