User:Citlalli95/sandbox

=== Neuroscience ===

Multiple studies have been conducted on human brains in efforts to see if the gender binary has a neuroscientific basis. While some studies found average differences between people assigned male at birth (AMAB’s) and people assigned female at birth’s (AFAB’s) brain structures, these differences did not create two distinct types of brains because the differences are neither internally consistent in individuals (i.e. women did not have all “female” brain structures and men did not have all “male” structures) nor highly dimorphic. Another study supported this finding by testing various ages, types of imaging, and methods of analysis only to reach the same conclusion that most people (23 to 53%) have a combination of “female” and “male” brain structures; internal consistency only occurred in 0.7 to 10.4% of brains.

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Behavioral Neuroendocrinology ===''' ======            There is a misconception that humans have “female” and “male” hormones, but studies show that every person has estrogens, androgens, and progesterone (Gillies & McArthur, 2010). In fact, even the levels of estradiol and progesterone do not have a significant difference between people AMAB and people AFAB; testosterone is higher in people AMAB than in people AFAB on average, but even these distributions show considerable overlap and differences were much smaller than what was widely expected. Additionally, non-pregnant AFAB people have levels of progesterone more similar to people AMAB than to pregnant people.

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Psychology ===''' ======            Research shows that most people have “feminine” and “masculine” psychological characteristics. A study was conducted on U.S. college students using ten gender-stereotyped behaviors (boxing, construction, playing golf, playing video games, scrapbooking, taking a bath, talking on the phone, watching porn, watching talk shows, and using cosmetics), and the results show over 55% of students conducted a combination of female and masculine behaviors; whereas less than 1% conducted only feminine or only masculine behaviors.

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Socialization of the Gender Binary in the U.S. ===''' ======            Studies on children in the U.S. have found that children are only able to detect the gender of other children when there are “culturally stereotypic markers of their gender,” including hair styles, make-up, and clothing. Throughout U.S. history – until the victories of the Stonewall riots – it was illegal to not conform to the assigned sex at birth in public settings, which Hyde and colleagues argue suggests that gender is visibly marked so that it unnaturally becomes psychologically salient.

Scholars who study the gender binary from an intersectional feminism and Critical Race Theory perspective agree that during the process of European colonization of the U.S., a binary system of gender was created and enforced as a means of protecting patriarchal norms and upholding European nationalism. This idea of a gender as a binary has been shown to be an oppressive means of reflecting differential power dynamics. Studies of Two Spirit traditions have shown that various Native American nations understand gender and sexuality in a way that directly opposes Western norms.

==== English Language ====

In English, nouns (e.g., boy), honorific titles (e.g., Miss), occupational titles (e.g., actress), and pronouns (e.g., she, his) are gendered, and they fall into a male/female binary. Children raised within English-speaking (and other gendered-language) environments are literally forced by language to attend to gender and view it as a binary category. Studies have found that for children who learn English as their primary language in the U.S., adults’ use of the gender binary to explicitly sort individuals (i.e. “boys” and “girls” bathrooms and softball teams), as opposed to just the presence of gender markers, causes gender biases.