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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Scientists please gather round

80 replies

GenderApostate · 16/03/2018 15:45

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17563-z.pdf

Would any of you like to unpick what is claimed in this study ? 🙂
Prick News are all over it 🙄

OP posts:
AssassinatedBeauty · 16/03/2018 15:52

What statements are Pink News making based on this study?

Chanelprincess · 16/03/2018 16:00

What exactly is there to 'unpick'? The results don't look earth shattering to me from a read through of the paper.

AssassinatedBeauty · 16/03/2018 16:06

Having had a quick skim of the PNs article, it seems that this apparently incontrovertible evidence that people are born as transgender, and are "closer" to their acquired gender than their birth one. (Although I'm assuming they mean trans women here, as this research wasn't about trans men).

That's absolutely not what this research seems to be saying to me.

deydododatdodontdeydo · 16/03/2018 16:12

Haven't read the Pink News article but the paper seems to be saying that untreated and hormone treated TW =/= cis women.

Ereshkigal · 16/03/2018 16:16

I read on a feminist fb group about some research which was being misinterpreted when it seems to say the opposite. I've had a look at this and can't see it either. What are PN saying?

gandalfspants · 16/03/2018 16:17

At a glance, that paper says TW's brains are much more like men's than women's, but slightly more like women's brains than most other men's brains.

I bet that's not what us being reported though.

UpstartCrow · 16/03/2018 16:19

Did the cis people have body dysmorphia?

DjunaBarnes · 16/03/2018 16:23

theres an interesting discussion of this over at reddit/gendercrit www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/84twlv/study_investigates_brain_structure_of_trans/ as well, with some good points

Xenophile · 16/03/2018 16:25

I fear Penis News are probably not best placed to be able to correctly interpret the results of that study. I further fear that Prick News are working from a point that could not be said to be either scientific or unbiased in their reporting of the study.

The study does not say what Penis News thinks it does.

DjunaBarnes · 16/03/2018 16:26

I think penis news might struggle to interpret anything given their 'reporters' all appear to be gender studies MA students

Elendon · 16/03/2018 16:27

Firstly, sex is not assigned at birth, it is usually confirmed because most mothers and partners are told the sex of their foetus. Some parents need this to establish whether or not the neonate will need treatment due to it's sex, for example haemophilia.

Assigned sex is usually given to intersex neonates and then the parents are asked to confirm it.

MRI studies on the subconscious part of the brain are subjective in the analysis. In other words, it's woo. These studies can be couched in words and phrases to add gravitas to the study but the outcome is still subjective.

And anyway, apart from all that, this is ostensibly a study on the long term use of synthetic female hormones on males.

imnolaidee · 16/03/2018 16:39

DjunaBarnes the reddit postings on this are pretty good. I had a very brief read of the paper and the small sample size jumped out at me.

One of the reddit posters pulled this out - which also jumped out at me as having possible conflation value and significant:

“...Decreased insular volumes have been reported in depressed subjects with melancholic symptoms36, and these changes in insular and prefrontal cortical volumes may be specifically associated with the manifestation of psychotic symptoms in major depressive disorder.”

I also know there have been questions about using MRI as a technique in this type of study - I just cannot find the paper on it - I'll keep searching.

TallulahWaitingInTheRain · 16/03/2018 16:52
  1. In terms of whole-brain volumes, TIMs (whether treated with hormones or not) had brains that were congruent with their sex (I.e., larger than women's and the same as men's)
  1. They had reduced grey matter volumes in a very specific brain area (the insula) compared to women. Differences with men were less reliable but in the same direction. The authors point out that reduced grey matter volumes in this same area are characteristic of some forms of depression and suggest the findings in TIMs are attributable to gender dysphoria.
Ereshkigal · 16/03/2018 16:53

Penis News know that lying about something about trans issues is effective propaganda and that most of their readers won't understand the study as it's a specialised and complex area of science. They will lap up all the "cisgender" and "assigned at birth" crap.

