gee whiz, Gilly

[gillygeewhiz]

hey sorry if you've already answered similar stuff before, do you have any meta-analyses or a link to a collection of studies on sexual dimorphism in the brain?

I haven't been maintaining it the past few years, but this is my spreadsheet of studies about neurological gender and transgenderism. The last tab is ones specifically about the sex differentiation of the brain.

The spreadsheet.

[gillygeewhiz]

Have you seen this study? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804

They claim that there are differences in male and female brains but that those differences are subtle and not large enough to warrant the use of the term "dimorphism", so they reject the idea that the brain is sexually dimorphic at all.

They cite Joel et al.'s 2015 infamous "mosaic" brain study which throws me off a bit.

Link: [x]

Yeah, I've covered it before, and it's bunk. Just one of Joel's disciples leaning on the same nonsense and dishonest reasoning to claim that decades worth of research into neurological sex differences actually shows nothing.

[gillygeewhiz]

I am very skeptical of non-binary genders as legitimate in the way transexuality is (I can understand the label if it just means being gnc or against gender roles, politically or socially), which is pretty obvious in the way you find trans people of all political ideologies, whereas non-binary is a left wing label.

However, I have seen you on your blog claim that the existence of non-binary identities itself would be at odds with current research on transexuality (paraphrasing). What exactly does that mean? We have proof that binary transexuality is a reality of the brain, and no good evidence that non-binary transexuality is real. But to say that it CAN'T be real? Not saying you are wrong, but I don't know how you reach that conclusion.

Hope you are doing alright btw, since you've been gone for a while.

I don't recall if I've ever gone as far as to authoritatively declare that nonbinary as an innate gender identity CAN'T be real, because I remain open to evidence proving otherwise, but the bar the evidence would have to clear to be convincing is so ridiculously high that I don't believe it can be met. Nonbinary as a gender identity simply doesn't make sense given the body of research on transsexualism, sex, and gender we have -- it's less that it's strictly not possible (though I do heavily lean that way), and more that there's no reason to believe it could be possible.

Gender identity is the brain's expectation of what sex the body is and what sex characteristics it has, that is thought to be fixed before birth. There are only 2 sexes in humans, so right off the bat the concept of nonbinary gender fails to be convincing, because how and why would the brain come to develop an expectation of a sex that doesn't exist?

It shouldn't be possible to develop a "null" gender identity, because human sex development defaults to female if there's insufficient hormone exposure in utero, and so it follows that gender identity should also default to female in the hypothetical scenario that no neurological sex differentiation happens during development. A "mixed" gender identity is slightly more plausible, but still doesn't make sense, because our DNA give our bodies a whole-sex template for development. How and why would the brain develop an expectation for a mixture of male and female sex characteristics when its concept of the body should also be a single whole-sex template? If gender identity development involved the kind of piecemeal assignment of neurological sex trait connections that would be required to develop a "mixed" nonbinary gender identity, why hasn't it been a more common occurrence throughout history for people to declare the need for single, random traits of the opposite sex?

We also have evidence that cisgender man, transgender man, cisgender woman, and transgender woman are distinct neurological phenotypes -- therefore, that there are neurological correlates with gender identity and being transgender, and that the phenotypes for every combination of gender and sex in the binary paradigm are accounted for. If nonbinary were a real gender identity category, you would expect to see evidence of at least two more phenotypes (natal male nonbinary & natal female nonbinary) that are similar to each other but distinct from the other four categories with a binary gender identity. As yet, no such gender phenotype has been described, so we can assume that it's either vanishingly rare or (more likely) that claims of being nonbinary are just not related to any pattern of features in the brain involved with gender.

Occam's razor applies. Why invent a convoluted explanation for how the brains of people claiming to be neither a man nor a woman work, that requires completely overturning everything we know about human sex and gender identity development... when the simple explanation, that they are binarily gendered and just ignorant and bigotted, already aligns with the existing evidence, requires fewer unsupported assumptions, and involves no extraordinary claims?

[gillygeewhiz]

Hey Gilly, bit of a weird question.

Do you believe BIID (body integrity identity disorder) is a legitimate neurological complication? I don't know what to think about it, my gut tells me "it's a mental illness that can be treated and possibly cured", but the limited studies I've seen tend to act as though it's not.

I ask you because it's a condition often compared to being trans (by transphobic individuals, mostly). What would you say the biggest differences are between them (in terms of why transition should be treated through matching your mental image whereas BIID shouldn't)?

