It’s All In your Mind

Researchers are probing our minds and what they are finding is interesting, that gender is all in our minds.

Is There Something Unique about the Transgender Brain?
Imaging studies and other research suggest that there is a biological basis for transgender identity
Scientific American
By Francine Russo
January 1, 2016

Some children insist, from the moment they can speak, that they are not the gender indicated by their biological sex. So where does this knowledge reside? And is it possible to discern a genetic or anatomical basis for transgender identity? Exploration of these questions is relatively new, but there is a bit of evidence for a genetic basis. Identical twins are somewhat more likely than fraternal twins to both be trans.

Male and female brains are, on average, slightly different in structure, although there is tremendous individual variability. Several studies have looked for signs that transgender people have brains more similar to their experienced gender. Spanish investigators—led by psychobiologist Antonio Guillamon of the National Distance Education University in Madrid and neuropsychologist Carme Junqué Plaja of the University of Barcelona—used MRI to examine the brains of 24 female-to-males and 18 male-to-females—both before and after treatment with cross-sex hormones. Their results, published in 2013, showed that even before treatment the brain structures of the trans people were more similar in some respects to the brains of their experienced gender than those of their natal gender. For example, the female-to-male subjects had relatively thin subcortical areas (these areas tend to be thinner in men than in women). Male-to-female subjects tended to have thinner cortical regions in the right hemisphere, which is characteristic of a female brain. (Such differences became more pronounced after treatment.)

This is something that we have always known, ever since we were old enough to talk we knew what gender we were.

In the book “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as A Girl” the story was about two twin male boys. When they were being circumcised the doctors made an “Ops” on one of them. But Dr. John Money had a theory and this was the perfect test case, his theory was gender was all nurture, that if you raise a child as a girl they will become a girl… he was wrong dead wrong. He always knew he was a boy; he was insistent, persistent, and consistent in the fact that he was a boy. Sadly when he found out the truth he couldn’t handle it and later took his own life.

So there is something in the brain that tells us our gender. The article goes on to talk about another study,

Other investigators have looked at sex differences through brain functioning. In a study published in 2014, psychologist Sarah M. Burke of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam and biologist Julie Bakker of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience used functional MRI to examine how 39 prepubertal and 41 adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria responded to androstadienone, an odorous steroid with pheromonelike properties that is known to cause a different response in the hypothalamus of men versus women. They found that the adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria responded much like peers of their experienced gender. The results were less clear with the prepubertal children.

As more and more evidence start to come in from other research it is starting to look like that gender dysphoria is a disorder of sexual development (DSD) a form of intersex. One thing to consider, these studies are just starting to explore the gender differences in the brain just because a trans person might not show these traits it does not mean that they are not trans because there might be other vectors involved, the best way still is to just ask.

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I found this link on A.E. Brain this morning to this research paper on what I was saying, "Evidence supporting the biologic nature of gender identity."

The Abstract has the results and conclusion,

Results: Evidence that there is a biologic basis for gender identity primarily involves (1) data on gender identity in patients with disorders of sex development (DSDs, also known as differences of sex development) along with (2) neuroanatomical differences associated with gender identity.

Conclusions: Although the mechanisms remain to be determined, there is strong support in the literature for a biologic basis of gender identity.

It appears to be a review of existing studies. The thing that I find interesting is that a peer reviewed paper categorizes gender dyshoria as a disorders of sex development.