Simon_Jester wrote:I love how you have this cuttlefish-like habit of squirting out a cloud of ink to cover your escape when cornered and called to engage on a fact-based issue.
That was just stating that I am not particularly invested about the question. Yes,
the weight of evidence is on the side of 'brain sex' being a myth. I could supply more links; actually I'd just link
r/GenderCritical and say read the first twenty or so links; but I do not have any particular expertise to contribute, other than a dozen or so hours reading papers, nor does this issue affect me or any close friends. My point is that if we did spend time quoting lists of papers, there are a lot more studies supporting the radfem position, but it is not sufficiently settled that the theory will be reduced to crank status. People who desperately want to believe in it have not yet been deprived of support. I'm not sure if you're in the later cateory, but going by the typical gender critical vs transgender debate experience no one will change their mind based on links to papers.
It's not about facts, in this ink cloud. It's about finding a group of activists or 'leftists' or whatever whom you can blame for muddying the waters somehow.
I don't 'blame' them for anything, in the sense that they are not doing anything morally objectionable. Rather I find the social dynamics of movements being co-opted fascinating to watch. The second-wave feminists were quite effectively marginalised within their own group, using many of the same tactics, language and rhetorical weapons (including endless repeition of tautologies and constant attempts to redefine language) that they themselves used in their original fight (for rights and just self-definition). The trans advocates just took it to the next level, really weaponising victim status and passive-agressiveness, and playing oppression olympics to win in a way that earlier feminists had not. The same thing then happened to the original core of the transgender movement as seen in the whole 'truscum' vs 'tucute' Tumblr mess. However expansion based on youth-focused fashion trend is inherently not sustainable and will exacerbate the backlash that trans was already in for from overreaching on commandeering feminist groups & spaces.
As with many social issues, a technological solution should eventually render this irrelevant; hopefully the ability to actually and fully change a human's biological sex will be developed. But in the mean time I'm quite curious as to how this particular culture war will play out.
If you consider the detransitioning narratives, then the obvious explanation is that those are the cases where there isn't a brain structure supporting the change- either it's nonplastic and doesn't respond favorably to switching genders, or it's plastic and doesn't change fast enough.
The second does not make sense. To be specific, what is under debate here is the idea that a person with male hormones, hormonal response, genotype, genitals, and secondary sexual characeristics, was born with an immutable brain structure that generates discomfort because it is 'expecting' female anatomy... and furthermore that someone self-reporting this discomfort is enough to presume that the structure exists, as there is no test or physical diagnosis for it. There are obviously significant and systematic differences between typical male and female human brains; this is a point where the average (but not every) radical femnist is wrong and in denial of reality, with their 'everything is socially constructed' mantra. What there do not appear to be, but the majority of trans activists are trying to claim, are any such differences between typical biological males and males claiming they are women. In fact the claim goes even further than that, by insisting that the structural difference must be present from birth or at least early childhood. This is part of the general pattern of self-defeating overreach in recent trans advocacy, where if the claims were just toned down a bit, they would be a lot more realistic. Unfortunately the brakes are still locked firmly off on that train.
Anyway, the idea of 'gender confirmation surgery' (all terms must be renamed and redefined, every possible linguistic weapon must be recruited in the struggle to normalise the narrative) is that this immutable 'brain gender' creates an expectation of anatomy which causes dysphoria when not matched by reality (ignoring that trans no longer requires dysphoria, but when you evolve the narrative so quickly naturally it becomes fragmented and self-contradicting). If the symptoms after anatomical adjustment then by definition there was no structure generating an expectation of the altered anatomy. Which, given the relatively large fraction of detransitioners, means that even if we were to consider brain gender to be real, clearly a subject verbal statement of discomfort is not in any way a reliable indicator that such a structure exists or that surgery will fix it.
Again, the sad thing here is overreach. No justification to do with brain gender or even dysphoria should be required for an adult to undergo elective body modification. However the attempt to justify making the state or insurance pay for cosmetic surgery without sufficient evidence of treatment success, or apply risky sterilising treatments to children below the age of consent (who are statistically even more likely to regret the decision later), or just desperately shore up support for self-descriptive narratives no matter the actual reality, results in these highly dubious claims.
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- PeZook
