Original in Spanish: Estudios de género con bebés de un día
This man has gone as far as running studies with one-day-old babies, looking for behavioural differences between genders.
Turns out there are differences very early on: if we place a person and a weird gadget near the crib, girls look more at the person and boys are more interested in the gadget.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/biology-sexist-gender-stereotypes
The man says this correlates with testosterone levels in the fetus.
Then he goes a step further and says (I’m going to put this terribly, but this is how it stuck in my head) that autism would be the consequence of a very, very male brain. That autistic people are the extreme case of enormous interest in how things work and very little interest in social matters. According to him, the degree of autism also correlates with testosterone levels.
So far I haven’t had the guts to read this paper, I leave it here in case you do: http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2015_Lai_Journal_Child_Adolescent_Psychiatry_Sex_Gender_Differences.pdf
Though I’ve put his book on the wishlist, because it does look interesting: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/046500556X
From my point of view, intuitively it seems to me he may be very right that behavioural differences between genders don’t have a purely cultural origin. I like the idea of someone studying it seriously so we can learn more about ourselves.
I also like the idea of seeing sex more as “a matter of degrees” than something binary. I’ve always felt that behaviour-wise I’m quite a lot of a dude even though I have boobs. I don’t know. That would explain things.
The autism part seems more far-fetched to me, I don’t know. Maybe I will read the paper after all…
(Facebook, 2016-01-09)