Hidden Brain - The Edge of Gender

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

Gender is one of the first things we notice about the people around us. But where do our ideas about gender come from? Can gender differences be explained by genes and chromosomes, or are they the result of upbringing, culture and the environment? In this encore episode from October 2017, we delve into debates over nature vs. nurture, and meet the first person in the United States to officially reject the labels of both male and female, and be recognized as "non-binary."

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. For many years, tech companies have been really good at innovation and making money. What they've been less good at is in hiring and keeping a diverse workforce. In the past few months, Freakler reports of Silicon Valley's rocky relationship with women have bubbled to the surface. Very few women and non-Asian people of color in engineering. They're diversity or lack of diversity and what they plan on doing to tackle it. Many companies have gone to great lengths to study the problem and to address it. Google, for example, spends tens of millions of dollars every year on efforts to recruit

more women and people of color. Some of that money went to produce this video. Make it really clear, we want to see more women in senior leadership positions. We want to see more people from underrepresented groups because it makes us a better company. While there are recruitment success stories in Silicon Valley, the overall results have been dismal. Many women, African Americans and Latinos, see a tech is unwelcoming to them. Some have filed discrimination lawsuits against their companies. One senior software engineer at Google, James Deymor, recently suggested his company and the tech industry were going about it all wrong.

In an internal memo, he argued that the vast gender gap in technology wasn't the result of prejudice, but of biological differences between men and women. Daymore cited research studies into the psychological and biological differences between the sexes. Women he said were more interested in people than things. They had more anxieties and lower stress tolerance. They tended to be less confrontational. This quality, he said, made it hard for them to ruffle feathers and take on leadership roles.

The memo created a firestorm inside the company. Many women at Google said it made them feel inferior and unwelcome. When that memo was leaked to the world, Google was not happy. Google has fired a software engineer who wrote a controversial internal memo that leaked over the weekend. He claimed that biology in part explained why there were more men than women in the tech field. Almost instantly, everyone seemed to have an opinion about the Google memo, the firing decision, and the larger question about women in tech. As far as I can see, they effectively have fired somebody for dissenting from the group consensus. The crux of his argument was that women were inherently less competent to hold high status

positions, which is a biased opinion. The infamous Google Memo, the most important document since the Magna Carta-Jay. Demor said the media took his statements out of context. His point he said wasn't to put down women or discourage them from entering tech. It was to find solutions to the technology gender gap by acknowledging the differences between men and women and seeking ways to bridge them. Science he said had conclusively found that nature, trumps nurture, that women and men are different, and all the diversity training in the world couldn't change that.

If you have an opinion about De Mor, it probably comes in one of two flavors. You might say, of course he's right. Lots of scientists agree with him. Political correctness is keeping us from acknowledging the obvious. Or you may say, this is just the latest effort to use science to advance a racist or sexist agenda. It's no different than people who use spurious science in the 19th century to argue that blacks were slaves because they were inferior to whites.

This week on Hidden Brain, we ask how much the gender differences we see in the world can be explained by genes and chromosomes and how much the other result of culture and the environment. Noture? Gender identity really is largely socially learned. Versus nature? Socialization cannot override biology. Versus reality.

The categories aren't even realistic and that was toxic to me because I could never fit into either one of those categories. You know, we're back to I was never able to make peace with being a male. And I know that I'm not a female as well. We're going to ask if this age-old debate really captures what we see in the world today. Is it possible the terms and categories of this debate are increasingly outdated? terms and categories of this debate are increasingly outdated? When the Google memo hit the news, the talk shows went hunting for experts. Let's go to our guest now.

She is a writer about the intersection of science and sex and its politicization. She has a PhD in sexually-denurroscience from York University. And she has done quite a bit of work and research around this topic that we're going to get into with the Google memo. The one and only, Dr. Deborah So is here. Dr. So how are you? I'm well thanks, how are you Luke? Deborah So was in demand because like former Google engineer James Daymore, she is a firm

believer that biology makes men and women different. Deborah has a PhD in neuroscience, but her opinions on gender are also personal. When we got in touch, she told me that when she was young, she did not feel much like a girl. All my friends were boys, I just as a boy, I looked like a boy. Deborah says she felt male. She has helped conduct studies into the nature of gender. She thinks both her outlook and her interest in science stem from her biology.

