Michael Knowles responds to the idea of trans brain difference

Good points being made on this thread, and especially I found myself nodding to @myveryownelectrickitten's post!

I don't think fMRI studies of brain function are necessarily bad science. If, for example, you read the paper I mentioned about sizes of different brain regions (essentially they are measuring the size of patches of active areas in the fMRI studies and then comparing average sizes in male-attracted transwomen vs female-attracted transwomen, vs natal women and vs natal men, for example), they don't draw sweeping conclusions that transwomen have a greater interest in feminine clothing because of those brain areas. They just state that the sizes of such-and-such regions are smaller/larger than expected and compared them with the sizes of typical men and typical women. Interestingly, that same study emphasized that atypical sizes, in the male-attracted subset of transwomen, were NOT "the same as women", or even "closer to women than to men" but rather tended to be somewhat outside the range of what was typical for a male, and in a feminized direction. Much more subtle than what we are usually told by activists (most of whom are not scientists, as I understand).

But the way activists present the science draws much more far-reaching conclusions than that. And some of the research literature seems to be primarily about how any residual unhappiness among transgender people is due to failure of society to treat them as the desired gender, failure of possible mates of their desired dating gender to accept them as possible mates, etc. There just seem to be big gaping holes in how science got from A to B to C to total mastectomy for young women who wish to live as men (or, vice versa, vaginoplasty for young men who wish to live as women).

Sorry if I didn't clarify sufficiently, Gardinia or myveryown. I think we all agree, basically.

I’d also add, which is to get into a slightly different kind of area of discussion, that I think that one of the reasons for the hugely inflated claims of being oppressed for being trans (eg the vastly overinflated risks of murder, violence, genocide, hate speech, safety in the men’s loos so must be in the women’s etc. that we all know) — one of the reasons for this huge manufacturing of this perceived victimhood is partly that transwomen rarely take on the aspects of femininity that women experience as their oppression (aside from the fetishised sexualised ones). They aren’t actually experiencing misogyny or sexism. (They could be experiencing what we would call genuine transphobia - that is, not the “GC women says biological sex is real” kind of transphobia - but that’s different to sexism).

Which is why the idea of “transmisogyny” is so convoluted, and doesn’t make any sense. It’s trying to account for the fact that gender ideology is actually approving of some aspects of stereotypical or oppressive gender roles, if they serve validation purposes. But it also pretends that transwomen pass completely indistinguishably as women. But in reality Diana who used to be Steve is not actually being expected to become “feminine” in any other way than the extreme surface of easily commodified accoutrements. They are not being expected to give up the Bar or the priesthood in order to sit at home and arrange flowers.

But if women are clearly subject to sexism, the whole envy of the female demands that a kind of synthetic kind of oppression be brought in instead to fill the place where the experience of sexism isn’t - hence the manufactured sense of great injustice and marginalisation. It’s a kind of synthetic victimhood — wanting to have the status of oppressed without actually having to do all the shit stuff that comes with actual sexism, whether it’s being lumped with all the Christmas cards for everyone’s family, always being called as the emergency contact by the school because you’re the mum, being ignored in meetings because now you’re too old and unfuckable to be taken seriously, losing your job for being pregnant, being touched up by your boss or just some man who thinks he’s entitled to grab you in the pub — or just being the one who ends up wiping all the vomit up and washing the dishes and taking great auntie Deirdre to all her hospital appointments because no-one else will if you don’t.

You’d think that transwomen would avidly join in to experience “womanhood”, and then loudly say - now I am a woman, I realise how bad things still are for women - we’re oppressed by these social expectations!

But no - it’s more like “I’m oppressed - but in a special way that doesn’t actually involve doing any actual work, but instead just getting angry at JK Rowling on Twitter and sobbing a lot.” It’s the very opposite of “lived experience” — it’s “social media feelings pretend oppression” instead.

@OldGardinia I think you’re reading @aloris a bit too literally - I took her post to be making a similar point to mine upthread, which is that the idea that even if you could make any claims about a “feminised” brain, why that feminisation should manifest itself in one specific stereotypical area of female social sex roles (like clothing) and not another social aspect of female sex roles (like ending up doing caring work) is pretty weak.

