is anybody here who has autism and is transgender?

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Yeah, if it's just about wearing clothes of the opposite sex, then it's called transvestism.
Transsexuals, like myself, aren't usually interested in playing with
gender roles any more than the average person. We want to be ourselves. By the way,
all transsexuals are transgendered even though all transgendered aren't necessarily transsexuals.



I don't think gender norms are awesome either. I don't conform to every given gender norm for girls. For example,
I am so interested in certain types of computer-games that some old-fashioned people could find it unsuitable for a woman.
It's just that I am naturally interested in girlie-things most of the time, e.g. how my nails look like and
my identity is completely female.
I think according to certain older feminist theories, all gender-roles are introduced by society to
children who have no inborn gender-identity. I don't think so. Even though some gender-roles are cultural
(like the assumption that girls are only interested in clothes and dolls and such), there are actual differences in
the overall neurology and biology of males and females, differences which cause some of
the feelings and behaviour which is gender-specific. Being born transgendered means that a
significant part of the genetic makeup of a newborn child (at least the part that constitutes brains) is that of
one sex and the body is mostly of the opposite sex. Research is carried out all the time, but
there is still a lot to find out about this subject.

I was labled a tomboy as a kid and would scream and attempt to injure myself if forced to dress or act feminine. Everyone asusmed it was because I was a tomboy but I think it went deeper than that. I HATED anything feminine. I played with barbies but I was more intrested in her pets and furniture. The animals kicked Barbie out and took over. I hated dolls and perfered stuffed animals and gender nutural toys like Littlest Pet Shop and art supplies.

However, there are often many who have no wish to physically change, yet identify as women (or men, but that is rarer). In short, it comes down to what makes a man a man and a woman a woman? What, fundamentally, is gender?

It often helps when dealing with a host of confusing questions to boil them down to their fundamentals, often under the flames of thought experiments.

Re. brain anatomy - have their been any brain scans on newborn babies to check thos theory, followed by monitering as they grow up? With modern techniques, scanning could be performed while they're being measured. If no differences in neurolgy are present immediately after birth, and the neurology only begins to diverge once the concept of gender is introduced...

I don't think there have been brain scans on newborn babies to check this theory,
because then the researchers would have to know which babies to examine (transgendered babies
do not born very often and they look the same as all the other babies), or
they would have to scan all of them + see if any time soon any of the scanned people
were feeling gender dysphoric .
But the physical evidence does suggest that the cause of transsexualism (or transgender) is genetic.
Also the conclusions, which are useful in treatment, are drawn by combining physical evidence
with personal history. Personal history tells us for example that a transgendered female in a male body
is usually brought up a boy, but simply identifies herself as a normal female.
So yes, social studies are as important as genetic / medical studies, all
viewpoints are needed in this kind of research area.

Why would the babies have to be transgendered? Scanning several hundred male babies, and several hundred female babies, should be enough to tell you if there's any difference in neurology between males and females, from the moment of birth.

If it's genetic, then it's heritable. Have there been any studies investigating gender dysphoria in families? For example, twin studies. If it's genetic, then identitical twins should be more likely to display it (that is, if one twin has it, then the other should stand a higher than average chance of having it), controlling of course for cultural and social factors (twins raised in the same house would [usually] have the same home environment, which could skew the results).

Anyway, what is gender? I know about gender roles and gender norms, but what of gender itself?

Well, boys and girls have DIFFERENT BRAINS! If you knew nothing else about the processors, and an AMD and INTEL processor had the SAME EXACT PROGRAM, they could both operate DIFFERENTLY. In fact, they often do.

With Brains, you really DO know less, and can't even read the program, so to speak. Two brains could look very different, and STILL have the same knowledge, etc... So the idea of "no differences in neurolgy" is BUNK! There is NO ability to do such a comparison.

ALSO, Males undergo a kind of early puberty a few months after birth! It is believed that ALSO changes the brain. I have to go now, so I only found this right now: http://www.uni.edu/walsh/SEXDEV.html

Anyway, the differences are REAL. I was raised by my mother. She constantly HATED my trying to fix toys, etc... I followed the old male stereotype. ALSO, Females are almost like another species in some way to men. If we had the same way of thinking and communication, that wouldn't be the case.

Yes, they're real; but the differences between individual brains overwhelm the differences between male and female averages to a huge degree. There are males whose brains operate in the "female" range and vice versa.

It's like--you have males, on average, being at the 48th percentile on language; and females, on average, being at the 52nd percentile. That's a real difference, a measurable difference between male and female brains. However... there are individual males at the 90th percentile and individual females at the 10th percentile. The individual variation is just so much more of an effect than the male/female differences.

Of course, our brains are also shaped by our environments; when we learn things, our brains change to reflect that. And we live in a world where gender is a big part of society--our brains are growing and learning in a world where genders are different and, if our mental gender matches the physical, we tend to conform to stereotypes because it doesn't hurt us to do so.

