Throwaway to avoid getting doxxed
I know there are probably arguments against centering biology in the discussion about trans people (and if you want to make these arguments to me please do, I'm all ears), but I have found that many transphobes are brought to reflection when told that transgender feelings have a congenital basis, like homosexuality. I have been testing this. Again, I realize this might be a flawed or wrongheaded approach and I am open to criticism.
Anyway, my issue is that, while I have read some research, I do not have a strong enough grasp of the field as a whole to be forceful with this rhetoric. If I start posting studies, I might end up cherrypicking a position that is open to strong criticism.
I realize the research itself is unsettled and many questions remain, but I just want enough to inspire doubt. I want people to doubt that their current understanding of trans people is correct.
This study published in nature found correlations in the parietal lobe that might be associated with perception of one's own body, but I do not feel comfortable posting studies anywhere until I feel more confident that I know what I am talking about.
*got rid of the word "transsexual"
If you're not a troll, then you should switch over to the term "transgender" instead. 'Transsexual' is outdated and only a thing in certain trans sub cultures, rocky horror screenings, and/or true scum (transmedicalists) for some reason. Many consider the term offensive.
Transgender is an adjective and should not be used as a noun. If using trans to describe a person, you would say "trans person", "trans man," "trans woman", etc. Combining the two words is inappropriate and a common dog whistle because it implies the person being describes is not their actual gender.
Ultimately, whether or not there is firm scientific evidence is pretty unimportant. Transphobes are not approaching the topic sincerely and will move whatever goal post they set. The only thing most transphobes are good for is target practice.
only thing most transphobes are good for is target practice
I think transphobes can be clumped into categories, and some of those categories are persuadable to an extent while others are not.
I actually just finished with a thread that went way better than expected. When I got there the thread was all really fucked up transphobic memes, pictures of intermediate stages of phalloplasty, etc.
I've been copying down the exchange to study it later and maybe post it, but i got the memes to stop and i talked to one of the anons about how phalloplasty actually turns out and why trans men get them, and there were a lot of long pauses between the anon's posts but they eventually seemed to adopt a more understanding mindset
I'm still monitoring the thread but it looks like the transphobic anon has left, hopefully to go think things through
Evidence Supporting the Biologic Nature of Gender Identity
Aruna Saraswat, MD; Jamie D. Weinand, BA, BS; Joshua D. Safer, MD
Endocr Pract. 2015;21(2):199-204.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/840538_3
That's a meta-analysis of various studies on congenital endocrine or intersex conditions along with a few other things like confirmed or suspected prenatal exposure to diethylstilbestrol. I thought it was paywalled, but it's showing me the plain text of the paper looking at it now so if it doesn't show up disable javascript.
This is interesting, thanks. I'll need to review whether it's coherent or not.
It's basically just "studies on people with congenital hormone conditions like congenital adrenal hyperplasia have found that they are several times more likely than the general population to have a trans identity, while studies on XY individuals raised female due to missing or ambiguous genitalia find that they tend to still have male identities despite their socialization, so the evidence suggests that gender identity is innate in some manner instead of something learned or taught, even if the exact mechanism is unclear and there's no deterministic 'these conditions lead to such and such an identity 100% of the time'."
I also agree with your sentiment in the other comment, that this is in many regards the wrong question to ask because whether trans identities are innate or not shouldn't matter, although I do believe that the evidence is on the side of gender identity being real and innate regardless of whether it needs to be or not, especially since the only way to ever determine someone's gender identity concretely is for them to assert it for themselves. And I think that it'll probably stay that way because whatever "gender" is it's probably too convoluted and distributed a system in the brain to ever nail down a particular structure or configuration that's linked to it.
I have javascript disabled (pretty sure) and it's still paywalled for me
Thanks, you just saved me a lot of trouble of trying to copy and format the text into a post or find somewhere to upload that pdf.
While medical basis for transness can help, it can also be a crutch as well. Transmedicalists and trutrans/truscum sort of ideologies can be repressive toward nonbinary identities and even help conservatives out by splitting transpeople up between the "right" ones and the "wrong" ones.
I've heard of truscums and how toxic they've been. Do you think I risk doing more harm than good when I bring biology into these discussions online?
Depends, like we need to recognize that the need/desire to alleviate dysphoria is very real in a lot of people, but not all trans or nonbinary people have extreme dysphoria and tbh with "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness" etc it's not our place to define others even if they transition socially or medically for cultural reasons.
