The Edge of Gender

Hey there, Shankar here. If you listen to the show regularly, you heard us talk about all sorts of research. Today we have a research project of our own. We want to learn more about you. Please head to npr.org slash hidden brain survey to fill out a short questionnaire for us. Again, that's npr.org slash hidden brain survey. All one word, all lowercase. Thanks in advance. Okay, now on to the show. It's a rebroadcast of one of our favorites from twenty seventeen. It's called The Edge of Gender.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantan. For many years, tech companies have been really good at innovation and making money. What they've been less good at is in hiring and keeping a diverse workforce.

In the past few months, frequent reports of Silicon Valley's rocky relationship with women have bubbled to the surface.

Very few women and non-Asian people of color in engineering.

their diversity or lack of diversity and what they plan on doing to tackle it.

Many companies have gone to great lengths to study the problem and to address it. Google, for example, spends tens of millions of dollars every year on efforts to recruit more women and people of color. Some of that money went to produce this video.

and make it really clear we want to see more women in senior leadership positions. We want to see more people from underrepresented groups because it makes us a better company.

While there are recruitment success stories in Silicon Valley, the overall results have been dismal. Many women, African Americans and Latinos, say tech is unwelcoming to them. Some have filed discrimination lawsuits against their company.

When that memo was leaked to the world, Google was not happy.

Google has fired a software engineer who wrote a controversial internal memo that leaked over the weekend.

He claimed that biology in part explained why there were more men than women in the tech field.

Almost instantly, everyone seemed to have an opinion about the Google memo, the firing decision, and the larger question about women in tech.

They as far as I can see, they effectively have uh fired somebody for dissenting from the

group.

Consensus.

The crux of his argument was that women were inherently competent to hold high status positions, which is a biased opinion.

The infamous Google memo, the most important document since the Magna Carta change. His point, he said, wasn't to put down women or discourage them from any. Science, he said, had conclusively found that the first time.

If you have an opinion about Daymore, it probably comes in one of two flavors. Of course he's right. Lots of scientists agree with him.

This is just the latest effort to

This week on Hidden Brain.

really is uh largely socially learned.

This is reality.

The categories aren't even realistic.

Yeah.

We're going to ask if this is Really captures what we see in the world today.

When the Google Memo hit the news, the talk shows went hunting for exercise.

Let's go to our guest now. Um she is a writer about the intersection of science of sex and its politici politicization. Uh she has a PhD in sexual neuroscience from York University, and she has done quite a bit of work and research around This topic that we're going to get into with the Google memo, the one and only Dr. Deborah So is here. Doctor So, how are you?

I'm not sure.

Well thanks.

Deborah Sow was in demand because like former Google engineer James Daymour, she is a firm believer that biology makes men and women different. Deborah has a PhD in neuroscience, but her opinions on gender are also personal. When we got in touch, she told me that when she was young, she did not feel much like a girl.

All my friends were boys. I dressed as a boy. I looked like a boy.

Deborah says she felt male. She has helped conduct studies into the nature of gender. She thinks both her outlook and her interest in science stem from her biology.

I do think that I personally was exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb.

Prenatal testosterone. That's Deborah's simple explanation for her boyness.

The levels of exposure to prenatal testosterone is actually the determining factor in terms of what children will be interested in, what they will gravitate towards in terms of their interests and behaviors.

In some ways, Deborah's point of view sounds pretty old-fashioned.

Boys tend to gravitate towards mechanically interesting things. So they tend to be interested in things when they're playing with toys, they'll gravitate towards trucks and cars. Girls tend to be more interested in socially interesting activities. So things like playing with dolls and playing house.

Old fashioned, right? But Deborah says the science backs her up with many studies. She gives one example of a research study on girls who have a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

These girls are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. And what we see when they are born is they will gravitate towards male typical toys. Um and this is even if their parents give them more praise for playing with female typical toys. So it speaks to how powerful biology is and that gender identity and gender preferences can't really be molded as much by socialization.

