Male & Female Brains Are The Same

I think that you should add "a different mix of hormones affecting the embryonic brain." Based on the theories I've heard, this seems to be essential. Nowadays, both male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals describe what happens to them emotionally and mentally when they undergo sex-change hormonal therapy, but they are already at the outset the opposite gender of what we would expect them to be based on their bodies and genetics. The hormones of the amniotic fluid seem to contribute to gender identity and sexual orientation.

That may be true, although it isn't what I meant. I think that your brain and mine are being affected by hormones right now, not just in the past. That is not to say that we are ruled by our hormones (although some people may be) but we are influenced by them at least.
 
I suggest that one lack of sameness between the brains of males & females is the type of woo they go for. Have a look at a John Edwards show and see the percentage of women in the audience. Go to a show and take a peek at the person reading the tarot cards or other such tosh, and who is the paying customer.

Men go in for woo also but different flavours. Divining may be one of them.
 
...combined with past experiences and current environment.

Nope. Just anatomy.

That anatomy may have been shaped by past experiences and current environment, but all thoughts, feelings, emotions, needs, wants drives and everything else we human being experience is a result of our anatomy. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
OK, but how was any of that a response to the quote from me that you quoted?


Your objection was that what was being referred to was a feeling, not anatomy.


They're pretty much the same thing. Every feeling you ever have is the result of your biology.
 
One thing resulting from another does not make them anywhere near "the same thing".

Do you even know what the subject was that I was responding to? There's really no way at all for this weird little fixation of yours to make a speck of sense in context. What you're saying could be completely right or completely wrong without the slightest effect on my comment or the one I was responding to in any way. You might as well be giving a lecture on the life cycle of sea turtles. It's just odd.
 
One thing resulting from another does not make them anywhere near "the same thing".

Do you even know what the subject was that I was responding to? There's really no way at all for this weird little fixation of yours to make a speck of sense in context. What you're saying could be completely right or completely wrong without the slightest effect on my comment or the one I was responding to in any way. You might as well be giving a lecture on the life cycle of sea turtles. It's just odd.

What he is saying is that feelings come from the physical state of the brain.

Like I said before "Where does feeling like a woman trapped in a man's body come from? Does this not require their brain to be different from a man who identifies as a man?"

Perhaps people have thought too often that we are very much different than we really are, but whatever part of the brain deals with feelings regarding sexuality, it is clearly very different between male and female populations.
 
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What he is saying is that feelings come from the physical state of the brain.

Like I said before "Where does feeling like a woman trapped in a man's body come from? Does this not require their brain to be different from a man who identifies as a man?"

Perhaps people have thought too often that we are very much different than we really are, but whatever part of the brain deals with feelings regarding sexuality, it is clearly very different between male and female populations.


I'm not really sure that it's a feeling. It might be more of an idea. I feel cold, I feel warm, I feel comfortable, but I can't really say that I walk around feeling like a man in a man's body. I know that I am, I'm quite content with the condition. I feel sexual attraction to the opposite sex, and I would hate to be one of those men who need to stress their masculinity all the time in order to feel that they are real masculine alpha hemales.
Is identifying with a certain subset of humanity a feeling or and idea? Ideas very often give rise to feelings, which is why we tend to confuse them: 'I feel that you don't respect me,' for instance, isn't actually a feeling. It's an idea that makes you feel all kinds of things: angry, sad, embarrassed etc., but it's not a feeling.
 
Never had much time for the idea myself.

Physically men and women have significant differences but the brains are identical?

Sort of conflicts with evolutionary theory also. I mean our brains evolve to fit the tasks required and the tasks for men and women are often different. Childbearing is one example of this.

Sounds hard to believe that both sexes have different hormones, which specifically act to alter behaviour, but somehow they're not different.
 


I may have confused the evidence for a biological cause of the two conditions, gender dysphoria and homosexuality.

In another thread, I referred to an article about the correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior. It mentioned a group of women who as young girls had had ...

... several diagnostic indicators of gender identity disorder. They might have strongly preferred male playmates, insisted on wearing boys’ clothing, favored rough-and-tumble play over dolls and dress-up, stated that they would eventually grow a penis, or refused to urinate in a sitting position.


In this context, it is interesting that only a minority of them were gender dysphoric as adults:

As adults, however, only 12 percent of these women grew up to be gender dysphoric (the uncomfortable sense that one’s biological sex does not match one’s gender identity). Rather, the women’s childhood histories were much more predictive of their adult sexual orientation. In fact, the researchers found that the odds of these women reporting a bisexual/homosexual orientation was up to 23 times higher than would normally occur in a general sample of young women. Not all “tomboys” become lesbians, of course, but these data do suggest that lesbians often have a history of cross-sex-typed behaviors.
Is your child a "prehomosexual"? Forecasting adult sexual orientation (Scientific American blog, Sep. 15, 2010)


And it doesn't mention a biological cause of their behavior as children.
 