BIID is something I simply haven't done any research on, so I can't go too deep on what I think about it. The premise (that someone could have a durable, long-term discomfort with and desire to disable/remove healthy body parts) sounds plausible enough, and assuming it's caused by an innate neurological condition, it WOULD be (at least superficially) a similar condition to gender incongruence. But what I think sounds plausible, or what would make sense to me based on what I know about a completely different medical condition, isn't enough for me to be comfortable making any sound judgments about its legitimacy.

But you're already poking at an ethical issue that we presently don't have enough evidence to be able to solve. The reason people with BIID "shouldn't" be treated by changing their bodies isn't because their condition is meaningfully any different from trans people's, it's because there currently are too many unknowns to be able to decide if the benefits outweigh the risks.

We don't know what causes those feelings, we don't know whether it's an innate neurological issue or an acquired psychiatric one, we don't know if it's possible to effectively address their symptoms in a less invasive way, and -- perhaps most importantly -- we don't know whether having their desired procedures done would measurably improve the patient's quality of life. Without that information, all we can say is that we don't have evidence that disabling patients who wish to be disabled actually brings them any relief, or if it does, whether that relief outweighs the presumed loss in quality of life that a new disability would cause them. Obviously it would be irresponsible and ethically-dubious to mandate disabling BIID patients as treatment without evidence that it works, but that's a declaration of the state of our understanding of BIID, not on whether that treatment could actually be an effective way to address the underlying condition.

By comparison, treating gender incongruence with medical transition is proven to vastly improve trans people's quality of life with extremely low rates of regret. We know that trans people's dysphoria towards their bodies has an innate neurological cause, and that treating it with therapy or medication without addressing the underlying brain-body mismatch doesn't work. Transition makes sense according to what we know about transgenderism as a neurological condition, and we have the evidence that transition works. That's the difference.

[gillygeewhiz]

Hello there! Evolutionary Biologist Colin Wright (yeah I know) recently wrote an article saying that the studies often fail to account for sexual orientation. How true is this?

For a vague statement like "often fails to", sure, it's true that there are many studies on trans people that do not control for possibly confounding variables like sexual orientation. There are also many that do control for those variables, and which still come to the conclusion that trans people's brains vary from the brains of cis people, and that gender identity has neurological correlates.

The true statement that many studies have serious limitations is not in any way a threat to the broad findings of the research area at large, which still has the same core threads -- that gender identity is a neurobiological facet and transgenderism is a real, innate condition -- underlying the results of studies regardless of their methodology or level of control.

[gillygeewhiz]

Hey, are you still active on this blog? I hope you do okay

Thanks for asking! I'm doing fine. I just don't have much to say anymore that I haven't already, so I only really post when I get asks.

[gillygeewhiz]

(1/2) Hello! I found your blog thanks to your resources sheet -- it's been an invaluable resource, thanks for compiling it. I was wondering if you know of any studies on the concept of 'biochemical dysphoria' that's often mentioned in some trans spaces. We know cis people don't do well on cross-sex hormones, and there are many studies indirectly pointing to an innate need for a specific hormone since quality of life improves dramatically after transition. That could be due to people generally

(2/2) being happier living as themselves though. I'm curious if the idea that our brains are hardwired to 'run better' on either estrogen or testosterone depending on whether andogenization occured in the fetal stage holds any water. It certainly reflects my (and many others') experience, and we do know hormones act as neurotransmitters, but I can't find anything specific wrt trans people and HRT that's not general QoL data. Apologies if there's relevant research in the sheet that I missed!

I'm afraid I've never heard of "biochemical dysphoria", so I'm not really sure what kind of resources you're looking for. I'm also not sure what you mean by saying that studies "indirectly" suggest that trans people have an "innate need" for certain hormones. Studies showing that HRT improves trans people's quality of life show only that -- there's no way to prove or test for an "innate need", if such a thing has ever even been defined, and to my knowledge none of the resources I've collected try to. As you mentioned, improvements in functioning can equally be chalked up to distress being relieved and the brain naturally working better when it's not under such significant stress, and I'm not sure there's a reliable way for the research to demonstrate which is the case.

I'm highly sceptical of any kind of teasing apart of gender dysphoria into different types that non-healthcare-professional people invent in trans spaces. There is no such thing as "bottom dysphoria", there is no such thing as "social dysphoria", and I would hazard that there's probably not such a thing as "biochemical dysphoria", either -- it's all just dysphoria, and benefitting from a medical treatment for dysphoria does not make someone a special kind of dysphoric.

