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By Root 2050 0

as extreme cases of the male (systematizing) brain. Autism is diagnosed ten times more often in males than in females. Indeed, Hans Asperger, an early researcher on autism, suggested in 1944 that “the autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence.” This “monumental” idea, Baron-Cohen says, went unnoticed for nearly fifty years, and it wasn’t until 1997 that researchers began exploring this “controversial hypothesis.” Diagnoses of autism, like those for gender identity disorder, have been rising steadily over the past few decades, and though Baron-Cohen does not suggest any linkage between environmental factors and autism, one does wonder what might explain the sudden upsurge in cases of autism and Asperger’s syndrome.

Baron-Cohen’s research and his book, which was the subject of a cover story in Time magazine, provide another indication that the theory of psychosexual neutrality in particular and social construc-tionist views in general are steadily being eroded in both scientific and popular accounts of gender. A few months after Baron-Cohen’s research was highlighted in Time, a cover story in the New York Times Magazine inquired, “Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top?” The answer: “They Choose Not To.” Author Lisa Belkin concluded that “as women look up at the ‘top,’ they are increasingly deciding that they don’t want to do what it takes to get there,” namely neglect their families and their own emotional well-being. One of her sources says: “I think some of us are swinging to a place where we enjoy, and can admit we enjoy, the stereotypical role of female/mother/caregiver…. I think we were born with those feelings.” Belkin notes that “when these women blame biology, they do so apologetically, and I find this tone as interesting as the words…. We accept that humans are born with certain traits, and we accept that other species have innate differences between the sexes. What we are loath to do is to extend that acceptance to humans. Partly that’s because absolute scientific evidence one way or another is impossible to collect. But mostly it’s because so much of recent history (the civil rights movement, the women’s movement) is an attempt to prove that biology is not destiny.”

Like it or not, we seem to be reaching the point (again) at which we are willing to entertain the possibility that there may in fact be “essential” differences between the average man and the average woman, differences grounded in biology, not culture. In our attempts to sort out what those differences might be, and how they are formed, and how vulnerable the human reproductive anatomy is to environmental assault, intersexual, transgendered, and transsexual people are a hugely important and almost completely ignored source of information. Not everyone will want to participate in research studies or discuss personal struggles with strangers, of course, but in the three years that I spent researching this book, I found among many transgendered people a real hunger to be heard and understood. There is some fear, however, that if a cause for gender variance is found, the search for a “cure” will inevitably begin. “Once the source is found, the drive to cure or eradicate our particular form of biological variation is probable, based on current medical mentalities. Isn’t it better not to address this issue at all?” says one of the trans friends I asked to review this chapter. Dylan Scholinski also voiced this concern. “I have a real problem with this being conceptualized as a birth defect,” he said. “I am not ‘defective.’”

Many gay people express the same reservations about the search for a gay “gene,” or organic etiology for homosexuality. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay acknowledges that studies like his, which identified structural difference in the brains of gay and straight men, are perceived by some as an attempt to “re-pathologize homosexuality and take us back to a time when it was considered some sort of disease. In all my writings and lectures I don’t present it that way. I’m gay myself. I’m happy to be gay. I think the world would