No - you mentioned corpus callosum distinctions, and there is evidence to support mental gender has a strong tie to physical form of the corpus callosum.
See Yokota, Y. et al. “Callosal Shapes at the Midsagittal Plane: MRI Differences of Normal Males, Normal Females, and GID” Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference,
Shanghai, China, September 1-4, 2005.
You have to read further than the abstract; the abstract isn’t very good.
Let me deliberately hedge here and opine that it could give one more piece of information that might help in a determination. It’s also possible that there are several different physiological changes which could give evidence, and that one specific change may not be evident while others may. In the paper I cited, the test was not nearly 100% accurate in detecting birth females and males, although it did appear to have significant value towards that end.
There is also some theory about pituitary gland changes and pineal gland changes and their impacts, but again this has not been well-studied. Pituitary gland prolactinomas can cause gynecomastia and in some cases simultaneously suppress testosterone to insanely low levels (the reasons for this latter effect I cannot explain).
And of course, this is not a very well-studied area of medicine, and somewhat new, so it is all but certain, IMO, that other things could be at play which we do not yet understand.
Personally, my opinion is that while there is academic interest in brain structure differences, I don’t believe it matters in the overall scheme of things. I think people in general and legally speaking should really not care what gender identity any specific person has. If they’re not hurting or threatening one, then one should just chalk it up as “people are different” and not get so hung up on it. Like the aforementioned backhanded insult referencing Napoleon - I could care less if the guy at Starbucks is dressed in a bicorn hat and speaking with a French accent, so long as I get my Frappuchino. Now when Napoleon wants to cut in front of me at the DMV because, after all, he’s Napoleon, that’s where you draw the line.
Might this have more to do with explaining the situation in a way the general public might understand better, considering ignorance on this topic is still rather widespread?
Also, more than likely it’s shorthand for: "I used to live in and move about the world in the role of a man, and I had that self perception because I didn’t believe/didn’t realize it could be different " rather than “that is what my internal identity was and then I changed”.
… who “painted himself into a corner” many years ago. It’s a very sensitive subject indeed as I quickly learned. For me, it was a lot like walking around telling everyone you know that you’re not racially prejudiced. If that’s the way it is, fuck it, that’s the way it is and if it’s true for you, you shouldn’t need to announce it (or prove it to everyone. That’s what I learned the hard way.
Admittedly, your OP and my situation are different, yet alike in that the wrong questions were asked and the wrong and useless statements were made.
I learned to shut up about it, but I felt so bad I wanted to poke white-hot needles into both eyeballs simultaneously. Instead, I forced them open and saw where I’d screwed up. I hope there are no hard feelings about what I just wrote, because none were intended.
I listened to it - thought it was a good piece. I was saddened by the East Coast family that chose to take away everything their child enjoyed and tried to force an alternate identity on him (her). You know that kid will be forced to live a lie for most of his (her) life - even the mother said as much, yet seems fine with that fact as long as her kid plays well with the boys.
The West Coast family seems to me to be doing it right - as long as no surgery happens there is always an opportunity to change back if the child develops differently along the way. Listen to your kid - they know how to be who they are better than anyone else.
I was diagnosed with a pituitary prolactinoma when I was 18, and at some point one of the many doctors I saw explained that the hormone prolactin has a sort of see-saw relationship with both estrogen and testosterone. When prolactin levels go up, as they do when you have a prolactin producing tumor or sometimes just when a tumor is pressing on the pituitary gland, estrogen and testosterone levels drop.
I’m a cisgender woman so I can’t speak from personal experience as to what effects elevated prolactin levels would have on a male-bodied person (the most obvious symptom in women is irregular periods or amenorrhoea), but I remember seeing a story on IIRC Dateline about a man who’d had a prolactinoma since childhood but wasn’t diagnosed until he was an adult. He said that prior to receiving treatment he’d had kind of a “womanly” figure (gynecomastia and round hips), and also that he’d had a very low sex drive and had been impotent the few times he’d tried to have sex. All of this was presumably due to low testosterone levels, and he said that it changed pretty quickly after he had surgery for the tumor and began taking medication to suppress the excess prolactin.
ETA: FWIW, I feel my own experience with having a hormone imbalance has made me more sympathetic to transgender people. I know that it can be pretty unpleasant to have a body that’s not making the hormones it “wants”, and that even if you’re testing within the normal range your current hormone levels may not be in the best place for you as an individual.
My understanding…and I’m going to go out on a limb from memory without citations handy, is that while hormones can change thoughts and feelings about gender, the change overall is not to the level that a transgendered person will feel. I read a couple of studies where prostate cancer sufferers were on modest amounts of estrogen (it was early in the era) and they found a small percentage of the men felt “unsexed” or without gender, and a couple of men felt some leanings towards feeling they were female. But none of them came out with this crushing feeling of “OMG why doesn’t my body fit me, I’m a woman not a man, what’s going on?” Another few studies I researched on female bodybuilders who were taking large amounts of testosterone found huge increases in aggression, violence, and to the point of growing facial hair and having their voice change - but IIRC none of them felt “male”, although some felt like they were “genderless.”
My opinion based on the limited research I’ve found on this subject is that hormones will push someone towards one side or another, but overall there’s much more at play.