Sorry I can't point you towards what you're looking for, but honestly, the evidence of how well HRT improves trans people's quality of life should be enough on its own. Whether the reason it works so well is or isn't that trans people's brains "innately need" to run on those hormones doesn't matter when it comes to deciding whether it's an effective treatment and should be considered medically necessary.

[gillygeewhiz]

Hi, I hope you’re good; I wanted to ask a few questions about a retraction (sorry about the long post but I needed context for my questions). Link below to the post I’m referencing (which also includes the retraction watch article I am referencing):

https://www.tumblr.com/myragewillendworlds/628643793671946240/the-neurobiological-basis-of-gender-dysphoria?source=share

@myragewillendworlds and you once reblogged and broke down the retraction for a work by Stephen Gliske on alternate theories for gender dysphoria’s cause. In the retractionwatch article you cited, Gliske also said that “However, since we do not know the true cause of gender dysphoria, it is not disrespectful” with regards to his theory. I’m not an expert on this issue, but based on your blog’s explanations, the explanations of @myragewillendworlds, and other science eduators’ explanations, this guy does not seem correct. However, I was wondering exactly what the issue with his work was. It was clear that there was no new research being created here, he was doing a review and forming a theory - so what exactly led him to this new theory? Why was it counter to the previous research? Why did you say it was inaccurate?

You also said in that old post that some people were worried about some “trans lobby” trying to take the article down (which I already hear as a dog whistle used against trans people so I didn’t take that particular comment too seriously), but I wanted to know what the article’s actual issues were and why people had negative reactions to the article.

Thank you for your time.

My post being referenced.

The retracted article in question.

The independent assessment leading to the retraction.

This is about Stephen Gliske's 2019 article proposing a "multisense theory" of the development of gender dysphoria, which garnered a huge amount of criticism calling it transphobic, and was eventually given an external review and officially retracted due to lack of scientific support in 2020.

As I touched on in another brief criticism of it shortly after it was published, I don't think Gliske was entirely off-base, he was just coming at the issue from a skewed angle and making some weird leaps that didn't make sense. It's worth noting that Gliske has worked in neuro departments but medicine & biology are not his areas of expertise; he's a physicist, and is probably not any more qualified to analyze the research on an emerging & extremely niche neuropsychological research area and publish a new theory about it with serious healthcare repercussions than I am. His biggest mistake was thinking he could suggest that a current standard treatment with proven efficacy (i.e. transition) could be avoided based on his inexpert analysis of the evidence, and no one would be up in arms about him potentially endangering people's health.

His "multisense theory" was proposed as an alternative to what he interpretted as the prevailing "brain sex theory" of gender dysphoria, when "brain sex theory" is something he simply just made up that didn't align with the research any more than his own theory did. He was focussed solely on the 'distress' aspect of dysphoria and explaining it in a functional way, rather than his invented opposition, which focussed solely on the 'gender' aspect of dysphoria and explained it in a structural way. The truth is obviously more nuanced than this false dichotomy, and the existing literature he accuses of supporting the non-existent "brain sex theory" has also discussed the sorts of links to functional systems and distress networks that Gliske thought were novel suggestions. The way he presented his position and his supposed opposition were enough to make clear to me that he didn't have a strong understanding of the research area, but if you want specific examples of why his proposal was scientifically unsound, you can check the assessment linked above that led to the retraction.

The main reason he got so many accusations of transphobia was the underlying assumption that trans people's gender identities are not innate and that gender dysphoria might be fixed by treating this proposed dysfunctional multisense network (in unspecified ways that critics assumed would be sinister) rather than affirming trans people in their experienced gender (i.e. making them cis, which brings to mind conversion therapy and could be compared to proposed "cures" for homosexuality). Not all of the transphobia accusations were related to his scientific errors, and as his supporters claim, many may have simply been knee-jerk reactions to a challenge of the status quo of trans healthcare -- but the fact is that the status quo of trans healthcare is supported by evidence as being highly effective, and Gliske suggesting an alternative "theory" without an equally strong scientific backing was incredibly irresponsible, even after his sections about the clinical implications were cut out. I don't blame anyone for assuming bad faith.

[gillygeewhiz]

Okay... Even assuming you can change sex (which you can't) and assuming there is legitimate gender dysphoria for all that claim to be 'trans', why is transitioning seen as the best solution? Something so drastic and dangerous (even if you ignore the cosmetic surgeries, cross sex hormones are dangerous in itself especially a life time supplement).

Nordic countries are rightfully pulling back on treating underage kids:

https://nypost.com/2024/02/24/opinion/a-finnish-study-is-changing-how-we-approach-trans-kids/

https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e300940.full

Also amore recent study that shows people are twelve times more likely to commit suicide AFTER gender affirming surgery

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38699117/

No one is ever born in the wrong body. Dysphoria if anything is a mental health condition similar to anorexia. And we do not affirm anorexics by endorsing their delusions do we? There are other ways to help and fix those people. And no this 'fix' is not conversion therapy. Helping them accept their body isn't a conversion, on the other hand some Muslim countries do use 'transitioning' in order to 'fix' gay people (most of the time gay males cause females are too important to castrate)

(This ask covers a lot of ground so I'll try to address it all, but if there's something I miss that you want my comment on feel free to send a follow-up ask.)

What you're calling "legitimate gender dysphoria" is caused by a mismatch in what sex characteristics the body has, versus what sex characteristics the brain expects to have. Research supports this, showing that not only do dysphoric trans people's brains have a unique phenotype compared to cisgender members of their same sex, but that the brain areas that most differ from their cisgender counterparts are the ones responsible for body image and perception of self. All this meaning that Gender Incongruence -- the condition of the brain's expectation of the body not matching the body's natal sex characteristics -- is an innate neurological state that results in a physical inability to recognize one's natural sexed traits as part of the self.

"Dysphoria" is the label for the distress caused by this condition. So while Gender Dysphoria is technically a mental health condition, it is itself a symptom of Gender Incongruence, which is a physical health condition fixed in-utero and cannot be changed by outside influences. Because we can't alter the brain's innate (mis)understanding of the sex of the body, treating Gender Incongruence is done by changing the sex characteristics of the body instead, and this type of treatment is proven to be extraordinarily effective at reducing feelings of dysphoria and improving overall quality of life, with extremely low rates of regret.

All medical interventions -- noting here that what you're calling "cosmetic surgeries" are also medical interventions, because they have proven health benefits and are one of the only known effective treatments for Gender Incongruence/Dysphoria -- carry risk and are carried out only when the benefit to the patient is deemed to outweigh it, whether you're talking about transgender healthcare or not. The position of experts in the field is that blockers and HRT are safe when properly administered and monitored, and that the potential improvements to transgender people's quality of life outweigh potential risks. They emphasize the importance of transition-related interventions being considered medically necessary, while agreeing with you that the approach should be conservative, because we still have large gaps to fill in our understanding of the mechanisms and long-term effects.

That study of suicide risk (linking to the full text) leaves out a very crucial distinction in its data, which unfortunately makes its conclusion foregone: It's comparing people who had gender-affirming surgeries to people who did not, not trans people who had gender-affirming surgeries to trans people who did not. It's already well-known that trans people (regardless of their transition status) have much higher suicide rates than the general population, so if the GA surgery group was composed of all trans individuals and the non-GA-surgery group was not, obviously the group with more trans people is going to have a higher overall suicide rate. There is no evidence that gender-affirming surgeries caused their suicidality, just that getting gender-affirming surgery is correlated with being part of a population with an already-high suicide rate -- which that article was corrected to specify.

Gender dysphoria also cannot be handled as we do dysmorphia in cases of anorexia nervosa, because they are fundamentally etiologically different. Dysmorphia refers to the distress caused by an incorrect perception of the body (e.g. an anorexic woman distressed by seeing her body as fat, even if it objectively is not), and a fixation on it as a "flaw" that needs to be corrected. In gender dysphoria, however, the problem is that sufferers perceive their bodies correctly (e.g. a trans woman distressed by seeing her body with male sex characteristics, which she objectively does have), and the distress occurs because their bodies have traits that they are neurologically incapable of integrating with their self-knowledge. In which case, changing the incongruent sex characteristics directly addresses the source of distress and results in significant mental health improvements -- compared to anorexia, with which the source of the stress is not actually body, but the obsession with a mental distortion.

Finally, in Iran gay men are forced to transition to female for their survival, in order to avoid persecution for their sexuality. This is a form of homophobic oppression that deserves its own attention outside of conversations about medically-necessary healthcare for trans people, as the two groups have vastly different reasons for pursuing sex reassignment and it is not helpful to either to conflate them with each other.

[gillygeewhiz]

First of all thank you for your answer.

