2 ms·
As other commenters have notes, the massive amount of overlap makes it difficult to use it to justify any kind of discrimination. It does, however, suggest tha
by jfengel 2y ago
As other commenters have notes, the massive amount of overlap makes it difficult to use it to justify any kind of discrimination.
It does, however, suggest that transgender identities could have a biological basis. Studies already hint that trans people have brains more like their gender than their sex. It's nowhere near giving us a diagnostic tool, but there's reason to think that it's not a fad or meme or whatever else anti-trans activists are claiming this week.
Some trans people think of transgender as an intersex condition. I'm not sure the studies really justify that yet, but it's worth looking into. It's not necessary to have a biological basis to justify their identity, but it would shortcut a lot of useless arguments.
- higgle 2y agoThere were some early studies that seemed to show brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex, and perhaps closer to the opposite sex in some measurements, but these didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts. It turned out that these were brain differences relating to homosexuality. Later studies that controlled for sexuality (that is, by including both same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the cohort) couldn't replicate the earlier findings of sexually dimorphic brain structures being associated with transsexuality itself. Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions associated with bodily perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) patients. Which I think is a more interesting finding, perhaps suggesting that gender dysphoria is a subtype of BDD, or at least has some neurological commonality.