The brain is a highly complex organ that is able to change over the course of someone’s life – they are plastic. Our brains are shaped by our education and the skills we practice.
As it stands, it isn’t clear whether there are significant sex differences in the brain. The differences that have been reported are small, overlap, and can be internally inconsistent, which means that most people have some regions of the brain that are more “male” and others that are more “female” and it changes from person to person. It’s also unclear what these differences mean since humans do not show sex differences in psychological and cognitive abilities (Hyde et al., 2019; DuBois & Shattuck-Heidorn, 2021; DeCasien et al, 2022).
DeCasien, A.R., Guma, E., Liu, S., & Raznahan, A. (2022). Sex differences in the human brain: a roadmap for more careful analysis and interpretation of a biological reality. Bio. Sex Differ. 13, 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-022-00448-w
DuBois, L. Z., & Shattuck-Heidorn, H. (2021). Challenging the binary: Gender/sex and the bio-logics of normalcy. American Journal of Human Biology, 33(5), e23623. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23623
Hyde, J. S., Bigler, R. S., Joel, D., Tate, C. C., & van Anders, S. M. (2019). The future of sex and gender in psychology: Five challenges to the gender binary. The American Psychologist, 74(2), 171–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000307