How do trans brains work?

What part(s) of the brain makes trans women more female than gay men and how does it do that? I would prefer if you could explain this in your own words rather than just spamming links or paragraphs of pre-written text at me.

How do you go from "this part of the brain is slightly larger" to "I feel compelled to wear women's clothes and take hormones and remove my balls"? What are the in-between steps biologically?

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    It's the other way around, probably, with these unusual qualities being signs of being neurally feminized/masculinized in utero. Like with gay people we don't really know which features actually make people queer. None of the ones we've found are found in every queer person, just in an unusual amount of them. Hence them being markers of the actual core effect.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >neurally feminized/masculinized in utero.
      what does this mean exactly? What is the evidence for this process and why would it cause dysphoria?
      >make people queer
      what do you mean by queer?

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >what does this mean exactly?
        Sexual differentiation in the direction of cross-sex typicality.

        >What is the evidence for this process..
        In general? Anatomic brain differences between men and women. The correlation between prenatal exposure to sex hormones and behavior after birth despite of current hormone levels as seen in e.g. girls with CAH. Animal studies involving the direct manipulation of sex hormones in utero modify behavior after birth. Same-sex attraction correlating both with sex-atypical behavior and with having sex-atypical neural structures.

        In the case of transgender people? The correlation between being transgender and sex-atypical brain structures, genes that make you less sensitive to the dominant sex hormones of your natal sex, being intersex, same-sex attraction (which itself relates to sexual differentiation), autism (which again relates to sexual differentiation and to same-sex attraction), having a transgender twin, and neurally reacting to certain smells in sex-atypical ways. The strong tendency of people who are raised as the opposite sex to develop gender dysphoria.

        >..and why would it cause dysphoria?
        We don't really know. There are various theories, though. One is that it makes you develop the sense that your body is "supposed" to have some features of the other sex and everything else is downstream from that. Another is that people have some innate sense of their gender in relation to others and it's mediated by sexual differentiation. A third one is that the same circuits that relate to self-recognition also fire when you see people of your own identified sex because they're similar, creating some sense of sexed kinship.

        >what do you mean by queer?
        LGBT.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          this seems pretty vague
          your claim is that there is clear proof trans women and gay men are distinct but then the details are hazy and broad

          >prenatal exposure to sex hormones
          what exposure? Which hormones? How?
          >behavior after birth
          what behavior?
          >girls with CAH.
          we are talking about trans women and you are changing the subject unless you are saying trans people are equivalent to girls with CAH

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >this seems pretty vague
            Not any vaguer than the research about sexual orientation. We know which things lead to homosexuality. We know it relates to sexual differentiation. We don't really know the specifics.

            >your claim is that there is clear proof trans women and gay men are distinct but then the details are hazy and broad
            In studies that control for sexual orientation transgender women tend to have neural qualities gay men tend to lack. Furthermore many transgender women are not attracted to men, and this lack of attraction is verified by the very same studies that controlled for sexual orientation. Were this otherwise comparing gynephilic transgender women to gynephilic cisgender men would show that the former differ from the latter in the same way androphiles differ from gynephiles in general. All of this aside, the clear difference in symptoms tells us the groups are distinct.

            >what exposure?
            Prenatal exposure.

            >Which hormones?
            Sex hormones.

            >How?
            Pregnancies natural involve that. All fetuses are exposed to various levels of sex hormones.

            >what behavior?
            Depends on the animal and the form of exposure. Girls with CAH, for instance, tend to have more male-typical interests.

            >we are talking about trans women and you are changing the subject unless you are saying trans people are equivalent to girls with CAH
            You asked me what the evidence for neural sexual differentiation being a thing was. I answered.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            to be clear you support forcing people to refer to trans women as she and punishing them as they do not.
            If trans women looked like cis women and could not be distinguished from them, this would not be at issue.
            You are supposing this neurology be used to justify compelling otherwise unwilling people to refer to people they view as gay men as "she".

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Sorry, what does that have to do with the subject of the thread, or with what was asked of me?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            This brain scan claim stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your end goal is to use is to justify forced pronoun use. What does it mean for trans women to be men or women? Well socially it means you can punish people who call them men if they are "women".