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Male and female brains don't even taste the same, for crying out loud.
 
I may have confused the evidence for a biological cause of the two conditions, gender dysphoria and homosexuality.

In another thread, I referred to an article about the correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior. It mentioned a group of women who as young girls had had ...

In this context, it is interesting that only a minority of them were gender dysphoric as adults:

And it doesn't mention a biological cause of their behavior as children.

Since gender identity does seem to be more of a purely social construct than sexual orientation, that makes sense.
 
I'm not really sure that it's a feeling. It might be more of an idea. I feel cold, I feel warm, I feel comfortable, but I can't really say that I walk around feeling like a man in a man's body. I know that I am, I'm quite content with the condition. I feel sexual attraction to the opposite sex, and I would hate to be one of those men who need to stress their masculinity all the time in order to feel that they are real masculine alpha hemales.
Is identifying with a certain subset of humanity a feeling or and idea? Ideas very often give rise to feelings, which is why we tend to confuse them: 'I feel that you don't respect me,' for instance, isn't actually a feeling. It's an idea that makes you feel all kinds of things: angry, sad, embarrassed etc., but it's not a feeling.

I would say both, we're beings of experience, both feeling and conceptualizing. And both of those things can affect the other one.

As a thought experiment, imagine if you were put into a female body. How would you feel about it?
 
Sounds hard to believe that both sexes have different hormones, which specifically act to alter behaviour, but somehow they're not different.

What do you mean when you say "specifically"? How specific is that behaviour?

I mean that their specific purpose is to alter behaviour. Maybe that wasn't very well worded.


Well worded enough I think.

On another note I sigh when I hear the talk of some, proclaiming the identicalness of anything. Nothing is 100% identical in the world we live. If some things appear to be, it only illustrates the limitations of our perception.
 
Personal observations trump demographically-representative samples from a panel of 5 million people worldwide!


Well you know what is said about the plural of anecdote...

yt;dw


That's strange. The chart you showed clearly said US people.

We all know how kinky US folk are about all kinds of woo...... Opps! Some of those on this forum to be excluded of course. :o
 
I would say both, we're beings of experience, both feeling and conceptualizing. And both of those things can affect the other one.

As a thought experiment, imagine if you were put into a female body. How would you feel about it?


I've put parts of myself into female bodies and enjoyed it immensely. (I know it's not what you're asking about, but it's a silly question.)
 
I've put parts of myself into female bodies and enjoyed it immensely. (I know it's not what you're asking about, but it's a silly question.)

Sure. To believe that male and female brains are the same in regards to sexuality and gender is silly, to put it lightly.
 
No, it's not. Neuroscience can help you with that, and it tells us that male and female brains are basically the same with a few differences, for instance concerning the production of hormones. And brain scans tell us that women (on average) use their brains in a different way than men (on average) in some cases that don't have much to do with sexual orientation or gender identity.

Fiction can tell us what a writer imagines it's like to find yourself in a body other than the one you presently inhabit; the one that's you. It has very little to do with any kind of reality, and it's better to ignore it if reality is what you want to find out about.
 
No, it's not. Neuroscience can help you with that, and it tells us that male and female brains are basically the same with a few differences

Neuroscience can help show me that sexual orientation and gender identity come from non-differences in male and female brains?

Fiction can tell us what a writer imagines it's like to find yourself in a body other than the one you presently inhabit; the one that's you. It has very little to do with any kind of reality, and it's better to ignore it if reality is what you want to find out about.

Too bad you weren't around to tell Einstein that, he was fond of gedankenexperiment. I didn't think you'd get fussy about it. I enjoy thought experiments.
 
I may have confused the evidence for a biological cause of the two conditions, gender dysphoria and homosexuality.

No you didn't, the evidence is the same. Something gender ideology advocates always leave out is that the studies showing similarities between the brains of transgender people and people of the other sex also show the same similarities between homosexuals and people of the other sex. Combine that with observations that the vast majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria grow up to be homosexual.

Occam's razor suggests that you're measuring homosexuality, with transgenderism being just one possible outcome of homosexuality in a heteronormative society. Essentially a form of repressed homosexuality.
 
Neuroscience can help show me that sexual orientation and gender identity come from non-differences in male and female brains?


