“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance” – Title IX

A school principal called me recently about our Gurian Institute team providing Pilot programs in that district.  The administration has disaggregated district test score, grades, and discipline data in accordance with Title IX.  Boys lag significantly behind girls, and boys of color are further behind.  Moved by this data, the district decided to create an initiative to help the students in need by utilizing some of our Institute’s previous success in helping to close these gaps.

On the same morning the principal called me by phone, a newspaper headline and article was published in her area’s local paper:  “AMA says ‘male’ and ‘female’ should be removed from birth certificates.”  The principal asked if I had seen the AMA finding, and I said I had (more on that in a moment), then she said, “At our pilot funding meeting yesterday, one of our board members said, ‘I just went online and googled Gurian—he and his institute are sexist, misogynist, racist, and anti-trans.’”  This person, she said, found a tweet by someone who roils people up on social media and has used my name in negative ways to do that.

“But I know your work,” the principal said, “so I asked the board member for some context or proof of these accusations.  As you can guess, his ‘proof’ came from his Smartphone:  I think he was reading something on Twitter about the AMA and birth certificates, then he scrolled to something else where your name is mentioned as a sex and gender expert who does not agree with someone else on twitter that he found there.”

The principal and I figured out the Twitter Feed he had found and looked at it ourselves.  The writer/accuser had not read my work at all or probably just decided to misinterpret what my team and I do so that we could be fodder for attack on social media.  The principal admitted, “This board member is someone who doesn’t really do homework anyway.”  She requested I give her something with facts in it so that she could do homework for the board and get approval.  I provided her with the News page of www.gurianinstitute.com for fact-based articles, blogs, and videos, including this blog she ended up using: https://gurianinstitute.com/supporting-a-schools-scientific-path-to-sex-and-gender-equity/.  She also used the Success pages of www.gurianinstitute.com  where our data shows how our pilots and training–programs that use sexual dimorphism as the baseline–are inclusive of all boys, girls, and LGBTQ+ students of all races.  The principal used our resources and the Board gave approval for the programs.

Meanwhile, the phone/Twitter culture of the exception in board meetings is a real phenomenon, and I promised this principal I would write more about it.  If you have not read it, please see the first blog in this series on the News page of www.gurianinstitute.com.  It provides foundation for this blog.  In it I explore the development of an academic and then social media fueled sexodimorphobia (the fear of sexual dimorphism).   I have personally gotten to the point of saying to folks in meetings, “Please trust your colleagues to know what they are doing and presenting, they have done their homework.  And please go deeper the first hits on Twitter or elsewhere online.”  This is crucial in the study of sex and gender.  Quick hits on social media do not do these crucial human topics any justice.

 

Does the American Medical Association Really Want to Get Rid of Male and Female?

 

In Part I of this blog series, we explored how social media has a profound effect on the way we are creating culture.  Specifically, without our realizing it consciously, when we rely on social media for social progress, we are relying on the promotion of exceptions against rules, minorities blaming majorities, a sex vs. gender war, and the negation of complex science and common sense.  Did the AMA say it wants to erase male and female?  On social media it looked like the doctors of the AMA did.  In August of 2021, the AMA’s LGBTQ+ advisory committee wrote an advocacy report that included the suggestion that ‘male’ and ‘female’ could be removed from birth certificates to help gender nonconforming people later in life.  In this report, some of the authors said that those people who acknowledge sexual dimorphism (male/female) “fail to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity.”  They also said, “participation of the medical profession and the government in assigning sex at birth is often used as evidence supporting the binary view,” and that the binary view is inherently “marginalizing, and minoritizing” of non-binary people.

The AMA would lose credibility if it came out as an organization “against male and female” because its physicians know that sexual dimorphism is crucial to providing adequate medical care, both in physiologic and mental/psychological.  The AMA is aware of studies such as this one from the National Institute of Health that shows sexual dimorphism in our genes and cells (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/).  But the advisory board explicitly called for a culture of the exception by pressuring the organization and others to argue that sexual dimorphism does not or should not exist in our every day lives if we care about protecting a minority population.   This is sex vs. gender war we discussed in the first blog.  The culture of the exception attempts to erase or efface the foundation of all human beings–male and female–as if that is necessary for the uplift and protection of the exception.  This is an impossible war, unwinnable, between majority and minority.

