Elliot Page undergoes “lifesaving” “top surgery”

[OnWednesdaysWeWearMink]

BBC R1 news beat has just reported that Elliot page has undergone “life saving” “top surgery”.

Here is the related web article: www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-57239448

This reporting perpetuates the narrative that people will commit suicide if they don’t get the right sort of treatment. I find it deeply irresponsible. Does anyone know if Samaritans are tackling this sort of coverage in their media guidelines? I’d hope work is going on behind the scenes as they are a fantastic charity. (I assume they are not captured?)

A double mastectomy is usually lifesaving when it comes to breast cancer... so I find calling an elective cosmetic procedure lifesaving pretty insulting. But that’s just me being petty and not the main point.

if you look at brain scans of trans people, their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender - which makes it a different scenario again.
Where's your evidence of this? As far as I'm aware, male and female brains are almost identical and indistinguishable from each other apart from size factors.
And it’s been repeatedly proven that gender confirmation surgery does reduce suicide ideation/attempts in trans people. It’s not really something we can debate or argue because there’s the data behind it.
Show us the data.

if you look at brain scans of trans people, their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender - which makes it a different scenario again.

This has been disproven, hasn't it?

their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender

Do you mean sex, or gender?

Do you mean a trans woman’s brain looks like a female brain and not a male brain and that they are therefore female?

If so, why does their brain shape decide what they are and not their body shape? I’m taller that the average man, so you could say my height is just like that of a man. So does that make me a man? If not, why would a male-looking brain make me a man?

Also, have the brain shapes of GNC people who do not identify as trans been compared as well? Maybe there are a range of brain shapes in both sexes, like there are shapes of all body parts. What if a butch lesbian has a male looking brain? Is she therefore a n if she doesn’t think she is?

And lastly, if you can tell if someone is trans by a brain scan, then we should not be allowing self ID or taking seriously any claim to be trans. We should just do a brain scan, surely? That would make sure no one transitions who isn’t really trans and then people wouldn’t end up detransitioning. That makes the most sense doesn’t it?

These are genuine questions that I’d like to know the answers to.

if you look at brain scans of trans people, their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender - which makes it a different scenario again

This doesn't even mean anything. It's baseless bullshit.

I call hard bullshit on that one.

What about Pip Bunce, who is a woman half the time, and a man the other half?

What's his brain then? Not pink or blue but a sort of hazy purplish?

Brain scans can’t reliably differentiate between male and female brains, for starters. The only consistently reliable difference that’s been found is that male brains are slightly bigger on average, just as male bodies are. Talking about male and female brains makes as much sense as talking about male or female kidneys or lungs: they’re male if they’re in a male body, and female if they’re in a female body.

I remember reading this a while back:

www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

"Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.

Passionately argued and unfailingly astute, Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different―a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society."

"if you look at brain scans of trans people, their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender."

Doesn't a 'female' brain inside a male body disprove the very idea that there are gendered brains? If a male has a female brain, that means that brains aren't gendered! Brains would only be gendered if only males had 'male' brains and only females had 'female' brains.
(And as an aside...in my grad school neuroscience classes, none of the lecturers thought the human brain was sexually dimorphic.)

Scans of post surgical trans people brains are similar in one respect , showing signs of having experienced trauma

On average also women are more likely to have signs of that than men

But men can have that also and it's something squired over life not something people are born with

There was a paper that had to issue a correction to explain that was what they had seen

The brain thing all seems like a decades long No True Scotsman Fallacy.

For the uninitiated, the fallacy goes like this:

Person 1: no Scotsman puts salt on his porridge.
Person 2: Yerwot? My cousin Dan has salted his porridge every day for thirty years.
Person 1: Your cousin is it? Well, notrueScotsman puts salt on his porridge!

Possibly followed by:he should bugger back off to England with you!

Instead of questioning the original assumption in response to new information, fault is just found with later information to justify why it doesn't actually count.

At some point after some study or other, we developed some observations on how to distinguish a male brain and a female brain.

Male brains had this feature. Female brains had that feature. This was used to justify (in learned tones) why women were under-represented in well paid professions in various popsci magazines. Our brains, see?

Then, someone points out that some male humans may have a neurological feature after all and it's:

"No true male brain has that feature. Bugger off, you're a woman!"

All seems rather daft. We all trace our origins back to the fusion of one egg cell and one sperm cell. 99.982% of human babies born were conceived with an XX or XY karyotype, by the way. And there has been no significant correlation between people with intersex conditions and people who identify as transgender, so let's not discuss that. People with variations of sexual development have said to keep them out of it!