You don't need neuroscience to wonder why you had to leave out the rest of that sentence.

Too bad you weren't around to tell Einstein that, he was fond of gedankenexperiment. I didn't think you'd get fussy about it. I enjoy thought experiments.


Now we've gone from an idea (yours) that's clearly impossible and therefore a favored theme of fiction (usually comedies, for example Switch, The Hot Chick, It’s a Boy-Girl Thing, Dating the Enemy, Goodbye Charlie) to Einstein's Gedankenexperiment, which is very pretentious of you. Einstein made actual thought experiments to grasp reality. You don't.
And unlike Einstein's thought experiment, in this case all you need to do is ask transgender people what it's like to be them, and they tell you that they identify with the sex they weren't born as, and that it feels awful.
So what do you learn from that?!
 
the studies showing similarities between the brains of transgender people and people of the other sex also show the same similarities between homosexuals and people of the other sex.

Can I get a link on that?
 
I found this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
As noted above, there is only one morphological study on untreated nonhomosexual transsexuals in the literature (Savic & Arver, 2011). This study and our proposed phenotypes for homosexual MtFs and FtMs could help us take the first steps in discerning between homosexual and nonhomosexual transsexuals. Homosexual MtFs are female-like in a series of sexually dimorphic behaviors, while nonhomosexual MtFs are not (Blanchard, 1989a, 1989b). It has also been hypothesized that the brain of homosexual and nonhomosexual MtFs would differ from that of males in different ways. In homosexual MtFs, the differences would involve sexually dimorphic structures and the nature of the differences would be a shift toward the female-typical patterns, while in nonhomosexual MtFs the differences themselves would not involve sexually dimorphic structures (Blanchard, 2008). Moreover, it was also suggested that “if there is any neuroanatomic intersexuality, it is in the homosexual group” (Blanchard, 2008).

Following this line of thought, Cantor (2011, 2012, but also see Italiano, 2012) has recently suggested that Blanchard’s predictions have been fulfilled in two independent structural neuroimaging studies. Specifically, Savic and Arver (2011) using VBM on the cortex of untreated nonhomosexual MtFs and another study using DTI in homosexual MtFs (Rametti et al., 2011b) illustrate the predictions. Cantor seems to be right. Nonhomosexual MtFs present differences with heterosexual males in structures that are not sexually dimorphic (Savic & Arver, 2011), while homosexual MtFs (as well as homosexual FtMs) show differences with respect to male and female controls in a series of brain fascicles (Rametti et al., 2011a, 2011b). If other VBM and CTh studies on the cortex of homosexual MtFs are added (Simon et al., 2013; Zubiaurre-Elorza et al., 2013), there is a more substantial number of untreated homosexual MtFs and FtMs that fulfill Blanchard’s prediction but still only one study on nonhomosexual MtFs; to fully confirm the hypothesis, more independent studies on nonhomosexual MtFs are needed. A much better verification of the hypothesis could be supplied by a specifically designed study including homosexual and nonhomosexual MtFs.

Conclusions
Untreated MtFs and FtMs who have an early onset of their gender dysphoria and are sexually oriented to persons of their natal sex show a distinctive brain morphology, reflecting a brain phenotype. These phenotypes are different from those of heterosexual males or females; the differences affect the right hemisphere and cortical structures underlying body perception.
 
Your link is actually better than what I had, which consisted of me looking up studies of transgender brains and homosexual brains and seeing how they did or didn't match up.

I'm not sure I can fully agree with you conclusion, though. What you say here:

Occam's razor suggests that you're measuring homosexuality, with transgenderism being just one possible outcome of homosexuality in a heteronormative society. Essentially a form of repressed homosexuality.

As society has become less hereronormative, the incidence of transgenderism has increased.

If I were an anti-lesbian, anti-gay trans rights activist, I'd see all this as evidence that homosexuality is one possible outcome of transgenderism in a cis-normative society, essentially a form of repressed transgenderism.

:p

In all seriousness, people are complicated, society is cruel and also complicated, and I'm just an advocate of defaulting (within reason) to accepting people in the way they wish to be accepted, and treating everyone with dignity.
 
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I'm not sure I can fully agree with you conclusion, though. What you say here:

As society has become less hereronormative, the incidence of transgenderism has increased.

What makes you think society has become less heteronormative? Besides, I'd be willing to bet you a crate of beer that you'd find that transgenderism is correlated with growing up in a traditional/genderist/heteronormative family.

If I were an anti-lesbian, anti-gay trans rights activist, I'd see all this as evidence that homosexuality is one possible outcome of transgenderism in a cis-normative society, essentially a form of repressed trandgenderism.