 

Sex Comes First, Gender Comes Second:  An Inclusive Model in Preschool

 

But the teen suicide rate among LGBTQ+ populations is higher than average in part because of oppressive attitudes towards them by some families, other adults, and peers.  There are people among the majority who try to erase the minority.  The minority fights back by trying to erase the majority.  Is there a better way than erasure of either?

There is.  In practical terms, protection for both majority and minority happen in schools and neighborhoods all around us.  Because the Gurian Institute is involved in this work, we can share successful models.  This model is not sexodimorphobic; it does not include fear sexual dimorphism (male/female) nor is it gender phobic.  It grows from what we looked at in blog 1, that sex comes first, then comes gender.   Sexual dimorphism is like the center of a wheel–we have to build it first in order to add the spokes, gender.

If you have any doubts of sexual dimorphism in the brain, check out MRI scans published in April 2019 of 8 and 9 month old fetuses.  These scans show how male/female already differentiate in the brain in utero.  (Wheelock, et.al., 2019, “Sex differences in functional connectivity during fetal brain development,” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929318301245)  Before children are born,  X and Y chromosomes trigger hormones to wire the male and female brain.  Questions about gender identity do not yet exist at birth–the spokes aren’t built yet, but the center of wheel is.

This means that our children and adults exist in two operating systems that involve sexual dimorphism from the git go:

1. Physiological package – assets, liabilities, predilections, all of which are genetically endowed AND environmentally influenced–from fast-twitch muscles to height to weight to everything else that is cellular in the body, including the brain.
2. Psychological package – what our brains and minds bring to our lives from our core personality that activate on a spectrum of male/female brains that are influenced by attachment, trauma, the environment, and the society’s expectations for sex and gender.

Our Gurian Institute Model is all inclusive because it works with sex first, then gender.   Sex applies to all children, gender fluidity to some.  By working with the all and including the some, we can help schools solve social issues.

Proof of this comes from working with teachers in Phoenix.  GI has joined with Head Start of Phoenix, the Greater Phoenix Urban League, and Booker T. Washington School to provide pilot programs designed to end the preschool to prison pipeline, especially among boys of color, and support all children for future success.  These pilots, in existence two years now (and proceeding even through Covid schooling) show positive results.  For more on the Pilots and their success, check out https://gurianinstitute.com/gi-model-schools/.

The Head Start team of teachers and parents in Phoenix, led by Head Start Program Coordinator Marion Hill and Greater Phoenix Urban League CEO Natalie Alvarez, understand the children in their care, and what they need.  As Marion Hill has put it, “The Gurian Institute work with sex-in-the-brain has been the missing piece for us.”   By receiving and implementing training in both sex and gender, the teachers, coaches, caseworkers, and stakeholders in the preschool pilots have raised evaluation and milestone scores for all children in the aggregate group—boys, girls, and any children exploring other concepts.

This happens because of the inherent positive abilities of the teachers and staff themselves, the Head Start models already in place, and also because the GI training deals with the center of the wheel.  Teachers in preschool know very well from personal observation that even when children explore other self-concepts, they are still boys and girls.  In early childhood care and systems especially, sexual dimorphism informs the vast majority of children, as there are very few gender-fluid kids yet.  Training in sexual dimorphism helps focus parents, teachers, and caregivers on individualization of pedagogy/emotional support, and best strategic practices for attachment and learning with both sexes.

From our initial two year pilots in six school districts in Missouri in the late 1990’s to our present Pilots in Arizona, we see that neglecting any significant piece of the whole child is to condemn the system to inadequacy in physiological, psychological, or academic areas.  In most early childhood programs around the country, teachers and parents especially notice that boys are behind girls, boys get in the most trouble, social systems in ECE “often do not understand boys as well as they do girls,” in the words of one teacher, and in the words of another, “the situation for boys of color is especially troubling.”

 

The Importance of Equity and Inclusion

 

“Boys” issues are directly connected to our national equity initiatives.  In early childhood environments, children who fit under “expulsion, suspension, excessive punishment, low performance, and lack of attendance” are mainly boys and boys of color.  Over the decades, our GI teams have asked ourselves and our colleagues why our programs help with equity and inclusion, both in race and gender, so directly.

An answer was provided to me by Dr. Vermelle Greene, a lifelong educator who presently serves on the Maryland Board of Education and spearheads Maryland’s Achieving Excellence for Black Boys Initiative.  She offered this analysis in August 2021:  by receiving training in how to work with one of the foundational elements of equity and inclusion—the boy himself–school teachers and staff come to understand both boy and girl natural behavior, but not out of context; rather, in multiple contexts of sex, gender, race, trauma, and poverty-response.  “This is especially important for us as female teachers.  It is the boys, and the black boys, who raise the most questions for us.”

