I think part of the problem is that gender is partly biological and partly a social construct. We haven't always understood gender the way we currently do. We have at various historical junctures held notions of gender that to the modern western mind seem absurd. To suggest that our age is the one that has the purest expression of gender untainted by cultural factors, is equally absurd. Some of what we understand as gender is biologically driven, some of it is chemically driven, some of it is culturally acquired. To what extent biological and chemical differences are themselves driven by cultural expectations during early childhood is almost impossible to know. What we do know is that there are greater levels of difference between individual brains of either sex than there is between 'male' and 'female' brains.
To me it seems likely that there is a relationship between cultural and biological. What that relationship is, I dunno :p
|