I do think that I personally was exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb. Prenatal testosterone. That's Deborah's simple explanation for her boinness. The levels of exposure to prenatal testosterone is actually the determining factor in terms of what children will be interested in, what they will gravitate towards in terms of their interests and behaviors. In some ways, Deborah's point of view sounds pretty old-fashioned. Boys tend to gravitate towards mechanically interesting things, so they tend to be interested in things when they're playing with toys, they'll gravitate towards trucks and cars. Girls tend to be more interested in socially interesting activities, so things like playing

with dolls and playing house. Old-fashioned, right? But Deborah says the science backs her up with many studies. She gives one example of a research study on girls who have a genetic condition called congenital, adrenal, hyperplasia. These girls are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb, and what we see when they are born is they will gravitate towards male typical toys. And this is even if their parents give them more praise for playing with female typical

toys. So it speaks to how powerful biology is, and that gender identity and gender preferences can't really be molded as much by socialization. Testosterone masculinizes the brain, Deborah says. You can see this play out in many ways. Men's brains on average are bigger than women's, and there are differences in the connective tissue in the brain's white matter. There are more connections running from the front

to the back of the brain and men, and more connections running left to right or interhemisorically in women. So this leads to an adulthood differences. Well, I mean, this is evident from a very young age as well, in terms of what children gravitate naturally towards, differences in terms of efficiency of processing. So men tend to be more efficient on average

when it comes to visual spatial processing, whereas women tend to be more efficient with processing analytically and intuitively. In animals, researchers have observed behavioral changes after birth if testosterone levels are changed in utero. In the wild, male and female monkeys behave differently. Monkeys are not socialized to prefer certain toys over others. And we see the same thing with male monkeys they tend to gravitate towards trucks

and cars wield toys that boys tend to find more interesting. And we see the same thing with female monkeys they tend to gravitate towards more socially interesting toys like dolls. The bottom line says Deborah is that men and women are different. These differences are so obvious that she gets frustrated when people argue that gender is a social construct. To Deborah, that doesn't make sense. We look at it from an evolutionary perspective. We will, and I think people who take the socialization approach will agree,

when we look at men and women on average, men tend to be taller than women, our reproductive organs are different. So they'll acknowledge and accept that there are these differences in terms of biology and physiology, but for some reason, those differences stop at the brain. And I don't think that makes much sense because when you look at the brain as an organ, it's responsible for these differences

that we see with regards to organs and growth. Deborah wants to be clear, believing that biology shapes the choices men and women make does not mean she's sexist. Nora, she advocating lesser roles for women. In her view, these two things have nothing to do with each other. The scientific findings should be allowed to stand on their own. You know, if we acknowledge that men and women are different because this is what biology is telling us, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be equal. It doesn't mean that one is necessarily better than the other. And I think also there's this sense that female typical traits are somehow inferior to male typical traits.

And I think that's the thing that we should be talking about. Why is that the case? Not pretending that women and men are absolutely identical. Not the only differences we see are due to socialization. In a sense, this is exactly the point that former Google software engineer James D. Moore was making. If you accept that men and women are biologically programmed to have different interests, then all the efforts to get more women to become engineers can look foolish.

But there's a problem with this view. When we look at the world, we have a tendency to think that the way the world is, is the way the world is supposed to be. Women are supposed to be. Women are supposed to be kind and affectionate. Men are supposed to be tough and dominant. Similar arguments to the ones that James and Debra are making were made a couple of generations ago to explain why Caucasians

were smarter than Asians. There were very few Asians in American scientific institutions and very few Asian Nobel Prize winners, so it seemed reasonable to say that there was something about the biology of Asians that made them bad at science and tech. Today, we'd find that idea laughable. Again, because we see so many examples of Asians excelling at places like Google. If biology produces reality, how can that reality change dramatically in just a few decades?

In a moment, we'll take a deeper look at the brain and what neuroscience can tell us about gender choices. But first, I want you to meet an historian. She thinks many of the choices that men and women and boys and girls make today are shaped by norms, by culture, even by marketing. I met Joe Peoletti at a mall in suburban Maryland. I'm a professor in American studies at the University of Maryland. Joe is also the author of the book, Pink and Blue, which explores the history of how we address our children.

So I always had right for the infants department first to see how much pink there is and how many things you could put either a boy or girl in. The Children's Clothing Section at Macy's is packed with racks of onesies, dresses, and tiny suits for the under-seven set. It is, Joe told me, an excellent place for a history lesson. You know, one of my taglines that I'm going to put in my business card is I think deep thoughts about shallow things. It's what you do when you study popular culture. You can't just say, oh, I'm only going to study the intellectual stuff. Joe's been keeping tabs since the mid-1980s on gender norms by strolling through the clothing section of mainstream retailers. In recent years, she's noticed more gender neutral options for kids. But mainly she says, children's clothing remains predictable. Boys mostly wear the same palette of colors.

