The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  Carl, a thirty-four-year-old “stealth” transman, told Schilt about the hardware store where he worked after he made the transition: “Girls couldn’t get their forklift license, or it would take them forever. They wouldn’t make as much money. It was so pathetic. I would have never seen it if I was a regular guy. I would have just not seen it.”

  A Latino attorney told Schilt that an attorney at another law firm had complimented his boss for firing an incompetent woman and hiring a new lawyer who was “just delightful.” The attorney at the other firm did not know that the incompetent woman and the delightful new lawyer were the same person.

  One transman told Schilt that he was not asked to do different work after the transition, but doing his work suddenly became much easier. He recalled that before the transition, he would often be told that crews and trucks were not available when he needed some help. “I swear it was like from one day to the next of me transitioning. [I would say,] ‘I need this, this is what I want,’ and—” The man snapped his fingers. “I have not had to fight about anything.”

  Another study that Schilt conducted with Matthew Wiswall analyzed the salaries of forty-three transgendered people after the volunteers made transitions from male to female or female to male. Schilt and Wiswall found that men who became women reported a decline of 12 percent in their earnings. Women who became men reported an increase of 7.5 percent in their earnings.

  “While transgender people have the same human capital after their transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically,” Schilt and Wiswall wrote in a paper they published in The B. E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. “We estimate that average earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increase slightly following their gender transitions, while earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fall by nearly ⅓. This finding is consistent with qualitative evidence that for many male-to-female workers, becoming a woman often brings a loss of authority, harassment, and termination, but that for female-to-male workers, becoming a man often brings an increase in respect and authority. These findings … illustrate the often hidden and subtle processes that produce gender inequality.”

  I am going to show how such changes manifested themselves in two lives, but I want to make a couple of things clear first. Transgendered people do reveal something powerful about sexism, but they are also victimized in other ways. Many encounter scrutiny, suspicion, and hostility, with homophobia mixed in. Two transgendered people agreed to speak with me on the record about their experiences, because both care deeply about the wounds that sexism has inflicted on American society. Before I tell you their stories, I want to acknowledge their courage—and my debt.

  Joan Roughgarden and Ben Barres are biologists at Stanford University. Both are researchers at one of the premier academic institutions in the country; both are tenured professors. Both are transgendered people. Stanford has been a welcoming home for these scientists; if you are going to be a transgendered person anywhere in the United States, it would be difficult to imagine a place more tolerant than Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am a graduate of Stanford’s MA program in journalism—and I have warm memories of and high regard for my alma mater.

  Ben Barres did not transition to being a man until he was fifty. For much of her early life, Barbara Barres was oblivious to questions of sexism. She would hear Gloria Steinem and other feminists talk about discrimination and wonder, “What’s their problem?” She was no activist; all she wanted was to be a scientist. She was an excellent student. She was captain of her high school’s math team. When a school guidance counselor advised her to set her sights lower than MIT, Barbara ignored him, applied to MIT, and got admitted in 1972.

  During a particularly difficult math seminar at MIT, a professor handed out a quiz with five math problems. He gave out the test at nine A.M., and students had to hand in their answers by midnight. The first four problems were easy, and Barbara knocked them off in short order. But the fifth one was a beauty; it involved writing a computer program where the solution required the program to generate a partial answer, and then loop around to the start in a recursive fashion.

  “I remember when the professor handed back the exams, he made this announcement that there were five problems but no one had solved the fifth problem and therefore he only scored the class on the four problems,” Ben recalled. “I got an A. I went to the professor and I said, ‘I solved it.’ He looked at me and he had a look of disdain in his eyes, and he said, ‘You must have had your boyfriend solve it.’ To me, the most amazing thing is that I was indignant. I walked away. I didn’t know what to say. He was in essence accusing me of cheating. I was incensed by that. It did not occur to me for years and years that that was sexism.”

  In her sophomore year, Barbara found herself stymied as she looked for a lab where she could in effect become an apprentice to an expert professor. She had an excellent record, but none of the top labs wanted her. A female professor said yes, but Barbara felt this lab was second-best. In academia, as in many other professions, finding a good mentor is a powerful first step that affects the rest of a person’s career.

  By the time she was done with MIT, Barbara had more or less decided she wanted to be a neuroscientist. She decided to go to medical school at Dartmouth. Gender issues at med school were like the issues at MIT on steroids; one professor referred Barbara to his wife when she wanted to talk about her professional interests. An anatomy professor showed a slide of a nude female pinup during a lecture. During the first year of Barbara’s residency, when she was an intern, she found herself clashing with the chief resident. “When you have to learn to do a spinal tap or do a line, at some point only one person can do the procedure. What I noticed is that every time a male resident would do the picking, he would pick a guy to do the procedure. I had to often say, ‘He did it last time. It is my turn this time.’”

  But things changed in large and subtle ways after Barbara became Ben.

