Is there any such thing as gender identity?

@ErrolTheDragon, I agree. Imaging research is expensive, and funding bodies are much less likely to award research grants for it than they used to be, so a lot of studies are under-powered.

the sample sizes are actually quite decent for a functional imaging study

Or to put it another way, 'sample, sizes in functional imaging studies are typically small' .... that doesn't make any of them more statistically robust.

Brain images are hocus pocus.

No, they're not. Brain imaging techniques have provided some extraordinary insights into the way the brain functions and the way brain circuits are organised. But it's like every other scientific technique - if you have a flawed study design, you'll have flawed results that don't prove what you intended them to prove or can't be interpreted properly.

@justspeculation - I asked the same question. No answer though!

But I can't see "gender identity" as being any different from Phlogiston

I love this, I am definitely stealing this to use.

‘Lost a word’....

Sorry list a word up there - ‘excluded by strict sex segregation’.

I recognise that sex segregation can exclude trans people. I just also recognise that lack of sex segregation can also exclude women.

I can see why knowing sex is useful.

I think it’s not just useful, but essential, if half the population isn’t to be disenfranchised.

You don’t need to be actively sexist to exclude women from participation in society. You just need to organise society around the default male SEX.

My body’s insistence on expelling blood every month has nothing to do with my identity. A hysterectomy would end my periods, whether I needed it to combat cancer, endometriosis or gender dysphoria. However, the fact of the surgery would mark me as female and access to medical care cannot be taken for granted.

The same can be said of any group that has different needs - whether they are excluded by steps or strict segregation. You can’t protect rights if you can’t name the people whose rights are threatened.

Insistence on affirmation of identity over protection of rights, is I think, the mark of people who have no concept that their rights could be threatened.

But I can't see "gender identity" as being any different from Phlogiston or the luminiferous ether. It's a speculative entity which you only need to support a theory which doesn't actually seem to have much in the way of empirical content.

^ This.

I can see why knowing sex is useful. It helps you make children (which is quite important). It helps medical treatment. It gives 50% of the population a chance to compete fairly with others of the same body type. It's a strong predictor of risk factors for violence. It lets you totally prevent unwanted pregnancy by separating the sexes.

(And all that's true for any animal, not just humans).

But "gender identity"? We don't even know how to identify it, let alone what predictive value it has. Anything it correlates to, sex is a better predictor for. Using gender identity is reducing the male/female difference in crime stats, athletic performance, everything.

If gender identity corresponded to any measurable attribute, you'd be able to find something where the "male/female" difference was higher than if you'd used sex as your differentiator. But you can't.

So this is not a viable replacement for sex.

(Conceivably "trans" could be a thing that has an auxiliary effect, like "gay" - a modifier of the usual sex-based behaviour. That might have some predictive value. And I guess we know it does - trans status correlates with a whole bunch of other conditions, including autism.)

Brain images are hocus pocus.

What is gender? It is entirely made up. So how can humans have it? By likening their personality to it.

In the world of machine learning / predictive analytics you would not celebrate that as a successful algorithm. Nobody would buy it off you.

@CharlieParley, the sample sizes are actually quite decent for a functional imaging study; not sure whether or not they're adequate for a machine-learning study.

The gender ideology position is that women and transwomen have the same gender identity. Therefore if the neural connectivity (brain activity) measured in this study is related to gender identity, the brain activity patterns in women and transwomen should be the same. But they're not - women and transwomen have different brain activity patterns.

So either:
A) the brain activity patterns are related to gender identity, in which case the results show that women and transwomen don't have the same gender identity
or
B) the brain activity patterns aren't related to gender identity, and therefore don't prove its existence.

I think this is going to upset some members - a brain study that can literally see the apparently non existent thing we call gender identity, and which also gives a scientific basis for non-binary identities to exist.

Except, it didn't. What the study showed is that the brains of individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria differ from control groups of their own sex.

Under Materials and Methods: Participants, the authors state: Furthermore, all transgender participants fulfilled diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria, as diagnosed by a board-certified mental-health professional. They also state that these individuals were recruited from self-help groups and a specialist clinic, had socially transitioned and were planning to medically transition which strongly suggests these are individuals who experience more severe cases of gender dysphoria.

Now there are several studies that have already successfully shown that individuals with gender dysphoria have measurable differences in the brain to control groups of their own sex. (One study for instance showed a particularly active brain region related to body image also found in patients with anorexia. As one would expect.)

Previous studies have also found measurable differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual individuals, so it's a serious oversight that the study has not accounted for this variable.

To date, how much of the differences in individuals who are both homosexual and gender dysphoric is due to either characteristic has not been quantified. This can only be done by matching participants by sexuality before measuring for neurological differences due to gender dysphoria.

It's an interesting study, but it falls short of proving the existence of gender identity.

(On a sidenote, the sample sizes are small. Matching with 52% accuracy for instance means that the machine correctly identified a mere five or six individuals over and above the result one would expect from pure chance. Statisticians would have quite a bit to say about the glib assurance that in such a small sample size this proves the quality and accuracy of their algorithm.)

@continuallyconflating, agree that the authors' meaning in those Discussion sections is not at all clear.

the observation is that trans women have a female gender identity and the claim (which you won't agree with of course) is that gender identity is more important than things like gonads when assigning a sex to someone

If gender identity is more important than gonads when "assigning a sex", why are gonads/genitalia used to "assign" sex at birth?

