Neuroscience - Of course course neuroscience is there to undermine tea ideology

[mids2019]

Take it from a neuroscientist: searching for a ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain is a waste of time | Gina Rippon https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/22/male-female-brains-different-centuries

Ok so a bunch of neuroscientists use fMRI and AI to ascertain the difference between male and female brains in terms of blood flow patterns (or perfusion) as I can see it. I have worked in MR and this is pretty standard academic stuff but the catchy trial has caught the media's attention.

But.......of course linking any change of brain structure between men and women is just adding another biomarker that distinguishes male and female sex. The fact gender isn't used in the study is worrying this particular commentator and she basically argues against the scientific work (in my opinion because any differences found between brains would add yet another fundamental difference between men and women).

It is really condescending I think for someone to write an opinion dismissing the work of established academics when she I presume wasn't a reviewer and it smacks of certain academics wanting works that in any way finishes trans ideology banned.

Sorry for the title typo

Agh huh fguggheAGH
WE HAVE ONLY JUST GOT RESEARCHERS TO ACKNOWLEDGE THERE ARE SEX DIFFERNCES WHICH SHOULD BE MEASURED FOR AND CONSIDERED IN RESEARCH AND OF COURSE EVERYONE IS IMMEDIATELY CLAMOURING TO TAKE OUT SUCH A RIDICULOUS FACET OF THE ANALYSIS AND REPLACE WITH GENDER
agh!!
she has good points to make on the plasticity of brains for experience but bloody hell imagine using that to say therefore no one should look at sex as a factor. I don’t know if thats worse or the tired old argument that people used to do this to prove women less capable therefore they should never be allowed to consider it again.

I wonder whether her actual concern is that it would be possible to demonstrate clearly that men who claim they are women don’t have brains that work like women’s brains at all. That would immediately close down the claims that feelings and thoughts matter more than the gonads.

The thing is, trans ideology is so illogical that I don't think any science could make a difference. It already makes literally no sense. If we prove men and women have different brains well surely in TRA world all that means is some people have been born with the wrong brains as well as the wrong bodies. They'll be asking for the full package on the NHS; top surgery, bottom surgery and brain surgery.

I thinks it's I treating research and I suppose on a statistical level there will be some average difference in brain blood flow between sexes especially if functional areas are identified with sexual desire or childbirth etc. I actually think it is maybe quite mundane (or should be) in a sense. I guess it's more interesting than a conclusion women are 100% more likely to have a uterus.

The brain is immensely complex compared to other organs but the point is that the author seems to want to undermine legitimacy of actually performing sex based research possibly on the grounds of that any research that is sex based and not gender based is discrimatory.

Brains are neuroplastic agreed and areas of the brain do strengthen in terms of neural connections if you are adept at something but this does not obviate the fact there may be some brain function that is entirely sex dependent. I guess why such research is carried out. It is the title that got me as it is disrespectful to dismiss fellow academics work like this in the press.

@guinnessguzzler

there agonisingly some that would state as no trans women were in the woman side of the trial the trial itself was based on a false premise.....that would be scary.

@Codlingmoths

I heard the research here being interviewed and she categorically denied the research was there to prove any sort of 'inferiority'. The research was looking at simple blood flow/structural difference for large population data sets. Maybe useful for showing relative difference with illness perhaps?

Just as medicine starts to wake up to the potential impacts of sex differences after so long of using males as the default humans...

https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2912.full

TRAs don't want anyone to waste time and money doing science when they could be playing wanky word games. See also Judith Butler.

Gina Rippon wrote a book arguing that sex-related behavioural and brain differences are due to socialisation. When she refers to gender she's using it in the older feminist sense. I don't think she subscribes to transgenderism, although maybe she does now.

Her arguments have actually been used by many GCs to argue that transgenderism makes no sense because if there is no such thing as a male or female brain, you can't have a female brain in a male body. Her book was criticised by other people working in the area - Stuart Ritchie and Kevin Mitchell said something along the lines of she cherry-picked and misrepresented the evidence.

I understand why she doesn't want there to be biological differences but I think Victoria Smith's essay on this was very good (can't find it right now but maybe someone else knows the one?). Women can't base our claims to equality on the falsehood that we are identical to men.

Wasn't there a paper that was due to be released a year or two ago that was going to prove a biological basis for trans, but they decided not to release it due to complaints from TRAs??

Kathleen Stock has written about it too - it seems that Rippon took a different stance in The Telegraph.
unherd.com/2024/02/whos-scared-of-a-female-brain/

This.

It caused panic. If there's a definitive yes/no marker, then it risks someone being told the test does not show what they want it to show.

Ripon’s argument here is that it’s not sex/nature ie innate differences in size/structure that have anything much to say and also that what was observed in the paper ie blood flow may be due to nurture/gender - ie acculturation. The group observed were old enough to have been trained/socialised like pianists/taxi drivers who do show brain differences due to recorded/observable training but she doesn’t think so.
So it’s a defence of the yeah this is interesting but differences between males and females exist due to biology in general (not shit Sherlock as she described the paper elsewhere) but you can’t use it to say anything beyond that. I suppose if ‘lady training’ were a thing like doing The Knowledge or studying a musical instrument then someone could possibly argue that they had trained their brain to be masculine or feminine by observing certain structures and blood flow via fMRI but she is dismissing the ‘born in wrong body/brain’ arguments and also saying this paper doesn’t really tell us anything new or lead where some - either the women are inferior due to smaller brains or that gender is innate/measurable camps - think.

I heard a radio programme (sorry can’t reference, but would be R4!) where a neurologist described statistically significant differences between the sexes for brain-based illnesses, including some mental health issues. They also made clear that there was no understanding of whether this was driven by innate sex difference, or due to socialisation

I agree with Stock - just because science has found something you don't like, it doesn't mean it's not true.

The whole business of "male" and "female" brains is quite complicated. We would all agree, I think, that men and women have broad behavioural differences. We know that men are, on average, more predisposed to violence, more predisposed to sexual aggression, more likely to have paraphilias. I would be astonished, personally, if this predisposition turned out to be entirely the result of socialisation rather than at least based partly in biology.

If we know that men and women have behavioural differences, then how much of a stretch is it to say that there are broad cognitive differences too? The evidence seems to be that women are verbally more dextrous than men while men have a better spatial awareness. Again, some of this might be socialisation, but is it such a terrible thing if some of it turns out to be innate? These are only broad differences, after all, with overlap between the two groups. Just as not every man is taller than every woman, not every man is going to be better at physics than every woman.

One of the arguments many of us have made over the years in relation to the transing of children is that butch girls who are told they are trans will often, in fact, grow up to be lesbian. (Likewise effeminate boys growing up to be gay.) Doesn't this in itself suggest there is something innate going on?

Why, after all, should sexuality be tied to cognitive abilities and behavioural preferences? Why is it that a girl who likes playing with Meccano and keeping her hair short is more likely to grow up to be a lesbian? If, as feminists, we argue that all girls should be free to play with "boys' toys" and wear "boys' clothes", then shouldn't heterosexually-inclined girls be just as interested in those things as same-sex-attracted girls?

Swansea University has been doing research into concussion among female rugby players.

One factor they had to consider was that, to quote what a researcher said in a BBC story, "Recent research in the neurology field has reported that axons [nerve fibres] in women's brains are a lot thinner and they have fewer microtubules [hollow tubes that give shape to cells]."

That tells us about the physical strength of the brain's structures, of course, not about how they function.

But it is a difference between the sexes that is important in contact sports, and indeed any sports where head injuries are possible e.g. cycling

What my mother once described in all seriousness as real differences between the male brain and the human brain . . . .

Science isn't (always) about coming up with a hypothesis then trying to prove it. It's about measuring something measurable (because you've got the right machine) and then looking for non-trivial correlations between what you measured and any one of the parameters that could be used to sort your dataset.

This writer is complaining because the researchers failed to disaggregate the parameter (is female) from (was brought up as female). But the dataset could never have supported that, because there aren't that many crazy parents in the world. That's not a reason not to do the research.

I don't think she's thinking about the trans issue at all. And I would love to see this research applied to trans subjects. But none will agree to participate, surely.

ETA wondering if people with DSDs were willing, would we find CAIS females have female brains, and 5-ARD males have male brains?

OP, I think you've misunderstood Rippon's stance (understandable from just that article - she's not had space to add her usual context so it could be read either way). And she won't have had anything to do with the headline.

She strongly feminist, and her point isn't 'don't look', it's that what you see in adults is a multilayered result of years of external influence. And people make claims based on just 1 factor rather than looking properly at desgregated data on multiple factors.

So you can't say 'brain X is male, brain Y is female' (and definitely can't have a female brain in a male body). You can perhaps say 'X has a big language area so probably reads or talks a lot, Y has a big visual-spacial area and is likely to play a lot of video games'. And on average the former tends to be more associated with women and the latter with men. But that is a result of a couple of decades of (gendered) external pressures and experiences.

So the 'is an adult' part of the subject description is more important than the 'is a woman' part. A woman who has spent a lot of time gaming will have a brain more like Y because the difference is a 'does a lot of gaming' marker rather than 'is a woman' marker.

Good point. They should find much younger subjects (ethics problem?).

In her book she covers some of that, and the problem is not so much ethics as practicality. Girl babies are treated differently from boy babies from birth. So unless you literally deliver directly into the scanner, there will always be outside influences.

A woman who has spent a lot of time gaming will have a brain more like Y because the difference is a 'does a lot of gaming' marker rather than 'is a woman' marker.

The abstract seems to suggest something stronger than a continuum (with males clustering towards one end and females the other). They are saying there is a discontinuity, with the sexes falling either side, and it correlates strongly with a cognitive profile.

The devil may be in the programming detail, and the full text is paywalled 🙁

This writer is complaining because the researchers failed to disaggregate the parameter (is female) from (was brought up as female). But the dataset could never have supported that, because there aren't that many crazy parents in the world. That's not a reason not to do the research.

I think her point about the difference between 'is female' and 'was brought up as female' is to do with the nurture/nature debate, not to do with crazy parents who bring their child up as the opposite sex or as 'gender neutral'.

Her point is that the child being brought up as female may have as much influence or even more influence on certain areas of the brain than being of the female sex, and what is unknown is which differences are due to biology and which to socialisation.

I don't think she's thinking about the trans issue at all.

I agree. I don't think her objections are to do with this at all. In fact Gina Rippon was one of the first scientists I heard dismissing trans ideology, back in 2017 when she was interviewed in the programme 'Transgender kids: who knows best?' She made a comment which was something like "it's just reinforcement of gender stereotypes".

Gina's stance is that differences in the male and female brain are not deterministic. Mostly in terms of cognitive abilities and personality.

Much is a true feminist stance. Her book was about how past neuro research tried to look for differences to prove that women are 'lesser' (in cognitive abilities and personality) which justified their position in society. When it was really the impact of external gender stereotypes on these aspects are huge.

So her position is actually anti trans activism.

In terms of research on the female brain, in terms of things like injury, altzhiemers, disease, impact of medicines, we are decades behind what we know for men.

Most of what has been researched has been done on men and assumed to be the same in women.

I don't believe she's denied that there are these biological differences.

The other issue is that research into brains is extremely hard to evaluate and make statements about.( trying to find the paper she wrote about that.)