6 ms·

New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

44 points by janandonly 2y ago

mouse_ 2y ago
Interesting. Would also like to see a similar study conducted among non-binary and gender nonconforming people.
- Javalicious 2y ago
  Looks like they _might_ have been in the study set, but weren't separated out and focused on? At any rate, the author is hoping for the same: "In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."
- liveoneggs 2y ago
  the sample was "roughly 1,500 young adults 20 to 35 years of age" so, in today's environment, I don't think it's possible that there were not at least a few who self-identify as non-binary and nonconforming.
  - riskable 2y ago
    Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population. So if the study had 1500 participants that would mean ~7 were transgender. If you look at the graphs from the study those people could be the outliers but no matter what, it's not really enough people to glean anything useful.
    - empthought 2y ago
      > Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population This is not accurate for the cohort under study. 5% of people under age 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary. I would personally be unsurprised if well over 100 individuals in the study identified that way. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-o...
      - rachofsunshine 2y ago
        You have to be a little bit careful with those kinds of numbers. Once you get down to a few %, actual signal starts to be swamped by troll answers, misclicks, and other sources of error. You'll basically never see a number below a few percent in any poll with a decent sample size. (As an aside, this is one of the things that makes the data on the effectiveness of transition care more remarkable than it even looks. Given the very high probability that a random person is cisgender, even moderate false-positive rates would swamp true-positives. The fact that they don't suggests false-positives are very rare indeed.)
        empthought 2y ago
        This is a Pew Research study…
        rachofsunshine 2y ago
        What's your point? Looking at their methodology [1], it's pretty clear those sources of error would still be an issue here: > The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans-estimates-blog-post-methodology_final.pdf https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans...
        2y ago
- astromaniak 2y ago
  The difference has two components: genetic, personal. Genetic does not depend on self identification. Personal is very similar these days. Same families, same schools. As for trans. Humans, unlike most animals, cannot even have sex without being taught. The reason is humans for many generations, million years probably, lived in groups and learned how to do it. Those who didn't have genetically hardcoded knowledge how to make kids by the time they grew up they knew it any way. It wasn't necessary and with the time it was almost lost. The same with gender identification. Everywhere boys and girls where brought up differently. So, we lost hadcoded self identification. Today human kids may grow up thinking they are dogs, or wolfs, or sheep. If they happened to grow up with animals. Conclusion is it's parents responsibility to give kids the right identity. Failure to do it, some brainwashed wokes don't do it intentionally, results in miss self-identification. Add to that 'doctors' multi-billon industry preying on them and some schools playing along to keep parents uninformed. There was a couple of months back interesting article about navy seal who had mental problems. He was brainwashed into believing he was a woman, and needs treatment and surgeries, payed by government. Later he realized he was just used to make money, and became a man again. The same happens to kids en mass. Because they are easy targets.
  - Flemiklo 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - trealira 2y ago
      > And obviously we as a society created this stark contrast between male and female. Look at animal kingdom How so? Many species of animals show sexual dimorphism.
      - astromaniak 2y ago
        yep, chimpanzees are an example. we were one specie 7 mln year ago. so, it started long before humans separated from animals.
logicprog 2y ago
So a [gigantic meta analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...) of thirty years of studies on sexed structural and functional differences in human brains found zero evidence of any differences, a completely overlapping distribution, but as soon as "big data AI" is used suddenly not only are there differences, there's literally zero overlap? Count me suspicious. I think I'm going to trust the meta-analysis of 30 years worth of wide-ranging scientific study over the brand new study that's just throwing whatever fad is currently in the vogue at the problem to see what happens.
- im3w1l 2y ago
  Sounds like a case of "Old measuring instrument cannot tell two things apart. New more precise instrument can tell them apart"
  - logicprog 2y ago
    They're using the same measuring instruments, though. They're just feeding them through AI. Maybe, though. Let's see if it replicates.
- courseofaction 2y ago
  Without making any claims about gender or non-binary people (not my wheelhouse, I simply don't know), there's ample evidence to suggest statistically significant population-level differences between males and females on a many cognitive measures. I don't see how it's surprising that an new generation of signal-detection tool finds population-level differences in the brains that produce these cognitions.
- derbOac 2y ago
  I think the linked news article is a little misleading, although I share your skepticism. I'd like to see these results replicated rigorously on still new sets of data by independent researchers; I wouldn't be surprised either way, if the results did or did not replicate. However, the news article seems to spin this as "male and female brains are totally different entities that bear no relationship with one another." Although I haven't reread it carefully, it seems like the article is saying something more like "you can identify gender-specific patterns, and those gender-specific components relate to things like cognitive ability gender-specifically". It's not that you can't find overlap — that that wasn't the focus of the study — it's that if you go looking for differences, you can find them.
aappleby 2y ago
"Male and female brains are so similar that it takes a dedicated AI to distinguish between the two."
- hpen 2y ago
  Turns out AI is good at separating noisy signals
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
dopylitty 2y ago
The article seems to conflate sex and gender while the study is paywalled so I can't tell how they defined male and female. The study does seem specific to sex and doesn't mention gender at all in the abstract. Without those definitions it's basically saying "things we grouped a certain way ended up grouped that way" which isn't really a useful result.
- elzbardico 2y ago
  Really, I understand the human rights aspect of calling people whatever they feel they are and I am all for it. I think we should call people by their pronouns and whatever. Sex is one thing and gender is another. But definitely, pretending that innate differences between sexes are influenced by the social construct of gender is going to far into a rabbit hole. Let's just accept that we can still have medical research based on sex, and understand that it doesn't invalidade the idea of gender. It is just a different matter.
  - AndrewKemendo 2y ago
    That’s making a pretty big assumption that external factors are non-causal in the expression of genes that impact gender We know for a absolute fact that genetic expression is environmentally impacted - To the extent that even eukaryotic organisms can change sex based on environmental factors So it’s not implausible that environmental factors actually do affect human genetic expression of characteristics that we typically consider gendered
    - elzbardico 2y ago
      I am not assuming this, but the point is that it is perfectly valid to keep doing studies on the fundamental and pretty well-understood phenomenon of birth-sex and whether it is a significant causal factor on the biology of homo sapiens. It is a simple variable, we can start from it and then try to see whether gender self-identity has any effect. We can be pretty sure of the sex-at-birth of any human being given some simple tests. It is a simple variable that we can trust have been correctly recorded the vast majority of time. Gender identity? not so simple. And given a correct understanding of the differences, if any, between sex-at-birth individuals, we will have a good framework from which we can investigate if those differences follow gender identity, and if so, what is their causal relationship with gender, etc. etc. etc... What I am questioning, is that if every time a scientist do a sex-at-birth based study we question implicitly if they are not being bigots, we will end up censoring scientific inquiry for no good reason at all. (yeah, I do believe that not all scientific inquiry is allowable, for example, I oppose research on chemical and biological weapons)
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
stefantalpalaru 2y ago
[dead]
grugagag 2y ago
Im surprised they didn’t find any differences between brains of various men. Or women.