  Ben once gave a presentation at the prestigious Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A friend relayed a comment made by someone in the audience who didn’t know Ben Barres and Barbara Barres were the same person: “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but, then, his work is much better than his sister’s.”

  Ben also noticed he was treated differently in the everyday world. “When I go into stores, I notice I am much more likely to be attended to. They come up to me and say, ‘Yes, sir? Can I help you, sir?’ I have had the thought a million times, I am taken more seriously.”

  When Harvard’s former president Larry Summers (who went on to become a senior economic adviser to President Obama) set off a firestorm a few years ago after musing about whether there were fewer women professors in the top ranks of science because of innate differences between men and women, Ben wrote an anguished essay in the journal Nature. He asked whether innate differences or subtle biases—from grade school to graduate school—explained the large disparities between men and women in the highest reaches of science. “When it comes to bias, it seems that the desire to believe in a meritocracy is so powerful that until a person has experienced sufficient career-harming bias themselves they simply do not believe it exists…. By far, the main difference that I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect: I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

  Joan Roughgarden came to Stanford in 1972, more than a quarter century before she made her male-to-female transition in 1998. When the young biologist arrived at Stanford, it felt as though tracks had been laid down; all Roughgarden had to do was stick to the tracks, and the high expectations that others had of the young biologist would do the rest.

  “It was clear when I got the job at Stanford that it was like being on a conveyer belt,” Roughgarden told me in an interview. “The career track is set up for young men. You are assumed to be competent unless revealed otherwise.
You can speak, and people will pause and people will listen. You can enunciate in definitive terms and get away with it. You are taken as a player. You can use male diction, male tones of voice. You can speak definitionally. You can assert. You have the authority to frame issues.”

  At the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, an outpost of the university about ninety miles from campus, Roughgarden ruffled feathers in the scientific establishment by arguing that a prominent theory that described the life cycle of marine animals was wrong. Where previous research had suggested that tide pools were involved in the transportation of certain larvae, Roughgarden reframed the issue and showed that the larger ocean played a significant role. The new theory got harsh reviews, but Roughgarden’s ideas were taken seriously. In short order, Roughgarden became a tenured professor, and a widely respected scientist and author.

  Like Ben Barres, Roughgarden made her transition to Joan relatively late in life. Stanford proved tolerant, but very soon Joan started to feel that people were taking her ideas less seriously. In 2006, for example, Joan suggested another famous scientific theory was wrong—Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Among other things, the theory suggests that men and women are perpetually locked in a reproductive conflict. Men are supposed to be sexually promiscuous because they stand to gain from spreading their genes as widely as possible, whereas women are supposed to value monogamy because they can have relatively few biological children. Even when women and men escape from this “battle of the sexes,” it is only because a temporary truce has been declared. A monogamous husband, for example, “forgoes” his natural inclination to infidelity because his partner offers him something of exceptional value—such as beauty or youth. The theory essentially suggests that conflicting goals are basic to all male-female human relationships—and even purports to “explain” why men rape women. Using ideas from game theory, Joan published a review article in the prestigious journal Science, where she explained why she thought the theory was wrong. She drew partly on her 2004 book, Evolution’s Rainbow, where she detailed the extraordinary range of sexual practices that flourished in the animal kingdom. Thinking about sex purely in terms of reproduction was flawed, Joan argued. Sex was also about building alliances, trading, cooperation, social regulation, and play.

  Joan used the example of the Eurasian oystercatcher, a wading bird, in her 2006 paper. In particular, she looked at nests involving three birds, a male and two females. In some of these families, the females fought viciously with each other, whereas in others, the females mated with each other almost as often as they mated with the male. Nests where females bonded sexually were much more likely to have offspring that survived, compared to nests where the females fought each other, since the cooperative nest could call on the resources of three birds to defend offspring against predators. Sex between the females may not have produced offspring, but it had a powerful effect on the survival rate of offspring.

  Where Darwin’s theory of sexual selection would argue that the competing interests of males and females are what produce a range of sexual behaviors, Joan’s theory of “social selection” offered a different viewpoint: Conflict between Eurasian oystercatchers, as perhaps with conflict between human mates, was not the starting point of relationships but an unfortunate outcome. Cooperation, not conflict, Joan argued, was basic to nature. “Reproductive social behavior and sexual reproduction are cooperative. Sexual conflict derives from negotiation breakdown. In Darwinian sexual selection, sexual conflict is primitive and cooperation derived, whereas in social selection, sexual cooperation is primitive and conflict derived.”

  The scientific establishment, Joan told me, was livid. But in contrast to the response to her earlier theory about tide pools and marine animals, few scientists engaged with her. At a workshop at Loyola University, a scientist “lost it” and started screaming at her for being irresponsible. “I had never had experiences of anyone trying to coerce me in this physically intimidating and coercive way,” she told me, as she compared the reactions to her work before and after she became a woman. “You really think this guy is really going to come over and hit you.”