I was writing in a hurry to get my edit in before I ran out of time, so I maybe wasn’t as clear as I could have been. As far as I can tell, my own problems with out-of-whack hormones never had any effect on my own gender identity. Amenorrhoea in women and a loss of libido in both men and women are fairly common symptoms of endocrine problems so some patients may feel like “less of a woman/man” because of that, but I’ve never heard of this leading to identification with the opposite sex.
But what I have heard from some transgender people, including here on the SDMB, that sounds familiar to me as someone with an endocrine problem is that when they started on hormones they felt “right” or “better”. Some have even said that the hormone treatment was more important to them than having the surgery, and not just because the hormones affected their appearance. I could believe that with at least some transgender people there is something going on with their bodies that makes them “want” higher levels of estrogen or testosterone than people of their physical sex can normally produce on their own. Now, if e.g. MtF transwomen were just men with high estrogen levels and/or low testosterone levels I’d expect this would have been known to medicine for years. It could be proven easily with a blood test. But if there’s something about an MtF woman’s body that functions better with the estrogen levels of a healthy cisgender woman, there may be no way to test for this other than by just giving her estrogen and following up with questions about how she feels.
I know there’s been research indicating that one of the brain structures that is different in transgender people than cisgender people of the same physical sex is the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus links up with the pituitary gland and releases some hormones itself, so maybe there’s something going on there – although I really don’t know enough about the science involved to say what exactly this might be.
Jokes like that or “hot tranny mess” I’ve always understood to be a transvestite joke. Is that just me?
Transvestite (or crossdresser) is not the same thing as transgender, and it’s possible to be a crossdresser while also being firmly cisgender.
I think crossdressing comes up for more joking because of Drag Queens and the types of over-the-top shows they are associated with, and of course lets not forget the classically hysterical frat-boy-does-halloween. :rolleyes:
Your cites didn’t do anything to show that I didn’t know what I’m talking about, but again show you really want this to be true even though the science isn’t saying that it is. Even the brain structure studies show similar results to the brain activity studies, that GID patients have some abnormalities from a normal brain of someone of their biological sex, some of the abnormalities make it “more similar to the brain of the gender they identified with than their biological sex” but you’ve yet to provide one small bit of evidence to support you fatuous and wildly off base claim that people with GID “literally have women’s brains in a man’s body.”
FWIW, in response to another poster saying I’ll “never find science to support my side”, my argument is the default position: the reasonable scientific assumption that a biological male has a biological male brain. To show that certain biological males have literally female brains requires some actual proof first, so the onus is not on me to disprove such a silly assertion.
All you guys have proven is brain deformities in GID patients, and to be quite frank that’s what I would expect, they’re clearly not of sound mind since they believe they are something they factually cannot be.
Biological gender and sexual orientation are tightly linked, as the vast majority of mammals naturally are attracted to and desire heterosexual intercourse. You would have to ask the researchers who did these studies the reason for their approach, though. It certainly isn’t my responsibility to answer for them. You can read more about the study here and follow up on it to your heart’s content.
Homosexuality is an aberration from the norm and while we have no definitive understanding of why it happens we know that attraction and sexual desire happen in the brain itself, so the cause for the aberration is probably in some way related to a defective physical brain or defective hormone processing or something of that nature. I think if not for political pressure the DSM-IV would recognize homosexuality as a mental defect as it obviously and most absolutely, undeniably is. However, practically speaking there is no known treatment for homosexuality (that works, at least as I’m aware) and in fact untreated homosexuals mostly have no problems with their day to day lives so it’s a disease that is fairly harmless. No worse than mild personality disorders for example that many persons have.
Since it doesn’t really impair life quality or cause problems functioning I would probably say if I wanted to be more “precise” homosexuality should be called a general “mental defect” and probably not a illness proper, because illnesses by definition have negative affects on the person. Of course mental illness is a vaguely defined term, so there’s also that to consider.
Does anyone else want to step up to the microphone and go on the record here and state that lesbians, gays, and transgendered are mentally ill or mentally defective? Come on, don’t be shy now.
Nonsense. I was, at worst, slightly facile in suggesting that a transgendered person has the exact brain of the gender with which they identify. What the links show is that brain structure is a secondary sexual characteristic, and that transgendered people have a mix of secondary sexual characteristics from both genders. The point being, you can’t draw the bright line you’ve attempted to create between transgendered and intersexed people.
Ah, the hand of the mighty Gay Mafia! Tell me, exactly what form did this political pressure take? What were the repercussions for psychiatrists who didn’t toe the line? How did the gay rights lobby manage to coerce a majority of the psychiatric profession to go against their conscience and vote to remove homosexuality from the DSM? Remember, this is 1973 - we couldn’t even get gay sex fully decriminalized until 2003.
By that same criteria any believer in a miracle-containing religion is also not of sound mind, as they believe in something non-factual. I think you’ve just stipulated that at least 90%+ of the planet is of unsound mind.
Which page or paragraph of the full paper are you referring to? Or did you only review the abstract at this time?
Different != defective, even if the difference does not appear to be beneficial to one.
It’s not a defect if it doesn’t interfere with their ability to interact with the rest of the world. There’s no evidence that being gay, in and of itself, has a deletorious effect on a person’s quality of life.
Not really. Opposite-sex attraction is a useful motivator for reproduction, but not a necessary one. A 100% homosexual population is still a viable one, and in some circumstances (such as reduced access to resources) a potentially more successful one that a 100% heterosexual population. It’s a variance, not a defect.