There is a study out there that claims that Trans-identified Males who haven't taken any HRT do display quantifiable brain shape and function closer to their insisted female gender identity. I've seen this study cited as indisputable evidence that male and female brains exist and that trans people do have different brains that match their desired sex before any hormones, in blatant conflict with quite a lot of other science.
I want to unpack it so you can all better understand the kind of slippery science that is used to back the legitimacy of transgenderism.
Transgender people report discomfort with their birth sex and a strong identification with the opposite sex. The current study was designed
They claim, quite boldly, "These findings add support to the notion that the underlying brain anatomy in transgender people is shifted away from their biological sex towards their gender identity." and then proceeds to explain in its methodology that this might not work and the entire thing may be bunk. Followed with data that does not support their conclusion, but it used to insist that their hypothesis of trans people having different gendered brains was proven true anyways.
This study has a number of problems from the start. The first being small sample size. They did MRI scans the brains of 24 cis men, 24 trans-identified men, and 24 cis women. However, they made no effort to really control for anything except that the trans-identified men could not have taken any HRT yet. As far as I can tell, they did no tests of any kind other than having participants give their word. They claim to have verified that, in some way, but did not explain further. There was no other attempt made to control for anything.
They second problem being that this classification system may not be trustworth for a variety of reasons. They used a form of AI-driven data analysis which was initially trained on hundreds of MRI scans that, likewise, were not sorted through any sort of controls, comparing men and women between 19 and 86 years old.
From what I've been about to gather about the Relevance Vector Regression Machine (RVR/RVM) method of training has some documented problems with the way it handles data. In this specific case, there's no mention of controlling for brain size, which could lead the AI to reach the conclusion that "Big = male" and that "small = female" as it's primary classification criteria. This is an already known problem specifically where this exact topic is concerned. (that study even cites the NCBI study above and its problems, too)
Then you've got overfitting, which is a huge problem with AI training where the model will end up accidentally trained on the noise pattern of the data, rather than generalized information. So what you end up with is a model that is trained to repeats patterns unique to the data used. Their participants were more measured for brain maleness or femaleness based on how they compared to the few hundred, majority male, brain scans they had access to. They did not control for any other factors except male or female in any way, nor was that database explicitly created as a sort of "generic human brain MRI scan collection" in the first place.
This method can end up with the machine learning equivalent of teaching the test, rather than teaching the material. It learns the answers it is expected to give, rather than learning how to accurately and repeatedly identify the specific gendered features they believed they were testing for.
The third problem is that their data actually shows about half of their cis male and cis female brains occupy the same middle-ish, androgynous center of the bell curve rating between their male-brain/female-brain scale, right where the supposed unusual trans brains are shown. There are also some significant outliers for both, which raises questions about this methodology.
Some of those outliers are supposedly more trans than the trans people in this study that reports the trans group as "significantly more female than cisgender men" and even that is only based on what may very obviously be a set of bad data with no real controls and no further investigation into the participants.
Going by their conclusion that a measurable difference in brain structure exists within trans people, you would also have to assume that about half of the cis men and women they scanned must actually also be trans. They occupy the same supposed "significantly more" opposite-sex part of the spectrum as the trans data points, but there's no real consideration given to what those data points say about their research.
Earlier, I harped on the lack of controls, specifically in relation to brain size and how that commonly fucks up the datasets and machine learning. However, this study also failed to control for age, ethnicity, background, hormone levels, sexuality, autism, personality disorders, or other physical conditions and/or mental illnesses that are already known to present in or impact the brain in certain ways. And that's both in the participants for this study and the databases of MRI scans used to training their sex identifier model.
An elderly man's testosterone levels would have been dropping for years, and the physical effects would be measurable. Likewise for an aging, post-menopausal woman, and the well documented effects of hormone imbalance. Someone in the prime of their youth who works out regularly would have drastically different hormone levels and their brain would reflect those differences. While a man with long-term clinical depression will have far lower t-levels than an average man, which will cause measurable differences in his brain.
If I haven't made my case clear enough, I think this data is effectively worthless and the researchers involved had a conclusion they were ready to push before they even began botching the data just to get the chart above that says about a dozen or so of the trans-identified men are somewhat unusual, compared to some cis men, but not genuinely so far outside of the classification of male to actually be genuinely noteworthy. However, that same set of measurements also implies that about half of all men and women would also qualify as trans, which strongly implies that whatever it is that makes someone trans is not explained by arbitrarily gendering brain features.
