Resources/articles on de-bunking the biological or neurological reasons for being trans.

Based on this post alone, you should definitely read Rippon's book.

It's packed with this sort of thing - things like male/female difference in 3-D mental rotation tasks vanishing if you control for the amount of time people have spent playing with Lego, which has intruction books full of diagrams exactly like the ones used for the tasks. And early science and philosophy on femaleness, and some forgotten female scientists, and all sorts of other stuff. Great book. (Apart from about a page and a half that has a decidedly 'shoehorned in by the publisher' feel - you'll know it when you see it.)

A warning, though - you'll end up with a long list of other things to read as a result.

As others have already said, if gender incongruence does have a neurological basis,
(a) it still doesn't make the person a different sex but just somebody with a neurological difference;
(b) we wouldn't be able to tell whether it is caused by socialisation/"nurture" because the brain especially in young people is amazingly plastic (malleable);
(c) then proponents of genderism should be delighted to use this amazing diagnostic tool to identify the "genuine" sufferers, and yet they are mysteriously reluctant.

No, it isn’t “just as plausible” that gender is an innate thing independent of sex.

I'm a neuroscientist but I don't have time to write a great long article in reply right now.

two major papers that I will point out

This study of over 5000 brains shows that there are some subtle statistical differences but also massive overlap. this means that there is no clear way to define a 'male brain' and 'female brain' based on structure alone.
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/28/8/2959/4996558

This study of 1000s of children's brains looked at both sex (at birth) and gender (as reported by parents). They tried to train an AI to predict from the brain scan if that brain was male or female (sex) or had a masculine / feminine gender. They find that they can predict (above chance) for both but making predictions for sex is much easier and more robust. this suggests that gender is not obvious in the brain. They say "Our predictions of gender (beyond sex) are far less accurate than predictions of sex or gender alone, suggesting that gender may be a more complex construct that is not as clearly represented in functional connectivity patterns."
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adn4202

And for anyone reading academic papers around this topic, one of the first things you should look for is how many people contributed to the data. If there are only 10 or 20 people, or even 100, that is probably not enough datapoints to have any strong conclusions with robust statistics. the papers about looked 1000s of brains and so they are more reliable than smaller studies.

I think you have perhaps missed the point.

“Gender” doesn’t matter, it isn’t important as a means of defining groups, it is just that every person is an individual, we shouldn’t be attaching microlabels to tiny differences, it is just a load of navel gazing and self-absorption.

Your sex however, is an easily verifiable fact about you. Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, it doesn’t matter what your sex is. But where it does, where women are disadvantaged physically by being generally smaller, not as strong, and vulnerable to assault, and discriminated against in the workplace because we might get pregnant, or because we have caring responsibilities it really does matter.

Sex is just your reproductive class; it doesn’t have to dictate your interests and abilities.

Sex is defined, tangible, observable, testable.

Gender is ? a feeling ?

And you know this how?

Just as plausible that your understanding of gender is socially conditioned.

Sex is binary. It’s based on reproductive class. There are precisely two: male, and female. “Gender” is the socially constructed framework based on sex. That’s it.

I’m not sure if you are using “gender” to mean “sex” here.

Sex is binary, and gender (or gender expression or “personality”) is on a spectrum. In fact it is multi-dimensional spectrum as there are so many axes of variation between human beings.

Variation in gender expression is not an illness.

Believing your sex is the opposite of what it materially is, or believing you will be happy if you can surgically remove your secondary sexual characteristics, or take opposite sex hormones to grow breasts or facial hair easily meets the criteria for some sort of illness.

I should have said in my post that the big problem with identifying any differences in adult brains is the fact that our brains change over our lifetime, and doing something a lot will develop the relevant part of the brain - the classic example is the changes in the brains of London taxi-drivers caused by constantly navigating their way around their mental map of London..

So I guess if someone 'does stereotype femininity' instead of 'doing stereotype masculinity' for long enough, that's could show up in their brain/brain activity.

