Scientists please gather round

[GenderApostate]

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 🙄

For once I have some sympathy with PN (ok, not really) - I have a postgraduate degree in a biomedical science and I'm struggling to work out WTF the paper's saying

Ah, I didn't read the penis news version.

They really need to include mental health measures or controls in these studies given the dysphoria confound.

The main thing is there's no evidence whatsoever for 'ladybrain' here.

I'm no scientist but I'm glad other people found the report in Nature incomprehensible. Maybe they ran it through Google Translate or something? It appears to be in a language that looks quite like English but isn't.

Or maybe, judging by the PN quotes, the authors are obfuscating the fact that their study didn't show what they'd hoped

I'm not a good assessor of scientific papers - but I have a general question of wether in this paper 'trans-ness' is assumed as something causal rather than an effect. Is it not equally possible to look at the data and say that cross-sex identification could be the result not the cause of any putative brain abnormality?

I just had a only quick look at it TheXXfactor and felt really sorry for the reviewers. That is one hell of a paper to read through line for line.

Djuna, I haven't seen a single example of a paper that finds differences in transpeoples brains, that even attempts to adequately address either causality or brain plasticity.

That's crap English, but hopefully makes sense

TheXXFactor Some of you criticisms are a bit off the mark.

The analysis is all done by automated statistical procedures so there isn't really any room for researcher bias to effect the results (short of fraud).

The raw data here are the actual brain scans so I'm not sure how easily they could have published it (although there may have been summary data they could have published instead).

I also don't see where they claim that that the TW sample are on a spectrum between the male and female populations.

OP, bottom line is the study seems to have made a modest but interesting finding which probably doesn't have a big impact on either side of the debate, but which one of the authors has tried to hype up in a misleading way in their subsequent press comments. I don't see that there's anything here that is worthy of being picked apart (and indeed I think picking apart research because you don't agree with the results is intellectually dubious to say the least).

You can't generally address causality using brain imaging. All they are looking at is whether there are differences between groups in the various brain volume measures, everything else is just speculation.

Obviously David, but that doesn't stop media reporting it when it isn't there

Its tactfully put, but the key conclusions that this paper comes to are

1. TIM's brains are mostly consistent with male brains

2. they are unlike most people's brains in a way that may be consistent with having a mental health problem

BDSiren - ah, I had naively assumed the paper said something :)

Isn't Nature where they published the proof that gathering is a female brain activity by describing the difficulty two men had shopping at a mall?

Nature is a great resource for science, especially biology.

There are other publications that try to emulate Nature but they fail spectacularly.

Well, I felt like a comprehension work-out..........

I agree with previous posters -- seems to agree that no blue-brain/pink-brain divide, hence there isn't a simple TW have lady-brains thing going on. What there does seem to be some possible indication for is a trans difference in terms of a possible 'what you think of your own body' kind of region.........
I note though that although they did restrict their TW group to TW attracted to males, they just state that gender identity and sexual orientation are distinct (hence don't really consider that some of what they are measuring might be to do with same-sex sexual orientation rather than a specific trans thing..............).

One good thing -- at least they clearly(!) state that:
"All MRI studies in this field to date have suggested that the sex/gender of the brain does not present such well-defined characteristics presented by the genitalia[12–14]."

What makes me angry though is that MRI is a valuable resource to accurately determine

internal injury
exact locations of tumours

It's expensive. It uses energy. It is not always available to all.

Why is it being used to conduct these surveys?

I note though that although they did restrict their TW group to TW attracted to males, they just state that gender identity and sexual orientation are distinct (hence don't really consider that some of what they are measuring might be to do with same-sex sexual orientation rather than a specific trans thing..............).

This concerns me a bit because it could be exploited to insinuate that gay people are really just trans people who don't know it yet. A bit like that Juno Dawson article that said all gay men really want to be women.

Christ it’s terribly written. It does look like it’s been run through google translate.

I am a scientist - more of a geneticist/dev bio/cancer bod than a neuroscientist but I’m reading it now.

Just picked this little gem out of the intro though

All MRI studies in this field to date have suggested that the sex/gender of the brain does not present such well-defined characteristics presented by the genitalia

So no lady brain then?

I shall continue perusing.

MRI is a valuable resource

Neuroscience departments are likely to have their own scanners which are maintained and run using research money. Studies like this won't be taking scanning time from hospitals under normal circumstances.

So as far as I can see:

The TIMs pre treatment (which is what you should look at) would separate with the natal men anyway.

The differences seen are pretty much what you see in certain types of mental health issues.

So not only does their null hypothesis fall down (actuallyviys not even a null hypothesis they are actively looking for difference which is bad on itself) but they offer a plausible mechanism to account for the difference which has nothing to do with gender feelings.

If anything, this is support for better mental health provision, but it’s certainly not finding that pre treatment TIMs have some sort of lady brain from birth.

Also sex isn’t assigned ffs. It’s observed.

If one of my old students or post docs have me this manuscript to submit we’d be sitting down and having a jolly good chat about paper structure, null hypothesis concepts, mechanism projection and statistics. I wouldn’t let this leave the lab tbh - it’s poor work.

First impression is that it's the type of paper that gets published in Nature not for the quality but for the citation factor and newspaper lines.

I'm leaping in here as a cognitive neuroscientist, so I have some familiarity with the topic but I don't normally work on either brain structure or sex/gender

First, the journal is not Nature (the high profile one), this is Nature Scientific Reports which publishes anything that passes a basic threshold of being OK. So all sorts of stuff.

Second, the sample size (n=20 cisfemale, n=20cismale) etc is VERY small. most studies that look for sex differences should have sample sizes around n=100 per group, but I guess that is hard to find for trans samples. But it does mean that any conclusions may be unreliable. For example, the study showing no clear male/female brain differences had n=700 scans per group in the dataset (doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509654112). When scientists report results on small sample sizes, we should always be very cautious.

Third, the whole-brain results show that transwomen are different to the ciswomen but not different to the cismen (the statistics don't allow you to say they are the same as cismen, but that is possible). A second analysis suggests that the insula is different in ciswomen compared to both hormone-naive and hormone-treated transwomen. The insula is commonly associated with interoception (feeling your body from the inside, ie, am I hungry, tired, aches & pains etc). None of the analyses suggest that transwomen are different to cismen, nor that transwomen are the same as ciswomen. But they also don't report any differences between cismen and ciswomen, so no general brain gender effects.

So overall, I don't think this study tell us much, and certainly I wouldn't take it as support for either gender-in-the-brain or something special about the brain in transwomen.

All MRI studies in this field to date have suggested that the sex/gender of the brain does not present such well-defined characteristics presented by the genitalia.... So no lady brain then?

Sadly, I don't think that's their argument. I think they are saying that your brain can be pink even if your genitals are male. So, it's quite satisfying that their data disprove this

None of the analyses suggest that transwomen are different to cismen, nor that transwomen are the same as ciswomen

Yes. That's what the abstract says. But then they seem to draw other conclusions. Weird.
I'll have to look at the whole thing on my laptop.

Wonder why this made headlines but the part where they reference a similar study done on trans identified females with different results did not

"Manzouri et al. recently conducted a morphological and functional MRI study including treatment-naïve transgender men - female sex assigned at birth - and cisgender controls. The GMV differences found in the transgender men group followed patterns related to the sex assigned at birth. "

So TIMs are born with "lady brains" (or slightly more similar to one part of some womens brains) and TIFs are too

If only someone would publish the study that Lily Madigan claims to have been a part of that definitively proves brain gender twitter.com/madigan_lily/status/966096131636723712