I am Janice Turner's No 1 fan - another excellent article

It's a good job we can still laugh about all this crap.

the whole pink brain stuff bothers me intensely - it's the one area where I've got drawn into FB arguments (which is never a productive use of anyone's time, let's be honest). It's scary how people just take something vaguely science-y at face value and don't bother to engage their (pink or blue) brains further to consider whether this might in fact be bollocks.

It reminds me of when India Knight or Kelley Maloney was on Loose Women and they tried to explain transgenderism by likening a developing foetus in utero to being in a washing machine with different hormones floating around and sometimes the girl ones stick and sometimes the boy ones stick...

Well, of course 'gender' isn't a binary. Its more like a large set of (culturally determined) different continuums isn't it?

Someone ought to set Ben Goldacre onto this area of Bad Science.

1. I am now going to call myself ' a cunt identified woman' - and demand this is used instead of the revolting 'cis'.

1. My doctor told me he didn't like prescribing HRT for more than five years. So I am going to tell him I a actually a MAN who transformed to female - and he can't look at the records as it's transphobic. Therefore I can get HRT FOR EVAH.

None of this is funny but you lot are keeping my spirits up

Pathetic effort by Sharman. Pink brain in zero gravity looks like this.

She wasn't even wearing the proper sort of female spacesuit, as we all know from reading the literature.

Or perhaps NASA has gone all 'gender-neutral' with their uniform, seems to be the current response to any kerfuffle..............

"Also remember that the studies of trans people's brains are tiny. "
Same double-take for me as well!

As well as being small sample size, one study I looked at that claimed to find trans closer to their identified wotsit than their actual also made the classic error of using the SAME set of subjects as training set and test set. Basically, take a smallish set of normal males and females. Measure the size of a whole bunch of brain regions, and pick the one (or combination of measurements), that best distinguishes the males in your sample from the females (that's the training of your wonderful male or female brain classifier). They then used that on the brains of trans folks, and claimed that TIMs had brains more like females, and so on.
Except you FIRST have to show that your wonderful male or female brain identifier WORKS on non-trans brains other than the ones you used to train it, that it does what it says on the tin in the first place.Only then does the result on trans brains possibly mean something.

With small datasets and measure enough stuff, you're very likely to find stuff that just by chance can distinguish your particular set of males from your particular set of females. And if you add OTHER data (like your trans test set or even a non-trans test set), then it is quite probable that it will tend to lie in between the extremes of the groups you trained on (just since the measure was specifically chosen to separate those particular groups anyway!).

For these reasons, I tend to stick to the recent larger samples work that seems to be showing that actually there isn't a meaningful categorization of brains into male-type and female-type. Although unfortunately the New Scientist report on this work took it is a 'gender is non-binary' result. Although at least based on that criterion we are almost all non-binary in terms of our 'brain-region-gender', so why bother with the concept at all?

Actually, we can trans Helen Sharman right now, no bother.

Here she is, identifying as a man by wearing man's clothes:

nauticant it does indeed work like that.

The other great thing is that people can be transed after, or even before in some cases, death.

So when Helen Sharman dies it can go>>
Going into space is a very masculine thing to do. All that exercise and science and not being able to do your nail varnish in zero gravity.
No proper woman would be interested in doing something like that.
Helen Sharman did wear trousers a lot and her hair wasn't super long, and she wanted to go, and did go into space, this indicates her innerfelt desire to be a man. If she didn't want to be a man she would have stayed at home in a floral dress.
Therefore HS was actually trans and therefore the first and second brits to ever go into space were both men, and everyone can relax.

Transing dead gender nonconforming people is shit. Basically it means that any women who has ever done anything of note outside of gender role must've been a man, instantly erasing the possibility that women can do anything outside gender role... The whole thing is entirely circular.

Slightly OT but I am pretty sure that Wossname the bloke who was in the space station last year did a lot of correcting of interviewers who said he was the first Brit in space, and bigging up the fact that the first Brit in space was a woman, and not him.

I AM LITERALLY KILLING THEM

I just cannot believe you wrote trans people's brains are tiny!!! That must make you like the biggest transphobe on the planet.

Also remember that the studies of trans people's brains are tiny. This makes it very difficult to distinguish real differences from chance.

If I scanned the brains of 5 people with a birthday that's an even number and 5 with an odd number birthday, I would almost certainly find differences between the two groups' brains but it's unlikely that the differences would be caused by their birthdate. Correlation is not causation.

