Lecture Panel Discussion | Daphna Joel | Beyond the Binary: Rethinking Sex and the Brain" plus Panel Discussion

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Although most scientists nowadays would not argue that brains of males and females belong to two distinct types, the binary framework still dominates thinking about the relations between sex and the brain. I’ll describe challenges to the binary formulation of these relations and how this formulation has evolved in response to these challenges, with the latest version claiming that brains are typically male or female because brain structure can be used to predict the sex category (female/male) of the brain’s owner. I will also present several lines of evidence revealing that sex category explains only a small part of the variability in human brain structure, and a recent study challenging the masculinization hypothesis. I suggest to replace the binary framework with a new, non-binary, framework, according to which mosaic brains reside in a multi-dimensional space that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a male-female continuum or to a binary variable. This framework may also apply to sex-related variables and has implications for research.

Panel Discussion with Daphna Joel and Lise Eliot | moderated by Donna Maney and Katrina Karkazis.
Click here to start video at Panel Discussion

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh