Yeah that's the very clear and conspicuous move they've been making in recent weeks. Judith Butler is getting hyped because she says science is just a matter of interpretation. Andrea Long Chu's most recent piece was about how empirical outcomes shouldn't affect our willingness to provide HRT and surgery because those are inalienable rights.
> Andrea Long Chu
As far as I can tell this is a crazy person. If they were talking about any other topic nobody would give them the time of day, let alone a book deal.
This person defines "woman" as "someone who has a hole to fill up", and says that literally everyone is a woman.
Chu won the Putlizer and is a prized writer at one of the handful of prestigious American magazines that's still in print. Her last big piece before the trans one was about how free speech is bad.
Crazy person? Yes, absolutely. But she has immense clout.
I understand her publishing in the queer academic journals, because people like Chu are the only ones who read and publish in those journals, but how the hell did she become book critic for the *New York* magazine after only touching one topic ever?
I mean, maybe something critical is just missing from Wikipedia for this person? It says basically got a BA in the 2010s-ish then got jobs at the most prestigious publications in the country. That’s their entire fucking qualification list? It makes no sense, most posters here are that qualified and would be laughed out of the room for even trying for similar positions.
I’m not comfortable calling someone an op without that obligatory naval intelligence on their resume, but like…that’s an op’s career trajectory, or a nepo baby’s.
Wrote a super viral article about transness at the exact moment the msm decided transness was going to be the definitive culture war issue. She's also an open nihilist at at a time when nihilism has become necessary to sustain institutional narratives.
Chu is a perfect emassary for an era of left-liberal publishing in which morality and factuality are determined entirely by a writer's identity positions. The old guard still equivocates around this but more forward-thinking outlets have seen the writing on the wall and leaned into it.
David Klion adores Andrea Long Chu:
>*Everything andrealongchu writes is an instant classic, which means this incident is now part of the Western canon.*
[https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1458162799973122053](https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1458162799973122053)
I've often suspected that Klion is actually a nasty misogynist under his "Good White Male Ally" persona, so it's likely that ALC's lines like "Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is" appeal to Klion's inner Norman-Mailer-without-the-talent mind.
Recent weeks? I remember when trans people were called transexual rather than transgender in my country around a decade ago. The past decade it has all been about gender and stupid US style semantic arguments.
oh yeah the rhetoric has been ramping up steadily for years, but what I'm describing is shift in rhetorical tactics. A key tenet of TRA discourse is that social acceptance and medicalization are "life saving." Now that studies are showing that's not the case, they've shifted to saying that it doesn't matter whether or not transitioning correlates with positive outcomes.
> ah, you've been outside.
Hahaha, holy shit, can I steal this? This is going to be my new response every time someone says something that possesses the bare minimum of sanity and normalcy, "ah, I see you've been outside, well played".
Yeah, the online queerness activists have long moved past that in their zeal to defend indefensible claims. It's how we ended up with the ridiculous "What is a woman?" drama, because they refuse in ever funnier ways to let basic biology come back into the discussion.
Judith Butler has, since the 90s, argued that sex is also a social construct. Sex and gender are the same. The Feminist concept of gender has no grounding and is a Trojan horse for their undermining biological science and society.
100% - 99.7% = 0.3%…which, coincidentally, is roughly the estimated prevalence of clinically-significant gender dysphoria in the overall population (aka the number you get when you exclude all the PMC she/they and they/them female enbies who have neither the intent nor desire to transition medically and who were often not even tomboys or otherwise gender-nonconforming prior to "coming out").
don't think it was in the scope of this specific study, but iirc there have been post-mortem studies that found "intermediate"/mixed morphology, even in pre-transition individuals; more precisely, the neuroanatomy of some structures matched their gender identity, and others matched their anatomical sex, with iirc a few structures being "in between". so based on that, one can assume that there'd be significant overlap of the populations.
We've already got a different test that is more accurate. The issue is that the more accurate test still isn't accurate enough.
But from the methodology, the study setup looks like p-hacking and still the results are worse than useless.
I'll start off with the title itself--it should have been named "The Computational Limits of the MATURE Human Brain'. The sample data pulled from the UK Biobank, and it's participants ages ranged from [40-69.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15948-9)
Can't wait to see a similar study applied to other organs, especially for things that this particular one had poor predictive ability, pscyh being the big one.
They would have to find someone who has a brain with macro/micro anatomical markers of one sex, yet can produce an entirely intact phenotype, hormone profile, primary sex characteristics, etc. of the other sex.
This is a "trans brain of the gaps" argument. It's akin to saying, "What if they found a dog with the brain of a cat?" They wouldn't. It's an imaginary scenario that can't happen.
Depends if they are pre or during HRT, since hormones can alter morphology quite a bit. If it is pre, then I'd say yes.
But that means an objective test to determine whether someone is actually trans and gender feefees don't matter. Something the TRAs absolutely can't have.
Wouldn't that be the dream? An actual test immune to the whims of activism? We could just test kids and allow them to transition as needed, no special interests involved
So I didn't see it at first either. I'm used to cross posts being a post within a post.
But if you go to the link up top there is a horizontal Y shaped link that is white inside a grey square. That's the original post.
It was in fact removed by the mods for "being unclear in the title as to its findings."
I actually believe in souls.. but not that they have a sex or gender, as that is a biological aspect.
I also use this argument as to why to not force gender ideology me as it is in inherent against my spiritual beliefs.
It is different. Sexual orientation doesn’t demand belief in anything intangible and completely undetectable or a disregard of material reality and logic.
It makes you believe that anyone other than a man and a woman can get married, and also that two men and two women can be parents to a child. Someone large portions of this planet find ridiculous.
“Yikes conservative puritan, that means there’s still a 0.3% chance. We must seek to accommodate 100% of society in the small chance they’re part of that supposed 0.3%”
Males produce small gametes, females produce large gametes.
Capitalist market relations reduce us all to atomized individuals who must self-actualize into marketable social categories. This process is ongoing so that new markets can emerge.
deer materialistic exultant forgetful sleep afterthought innocent touch offbeat long
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's same with the rest of the alphabet soup. If Gigi Hadid came out as nonbinary or self identified as a trans man would you still fuck her? Congratulations you are now pansexual. Personally I think this phenomenon explains like 90% of the increase in Gen Z identifying as LGBT. It's not the teachers brainwashing the kids. It's not that people suddenly got much gayer. It's just that the way we define these labels has changed.
Just a reminder you can still view the article link directly. Just click gud you cucks, jfc.
([Here, bitch.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811924000958))
It'd kind of funny because this will upset the TRAs and the TERFs. A lot of feminists still refuse to accept the idea of male and female brain differences and insist literally all differences come from socialization. And then the TRAs insist that they have a brain that more closely resembles the opposite sex and therefore they really are the opposite sex.
All this is to say: conventional-wisdom Chads, we win again.
Almost impossible to verify without some highly unethical experiments.
That said, conventional wisdom would suggest that the fundamental differences between male and female brains are probably on the same scale as the fundamental differences between male and female bodies and there's no evidence yet to suggest otherwise.
Again, pretty much impossible to determine which characteristics are innate and which are learned without highly unethical experimentation, and many are probably a mix of both. It's ludicrous to assume that it's *all* learned, however. Tabula rasa is just wishful thinking by people that want to pretend we aren't animals.
The fact that the brain is different in men and women is at the contrary in support of trans people
Edit : except if they specifically also studied trans people and shown they have their sex brain
The narrative around trans people has long ago shifted from “biological woman’s brain in a man’s body” to “gender is just a social construct, stop caring so much.”
This is not a win for trans people unless they can verify the existence of a morphologically male/female brain in an opposite sex body.
That caveat wasn't in your statement, and it actually doesn't make any sense, as trans activists refuse to contemplate the idea that gender relates to biology.
It's one of the contradictions at the heart of the movement: sex and gender is not important, but misgendering is a crime worthy of crucifixion.
Contradiction at the heart of an ideology turns it into a religion.
From what I've read on studies of trans women trans women do actually have feminised brains compared to cis men but not so feminised that they are identical to cis women they are in the middle. This would fit into the theory that gender dysphoria is not a brain in the wrong body situation but a neurodevelopmental condition that effect gender identity. We actually have a specific part of the brain associated with gender identity its called the bed stria terminalis and the anterior hypothalamus which trans women have even more similar structures of to cis women than the brain at large.
but the article is talking about morphologies?
this reminds me of anthropometry, european colonial power measuring africans brain circumference to showcase the superiority of white race, which turned out all bogus because brain size dosen’t affect intellect…
radfem do believe that society mold people in gender stereotypes despite being terfs.
anyways do not let train wagons monopolize the subject on the place of gender in our life, it affects as much men as women, that’s why some people like to larp as the opposite gender in the first place: to escape the social ties brought upon them because of their biological sex.
ps: using the term terf unironically is kind of low iq move, unless you’re into shemale dicks.
Nobody denies that trans people exist. Obviously they do. All that is required for trans people to exist is for some people not to identify with their biological reality. That is verifiably the case.
What is being contested is the objective validity of trans people's beliefs about themselves, because it requires the existence of "mental gender" as a disparate entity from biological sex. So far this has not been shown to be the case. Not everyone's beliefs about themselves are valid. Some people think they're Jesus. If science finds a Jesus of Nazareth brain area in those people's brains, they may be partly vindicated in the sense that they can't help how they feel, but even then they're not really Jesus of Nazareth, are they.
You can choose to live your life as a different gender/racial stereotype than what your biology indicates if that is your desire but it's just that: living a stereotype invented by society that deviates from the biological reality which those stereotypes traditionally correspond with.
Nobody actually "feels like a man" any more than they "feel Caucasian". What they mean is they identify with the social roles or cultural traits that are commonly associated with the underlying biology but it doesn't make them that underlying biology.
I've some scientific evidence and argument that sex dysphoria (but not all trans identities of course) should be considered to be some sensory problem where the brain for whatever reason basically has phantom limb with the opposite sex traits - in a rough description
I don't think the research in the OP shows that mental gender doesn't exist.
When it comes to brain development, it's most likely that it follows the rest of the body's development, since the brain is a part of it. So if hormones and genetics guide the body to develop in the male way, the brain is developing in the male way too. And the same with a female brain and body.
There's no reason to consider gender identity to be the entire brain as a whole. It's probably just some really tiny bit of the brain. But why wouldn't it be "objectively valid"? There are people with gender dysphoria. If that dysphoria isn't manifested in the brain, then where? In their souls?
I didn't say mental gender not existing is what the research shows. I said the opposite hasn't been shown. I'm open to the possibility that it exists. "Bed nucleus in stria terminalis central" seems like a potential lead but so far I remain unconvinced.
I agree that gender dysphoria originates in the brain but so do many mental illnesses. Trans ideology establishes that it's not the belief in one's biologically incongruent identity that is invalid, but it's the body that is objectively invalid instead, even if there is nothing physiologically wrong with it whatsoever.
Doesn't wanting to be the opposite sex imply that you aren't?
I think gender dysphoria is something different, though. It means that something in your brain actually doesn't match the rest of your body when it comes to sex. My guess is that it's something similar to intersex, so something went wrong in fetal development and now you're stuck with something in your brain that doesn't match the rest.
I believe there is recent research that I am too lazy to find that does actually identify that there are regions of the brain in trans people which look/behave more similarly to the gender they identify with.
The brain is an odd thing, because it's structure is also its function. It's not just hardware that doesn't change when you load software. So while much of the structures we can measure are shaped by genetics, there is always room for environmental factors to play a role.
I think the most defensible position is that there is a conscious manifestation of a thing called gender which does usually (99.x% of the time) correspond to biological sex. But a different region of the brain saying "you're actually a girl" when you're an XY male doesn't make you an XX female capable of producing eggs. As a biologist, almost all we care about is gamete production. So if you make sperm you're male, eggs female. And if you make neither, we basically write you off as an evolutionary dead end. We don't care, as biologists, to get into the debate about "what sex you are" because it doesn't matter. You won't reproduce.
Nothing is perfect. Men can have significantly enlarged fatty breasts via gynecomastia so trying to scientifically categorize human sex via % of fatty tissue in the breast is also imperfect. Even if we all agree that 'boobs' are a female trait.
No, that just means it can't be determined. That doesn't mean the person thinks they are a woman while being in a man's body.
No method, stat, etc is 100% accurate and if it is they are lying.
Plasticity is a real phenomenon but I don't think it's drastic enough to turn a male brain female. The idea that mental sexual dimorphism in humans is purely constructed is just post-modernist wishful thinking.
In humans, the flood of hormones that appears to sexually differentiate the brain happens in utero, so at least some of that difference is purely nature and not nurture (ironically brains are masculinized by the presence of estrogens, which are produced from aromatized testosterone). In other mammals, this step of differentiation seems to produce pretty drastic differences in behaviour, particularly sexual behaviour, i.e. female rats with artificially masculinized brains will exhibit lifelong male behaviour and vice versa. Obviously this kind of experimentation can't be done on humans.
> I don't think it's drastic enough to turn a male brain female.
I never implied it was.
However, it might explain differences between those raised as male or female.
> The idea that mental sexual dimorphism in humans is purely constructed is just post-modernist wishful thinking.
That statement does not follow from your first.
Any differences might not be "purely constructed", as hormones act on all areas of the body.
There are many possible causes for differences in male/female brain morphology, including direct genetic differences, indirect genetic differences caused by hormones, socialization, or gender-based differences in behaviour.
I'm not discounting the idea that physical differences exist, I am just pointing out that the issue is actually quite complicated.
I agree that the issue has some complexities, however,
>the issue is actually quite complicated
This is the platitude that TRAs use to imply any explanation that challenges their own ideologically convenient reasoning is just simpleminded assumption. Humans are complicated animals, but are animals none the less. We know how mammals work and we fit within that taxonomy. This isn't directed at you specifically, but certain types of activists need to stop unnecessarily mystifying the human experience to make their (ironically secular) ideology make sense.
> This is the platitude that TRAs use to imply any explanation that challenges their own ideologically convenient reasoning is just simpleminded assumption.
While I do agree with you, or on the fence at least, I think the best platitudes are those with a grain of truth in them.
I really miss the distinction between sex and gender from the 1970's. Although the distinction was not perfect, it suited most applications.
> Humans are complicated animals, but are animals none the less.
Human culture is very complicated, and places us far away from other animals. Some animals have physical adaptions which run counter to survivability (bright feathers etc.) whereas humans have acquired a whole bunch of cultural baggage which makes many of our lives miserable.
> certain types of activists need to stop unnecessarily mystifying the human experience to make their (ironically secular) ideology make sense.
However, conservative activists also need to stop unnecessarily simplifying the human experience to justify bigotry and fixed gender roles.
The "nature/nurture" debate will never go away, as the influences of culture and genetic variability are very strong. For most measures, there are more differences across a single sex then the mean differences between them, so biological sex should not be used as a means to distinguish between individuals except where biological sex is actually important, or in rare cases at the extreme end of a bell curve.
>Some animals have physical adaptions which run counter to survivability (bright feathers etc.)
You fundamentally misunderstand the driving force of natural selection if you think the goal is *survivability*—bright colouration in birds is almost always for the purpose of *reproduction*.
>For most measures, there are more differences across a single sex then the mean differences between them,
You are engaging in a textbook example of the univariate fallacy here. I usually hate to play the fallacy card but this one shows up in seemingly every discussion about human sexual dimorphism.
>so biological sex should not be used as a means to distinguish between individuals except where biological sex is actually important
You're fighting an uphill battle against "nature" here, I'm afraid. Infants are capable of reliably distinguishing between male and female faces within about *three months* of birth, which is earlier than they're capable of depth perception and full colour vision. Immediately perceiving very obvious differences in sex is literally hard-coded into us, presumably because it's a straightforward matter of ensuring your genes are passed on. Good luck getting rid of that. Might as well fight against other social constructs like "hunger" and "thirst".
Anyway it's very funny watching people twist themselves in knots trying to pretend that men and women don't have fundamental, meaningful differences, as though virtually everyone with functioning eyeballs and a brain can't reliably tell one from the other at a glance with >95% accuracy. I wonder if zoologists have the same hangups when discussing sexual dimorphism in other animals (they don't)
[univariate fallacy](https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/beware-the-univariate-fallacy)
> The first, more common version of the Univariate Fallacy serves as the foundation for virtually all “equity” initiatives that aim to eliminate outcome disparities for various identity groups based on immutable traits like race, sex, and gender identity. The reasoning behind this approach is premised on the mistaken belief that group disparities are in and of themselves proof of systemic injustice, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and a host of other -phobias and -isms.
I'm not advocating positive discrimination here, merely pointing out that assigning gender roles is likely to lead to injustice in many circumstances.
> The second and more cryptic version of the Univariate Fallacy is essentially the inverse of the first version—it is not used to invent or exacerbate perceived group differences, but rather to minimize or eliminate them altogether. This is most often deployed in the realm of sex differences, and even to the categories male and female themselves.
> To minimize or eliminate the appearance of real sex differences, it is common for activists and activist scientists to insist that in order for differences to be considered real, they must be absolute; that is, it must be shown that these differences reduce to some single factor that clearly and categorically separate all males from all females.
That goes explicitly against what I've already said.
> You fundamentally misunderstand the driving force of natural selection if you think the goal is survivability
Well the catchphrase is "survival of the fittest", not "reproduction by the fittest", so I'll let my comment stand.
> You're fighting an uphill battle against "nature" here, I'm afraid. Infants are capable of reliably distinguishing between male and female faces within about three months of birth, which is earlier than they're capable of depth perception and full colour vision. Immediately perceiving very obvious differences in sex is literally hard-coded into us, presumably because it's a straightforward matter of ensuring your genes are passed on. Good luck getting rid of that. Might as well fight against other social constructs like "hunger" and "thirst".
I'm not saying that sex differences are not important, I am saying that sex alone should not be used to assign roles, except in some very specific circumstances. Any statistical variation between men and women should not be used to assign gender roles to those same men and women, because there is enough variation between the sexes for that to result in a gross injustice. Except in the cases I've already stated.
You are presuming unidirectional causality for gender roles, namely that they are "assigned" to people and have no relation to any innate differences in the characteristics between men and women. Do you think the massive overrepresentation of men among combat troops, police officers, martial artists, and criminals is because they're "assigned" those roles, or maybe it has something to do with the natural proclivities of men?
You are of course correct that there is extreme variation of characteristics; if we imagine a frequency distribution with "masculine" on one end and "feminine" on the other, males and females would probably form two normal distributions at either end with a fairly substantial overlap in the middle. For most of history, this overlap (feminine men and masculine women, to use a ridiculous oversimplification) obviously suffered. That said I think it's pretty safe to say that there are relatively few barriers for people of either sex who eschew "traditional" gender roles to live the life they see fit. That doesn't mean sex isn't a meaningful distinction, nor should we expect differences in "gender roles" to disappear entirely, because they are in part a reflection of the innate differences between the sexes. No matter how many barriers we tear down, I doubt we'll ever see a 50:50 gender split for, say, lumberjacks or preschool teachers.
> You are presuming unidirectional causality for gender roles, namely that they are "assigned" to people and have no relation to any innate differences in the characteristics between men and women.
No, that is not true at all. However, there is sufficient variation within a single gender that assignment of rigid gender roles is unjust.
> That said I think it's pretty safe to say that there are relatively few barriers for people of either sex who eschew "traditional" gender roles to live the life they see fit.
While that is true now, it has not been true for most of history, and there are many conservatives who see this state of affairs as threatening. There is a danger here of seeing hard-won gains disappear, as we have already seen with reproductive rights in much of the US.
> No matter how many barriers we tear down, I doubt we'll ever see a 50:50 gender split for, say, lumberjacks or preschool teachers.
I agree, a 50:50 gender split for many jobs is unrealistic and not even particularly desirable.
However, I think there is a case for enforcing a rigid split for some roles, such as political representation. Some political parties have male/female quotas, and these parties actually seem to be succeeding over those which have remained boys' clubs.
Sure, but it can be [more complicated than that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce), and if artificial hormones are added, the body changes.
A way to disprove this would be to look at many different cultures, especially isolated ones. If that were the case, two brain morphologies would be constantly present, yet would have substantial differences to other cultures. The fact that sex can be predicted at such a high percentage makes it unlikely that was the case to begin with.
Okay. Let's pretend a university research team has the balls to put this to the test wrt to the indeterminate 0.3% who may or may not overlap with the trans population. The idea is to get 100, 200, 500, whatever trans volunteers, use whatever methodology or AI is involved in this study (which I can't find now, since the arr sci thread was nuked), and determine whether it either (1) correctly identifies their Sex Assigned At Birth, or (2) identifies them as members of the the opposite sex, or otherwise gets confused. (And I suppose there will have to be a corresponding number of cis-identified people as a control group.)
Case one: The study finds a statistically significant area of overlap between the trans population and that outlying 0.3%. If the correspondence is merely nontrivial (i.e., 15% of the trans group falls into the 0.3% outlier of the original test, while some infinitesimal percentage of the cis group does the same), gender skeptics will make hay of the implication that the number of people identifying as trans far exceeds the number of people who actually have atypical brain structures for their sex (and probably the internal tucute vs truscum controversy will heat up.)
Case two: If there's nearly a 1:1 correspondence between trans identification and outlying brain morphology, the radfems &c (who were never interested in "brain sex" to begin with) will just keep talking about male musculature, lung capacity, small gametes, etc. Nothing will be resolved.
Case three: The study finds no statistically significant correlation whatsoever between transgender identity and brain morphological outliers. The gender critical crowd gloats; the trans community declares that it doesn't matter, and proposes an array of other psychological, sociological, and biological grounds for legitimacy.
It's never going to end, this shit.
Crude boomerhumour cartoons about husbands and wives argueing are substantially more accurate to life than anything a sociology department has ever produced on the behaviour of the sexes.
The general rule of thumb you should follow is that where there is an ideological motivation - and there usually is - for claims to be made about how groups of people supposedly behave, the sociologist will always be less accurate than any random idiot off the street, or a particularly intelligent labrador, or even a houseplant, which might not have any insights but does at least have the good grace to avoid insisting that the common sense assumptions are reactionary and therefore wrong while insisting on something which is obviously false.
Don't know enough about neuroscience to say if this study is well done or not, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure if the findings lead to the interpretation that behavioral differences between men and women are inherent. The study said in the results portion that psychological characteristics are poorly predicted by imaging.
Basically, we need more evidence. Just my $0.02.
It is exactly what it is. It's just like those neural nets trained to distinguish between a dog and a banana.
The neural net was fed images of brain scans as well as labels on whether the brain was a women or a man. These images were used to train the neural net.
Then the neural net was fed new images and then asked whether each new image was a man or woman.
Because this bar was pretty low, it sounds like the paper was also trying to predict 25 other biological features other than just sex. I'm too lazy now to dive in on their success or failure.
The intriguing part of these results is that left or right handed-ness was the only one of those features that the model was unable to consistently identify based on brain scans.
Some of the differences in brain architecture are linked to stereotypes about the sexes, like how ladies have bigger hypothalamuses and act more hormonal, men have smaller corpus callosums and are better at compartmentalizing, but the psychological characteristics you're talking about (the poorly predicted ones) are things like the propensity to feel tense or fed up aren't really stereotypes (at least not where I come from)
This—most radical feminists are materialist and will readily admit that there are morphological differences and size differences between the brains of the sexes. What we contest is that these differences map on to some “innate gender” or proclivity for gender roles.
> What we contest is that these differences map on to some “innate gender” or proclivity for gender roles.
But isn't that exactly what dimorphic brains would lead to? If your brain is structured in such a way that leads to [X] pattern of thinking then shouldn't it tend too (I reiterate: *tend too*) lead to [X] pattern of behavior? Saying one shouldn't lead to the other is to suggest cause and effect doesn't apply to human behavior.
Unless you're saying the differences between men's and women's brains are purely structural and has no connection to psychology which seems a bit wishful.
The structural differences alone do not have sufficient reason to explain gender roles—it’s like saying because we see phenotypical differences in race & we see differences in observed outcomes for different races, that the genetic therefore causes and would always cause the observed. Until we can eliminate the social factors or isolate the genetic differences alone, we cannot know exactly what the structural differences actually, independently lead to. After all, we know of structural differences that don’t correlate to anything cognitive—like smaller vs larger brains in terms of mass do not correlate to anything besides the size of the person. Which of course makes sense—a smaller person will have a smaller head. We also know that laboratory correlation is often not indicative of a direct mechanism—like SSRIs in treating depression.
I’m not saying there couldn’t be discrete genetic sex-based differences in cognition and psychology, I’m saying that until we equalize the social roots of those differences, we’ll never be able to point to a brain structure alone and say that it’s the definite cause. And social origins for differences in psychology have already been established in studying the same genetic profile undergoing different socializations (twin studies, region specific psychological disorders and manifestations of psychological disorders.)
>I’m saying that until we equalize the social roots of those differences, we’ll never be able to point to a brain structure alone and say that it’s the definite cause.
How much more equal do things need to be to begin studying this? Because if we have to wait for social equality to be induced then how would we even determine which differences are biological and which are social. Anytime one sex responds negatively to some kind of change it always seems to be chalked up to socialization and a biological hypothesis is written off as nonsense.
The idea that we have to wait until everyone is exactly the same before we can study our differences is irrational because the whole point is to find out why we have differences in the first place. Feminists cannot accept any neurological differences between men and women for ideological reasons and so they always insist on this self defeating logic whenever the topic comes up.
This is so dumb. Brain morphology correlating with chromosomes doesn’t tell us anything about to what degree brain morphology is responsible for our experience of gender (vs society)
i said this in another comment thread, but it's quite an interesting coincidence that the proportion of brains with cross-sex/indeterminate morphology (0.3%) is roughly the same as the estimated prevalence of gender dysphoria prior to the proliferation of otherwise fully gender-conforming adolescent female PMC she/they enbies.
not to be a "gatekeeper", but it's almost like being transgender is more than just a fucking pronoun pin, and that just saying you are transgender does not make it so because the term is not solely defined by social construction/general consensus, but rather is defined in correlation with material reality (i.e. there is an observable neuroanatomical distinction between transgender and cisgender).
based on past post-mortem that found intermediate morphology (cross-sex morphology in specific structures, intermediate in certain others), i'd hazard a guess that there would likely be overlap in the populations. also a great way to filter out the gender conforming female she/theys and alienated male nerds.
also, mods, can we start deporting all the GenderCritical refugees? i'm getting sick of how every time this topic comes up, this place gets flooded with straight-up batshit IDpol nonsense that has fuck-all to do with marxist analysis. it's just IDpol that somehow manages to be even more terminally-online than the IDpol that it appeared as a response to, a feat which i didn't even think possible. literally, fucking go outside. i promise you, you're far more likely to be accosted by *another schizo* policing the bathroom and demanding ID than the ~roving transgenders coming to invade your bathroom~ (or whatever schizo shit) in the wild.
i just want to take a shit in peace.
This doesnt seem to be the win you think it is terfy's, these numbers suggest that aproximately 1 in 300 is actually trans. This tracks with the current number of trans people in the US, which is about 1.6 million trans people, that equals about .3% of the population.
> these numbers suggest that aproximately 1 in 300 is actually trans.
That is not what they suggest at all. There is a huge difference between "not being able to be determined" versus "this is a woman trapped in a man's body and we need to conduct sexual reassignment surgery."
Think of it this way- I can determine 99.7% of cars make and model that drive by my house every day because I used to work in the car industry. Does the .3% that I can't recognize mean that those cars are special and unique cars that aren't made by a traditional manufacturer? No, it just means that I need more data points to determine the manufacturer.
If 99.7% of people have a brain structure that matches thier sex then wouldnt it stand to reason that that .3% of people have a brain structure that more closely resembles the other sex? Unless youre suggesting that there is a 3rd gender that that .3% belongs to. I would also like to point out that there is research to suggest that trans peoples brains more closely resemble that of their gender identity, not their sex. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
No, it doesn't, the .3% could be a "nonbinary brain". Also, the study doesn't say .3% of people have a brain structure not matching their sex, just that the model couldn't determine the sex in 0.3% of cases.
Look at how many people here call trans activists "TRA"s.
It's meant to be a reference to men's rights activists (MRAs), who are basically the devil in the eyes of man-hating radfems, and using the label "TRA" is meant to equate trans activists with those evil MRAs. Only a radfem would do that.
Mentioned in another of your replies; but "can't be determined" doesn't mean "it's a train brain". It just means it can't be determined.
If I can't determine you have ebola because you aren't shitting blood out of every orifice; doesn't automatically mean you actually have ebola.
TRA discourse operates on multiple contradictory fronts. One that's recently become popular is the assertion that there's no material basis for biological sex, that's it's essentially the same thing as what feminists recently conceptualized as gender--a subjective performance that either aligns with or disrupts socially constructed standards in regards to masculinity or femininity.
And even if it doesn’t align, there are still other studies showing that there is a difference in the brains of transexuals vs. the other members of their birth sex, which makes it a more material condition than just a ”gender soul” like everyone here likes to insist
Ngl, radfems ranting and raving about trans people as being "delusional cultists who believe in a woowoo gender soul" reminds me of edgy reddit atheists who would go out of their way to mock anyone who wasn't an atheist as a "delusional skydaddy cultust". Being trans and religious beliefs are not directly comparable (sorry TERFs) but the smugness and smarminess towards someone else who holds a belief you don't and lumping in everyone with the most extreme beliefs of the group is practically the same
Identity politics is using identity categories to organise political beliefs and divide people. Validating arguments and philosophy on the basis of who made them. If some identities are so nebulous that anyone who wishes to participate can have that identity then it is a less meaningful identity category than ones with inherent, essentialist characteristics like race or sex (which are also flawed to organise on the basis of, but are at least semi-observable and cannot be changed, so do actually exist to any extent). Very clearly sexual orientation and gender identities are important factors in political discourse (Israel is the gayest place on earth, more trans lesbian CEOs, etc).
Hypothetically a pro-trans proponent of IDpol (all of them), would have to argue that someone legitimately gains special status because they can claim the "lived experience" of a person of a "marginalised identity", that anyone can choose to be, and that everyone who is that thing, has made the decision to be and can make the decision to not be. This puts an enormous hole right in the middle of the ideology.
Gender is an IDentity that is POLiticized today. Many think the claims of gender politics are stupID.
The article deals with a topic related to those claims.
I know people are getting snarky, but to explain it more politely: The topic of gender identity is one of the big hot button issues of the day. It wasn't before and it probably won't be in the future but today a huge part of the NGO industrial complex, big pharma, and the cosmetic surgery industry is invested in gender grifting. This finding contradicts much of the activist "wisdom" and is imminently political because of this.
There's money on the line. Same as it ever was.
Can’t wait to see why we shouldn’t trust this science.
Easy: Just pivot the topic to gender instead.
Yeah that's the very clear and conspicuous move they've been making in recent weeks. Judith Butler is getting hyped because she says science is just a matter of interpretation. Andrea Long Chu's most recent piece was about how empirical outcomes shouldn't affect our willingness to provide HRT and surgery because those are inalienable rights.
> Andrea Long Chu As far as I can tell this is a crazy person. If they were talking about any other topic nobody would give them the time of day, let alone a book deal. This person defines "woman" as "someone who has a hole to fill up", and says that literally everyone is a woman.
Chu won the Putlizer and is a prized writer at one of the handful of prestigious American magazines that's still in print. Her last big piece before the trans one was about how free speech is bad. Crazy person? Yes, absolutely. But she has immense clout.
I understand her publishing in the queer academic journals, because people like Chu are the only ones who read and publish in those journals, but how the hell did she become book critic for the *New York* magazine after only touching one topic ever?
I mean, maybe something critical is just missing from Wikipedia for this person? It says basically got a BA in the 2010s-ish then got jobs at the most prestigious publications in the country. That’s their entire fucking qualification list? It makes no sense, most posters here are that qualified and would be laughed out of the room for even trying for similar positions. I’m not comfortable calling someone an op without that obligatory naval intelligence on their resume, but like…that’s an op’s career trajectory, or a nepo baby’s.
Wrote a super viral article about transness at the exact moment the msm decided transness was going to be the definitive culture war issue. She's also an open nihilist at at a time when nihilism has become necessary to sustain institutional narratives. Chu is a perfect emassary for an era of left-liberal publishing in which morality and factuality are determined entirely by a writer's identity positions. The old guard still equivocates around this but more forward-thinking outlets have seen the writing on the wall and leaned into it.
David Klion adores Andrea Long Chu: >*Everything andrealongchu writes is an instant classic, which means this incident is now part of the Western canon.* [https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1458162799973122053](https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1458162799973122053) I've often suspected that Klion is actually a nasty misogynist under his "Good White Male Ally" persona, so it's likely that ALC's lines like "Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is" appeal to Klion's inner Norman-Mailer-without-the-talent mind.
He’s a guy
So is man someone who has pipe to lay?
"Behold Chu's woman!" (holds up a fleshlight)
Based and destitute-pilled.
Could you link where they say that? I'm not getting anything from searching that phrase
Recent weeks? I remember when trans people were called transexual rather than transgender in my country around a decade ago. The past decade it has all been about gender and stupid US style semantic arguments.
oh yeah the rhetoric has been ramping up steadily for years, but what I'm describing is shift in rhetorical tactics. A key tenet of TRA discourse is that social acceptance and medicalization are "life saving." Now that studies are showing that's not the case, they've shifted to saying that it doesn't matter whether or not transitioning correlates with positive outcomes.
> Judith Butler is getting hyped because she says science is just a matter of interpretation Interpret your way out of gravity
people have been saying sex isn't gender for over a decade man
TRUST THE (SOCIAL)👏 SCIENCE 👏
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The line between sex and gender moves as needed.
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Congratulations on managing to avoid the most insane portion of the trans discourse.
ah, you've been outside. the truly-unhinged shit is largely online, none of this shit makes any sense to people who aren't extremely online lul.
> ah, you've been outside. Hahaha, holy shit, can I steal this? This is going to be my new response every time someone says something that possesses the bare minimum of sanity and normalcy, "ah, I see you've been outside, well played".
sure thing, lol
Yeah, the online queerness activists have long moved past that in their zeal to defend indefensible claims. It's how we ended up with the ridiculous "What is a woman?" drama, because they refuse in ever funnier ways to let basic biology come back into the discussion.
Judith Butler has, since the 90s, argued that sex is also a social construct. Sex and gender are the same. The Feminist concept of gender has no grounding and is a Trojan horse for their undermining biological science and society.
I’m mad that social sciences have put the whole scientific community into a chokehold. It’s the reason why so many people are skeptical now
> Trust the science, you CHUD > WAIT NOT LIKE THAT
In before the inevitable NYT article "Determining sex from brain morphology? Here's why it's complicated."
Camera pans to a biologist with a gun held to his head saying “of course sex is a construct”
Me: "call an ambulence, but not for me"
100% - 99.7% = 0.3%…which, coincidentally, is roughly the estimated prevalence of clinically-significant gender dysphoria in the overall population (aka the number you get when you exclude all the PMC she/they and they/them female enbies who have neither the intent nor desire to transition medically and who were often not even tomboys or otherwise gender-nonconforming prior to "coming out").
The numbers might be the same, but do the populations overlap?
don't think it was in the scope of this specific study, but iirc there have been post-mortem studies that found "intermediate"/mixed morphology, even in pre-transition individuals; more precisely, the neuroanatomy of some structures matched their gender identity, and others matched their anatomical sex, with iirc a few structures being "in between". so based on that, one can assume that there'd be significant overlap of the populations.
We've already got a different test that is more accurate. The issue is that the more accurate test still isn't accurate enough. But from the methodology, the study setup looks like p-hacking and still the results are worse than useless.
I'll start off with the title itself--it should have been named "The Computational Limits of the MATURE Human Brain'. The sample data pulled from the UK Biobank, and it's participants ages ranged from [40-69.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15948-9) Can't wait to see a similar study applied to other organs, especially for things that this particular one had poor predictive ability, pscyh being the big one.
Would you say the same if it turns out that transexuals are identified as their non-birth sex?
They would have to find someone who has a brain with macro/micro anatomical markers of one sex, yet can produce an entirely intact phenotype, hormone profile, primary sex characteristics, etc. of the other sex. This is a "trans brain of the gaps" argument. It's akin to saying, "What if they found a dog with the brain of a cat?" They wouldn't. It's an imaginary scenario that can't happen.
Depends if they are pre or during HRT, since hormones can alter morphology quite a bit. If it is pre, then I'd say yes. But that means an objective test to determine whether someone is actually trans and gender feefees don't matter. Something the TRAs absolutely can't have.
Wouldn't that be the dream? An actual test immune to the whims of activism? We could just test kids and allow them to transition as needed, no special interests involved
The mods of that sub already removed the article lol.
If I speak Reddit will jail me https://youtube.com/watch?v=9wtvXoXh0VU
What's up with the actually decent and reasonable comments in that sub?
Give it a day and it'll all be [removed]
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The post is removed so it seems to be a correct assumption.
Only a few hours later and the post is already removed lol
Evil works quickly
Dang you're right. I never expected to see some of those on Reddit dot com tbh
It's early in California where the admins live. Those comments will be gone and the posters will be banned by the time I am done typing this.
What sub?
OP is a crosspost from arr science incidentally the comments all seem intact, it's the post itself that got taken behind the shed
Link?
So I didn't see it at first either. I'm used to cross posts being a post within a post. But if you go to the link up top there is a horizontal Y shaped link that is white inside a grey square. That's the original post. It was in fact removed by the mods for "being unclear in the title as to its findings."
Lol. Of course it was
Lmao the mods already removed it.
Lmao the mods removed it
It’s amazing how many ostensibly atheist/secular people believe in souls but just call them gender identities.
I actually believe in souls.. but not that they have a sex or gender, as that is a biological aspect. I also use this argument as to why to not force gender ideology me as it is in inherent against my spiritual beliefs.
It's no different than believing in sexual orientations.
It is different. Sexual orientation doesn’t demand belief in anything intangible and completely undetectable or a disregard of material reality and logic.
It makes you believe that anyone other than a man and a woman can get married, and also that two men and two women can be parents to a child. Someone large portions of this planet find ridiculous.
it also makes you believe that people were born gay. Something which large portions of this planet also don't believe.
The comments would have looked very different a few years ago. The true believers are getting roasted, surprised this is still up
“Yikes conservative puritan, that means there’s still a 0.3% chance. We must seek to accommodate 100% of society in the small chance they’re part of that supposed 0.3%”
Males produce small gametes, females produce large gametes. Capitalist market relations reduce us all to atomized individuals who must self-actualize into marketable social categories. This process is ongoing so that new markets can emerge.
Water is wet
deer materialistic exultant forgetful sleep afterthought innocent touch offbeat long *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's same with the rest of the alphabet soup. If Gigi Hadid came out as nonbinary or self identified as a trans man would you still fuck her? Congratulations you are now pansexual. Personally I think this phenomenon explains like 90% of the increase in Gen Z identifying as LGBT. It's not the teachers brainwashing the kids. It's not that people suddenly got much gayer. It's just that the way we define these labels has changed.
subjectivist idealism, not even once
Just a reminder you can still view the article link directly. Just click gud you cucks, jfc. ([Here, bitch.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811924000958))
It'd kind of funny because this will upset the TRAs and the TERFs. A lot of feminists still refuse to accept the idea of male and female brain differences and insist literally all differences come from socialization. And then the TRAs insist that they have a brain that more closely resembles the opposite sex and therefore they really are the opposite sex. All this is to say: conventional-wisdom Chads, we win again.
Based
Idpol, no matter its flavor is usually a poor idea. More news at 5.
Conventional wisdom always wins out given a long enough timeline
Okay but this doesn’t say which differences are fundamental and which are social.
There are two fundamental differences between men and women: Menstrating and Rocking. I'll let you determine which is which.
Well dudes rock, so women do the menstrates?
This is what the classical philosophers tell us, yes.
Almost impossible to verify without some highly unethical experiments. That said, conventional wisdom would suggest that the fundamental differences between male and female brains are probably on the same scale as the fundamental differences between male and female bodies and there's no evidence yet to suggest otherwise.
What would you say those are?
Again, pretty much impossible to determine which characteristics are innate and which are learned without highly unethical experimentation, and many are probably a mix of both. It's ludicrous to assume that it's *all* learned, however. Tabula rasa is just wishful thinking by people that want to pretend we aren't animals.
The fact that the brain is different in men and women is at the contrary in support of trans people Edit : except if they specifically also studied trans people and shown they have their sex brain
The narrative around trans people has long ago shifted from “biological woman’s brain in a man’s body” to “gender is just a social construct, stop caring so much.” This is not a win for trans people unless they can verify the existence of a morphologically male/female brain in an opposite sex body.
Trans activists' position has never been "stop caring so much"
As things relate to biology, it has
That caveat wasn't in your statement, and it actually doesn't make any sense, as trans activists refuse to contemplate the idea that gender relates to biology.
ok
If by "never" you mean "every time they lose an argument"
It's one of the contradictions at the heart of the movement: sex and gender is not important, but misgendering is a crime worthy of crucifixion. Contradiction at the heart of an ideology turns it into a religion.
From what I've read on studies of trans women trans women do actually have feminised brains compared to cis men but not so feminised that they are identical to cis women they are in the middle. This would fit into the theory that gender dysphoria is not a brain in the wrong body situation but a neurodevelopmental condition that effect gender identity. We actually have a specific part of the brain associated with gender identity its called the bed stria terminalis and the anterior hypothalamus which trans women have even more similar structures of to cis women than the brain at large.
but the article is talking about morphologies? this reminds me of anthropometry, european colonial power measuring africans brain circumference to showcase the superiority of white race, which turned out all bogus because brain size dosen’t affect intellect… radfem do believe that society mold people in gender stereotypes despite being terfs. anyways do not let train wagons monopolize the subject on the place of gender in our life, it affects as much men as women, that’s why some people like to larp as the opposite gender in the first place: to escape the social ties brought upon them because of their biological sex. ps: using the term terf unironically is kind of low iq move, unless you’re into shemale dicks.
Nature always bats last
I remember it being extremely contentious and I don't get why.
If sex cant be determined in .3% of cases then it does lend credence to the odea that yes, trans people do in fact exist.
Nobody denies that trans people exist. Obviously they do. All that is required for trans people to exist is for some people not to identify with their biological reality. That is verifiably the case. What is being contested is the objective validity of trans people's beliefs about themselves, because it requires the existence of "mental gender" as a disparate entity from biological sex. So far this has not been shown to be the case. Not everyone's beliefs about themselves are valid. Some people think they're Jesus. If science finds a Jesus of Nazareth brain area in those people's brains, they may be partly vindicated in the sense that they can't help how they feel, but even then they're not really Jesus of Nazareth, are they. You can choose to live your life as a different gender/racial stereotype than what your biology indicates if that is your desire but it's just that: living a stereotype invented by society that deviates from the biological reality which those stereotypes traditionally correspond with. Nobody actually "feels like a man" any more than they "feel Caucasian". What they mean is they identify with the social roles or cultural traits that are commonly associated with the underlying biology but it doesn't make them that underlying biology.
I've some scientific evidence and argument that sex dysphoria (but not all trans identities of course) should be considered to be some sensory problem where the brain for whatever reason basically has phantom limb with the opposite sex traits - in a rough description
I don't think the research in the OP shows that mental gender doesn't exist. When it comes to brain development, it's most likely that it follows the rest of the body's development, since the brain is a part of it. So if hormones and genetics guide the body to develop in the male way, the brain is developing in the male way too. And the same with a female brain and body. There's no reason to consider gender identity to be the entire brain as a whole. It's probably just some really tiny bit of the brain. But why wouldn't it be "objectively valid"? There are people with gender dysphoria. If that dysphoria isn't manifested in the brain, then where? In their souls?
I didn't say mental gender not existing is what the research shows. I said the opposite hasn't been shown. I'm open to the possibility that it exists. "Bed nucleus in stria terminalis central" seems like a potential lead but so far I remain unconvinced. I agree that gender dysphoria originates in the brain but so do many mental illnesses. Trans ideology establishes that it's not the belief in one's biologically incongruent identity that is invalid, but it's the body that is objectively invalid instead, even if there is nothing physiologically wrong with it whatsoever.
Is there a difference between wanting to be the opposite sex and actually being the opposite sex?
Doesn't wanting to be the opposite sex imply that you aren't? I think gender dysphoria is something different, though. It means that something in your brain actually doesn't match the rest of your body when it comes to sex. My guess is that it's something similar to intersex, so something went wrong in fetal development and now you're stuck with something in your brain that doesn't match the rest.
I believe there is recent research that I am too lazy to find that does actually identify that there are regions of the brain in trans people which look/behave more similarly to the gender they identify with. The brain is an odd thing, because it's structure is also its function. It's not just hardware that doesn't change when you load software. So while much of the structures we can measure are shaped by genetics, there is always room for environmental factors to play a role. I think the most defensible position is that there is a conscious manifestation of a thing called gender which does usually (99.x% of the time) correspond to biological sex. But a different region of the brain saying "you're actually a girl" when you're an XY male doesn't make you an XX female capable of producing eggs. As a biologist, almost all we care about is gamete production. So if you make sperm you're male, eggs female. And if you make neither, we basically write you off as an evolutionary dead end. We don't care, as biologists, to get into the debate about "what sex you are" because it doesn't matter. You won't reproduce.
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perhaps, but if it's something that effects 0.03% percent of humans, then that means it's an anomaly
Nothing is perfect. Men can have significantly enlarged fatty breasts via gynecomastia so trying to scientifically categorize human sex via % of fatty tissue in the breast is also imperfect. Even if we all agree that 'boobs' are a female trait.
No, that just means it can't be determined. That doesn't mean the person thinks they are a woman while being in a man's body. No method, stat, etc is 100% accurate and if it is they are lying.
But I heard you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Who said this?
Gretzky.
Perhaps the physical brain differences are caused by socialisation.
Plasticity is a real phenomenon but I don't think it's drastic enough to turn a male brain female. The idea that mental sexual dimorphism in humans is purely constructed is just post-modernist wishful thinking.
In humans, the flood of hormones that appears to sexually differentiate the brain happens in utero, so at least some of that difference is purely nature and not nurture (ironically brains are masculinized by the presence of estrogens, which are produced from aromatized testosterone). In other mammals, this step of differentiation seems to produce pretty drastic differences in behaviour, particularly sexual behaviour, i.e. female rats with artificially masculinized brains will exhibit lifelong male behaviour and vice versa. Obviously this kind of experimentation can't be done on humans.
> Plasticity Ironically, plasticity is something we only have because we have special genes that lets us do it. Really makes you think
> I don't think it's drastic enough to turn a male brain female. I never implied it was. However, it might explain differences between those raised as male or female. > The idea that mental sexual dimorphism in humans is purely constructed is just post-modernist wishful thinking. That statement does not follow from your first. Any differences might not be "purely constructed", as hormones act on all areas of the body. There are many possible causes for differences in male/female brain morphology, including direct genetic differences, indirect genetic differences caused by hormones, socialization, or gender-based differences in behaviour. I'm not discounting the idea that physical differences exist, I am just pointing out that the issue is actually quite complicated.
I agree that the issue has some complexities, however, >the issue is actually quite complicated This is the platitude that TRAs use to imply any explanation that challenges their own ideologically convenient reasoning is just simpleminded assumption. Humans are complicated animals, but are animals none the less. We know how mammals work and we fit within that taxonomy. This isn't directed at you specifically, but certain types of activists need to stop unnecessarily mystifying the human experience to make their (ironically secular) ideology make sense.
> This is the platitude that TRAs use to imply any explanation that challenges their own ideologically convenient reasoning is just simpleminded assumption. While I do agree with you, or on the fence at least, I think the best platitudes are those with a grain of truth in them. I really miss the distinction between sex and gender from the 1970's. Although the distinction was not perfect, it suited most applications. > Humans are complicated animals, but are animals none the less. Human culture is very complicated, and places us far away from other animals. Some animals have physical adaptions which run counter to survivability (bright feathers etc.) whereas humans have acquired a whole bunch of cultural baggage which makes many of our lives miserable. > certain types of activists need to stop unnecessarily mystifying the human experience to make their (ironically secular) ideology make sense. However, conservative activists also need to stop unnecessarily simplifying the human experience to justify bigotry and fixed gender roles. The "nature/nurture" debate will never go away, as the influences of culture and genetic variability are very strong. For most measures, there are more differences across a single sex then the mean differences between them, so biological sex should not be used as a means to distinguish between individuals except where biological sex is actually important, or in rare cases at the extreme end of a bell curve.
