The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identify in Our Society by Dr. Debra Soh
The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society by Dr. Debra Soh takes on controversial topics like whether transgender women are women, autogynephilia, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, bathroom bans, and feminism. Critical to Soh’s argument is the theme that gender expression, limited only by creativity, should not be confused with scientific categories.
On starting The End of Gender, I was immediately struck by how clear and straightforward Debra Soh communicates. She does not mince words, complicate her message, or weigh her writing down with rhetorical flourishes. While she approaches the topic as a scientist, a “sexologist” (which I didn’t realize was a thing, but Google confirms that yes, it is), the book is designed for the lay reader, not the scientific community. She’s a neuroscientist with graduate work in paraphilias (abnormal sexual preferences, or more colloquially, kinks). In other words, she uses an MRI machine MRI and brain imagining to understand sex and gender. To boot, she’s pro-choice, pro-kink, and pro-sex-without-strings.
Socially speaking, that’s a long bit away from where I fall on the spectrum.
Despite her inclinations, Dr. Soh doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith that the scientific community can research and publish in the area without facing the threat of attack and the potential to be “canceled.” She argues that there might actually be more research on point, but activists have made it too difficult for researchers to publish without negative ramifications for results that don’t match up with the political narrative of the activists. While I can’t speak to that, there are strong and intense feelings around gender and gender identity, and it is a topic that has become politicized. I myself have friends and associates who have transitioned genders, and as I wrote this review of The End of Gender spent a lot of time considering how to avoid anything that might step on or harm their experience, while also adequately discussing and sharing what I learned from the book.
I don’t know that I’ve succeeded but I hope that the book will be read, anyway. As Debra Soh argues, it’s possible to both support those who feel like they should transition, while also raising questions and concerns about the implications of transition, especially for children (which I define as anyone under the age of majority, or 18. Science tells us that even then the human brain has not finished growing and changing, but generally, 18 seems to be the legal age we’ve arrived at as a society when a person becomes an adult).
Soh’s ability to communicate well on her topic is useful to the lay reader, because gender, and sexuality and identity, and so on, is anything but simple, and it is increasingly a topic that is relevant to all of us. Whether it is through debates about who participates in sports, who uses what bathrooms, the pronouns that people prefer, or the politics that swirl around these, it’s hard for these topics to not come up. And the message can be difficult to parse with from the politics. Soh aims to avoid this, or at least to point out the conflicts in politicizing something that is supposed to be largely driven by research and medicine. Soh, who comes from the political left, recognizes that most on her side of the aisle can’t agree with her.
Despite these fairly liberal inclinations, Soh says the science in the field has led her to criticize the ideas being pushed by trans activists. While she supports the transitioning of adults if it makes them happy, participating in sports, and even using public bathrooms of the sex they identify with, she raises serious questions about the transitioning of children and teens.
Dr. Soh, be her own account the victim of the social media mobs (she dedicates the book to “everyone who blocked me on Twitter”), organizes the book to address 9 different myths of the gender conversation:
Myth 1: Biological Sex is Spectrum. Based on the gametes of each individual, Dr. Soh argues that science provides for only two sexes: male and female. If you produce sperm, you’re male. If you produce eggs, you’re female.
Myth 2: Gender is a social construct. On the contrary, Dr. Soh, says. Gender has a basis in biology, with men gravitating towards certain behaviors, interests, and activities, while women are inclined towards others. And those inclinations, whether a man or woman is gender-conforming, depend on how much the person is exposed to testosterone in the womb.
Myth 3: There are more than two genders.
Myth 4: Sexual orientation and gender identity are unrelated.
Myth 5: Children with gender dysphoria should transition.
Myth 6: No difference exists between trans women and women who were born women. The research that Soh cites here is extremely interesting, but her less scientific approach in communicating it does open her to critique.
Myth 7: Women should behave like men in sex and dating. (See my comment for Myth 6)
Myth 8: Gender-neutral parenting works.
Myth 9: Sexology and social justice make good bedfellows.
It’s a list that touches on so many of the topics that seem to be right at the edge of the news.