Basically, it's a variety of spectrums that current science is only touching on so we can't take evidence as word of god, only a suggestion. You can bring this stuff up but the primary evidence you should search for and put foward is that transitioning works. It's empirically verified to reduce stress/depression in queer people and detransitioning stats are blown way out of proportion by terfs. 90% of detrans ppl do so because of social pressure, not because they have regrets.
transitioning works. It's empirically verified to reduce stress/depression in queer people and detransitioning stats are blown way out of proportion by terfs. 90% of detrans ppl do so because of social pressure, not because they have regrets.
Excellent! this is another line of rhetoric I want to build up. Do you have any studies on hand? Should I make a new thread?
https://hexbear.net/post/90266/comment/992896
This is a comment I found on the topic, mainly focused on trans children because that's usually where the topic of detrans pops up.
i feel like this is fundamentally misleading about what being trans is, and who trans people are. like most, i was raised in cisnormativity, and what brought me around wasn't learning that men and women have different brains, and trans people actually have the "opposite" brain, it was seeing and talking to trans people who had clearly given a lot of thought to their gender and gender in general living their lives as themselves, regardless of what cis society might have to say about it.
anyway i guess my point is literally do that meme of Dr. Phil handing you a copy of Stone Butch Blues
e: the meme
this is also what brought me around. I'm not sure how to turn it into rhetoric though.
transphobes are coming from the position where they currently doubt a trans person's self-knowledge and motives. If I say "actually their self-knowledge is pretty damn good and they tend to be good people with good motives" the response will be "nuh uh, I don't believe you." If I mention trans people who are obviously intelligent and kind and have good motives, like Chelsea Manning for example, the response can be "small sample size, cherrypicked." I tried this and that was the response I got, although the person who said it had some red flags for impersuadability and I stopped talking to them soon after. Someone more persuadable might react in a different way.
what do you think of this approach https://hexbear.net/post/196621/comment/2473672
I remember reading some papers while getting my undergrad that twin studies indicated that the prevalence of both of them being trans had a high correlation which implies genetics, basically the same as with homosexuality. It was a long time ago so I dont have the study, or access to those journals anymore, but if you try searching for twin studies you might have luck.
Also be really careful because trans people are very understudied as a cohort by legitimate studies. We often joke that trans reddit knows more about trans healthcare than most doctors, and it isn't too much of an exaggeration; some of the major studies in trans care are literally from the fucking 30's Germany still. This is combined with the fact that a ton of TERFs and run of the mill reactionaries like publishing really shitty papers in fifth rate journals that paint trans women in the worst light possible.
is there a subreddit you would recommend me posting a question like this in?
also, I saw the twins thing mentioned on wikipedia but I'm wary of mentioning it because I anticipate someone pointing to something like this , where two twins separated at birth end up living similar lives and having similar idiosyncrasies
Wait why is that a problem? That's a classic example of genetic factors.
transphobic line of rhetoric
the response will be "obviously two twins are going to be predisposed to the same delusions and personality flaws"
Uhhh.... yeah it's called genetics. That response is just a person being a bigoted asshole. Twin studies are all about controlling for genetic variation to determine what traits hold regardless of environmental factors. This is a method used to test everything from mental health to metabolism.
I am curious what kind of biological evidence you are looking for? If you are expecting to find a study saying they found a trans "gene" you ate going to be disappointed. Strong correspondence of simple genetic factors to complex behavioral phenomena are unfortunately rather rare.
I guess I'm looking for two lines of evidence: differences in the brains of adults, and developmental stuff (hormone levels during pregnancy?) that might be expected to produce differences in the brains of adults.
Also looking for good studies demonstrating that transitioning is the best treatment. Bonus points if the studies can be compressed into concise soundbites.
I do not expect to find a paper that says "we found the trans gene," although there might be some interesting genetic cluster analysis out there.
The different brains line is difficult because brain scan tech is really really iffy, and dissected brains come from trans people who have been on hormones which would affect the tissues. As to the developmental stuff, that's also a really difficult line because it's hard to get data in stuff like that without running into intersex phenomena and that isn't the same thing.
Treatment is definitely a good way to go though you are going to run into the same issues with people just being bigots as you will with genetics.
The thing that makes someone trans is wanting to be trans. There is no one umbrella that people who decide to transition fit under. Even looking for "biological basis" for it is sus, as its usually done by truscum nazis trying to gatekeep.
If you're looking to impress your STEM friends there are no super conclusive /thorough studies on the subject,
What are your thoughts on this thread?
I tend to agree with you, but on the other hand I'm the person who might be construed as "just asking questions" about who is allowed to identify as trans, because I centered biology by posting this thread
biology is definitely an easy answer, which I think is what led me to it.
some vague mention of transphobic rhetoric
Much of the transphobic rhetoric online posits that trans people are either delusional or have various strange motives. Many transphobes are christians who think trans people are an affront to god.