:p

You wouldn't be a very smart one then, most early-onset GD people are homosexual but not most homosexual people have GD, the reasoning only goes one way. :p

In all seriousness, people are complicated, society is cruel and also complicated, and I'm just an advocate of defaulting (within reason) to accepting people in the way they wish to be accepted, and treating everyone with dignity.

More importantly, none of that stops a theory proposing two different phenomena (homosexuality and transgenderism) to be disfavoured with respect to a theory proposing a single phenomenon (homosexuality) given that the latter explains all the data as well. The onus would be on the one asserting the existence of a second phenomenon (transgenderism) to show it to have independent existence, and it appears that the only study (as per your link) done on this so far, using non-homosexual transgender people, does not support that contention - at least not in the neurological sexual dimorphism in the brain sense.
 
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What makes you think society has become less heteronormative?

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...-characters-at-record-high-on-tv-report-finds

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx

Besides, I'd be willing to bet you a crate of beer that you'd find that transgenderism is correlated with growing up in a traditional/genderist/heteronormative family.

All transgenderism?

And you think groups like fundamentalist Christians and strict Muslims are more likely to produce children who become transgender at some point in life than more secular-left, gay-accepting families?

The onus would be on the one asserting the existence of a second phenomenon (transgenderism) to show it to have independent existence, and it appears that the only study (as per your link) done on this so far, using non-homosexual transgender people, does not support that contention - at least not in the neurological sexual dimorphism in the brain sense.

You seem to be misunderstanding my contention. I agree that "transwomen who are into guys" have brains most similar to gay dudes, whereas "transwomen who are lesbians" appear (according to the very limited data) to be most similar to straight dudes.

I'm saying there's no reason to default to saying "transwomen into guys are just repressed gay dudes" any more than there's a reason to default to saying "gay dudes are obviously just repressed transwomen."

eta: and the above goes for FtM transpeople and cis lesbians, too.
 
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You realize that the subset of the population which actually goes out to enforce heteronormativity (ie actually harassing two guys publicly kissing or things like that - I challenge you to try it and see what happens ;) ETA: to be clear, challenging you to publicly kiss with someone of the same sex and see if you get harassed, not challenging you to harass people kissing in public, obviously) has never been a majority? Your data does not imply any reduction in social heteronormative enforcement.

All transgenderism?

Of course not, don't be silly. There's bound to be minor subsets of transgenderism which have nothing to do with homosexuality but are just manifestations of autism or body identity disorder or various other conditions.

And you think groups like fundamentalist Christians and strict Muslims are more likely to produce children who become transgender at some point in life than more secular-left, gay-accepting families?

Not necessarily fundamentalist Christians or strict Muslims, but yeah. Interesting that you interpret traditional/genderist to mean religious, there are plenty of secular and even gay-accepting families that enforce traditional gender roles, with the girls only given pink stuff and encouraged to play with girly toys and vice versa for the boys.

You seem to be misunderstanding my contention. I agree that "transwomen who are into guys" have brains most similar to gay dudes, whereas "transwomen who are lesbians" appear (according to the very limited data) to be most similar to straight dudes.

I'm saying there's no reason to default to saying "transwomen into guys are just repressed gay dudes" any more than there's a reason to default to saying "gay dudes are obviously just repressed transwomen."

And I'm saying there is such a reason and it's called Occam's razor. There is no reason to introduce an independent phenomenon (gender, in particular in the "brain sex" interpretation) when already-existing phenomena already account for the data. In particular, homosexuality accounting for the vast majority of transgenderism and the rest probably accounted for by various other conditions (autism etc, as per the above).
 
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Honestly, I'm just seeing "grasping at straws" arguments (no idea what your hetero normativity enforcement minority argument is even going for) attempting to invalidate transgenderism here, more than an honest attempt at making sense of the data. But whatever. Believe what you will. :)
 
Honestly, I'm just seeing "grasping at straws" arguments (no idea what your hetero normativity enforcement minority argument is even going for) attempting to invalidate transgenderism epicycles here, more than an honest attempt at making sense of the data. But whatever. Believe what you will. :)

ftfy :)
 
Just been reading up about schizophrenia and it would seem it afflicts men more than women. Sort of flies in the face of the identicalness of male and female brains hypothesis.
 
That's strange. The chart you showed clearly said US people.
Got a comprehension problem? What you think 'demographically-representative samples' means?

US population is ~327 million. Even if every female you ever met or saw on TV confirmed your stereotype, it still wouldn't mean anything.
 

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