Michael Knowles responds to the idea of trans brain difference

[PorcelinaV]

An argument that comes up on the trans side:

For anyone that doesn't know, Knowles is an American conservative that works for The Daily Wire.

Even if the brain of a person who identifies as trans were closer to that of their identified gender (Narrator's voice: "They're not"), who is to say that these minor differences override than the vastly larger biological differences of sexual organs, hormone levels, etc.

He goes off on a tangent about souls which for me is irrelevant and also not a basis for argument, but his initial response to point out that she's now arguing that gender IS determined by biology is a good one to make and one I made years ago. I have found in general though that the science for brain differences is so weak that I prefer to just focus on rebutting that and keep it simple.

There ARE different tendencies between male and female brains, but my understanding is that they are developmental rather than inherent. By which I mean the different environments - size of the brain case, the bath or hormones in which they operate - lead to slightly different outcomes. A red rose was always going to grow red and not white, but the difference between male and female brains is more akin to two red roses grown in slightly different conditions.

And I've never seen any evidence that the brains of trans people follow the opposite tendency to their actual sex. And indeed, as we are ONLY talking tendencies and not clear separation that wouldn't really be meaningful anyway as a trans person would merely be an outlier for their sex amongst many other outliers who WEREN'T trans.

Of course that last point would suddenly have TRAs pipe up that other outliers were trans but just didn't know it, which is patronizing.

She didn't realise that she was putting up an argument that contradicts the 'true self/nothing to do with sex assigned at birth' argument. I have seen this pink brain/blue body position in the materials used to teach gender. This is the contradiction in the trans argument: either it's spiritual or it's material, but they have said it cannot be both and also that it is both....so which is it? They can never explain, as she could not explain, falling back on not having the exact figures only the findings.

Yes and it’s funny how these apparently innate brain differences always seem to express themselves via things like clothes and hairstyles (which we know vary hugely throughout history); and not supposedly “female” personality traits like, oh, I don’t know, being meek, quiet, delicate, accommodating, shy and nonviolent (which have been thought of as particularly “feminine” characteristics pretty much invariantly across history).

Everyone seems to have forgotten that brains are made, not born. The brain is always developing according to it's environment and the need for different parts to be strong and for neurons to fire more quickly. Neuroplasticity is key. That's why if someone says women's brains are different to men's, eg the ability to multitask, if you need to multitask you'll do it better and better the more you have to do it. Analysing trans people's brains show nothing as its a reflection of the way their brains have responded to their environment.

She really was going to read the whole paper to him! She was a very fast talker, but still.

I asked a neurosurgeon could they definitely tell the difference of women and men and they said no.

There is however, a bit you can stimulate to ‘see god’ or get a religious experience. Which I reckon is being stimulated by this gender ideology in the absence of religion.

So should people have brain scans before they undergo medical care? What happens to those whose brains don’t show any difference - do they get told they are faking it?

The reality is, if there was an aspect of the brain that could be used to diagnose ‘gender’ or even ‘gender dysphoria’ then it would be used.

A poster keeps posting stuff about this and it never makes sense.

As pp said, a brain does react to specific hormones, it also reacts to repeated stimuli such as in the taxi driver example. That has never made it more than wishful thinking that a male trans brain is ‘female’ at all. It is just wishful thinking at this point. It is interesting though.

Do you realise how few people can actually interpret brain anatomy at this level? And how many brain injuries there are? Maybe Stonewall could use their money to fund some medics to overcome the shortage to ‘discover’ this and then once they have qualified after years and years they could go on do some much more useful work with people with brain abnormalities.

Yep, good point.

Of course they are going to insist that you let people self-identify regardless.

Been following this chap - a neuroscientist - on Twitter for a while. He has loads of information on brain differences etc. Seems like most of the 'research' cited does not control for same sex attraction... https://twitter.com/NeuroSGS/status/1551155044267032577

Can you imagine if we determined sex and sexuality by scanning peoples brains rather than their observing their sex and who they are actually attracted to.

Im pleased to inform you mr jackson, it turns out you arent the straight man you id as , you are a bisexual women!

Even if there were a female type brain and if that typen of brain were found in a male body, it wouldn't matter. We don't organise society by brain type, we organise it by body type.

I am glad he’s also said you can’t tell by looking at an mri scan if a brain is male or female.

I do believe that the male brain, dna, skeleton, is different to the females.

Well yes, dna will be different, as will skeletal remains, since skull shapes are different as are pelvic structures. And apparently blood. But a brain is a brain. You might as well say looking at a spleen or an appendix can tell you if it’s previous owner was male or female.

Let’s hope his Phd supervisors are as generous in their interpretation of empirical data as he appears to be.

The DNA of the brain will be male or female but this is no more significant than the DNA of your spleen or your white bloodcells or your eye being male or female. Yes, you have XY chromosomes in one sex, XX in the other but individual organs don't function differently.

They do develop slightly differently due to different environment as discussed above, but that's not an essential difference, just a tendency. This can have significant outcomes differences on the large scale - such as IQ distribution being different between the sexes - but it doesn't mean you can take any given brain and say it is specifically male or female any more than you can with a spleen.

And in any case, a trans person doesn't have the DNA of their opposite sex, they have the DNA of their own sex so the point is academic.

Huh. The very next post after the one I replied to also went straight for the spleen. I wonder why spleens are the go to example of sexual similarity. Probably because nobody knows what one looks like.

Interesting that the pink-brain/blue-brain argument has always been presented by the anti-feminists in the past, to argue that existing gender arrangements in all societies are based on biology and at most a tiny bit altered by the environment and culture (well, a bit more than that in Afghanistan,say).

Now this argument finds stronger support from the far left, including many feminists, but the anti-feminists haven't abandoned it, either. They insist it's based on biological sex alone, the gender identitarians argue that anyone can have a pink or a blue brain, but then some need to change their bodies or apparent sex to match.

So not that far removed from each other, those two ideologies. They also both produce hierarchical societies if allowed to be the ideology in power, and the top and bottom of those hierarchies by sex will consist of exactly the same two demographics: top will be men with penises, bottom will be women with vulvas.

I wonder how many men in Afghanistan yearn to be women? Women’s enviable decision-free lives, eh?

Exactly. I feel so awful that I can't help women and girls there more than by the little I can donate, and I am angry at those in the West who don't squarely face to the fact that the oppression of women is sex-based. We have extremely clear examples of that right now on this planet.

This one.

There is one study that controlled for same-sex attraction, at least in transwomen, and if I recall correctly, that study found that transwomen who were attracted to men, did have somewhat feminized brains compared to men. Transwomen who were attracted to women had changes in the size of various brain regions, but not in such a way that their brains were feminized, and not in the same regions as male-attracted transwomen.

I don't think anyone knows exactly what these differences mean, or why they manifest as a desire to wear women's clothes rather than, as, say, a desire to take care of people.

I think it would be interesting to understand the brain basis of dysphoria with one's body. I would have predicted a common region of the brain being affected as compared to people who have dysphoria with non-gendered body parts. But I don't know if anyone is doing that research.

Again, from a societal viewpoint, it sorta doesn't make sense to use brain differences to justify mixing the resources set aside for women, because we have different resources for men and women, not because of different brains, but because of being born with different bodies.

I doubt the brain sex thing is reliable because if it was, diagnosis of gd would be based on that, not whatever it is now.

If someone did find out they had the opposite sex brain, would they be the opposite sex in certain situations, or would it be just if they wanted it? If it turns out that a self id TW didnt have GD, would he be stopped from transitioning?