So much so that it’s obvious that the idea of “feminisation” is pretty suspect, if it somehow only picks certain selective external commodified aspects of “femininity” (where femininity is socially produced gender), and not any of the aspects of social femininity that are unpleasant or associated with hard work or unpalatable work or anything that incurs certain kinds of social penalties.

Which we know, of course, already: it’s pretty obvious that the aspects of “femininity” that get somehow chosen by these mysteriously feminised brains tend the ones that don’t actually incur any of the social work assigned largely to women. So that we see transwomen on Twitter, and being influencers and models, and barristers, and sportspeople, and so on and so on; but somehow what constitutes “living as a woman” is wearing a dress and makeup — and not, say, suddenly discovering that you’ve always yearned to visit elderly ladies in the parish with nourishing food; rushing to wash up the dishes and get everyone cups of tea and so on; or hanging back in conversation so as not to appear too forceful. So some arbitrary social performances of femininity are fine; but somehow those ones which involve the less sexualised and less enjoyable (to the man) bits of “femininity” are not.

And this is never more evident than when some transwomen talk about enjoying or being validated by sexist behaviour that women actually dislike or are threatened by (eg. being catcalled). But funnily enough we don’t much hear of how validating it is in one’s transition to be suddenly asked to make the tea or talked over in meetings at work (and there are several reasons for this, of course — one obvious one being that trans women are rarely, if ever, treated as biological women are, because men know quite well that they aren’t actually women).

I don't think anyone knows exactly what these differences mean, or why they manifest as a desire to wear women's clothes rather than, as, say, a desire to take care of people.

I'm sorry but this is bad science. Setting aside the questionable nature of any studies on physical differences of the brains of those attracted to women vs. attracted to men, attributing a desire to wear women's clothes to it is a giant leap. Even in the premise you lay out, you'd have to establish that the claimed difference between same-sex and opposite sex attracted was specific to transwomen and not just males in general. There are plenty of gay men who don't cross-dress.

I think it would be interesting to understand the brain basis of dysphoria with one's body. I would have predicted a common region of the brain being affected as compared to people who have dysphoria with non-gendered body parts. But I don't know if anyone is doing that research.

Here also there's a questionable assumption which is that trans = dysmorphia. In adolescents and particularly girls, a form of body dysmorphia does appear to undrly a lot of trans identification as young girls find themselves uncomfortable with their developing bodies or the attention it brings. But adult men who transition to female in my experience, do so overwhelmingly for sexual fetish reasons. Of all the adult male trans people I have known, precisely one may have had some dysphoria. (And even then, he hardly acted like a woman. Least ways I've never had a female collegue who'd tell the people on the call she wasn't wearing anything below the level of the camera).

There is a neurological correlation with identifying as trans as adolescents. And it's autism. The correlation is very high. Autism isn't fully understood and may be developmental, but it doesn't equate to being trans. What it does is create a risk factor because an autistic child, especially as they hit puberty, often finds themself struggling to understand social interaction and feeling out of place. Suddenly a group come along (usually on Discord) and tells them there's a clear and simple explanation for that which is they've got the wrong brain. Instantly they have (a) an explanation they can understand, (b) social approval from teachers and the media that tell them they're special and (c) a set of social stereotypes that they think they're supposed to behave like. It's like a rock to a drowning man. In this model, which matches my observations, neurological issues don't lead to a "desire to wear women's clothes". They create an exploitable situation for others with their own interests to take advantage of.

Also, and I have to say this, your implication that "taking care of people" is a biologically feminine trait is also something I'm not inclined to just accept. It's a human trait, I feel. Men typically express it differently in our society but the idea that there's a female brain type which cares about people more and a male brain type which cares less, is offensive, you don't think?

I doubt the brain sex thing is reliable because if it was, diagnosis of gd would be based on that, not whatever it is now.

If someone did find out they had the opposite sex brain, would they be the opposite sex in certain situations, or would it be just if they wanted it? If it turns out that a self id TW didnt have GD, would he be stopped from transitioning?

This one.

There is one study that controlled for same-sex attraction, at least in transwomen, and if I recall correctly, that study found that transwomen who were attracted to men, did have somewhat feminized brains compared to men. Transwomen who were attracted to women had changes in the size of various brain regions, but not in such a way that their brains were feminized, and not in the same regions as male-attracted transwomen.

I don't think anyone knows exactly what these differences mean, or why they manifest as a desire to wear women's clothes rather than, as, say, a desire to take care of people.