Ereshkigal · 16/03/2018 16:54

That Reddit discussion is great.

TheXXFactor · 16/03/2018 16:55

Fucking hell, that's one of the worst-written papers I have ever read - can't believe that it got published in Nature.

Basically, they used MRI scans to compare the size of various brain components in 4 groups: men, women, TIM before hormone treatment and TIM on hormone treatment. There are loads of potential flaws in their methodology: the groups studied were very small, for example, and it's not clear that the scientists assigned to analyse the MRIs were blind to (unaware of) which group each patient came from - so there is a high risk that they weren't objective.

More fundamentally, though, their hypothesis doesn't fit their own data. They seem to be saying that there are innate biological differences between biological men and TIM, and that TIM are on a spectrum between bio men and bio women. If this hypothesis were true, you would expect the pre-treatment TIMs' results to be somewhere between the bio men and bio women. But that's not what they found: where they give the results of a direct comparison between the 4 groups, the differences between the pre-treatment TIMs and bio women are actually greater than between bio men and bio women, in most respects. So, if anything, the TIMs are more masculine than the bio men! The hormone-treated TIMs are a bit more like the women than the pre-treatment TIMs, though not very. What this suggests is the exact opposite of their hypothesis: there are no innate differences between TIMs and other men, but taking female hormones (not surprisingly) may have some effect on the brain.

In most cases, though they avoid a direct comparison between the 4 groups, but just give comparisons between two groups at a time and without the actual data: they just tell you that one group had a bigger brain component than the other. This is highly suspicious. I can't think of any reason for not giving the raw data than that it would have further undermined their hypothesis.

imnolaidee · 16/03/2018 17:02

TheXXFactor - you're great!

Star
Lancelottie · 16/03/2018 17:07

Sci Rep isn't the main Nature journal (understatement). It publishes huge volumes of research (open access, unlike the main journal) and does it quickly -- more like PLOS One than Nature flagship research.

TheXXFactor · 16/03/2018 17:10

Thanks imnolaidee Smile, but caveat: I'm not a neuroscientist or radiologist, and the paper is so badly written that I struggled to work out what it is trying to say. Hopefully someone with neuroscience expertise will be along later.

TheXXFactor · 16/03/2018 17:11

Ah thanks, Lance - that makes sense. I just glanced at the URL so assumed it was the proper Nature.

TallulahWaitingInTheRain · 16/03/2018 17:16

They seem to be saying that there are innate biological differences between biological men and TIM, and that TIM are on a spectrum between bio men and bio women

Did I read the right paper? I didn't think they were saying this at all! I thought they said TIM brains were mostly like male brains with some specific changes which they attributed to depression and to taking a load of hormones.

TheXXFactor · 16/03/2018 17:21

Well that's what the conclusion seems to say, tallulah, but the intro seems to say the opposite.

CapnHaddock · 16/03/2018 17:26

Here's the idiotic clickbait Penis News article: www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/03/15/transgender-people-are-born-that-way-a-new-study-has-found/

(but also demonstrates that the study's authors were hoping to find difference - quel surprise)

HairyBallTheorem · 16/03/2018 17:30

XX is spot on - what jumped out at me was that "cis women" [ sic] were used as the null hypothesis and (table 1 IIRC) showed (p values less than 0.05) that the distributions for both "cis men" and the pre and post hormone treatment TIMs were significantly different from the female distribution. However TIMs had marginally smaller volumes than "cis men" - but (and I think this is a really telling omission on the part of the research team) they did not quite p values for the differences between the two categories of TIM and the "cis men" so we are not told whether these differences are statistically significant or not.

BeyondDeadlySiren · 16/03/2018 17:31

I haven't read the paper yet, but did see the article in PN. Weirdly the conclusion in the text in the article didn't match the headline.

It was almost as if there was some sort of agenda..?