So there you are, with a single cell that resulted from the fusion of the X egg and a Y sperm, rapidly undergoing cell division. Every cell is an undifferentiated, i.e. unspecialised cell, but each is XY in the DNA in the cell nucleus. Then as the weeks progress, cell differentiation starts happening, which means specialised cells, like bone, skin, muscle, pancreas andneuralcells start forming. Every single one carrying the same DNA instructions as that first cell, but following different sections of it.

Of course the male fetus has a male brain! Where would a female brain have come from? No-one would talk of a male baby having female kidneys if his kidneys were smaller than usual for a boy, would they?

P.S. Women tend to have smaller feet than men. Does that mean a man who wears UK size 5 shoes has female feet?

Just read this article on the BBC website:
"Adult brains cannot be neatly categorised into male brains and female brains either. In a study analysing 1,400 brain scans, neuroscientist Daphna Joel and colleagues found "extensive overlap between the distributions of females and males for all grey matter, white matter, and connections assessed". That is, overall we are more similar to each other than different."
www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-gender-biases-that-shape-our-brains

"if you look at brain scans of trans people, their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender."

I thought scientists had concluded that, while there are some tendencies for particular characteristics in male/female brains, it is actually not possible to tell for sure which are male and which are female just from looking at a brain scan. And in addition, the brain is plastic meaning that a lot of the way it develops depends on the environment of the person (eg. I have read things about how attachment issues in babies and small children can literally cause brain damage, because certain vital connections are not made, in very layman's terms!)

Also if brain scans can be used as a diagnostic tool, why don't doctors use this, particularly when deciding whether to put a child onto a lifetime medical pathway? What if a trans person had a brain scan and it showed they 'weren't actually transgender'? Would they have to revoke their trans status? What if Paris Lees/Munroe Bergdorf/Elliot Page had brain scans and it showed they weren't trans after all?

So WeavingWandering, can you answer these questions about the brain scan issue please?

@SoMuchForSummerLove

I call hard bullshit on that one.

What about Pip Bunce, who is a woman half the time, and a man the other half?

What's his brain then? Not pink or blue but a sort of hazy purplish?

Also Eddie Izzard who is she/ he/ man / woman / transvestite / transexual as he / she feels that day.

Also aren't there an infinite number of genders? So why would brains only be gendered male or female?

Ah, the ladybrain fallacy.

And it’s been repeatedly proven that gender confirmation surgery

Please, please explain why removing breasts has anything to do with having a male gender, @WeavingWandering ?

What have sexed bodies got to do with gender, which is an innate feeling? To say that having no breasts "confirms" you are male is hugely offensive to trans men with breasts.

Were you confusing sex and gender there, do you think?

Maybe gender issues are far more basic than teenagers today really understand. I remember being very scared of the effect my morphing female body had on the opposite sex. Add to this the peer pressure to bare virtually all on social media and you create real problems.
I wasn’t ready to “show off” my new body at 14/15 and wore baggy clothes to hide the curves and boobs. I did grow into it though so by late teens and early twenties I was ready to embrace my fully developed body. Happy to show it off and confident to share it.
Social media puts so much pressure on young girls it’s no surprise that some are so petrified of their changing bodies that when medical science presents them with a solution they are more than happy to go down this road. We know that the teenage brain is immature and lacks the ability to think rationally or risk assess. They do not understand permanence.
More research needs to be done on the long term effect of hormone blockers. But for some individuals putting a temporary block on puberty particularly when it is early may give their brains ( and their peer group) time to catch up so they don’t feel so isolated.
I do not support hormone blockers but if a child is truly suicidal because of their body maybe it would give them time to have appropriate psychiatric treatment and also the control they feel they are missing.

@CardinalLolzy

Were you confusing sex and gender there, do you think?

And therein lies the entire problem really.

Does that mean a man who wears UK size 5 shoes has female feet?

It means she is female, clearly!

if you look at brain scans of trans people, their brains are literally made like the brain of their identified gender - which makes it a different scenario again

"Literally made like"

I am enamoured of this language, it is quite endearing. It suggests a cute story where babies are found under bushes with elves and fairies churning them out in little workshops under the toadstools and occasionally they literally put a male brain they made with frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails in a female baby. Sweet but sexist story.

How is a brain literally made like a gender?

What is a gender 'like' that it can be seen in the structure of a brain?

Utter utter bullshit.