44 points by janandonly 2y ago

mouse_ 2y ago

Interesting. Would also like to see a similar study conducted among non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

Javalicious 2y ago
Looks like they _might_ have been in the study set, but weren't separated out and focused on? At any rate, the author is hoping for the same: "In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."
liveoneggs 2y ago
the sample was "roughly 1,500 young adults 20 to 35 years of age" so, in today's environment, I don't think it's possible that there were not at least a few who self-identify as non-binary and nonconforming.
- riskable 2y ago
  Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population. So if the study had 1500 participants that would mean ~7 were transgender. If you look at the graphs from the study those people could be the outliers but no matter what, it's not really enough people to glean anything useful.
  - empthought 2y ago
    > Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population This is not accurate for the cohort under study. 5% of people under age 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary. I would personally be unsurprised if well over 100 individuals in the study identified that way. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-o...
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      You have to be a little bit careful with those kinds of numbers. Once you get down to a few %, actual signal starts to be swamped by troll answers, misclicks, and other sources of error. You'll basically never see a number below a few percent in any poll with a decent sample size. (As an aside, this is one of the things that makes the data on the effectiveness of transition care more remarkable than it even looks. Given the very high probability that a random person is cisgender, even moderate false-positive rates would swamp true-positives. The fact that they don't suggests false-positives are very rare indeed.)
      - empthought 2y ago
        This is a Pew Research study…
        rachofsunshine 2y ago
        What's your point? Looking at their methodology [1], it's pretty clear those sources of error would still be an issue here: > The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans-estimates-blog-post-methodology_final.pdf https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans...
        2y ago
astromaniak 2y ago
The difference has two components: genetic, personal. Genetic does not depend on self identification. Personal is very similar these days. Same families, same schools. As for trans. Humans, unlike most animals, cannot even have sex without being taught. The reason is humans for many generations, million years probably, lived in groups and learned how to do it. Those who didn't have genetically hardcoded knowledge how to make kids by the time they grew up they knew it any way. It wasn't necessary and with the time it was almost lost. The same with gender identification. Everywhere boys and girls where brought up differently. So, we lost hadcoded self identification. Today human kids may grow up thinking they are dogs, or wolfs, or sheep. If they happened to grow up with animals. Conclusion is it's parents responsibility to give kids the right identity. Failure to do it, some brainwashed wokes don't do it intentionally, results in miss self-identification. Add to that 'doctors' multi-billon industry preying on them and some schools playing along to keep parents uninformed. There was a couple of months back interesting article about navy seal who had mental problems. He was brainwashed into believing he was a woman, and needs treatment and surgeries, payed by government. Later he realized he was just used to make money, and became a man again. The same happens to kids en mass. Because they are easy targets.
- Flemiklo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - trealira 2y ago
    > And obviously we as a society created this stark contrast between male and female. Look at animal kingdom How so? Many species of animals show sexual dimorphism.
    - astromaniak 2y ago
      yep, chimpanzees are an example. we were one specie 7 mln year ago. so, it started long before humans separated from animals.

