Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should …
Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should we do if someone wishes to transition but doesn't have that biological trait? Should we screen for it before allowing someone to access transition-related care? What about trans people who don't want to medically transition but are firm in their identity? The search for biological reasons that people are queer/trans/gay/etc only reflect a scientific desire to explain, track, and control something that ought to be left to the rights of the individuals themselves. Even if there were a strong correlation between transness and any observable neurological structural differences, there will always be people who wish to transition who do not have them, and so it's a faulty theoretical orientation. And a dangerous one.
Let's start at step one. Let me know what you disagree with, ok? :)
Biological sex is not a discrete, independent, binary, property. Everyone has properties that fall somewhere on the spectrum we see for a given species, and, yes, there are usually, but not always, two modes for this distribution in adult animals.
However, we, humans, have created the classifications of female, male, and intersex. But it's always a human agent who makes the call of who is the 'last female' and who is the poor woman who loses her female-ness when she's plopped over into the category of 'intersex.' In actual reality, we are over 8 billion individuals, each with their unique blend of properties. Intersex as a category is just a crutch. (But it can be clinically useful)
You see the difficulty when you start asking for 'a rule of recognition' -- how to recognise the female-ness or male-ness of someone. You get word salad. For every rule I've heard, there are either naturally-occurring exceptions that show the rule doesn't quite do the job, or the person formulating the rule has some explaining to do for why they have so gerrymandered the definition.
Example 1. Having many genetic variants that code for 'tall' doesn't make you tall. Having the kind of sex hormone dominance that often correlates with being taller than most people doesn't make you tall. Height is a physical property we can measure, but where is the limit of being tall or just normal height?
If you get leg lengthening surgery, and you start hitting your head on low-hanging lamps, and you can suddenly reach the top shelf -- are you now tall or not? If you lose your legs in a traffic accident, are you still actually tall? Depends on how you want to use those labels, right?
So, what is a female? If you talk about producing oocytes, or having the kind of organs that can, or will be able to, or could earlier, do that, you've now excluded many PCOS women from being female.
If you make exception for those "hormonal imbalances" (as if nature has such a thing as 'right' hormones concentrations -- we have those hormones we have, and we might enjoy the results or not, but there's no right in biology) but not others, why?
Example 2. If an identical twin is born without ovaries, but gets one from her sister, are they now both female? Were they both female ab initio? If yes, then being female doesn't actually depend on having the type of gonad, sex hormone synthesis, pubertal development, or sex cell production that TERFs and intellectually lazy biologists use for classification into female sex.
If no, then we have made someone from not-female into female. Through surgery. Here, the TERF or lazy biologist has to explain why restoring function that leads to 'female-typical' course of development and life somehow fails to make the person female, despite them having "female" genes, sex hormones, anatomy and germ cells.
Or if she loses her ovaries as a child in an iatrogenic accident? She now no longer has "female" gonads, sex hormone synthesis, sex cell production, growth and development, and likely not psychology, either. Why is she still female, regardless? Genes?
But why base our classification of the animal body on genes? We don't classify someone as 'patient with haemophilia' if they don't actually express that property in their phenotype. Or "myopic" if they have 20/20 vision, no matter their genetic predisposition for myopia.
In nearly every other case, we base our classification on phenotype, gene expression, not the chromosomes or genetic variants. (Except medical genetics, but that doesn't save the essentialist thinker, either. Because there, our intention is to avoid letting someone go from 'has DNA that codes for condition X' to 'has condition X')
Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should we do if someone wishes to transition but doesn't have that biological trait? Should we screen for it before allowing someone to access transition-related care? What about trans people who don't want to medically transition but are firm in their identity? The search for biological reasons that people are queer/trans/gay/etc only reflect a scientific desire to explain, track, and control something that ought to be left to the rights of the individuals themselves. Even if there were a strong correlation between transness and any observable neurological structural differences, there will always be people who wish to transition who do not have them, and so it's a faulty theoretical orientation. And a dangerous one.
Let's start at step one. Let me know what you disagree with, ok? :)
Biological sex is not a discrete, independent, binary, property. Everyone has properties that fall somewhere on the spectrum we see for a given species, and, yes, there are usually, but not always, two modes for this distribution in adult animals.
However, we, humans, have created the classifications of female, male, and intersex. But it's always a human agent who makes the call of who is the 'last female' and who is the poor woman who loses her female-ness when she's plopped over into the category of 'intersex.' In actual reality, we are over 8 billion individuals, each with their unique blend of properties. Intersex as a category is just a crutch. (But it can be clinically useful)
You see the difficulty when you start asking for 'a rule of recognition' -- how to recognise the female-ness or male-ness of someone. You get word salad. For every rule I've heard, there are either naturally-occurring exceptions that show the rule doesn't quite do the job, or the person formulating the rule has some explaining to do for why they have so gerrymandered the definition.
Example 1. Having many genetic variants that code for 'tall' doesn't make you tall. Having the kind of sex hormone dominance that often correlates with being taller than most people doesn't make you tall. Height is a physical property we can measure, but where is the limit of being tall or just normal height?
If you get leg lengthening surgery, and you start hitting your head on low-hanging lamps, and you can suddenly reach the top shelf -- are you now tall or not? If you lose your legs in a traffic accident, are you still actually tall? Depends on how you want to use those labels, right?
So, what is a female? If you talk about producing oocytes, or having the kind of organs that can, or will be able to, or could earlier, do that, you've now excluded many PCOS women from being female.
If you make exception for those "hormonal imbalances" (as if nature has such a thing as 'right' hormones concentrations -- we have those hormones we have, and we might enjoy the results or not, but there's no right in biology) but not others, why?
Example 2. If an identical twin is born without ovaries, but gets one from her sister, are they now both female? Were they both female ab initio? If yes, then being female doesn't actually depend on having the type of gonad, sex hormone synthesis, pubertal development, or sex cell production that TERFs and intellectually lazy biologists use for classification into female sex.
If no, then we have made someone from not-female into female. Through surgery. Here, the TERF or lazy biologist has to explain why restoring function that leads to 'female-typical' course of development and life somehow fails to make the person female, despite them having "female" genes, sex hormones, anatomy and germ cells.
Or if she loses her ovaries as a child in an iatrogenic accident? She now no longer has "female" gonads, sex hormone synthesis, sex cell production, growth and development, and likely not psychology, either. Why is she still female, regardless? Genes?
But why base our classification of the animal body on genes? We don't classify someone as 'patient with haemophilia' if they don't actually express that property in their phenotype. Or "myopic" if they have 20/20 vision, no matter their genetic predisposition for myopia.
In nearly every other case, we base our classification on phenotype, gene expression, not the chromosomes or genetic variants. (Except medical genetics, but that doesn't save the essentialist thinker, either. Because there, our intention is to avoid letting someone go from 'has DNA that codes for condition X' to 'has condition X')