Testosterone masculinizes the brain, Deborah says. You can see this play out in many ways. Men's brains, on average, are bigger than women's, and there are differences in the connective tissue in the brain's white matter.

there are more connections running from the front to the back of the brain in men, uh and more connections running left to right or inter hemispherically in women. So this leads to in adulthood differences. Um well I mean this is evident from a very young age as well in terms of what children gravitate naturally towards differences in terms of efficiency of processing, so men tend to be more efficient on average.

In animals, researchers have observed behavioral changes after birth if testosterone levels are changed in utero. In the wild, male and female monkeys behave differently.

Monkeys are not socialized to prefer certain toys over others. And we see the same thing with male monkeys. They tend to gravitate towards trucks. Cars wield toys that boys tend to find more interesting, and we see the same thing with female monkeys. They tend to gravitate towards more socially interesting toys like dolls.

The bottom line, says Deborah, is that men and women are different. These differences are so obvious that she gets frustrated when people argue that gender is a social conversation.

If we look at it from an evolutionary perspective, We will um and I think people who take the socialization approach will agree, when we look at men and women on average, men tend to be taller than women, our reproductive organs are different. So they'll acknowledge and accept that there are these different

Deborah wants to be clear, believing that biology shapes Men and women make it. Nor is she advocating lesser roles for women. In her view, these two things have nothing to do with each other. The scientific findings should be allowed to stand on their own.

You know, if we acknowledge that men and women are different because this is what um biology is telling us, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be equal. It doesn't mean that um one is necessarily better than the other. And I think also that

In a sense, this is exactly the point that former Google Software Engineer James Daymore was making. then all the efforts to get more women to become engineers can look foolish.

In a moment, we'll take a deeper look at the brain and what neuroscience can tell us about gender choices. But first, I want you to meet an historian. She thinks many of the choices that men and women and boys and girls make today are shaped by norms, by culture, Even by marketing. I met Joe Paoletti at a mall in suburban Maryland.

I'm a professor in American Studies at the University of Maryland.

Joe is also the author of the book Pink and Blue, which explores the history of how we dress our children.

So I always head right for the infants department first to see how much pink there is and how many things you could put either a boy or girl.

The children's clothing section at Macy's is packed with racks of onesies, dresses, and tiny suits for the under seven cents. It is, Joe told me, an excellent place for a history lesson.

You know, one of my taglines that I'm gonna put on my business card is I think deep thoughts about shallow things. You can't just say well I'm only gonna study the the intellectual stuff.

Joe's been keeping tabs since the mid 1980s on gender norms by strolling through the clothing section of mainstream retailers. In recent years, she's noticed more gender-neutral options for kids. But mainly she says, children's clothing remains predictable. Boys mostly wear the same palette of colors. The boys' shirts, sweaters, jackets and pants have pictures of trucks, bulldozers, sports cars, and cute macho sayings. This goes even for infants. Joe points to a stack of onesies.

There's dude and we have a puppy and we have an alien coming out of a pocket. Matter of fact, the two out of the first four have little pockets, even though they're not functional anymore. It's a pocket because he's a boy. Little brother. Super rad like dad, super hunk, local cutie.

Next we head over to the girl section. It's overflowing with soft and cheerful hues.

It used to be the pastels were kind of uh summer colors, and now gr pastels are f girl colours all year round.

But if I'm looking at sort of things like this, for example, in in the racks over here, it feels like there's absolutely no question that this is girls' clothing.

Well it's very decorative. We we have not only a flamingo but a flamingo with flowers on it and a bow on its head so you know it's a girl flamingo.

Why do so many of us dress little boys and little girls so differently? It isn't biology. A hundred odd years ago, Joe says small kids were all dressed the same, in frocks.

And partly w what it was was people really thought that drawing a child's attention to what their sex was was was bad. That w To the late nineteenth century mine, early twentieth century, the the cause of any kind of sexual depravity was precocious. sexuality. Like a little girl should not be thinking in terms of being a woman someday. A little boy must not be thinking that he's like daddy until it's kind of development developmentally appropriate.

But if you put children in l put a little put a baby in pants, they would be a well, they'd be horrified at the little girls in pants and the little boys in pants because pants were just not for babies.