Any perceivable differences in brains seem to be a result, not a cause..

I haven't read this myself - maybe I'll actually order it this time instead of thinking 'that looks interesting' and forgetting about it🙄:

The Gendered Brain by Professor Gina Rippon

"The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain
An agenda-setting book that demolishes the myth of the male or female brain

‘This book is about an idea that has its roots in the eighteenth century and still persists in the twenty-first century. This is the notion that you can ‘sex’ a brain, that you can describe a brain as ‘male’ or ‘female’ and that you can attribute any differences in behaviour, abilities, achievements, personality, even hopes and expectations to the possession of one or the other type of brain...'"

Professor Gina Rippon - Author & Professor Emeritus of Cognitive NeuroImaging at Aston University, UK

People’s perspective on this whole issue surely it depends whether you believe that gender is binary and that any variation from that should be treated as abnormal or an illness that needs treating, or that there are more than two forms of gender that are innate and a natural part of human diversity.

I too am open to the idea that there may be a difference in the brains of people with genuine gender dysphoria. I have a friend who has GD and says this is how it feels.
If such a thing was proven, great! It might pave the way for treatments to help those suffering.
But it does not mean that men are women, and it does not mean that anything should be changed at a societal level. Our society is organised based on body-sex. Even if a majority of people wanted to change it to 'brain-sex' instead, it wouldn't work. The only times when men and women are separated is when body-sex matters for safety/privacy (eg changing rooms), or when there is a demonstrable advantage to one sex in competitions, either due to physical attributes (eg rugby) or social conditioning based on how society treats body-sex (eg chess, positions on boards). None of that would be affected by brain-sex so reorganising would be pointless.

That has always been my argument too.

I also point out the lengths that WPATH have gone to remove any indication in the DSM that trans is a medical condition (without completely removing it, because they need there to be something there otherwise US healthcare insurance won’t cover hormones and surgeries - they walk a fine line; it’s quite interesting.). If the supposed medical experts in the field (let’s assume they are what they identify as for the purpose of this argument; I don’t think they are, but anyway) do not want research done into possible medically verifiable causes for trans patients, despite wanting to be able to medically treat such patients, I personally start to wonder why. Is it because there is no such cause? Or that the only causes they can identify are so closely linked to mental health issues that we definitely do not treat with surgery? I haven’t dug deeply enough into this to have a solid opinion, but it does raise a hundred red flags to me.

Excelllent point.

Good to see some tools here to help with debunking this.

My argument when faced with this is normally to point out that if there were genuine biomarkers or significant differences, they would be used as part of the diagnostic process.

Given that diagnosis is still entirely based around self-reported feelings, there cannot have been any significant findings that would allow accurate identification of those who are “trans”.

Given the medical process is severe and damaging, if there was a real diagnostic tool, it would be in use.

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Dr Az Hakeem is really good on why people have trans identities and refers briefly to the evidence on different brains.

My personal view is that there is likely to be a 'medical' reason why some people have settled gender dysphoria in adulthood. But its certainly not that they have a female brain trapped in a male body. Why do only female brains end up in male bodies, why not female hearts or lungs or livers or femurs. Its such a silly idea.

To some degree, possibly? But I don't think everyone experiences a disconnect with their actual body to the degree that, for example, anorexic people do?

Isn’t that everyone?

I would have thought your tech background would give you an appetite for objective scientific appraisal of the phenomena.

Yeah, I'm browsing the net for more information, and this has come up. It makes sense to me: in both cases, it's a matter of the person not seeing their body as it actually is.

I think we're not talking about the same thing? The difference in the default mode network is not linked to sex.

I think (though it’s been a while since I read the literature, so I may be misremembering, but I don’t think I am) weak connectivity in that same area is also seen in people with anorexia.

There is no evidence of any underlying difference in the brains of “trans” people whether they have GD, AGP or whatever. There is some evidence of differences in those who are same sex attracted.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the only people with any sort of sex atypical cerebral differentiation occurs in homosexual individuals (on average).