I think it would be interesting to understand the brain basis of dysphoria with one's body. I would have predicted a common region of the brain being affected as compared to people who have dysphoria with non-gendered body parts. But I don't know if anyone is doing that research.

Again, from a societal viewpoint, it sorta doesn't make sense to use brain differences to justify mixing the resources set aside for women, because we have different resources for men and women, not because of different brains, but because of being born with different bodies.

Exactly. I feel so awful that I can't help women and girls there more than by the little I can donate, and I am angry at those in the West who don't squarely face to the fact that the oppression of women is sex-based. We have extremely clear examples of that right now on this planet.

I wonder how many men in Afghanistan yearn to be women? Women’s enviable decision-free lives, eh?

Interesting that the pink-brain/blue-brain argument has always been presented by the anti-feminists in the past, to argue that existing gender arrangements in all societies are based on biology and at most a tiny bit altered by the environment and culture (well, a bit more than that in Afghanistan,say).

Now this argument finds stronger support from the far left, including many feminists, but the anti-feminists haven't abandoned it, either. They insist it's based on biological sex alone, the gender identitarians argue that anyone can have a pink or a blue brain, but then some need to change their bodies or apparent sex to match.

So not that far removed from each other, those two ideologies. They also both produce hierarchical societies if allowed to be the ideology in power, and the top and bottom of those hierarchies by sex will consist of exactly the same two demographics: top will be men with penises, bottom will be women with vulvas.

Huh. The very next post after the one I replied to also went straight for the spleen. I wonder why spleens are the go to example of sexual similarity. Probably because nobody knows what one looks like.

The DNA of the brain will be male or female but this is no more significant than the DNA of your spleen or your white bloodcells or your eye being male or female. Yes, you have XY chromosomes in one sex, XX in the other but individual organs don't function differently.

They do develop slightly differently due to different environment as discussed above, but that's not an essential difference, just a tendency. This can have significant outcomes differences on the large scale - such as IQ distribution being different between the sexes - but it doesn't mean you can take any given brain and say it is specifically male or female any more than you can with a spleen.

And in any case, a trans person doesn't have the DNA of their opposite sex, they have the DNA of their own sex so the point is academic.

Let’s hope his Phd supervisors are as generous in their interpretation of empirical data as he appears to be.

Well yes, dna will be different, as will skeletal remains, since skull shapes are different as are pelvic structures. And apparently blood. But a brain is a brain. You might as well say looking at a spleen or an appendix can tell you if it’s previous owner was male or female.

I do believe that the male brain, dna, skeleton, is different to the females.

I am glad he’s also said you can’t tell by looking at an mri scan if a brain is male or female.

Even if there were a female type brain and if that typen of brain were found in a male body, it wouldn't matter. We don't organise society by brain type, we organise it by body type.

Can you imagine if we determined sex and sexuality by scanning peoples brains rather than their observing their sex and who they are actually attracted to.

Im pleased to inform you mr jackson, it turns out you arent the straight man you id as , you are a bisexual women!

Been following this chap - a neuroscientist - on Twitter for a while. He has loads of information on brain differences etc. Seems like most of the 'research' cited does not control for same sex attraction... https://twitter.com/NeuroSGS/status/1551155044267032577

Do you realise how few people can actually interpret brain anatomy at this level? And how many brain injuries there are? Maybe Stonewall could use their money to fund some medics to overcome the shortage to ‘discover’ this and then once they have qualified after years and years they could go on do some much more useful work with people with brain abnormalities.

The reality is, if there was an aspect of the brain that could be used to diagnose ‘gender’ or even ‘gender dysphoria’ then it would be used.

A poster keeps posting stuff about this and it never makes sense.

As pp said, a brain does react to specific hormones, it also reacts to repeated stimuli such as in the taxi driver example. That has never made it more than wishful thinking that a male trans brain is ‘female’ at all. It is just wishful thinking at this point. It is interesting though.

So should people have brain scans before they undergo medical care? What happens to those whose brains don’t show any difference - do they get told they are faking it?

I asked a neurosurgeon could they definitely tell the difference of women and men and they said no.

There is however, a bit you can stimulate to ‘see god’ or get a religious experience. Which I reckon is being stimulated by this gender ideology in the absence of religion.

She really was going to read the whole paper to him! She was a very fast talker, but still.