People take it for granted that their lives divide into three time zones: past, present and future. Some people live predominantly in their private past; others in their future time zone. Then there are those who, as the Latin saying "carpe diem" goes, seize the day. It is the general consensus among psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists that a person's time perspective is acquired and variable in nature. Pos, however, came to a different point of view based on his clinical experience with and research on 405 consecutive office patients (1987-1991). He concluded that people's time perspectives can be reduced to two mutually exclusive, universally occurring and therefore genetically determined personality types: those he termed alphas who predominantly relate emotionally to their here-and-now, but have difficulty in relating emotionally to their past and future (the future is "not yet the present," the past "no longer the present"); and those he called betas, who have no problem relating emotionally to their future and past, but find it hard to focus primarily on their here-and-now. Pos came to the conclusion that this genetically determined duality in time perspectives is due to two different ways of autobiographic memory recording from which one's life story derives and which begins around age 5-6.

Early in 1994, Pos completed his manuscript The Gender Beyond Sex: Two Distinct Ways of Living in Time (ISBN 0-9735244-0-5), in which he describes relevant data. He found that the behavior of men and women is often viewed as expressing their sexual gender, while in fact it expresses their particular time perspective (which he therefore came to refer to as their time gender as opposed to sexual gender) . In short, there are alpha men and women, and beta men and women. An alpha and beta may be as different from one another as a man and a woman, for one’s time gender influences the regulation of one’s mood and self-esteem; how one experiences one’s identity; how one behaves socially, including significant aspects of sexual behavior, partnering, and parenting; how one thinks; how one experiences one’s adolescence and attitude toward education, and how one eventually relates to one’s occupation.

Pos found that the sex distribution among his 405 subjects was the same (almost 50%-50%) as the sex distribution among the local general population. However, the alpha-beta ratio among the women turned out to be about 70%-30%, in contrast with the almost 50%-50% alpha-beta ratio among the men. (As a result, around 60% of all subjects were alphas and 40% betas). In his 2004 manuscript (which is available through this website as an e-book), Pos had no explanation for this statistically confirmed connection between time gender and sexual gender in women, although it was commonly known that women are characterized by two X-chromosomes (XX: one inherited from the father, the other from the mother) and men by only one X-chromosome (inherited from the mother) with a Y-chromosome (inherited from the father).

When recent genetic research (Ross et al. (2005), Nature 434: 325-337) confirmed that many genes on the X-chromosome are the genetic underpinning of mental functions, Pos began to speculate that the genes responsible for autobiographic memory (and thus time gender) may also be located on the X-chromosome. In this case, the time gender of a man is determined by his mother, and the time gender of a woman by both her mother and father. Since the distribution of alphas and betas among men was almost the same, their group of mothers must have carried almost equal amounts of alpha-causing and beta causing-genes. As a result, one can only explain the alpha-beta ratio of about 70%-30% among women by assuming that the X-linked alpha gene they may carry is dominant and the beta gene recessive, so that a woman with "AA" and "Ab" would be alpha, and only a woman with "bb" would be beta.

In September 2006, Pos published through Trafford Publishing (www.trafford.com) a shortened, amended, popular version of his original 2004 manuscript (ISBN 1-4120-8843-7). This 2006 version earned Pos the gold medal (Psychology/Mental Health category) in Independent Publisher magazine's 14th Annual IPPY awards.

The 2004 manuscript has been read by a number of people and discussed in detail with many others, including several scientists. The response has been uniformly positive. Concerning the statistical data analysis an internationally recognized authority in statistical genetics, David F. Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto, noted, for example, that the chapter on Time gender and Sexuality, Partnering and Parenting which summarizes the associations found between type (alpha/beta) and a number of sexual behaviors showed a consistent pattern to support the major theses of the book.

This website contains four reviews of the 2004 version: one by Edward Michael Coles, Ph.D., an Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia (retired); one by Donald Lidstone, LL.B., Founding Partner of Lidstone, Young, Anderson in Vancouver, a specialist in municipal and constitutional law, and a Founding Director of the Sierra Legal Defense Fund; one by David Aris, M.Sc., a mechanical engineer, past President of Psycho-technics, a human research consultancy and personnel selection institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands; and one by Janette Pelletier, Ph.D., , Associate Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (Applied Psychology/Early Childhood), University of Toronto.

The original, unabridged 2004 manuscript is available through this website as e-book on a CD (ISBN 0-9735244-0-5). The abridged, amended 2006 publication of 305 pages (ISBN 1-4120-8843-7) is available through Trafford's bookstore (www.trafford.com) and other established outlets.