But my question was more about if you know of any current reviews being made or validation of some organisations trying to proof / disproof the validity of the Cass report. Meaning, that I know the Cass report has its biases but normally how would the "expert scientists" go about countering it then? Like you said there are already many studies that somewhat disproof the Cass report (who were conveniently dismissed or ignored) but I doubt these will be enough to serve as an argument against the halt on care, no?

So in cases like this (generally speaking) what is the "protocol"? Because I would imagine that some major health organisations like WHO or other organisations that commit to research in that field would feel obliged to publicly state their knowledge and opinion on possible consequences (and I think in some countries they are even mandated to do that)?

I mean of course at the end it's the legislators who choose who to "believe", but I'm interested in this process in general. Like with vaccinations. Maybe that's a dumb comparison, but I had to think of it, because in the US after the scandal of that " doctor" the distrust was immense and with still lasting consequences but there were researches and doctors countering him. So is that something we could expect, because I've not heard much about "official" bodies tackling that issue up front. (But maybe it's also part of media bias)

I hope I made it a bit clearer what I mean, I'm not sure how to properly explain it.

Thanks for clarifying. Unfortunately, again, I'm clueless on this. I don't know what the Cass Report even is, what it says, whose input was sought, or why anyone would act on whatever recommendations it's making. I ignore politics as much as possible, and this issue in particular is completely off of my radar, so I don't have any insight into what the "protocol" is to fight whatever dumbass culture war bullshit is worming its way into policy. I can't tell you what to expect.

[gillygeewhiz]

Hello. Did you know that last year some Scandinavian countries limited the "youth gender care" (e.g. puberty blockers)?

What is your stance on this? And do you think that with the Cass report as it is now we could expect more drastic actions by various governments that previously had a more liberal stance (e.g. expand the restrictions to adults like in some states of USA)? Is that likely?

Or do you think/ know of some organisation or reports/ reviews that are currently being done to expose/ debunk the current Cass review? (as I heard the backlash in established medical communities was quite big regarding the methodologies they used or rather didn't use).

With the UKs NHS putting youth gender care on "temporary" hold it seems they would try to expand on it. My question is basically if someone/ some organisations are doing something about it and if that would be recognised / acknowledged to reverse the ban and or help from expanding the laws to adults.

Thanks for the thoughtful questions, but I'm afraid I'm not the person to ask about this. I intentionally avoid all of the politics & culture war garbage and focus as much as I can on the research isolated from that, so I don't have any insight into this. I only know the Cass Review exists at all because I've scrolled past people mocking it; I don't have a clue what it says.

I'm not sure it's the same as what you're referring to, but I did check out changes to Sweden's guidelines for youth transition healthcare a couple years ago, and my surface impression (looking only at the policy documents and not any political analyses of them) was that there wasn't anything objectionable in there that should prevent legitimately trans children from receiving care. Now that they've been implemented for a while, there's probably a better picture of whether in practice the new guidelines have jeopardized access to care for youth who need it or not, but in letter it was all reasonable limitations that represented an appropriate level of caution for avoiding harm to children without barring them from it.

[gillygeewhiz]

Assuming it's the same anon or someone in the same group, because that was one of a ton of asks I got all in a very short time, but FYI:

Enbies do a good enough job of making themselves look bad without you faking being one and filling my inbox with daily racial slurs. That charade is waste of effort you could spend drawing attention to the actual racism in the nonbinary community.

[gillygeewhiz]

Again I ask, if gender is biological, why does it require a police state to enforce it?

It doesn't, and all sending me the same anonymous, bad-faith ask multiple times a couple days apart does is show the pathetic level of entitlement you feel to the attention of randos online.

[gillygeewhiz]

All gender is a political identity lol

It is not. Forget you've ever heard the word "gender" for a minute, because it has several competing definitions that are hugely harmful to conflate with each other, and starting with the political academic theory first puts you at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding what gender identity is factually, and leads to ignorant attitudes that encourage sexism and transphobia.

One of the necessary functions of the human brain is to have an innate sense of what body parts you have, which further gives you the ability to understand that your body belongs to you when you feel it touched and to recognize yourself when you look in a mirror, etc. Because male and female bodies have different anatomy and characteristics, this function develops differently between male and female brains, in order for them to be able to integrate the correct set of sex traits with the sense of self. In the vast majority of the population, the sex mapping of the brain & body are congruent and this function works invisibly, but it is possible for the brain to be wired to expect the other set of sex characteristics during development, which causes a neurological inability to accept the traits of your natal sex and distress at existing in what your brain tells you is a body that doesn't fully belong to you.