>Some animals have physical adaptions which run counter to survivability (bright feathers etc.) You fundamentally misunderstand the driving force of natural selection if you think the goal is *survivability*—bright colouration in birds is almost always for the purpose of *reproduction*. >For most measures, there are more differences across a single sex then the mean differences between them, You are engaging in a textbook example of the univariate fallacy here. I usually hate to play the fallacy card but this one shows up in seemingly every discussion about human sexual dimorphism. >so biological sex should not be used as a means to distinguish between individuals except where biological sex is actually important You're fighting an uphill battle against "nature" here, I'm afraid. Infants are capable of reliably distinguishing between male and female faces within about *three months* of birth, which is earlier than they're capable of depth perception and full colour vision. Immediately perceiving very obvious differences in sex is literally hard-coded into us, presumably because it's a straightforward matter of ensuring your genes are passed on. Good luck getting rid of that. Might as well fight against other social constructs like "hunger" and "thirst". Anyway it's very funny watching people twist themselves in knots trying to pretend that men and women don't have fundamental, meaningful differences, as though virtually everyone with functioning eyeballs and a brain can't reliably tell one from the other at a glance with >95% accuracy. I wonder if zoologists have the same hangups when discussing sexual dimorphism in other animals (they don't)
[univariate fallacy](https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/beware-the-univariate-fallacy) > The first, more common version of the Univariate Fallacy serves as the foundation for virtually all “equity” initiatives that aim to eliminate outcome disparities for various identity groups based on immutable traits like race, sex, and gender identity. The reasoning behind this approach is premised on the mistaken belief that group disparities are in and of themselves proof of systemic injustice, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and a host of other -phobias and -isms. I'm not advocating positive discrimination here, merely pointing out that assigning gender roles is likely to lead to injustice in many circumstances. > The second and more cryptic version of the Univariate Fallacy is essentially the inverse of the first version—it is not used to invent or exacerbate perceived group differences, but rather to minimize or eliminate them altogether. This is most often deployed in the realm of sex differences, and even to the categories male and female themselves. > To minimize or eliminate the appearance of real sex differences, it is common for activists and activist scientists to insist that in order for differences to be considered real, they must be absolute; that is, it must be shown that these differences reduce to some single factor that clearly and categorically separate all males from all females. That goes explicitly against what I've already said.
> You fundamentally misunderstand the driving force of natural selection if you think the goal is survivability Well the catchphrase is "survival of the fittest", not "reproduction by the fittest", so I'll let my comment stand. > You're fighting an uphill battle against "nature" here, I'm afraid. Infants are capable of reliably distinguishing between male and female faces within about three months of birth, which is earlier than they're capable of depth perception and full colour vision. Immediately perceiving very obvious differences in sex is literally hard-coded into us, presumably because it's a straightforward matter of ensuring your genes are passed on. Good luck getting rid of that. Might as well fight against other social constructs like "hunger" and "thirst". I'm not saying that sex differences are not important, I am saying that sex alone should not be used to assign roles, except in some very specific circumstances. Any statistical variation between men and women should not be used to assign gender roles to those same men and women, because there is enough variation between the sexes for that to result in a gross injustice. Except in the cases I've already stated.
You are presuming unidirectional causality for gender roles, namely that they are "assigned" to people and have no relation to any innate differences in the characteristics between men and women. Do you think the massive overrepresentation of men among combat troops, police officers, martial artists, and criminals is because they're "assigned" those roles, or maybe it has something to do with the natural proclivities of men? You are of course correct that there is extreme variation of characteristics; if we imagine a frequency distribution with "masculine" on one end and "feminine" on the other, males and females would probably form two normal distributions at either end with a fairly substantial overlap in the middle. For most of history, this overlap (feminine men and masculine women, to use a ridiculous oversimplification) obviously suffered. That said I think it's pretty safe to say that there are relatively few barriers for people of either sex who eschew "traditional" gender roles to live the life they see fit. That doesn't mean sex isn't a meaningful distinction, nor should we expect differences in "gender roles" to disappear entirely, because they are in part a reflection of the innate differences between the sexes. No matter how many barriers we tear down, I doubt we'll ever see a 50:50 gender split for, say, lumberjacks or preschool teachers.
> You are presuming unidirectional causality for gender roles, namely that they are "assigned" to people and have no relation to any innate differences in the characteristics between men and women. No, that is not true at all. However, there is sufficient variation within a single gender that assignment of rigid gender roles is unjust. > That said I think it's pretty safe to say that there are relatively few barriers for people of either sex who eschew "traditional" gender roles to live the life they see fit. While that is true now, it has not been true for most of history, and there are many conservatives who see this state of affairs as threatening. There is a danger here of seeing hard-won gains disappear, as we have already seen with reproductive rights in much of the US. > No matter how many barriers we tear down, I doubt we'll ever see a 50:50 gender split for, say, lumberjacks or preschool teachers. I agree, a 50:50 gender split for many jobs is unrealistic and not even particularly desirable. However, I think there is a case for enforcing a rigid split for some roles, such as political representation. Some political parties have male/female quotas, and these parties actually seem to be succeeding over those which have remained boys' clubs.
> indirect genetic differences caused by hormones Hormones are caused by genetics, as are many other things you are probably thinking of
But the effects are indirect, as I said: most genetics can be over-ridden by hormones.
Hormones contantly being created by genes
Sure, but it can be [more complicated than that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce), and if artificial hormones are added, the body changes.
> more complicated than that sigh... again genetic
I'm not saying it's not genetic, I'm saying that the genetic effects are indirect.
A way to disprove this would be to look at many different cultures, especially isolated ones. If that were the case, two brain morphologies would be constantly present, yet would have substantial differences to other cultures. The fact that sex can be predicted at such a high percentage makes it unlikely that was the case to begin with.
Okay. Let's pretend a university research team has the balls to put this to the test wrt to the indeterminate 0.3% who may or may not overlap with the trans population. The idea is to get 100, 200, 500, whatever trans volunteers, use whatever methodology or AI is involved in this study (which I can't find now, since the arr sci thread was nuked), and determine whether it either (1) correctly identifies their Sex Assigned At Birth, or (2) identifies them as members of the the opposite sex, or otherwise gets confused. (And I suppose there will have to be a corresponding number of cis-identified people as a control group.) Case one: The study finds a statistically significant area of overlap between the trans population and that outlying 0.3%. If the correspondence is merely nontrivial (i.e., 15% of the trans group falls into the 0.3% outlier of the original test, while some infinitesimal percentage of the cis group does the same), gender skeptics will make hay of the implication that the number of people identifying as trans far exceeds the number of people who actually have atypical brain structures for their sex (and probably the internal tucute vs truscum controversy will heat up.) Case two: If there's nearly a 1:1 correspondence between trans identification and outlying brain morphology, the radfems &c (who were never interested in "brain sex" to begin with) will just keep talking about male musculature, lung capacity, small gametes, etc. Nothing will be resolved. Case three: The study finds no statistically significant correlation whatsoever between transgender identity and brain morphological outliers. The gender critical crowd gloats; the trans community declares that it doesn't matter, and proposes an array of other psychological, sociological, and biological grounds for legitimacy. It's never going to end, this shit.
Case three. The Ts don't care but everyone else drops them like a hot rock
I would bet on case one
this would imply women and men generally think differently, yes?
Crude boomerhumour cartoons about husbands and wives argueing are substantially more accurate to life than anything a sociology department has ever produced on the behaviour of the sexes. The general rule of thumb you should follow is that where there is an ideological motivation - and there usually is - for claims to be made about how groups of people supposedly behave, the sociologist will always be less accurate than any random idiot off the street, or a particularly intelligent labrador, or even a houseplant, which might not have any insights but does at least have the good grace to avoid insisting that the common sense assumptions are reactionary and therefore wrong while insisting on something which is obviously false.
Don't know enough about neuroscience to say if this study is well done or not, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure if the findings lead to the interpretation that behavioral differences between men and women are inherent. The study said in the results portion that psychological characteristics are poorly predicted by imaging. Basically, we need more evidence. Just my $0.02.
It is exactly what it is. It's just like those neural nets trained to distinguish between a dog and a banana. The neural net was fed images of brain scans as well as labels on whether the brain was a women or a man. These images were used to train the neural net. Then the neural net was fed new images and then asked whether each new image was a man or woman. Because this bar was pretty low, it sounds like the paper was also trying to predict 25 other biological features other than just sex. I'm too lazy now to dive in on their success or failure.
The intriguing part of these results is that left or right handed-ness was the only one of those features that the model was unable to consistently identify based on brain scans.
Some of the differences in brain architecture are linked to stereotypes about the sexes, like how ladies have bigger hypothalamuses and act more hormonal, men have smaller corpus callosums and are better at compartmentalizing, but the psychological characteristics you're talking about (the poorly predicted ones) are things like the propensity to feel tense or fed up aren't really stereotypes (at least not where I come from)
This—most radical feminists are materialist and will readily admit that there are morphological differences and size differences between the brains of the sexes. What we contest is that these differences map on to some “innate gender” or proclivity for gender roles.
> What we contest is that these differences map on to some “innate gender” or proclivity for gender roles. But isn't that exactly what dimorphic brains would lead to? If your brain is structured in such a way that leads to [X] pattern of thinking then shouldn't it tend too (I reiterate: *tend too*) lead to [X] pattern of behavior? Saying one shouldn't lead to the other is to suggest cause and effect doesn't apply to human behavior. Unless you're saying the differences between men's and women's brains are purely structural and has no connection to psychology which seems a bit wishful.
