Vivre la Difference

This blogger, Dismal Aesthetics, took our EQSQ personality tests and found that, while being genetically female, she had very much a male brain, right at the very systemizing end of the possible results. This then leads to the thought that:

Could it be that I’m on the autistic spectrum instead of being a female-to-male transsexual?

Now as regular readers know, I’m not a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, I’m an economist by training. I’m simply an interested amateur in these matters, blogging here to find out things as much as to try and tell them to anyone.

But could there be a link between sexual attraction and having either a male or female brain as determined by our personality tests? Certainly, there could be, it’s possible. We think that the formation of the male/female brain comes from the exposure to fetal testosterone, more leading to a more male type brain. This then leads to the greater systemizing behaviour.

But looking at the actual figures, I’m not sure that we can then make that leap to thinking this might lead to either same sex attraction or to transexuality (and yes, I’m aware that the two things are different yet intertwined). For weactually find that some 17% of men have the female or empathic brain type. But the numbers of men who are either gay or transexuals is (depending upon who you ask, the higher numbers relate to those who have had a homosexual experience, the lower to those who self-define as gay) is somewhere between 1or 2% and 10%. Similarly, we also find that 17% of women have the male or systemizing type brain and the number of those who self-define as lesbian is, I think, even lower than those men who identify as gay.

Further, we’ve found no evidence that the number of gays/lesbians in the men /women who have the female/male brain type is any different from their number in the general population.

So while it is still possible that there is a connection between systemizing and empathizing and sexual identity, as we can’t actually see any correlation I tend to think that it’s unlikely. Trivialising slightly, being left or right handed is also something determined by hte structure of the brain, but we see no correlation betwen male and female brain types and this, either. It may just be that there are many things determined by difference in brains and what we’re looking at here with the EQSQ tests is only one of them, the others caused by, umm, different differences in the brain.