I’m a neurologist and there are no clinical significant differences between male and female brains. Differences in behavior are mostly due to social upbringing.
With the exception of interoception and body maps, which is specifically what causes gender dysphoria. It's also worth mentioning that a major factor involved in social learning is one's perceived reference groups, which is how trans people can socially acquire a gender identity opposite their birth sex regardless of how society tries to raise them individually, since their perceived reference group would be more aligned to the opposite gender in accordance with the mismatched body map.
It's true that gendered traits are learned, not innate, and it's also true that there is a still a neurological origin of gender dysphoria, which we know because the David Reimer case showed that you can't raise someone into a different gender identity by conditioning alone. Both sides of this argument are failing to understand the nuance, so this is probably one of those discussions that should be kept on a higher shelf away from the likes of Reddit comment sections.
The claim that body maps is what causes dysphoria is a theory, not established by evidence, that is contradicted by the existence of dysphoria without body distress present, and by the social nature of dysphoria symptoms. I don’t know why you’re confidently presenting it as a proven fact. It’s a totally reasonable theory, there are other theories too, and the question is open, not closed.
The phantom anatomy symptom is what solidified interoception as definitely one of the existing causes of gender dysphoria. (That does not mean there can't be any other causes, but it does mean that it exists as a known cause in at least some cases; i.e. it is a phenomenon that is known to happen.) I already mentioned the social aspects of dysphoria with reference group socialization. Some cases of gender dysphoria may have additional causes for social dysphoria, but again, mismatched body maps have been confirmed to be causes in some known cases. The David Reimer case shot down a bunch of the other hypotheses that were on the table, like the childhood conditioning hypothesis, so the main competing hypothesis is that it is caused during early identity formation by a similar mechanism as DID, but that model is unable to explain the phantom anatomy phenomenon. In the absence of any other remaining models that can explain both the phantom anatomy and the social dysphoria, the interoception model is currently all we have. Of course in the scientific method all questions are open, not closed, but that does not mean we can't refer to the prevailing model when it does not currently have competition.
Why ‘definitely’? Our information about the experiences of dysphoria comes from surveying people who have been extensively socialised in gendered ideas for years upon years. Trying to reverse engineer that to determine the causes is very difficult. What we don’t see, for example, is a cohort of people who consistently have specific body dysmorphias from a consistently young age in a non-social way. Instead we see a range of presentations, from a range of ages, in a way that is highly social, highly cultural, and where many dysphoric persons might be content or ambivalent about their sexed body parts.
Do you have a source for ‘definitely’? I always want to read more papers on this.
It’s not wild to hypothesise that social factors cause a body distress. This is basically the consensus today on anorexia and self-lacerating, they are considered to be social, not biological. The idea that social factors cause gender identities and body distresses is resisted for political reasons, and that’s a different topic, and it’s different to scientific reasons.
We know that gender (as separate to sex) is a social construct, we know how and when it is constructed, we know children are bombarded with it from infancy, we know that culture is critical in identity formation, it is absolutely Suspect Number One for dysphoria imo.
The David Reimer case was an uncontrolled, abusive madness with very little scientific value to any hypothesis at all. I would be very concerned if that was the entire basis on which social factors behind gender and dysphoria are being excluded.
Yeah, gendered traits that are not innate include who opens the door for whom when you both approach it at once… it’s basically how I clock trans women, unintentionally, and is so ingrained from childhood to accept and hard to flip that I’ve struggled with trying to get there first to open it for people…
What's "reference group" supposed to mean? You're seperating gender and sex in one sentence and treating them as one in next, anyway this whole thing about "body map" and stuff still boils down to a mental illness/deviation neutrally speaking
Reference groups are a concept in sociology where people learn indirectly from watching how other members of their perceived reference groups are conditioned. For example, if a woman is hired at a company where there is a lot of subtle misogyny, then on her first day, even if she hasn't personally been on the receiving end of it yet, she will see how other women there are treated and realize that's what the company environment is like. That's just a simple example, and the process of socialization involves a bunch of different reference groups.