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            The truth exists in a vacuum. What people do with it is up to them. What I wrote is simply true.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >This brain scan claim stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your end goal is to use is to justify forced pronoun use.
            meds

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            So you think teachers in schools should be allowed to use a trans students birth sex pronouns if they feel doing otherwise would be lying without facing repercussions?

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    It's not a compulsion for everyone. For some homosexuals transition is just a reasonable thing to do.
    If you understand men like feminity, and hormones feminize you, it's a simple choice, not compulsion.
    Or
    Some gay men are attached to there feminity and are likely try to keep it, and develops it with hormones.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >If you understand men like feminity
      some gay men are fem4fem (meaning attracted to other flamers), what is the purpose specifically of VISUAL feminization and what is the biological impetus for it?
      How does estrogen maintain behavioral femininity which is innate at birth and consistent throughout life? Are you suggesting estrogen induces behavioral femininity in otherwise masculine-acting men?

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Estrogen does further feminize behavior.
        And there are degrees of feminity, it's not all just from birth, a lot is wired in at puberty too.
        Fem4fem gays are an extreme minority and usually done as a cope, as most gay men are not into feminine men.
        Another good reason for feminine men to transition, as non-homosexual men can appreciate it.

        There doesn't have to be a biological reason behind every single aspect of it all. It's a choice thay may have a predisposition to it, but a choice none the less.

        If your gay,feminine and like your feminity transition is just a simple choice. Is that not a reasonable explanation for homosexuals to trannies?
        Access to more less feminized men, being seen as a woman your feminity is just normal, even sort of passing is a legit upgrade lol

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Who cares is the best answer, in what way does some guy wearing a dress and being called susan impact your life? Don't like calling some ogre susan? There are plenty of ugly ass women called susan, who fricking cares.

    It's no different than gay guys, I don't care if a gay guy wants to frick another guy.

    As long as I don't have to be involved, I'm cool with you doing whatever the frick u wanna do.

    Ultimately, women wearing dresses, female names and hairstyles are all social constructs so it really does not matter if some guy does it too. At the end of the day, trans are less than 1%. Most of us never even see them irl.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >Who cares is the best answer,
      The people who wish to compel gay men to refer to other gay men who identify as trans women as "she", and punish them socially or legally if they refuse.
      The ultimate end game of the brain scan gambit is to force people to refer to trans women as she by staking a biological claim to womanhood. Because if there's no biological distinction, trans women who like men are just larping gay men in dresses.

      Why is visual femininity so important and how does it related to behavioral femininity? How do men process one characteristic in the absence of the other?

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    There is a section of the brain that deals with self identification. That same section is also responsible for being able to recognize ourselves in a mirror. Only a few of the more intelligent species on the planet can do this like apes dolphins and Ravens. It’s the part of the brain that deals with gender identity or the personal sense of one's own gender.

    When this part of the brain becomes feminized or masculinization in utero via hormone washes from the mother it results in a baby who may have female parts but the part of the brain that deals with gender identity looks more like a males brain. As the child grows older it will start to develop gender dysphoria as it feels a disconnect with what its brain expects to see when they look at themselves and what they actually see.

    Trans women are psychologically female since birth and with the introduction of HRT intervention their bodies’ gene expression become basically. Completely female and after surgery I would argue they are completely female. You may not agree with that because you feel like being male or female is something that cannot be changed but eventually they will have the nanotechnology available to physically change every last XY cell to XX and create fully functional uterus and ovaries in trans women. Let me ask you would you consider them female then?

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      How does the brain process self identification? What does it mean cellularly when a brain identifies as male or female?
      This just seems like a hand-wave broad way to turn "I feel like a woman so I am one!" into science without directly and concisely proving your claims.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        NTA but this is not a question that can be answered in a NSFFW thread. If you'd like to read about it:
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7197078/

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          The whole point is you don't actually understand your own argument so you just spam links and paragraphs of text. If you had actual proof of the precise cause of "feeling like a woman" you would explain it in 3-4 sentences.
          The details are absent in your own words because really you are just trying to shut down the conversation.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Sorry, how does that make any sense? Can you explain the molecular process behind homosexuality to me in 3-4 sentences?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Gay people aren't trying to force others to call them something they are not. If you looked like a woman, you wouldn't care about proving neurology.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            So you can't. Does that mean gay people are not gay for reasons that have to do with biology?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >whataboutism
            just admit you can't prove that "feeling like a female" means you have some sort of woman's brain

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            The scientific evidence does show that transness is related to sexual differentiation, though. Why would I admit something wrong?
            It is not whataboutism to point a double standard out.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            I'm not claiming we know the precise cause of homosexuality.
            You are claiming we know what causes transness to the point where concluding you are mentally ill gay men is necessarily false.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Right, because the neurological evidence we have already rule that out, just like the biological evidence we have with regard to homosexuality rule out the idea that it's caused by sexual abuse. We have part of the picture. It's not all or nothing.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            I just explained it to you and you brushed it off as ‘hand waving’

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            You didn't actually explain the details with any precision. It's still completely unclear how you get from A to P. There's intermediary steps. You just use a few big words and think that's enough. It isn't.
            Your specific claim is that trans women attracted to men are closer to women biologically than gay men, is it not?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            That isn’t what I said at all. I said trans women are psychologically female and with medical intervention become physically female via changes in gene expression and phenotype which is the simplest way I can explain it sorry you’re too stupid to understand that

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            It has nothing to do with who they are attracted to. Sexual attraction happens occurs in a different part of the brain than gender identity.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >This just seems like a hand-wave broad way to turn "I feel like a woman so I am one!" into science
        Well, you personally asked us to use our own words instead of linking to scientific articles.
        In case you have changed your mind, look up "Grey and white matter volumes either in treatment-naïve or hormone-treated transgender women: a voxel-based morphometry study". I'd link the article here (it's free to read), but NSFFW's spam filters are blocking it.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          but how do you go from "there's less or more brain volume in this part of the brain" to "we are for sure not just larping gay men"
          just seems like you are searching for results that look good then assigning causation in an arbitrary fashion because you want to believe at the first positive correlation you find

          It just seems like a way to add science to what is essentially just your feelings, and again, the endgame for you is to force people to call gay men who claim to be trans "she", is it not? Are you against that?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            I have absolutely no idea what you mean about gay men or pronouns
            you asked how the brain process self identification, I gave you an article that explains that in the context of transgender people.
            but honestly I'm getting a vibe that you're coming from /misc/ or something so idk, find someone else to argue with

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            He's a transphobic gay men who is obsessed with the idea that transgender women are transitioning to escape homophobia. I've been arguing with him for literal years. I still drop in now and then because it's a nice way to spread the word and convert the public. Sort of like a catechism.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >He's a transphobic gay men who is obsessed with the idea that transgender women are transitioning to escape homophobia.
            lol
            weird, I've been attracted to women my whole life and I'm transitioning (MtF)
            ¯_(ツ)_/¯

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >but how do you go from "there's less or more brain volume in this part of the brain" to "we are for sure not just larping gay men"
            NTA but see the second response here

            >this seems pretty vague
            Not any vaguer than the research about sexual orientation. We know which things lead to homosexuality. We know it relates to sexual differentiation. We don't really know the specifics.

            >your claim is that there is clear proof trans women and gay men are distinct but then the details are hazy and broad
            In studies that control for sexual orientation transgender women tend to have neural qualities gay men tend to lack. Furthermore many transgender women are not attracted to men, and this lack of attraction is verified by the very same studies that controlled for sexual orientation. Were this otherwise comparing gynephilic transgender women to gynephilic cisgender men would show that the former differ from the latter in the same way androphiles differ from gynephiles in general. All of this aside, the clear difference in symptoms tells us the groups are distinct.

            >what exposure?
            Prenatal exposure.

            >Which hormones?
            Sex hormones.

            >How?
            Pregnancies natural involve that. All fetuses are exposed to various levels of sex hormones.

            >what behavior?
            Depends on the animal and the form of exposure. Girls with CAH, for instance, tend to have more male-typical interests.

            >we are talking about trans women and you are changing the subject unless you are saying trans people are equivalent to girls with CAH
            You asked me what the evidence for neural sexual differentiation being a thing was. I answered.

            The gay men thing is definitely untrue and you're ignoring why

            >just seems like you are searching for results that look good then assigning causation in an arbitrary fashion because you want to believe at the first positive correlation you find
            What's your explanation for all of the correlations outlined here, keeping in mind that same-sex attraction is absent in many transgender women?

            >what does this mean exactly?
            Sexual differentiation in the direction of cross-sex typicality.

            >What is the evidence for this process..
            In general? Anatomic brain differences between men and women. The correlation between prenatal exposure to sex hormones and behavior after birth despite of current hormone levels as seen in e.g. girls with CAH. Animal studies involving the direct manipulation of sex hormones in utero modify behavior after birth. Same-sex attraction correlating both with sex-atypical behavior and with having sex-atypical neural structures.

            In the case of transgender people? The correlation between being transgender and sex-atypical brain structures, genes that make you less sensitive to the dominant sex hormones of your natal sex, being intersex, same-sex attraction (which itself relates to sexual differentiation), autism (which again relates to sexual differentiation and to same-sex attraction), having a transgender twin, and neurally reacting to certain smells in sex-atypical ways. The strong tendency of people who are raised as the opposite sex to develop gender dysphoria.

            >..and why would it cause dysphoria?
            We don't really know. There are various theories, though. One is that it makes you develop the sense that your body is "supposed" to have some features of the other sex and everything else is downstream from that. Another is that people have some innate sense of their gender in relation to others and it's mediated by sexual differentiation. A third one is that the same circuits that relate to self-recognition also fire when you see people of your own identified sex because they're similar, creating some sense of sexed kinship.

            >what do you mean by queer?
            LGBT.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            that you are using scanning to detect something it's not really designed to do, its meant to find cancer not assigned gender

            its just assigning size variability as somehow causative of gender because the conclusions are more important than the quality of proof

            >how do you these correlations!
            I don't you are the one claiming you aren't just mentally ill gay men not me. If causation is unclear, I don't make claims.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >that you are using scanning to detect something it's not really designed to do, its meant to find cancer not assigned gender
            What are you talking about? The scans are not designed to find anything in specific. Just the underlying neuroanatomy. Analysis then makes sense of that neuroanatomy.

            >its just assigning size variability as somehow causative of gender because the conclusions are more important than the quality of proof
            This is not what I said. Please read:

            It's the other way around, probably, with these unusual qualities being signs of being neurally feminized/masculinized in utero. Like with gay people we don't really know which features actually make people queer. None of the ones we've found are found in every queer person, just in an unusual amount of them. Hence them being markers of the actual core effect.

            >what does this mean exactly?
            Sexual differentiation in the direction of cross-sex typicality.

            >What is the evidence for this process..
            In general? Anatomic brain differences between men and women. The correlation between prenatal exposure to sex hormones and behavior after birth despite of current hormone levels as seen in e.g. girls with CAH. Animal studies involving the direct manipulation of sex hormones in utero modify behavior after birth. Same-sex attraction correlating both with sex-atypical behavior and with having sex-atypical neural structures.

            In the case of transgender people? The correlation between being transgender and sex-atypical brain structures, genes that make you less sensitive to the dominant sex hormones of your natal sex, being intersex, same-sex attraction (which itself relates to sexual differentiation), autism (which again relates to sexual differentiation and to same-sex attraction), having a transgender twin, and neurally reacting to certain smells in sex-atypical ways. The strong tendency of people who are raised as the opposite sex to develop gender dysphoria.

            >..and why would it cause dysphoria?
            We don't really know. There are various theories, though. One is that it makes you develop the sense that your body is "supposed" to have some features of the other sex and everything else is downstream from that. Another is that people have some innate sense of their gender in relation to others and it's mediated by sexual differentiation. A third one is that the same circuits that relate to self-recognition also fire when you see people of your own identified sex because they're similar, creating some sense of sexed kinship.

            >what do you mean by queer?
            LGBT.

            Rather, it is clear that sexual differentiation is somehow related to transness, and these neural features are markers of that. Since the same markers are found in transgender women regardless of orientation, but not in cisgender gay men, on average, this indicates that we're looking at different phenomena.

            >I don't you are the one claiming you aren't just mentally ill gay men not me. If causation is unclear, I don't make claims.
            Is that so? So you fully accept the possibility that everything I said is true? That transgender women might well be women?
            If one theory is capable of explaining what is going on, and another is not capable of explaining what is going on, it is clear which we should favor.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    What causes men to be straight bottoms?

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Mommy issues

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        so it's social not biological?

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