In the nineteen fifties, many boys and girls wore similar navy and maroon outfits to school. Play clothes were also dark. Pastels were thought appropriate only for holidays like Easter or formal occasions, but gradually the distinction between boys' clothes and girls' clothes started to grow. One reason money.

The more you make something individual, the more you can sell. So having something that can only be worn by a girl means it can less likely be handed down to a brother.

This led to a small bit of marketing genius.

What we think of now as it's just a law, right? That pink is for girls and blue is for boys.

That was invented too. If you made pink a girl's colour and blue a boy's colour, then male and female siblings couldn't wear the same clothes. Marketing wasn't the only force at work. Societal biases came into play that allowed girls to sometimes wear blue but made it hard for boys to ever wear pink.

A girl can wear blue. I look around and I see plenty of blue things and nobody says, oh, she's wearing blue, she must be a boy, or she's wearing blue, her mother must be making a statement. about gender politics, but if a boy wears pink, there always has to be some kind of explanation. because i it goes back to the idea from the early unisex period in the sixties and seventies that it is it is better to be a boy than a girl. That for a girl to want to be like a boy That's understandable.

Or at least expect to be made the butt of jokes, like in this episode of Friends.

Has anyone seen my shirt? It's a button down like a a faded salmon color.

You mean your pink shirt?

Yeah.

Faded salmon color.

I haven't seen your pink shirt.

I must have left it at Mulners. I knew it.

I'm sure you're not going to be able to do

get another one at Dan Taylor's.

Yeah.

But seriously, what's interesting about Joe's point is it shows that what today might seem like individual gender choices are actually driven by many hidden factors. Money, marketing, homophobia, sexism. Does this mean that biology has no role in shaping what boys and girls and men and women do? It turns out the contention that genes and prenatal testosterone don't matter is as simplistic as saying they explain everything.

Nature and nurture are completely intertwined, and there is no such thing as nature without nurture and vice versa.

Stay with us.

We're exploring today the differences between the sexes and the debate over where such differences come from. One thing that's not up for debate? An important part of how we understand people is to ask if someone is male or female. This is why when a baby is born, everyone wants to know.

unquestionably the most salient feature of a person's identity. That's the first thing we notice about someone, and it's certainly the first characteristic that uh infants learn to discriminate.

This is Lise Elliott. She's a professor of neuroscience at Roslyn Franklin University in Chicago. For some two decades, she's pondered and researched differences between boys and girls. Lee says she first became interested in the subject as she was writing a book on brain development, but she became immersed in the topic after her own children were born.

We had a daughter and a couple of sons, and uh as many parents as we We'll tell you, they seem so different. And um that certainly is one of the favorite conversations uh among parents is gender differences. So I set out to do the research and really educate myself and translate to others what's truly known about the differences between boys and girls' brains.

Lise didn't start by looking at boys' brains and girls' brains. She started with an insight about all brains. More than any other organ, the brain is uniquely adaptable, designed to change in response to the environment.

My own research has always been in the area of neuroplasticity or how our brains change as a result of experience. And so I'm always sort of acutely aware of the fact that these little babies are absorbing things from the moment of birth.

If you think of the brain not as a computer that comes with a chip and a hard drive, but more like a liquid designed to take the shape of the vessel that it's in, you start to get the idea. When a baby is born, its brain comes programmed not with the ability to learn one specific language. but to learn any language. The infant brain is designed to learn from everything that's going on around it. Much of that starts by being alert to the social world.

It's remarkable the degree of understanding babies have way before they can talk, way before they can even reach out and grab a a a rattle um under control. They appreciate the motives of other people. Uh they can tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy. And as I said, they can also discriminate uh gender and they start learning quite early. the distinction between male and female, how their mother and father behave differently.

Although babies are unaware of their own gender, within the first few months of life they can tell the difference between male and female voices and male and female feelings. They are absorbing clues to gender identity.

once children figure out they're a boy or girl, which happens somewhere in the third year of life when they really have a solid understanding, it becomes a great crystallizer for uh their own behavioral decisions.

