Transgender brains are more like their desired gender.

This is an oldie

All that has ever been proven is that some men who feel like women have brains that are more 'like most women's brains'* than most men who do not feel like women, whilst still being definitely men's brains.

*unproven and unquantifiable term

I don't think that a test would be proof of anything (but it could be interesting to research, if done properly, but the chances of that happening...) I just find it amusing that TRAs are using these sort of articles as 'proof' of transgender being real, whilst simultaneously saying that self-id is king.

The article linked to in the OP isn't a research study. Was the study published anywhere? I'm not sure they can make any claims without providing the details - and the little information they have provided doesn't substantiate the claims they are making.

I'd be curious to know what the 'pheromone known to produce gender-specific activity' is and how it was shown to produce gender-specific activity in the first place.

I read this report a while ago: what occurred to me was that if they were testing pheromones then, yes, a lot of homosexual transexuals would respond in a similar way to a lot of women, but that would be true of gay men as well. This study didn't seem to test out middle-aged, blonde-wig wearing high/over achievers who transition, most of whom seem to be heterosexual men with a wife (transwidow) and three children. I rather suspect their brains respond to different pheromones than most women.

A 6ft woman is in the 97th quartile of women for height. It doesn't make her a man.

If gender was real, it would be consistent across cultures and time.
It isn't. So its socially constructed.
If gender was real there would be a definitive test, such as a chromosome test or brain scan. It isn't.

Our brains are plastic, we are an adaptive species. Unfortunately we are also prone to bias. If a researcher has been socialised to believe that being kind is a female trait, then men who are kind will rate highly on their constructed feminine scale.

Now do you see the problem?

Rip up the report and storm out shouting that it was all ‘junk science’ anyway?

Possibly kick over a display on the way out?

I feel like I'm writing in crayon here so apologies that nothing that I am saying is very profound, but I don't see how there could ever be a definitive physiological test for transgenderism because 'gender' is a load of stereotypical bollocks that relates to how society sees sex differences and different people will perceive that in different ways.

So what would happen if Shon, or Paris, or Jane, or Joss, or Stephanie or anyone elss had a brain scan and it showed they weren't transgender after all? That their brain was just bog standard male? What would they do?

Ah yes! The study of the affect of Triptorelin on adolescent brains (you know - the drug that creates a ‘harmless pause’). They had a control group (pre-adolescent so not ideal) who had not been taking triptorelin and found no difference in that group.

Also having a brain pattern that “more closely resembled that of non-transgender boys and girls of their desired gender” after taking triptorelin than non-transgender children of their same sex, or preadolescent transgender children who had not taken triptorelin, does not mean they are the same or even similar to ‘non-transgender boys and girls of their desired gender’.

Why does this keep cropping up like some sort of gotya?

To have a test for transgender, you first need a test for gender.

Good luck with that.
There isn't even a coherent non circular definition for it, let alone criteria, or a test.

It's like announcing you've found evidence for incarnated souls, although you haven't yet defined soul, or proved it exists, or that everyone has one, or that they can jump from one body to another.

Most of these transgender brain studies don't control for sexual orientation. The studies that do, find that these (minor!) brain differences that show up are related to homosexuality, not gender identity.

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17352-8

It would be interesting if there was a test that could determine whether someone was transgender though. I somehow doubt that the self-id ideologues would be entirely happy with it...

This is also a good article, from someone who knows what they're talking about.

No study has been conclusive. The most that seems to be have been found is that transgender brains resemble transgender brains and that the brains of heterosexual TIMs (AGPs) if they resemble anything resemble, well, male brains, quelle surprise!

This article gives a fairly good summary of where we are

www.genderhq.org/trans-nature-vs-nurture-innate-gender-identity-culture

But yes, it ultimately doesn't matter why...we're still talking biological males invading women's spaces and we can't change sex

This is the kind of pseudoscience that people like my BIL latch onto to ‘prove’ that his daughter is definitely in the wrong body ‘because there is evidence.....’

There is just as much ‘evidence’ out there that climate change is a complete myth should one choose to look for it.

If there was an accurate test, such as a brain scan, that could diagnose “transgenderism” then all the problems with the ideology would be solved overnight. Yet such a test remains elusive.

Fortunately the transgender cause is very well funded and they are pouring millions into research to find this test, and thus give gravitas to their claims.

Oh, wait....

A female brain is only a female brain because it is located in a body with female reproductive organs.

But if you can diagnose transsexualism via a brain scan, I’d be all for it.

Will never happen though, because that’s ‘gatekeeping’ and the fetishists want no gatekeeping whatsoever.

Its total nonsense.There is no such thing as a gendered brain. (See the likes of Cordelia Fine. Delusions of Gender.)The particular piece of research you refer to has been rubbished over and over again.

That study does not enable the claim in the title to be made.

It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous

Apparently, women who are 6 feet 2 are more like a typical male height than they are a typical female height.
This obviously suggests that they are mystically somehow meant to be men.

Or, it suggests that there is immense variation of physical characteristics such as height, weight, muscle strength, brain cortical thickness, and outliers at the edges of a normal curve are not 'the wrong sex', they are examples of their own sex. Because none of those characteristics mentioned are sex characteristics. They are human characteristics.

The utter daftness of contriving that testicles should be ignored as an indicator of sex but 'brain activation' is meaningful.

Even the article is bunkum from the beginning. All of the children have both a sex (obviously they mean biological here) and a gender which either matches or doesn't - but the paper doesn't describe gender, or evidence it, and apparently they compared children of one SEX who thought they were the wrong 'gender' with other kids who were the same 'gender' but I have no idea how they verified or quantified any of those children's 'genders' and whether their sex also came into it.

And what could be concluded? Nothing.

More boys than girls are red green colourblind. If you find a girl who is colourblind it isn't evidence that she's a boy.

Scientists should be able to distinguish between defining sex characteristics (testicles, ovaries) and generalised human traits found in the entire population of male and female people, but with variations between the sexes.
They also need to ascertain the difference between innate and environmentally adaptive traits.

The utter kicker, is that in order to argue that male and female brains exist and are fundamentally different, you have to first argue that male and female bodies exist and that the definition of a sexed brain is dependent upon the sexed body it is a component part of.

The circular reasoning is ridiculous.
Some boys have brain activity similar to some girls? Do they? Other than the girls who have similar brain activity to the other boys, perhaps?
Jack's brain is a bit like Janet's and also like Jane's, but not at all like Mary's or Mia's, because their brains are like Mark's.

What have we learned?

That bad science exists to try to support Impossible circular reasoning, and some people will believe it.

It's nonsense on stilts.

I wonder which organisation funded the research. Always worth looking in to.

used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to assess brain activation patterns in response to a pheromone known to produce gender-specific activity.

'gender-specific activity' - so they're saying that there are pheromones which detect gender? They could tell me my gender? I would be very interested to hear how they established the properties of this pheromone. I feel like they actually mean sex here, and still, I'd like to see the responses compared to a selection of non-GD children - without that, how can we see if there is actually a significant difference.

GD adolescent girls showed a male-typical brain activation pattern during a visual/spatial memory exercise.

I normally score well on this sort of exercise (and DP doesn't) - they need to do the same tests on controls and tell us what the variability difference is - ie if 100% of GD girls, 100% of non-GD boys, 0% of GD boys and 0% of non-GD girls tested this way then that would be one thing, but I highly doubt this is the case - to understand what they're saying we need to see the numbers. How consistent and conformant GD/non GD boys and girls are.