I am Picasso the art of gender

In the 1930s it was classed as a form of intersex and treated medically. I have a news paper article celebrating the return of siblings who has left a little village as sisters and returned as brothers, they were welcomed back with open arms in the 1930s and the article is 1940s talking about how sucessfull these gentlemen were. Not dead names or misgendered once.

@Eli: Really? I didn't know this. Do you have an article link perhaps? I'd love to share that story with some people.
Kinda feels like we're digressing instead of improving in a way though. Or, you know, that some people are just bigoted.

@Vi: what you're saying is actually beautiful but somehow I can't stop laughing at how it's almost like a commercial slogan. "Be trans and transcend gender!" I'm sorry, I've got the worst humour. If being trans was a choice, you'd have made a good case for it now though

~ Grey

Not the article i read as it is behind a pay wall but similar https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/arti ... ark+ferrow

Also there is a dissertation on 1930 sexchange in one of the answers to this question
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ques ... transition

Thank you, Grey. The definitions are also kind of what they were originally, from what we were able to find years and years ago. We just kind of spiffed them up a bit.

As for the past with transsexuality being seen as intersexuality, we knew that. We ran into a lot of that in the research that we did while running our old blog. Unfortunately, there were also attempts to force people into sex changes to 'cure' homosexuality. But lately, the issue of transsexuality being a form of intersexuality has begun to be more apparent as things like brain mapping have become more common.

Transsexuals have identical or almost identical brain maps of the sex they were assigned to at birth. So a transsexual woman will have a brain map that matches a cis woman despite being assigned male at birth, and vice versa.

There's other factors like the rates of autoimmune disorders in trans women and cis women are very similar.

We find gender to be fascinating in so many ways, and especially when it comes to DID lately because.

Violette

@Eli: thanks for the links! These are now bookmarked
Wonder if my country has specific stories like these too. Worth looking for.

@Vi: What do you mean by brain maps? I find this interesting because there's so little to define gender and even sex by that it'd be kind of groundbreaking to have something like that correspond so clearly (am I making sense? Sometimes I don't know what I'm writing it just goes).

Kinda feel like we took over Eli's beautiful post with a gender debate

~ Grey

A brain map is an image taken by, like a CT scan, an MRI, or in some cases just physical dissection (post mortem). These kinds of maps show the different areas of the brain, and different organs that the brain contains. This scientific look into the brain has been going on for decades. We remember that, back in the 1980's, they found that the brains of gay men and lesbians showed differences from their straight counterparts.

While not identical, the brains of trans people are closer to the gender they wish to present than the gender their sex would mandate. The gendered differences in the brain do shift a bit more towards the gender that trans people wish to express while undergoing treatment. Thus, for a trans woman on estrogen, their brain map would become more and more female in structure; however, it was already part of the way there to begin with.

It's maps like these that have shown how the brain 'scars' when trauma happens, and that DID actually does exist as they've shown different areas of the brain lighting up when someone switches while in a scan.

Hope that clarifies.

Octavia

Hate to burst your bubble but brain maps via mri have been debunked. A recent test showed that a rotting fish produces images that were confidently "diagnosed" as a human brain displaying x emotion/y thought by experts in mri interpretation.

https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/fgL6QEWgBpqa

Also brain growth via direction can only tell you how someone's brain formed not why. There is no proof that having an opposite gendered brain makes you trans. It could equaly be that being trans and the environment that creates for a plastic brain shapes it. If you copy the boys mannerisms often enough your brain will grow in a particular way to store those mannerisms so they become second nature and voila by ignoring female habits and practicing male habits the ftm person atrophied the ",female " parts of their brain and hypertrophies the "male" parts of their brain.
Gender expression molding final brain form is backed up by the fact that butch lesbians have disected brains nearly identical to ftm people despite the fact that butch lesbians identify as female.
I suspect if you disected a fem boy's or effeminate gay brain you would see "female" plasticity in the brain.

I was realy excited about a study being done here into making an alters area in the brain but the study was dropped after the dead fish findings.

There are differences between a lesbian's brain and an transsexual man's brain. There are differences between a gay man's brain and a transsexual woman's brain. While a lesbian's brain is similar in some ways to a cis man's brain, it is not identical. The same holds true for a gay man's brain and a cis woman.

The similarities get closer when you talk about a transsexual woman's brain and a cis woman's brain, and a transsexual man's brain and a cis man's brain. However, they are slight differences. And just to point out that we have been reading about these studies going back to the 1980's and the dissection of the brains of people, many of whom died from HIV/AIDS. As we stated, we have looked into studies involving MRI, CT Scans, dissection, and a variety of other methods.

Given the vast number of cases involving trans people being forced to emulate their assigned sex's mannerisms, the idea that brain plasticity is involved is irrelevant. Trans women are, quite often, forced to emulate male behaviours, sometimes to the point of being beaten and abused.

Our own experience would show this as we actually emulated our peers with regards to handedness, and even to this day we struggle with our right handedness because our brain was not wired from birth to use our right hand in the manner that we emulated. A study published in 2003 showed that handedness, even when forced to change, affects the brain and the brain still activates the areas to use the left hand even if someone has been forced to use their right hand their whole life.

Neuroplasticity does exist, but what they have often found is that, if something is innate to the biological makeup of the brain, it remains there no matter what attempts are made to change those behaviors. As per the example of left handedness. One cannot make a left handed person a completely non-left handed person nor can one make someone not trans or gay by forcing a change in behaviour.

Basically, when the brains have similar to near identical structures despite lived experiences, that is not neuroplasticity.

With regards to 'brain mapping being debunked', it has not been. A few scientists have raised concerns regarding that; however, that is often about where emotions and behaviours are experienced in the brain not what we were discussing. What we have been discussing is the brain's structure.

Another thing is, using a rotting fish brain to determine anything would not work because a fish brain, by its nature, is incredibly simple. Such a study would require the use of a more complicated brain to have any real validity. Even at that, you have one study vs. hundreds showing the validity of brain mapping.

At the crux of the issue regarding the brain maps of trans people being similar to the brains of the sex opposite that which they were born is similar idea of 'phantom limb syndrome'. Basically, the brain is, from birth, wired to accept signals for the genitals that the body was not born with. This can go to the point of some trans women even having PMS like symptoms as early as puberty despite not having a uterus.

With regards to DID...the MRI images have shown that someone switching rewires the brain so that it has a different personality. As you said, they abandoned their study. They could have and should have continued their research. After all, a jelly has the same electrical conductivity as a brain, but it does not show any signs of cognition.

Sorry for the long response.
Octavia.

...Sorry if what we said sounded off.

We were aware that the researchers who have looked at MRI data for how brains alter and change while doing activities have cast some doubt about that tool being useful, they have not debunked it quite yet.

The whole statement about the jelly was not an insult or anything along those lines, btw.

Most of our data has been about brain dissection with some of the studies being MRI, CT scans and PET scans. One (the one about handedness) involved measuring oxygen flow to certain parts of the brain.

Take care,
Violette

This does line up with our experience. When taught how to write, we wanted to use our left. We were told to use the right. Now we can do both. Prefer left, but Grey and White prefer right. When right hand cramps, I take over writing.

And it explains how Grey thought we were male for so long but fell back on being female when no longer treated as male.

Nurture adapts, nature is fixed? Maybe?

Raven