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.

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'm sorry but this is bad science. Setting aside the questionable nature of any studies on physical differences of the brains of those attracted to women vs. attracted to men, attributing a desire to wear women's clothes to it is a giant leap. Even in the premise you lay out, you'd have to establish that the claimed difference between same-sex and opposite sex attracted was specific to transwomen and not just males in general. There are plenty of gay men who don't cross-dress.

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.

Here also there's a questionable assumption which is that trans = dysmorphia. In adolescents and particularly girls, a form of body dysmorphia does appear to undrly a lot of trans identification as young girls find themselves uncomfortable with their developing bodies or the attention it brings. But adult men who transition to female in my experience, do so overwhelmingly for sexual fetish reasons. Of all the adult male trans people I have known, precisely one may have had some dysphoria. (And even then, he hardly acted like a woman. Least ways I've never had a female collegue who'd tell the people on the call she wasn't wearing anything below the level of the camera).

There is a neurological correlation with identifying as trans as adolescents. And it's autism. The correlation is very high. Autism isn't fully understood and may be developmental, but it doesn't equate to being trans. What it does is create a risk factor because an autistic child, especially as they hit puberty, often finds themself struggling to understand social interaction and feeling out of place. Suddenly a group come along (usually on Discord) and tells them there's a clear and simple explanation for that which is they've got the wrong brain. Instantly they have (a) an explanation they can understand, (b) social approval from teachers and the media that tell them they're special and (c) a set of social stereotypes that they think they're supposed to behave like. It's like a rock to a drowning man. In this model, which matches my observations, neurological issues don't lead to a "desire to wear women's clothes". They create an exploitable situation for others with their own interests to take advantage of.

Also, and I have to say this, your implication that "taking care of people" is a biologically feminine trait is also something I'm not inclined to just accept. It's a human trait, I feel. Men typically express it differently in our society but the idea that there's a female brain type which cares about people more and a male brain type which cares less, is offensive, you don't think?

@OldGardinia I think you’re reading @aloris a bit too literally - I took her post to be making a similar point to mine upthread, which is that the idea that even if you could make any claims about a “feminised” brain, why that feminisation should manifest itself in one specific stereotypical area of female social sex roles (like clothing) and not another social aspect of female sex roles (like ending up doing caring work) is pretty weak.

So much so that it’s obvious that the idea of “feminisation” is pretty suspect, if it somehow only picks certain selective external commodified aspects of “femininity” (where femininity is socially produced gender), and not any of the aspects of social femininity that are unpleasant or associated with hard work or unpalatable work or anything that incurs certain kinds of social penalties.

Which we know, of course, already: it’s pretty obvious that the aspects of “femininity” that get somehow chosen by these mysteriously feminised brains tend the ones that don’t actually incur any of the social work assigned largely to women. So that we see transwomen on Twitter, and being influencers and models, and barristers, and sportspeople, and so on and so on; but somehow what constitutes “living as a woman” is wearing a dress and makeup — and not, say, suddenly discovering that you’ve always yearned to visit elderly ladies in the parish with nourishing food; rushing to wash up the dishes and get everyone cups of tea and so on; or hanging back in conversation so as not to appear too forceful. So some arbitrary social performances of femininity are fine; but somehow those ones which involve the less sexualised and less enjoyable (to the man) bits of “femininity” are not.

And this is never more evident than when some transwomen talk about enjoying or being validated by sexist behaviour that women actually dislike or are threatened by (eg. being catcalled). But funnily enough we don’t much hear of how validating it is in one’s transition to be suddenly asked to make the tea or talked over in meetings at work (and there are several reasons for this, of course — one obvious one being that trans women are rarely, if ever, treated as biological women are, because men know quite well that they aren’t actually women).

I’d also add, which is to get into a slightly different kind of area of discussion, that I think that one of the reasons for the hugely inflated claims of being oppressed for being trans (eg the vastly overinflated risks of murder, violence, genocide, hate speech, safety in the men’s loos so must be in the women’s etc. that we all know) — one of the reasons for this huge manufacturing of this perceived victimhood is partly that transwomen rarely take on the aspects of femininity that women experience as their oppression (aside from the fetishised sexualised ones). They aren’t actually experiencing misogyny or sexism. (They could be experiencing what we would call genuine transphobia - that is, not the “GC women says biological sex is real” kind of transphobia - but that’s different to sexism).

Which is why the idea of “transmisogyny” is so convoluted, and doesn’t make any sense. It’s trying to account for the fact that gender ideology is actually approving of some aspects of stereotypical or oppressive gender roles, if they serve validation purposes. But it also pretends that transwomen pass completely indistinguishably as women. But in reality Diana who used to be Steve is not actually being expected to become “feminine” in any other way than the extreme surface of easily commodified accoutrements. They are not being expected to give up the Bar or the priesthood in order to sit at home and arrange flowers.

But if women are clearly subject to sexism, the whole envy of the female demands that a kind of synthetic kind of oppression be brought in instead to fill the place where the experience of sexism isn’t - hence the manufactured sense of great injustice and marginalisation. It’s a kind of synthetic victimhood — wanting to have the status of oppressed without actually having to do all the shit stuff that comes with actual sexism, whether it’s being lumped with all the Christmas cards for everyone’s family, always being called as the emergency contact by the school because you’re the mum, being ignored in meetings because now you’re too old and unfuckable to be taken seriously, losing your job for being pregnant, being touched up by your boss or just some man who thinks he’s entitled to grab you in the pub — or just being the one who ends up wiping all the vomit up and washing the dishes and taking great auntie Deirdre to all her hospital appointments because no-one else will if you don’t.

You’d think that transwomen would avidly join in to experience “womanhood”, and then loudly say - now I am a woman, I realise how bad things still are for women - we’re oppressed by these social expectations!

But no - it’s more like “I’m oppressed - but in a special way that doesn’t actually involve doing any actual work, but instead just getting angry at JK Rowling on Twitter and sobbing a lot.” It’s the very opposite of “lived experience” — it’s “social media feelings pretend oppression” instead.

I don't think fMRI studies of brain function are necessarily bad science. If, for example, you read the paper I mentioned about sizes of different brain regions (essentially they are measuring the size of patches of active areas in the fMRI studies and then comparing average sizes in male-attracted transwomen vs female-attracted transwomen, vs natal women and vs natal men, for example), they don't draw sweeping conclusions that transwomen have a greater interest in feminine clothing because of those brain areas. They just state that the sizes of such-and-such regions are smaller/larger than expected and compared them with the sizes of typical men and typical women. Interestingly, that same study emphasized that atypical sizes, in the male-attracted subset of transwomen, were NOT "the same as women", or even "closer to women than to men" but rather tended to be somewhat outside the range of what was typical for a male, and in a feminized direction. Much more subtle than what we are usually told by activists (most of whom are not scientists, as I understand).

But the way activists present the science draws much more far-reaching conclusions than that. And some of the research literature seems to be primarily about how any residual unhappiness among transgender people is due to failure of society to treat them as the desired gender, failure of possible mates of their desired dating gender to accept them as possible mates, etc. There just seem to be big gaping holes in how science got from A to B to C to total mastectomy for young women who wish to live as men (or, vice versa, vaginoplasty for young men who wish to live as women).

Sorry if I didn't clarify sufficiently, Gardinia or myveryown. I think we all agree, basically.

Good points being made on this thread, and especially I found myself nodding to @myveryownelectrickitten's post!