Meh, I think the whole male/female dynamic is a bit overplayed. In all honesty, there have been tons of authors who have written characters (read: protagonists) which are the opposite gender they are. If there was really something all that compelling between the two sexes, then there would be a noticeable gap in how a man writes a woman, and how a woman writes a man. When an author is good, the differences are negligible or not noticeable at all.
To be honest, most of the sex differences are just stereotypes particular to culture.
There are, for the most part, an amazing amount of similarities between the male and female bodies; they are like semi-overlapping schematics, in the sense that a large portion of bodily functions are similar, but yet, those portions of the schematics that don't overlap, are extremely different and hard to phsyically comprehend by the other gender. So, writing a book in which the protagonist is a female and the author is a male, or vice versa, is not so complex because we have some understanding of one another even with our differences.
Even so, those dramatic differences can be explained, and mentally categorized by some detached form of empathy, e.g.: I will never know what it feels like to have a child, or have a monthly cycle, or think in the way a woman does, but I can comprehend some, and dear god is that hard, of it by trying to relate. My tries won't ever be exact though, because they are from the perspective of a male and I am used to my own schematics.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, transex individuals, etc., but they might go into their own category in this case. I don't know. So, my point is, any sex differences, some are overplayed because similarities are disregarded, are sex differences and culture just ruminates on them and distorts them to unecessary extremes. They are there though.
Feel free to beat me with a ladle now. That is, if I offended anyone. I don't even know where I was going with this, I just felt like writing.