This function is solely concerned with the brain's relationship with the body at a subconscious level, so any conscious, cultural, social ideas about what male/female/man/woman mean or how those groups should look and behave have no effect on it. Research supports that the brain's conception of the sexed self is innate and fixed, so it is physically impossible to change through therapy, peer pressure, willpower, or political enlightenment. However, for people in whom this function is incongruent with the body, there is evidence that changes aligning their body with their experienced sex effectively address the mismatch and improve quality of life.

This function is gender identity. Hopefully it's clear that what you're characterizing as "political identity" is a completely different concept (i.e. a reaction to societal sexism) that is irrelevant to the innate experience of being a man or a woman (i.e. the brain understanding oneself as male or female). Hopefully it's also clear that insisting that gender is political, ideological, socially-constructed, or any adjacent term that could be interpretted to suggest that it is chosen or malleable, is counter-factual and promotes misinformation that leads to actual harm.

Whatever your "political identity" is, stop calling it a gender. Political advocacy for each gender can only effectively be done while acknowledging that they are objectively real, fixed categories with equal humanity, not by pontificating that they're fluid ideological tribes that can be opted into or out of. Cultural ideas about gender that divide and subjugate can only effectively be challenged while being honest about how insignificant our differences really are, not by constructing a worldview around the fear that any differences that exist must be a barrier to our equality.

[gillygeewhiz]

Have you ever considered that non binary identities might be a product of the natural evolution of societies as they move towards gender abolition? And it might actually be a good thing?

No, because gender identity is not societal and physically cannot be "abolished" any more than memories or emotions can. Gender identity is not some cultural invention, it is an observable, innate trait of the brain that integrates sex characteristics with the sense of self -- there are no third sex traits in humans, so no matter what happens in society it is not possible for us to "evolve" into developing nonbinary gender identities attached to sex traits that don't exist.

Gender roles are the cultural invention you think nonbinary identities are dismantling, and what you're referring to as "gender abolition" is just opposition to sexism, taken to such a cartoonish extreme that it just reinforces it again. If you can only challenge sexism in society by pretending that "man" and "woman" don't (or shouldn't) exist and that everyone is actually (or should be) some neutral third category, you don't actually believe that people can be fundamentally different and still be equal in dignity and deserving of the same opportunities.

As this ask illustrates, nonbinary is a political identity, not a gender identity, and it's built on ignorance of what gender is and on sexist beliefs about what it means to be a man or a woman. People adopting it represent a step backwards for society, not a step forwards.

[gillygeewhiz]

Trying to find a biological cause for being transgender is eugenic, racist, and transphobic.

Do you have any concrete reason to believe that, or do you just think that whoever slings the scariest-sounding buzzwords gets to be right?

The biological correlates of gender identity and transgenderism -- which have already been found, by the way -- prove that they are innate traits that cannot be changed by conversion therapy, and give us the context to very easily and logically explain why affirming trans people in their gender identity is so essential to their quality of life.

No one is helped by favouring ignorance over truth. Pretending that there is no biological explanation for trans people's experiences allows conversion therapy rhetoric and "gender ideology" conspiracy theories to flourish unchallenged, and hamstrings trans people in their access to gender-affirming healthcare and legal fights for their rights. Why would medical information that legitimizes that trans people are born that way and debunks transphobic canards scare you more than the consequences of denying it exists?

[gillygeewhiz]

Have you seen this study? Seems legit and in line with other findings, although I'm not well informed enough to have an opinion on the methodology https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811924000958

[link to study]

This is about whether it's feasible to train machine-learning models on neuroimaging data in order to predict psychological and health characteristics on an individual level -- whether it's possible to accurately guess whether someone is, e.g. lonely or a smoker, based on a brain scan.

TBH I only skimmed it, because it said exactly what I expected it to: that most trait predictions are extremely low-accuracy and simply feeding a computer a brain scan is unlikely to provide useful diagnostic data. The study is notable for how thorough the training of the computer models was and how many traits it was attempting to predict, but the findings aren't very surprising, especially wrt psychological traits.

Significantly, though, three traits were singled out as having incredibly high prediction accuracy based on neuroimaging: weight, age, and sex. The computer model accurately predicted weight within a couple kilograms, age within a couple years, and was an overwhelming 99.7% accurate in determining sex.