If Helen Sharman now identified as a man, he (as she would then be) would be the first man in space and the first person on space.

That's how it works, isn't it?

Errol yes apologies for the language but "the old fashioned cunty type of women" is one I've been using for a while.

That's interesting about Helen Sharman and you can see the point:

If people say "first british woman in space" the assumption by most people will be that a british man went first

OTOH and the reason people say first british woman in space - is that if you say "first brit in space" then people will assume male also

The best thing to do then is to say "The first Britain in space was a woman - Helen Sharman" or similar to make clear that she was the first person and also that she is a woman. If you leave either piece out, then it reverts to assumption that a man was first.

And of course this only comes up because when that guy went to the ISS HE was suddenly the first brit in space and everyone conveniently overlooked her. Then when this was pointed out, there was rather a (to my mind) convoluted technical reason for it, and rather than starting to say he was the second, they started saying he was the first official brit in space (or similar wording). Because OBVIOUSLY space is for men, and when things are very masculine, even when women do them first / better, there is often a reason found not to mention that, due to some technicality or other.

Annoying.

Of course now a TIM will be first and women will never need mentioning ever again. Phew!

I even found the paper - full text! - and I love the title of the journal.

http://cda.psych.uiuc.edu/sgepcourseematerial/sgepweeklyyreadingsposted/salmonn_fmri.pdf

I haven't seen the programme yet, so I can't comment on purpose, methodology, sample size etc and could well be getting the wrong end of the stick here. BUT, if a woman and a transwoman use the same part of their brain when completing a specific task, and a man uses a different part, how does that have any bearing on the fact that the woman is of the class of people who produce eggs, and the transwoman is still of the class of people who produce sperm?

D-value/Cohen's d is a useful concept when evaluating demographic difference. Here's an (hopefully) a-political example hastily googled and attached, which shows a height distribution (not sure of the population it's graphing, but it's differentiated by sex which is the point I'm illustrating).

The d-value is basically the distance between the two peaks. There are some sex differences, like height, which have large d-values (though still significant overlap - you could say primary sex characteristics are defined as that which has no overlap, if you think about it) and it's implied that other differences that show up, in things like mathematics or empathy are just as strongly differentiated. But mostly those d-values are so tiny and the overlap so immense that it would be (statistically) irrational to make a prediction of male or female based on a given point. On the flipside, it's also irrational to claim d-values could never biologically/a-politically show up as inequality in some extreme edge cases, which some people do for political reasons but I wish they wouldn't because it's a bad argument. I'm talking here of some hypothetical, imaginary future world where we actually had women's liberation - it's possible that there are some areas of super elite academic enquiry that might be dominated by men or women. We just don't know. We can't know, because of the neuroplastic, dynamical nature of the brain. That's the whole point. All the brains we are evaluating are part of and constructed by interaction with a gendered society. We don't have access to a control.

Any rational interlocutor would concede, therefore, that it's not relevant for policy positions - we aren't living in that world. We don't currently need policy allocating equitable resource distribution of our oxygen recycling units on Mars either. The gendered brain is the least persuasive argument for men "really" being women I have ever heard. The brain is a dynamical system!

Here's a nice explanation of the ignobel salmon: blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/

I don't have time to research it now but I will look up some peer reviewed studies later. On a note though, brain difference does NOT equate to inferiority at all. We have to look at the science and evidence.

Brains are very, very plastic.

I offer you (slightly randomly), from something I'm reading for work:
In professional players of string instruments, the cortical representation of the digits of the left hand (the fingering hand) becomes significantly larger than in non-string players -- that is, if you use something a lot, or indeed think about something a lot, your brain will change to reflect that.

See also black cab drivers.

See also Cordelia Fine's rather lovely example of the detection of empathy in a brain scan of a dead salmon. (I can't find the original research for that, but it was allegedly done as a reminder to colleagues to check that their results weren't just false readings and random noise flickers.)

From everything I've read, there is only one way to tell for sure if a brain is a woman's or a man's. Which is to check if its got XX or XY chromosomes.

Re the 'womens firsts', there is a notable counterpoint.

Apparently when Helen Sharman is interviewed she routinely has to correct the description of 'first British woman in space' to 'first British person in space'. Matthew Parris recently commented ruefully that he'd made this mistake, betraying his unconscious sexism.

(Also ... I have an aversion to typing swear words, but 'cunty type woman' is a vast improvement over 'cis woman', in cases where 'woman' is now not sufficient)