Lise doesn't dismiss the power of biology, but she thinks many of us fail to see what neuroscientists know. The brain not only is shaped, but has to be shaped by the social world. When we see differences between men and women and then see differences in their brains, we intuitively think, voila, this must explain why Johnny likes trucks and Jane likes dolls. But Lees believes the human brain is basically intersex or non gendered with one major exception.

You know, my view is of course there are group level differences between men and women. Um, but they're statistical and they are not categorical. So whereas our reproductive organs come in two types, they come in uh testes or ovaries and some other parts as well. Our brains come in one type and it's a spectrum from masculinity to femininity. The the male brain and female brain are no different, no more different than the male heart and the female heart.

Now there used to be a time when scientists thought that the size of the brain was really important. Phrenologists measured the size and shapes of people's skulls and then drew sweeping conclusions about people from different groups. But more recent work has challenged the idea that bigger always means different.

I've done uh several studies looking at structures that are alleged to differ between men and women. One is the hippocampus, which is important for memory. And the other is the amygdala, which is important for emotion and fear. And both of these structures have been alleged to differ between adult men and women. But when we did a meta-analysis, uh basically downloading all of them dozens and dozens of studies of comparing men and women's brains.

Lise agrees with Deborah Sow, the scientist we heard from earlier, who believes that hormone levels in utero can affect the brain of the baby. But where Deborah sees hormonal influence as decisive, Lise thinks of it as just a nudge.

There are probably some um properties of toys that may appeal more to boys and girls. quote unquote instinctively, um, there's so much more layered on top of that in terms of the marketing, in terms of the parent and grandparent, you know, encouragement. um in terms of especially peer reinforcement because we see that there's almost no gender difference before the first birthday. in the type of toys that children prefer. There's a little hint of it er uh maybe at about nine months.

A host of scientific studies have found evidence of the powerful role that social influences play.

There was this recent study out of Emory University where fathers were studying and they had these nice audio recorders so the parents weren't aware of every moment, every interaction, and it turned out that the fathers were commenting more on their daughter's physical appearance, more on their tummies, and also endorsing their daughters' feelings more than their sons. basically reacting more to their son's neutral expressions and more to their daughter's uh sad or fearful expressions.

We do this because we have different expectations for males and females, and that has to do with our very deep seated gender assumptions.

Lees also cites a study with mothers and their eleven-month-old babies.

The infants are put on a what looks like a crazy steep slope to crawl down, but it's carpeted and it has

In yet another study, both mothers and fathers discouraged risk taking on the playground for their daughters more than for their sons.

So when you start doing that when kids are one and two and three years old, um, it really sets them on different trajectories.

Without necessarily intending to treat sons and daughters differently, adults also subtly communicate expectations about language, math, and spatial skills. Research from Israel, for example, found that sixth grade teachers in Tel Aviv schools give girls slightly lower math scores than they deserve and give boys slightly higher math scores than they deserve. By high school, the children often end up with different beliefs about their own ability in math.

Males and females are both capable of learning spatial skills and verbal skills perfectly well. It really is largely a matter of dose of experience that determines our differences.

Here's what all these studies together tell us. Social norms that treat girls and boys in different ways are all around us, and even the most diligent parents will find that they can control only a small fraction of the influences shaping their children.

erase gender from a child's experience. There's no such thing as a gender free society. And and parents who claim that they're raising children gender neutral, we treated our son and daughter exactly the same, are are really fooling themselves.

Lee says that doesn't mean people should stop trying to push back against gender stereotypes.

What we can do is w we can say what kind of society we do we want to have and what are the experiences that young children are immersed in that will either make boys and girls have more similarity of opportunity.

As I talked to scientists Lise Elliott and Deborah Sewe and to historian Joe Peoletti, I realized that all of them agreed on People ought to be allowed to live their lives, to be all they want to be, regardless of what the world tells them they should be.

The reason I went to court to blow all of this up was We're all unique human beings and I think we're a mixture to some extent of of male and female, you know, you know, irrespective of of the you know the biology.