The Brain Mosaic Theory is one of the most popular approaches to understanding the human brain in. It rejects the idea that there are specific male and female characteristics and instead suggests that all human brains are more of a mosaic of different features where some are more prevalent in males or females, but not exclusively unique to either. So a man with a smaller than average skull size, having a smaller than average brain, is not intrinsically more female because of it, any more than a woman with a large skull is biologically more male. Saying otherwise is unscientific.
Where does that leave us, then? I think all we've really got here is some poorly made politicized flailing. They started with the conclusion that gender dysphoria is evidence that the brain must be mismatched and thus that gender-affirming care, HRT, SRS, etc, is a legitimate and necessary form of treatment for that biological mix-up. That is a set of beliefs that are in direct conflict with our understanding of medicine, biology, and neuroscience.
You can read it a few different ways, but I'm unsure why any of them would be considered to be credible. The most obvious being that they are insisting trans people are naturally born with brains that are tuned to their desired gender identity. This is something that is not found is cis people at all, but also requires that we ignore every other possible aspects of a person's genetics, lifestyle, history, and so much more. Under this assumption, someone with low T levels that manifest as certain brain traits that an MRI can pick up, could either be trans or just a normal cis dude with a slight hormone deficiency.
The other, less direct implication from this research is that, by desiring very strongly to be female, trans people are able to subconsciously alter and "shift" their brains to better suit their desired gender identity. Which simply makes no sense and is not otherwise observable with any other condition that has strong desires and fixations. Other body dysmorphia conditions do not come paired with the unscientific belief that the thing a person wants to be is their true self and requires "life-saving" surgical intervention. Nor have we ever observed that those other kinds of dysmorphia come with subtle physical changes that seek to align some aspect of the patient with their desired self-image.
Which leads me to believe that researchers are putting the cart before the horse. What they expect people to believe is that trans people suffer from a set of conditions and comorbidities because they are trans. We are supposed to believe that all the mood disorders and autism and anxiety conditions and constant distress that is universal with trans people are because of their untreated gender dysphoria. As if these people are so deeply trans down to their DNA that it caused them to grow up with lower testosterone, or shorter height, or other varied, but not universal, minor physical brain traits and personality quirks that could be classified as "female-ish" enough to legitimize and objectively prove that their transness is real and valid and should be treated as being as real as the femaleness that biological cis women have.
We have a collection of people who almost universally share certain mental illnesses, are practically 100% autistic, and have all been led to believe that transitioning is a deeply real and scientifically legitimate practice backed by research that can't actually prove that, but it considered politically problematic to point out that the genuine conclusion to draw here is that people with these certain traits are more likely to believe that transitioning is the cure-all to their problems. Especially when there are so many misguided authority figures who will throw their weight behind a cult-like political movement, while punishing and aggressively lashing out at anyone who contradicts the catastrophically unscientific handling of gender identity as a political wedge issue.
They want people to believe that a man with gender dysphoria is, in some way, genuinely more female than normal men, and not that men with specific mental conditions and certain traits may simply be more predisposed to believing and buying into the ideological zealotry that backs transgenderism, and then further emboldened by misguided doctors, activists, and politicians insisting upon the importance and legitimacy of transgenderism.
Research like this is primarily attempting to fabricate legitimacy for what has been an increasingly disastrous politicized movement. Without any substantial evidence to prove it real, you are left with a lot of people who were misled or otherwise encouraged to pursue a worthless form of treatment, and a smaller group of people who chose a set of cosmetic treatments for their own gratification. The first group is a lawsuit waiting to happen. People misled and manipulated.
The second group is no different than people who choose to get face tattoos, or other extreme body modifications. Still deserving a certain amount of basic human decency, but otherwise their choices were their own and are not deserving of special treatment, nor having the entirety of society made to kneel and change to accommodate those choices. Allowed to do whatever they want, but no one else is actually required to treat their identity as some kind of scientifically proven, inalienable aspect of their humanity. Not legally protected. Not made the star of a civil rights movement.
And as I finally wrap up this colossal diatribe, I would like to add that even if I am completely wrong and research one day shows with 100% certainty that there is legitimacy to transgenderism and that gender affirming treatment is required, I still believe the medical industry has a lot to answer for. The treatments, medicines, and surgeries they've pushed for so long are nightmarishly crude and harmful.
It's nothing short of horrifying what people have come to accept as a necessary form of treatment for kids and adults, and it's all the more reason to be intensely distrusting of any self-styled authority on the topic insisting that mutilation is life-saving care, while relying on a handful of antidepressants and unconditional lovebombing from the trans community to cover for the fact that they aren't actually treating people's real problems.
