Science Says: Treat Women Differently Than Men

Men and women are different, a fact known to all throughout all history, until recently. Sort of. We know the fact now, too, but some pretend not to know it while also admitting they know. This only sounds confusing, as we’ll see.

Peter Boghossian tweeted:

There are sex differences between men’s and women’s brains, and those are tied to sex chromosomes.

This study—from the National Academy of Sciences—has received almost no national media attention because it runs counter to the dominant narrative.

A reminder that should not have to be stated—this does not justify treating people differently on the basis of an immutable characteristic.

The reminder that does have to be stated is amusing because it is the dominant narrative to treat the unequal as equal. Which is absurd, especially after admitting the unsame aren’t the same. When differences matter, the different should be treated differently.

The paper Boghossian references is Integrative structural, functional, and transcriptomic analyses of sex-biased brain organization in humans by Lui et al. in PNAS. Full of ripe information on the innards of brains in ladies and men.

Good stuff, and interesting. But here, if we’re not careful, is where another error can be read into Boghossian’s comment. We didn’t need science to “confirm” there were differences between the way men and women think or behave. Everybody always knew these differences existed. It’s fine to point to particular bits of biology to say “Here’s why the ladies like to coddle their kids and go shopping, whereas this is why men like to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.”

But if we never knew the whatsit on the limberosis of the particulratum glowed differently under the fMRIs os men and women, we still would know that men and women thought and acted differently. We don’t need—we never need—to say how to say that. If we allow the how to replace the that, we commit the Deadly Sin of Reification, where the theory becomes more important than the fact. To say that science is needed to finally “confirm” this, or any other known truth, is to display scientism of the first kind.

The authors of the paper skirt this error. Here’s the opening of the Abstract:

Humans display reproducible sex differences in cognition and behavior, which may partly reflect intrinsic sex differences in regional brain organization. However, the consistency, causes and consequences of sex differences in the human brain are poorly characterized and hotly debated.

The “reproducible” is there only to make the sentence sound like careful empirical measurements under strict scientific supervision were taken. They could have began “Everybody knows men and women think and act differently…”, but that would have induced in readers the very kind of hyperventilating reaction they were hoping to avoid and clearly anticipated.

They go on about regional gray matter volume, imaging-transcriptomic analyses and suchlike jollities. All written in fine, rich prose. Whether what they say about male and female brains is true, I’ll let others decide. It’s not interesting for us today.

The “hotly debated” part concerns us. Men’s and women’s bodies differ in myriad observable ways. These scientists claim male and females bodies also differ in invisible, or rather difficult to see, ways. Well, this should not be a surprise to anybody. Surprised is often feigned, though.

That women have innies and men outties, and the plumbing associated with each, was enough give at least a hint why women and men act and think differently. But some of us thought those visible differences could be ignored, perhaps through familiarity, or that they could be disguised through mutilation or cross-dressing. The brain, though, especially because of a philosophical materialism, seems a special organ. Saying there are differences there implies those differences are, in a way left unsaid, ineradicable.

Those under the sway of Equality (and materialism) cannot bear this, because brains unlike genitals are serious, so they fight the idea and evidence. Yet even if these equalitarians can refute these scientists’ findings, it doesn’t matter. There are still innumerable ineradicable differences between the sexes, and always will be.

Here’s the strange part. It is clear even to equalitarians that Equality is false. To say “women must be treated the same as men” is to admit that men and women are different. And, as said, when differences matter, the different should be treated differently. Thus the demand for equal treatment is self negating.

If men and women were equal, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. We wouldn’t even have words to distinguish between them. We’d only have human. The demand would then be “humans must be treated the same as humans”, which is a valid request but empty.

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