A lot of navy blue and olive and brown and black and gray. The boys' shirts, sweaters, jackets and pants have pictures of trucks, bulldozers, sports cars, and cute macho sayings. This goes even for infants. Joe points to a stack of onesies. There's dude, and we have a puppy, and we have an alien coming out of a pocket, as a matter of fact, the two out of the first four have little pockets, even though they're not functionally more, it's a pocket because he's a boy.

Little brother, super rad like dad, super hunk, local QDs. Next we head over to the girl section. It's overflowing with soft and cheerful hues. It used to be the pastels were kind of summer colors and now pastels are girl colors all year round. But if I'm looking at sort of things like this example, in the racks over here, it feels like there's absolutely no question that this is girls clothing. Well, it's very decorative. We have not only a flamingo, but a flamingo with flowers on it and a bow on its head so

you know it's a girl flamingo. Why do so many of us dress little boys and little girls so differently? It isn't biology. A hundred odd years ago, Joe says small kids were all dressed the same in rocks. And partly what it was was people really thought that drawing a child's attention to what their sex was was bad. That to the late 19th century, mine early 20th century, the cause of any kind of sexual depravity was precocious sexuality. Like a little girl should not be thinking in terms of being

a woman someday, a little boy must not be thinking that he's like daddy until it's kind of developmentally appropriate. And back at that time, that developmental appropriateness was well past toddlerhood. So by the time they were four or five, a lot of the advice comes when the mothers are writing in the saying, when should I put my little boy in trousers? Because they'd be wearing little dresses.

And he's tall for his age, or he's this, or he's that. And he say, well, you wait till he insists upon it. So, the idea that your gender was innate and you would start to express it later. But if you put children in, put a baby in pants, they would be, well, they'd be horrified at little girls in pants and the little boys in pants because pants were just not for babies. In the 1950s, many boys and girls were similar navy and moroun outfits to school. Play clothes were also dark.

Pastels were thought appropriate only for holidays like Easter or formal occasions. But gradually, the distinction between boys clothes and girls clothes started to grow. One reason, money. By the 1970s, American families were having fewer kids. Fewer kids meant families needed fewer clothes. For retailers, fewer clothes sold, meant fewer dollars. They didn't like that. So they came up with an ingenious way to sell more stuff. They marketed the idea that clothes defined what it was to be a boy or a girl.

The more you make something individual, the more you can sell. So having something that can only be worn by a girl means it can less likely be handed down to a brother. This led to a small bit of marketing genius. What we think of now is it's just a law, right, that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. That was invented too. If you make pink a girl's color and blue a boys color, then male and female siblings couldn't wear the same clothes. Marketing wasn't the only force at work. Societal biases came into play that allowed girls to sometimes wear blue, but made it hard for boys to ever wear pink.

A girl can wear blue. I look around and I see plenty of blue things and nobody says, she's wearing blue, she must be a boy or she's wearing blue, her mother must be making a statement about gender politics. But if a boy wears pink, there always has to be some kind of explanation. But if a boy wears pink, there always has to be some kind of explanation. Why is that? Because it goes back to the idea from the early unisex period in the 60s and 70s that it is better to be a boy than a girl. For a girl to want to be like a boy, that's understandable. And so go out of it. But for a boy to want to be like a girl, that's deviant and he must be taken to therapy. Or at least expect to be made the butt of jokes, like in this episode of Friends.

Does anyone see my shirt? It's a button down like a faded salmon color? You mean your pink shirt? Faded salmon color? No, I haven't seen your pink shirt? Faded salmon color? No, I haven't seen your pink shirt. Great, great. I must have left it at moan as I knew it. I'm sure you can get another one at Dan Taylor's.

But seriously, what's interesting about Joe's point is it shows that what today might seem like individual gender choices are actually driven by many hidden factors. Money, marketing, homophobia, sexism. Does this mean that biology has no role in shaping what boys and girls and men and women do? It turns out the contention that genes and prenatal testosterone don't matter is as simplistic as saying they explain everything. Nature and nurture are completely intertwined Just as saying, they explain everything. Nature and nurture are completely intertwined, and there is no such thing as nature without

nurture and vice versa. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We're exploring today the differences between the sexes and the debate of where such differences come from. One thing that's not up for debate, an important part of how we understand people, is to ask if someone is male or female. This is why, when a baby is born, everyone wants to know.

What is it? Gender is unquestionably the most salient feature of a person's identity. That's the first thing we notice about someone and it's certainly the first characteristic that infants learn to discriminate. This is Lisa Elliott. She's a professor of neuroscience at Roslyn Franklin University in Chicago. For some two decades, she's pondered and researched differences between boys and girls. Lisa, she first became interested in the subject as she was writing a book on brain development, but she became immersed in the topic after her own children were born. We had a daughter and a couple of sons and as many parents will tell you, they seem so different.

And that certainly is one of the favorite conversations among parents is gender differences. So I set out to do the research and really educate myself and translate to others what's truly known about the differences between boys and girls' brains. Lees didn't start by looking at boys' brains and girls' brains. She started with an insight about oil brains. More than any other organ, the brain is uniquely adaptable, designed to change in response to the environment. My own research has always been in the area of neuroplasticity,

or how our brains change as a result of experience. And so I'm always sort of acutely aware of the fact that these little babies are absorbing things from the moment of birth. If you think of the brain not as a computer that comes with a chip and a hard drive, but more like a liquid designed to take the shape of the vessel that it's in, you start to get the idea. When a baby is born, its brain comes program not with the ability to learn one specific language, but to learn any language. The infant brain is designed to learn from everything that's going on around it. Much of that starts by being alert to the social world. It's remarkable the degree of understanding babies have way before they can talk, way

before they can even reach out and grab a rattle under control. They appreciate the motives of other people. They can tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy. And as I said, they can also discriminate gender and they start learning quite early the distinction between male and female, how their mother and father behave differently. So it's built in from the very get-go of social and communicative development. Although babies are unaware of their own gender, within the first few months of life they can tell the difference between male and female voices and male and female faces.

They're absorbing clues to gender identity. Once children figure out they're a boy or girl which happens somewhere in the third year of life when they really have a solid understanding, it becomes a great crystallizer for their own behavioral decisions. Leeds doesn't dismiss the power of biology, but she thinks many of us fail to see what neuroscientists know. The brain not only is shaped, but has to be shaped by the social world.

When we see differences between men and women and then see differences in their brains, we intuitively think, voila, this must explain why Johnny likes trucks and Jane likes dolls. But leaves believes the human brain is basically intersex or non-gendered with one major exception. Since men tend to be physically larger than women, the male brain is also likely to be larger than the female brain. You know, my view is, of course, there are group-level differences between men and women, but they're statistical, and they are not categorical.

So, whereas our reproductive organs come in two types. They come in testes or ovaries, and some other parts as well. Our brains come in one type, and it's a spectrum from masculinity to femininity. The male brain and female brain are no different than the male heart and the female heart than the male kidney and the female kidney, which by the way, also are all proportionally larger in men than women.

Now, there used to be a time when scientists thought that the size of the brain was really important. Phrenologists measured the size and shapes of people's skulls and then drew sweeping conclusions about people from different groups. But more recent work has challenged the idea that bigger always means different. I've done several studies looking at structures that are alleged to differ between men and women. One is the hippocampus, which is important for memory, and the other is the amygdala,

which is important for emotion and fear. And both of these structures have been alleged to differ between adult men and women, but when we did a meta analysis, basically downloading all of them dozens and dozens of studies of comparing men and women's brains, it turns out there is no difference between the hippocampus of men and women or the amygdala of men and women once you correct for overall brain size.

Lees agrees with Deborah So, the scientist we heard from earlier who believes that hormone levels in utero can affect the brain of the baby. But where Deborah sees hormonal influence as decisive, leaves things of it as just a nudge. There are probably some properties of toys that may appeal more to boys and girls, quote unquote,

instinctively. There's so much more layered on top of that in terms of the marketing, in terms of the parent and grandparent encouragement, in terms of the marketing, in terms of the parent and grandparent, you know, encouragement, in terms of especially peer reinforcement, because we see that there's almost no gender difference before the first birthday in the type of toys that children prefer. There's a little hint of it, maybe at about nine months, but it's really once children start to gender identify, and especially once they start breaking up into separate play groups, because gender segregation

happens beginning about age three, that the difference is in preference become extremely pronounced. So, there's a, I would say a strong social role, a modest innate or instinctive role, and you put those two together and you end up with a very dramatic divergence by the time kids are four years old. A host of scientific studies have found evidence of the powerful role that social influences play. There was this recent study out of Emory University where fathers were studying and they had these nice audio

recorders so the parents weren't aware of every moment, every interaction. And it turned out that the fathers were commenting more on their daughters' physical appearance, more on their tummies, and also endorsing their daughters' feelings more than their sons. Basically reacting more to their sons' neutral expressions and more to their daughters, sad or fearful expressions. And so we do this because we have different expectations for males and females, and that has to do with our very deep-seated gender assumptions. Lees also site to study with mothers and their 11-month-old babies. The infants are put on a, what looks like,

a crazy steep slope to crawl down, but it's carpeted and it has gating up on the sides, so it's safe. And it turns out when mothers were asked to adjust the steepness of the slope for the steepest slope they thought their babies were capable of crawling down, the mothers turned it to a steeper slope for their sons sons than their daughters and then when the infants were actually tested,

there was actually no difference in the courageousness or the physical ability of baby boys and girls to crawl down a steep slope. And yet another study, both mothers and fathers, discouraged risk-taking on the playground for their daughters more than for their sons. So when you start doing that, when kids are one and two and three years old, it really sets them on different trajectories. Without necessarily intending to treat sons and daughters differently, adults also subtly communicate expectations about language, math, and spatial skills.

Research from Israel, for example, found that sixth grade teachers in Tel Aviv schools give girls slightly lower math scores than they deserve, and give boys slightly higher math scores than they deserve. By high school, the children often end up with different beliefs about their own ability in math. Males and females are both capable of learning spatial skills and verbal skills perfectly well. It really is largely a matter of dose of experience that determines our differences.

Here's what all these studies together tell us. Social norms that treat girls and boys in different ways are all around us. And even the most diligent parents will find that they can control only a small fraction of the influences shaping their children. You cannot erase gender from a child's experience. There's no such thing as a gender-free society, and parents who claim that they're raising children gender-neutral. We treated our son and daughter exactly the same, are really fooling themselves.

Leigh says that doesn't mean people should stop trying to push back against gender stereotypes. What we can do is we can say what kind of society we do we want to have and what are the experiences that young children are immersed in that will either make boys and girls have more similarity of opportunity or will drive a wedge between them. And I think in our society we're always driving for greater equality. And so we need to think about how to maximize the brain potential of both genders as opposed

to slot them into these limited roles that really don't allow them to express the full range of humanity. As I talk to scientists Lee Saliat and Deborah Soe and to historian Joe Peoletti, I realize that all of them agreed on one thing. People ought to be allowed to live their lives, to be all they want to be, regardless of what the world tells them they should be. To what the end of his memo on gender issues, Google Engineer James Daymore said, I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that we shouldn't try to correct

for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles, I'm advocating for quite the opposite. Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group. The person we're going to hear from next has never talked to James Daymore or Deborah Soh, never taken a class with Joe Peo Lady or Lee Sallien. But I'm sure I know what this person, Jimmy Shoop, would say to the idea that we should treat people as individuals, and not as just another member of their group.

The reason I went to court to blow all of this up was we're all unique human beings and I think we're a mixture to some extent of male and female, you know, irrespective of the biology. When we come back, what Jamie Shoupe, the first legally recognized, non-binary person in the United States, Can tell us about the great gender debate. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've been talking today about gender and about our long-running debates over the role of biology versus culture. For many years,

these debates have largely assumed that gender is a binary, male and female. But even in science struggles to understand the male brain and the female brain, some people are challenging the reality of those fundamental categories. Jamie Shoop is in the vanguard of that movement. Jamie just pulled into Carson City, Nevada, after roaming around the West for the past few months, in a small camper, perched on top of a pickup truck. So basically we're in what's called a truck camper. It's approximately 17 feet long.

It weighs about around 3,000 pounds. In other words, heavy and small but also efficient. I've got a microwave and oven stove, you know, double sink, a small bathroom with a shower. Jamie's at ease in this desert town, clad in jeans, a flowing blouse and head scarf. The camper has been traveling a lot of late, but for now, Jamie's biggest journey is over. ease in this desert town, clad in jeans, of flowing blouse and headscarf. The campers been traveling a lot of late, but for now, Jamie's biggest journey is over, a rocky trip over the landscape of gender identity. I think the best way to frame this and understand it

is to just think of me as very fluid. Jamie lives between the sexes. Jamie thinks not of himself or of herself, but of themselves. I can be masculine, I can be feminine, I can do anything I want. Jamie is the first officially recognized non-gendered person in America. It was a status that had to be fought for and won. It came after a five-decade struggle, a struggle to find an identity that felt right. Now 54 years old, Jamie was born in Washington, DC and raised in a large blue collar family

in rural southern Maryland. It was a place of tobacco farms and deep conservative views. This is a place where the black kids that I cut tobacco with during the summer, they weren't allowed in the farmer's houses because they were black. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, like putting, I remember one occasion I'd read an article about putting mayonnaise and egg in your hair to make it soft and my mother absolutely just went ballistic over that and slapped me and called me a sissy. Jamie's mother also lost it when the teenager refused to get a short haircut and instead got a perm. I just wanted to feel more feminine. So this was Jamie's dilemma.