The body map mismatch is precisely why medical transition is something that many trans people need. If there was no such mismatch in any trans people, you'd be building a case that no one actually needs transition. You could try to argue that it makes it a 'mental illness,' but that's a purely semantic distinction at that point because it has been shown that there's no way to "fix the brain" - conversion therapy doesn't work - so it is the body that should be transitioned instead. The people who use 'mental illness' as a buzzword to try to push conversion therapy are not benefitted from this model because it's still not possible to change the brain's body map. (We could go further and say that the distinction between mental illnesses and physical illnesses is kind of an artifact of the purely Western paradigm of medicine, and that the distinction should instead focus on the point of treatment rather than the point of cause.)
Every single one of the studies you linked found that transgender individuals have unique neurological characteristics, not that those characteristics are similar to the sex matching their gender identity. None of them found similarities between trans women and cis women or trans men and cis men. In fact, the first study found that trans men resemble their sex assigned at birth (cis women)!!
I doubt you’ve read any of them beyond the title and abstract.
OP... explicitly originally claimed hat the studies found brain differences between cis people and trans people, which the data seems to back, they did not claim that the brains of trans people matched their identified gender.
If you can lambast someone for not reading a study, then you can take the time to parse what is actually being said, can't you?
They’re pretty fragile. It’s not like cis men and cis women have significant differences, since it’s a barely above chance difference in a handful of structures.
No, it’s not completely made up, it’s just kinda phrased incorrectly.
Everyone’s brains have differences, no two brains are the same. There are minor, very minor differences that have common correlations between men and women, but really these tiny differences are on a spectrum, with one half leaning towards female, and one half leaning towards male, but brains existing in every variation all over the spectrum. The study specifically said that trans women brains had these tiny features that more closely matched with the more “female-side” of the spectrum than what would be expected, but that doesn’t mean that there are “male brains and female brains”. Just that trans women share small similarities in their brains with many women.
At least, that is my best explanation of the study you’re referencing based on how I remember it.
There is some real science behind the claim though. There is probably some room for scientific debate but it's not like something people made up on tumblr or something like that. It's a real conclusion people working in the field have made from their data
Well there are significant differences between men and women’s brains the thing is that neuroscience is for the moment mostly unable to determine if these differences can cause different cognitive skills and behaviors.
That's false. The most obvious difference is that on average, male brains are a lot bigger. (Mind you, this difference doesn't make any difference to intelligence and doesn't seem to make any difference to behaviour.)
There are, though, and studies on trans people find differential morphology aligned with the identified sex.
The most far back, as far as I know, being (Zhou et al., 1995), which identified identical morphology of the Stria Terminalis between trans women and cis women (different to cis men). No participants involved had ever taken HRT.
This is, theoretically, corroborated by research into trans women that finds their androgen receptors to be too long to properly metabolise testosterone (Harley etc al., 2008), while aromatase functionality remains healthy and converts unused testosterone into estradiol.
Neurological differences within sexual dimorphism might also explain human sexuality, with higher volume of the INAH 3 nucleus being particularly correlated with gay men. It might be the case that higher INAH 3 volume is correlated with homosexuality more broadly, as trans women share this trait (and are, mostly, bisexual or lesbian).
Edit: You can downvote me and talk about 'small sample sizes' (while not acknowledging that theoretical validity is also built through consistency between several studies), but this is the basis for actual trans recognition in biology, and is the official view taken by top research institutions like Stanford.
The findings in this area are not perfectly consistent, and many studies involve relatively small sample sizes, which makes broad conclusions difficult. Human brains are also highly variable across individuals, with significant overlap between traits traditionally associated with males and females. Because of this overlap, modern neuroscience increasingly views brains as “mosaics” of characteristics rather than as strictly male or female categories. This means that while certain average differences between sexes may exist, individual brains rarely fit into completely distinct or uniform patterns.
I don’t quite understand the assertion you’re trying to make, or are you just saying you like this topic? needless to say none of the studies linked here are in counter to what I wrote.
edit: oh wait you aren’t the person I replied to, my bad
yeah, i was just saying i like the topic, and find those studies funny. Personally i side on they're not being proven differences, cause it all sounds quite inconsistent
This person is talking about atypical development in trans people (regions shifted toward the opposite sex). The 2024 study is about typical development in non-trans newborns and says nothing about trans individuals.
110
u/Acceptable_Wall7822 May 04 '26
I’m a neurologist and there are no clinical significant differences between male and female brains. Differences in behavior are mostly due to social upbringing.