An interesting video about transgender medicine.

[WhatsthetruthRuth]

It’s a long one. It came up as a suggestion on YouTube after I’d watched the Jammidodger dissection of JKR’s statement (the one posted within the Atwood thread that’s on here at the moment)I started watching it and (because I had nothing better to do) ended up watching it all the way through.

I know some of you will have better things to do than spend 2 hours watching this video. But I did find it fascinating. And I found the Dr (based in The US) fascinating too. I’m deliberately not naming him in this thread because he strikes me as the sort of person who would definitely google himself. What strikes me is that there are a growing number of ‘go to’ people in this emerging field and because there are not many of them yet, they are making a name for themselves - and an absolute fortune.

Suffice to say that if you were someone struggling with gender dysphoria you would be sorely tempted to get treated by this Dr. He’s about to produce some guidelines for Transgender Healthcare that he hopes will rival the WPATH guidelines (that he thinks are woefully inadequate and out of date)

He has a very persuasive and convincing manner and totally believes that being transgender is a medical condition (definitely not a mental illness) in most cases (but admits to having treated one autogynephile) He says you could MRI a transgender person’s brain and easily see that they were transgender. And he goes into a lot of detail as to why he thinks this is the case and what some of the probable causes are.

I am not medically trained but I tried my best to follow the ‘science’. I’m wondering if anyone on MN who is medically trained could give their opinion.

I’m a serial name changer by the way who has posted on this board for years. I am honestly curious for others’ opinions and hesitated posting this in case it was thought I was being provocative. But I’m just so wanting to discuss it with other people that I thought I’d go ahead anyway.

I can't watch a lot of that Doctor. Lot of throwaway remarks which render me a little bit sceptical of him. He says there is a 'male' brain and if you scan someone you can tell if they have a male brain. Is that an accepted medical fact now?

Is this what they do at the Gender Clinics to see if someone has a male brain?

So babies must have male type brains and female type brains right? If the difference is innate. But they don't.

Ah. It would be a good way to 'assign' someone at birth. Don't know what we have here yet, be back in a mo after the brain scan!

I can't watch a lot of that Doctor. Lot of throwaway remarks which render me a little bit sceptical of him. He says there is a 'male' brain and if you scan someone you can tell if they have a male brain. Is that an accepted medical fact now?

Well, insofar as brains from men are on average larger than brains from women, I suppose you could take a punt, and if you did so repeatedly, you'd probably make more money than you lost. In the same way that we know that the average male height is about 5'11" and the average female height is about 5'5" so if you bet "this is a man" every time you got told an individual had a height over 5'8", in the long run you'd make money. You'd be wrong a lot of the time, and also the mere fact that over a long run of trials you could do this and make money doesn't mean there's such a thing as a "male height" or a "female height".

But if by this he means functional neurological structures which give rise to measurable differences in cognitive performance, the answer is no. (Lise Elliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain is very good on this.)

He says you could MRI a transgender person’s brain and easily see that they were transgender.

And yet, strangely, no one has done so.....

@Aesopfable

He says you could MRI a transgender person’s brain and easily see that they were transgender.

And yet, strangely, no one has done so.....

Then again, if you mean identify the brain of someone who has had their puberty blocked so their brain has never had the chance to mature, then possibly. Though they probably wouldn’t want to draw attention to the impact of puberty blockers on brain development...

I was going to say Aesopfable that it would make sense for this doctor to use an MRI scan to filter out those people who were seeking treatment but according to the doctor's MRI-o-Vision were not transgender.

What's the betting that everyone walking into his surgery would pass the MRI test?

It looks like we're saying the same thing in different ways.

WhatsthetruthRuth wrote - "He says you could MRI a transgender person’s brain and easily see that they were transgender."

Even if an MRI scan could show that transgender people are transgender, it will not mean that transgender people are the opposite sex. Gender identity is not sex.

Even if an MRI scan could show that transgender people are transgender, it will not mean that transgender people are the opposite sex. Gender identity is not sex.

This is an important point to remember.

A few years ago there was a neurologist who found what the popular press nicknamed "the god region" of the brain. It lit up in the brains of religious believers in MRI scanners when they reported having religious experiences (induced by religious meditation), but not in brains of atheists instructed to do relaxation exercises (nor in the brains of the theists while they were doing relaxation exercises rather than religious meditation). It worked both ways round: if you stimulated that region of the brain with electrodes, religious believers would then report feelings of the immanent presence of the divine.

The neurologist leading the team was at great pains to point out that this didn't answer the question of whether there was a god or not; it merely explained what was involved when someone reported the subjective experience of "being at one with god".

Likewise, if someone were to discover a region associated with identifying as trans (not that anyone has) - it wouldn't show that transwomen literally were women, with female brains trapped inside male bodies. It could equally well be interpreted as explaining why some men feel at such a profound, psychological level, that they ought to have been women, without in any way altering the fact that they are men.

Explaining why someone experiences the world as if it were a certain way is not the same as proving that the world actually is that way.

Oh dear 😂

Gender identity is not sex.

This. It doesn't matter what's going on in their brain. It's a red herring. It doesn't make someone of the male sex into someone of the female sex.

@Aesopfable

He says you could MRI a transgender person’s brain and easily see that they were transgender.

And yet, strangely, no one has done so.....

Bergdorf went to a clinic in Germany claiming they could do this. They tried but couldn't. It's in the programme "What makes a woman" Channel 4 did.

He says you could MRI a transgender person’s brain and easily see that they were transgender.

And yet it's not a medical condition, nor a mental condition? This is their argument not mine, it's just another 'born this way' attempt similar to using DSD conditions as debating weaponry.

So if (big IF) an MRI did prove this it would be proof of a different type of brain and therefore they are just special humans?

And if it proved that a Male brain can be 'born into' a woman's body then wouldn't the next logical step by all accounts with the scalpel-happy surgeons (looking for ground-breaking notoriety and recognition) be looking at trans brain surgery?

I'll watch as much as I can but his voice is already annoying me and I'm 3 mins in.

if you could prove that it would be a scientific discovery worthy of a nobel prize

I'm not a radiologist but I do get to look at quite a lot of brain scans. Certain pathologies like tumours are relatively easy to see. In the absence of obvious pathology they all look the same to me though I'm happy to have the size difference pointed out.