This article provides insight into the entwinement of the allegedly neutral category of handedness with questions of sex/gender, reproduction, dis/ability, and scientific authority. In the 1860s, Paul Broca suggested that the speech centre sat in the left brain hemisphere in most humans, and that right-handedness stemmed from this asymmetry. One century later, British psychologists Marian Annett and Chris McManus proposed biologically unconfirmed theories of how handedness and brain asymmetry were passed on in families. Their idea to integrate chance into genetic models of handedness was novel, and so was their use of computerized statistics to parse out the incidence of handedness genotypes and phenotypes. Notwithstanding significant conceptual and methodological overlaps, McManus and Annett did not collaborate and proposed competing theories. I analyse the sexed/gendered dimensions of their controversy by drawing on published literature, unpublished documents, and oral history interviews. I first attend to the epistemological importance of sex/gender. Both psychologists published several iterations of their models, which increasingly relied on questions of sex/gender and reproduction. Annett additionally linked handedness with stereotypically gendered cognitive abilities. Second, I argue that using masculine-coded computer technologies contributed to Annett’s professional marginalization whereas similar methods endowed McManus with surplus authority. Finally, I show that Annett’s complicity in stabilizing sociocultural hierarchies within her theory mirrored her personal experience of marginalization based on sex/gender, age, education, and lack of institutional affiliation. This analysis exemplifies the entanglement of cognitive and social factors in scientific controversies and adds to the literature on 20th-century British women psychologists.

中文翻译：

---

一场公平的辩论？1970 年代至 1990 年代英国心理学中关于偏侧性基因的性别/性别争议

这篇文章提供了对据称中性的惯用手类别与性别/性别、生殖、残疾/能力和科学权威问题的交织的洞察。在 1860 年代，Paul Broca 提出大多数人的语言中心位于左脑半球，而右手习惯源于这种不对称性。一个世纪后，英国心理学家玛丽安·安妮特 (Marian Annett) 和克里斯·麦克马纳斯 (Chris McManus) 提出了关于惯用手和大脑不对称如何在家庭中遗传的生物学上未经证实的理论。他们将机会整合到惯用手的遗传模型中的想法是新颖的，他们使用计算机统计来解析惯用手基因型和表型的发生率也是如此。尽管存在重大的概念和方法重叠，麦克马纳斯和安妮特并未合作并提出相互竞争的理论。我通过引用已发表的文献、未发表的文件和口述历史访谈来分析他们争论的性别/性别维度。我首先关注性/性别的认识论重要性。两位心理学家都发表了他们模型的几次迭代，这些模型越来越依赖于性/性别和生殖问题。安妮特还将惯用手与刻板的性别认知能力联系起来。其次，我认为使用男性编码的计算机技术导致了安妮特的职业边缘化，而类似的方法赋予了麦克马纳斯多余的权威。最后，我展示了安妮特在她的理论中稳定社会文化等级的共谋，反映了她基于性别/性别、年龄、教育和缺乏机构隶属关系的边缘化的个人经历。