For another, the vast majority of children with gender dysphoria-if left alone and not socially or medically transitioned-will outgrow it. Soh argues, convincingly, that this is a grave mistake.įor one thing, she points out that “gender dysphoria” is often itself the symptom of another comorbidity, the one that ought to be treated first-anxiety, autism, or body-dysmorphic disorder. They are often invited to pick a new name and begin a course of hormonal blockers to inhibit puberty until they can be started on cross-sex hormones, which will give them the appearance of the opposite sex at the cost of their future fertility. The masculinity or femininity we exhibit may be closely tied to the testosterone level to which we were exposed as babies in utero, for example.īut in 2020, young gender-non-conforming children are encouraged to do exactly that. No, she explains, gender proceeds from biology.

In Soh’s telling, gender is neither purely a “social construct” nor is it everything-more important than biology itself. But we seem to have a lot of fervent opinions about sex, sexuality, and gender, many of them gleaned from pop culture-many of them dead wrong. Today’s educated lay public might not dare proffer an opinion on the measured value of the Hubble constant or the likelihood that protons ultimately decay. In her new book, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society, the neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh provides an indispensable cultural sanity check.

Our current obsession with gender identity has led us to treat the pronouncements of four-year-olds (“ No, Mommy, I’m not a boy”) with the reverence once reserved for oracles. In the last decade, gender has vaulted in the popular imagination from something we might dismiss as a dispensable collection of stereotypes to a matter of “identity”-humankind’s signal trait. This is “gender,” the behavioral manifestation of our sex. I, too, preferred the rough-and-tumble games of boys to the orderly domestic dramas of girls. I, too, had an attorney father who taught me to read in his broad lap, penciling out words on a page of yellow foolscap. The first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I loved Scout because I was Scout.

The end of gender soh