When we come back, what Jamie Shoop, the first legally recognized non binary person in the United States Can tell us about the great gender debate. Stay with us.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. We've been talking today about gender and about our long-running debates over the role of biology versus culture. For many years, these debates have largely assumed that gender is a binary, male and female. But even as science struggles to understand the male brain and the female brain, some people are challenging the reality of those fundamental categories. Jamie Shoop is in the vanguard of that movement.

So basically we're in what's called a truck camper. Um it's approximately 17 feet long. It weighs about around three thousand pounds.

In other words, heavy and small, but also efficient.

I've got a microwave, an oven, a stove, you know, a double sink. Um a small bathroom with a shower.

Jamie's at ease in this desert town, clad in jeans, a flowing blouse and headscarf. The camper has been traveling a lot of late, but for now, Jamie's biggest journey is over, a rocky trip over the landscape of gender identity.

I think the best way to frame this and understand it is to just think of me as very fluid.

Jamie lives between the sexes. Jamie thinks not of himself or of herself, but of themselves.

I can be masculine, I can be feminine, I can do anything I want.

Jamie is the first officially recognized non-gendered person in America. It was a status that had to be fought for and won. It came after a five decade struggle, a struggle to find an identity that felt right. Now 54 years old, Jamie was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in a large blue-collar family in rural southern Maryland. It was a place of tobacco farms and deep conservative views.

This is a place where, you know, the kid the black kids that I cut tobacco with during the uh during the summer, they weren't allowed in the farmers' houses because I mean it it was that kind of place. There w there were no gay people, there were no trans people. Football consisted of being called Smeared the Queer.

Jamie was different and didn't fit in with the boys.

As a teenager I was reading fashion magazines and you know doing things like, you know, putting uh I remember one occasion I I read an article about putting mayonnaise and egg in your hair to make it soft. And my mother absolutely just went ballistic over that and slapped me and called me a sissy.

Jamie's mother also lost it when the teenager refused to get a short haircut and instead got a perm.

I just wanted to feel more feminine.

So this was Jamie's dilemma. He had a male body, but inside there was also a she, with all this femininity flowing about. Romantically, Jamie was drawn to both boys and girls. But this was the late 1970s, so Jamie took a girl to the Queen of Hearts dance and drove a big-wheel Camaro and cut tobacco and felt nothing at all like a real boy.

Yeah, I mean I just I've never been connected to identifying as a male. I've never agreed that I was a male. And yeah, I I just ha I had no connection to to masculinity. But you know, at the same time I knew what the boundaries were and I knew what the punishment was and I just kinda went along with things.

After high school, with no money and few options, Jimmy entered the army, trained as a mechanic. It meant more going along with things.

You know, the military is a world of testosterone and diesel fuel and I don't relate to all that.

But the young recruit was brilliant at fixing things. Soon a promotion came.

I was a computer whiz, so they made me an information system security officer. I was the go-to person to, you know, write awards and and write evaluation reports. Um yes, and you know, I was highly intelligent about how to fix the vehicles. You know, I could walk into the shop and say, Well, this is what we need to do to fix this. So all those things, you know, they they covered up for my my gender variances and my sexual orientation.

But other soldiers picked up that Jamie was different. It led to some scary situations. Once at a training site, Jamie was surrounded by several officers and the instructor.

And they started describing sex acts um between males and they were just you know, just getting really vulgar and and they were doing it, you know, entirely for my benefit. They were, you know, saying all these things and and looking at me the whole time and just studying to see what my reaction would would be.

What was your reaction?

Oh I was terrified.

This was Jamie's life for eighteen years and walking the finest of lines, fearing that one wrong step might result in an attack or the end of a hard earned career in the army. It's a sad story, but through much of it, Jamie had one powerful source of support.

Uh my name is Sandy Shoop. Um See uh married to Jamie. We've been married about thirty years now, we have one child.

Jimmy and Sandy sit side by side as they talk about their life. They're in a small park across the street from an RV campground, under the shade of a picnic shelter. They seem at ease. Sandy grew up outside Fort Knox, Kentucky. She met Jamie when a friend set them up on a blind double date.

the guys didn't have a have cars. So my friend Tina, um, we picked up the guys that And so when we went to pick him up, like I said, it was really kind of the first time I'd seen Jamie. And I'm like, I pulled my friend aside because we were going up to a a bar up in Louisville. And I'm like, um, are are are they old enough to get into the bars? Because Jamie had such a baby face.