I don't think you can determine gender identity by just doing a "brain sex" test. There's more to being female than being slightly better at language, more to being male than being more lateralized or better at visual-spatial stuff... there's also society, culture, your past, your own image of yourself, your hormones, your history both before birth and during early development... etc. people are just too complicated to put into boxes that way, and gender is too complicated to use any one criterion to determine it. Best way is just to ask the person what gender they are--that's the most relevant fact in any case!

Prove it.

When it comes to gender, I wish there was someway of removing socio-cultural effects, so that we can do an actual comparison... one may be able to do that by following the common threads through different cultures, but even that is frought with problems (biology affects culture; men are stronger physically, therefore they get shoehorned into roles requiring their strength).

When you do that--with the different cultures--you end up with the very small differences I mentioned.

The important distinction, though, is the difference between:
"Male and female brains, on average, are different." (a true statement), and:
"Any given male brain will be different from any given female brain in the same way that male and female brains differ on average." (A false statement.)

Male brains are, on average, larger (though that's primarily a consequence of male body size being larger, and doesn't seem to affect brain function very much).

Well, intelligence in animals tends to correlate well with the body:brain size ratio...

Anyway, I do statistics in both Maths and Biology. What's the mean and standard deviation between the two sets (male and female)? Small difference in mean, large standard deviation in both?

They HAVE donbe FMRI scans of males and females, and found they operate differently. Healing is different in operations. The corpus callosum is larger in females. Hey, I am NOT saying either is inferior to the other.

I am given the impression that current scanning technology is not adequate to the task.

There have been studies of cadaver brains that have shown differences,  though.

One region is the BSTc region of the hypothalamus.  The difference is in the density of neurons there (something which an MRI scan cannot measure).  They found that women, MTF trans people who had and had not transitioned (taken hormones) had (IIRC) a lower density than nontrans males who had and had not been exposed to exogenous female hormones ( blocking all testosterone and giving female hormones is a treatment for advanced prorate cancer).

There's also a region called the pre-optic nucleus.  And one called the "sexually dimorphic nucleus.". (May be the same region, can't remember.)

The trouble with that research,  though is that they involve a small sample size.  So, while compelling (to me, anyway) it's nit definitive.  I do recall a scientist commenting about the BSTc study that although the "n" was small,  the difference was somewhat dramatic.  IOW,  a large sample size is needed to differentiate small, subtle differences,  and the density numbers were pretty clearly different.  Still, a larger "n" would be better,  though.

One of my personal theories about how brain-gender stuff might intersect with autism is the reduced "pruning" of brain connections w/ autism.  Maybe autistics end up with an unusually strong mix of male & female wiring,  due to not having the 'opposite' wiring removed as it normally would. And that those networks might be modulated by adult hormone levels. (Some trans people report their orientation shifting due to hormones, which is not an effect seen in non-trans people.) But anway, I've not looked up much how possible that is,  though.

Yeah, that can't possibly be true. If that were true, then I wouldn't have stuck out like a sore thumb. (I really have no inborn gender identity. And that ends up making a person conflict with a whole lot of people who do very clearly have gender identities and want to impose their ideas onto you.)

Human neurology changes throughout life. I'm not denying their are differences in the neurology between males and females; I'm asking if there are differences from birth, before a lifetime of hormones have taken effect.

Do many people have a specific inbuilt gender identity, or is it for most people determined by socio-cultural factors?

The MTF trans people who had never taken any female hormones, but had the same density of neurons as women (er, "born women") in the BSTc would seem to answer that, for that one small part of the brain, at least.

There are some interesting experiments that have been done with rats, that do seem to indicate that there is significant wiring that happens pre-natally. From about page 22 on there is info. at the following:

http://www.uni.edu/walsh/sexdiff.pdf

Also studies of gender identity in people w/intersex conditions is interesting. Particularly, androgen insensitivity and congential adrenal hyperplasia.


There are cases that indicate that for some, gender identity does seem biological. See the story of David Reimer. As far as how prevalent that is, it's hard to say. You'd have to study a large number of people, and don't think anyone has done that. And without taking peoples' word for it, it's hard to figure out how one test if it's due to biology or culture. It seems to me the weight of scientific evidence is on the side of at least some biological influence on gender identity.

I have to go out and run an errand, so these are some links (that contain links) about these issues. There's a lot of stuff out there.

http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2009/02/evidence.html
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2008/06/big ... brain.html
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2008/05/sex-and-brain.html

Also, how do people#s actions affect their brain? Has this been controlled for (the connections in the brain that one uses grow stronger etc)? Rat studies don't cut it; especially since another study with rats found it was dependent more on nurture (how they were treated by their mothers after birth affected how they acted; female rats treated in the same way males normally are acted more male - importantly, this also had neurological effects).

For the moment, I'll have to go with the hypotheses that the difference in mean between male and female is swamped by the standard deviation of both sets