  At a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis, Joan told me, a prominent expert jumped up on the stage after her talk and started shouting at her at the top of his voice. “If he had hit me, I would have hit him back, but if you have a big man shouting at you, you can feel your tongue getting dry…. Once every month or two, I will have some man shout at me, try to physically coerce me into stopping.

  “When I was doing the marine ecology work, they did not try to physically intimidate me and say, ‘You have not read all the literature,’” she told me. “They would not assume they were smarter. The current crop of objectors assumes they are smarter.”

  Joan is willing to acknowledge her theory might be wrong; that, after all, is the nature of science. But what she wants is to be proven wrong, rather than dismissed. Making bold and counterintuitive assertions is precisely the way science progresses. Many bold ideas are wrong, but if there isn’t a regular supply of them and if they are not debated seriously, there is no progress. After her transition, Joan said she no longer feels she has “the right to be wrong.”

  “It is like we are in a forest and the men are the trees, and what we can do is to water the roots and make the trees flourish, but we can’t move the trees,” she said. “We can live in the canopy of the forest and be bathed by the light filtered through the canopy. It does not occur to men that a woman can frame the issue and that we are entitled to frame it differently.”

  Where she used to be a member of Stanford University’s senate, Joan told me she is no longer on any university or departmental committee. Where she was once able to access internal university funds for research, she said she finds it all but impossible to do so now. Before her transition, she enjoyed an above-average salary at Stanford. But since her transition, she wrote in an email, “My own salary has drifted down to the bottom 10 percent of full professors in the School of Humanities and Sciences, even though my research and students are among the best of my career and are having international impact, albeit often controversial.”

  I asked her about interpersonal dynamics before and after her transition. “You get interrupted when you are talking, you can’t command attention, but above all you can’t frame the issues,” she told me. With a touch of wistfulness, she compared herself to Ben Barres. “Ben has migrated into the center, whereas I have had to migrate into the periphery.”

  I want to tell you another story, a personal story. On its surface, it has nothing to do with the hidden brain, bias, or sexism. But stay with me a second. The story has an unexpected insight into the strange canvasses that Ben Barres, Joan Roughgarden, and Schilt’s volunteers have painted for us.

  Shortly after I started work on this chapter, I took a vacation with my family. For me, the highlight of our destination—the tiny island of Isla Mujeres in Mexico—was a wonderful snorkeling opportunity off the southwestern coast. When I arrived at the snorkeling spot, it was noon. The water was calm and warm, the December sun glorious. The coral reef that lay a short distance away had been damaged in a recent storm, but it was growing back. At the southern lip of a small bay, officials had cordoned off the reef from swimmers with lines attached to buoys in order to allow the reef to grow. The cordoned-off area was about two hundred and fifty feet from my deck chair. The lines and buoys continued out of sight around a solid wall of rocks.

  I have a complicated love affair with the water. I didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult. Well into my twenties, I carried the kind of unreasonable fear of water that you do not have if you learn to swim as a child. A considerable part of my enjoyment of the water lies in demonstrating to myself, over and over, that I have conquered my mortal fear. I am a decent swimmer, but I also know my fear has not completely disappeared. When things go wrong in the water, I easily panic.

  After several dips, I decided to take one final excursion
—this time around the edge of the bay. I felt happy and wonderful and fit; the water was calm. I suspected some of the best snorkeling lay around the edge of the rocks, two hundred fifty feet away. There were no signs posted that warned of any danger. With a good lunch in my stomach, I felt I could easily swim around the edge of the bay and back. I briefly thought about donning a life jacket and flippers, but decided against it. The life jacket would slow me down, and flippers don’t allow for the kind of maneuverability I like when I am snorkeling over a shallow reef.

  The moment I got into the water and headed for the edge of the bay, I knew I had made the right decision to swim without a life jacket or flippers. I felt strong and good. I had done a lot of swimming that day already and was surprised at how smoothly I was kicking through the water. The trip would be child’s play; the way I was feeling, I knew I could easily swim well past the edge of the bay. I struck out purposefully to the lip of rocks. I imagined seeing myself from the deck chairs back on land, disappearing from view around the rocks.

  The water felt suddenly cooler as I rounded the lip of the bay. It felt pleasant. I kept within ten or fifteen feet of the line attached to the buoys. From my side of the line, the ocean side, I could see the coral reef growing back within the protective arc. The water was now twenty or thirty feet deep. The reef and the fish were lovelier and more plentiful than anything close to the main snorkeling area. All the other swimmers were staying in the main area. I was alone in the water and hidden from view. It felt delicious, as though I had the whole reef to myself.

  My legs and arms felt stronger than ever. Each kick took me several feet; my technique was better than I remembered. I lengthened my stroke, feeling the pull of cool water against my torso. I felt graceful. Without realizing it, through steady practice, I had become a very good swimmer. I felt proud of myself.