logicprog 2y ago

So a [gigantic meta analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...) of thirty years of studies on sexed structural and functional differences in human brains found zero evidence of any differences, a completely overlapping distribution, but as soon as "big data AI" is used suddenly not only are there differences, there's literally zero overlap? Count me suspicious. I think I'm going to trust the meta-analysis of 30 years worth of wide-ranging scientific study over the brand new study that's just throwing whatever fad is currently in the vogue at the problem to see what happens.

im3w1l 2y ago
Sounds like a case of "Old measuring instrument cannot tell two things apart. New more precise instrument can tell them apart"
- logicprog 2y ago
  They're using the same measuring instruments, though. They're just feeding them through AI. Maybe, though. Let's see if it replicates.
courseofaction 2y ago
Without making any claims about gender or non-binary people (not my wheelhouse, I simply don't know), there's ample evidence to suggest statistically significant population-level differences between males and females on a many cognitive measures. I don't see how it's surprising that an new generation of signal-detection tool finds population-level differences in the brains that produce these cognitions.
derbOac 2y ago
I think the linked news article is a little misleading, although I share your skepticism. I'd like to see these results replicated rigorously on still new sets of data by independent researchers; I wouldn't be surprised either way, if the results did or did not replicate. However, the news article seems to spin this as "male and female brains are totally different entities that bear no relationship with one another." Although I haven't reread it carefully, it seems like the article is saying something more like "you can identify gender-specific patterns, and those gender-specific components relate to things like cognitive ability gender-specifically". It's not that you can't find overlap — that that wasn't the focus of the study — it's that if you go looking for differences, you can find them.

aappleby 2y ago

"Male and female brains are so similar that it takes a dedicated AI to distinguish between the two."

hpen 2y ago
Turns out AI is good at separating noisy signals
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

dopylitty 2y ago

The article seems to conflate sex and gender while the study is paywalled so I can't tell how they defined male and female. The study does seem specific to sex and doesn't mention gender at all in the abstract. Without those definitions it's basically saying "things we grouped a certain way ended up grouped that way" which isn't really a useful result.

elzbardico 2y ago
Really, I understand the human rights aspect of calling people whatever they feel they are and I am all for it. I think we should call people by their pronouns and whatever. Sex is one thing and gender is another. But definitely, pretending that innate differences between sexes are influenced by the social construct of gender is going to far into a rabbit hole. Let's just accept that we can still have medical research based on sex, and understand that it doesn't invalidade the idea of gender. It is just a different matter.
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  That’s making a pretty big assumption that external factors are non-causal in the expression of genes that impact gender We know for a absolute fact that genetic expression is environmentally impacted - To the extent that even eukaryotic organisms can change sex based on environmental factors So it’s not implausible that environmental factors actually do affect human genetic expression of characteristics that we typically consider gendered
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    I am not assuming this, but the point is that it is perfectly valid to keep doing studies on the fundamental and pretty well-understood phenomenon of birth-sex and whether it is a significant causal factor on the biology of homo sapiens. It is a simple variable, we can start from it and then try to see whether gender self-identity has any effect. We can be pretty sure of the sex-at-birth of any human being given some simple tests. It is a simple variable that we can trust have been correctly recorded the vast majority of time. Gender identity? not so simple. And given a correct understanding of the differences, if any, between sex-at-birth individuals, we will have a good framework from which we can investigate if those differences follow gender identity, and if so, what is their causal relationship with gender, etc. etc. etc... What I am questioning, is that if every time a scientist do a sex-at-birth based study we question implicitly if they are not being bigots, we will end up censoring scientific inquiry for no good reason at all. (yeah, I do believe that not all scientific inquiry is allowable, for example, I oppose research on chemical and biological weapons)

wetpaws 2y ago

[dead]

stefantalpalaru 2y ago

[dead]

grugagag 2y ago

Im surprised they didn’t find any differences between brains of various men. Or women.