Even in the news, many of these seem almost obvious or common sense. There are moments when I was reading (or listening—I listened to the audiobook, read by Soh herself) when I couldn’t but wonder that we have a book like this. Do we need a book that lists out things that seem so obvious? That men and women are different—physically, emotionally, psychologically—and that there are real reasons for these differences. Her goal is to refocus on the science underpinning what and who we are rather than allowing politics to distort the conversation.
She is, implicitly and explicitly, planting her flag in an ongoing cancel-culture war.
Not surprisingly there are critics (and not just the ones who blocked her on Twitter). One critique is with how she uses her “gender”, which she defines early in the book, and though she later becomes more fluid in how she uses the word, sometimes even discarding it or conflating it with “sex.”
In another critique, the critic argues that her response to Myth 2, that gender is a social construct, is circular, and that Soh does not understand feminism. (Far be it from me to define what feminism is, but I see it as treating men and women equally, providing equal opportunity, and removing barriers to women to advance in any particular field, merit alone being the advancing factor in promotion and pay…roughly speaking).
Another critique, and one that landed less persuasively to me, is Dr. Soh’s disdain for non-scientific explanations. Given that much of her attack is on those very non-scientific explanations, it is unsurprising that those who rely on them feel a little stung by her arguments. Ironically, these critiques were heavy with disdain for Soh’s views on the differences between men and women, looking at evolution for explanations about why we act and prefer the things we do. She does not think much of gender studies majors.
For example, Soh writes: “Men’s behavior is, to some extent, the result of female sexual preferences. If women didn’t want to mate with masculine men, these traits would have been removed from the gene pool long ago. It’s a case of ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ Toxic masculinity is the result of women’s sexual preferences over thousands of generations. Contemporary feminists are punishing an entire generation of men for the mating preferences of their female ancestors.”
I’m not so sure, but I see the logic. The counterpoint might be that our race has continued to produce monsters, whether it be Stalin, Hitler, or drunk and abusive husbands and boyfriends. Blaming those choices by terrible people on women’s sexual preferences seems to be missing the mark that people always have a choice in what to become, and what they become is not always apparent when sexual selection is operating.
Soh goes to lengths to remind the reader that she’s not opposed to “live and let live,” and that if a woman wants to crossdress, or a man wants to identify as a woman (or a tree, or a different gender at night than in the day), then she is okay with it. It’s a free country. But what she sees as troubling is the impact on children and the dangerous effects of transition (from one gender to another, including using puberty-blocking drugs and surgery).
This is where Dr. Soh sounds most concerned. She says that research suggests that young women (biological, not trans) that are experiencing mental health disorders are moving to medical transition far too frequently through Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria that spreads socially. (According to one paper I found online, this gender dysphoria “seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified” within a period of time. The same study also noted that parents reported that their children exhibited an increase in “social media/internet use prior to the disclosure of transgender identity. And now that I’ve waited so long to post this, I no longer have the study at my fingertips).
How to sum up?
Read the book and decide for yourself. The information is worth understanding better. The End of Gender is a fascinating read, relevant and timely. Even if you don’t agree the arguments are compelling and thought-provoking, and the book is worth the read.
The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society
Biology
Threshold Editions
August 31, 2021
336
Is our gender something we’re born with, or are we conditioned by society? In The End of Gender, neuroscientist and sexologist Dr. Debra Soh uses a research-based approach to address this hot-button topic, unmasking popular misconceptions about the nature vs. nurture debate and exploring what it means to be a woman or a man in today’s society.
Both scientific and objective, and drawing on original research and carefully conducted interviews, Soh tackles a wide range of issues, such as gender-neutral parenting, gender dysphoric children, and the neuroscience of being transgender. She debates today’s accepted notion that gender is a social construct and a spectrum, and challenges the idea that there is no difference between how male and female brains operate.
The End of Gender is conversation-starting “required reading” (Eric R. Weinstein, PhD, host of The Portal) that will arm you with the facts you need to come to your own conclusions about gender identity and its place in the world today.
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