But Jamie also had an enduring personality. They hit it off. Sandy liked how sweet and attentive Jamie was, so different from other guys she dated. They had fun together. One thing Sandy didn't notice was Jamie's gender struggles. They were clues, but Sandy shrugged them off.

There was like Sometimes Jamie would dress kinda strange like Jamie had um this le leopard pr leopard print kinda like you know, T shirt, kind of not you know, it was l like sleeveless, but it was just like this leper print and it's not something you would normally see on a guy. And that was just kinda like

So they eventually got married. A few years later, while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas,

She's an awesome kid.

And and when Jamie talks about getting uh grief from colleagues in the military, did you hear about that? I'm wondering if these issues of gender and sexuality came up in your conversations.

Um, no. Jamie really didn't um, you know, discuss that kind of stuff. Um yeah, Jamie would grumble about, you know, the things like, you know, work issues and stuff like that. But um I really don't remember Jamie, you know, talking about anything like that. You know, Jamie c I guess kept it close. to vest is you know, would be an expression to use, but yeah, I don't remember

But the truth is, Jamie's carefully choreographed life was coming apart. There were run-ins with supervisors who suspected Jamie was gay. One said he wasn't going to recommend Jamie for any promotions, despite a stellar work record. It was like being confined in a cell where the walls kept closing in. And then one icy winter morning, Jamie fell and broke a wrist during a training run. The injury caused permanent damage. After 18 years, Jamie's army career was over.

I was forty nine years old. Um I think it's best to term it as I I was at my breaking point. I had literally had nearly five decades of suppressing my gender identity, supp suppressing my sexual orientation. And it was real literally to the point of like I mean, I was kinda thinking either I do something about this or I commit suicide. I mean, it it had reached, you know, that level of of distress.

The choice was that star. And it's the point in our story when you might expect a familiar resolution. In this version of the story, Jamie stops hiding and comes out as a woman, maybe gets gender reassignment surgery. That was indeed the path that Jamie's doctors initially recommended. And for a time, Jamie eagerly listened to them.

So I I bought into it, hook, line and sinker and you know right away decided I was gonna gonna transition to a female because Yeah I w expected it to help alleviate my mental health crisis that I was having from all the suppression.

Jimmy also finally told Sandy what was going on.

I it it was kind of a surprise. Um But um I mean I I wasn't offended. I was just kind of like Yeah, no. You know, w when you when you when you marry someone, it's because you love them and you want them to be happy and you want them to you know, be fulfilled. And I I just I wanted Jamie to be happy.

It's not that Sandy would have chosen this route. She says, of course she would have liked to live life with Jamie as a he. But in a way she says this is what she signed up for when she married a soldier.

You know, Jamie really feels that this is something that they have to do. And um you know, I've always supported Jamie. Um I mean You know, army wife and you know, you that was your part of your job. You know, you just like you were the support. You were the one that, you know, took care of things like for the soldier.

So with Sandy's support, Jamie started taking hormones, developing breaths, wearing a wig in high heels, and hanging out with transgender women. But it still didn't feel right. After hearing a few horror stories about assignment surgeries that turned out poorly, Jamie rejected that option. Also, Jamie didn't want to wear clothes that screamed, female.

And you know, so my idea w of transitioning was okay, so uh, you know, I'll start wearing like women's jeans, I'll wear, you know, women's casual shirts, uh I'll probably you know, put a flowered scarf on my head or something like that. And and the trans women I was interacting with w they were absolutely freaking over that. They were like, Well, you don't look like a female. We don't want to hang out with you because I wasn't doing you know, doing enough to be uh hyper feminine.

Here's what Jamie was realizing. There were rules about what it meant to be a woman.

You know, the transgender community has hierarchies. Um, the you know, you never see cross dressers in the news. It's all about the trans women and the trans men and You know, the the lesbian community, they have their gold star lesbians that, you know, if you if you've ever touched a male, then you're not really a lesbian, you're not our equal. You know, everywhere you look in a in society there's hierarchies.

