Month: April 2023

In the introduction to her book ‘The Hormone Cure’, Sara Gottfried, a hormone expert and Harvard-educated physician-scientist, speaks about what she calls ‘The Unfair Truth’, the fact that women are much more vulnerable to hormonal imbalance than men; e.g., an underactive thyroid affects women up to fifteen times more than men, and women feel more stressed than men.

Contrast this to the title (but not necessarily the content) of my study unit ‘Gifted by Nature: The Science of Being a Woman’ that is part of the University of Malta’s Programme for Liberal Arts and Sciences. The idea behind this study unit is that women have been gifted by nature with some unique talents that enable them to solve problems, offer solutions, and bring about change, and that it is through an awareness of our female nature and the tools we have been given over evolutionary time that we can be empowered to participate with liberty in modern society. The core premise here is that being a woman is not about being the same as a man, but having a mind of your own, a thought that is borrowed with gratitude from the title of the book ‘A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women’ by the great Anne Campbell, British academic specialising in evolutionary psychology.

Whenever I start to deliver a new training course, I prepare both students and myself for the excitement that comes along with the experimental nature of something that is fresh out of the oven. What follows is fascinating; the result of an open conversation in which everyone feels free to share and challenge what is being said. One such debate centred around the title, with some asking whether the term ‘gifted’ was in the context of a comparison with men, and whether this in turn implied that women had some sort of advantage in solving everyday problems including situations where it is mainly an issue of competition with males.

This question, transferable from week to week, set a few thinking wheels in motion. From a biased point of view, arguing from the perspective of either men or women, this might well be the case, but from a more neutral position, which is why we choose evolutionary theory as our ground, it doesn’t make sense to compare. When we speak about human nature, what we are talking about, in reality, are two human natures, one male, and one female, a distinction with good evolutionary reasons and clear evolutionary consequences (Matt Ridley, 1993, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature). The point, then, is not whether the tools you have been given are better or more high-tech, the point is whether they are suited for the task at hand, and that since men and women have faced different problems (this is especially true when it comes to reproduction rather than survival), they have also evolved different adaptations. This is the basis of sex differences.

With sex differences, you are either a fan, or an objector. In a recent episode of ‘The Psychology Podcast’ by cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, American sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling made a call to end sex differences research. Fausto-Sterling is also the author of the 1993 paper ‘The Five Sexes: why male and female is not enough’. Precisely why I find knowledge on sex differences to be illuminating: it is one of the filters through which we can construct our individual identity as we sift through the many layers that make our core – our human nature; our biological sex; our gender; our personality traits; our desires, preferences, and ambitions, and so on and so forth.

It is also why I find that the research on sex differences provides a robust basis for exploring what it means to be a woman. When my new study unit Gifted was being advertised, I was hesitant to promote it to men, and not out of any sort of discrimination. With the material I had prepared, intended to explore different chapters of a female’s life journey – motherhood, work, mating, aggression, status, sexual conflict – through an evolutionary lens, I felt men would derive much less benefit than women and, in a sense, it would be a disservice to let them in.

Right now, I am in my 8^th or 9^th lecture, and I have a class of twelve females, one male. It is immense fun for all (or at least I hope it is the right mix of information and amusement). One reason for what I believe is the success of this course is that it provides the space and the opportunity for women of different ages and lifestyles to explore what it means to be a woman. Some of the chapters, like motherhood and sexual conflict, can be uncomfortable to say the least, and this is where the mutual respect for sensitivities is appreciated. In other instances, such as learning what women want in a mate, the atmosphere is lighter and many can relate to the stories on offer.

Back to our original argument on whether women are truly gifted. I say yes. We are gifted with wonderful adaptations that enable us to do marvellous things, like the superheroes. Of course, that might be the more romantic side of me speaking, because back on solid earth we all know that some of these adaptations are incredibly costly (consider, for example, that the placenta is referred to by obstetricians as a “ruthless parasitic organ existing solely for the maintenance and protection of the foetus, perhaps too often to the disregard of the maternal organism”; or that women’s fear of rape redesigns their internal psychology and motivates a suite of tactical and metabolically expensive actions for the sake of vigilance. I say we are gifted because these are the tools we need to navigate the complexities of life and to handle the things we cannot change, the gifts that grant us the freedom to lead our lives with the purpose we choose.