Dr. Greene talked about “boys” at the level of sex because it is “boys” and “black boys” at that level who are having so much trouble in our schools.  But gender is absorbed into equity and inclusion with specific questions answered regarding children who are gender fluid, gender non-binary, trans, and LGB or Q+.   These latter questions rise, for the most part, later in a child’s development than the preschool years.  Sex-specific pedagogy, and boy- and girl-friendly theory and strategies, affect all students inclusive of gender identity, race, ethnicity, and economic resources.  As training is inclusive, positive results emerge across the curriculum, suspensions and expulsions go down, grades, test results, and evaluation results rise for both boys and girls, and issues of racial inequity are met with solutions.

 

The Sacred but Potentially Destructive Pressure of the Exception

 

As we noted in the first blog, the pressure of exceptionality is crucial to progress in a democratic society.  Throughout American and world history, what began as exceptions (“you know, folks, the world is not flat”, “we can absolutely get to the moon,” “you are not like me but that’s okay”) often end up changing culture for the better.  But this same pressure of the exception can act in negative ways and destructive ways, especially now, either by forcing the omission of programs that help with equity and inclusion, or by forcing changes that are detrimental to existing people and programs.

The AMA would not be able to fulfill its Hippocratic oath if male and female were removed from birth certificates, thus, I can’t see a scenario in which they will ultimately support their advisory board’s recommendation, but the advisory group concept that “what is binary attacks gender fluidity” requires attention.  The AMA is not alone in presenting this idea.  Regarding pregnancy, in a September 2021 bill,  U.S. House members changed the word “woman” to “identity of the majority of people.”  The Justice Department did something similar in the same month, filing a brief on the Texas abortion bill that says, “any individuals who become pregnant,” rather than “women.”  The CDC changed “Covid vaccines are safe for pregnant women” to “Covid vaccines are safe for pregnant people.”

These linguistic experiments are done to protect people who are gender non-binary or trans from feeling left out, but if a trans person can get pregnant, she is a woman.  If a gender non-binary person gets pregnant, she is a woman.  Is trying to erase sex from cultural systems the right way to get necessary protections for gender?  Does removing “woman” help us, or does it end up hurting women while gaining nothing for everyone else?  Our culture needs to answer this crux question if we are going to move forward with all children and all people in mind, inclusively.

I believe arguing against male/female on birth certificates and changing “pregnant woman” to “pregnant person” would not gain much traction if not for bombardment of sexodimorphobia in social media.  We are being pressured to believe that sexual dimorphism is dangerous when it is not.  We are being pressured by short burst concepts and inferential leaps to try to replace sex with gender.

While exceptions should challenge a status quo in frictional ways that can be potentially healthy, it is a science-erasing kind of pressure in social media, one that ends up advancing a fear of the majority or of another group, keeps good science on the shelf, and harms huge swaths of the human population.  Meanwhile, sexodimorphobia will also backlash against the people we are trying to protect, creating the ultimate, and tragic, irony of our reliance on erasure of the whole in order to save the exception.

 

A Covid Case Study

 

In a three-blog series on Reality Cloaking (see the News pages of www.gurianinstitute.com) I looked at examples of social media bombardment that muddy or neglect the expanding science of Covid.  Our American culture as a whole, I argued, has felt intimately how the sacred pressure of the exception became destructive when the exceptions were painted in such a way that science got drowned out.

A very recent example showed up in an August 2021 front page article in my local paper, the Spokesman Review.  The article surrounds a photo of a woman who got a breakthrough case of Covid 19.  She was vaccinated but still got infected; now she is looking at the possibility of have a long-haul form of the virus.  Every reader, including myself, felt deep sympathy for her; and as her story went viral on social media, many people felt the anxiety and fear of “I could become her.”  That fear built up and kept feeding itself in us.

Mentioned only in passing in the article was the actual science of Covid and vaccination:  the probability of having a case like she has is statistically very rare.  It happened and does happen, but not at the rate implied by the article.   I assume the reporters and editors of the newspaper, blog, and then social media blasts buried the science to get clicks, but this kind of social media rendering has been so fear-arousing over the last year and a half regarding Covid that groups who are only rarely vulnerable, if at all, have thought they and their families were especially vulnerable, and live in fear, isolating themselves and their children, even if vaccinated, and others are afraid of vaccines, using rare cases like this woman’s to say, “Well, you see, vaccines don’t work, why should I get the vaccine?”

