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Dr. Stoller's thesis will find few opponents among the neurobiologists who now take the existence of a male or female brain as a foregone conclusion. Since their evidence comes from animals as phylogenetically diverse as rats and rhesus, the burden of proof that a genderized brain is absent in humans rests upon those who assert it.
The animal experimenters reason from data on the neural control of dimorphic sexual characteristics, on its control of masculine or feminine behavior, and on the manner an animal is accepted by others in his group. Obviously this is a far cry from proof that the genderized neocortico-limbic-hypothalamic systems confer a psychic sense of identity upon the human infant. However, since we cannot perform the animal experiments on humans nor ask an animal how he felt as an infant, it may be a long time before Stoller's thesis is validated or not.
Note that the hypothesized biological force can be discerned only in those rare hermaphrodites (an infrequent syndrome anyway) who were considered unquestionably males by their parents but who felt and wanted to be females. (Case 1 is equivocable, since an XY child with a hypospadiac penis and sufficient testosterone to masculinize partially at puberty could readily evolve a strong masculine identity if the deeper family dynamics encouraged it.)
The Johns Hopkins researchers are the only ones to maintain consistently conclusions diametrically opposed to Stoller's. None of the published material from this center singles out cases such as his; therefore no meaningful comparison between the two contradictory views can be made at present.
There are, however, related research developments which seem to me to bear directly on psychoanalytic theory, and the remainder of this comment will deal with this work.
Accepting the existence of the genderized brain, it is important to recall that it occurs as the result of embryonic hormonal influences. Both the reproductive tract and the brain are initially autonomously f