From the world of science comes further proof that gender is a mysterious and fluid subject. Neuroscientists at Harvard found that by blocking female mice’s ability to smell pheromones, they exhibit much more “masculine” behavior, “without any significant rise in testosterone or other steroid hormones.”
All the thinking until now was that female brains can produce feminine behaviors while male brains can produce masculine behaviors, with little or no cross talk between them,” says Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “These results do suggest that, at least for mice, the brain retains circuitry to display both masculine and feminine behaviors into adulthood.
The “masculine” behavior the female mice showed, however, was to chase the male mice, “mount them and attempt to pelvic thrust.” It seems to me, though, that for the female mice to exhibit truly masculine behavior, at least in the traditional sense, they would have to chase and mount the non-altered female mice. Are the scientists just reluctant to entertain the idea of lesbian mice, or do I just not understand enough about animal behavior?
Probably the latter; but this research does imply further depths to be plumbed in terms of human gender expression. Humans lack the pheromone receptors at play with the mice here, but researchers speculate “our brains may be wired similarly with ‘both [female and male] circuits present and one is constantly inhibited. The key to gender-specific behaviors may have less to do with hormones and more to do with how various neural circuitry gets triggered.” The idea that some of us have rheostats follows naturally, don’t you think?