Jamie didn't like this. Jamie didn't feel like a woman trapped inside a man's body. Jamie felt like a man and a woman. Why couldn't Jamie just be Jamie?

You know, like I said it it was all very black and white thinking that you know, you're either male or you're female. And if you're a a female, you know, this this is this pathway that you you do to become a female.

If Jamie went to the doctor and said, I think I'm female and the doctor asked why, Jamie might say, Because I do feminine things. As a kid, I played hopscotch and jacks and perm my hair and hated football. I feel more comfortable among girls than boys. And the doctors might tell Jamie.

my question and the reason I went to court to blow all of this up was, you know, I d the we're we're all unique human beings and and I think we're a mixture to some extent of of male and female, you know, you know, irrespective of of the you know, the biology.

So here's what happened. made peace with this idea that the categories of main Jamie wanted legal documents to reflect this point of view.

A he or a she, but a they. Jamie's Oregon State ID card said female. Jamie wanted that changed.

Well the first stop was actually the D M V in downtown Portland. I walked in there uh one day and I told the clerk uh I said I want you to remove e either you know, I had female on my uh Oregon ID and I said I want you to remove the female off of there and I and I don't want you putting male on there. I want nothing on there.

The answer Jamie received wasn't a big surprise.

And she just, you know, calmly and politely says, Well, we don't do that. At that point, um, you know, her denial of taking the the gender marker off of my me an actionable legal claim and I went and started searching for attorneys.

Jimmy found a Portland attorney who agreed to take on the case. What did you ask him to do?

I literally told him I I wanted to be declared uh n you know non binary as my sex, which would mean that I was neither male or female.

What was uh his strategy?

You know, i i it's unbelievably simple.

Jamie's attorney downloaded a readily available state issued sex change form.

He put it into the computer, he took Photoshop and he did, you know, he cut out where it said male and female, and he typed in non-binary, and he filed it with a court.

That was it. A court date was set for June of twenty sixteen. Jamie made sure to be ready.

I came armed with um two letters from uh the doctors, you know, one from the VA and one from OHSU saying that the doctors supported the change. We walked into court, I mean the judge hardly said anything and and signed it.

With that pen stroke, Jamie Shoop became the first person in America to be legally declared as neither male nor female. A half century of struggle was over.

I w I was on a different planet. I mean I I was just kinda speechless. Um yeah, I mean it it was it was just a very surreal moment. Um You know, I it was kinda like the judge said yes and you know, I was in a daze. We walked through the courthouse and next thing I know I was crying on the sidewalk.

The judge's decision, legitimizing Jamie's gender fluidity, meant all the constraints were gone. No more hiding, no more URA or B, no more if you're a this, then you have to behave like that. Water, says Jamie, that's what life feels like now. It just flows.

I really like my place now of being non binary because I've had all the roles stripped away from me. You know, you can't tell me that I'm in the wrong clothing. You can't tell me that I'm loving the wrong person. You know. I can be masculine, I can be feminine, I can do anything I want. I I've broken all the rules and just gotten rid of'em.

Jimmy wants to roam. That's the appeal of being non-binary and also the attraction of traveling around in the camper.

But yeah, we went from the three thousand square foot house to the two bedroom, to the one bedroom, to the studio and right, she's almost to the pup tent on the beach.

I draw the line there.

No, no.

And that's how we leave them, Jamie flowing like water, and Sandy, the level ground nearby.

Debates over gender quickly produce vitriol, anger, and contempt. The folks who think biology determines gender roll their eyes at people who think culture is important. Proponents of culture accuse the biology people of being sexist. This is what happened after that Google memo went public. Everyone quickly took sides. We slotted people into groups, even if they didn't want membership in those groups.

This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Gabriella Saldivia, and Raina Cohen, and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Parth Shah, Thomas Liu, Laura Quirell, and Camilla Vargas Restrepo. We had original music from Ramteen Arabi. Special thanks to Phil Corbett of the podcast Van Sounds for helping us with our interview of Jamie and Sandy Shoop.

I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR.