There are, it seems, those in the transgender activist community who maintain that it's possible to have a "female brain in a male body," or vice-versa. They make this claim in support of the transgender agenda - the idea that they should be able to change their appearance and, through surgery and hormone treatments, their bodies, to conform with how they claim to "identify." It's unclear why this is important to the activists; it stands to reason that if they were confident in their assertion to "identify" as the opposite sex, it shouldn't matter what any brain scan says.
And the fact is, the science behind their claim just doesn't support this assertion. It's a lot more complex than this rather silly and oversimplified explanation - and you can add to that the fact that much of our own brains' functions are still poorly understood.
The sad thing is that this claim is being used to convince young people to "transition":
Earlier this week, City Journal published the tragic story of Yarden Silveira, a young detransitioner—someone who pursues hormonal and/or surgical “sex change” procedures but then seeks to reverse course—whose life ended abruptly after suffering severe complications from a gender-related genital surgery. What led Yarden to adopt a transgender identity in the first place? In 2014, after encountering the growing wave of pro-trans narratives in popular culture, Yarden told his family that he believed he had a “female brain.” Though initially uncertain, his mother was ultimately convinced by scientific papers that suggested that her son could have a female brain trapped in a male body, and that this mismatch caused him unimaginable distress.
“A trans woman (such as myself) was born with a male body, but she has always had her female brain. Literally born with a female brain,” Yarden wrote in 2016.
Except, of course, Yarden wasn't born with a "female brain." Biology isn't always that simple. Genetically, sex is pretty simple in mammals - it's bipolar, either male or female, determined genetically. But our brains aren't quite like that; their function is, like so many things in biology, somewhat fuzzy. There aren't a lot of sharp lines. It's not as simple as having a "male brain" or a "female brain," as the differences here are more of degree than of kind. The studies that claim to show that have some serious flaws, in that there are some significant variables that were not taken into account.
Here's why:
The central flaw in current research purporting to validate the cross-sex brain hypothesis is an inconsistent—or complete lack of—control for individuals’ sexual orientation. Why does this matter? Because most people who identify as transgender are not exclusively heterosexual, and same-sex attraction has been linked to neuroanatomical differences that reflect a cross-sex shift—or, more broadly, to a reduction in typical sexual dimorphism (i.e., to having more androgynous brain structures). This raises serious methodological concerns about the extent to which sexual orientation might confound or interact with the neurobiological markers that “brain sex” studies routinely attribute to gender dysphoria. It also raises major ethical concerns about the use of “gender-affirming care” as a form of gay conversion therapy or as a maladaptive coping strategy for gay men.
In other words, they didn't control the data for sexual orientation. That's kind of a major, glaring flaw.
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In research of this kind, one of the key things researchers should do when examining the evidence to see if the "male brain, female brain" dichotomy is a real thing would be to eliminate, to the greatest extent possible, any variables. Same-sex attraction is something of a huge variable that these studies apparently didn't eliminate.
And there's the rub: "Transgender" activism is almost exclusively a left-wing issue. Isn't the left also against what is known as "conversion therapy," the goal of which is to make a gay person no longer gay? If this "male brain, female brain" bipolarity were accurate, would not that be what "transgender" therapies and surgeries would be doing?
I know, I know - you can't expect intellectual consistency from the left.
Now, to indulge in some personal opining: It seems that the "transgender" community's reliance on bad science like this to justify their desire to "identify" as the opposite sex. If their claimed identity was enough, they wouldn't require shoddy science to shore up their arguments. It's a free country, and if a consenting adult wishes to identify as a man, a woman, or a Great Crested Flycatcher, they can always just go ahead and do so, instead of claiming the support of scientific inquiry that's badly done. And these studies, clearly, were badly done.
There's another problem: Studies like these, which are activism couched in pseudo-scientific language, damage the scientific community as a whole. That's the very real danger with people relying on poorly thought-out work like this to serve a social agenda.
