proto-mammalia

After reading Halpern's book, I went back and skimmed through various reactions to Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference, which I have yet to read.

The rest of the book's title, "The Truth about the Male and Female Brain" (hardcover) and "Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism" (paperback), probably helps the book to sell, in spite of the way even the author might agree it oversimplifies the terminology.

In responding to a Pinker comment on Edge about the ways we are "sexed" and "gendered", Baron-Cohen suggests,

Pinker is on to something here, in that we are just emerging from decades of linguistic ambiguity and linguistic inadequacy. I would go one step further and argue that we probably have at least 7 different meanings, and only 2 words available to us. So, when we think about someone's sex, we can think about their chromosomal sex (how many X or Y chromosomes they have); their gonadal sex (do they have testes or ovaries); the sex of their brain (do they have the brain structure and function that is typical for people with their chromosomal sex); their sex-typical cognition (do they have the profile of strengths and weaknesses that is typical for people with their chromosomal sex); their sex-typical behaviour (do they act in ways that are typical for people with their chromosomal sex); their gender identity (do they identify with others who share their chromosomal sex); and finally, their sexual orientation.

While his comments seem to mostly make sense, his description of gender identity doesn't seem appropriate to me (in the way that I try not to use the word "non-whites"), and the phrase "sex-typical cognition" could be typically problematic.

I've been thinking about what kind of language makes sense when talking statistically and socially, and current terms don't seem to fit the bill.

"Average males and females" is a bit better than "males and females", but if average means mean, then many don't realize that average "males and females" tend not to exist. I've been using the phrase "median male" and "median female", but I realized that that doesn't quite work, as it only seems to make sense to talk about median-ness along a single dimension (where a median person does exist), rather than describe a hypothetical person who is median along multiple dimensions.

The phrase "stereotypical males and females" is a bit more accurate in this way, but seems troublesome on a personal and social justice level, perhaps because the phrase tends to be used to describe aggregate, subjective perceptions rather than falsifiable statistics, in a more formalized way.

I think I'll propose the terms "proto-male" and "proto-female" to describe the mythical men and women (nouns), and the theoretical traits (adjectives) that sex difference researchers tend to study.

Why? I think it's important to remember that prototypical traits exist, but prototypical people tend not to exist, unless you consider a single dimension. For example, you could line up all the people in the world and find someone with the median height, but it seems unlikely that you'd find a "prototypical" human who is of exactly median height and median intelligence, who works in an average job, earning a median income, and also is "median" wrt all personality traits and life experience statistics you could imagine.

Although there may be implicitly statistical reasoning behind our unshared stereotypes, I feel that it makes sense to distinguish between stereotypes, which are mediated by people and their media over time, and prototypes, which are affected by stereotypes but, if suitably defined, would be quantifiable and thus falsifiable.

Phew, enough definitions. "Unsex me here", unsex me now. And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cute-lty.