He had a male body, but inside there was also a she, with all this femininity flowing about. Romantically, Jamie was drawn to both boys and girls, but this was the late 1970s, so Jamie took a girl to the Queen of Hearts Dance and drove a big wheel Camaro and cut Tobacco and felt nothing at all like a real boy. Yeah, I mean, I just, I've never been connected to identifying as a male. I've never agreed that I was a male.

And yeah, I just had, I had no connection to, to masculinity. But you know, at the same time I knew what the boundaries were and I knew what the punishment was and I just kind of went along with things. After high school, with no money and few options, Jamie entered the army, trained as a mechanic. It meant more going along with things. You know, the military is a world of testosterone and diesel fuel and I don't relate to all that. But the younger crew was brilliant at fixing things. Soon a promotion came.

Jamie made Supervisor. I was a computer whiz, so they made me an information system security officer. I was the go-to person to write awards and write evaluation reports. Yes, and I was highly intelligent about how to fix the vehicles. I could walk into the shop and say, well, this is what we need to do to fix this. So all those things, you know, they cover it up for my gender, variances, and my sexual orientation. But other soldiers picked up that Jamie was different.

It led to some scary situations. Once at a training site, Jamie was surrounded by several officers and the instructor. And they started scribing sex acts between males, and they were just getting really vulgar, and they were doing it entirely for my benefit. They were saying all these things, and looking at me the whole time,

and just studying to see what my reaction would be. What was your reaction? I was terrified. This was Jamie's life for 18 years. Walking the finest of lines, fearing that one wrong step might result in an attack or the end of a hard-earned career in the army. It's a sad story, but through much of it, Jamie had one powerful source of support. My name is Sandy at Shoeop. So I've married to Jamie. We've been married about 30 years now. We have one child. Jamie and Sandy sit side by side as they talk about their life.

They're in a small park across the street from an RV campground under the shade of a picnic shelter. They see them at ease. Sandy grew up outside Fort Knox, Kentucky. She met Jamie when a friend set them up on a blind double date. The guys didn't have cars. So my friend Tina, we picked up the guys on base, and so when we went to pick them up,

I said it was really kind of the first time I'd seen Jamie, and I'm like, I pulled my friend aside because we were going up to a bar up in Louisville. And I'm like, are they old enough to get into the bars? Because Jamie had such a baby face. But Jamie also had an enduring personality. They hit it off. Sandy liked how sweet and attentive Jamie was, so different from other guys she did it.

They had fun together. One thing Sandy didn't notice was Jamie's gender struggles. They were clues, but Sandy shrugged them off. There was like, sometimes Jamie would just kind of strange. Like Jamie had to have this leopard print, kind of like, you know, t-shirt, kind of, not, you know, it was like sleeveless, but it was like this leopard print.

And it's not something you would normally see on a guy. And that was just kind of like, hmm, you know, but I just put it down as, you know, when I, Jamie's quirk, you know, I mean, I was frunken, Tucky, and you know, it's the south, and I was like, well, okay, well, Jamie's not from around here, so. So, we eventually got married.

A few years later, while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, they had a daughter. She's an awesome kid. And when Jamie talks about getting grief from colleagues in the military, did you hear about that? I'm wondering if these issues of gender and sexuality came up in your conversations. No, Jamie really didn't discuss that kind of stuff.

He had Jamie would grumble about the things like work issues and stuff like that. But I really don't remember Jamie talking about anything like that. Jamie, I guess, kept it close to the vest, it would be an expression to use. But yeah, I don't remember. But the truth is, Jamie's carefully choreographed life was coming apart. There were run-ins with supervisors who suspected Jamie was gay.

One said he wasn't going to recommend Jamie for any promotions, despite his teller work record. It was like being confined in a cell where the walls kept closing in. And then, one icy winter morning, Jamie fell and broke a wrist during a training run. The injury caused permanent damage. After 18 years, Jamie's army career was over.

