Male/female brain evidence

[DogDaysNeverEnd]

Can anyone help find the paper alluded to in this listicle please? www.boredpanda.com/things-easier-to-do-for-women/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

I think it's point 17 about hearing difference. In the comments someone claims that trans people perform in accordance with the side they transitioned to even if they haven't actually transitioned i.e. it's not a hormonal difference but a neurological one. They don't provide any reference, and I can't help but be sceptical, but fairs fair, if there is such a study it would be fascinating. I did some searching and came up with studies but nothing mentioned trans people participating so I'm assuming BS.

I have a visit with SIL who is very TWAW and it would be great to be able to counter this kind of discussion.

Sorry, I misremembered the post - it's the snippet itself that makes the trans claim which is supported by a "neuroscientist" in the comments. Why it would be posted without a link to the study is beyond me

Having a few issues doing this on my phone butt here is the post;

^Binaural Hearing. Using headphones, play different recordings per ear which each contain mostly gibberish with the occasional intelligible word thrown in.

Women are consistently better at recognising the words, particularly when two intelligible words are played at the same time. Men have more difficulty with this.

The reason this experiment is fascinating and repeated many times is that cis women and trans women perform just as well as each other, with trans men and cis men together doing generally worse. We don't know why.^

Frankly, a blogpost that uses the phrase ‘some random Karen’ and tells said person to ‘screw off’ amidst outpourings of male self-pity about all the things that are easier for women (example ‘knowing the baby is yours’) wouldn’t fill me with the idea that anything referred to actually existed.

There was a studdmy that was constantly referenced that foubd transgender brain were 'more similar' (ie not the same) as the sex they were transitioning to. That study also found no difference prepuberty. But everyone quoting it failed to mention at puberty the transgender participants started Tryptorelin. In otherwords what it showed was an association between Tryprorelin and brain differences. That this drug affected brain development a) isn't a surprise and b) again questions how reversible/harmless pause these drugs are.

*study. Hate this phone. So many more typos than my last phone.

If someone is saying this is 'evidence', ask them for a link to the original research. If they can't do this it probably doesn't exist or doesn't say what they think it does.

I suspect it's bollocks, or you would have got a citation.

As we know from posters here, actual citations from TRAs almost always undermine the claim being made.

If it's not bollocks, then it's related to something real and concrete that correlates with their "cis/trans" cohort. Either sexuality, or hormones, most likely. So it would have no relevance to "transgender" in the broader sense.

It's like saying "tall people tend to have beards". True, but it's not the tallness that causes the beard. There's an underlying more concrete variable.

I think it's the mixing the valid with the utter shite that is problematic. I'm all for men being able to ask for help when the need it, but totally agree there are some questionable points on that list. And I'm not just bitter because my giant lady hands don't fit in a pringles can...

There have been threads discussing this and digging up the best sources and studies so far available, which ultimately concluded there wasn't much evidence and it was all a bit inconclusive - especially as sample sizes were small and as Tibtom says, it's hard to tell what's caused a brain difference when people are taking hormone treatments that can cause those effects.

Plus of course, why should brain scans mean anything? What if my nose or my feet are more like those of an average man, does that make me male? No. So why should brain shape or whatever? Why should a brain scan matter more than the rest of the body being male sexed?

The other thing to point out is that if someone really believes trans people have special brains matching their desired "gender" and this can be shown in a scan, then why would they want self ID? You could simply test who is really trans using a scan. Trans people surely wouldn't want anyone to be faking it and using up their resources, or giving them a bad name by being predatory and not really trans. So they should be in favour of brain scans and not self ID.

Strangely they don't seem to pursue it when you point this out.

It wouldn't matter if we were all drones with identical brains. If bodies were sexed there would still be male drones and female drones. If you have a 'female' brain in a male body, it isn't a female brain. If there is a typical male brain and a typical female brain it would still just mean it was an atypical male brain.

As it is, most sex differences are 2 normal overlapping population distribution curves. Some with a significant overlap, some with very little overlap. Mostly attributed to the action of hormones at different stages. That means on any given measure you would expect a proportion of males to present in the female range and vis versa.

@CircularReasoning

It wouldn't matter if we were all drones with identical brains. If bodies were sexed there would still be male drones and female drones. If you have a 'female' brain in a male body, it isn't a female brain. If there is a typical male brain and a typical female brain it would still just mean it was an atypical male brain.

As it is, most sex differences are 2 normal overlapping population distribution curves. Some with a significant overlap, some with very little overlap. Mostly attributed to the action of hormones at different stages. That means on any given measure you would expect a proportion of males to present in the female range and vis versa.

Yup.

If a brain is in a male sexed body it's a male brain.

@Tibtom

There was a studdmy that was constantly referenced that foubd transgender brain were 'more similar' (ie not the same) as the sex they were transitioning to. That study also found no difference prepuberty. But everyone quoting it failed to mention at puberty the transgender participants started Tryptorelin. In otherwords what it showed was an association between Tryprorelin and brain differences. That this drug affected brain development a) isn't a surprise and b) again questions how reversible/harmless pause these drugs are.

