[dragonwriter]

> A female grade school teacher, at a private school, tried to explain to me how "girls brains are wired differently from boys"

While an oversimplification, this seems to be generally true; females are biologically different than males and those differences seems to have psychological/behavioral manifestations.

Its still difficult to isolate socialization effects from biological ones, but the indications seem to be that there are real, biologically grounded differences.

> and therefore "we need to teach girls to be more like boys."

Wait, what? Wouldn't that be a reason to stop trying to do that, at least where those biological grounded differences have strong effects?

[dogruck]

I personally agree that women are biologically different than men. But, I don't know what the correct next conclusion is. (Not to mention when you extend it to gender self-identification.)

One of her specific examples was "because of that different wiring, boys will typically try to win a game, but many times girls will not try to win, because, for example, winning might hurt the other player's feelings."

All I could say in response was, "well, I'm a guy, and to me it sounds like those girls are thinking at a higher level -- who cares about winning some artificial game, if it's going to hurt another person." And that's where the bulk of the conversation ended.

I struggle to find the right path when discussing gender -- especially about kids.