After getting medically discharged, Jamie's gender crisis intensified. I was 49 years old. I think it's best to term it as I was at my breaking point. I had literally had nearly five decades of suppressing my gender identity, suppressing my sexual orientation. And it was really, literally to the point of like, I mean, I was kind of thinking either I do something about this or I commit suicide. I mean, it had reached that level of distress. The choice was that stark.

And it's the point in our story when you might expect a familiar resolution. In this version of the story, Jamie stops hiding and comes out as a woman. Maybe gets gender reassignment surgery. That was indeed the path that Jamie's doctors initially recommended. And for a time, Jamie eagerly listened to them. So I bought into it, I'll climb and sink her in, right away decided I was gonna transition to a female because I expected it to help alleviate

by mental health crisis that I was having from all the suppression. Jamie also finally told Sandy what was going on. It was kind of a surprise, but I mean, I wasn't offended. I was just kind of like, you know, when you marry someone, it's because you love them. And you want them to be happy and you want them to, you know, be fulfilled. And I just, I want Jamie to be happy.

It's not that Sandy would have chosen this route. She says, of course she would have liked to live life with Jamie as a he. But in a way she says, this is what she signed up for when she married a soldier. You know, Jamie really feels that this is something that they have to do. And, you know, I've always supported Jamie. I mean, you know, as an army wife and, you know, that was your part of your job. You know, you were just like, you were the support. You were the one that, you know, to care of things like for the soldiers.

So with Sandy's support, Jamie started taking hormones, developing breasts, wearing awake and high heels, and hanging out with transgender women. But it still didn't feel right. After hearing a few horror stories about gender reassignment surgeries that turned out poorly, Jamie rejected that option. Also, Jamie didn't want to wear clothes that screamed female. And my idea of transitioning was, okay, so I'll start wearing women's jeans, I'll wear women's casual shirts, I'll probably put a flowered scarf on my head or something like that.

And in the trans women, I was interacting with them, they were absolutely freaking over that. They were like, well, you don't look like a female, we don't want to hang out with you, because I wasn't doing enough to be hyper feminine. Here's what Jamie was realizing. There were rules about what it meant to be a woman, or gay, or trans. The transgender community has hierarchies. You never see cross-dressers in the news.

It's all about the trans women and the trans men. And the lesbian community, they have their gold star or lesbians that if you've ever touched a male, then you're not really a lesbian, you're not our equal. Yeah, everywhere you look in society, there's hierarchies. Jamie didn't like this. Jamie didn't feel like a woman trapped inside a man's body. Jamie felt like a man and a woman.

Why couldn't Jamie just be Jamie? You know, I said it was all very black and white thinking that you know you're either male or your female and if you're a female, you know, this is this pathway that you do to become a female. If Jamie went to the doctor and said I think I'm female and the doctor asked why, Jamie might say because I do feminine things. As a kid I played hopsc female and the doctor asked why, Jamie might say, because I do feminine things. As a kid, I played hopscotch and jacks and permed my hair and hated football. I feel more comfortable among girls than boys.

And the doctor's might tell Jamie, you're really a woman and you can transition to being female. But if Jamie had gone to the doctor and said, I think I'm female because I like women and fast cars and tinkering with machines. The doctor might say, I don't really think your chance. But why not? As I talk to Jamie, I realize that the answer

is that most of our conceptions of gender are built around a series of stereotypes of what it means to be a man or a woman. My question and the reason I went to court to blow all of this up was, you know, we're all unique human beings and I think we're a mixture to some extent of male and female, you know, irrespective of the biology. So here's what happened. Once Jamie made peace with this idea that the categories of male and female were too confining,

Jamie wanted legal documents to reflect this point of view. Jamie didn't want to be a he or a she, but a they. Jamie's Oregon State ID card said female. Jamie wanted that changed. Well, the first stop was actually the DMV in downtown Portland. I walked in there one day and I told the clerk, I said I want you to remove either. I had female on my organ ID and I said I want you to remove the female off of there and I don't want you putting male on there.

I want nothing on there. The answer Jamie received wasn't a big surprise. And she just, you know, calmly and politely says, well, we don't do that. At that point, you know, her denial of taking the gender marker off of my ID gave me an actionable legal claim. And I went and started searching for attorneys. Jamie found a Portland attorney who agreed to take on the case.