Can you reference this one please.

I find it really surprising if a study along these lines has been done - you're saying that researchers gained consent from prepubertal children's parents for brain scans of their kids before medication was given?

Interesting that people who deny the very obvious differences between male and female heart, lungs, liver, gut and all other vital organs in the torso are so keen on finding a difference in the one vital organ that is indistinguishable by sex.

I read an article today (Rise of the Trans Medical Taliban) via Genspect. As a scientist, the father of a boy who felt he could be trans, wanted to understand, from a medical and scientific perspective, what was going on with his son. He has found a lot of data (which it appears many researchers seem to be ignoring - no surprise there) that show a variety of treatments that could help, rather than the typical ones used at the moment. For example, there was one where it was observed that if they reduced the patient's testosterone levels, the desire to identify as the opposite sex completely went away! He states, "the brain is clearly impacted by hormonal changes in the body and that the brain is an endocrine organ".

He also discusses how oestrogen 'feminizes' the brain and completely dismisses it. What it appears to do is change blood flow, reduce the size of the brain, interfere with executive function, cause dangerously high builds up of glutamate and lead to early on-set dementia and high risk of stroke.

I read the comments on the article you linked and yes the commentator does seem to feel she is some sort of neuro researcher. However she is also a keen advocate of 'transmen are men' etc and seems to be a person (in other threads) who knows everything there is to know about everything. I am not saying that she isn't but at the same time I think if you want something to be true you go looking for it. I would also question how she dismisses another comment about 'hormones' considering they play such an important role in brain development and function.

I know this doesn't answer your query but thought it may be useful.

Was anyone else a bit creeped out by that article? I couldn't help but feel I was being educated to lower my boundaries and to ignore my gut.

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences is a fantastic book, which is well worth reading for a wider perspective on experiments showing gender differences.

The author (a neuroscientist scientist herself) looks at various experiments and analyses them using her own expertise. Spoiler: mostly when you look at multiple experiments together rather than just looking at one in isolation, you find flaws in many of those experiments which seem to show gender differences .

Sometimes it's quite subtly reminding someone of their gender (eg telling them you are testing for something stereotypically gendered, or even just getting them to write their name!). Repeated experiments have shown that these significantly change the experiment's results.

There do seem to be some genuine differences in men and women's behaviours which experiments show robustly, and seem to be rooted in biology not upbringing, but it's not necessarily the differences you would expect.

Some of these experiments show people self-editing - not even aware they are doing it - so I think it's conceivable that sometimes experiments might seem to show Trans people performing similarly to the gender they have switched to... But that might not be due to genuine brain differences.

The experiments that show that being reminded of our gender changes our behaviour is one of the reasons I'm against giving pronouns. It's not harmless: it reinforces gender stereotypes.

(The other reason is that as a woman in a non-gender-conforming career, I don't want to emphasise something which is frequently held against me)

And:

amzn.to/3ljVTia

It could be quite interesting if it were true that male trans-identifying subjects performed more like women on linguistic tests. I'd tend to wonder if the same would be true of gay male subjects.

I think the underlying good faith use of looking for such brain differences would be to find a medical explanation for sex dysphoria. Though that is not why activists are interested in general.

But I've never heard of the particular test and I would want a reference before taking it too seriously.

I've just spent a good 10 mins searching google-scholar for all likely combinations of words that could find a paper on binaural listening in transgender participants and I've found nothing. There are a few with basic sex diffs in binaural listening but even there results are mixed.

This one suggests that transmen improve on spatial memory tests when they take hormones but no other changes
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453020301402#fig0010

This is where you need to read Gina Rippon's book, the gendered brain.

That's an example of neurotrash.

It's a nuanced area as there clearly are some mild sex differences in a few areas - but it's how statistics play into this.

This is a good, but neuro challenging, summary:

sfonline.barnard.edu/neurogenderings/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-sex-gender-brains-and-behavior-a-guide-for-academics-journalists-parents-gender-diversity-advocates-social-justice-warriors-tweeters-facebookers-and-ever/

He also discusses how oestrogen 'feminizes' the brain and completely dismisses it. What it appears to do is change blood flow, reduce the size of the brain, interfere with executive function, cause dangerously high builds up of glutamate and lead to early on-set dementia and high risk of stroke

Sorry, is this in women generally (what oestrogen does to all of us) or just to males who take Oestrogen as part of hormone therapy (you've got me a bit worried).

(Basically the two authors/ researchers JustWaking linked to writing together in one paper.)

@YetAnotherSpartacus

He also discusses how oestrogen 'feminizes' the brain and completely dismisses it. What it appears to do is change blood flow, reduce the size of the brain, interfere with executive function, cause dangerously high builds up of glutamate and lead to early on-set dementia and high risk of stroke

Sorry, is this in women generally (what oestrogen does to all of us) or just to males who take Oestrogen as part of hormone therapy (you've got me a bit worried).

No.

We need oestrogen to protect against dementia.