When exceptions to the rule (breakthrough cases that exist) are amplified in social media and spread through fear-currents in the culture, the friction and pressure they put is dangerous to adults and children.  The minority is important, but the majority needs to rely on science to make legislative, familial, and personal policy.  Science is here for that reason:  to create a ground for cultural expression we can hold onto and through which we can find our common ground.   It does not deny exceptions–the minority—but it also does not replace the majority with the exceptions.

 

The Science of LGB

 

In the area of sex and gender, specifically regarding lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights, we have proven how science well used is the best way not just to support the majority but to empower and protect the minority, as well.   In the past, gay rights activists (and anti-gay activists) argued that being gay was a choice, which did not fit the science, and dis-empowered the LGB minority.   Enough people in power could just say, “Look, gay people are making the wrong choice,” or “The way you choose to love is a sinful choice,” and equal rights for alternative sexual orientation stalled.  Beyond that, the layering of rejection with grief and loss created an even more unfair, inequitable life for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people.

But when the majority of Americans–including justices on the Supreme Court–understood the science of homosexuality, they altered social policy and law.  Being gay, they saw, is not a matter of choice or no-choice–it is a matter of genes and brain activity.  The turning point on this issue came, I believe, in 1994 when the Harvard Medical Letter codified the genetic foundation of sexual orientation in the brain.  Further scientific evidence along this line gradually penetrated the culture; now, even a conservative Supreme Court like the one in place now (2021) has ruled that gay rights are to be protected.  This protection did not exist in the past when being gay was a “choice.”

The women’s movement followed a similar pattern regarding science–though that movement is splintered now into pro-science and anti-science factions.  Early on, women asserted their equality from a post-enlightenment scientific position.  Gender was not a word used much if at all a hundred years ago when the women’s movement really started to take hold.  At that time, there were two sexes, one of which was being treated as second class citizens, especially where workplace and financial power were concerned.  From approximately Susan B. Anthony’s era all the way to Betty Friedan, the focus of this movement was on sexual (women’s) equality.

Beginning with the Gloria Steinem era, a splintering of the women’s movement into feminist ideologies took hold.   In some of these movements, precursor, I think, to the “replace sex with gender” movement in social media now, science is often not used at all, especially as regards sex.  Sexodimorphobia operates, and females lose as they lose power as women and men lose as culture-influences bombard us with male-erasing idea that deny the existence or significance of male and female.

 

The Science of Sex Will Always Apply

 

In the sex/gender area, we do not need to have confusion anymore about the science:  the AMA does not need to push for “male” and “female” to come off birth certificates, and government officials do not need to remove “women” when women is exactly who we need to discuss.  Parents can enjoy their boys and girls for who they are.  Schools can achieve equity by helping staff understand how to teach and mentor boys and girls.  Inclusion for race, socio-economic, gender, and trauma can all flourish on the ground of settled science.  If a boy or girl presents with gender dysphoria (blog 4 in this series) parents can receive medical and scientific help to understand this situation.  If it the child is trans (blog 3), brain science will be the key to creating a healthy path for child and family.  If the child is gay, lesbian, bisexual, gender-nonconforming, neural science will include the exceptions, not exclude.

Neural science has many spokes on the wheel.  Sex has been with us for more than a million years.  The science of sex holds multiple keys to our past, present, and healthy future.  It is a common ground for empowerment, inclusion, equity, diversity, and unity in homes, schools, and social policy.  I hope those of you who are very active on social media will deploy phrases like, “Sex comes first, gender comes second, and both are valuable.”  “Sex is the house, gender fills the rooms.”  “Sex is dimorphic (binary) but gender is fluid (non-binary).”  “The science of sex and the science of gender do not have to be at war.”

When the board member in the school district meeting looked into his phone to quickly find something on social media to ballast his sexodimorphobic position, he found an article that cherry-picked exceptions and dissembled science so that he could make accusations outside the realm of science and common sense and just plain wrong…except in social media. These positions, which perhaps he tried to hold in order to protect trans people, I will argue in the next blog, do not do so.   Trans people have as much or more at stake regarding their “brain sex” than perhaps anyone else in the world, and science of sexual dimorphism is a key to helping them flourish.

 

End of Part II

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © Michael Gurian 2021