What did you ask him to do? I literally told him I wanted to be declared for attorneys. Jimmy found a Portland attorney who agreed to take on the case. What did you ask him to do? I literally told him I wanted to be declared non-binary as my sex, which would mean that I was neither male or female. What was his strategy? It's unbelievably simple. Jimmy's attorney downloaded a readily available status shoot sex change form.

He put it into the computer. He took Photoshop and he did, you know, he cut out where it said male and female and he typed in non-binary and he filed it with a court. That was it. A court date was set for June of 2016. Jamie made sure to be ready. I came armed with two letters from the doctors, you know, one from the VA and one from

OHSU saying that the doctors supported the change. We walked into court. I mean, the judge hardly said anything and signed it. With that pens truck, Jamie's shoe became the first person in America to be legally declared as neither male nor female. A half century of struggle was over. I was on a different planet. I mean, I was just kind of speechless. It was just a very surreal moment.

It was kind of like the judge said, yes. And I was in a days. We walked through the courthouse courthouse and next thing I know I was crying on the sidewalk. The judge's decision legitimizing Jamie's gender fluidity meant all the constraints were gone. No more hiding, no more URA or B, no more if you're a this then you have to behave like that. Water says Jamie, that's what life feels like now. It just flows. I really like my place now of being non-binary because I have had all the roles stripped away from me.

You know, you can't tell me that I'm in the wrong clothing. You can't tell me that I'm loving the wrong person. You know, I can be masculine, I can be feminine, I can do anything I want. I've broken all the rules and just gotten rid of them. Jamie wants to roam. That's the appeal of being non-binary and also the attraction of traveling around in the camper. Yeah, we went from the 3,000 square foot

house to the two bedroom, to the one bedroom, to the studio, and she's almost to the pop-tent on the beach. I draw the line there. No, no. No pop-tents on the beach. And that's how we leave them, Jamie flowing like water and sandy, the level ground nearby. Debates of Agenda quickly produce vitriol, anger, and contempt.

The folks who think biology determines gender roll their eyes at people who think culture is important. Proponents of culture accuse the biology people of being sexist. This is what happened after that Google memo went public. Everyone quickly took sides, we slotted people into groups, even if they didn't want membership in those groups. The former Google engineer, James Daymore, was embraced by ideologues on the alt-right, by groups that were critical of diversity.

He said he wanted no part of their causes. As for Jamie Shoe, there are plenty of people who don't see Jamie as a conciliator or someone who occupies a middle ground. They see Jamie as someone who undermines the hard-earned victories of people who have long suffered disrespect. Jamie thinks that if people are both male and female, it isn't right for a transgender woman who's still partly a man in Jamie's, to have access to women's bathrooms. For the same reason, Jamie also thinks transgender women shouldn't be competing in athletic

competitions with other women. That said, there's a lesson to be taken from Jamie's story and from our larger debates about gender. When I first became a science journalist many years ago, I heard a phrase that stuck with me. Nature doesn't have edges. Humans like to think there is a clear demarcation between one species and the next, between one gender and the next, between one season and the next.

But when you look closely, these categories get blurry, especially at the boundary between category A and category B. So many of our quarrels about gender come down to this. There are really ways of saying the categories I see and believe are better than the ones you see and believe. To the extent we will ever have progress on these debates, we may all need to get more comfortable with blurriness. This week's show was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Gabriella Saldevia and Raina Cohen, and

edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Maggie Penman, René Clarre and Parth Shah. We had original music by Ramteen Arableui. NPR's Vice President for Programming and Audience Development is Anja Grunman. Special thanks to Phil Corbett of the podcast Van Sounds for helping us with our interview of Jamie and Sandy Schoo. Our unsung heroes this week are Emily Dagger, Sai Sykes and Andrew Hayden. Emily and Sai and Andrew have helped Shepherd Hidden brain from a podcast to a radio show,

relaunched last week on more than 100 stations nationwide. Emily kept us on track throughout the process, while Sai and Andrew spread word about the show throughout the public radio ecosystem. All three of them are walking testaments to professionalism, for example as a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, Sai somehow managed to ignore the fact that I support the Philadelphia Eagles. Thanks Emily, Andrew and Sai for going above and beyond the call of duty. If you like this show, please share it with a friend

where on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. By the way, one of today's guests, neuroscientist Lease Elliott, has offered to answer follow-up questions about gender. So if you have questions, please send an email to hiddenbrainatnpr.org. We'll choose a few by Wednesday, October 11th, and we'll post Leigh's video responses on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram by the weekend. That email again is hiddenbrainatnpr.org. I'm Shankar Vedantum and this is NPR.