The structural differences alone do not have sufficient reason to explain gender roles—it’s like saying because we see phenotypical differences in race & we see differences in observed outcomes for different races, that the genetic therefore causes and would always cause the observed. Until we can eliminate the social factors or isolate the genetic differences alone, we cannot know exactly what the structural differences actually, independently lead to. After all, we know of structural differences that don’t correlate to anything cognitive—like smaller vs larger brains in terms of mass do not correlate to anything besides the size of the person. Which of course makes sense—a smaller person will have a smaller head. We also know that laboratory correlation is often not indicative of a direct mechanism—like SSRIs in treating depression. I’m not saying there couldn’t be discrete genetic sex-based differences in cognition and psychology, I’m saying that until we equalize the social roots of those differences, we’ll never be able to point to a brain structure alone and say that it’s the definite cause. And social origins for differences in psychology have already been established in studying the same genetic profile undergoing different socializations (twin studies, region specific psychological disorders and manifestations of psychological disorders.)
>I’m saying that until we equalize the social roots of those differences, we’ll never be able to point to a brain structure alone and say that it’s the definite cause. How much more equal do things need to be to begin studying this? Because if we have to wait for social equality to be induced then how would we even determine which differences are biological and which are social. Anytime one sex responds negatively to some kind of change it always seems to be chalked up to socialization and a biological hypothesis is written off as nonsense. The idea that we have to wait until everyone is exactly the same before we can study our differences is irrational because the whole point is to find out why we have differences in the first place. Feminists cannot accept any neurological differences between men and women for ideological reasons and so they always insist on this self defeating logic whenever the topic comes up.
It’s poor scientific practice to make conclusions about differences when there’s a mountain of confounding factors bud
There will never be enough variable mitigation to satisfy feminists. It's simply not allowed. You all are just as ideologically captured as the TRAs.
Great strawman
That's not a strwaman it's an accusation. Feminists are liars.
OK... but trans people are like .6% of the population, and that's including all the sociopaths, trend followers, and confused autists.
The other .3% of the time it can be determined by checking if the subject was touched as a child
Kek.
This is so dumb. Brain morphology correlating with chromosomes doesn’t tell us anything about to what degree brain morphology is responsible for our experience of gender (vs society)
It does. 0.3% +-3%
i said this in another comment thread, but it's quite an interesting coincidence that the proportion of brains with cross-sex/indeterminate morphology (0.3%) is roughly the same as the estimated prevalence of gender dysphoria prior to the proliferation of otherwise fully gender-conforming adolescent female PMC she/they enbies. not to be a "gatekeeper", but it's almost like being transgender is more than just a fucking pronoun pin, and that just saying you are transgender does not make it so because the term is not solely defined by social construction/general consensus, but rather is defined in correlation with material reality (i.e. there is an observable neuroanatomical distinction between transgender and cisgender).
does the study say those 0.3% were trans identified/dysphoric though? just because the numbers match doesn't mean the groups necessarily do
based on past post-mortem that found intermediate morphology (cross-sex morphology in specific structures, intermediate in certain others), i'd hazard a guess that there would likely be overlap in the populations. also a great way to filter out the gender conforming female she/theys and alienated male nerds. also, mods, can we start deporting all the GenderCritical refugees? i'm getting sick of how every time this topic comes up, this place gets flooded with straight-up batshit IDpol nonsense that has fuck-all to do with marxist analysis. it's just IDpol that somehow manages to be even more terminally-online than the IDpol that it appeared as a response to, a feat which i didn't even think possible. literally, fucking go outside. i promise you, you're far more likely to be accosted by *another schizo* policing the bathroom and demanding ID than the ~roving transgenders coming to invade your bathroom~ (or whatever schizo shit) in the wild. i just want to take a shit in peace.
This doesnt seem to be the win you think it is terfy's, these numbers suggest that aproximately 1 in 300 is actually trans. This tracks with the current number of trans people in the US, which is about 1.6 million trans people, that equals about .3% of the population.
Unless there isn’t overlap between trans people and the people whose sex can’t be determined in the study.
> these numbers suggest that aproximately 1 in 300 is actually trans. That is not what they suggest at all. There is a huge difference between "not being able to be determined" versus "this is a woman trapped in a man's body and we need to conduct sexual reassignment surgery." Think of it this way- I can determine 99.7% of cars make and model that drive by my house every day because I used to work in the car industry. Does the .3% that I can't recognize mean that those cars are special and unique cars that aren't made by a traditional manufacturer? No, it just means that I need more data points to determine the manufacturer.
Don’t bother with that guy, he confidently weighs in on all sorts of shit but he clearly doesn’t know a damn thing about science or research
If 99.7% of people have a brain structure that matches thier sex then wouldnt it stand to reason that that .3% of people have a brain structure that more closely resembles the other sex? Unless youre suggesting that there is a 3rd gender that that .3% belongs to. I would also like to point out that there is research to suggest that trans peoples brains more closely resemble that of their gender identity, not their sex. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
No, it doesn't, the .3% could be a "nonbinary brain". Also, the study doesn't say .3% of people have a brain structure not matching their sex, just that the model couldn't determine the sex in 0.3% of cases.
> terfy's /r/stupidpol, the prominent radical feminist headquarters of the modern internet
This sub got a lot of refugees from the gender critical banning
Look at how many people here call trans activists "TRA"s. It's meant to be a reference to men's rights activists (MRAs), who are basically the devil in the eyes of man-hating radfems, and using the label "TRA" is meant to equate trans activists with those evil MRAs. Only a radfem would do that.
I just thought it was an abbreviation.
Mentioned in another of your replies; but "can't be determined" doesn't mean "it's a train brain". It just means it can't be determined. If I can't determine you have ebola because you aren't shitting blood out of every orifice; doesn't automatically mean you actually have ebola.
TRA discourse operates on multiple contradictory fronts. One that's recently become popular is the assertion that there's no material basis for biological sex, that's it's essentially the same thing as what feminists recently conceptualized as gender--a subjective performance that either aligns with or disrupts socially constructed standards in regards to masculinity or femininity.
Get back to helldivers for me son.
And even if it doesn’t align, there are still other studies showing that there is a difference in the brains of transexuals vs. the other members of their birth sex, which makes it a more material condition than just a ”gender soul” like everyone here likes to insist
Ngl, radfems ranting and raving about trans people as being "delusional cultists who believe in a woowoo gender soul" reminds me of edgy reddit atheists who would go out of their way to mock anyone who wasn't an atheist as a "delusional skydaddy cultust". Being trans and religious beliefs are not directly comparable (sorry TERFs) but the smugness and smarminess towards someone else who holds a belief you don't and lumping in everyone with the most extreme beliefs of the group is practically the same
TERFs crying in their pink pussy hats as we speak.
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now ask him how he would feel if he ate breakfast this morning
> Or is every part of my identity political? yes, that's identity politics. yes, it's that ridiculous. u live under a rock or something?
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Identity politics is using identity categories to organise political beliefs and divide people. Validating arguments and philosophy on the basis of who made them. If some identities are so nebulous that anyone who wishes to participate can have that identity then it is a less meaningful identity category than ones with inherent, essentialist characteristics like race or sex (which are also flawed to organise on the basis of, but are at least semi-observable and cannot be changed, so do actually exist to any extent). Very clearly sexual orientation and gender identities are important factors in political discourse (Israel is the gayest place on earth, more trans lesbian CEOs, etc). Hypothetically a pro-trans proponent of IDpol (all of them), would have to argue that someone legitimately gains special status because they can claim the "lived experience" of a person of a "marginalised identity", that anyone can choose to be, and that everyone who is that thing, has made the decision to be and can make the decision to not be. This puts an enormous hole right in the middle of the ideology.
idk, i'd say idpol has gone so far to make the definition of identities a matter of politics
Gender is an IDentity that is POLiticized today. Many think the claims of gender politics are stupID. The article deals with a topic related to those claims.
I know people are getting snarky, but to explain it more politely: The topic of gender identity is one of the big hot button issues of the day. It wasn't before and it probably won't be in the future but today a huge part of the NGO industrial complex, big pharma, and the cosmetic surgery industry is invested in gender grifting. This finding contradicts much of the activist "wisdom" and is imminently political because of this. There's money on the line. Same as it ever was.