The idea that these two radically differently supplied halves of the population would have no major psychological differences is an idea so patently stupid that only a modern academic could take it seriously.
All this study shows is that the brains are pretty much the same physically. Now as someone who has seen the effect of hormones on friends going through a gender change, have seen girlfriends use hormones as birth control methods I can tell you that hormonal activity can have a huge impact on the way the hardware runs.
Consider for a moment that the hardware is the brain and the hormonal activity brought forth by the body is like the OS.
Apart from the cutely glossed over 11-12% size difference, which seems like a major physical difference (remember we're ignoring function/structure here and only concerning ourselves with macroscopic physical aspects).
Even when normalised though they found a 2.5% difference. Not huge, but still seems of note.
The set-up is this:
>“Despite the common impression that men and women are profoundly different, large analyses of brain measures are finding far more similarity than difference,” said Lise Eliot, PhD, principal investigator and associate professor of neuroscience at RFU’s Chicago Medical School. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811916...) //
Professor Eliot is said to work closely with the study's writers. So, at least in Science Bulletin, and for the department performing the study the macroscopic brain morphology is being used to argue against the idea that men and women are different.
This gets to newspapers as "neuroscientists find mens' and womens' brains identical" and Eliot seems, with her comment, to be encouraging that viewpoint.
The final part of the study abstract:
> it is not accurate to refer to the human amygdala as “sexually dimorphic.” (ibid) //
Presumably they mean except for the 11-12% (+2.5% of that) volume difference which for some reason doesn't count. I guess it's like "men aren't bigger if their trousers are proportionally bigger than women's trousers"??
Your idea has a lot going for it, but you have to remember then that the hardware is not fixed at the point at which hormonal activity starts to have effect. Perhaps the brain hardware is more like a software programmable array that can affect its own continued construction rather than a fixed silicon die. [Probably a terrible analogy].
I get your point, but what else are we but a bunch of bodily fluids?
Or put another way, that everything we know about supply/demand curves and evolution is wrong?
You can alter psychology of a person by altering brain structure, surely that link is well established even if the finer details aren't known?
You can run the same program on different hardware, and run the same program on the same hardware and get different results. I'm not sure the analogy gets us very far.
The argument was made that "bodily fluids" can't be a differentiator between men and women.