Regular reminder that brain sex is
1) Bullshit
2) Never going to make transphobes actually stop hating you
3) Neurological phrenology.

You could argue with someone about how neural clusters in the Foobar Corpus are 37% more feminine in trans women than they are in cis men, or you could reclaim all that lost time living excellently without pseudoscience.

Hi, if you felt moved to tweet at me about why I'm wrong (despite brain sex research having been proven to be bullshit time and again) you might be on a mute list for me. IDK. I also value my time too much to argue /w folks who don't want to look skeptically at the evidence here.

I don't mind muting you because I feel no compulsion whatsoever to be part of a trans rights movement that hangs its basis on the idea of male and female brains.

Instead I recognise we've all got differing (and generally extremely similar) brains and all of us need liberation.

Because someone answered one of the folks I've got on mute, I saw someone accusing me of saying trans folks don't exist.

This too is bullshit. A number of us are very evidently trans. In fact the evidence for trans people's existence far outweighs the existence of brain sex.

Which I hasten to emphasise - there is no credible evidence for brain sex and the more people look for it the more clear it becomes that there's no such thing and that other results were probably a mix of accidental p-hacking and bad luck.

Oh I forgot the third confounding factor - one of the popular methodologies that kicked things off was end of life neurological dissection of trans women's brains who had spent their lives on oestrogen.

Is it possible that oestrogen makes the brain look a little different under microscope? It seems easily as likely as the claim that the differences which were measured were innate somehow, and likely as anything that such differences have no functional impact on anything.

This is a fantastic question, and the not necessarily obvious answer is that the brain is a profoundly complex system, many aspects of its capability aren't differentiable by particular structure and many structures are plastic during development. https://twitter.com/GlauSciathan/status/1387840963570241539

So to answer - the experience of gender identity in terms of affiliation/self-identification with one or another sex (and developing an instinct towards imitation of that within your respective culture) may arise from a complex of innate and socially mediated things. Who knows?

Also maybe sometimes being able to sit with lack of knowledge about how something works is better than trying to claim knowledge despite the evidence to the contrary.

I know people don't like CF, but she's right on this. https://theconversation.com/are-there-male-and-female-brains-computers-can-see-a-distinction-but-they-rely-strongly-on-differences-in-head-size-143972

Incidentally the technique of classifying partitions of brain into an arbitrary index of masculine/feminine and then saying that humans of either sex have "mosaics" of male and female traits is a fucking hilariously bad example of such P-hacking where you invent a systemic...

...classification schema and then apply it to localised areas where it actually holds.

Literally a classic P-Hack.

To explain let's say someone says "Brain sex exists, you can tell male and female brains apart, we'll colour code them pink and green"

And you're like, right. Cool.

Left. the Green Sex Brain. Right, the Pink Sex Brain.

Our brains have a sex. Brilliant

And then a few years later the researchers come back and they're like "Well actually in practice brains look a bit more like this.

You might at that point start to wonder whether the idea of splitting brains into two categories really made any sense anymore. And that would be reasonable because these axes it is being measured along no longer make any fucking sense at all.

Also this.

It's 19th century eugenic thinking to look at brains this way, carried on into a future that doesn't and has never needed it. https://twitter.com/ElizabethLidd/status/1387854454314131456

Just fuck Baron Cohen and autistic brain sex theory too. https://twitter.com/geeoharee/status/1387856246485704705