Why don't we wait and "assign" sex when a child is 2 or 3 and (according to Shizuku) their innate gender identity starts to manifest?

Given that "assigning" the wrong sex causes distress for trans individuals, why wouldn't we wait and assign the correct label? There must be a reason that humans have relied for millennia on the gonads/genitals to "assign" sex at birth?

Sorry, I have to jump in here for my own peace of mind. Shizuku says, upthread:

We already know that trans brains are not the same as cis brains - that's not new information. The claim isn't that trans women are women because their brain scans are identical to cis women's, the observation is that trans women have a female gender identity and the claim (which you won't agree with of course) is that gender identity is more important than things like gonads when assigning a sex to someone.

Why is it more important? Even a casual look at history and geography shows that women are controlled and discriminated against precisely because of their gonads and ability to grow babies. That is the material point. So why should "gender identity" be more important? What is the elusive reason for this? Why can't it be said?

You can look at the world as a flux of identities floating around in power structures supported by narratives as much as you like, but in reality the world is material. When you stub your toe, it hurts, and not because the stone you tread on has been constructed to marginalise disempowered identities. You can figure stuff out about the world using observation, reason and your brain, and when you do, the stuff you figured out actually works, and you can use it to figure out even more stuff.

But I can't see "gender identity" as being any different from Phlogiston or the luminiferous ether. It's a speculative entity which you only need to support a theory which doesn't actually seem to have much in the way of empirical content.

Sorry about the rant. I'll go now....

an instinct that facilitates social cohesion in social species like humans.

Except it doesn’t facilitate social cohesion. It facilitates sexism and oppression.

We already know that trans brains are not the same as cis brains - that's not new information.

Only if you can define what ‘trans’ means. The definition is now very, very inclusive.

@Awiltu Hating to presume but I think the bit your referring to in the Discussion about cross-sex hormones and other studies is a bit later on than the bit I posted?
It's certainly very muddled around this issue
I had to go through it a few times to try and understand if the participants were in treatment and the bit I quoted, and this following bit, which is at the end of the same paragraph, sort of convinced me they were.

Furthermore, we acknowledge that future studies should gather additional information regarding recognition of gender incongruence, sexual orientation of subjects as well as beginning (start?) and exact nature of treatment
(my italics)

And yes, yes about ASD

But you can have a sense of what sex you are. Some people develop a cross-sex sense of what sex they are

That’s so silly. I don’t have a sense of what sex I am. I have knowledge of what sex I am. I have knowledge of the extent to which I conform to the stereotypes associated with my sex, and that I have a body map which incorporates my sexed organs.

It’s impossible for a trans person’s gender identity to be based on knowledge of their sex, so we can skip over that. TRAs keep insisting it’s nothing to do with stereotypes so let’s pretend that’s true.

It seems that the body map piece is the most related to “gender identity” in that some dissociated or traumatised people start disconnecting from the signals sent by their actual body and imagining themselves as the opposite sex, or as sexualised cartoon animals (or split the difference with an anime identity), or whatever. I don’t think it’s useful to reduce this interesting and complex issue to “gender identity” as if that’s an explanation of any sort.

I think it’s probably the case that fixation of gender stereotypes or aversion to them feed in to the body-map stuff.

I’d love to see a brain imaging study that compares trans people to furries. I don’t think it will ever be done but I’m confident the algorithms would lump both groups together; the erotic target is different but it seems very likely to be a slightly different manifestation of the same phenomenon.

TRAs are welcome to dismiss this theory but all the observable evidence we have about “gender identity” suggests it’s not a fixed thing in individuals, it does change over time, it’s quite clearly influenced by cultural factors, it’s influenced by trauma and by neurological and mental health conditions, and positing gender identity as a singular ineffable cause of anything rather than as a multi-causal manifestation of mental and cultural processes is fucking stupid.

You know else who has has strong issues around the irrelevance of gender identity and importance of biological sex?

Actuaries

Those insurance laddies won't put up with this nonsense if there's any chance of it affecting profit
They made damn sure they carved out an exception for themselves under the GRA

Other exceptions: These are fairly limited in scope and include... provision of annuities, life assurance policies, accident insurance policies or similar matter which involves the assessment of risk...

@continuallyconflating, I could be wrong, but I understood the comments in the Discussion to be the authors explaining why results in other studies might have differed and to highlight the importance of considering hormonal influences. The statement in Methods did seem to indicate that none of the study participants were taking cross-sex hormones, though I suppose that "declared their intention of undergoing cross-sex hormone therapy in the future" could be polite code for "we have no idea if our participants were taking hormones bought off the internet".

The methodology of resting state connectivity analyses is complex, and not very transparent - you're a long way from the original fMRI signal by the time you see a statistical result. Adding the machine-learning algorithm element just increases the complexity. The analysis methodology looks OK (and the geek in me thinks it's pretty neat to combine the two analysis techniques), but I think not explicitly controlling for or factoring in neurodiversity is a big weakness. Neural connectivitiy patterns are known to be atypical in ASD, - given the recognised association between ASD and trans identity, how do we know that the connectivity patterns in the trans groups don't reflect high numbers of participants with ASD?

the claim (which you won't agree with of course) is that gender identity is more important than things like gonads when assigning a sex to someone.

I don't agree with it but I would like to know WHY you think gender identity which you have said that not everyone has and which cannot be measured is more important than actually biological differences which can be clearly identified.