“What it would be foolish to do – and what many WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) people in the 21^st century are doing – is to pretend that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary.” These are the words of Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein from their book ‘A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century – Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life’.

Now Bret Weinstein is not a safe choice for a quote on sex and gender. He is considered to form part of the intellectual dark web and his resignation from the Evergreen College in the aftermath of the protests around the Day of Absence is surrounded by controversy. On the other hand, Weinstein and his wife Heying are evolutionary biologists, so they should be pinning their arguments to the evidence. The real reason why I chose to use this quote, however, is that I think there is a lot of truth in it, and that it is through truth that we can try to make sense of the world.

Before Maltese podcaster Jon Mallia invited me to be one of his first guests in April 2021, and to talk about sex differences, I had little interest or motivation to delve into the biological meaning of gender and gender identity. When he popped the question about definitions, and asked me to explain the difference between sex and gender, I felt that I had been taken by surprise because I had forgotten to do my homework properly. In the difficult 3 to 4 minutes that followed, I tried to rely on the wisdom of one of my favourite evolutionary psychologists, David M. Buss, and the introduction to his 2021 book ‘When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault’ in which he explains that whereas sex is defined by the size of the games – males being the ones with the small gametes (sperm), and females the ones with the large gametes (eggs), the term “gender” includes many meanings – cultural, social constructions, and psychological identities.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the relationship between sex and gender and what this means to different individuals. One of these occasions was the conference ‘Gender 360° – A Multidisciplinary Approach Towards all Genders’, organised by the mental health and counselling service Willingness in March last year, where I delivered a workshop entitled ‘The Biological Roots and Truths of Sex, Gender, and Equality.’ This is where I talked about sex role and gender expression as the behavioural expression of sex; how the usual rules of sex roles are ones of male display and female choosiness – males tend to put more effort into what happens before sex, as opposed to females who are more invested in what happens afterwards; and that as humans and compared to other animals we are able to ‘switch’ gender, or change our sex role (our gender) much more easily. I guess this is where the terms ‘fluid’ and ‘gender fluidity’ come from.

Here, with no camera or videographer in the hall, in front of an audience of people who had willingly chosen to sign up for this workshop, and secured by the thickness of the stone walls at Razzett Antik in Qormi, I was still not entirely in my comfort skin. The idea for this workshop was to present some of the ‘biological realities’ – such as that in humans, fertilisation occurs internally within women, that it is women who carry the metabolic costs of pregnancy, and also women who have breasts capable of lactation – and then use these fundamentals to illustrate what I called the three inequality chapters:  inequality in parenting, in working, and in sexual mating strategy. So when one of the participants – a highly-qualified person with years of experience in academia – remarked that although they agreed with what I said and felt it was all very true, they would not dare repeat any of this stuff elsewhere, it felt as if my fears were being confirmed.

This is the fear of saying something that sounds dangerous, and that can be propagated heavy with the burden of misunderstanding, irrespective of whether the original message is supported by science and has been shared with noble intent.

Frankly, I get the sensitivity around sex and gender identity. Together, these two speak of who we are at our deepest core, that intimate space which we guard with force.  I also understand the conflict that comes from wanting, on one hand to keep such signatures private, and a desire on the other to express ourselves and signal to other people.

What I do not understand, however, is how it be can convenient or beneficial to ignore the biology, disconnect either sex or gender from their biological basis, or to confound the relationship between sex and gender. Let me give an example. The first question that you provide on a survey looking into the determinants of mental health at the workplace is titled ‘Gender’ and you can choose from 1) male; 2) female; 3) prefer not to say; and 4) other. I’m assuming that in a study of this sort, what you are really interested in is the sex, because that will help you analyse the data in a meaningful way and address the gap in data and in research. I’m also assuming that you are not really interested in the respondents’ behavioural expression of sex, but if that were the case, it would be good to have a separate question.

This is why I feel it is time to at least start the conversation about the biological truths of sex and gender. It is not because I believe that biology is the only truth. I think that, as for other aspects of our human nature, biology is an essential part of the equation without which we will have trouble constructing a coherent narrative of our life and our identity. Biology, along with the realities it relays, is a powerful element that shapes our story and gives us the confidence to thrust ourselves into the world with pride and positivity.