On neuroscience, neurosexism, circular arguments, and what actually helps in a therapy room.
It was around 2018. I was sitting in a module on my counselling training course, watching a tutor walk us through exercises built on the idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain do fundamentally different things. I was uncomfortable. I knew this had been debunked years earlier. When we broke into small groups, I said so.
The response I got was something like: “It’s just a metaphor.”
I didn’t find that acceptable then, and I don’t now. A metaphor that borrows the authority of neuroscience to push a particular way of working isn’t a metaphor. It’s a marketing claim dressed up in designer clothes.
I already knew what a brain binary viewpoint cost
By the time I sat in that training room, I’d had fifty years to think about what happens when you sort people into categories and tell them their biology explains it.
At Grammar school in the 1960s, the binary was explicit. Boys studied sciences and woodwork. Girls studied arts and home economics. I was a boy who spent every hour I could playing guitar, writing songs and poetry, drawing and painting. The school’s message was consistent. I should be heading towards sciences, engineering, towards something suitably male.
I didn’t cooperate. I followed their agenda and failed fast. I left school with almost no qualifications and spent the next decade teaching myself the things I’d actually wanted to learn. The further I got from the state system, the more accessible real education became.
That was social pressure enforcing a binary. Nobody was talking about brain science then.
The circular argument hiding in plain sight
Here’s the problem at the centre of the male/female brain industry. It has become a circular argument.
The research finds minor statistical differences in brains that have already spent decades being shaped by social conditioning. Girls steered towards language and relationships. Boys steered towards spatial reasoning and independence. Generations of different experience, different expectation, different permission. And then researchers scan those brains, find some small average differences, and present those differences as the explanation for the social conditions that produced them.
That’s a circular argument. The conditioning comes first. The differences, such as they are, come after. Nobody can tell you what brains would look like without the conditioning, because no brain has ever developed without it. And nobody can tell you what those differences might look like in fifty years, as expectations shift and more people are permitted to be more fully themselves.
Cordelia Fine, who coined the term neurosexism, spent two books systematically dismantling these claims. Researchers like Daphna Joel have since shown that when you look at actual individual brains rather than group averages, you find a mosaic: each brain is a unique combination of features, and the overlap between males and females on almost every measure is enormous. The variation within any gender category dwarfs the average difference between categories. Knowing someone’s gender tells you almost nothing reliable about how their brain works.
The binary is a social category being laundered through neuroscience.
The story of brain binaries
This isn’t new. For decades, the wellness and self-help industry has been built, at least partly, on the idea that brains divide neatly into camps. Left brain versus right brain. Male brain versus female brain. The model changes; the logic stays the same. Take a real but complicated picture, flatten it into two categories, and sell people a route from one to the other.
The left-brain/right-brain model had a long run. By the time it was being taught on my counselling course, the neuroscience community had largely moved on. The actual research shows that almost everything we do cognitively involves both hemispheres working together. The division was always a simplification; it became mythology.
The male/female brain version is following the same arc, just more slowly. And when you look at who’s producing this content, it’s worth spending thirty seconds on what’s attached to it. Often there’s a workshop programme, a supplement range, or both. The bold claim about your brain type is the unique selling point. It’s what makes the product feel necessary.
What I see when it arrives in my therapy room
This material circulates heavily in relationship spaces. Couples come in having absorbed it. And when they do, it tends to function as a way out of a harder conversation.
Rather than sitting with a particular behaviour as something specific and personal, rooted in someone’s history, their upbringing, their culture, the ways they learned to survive, it gets explained away as “that’s just how men are” or “it’s my female brain.” The behaviour becomes fixed, inevitable, outside the reach of curiosity or change. I’ve noticed how often that move relieves anxiety in the short term and shuts down real work in the longer term.
I’ve also sat with clients who’ve spent time and money following these threads. They’ve done the programmes, bought the products, and ended up in a therapy room saying none of it worked. The question they usually arrive with is: “What’s wrong with me?”
Nothing is wrong with them. Something is wrong with the premise they were sold.
What actually helps
The wellness industry’s version of this problem and the neuroscience industry’s version share the same shape. Both offer you a category to belong to, a framework that explains you, and then a product or a programme to help you work within it. Both require sustained effort: researching, optimising, tracking, striving. The category does the work of making the striving feel necessary.
What I notice in the therapy room runs in the opposite direction entirely. The moments that matter tend to involve people becoming less busy, not more. Less convinced that the right framework will finally unlock them. More able to simply be present to what’s actually there.
Nervous system regulation isn’t a metaphor or a supplement. When someone feels genuinely safe, something opens that no brain category can open for them. That’s the ground on which real change happens, and it can’t be reached through effort. It can only be reached by reducing the pressure, relaxing into life rather than powering headfirst into it.
Your brain isn’t male or female. It’s uniquely yours, shaped by everything that’s happened to you, still capable of change. That’s a considerably more demanding thing to sit with than a binary. It’s also the only place the real work starts.