Is gender still a valid concept if...

One should take into account of (Cooke, Tabibnia, & Breedlove, 1999) supports the idea that hormones can change sexually dimorphic brain nuclei and some results are influenced by hormones rather than inbirth characteristic. For the first two studies, there is the problem of comparisons regarding samples. According to the critique of the brain-sex theory website, the problems regarding samples such as there is few non-transexual with elevated cross-sex hormone levels and did not include non-transsexual men who had been treated with estrogens along with non-transexual women who had been treated for testorones. It's possible to argue that these few non-transexual had not received hormone treatment long enough.

So those two studies are ruled out as valid.

As for Garcia and Chang studies, I think you should have a look at sample issues

From the study : "Post-mortem brain material was used from 42 subjects: 14 control males, 11 control females, 11 male-to-female transsexual people, 1 female-to-male transsexual subject and 5 non-transsexual subjects who were castrated because of prostate cancer. "

The biggest problem noticed in sample used is one FtM and I'm not even sure whether these folks had hormone therapy which could influence the results as well.

Hulshoff study does show that hormone therapy could have major effect in 4 months.

So yeah, the theory that the brain should be seen as multi-morphic than di-morphic kind of holds a lot of validity considering the issues with these trans study and what is founded.

 

Yet transgender people who hadn't had any hormone treatments at the time of the studies also matched up with the trans people who had taken hormones. Moreover, people who had undergone hormone reversal matched up with the cisgender brain structure.

Luders et al. (2009) looked at 24 trans women pre-hormones and they too showed that transsexualism is caused by cerebral pattern. A similar conclusion was reached in Rametti et al. (2010) which looked at pre-hormones trans men.

 

Then use those studies as those have less limitations and issues. Nonetheless, since it has to do with cerebral pattern, I concur that the brain is still multi-morphic as the cerebral area isn't the entire brain. It's possible that the brain sex is valid, but not in most areas.

Considering gender identity, one thing that would be interesting is to differentiate control groups as in distinct categories. For example, those that considers themselves a man because they feel like they are and those that considers themselves a man by default as in they don't feel anything as in they don't understand the concept of gender identity, but it's just as it. I would suspect that the ones that feel as they are would have differences compared to default-minded.

Also, those studies do have the issues of subject(s)' numbers.

Also, another criticism is found on openmindedhealth website which is

"Potentially the most glaring limitation in these studies is their conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity. Berglund et al (2008), for example, only compared heterosexual cissexual women and men with gynephilic/homosexual transsexual women. While they could not include androphilic/heterosexual transsexual women in their study because of rarity, they failed to include homosexual cissexual men and women as comparison groups. This introduces a potentially confounding variable."

So, I'm gonna have to say there needs to be a larger study that does not suffer from those limitations and with emphasis on overlap analysis.

 

The point is that there IS a neurological reason for transsexuality, as these studies show. So there is an intrinsic gender identity. That was all I was getting at. Regardless, I feel that science should not define how you treat a person. Honestly, I often use these just to justify my feelings to people I'm coming out to, as many don't believe you at first. Having some studies with authority and professional sounding names is really useful.

And j6, that was an interesting article. Gender imbalance is very apparent, especially from the viewpoint of women and transpeople. I remember reading something in which internal gender was portrayed as a spectrum and that everyone is on a different point of the spectrum. The idea of gender as a binary is difficult one, as there are many people who fit outside of it.

 

I don't doubt that there is a neurological reason for transsexuality, but like I said, my intention was to show that the idea of brain sex is kind of doubtful considering the limitations of those studies and how the brain can be seen as intersexed with studies of no psychological difference. If your point was that there's neurological reason for transsexuality causing intrinsic gender identity feeling as a result, I'm not going to argue against that because I accept that.

 

Whether you are comfortable with the framework of gender or not, the fact is that hormonal levels, and the brain's ability to accept different hormones, reliably change people's behavior and thought patterns. So at the very least, some psychological differences between people with primarily androgens (like testosterone) and a brain that accepts them, and people without, definitely exist, at statistically significant levels. Doctors prescribe hormones, for instance, in menopausal women, partially because they are aware of these differences and the way women won't feel like themselves without enough of the right hormones. There are of course physical symptoms such as hot flashes that are treated as well. But the discomfort caused by a hormonal mismatch is well documented and well understood. There is simply no controversy to discuss so far.

However, I believe sex and gender are a combination of many different things. When deciding whether or not someone is a man, woman, neither, both, or something else, there are a lot of variables here:

* physical sex
* gender identity
* social gender expression
* personal gender expression
* hormonal levels
* hormonal acceptance
* etc

And I think where the debate here is, is whether there is a difference between personal and social gender expression. What I mean by that, is whether there are things that girls do that boys don't, that "come naturally" and don't have to be learned.

So I believe personally that there are. One of the reasons I believe this is because there are studies that a woman crying can lower a man's testosterone. Men are reliably more empathetic and likely to hug a woman that is crying. You can see the shift some times when couples are arguing. Here's an article on the phenomenon,

Tears are a turnoff to men; Study shows crying tears lowers man's testosterone - NY Daily News

I personally also have a lot of traits that I feel come naturally that are read as feminine. My soft voice and my natural cadence when it comes to speech, the way I carry and shift my weight, and the way I talk with my hands, are three traits I taught myself to cover up, that I no longer fight.

I do think a lot of our behavior is learned, though. I think during our formative years especially, we learn the way a boy or girl ought to act. And now that I am living as a woman more and more, I find myself fighting a lot of what I learned growing up learning how to be male. And there's little social customs like someone climbing over themselves to hold the door open for me, or going out into the rain to grab the car so I don't have to, that I had to have learned at some point, even though the way they make me feel when they happen is incredible and real. Those things are completely social.

But I'd argue that, because these roles are picked up during a person's first 10 years of life, that they are still important, and we shouldn't view them as being completely "fake" or "constructed". First, they had to come from somewhere. There wasn't a big meeting between the grand gender wizards where they decided that women would from that day on love chocolate or anything. Also, a lot of cultures that have nothing to do with each other still end up with similar gender roles. But the biggest reason, is that I think there is a lot of this that ends up "set in stone" so to speak after a certain point, that you can't just change intentionally later. Or else I wouldn't be running into obstacles fighting against 32 years of male socialization.

When I grew up, I had options like playing house and dress-up that a lot of other boys didn't have (although they caused me problems and got me into fights). But I also had options many girls didn't have, and it's my opinion that's part of why I'm so into computers and math as an adult. There are plenty of brilliant women I went to school with. Everyone at school after your Junior year is smart enough to be there still. But I feel like they had to fight some social expectations to get there, that I didn't have to.

So where I'm going is that I don't think that you can always neatly separate what was learned from what was wired. Partly because a person is still being wired after they're born, and partly because people reach a point where who they are just isn't going to change easily any more. And partly because learned and wired feel exactly the same when you experience them.

What I do think, though, is that we should absolutely make a conscious effort as a society to change the things we do know we have control over. I don't think we have to say that gender is completely "fake" before we're allowed to say that women should have more opportunities to do things that make them successful, and shouldn't be put in situations where they're forced or expected to rely on men. And men shouldn't be put in a position where they have incredible pressure to succeed in things that they have absolutely no control over.

We know we're capable of buying girls computers and teaching boys how to cook when they're children. I do get that people have a lot of hang-ups about doing just that, and a good way to fight those hang ups is to explain just how much of gender is learned. I mean people do have a moment when they realize pink used to be for boys. Questioning these things is good in my opinion. But I think saying that "gender is completely constructed" is going way way further out on the limb than I'm comfortable doing. And I don't think you need to paint yourself into that corner before you can make any meaningful change.