A biological basis swats much of that aside, but it also potentially restricts socially acceptable expression of sexuality, like you mentioned, especially if the biological basis is one we claim to fully understand. We end up with an approved list of ways people can be, and it'll be a list reactionaries can attempt to modify.
What do you think about the following middle ground approach: I point to some biological patterns that have been found and say "obviously at least some trans people were born this way and have no control over it" but then add "it'll be a long time before we fully understand all the biological factors that contribute, so maybe we should just let people live their lives how they want to as long as they are not hurting anyone. There aren't that many, and overwhelmingly they are not hurting anyone. Trans people have been around throughout human history, this is just part of the human condition."
Yeah, that is the idea. Instead of transmitting an entire worldview, I just want to prove that their current one cannot be correct. Based on feedback from this post, I'll also prioritize not setting anyone up for a truscummy, trans-medicalist view in the future.
I want to add my perspective as someone who you seem to think would have been helped by there being more hoops to jump through. I completely recontextualized my gender identity in the years that I've been trans. For context, I've know that I'm trans for four years now and I've been on hrt for a year an a half. About a year ago, half a year into being on feminizing hrt, I realized that I had dysphoria from my breast development. This began a series of self-reflections on gender that led to me going from identifying as a transfem to a demiboy, and one that's pretty heavily aligned with masculinity at that. You might be tempted to look at an experience like mine, where hrt caused me more dysphoria and changed my body in a way that I didn't like, where my gender identity swung wildly from one end of the binary to another, where my goals with hrt went from looking like a binary woman to light feminization, as evidence that there should have been more systemic hurdles for me to face. I'd like to tell you that wouldn't have helped.
At the start of being prescribed hrt I was asked to confirm that I had gender dysphoria through a series of questions. I was lucky, genuinely, to have a doctor who understood that my dysphoria was valid even if it presented atypically. Because I do have dysphoria, even now I can barely look at my face without feeling uncomfortable among a litany of more dysphoria from other secondary sex characteristics. If my doctor had a more strict diagnostic criteria like that often used in European nations my dysphoria wouldn't have been enough. These additional restrictions would have prevented me from getting hrt at all. I sincerely doubt I would have ever been able to parse my feelings on my identity before hrt, a process which does take time to truly affect a patient. I needed to stop feeling disgusted by my masculinity in order to identify with it, a process which couldn't have happened without being on estrogen. I like being a guy, its just that being a guy feels better for me on E.
My recontextualization of my identity happened through talking to trans people, binary and non-binary. These conversations with people who deeply understood my experience directly lead into me realizing that I wasn't a binary trans woman or even transfem because of their willingness to accept my transness and also give room for me to be critical of my own gender. This wasn't me talking to transfems and realizing I didn't meet a checklist but rather them helping me process the complex emotions that often come with something like gender by first assuming that I was right to call myself trans. An experience which did fuck with me early in my transition is actually very aligned with what you're proposing. I was talking to a trans woman who told me that I was just a very gay man and that I couldn't be trans because I didn't have a very narrow, specific type of dysphoria. This was confusing and unhelpful, because I hated being a man and very earnestly wanted to be something else. Instead of giving me room to figure out how to contextualize my relationship to masculinity and connect the aspects of it that I dislike to the patriarchy or to my dysphoria, I was dismissed outright. It was that dismissal that directly led into me pursuing hrt without having a deeper understand of my identity. By making rigid, inflexible definitions of who can and can't be trans, by imposing a larger than current number of restrictions on me, I was denied support in figuring out my identity which directly led to a situation you seem to be concerned about preventing.
At the end of the day, even as I type this in a binder because I haven't had top surgery yet, I don't regret a minute of my transition. I don't regret that I'm going to have scars on my chest for the rest of my life because I was wrong about my identity. More hoops would have made it harder for me to start this process, more challenging for me to get resources that would have helped me. Having more rigid definitions of transness encourages a narrow interpretation of the gender binary leaving many trans people out. It also creates a situation where euphoria isn't considered valid. You can't prove empirically that my gender identity is something that I love, you have to rely on the absence of dysphoria that used to exist. If you have too little or not the right type of dysphoria then you can't be trans even if you'd be overjoyed to transition like I am. People are complex beings and adding more clinical steps, more boxes people have to check to be valid, is antithetical to this complexity.
"not the least of which being that humans cannot change their sex like they can their gender (sex being a biological feature, gender being a social feature)."
This is debatable depending on on how you are defining your terms and in what field you are using your terms. I point this out not to criticize only to say that you are touching a live wire of debate for which there are a ton of bad actors who will use this statement in ways you don't intend it.
Just saying for purpose beyond where people interact in good faith. Don't give them a fucking inch regardless of how much nuance there might be in any subject. :cat-trans:
