Resources/articles on de-bunking the biological or neurological reasons for being trans.

[jeaux90]

I am openly GC, on Facebook and at work etc. I am in tech which to date has been a bit of a cesspool for Gender Ideology.

Feels like since the SC ruling some old arguments are coming back up around brain scans showing TW have similar brains to females, or there is a biological reason for it.

Anyone have good/recent studies or articles on this?

And you know this how?

Just as plausible that your understanding of gender is socially conditioned.

Sex is defined, tangible, observable, testable.

Gender is ? a feeling ?

I think you have perhaps missed the point.

“Gender” doesn’t matter, it isn’t important as a means of defining groups, it is just that every person is an individual, we shouldn’t be attaching microlabels to tiny differences, it is just a load of navel gazing and self-absorption.

Your sex however, is an easily verifiable fact about you. Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, it doesn’t matter what your sex is. But where it does, where women are disadvantaged physically by being generally smaller, not as strong, and vulnerable to assault, and discriminated against in the workplace because we might get pregnant, or because we have caring responsibilities it really does matter.

Sex is just your reproductive class; it doesn’t have to dictate your interests and abilities.

I'm a neuroscientist but I don't have time to write a great long article in reply right now.

two major papers that I will point out

This study of over 5000 brains shows that there are some subtle statistical differences but also massive overlap. this means that there is no clear way to define a 'male brain' and 'female brain' based on structure alone.
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/28/8/2959/4996558

This study of 1000s of children's brains looked at both sex (at birth) and gender (as reported by parents). They tried to train an AI to predict from the brain scan if that brain was male or female (sex) or had a masculine / feminine gender. They find that they can predict (above chance) for both but making predictions for sex is much easier and more robust. this suggests that gender is not obvious in the brain. They say "Our predictions of gender (beyond sex) are far less accurate than predictions of sex or gender alone, suggesting that gender may be a more complex construct that is not as clearly represented in functional connectivity patterns."
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adn4202

And for anyone reading academic papers around this topic, one of the first things you should look for is how many people contributed to the data. If there are only 10 or 20 people, or even 100, that is probably not enough datapoints to have any strong conclusions with robust statistics. the papers about looked 1000s of brains and so they are more reliable than smaller studies.

No, it isn’t “just as plausible” that gender is an innate thing independent of sex.

As others have already said, if gender incongruence does have a neurological basis,
(a) it still doesn't make the person a different sex but just somebody with a neurological difference;
(b) we wouldn't be able to tell whether it is caused by socialisation/"nurture" because the brain especially in young people is amazingly plastic (malleable);
(c) then proponents of genderism should be delighted to use this amazing diagnostic tool to identify the "genuine" sufferers, and yet they are mysteriously reluctant.

Based on this post alone, you should definitely read Rippon's book.

It's packed with this sort of thing - things like male/female difference in 3-D mental rotation tasks vanishing if you control for the amount of time people have spent playing with Lego, which has intruction books full of diagrams exactly like the ones used for the tasks. And early science and philosophy on femaleness, and some forgotten female scientists, and all sorts of other stuff. Great book. (Apart from about a page and a half that has a decidedly 'shoehorned in by the publisher' feel - you'll know it when you see it.)

A warning, though - you'll end up with a long list of other things to read as a result.